What happened to Jackson during the week or more he spent riding the rails between Kansas and California, if anything, isn’t known. Years later, in drunken candor, he told Manuel Tolegian that his time on the trains had been “terrible” and “scary.” Another League classmate remembers Jackson listening with unusual interest and sympathy to his stories about being assaulted in the jungle and admitting that “he had also had some homosexual experiences when he was younger.” Whatever happened, the trip clearly took its toll. Jackson arrived in Los Angeles on June 29 a physical wreck. A friend who saw him soon afterward remembers, “He looked so different I hardly recognized him. All that beautiful blond hair had been chopped off and it was just hanging out in tufts. His face was all pimply. Even his ways and disposition had changed.” Jackson was so exhausted and disheveled that even a week later when Stella, who had been away, saw him for the first time, she wrote to Frank and Charles in distress: “[Jack] looks very tired from his trip needs a rest & get fed up as he went with out eats more than once on his trip. I would have been worried sick if I had known he was bumming the freight train, he sure took lots of chances of getting killed or crippled for life.”
Still, when the time came to report his trip to his brothers and the Bentons back in New York, Jackson was determined to put a manly face on it. In terms that could have come directly from his mentor’s mouth, he transformed his ordeal into a postcard-perfect tour, as upbeat as Benton’s New School murals. “My trip was a peach,” he wrote. “I got a number of kicks in the but and put in jail twice with days of hunger—but what a worthwhile experience. I would be on the road yet if my money had lasted.” Instead of a hard-hit, drought-ridden area, Kansas became the place where “wheat was just beginning to turn and farmers were making preparations for harvest.” Instead of the “grim misery” of a shantytown on the St. Louis riverfront, Jackson reported seeing “negroes playing poker, shooting craps, and dancing along the Mississippi.” The miners and prostitutes in Terre Haute, he wrote, “gave swell color” then added, in a flourish of Bentonesque anti-capitalism, “their both starving—working for a quarter—digging their graves.” Of his days riding the rails, he speaks only of the “interesting bums” he met, and concludes with vacant rhetoric: “the freights are full, men going west men going east and as many going north and south a million of them.”
For a few days after his arrival, Jackson recuperated in the hot California sun at a “swell place” that his old friend Don Brown and Sande had rented on Montecito Drive. Situated on the grassy hills just a few miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, the house enjoyed a panoramic view of the growing city that, on days when the desert wind cleared the air, stretched all the way to the curved blue line of the Pacific. Eager to resume their relationship after a year of intermittent letters, Jackson contacted Berthe Pacifico within days of his arrival and invited her to the Montecito Drive house. Despite her own waning interest—she had begun dating another Manual Arts student—Berthe arrived the next day with her sisters Ora and Pauline just as Jackson and Sande were finishing a crude mural on the garage door. The young women were shocked by what they saw. Jackson had been drinking and the trials of the recent trip showed on his face and in his manner. “I couldn’t stand to look at him,” Berthe remembers, “he was such a mess. He just wasn’t the person I knew.” Ora couldn’t conceal her disgust. “He looked awful and I told him so,” she recalls. Stung by the rejection and emboldened by alcohol, Jackson quickly turned abusive. He grabbed Pauline and tried to kiss her. When she resisted (“I didn’t want him to even touch me, he looked so dirty,” Pauline said afterward), there was a brief, awkward struggle, then perfunctory good-byes, and Berthe Pacifico left Jackson’s life forever. “After that we never saw him again,” says Ora. With the summer barely begun, Jackson had lost his only claim, however tenuous, to sexual prowess.
After the heat of the day on Saturday, July 4, Jackson, Sande, and Arloie drove to the relative coolness of Wrightwood. Roy Pollock had been laid off from the park service at Big Pines the previous spring, but had found work on the federal roads project near his old camp and had even managed to arrange a job for Jay. The reunion at Wrightwood was even more subdued than usual, shadowed as it was by the realization that the Depression had finally caught up with the Pollock family. The “raw food” rage of two years before was now an economic necessity; there was simply no money for meat. While Roy and Jay had found jobs and Sande still earned a solid wage at the Times, a certain anxiety clung to conversations about the future. “[Jay] and I are still working,” Roy wrote Charles, “but do not know how long it will last. Sande still has his job … [but] a lot of fellows have been laid off while he stays on.” After a week of looking for a place on the work crews with Jay and his father, Jackson returned dejectedly to the house on Montecito Drive with Sande. After they left, Roy confided in a letter to Frank, who was also without a job, “Hope [Jack] finds something to do [in Los Angeles] but it will be almost a miracle if he does.”
Idle and restless, Jackson drifted back to his old circle of friends from Manual Arts. In the year since his departure, former Schwankovsky favorites like Harold Lehman and Phil Goldstein had achieved considerable notoriety in the small, emerging Los Angeles art world. While Jackson was struggling to control the bump and the hollow, they had begun to form their own independent artistic circle with Lorser Feitelson and Benton’s old friend, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, as mentors. They had their own avant-garde gallery, Stanley Rose’s bookshop in Hollywood—described as “a combination cultural center, speakeasy, and bookie joint”—and their own prominent collectors, Walter and Louise Arensberg, at whose Hollywood house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, they could view works by Picasso and Brancusi, as well as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which the Arensbergs had purchased from the Armory Show. Like Benton, both Feitelson and Macdonald-Wright looked to the Italian Renaissance for inspiration, but had served their terms in Paris and exposed their students to Cubism and Surrealism. Under their influence, Goldstein had abandoned Otis and advanced to an idiosyncratic style of his own, combining the empty architecture, reclining statues, and blank-faced mannequins of Giorgio de Chirico with the Mannerist distortions of the late Renaissance in paintings of startlingly professional quality. Meanwhile, Harold Lehman was organizing trips to the Philharmonic, private playings of new classical recordings, and weekly reports on philosophical tomes.
In the midst of so much accomplishment, Jackson’s insecurities quickly resurfaced, and his relationship to the old gang during the summer, although cordial, was never comfortable. He must have felt the widening gap that separated him from the others, although his comments reveal some uncertainty as to who was drifting away from whom. “The old bunch out here are quite haywire,” he wrote to Charles in August, “they think the worse of me tho.”
At a reunion of the “old bunch” early that summer, Jackson saw a new face: a short, slender, solemn young man in wire-rim glasses, fine Worumba coat, and domed Borsalino hat. Jackson was attracted by his directness and intensity—so unlike the glibness of Lehman or Tolegian—as well as his well-articulated radical ideas about art and politics. It wasn’t until they were well into the conversation that Jackson realized he had spoken to this young man once before. The previous summer, he had seen an article in the paper about students at a Los Angeles area high school organizing a demonstration to protest the presence of American marines in Nicaragua and had called one of the protest leaders, a student named Reuben Kadish. This was the same Reuben Kadish. “That cemented our relationship,” says Kadish. “He was a bad boy, I was a bad boy. We felt the same way about each other right from the beginning.” The more the two men talked, the more surprising it seemed that they hadn’t met sooner. Kadish had known Marie Levitt, Frank Pollock’s girlfriend and future wife, since their childhood together in Ontario, California. Like Jackson, Kadish had gone to New York the previous fall, looking for some direction after being expelled from high school, only to return at midy
ear and enroll at the Otis Art Institute. There, he had met Phil Goldstein, and the two soon established their own studio. Ultimately, however, Otis proved as frustrating for Kadish as high school. “It was a very regimented kind of place,” he remembers. “You couldn’t take life drawing until you did cast drawing and you couldn’t do this until you did that.” By spring, Kadish and Goldstein’s independent “studio” had become an embarrassment to Otis and they were asked to leave. “You don’t need Otis,” the dean told them. Soon afterward, only a few weeks before Jackson’s arrival, Kadish had met Sande Pollock.
Although fate seemed determined to bring them together, Jack Pollock and “Rube” Kadish were an improbable pair: the bookish Russian Jew with his intense visage, quick walk, and close-cropped hair, and the broad-faced American boy with his hank of blond hair, cowboy boots, and dimples. Where Jackson’s ancestors had arrived in America before the Revolutionary War, Kadish’s had only just preceded the Great War, having fled czarist persecution in the Lithuanian town of Vilna. His father, Samuel Shuster, had come through Germany to the Russian-Jewish community in Chicago where he took a new name and started a housepainting business specializing in faux bois and marbling (techniques that Georges Braque would soon introduce into the Cubist vocabulary). In 1920, when their first child, Reuben, was seven, the Kadishes moved to Los Angeles in search of a better climate for Samuel’s chronic bronchitis. Not until Reuben took a trip across country in 1925 to visit his uncle in New York City did his artistic ambitions begin to coalesce. Leib Kadison had formed a theatrical company, the Vilna Troupe, in the flourishing Jewish community around lower Second Avenue, premiering plays like The Dybbuk. Kadish remembers his uncle as a “culture vulture” who introduced him to painter friends like David Burliuk and took him to galleries and museums. On one such visit to the Metropolitan Museum, fourteen-year-old Reuben had an epiphany. “I was looking at a Courbet nude,” Kadish remembers, “and I totally succumbed to the erotic aspects of it. I made a choice right there that I wanted to be an artist.”
More than his facility or his learning, both of which were formidable, Jackson admired Kadish’s feeling for art, for art’s power to arouse, to persuade, to grip. In contrast to Goldstein’s facile manipulations and Lehman’s cold, intellectual precision, which had always made Jackson feel inadequate, Kadish’s approach to art was, like his radical politics, direct, earnest, and utterly committed. Kadish, whose own work lacked the uncerebrated urgency he espoused, envied Jackson’s enormous reserves of raw artistic energy. From the beginning, he saw what it would take the world another two decades to see: this crude, intense, untrained nineteen-year-old possessed an “imaging power” that, for all his lack of technical facility, could bring inanimate objects to life. “Jack had a way of making magic out of things,” Kadish remembers. “When he looked at something, it was as if it had been created for him alone, for him as an artist.”
Through the rest of July and into the record-setting heat wave of early August—every day for two weeks, temperatures soared past 100 degrees—the two boys visited museums and galleries together, searching out works of art that captured the directness, the immediacy, the emotional energy about which Kadish waxed eloquent in the evenings over beer. In the Southwest Museum, not far from the house on Montecito Drive, they saw Southwestern and Plains Indian artifacts—some displayed in recreated environments—and Pacific Coast Indian baskets: from the thick coiled willow-splint baskets of eastern California to the delicate sea-grass baskets of the Aleutian Islands. At the Los Angeles County Museum near Exposition Park, not far from the Pollocks’ old bungalow court on West Fiftieth Street, they bypassed paintings by the old masters and exhibitions of local art and headed for the deserted cellar to wander the “ethnographic” exhibits of South Pacific cultures—glass cases filled with boldly sculptural ceramic bowls from the Pava cultures of the South Pacific, carved knife hilts and sword handles brought back from the Philippines by sailors, tapa cloths in vivid geometric designs. “We had to lie down on our bellies sometimes to see what was in the bottom of the cases,” Kadish remembers. “Marvelous things were just stuck back in there. At the time, those things were thought of as mere ethnological data, but we didn’t care. We would eyeball them for hours rather than waste our time with the show that the Los Angeles County Art Association was putting on upstairs. We knew where the vigor was, where the real energy was.”
In mid-August, Roy sent word from Wrightwood that two jobs had opened up at the camp. With work scarce and the Los Angeles sun sizzling, Jackson reluctantly accepted, inviting Manuel Tolegian to join him on what turned out to be an illfated expedition. The work was sawing felled trees into standard lengths that could be chopped into stove wood for winter. The sawing was done with long two-man saws like those depicted by Benton in his Midwest mural. One man pushed, the other pulled, for ten to twelve hours a day. Even for men who had spent their whole lives in the camps it was exhausting work. For Jackson and Manuel, dissipated by a year of subsistence living in New York, it was slow, backbreaking agony. Every morning, a supervisor came by, recorded the size of their pile, and paid them accordingly—usually in small change. Even the normally unmovable Stella felt something like pity. “Jack and Tolegian are cutting wood,” she wrote to Frank, “[and it’s] sure hard work. They can’t cut very fast until they get used to hard work again.”
In the mountain air, the boys had hoped for some respite from the record heat in the valley, but none came. Between the sun, the exhaustion, and the frustration that had been simmering all summer, tempers flared. Arguments broke out about who was doing most of the work on the two-man saw. On a ride into camp to get the saw blade sharpened, Manuel accused the supervisor—a friend of Roy’s—of taking wood from the pile during the night. Infuriated, Jackson grabbed the blade that was braced between them and shoved the cutting edge against Manuel’s neck. In the struggle to protect himself, Manuel let go of the wheel and the car swerved perilously toward the precipice at the edge of the road. “He said he was going to cut my throat,” Tolegian later told his wife. “For a minute there I really feared for my life.”
Soon afterward, Tolegian left Wrightwood, and soon after that, the work ran out. In several weeks of bone-tiring effort, Jackson had earned almost nothing. “I have finished up my job today,” he wrote to Charles in late August, “and after figuring things out there is damned little left—barely enough to pay for my salt.” For several weeks, however, he lingered at the camp instead of returning to Los Angeles. Except for his time with Kadish, the summer had left him socially alienated and creatively paralyzed. “I haven’t done any drawing to speak of,” he confessed to Charles.
For Roy Pollock, the summer—especially Jackson’s last idle weeks at camp—only confirmed his worst fears about his youngest son. Now fifty-four, Roy had spent most of the previous year depressed and ill, alternately worried about keeping his job and about staying healthy enough to work. More and more, as his savings dwindled, he was haunted by thoughts of his own failure. Earlier that summer he had written Frank in New York, “I wish we were all back in the country on a big ranch with pigs cows horses chickens—don’t you? The happiest time was when you boys were all home on the ranch.” To Roy, Jackson seemed to be dangerously adrift at a time when even skilled workers, desperate to work, were standing in breadlines. His artistic career, unlike Charles’s, held little promise of employment. Even the self-centered Tolegian had sensed the tension between them, later describing Roy’s relationship with Jackson as “the most unfatherly thing I ever saw.” In the provocative August heat, Roy couldn’t contain his exasperation for long. At some point he lashed out as he had the previous summer, making clear to Jackson just what a dismal future lay in store for him.
Again, Jackson turned to Charles for consolation and guidance:
I don’t know what to try and do—more and more I realize I’m sadly in need of some method of making a living—and its beginning to look as tho I’ll have to take time off if I’m ever to get star
ted. To make matters worse, I haven’t any particular interest in that kind of stuff. There is little difficulty in getting back there—and I suppose I can find something to do—what is your opinion?”
Charles apparently answered quickly, encouraging his little brother to return to New York, because on Tuesday, September 22, Jackson left for Oklahoma City, the destination of a woman who paid him to drive her car. The summer had only sharpened the conflict inside him, only widened the gap between his frustrations and his ambitions. “Dad thinks I’m just a bum,” he wrote Charles, “while mother still holds the old love.”
In New York, too, the reception was mixed.
Embittered by Jackson’s bid for Benton’s favor and furious at Charles for acquiescing in it, Elizabeth greeted his return with a late-autumnal chill. “Most women were like Rita,” Elizabeth recalls. “They babied him and stroked him. I gave him a cold glassy eye when I realized what he was doing to Charles.” Nevertheless, as a money-saving measure, Charles arranged for Jackson to sleep in his Tenth Street studio and to share meals, many of them prepared grudgingly by Elizabeth, in his new apartment at 47 Horatio Street. By contrast, the Bentons, especially four-year-old T. P., greeted Jackson’s return with warm celebration.
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