Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  A confirmed Freudian, Wall began by encouraging every patient to “unburden himself and to tell his life story in his own words.” Despite Wall’s gentle, circumspect approach—“The patient must be convinced of real interest on the part of the therapist,” Wall later remarked—Jackson barricaded himself in a stony silence. When Wall turned in frustruation to Sande, he encountered the same defensiveness as well as a memory that was alternately inaccurate and self-serving. Gradually, however, Wall’s persistence and reassuring southern charm wore down Jackson’s defenses and, one by one, the demons of his inner landscape began to emerge into the open for the first time.

  Although the records of Jackson’s psychotherapeutic sessions remain confidential, it’s clear from Wall’s later writings that much of what he discovered about Jackson’s past confirmed his own emerging theories about the origins of alcoholic psychoses. Like more than half of Wall’s patients, Jackson was not the only member of his family with a drinking problem, although to Wall, it would have been Roy’s (or Frank’s or Sande’s) example, not his genes, that led Jackson astray. “The example of a relative who uses alcohol to help him manage his problems is of dynamic significance in personality formation,” Wall wrote only six years after treating Jackson. According to his research, mothers of alcoholics were typically “aggressive [women who] dominated not only the fathers of the families but the patients, whose lives they sought to direct.” “In the case of male patients,” Wall wrote, “the spoiling, pampering and protective type of mother was common.” Fathers of alcoholic men, on the other hand, typically “took no part in disciplining their offspring, and in several instances deserted their families when the children were young.” In almost every way, Roy Pollock fit Wall’s model: “a weak individual who set a poor pattern for his son to follow,” an alcoholic who “lacked forcefulness, and [was] too calm and placid, giving in to the mother and the children.”

  According to Wall, the combination of dominating mother and weak father subverted the normal identification process. Unable to identify with the submissive, or absent, father, male alcoholics tended to develop a “pathological but ambivalent fixation on the mother.” As a result, Wall found his male patients “were likely to be too close to their mothers … and seemed to develop a feminine approach to life and its problems.” For most alcoholic men, like Jackson, this skewed identification began to take its toll during adolescence, when exaggerated sexual demands enforced by peer pressure turned the close maternal relationship into “a source of growing resentment and conflict.” Not surprisingly, adolescence was also when most male alcoholics began to drink. “When drinking begins with puberty,” Wall reported, “and unfortunately becomes associated with sexual prowess in the mind of the patient, we see the beginning of a pattern in which a fundamental human relationship is placed on a false basis.” Thus, Wall wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Jackson was “fundamentally afraid of women” or that his relationships had all ended in disappointment or disaster. Although few of his patients during these years demonstrated “overt homosexuality,” Wall saw such behavior as nothing more than an exaggerated display of the mother identification and “effeminate approach to life” that underlay most alcoholic psychoses. Among the reasons cited by male patients for seeking therapy—including disappointment in love and the marriage or death of a relative—the second most common was “conflict over homosexuality.”

  In a move apparently intended to reinforce Jackson’s ill-formed identification with his father, Wall shrewdly assigned him to the hospital gardening detail. From the wide assortment of occupational diversions (basketry, bookbinding, block printing, broom-making, cooking, chair-caning, knitting, leather tooling, printing, rug-making, weaving) Wall guided Jackson into metalworking—despite the availability of painting, drawing, and sculpting—in an apparent effort to bolster his masculine self-image. “Metal work and wood work appeal quite often,” Wall wrote, “as the [male] patients consider them employment of a masculine nature.”

  The few copper plaques and bowls that Jackson hammered out in the metalworking shop during the summer confirmed Wall’s analysis. Around the outside of one small copper bowl, he depicted a line of nude men cavorting in sexual revelry. On a plaque, a huge, muscular male nude sits astride an emaciated, stumbling steer. The sexual subject matter and the fact that Jackson worked from drawings suggest that these were calculated efforts, probably done at Wall’s urging to help Jackson explore his sexual identity. Sande later recalled that Wall “attached great importance to [Jackson’s] interest in drawing the male nude.” These works represent Jackson’s first conscious attempt to probe his own unconscious with his art. The process had begun years before, but it wasn’t until the summer at Bloomingdale’s and the prodding of Wall’s Freudian preoccupations, that Jackson took the final step. By the end of his stay, the process had become explicit. After fashioning a large copper plaque showing two male nudes in a combative embrace surrounded by allegorical figures, Jackson gave it to Wall along with, for the first time, an explicit interpretation of the images. “He spoke of it as the cycle of man,” Wall later wrote. “Moving away from infancy and parents, mating, the chaos of life [at the] top, man helping another to the left and death at the base. I can hear him talking now as he pondered this out.”

  But Jackson had other, more surreptitious reasons to impress Wall with his newfound powers of insight.

  As early as August, just two months after being admitted, Jackson was restless to go home. But Wall had determined that a minimum of six months was necessary for effective rehabilitation. Most patients stayed nine months, and some lingered for a full twelve, the maximum allowable under the inebriate certification guidelines. The only way Jackson could win an early release was to convince the doctors that he was fully recovered. With the same combination of eager ingenuousness and creative angst that had attracted Benton and Siqueiros, he set out to charm Wall. “He was an intelligent and cooperative patient,” Wall recalled, “and made real progress fairly soon.” By late August, a tentative release date had already been set and extended. By early September, Jackson received permission to return to New York for a brief visit, a privilege that clearly signaled the final stages of treatment. “My time here has been extended to the end of Sept.,” he wrote Sande early in the month. “Can you come up here one day this week and get me? Any day that is convenient for you—I will come back by train.”

  In his campaign for early discharge, Jackson’s art played a persuasive role. Through it, he could demonstrate the “interest and curiosity … in working out his inner problems” that Wall considered essential to a successful recovery. Thus the copper bowls and plaques, with their exaggerated masculine imagery and thoughtful accompanying narratives, became tangible proof of Jackson’s near-miraculous rehabilitation. “It was obvious that here was a talented artist,” said Wall. “I [saw] a sweetness and strength in his work just as I did in him.” The present of the copper plaque was for Wall, apparently, the clinching evidence. (Perhaps he saw himself in Jackson’s flattering depiction of “[one] man helping another.”) “It really [was] a lovely object,” Wall concluded, “and he really was a lovely person.” On September 30, after only three and a half months and with a promise “never [to] drink again,” Jackson was released.

  It was a disastrous precedent. By charming his therapists, Jackson not only squandered a unique opportunity for genuine rehabilitation, he also established a pattern that would control his therapy for years to come. Wall and Allen were only the first of many doctors who, despite Jackson’s continued drinking and repeated relapses, were persuaded to cut short or forgo his treatment; the first of many who were distracted by his art or beguiled by the voyeuristic pleasures of treating an artist. Not surprisingly, Wall came away from the summer convinced of Jackson’s recovery and the effectiveness of his brief therapeutic experience. “My recollection,” said Wall, “is that … we felt good about our work with him as a patient.” More than a decade later, on the occasion of a
Pollock exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Wall wrote Jackson, “I remember you very pleasantly and always enjoyed working with you,” and invited his former patient back to White Plains for a friendly reunion.

  Jackson, on the other hand, came away from Bloomingdale’s brimming with resentment, angry at Wall for prying into his private world and angry at himself for letting him in. He told friends that his confinement had been “a waste” and, later in life, seldom mentioned the lost summer. On the rare occasions it came up in conversation, he “would get really furious,” according to one friend. “He wanted to completely wash his hands of it.” Several years later, when Attilio Salemme, a fellow artist who had also spent time in a mental institution, reminded him of their common experience, Jackson stormed out of the room. Even a decade later, he was still fulminating. “He told me he didn’t think [the therapy] was very effective,” recalls Roger Wilcox, a close friend in the late forties and fifties, “and he didn’t think it was good for him either. He said it was Sande’s idea and he just went along with it and he was sorry he did.”

  Back on Eighth Street, Jackson’s efforts to stay dry, however halfhearted and ineffectual, were quickly undermined by well-meaning friends and family. Only days after returning home, he received a letter from Tom Benton, who apparently had heard the full story. “I am very strongly for you as an artist,” he wrote, “[but] you’re a damn fool if you don’t cut out the monkey business and get to work.” Although the accolade was undoubtedly welcome, the advice was both belittling and ambiguous. Given his distrust of psychoanalysis and his fondness for whiskey, it wasn’t clear whether Benton meant “monkey business” to refer to the drinking or to the therapy. Rita’s letter, in the same envelope, was clearer and more reassuring but fingered old wounds:

  I was worried about you for 4 months, and can’t tell you how relieved I was to hear from you. We all hope & pray that you settle down & work— & we mean work hard paint hard—so few have the ability to say something thru their work—You have—Tom & I and many others believe in you.

  Unfortunately, most of the “many others,” like Peter Busa and Axel Horn, knew only that Jackson “had gone away for a while to dry out.” No mention was ever made of psychological problems or therapy. “Willy and Walter,” the owners of the nearby Cedar Bar, had received only a cryptic note from Jackson early in the summer: “I can’t get into town for a few days,” he wrote. “Will you let Sande McCoy cash my checks and have a couple on me—thanks.” Undermined by uninformed friends and inadequate follow-up, Jackson’s resolve didn’t last long. “He really tried to stay on the wagon,” Arloie remembers, “but the first time a friend offered him a drink, of course, he took it, and—boom!”

  Once Jackson began drinking, the last months of 1938 offered ample excuse to continue. In late September, Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain met in Munich while the world waited anxiously to be delivered from a war that seemed increasingly unavoidable. In October, closer to home, Charles and Elizabeth provided Stella Pollock with her first grandchild. (Finally, at age twenty-seven, Jackson was no longer the “baby” of the family.)

  Of most immediate concern, however, was the perilous state of the Federal Arts Project. As early as mid-September, while still at the hospital, Jackson had appealed to be rehired at his old job in the easel division. Every week, through October and November, he visited the WPA office on King Street to check on his application. Every time, he was turned away by a bureaucracy paralyzed with apprehension. In Washington, the summer hearings of Texas Congressman Martin Dies’s Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities had struck a mortal blow at Federal One, successfully branding it “a hotbed for Communists” and “one more link in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine.” Even before Roosevelt’s humiliating loss of congressional support in the midterm elections, most WPA bureaucrats and artists sensed that the end was near. On November 23, Jackson was finally readmitted—with a cut in pay. Amid the growing anxiety, it must have seemed a Pyrrhic victory. Only weeks later, when Harry Hopkins, the old New Deal warrior, resigned from the WPA, anxiety turned to despair. “From all appearances,” Sande wrote Charles in early 1939, “this may be our fatal year.”

  During the weeks of uncertainty following his return from Bloomingdale’s, Jackson tentatively resumed work. On the advice of Dr. Wall, who scheduled several follow-up visits to White Plains during October and November, he continued the “identity therapy” begun that summer with metalworking. For several months, he shied away from painting and concentrated instead on “masculine” activities like sculpture and lithography. Partly in an effort to raise money while he waited for a Project job, he also painted a number of ceramic bowls. It was a medium that appealed to him both for its easy marketability and for its relative freedom. Canvas and easel were circumscribed by formalities; they bore the burden of training, of classes, of composition, of Charles and Benton and all the other competitors. A bowl or a plate, on the other hand, was an invitation to play—a cheap and disposable license to spontaneity in which he could safely explore his own artistic future.

  On one bowl, executed during the last months of 1938, he painted a scene that he referred to as “the story of my life.” On the right, a Bentonesque male nude shoots an arrow at two distant horses galloping across a sky streaked with red clouds. On the left, a mother figure from Orozco—even to her Mexican face—crouches to give birth. In the center, an infant curls fetus-like in a blossom of flames. At the bottom, a sailboat tosses on a surging Ryderesque sea. Whatever specific meaning Jackson attached to this impenetrable allegory, if any, the imagery is clearly a summing-up of everything that has gone before, a roll call of his unconscious and the idioms he has learned to express it. After the stay at Bloomingdale’s, he is marshaling his forces, rehearsing the summer’s lessons, testing the new, conscious connection between art and the unconscious.

  Later, on a bowl that he presented to Dr. Wall on one of his return visits, Jackson painted a swirl of red, yellow, and blue nude forms floating around a single figure, glowing like Orozco’s Man on Fire, in the center. On the sides, nudes dance in a near-abstraction of curved lines. When he gave it to Wall, he described the image—probably for Wall’s benefit—as “the flight of man.” Wall responded in kind by commenting approvingly on the beauty of the female forms. The same forms appear again on a bowl Jackson sent the Bentons after Christmas, only by now their abstracted dance has moved just out of legibility. The lines are still there—dense motions of black, blue, and green against a yellow ground—but the confining reality of figures is gone. Jackson has invented his own imagery, as psychologically charged as Orozco’s, but as personal and disembodied as his own unconscious. Reuben Kadish remembers that “after [Jackson] left Bloomingdale’s, he began using the accident for the first time. The images became much more abstract, as if they had gone underground.”

  “The story of my life,” c. 1938, enamel on porcelain bowl, 11⅛” diameter

  Jackson’s neighbor, Ed Strautin, was probably the first to see the next breakdown coming. As late as January, Sande and Arloie still pointed with hopeful pride to the “improvement” Jackson was showing. Artist friends were distracted by the quality and confidence of his recent work. But Strautin, an amiable Lithuanian housepainter, saw the troubled man, not the aspiring artist. Sometime after the New Year, he noticed that Jackson was even quieter than usual. “It got so you couldn’t get him to say a word in a half-hour,” Strautin’s wife, Wally, recalls, “and when you did, he’d say one word at a time and that was all. We could see he was getting more depressed every day.” The breakdown that followed—probably another prolonged binge—caught everyone else, especially Sande, by surprise.

  Exasperated to the verge of despair, Sande turned again to Helen Marot.

  Jackson had been visiting Marot’s brownstone on Twelfth Street on and off since the winter of 1934 when he and Sande worked at the City and County School. During the hellish months preceding his hospitalization, she had
offered both a sympathetic ear and practical (if unheeded) advice on treatment and recovery. Seeing a crisis coming, she had worked with Sande and arranged Jackson’s eleventh-hour admission to Bloomingdale’s as a charity patient. Since his release, he had been visiting her more often. “He would come at midnight or later,” remembers Rachel Scott, a friend and neighbor of Marot’s, “and when he’d come up he’d be half overseas, you know. He couldn’t talk until he was pretty well lit.” One can imagine that, after a summer of Freudian analysis, much of it focused on his relationship with his mother, Jackson had begun to understand the role that Marot played in his life. Wall, who knew of Marot’s interest in the case, may even have prescribed more contact between the two, both to monitor his progress and to help Jackson work through his “ambivalent fixation” on Stella. Whatever the cause, by the time of the second breakdown, Marot had finally been drawn into the center of Jackson’s turbulent emotional world. One night very late, Scott woke up to the sound of Jackson pounding on Marot’s door screaming, “Let me in, let me in!”

  As a surrogate mother, Marot was everything Stella had never been: combative, articulate, irreverent, empathetic. Where Stella favored lace and veils and shopped compulsively, Marot wore mannish clothes and bookkeeper’s spectacles and “didn’t pay much attention to clothes and things.” Where Stella was stout and “strong-bottomed,” Marot was spare and slender as a Shaker chair. Born in Philadelphia two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Marot was the product of an upbringing far removed from the Presbyterian grinmess of Tingley, Iowa. Her wealthy Quaker parents supplemented her solid education with tutoring and exhortations to intellectual and moral betterment. “I want you to think for yourself,” her father, Charles Henry Marot, a bookseller and publisher, used to tell her, “not the way I do.” For the next fifty years, Marot pursued her father’s advice with a vengeance. An early crusader for child labor laws, she rose quickly in the leadership ranks of both the trade union movement and the women’s rights movement of the early 1900s. With an unusual combination of pragmatism and ideological zeal, she organized strikes, wrote tracts, and investigated labor abuses. She even served briefly on the editorial board of the radical pamphlet The Masses until a controversial Supreme Court decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., suppressed it. “Whatever she undertook,” recalls her friend Lewis Mumford, “she was always an insurgent.”