Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  From the long list of available properties, the Pollocks chose a small hotel and some property in the town of Janesville, about 120 miles northeast of Chico. On December 31, 1919, they sold their Chico farm for $3,500—a loss of $500—and one month later bought a “property known as Dakin or Janesville Hotel” for $10 down and a mortgage of $6,000, due on or before January 1, 1925. Only desperation could explain such a wildly misconceived purchase. Although the deed included 140 acres, only a small part of the land was clear and level, and that, according to a collateral agreement, would continue to be farmed by the seller, J. B. Rice. The Pollocks’ only clear title was to the hotel, a few cherry trees, and a small field for grazing a handful of sheep. Once again, Roy was stumbling into a business that he knew nothing about. “They were just grasping at straws,” says Frank.

  As in Chico, the combination of Roy’s inexperience and Stella’s blind determination invited disaster. Just as they had failed to discover the alkaline strip, they neglected to inquire about the hotel’s occupancy rate or the level of traffic through Janesville, a crucial factor for a hotel in a town with a population of only two hundred. Belatedly, Roy tried to visit the property for a second look in early February 1920—after title had passed—but turned back when the Ford roadster he had bought for the trip died in a winter storm on the mountainous passage. Far from breaking the cycle of debt and borrowing, the Janesville mortgage added $2,000 in debt at a time when the area’s agricultural economy was depressed and hotel rooms rented for $1.50 a night. Nor would the move to Janesville cure Stella’s headaches. The weather on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada was far more severe than in Chico, with long winters, brief summers, and frequent ferocious windstorms created when hot air rising from the desert to the east sucked steamy air off the Pacific. By far the gravest miscalculation, however, was Stella’s belief that the move to Janesville would keep her family together. If anything, it hastened the collapse. On the eve of the move, Charles and Jay announced their intention to stay with friends in Chico to attend high school and, afterward, visited Janesville only two or three times in two years.

  After a train trip from Chico to Susanville, where the snow was hip deep, Roy rented a wagon to take his family and possessions the last twelve miles to Janesville. Just a few miles out of town, the dirt road turned the corner of Thompson Peak and plunged down the mountainside, dropping thousands of feet in three heart-stopping miles. Looking down from the road, the Pollocks could see Honey Lake stretched out like a mirage over seventy thousand acres in a semi-arid valley of sagebrush, sand dunes, and salt flats. Along the mountains on the western rim of the valley, a straight line where sagebrush met pine marked the shores of an ancient inland sea, now dried to a shallow puddle of saline water that disappeared entirely in the dry season. Just above the line, hidden among the pines on the slopes of Diamond Mountain, lay Janesville.

  For eight-year-old Jackson, it was a hostile, lonely town. Where Chico had been open and sun-filled even in winter, Janesville was dark and claustrophobic—a dungeon with tall pine trees for walls. The “town” consisted only of Orlo Wemple’s combination general store and post office, the Odd Fellows Hall, the bank, and the hotel. In summer, the big burl tree in the middle of the highway that passed through town hid the buildings from each other. In winter, howling winds and frigid temperatures turned every house into an island, cut off sometimes for days from its neighbors. When it rained, the dirt roads clogged with “gumbo mud” (mud studded with axle-breaking rocks). Where Chico, like Phoenix, had beckoned a shy little boy to explore the world around him, Janesville was grim and punitive. Isolated by harsh weather and bad roads, people lived private, insular lives. “We had very little communication,” recalls a woman who was fourteen the year the Pollocks arrived. “It was a lonely life—especially for a child.”

  Because Janesville sat at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the last barrier on the emigrant trail to the golden valleys of California, most of the townspeople were descendants of settlers or prospectors who had come in search of easy riches but lacked the fortitude to carry them over the top. In the sixty years since the town’s founding, a process of reverse selection—a weeding out of the most ambitious and most capable—had produced a populace that was by turns dissolute, spiteful, ignorant, and suspicious: the dross of westward expansion. The day the Pollocks arrived in late February 1920, a neighbor brought his family over to greet the new owners. “That was a rough family,” remembers one old resident. “They had a cattle thief and a criminal and the girls weren’t too good either.” Frank Pollock recalls, “Their attitude was you have to fight your way through this life.” One of the boys told Frank that if he refused to fight the town bully, “we’ll stick you in a hollow oak tree and pelt you with acorns.”

  Surrounded on all four sides by a high fence, the Janesville school was a one-room microcosm of the town itself. “They were a bunch of rowdy buggers,” recalls Gordon McMurphy, one of Jackson’s classmates, “big kids who made it pretty miserable for the teachers and everybody.” The classroom taught by Mrs. Drake, who lived quietly at the Diamond Mountain Inn, and Miss Smith, her attractive young assistant and the object of Frank’s schoolboy crush, was more often a battleground than a place of learning. “One time Erwin Tuckey flew a paper airplane,” McMurphy remembers, “and [Mrs. Drake] went back there to stop him and he started to give her some lip—he was a low child and thought he could talk his way out of anything. So she grabbed him out of that seat and threw him down on the floor and fell astraddle of him and took a history book—one of those advanced history books—and she pounded his head with it.”

  The Diamond Mountain Inn

  Unable to make new friends among his hostile, clannish schoolmates, and trapped inside by the weather, Jackson retreated into the private world of the Diamond Mountain Inn.

  Built in 1872 as a stagecoach stop between Reno and Susanville, the inn had seen settlers, gold prospectors, diamond miners, and the usual entourage of gamblers and confidence men. Its clientele had changed little since the days of Black Bart, California’s most famous highwayman, who robbed a stage just across the county line near Quincy—although the traffic had thinned considerably. A salesman would straggle through occasionally, in need of a night’s rest and a meal, but most of the Pollocks’ handful of guests were, like the schoolteacher Mrs. Drake, permanent residents. The most regular of these was a group of surveyors working on the Baxter Creek Irrigation Project near Susanville. “They drove down every night after work,” Frank recalls, “and they had dinner with us and slept there. Next morning, they had breakfast and Mother made lunches for them. They liked Mother’s cooking.” It was a rowdy group that enjoyed a drink, a laugh, and a ribald story. Roy reveled in their fellowship, Stella tolerated them, while Jackson stood at a safe distance and watched as these strangers replaced his brothers at the dinner table.

  The hotel itself was a brooding building, covered with weathered dark brown shingles and guarded by six tall elms with rails in between where riders could tie their horses. In summer, elm leaves exploded over the front porch, blotting out the sun in the upstairs guest rooms, and ragged sashes of wild ivy hung from the porch beams. Inside, the shadows cast by deep porches and the broken light filtering through the latticework of branches left the big rooms cool and melancholy even on the hottest, brightest days. The small bar in the front corner of the building facing the street had been closed, officially at least, for two months when the Pollocks arrived. Prohibition had just become the law. “The bar only offered soda pop,” says Frank, “and served a few cowboys who danced to an accordian. My mother put her foot down about hard liquor being served although bootleggers were everywhere.” Behind the bar was the dining room where Stella served family and guests at a big boardinghouse table. Beyond was the kitchen, more spacious and better equipped than anything Stella had seen before, and beyond that a bedroom for “the help.” Upstairs, a single long corridor served the hotel’s twenty guest rooms. Over the years, previous o
wners had opened up rooms one by one, as money for furniture, linens, wallpaper, and fixtures became available. The result was a melange of furnishings, all styles and shapes, mostly idiosyncratic family heirlooms that settlers had lugged west then discarded at the last minute because the wagon was too heavy, the river too high, or the money too low. Jackson and his brothers were now the beneficiaries of this accumulation of misfortune. Eerily empty and suffused with broken light, the upstairs guest rooms were a small boy’s wonderland. “I remember fantastic hardwood chests,” says Frank. “Some had marble tops and some had mirrors. We never got tired of exploring up there.” Against Janesville’s climate and people, against the mounting tensions in his own family, Jackson found a temporary refuge.

  Soon he discovered another refuge, one both more insulating and more enduring.

  One morning in April of 1920, as soon as the winter snow had melted and the spring mud began to harden, small groups of Indians appeared on the road in front of the Diamond Mountain Inn. They were members of the Wadatkut (“seed eaters”), a small offshoot of the Northern Paiutes, on their way to the annual Bear Dance. When the first white man settled in Honey Lake valley in 1853, the Wadatkut “headsman,” Babakukua (“big feet”), had ridiculed an old shaman for predicting that “white-skinned people” would eventually overrun the Wadatkut valley. By 1920, all that remained of the Wadatkut was the Bear Dance, a few old legends, and a disappearing language.

  Compared to the “sparkling” Indians Frank had seen in Phoenix, the Wadatkut must have been a disappointment. Coming from their jobs as domestic servants and farmhands, dressed in print dresses and denim work shirts, they hardly fit a schoolboy’s romantic visions of buffalo hunts and raiding parties. Yet they were still Indians, and the remoteness of their flat, broad faces still exerted a powerful attraction. “Jack, Sande, and I followed them out to the burial grounds in the mountains,” Frank remembers, “and listened to the chanting in the pine trees.”

  Indian burial ground near Janesville, site of the annual Bear Dance

  About three miles out of town they came to a clearing where more than a hundred Indians were gathering for the ceremony. The spot, chosen for its proximity to the ancient Wadatkut village of Kasawinaid, long since vanished, was appropriately funereal—a desolate shelf of sagebrush and gnarled trees strewn with granite boulders sculpted by nature into pyre-like formations. As the Pollock boys watched from the surrounding pines, the crowd gradually formed a circle in a clearing between two piles of boulders. To one side, a tall curved pole, stuck in the ground and festooned with long streamers of sagebrush bark dyed red with yam and black with coal, announced the ceremony. There was a moment of quiet and expectation. Then suddenly a tall figure wearing a long bearskin jumped from behind the boulders and, with a loud shriek to clear his path, pushed into the ring. Little boys jumped, girls squealed. The current headsman, Hele Joaquin, Babakukua’s grandson, and the other old people around the ring closed their eyes and began to chant together loosely in a low, nasal hum as ancient melodies floated up from childhood memories. In the middle of the circle, the bear danced and chanted loudly. The old men shifted their weight back and forth to the unbeaten rhythm. The circle undulated. Occasionally the bear would dance close to the ring, shake his wormwood tassles threateningly, and pull someone into the circle with him. Young boys would rush to the breach and poke at him with sticks. The bear would play with them and coax them to join him in the dance. Gradually, the circle began to fill and the ring began to thin. After an hour, the clearing was filled with lines of chanting dancers and clouds of yellow dust.

  When Stella cut herself on a tin can and had to be hospitalized for blood poisoning, Roy hired an Indian woman named Nora Jack to assume her hotel duties and act as nurse. “She was a fine, statuesque, beautiful woman,” Frank remembers, “extremely kind and generous. She stayed a couple of weeks and became a friend of the family forever.” While living at the hotel, Nora Jack beguiled the youngest Pollock boys with local Indian legends. For the Wadatkut, every object and every activity in the real world had a significance in the spirit world. “Feasting, dancing, and painting … were modes of religious appeasement,” writes a student of local Indian culture. “Natural forces, disaster, the noises of the night, the rustling of the forest’s limbs and leaves, vivid dreams, all had supernatural portent connected with the unknown world of demonology.”

  From his concealed position near the Janesville burial grounds, and later at Nora Jack’s knee, Jackson learned for the first time the power of mysticism. Having grown up in a family that was never religious, a family that never even attended a church service, he might have been puzzled, but surely he was intrigued. Like the Wadatkut who had been terrorized since prehistory by the bears that descended from their mountain lairs to forage for food, Jackson had felt threatened since infancy by forces that he neither understood nor controlled. In the Bear Dance, the Wadatkut could, through fantasy, release their anxieties and defeat their fears; the imaginary could overcome the real. For a boy who had spent much of his childhood in a fantasy world, the Bear Dance and Nora Jack’s tales were both revelation and confirmation. Physical senses were an artificial limitation. Demons could be appeased. There were other landscapes, no less real than the Janesville burial grounds, where bears were harmless and mothers were loving and fathers doted on their sons. For the rest of his life, Jackson’s “other reality” would assume different shapes and names—Krishnamurti, Jungian psychology, Hindu mysticism—but in the end, only the other reality of art, which he hadn’t yet begun to explore, would placate the bears that terrorized him.

  The coming of summer brought some relief from the claustrophobia of Janesville life. But if Jackson hoped it would also bring his family back together, he was soon disappointed. After graduating from Chico Grammar in early spring, Jay immediately took a job on a friend’s cattle ranch in Altebertus, about twenty-five miles north of Susanville. He stopped briefly in Janesville on his way there, but disappeared after a few days with a vague promise to stop again before school in the fall. Jackson’s beloved Charles didn’t even make a token visit. With “Cat” Grimm, his girlfriend Hester’s brother, he drove directly from Chico to the bustling lumber camps around Westwood where he soon found a summer job hauling logs. Frank accepted a job with Dr. May, a physician who “dropped in from somewhere,” stayed one night at the hotel, and decided to put out a shingle in Janesville. During the summer, Dr. May took his practice on the road and he needed a companion on overnight trips along the edge of Honey Lake to the Nevada border.

  Since moving his family to Janesville, Roy Pollock had grown progressively more isolated and irritable. During the spring, he tended his few sheep, his cherry orchard, and vegetable garden with exaggerated devotion, leaving the hotel early in the morning and not returning until supper, lavishing on two or three acres the restless care that had nourished twenty in Phoenix, while Stella maintained a busy routine of cooking and cleaning for both family and guests. “In Janesville,” says Frank, “my mother worked much harder than my dad.” In late June or July, an old neighbor named Guthrie approached Roy with a business proposition: Guthrie would sell Roy’s vegetables door-to-door from the bed of his Model T truck in exchange for a share of the profits. Roy accepted listlessly but quit soon afterwards, haunted undoubtedly by memories of Phoenix. More and more, his only joy was the time he spent with the team of surveyors who gathered each night at the dinner table to swap stories and defy Prohibition.

  In Janesville, once again, Roy Pollock was carried toward a crisis not just by demons from his past, but by the vast, contrary tide of history. Despite Stella’s prodigious labors, which earned her dining room a local following, the hotel continued to lose money. By the end of the first year, they had paid off less than one percent of a five-year mortgage. The Pollocks were feeling the first effects of the automotive revolution in America. “The automobile did the same thing to all the rural areas here,” says Tim Purdy, a local historian. “You could travel
so much further that there was no longer a need for so many places close together. A whole way of life—and a lot of livelihoods—were lost.” What the car did to the hotel business, the Eighteenth Amendment did to the saloon business. If it hadn’t been for permanent guests like Mrs. Drake and the crew of surveyors, the Diamond Mountain Inn would have closed much sooner.

  Finally, in midsummer, Jackson’s wish for a family reunion came true, although not in a way he would have hoped. It began with the arrival of Roy’s brother, Frank, Frank’s wife Rose, and their adopted daughter Betty Nelson, from Casper, Wyoming, where Frank owned a prosperous secondhand furniture business. Roy had always admired his brother’s shrewdness and success in business, his bravado, and his taste for ostentation. “He collected gold and diamonds,” his nephew and namesake, Frank, remembers. “He was bald, bow-legged, bow-armed and he walked with a strut.” His taste for show extended even to his wife, the former Rose Fivecoats of Nebraska, a tall, raven-haired woman, considerably younger than her husband, with a “doeskin complexion” and “two or three diamond rings on each hand.” They were a warm, effusive pair whose presence must have buoyed the dispirited Pollock household, even as their ostentatious display of financial and marital success underscored Roy and Stella’s failures.

  In August, Charles visited Janesville for the first time. It was the search for a job, not family devotion, that finally brought him home. In two months of work around the Westwood logging camps he had been fired from one job for romancing a co-worker’s daughter and quit another after a day and a half for fear of bodily injury. Stella, Jackson, and Sande gave him a hero’s welcome regardless. She made his favorite meals for a week while the two boys listened raptly to tales of his logging camp adventures, and Charles made passes at Betty Nelson, a pretty, blond, blue-eyed sixteen-year-old with “a conspicuous nose kind of prominent in her face,” according to Frank, and—most eye-catching to Stella’s sons—big, firm breasts. Soon after Charles’s arrival, Jay returned from his summer in the mountains, completing the impromptu reunion and joining the pursuit of Nelson. “God almighty,” Charles recalls, “Jay and I were chasing her all over the place. You could make a Tennesse Williams story out of it—two boys and one pretty girl in this little hotel.”