The MagazineBohemian RhapsodyA backward look at the Manhattan hipster life.Apr 18, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 30
• By ANN MARLOWE
 Art and Madness  Leonard Bernstein, George Plimpton, 1968 Bettmann / Corbis Seventy-five-year-old Anne Roiphe’s short, incandescent fourth memoir doesn’t read like an older writer’s book, but it explores obsessively an archaic constellation of ideas: that there’s something special about artists and writers that excuses their moral lapses, especially in the arenas of alcoholism and adultery. “I believed that I was going to be a muse to a man of great talent,” she intones, and she might as well be saying she dreamt of being a lady in waiting at the court of Louis XIV, it is so remote to the present day. “Alcohol was the lubricant of genius . . . the men needed to drink.” In sentences that alternate between Hemingwayesque brusqueness and Woolfian rhapsodies, Roiphe offers short set pieces anchored mainly in New York and the Hamptons from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. At the time, the United States still had a nearly official culture, with a hierarchy of writers (almost all white and male) whose relative rank order everyone knew. In Roiphe’s account, they partied furiously, often at the Sutton Place apartment of the Paris Review cofounder George Plimpton. Maybe the nonstop drinking and adultery she participated in was possible because writing was a reasonably paid enterprise, or because many of the Paris Review crowd—Peter Matthiessen, Doc Humes, Plimpton himself—were trustafarians. Some were also highly productive; Roiphe has bested most by publishing three earlier memoirs as well as nine novels and six works of nonfiction, while raising three daughters. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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