Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

by Michael Cunningham

  NIGHT SONG FOR A BOY

  Lock up the church,

  I feel as unasleep

  as a dead cat: regards

  are what I want,

  regards, regards, regards.

  A priest after boy’s ass

  feels better than I

  do: When I walk around

  ladies on the stoops

  think I am death: If I

  had steel plates on my heels

  Oh they would know it.

  I should rape a saint

  and she could save me

  from the dangers of life.

  ALAN DUGAN

  The East End

  AS YOU CONTINUE east, away from the center of town, you’ll notice that your surroundings are beginning to take on what passes in Provincetown for staid respectability. The shops on this end generally aspire to a higher level of dignity. Here you are likelier to find antiques that are genuine antiques, and jewelry that does not intend to be whimsical. It is the only part of town where you could buy a nonsatirical necktie.

  The East End is where most of the art galleries are. Charles Hawthorne taught painting on Miller Hill Road in the East End, and after his death the studio was taken over by Hans Hofmann. Franz Kline studied painting with Henry Hensche in the East End. Mark Rothko bought a house there in the late fifties, though he didn’t live in it for long. Milton Avery spent summers there in the fifties; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner came one summer before settling in Easthampton. Robert Motherwell summered in his house on the East End for the last forty years of his life. The East End is where Eugene O’Neill’s first plays were produced.

  BIG ART, LITTLE ART

  The light in Provincetown rivals that of Paris or Venice. Being in Provincetown is like standing on a raft moored fifty miles out to sea. Its light is aquatic; it falls not only down from the sky but up again from the water, so that when you stand there, you do so as if between two immense platters of mirror. Provincetown’s shadows are deeper and more complex than the shadows in most other places; its edges are sharper and its colors clearer. If you go there on a sunny day, you may imagine that you’ve been wearing tinted glasses all your life and have only now taken them off. Painters have been drawn to the light of Provincetown for over a century. Edward Hopper lived in Truro, and his paintings of Cape Cod will give you a good idea of the slightly terrifying purity of the light, its capacity to be exquisite, dazzling, beneficent, and merciless all at the same time. Like most things of great beauty, it is not entirely gentle and not merely pretty, not in any way.

  Provincetown has long been a member of that rarefied breed, the artists’ colony. Like so many places and people of a certain age, it had a heyday, which can be marked with an unusual degree of precision: As a center for the arts, Provincetown reached its acme in the summer of 1916.

  Provincetown’s metamorphosis from scrappy little fishing village to artists’ colony more or less began in 1873, a year before the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, when railroad lines finally connected Provincetown to Boston. Until then Provincetown had been so difficult to reach that hardly anyone went unless they had business there (which would inevitably have involved whales or fish) or were true adventurers. Provincetown’s suddenly increased accessibility was a small part of a titanic shift in the dispersal of people everywhere. In the mid-1800s, railroads in particular and industrialization in general inspired people to abandon rural areas for what seemed at the time like better lives in the cities. Artists, moving in opposition to the larger trends, as artists tend to do, began fleeing the cities to live more cheaply, closer to nature, in the suddenly depopulated countryside. Artists were properly unnerved by the rise of mechanization and what it betokened about the extinction of the handmade, the particular, and the indigenous, which had never before seemed like endangered species. Painters began preferring the regional to the mythic and began leaving their studios to paint outdoors, where they could try and render life as it occurred and light as it fell. With trains—with easier travel across long distances—came the idea of the summer idyll, and rural villages all over Europe and Russia found themselves made into colonies by painters whose ambitions ranged from dabbling to dead seriousness, most of whom arrived determined to find whatever they could of feral and spontaneous beauty; to do justice of one kind or another to the local fields and mountains, the people and animals. At its highest it was the shift in method and intent that spawned the work of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Monet.

  The same current of altered ambition ran through Provincetown, beginning with the railroad, though in Provincetown it all took a somewhat sterner, more New England—ish turn. The seminal event in Provincetown’s early life as an artists’ mecca was not the sudden appearance of a genius or two but the establishment, in 1899, of the Cape Cod School of Art by Charles Hawthorne, who produced vaguely Manet-like oils of Provincetown scenes and citizens and who was an early American advocate of Impressionism. Hawthorne was a “gentleman painter” who spent his summers in Provincetown and his winters in France and who was generally congratulated for being so unassuming and democratic as to be seen riding a bicycle around town. His Cape Cod School of Art, and several others that started up in Provincetown around the same time, was enormously popular, especially with the wives of wealthy men who began arriving in considerable numbers to spend a summer week or two as bohemians, capped and smocked, laboring at easels set up on the wharves, beaches, and streets.

  Provincetown the art colony took a more serious turn with the outbreak of World War I, when artists who might otherwise have gone to Europe found themselves forced to search out some sort of domestic equivalent of the exoticism and low rents their forebears had discovered in Paris. Provincetown naturally suggested itself. And so a new breed of artist—poorer and shaggier, more radical—began turning up on the streets and beaches, elbowing out the matrons and dilettantes.

  Eugene O’Neill arrived in the 1910s, as did John Dos Passos, Mabel Dodge, Edmund Wilson, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Max Bohm, John Reed, and Louise Bryant. They were wild men and women, prone to free love, open marriage, Marxism, psychoanalysis, peyote, and Eastern religion. The women bobbed their hair and eschewed corsets; the men wore berets and open-necked working-class shirts of flannel or corduroy. Charles Demuth sometimes sported a black shirt and purple cummerbund, and Marsden Hartley could be seen in an enormous navy blue coat with a gardenia boutonniere.

  They rented the old houses that had once belonged to sea captains. They argued and drank at the A-House and the Old Colony Tap. Everybody slept with everybody. Some of the writers started writing plays, usually about their complicated love affairs, jealousies, and political disagreements. One night in 1915 the writers Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood produced two one-act plays for friends in their home. The first, Boyce’s Constancy, about the romance between Mabel Dodge and John Reed, was staged on the veranda, with the audience watching from the living room, and the second, Suppressed Desires, a spoof of Freudianism by Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook, was put on in reverse, with the audience on the veranda and the play performed in the living room.

  They named themselves the Provincetown Players and began staging more elaborate productions in a decrepit fishing shack on Lewis Wharf that had been bought by Mary Heaton Vorse, one of the first writers to settle in among the fishermen of Provincetown. What had been a lark soon took a more serious turn—the Players realized that work no one would produce in New York could be done in Provincetown for little or no money, by and among themselves. Jig Cook, the leader of the group, had visions of an American version of the Abbey Players in Dublin. In what has become locally known as the Great Summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell said, “We would lie on the beach and talk about plays—every one writing, or acting, or producing. Life was all of a piece, work not separated from play.” It was during that summer that the Provincetown Players put on the first production of an O’Neill play, Bound East for Cardiff, which O’Neill directed.

  EUGENE O’N
EILL, THEN twenty-eight years old, the son of a successful actor, had been sent by his father on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires, in the hope that a long voyage would help cure him of his tendencies to drink too much and consort with pariahs and derelicts. Young O’Neill, however, found Buenos Aires more than sufficiently full of alcohol, pariahs, and derelicts, and when his money and health ran out, he worked his way back to the United States on a freighter and ended up in Provincetown.

  At twenty-eight he had already begun showing signs of wear; his face had already taken on some of the wounded stateliness he would wear into old age. He dressed as a sailor and did as much as he could to act like one—to eradicate the taint of privilege, to take up a life here in this new place as a rough stranger who’d washed up on the beach, who had never been pampered or cosseted, whose way had never been paid by a father or anyone else. He looked startled and sorrowful and aloof; he might have been a man in the very first stages of transfiguration into an elk. He was not large, but he looked bigger than he was, because he carried himself as if he were large and because he possessed that rare ability to occupy more space than his flesh actually did. Except when drunk, he was taciturn and vaguely disapproving; people who knew him then tended to love and fear him to roughly equal extents, and many believed—or hoped—that he harbored for them some special affection that he was unable or unwilling to demonstrate by the conventional means. Women adored him.

  Bound East for Cardiff, which concerns a dying seaman named Yank on a ship bound for North America from Argentina, was performed at Lewis Wharf on a foggy night in the summer of 1916, with the water of the incoming tide splashing audibly under the floorboards. It was revelatory. Those who attended the performance that night discovered what the larger world would learn soon enough: that even in his early efforts O’Neill was a transforming agent in American theater. He insisted on an American version of the grim, resolutely unflorid work of European playwrights like Strindberg and Ibsen, whom he admired; he was the first American to write about lower-class life in lower-class language, without condescension or cheap attempts at moral uplift.

  O’Neill lived in Provincetown for eight years in various places, among them a room over the A-House. He wandered the streets in seaman’s clothes, in a riot of melancholy drunkenness. He had a tortured affair with Louise Bryant. He made Abbie Putnam, the strict and rather terrifying local librarian, into a character who murders her child in Desire Under the Elms. Eventually he married a woman named Agnes Boulton and settled with her in the Peaked Hill Life-Saving Station, a grand old barn of a building on the edge of the Atlantic that could be reached only by a half-mile hike through the dunes. (It has since collapsed into the ocean.) It had been renovated by Mabel Dodge, who painted the walls white and the floors blue and furnished it with antiques brought back from Europe. O’Neill wrote nineteen short plays and seven long ones in Provincetown, most of them while he lived in the house at Peaked Hill. He taught himself how to write during that time and had at his disposal a body of amateur actors and set designers who would mount everything he wrote. He became a great artist there, in what he called “a solitude where I lived with myself.” He was at home at Peaked Hill when he learned, from a neighbor, that he had won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize, the first of his four Pulitzers. He celebrated quietly, with his wife, in their capacious and remote house, with its blue floors and its two couches that had been bought by Mabel Dodge from the estate of Isadora Duncan.

  FURTHER ART, OTHER ART

  After World War I ended, after the preeminence of European painting and sculpture was toppled by the work of American artists, Provincetown’s remoteness turned fairly abruptly from its central virtue to its most prominent liability. Who wanted to live so far from New York City, when New York had become the center of the world? A few artists spent their summers there, Robert Motherwell prominent among them, but Provincetown had become a backwater, a retreat, and many of the famous names connected with the town—people like Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner—were there only a summer or two. Still, a body of serious painters and sculptors like Paul Bowen, Fritz Bultman, Nanno de Groot, Chaim Gross, Peter Hutchinson, Karl Knaths, Leo Manso, Jack Tworkov, and Tony Vevers all lived there during the second half of the twentieth century, and some of them live there still.

  Since the 1940s progressive little galleries have opened, thrived, and ultimately closed: Forum 49 and Gallery 256 and HCE (for “Here Comes Everybody,” from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake); the Sun Gallery, which in 1959 showed Red Grooms’s Walking Man, possibly the first installation (known at the time as a “happening”) to involve live actors; and the Chrysler Museum, where Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground put on Exploding Plastic Inevitable.

  By the late 1960s, however, Provincetown had devolved into a straightforward tourist town, albeit one with a slightly higher incidence of foment and creation than most other places whose main occupation was being visited. All the edgy little galleries had gone out of business, and the people who emigrated there were likelier to be seeking peace and quiet than inspiration, agitation, or argument. Those who went to the A-House and the Old Colony Tap went only to drink.

  In 1969 Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, and other artists and writers who were upset about Provincetown’s decline set out, essentially, to restock the town with younger artists and writers the way a forest service restocks a lake with fingerling trout. They raised a modest sum of money and bought Days Lumber, a defunct lumberyard on the East End. They converted it into studios, which they offered to artists and writers, along with a small but livable monthly allowance, and called it the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It is still there.

  The buildings of the Work Center, on Pearl Street, are agreeably disorderly. They include the long flat-roofed buildings that were once Days Lumber, a shingled barn that has been made over into studios, and two cottages fading among the weeds. Among the writers, painters, and sculptors who have received fellowships early in their careers, lived for a while in Provincetown, and gone on to more visible careers are Richard Baker, Maria Flook, Nick Flynn, Ellen Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Marie Howe, Denis Johnson, Tama Janowitz, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jenny Livingston, Elizabeth McCracken, Sam Messer, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jack Pierson, Louise Rafkin, Kate Wheeler, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lisa Yuskavage.

  Due partly to the Fine Arts Work Center, and partly to the increasingly imponderable cost of living in New York City, Provincetown has to a certain extent been revived as an art colony. Still, it is not what it once was. Provincetown today is something like an elderly bohemian who once knew people of great influence, who still dresses eccentrically, still lives in defiant poverty, still paints or sculpts with heroic optimism, and flirts only on bad days with bitterness about having been gifted and dedicated and having been left behind.

  As far as literature is concerned, O’Neill remains the town’s great-grandfather, its most venerable ghost. Tennessee Williams summered there in the forties—he stayed at Captain Jack’s Wharf, on the West End—but as far as I can tell, none of the more hopeful rumors about his relationship to Provincetown are true. He did not write The Glass Menagerie or anything else there; he did not seduce the young Marlon Brando there, as a condition for getting him the lead in Streetcar. He came, it seems, for the same reasons so many have—for the sun, the quiet, and the boys.

  The poets Mark Doty and Mary Oliver live in Provincetown today, and Stanley Kunitz spends each spring and summer in his house on the West End. Norman Mailer lives year-round in a big brick fortress of a house on the East End. Alan Dugan lives just over the line, in North Truro.

  ALTHOUGH FEW OF the visual artists living and working in Provincetown are internationally known, some of them are in fact very, very good. On the one hand, Provincetown offers every form of artistic travesty, from landscapes and seascapes painted on assembly lines in Korea to dreadfully earnest Impressionist-style paintings of sunlit gardens and village streets. But on the other, it show
s and sells work that is much edgier, work that engages the world in more complicated ways, that takes in not only the beauty of the skin but the existence of the skull beneath. I am looking, right now, at a shadowy charcoal drawing of a nocturnal Provincetown street by John Dowd, which I keep close by for inspiration when I write, along with a miniature lamp sewn into a square of white silk organza by Melanie Braverman; a series of mysteriously compelling random snapshots by Sal Randolph; a great cartoonish painting of an empty stage by Polly Burnell; a haunting photograph of a cottage by Marian Roth; and two little ceramic houses by Pasquale Natale that speak to equal extents of comfort and menace.

  The painters, photographers, and sculptors of Provincetown need to sell their work as urgently as any artists do, but because the scale is so much smaller and the market so much broader, they are free to do whatever they feel moved to do, without the obligation to Be Important or to Move Art Along. Beauty as a subject in itself doesn’t sell very well in the larger world these days—you’d be hard pressed to find a serious gallery in New York or Los Angeles or another big city showing many newer artists whose work isn’t ironic, defiantly ugly (if defiant is the right word for such relative unanimity), and intended as commentary on the state of the culture at large. These are lean years for young still-life and portrait painters. A frank love of the visible world and a determination to pay tribute to it won’t get you very far just now. But you can do fine in Provincetown.

  What passes for a dowager on the Provincetown art scene is the Provincetown Art Association, a gracious, rambling old white building in the East End with a trove of work by the luminaries and semiluminaries of Provincetown past and present. The galleries of Provincetown are not averse to showing work that aspires unashamedly to the rendering of the visible world, but at the same time some of them also show the work of artists who might be a little too far out there for most galleries in New York. Provincetown is where Kathe Izzo can get permission to live for several days in a gallery and arrange herself as a living tableau. It is where Michelle Weinberg could make a gown in the shape of a giant pink While You Were Out slip for opera singer Debbie Karpel, who wore it and stood in the window of a gallery on Halloween night, singing arias. It is where Sal Randolph could, last October, curate a show of free art, in which dozens of artists from town participated and at which you could take anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, for free.