Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  With the end of the celebration and approach of summer, the workshop emptied. Newly flush, WPA artists made plans to leave New York for the summer; Siqueiros began work on a series of private commissions to earn money for the next round of political activity. “He was always working,” Lehman recalled. “At such [quiet] times people would drift off and only the central core would remain—the Mexicans, other Latins, and a few, very few, Americans.” Neither Jackson nor Sande was among those few who remained. By the end of May, less than two months after arriving at the Union Square studio, they stopped coming altogether. Others who did return remember seeing the Pollock brothers working on and off at the workshop until early the next year when Siqueiros left to join the Republican Army in Spain, but the immersion was over. It had been an experiment, not an education.

  It did, however, give Jackson a vivid glimpse of what was possible: in scale, in materials, in methods, even in fundamental assumptions about the nature of art. It now remained only to realize those possibilities—a task that frustrated even Siqueiros. “I am at more unrest with the problems of form in art than ever,” he wrote in December 1936, in a letter to all those who had participated in the New York workshop. “I have not yet crossed the bridge of experimentation that will put me on the road to production.”

  The summer that lay ahead was as bright with promise as any that Jackson could remember. He not only had freedom, thanks to the easel division’s lax work rules, he had a car with which to exploit it and, thanks to the WPA, the money with which to enjoy it. Best of all, he had Sande, whose companionship had made the worst year of the Depression tolerable and now promised to make the best year even better. Not since the halcyon summer days in Riverside when they would slip the stripped-down Model T out of gear and let it glide down the mountain from Wrightwood had Jackson felt such a prolonged limbo of happiness.

  As in Riverside, the Pollock boys celebrated by taking to the road. A trip north to see Orozco’s new murals at Dartmouth College was only one of several long drives into the surrounding countryside that filled the short weeks of spring. They also went west to coal country, and southwest into the rolling farmland and low wooded hills along the Delaware River. “God damn beautiful son-of-a-bitch country,” Jackson called it, shouting into the wind from the rumble seat of the Model A. When, in early summer, the opportunity arose to join the legions of Project artists who could finally afford to desert the city, Jackson leapt at it. With memories of Wrightwood and visions of long country days with Sande undoubtedly in his head, he made arrangements with Bernie Schardt, a neighbor, and Reginald Wilson, a League classmate, to rent an old “Dutch” farmhouse on sixty acres of land. For all four, the cost would be only fifteen dollars a month.

  Just how long Sande waited before telling Jackson the news isn’t known. He may have accompanied the others to the house near Erwinna, Pennsylvania, during the first weeks of summer, giving Jackson at least a few days of the old pleasures. By the end of June, however, he was compelled to give up his secret: he had proposed marriage to Arloie and she had accepted. She would arrive from California in a few weeks.

  20

  THIS UNNATURAL MASS OF HUMAN EMOTIONS

  For a while, Jackson found consolation in the lolling green hills and off-road solitude of Bucks County. The house, like most of those that dotted the hillsides, was little more than an old stone shell, overgrown with rhododendron and blackened with age, its deep front porch yawning out of the underbrush. All around, stands of soybean, corn, and winter wheat rose and fell in shaggy disarray. Like many farms in Bucks County, this one had died years before in the first plague of bank foreclosures that followed the crash. During the summer, limpid sunlight and a reprieve of wildflowers in the hip-high grass lent the old house a tentatively festive air.

  The misfortunes of Bucks County farmers had proved a windfall to New York’s burgeoning population of artists and writers. Flush with WPA money and time, they rushed to the kind of country life that, during the twenties, had been reserved for the genuinely well-to-do. As in Greenwich Village, the accommodations were often Spartan—few Bucks County farmhouses had heat or water or bathrooms—but they were enough to create the illusion of comfort and leisure. Just down Geigle Hill Road from Jackson’s farmhouse, S. J. Perelman was already making notes for his series of pieces in the New Yorker on life in Bucks County. Not far away, novelist Josephine Herbst set neighborhood gossips buzzing with rumors of her Communist sympathies. The year Jackson arrived, Dorothy Parker and her husband, Alan Campbell, bought a farm in the same township, Tinicum. While the house was being modernized, they held court at Dyer’s Mill restaurant in nearby Doylestown, often accompanied by Herbst and out-of-town guests like Lillian Hellman. Only two miles away, in Frenchtown, on the New Jersey side of the river, both Arthur Koestler and Nathanael West settled in for the summer. Between these pockets of reputation were hundreds of stone farmhouses sheltering hundreds of unknown writers and artists who, like Jackson, didn’t think five or ten dollars was too much to pay for a month of escape from the city heat.

  In Bucks County with Jay and Sande

  Despite the opportunities for socializing, Jackson spent most of his days painting on the big front porch with Schardt and Wilson or one of their frequent guests. According to Reuben Kadish, who visited regularly, “There was a lot of running off into the woods to draw trees or roots coming out of the swamp. That kind of thing.” Most evenings were spent around the old-fashioned country range where the three bachelors “took turns trying to cook something that our mothers used to make,” Wilson recalls. For a break from the isolation and one another, they would drive down Geigle Hill Road toward the river, past Stover’s Mill, through a covered bridge and into the town of Erwinna where they bought supplies and traded jokes with the locals at Williams’s store. A cluster of sturdy stone houses hard by the Delaware Canal, Erwinna had never boomed in the western sense; but, like the farmhouses in the surrounding hills, it had known better times. Before 1930, when mules still pulled barges along the canal, cozy Erwinna had seen its share of drinking, cardplaying, and shooting by canalers, the men who ran the barges filled with Lackawanna coal and Bucks County grain down to markets in Bristol and Philadelphia. Now, for anything like the boisterous nightlife of Erwinna in its glory days, visitors had to drive to Revere, about seven miles northwest, where they found no town at all, just two buildings on either side of Rock Ridge Road, one a store, the other a hotel, the Paul Revere. “It was a tiny little place where we used to go to play pool and have a beer,” Wilson remembers.

  But nothing matched the solitude and escape Jackson found behind the wheel of a car. Even more than painting, driving was the activity that filled the long summer days and helped him forget what was waiting for him on his return to New York. It was as if he had traveled so many miles with Sande that now any traveling, even without Sande, was a way of holding on to him. Jackson could often be seen flying down the rough, gravel roads between Erwinna, Revere, and Doylestown in the Model A Ford, trailing a plume of dust across the rolling quilt of the Piedmont Lowlands. From the pine slopes of Flint Hill in the north to the Atlantic Coastal Plain in the south, on quick trips into the city for WPA submissions, Jackson piled up hundreds of miles against the inevitable. “Jack was a thrilling driver,” recalls Wilson, who accompanied Jackson on many of his trips. “He drove very fast and accepted any space that opened up to him, and he was incensed if he felt anyone was infringing on his rights.” This may have been the summer that Jackson and Kadish—a frequent standin for Sande—took off for Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, twenty-two miles northwest of Erwinna, to sketch at the mile-long Bethlehem Steel mill. Sitting outside the factory fence, sketch pads in hand, the two were “captured” by Bethlehem Steel guards and hauled into the office. “They wanted to know what we were doing,” Kadish remembers. “They kept us there, made all sorts of threats, and took all our drawings. Finally they let us go.” On the way out of town, the two stopped at a bar where, after telling their story, t
hey were toasted as heroes by local steelworkers, all “big Poles,” Kadish remembers, “huge, huge men.”

  Jackson crammed as many miles as he could into the weeks prior to Arloie’s arrival, but nothing, not even alcohol, could forestall the impending panic. On the eve of his return to New York in mid-July, Schardt and Wilson were startled from their rooms by a loud noise on the roof. Outside, Wilson recalls, they “saw Jackson running back and forth along the peak of the roof, waving his fists at the moon and shouting, ‘You goddamn moon, you goddamn moon!’”

  On July 25, 1936, a wiltingly hot and humid Saturday in New York City, Sande Pollock married Arloie Conaway. It had been almost nine years since their blind date to the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way, Sande had contrived delay after delay and Arloie had outlasted each one without complaining. When she arrived in New York, he tried one last feint; ostensibly for political reasons, he insisted that the wedding be conducted by a black minister. In the final masochistic act of their long masochistic courtship, Arloie spent a week searching the alien city in vain before Sande finally relented. The wedding took place at City Hall with a drunken Jackson and a total stranger standing witness.

  As was her way, Arloie slipped into the apartment on Eighth Street with barely a ripple of disruption. Only in Sande’s bedroom, now their bedroom, did she allow herself the self-expressive luxury of an old-fashioned wrought-iron bed painted white and covered with a patchwork quilt. Sande cleared one of the three sections in the hall closet. “I was very aware of coming into a situation that I didn’t want to upset,” Arloie remembers. “And I leaned over backwards not to change things too much. I didn’t want to intrude on their relationship.” She wore her extravagantly long, light brown hair in a ring of tight braids like a crown and seldom ventured into the front room, which, although open to the back hall, was considered Jackson’s space. She passed the days in the bedroom sewing, or in the kitchen, where her skill as a cook soon began to attract visitors like Harold Lehman, who arrived regularly around dinnertime three or four days a week.

  But Jackson wasn’t appeased. Within a week of the wedding, he accepted an invitation from the Bentons to come to Martha’s Vineyard and urged Sande to join him. Only days after vetoing a honeymoon as “too expensive,” Sande packed his suitcase and joined Jackson on a sketching trip from New York City, through Connecticut and Rhode Island to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. There they caught the ferry to the Vineyard where the Bentons, who now lived in Kansas City, continued to spend their summers. For two weeks, Arloie paced the Eighth Street apartment in the sweltering August heat. “It was a strange city and I didn’t know anyone,” she remembers. “I never felt so alone in my life.”

  Sande’s marriage was only the last and most dramatic in a series of events that lent Jackson’s sexual dilemma new urgency. In April of 1935, Frank had married Marie, leaving Jackson alone in the family without even a prospect of marriage. “His brothers betrayed him by getting wives,” said one old friend. Everywhere Jackson turned, he saw the same threat. With WPA money in their pockets, more and more of his friends who had postponed commitments during the general abstinence of the Depression began to make plans; marriage became thinkable again. In 1936, Phil Goldstein bunked in the Pollock’s Eighth Street apartment for several weeks and bragged about his beautiful bride-to-be, Musa McKim; Herman Cherry passed through town morose and dispirited by a broken love affair; Bruce Mitchell, Jackson’s old drinking buddy from the Art Students League, married Olivia Dehn; Bernie Schardt, his Bucks County housemate, met his soon-to-be-bride Nene Vibber; and even Manuel Tolegian, while still on the prowl in New York, began to make marital noises with the faithful Araks in Los Angeles.

  At twenty-four, Jackson was still struggling to find his sexual footing. For a long time after the debacle with Rose Miller, most of his experiences with women had been brief, crude, drunken exchanges at parties and in bars. From Ahron Ben-Shmuel, he had learned frightening new ways to express his hostility, ways that made Tom Benton’s caustic misogyny look pale and chivalrous by comparison. “Ben-Shmuel put every contact with women, no matter how casual, on a sexual basis,” recalls his student Nathan Katz. “He would run up to women on the street and grab them by their box.” According to another student, “he liked to humiliate women by talking about their period, or their sagging breasts. He humiliated them by vocalizing what seemed to be most forbidden.” It was a repertoire of abuse to which Jackson would resort again and again in an effort to protect himself from the forbidding demands of intimacy.

  At one party, Elizabeth Pollock made the mistake of introducing him to the hostess, a bright, single woman in her late thirties, described by Elizabeth as “a lovely person.” After “vacuuming up the wine,” Jackson spent most of the evening sitting in a corner, glowering at the festivities. Suddenly, without warning, he stalked across the room to the woman and roared, “You are the ugliest goddamned old bitch I ever saw!” Family members began to comment to one another about how it was “unnatural for [Jackson] not to bring women home.” At one point, aware of the gossip and undoubtedly stung by it, Jackson tried clumsily to put a stop to it. Arriving home in the middle of the day, Charles and Elizabeth heard “scuffling” and “a girl’s frightened protest” on the fifth floor landing. “Jackson was trying to shove a young woman back into his room and she was fighting back,” Elizabeth remembers. “He pushed her, really shoved this girl ahead of him through the door. She looked scared to death as he slammed the door behind them.” Through the wall, Charles and Elizabeth heard arguing, then, only minutes later, the sound of Jackson “brutally shoving her along the hall and following her down the stairs.”

  Sande’s arrival in the fall of 1934 saved Jackson from more serious abuses. As in Riverside, his companionship satisfied Jackson’s need for intimacy and, at the same time, reaffirmed his manhood. “Sexually, Jackson was always a solitary guy,” says a fellow artist who met Jackson around this time. “Rather than having any kind of a sustained relationship with some other person, he had that family relationship with Sande.” Abetted by hard times, which made “dating” unaffordable, Jackson spent two unthreatened years with Sande, his sexuality safely confined to dance-floor outbursts and barroom antics. He no longer even bothered to fabricate affairs as he had for years at the Art Students League. After moving into the privacy of the Eighth Street apartment, he avoided any repetition of the scene on the landing. “I never saw a girl up there,” recalls Harold Lehman, who visited often.

  Sometime prior to Arloie’s arrival, Jackson was seen several times with a woman named Sylvia, “a very plain girl,” Axel Horn recalls, “rather tall and very diffident—just like Jackson”—who was “obviously having trouble finding a man. They must have gravitated together by virtue of both being unhandy in love—kindred souls.” Remembered mostly for her height and fuzzy blond hair, Sylvia appeared so infrequently in Jackson’s life that most of his friends, including Lehman, never met her and those who did never learned her last name.

  Immediately after returning from Martha’s Vineyard in August, Jackson jumped in the Model A and roared off to Bucks County to rejoin Bernie Schardt and Reginald Wilson. Two months later—long after the trees had begun to turn, long after the other temporary residents (including Schardt and Wilson) had fled to the city—Jackson was still there, as if in hiding, driving through the hills as the color drained out of them. He found a small farmhouse near Frenchtown on the New Jersey side of the river that the owner gratefully let for five dollars a month. It must have seemed the perfect place for his self-imposed exile: a one-room cell with eighteen-inch-thick stone walls, a lean-to kitchen, and a sleeping loft. Outside there were no trees nearby to protect it from the cold winds that blew down the Delaware Valley from Canada, only a rusty pump and a field of old clumped soybean.

  Nevertheless, on his brief trips into the city, Jackson talked of staying the winter in Frenchtown, bragging to Sande that he had persuaded Sylvia to join him in the country. “He had this romantic notion th
at they would spend the winter together in this little house,” Arloie remembers. Whether Sylvia actually went or how long she stayed is not recorded, but, according to Reuben Kadish, Jackson was incapable of spending more than “a couple of hours” alone with a woman. “He had no idea how to strike up a conversation with the opposite sex,” says Axel Horn, “or how to maintain a conversation once it began.” If Sylvia did go, she may have stayed long enough for Jackson to paint a portrait of her. (“He must have been thrilled that somebody was finally willing to pose for him,” says Horn, into whose hands the portrait later passed. “It was not very deft. Jackson was struggling to evoke a particular person but having a hard time with the paint.” Horn later threw the painting away.) If, as seems more likely, Sylvia never visited the little stone house outside Frenchtown at all, or visited only briefly, then Jackson spent the month of October sitting alone in the desolate farmhouse, drinking to stay warm, and driving around the barren hills, concealing his lie with an elaborate charade.

  Late that month, undoubtedly while drunk, he demolished the Model A. In reporting the accident to Charles, Sande made the usual excuses. “Jack had the misfortune of collideing with some bastard,” he wrote, “and as a result the old Ford has been permanently lain to rest. The other man’s car was damaged to the extent of eighty bucks which it appears Jack will have to pay.” Saddled with a bill for eighty dollars, confined by the winter to his tiny, drafty cell, confronted for the first time with real loneliness, Jackson quickly capitulated. In early November, he returned to the Eighth Street apartment, explaining tersely that the little farmhouse was simply “too cold.” Soon thereafter, Arloie noticed that Sylvia had dropped out of his life.