Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In town, Jackson also saw the blacksmith who repaired his father’s wagon—the first black man he had ever seen; he heard Mexicans talking excitedly about Pancho Villa’s return after the assassination of Francisco Madero (he recognized Villa’s name from the stories his brother Charles told about Villa’s raids across the border); he saw the Chinese peddlers’ “village,” a street lined with wagons from which Chinese families sold vegetables, and Indians surrounded by their handiwork—baskets, pots, silverware, beads, blankets, turquoise jewelry. Especially on Saturdays when the whole countryside came to shop and sell and trade, and the stores stayed open late, the streets of Phoenix formed canals of color and energy, of strange faces and curious details, all of them rendered impossibly vivid in the blazing Arizona sun.

  5

  AN ORDINARY FAMILY

  When Roy Pollock agreed to buy Hart Baker’s twenty acres of irrigated land, he thought he finally had what he wanted. At last, no one was looking over his shoulder or telling him what to do; at last, the ghost of James Matt Pollock had been exorcised. “Here he’d finally got ahold of something,” says son Frank, “something that was his.”

  Liberated, Roy threw himself into farm work with an intensity that often bordered on anger. Using the skills he had learned so well as a for-hire farmhand back in Ringgold County, Roy coddled and coaxed his stock with such a loving hand that, in time, his pigs were fatter and his cows more productive than any of his neighbors’. “He loved animals and the animals seemed to love him,” says Frank. “He could get them to do anything.” He worked the same magic with the soil, winning blue ribbons for his produce at local fairs; growing fatter melons, taller alfalfa, and more of it per acre. He introduced new crops to the sandy Phoenix soil, like the yams his cousin Leonard Porter had brought from Louisiana. Roy was so proud of his farm and its productivity that he invited his widowed mother to come to Phoenix and see it. When a traveling photographer came to the door, Roy posed his family with slices of his biggest watermelon and proudly sent copies of the picture to all his relatives. “Dad was just showing off,” says Frank.

  But the isolated life of a hired hand, concerned only with the productivity of soil and stock, had not taught Roy all the skills that an Arizona farmer needed. In Iowa, he didn’t have to think about market prices or shipping costs; his father was paid regardless of market conditions. In Arizona, however, working hard wasn’t enough. At the glutted, fiercely competitive farmers’ market in Phoenix, it wasn’t enough to produce the biggest, sweetest melons or the most milk per cow. Unsold, even blue-ribbon produce was worthless. “My father knew how to make things grow and he knew how to care for animals,” Charles Pollock remembers, “but he didn’t know how to make money doing it.”

  But Roy Pollock was “a very quiet type of fellow” whose sons saw little of his borning frustration. What they saw was a man buried in work from before dawn until long after dark. Charles and Jay, eleven and nine, helped as they could, but neither showed any real enthusiasm for farm work. Charles delivered papers in the afternoons to earn spending money—none of which was contributed to the family kitty; Jay escaped to school after the morning milking; and Sande and Jackson were too young for real work. Frank, at six, was eager and willing but not much help. To some extent, all the Pollock boys followed the example of their mother who, despite Roy’s pleading, steadfastly refused to take any part in running the farm. “Mother’s day was spent largely in the kitchen cooking and sewing,” Frank remembers. “She spent very little time in the yard. While we were working, she was always writing letters or reading magazines.”

  Stella’s quiet war of attrition soon began to take its toll. Isolated and disdained by his own family, Roy withdrew further into his work. As in Tingley, the fields became his refuge; work, his escape. Daughter-in-law Elizabeth Pollock remembers, “Stella used to talk about the rare occasions when they’d dress up to go somewhere. By the time she got the children all dressed to go, LeRoy would forget he had his good clothes on and would go outside and muck around and get dirty.” In apparent retaliation, Roy redoubled his efforts to make men of his overmothered sons. “Jackson didn’t talk about his Dad much,” recalls Peter Busa, a close friend twenty years later. “Except there was this emphasis on manliness—if you have boys, you have men. That was his father’s philosophy.” When the time came for the bloody business of castrating the young pigs and calves, Roy made sure that all five boys participated—the oldest helping, the youngest watching. Almost inevitably, such strategies backfired. “I helped with that awful business,” Charles recalls ruefully. “You had to tie the animal down on its back first. It was a gory mess and they squealed like crazy. I couldn’t understand how Dad brought himself to do it.”

  Outside of the daily routine of meals and chores, there was little time for contact between father and sons. Occasionally, just before bedtime, Roy would take a book from the glass case and read to Charles and Jay by the light of the kerosene lamp. Sometimes, he would give the book to them, sit back, close his eyes, and listen as they read to him; sometimes drift off into stories about his trip down the Mississippi with Ralph Tidrick, about his adoption by the Pollocks, or about his belief in “the higher power of nature.” On those increasingly rare evenings, the older brothers caught a glimpse of the sensitive, romantic man-child that Roy Pollock always struggled to conceal—the father who scolded them for shooting at birds with slingshots or destroying eggs in the nest; the farmer who, at the sight of a beautiful sunset, never failed to “look up from his plow and stare until it was gone.”

  Jackson Pollock never saw this side of his father. By the time he was old enough to stay up and listen, the readings had become rare events. “With the younger sons he didn’t have that much contact,” says Frank, who also grew up too late. “After the first two, I think he kind of gave up.” Whether working distantly in the fields or sitting unapproachably in the light of the kerosene lamp, Roy Pollock would remain a dark figure at the far edge of Jackson’s world, a figure that he longed to be near but despaired of reaching. According to Sande, whenever his father left the farm, Jackson would stand at the gate and cry.

  Roy, Frank, Charles, Jackson, Jay, Sande, and Stella in Phoenix, about 1915

  In place of fatherly affection, Roy Pollock gave his sons a strict system of duties and privileges modeled after the one his father had imposed on him. A boy couldn’t wear Levi jeans, “the kind without the bib,” until he was five, shoot a gun until he was nine, or drive a team until he was ten. As the oldest, Charles was given the choicest jobs and the most enviable privileges. On his trips every morning to deliver milk to the sanitarium, he drove his own cart drawn by his own pony. When the boys walked to the fields, they walked in order of age, their rank reflected in the implements they carried: Dad in front with the horse, Charles next with the plow, Frank with a hoe, Sande with a shovel, and Jackson “tagging along behind without the dignity of even a shovel over his shoulder,” according to Sande.

  Stella further fanned the flames of rivalry by dividing her boys into two groups; the “Low Steps,” Sande and Jackson, and the “High Steps,” Charles and Jay, because “when they stood in a row they made regular stairsteps.” (Frank, as usual, occupied a filial limbo.) Between the two groups, the dividing line ran deep. The Low Steps were usually assigned to Mother’s work in the kitchen, the High Steps to Dad’s work in the barnyard. In the mornings, “the High Steps were awakened first … but they could never resist the temptation of pulling the covers off [the Low Steps], or sprinkling water in their faces,” according to Sande. In the evenings, only the High Steps were allowed to churn Mother’s butter. Roy let footraces, which the High Steps invariably won, determine who could ride next to him in the wagon, and when Stella went into town, the High Steps were always first in line for the two extra seats. During most of the Phoenix years, the High Steps went to school while the Low Steps stayed home.

  Roy and Stella with (from left) Charles, Sande, Jay, Jackson, and Frank

  De
spite the gulf that separated them, the High Steps seemed to take a special pride in their youngest brother. “Jackson was the baby,” says Jay, “and for that reason, it seems to me we went overboard feeling responsible for him, taking care of him so that he didn’t get in trouble.” In their enthusiasm to indulge him, however, they quickly spoiled him. Unlike his brothers, Jackson was never required to work. “We didn’t ask him to help out around the house,” Jay remembers. But to Jackson, such enforced idleness may have felt more like ostracism than privilege. He would linger at the kitchen door or at the edge of the fields, begging to be given some trivial task, like pulling carrots or radishes for his mother, or inspecting the borders for gopher holes for his father. When work was allocated, he insisted “I will too” so often that the phrase became a favorite taunt within the family. On the rare occasions when he was given a responsible task, his overeagerness often resulted in embarrassment and failure. Sande later recorded one such incident.

  As I ran along the top of the embankment I saw that Jackson and Gyp were in mad pursuit of an excited gopher. … I was just behind them, when Jackson made a flying tackle and caught the tip of the gopher’s tail. Jackson, flat on his stomach, panted, “I got him!” Then he let out a yell and jumped up as the gopher turned and fastened its teeth in his finger. “Ouch! Oh, ouch!” screamed Jackson. “Take him off! Oh, take him off!” I was frightened too, but the sight of blood and Jackson’s pain forced me to act. I grabbed the gopher and started to pull. “Wait! Don’t do that!” yelled Charles, as he came running to us. “You’ll hurt him worse—here, hold Jack’s arm—” As I did as I was told, Charles hit the gopher on the head with a rock. The little animal dropped to the ground without a sound. … Jackson was shaking from head to foot and his face was so white the freckles stood out browner than ever across his nose. … “It is pretty bleedy,” sniffed Jackson, trying to keep back the tears.

  Jackson’s brothers may have deferred to him as the baby of the family, and protected him from work, but underneath they resented his privileges and envied his idleness. “Jackson was a dandelion,” says Frank. “We didn’t pay much attention to him. We did the work and, if there was any playing to be done, Jack did it. Maybe he fed a chicken or two. That’s easy to do. Maybe gathered an egg. He never milked a cow—but I sure did.” Like all emotions in the Pollock family, such resentments rarely, if ever, surfaced. But Jackson undoubtedly sensed them in the teasing and impatience that greeted his every effort. According to Sande, when the family planned a trip to Camelback Mountain, Jackson was “busy running from one person to another, begging to be told what mountains really would be like.” But no one would tell him. As Jackson grew up, his brothers would continue to extract payment for the childhood privileges they had conferred on him. “They used to refer to him as ‘baby’ up into his teenage years,” remembers Marie Pollock, Frank’s wife, “and he hated it.” All of Jackson’s brothers would later insist, with Frank, that “there was never any rivalry between us. We were never in competition with each other. Never. Just wasn’t so.” But Jackson knew otherwise. Thirty years after leaving Phoenix, he told his friend Clement Greenberg about a recurrent nightmare in which his brothers tried to push him off the edge of a cliff.

  Only in his imagination could Jackson close the gap that separated him from his brothers. Almost as soon as he could talk, he began appropriating events from their lives and recasting them to include himself. He talked about “his trips to the mountains” long before he had seen a mountain; about the birth of Brown Jim, the family horse, although he had been only a baby at the time; about a flood in the arroyo that he had only heard about from Sande. Years later, Sande recalled the exchange.

  “Remember the time there was water in the creek bed?” Sande said at the dinner table one night.

  “I remember,” said Jackson.

  “No, you don’t, you were too small,” said Sande.

  “But I do remember,” Jackson insisted. “The water came down—it was muddy and yellow and there were branches and sticks in it—and it poured over the bridge and over the banks and over the rocks—and it roared—and the rain came down. …”

  “You don’t remember that at all,” said Sande. “You were too little.”

  But Jackson went on, “and the next day the water was gone again—it was gone to the ocean.”

  Nothing made Jackson feel more like an outsider than sex. “Mother and Dad felt we didn’t need to be told the facts of life,” says Frank. “We learned that from the animals. We grew up with roosters and hens, dogs and bitches, boars and sows, bulls and cows, studs and mares. Sexual activity was everywhere.” Jackson’s older brothers occasionally let slip tantalizing insinuations, but they never dared to ask (or entertain) any questions among themselves about sex. “You wouldn’t confide to anyone, least of all your brothers, that you didn’t know anything,” Frank remembers. “You would just imply that you were experienced.” But when the neighbor, Mr. Mori, accused Frank of “making mischief” with his daughter Shizuko, Frank denied the charge. “I told him we weren’t into anything,” he recalls. “I didn’t even know about such mischief.” Later, Jackson bragged to Sande that he, not Frank, had been caught and reprimanded for “playing doctor” with Shizuko.

  For the rest of his life, Jackson would play with reality in the same way, both in his life and in his art, taking the real world—his age, his sexual inexperience, an unseen flood—and elaborating on it, gradually transforming it into the world as he wanted it to be, or the image that he wanted to see.

  If Jackson could have changed places with any of his brothers, it would have been Charles. Charles enjoyed a catalogue of privileges that piqued the envy of all his brothers. He could read like his father (and increasingly took Roy’s place under the kerosene lamp); he could play marbles, shoot a gun, chew gum, and blow bubbles. He could even whistle—a skill that Sande and Jackson spent endless hours trying to match. Because he had his own horse, a pinto pony named Prince, Charles could also travel. For him, trips to Phoenix were not special occasions at all; he went every day to pick up the papers he delivered for the Arizona Republican, often stopping on the way at the only movie house in town to watch the latest serial adventure of Pearl White. Jackson and Sande listened raptly to Charles’s tales of the movies and of his trips to the traveling circus, the motorcycle velodrome, and the fairgrounds where he watched “Model T Polo,” a wild game in which players rode stripped-down cars with foot-operated gears.

  Of all Charles’s privileges, none was more envied than his special relationship with Stella. “I was the first born and the first to strike out,” says Charles. “Inevitably, I suppose, that showed in Mother’s feelings.” At Stella’s insistence, Charles quit his barnyard chores and began pursuing his own interests at an early age. “We had eight or ten cows in Phoenix,” Charles recalls, “but I never learned how to milk. I managed to escape that.” According to one family member, “Just like Grandma Pollock, Charles’s dream was to escape being a farmer. That was their dream.” When Stella drove the skittish Brown Jim into town, it was always Charles who accompanied her—“in case she got tired.” On a trip to Goldwater’s Department Store, she bought denim for the other brothers’ shirts, but silk pongee for Charles’s. “I had the idea that I wanted something special,” Charles recalls. With money from his paper route, he also bought a pair of Florsheim kangaroo-skin shoes—“the most expensive shoes you could buy. My mother gave me a taste for quality materials.”

  But the most important reason to admire and envy Charles was that he could draw.

  As early as Cody, Charles had begun to take an unusual interest in the visual world. Even before he could read, he would linger over cartoons in the Cody papers, like Mutt and Jeff, Buster Brown, Happy Hooligan, and Little Nemo. Later, when the family moved to the Watkins ranch, he experienced an artistic epiphany while exploring the dry sagebrush hills nearby. Inside an abandoned log schoolhouse, its interior illuminated only by streaks of light angling between the wind
ow boards, he found hundreds of sheets of lined foolscap scattered across the floor, each sheet covered with handwriting in the Palmer method. “The elaborate pattern made a tremendous impression on me,” he recalls. By the time the family settled in Phoenix a few years later, Charles considered himself an artist.

  Soon after their arrival, he began painting lessons with “Mrs. Warner,” a Swiss immigrant who lived with her husband in the desert between the Pollock farm and Tempe. “She painted in oils, so that’s what I did,” Charles recalls, “and she introduced me to Payne’s Gray and other colors I had never heard of.” Charles’s search for something better, his mother’s search, found its fulfillment in the feel of sable brushes and the smell of linseed oil. “At twelve or thirteen,” says Frank, “Charles was always drawing. My Dad thought he ought to be on the farm more, but Mother would say, ‘He’s entitled to it.’”

  Charles turned all of his attention and energy to the new pursuit. At home, he cut illustrations out of Stella’s Ladies’ Home Journal and Roy’s Country Gentleman to create a “library of art.” He cherished these illustrations, he told later interviewers, “and learned to make judgments about their relative merit.” At the Wilson School, he befriended a talented Japanese classmate, Ginsu Matsudo, who “could draw the most elegant vase or bowl.”

  None of this was lost on Jackson, who watched his older brother’s exciting life with wide-eyed envy. He saw the way Charles cut illustrations from magazines with his mother’s scissors, the way he rode off on Prince every Saturday to his lessons with Mrs. Warner, the way he took out his pad and began to sketch when Mr. Wyncoop asked him to make a drawing of a submarine he had invented. “I think we were all influenced by Charles,” says Frank. “I know I was.” Sande put the point more bluntly. “Charles started this whole damn thing,” he told a Time/Life reporter forty-five years later. In 1957, in the brief interlude between Jackson’s death and her own, Stella told an interviewer from the Des Moines Register: “When Jackson was a little boy and was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d always say, ‘I want to be an artist like brother Charles.’”