Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

  No one could have savored the moment more than Roy Pollock. For forty years he had seen the folly and injustice of the economic system, a system that had brought a full measure of hardship to his own life, from his childhood of alienated labor, through his high school days as Tingley’s lone, embattled socialist, and into a life buffeted and finally defeated by market forces—crop prices, war quotas, land speculation—that even his powerful hands could not control. When the voice on the radio blamed “the rules of the exchange of mankind’s goods” for the disaster that had befallen the country, it was almost as if his old hero Eugene V. Debs had returned to claim his victory. “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”

  The speech was over in less than ten minutes, but Roy’s elation lasted the rest of the day as he searched the airwaves eagerly for newscasts to hear the reactions. At times, Jay found it hard to believe his father was as sick as the doctors said he was. “He took it all in a fine spirit and fighting,” he remembers. The next morning, Sunday, the radio was on again early, in time for the first bulletins that Roosevelt had declared the following week a national “bank holiday,” officially extending the “holidays” that most states had already imposed to stem the tide of bank closings. The radio stayed on through the live broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir from Salt Lake City, which opened and closed with the beckoning lines of a Mormon hymn:

  Come, come, Ye Saints,

  No toil or labor fear;

  But with joy wend your way.

  Soon afterward, around noon, Roy began to complain about shortness of breath. The pain followed—“great pain,” Jay remembers. “[We] thought the critical time was near.” But Stella resisted calling a doctor; shortness of breath, she explained later, “[was] the only thing that seemed to be the trouble.” For almost six hours, after a lifetime of silence, Roy cried out while Stella tried to calm and comfort him.

  Finally, at about six o’clock, Jay left to bring the doctor. For the next two and a half hours, Roy and Stella were alone together. She held him tightly as he struggled for breath, thinking, she said later, about how “her parents had made fun of her because she was being courted by a socialist, the only one in the county at that time.” She reassured herself that Roy would never want to live with an incurable disease—they had talked about it once, in the abstract—especially one that kept him inside, stockaded in pillows, separated from the land whose moods he knew so well. She herself had tried that in the first years of their marriage, to bring him inside, into the Victorian parlor of her girlhood dream, into the city house in Cody with its lace curtains, into the chalet bungalow in Chico, even into the frontier finery of the Janesville hotel. But, as in Phoenix, he was always running outside again, even in his Sunday suit, to get his big hands dirty, looking in the Arizona sand for the fragrant black soil and endless furrows of his boyhood dream. For Roy, inside was a place where nightmares happened, where his mother and sister had died, where his father had abandoned him, where Matt Pollock had trapped him, Lizzie had broken him, and Stella and her boys had betrayed him. But he was inside now, cradled in Stella’s arms, breathing harder and harder, drawn by the old emptiness that Becky McCoy had left when she died.

  At about eight-thirty, just as Jay was opening the door, Roy looked at Stella and tried to speak. “Mother,” he began in a gasping whisper, “I don’t think I can last till morning … ” He wanted to say more, Stella thought, but before he could, his flawed heart finally gave out. She held him for a long time. The lone socialist of Ringgold County had finally come in from the field.

  After calling Sande in Riverside and arranging for the body to be removed, Jay drove to the Western Union office and, at 1:27 on the morning of March 6, sent a telegram to his brothers in New York: “Dad passed on 8:30 tonight we can take care of everything.”

  16

  OUT OF THE VOID

  In New York, the long-awaited telegram stirred little apparent grief. Charles left a message at the Columbia law library: “Tell Frank that his father has died.” Even after the message was relayed, Frank had to be coaxed into taking the rest of the day off. “I already knew Dad was dying,” he explains. By late morning, the three brothers had gathered in Charles’s studio for a reading of the telegram and a “moment of silence.” They quickly dismissed as too expensive the possibilities of telephoning or traveling to Los Angeles for the funeral. Besides, they couldn’t get at what little money they had—Roosevelt had closed the banks. “The fact that we couldn’t go to the funeral didn’t really affect us much,” Frank recalls. “A funeral was something we had no experience with.” At Charles’s direction, they agreed to write letters.

  Throughout the gathering, Jackson remained stone silent. “I simply have no memory of any effect [Dad’s death] had on Jack,” says Charles. Frank, too, noticed Jackson’s odd calm but dismissed it: “Dad was a father to Jack for a much shorter period of time. And Jack seemed to be able to withstand these shockers without tears. I can’t remember his ever crying in his adult life.” A few days later, Jackson mailed a short letter to Stella, Sande, and Jay.

  I really can’t believe Dad is gone. With all your letters we were unable to fully realize the seriousness of his illness. I wish we could go there—it is hard for you three to have to shoulder everything—and being there makes it much harder. Please, mother, don’t let yourself get too upset—it is one thing unavoidable in life, but of course not as young as dad. I am glad, tho, that he was not bed fast for a long periods, and didn’t have to suffer great pain … This is poorly put—but will let it go—and will write soon.

  On Friday, March 10, Roy’s body was immured in a crypt in the mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. For a man who had worked and loved the earth, it was the final indignity, but burial was too expensive. Stella, Jay, Sande, Marie, and Arloie drove the short distance to the cemetery at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains, where they were joined by Robert and Margaret Louise Archbold, their cousins from Santa Ana, and a few of Roy’s leather-skinned co-workers from the road crew at Wrightwood. It was, like Roy’s life, a brief, modest ceremony that deserved tears but received none. Stella retained her stony poise throughout and never visited the crypt again.

  Only hours after the mourners had dispersed, the earth began to shake. In just a few minutes, from Long Beach to Pasadena, hundreds of buildings, including Manual Arts High School, collapsed into piles of bricks and clouds of dust. According to local newspaper accounts, the vibrations of the quake shook extra eggs from chickens and caused the lame to walk. Even the hill under Montecito Drive felt the jolt. Mourners in another era might have taken the quake as some kind of omen, but the Pollock family went on about their lives as if nothing had changed.

  In fact, everything had changed. For the first time, Charles and Frank rebuffed Stella’s plea for them to return to Los Angeles that summer, even though they had made similar trips every summer for three years. In letters home, they claimed there was no money for travel, but even at the time, Marie doubted their excuses: “If it had been Stella who died and Roy who needed them,” she remembers thinking, “you can be sure they would have made the effort.” Poverty didn’t prevent Frank from crossing the country to visit Marie that June, or Charles from traveling to the world’s fair in Chicago. In late March, Jackson wrote his mother, “I can only wish that we were there with you. … We will all try and come home this summer,” but when offered a free ride in May, he refused it. What all of Roy’s sons were thinking, only Frank, Roy’s favorite, was willing to admit: “Dad deserved a better break than he got. If he’d stayed in Arizona he would have been a tremendous success and become a wealthy man.” Roy’s death h
ad begun sixteen years before when Stella insisted on leaving Phoenix; it wasn’t the hard work that had killed him, it was the betrayal. “Mother still had her boys,” Frank thought but dared not say. “She’d gotten what she wanted after all. She wanted this family and she’d got it. She didn’t miss Dad too much.”

  For Jackson, Roy’s death was every bit as devastating as his sudden departure from Janesville twelve years earlier. From the Carr Ranch to Santa Ynez, through a succession of arguments and fistfights, Jackson had never stopped angling hopefully for his father’s approval. Increasingly, however, one obstacle had come between them: Jackson’s desire to become an artist. While never overtly hostile to any of his son’s ambitions, Roy Pollock had been convinced since Jackson’s high school days, perhaps before, that his fifth son was feckless and irresolute, that an indulgent family had protected him for too long from hard work and self-reliance. In Roy’s view, Jackson’s interest in art represented just another refuge from the character-building vicissitudes of the real world; and his life in New York, under Charles’s aegis, just a perpetuation of the state of dependence that had always been at the root of his troubles.

  Jackson had tried every means of appeasement. In a letter written only a few months after his summer at Wrightwood in 1931, he had tried mightily to persuade his father that his commitment to art was genuine and that an artist’s “work” was little different from a road builder’s:

  I’m going to school every morning and have learned what is worth learning in the realm of art. It is just a matter of time and work now for me to have that knowledge a part of me. A good seventy years more and I think I’ll make a good artist—being a artist is life itself—living it I mean. And when I say artist I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. Its all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel.

  On other occasions, he wrote admiringly of Benton, of his painting “jobs,” of the sheer physical effort involved in large murals, and of his “struggle with the elements of every day experience.” Benton was the kind of man Roy Pollock might have worked with or drunk with, Jackson told his father, a stranger to Stella’s pretensions to culture and Charles’s precious calligraphy; in short, an artist and a man. But the reality never lived up to the illusion Jackson labored to create. In December 1932, Benton refused to hire him as an assistant on the Indiana murals, and the League rejected his application for a teaching position (citing “bad habits”). To Roy Pollock, of course, any man who couldn’t get a job, no matter what he called himself, was “just a bum.”

  In January, Jackson’s situation took another turn for the worse when he enrolled in John Sloan’s drawing class. He may have hoped that Sloan, whose career had begun with cartoons and whose paintings demonstrated a similar journalistic empathy for American anecdote, would be as indulgent a teacher as Benton. Like many other artists, Sloan had been inspired to switch from realism to modernism by the 1913 Armory Show and used his drawing class to introduce students to the “European” Cubism that Benton noisily denounced. Yet his conversion to modernism had somehow misfired. Instead of working toward a more radical painting style, he had developed a watchmaker’s preoccupation with methodology and craft, focusing on a particular way of modeling a figure by shading with hatches and crosshatches to achieve sculptural volume.

  Whatever it was, it was a world apart from Benton’s “hollow and bump,” his emphasis on rhythm even at the expense of proportion. After two years in the League, Jackson was suddenly adrift again; suddenly a beginner. “Benton tolerated Jack’s attempts to draw,” recalled Manuel Tolegian who, like Jackson, moved to Sloan’s class after Benton’s departure. “In fact, all of his teachers at the League were tolerant of him, all except John Sloan. But no matter how hard Jack tried, he just couldn’t draw realistically. It was an impossibility.”

  In February, Jackson quit the class. A month later, Roy died and, with him, all hope of persuasion. No longer restrained by Bentonesque illusions, the old demons returned.

  In March 1933, Jackson abandoned painting altogether. Long frustrated by his lack of facility, he forsook the tainted art of Charles and Stella and set out to create an artistic identity of his own, one that would appease the ghost of Roy Pollock.

  He turned to sculpture.

  As a young man, Roy had learned the rural mason’s craft, laying foundations and sidewalks alongside his future father-in-law, John Robinson McClure. On his marriage certificate, he proudly listed his occupation as “mason.” Jackson had undoubtedly heard his older brothers’ stories of Roy’s days in Cody, working at the rock-crushing plant, lugging ore samples, doing odd masonry jobs. Later, he had seen his father at work in Arizona and California, routing roads around rock formations, clearing boulders from roadbeds, and spreading gravel. Jackson’s most vivid images of his father—working against the rock-strewn horizon in Phoenix, catching a gila monster behind a stone on Camelback Mountain, urinating on a flat rock near the Carr Ranch, trapped by a boulder at the Cherry Creek Indian Ruins, camping on the rim of the Grand Canyon—formed a web of unconscious associations that surfaced decades later in boulder-like sculptures and a fascination with earth-moving.

  From the time Jackson was old enough to work, Roy had been openly urging him to study masonry and “do what is best for your own good.” Even after Jackson left for New York, returning for summers at Wrightwood with enthusiastic accounts of Tom Benton and his new commitment to art, Roy reminded him that he needed “a method of making a living” and that masonry was a sellable skill. In strained populist rhetoric, Jackson responded that the work of the artist and the work of the mason were in fact the same thing. “That’s the new artists job to construct with the carpenter—the mason,” he wrote, referring to the construction of Rockefeller Center, which was rising only blocks from the Art Students League. “The art of life is composition—the planning—the fitting in of masses—activities.” But his growing frustration with Benton’s meticulous technique and Charles’s head start made him increasingly receptive to Roy’s injuction. “Sculptoring I think tho is my medium,” he wrote in February 1932, in a transparent effort at reconciliation after the confrontation in Wrightwood. “I’ll never be satisfied until I’m able to mould a mountain of stone, with the aid of a jack hammer, to fit my will. … I would like to get work in a rock quarry—or tomb stone factory—where I could make a little money and at the same time learn something about stone and the cutting of it.” In January 1933, only days after hearing that his father had been taken to the hospital, Jackson enrolled in his first sculpture class.

  Even as early as Chico, when he collected birds’ eggs and brought them to his father for identification, Jackson had looked at objects with a sculptor’s eye. In Agnes Martin’s clay modeling class at Manual Arts, his abstract figures had “found a bit of encouragement”—enough for him to join with a group of students who arranged to have their sculptures professionally fired and glazed. He had hauled dozens of blocks of limestone and sandstone to Manuel Tolegian’s backyard where he would chip away at them tirelessly with a hammer and chisel. Jackson later told Tony Smith that “he originally came to New York to learn ‘to sculpt like Michelangelo.’” Even after a year of total immersion in Benton’s drawing class, he returned to Los Angeles in the summer of 1931 and, with the help of Reuben Kadish, fished a boulder from the Los Angeles River and spent long days pounding at it. “From the start, Jackson had an intense interest in sculpture,” recalls Kadish, who twenty years later became a sculptor himself. “The whole time he was studying with Benton, he never lost that interest.” By the summer of 1932, when Leonard Stark gave him a book on Michelangelo’s sculpture, Jackson was already familiar with the works of John B. Flannagan, the brooding, alcoholic Irishman from North Dakota whose powerful, primitivistic little figures of rabbits, birds, and fish defied all the rules of neoclassical sculpture.

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p; Despite this long-standing if erratic interest, Jackson was still a novice when he joined a stonecarving class at the Greenwich House annex on Jones Street in January 1933. What he lacked in training, however, he made up in conviction. “I have joined a class in stone carving in the mornings,” he wrote his father proudly. “I think I like it. So far I have done nothing but try and flatten a round rock and my hand too, but it’s great fun and damned hard work.”

  Jackson’s teacher at Greenwich House was Ahron Ben-Shmuel, a thirty-year-old darkly handsome sculptor of Egyptian Jewish descent who, even in an art world filled with eccentrics, seemed as strange and exotic as Fedallah on the Pequod. Born Archie Levitt in New York, Ben-Shmuel had begun his career carving wooden forms for his taxidermist father, and after an apprenticeship as a “monumental carver,” had assisted sculptor William Zorach. An insular, forbidding man, often described by friends as “angry,” Ben-Shmuel considered students a necessary but unwelcome burden. “He wasn’t a teacher at all,” according to Isidore Grossman, Ben-Shmuel’s apprentice in the late thirties. “He never talked to you about your work. He’d just give you a piece of stone and you’d carve away at it—and that was the last you’d see of him. “After Sloan’s demands, Ben-Shmuel’s indifference must have been a welcome relief to Jackson, even at the price of a flattened hand.

  Despite their obvious differences, Ben-Shmuel, the Egyptian Jew, and Benton, the Missouri Welshman, had their similarities. Choleric, opinionated, vulgar, and exhibitionistic, Ben-Shmuel presented an even more exaggerated caricature of masculinity than Benton. “He was a very tough, off-the-streets-of-New-York guy,” recalls Reuben Kadish. “Tough and foul-mouthed. Everything was ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ and all the rest of it, which indicated that he wasn’t going to be one of those faggy art types.” Although never a drinker, he could out-Benton Benton in his outbursts of profanity and violence. “He had the filthiest mouth in creation,” recalls Nathan Katz, who had also heard Benton in a rage, “and he didn’t care who was around. He called his neighbors ‘moron motherfuckers’ to their faces.” Friends thought of him as a “gentle eccentric” with “lots of personality” whose “outlandish” behavior was calibrated for shock value. Enemies labeled him “weird,” “nuts,” and “crazy as a bedbug.” Even more so than Benton, he treated women with brutish, humiliating hostility. “To him, they were always ‘wenches’ and ‘bitches,’” recalls a student. “You know, ‘Bring my coffee, you bitch.’ He was constantly talking about what a big cocksman he was and how he liked to fuck.” Yet, like Benton’s, his tales of conquest were purest fiction; he rarely socialized with women, and he married late in life, leaving a trail of speculation about impotence and latent homosexuality.