Lee & Elaine: by Ann Rower Chris Kraus As reviewers from Art in America to The Advocate to The New

York Times have observed, Ann Rower's Lee & Elaine has very little to do with Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning. This pisses them off. Hoping for what--a painstaking work of feminist scholarship? A juicy unauthorized story of catfights between the two girls?--Lee & Elaine's critics have almost universally trashed it. Grossly mistitled by Serpent's Tail Press from Rower's original Baby, with the completely irrelevant tagline "Pollock-The Wife's Tale," the book is actually a futurist work of revisionist history, aka fiction, in which Rower imagines what it might mean to write such a book. Of course it's completely impossible. These straight girls couldn't stand each other. Krasner, the balls-out manipulator from Brooklyn (so beautifully played by Marcia Gay Harding in Ed Harris' biopic) was forever at odds with the subtle and classy and much better connected Elaine. Both deeply involved in promoting their husband's careers, the personas of the two women derive mostly from roles ascribed to de Kooning and Pollock in the postwar New York art world: Pollock the outside-contender who could take the art world only by force, versus de Kooning, the European born immigrant whose fluent and troubled lyricism soon made him the Old World master of the new school. So much for essentialism. Lee and Elaine were the men's seconds, as in the nomenclature of the courtly duel. In the novel, Rower arrives at her winter sublet in the town of Springs, a wide-eyed outsider to the East Hampton art scene. (In the interest of total disclosure, the shabby "academic sublet" the narrator rented was mine.) The names of the living sort of impress her. They are famous snob names, drenched in an authenticity that only those schooled in snob ways can fully appreciate. (Lee Krasner's

ghost proclaims on page 89 of the book, the house had "no taste.") Rower, a writer, has only a scattershot interest in visual art. But when she gets to Springs, she sees that the American conceptual artist Hannah Wilke, her old classmate from high school, has died and was recently buried, with all the great artists, at the Green River Cemetery. When they got older, Wilke became Rower's friend enemy in Soho. They lived across Greene Street from each other in lofts, and while Rower loved Hannah, she remembers her as being an impossible character. "When we'd bump into each other on the street, it would be an hour before I could extricate myself ... interesting talk, but always about Hannah." Was scoring this prime spot in the Green River cemetery Wilke's greatest coup? But now the sight of Hannah's fresh dirt chokes the narrator up. "It was brownish wettish live red like someone rouged the mound," the narrator writes,"... plumped like a blanket." "Write about me," the desperate Hannah routinely implored Rower, who didn't. Wilke died in 1991 at the age of fifty two. Using her own gorgeous body as a philosophical proposition, Wilke was branded a narcissist nut by minimalists and early feminists alike. Writing in Artforum in 1974, James Collins commented: "Every time I see her work, I think of pussy." Its only now, a decade after her death, that Wilke's importance has begun to be recognized. As Wilke's contemporary, Rower wonders how things might have been different. Might Wilke's life have been less desperate and tormented if there'd been a tradition of female avant-garde visionaries? Lee and Elaine were buried at Green River too. What if their lives had not been spent defending the oppositional myths of their husbands' work? What if Lee and Elaine had been friends? To the aged ab-ex aristocracy that still lives in East Hampton, it was the dumbest of questions. But the narrator sticks with it, until the

question turns out pre-empting all of the choices she's made in her life as she's lived it. In late middle age, she sees that she must begin all over again. Enter, on the next East Hampton Jitney--the nice bus where they serve peanuts, juices and newspapers, just like on the plane--Iris, the narrator's possibly suicidal thirty-five-year-old lesbian student. Iris and the narrator have been flirting all semester, inside and out of Rower's creative writing class. Now Iris is coming to visit, for reasons that only partly have to do with photographing herself walking into the freezing sea carrying stones for her "Suicide Project." Rower hasn't had sex with a woman since her teenage romance with a dangerous person named Grace. In fact she hasn't had sex with anyone at all for twenty years besides her partner Jack, with whom she shares a rentcontrolled loft and two cats. She is completely freaked out. "I realized maybe I was afraid of getting involved because I don't want to take my clothes off for her. For anyone new. That I felt, not what I thought--old--but fat. Possibly old and fat?" In a hilarious performance of Platonic sex where the roles are reversed, iris ties her teacher to the bed with coloured scarves. But once the narrator begins to lose it all the way, becoming totally aroused as she'd feared not ever being able to, her student decides to undress her. But she can't remove the jumpsuit through the scarves, and leaves the room to ransack the house for scissors. "I was pleased," the narrator reports, "I'd felt. I'd gotten wet. I'd come. I wondered if my happiness had something to do with my corny s/m fantasy not going so smoothly, that there were kinks in the kink...." In this droll and deadpan manner, the narrator records the three-year unraveling of her life. "Researching"

her "book" on Lee and Elaine, she neglects all the legitimate sources and has little interest in either one's work or the facts of their lives. The impossibility of rewriting the myth is what drives her, and finally she's driven by impossibility itself. She leaves Jack and the loft and moves into a shoebox apartment. There is a lot of collateral damage. In her previous books, Armed Response and If You're A Girl, Rower brilliantly chronicles the tiny anxieties of daily life. She writes like she talks, only better, in a style once described by David Ulin as "a late night phone conversation to a friend." Though Rower herself has a Ph.D. from Columbia, her first-person narrator always plays dumb to great comic effect. But in Lee & Elaine, the anxiety isn't just social, it's internal and real. It's no surprise that Rower's book has been so widely dismissed. Like Wilke, Rower turns herself into a mirror, using the pain of real life to forge confrontational satire. She doesn't apologize, she doesn't explain. Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac became underground heroes by telling their stories in the first person. Half a century later, the female first per son can still only be the "I" of the memoir. Should a woman dare write down the facts of her life, she is expected to do so within a narrative are that slinks toward redemption. Rower refuses to do this. Reviewing Lee & Elaine in The New York Times Book Review, Catherine Texier, whose novel Breakup exemplifies this sort of smallminded memoir, takes Rower to task for "[her transparence] about the narrator's fantasies and motives, her fixation on artists, her competitiveness with other writers, her lack of conviction in her own artistic beliefs." It is precisely these qualities that make the book such a stunning success.

Chris Kraus is a fiction writer and art critic living in Los Angeles. Her next book, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, is forthcoming from Semiotexte/MIT Press in Spring, 2004. Hannah Wilke / What Does This Represent? What Do You Represent? (Reinhart), 1978-84, from the So Help Me Hannah series, black and white photograph, 152 x 102 cm. c 2002 Donald Goddard, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY Hannah Wilke / So Help Me Hannah: Snatch-Shots with Ray Guns, 1978, from set of 40 black and white photographs. [c] 2002 Donald Goddard, courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY