Death, Love, Taxes, and Beauty, Among Other Issues by Hilton Als

In The Philosophy, the artist Andy Warhol tells us relatively little about how he became Warhol. He shares parts of his story in this series of aperçus about death, love, taxes, and beauty, among other issues—thus making his philosophy a kind of conversation about what the “I” might mean in general and what his “I” means (at times) in particular. The Philosophy was Warhol’s first book-length work of nonfiction, and if “philosophy,” as we understand the word, means a systematic study of existence, values, dread, the universe, then the book is aptly titled.

But the artist slips into other genres as well. He writes a little stand-up banter (particularly with his friend B, with whom he has a kind of deadpan Nichols-and-May routine going on; but unlike Nichols and May, the life they’re talking about is no joke, or not one they’d consider a joke) in a book about removing oneself from the most confusing aspect of existence (or one of them)—that of feeling, which Warhol describes not wanting to experience in The Philosophy.

But if you make anything at all, let alone a book, you want to communicate something to the world, and the hope is that the world will see at least some of itself in what you have to say. Warhol spent a lot of time preempting the judgment he might have felt framed all feeling—judgment and rejection being your just deserts for having felt anything at all. In the sixties, his oft-quoted remarks, such as “I want to be a machine,” didn’t really fool that many people, given how much Warhol was surrounded by people who curried favor, and with whom he was, to varying degrees, involved. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t live under the threat of rejection; power always lives in fear of not being powerful. In some ways, Warhol was never not porous. After all, he lived with his mother until he was nearly forty; there’s something about this choice that is not only dutiful but comforting. The arch language of the art world, of the gay world, of commissions and running a business, finds its way into some of the tone of The Philosophy but so does fragility and his mother’s love. Near the beginning of the book, the artist recalls,

I had had three nervous breakdowns when I was a child, spaced a year apart. One when I was eight, one at nine, and one at ten. The attacks—St. Vitus Dance—always started on the first day of summer vacation. I don’t know what this meant. I would spend all summer listening to the radio and lying in bed with my Charlie McCarthy doll and my un-cut-out cut-out paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow.

My father was away a lot on business trips to the coal mines, so I never saw him very much. My mother would read to me in her thick Czechoslovakian accent as best she could and I would always say “Thanks, Mom,” after she finished with Dick Tracy, even if I hadn’t understood a word. She’d give me a Hershey Bar every time I finished a page in my coloring book.

Mother love, mother comfort. I wonder what Julia Warhola saw when she watched “her Andy” collapsed and pale against his white pillows. Did she think of his delicacy as being her fault or an aspect of being an artist, given that she, too, was an artist, but one with the added responsibility of having three sons? Would Andy be an artist for her? At the Factory, an early studio, Warhol became a kind of mother as well, one who obliged to “bring home the bacon.”

I first read The Philosophy upon its initial release. I remember being taken by the autobiographical elements in the book and how Warhol elided making the book an autobiography despite the power of certain passages, such as the following:

When I think of my high school days, all I can remember, really, are the long walks to school, through the Czech ghetto with the babushkas and overalls on the clotheslines. … We passed a bridge every day and underneath were used prophylactics. I’d always wonder out loud to everybody what they were, and they’d laugh.

He could be such a drip, or at least thought of himself as one. (“I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—‘The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.’ You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.”) And yet, over and over again, this lonely person—so rich in the isolation of fame—tries to talk to us, to connect with us, out of some sort of need he does not admit to—or never would admit to—which is another reason we were always eager for Warhol to talk to us more directly at times; we wanted to love him—his story—as much as we loved his art. Instead, Warhol diverts us in this book and any number of interviews through camp, the “swish” tone, and thus behavior, that put off older artists, such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But as Warhol wrote in the fantastic 1980 book that he coauthored with Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, he didn’t want to change his swish. And part of his radicalism was to make the art world, and then America, deal with his gayness, his silence, and what constituted love. In the “Love (Prime)” chapter in The Philosophy, we meet a young woman named Taxi, who bears a resemblance to Warhol’s 1965 superstar Edie Sedgwick:

Taxi was from Charleston, South Carolina—a confused, beautiful debutante who’d split with her family and come to New York. She had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody’s private fantasies. Taxi could be anything you wanted her to be—a little girl, a woman, intelligent, dumb, rich, poor—anything. She was a wonderful, beautiful blank. The mystique to end all mystiques.

She was also a compulsive liar; she just couldn’t tell the truth about anything. And what an actress. She could really turn on the tears. She could somehow always make you believe her—that’s how she got what she wanted.

Taxi invented the mini-skirt. She was trying to prove to her family back in Charleston that she could live on nothing, so she would go to the Lower East Side and buy the cheapest clothes, which happen to be little girls’ skirts, and her waist was so tiny she could get away with it. Fifty cents a skirt. She was the first person to wear ballet tights as a complete outfit, with big earrings to dress it up. She was an innovator—out of necessity as well as fun—and the big fashion magazines picked up on her look right away. She was pretty incredible.

We were introduced by a mutual friend who had just made a fortune promoting a new concept in kitchen appliances on television quiz shows. After one look at Taxi I could see that she had more problems than anybody I’d ever met. So beautiful but so sick. I was really intrigued.

She was living off the end of her money. She still had a nice Sutton Place apartment, and now and then she would talk a rich friend into giving her a wad. As I said, she could turn on the tears and get anything she wanted.

In the beginning I had no idea how many drugs Taxi took, but as we saw more and more of each other it began to dawn on me how much of a problem she had.

The drama of “problems” turns up again and again in The Philosophy:

At a certain point in my life, in the late 50s, I began to feel that I was picking up problems from the people I knew. One friend was hopelessly involved with a married woman, another had confided that he was homosexual, a woman I adored was manifesting strong signs of schizophrenia. I had never felt that I had problems, because I had never specifically defined any, but now I felt that these problems of friends were spreading themselves onto me like germs.

I decided to go for psychiatric treatment, as so many people I knew were doing. I felt that I should define some of my own problems—if, in fact, I had any—rather than merely sharing vicariously in the problems of friends.

But that’s precisely what Warhol did, especially in his films: make an art of “problems,” the internalized world of difference in conflict with itself. If his queerness was considered beyond the pale of his pale hair, then he would make a world out of the “straight” world’s aversion to it. He could fall in love, but with the wrong girl. Taxi had “problems,” but she had also come from money, which is another subject of Warhol’s interest in The Philosophy: money and class, both of which could whip him up into a hilarious frenzy. From the chapter titled “Economics”:

When I go to the numbers-racket newspaper greeting card store: in the neighborhood because it’s late and everything else is closed, I go in and I’m very CHIC. Because I have money. I buy Harper’s Bazaar and then I ask for a receipt. The newsboy yells at me and then he writes it on plain white paper. I won’t accept that. “List the magazines, please. And put the date. And write the name of the store at the top.” That makes it feel even more like money. The reason for doing it is I want that man to know I am an HONEST CITIZEN, and I SAVE MY STUBS and I PAY MY TAXES.

Warhol’s determination to be chic and have money was never not part of the plan. He must have quickly gleaned that stars are different and being famous legitimized their difference. For Warhol’s difference to be legitimized, he needed to be rich and famous, to build a wall early on that kept all those others who laughed at him out.

And it’s important to remember while reading Warhol’s views on money and fame what the late art critic Dave Hickey observed: Warhol had never been middle class. The poor boy became a rich man. But being rich always feels provisional if you grew up poor. There’s no such thing as security; there’s only more work and the terror that there won’t be more, and that the work will dry up and no one will remember your name because you haven’t worked hard enough to be remembered. Everything is transactional except the body shrinking from being laughed at.

By the time The Philosophy was published, Warhol had gone from queer avant-gardist with a strong interest in death, ranging from the death of beauty (Marilyn Monroe) to the death of time (as evidenced in his extended-duration films, like the twenty-five-hour-long Four Stars), to being a self-titled “business artist” with a strong, undisguised interest in not only accumulating capital but also being around it. A number of Warhol’s associates have written or said that one reason he turned in his leather jacket for a rep tie was that the mad people whom he so enjoyed being around and who had inspired him in the early sixties instead frightened him after 1968, when he was shot. (“Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”) Performers like the brilliant improviser Ondine were replaced by potential advertisers for his magazine, Interview, or the wives of wealthy men who could afford to pay the sizable fees that Warhol charged for his portraits. Still, Warhol didn’t think this was much of a switch. After all, he had started out as a commercial artist. “Business art is the step that comes after Art,” he writes in The Philosophy. He continues,

I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called “art” or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Businessman or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business—they’d say, “Money is bad,” and “Working is bad,” but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

What sticks out here is the “whatever it’s called.” By disavowing the art, he was trying to protect himself from an inner life he didn’t want but his genius insisted on. And yet he equated feelings with disaster—the disaster of vulnerability, the isolation of it. No one is safe from “feelings,” which is what the works in his brilliant Death and Disaster series say as well, such as 129 Die in Jet! and Tunafish Disaster, both from 1963: Look at what happens to us out in the world. Look at what the world does to us.

In the “Death” chapter in The Philosophy, Warhol doesn’t have much to say: “I don’t believe in it,” he writes, “because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it.” But one way he could prepare for it, at least subconsciously, was to embrace the opacity of being, hiding in plain sight while the world called him “fag” or “weirdo” or whatever. Don’t let them see your feelings, kill them, let them die, because those feelings might hurt you, and people will hurt you again if they saw that they hurt you the first time. So, Warhol put a wig on it, a stopper, in a sense, but we know his heart was broken early in life. No one wants to be excluded from anything, the hetero norm included. Who will have Christmas with me or mourn me when I’m dead? That kind of thing. And I think that heartbreak is essential to our understanding of Warhol in general—his drive not to feel, to hide, to make work that did and did not speak about him, the heartbreak that Something different is going on with my body and I know that the rest of the world is not part of it, those folks with their baby carriages and open world. Let me hide this strangeness. It can break your heart. So, best to be “nobody” even though Warhol’s not-exactly-Buddhist-influenced stance—there’s no disavowal of the ego in his life and work; otherwise, he wouldn’t be Warhol—was a supreme act of the will framed by humor. The Philosophy begins,

I wake up and call B.

B is anybody who helps me kill time.

B is anybody and I’m nobody. B and I.

I need B because I can’t be alone. Except when I sleep. Then I can’t be with anybody.

I wake up and call B.

“Hello.”

“A? Wait and I’ll turn off the TV. And pee. I took a dehydration pill and they make me pee every fifteen minutes.”

I waited for B to pee.

“Go on,” she said finally. “I just woke up. My mouth is dry.”

“I wake up every morning. I open my eyes and think: here we go again.”

Warhol’s resigned tone belies what he woke up to and lived in day after day: the great something that was his work, which is so often framed by distance, and the dream of what it must feel like to be touched.

 

Hilton Als, a Paris Review advisory editor, is the author of the nonfiction works The Women and White Girls. He has long been a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker, and is the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

This essay appears as an introduction to The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which Mariner will reissue in November.