Buoyed by Charles’s solicitude, Jackson survived the winter—increasingly his most troubled season. In late spring, the therapy continued with a long visit with the Bentons on Martha’s Vineyard. Rita, who had heard reports of Jackson’s drinking through her niece, Maria Piacenza, was especially eager to help.
For part of May and June, Jackson uncoiled and dried out in the Vineyard’s briny sunlight. “Without alcohol he was very quiet,” Benton recalled, “not morose, just quiet. He had charm for us. I guess we had that for him. From the stories I’ve heard I am inclined to believe that he was happier during his Martha’s Vineyard visits than at any other time in his life.” With Rita, Jackson picked blueberries and dug clams from the shallow inlets nearby. Eight-year-old T. P. taught him how to sail. Tom recruited him for gardening, house painting, and chopping firewood. Every day around noon, the family would “strike out across the moors” to join other summer residents at the beach for a picnic lunch and sunbathing in the nude on the hot sand—an activity that Tom had introduced to shocked islanders years before. If he wanted to be alone, Jackson wandered the hills around Menemsha, occasionally sketching or painting pastoral scenes and ocean vistas. When the sun finally began to lower behind the Gay Head lighthouse, Rita would layout a feast of spaghetti with squid, vermicelli with clams, lobster, or the freshest fish from the Menemsha fishermen; then Jackson would retire early to the converted chicken coop out back—dubbed “Jack’s Shack.” With no radio, no cardplaying, no phonograph and a regular 4:00 A.M. rousting, the days ended early.
But there were limits to what could be expected, either from a surrogate family or from the Vineyard’s sea air. Rita, after all, was a source of anxiety as well as comfort. And the intimacy and isolation of the little shingled house only aggravated the unspoken rivalry with Benton. Although still largely oblivious to the cause, Tom sensed the contradictions that underlay Jackson’s impenetrable moodiness. “He was mostly a silent, inwardly turned boy,” Benton recalled later, “and even in gay company carried something of an aura of unhappiness about him.”
In midsummer, Charles and Jackson set out in a 1926 Model T Ford on what would become an 8,000-mile cross-country trip. It was Jackson’s fourth such journey in five years.
When Stella Pollock was unhappy, she spurred her family to some new place, where, she vaguely hoped, fate would treat them more kindly. Unable to confront problems, she saw movement—the simple accumulation of miles—as the ultimate solution at times of crisis. Her sons had learned the lesson too well. For more than a decade, in an era when travel was arduous, time-consuming, and often dangerous, they ricocheted around the country, logging thousands of miles in ancient cars in a vast, transcontinental catharsis of motion. Long before Tom Benton urged his students to experience back-road America, Jackson Pollock had sought solace at the wheel of a stripped down Model T on the roads outside Riverside; and long afterward, his first instinct in a crisis was to pile up miles against it—the faster he drove, the more quickly they accumulated—searching for the destination or the escape velocity that Stella had never found.
The pretext for the 1934 trip was to make good their year-old promise to visit their widowed mother in Los Angeles. But there had to be more to it: the route was too roundabout, the pace too languorous, and the stay in Los Angeles too brief. By Pollock standards, preparations were unusually elaborate. They packed bedrolls and folding cots in order to avoid hotels, and cooking utensils to save money on food. “We prepared our meals on wood that we found along the highway,” Charles remembers, “and at night we just found a place in a churchyard or schoolyard and set ourselves up.” The route took them first through the coal-mining regions of southwestern Pennsylvania, through Uniontown and across the Monongahela River into West Virginia, where the mines were mostly idle and the towns desperately bleak. Near Charleston, winds blowing through the empty open pits covered everything within miles, including passing cars, in a shroud of black dust. Since 1929, both the price and the production of coal had plummeted. In a company town, after the company deducted rent, the cost of explosives, and insurance, even a miner who brought out as much as forty-five tons of coal in a month was deeper in debt at the end of the month that he had been at the beginning. Miners were forced to assign their children “eating days”—seldom more than three a week.
First stop was Harlan County, Kentucky, just across Tug Fork in the Cumberland Mountains. In 1931, striking Harlan County miners had fought a pitched battle with machine-gun toting deputies at the Battle of Evarts, leaving four dead and sparking a confrontation between mine owners, the United Mine Workers, and the National Guard. The Communist party had been quick to exploit the violence and the kangaroo trial that followed (in which miners were tried for murdering a deputy), calling them the opening salvos in the class war predicted by Marx. In the three years since, Harlan had become a mecca for the radical New York intelligentsia. A distinguished train of writers and intellectuals, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley, had made the pilgrimage from New York, but the war had been lost. By the time Charles and Jackson passed through, the union movement had disappeared from Kentucky and its last sympathizers had been hounded out of the mines.
From Harlan, the brothers followed Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Gap and out onto the rolling blue-pine plateau of the Great Smokies. To avoid retracing the route through Alabama that Jackson and Whitney Darrow had taken on their return from California in 1932, they turned due west at Knoxville and wound through Tennessee’s long, lateral spine. Past Nashville, the road finally plunged into the 200-mile-wide Mississippi trough; from the Tennessee River to Memphis, there was hardly a hillock. In Memphis, where Benton had stopped to see Beale Street, “home of the blues,” and paint a few drowsy street scenes, they saw the mile-wide Mississippi on the last leg of its extravagant journey, looping and curling in its path like “a long, pliant apple-paring,” in Mark Twain’s phrase. Impatient for New Orleans, they turned south at Memphis and sliced straight down through a still, sultry Mississippi summer, over the Tallahatchie, Yalobusha, and Yazoo rivers—names were all that remained of the region’s original inhabitants—and out onto the broad steamy delta—10,000 square miles of Mississippi silt, floated grain-by-grain from as far away as the banks of the Shoshone River in Cody, Wyoming.
For Charles, the visit to New Orleans was more than a sight-seeing tour. For the first few decades of the century, New Orleans had been the home of Storyville, the country’s only legalized red-light district. Tales of its tinseled demimonde of antebellum “palaces” and rows of street-side “cribs,” where pleasures of every kind were available for twenty-five cents and up, had inflamed his adolescent imagination. Although Storyville had been officially closed for more than fifteen years, the legend lingered, as did the considerable economy that had grown up around it. Scattered but not discouraged, the celebrated procuresses of New Orleans—like Countess Willie Piazza, Josie Arlington, and Lulu White, along with hundreds of smaller “independents”—filtered back into the surrounding areas, including the French Quarter, to carry on the New Orleans tradition. “Everything goes as it will,” boasted a local underground guide suggestively, “and those who cannot be satisfied [here] must surely be of a queer nature.”
In all likelihood, this was Charles’s real destination. More than a diversion to keep Jackson out of New York (and out of trouble) for the summer, more than just general therapy for his troubled soul, the visit to Storyville may have been planned to solve what the family believed was Jackson’s real problem: his lagging, and perhaps errant, sexual development. Whether or not rumors had reached his ear, Charles had plenty of reason to be concerned. Frank had undoubtedly reported the cold reception given Rose Miller. Elizabeth was quick to point up Jackson’s utter lack of interest in a serious, consistent relationship. And, even at twenty-two, Jackson had yet to show any real enthusiasm for the kind of sexual anecdote that preoccupied Charles. Among
his brothers, Jackson’s inactivity had become uncomfortably conspicuous. Here, in what remained of the fabled Storyville, Charles might be able to help his youngest brother regain his sexual bearings.
That night, he took Jackson to the red-light district. “The women were sitting in the doorways inviting us in,” Charles remembers. “‘Any way you like it for a quarter.’” Which way Jackson liked it isn’t recorded. In fact, Charles remembers nothing else about the evening except that neither he nor Jackson ever spoke of it again—an inauspicious sign, given the Pollock brothers’ tireless enthusiasm for tales of sexual conquest.
Beyond the Mississippi, the Great Plains had become “the new Sahara.” Across the half of Texas that wasn’t already desert, from Beaumont to San Antonio, Charles and Jackson witnessed the desolation at the southern rim of the dust bowl. Jackson had seen it coming on his trip in 1931, but since then, the summer of 1933 had turned millions of acres of topsoil across the Midwest into fine powder. On Armistice Day that year, a great dust storm had risen up on the Dakota prairies and obscured the midday sun as far away as Albany, New York. Roads, houses, animals, and people disappeared under the moonscape left by the “black blizzard” of 1933. Little had changed when the Pollock brothers came through seven months later. Temperatures seemed stuck above 100 degrees, every second farmhouse stood deserted, farm machinery and shed roofs poked out from under drifts “deeper than a man is tall.” At El Paso the road became clogged with farm families in jalopies even more ancient and decrepit than the Pollocks’—“square-shouldered” 1925 Dodges, 1927 La Salles, battered 1923 Model T Fords, and trucks piled high with mattresses, cooking utensils, and children—all of them headed, like Charles and Jackson, for California, the land of promise. “It was the year of the great Okie migration,” Charles recalls, “and the drought. We saw it all.”
Finally, after stopping for a few days outside Phoenix to visit with old friends, the Minsches and the Moris, Charles and Jackson arrived in Los Angeles sometime in late July.
They couldn’t have been prepared for what they found.
The Depression had finally overtaken the Pollock family. Sande had lost his lucrative job at the Times shortly before Roy’s death, and no one had been able to find steady work since. For a while, Jay worked on the road in his father’s place and Sande joined up with Reuben Kadish to paint faux bois on office safes. “We’d get twenty-five bucks for a job,” Kadish remembers, “which was a lot of money.” But soon those jobs, like most jobs in Southern California, dried up or were siphoned off by cheaper labor—the homeless thousands that Charles and Jackson had seen crowding the roads. When Frank returned in the summer of 1933, there was another mouth to feed and still only intermittent work—ten days in a power plant, seldom more than a few hours a day, always at bone-lean wages. Over the winter, Frank and Sande tried to sign up with the newly created Civil Works Administration (by January, four million people nationwide were making fifteen dollars a week with the CWA), but corruption in the local program shut them out. Stella had stopped paying rent on the Montecito Drive house when Roy died, and with even store-bought food now an extravagance, expanded her backyard garden. Jay spent everything he had saved on a milk goat, then started saving again for a few rabbits and chickens. In the spring of 1934, he felt compelled to reassure Charles, “We are eating regularly and shall continue to manage by some means. … With milk, eggs and meat from our back yard ranch we can manage until something can be done about this rotten situation.” The Pollock family had been relatively poor for years, but now, for the first time in anyone’s memory, they were sliding unchecked toward impoverishment.
No one felt the reverse of fortunes more acutely than Sande. For four years, even after the crash, his job at the Times’s rotogravure plant had shielded him from the rising tide of anxiety both in his own family and in the society beyond. He developed expensive tastes—in cars, in clothes, and in friends. “Sande was making a lot of money,” Reuben Kadish recalls, “and he spent it all. A thirty dollar pair of shoes, a hundred and eighty dollar suit.” Money also made it easy to commute to Riverside for weekends with Arloie. When not in Riverside or at the house on Montecito Drive, he would disappear into the city with a group of feckless, self-indulgent friends who were always getting into costly “jams” from which Sande felt obliged to rescue them. “Most of [them] aren’t worth the powder to blow them up,” Jay complained to Frank.
When the layoff finally came and the money stopped, Sande was devastated. Like millions of other men who were thrown out of work in the early thirties, men who relied on their jobs for a sense of identity, he clung for as long as possible to the habits of affluence. “Even when he was unemployed and he came to my place of work,” Kadish recalls, “everything was natty. Never blue jeans. We were graining safes, and we were using paints and solvents. But Sande always came dressed in a suit. That was the way he’d worked at the Times.” When denial failed, Sande, like Jackson, resorted to alcohol, self-abuse, and fast driving. Returning drunk from a party in Los Angeles, he ran his car into a telephone pole. “He just made for the pole,” recalls Marie Pollock, who was sitting in the rumble seat. “That was his target.” At another party, he climbed to the roof of a house and tried to jump to a nearby tree. “He missed the tree,” Marie remembers, “but he was so drunk he didn’t hurt himself.” His frustrations often found release on the Ascot Speedway outside Los Angeles, where he raced cars around the track at the unheard of speed of 90 miles per hour; or on trips to San Francisco when he covered 450 miles in as little as six hours.
During the flush years, Sande had abandoned the sketch pads and paints of his childhood, preferring to enjoy the artistic exploits of Charles and Jackson vicariously. But with new friends like Reuben Kadish and Phil Goldstein replacing the old circle of hangers-on, his interest in art returned. In late 1932, at Kadish’s urging, he joined a “fresco class” taught by Siqueiros. Soon he was assisting Kadish and Goldstein, learning both painting techniques and radical politics.
Phil Goldstein and Reuben Kadish in front of mural on which Sande Pollock assisted
But Sande’s devotion to art was always more a product of circumstance than a consuming passion. “He wasn’t as developed in his desire to be a painter as Phil or l or Jack, or anybody else in that group,” Kadish remembers. “He just wanted our company.” Jackson, too, sensed how sublimated and mutable his brother’s artistic aspirations were. “While your out of work,” he wrote soon after Sande joined Siqueiros’s workshop, “keep close to your art.” Closeness—whether to a job, to art, or to a brother—was all that mattered to Sande—having something or someone to care for. For a while, after Jackson went to New York, his errant friends had met that need. With his sculpted features, compact, muscular body, and winning country-boy ways, he made friends easily. “There was a warmth about the man that was very, very appealing,” says Kadish. But behind the warmth and the masculine reserve, there was a profound emptiness that neither Kadish, who left with Goldstein for Mexico in the spring of 1934, nor Arloie, in her uncomplaining self-sufficiency, could fill. Sande had to have a special charge, someone equally incomplete, to placate his own demons.
When Jackson left Los Angeles with Charles only a few weeks after arriving, Sande was, for the first time in all the comings and goings of the previous years, genuinely heartbroken. “We sure missed you was lonesome after you left,” Stella wrote Charles and Jackson. “I felt so sorry for Sanford he broke down and cried he hated to see you leave would like to of gone with you.”
The inevitable took only another month and a half. During that time, Jackson, barred by Elizabeth from returning to the Eighth Street apartment, found a cold-water flat on Houston Street; while Sande, in Los Angeles, continued to make lame arguments to Arloie: “Without money we can’t get married, so if we can’t get married, maybe we should stop dating for a while and see other people.”
Sometime in October 1934, Sande arrived in New York—“with 34 cents in my pocket and California clothe
s.” He had come to resume the job he seemed born to: taking care of Jackson. No one was ever more suited to the task or performed it better—which was fortunate, because over the next few years, Jackson would need it more than ever before.
The New York to which Sande came to rescue his brother was itself in need of rescue. Five years of depression had wrung the last drops of energy and optimism from the fabled city of the twenties. “The proud unsinkable ‘Titanic’ of New Capitalism,” Lewis Mumford observed, “had hit an iceberg and capsized.” Even Roosevelt seemed powerless to reverse the gray tide of “stringency and strain.” In the twenty months since the New Deal had been dealt, prices had risen, incomes fallen, and a vast migration begun. Honeymoon recovery efforts like the NRA had failed, sixteen million people were still jobless, and another million on strike (1,800 strikes were called in 1934 alone). Full-scale class warfare had broken out in some cities and seemed in the air almost everywhere. For those who, unlike Jackson, cared to look beyond the dizzying blur of personal and national traumas, there were even more ominous signal fires overseas: the death of Germany’s von Hindenburg and the ascension of Adolf Hitler, the civil war in Spain, border clashes between Ethiopian and Italian troops. “Among New York intellectuals,” says a historian of the period, “there was a tremendous sense of foreboding and darkness. Spengler was popular. The Decline of the West hung over the city like a dark cloud.”
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