Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  When Dr. Frank Waples looked out his window on Sunday morning, January 28, 1912, he was relieved to see blue sky. It had been snowing when he went to bed, but the morning wind had already blown the night’s accumulation off the roads, leaving only long, white scars where wagon tracks had frozen and filled with snow. Blue sky and clear roads meant that he could cover the eight miles out to the Sant Watkins ranch in a couple of hours or less. Stella Pollock had reported “irregularities” during her pregnancy, alerting Dr. Waples to the possibility of a difficult delivery. When Roy arrived by horse that morning to tell him that Stella was in labor, Dr. Waples decided it would be best if both he and the local midwife, Annie Howath, who had assisted at the delivery of the last two Pollock boys, were present.

  Dr. Waples’s familiar, affable bedside manner must have been a source of some comfort to Stella as she suffered through labor for the fifth time. Roy wasn’t in the room; as usual he was off with the sheepherders who were camped out at the ranch for the winter. Nor did Stella’s sons show much interest in the activities around their mother’s bed. When Charles was told another baby was due, he replied nonchalantly, “Oh, that’s nothing new. There’ll be another one by Christmas.”

  Soon after the final contractions began, Dr. Waples realized that something was wrong. Some unseen problem in the womb prevented the baby from moving even as Stella followed his instructions to bear down harder. When the head finally appeared through the birth canal—an alarmingly dark bulge straining to emerge—Dr. Waples saw the shiny, blue-black cord wrapped around its neck. He quickly cut the cord, disentangled the baby, and held it aloft to spank some life into it. When Stella saw her child for the first time, its head was deep blue, the color of a bad bruise (she later exaggerated the story and said it was “black as a stove”), and its 12¼-pound body was limp. Even after the first few slaps, there was no sign of breathing. Stella later admitted that, at the time, she feared it was stillborn.

  The baby, another boy, lived, but Stella paid a price for him. According to Dr. Waples, she could never bear another child. He was named Paul Jackson Pollock: Paul for a reason that only Stella knew; Jackson for the beautiful lake at the base of the Tetons where Roy used to go hunting with his friend Tom Archbold, who had just died. In accordance with an old McClure tradition of using the middle name, or perhaps at Roy’s insistence, the boy was called Jack from his first, traumatic day. “I guess mother knew he was the last one,” says Frank Pollock. “So she always referred to him as the baby of the family, even into his teens. She’d got this whole clan, and she’d say, ‘Here’s my baby.’”

  Within weeks of Jackson’s birth, just as he was becoming accustomed to the world, it began to change around him. Carried in Stella’s arms, he began a journey that would cover five thousand miles through eight states with only two brief stops along the way—almost nine months of continuous travel.

  For the other brothers—Charles, nine; Jay, seven; Frank, four; and Sande, two—the trip was a kaleidoscope of new sights and experiences. They had never ridden a train before or been outside the Big Horn Basin. “We discovered things that we’d never seen before,” Charles recalls, “Indians selling trinkets at the stations, prairie dogs popping out of their holes.” In Iowa, there was snow on the ground, and when the train stopped in Tingley, Stella’s father was there in his sleigh to meet them. When they returned to Cody, Stella spent a few months packing, selling the household goods, and waiting for word from Roy, who had left for San Diego in October. In November, she placed a short classified advertisement in the Park County Enterprise: “For Sale: All my household goods, baby buggy, canned fruit, and everything. Call at the house.”

  When the letter from Roy finally arrived, it instructed Stella to bring the family and meet him in National City, a new California fruit-growing town wedged between San Diego and the Mexican border. Leaving Cody on November 28, 1912, when Jackson was exactly ten months old, the train took a long, right-angle course through Montana and Idaho to Seattle, across Puget Sound, then down the coast through Oregon and California. In all, the trip took more than a week, requiring more than half a dozen changes of train.

  For four of the Pollock boys, the journey was yet another adventure. But for little Jackson, squirming and blinking toward his first birthday, traveling was a more anxious experience. The usually doting Stella was suddenly preoccupied with four rambunctious sons, including two-year-old Sande, who required vigilant supervision. Throughout the trip, except in rare moments of privacy, Jackson was denied the usual breastfeeding and, for much of his first year, experienced his mother from the perspective of a piece of cherished baggage, bundled in layers of lace, staring up into her impassive public face hidden behind the veil she always wore while traveling.

  The reunion in National City was not a happy one. In the months since they had last seen him, Roy had been unable to find either a farm to work or a place to live. He was drifting from one temporary job to the next, working here as a plasterer on a construction job and there as a hired worker on one of the big farms in the Imperial Valley. Stella had arranged for the family to stay at the house of a friend from Tingley, a Mrs. Edelmann, who lived on Sixth Street in Coronado, a small resort town on the narrow isthmus across San Diego Bay from National City.

  It was already clear to everyone, especially Stella, that Jackson was the most beautiful of her babies. He had his mother’s broad face and sensuous mouth, but his father’s refined features and vulnerable eyes. He had three deep dimples—one on each cheek and one on his chin—which he would keep the rest of his life, and thick blond hair, which he would lose. Stella might have doted even more on her beautiful new baby if it hadn’t been for an epidemic of mumps and measles that swept through the family soon after they arrived in Coronado, leaving Roy sterile. “That was the end of the Pollock family,” Charles recalls.

  Sterility wasn’t the only setback Roy encountered in Southern California. Like thousands of other Iowa farmers who flooded the area between 1900 and 1920, Roy Pollock came dreaming of a farm that combined Iowa soil and California sun. But only a few scraps of land were still available and only wealthy landowners could afford them. Then, in January 1913, a devastating freeze—not only the fruit on the trees but the trees themselves froze and split open—shook the region’s economy and its image as an agricultural paradise. Farmers like Roy Pollock began to look elsewhere for cheaper land and more predictable weather.

  Among the places he looked was Phoenix, Arizona.

  Roy had been in contact with Leonard Porter, a distant relative in Louisiana who planned to move to Phoenix in August, and on his recommendation, visited the area in the late spring of 1913. Impressed by what he saw, he returned to Coronado and, without waiting to make specific arrangements, prepared his family to move. Frank was sent ahead with Mrs. Edelmann, who was joining her husband in Phoenix, and on August 11, 1913, the rest of the family followed with a few household furnishings that had been stored since the move from Cody.

  After a year and a half, the period of transition and uncertainty that had begun soon after Jackson’s birth was almost over. It was prolonged for a few more weeks in Phoenix while Roy made the final arrangements to buy from Hart and Sydney Baker a twenty-acre plot of land six miles east of town on the road to Tempe. The family stayed in a rooming house in Phoenix until the day in September when Roy took them to the Five Point Livery Stable at the corner of Van Buren Street and Grand Avenue, rented a horse and buggy, and drove them out through the dust of Sherman Street to see their new home.

  4

  SENSITIVE TO AN UNNATURAL DEGREE

  In February 1913, a huge show of paintings and sculptures by Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and dozens of other artists opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street in New York City. Public reaction ranged from skepticism to outrage. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase drew “shrieks of laughter” from a crowd that was unable “to discover the lady or the stairway.” A
room filled with paintings in the new Cubist style, eight by Picasso, was dubbed the “Chamber of Horrors.” In March, Picasso left for a vacation in Ceret, France, with his mistress Eva. Securely prosperous and widely acclaimed, he was untroubled by the ridicule in New York and already beginning to play with a newer, more whimsical Cubist style than the one on display in the Chamber of Horrors. In April, Henri Matisse accompanied a critic through a Paris exhibition of paintings from his just completed trip to Morocco. In an effort to explain why he had simplified his images almost to the point of abstraction, Matisse told the critic, “I tend toward what I feel; toward a kind of ecstasy. And then I find tranquility.” That summer, Claude Monet, still in mourning after the death of his wife and suffering from cataracts, found personal solace and great art in the flowering arches of his garden at Giverny.

  In September, Jackson Pollock, age one and a half, saw his new home for the first time.

  Eventually, all of the events of 1913 would have an impact on Pollock’s art. At the time, however, and for the next five years, his entire world—visual, emotional, psychological—was bounded in a nutshell of land a quarter of a mile by an eighth of a mile. To a child, it was a universe—including his house, his father’s farm, and all the neighbors he knew—a universe at least as rich and fertile to a sensitive eye as the history of Western art.

  And no one’s eye was more sensitive than Jackson’s. “He looked at things psychedelically,” says Nick Carone, a close friend at the end of Pollock’s life. “He didn’t see them with the retina, he saw them with his mind. He would look at an ashtray like he was trying to get at its molecular structure. And then he would touch it, move a butt or a matchstick with his fingertips. He was organizing that phenomena, putting it right. He was going to make it his.” Even as a child, according to his brother Sande, Jackson was, like his father, sensitive “to an unnatural degree.” Barefoot, dressed in bib overalls, his blond hair shining in the Arizona sun, Jackson explored his little universe: both the outer landscape of adobe houses and dusty yards, and the inner landscape of sibling rivalries and unreturned love. Then, detail by detail, he took that universe and “put it right.” Through fantasy, he created his own landscape, a private world of images that, for the rest of his life, would haunt his dreams and preoccupy his art.

  In the front room of the little adobe house on Sherman Street, his father’s bookcase was the most sacred object. Two of the shelves were low enough for Jackson to peer through the diamonds of leaded glass at the rows of grainy black and brown leather spines etched in gold. Above the glass, beyond a little boy’s reach, was an expanse of dark, glossy wood with a keyhole at the top and, above that, another row of books so far up that he had to step back to see it. The floor in front of the bookcase was covered with a grass rug where he and his brothers often fell asleep after lunch when Mother warned them out of the midday sun, and at night when Dad read to them from one of his books. Next to the bookcase stood the chair where Dad smoked his pipe and read, or Mother sewed. Mother read too, but she read with scissors in her hand, cutting out recipes and pictures from her magazines. In the basket at the foot of the chair were several spools of white thread and a metal crochet hook. If his father’s magic came from the bookcase, his mother’s came from the basket. Proof of it filled the room: dark tabletops were broken into fragments by it, pillows were turned into snowflakes, chairs floated on clouds of it, and the bright Phoenix sunlight shimmered through curtains of it. “I can remember her sitting and crocheting these things,” says her grandson, Jonathan Pollock, who many years later shared Jackson’s boy’s-eye view of Stella’s handiwork. “I used to watch her working. It was so intricate. I couldn’t figure out how she could make something so complicated. The designs were intricate but the compositions were always well-balanced.”

  It was just a few sleepy steps from the grass rug in the front room to the bedroom where all five Pollock boys slept from November through March when it was too cool to sleep outside. Three iron bedsteads filled the small room: one for Charles and Jay, one for Sande and Jack, and one for Frank, the third son, marooned in the middle of the family. Even in the winter, they slept in the nude: five small bodies crowded together on sheets their mother had sewn. A teddy bear marked Jackson’s bed. “For some time he had felt that he was too big to have it around,” recalled brother Sande, but he was “unable to banish it to a trunk.’”

  In the front yard of the Phoenix farm

  In the wood dresser against the wall Mother kept their clothes. The top drawer, also beyond Jackson’s reach, held the pastry-like stacks of handmade lace blouses and gowns that had belonged in turn to each of her sons. Knowing that Jackson was her last, she dressed him in petticoats and lace until well past his third birthday. In the middle drawer were his brothers’ clothes: well-worn denim overalls for work and corduroy knee pants for school, stacks of soft chambray and blue gingham shirts, long black socks, and belted jeans that Jackson longed to wear—“They’ll never stay on you,” his father would say when he pleaded for a pair. For Stella, the dresser was a display case: like her children, a sample of her handiwork. “We were always groomed,” recalls Frank Pollock, “however poor we were.” Charles remembers “the pride that my mother had in the cleanliness and good looks of her five children.” Near the dresser, five pairs of shoes were lined up from small to tiny, hardly worn. Every fall, Stella went into Phoenix and bought each of her boys a new pair “because she didn’t want us to go to school and have the teacher think we couldn’t afford shoes,” says Frank. But sitting on the floor by the dresser in May, they still looked brand new. “It was more comfortable to go barefooted,” Frank explains, “so every day we stuck them on a pomegranate tree on the way to school and picked them up on the way home.”

  From the bedroom window, Jackson could see the front yard in the white light of noonday. The big umbrella trees were the focus of activity on the quiet side of the house. They offered a cool home to the red-winged blackbirds, shielded the sparse grass from the sun, and cleared a shady spot for dinner on a hot night. Most of the year, the front yard was also a bedroom. The Pollocks would drag the heavy bedsteads out and array them under the trees with only sheets to protect them from the mosquitoes. “It’d be so hot we couldn’t breathe,” remembers a Pollock neighbor. “So we’d jump in the irrigation ditch and wet our clothes. Then we’d sleep in wet clothes to keep ourselves cool.” The path from the front door passed through the shade of the umbrella trees out to a gate between tall cottonwood posts. Cottonwood trees had been planted all along the roadside acequias, or ditches, to provide shade, but they made unreliable fence posts. “You’d plant a cottonwood post,” Charles Pollock recalls, “and first thing you know you’d have a damned tree. So you’d cut it down again for firewood, stick in a new post, and that one would sprout branches. We did a lot of fencing on the place.” The shady acequias, lined with a cushion of grass, made a convenient place to wait for the mailman who brought Mother’s and Dad’s magazines mostly.

  No room beckoned Jackson more irresistibly than the kitchen at the back of the house, where he could almost always find his mother. Dominating the room and the house, like the tryworks of a whaling ship, was a huge, black iron stove. The flames in the firebox danced furiously from morning to night, so hot that Jackson could feel the heat on his face from across the room. He wasn’t allowed near. In the mornings, Mother moved around the stove with impunity, adjusting the black pot handles that jutted out over the edge of the stovetop. Looming over the stove, a huge kettle of water, poised just below boiling, added curls of steam to the heavy kitchen air. On wash days, Stella emptied the kettle into a galvanized washtub on the porch and sat with the washboard between her knees torturing the dirt from overalls and shirts. On Saturdays, it was Jackson’s turn in the tub.

  When Mother opened the oven door, Jackson could just glimpse the pans of bread before being hit by the wall of heat and smell. The oven door was always opening up to surprises that made a boy want to stay in the k
itchen forever. “Stella loved to bake,” remembers her grandson, Jonathan. “I remember apple pie very vividly, and cookies. When I came home from school I was always drawn to the aroma coming from the kitchen.” At Christmas there was special candy in the oven and roasted walnuts on the stove. The acrid sweetness of burnt sugar and the cannonade of popping corn filled the house for hours as Stella labored around the blazing stove through the night preparing Christmas candy and long strings of dyed popcorn to decorate the house “from corner to corner.”

  The warm smells and sweet feasts attracted flies as well as wanton boys to the kitchen. Especially during the summer when the nearby barnyard was ripe and the windows wide open, great sheets of flypaper hung around the room like banners, stirred slightly by an occasional breeze. When the smooth black paper became heavy and encrusted, Stella took it down, rolled it gingerly, and tossed it into the firebox where it crackled brightly for a few seconds, then flaked into nothing.

  On the counter beside the stove Mother kept a simple nine-by-twelve-inch book bound in imitation red leather like an old ledger. “It had all her recipes in it,” recalls Stella’s granddaughter Jeremy Capillé. “It was all handwritten and she had a very spidery, beautiful handwriting. On the side of each recipe were little notes, like ‘this is especially good,’ or ‘after you’ve taken it out of the oven, don’t forget to let it cool,’ or ‘try letting it sit overnight.’ She wrote personal notes, too, like ‘Made this cake for Jack’s fifth birthday.’ And it was so full of her handwriting, with cards clipped on at almost every page, that there was no order to it. You would find a recipe for dumplings right next to one for carrot cake.”

  The kitchen’s secret was the cellarway: a small, shallow hole in the ground beneath the house where, even in the inescapable summer heat, there was always a stale remnant of coolness in the air. Jackson seldom ventured down alone; but he had descended with his mother and seen her take the cover from one of the crocks and ladle buttermilk into a pitcher. He had himself groped in the butter jar, sniffing the sweet damp smell, and pulled out a pat of butter wrapped in moist cheesecloth; fetched apples from the barrel for pie; and brought up sweet milk for oatmeal—although he preferred to use the cream he skimmed off the top of a fresh pan of milk from the barn the way his brothers showed him.