I had publicly shown my work for the first time just a few years before I met Sara, before I began to spend my summers at Silver Islet. In 1917, I was coaxed by Rockwell to hang two of my New York scenes — one of which looked suspiciously like Sloan’s Ale House — in the Independent Exhibition he was administrating, which was to take place in the Central Grand Palace. I was tremendously flattered by his insistence that my pictures should be included, until, when scanning the list of exhibitors and their works on the day of the opening, I noticed an entry that read, “Kent, Rockwell, Junior, Nice Animals, Newfoundland” Then I realized that, true to his principles of socialist democracy and equal opportunity, Rockwell Senior had insisted that absolutely everyone should be included. He had observed, as was his nature, the exhibitions credo “No Juries! No Prizes!” down to the smallest and most subtle interpretations of that phrase.
In the course of the years following this inauspicious début, Rockwell cartwheeled in and out of my winter life in the city. After being thrown out of Newfoundland and coming back to New York, he went to Alaska and came back to New York. He went to the Straits of Magellan and returned to New York. He bought a boat, sailed the icy waters of the North Atlantic, was shipwrecked on the coast of Greenland, had great adventures there, and returned to New York. Unannounced, penniless, bursting with enthusiasm, and laden down with canvases, he would reappear in the offices of Chappel and Ewing and, inevitably, George Chappel would give him a job, or the Folio Society would commission illustrations, or his old friend George Putnam would arrange to publish the tales he had written about his most recent travels. At the end of the 1920s, he bought a farm in the Adirondacks and determined to stay there for life, painting views of forested hills. He became sought-after on the lecture circuit. He went to Greenland again. He returned to New York. He withdrew to the Adirondacks. He returned to New York.
Some people walk up a flight of stairs, others trot. Rockwell, a slave to his own boundless energy, galloped, creating such a singular racket that I always knew it was him. I heard the commotion of his approach for the last time in the winter of 1934.
I was no longer the kid that Rockwell had hauled out of Robert H.’s class at The Art Students’ League. I had, in fact, developed enough of a reputation that I’d been able to survive the worst of the Depression years on the sale of my work. That night I had been preparing for a spring exhibition and had, as a result, about twenty paintings — landscapes and nudes — leaning against the walls of my studio. I liked to leave them like this for the month or so preceding a show so that I could add highlights or finishing touches in a casual way as the days went by.
Quite late at night I opened my door to an uncharacteristically overdressed Rockwell. He said he had been delivering a lecture entitled “In Defense of True Art” to the Whitney Club and had decided once the evening wrapped up to drop by and see what I was up to.
“They were delightful,” he told me, referring to the crowd of people at the club. “Believe it, Austin, there is a lover of art at the centre of each bright human spirit. The problem is that most have been made to feel inadequate, ashamed of their own preferences. Why shouldn’t art serve mankind?”
“You’d better be careful, Rockwell,” I teased. “There must have been a great number of capitalists in that group.”
He waved aside my comment, hung his coat on the doorknob, and crossed the room. “Even the rich can be educated,” he said. “I’m just doing my bit.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Whatever you say.”
He was leaning on one of the window sills in the studio. Two tall, narrow paintings I had done of Sara were reflected in the glass on either side of him, and beyond him I could see the dark shapes of several rooftop water towers silhouetted against a vaguely yellow night sky. I walked across the floor to the old cupboard where I kept the liquor, removed a bottle of scotch, and placed it on a table in the centre of the room. I noticed that the electric light was shining on the top of Rockwell’s head. I realized that in the time that I had known him he had become almost bald, and yet somehow he looked no older than he had in the beginning. I, on the other hand, though a decade and a half younger, was starting to notice of late that there was grey in my hair and that the tired look around my eyes did not disappear after a good night’s sleep.
I went into the kitchen to collect glasses, and when I returned Rockwell was strolling around the studio examining the pictures.
“I should go there,” he said, looking at one of the views of the north shore of Lake Superior. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
“Scotch?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
I poured three fingers in the glass, handed it to Rockwell, and poured another three fingers for myself.
“Why are you so well ordered?” he was asking. “Don’t you just sometimes want to get up and go somewhere else? I mean, just recklessly chuck it all in an inappropriate season… just go?”
“I’m not like you, Rockwell,” I said. “Few people are.”
“I’m not asking you to be like me,” he said, pausing in front of a full-sized nude of Sara. He walked away from it and approached a smaller painting: one of Sara’s house huddled under the rock cliff. “I like Canada,” he said. “I like it up there. ‘With glowing hearts we see thee rise, the true north strong and free,’” he sang.
“Obviously that tune didn’t make it big on Broadway.”
“It’s a Canadian song. Who is this model of yours anyway?”
“A woman I know. She lives there. Her father was a miner… from Cornwall.”
“He worked for your father then?”
“He was dead before my father tried to reopen the mine. What a disaster that was! But short-lived, thank God. You’ll be happy to hear, Rockwell, that my father lost a barrel of money on that one. We went up there together that first summer… but he never went back again.”
“What happened to the mine?”
“The same thing that happened when it closed in ’84. The lake flooded it, then the lake took apart the superstructure. There’s not much left at all now on the islet. Mind you, there wasn’t much there in the first place. The mine — the tunnels — are under the lake.”
“All flooded now.”
I nodded, took a generous swallow from the glass. “I sometimes think about that, those tunnels down there filled with water.”
“Any silver left?” Rockwell’s glass was almost empty.
“So some people say.” I laughed. “Thinking of investing?”
“Usury!” he announced. He was looking at a small landscape I had made of the bay from Thunder Cape, the only one I had completed, the climb up there being so bug-filled and exhausting. “Some good painters in Canada,” he said. “Ever seen any of Harris’s work, or Varley’s?”
I hadn’t. “Don’t think so,” I said. Rockwell handed me his glass and I walked over to the table and poured him another drink.
“Your father would have lost all his money anyway, in the crash.”
“He was dead by then.” I lit a cigarette, offered one to Rockwell.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said, as he bent towards my lighter.
It seemed to me that Rockwell was unusually solemn. Despite his spirited ascent of the stairs, there was something studied and measured about the conversation we were having, and I was beginning to feel tense. He was frowning at a picture I had made, a picture of Sara leaning against a rough plaster wall, her arms crossed in front of her chest, the veins on her hands visible. It occurred to me that the drinks we were now sharing were perhaps not the first my friend had tasted this evening. He had seen my work before — landscapes, figures — but had never commented on it. I had always assumed his silence sprang from his dislike of qualitative opinion when it referred to artistic expression, himself being a man who disapproved of competition in the arts. But tonight there was something Rockwell wanted to say, and I knew it. I swallowed the remaining scotch in my glass. “Well?” I said as lightly as I could manage
. “What do you think?”
He was pacing up and down in front of the nudes. “They are quite good, Austin,” he said, rolling the scotch around in his glass. “Quite good.” He pulled a chair away from the wall and straddled it, his arms resting on the back. He was still looking at the pictures. The glass shone in his hand.
I thought he was patronizing me, was annoyed by his tone. “Come on,” I said. “I haven’t been a student for fifteen years. Tell me what you think.”
“Are you in love with her?” he asked abruptly.
I said nothing. I had no answer for this. Multiple images of Sara all over the room.
We both remained silent for several moments.
Finally, Rockwell shook his head, then looked directly into my face. “Are you going to answer my question, or what?” he demanded.
“Excuse me.” I placed the glass on the window sill, stood up straight as if to leave the room.
“She’s the same one,” he continued, “isn’t she, that we see exhibition after exhibition?”
I felt my face redden and I turned towards the night view so that Rockwell wouldn’t notice.
“This has nothing to do with you,” I said quietly, but I was beginning to become genuinely angry. He had no right, I believed, to inquire into my personal life, particularly if one took into consideration his own, which was certainly no shining example. I turned away from the view of water towers and faced him. We were both reflected in the window and Sara was everywhere in the room. “I think we should talk about the painting,” I said, “not about some woman.”
“Some woman,” he repeated. In the silence that followed, the radiator banged four times, like a gavel requesting order in a court of law.
“Let’s talk about the paintings,” I repeated. By now, I’m certain, my expression was grim, my voice hard.
Silence.
“Well?” I wasn’t going to give it up.
Rockwell looked at the floor for a few moments, then, avoiding my eyes, he shifted his glance to the radiator, which had begun to emit a combined clatter and cough. “I was talking about the paintings,” he said calmly, almost sadly. And then he added, “They’re as cold as ice.”
There is something peculiar about night and electricity in spaces such as artists’ studios, spaces chosen for the quality of the natural light that enters them during the day. The easels, the tables, the jars of brushes and tubes of paint, even the walls and floorboards look awkward and tawdry under the overhead glare. Unless I am working furiously in a night studio, I have always felt vaguely disoriented and terribly, terribly alone, almost as if I were an intruder about to burgle another’s workshop. Only unquestionably finished paintings do not alter in this unflattering light, paintings that cannot be changed regardless of what the artist does to them. Looking at my own work now in this harsh atmosphere, I knew that no final touch, no highlight was going to alter them. They were completed. And they were flawed.
“Cold … as … hell,” Rockwell was saying, each word like a knife slipped between the ribs.
“Get out,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as possible.
“I am doing you a favour by telling you this.”
“Get out!” I yelled, the anger finally verbalized. “Get out and don’t come back!”
“It’s your choice,” Rockwell said. Then he emptied his glass, put on his coat, and left.
This great white house, in which it appears I shall live out the remainder of my days, was designed to welcome natural light. During the day any one of its cavernous, echoing rooms would make a perfect studio, though I have chosen to work at the rear of the building as I cannot bear the idea of being observed by passersby on the street. At night, electricity has the same effect on my surroundings as it had on my old studio in Greenwich Village, and the same effect upon my soul. No arching lamps or muted shades can change the horror that I feel towards walls, floors, objects, furniture, my shoes, the sleeve of my jacket, the liver spots on my hands when they are exposed by artificial light. Normally I arrange to be asleep rather than witness this monstrosity of illumination and its attendant combination of darkness and images mirrored in my walls of glass. But today, after working on the collection all morning, I fell asleep in my chair in the afternoon. So now I find myself here in the electric light, painfully alert, remembering my break with Rockwell.
Get out. Get out and don’t come back.
What was it that caused the anger to burst out of me that night? Why did I feel I had to reject the criticism — the man himself — so forcefully? Did I have any idea what I was doing? Friends had criticized my paintings before, sometimes publicly, in print, and while the experience was never pleasant, the accompanying feeling of ill will disappeared in a week or two. But Rockwell’s comments stuck. I took them with me to the opening of the exhibition, where I could hardly bear to glance at my paintings on the wall and where I considered the patrons dupes for their purchases. Even months later, in the summer, I took them with me to Silver Islet, where the entire landscape looked used and cheap to me, as if it were suffering from the effects of the same artificial light that swims around me here now. I couldn’t forgive Rockwell — perhaps because I believed him — though I never would have admitted that then. I couldn’t forgive him, and I lost him, completely. He had caused me. you understand, to see my work as flawed. I believed I would look at my painting forever through the lens of his disapproval, and, though I refused utterly to examine the possible source of his disapproval, I hated him for it. In my vanity, I could not blame myself. For a while I tried to blame Rockwell, but he, after all, had not painted the pictures, so, despite my rage, I had to abandon that convenient option. But I could not indict myself, my own cherished expression. So I blamed the subject matter. I blamed Sara.
I looked at her standing, stricken, on the other side of the room. It was the end of summer and I was preparing to leave. For good. “This is an aesthetic decision,” I told her. “I’m not talking about character.”
“Fifteen years,” she said, turning her face partially away from me.
“Fifteen summers,” I corrected.
I was wrong. I had been talking about character. My character. It was not in my nature at that time to commemorate the past, just as it was not in my nature to be able to forget it. I never forgave Rockwell and I never forgave Sara. And those you never forgive you find impossible to forget. It would be years before I relaxed, paused long enough to wonder if they ever forgave me.
I was a creature of habit. Winter demanded that I remain in the city, but summer was for landscape. Once I decided to never return to Silver Islet, I was out of sorts when the heat came to New York. I made a couple of brief trips to the coast of Maine but was able to produce very little. So the next summer, on a whim, I drove to Rochester, left my car, and took the ferry to Davenport, where I visited George for a week or two. During this time I often met his dark-haired friend Augusta, who was on holiday from the Toronto General Hospital. I was admittedly grateful for the comfort of their company, these two unassuming Canadians, and a bit startled by the tenderness between them.
Early one evening, I remember, after I had returned from a walk on the beach at twilight, I removed my wet shoes and entered through the open back door. As I made my way down the hall to the stairs I passed by the dining room, where George and Augusta were still at the table. Augusta sat with her hands folded on her lap, her thin torso perfectly erect, her head lowered. George, who was diagonally across from her, had extended his arm over the width of the table so that his hand was resting on her shoulder. Neither of them was moving at all; they had not heard me enter. “Don’t,” George whispered, looking intently into Augusta’s downcast face. “Don’t.” There was an air of sadness about the tableau they formed, which was so profound it was almost suffocating, as well as a sense that nothing, no one, could move into the private region they had entered. “Don’t,” George whispered. Still, she did not look up. He shook her shoulder gently. “Don’t,” he said again. I
turned away then, moved with extreme caution towards the stairs.
On another occasion, I met George in the dark hallway on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He had a glass of water in his hand for Augusta, who he explained had awakened from a nightmare. But most often it was George’s nightmares I was aware of, his shouting in the night, followed by Augusta’s soft murmuring, and then silence. They were able, you see, to give each other the gift of sleep.
Halfway through my visit, Augusta returned to her job in Toronto. After she’d gone, George handed me an apron and encouraged me to stand with him behind the counter in the shop. I laughed at myself in this uniform, fervently hoped no stray tourist from New York would recognize me, but the truth is I enjoyed the trade, the gossip, the tidy rows of numbers in the account book. The following summer, I insisted that I would accompany George to the China Hall the first morning after I arrived. Earning my keep, I said, as an excuse. In fact, I was eager to see the new patterns, and, by the end of a week, I was almost as excited as George when a small crate containing the latest addition to his collection arrived in the shop all the way from France.
During the first few winters after Silver Islet, those first few winters after Sara, I worked on a series of ostensibly mystical cubist paintings that have now, mercifully, all but disappeared from the face of the earth, my dealer having been instructed to purchase them for me if ever they appeared at auction, and I, in turn, having instructed myself to subsequently dispose of them as quickly as possible.
The Underpainter Page 21
