It is that time of morning, toward eleven, when the sun in its overhead slant outside triggers a thought of relief, of enough momentarily done, and her custom is to make herself a second cup of tea, with the used bag, carefully saved in the stainless-steel sink, sitting upright like a tiny black-brown handbag beside the round drain. Her first run of concentration would have slowed down and blurred since breakfast, and the re-used bag would fuel a second go, an attempt to squeeze some further good out of herself before noon joined her with humanity in the gross chores of daily maintenance, of shopping and tidying and tugging by telephone on the few threads left in her life, many of them tied to medical specialists. Her dentist keeps telling her her teeth, the few front ones still lacking root canals and crowns, would be much brighter without that daily drenching in tea, but always there is, each morning, a hump of anxiety for the first cup to lift her over, and then, with the paler second an hour or two later, she can contemplate her still-wet work with the dazed self-adoration that so strangely alternates with her certainty that nothing she does is good enough or amounts, really, to anything. She is often seized by a dread that she has wasted her life up to now, a dread, at bottom, that she has displeased God, who is not there, or is there only in the form of light, which she rationally understands as a senseless rain of protons, a universe of particles that once upon a time burst into being for absolutely no reason. But she has a long life behind her that can’t be taken away, five grandchildren with some facet of herself embedded in them, works on display at the Hirschhorn and the Whitney, in Tokyo and Zurich and São Paulo, and a filing drawer full of reviews that are some of them very flattering, even adoring. Poor Zack had none of that, going out to the little barn, its loose and gappy boards leaking heat as fast as the woodstove could produce it, those first winters on the Island, for the single hour before the cold got hopelessly to his hands in the rough work-gloves he had cut the fingertips off of; he had only this desperate creative drive, this appetite for something even beyond fame and wealth, as blind as a sick animal’s instinct to seek privacy beneath the porch. He drank less in those years—he saw how she responded to his sobriety and still wanted to please her—but his smoker’s hack would take hours in the morning to clear.
Hope confides to this girl, to keep her off-guard, “You do understand that to have a real artistic advance there must be not only individual stout hearts but also a certain widespread—how can I say?—rottenness in things that only an initiated few suspect. It’s this nose for the rotten, I sometimes think, that takes the sensitivity, and the courage.” She would get dread in her stomach before each of Hochmann’s classes, too—before her mind lost itself in the paint, in that druglike rapture of self-forgetfulness when things began to happen on the canvas, in the painting, Zack used to say. The push and the pull. Since Kathryn, lurching forward in the chair to inspect her tape recorder, gives no sign of having heard this abruptly issued oracle, Hope asks her, more kindly, “Would you like a cup of tea if I made it?”
Kathryn casts an annoyed eye at the little gray machine purring on the refinished sea-chest with its rows of brass nailheads. “Could we keep going,” the younger woman insists, “until the tape runs out? Would you like to tell me how you remember meeting Zack?”
Feeling pushed, feeling the other woman has been deaf to the subtlety of what she has said, letting the little machine listen for her, Hope says, modelling attentiveness, “I like the way you put that. How one remembers slowly replaces what really was. Like fossils.” She thinks she is unclear, and amplifies, “The same way that mineral particles fill in the shape where a body has rotted away—a kind of lost-wax casting process, as I understand it. Zack,” she restates, nettled to think that the girl will see her as an old fool wasting precious tape. “As I remember it, it was at one of the Saturday dances at the Artists Union loft at Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. This drunken man grabbed me and asked me if I wanted to fuck, that was his word, considered quite rude in those days, even among so-called bohe-mians. Pretending to dance, he pushed his body against mine to show me he had an erection, and I slapped his face. It seemed to wake him up, because he became suddenly very polite, like a little boy. He kept begging my pardon, and I couldn’t get away from him. He was too drunk to remember me afterward, but I remembered him, and would see him at the Cedar Tavern, where Ruk used to take me before he suddenly deserted New York and joined his family in Minneapolis, where they had somehow landed on their feet. Or their boots. Their White-Russian boots. Did I tell you I never understood how his family got their money out of Russia? I mean, that yellow Lincoln cost somebody a bundle. Jewels, I supposed, sewed into their girdles. You know about the Cedar, I’m sure—it was a perfectly plain bar, painted one dismal shade of green inside, and looked from the outside just like a dozen other bars along University Place, but the painters took to it for some reason, or because there was absolutely no art on the walls, or because the management had made the decision to put up with temperamental artists. They would gather in the back, in the dark leatherette booths there, and argue about art.”
“Who, exactly?”
“It varied. The ones who liked to argue best, who were best at it, were Bernie Nova and Roger Merebien. And Mahlon Strunk, though he had a slower tongue and seemed older, it may have been more that he was getting some serious attention from the critics and galleries while the rest were still pretty much ignored. Mahlon was the one who took the Surrealist theories most seriously, even though he was from way upstate and very quiet and down-to-earth and married, which was a little surreal in itself. He and his wife, Myrtle, walked around in the Village like a working-class couple on a Sunday stroll, in matching gray overcoats. He always carried an umbrella, that’s the kind of cautious person he was, but he believed in automatism. Masson was in this country by then, and had an exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery, and he was the Surrealist we could take seriously, as opposed to Dalí, who as I say was technically everything we despised, though after Photorealism I wonder now why we all felt so superior. He was such a different kind of Spaniard from Picasso might have been the problem, though both were showmen, in their ways. I’m sorry, this isn’t the kind of thing you want, is it?”
“I want anything you can give me. It all helps make a picture.”
“It’s so hard, to remember honestly. After over fifty years, nearly sixty. Mahlon was quite nice to Zack, I remember that, and of course the idea that by letting accidents happen on the canvas you could let your subconscious speak was appealing to Zack, who was so messy anyway. Even in the ’thirties, he would draw right on the canvas with the tube. And go over and over a painting till its original image was totally covered up. We were poor but didn’t scrimp on paint. We weren’t so much interested in the craft or the finished product as in what the painting did for the painter. That was the thing, back then, that everybody talked about—getting the self out, getting it on canvas. That was why abstraction was so glamorous, it was all self. I know it must all seem very naïve to your generation, who don’t believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don’t believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything.” Feeling guilty over her resistant, counter-transferential feelings toward her interviewer, Hope does try to cast her mind back, into that opaque murk of the past.
In the dim back area of the leatherette booths, Roger Merebien’s puffy round face, younger than his years, seemed a white moon, glazed with sweat, insisting on itself in the haze of cigarette smoke and beer vapors. “The so-called ‘aesthetic,’ ” he stated in his rather high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, “is merely the sensuous aspect of the world—it is not the end of art but a means, a means for getting at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception. These objects of pe
rception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation. The impulse from the unconscious, the automatistic moment, is only a moment, a way to get the painting mind going—probing, finding, completing. Collage is another way of enlisting the random, but how the scraps are manipulated depends on feeling, and here an infinite subtlety enters in, a really quite breathtaking”—his round head seemed to rotate on its neck like a lighthouse beam, as if he dared objection to this girlish word—“play of body-mind trying to free itself from mechanical social responses, and in this becoming essentially moral, in subverting and even overthrowing an established American social order which is inhuman in its drives and responses. Our own Fascism, you could say.”
“Exactly!” Bernie Nova pounced. “Regionalism is Fascist painting; it appeals to the same Lumpen, it labels everything else degenerate, just like Nazism it caters to injured pride and a warped national ego. It hates the French, it hates the immigrants, it’s rural America—the pitchfork, the fat cattle, the cotton fields, the Okie in his jalopy, the good simple straight-standing farm folk, good Christ, the tidy rows of corn, the tornado lowering on the horizon—rural America in all its anti-Negro, anti-Jew, anti-city isolationism. The war, bless it, has swept isolationism away; ditto American Scene, though its cartoon populism makes good war propaganda. And good leftist propaganda, too.”
“Not propaganda, expression,” mildly objected Mahlon Strunk, who for all his stodgy appearance was a doctrinaire Socialist. “What the Urban Scenists said was there, was there. Poverty, crowding, tenements. Give them that, Bernie.”
Several painters began to object, to be sardonic, but Bernie’s staccato voice, a Bronx native’s undrownable-out voice, cut through them; settling his monocle in place with a lifted eyebrow, and switching his mustache back and forth with a sideways pursing of his lips, he continued haughtily, “Pittsburgh factories, breadlines, long-legged coons loping along A Hundred Twenty-fifth Street—face it, it’s all cheap genre painting, Benton and Grant Wood with their bib overalls off. American art has become a picture-postcard factory. Every nation has its commercial artists,” he stated resolutely, seeing that others wished to speak, “but not even the Nazis claim to have made art history with them. Americana doesn’t make good American painting; the American project,” he said, removing his monocle and gesturing with this disembodied emblem of vision, “is to create the conditions out of which great painters—great minds, great seers—can emerge. It is time artists refused easy success, refused isolationist-philistine money, repudiated the art dealers and museum directors; it is time we forgot about success.”
This was proclaimed, the last phrases with the drumbeat sonority of President Roosevelt’s high-toned broadcasts, to a group that had known little success. Their paintings—weak, coarse, modest-sized echoes of Miró and Mondrian, with a muddy impasto borrowed from the Mexican muralists—held yet only the wish for revolutionary action, not the achievement. Jarl Anders, gaunt and pasty, a Minnesota preacher’s child, a humorless shaman, cried out, hoarse with wrath, in the Cedar Tavern of Hope’s recollection, “Swill! Ever since the Armory Show, synthetic tradition and unredeemable corruption! The Armory Show was swill, the spoiled fruit of Western European decadence, dumped on the American yokels with all its labyrinthine evasions, and it’s been total confusion ever since. No shouting about individualism, no manipulation of academic conceits or technical fetishes can truly liberate. No literary games and idiotic automatism, no Bauhaus sterilities, no pseudo-religious titles, no obscene toadying to the smooth-tongued agents of social control can rise as high as even the toenail of the sublime.”
“My goodness,” Myrtle Strunk had to exclaim, sitting wedged against her husband. “ ‘The toenail of the sublime’—Jarl, how high would you say you have risen? The ankle? The kneecap?”
“You mean to mock,” he stated, his torso as rigid as the dark near-abstract shaman-figures prominent in his work, “but I will repay your discourtesy with an honest answer. Since 1941—I date the year precisely, as more momentous than any puffed-up events at Pearl Harbor—space and the figure in my canvases have been resolved into a total psychic entity, freeing me from the limitations of each, yet fusing into an instrument bounded only by the limits of my energy and intuition. My feeling of freedom is now absolute and infinitely exhilarating. A single stroke of paint, my mocking Myrtle, a single stroke backed by a mind that understands its potency and implications, can restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and pictorial devices for subjugation. Imagination, no longer fettered by the laws of fear, becomes as one with Vision. The Act, intrinsic and absolute, becomes its meaning and the bearer of its passion.”
Anders’ vatic rapture roused a murmur, and then a clatter, of earthier commentary, including drink orders to the waiter, but all were, Hope felt in the rosy flush of her youth, touched, like a crowd of doubtful churchgoers, by the possibility of any such absolute. Bernie, quick-tongued, a dapper big tout in his suit of small black-and-red checks, cut in, “Roight. The recognizable image—dead. Sensation, plasticity—dead. Beauty is dead: Impressionism began to kill it, the rediscovery of primitive and archaic art finished it off. Beauty and comedy belong to the same Christian lie. Nietzsche said it: ’Truth is ugly.’ He said, ’We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ The only virtue left in this day and age is courage before the hopeless. The only art is one whose symbols will catch the fundamental truth of life, its tragedy. Primitive art is magical because it is shaped by terror. Modern man has his own terror, and we—”
Strunk objected: “There’s more than that, Bernie. There is, as Roger said, everything we feel, including joy. There is a realm within; painting draws it out of us. Our self discovers its laws in what Jarl called the Act.”
Bernie snapped, “Self—a rag doll, a fetish. The painter’s feelings, personality—who cares? Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle—brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter’s mind should be as pure as the scientist’s and the philosopher’s. I call the process plasmic: the purpose of abstract art is to convert color and shape into mental plasma.”
“My God, what pseudo-European swill,” Jarl Anders protested.
Bernie Nova persisted: “The canvas enlists the viewer in sympathetic participation with the artist’s thought. It expresses the mind foremost, and whatever is still sensuous is secondary, an incidental accident. Truth before pleasure.”
Roger Merebien’s luminous round head emerged from a huddle with his bushy-haired girl of the evening. Flutingly his overcultivated voice announced, “I find I ask of the painting process one of two separate experiences. I call one ‘the mode of discovery and invention,’ the other ‘the mode of joy and variation.’ The first embodies my deepest problem, the bitterest struggle, to reject everything I do not feel and believe. The other is when I want to paint for the sheer joy of it. The strain of dealing with the unknown—the absolute—is gone. When I need joy, I find it making free variations on what I have already discovered, what I know to be mine.”
“Just watch it,” warned Bernie, “you don’t get decorative.”
The worst word they could bestow was “decorative.” Zack so dreaded being decorative that he threw dirt and broken glass into his wet canvases; he walked on them in his filthy shoes.
Phil Kaline, a millworker’s son from Detroit who had yet to discover his signature, big paintings in black and white, offered, “Come on, you turds, it’s not about knowing, it’s about giving. When you’re done giving, the canvas surprises you as much as anybody. For me, it’s free association from start to finish; it’s procedure that leaves a result finally. Sometimes I make preliminary drawings, but the painting tends to destroy them. Paint never seems to behave the same. It doesn’t dry the same. It doesn’t stay there and look at you the same.”
It hardens, Hope thought. None of this would be important if paint didn’t harden.
One painter was conspicuous by his silence. His eyes darted from face to face, tawny slitted eyes the raw sienna of dead grass in blond-lashed lids rubbed pinker and pinker as the beers or whiskeys accumulated within him. At times Hope saw him take in breath, or tense his lips as if to speak, but nothing came out, and an affecting look of congestion knotted his face, his forehead. His face had more muscles in it than most. His forehead knotted easily into ridges, and circles of muscle formed dimples beside the creases at the corners of his pensive mouth and in the center of his chin. His head sank a little lower into his shoulders when his numb-looking lips moved forward to engulf a cigarette; he hunched at each puff. He was not old, though older than she by ten years, she guessed. His fairish hair was thin on top and his scalp was tan, and he wore a white T-shirt beneath a scuffed leather jacket which he had taken off, so this image of hers must attach to warm weather, the summer of 1944, when, after D-day, eight-column headlines followed the advance of the invasion and every day brought its hundreds of American deaths. As she had said to Kathryn, it was strange that while all this slaughter was going on and cathedrals and palaces were being bombed they could have been so blithe, so autocratic, so oblivious in their pontifications about the redemptive mission of paint, but so it was: the duty of the living was to live, and the brave and valid part of their lives was painting. At this time she was working through the benign but ponderous influence of Hochmann by doing collages and Oriental-looking black brushwork like Merebien, who reworked his few images—a rectangular doorway, a row of black ovals like giant beans squeezed in a pod—in a mood of joy and variation, and whose round bland face was sweating amiably in their midst yet on its long child-thin neck also floating above them, willing to be their leader, their theorist. If Hope had ever been attracted to intelligence she would have been attracted to Merebien. But her own father had shown her the limitations of refinement, of well-bred intelligence.