Luminous and intensely personal, Art and Madness recounts the lost years of Anne Roiphe’s twenties, when the soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed author put her dreams of becoming a writer on hold to devote herself to the magnetic but coercive male artists of the period.
Coming of age in the 1950s, Roiphe, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, grew up on Park Avenue and had an adolescence defined by privilege, petticoats, and social rules. At Smith College her classmates wore fraternity pins on their cashmere sweaters and knit argyle socks for their boyfriends during lectures. Young women were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes and sought out the chaos of New York’s White Horse Tavern and West End Bar.
She was unmoored and uncertain, “waiting for a wisp of truth, a feather’s brush of beauty, a moment of insight.” Salvation came in the form of a brilliant playwright whom she married and worked to support, even after he left her alone on their honeymoon and later pawned her family silver, china, and pearls. Her near-religious belief in the power of art induced her to overlook his infidelity and alcoholism, and to dutifully type his manuscripts in place of writing her own.
During an era that idolized its male writers, she became, sometimes with her young child in tow, one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Terry Southern, Doc Humes, Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen, and William Styron. In the Hamptons she socialized with Larry Rivers, Jack Gelber and other painters and sculptors. “Moderation for most of us is a most unnatural condition . . . . I preferred to burn out like a brilliant firecracker.” But while she was playing the muse reality beckoned, forcing her to confront the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art.
Art and Madness recounts the fascinating evolution of a time when art and alcohol and rebellion caused collateral damage and sometimes produced extraordinary work. In clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed prose, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.
Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Roiphe's sharp, dazzling memoir of her literary youth in late 1950s and early 1960s New York City contains a dark story of untenable marriages, alcoholism, and outrageous sexism. Raised on Park Avenue in New York City, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence in 1957, Roiphe (Epilogue) was devoted to nonconformity at all costs, art worth dying for, and a brilliant if vaguely envisioned future "as a muse to a man of great talent." Married early to a hard-drinking, egotistical playwright, she typed his plays and supported him with secretarial work, attended parties where guests indulged in adultery and alcohol with equal enthusiasm and self-sabotage. Her marriage dissolved, and saddled with a small child, Roiphe had affairs with Paris Review founders "Doc" Humes and George Plimpton, among others, and finally found a new father for her child, who happened to be a doctor. Roiphe's narrative moves in punchy, spare episodes, nonchronologically and erratically, veering from past to present tense, and requiring effort on the part of the reader. Yet she is a masterly writer: her work presents vivid, priceless snapshots of the roiling era of Communist hysteria, faddish homosexuality, male privilege, and the heartbreaking fragility of talented men and their dreams of fame. (Mar.)
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(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Guaranteed a place in the pantheon of feminist writers, Roiphe has written memoirs about her childhood, marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, yet she has always glided over her twenties. Now we understand why. Roiphe’s fiercely candid account of her struggles during the cold-war era is propulsive and abrading in its exposure of unquestioned sexism and the elevation of art (made by men only) over life. Roiphe eschews chronology, instead setting out indelible incidents like the recovered shards of broken vessels, tagging each with a year. Determined to become a writer and escape the hypocrisy of her depressed mother’s pearl-and-white-gloves set, Roiphe ends up marrying an unstable, hard-drinking, and promiscuous writer and fully embracing the role of muse. She supports him and has his child, a tempestuous daughter she takes everywhere, including to George Plimpton’s now-legendary literary parties. Roiphe does name names, but she also keenly analyzes epoch-defining shibboleths and failings in lacerating tales of alcohol-exacerbated male egomania and artistic ambition and the brazen exploitation of women enthralled by the fantasy of serving greatness. We have come a long way. --Donna Seaman
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
"It is true what they said about the fifties. You really were supposed to behave."
March 18, 2011
By Cynthia
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I loved this book; it's one of the best I've read this year, right behind Ozick's "Foreign Bodies". The language is lush and the emotions ring true. It really touched me in part because it was chronologically a gap between my mom's generation and mine. The 50's seemed so settled but they weren't. Women were chomping at the bit to be themselves but they also longed to define themselves through their men and their children. None of this is wrong of course. It just was-- and still is in some ways.
Roiphe wasn't from the same demographic as my family. She was from the intelligentsia, from upper class, Jewish, New York but I still felt a commonality. Roiphe and her first husband had their fingers on the contemporary lit scene through their talent and their association with George Plimpton, editor of "The Paris Review", and the authors associated with it/him. The 50's were a false calm sandwiched between the war years and the upcoming cultural/sexual revolution of the turbulent `60's. Roiphe's world swirled around Radcliffe, Smith, Sarah Lawrence, Harvard, and Yale folks with their sorority/fraternity culture. The associated country clubs excluded Jews yet these same people avidly read (and were jealous of) Jewish authors. The literary world they were a part of was roiling in alcohol, competition, infidelity. The women for the most part felt their way to greatness was through their talented husbands, financially supporting them, typing their manuscripts, raising their children. Roiphe's twenties were a decade of JFK, a Cuba that might destroy the US at any second.......loving children, loving men who didn't love anything or anyone but themselves and their work......and their addictions. Here's quote from the book that helps give perspective, "It is to escape the rotting that I go to George Plimpton's parties. Artists and writers and their molls don't decay. They explode, perhaps, which is much better."
Roiphe barely got through the decade of her twenties with her sanity intact. Not that she was unstable but many around her were and that made the ground seem unsteady. She finally does find love and best of all she returns to her lifelong desire to write. In my opinion that's a wonderful thing for us. This was my introduction to her work and I'll definitely be reading more of her work.
Roiphe wasn't from the same demographic as my family. She was from the intelligentsia, from upper class, Jewish, New York but I still felt a commonality. Roiphe and her first husband had their fingers on the contemporary lit scene through their talent and their association with George Plimpton, editor of "The Paris Review", and the authors associated with it/him. The 50's were a false calm sandwiched between the war years and the upcoming cultural/sexual revolution of the turbulent `60's. Roiphe's world swirled around Radcliffe, Smith, Sarah Lawrence, Harvard, and Yale folks with their sorority/fraternity culture. The associated country clubs excluded Jews yet these same people avidly read (and were jealous of) Jewish authors. The literary world they were a part of was roiling in alcohol, competition, infidelity. The women for the most part felt their way to greatness was through their talented husbands, financially supporting them, typing their manuscripts, raising their children. Roiphe's twenties were a decade of JFK, a Cuba that might destroy the US at any second.......loving children, loving men who didn't love anything or anyone but themselves and their work......and their addictions. Here's quote from the book that helps give perspective, "It is to escape the rotting that I go to George Plimpton's parties. Artists and writers and their molls don't decay. They explode, perhaps, which is much better."
Roiphe barely got through the decade of her twenties with her sanity intact. Not that she was unstable but many around her were and that made the ground seem unsteady. She finally does find love and best of all she returns to her lifelong desire to write. In my opinion that's a wonderful thing for us. This was my introduction to her work and I'll definitely be reading more of her work.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blazingly honest slice-of-life from artsy scene of 50s & 60s - excellent!
April 9, 2011
Format:Hardcover
I've become an avid fan of Anne Roiphe again, after a forty-year hiatus. The last fiction I read by Roiphe was Long Division back in the early 70s. But in the past few years I've been reading her various books of memoirs - EPILOGUE, 1185 PARK AVENUE, and now her latest, ART AND MADNESS. And let us not forget the new book's subtitle, because it is exceedingly apt: A MEMOIR OF LUST WITHOUT REASON. Who'da thunk the famously sedate fifties were filled with so much sex, drinking, sleeping around, visiting of prostitutes and, well, yeah, lust.
Roiphe was born on Christmas Day 1935 and was raised under conditions of wealth and privilege, although her home life was plagued by parents who did not love each other, a philandering and cold father and all kinds of other unhappy stuff. That story is told in 1185 PARK AVENUE, all the way up through the dissolution of Roiphe's own first marriage and the deaths of her parents and brother. EPILOGUE is all about the grief-stricken period which followed the sudden death of her second husband, a marriage that had endured for forty years.
ART AND MADNESS is quite a different kind of animal. It was written, perhaps, in response to repeated queries from her adult daughter Katie (also a writer, who penned the Foreword) about what Mom's life was like during her twenties. But I also got the feeling that, at 75-plus, Roiphe is beginning to fell time closing in, because, unlike the carefully crafted prose of the other two memoirs, this one is told in a kind of full-speed-ahead, stream-of-consciousness mode, in a broken, back-and-forth chronology jumping between the fifties and sixties. There are no chapter headings; each section is labeled only with a year, and may jump from high school to young-married/new-mother, then back to a college year, and so on. The style is often terse and short, almost Hemingway-esque in manner. I thought too of the simplistic style of another minor writer I remember from the 60s, Jonathan Strong and his debut book, TIKE AND FIVE STORIES - and a damn good book at that. Other readers, I have noticed, complained of two many "I's" in this book. I noticed this too, but I didn't feel it detracted in any way from the forward (or backward) flow of the narrative. It maintained a uniform speed, which was considerable for the entirety of the book. So I'm not going to 'dis' this stylistic change, because it's not worse, it's just different. And it works, because you feel the urgency to get the stories told; you also benefit from the lifetime of encyclopedic reading she's done and a hard-won wisdom she has gained in the intervening years. Because a younger writer could never have told the kind of story you read here.
There is so much here that is so on-the-mark about coming of age in the 50s (and early 60s too). On dating, for example -
"...I let Bill kiss me until his face was covered with lipstick. I let him put his hands on my breasts. I didn't let him do anything else, because I knew that if I did he would talk about me." Then she tells how at the end of the evening, at her door, he became "not the knight in shining armor," but a "predator," and how she didn't want to be "spoiled goods," as her mother warned her.
There is a rather sad yet nearly comical description of her deflowering in a Barcelona tenement during an overseas college jaunt, by a would-be writer - a lover whose writing turned out to be so bad that she was glad to see the last of him.
There is much here about the doomed-to-failure marriage to playwright Jack Richardson, a man described as entirely self-centered, alcoholic and deeply damaged. In fact he sounds like he may have had some form of Asperberger's in a time before that disorder had even been 'discovered.' A child results from this unfortunate union, which finally dissolved after six years. "The child" - which is the only way Roiphe ever refers to this baby here - ends up irreparably damaged herself, despite being adopted by Roiphe's second husband, a good marriage which lasted for over forty years.
And then there are all the endless parties, happenings and orgies at which Roiphe was a frequent 'decoration' during her divorced years, all the adulterous affairs with married artists and writers from those crazy decadent years that were the 60s. She makes no apologies, but she's not particularly proud of any of it either, noting at the close of her narrative that she "would never do it again. Never." Many famous writers with whom she had dalliances are named here - almost all of them dead now, victims of alcohol, drugs, and too-much-too-soon - or in the case of her first husband, not enough; just failure.
This is one hell of a ride, lemme tell ya. I found most of it positively riveting. If I have a complaint, it's that there is some redundancy here, stuff from the other two memoirs that is repeated. But if you only read this one, that's not anything you'll notice. And this is an excellent, blazingly honest slice-of-life from the artistic scene in NYC in the 50s and 60s. I will recommend it highly. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER
Roiphe was born on Christmas Day 1935 and was raised under conditions of wealth and privilege, although her home life was plagued by parents who did not love each other, a philandering and cold father and all kinds of other unhappy stuff. That story is told in 1185 PARK AVENUE, all the way up through the dissolution of Roiphe's own first marriage and the deaths of her parents and brother. EPILOGUE is all about the grief-stricken period which followed the sudden death of her second husband, a marriage that had endured for forty years.
ART AND MADNESS is quite a different kind of animal. It was written, perhaps, in response to repeated queries from her adult daughter Katie (also a writer, who penned the Foreword) about what Mom's life was like during her twenties. But I also got the feeling that, at 75-plus, Roiphe is beginning to fell time closing in, because, unlike the carefully crafted prose of the other two memoirs, this one is told in a kind of full-speed-ahead, stream-of-consciousness mode, in a broken, back-and-forth chronology jumping between the fifties and sixties. There are no chapter headings; each section is labeled only with a year, and may jump from high school to young-married/new-mother, then back to a college year, and so on. The style is often terse and short, almost Hemingway-esque in manner. I thought too of the simplistic style of another minor writer I remember from the 60s, Jonathan Strong and his debut book, TIKE AND FIVE STORIES - and a damn good book at that. Other readers, I have noticed, complained of two many "I's" in this book. I noticed this too, but I didn't feel it detracted in any way from the forward (or backward) flow of the narrative. It maintained a uniform speed, which was considerable for the entirety of the book. So I'm not going to 'dis' this stylistic change, because it's not worse, it's just different. And it works, because you feel the urgency to get the stories told; you also benefit from the lifetime of encyclopedic reading she's done and a hard-won wisdom she has gained in the intervening years. Because a younger writer could never have told the kind of story you read here.
There is so much here that is so on-the-mark about coming of age in the 50s (and early 60s too). On dating, for example -
"...I let Bill kiss me until his face was covered with lipstick. I let him put his hands on my breasts. I didn't let him do anything else, because I knew that if I did he would talk about me." Then she tells how at the end of the evening, at her door, he became "not the knight in shining armor," but a "predator," and how she didn't want to be "spoiled goods," as her mother warned her.
There is a rather sad yet nearly comical description of her deflowering in a Barcelona tenement during an overseas college jaunt, by a would-be writer - a lover whose writing turned out to be so bad that she was glad to see the last of him.
There is much here about the doomed-to-failure marriage to playwright Jack Richardson, a man described as entirely self-centered, alcoholic and deeply damaged. In fact he sounds like he may have had some form of Asperberger's in a time before that disorder had even been 'discovered.' A child results from this unfortunate union, which finally dissolved after six years. "The child" - which is the only way Roiphe ever refers to this baby here - ends up irreparably damaged herself, despite being adopted by Roiphe's second husband, a good marriage which lasted for over forty years.
And then there are all the endless parties, happenings and orgies at which Roiphe was a frequent 'decoration' during her divorced years, all the adulterous affairs with married artists and writers from those crazy decadent years that were the 60s. She makes no apologies, but she's not particularly proud of any of it either, noting at the close of her narrative that she "would never do it again. Never." Many famous writers with whom she had dalliances are named here - almost all of them dead now, victims of alcohol, drugs, and too-much-too-soon - or in the case of her first husband, not enough; just failure.
This is one hell of a ride, lemme tell ya. I found most of it positively riveting. If I have a complaint, it's that there is some redundancy here, stuff from the other two memoirs that is repeated. But if you only read this one, that's not anything you'll notice. And this is an excellent, blazingly honest slice-of-life from the artistic scene in NYC in the 50s and 60s. I will recommend it highly. - Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir BOOKLOVER
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Jennifer O.
Format:Hardcover
"I believed that art, for me the art of the story, the written word, was worth dying for."
We hear about great writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Pound and Eliot, and their names are nearly mystical and eons away from us. But what would it have been like to be near to the pathos and genius, to be moving in the same circles as the novelists, poets, and playwrights that were giants in their day? Men like George Plimpton and Doc Humes, founders of The Paris Review? William Styron and Norman Mailer. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Would it influence how you view yourself? Would it affect your priorities? How far would you go to stay in that world? What would it take to pull you away from it?
Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness covers a time during the fifties when she partook in that literary monarchy. Not as a writer herself, but as one of dozens of girls, attracted to these fatalistic, complex, seductive, self-aggrandizing men-- women who sacrificed pieces of themselves, martyrs in the name of Art.
Much has changed since the days the public revered The Writer. Now, writing is viewed more through the prism of a career, rather than a "calling." As Kate Roiphe reveals in the foreword, her mother (now a well regarded author with many accolades of her own) treats her own work "with all the romanticism of a factory worker off for a day on the assembly line." Art and Madness charts that transition, that "slow and painful and interesting evolution."
"Normal life beckoned with all the appeal of soiled bedsheets. I wanted to dance in the dark, cheek to cheek, with something dangerous, something that would make me feel alive."
As a student enrolled in Smith College, Roiphe begins to realize she doesn't want to share in the type of lifestyle that her fellow classmates are destined to have. She looks at her mother, and rejects the ideals and setting of her childhood. She will not be a part of the staid suburbs, country club luncheons, golf get- togethers, and other banal happenings. Dammit, she will not be the kind of woman who wears pearl necklaces. But at that time, what is the alternative? Transferring to Sarah Lawrence is the inception of her intellectual and philosophical transformation.
But what are her alternatives? Even at this new college, an eminent professor declares that the words of women are "not worth the paper they [are] written on."
If she cannot be a writer, she will be a muse.
And so she dons her non-conformist uniform of jeans and black leotard. Heavy eye makeup and no lipstick. (Think back to the fifties and remember what they wore then.) If she cannot make the earth tremble with her words, she will flit about, in the world of those who do--self-destructive, selfish men who neglect their families and dive headfirst into an existence full of raving and roaring, of alcohol and heavy drug use, all the in the pursuit of Greatness.
Roiphe's memoir goes back and forth in time, in seemingly random scenes, and eventually culminates to the moment when she realizes that this pursuit of literary immortality and creation has resulted in a vast landscape of casualties.
It is not a price she is willing to pay anymore.
Salvaging what she can of her life, and her child's well-being (she marries and then divorces a tortured playwright), Roiphe once again transforms, this time from a muse to a writer. It is a long and arduous passage, full of one epiphany after another, but Roiphe writes with an unflinching eye towards her younger self, chronicling her flawed aims and her many mistakes.
For those of you who have not read this novel, it would appear that I have included spoilers. Actually, Roiphe's memoir unfolds in a way that you know how the story ends at the very beginning.
All in all, a gripping read. Roiphe writes with poetic compactness and illustrates a bygone era with such precision you will be surprised to realize you weren't there yourself.
We hear about great writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Pound and Eliot, and their names are nearly mystical and eons away from us. But what would it have been like to be near to the pathos and genius, to be moving in the same circles as the novelists, poets, and playwrights that were giants in their day? Men like George Plimpton and Doc Humes, founders of The Paris Review? William Styron and Norman Mailer. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Would it influence how you view yourself? Would it affect your priorities? How far would you go to stay in that world? What would it take to pull you away from it?
Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness covers a time during the fifties when she partook in that literary monarchy. Not as a writer herself, but as one of dozens of girls, attracted to these fatalistic, complex, seductive, self-aggrandizing men-- women who sacrificed pieces of themselves, martyrs in the name of Art.
Much has changed since the days the public revered The Writer. Now, writing is viewed more through the prism of a career, rather than a "calling." As Kate Roiphe reveals in the foreword, her mother (now a well regarded author with many accolades of her own) treats her own work "with all the romanticism of a factory worker off for a day on the assembly line." Art and Madness charts that transition, that "slow and painful and interesting evolution."
"Normal life beckoned with all the appeal of soiled bedsheets. I wanted to dance in the dark, cheek to cheek, with something dangerous, something that would make me feel alive."
As a student enrolled in Smith College, Roiphe begins to realize she doesn't want to share in the type of lifestyle that her fellow classmates are destined to have. She looks at her mother, and rejects the ideals and setting of her childhood. She will not be a part of the staid suburbs, country club luncheons, golf get- togethers, and other banal happenings. Dammit, she will not be the kind of woman who wears pearl necklaces. But at that time, what is the alternative? Transferring to Sarah Lawrence is the inception of her intellectual and philosophical transformation.
But what are her alternatives? Even at this new college, an eminent professor declares that the words of women are "not worth the paper they [are] written on."
If she cannot be a writer, she will be a muse.
And so she dons her non-conformist uniform of jeans and black leotard. Heavy eye makeup and no lipstick. (Think back to the fifties and remember what they wore then.) If she cannot make the earth tremble with her words, she will flit about, in the world of those who do--self-destructive, selfish men who neglect their families and dive headfirst into an existence full of raving and roaring, of alcohol and heavy drug use, all the in the pursuit of Greatness.
Roiphe's memoir goes back and forth in time, in seemingly random scenes, and eventually culminates to the moment when she realizes that this pursuit of literary immortality and creation has resulted in a vast landscape of casualties.
It is not a price she is willing to pay anymore.
Salvaging what she can of her life, and her child's well-being (she marries and then divorces a tortured playwright), Roiphe once again transforms, this time from a muse to a writer. It is a long and arduous passage, full of one epiphany after another, but Roiphe writes with an unflinching eye towards her younger self, chronicling her flawed aims and her many mistakes.
For those of you who have not read this novel, it would appear that I have included spoilers. Actually, Roiphe's memoir unfolds in a way that you know how the story ends at the very beginning.
All in all, a gripping read. Roiphe writes with poetic compactness and illustrates a bygone era with such precision you will be surprised to realize you weren't there yourself.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
interesting but....
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