Larry Rivers' title can be read sum of two units ways.

Larry Rivers' title can be read sum of two units ways. Place the emphasis onward "what" and the author is asking himself and the reader to referee his life. However, if the emphasis is shifted to the "I," then the title uninjureds like the whine of a bad child who tries to avoid punishment through asking, "What did I do?" Rivers wants the title read the couple ways: he wants to make known the reader the intimate details of his life, yet he doesn't want to be held responsible for any of it.

The work purports to be "unauthorized," however like other works in this tell-all pseudogenre, it doesn't take rise close to telling all. He uses a pseudonym for the same of his girlfriends. He probably uses others. This doesn't necessarily make the work a pack of lies, yet it does raise questions about the meaning of the phrase "unauthorized biography." Clearly, he wants to irritate some of his friends and to spare others. the same wonders why Rivers periodically announces his compulsion to be reliable Is he trying to convince himself or us?

In his preface Rivers declares that he "handwrote everything" in the main division then revised it in collaboration with a finish friend, the writer Arnold Weinstein. The result: a sweaty hyperventilated diction The reader who manages to stay interested [i]or[/i] part of to the other nearly 500 pages of this will learn who the author slept with (both men and women); that he fantasized about making be pleased with to his sister and tried it one time with his dog; what remedys he took (mostly heroin and marijuana) and with whom (the jazz musician Gerry Mulligan, for one); who helped him corrupt his house in the Hamptons (the bard James Merrill); and how greatly he was paid for about of his paintings. By his reckoning, Rivers did just about everything--and between the sides of it all he kept score. He scored dope; he read music scores; and he rated the men and women he "scored" with, or wanted to. Scoring is what Rivers does best; perhaps it's all he knows by what means to do.

Rivers' observations about his lover are pathetic and revealing: "Nothing I at any time respected gave me a hard-on, which was a point in dispute then and continues to be one" This question is part of what lies behind Rivers' confessions about sleeping with men something he maintains justifying and qualifying: "Except for single in kind brief shining moment, I hardly at any time made the first move toward a man, the favored exception being a foggy, fat saxophonist. . .I wanted to clash him." No doubt he also wants to clash the reader, but this macho probity act gets tiresome. Rivers' tale is long-winded, peevish, and humorless--a deadly combination, especially in a work that is supposed to be insider gossip.

Rivers claims to have a prodigious memory for details, nevertheless the use to which he bring forwards this total recall is selective and largely venal. His anecdotes of his friendship and affair with the author of poems Frank O'Hara suggest that he remains very much jealous of O'Hara's deserved fame and wants to bring him down a notch or two: "Sex with Frank O'Hara--I'll spare you the details--was not self-same thrilling." Given all the other details he hasn't spared the reader, single is, I guess, supposed to admire his discretion. For many author of poemss however, Rivers is simply the stay who did the familiar heroic-ironic painting of O'Hara bare and wearing boots. This is what gnaws at Rivers: he is not always the mostly important person in the room

This peevishness also increases to other artists. He states almost fondly "I knew strike Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns from the time they came to strange York in the early fifties, just not at home of Black Mountain College, where they studied subordinate to lovable, huggable, Franz 'the Gabber' Kline." Rivers' breezy recollection is a fantasy. John not ever went to Black Mountain, and either Rivers' memory took a vacation or he is acting pleasant in order to dish Johns: "He painted little boxe occupied by means of forms that alluded to Joseph Cornell and Franz Kline, and of course Marcel Duchamp. He lust aftered my opinion I guess because he heard of me before I heard of him. He felt a bit pain that I didn't invite his opinions about my work." Given what happened later in their respective careers, this "incident," if it happened, must give Rivers a certain bitter satisfaction.

Rivers' moot point is that he's like a somebody at a party who can't talk about anything unless himself. An artist who made a handful of paintings in the early '50 that will probably be remembered as minor, he numbers a self-centered story that not really gets anywhere. In this reason Rivers' book accurately mirrors his career as an artist.

John Yau is a author of poems and critic. His forthcoming parts are A.R. Penck (Abrams) and In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Ecco)

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