Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  Benton would later argue that his father had “something like a Puritan aversion to images, an uneasiness before them.” In fact, M. E. Benton’s aversion was to his wife and her ruinous cultural ambitions, and, by association, to his son’s artistic aspirations. The more he felt threatened by the first—over which he had no control—the more he detested and discouraged the second. Although he never outright forbade drawing lessons or art classes, M. E. did dismiss the effort as a waste of time, vainly protesting, “The boy has got to learn something.” But the drawings and the classes—like the dresses and the parties—continued, while M. E. commiserated with his cigar-smoking pals at the office who, Tom later wrote, “were sorry he had such a queer duck for a son.”

  In 1902, Lizzie was introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt. As the author of a biography of Old Bullion, Roosevelt took a special interest in the Missouri Bentons and Lizzie was, of course, “overwhelmed by the President’s chivalrous attentions to her.” Her year as a regular guest at the White House was “seventh heaven” for her, according to Tom, “probably the happiest time of her life.”

  Swollen with pride in her new presidential liaison, Lizzie returned to Neosho in the summer of 1903 “to teach the home folks how Washington society behaved.” Under her careful supervision, the Neosho house was refurbished, indoor plumbing added—the old tin-lined tub discarded—and new debts incurred. At the frequent gatherings of M. E.‘s political supporters, she served Washington-style dinners on new settings of china and silver with multiple courses and multiple wines. Neosho—where, according to Tom, people “set all the food out at once”—had never seen anything like it.

  Such ostentation proved political poison for M. E. Before long, Tom recalled, the talk of the town was that the Bentons had become “mighty uppity.”

  [My father] constantly admonished my mother, urging her to hold back and keep things simpler, not to dress too splendidly, and above all not to talk too much about “how we do it in Washington.” “It’s these folks that send us there, Mizzuz, don’t shame them,” he said. They bickered about this a lot, often at supper after my mother had put on too fancy a luncheon. But she had a good defense then that always worked. “Don’t criticize me before the children, Mister,” she’d say and lean back in her chair and wipe her eyes.

  All summer long, unrepentant, Lizzie promenaded around Courthouse Square in full Washington array. “Mother outshone them all,” Tom crowed. Not until after their return to Washington in the fall did M. E. finally broach the possibility that he might lose the 1904 election, whereupon Lizzie “went into hysterics and faints, crying out against his lack of courage and his ‘abandonment’ of the future of his children.” “You can’t take them back to that little country, Mister,” Tom remembered her crying. “You have to give them a chance in the world.”

  Nevertheless, on November 8, 1904, M. E. Benton was defeated in his bid for a fifth term in Congress.

  Lizzie Benton was at a party when the news came. A friend’s diary entry records her reaction: “[She] leaned against the wall dead white, as if she would faint, her pallor not relieved by the glow of the deep red velvet hat and dress in which, like Mary Queen of Scots, she had arrayed herself for her execution.” The Bentons returned to Neosho in the summer of 1905. Soon afterward, when the crates and boxes from Washington arrived, Lizzie suffered a nervous breakdown. She took refuge in her bed and two of her sisters were summoned from Texas to tend her. M. E., too, withdrew from the world. What the sale of the Phoenix farm had been for Roy Pollock, the election defeat of 1904 was for M. E. Benton. Never again did he participate actively in politics. Instead, he began to suffer “moody spells” and spent more and more time behind the doors of his study adding long columns of numbers.

  Unlike his mother, Tom Benton felt shamed and chastened by his father’s defeat and, back in Neosho, immediately set about mending his errant, sissified ways.

  He began by abandoning art. Instead of drawing and painting, he prowled the alleyways around Courthouse Square, picking fights, then running home proudly to show his father the bloodstains on his clothes. In his paranoia, M. E. blamed the “scoundrelly Republicans” who had taken over Neosho for setting the local boys on his son, but was pleased by Tom’s triumphs. The fights continued for several weeks until the church ladies began to complain about the “quarrelsome” Benton boy.

  He threw himself into farm chores and part-time work, and began meeting clandestinely with other boys at the swimming hole “where we added to our linguistic powers and learned the arts of chewing and smoking tobacco.” Despite being only 5 feet 2¾ inches (his full adult height), he joined the Neosho high school football team. When he was cut from the squad after only a few games because bigger opponents were beating up on him, he turned to wrestling, a sport in which tenacity—which he had in abundance—counted more than size. About the same time, as a kind of consolation, he became obsessed with the accomplishments of Napoleon, for whom he developed “a hero worship so infatuated that I could think of nothing else.” He also began to drink—a badge of manhood available even to a boy only 5 feet 2¾.

  By the summer of 1906, however, he was back under Lizzie’s spell and drawing again. Between spasms of exaggerated masculinity, he would repair to her dressing room or rose garden for prolonged indulgences in the very “sissy” behavior he decried. On Saturdays, he would practice boxing in the morning, follow the older boys to burlesque show matinees in the afternoon, then escort Lizzie to the opera at night. There, sitting in his starched shirt beside his bejeweled mother and watching Wagner’s Tannhauser or Parsifal, he was often moved to tears and would run home in the throes of enchantment to make pastel drawings of his favorite scenes.

  About the same time, in another futile bid for his father’s approval, he began referring to drawing and painting as “picture-making,” a term borrowed from his grandfather, Pappy Wise, whom Tom much admired as a “saddle-maker” and “violin-maker.” If M. E. objected to his son becoming an artist, he would become instead a “picture-maker” and work with his hands like a carpenter or cobbler.

  Mortified by such talk—no son of hers was going to be a carpenter—Lizzie introduced Tom to her piano teacher, Mr. Calhoun, “a big city man of the world” with cultivated manners and expensively tailored suits. Unlike the gaunt, laconic Pappy Wise, Mr. Calhoun was “a little puffy about the mouth and chin” and “a great talker” who enthralled Tom and Lizzie with tales of his journeys in Europe, his frequent visits to the Bayreuth Festival, and his love of Wagner. “We could hardly believe he was a resident of Jasper County,” Tom wrote. “He was all so big city.” Enchanted, Tom showed Mr. Calhoun his drawings and pastels.

  He was most enthusiastic about my pictures and told me that I was the most remarkable boy he had ever met, that I was already close to being a real artist and that I must let nothing stop me from becoming a professional one. “You must go to art school,” he said, “and then Paris.”

  For a while at least, listening to stories about Paris and “La vie de Bohème,” Tom forgot about “picture-making” and Pappy Wise. “[His] stories and flatteries had their effects,” Benton wrote. “He made me feel I was something special and belonged, like himself, to a special world.”

  In the summer of 1906, however, instead of enrolling in art school, Benton signed on as a rodman with a surveying crew marking out boundaries at the mining properties around Joplin. It was hard, hands-on work that undoubtedly made M. E. happy. Joplin was “a wild boomtown … the sinful enticements of which were notorious all over southwest Missouri,” and in later years, Benton would portray the summer as a restless boy’s liberation, the product of “that irrepressible itch, so common among western boys, to be up somewhere, to have done with home, family, and familiar things.”

  On Saturday nights I went into town and looked things over. There were friends of the family in Joplin, respectable people, but I steered clear of them. I’d left home mainly to get away from contact with respectability. … I w
ent in the saloons, drank beer, and put nickels in the slot machines. I was really a man, seventeen years old now, and foot-loose.

  In fact, Lizzie Benton had carefully supervised and approved all the summer plans, insisting that Tom live with relatives in Joplin—the “respectable people” that he claimed to avoid—and that he visit Mr. Calhoun’s studio regularly in order to meet “the right kind of young people.” Instead of frequenting saloons, drinking beer, and putting nickels in slot machines, Benton spent most Saturday nights sitting in a hotel dining room, sipping Benedictine aperitifs, and listening raptly to Mr. Calhoun talk about his upcoming trip to Paris. On one such occasion, the older man suggested that Tom accompany him “and see what a city of art is like.” Benton “became excited” at the talk of Paris and promised to take it up with his parents.

  But Mr. Calhoun had something else on his mind.

  I caught the strange way he was looking at me. His eyes were like girls’ eyes, when they want to tease you. … But I knew exactly what they were saying because I’d been approached by queers in Washington and had learned from the older boys there what such people were after.

  “Embarrassed and revolted,” Benton bolted from the table. By his telling, he never made contact with Mr. Calhoun again, although he “remembered for years the sad look on the face of this usually so self-possessed man when [he] departed.”

  Nevertheless, the following year, Benton took Mr. Calhoun’s advice and enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute. Two years later, he made the trip to Paris.

  In his autobiography, Benton recorded a very different version of how he came to choose art as a career. In the manner of a western movie, it began in the House of Lords bar and whorehouse in Joplin, Missouri, during the hot summer of 1906. He was standing at the bar, drinking a beer and staring at a painting of a nude woman that hung on the wall behind rows of bottles. Suddenly a group of “grinning fellows,” seeing him absorbed in the painting, began to harass him. “They laid into me with all the obscenities bearing on the picture they could think of,” Benton wrote. “They made me hot with embarrassment.” Rising to the challenge, young Tom insisted that he was studying the picture not because the girl was naked but because he was an artist and he wanted to see “how it was done.”

  “So, you’re an artist, Shorty?” one of the men asked with a snicker.

  “Yes, by God!” he answered. “And I’m a good one.”

  Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock in their respective dandy periods

  “I don’t think that it had ever seriously occurred to me before,” he wrote, “that I wanted to be an artist. Certainly, until the kidding in the House of Lords, I had never declared myself one.”

  This was the story Tom Benton wanted the world to believe—and, undoubtedly, wanted to believe himself; a story filled with the local color and characters of the real American West; a story in which women were little more than one-dimensional objects of lust; a story that could make Pappy Wise—even M. E. Benton, perhaps—understand how a man could want to be an artist.

  In fact, all of Tom Benton’s works, from his first drawings of trains to his great murals, were indelibly stamped with his mother’s mark. Everything else—drinking, fighting, cussing, carousing—was apology, offered sometimes desperately, sometimes bitterly to the unyielding father he carried with him. When he first returned to Neosho from Washington bearing the guilt for his father’s defeat and began his campaign of brawls and drunken binges, Benton himself called it a period of “rehabilitation.” By that definition, most of the Benton legend that grew up over the next fifty years, most of the Tom Benton that Jackson Pollock knew, was rehabilitation. Even the paintings themselves—the “huge masculine figures with bulging muscles,” the enormous murals, the preoccupation with western themes of men and mastery and camaraderie—were a form of “rehabilitation.” So were the constant battles—artistic, political, and personal—that he fought as desperately as brawls on Courthouse Square.

  At the Chicago Art Institute, he grew his hair long under a derby hat, wore what he called a “genius outfit,” and exulted in the taunts and scuffles his appearance incited among the neighborhood toughs on the city’s South Side. In Paris, “he bought himself a Balzac stick … wore tight, tailor-made suits, a black flowing cape, and a French beret … eager to look the part of a successful Left Bank artist.” Friends called him “le petit Balzac.” But there was, as always, a price to be paid, an apology to be made, an urgent need for “rehabilitation”: in Chicago, he worked out furiously at a local gymnasium; in Paris he was “notoriously drunk most of the time, fighting in cafes and quarreling with girls.”

  But he never let go of Lizzie. In the years to come, she would abandon M. E. to live with Tom in New York. Later, Tom would follow her to Great Neck, Long Island, where they lived together until he joined the navy. She would offer and he would accept her help in avoiding combat duty in World War I. He never spoke of girlfriends to her and, when he finally married, spent his honeymoon at her house. Over his wife’s objections, he invited Lizzie to spend the summers with him on Martha’s Vineyard, then helped her build a permanent house nearby. Into her last years, he continued to make designs for her embroidery and crewelwork.

  Tom Benton was caught forever in a scene that he had witnessed as a boy while visiting Pappy Wise. At the train station in Waxahachie, Texas, a line of volunteers was being loaded onto a train that would take them to fight in the “Spanish War”:

  As the last of the line reached the coach steps there was a terrified scream and one of the boys jumped out of the line and ran away from the train. The regulars caught him and brought him back. When he was pushed up the steps of the coach he cried out “Maw, Maw, Maw,” like a little boy. All of the women about us wept and some of the men. I cried too.

  Benton rushed home to draw the incident, but it wasn’t the drawing that fixed it forever in his memory. At the end of his life, Tom Benton could recall the scene in photographic detail because he had replayed it almost daily for seventy years.

  This was the Tom Benton that Jackson Pollock met for the first time in September 1930. Benton was forty-one years old at the time and, outwardly at least, a model of everything Jackson longed to be; the ideal combination of his father’s exaggerated masculinity and his mother’s artistic aspirations. Underneath, however, beyond Jackson’s seeing, was a still-desperate search for emotional resolution—a contest of identity and aspiration almost identical to Jackson’s own.

  13

  JACK SASS

  For Tom Benton’s favor, Jackson could compete with Charles on level ground, even perhaps—for reasons he couldn’t have imagined—favorable ground. “[Jackson] had no money and, it first appeared, no talent,” Benton wrote in his autobiography, “but his personality was such that it elicited immediate sympathy.”

  Exactly why Jackson elicited Benton’s sympathy or why Benton elicited Jackson’s in return, neither man was likely to explore. From the beginning, however, they must have felt a mutual, unspoken recognition that they were on the same errant trajectory, both victims of what Thomas Craven called “some strange irregularity of development.” Even Jackson’s classmates recognized their special kinship. “There was a rhythm between Jackson and Benton from the time they met until the time Jackson died,” says George McNeil, a classmate at the Art Students League. “The rhythm was physical, gestural. The two men were bonded, you could almost say.” Joe Delaney had a simpler view: “Benton was a stange shot, and he was inclined to be a more personal guy with people who were strange shots like he was. And Jackson was the strangest shot of all.”

  Strangely, it was Jackson’s very lack of ability that cemented the bond between student and teacher. “Jack’s talents seemed of a most minimal order,” Benton later wrote. “He had great difficulties in getting started with his studies, and, watching other more facile students, must have suffered from a sense of ineptitude.” If Benton had sympathy for Jackson’s plight, it was because he had heard many of the same
criticisms during his own student days. Even his friends considered his early works “halting,” “badly imitative,” and “crude.” “[Tom] made his bow to the current isms,” wrote his close friend, critic Thomas Craven, “but without grace or that ease of mind which lends the illusion of conviction to imitation.” According to a Benton biographer, “lack of technical facility, and frustration,” had driven Benton into a depression that lasted for most of his first year in art school, during which he was “notoriously drunk most of the time.” Just as Jackson withdrew from cafeteria discussions at the League, Benton had shied away from the Paris cafés frequented by artists like George Grosz and Diego Rivera because, he said, “they were all more talented and capable than I.”

  Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, c. 1935, ink on paper, 8½” × 11”

  Benton also shared with Jackson the reassuring conviction, born of his own self-doubts, that “great talents”—like those of Harold Lehman or Phil Goldstein, or even Charles—“were not the most essential requirements for artistic success.” He pointed Jackson toward artists like Albert Pinkham Ryder, the reclusive painter of late romantic landscapes and seascapes, who couldn’t draw a boat as finely as contemporaries like Winslow Homer, but could capture in his turbulent brush strokes its pitch and roll on a roiling sea. “Intense interest,” said Benton, the ambition to be a great artist, was what mattered most; “and that [Jackson] had.” In fact, it was the uneasy combination of artistic shortcomings and overreaching ambition that most reminded Benton of himself as a student. Like Jackson, he had suffered classroom indignities and the whispered ridicule of fellow students without surrendering his dreams of greatness. “I [liked] the idea of being a genius,” he wrote of his early student days at the Art Institute in Chicago, “and grew resentful of those who questioned it.” Later, in Paris, when he met Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the California painter, he wrote: “We agreed on only one thing … that all in Paris, but ourselves, were fools.” At the League, Benton served Jackson in the same conspiratorial way, throwing, in his suspended skepticism, a lifeline to Jackson’s ambition. “I had seen too many gifted people drop away from the pursuit of art because they lacked the necessary inner drive,” he wrote in his autobiography, expressing a thought that he had often shared with Jackson. “Jack’s apparent talent deficiencies did not thus seem important.”