Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  I was to bring images of my work as he wanted to show Max Hutchinson what I did. There were lots of different guests, very New York. Max Hutchinson had a gallery in Greenwich Village and was a very real force in the American New York art scene. A year or so later he became the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There were lots of different guests there, very New York but we two antipodeans, that is Max Hutchinson and myself, started on about the art scene in Auckland which he seems to know a lot about. We had just consumed sufficient alcohol to free us up and quite unconsciously fell into another mode of communication. He may have been brought up in Sydney but when it came to art-informed repartee we used the same language. Obviously for the New Yorkers this was an incomprehensible and alarming language. Middle-and upper-class New Yorkers had very good manners and I had responded with my very best behaviour. As a reward I think I was told two or three times that I was the only antipodean that they had met who was wholesome. But I was mystified by this. I had never been called wholesome in New Zealand. Did they mean I was naive but sincere? When I arrived a well-born American said to me, ‘How come you talk so fast when you come from such a slow country?’ I did try then to slow down so that I could be easily understood. But now I could see I had blown it. We had become aware that the room had fallen silent, our barbarous behaviour had been noticed. Helene his partner, the epitome of good manners rescued us. She integrated us back into the group. Later in the evening came the good news. Hutchinson viewed my slides and he particularly liked ‘Mother and Daughter Quarrelling’ and ‘My Skirt’s in Your Fucking Room’. Also ‘Requiem’. ‘Anything,’ he said, ‘along these lines I would show, do them on canvas, roll them and I will show them.’ That made for me a really good night out. Thank you Joe, thank you Helene.

  From these ravings you can see how ideally the Chelsea’s old inmates fitted in with my project. I had indeed moved into a house with many rooms. I found I got more from living in the Chelsea than from looking at paintings - not because the Chelsea was for a moment a good hotel, but because it was alive. Here in the Chelsea was a big building divided into compartments - each compartment in the Chelsea was a place in my brain. I had arrived at the Chelsea into my own fantasy. At 50 a lot of you is what you have read between say 16 and 35 and here they all were -Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Thomas Wolfe and the rest of the boys, O’Flaherty, Arthur Miller, O’Neil. Look, I don’t think this is a bit of literary snobbery - it’s what as a middle-class reader of books I was directed to read at university. Like so many others I read the lives of the ’30s and ’40s literary men with avid curiosity. I thought I should like to become an artist and I wanted to find out how I could survive. I thought at the time that I was a person and I did not realise I was mostly a woman.

  We had to wait for that sort of thing - for Germaine Greer and Janis Joplin to make their appearance at the Chelsea. In the meantime I really did not identify with wives. I knew that knowing reality was an essential part of being an artist and I did not want that reality second-hand so I went to New York at 50 to see how other women had worked it out - the awful problem of having only male artists to identify with - a male-like pattern to study. Katherine Mansfield is after all a freak - she could not have a baby and her illness gave her the isolation to write. She was removed from the life of a woman. Frances Hodgkins had to make a conscious decision to survive - no babies, no passion, and of course a private income - small but still security.

  I have written about Isabel Bishop earlier but in this summing up I have left her till last - last because she is 70. Another generation from my other women, and because she is unique - a Henry James American, a creature of privilege, fine sensibilities, order and beauty. I realise that this makes her sound rather intimidating but in fact I felt more at ease with her than any other woman I met in America. She had an openness that a real artist must have for her to receive ideas. She has a painting of two working-class girls - ‘Noon Hour, 1935’ in ‘Women Artists’, Karen Petersen and J. J. Wilson. I think it indicative of her good instincts to try to get to know her environment, that when she had a studio in Union Square when she first married, that she should want to paint what she saw around her, working class girls. She painted them as people with a real right to life and pleasure.

  One night at dinner I started to try to explain my feelings about painting or drawing or photographing the bums outside the Chelsea. To look at them was exploitive, intrusive, but their pain was so much part of my New York I didn’t want to leave them out. Isabel understood this so well. Ten years ago at a time when the atmosphere in Union Square was changing into something more menacing, Isabel was drawing two bums on a bench. Other bums gathered round. They started jostling her, they made rude remarks. She moved away. Like a group of medieval beggars they followed. Isabel was indignant. She had worked for so long in Union Square she felt it was as much hers as it was anybody’s. They became more frightening so she approached a policeman for help. He turned away, saying something to the effect that she had brought all this upon herself. She retreated to her studio and she has never worked in the Square since. How interesting! No wonder I responded to her so well. I have just read in ‘Women Artists: 1550-1950’ by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin - what they had to say about Isabel Bishop. ‘She has been absorbed by the dynamics of mobility and a representation of the ever present potential for changes. She believes that a convincing portrayal of physical movement, given the nature of her subjects and their obviously low social position, can be a metaphor for the possibility of a shift in social position.’ For myself, I wonder if time now has overtaken her and the hopeful signs she once deciphered in Union Square have turned to ominous messages of a fragile rigidity in a highly structured and threatening society.

  Isabel married a man who became a famous doctor. Professor Harold Wolff was indeed the truly great man who can quite unwittingly often destroy a woman of talent. See what I mean when I say Isabel is unique. Unique too in that she left her mother-in-law in charge of her kitchen. She loved her mother- and her father-in-law and lived happily with them. She went into her studio in Union Square every day and came home at night to her husband, child and extended family with pleasure. How civilised and how superbly pragmatic.

  So much of success in life relies on the quality of the people involved, and this brings me to something I noted in myself and other New Zealanders in New York; we are emotionally callow. The Americans call it wholesome - they were being kind. I think we are a suspicious punishing island people. I had prided myself on my tolerance for others’ differences and I was kidding myself. I am a barbarian and I think most of us are and so we will find forming women’s groups in the arts pretty hard, in New Zealand, in a small country, and yet I think I could see as clearly as anyone does, the necessity for it. If, in the arts, the belief that what is right, normal and the proper way of seeing things is male, upper class and Pakeha, all other ways of seeing things is as difficult to comprehend as a new language. Maori art is still, even in New Zealand, seen in its decorative sense, not for its challenging reality. If the tentative attempts for a new reality are never recognised in women’s painting, that reality is never going to become complete.

  As Lucy Lippard says, something along these lines, that women’s experience of life being different from a man’s experience of life sees to it that her art has to be different from a man’s art. Art should come from what an artist knows about life and if what a woman knows is not what a man knows then her art is going to have to be different. It’s difficult - even in New York, for all their tolerance, [there is] a real urge for women to use say A.I.R. Gallery as a place to dominate other women in dress, make up, or lack of it, speech and attitudes. I feel this to be very dangerous indeed, especially in a small place like New Zealand. Women painters fear this and are often reluctant to join art groups aligned to the women’s movement because of it. Women who want a place in the male political arena have no qualms about bringing to bear on other women the same pressu
res as men have done through the centuries, dictating to other women what’s what. Most women are not stupid, and know something is wrong here and draw back. Men who form say something like the Sculptures and Painters Association have learnt some sort of tolerance, at least in public with each other, and if women are to try similar groups they must extend the same tolerance to each other. There was something punishing, like a small breakaway non-conformist group, about some groups of women artists - a sort of uncreative rigidity that I fear. We have had enough of being told what to do in the men’s world and bossy ladies in artists groups will frighten away good painters. Am I trying to change the very nature of the beast? I don’t think so. I would not be prepared to join any women’s group unless tolerance for other women’s behaviour and dress were not one of its major guidelines.

  Clothes and make up may seem to be a trivial issue but I don’t think so. It seems quite incomprehensible to me that women are prepared to give up colour, shape and pure visual impact in their own appearance to be taken seriously by men, at least I assume that this is the reason. It becomes laughable in painters, whether they are men or women, as painters surely love to enrich life, a drab appearance is surely a manifestation of a drab mentality. We are not obliged to go along with the puritan backlash. For God’s sake, let’s make how we look an intelligent comment on how we feel. Get out of the dreary uniform some uncreative lady decided was a pledge of commitment to the women’s cause. The brown moumou, no make up, drab hair and a chunk of home-made jewellery.

  Women have been told how to look by men for long enough, and I for one am not going to be told by another woman. We have, I know, always had uniforms but artists have always invented their own clothes, partly for fun and partly from lack of money.

  Now home in New Zealand when I think of New York I don’t think of any one particular place or person, but of a huge, generous, energetic, dirty and clumsy animal. In my head New York’s persona is this very large animal that I love. At the joint where I sometimes had breakfast I said I would be leaving soon and the man behind the counter laughed at me and said, ‘Poor lady, I feel sorry for you. You’ve stayed too long. We have a saying in New York, after New York there is nowhere else to go. You’ll be back, you’ll be back. Maybe not next year, but you’ll be back.’ But in myself I felt like Brendan Behan who, as his ship pulled out and he was taking his last look at New York, was overwhelmed with a grieving conviction that he would never see New York again.

  In the Porirua garden it is 1962. We are back from Melbourne and I spent a lot of time there with Augusta, Alex, Mr Quickly and the dogs. The other photograph was taken by Fraser in 1963. We are walking in the hills behind the hospital where the corgis would attempt to round up the cattle. Luckily the cattle are not afraid of them.

  I clutch Augusta and Olga plays with her puppy. A happy scene with Mr Quickly supervising. Below Mr Quickly blows up balloons for Augusta’s birthday party.

  Fraser opens the gala day at Kingseat Hospital, 5 December 1970. Every year the staff turned on this all-day party for the locals. There were games, horse riding, and the big event, the marching girls. Augusta, Alex and Emily loved being there and met up with all the other little kiddos from Te Hihi School. One time Fraser even convinced the All Blacks to perform a demonstration game, wonders.

  Fraser in the early 1970s giving a speech at his niece’s wedding.

  This photograph is of Fraser and myself in the drawing room at Carrington. I took it in 1984. We had at that time one of those cameras you set and then hurry to join the picture. Where is that camera now? I still like the old-fashioned, sombre atmosphere of the room, with us as the casually dressed contemporary working couple.

  Above, my three daughters: Augusta in Wellington in 1983, just after she had graduated from drama school. The first batch to graduate. Was this a play at Downstage? I don’t remember. I do remember though how impressive both Lucy, the young woman from Luncheon on the Grass, and Augusta were in Top Girls.

  Alex in Queen Street, during the Queen’s visit in the early ’80s. After her encounter with the police, Alex was pursued down the street by Remuera matrons belabouring her with their umbrellas. She was laughing so much that she could hardly defend herself.

  Emily in 1990, taken by her brother-in-law Geoffrey Smith. What a wild gypsy woman she looks. This photograph reminds me of a children’s book I read years ago, Fahey King of the Gypsies. These were not desperate tinkers but had glamorous caravans, were breeders of lovely horses and dogs. Who knows, maybe some rogue gypsy gene slipped into the Fahey pool.

  These photographs were taken in 1987 by Nick Town, a boyfriend of the one of the girls. First I pose queenly in front of the fireplace; then more relaxed with my darling Max on the settee in the drawing room.

  Me in the kitchen at Carrington, I think in 1985, by Gil Hanly.

  A photograph of me taken about four years ago, by Jacqui Blanchard. The roses on the wall here represent the red rose of Ireland, a symbol used by poets and songwriters back when it was forbidden to speak even the name.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Expensive Hotel with Rather Strange Inhabitants

  We survived sixteen years at Carrington. When I returned from New York in late 1980 I was rapidly absorbed back into family life, a sort of frenetic balancing act.

  The painful separation from New York healed over. The ‘I love New York’ slogan came to sound shallow and the survival of my family a profound matter. No doubt about it, I had loved New York but was able to let it go. I had lost some naivety there and had solved one problem. I had always been convinced that in, say, New York or London, I would be accepted as a perfectly normal person. Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t care any more. If other people couldn’t see I was a perfectly normal person then they could worry about it; I was giving up on the subject. I never sent any paintings to New York either. The offer had boosted my ego but set up a conflict with my philosophical stance. I knew in the cold light of dawn back in New Zealand that I couldn’t put my money where my mouth was. I must stay with my original programme. To show in New York, I would have to move there and that was not possible. I was going to get on with things at home and my first concern was time management.

  The pattern I had set up in Australia continued at Porirua Hospital and then at Kingseat. However, that routine changed when we moved from Kingseat to Carrington. I reorganised my day. Even though the girls were now older, from past experience I was well aware of how quickly my carefully constructed day, my control of time, could turn to chaos. All it took was my mother to have a fall, a daughter to have a crisis, or Fraser’s health to become uncertain. Nothing special, perhaps, about these interruptions – it happens to everybody, so what’s there to complain about?

  But, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum. Life rushed in with trivial distractions to add to the widening, growing black hole absorbing my time, as if some alien organisation was waiting in the wings with desperate phone calls, unwelcome visitors and demands for services and money. Exhausting social occasions seemed suddenly obligatory. In the art world, being dragooned into other people’s agendas was always a lurking danger. How did these characters manage to convince dummies like myself that it was my duty to become involved in their issues, that their agenda was more important than my agenda?

  Fraser had been acutely aware for some time of the need for a unit concerned only with Maori mental health problems. To be committed to Carrington was scary enough for anyone, but it was doubly so for Maori. They were rendered powerless in this hierarchal institution, one that they found incomprehensible.

  Maori unease of Carrington relates back to Oakley Hospital, a Maori-only facility that was really a holding pen for potential dissidents unloaded from the prisons into the hospital system. Until very recently Carrington and Oakley had been combined. Fraser understood when he accepted his position at Carrington that he must, in due course, dismantle Oakley. He appointed Jed Felgate to carry out this difficult task, and I remember Jed telling me tha
t in all his time as a psychiatrist in South Africa he could not recall a more oppressive institution, even under apartheid – at Oakley the inmates were higher than 90 per cent Polynesian. With these associations, it was not surprising that Maori were still cautious about accepting treatment at Carrington.