Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Outside the back door, a path led to the barnyard. Jackson often stood for hours at a time behind the safety of the screen door, staring at the busy, dusty world of the barnyard, so different from the world of doilies and lace gowns his mother had created inside. Unlike the soft, curtained interior light, the light in the barnyard was pure and clear as glass, so bright that it threw a glare up from the hard-packed earth. At noon the sky was ice white; in the evenings, limpid blue.

  Jackson was at his post by the back door every morning when Stella stepped outside to prime the pump that stood hard by the kitchen door, then disappeared around the side of the house to tend her rose garden. A long flume ran from the pump along the top of a rickety trestle on the right side of the path to the water tubs for the livestock on the other side of the barnyard fence. After Mother had watered her roses and filled her two buckets for cooking and cleaning, Dad would come out and work the squeaky handle for a long time until the distant tubs were magically full. As he grew bolder, Jackson explored the whole length of the trestle aqueduct, although he was never tall enough to see the water in its course.

  To the left of the path, opposite the flume, stood the outhouse with its five holes. “The Sears, Roebuck catalogue was the toilet tissue,” Frank Pollock remembers. “It was tissue-thin paper, my god, a thousand pages it seemed like. You could sit there and read and look at these pictures and wish you could have this and that, then rip off a page.” In the corner stood a can of lye to keep away the relentless flies. Like most farmhands, the Pollock boys shunned the outhouse whenever possible, preferring to make evanescent designs on the nearest patch of dry, dusty ground. Young Jackson often saw his brothers urinating in the fields or in the far corners of the barnyard, sometimes competing to see who could reach farthest. Too young to compete, he would retreat to the outhouse, sitting in sullen, fly-plagued privacy even to urinate—a habit that persisted for the rest of his life, even after he was old enough to make the same long yellow arcs his brothers made.

  Map of the Phoenix farm, drawn by Frank Pollock

  Beyond the outhouse, on the other side of a whitewashed board fence, lay the vast, undifferentiated expanse of the barnyard. From the gate to the back fence fifty or sixty feet away, the ground was a table of brown dust strewn with yellow straw and sticks and a few traces of grass. Three large cottonwood trees cast skittish, doily-like shadows in the dirt. The barnyard was home to Patchwork, a female cat who would stand by during milking until one of the boys pointed a nipple her way and shot a stream of milk into her mouth, and Gyp, a white, short-legged dog with a brown patch around one eye.

  Gyp had inherited the fighter’s temperament of his bull-terrier father and the survival instincts of his collie mother. The Pollocks would give him up for dead many times in his seventeen years. Once a neighbor borrowed him for a hunting trip and abandoned him in a canyon a hundred miles from Phoenix. “We were all sick about it,” recalls Frank, “but a few days later, Gyp showed up. Made it home by himself.” Gyp might have been a “great companion” and a “member of the family,” but he was also a fighter. “He would never let another dog on the place,” Frank remembers. “No one had the nerve to pull Gyp off of a fight for fear he’d turn on them. Dad had to use a pitchfork to break them up. Gyp killed a lot of animals and other dogs.” The sight of Gyp in a killing frenzy could be traumatic. Evelyn Porter Trowbridge, a neighbor and playmate of Jackson’s, remembers seeing one particularly vicious dogfight. “Gyp got into it with a stray, and it was the most horrible thing I ever witnessed.”

  Stella in the barnyard

  Gyp was only one of the dangers waiting for two-year-old Jackson beyond the barnyard gate. (For some time after arriving in Phoenix, he refused to venture past the kitchen door without his mother.) The real denizens of the barnyard were the dozens of chickens, fully half his size, that roamed aimlessly in the dirt and straw. Clutches of them swept nervously back and forth from house to barn, exploding in squawks at the slightest disturbance. When he tried to feed them, they pressed in on him, bullying him, surrounding him in a waist-high frenzy of pecking beaks, beating wings, and beebee eyes. After only one traumatic encounter, Jackson was given the easier job of collecting eggs which, because the chickens were free to wander, was more like a treasure hunt than a chore.

  Past the barnyard, Jackson’s knowledge of his world grew fainter with every step. The gray-board barn and horse corral on the east side of the yard were home to even bigger and more awesome creatures. Jackson never ventured over the corral fence where his father kept the family’s four or five horses when they were not hitched to a plow or a wagon. (Sande couldn’t walk for three weeks after one of the horses kicked him for “getting too familiar.”) Jackson seldom neared the pen behind the barn where six big hogs and their offspring kept the family supplied with bacon, chops, and lard. The only farm animals he saw often were the milk cows, between eight and twelve of them, lined up at the water trough or in their stalls during milking time. Although he never milked a cow himself, he watched his older brothers every morning before breakfast as they spread the hay in the manger, waited for the cows to thrust their heads through the V-shaped stanchions, then slipped the loose board over their necks, trapping them. The white stream of milk made a metallic buzz as it hit the empty bucket, then, as the bucket filled, “softened to a steady purr.”

  Jackson could reach the hayloft at the top of the barn only with his father’s help. When Patchwork chose to have her kittens in the loft’s seclusion, Dad hoisted him up to see the tiny, mewing litter. The hayloft was replenished through an opening at one end equipped with a Jackson fork; its crescent-shaped metal talons could grasp a bale or a huge bundle of hay and unload a wagon in half the time it took a man with a pitchfork. Dad also used the fork when he wanted to butcher one of the big hogs. “He killed the hog with a gunshot between the eyes,” remembers Frank, “then hung it up by the hind legs, cut its throat and let the blood drain out, dropped it into a barrel of scalding hot water and scraped off the hair.”

  Beyond the barn and corral was his father’s domain. Although only twenty acres, it seemed endless. Only on rare occasions was Jackson allowed to tag along behind his older brothers as they left the familiar barnyard through a gate in the whitewashed fence and climbed the low embankment that surrounded the fields. From the top of the rise, he could see his whole world: the small adobe house surrounded by trees on one side, the green-striped fields on the other, everything encircled by the brown, crenellated horizon of North, South, Squaw, and Camelback mountains and, here and there, distant stands of trees marking other farms and other worlds. Laid out before him, the fields were a study in symmetry and order. Along the south side of the farm, its razor-straight course marked by a line of unkempt greenery, an irrigation ditch brought water from some unseen source whenever Dad paid the water man, the zanjero. “How many feet do you want?” the zanjero would ask, noting the answer in his little book along with the time the water should be turned on and for how long. By some magic, exactly at the appointed hour, the water would flow through the ditch and into the gate leading to the fields. To Jackson, the periodic coming of the water meant a swim and, for a few hours afterward, a chance to play in the changing landscape of receding puddles it left behind.

  Running perpendicular to the irrigation ditch, along its full length at intervals of eighteen feet, like the tines of a comb, were low banks of sandy soil that divided the fields into long green strips or “borders.” The banks allowed each border to be flooded separately depending on the crop and the weather. Within the strict grid of thirty-six borders, the patterns were constantly changing. A staggered irrigation schedule meant that some borders were silvered with new water, others—recently flooded—were dark brown, and others had dried to the light sandy color of the barnyard. One border would be filled with big-leafed melon vines and hundreds of watermelons, another with a soft green cover of strawberries. Tomato plants grew in ostentatious disorder next to more modest cucumber vines, rangy
cantaloupes just across from regiments of corn. Here and there stood patches of sweet potatoes, yams, okra, and anything else that could be loaded in the wagon and taken to the farmers’ market in Phoenix. Most of the borders, however, were given over to alfalfa. Its sweet fragrance hung over the fields even on the hottest days, its bright green young shoots or purplish mature blossoms waving in the rare breeze and spilling across the grid.

  From his vantage on the embankment, looking across the field of constantly changing stripes, Jackson could see his father: a tiny, distant figure, bent over the ground, plowing a field, seeding a furrow, tending a shoot, harvesting a crop, alone in a vast arena. He seemed to Jackson a tireless figure, like his mother, but more distant and working on a far larger scale. Where his mother crocheted her intricate designs on pillowcases and tablecloths, his father worked on a canvas that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  In the geography of Jackson Pollock’s childhood, there was also a hell—a forbidden place that both fascinated and terrified.

  Half a mile west along Sherman Street, Jackson’s universe came to an abrupt end. The green alfalfa gave way to sand and sagebrush, the road descended, and high gravel banks rose up on either side. Farther still, the land suddenly fell away and the road plunged into a deep gully several hundred feet wide. A dry wash of white sand curved through the bottoms. The road narrowed, then snaked its way down the steep walls of “bare, rain-washed earth” and across a little wooden bridge spanning the creekbed. “Here and there rocks cropped out and a cactus thrust up its spears,” Sande Pollock recalled. This was the arroyo, a forbidden territory of lizards and rattlesnakes and man-eating coyotes, of magical cacti filled with water, and supernatural stillness—the ideal place for a sensitive child’s exaggerated fears and private demons to take up residence. Whenever Sande suggested going to the arroyo, Jackson reminded him that “Mother wouldn’t like it.” When the family rode through in the wagon, he would beg the driver to “stay on the road.” On the rare occasions when Sande shamed him into exploring it, he was paralyzed with fear. According to Sande’s account of one such trip: “If the brush rustled, [we] jumped.”

  On the other side of the arroyo lay the Mesquite Camp, a tuberculosis sanitarium on the outskirts of Phoenix. To Jackson’s brothers who rode the milk cart every morning (Roy Pollock had a contract to supply the sanitarium with milk), there was nothing mysterious about the rows of tent-like shelters with their screened porches, wandering patients, and unnatural quiet. To Jackson, however, who had heard of it but never seen it, who knew only “that there were sick people in it and that it used up a lot of milk,” the sanitarium remained for the rest of his life, like the arroyo that guarded it, a landscape for nightmares.

  Beyond the irrigation ditch and barbed-wire fences of his father’s farm, Jackson saw little of the outside world. The Porters, who lived a few farms over, a mile down the road, were sharecroppers, poorer than the Pollocks, and considered “lower class” by others in the area—Jay called them “backwoods people”—but they were friendly and they were family, albeit distant, so the two clans often spent summer Sundays together over watermelons or ice cream. The Schrecks lived just across the lane to the west in a small frame house distinguished by the automobile displayed proudly out front. Like Roy Pollock, Adolphus Schreck had moved to Arizona partly for health reasons, bringing his young family with him. (The eldest daughter, Ellen, was just old enough to play with Jackson.) Half a mile east, Jacob Minsch ran a big, relatively prosperous farm with a machine shop that Roy used occasionally. To the south lived the reclusive Mr. Wyncoop, the neighbor who had abandoned Gyp in the canyon. According to the stories whispered by local children, Mr. Wyncoop was a “retired prospector” with a hoard of gold buried somewhere on his ranch. He owned the land the Porters worked but lived alone, tinkering with his inventions, and supplying grist for the local rumor mill.

  Of all the inhabitants of the outside world, none played a more important role in Jackson’s private world than the Moris, a Japanese family that lived just north across Sherman Street. Yoshiro Mori had been a houseboy in Santa Cruz, California, before marrying Ayame Hamasaki, a recent arrival from his hometown of Kumamoto, Japan, and moving his family to the Salt River valley in 1913, about the same time that the Pollocks arrived from Coronado. With the help of a local missionary—who signed the deed because Japanese were barred from owning land in Phoenix—the Moris moved into a tiny but handsome brick house with green trim, set back from the road at the end of a lane of chinaberry trees. Jackson often walked down the lane to play with Shizuko Mori, a shy little girl his own age, and Akinabu, her round-faced younger brother. He rode in the Moris’ truck and watched as the father made bread and danced around the stove while it baked. He watched the mother, who spoke no English, dressed in a long white dress, quietly preparing dinners of Japanese vegetables. He studied the strange-looking newspaper that arrived every week from Los Angeles, so unlike his parents’ papers and magazines, and stood enchanted at Ayame’s elbow as she wrote letters to relatives in Japan, creating pages of intricate calligraphy with hand movements even finer and more delicate than those of his mother crocheting.

  Because the Pollocks never went to church, family trips outside the neighborhood were rare. Once a year, the circus came to Phoenix and the whole family took a day off—“probably the only day off in the whole damn year,” according to Frank. They watched the noontime parade through the center of town and spent the afternoon in the big tent. In five years, the only other family outing was a “hayride picnic” with the Porters to Camelback Mountain. It may have been on this trip that Jackson first heard the story of the Hohokam—the civilization that had flourished in the same valley more than a thousand years before. The road to Camelback paralleled the course of the old Hohokam canals that had connected a vast network of communities (“the most complex urban civilization outside of Mexico in prehistoric times,” according to one historian). Jackson could see from the road the remains of Hohokam adobe houses, some of them several stories high, as well as the faded routes of their long, narrow canals, a few of which had been excavated by recent settlers to carry water again after ten centuries of disuse.

  Jackson with the Moris

  From the top of Camelback, Jackson could survey the whole Salt River valley, forty miles long, ten miles wide, bounded by the Superstition Mountains on the east, the White Tank Mountains on the west, and the black lava flows of Squaw Peak on the north. However much the panoramic view piqued his curiosity about the world outside the envelope of farm and family, he had few opportunities to explore it. He was always “too young”: too young to accompany his father to the farmers’ market in Phoenix every week, too young to sit next to him in the wagon, too young to eat breakfast with him in a real restaurant in town, too young to have “anything to do with the farming operations,” according to brother Frank. He was also too young to tag along with Charles and Jay when they struck out for Phoenix along the railroad tracks that ran just north of the farm. Returning from one such adventure, they questioned their father about the letters “I W W” scrawled on walls and fences along the way. His sympathetic explanations of the International Workers of the World and its struggles against capitalist exploitation were among the first disturbing hints they had that the world beyond Camelback was not only vast but also troubled.

  For the most part, Jackson knew of that world only when it came to him. Visitors to the Pollock farm were rare; even a passing car was a special event. (In 1913, there were only 646 cars in all of Phoenix.) Although the mailman stopped at the Pollocks’ box on the road only once or twice a week to deliver magazines and an occasional letter from relatives. Jackson waited eagerly in the roadside ditch every day for the calamitous noise of his car. Sande remembered that Jackson told his mother, “I think I’ll be a mailman when I get big. Then I’ll have an automobile and drive all over the country.”

  On Saturdays, small bands of Apache Indians would sometimes stop their wagons at the Pollock farm
to buy melons. During the week, Roy would stack the flawed melons by the side of the barn—the good ones went to market—and then sell them to the Indians for a nickel apiece. The Pollock boys had heard the terrifying stories of the Apache wars, which had ended only twenty-five years earlier. The older boys had even seen Indians on their trips into Phoenix, although only the peaceful Pima and Maricopa Indians, not the legendary Apaches. Jackson and Sande, who had heard their older brothers talk of having seen Indians in Cody, were especially captivated by these strange-looking people with their long black hair and bright ornaments. “The women were decked out in colorful dresses with bold patterns,” Frank Pollock recalls. “The bucks wore jeans and belts with silver buckles. Sometimes they were made out of snakeskin. And they always had rings and bracelets. They were a sparkling people.”

  On rare special occasions, Jackson rode into Phoenix with his mother. From the moment he climbed into the old buggy, took off his shoes, curled his toes around the dashboard, and pushed his straw hat back the way his brothers did, he was rigid with curiosity. The horse, Brown Jim, balked and whinnied nervously when cars rattled by. Over the flat, treeless approach, Jackson saw the big new buildings of Phoenix, the just completed state capitol building and YMCA, the cupola of the fire station, and the twin spires of the opera house. Mother’s destination was inevitably Goldwater’s Store at the corner of First and Adams. Amid the hardships of farm life, Goldwater’s was an oasis of self-indulgence, an extravaganza of style and finery unlike anything in Cody, where Stella and her sons could browse through four floors of furniture imported from Vienna, finger the finest clothes from Chicago and New York, and ride the first elevator most Phoenicians had ever seen.