Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage

  The end. Hokay?

  I sounded more enthusiastic about Pollock’s dribble paintings than I really was. (Dishonest!) And I am a person who has spent a lot of his life in commercial galleries and art museums. I have done what my Abstract Expressionist pal Syd Solomon said we had to do if we wanted to tell a good painting from a bad one, which was this: “look at a million paintings first.” After doing that, he said, we could never be mistaken.

  My main reason for not liking the dribbles much, except possibly as textile designs, is primitive: They show me no horizon. I can easily do without information in a painting except for one fact, which my nervous system, and maybe the nervous system of all earthbound animals, insists on knowing: where the horizon is. I think of newborn deer, who have to struggle to their feet and maybe start running for their lives almost immediately. The first piece of important information their eyes transmit to their brains, surely, is the location of the horizon. So it is, too, with human beings awakening from sleep or a coma: the first thing they have to know before reasoning is where the horizon is.

  As responsible shippers say on packages containing objects which are easily distressed, like the human nervous system:

  THIS SIDE UP

  The Franklin Library asked me to provide a special preface to its expensive edition of Bluebeard (illustrated by my daughter Edith Squibb). So I blathered on some more about painting, which my father and I both did badly:

  “To all my friends and relatives in Alcoholics Anonymous,” I began, “I say that they were right to become intoxicated. Life without moments of intoxication is not worth ‘a pitcher of spit,’ as the felicitous saying goes. They simply chose what was for them a deadly poison on which to get drunk.

  “Good examples of harmless toots are some of the things children do. They get smashed for hours on some strictly limited aspect of the Great Big Everything, the Universe, such as water or snow or mud or colors or rocks (throwing little ones, looking under big ones), or echoes or funny sounds from the voicebox or banging on a drum and so on. Only two people are involved: the child and the Universe. The child does a little something to the Universe, and the Great Big Everything does something funny or beautiful or sometimes disappointing or scary or even painful in return. The child teaches the Universe how to be a good playmate, to be nice instead of mean.

  “And professional picture painters, who are what a lot of this made-up story is about, are people who continue to play children’s games with goo, and dirt, with chalks and powdered minerals mixed with oil and dead embers and so on, dabbing, smearing, scrawling, scraping, and so on, for all their natural lives. When they were children, though, there was just they and the Universe, with only the Universe dealing in rewards and punishments, as a dominant playmate will. When picture painters become adults, and particularly if other people depend on them for food and shelter and clothing and all that, not forgetting heat in the wintertime, they are likely to allow a third player, with dismaying powers to hold up to ridicule or reward grotesquely or generally behave like a lunatic, to join the game. It is that part of society which does not paint well, usually, but which knows what it likes with a vengeance. That third player is sometimes personified by an actual dictator, such as Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini, or simply by a critic or curator or collector or dealer or creditor, or in-laws.

  “In any case, since the game goes well only when played by two, the painter and the Great Big Everything, three’s a crowd.

  “Vincent van Gogh excluded that third player by having no dependents, by selling no paintings save for a few to his loving brother, Theo, and by conversing as little as possible. Most painters are not that lucky, if you want to call that much solitude luck.

  “Most good painters I have known wish that they did not have to sell their pictures. The graphic artist Saul Steinberg said to me with whimsical smugness one time that he got to keep most of his creations, even after he had been paid well for them. Most of them are models for reproductions in books and magazines and poster shops, and need have no public life of their own. Steinberg makes a living from copies, but keeps the originals.

  “Both my grown daughters make pictures and sell them. But they wish they could keep them. It is the third player who forces them to put them up for adoption. And that player is full of vehement advice about how to make their pictures more adoptable, how to run a successful baby factory, so to speak.

  “The younger of those daughters is married to a painter who was poor for a long time, but who now is having what is called success. What do he and she find most exciting about this new affluence? It means that they can now keep their best pictures for themselves. They, too, can be collectors.

  “My point is this: The most satisfied of all painters is the one who can become intoxicated for hours or days or weeks or years with what his or her hands and eyes can do with art materials, and let the rest of the world go hang.

  “And may I say parenthetically that my own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating. Intruders, no matter how ill-natured or stupid or dishonest, are as refreshing as the sudden breakthrough of sunbeams on a cloudy day.

  “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza.

  “As for the founders of the Abstract Expressionist movement in this country soon after World War II: The third player crashed into their privacy suddenly, and especially into that of the shy and dead-broke Jackson Pollock, with a bewildering uproar equivalent to that of a raid by the Vice Squad. Pollock was goofing around with spatters and dribbles of paint on canvas on his own time and at his own expense and on the advice of nobody, wondering, as indeed a child might, whether the result would be interesting.

  “And it was.

  “That was his first masterstroke, surely, something of which a child would be wholly incapable: recognizing how enchanting to adult minds pictures made in this fashion might be. His second masterstroke was to trust his intuition to control his hands so as to show, doing now this with this and then that with that, how mysteriously whole and satisfying such pictures might be.

  “Some people were very upset with him, feeling that he was a swindler or a mountebank, although getting really mad at a painting or any work of art makes about as much sense as getting really mad at a banana split. Some of his supporters were at least as disconcerting, declaring that he had made an extraordinary breakthrough, in scale with the discovery of penicillin, say. He and some of his painter pals were onto something big and should keep pushing ahead. Everybody would be watching now.

  “And this was sensational news in terms of money and fame to come. But it was also hellish noise to a person as shy and innocent as Jackson Pollock of Cody, Wyoming. He died young and drunk and by all reports desperately unhappy—in an automobile crash which was his own fault if not of his own making. I did not know him, but I dare to suggest an epitaph for his stone in Green River Cemetery, to wit:

  THREE’S A CROWD.”

  (Paint and weapons have more in common than I previously realized. They both suggest to their owners surprising and possibly noteworthy things which might be done with them.)

  IV

  And listen to this:

  “No matter where I am, and even if I have no clear idea where I am, and no matter how much trouble I may be in, I can achieve a blank and shining serenity if only I can reach the very edge of a natural body of water. The very edge of anything from a rivulet to an ocean says to me: ‘Now you know where you are. Now you know which way to go. You will soon be home now.’

  “That is because I made my first mental maps of the world, in the summertime when I was a little child, on the shores of Lake Maxincuckee, which is in northern Indiana, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, where we lived in the wintertime. Maxincuckee is three miles long and two and a half miles across at its widest. Its shores are a closed loop. No matter where I was on its circumference, all I had to do was keep walking in one direction to find my way home again. W
hat a confident Marco Polo I could be when setting out for a day’s adventure!

  “Yes, and I ask the reader of this piece, my indispensable collaborator: Isn’t your deepest understanding of time and space and, for that matter, destiny shaped like mine by your earliest experiences with geography, by the rules you learned about how to get home again? What is it that can make you feel, no matter how mistakenly, that you are on the right track, that you will soon be safe and sound at home again?

  “The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family’s unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake, but to four adjacent cottages teeming with close relatives. The heads of those neighboring households, moreover, my father’s generation, had also spent their childhood summertimes at Maxincuckee, making them the almost immediate successors there to the Potawatomi Indians. They even had a tribal name for themselves, which sounded like ‘Epta-mayan-hoys.’ Sometimes my father, when a grown man, would call out to Maxincuckee in general, ‘Epta-mayan-hoy?’ And a first cousin fishing from a leaky rowboat or a sister reading in a hammock, or whatever, would give this reply: ‘Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!’ What did it mean? It was pure nonsense from their childhoods. It was German, if not transliterated as I have done, meaning this: ‘Do abbots mow hay? Yes! Abbots mow hay!’

  “So what? So not very much, I guess, except that it allows me to say that after the Potawatomis came the Epta-mayan-hoys, who have vanished from Lake Maxincuckee without a trace. It is as though they had never been there.

  “Am I sad? Not at all. Because everything about that lake was imprinted on my mind when it held so little and was so eager for information, it will be my lake as long as I live. I have no wish to visit it, for I have it all right here. I happened to see it last spring from about six miles up, on a flight from Louisville to Chicago. It was as emotionally uninvolving as a bit of dry dust viewed under a microscope. Again: That wasn’t the real Maxincuckee down there. The real one is in my head.

  “The one in my head is the one I swam across, all two and one-half miles of it, when I was eleven years old, with my sister, five years older than me, and my brother, nine years older than me, in a leaky rowboat near me, urging me on. My sister died thirty years ago. My brother, an atmospheric scientist, is still going strong, daydreaming about clouds and electricity. Times change, but my lake never will.

  “If I were ever to write a novel or a play about Maxincuckee, it would be Chekhovian, since what I saw were the consequences of several siblings’ inheriting and trying to share a single beloved property, and with their own children, once grown, moving to other parts of the world, never to return, and on and on. Our cottage, owned jointly and often acrimoniously by my father and his brother and his sister, was sold to a stranger at the end of World War II. The buyer put off taking possession for a week in order that I, just married after being discharged from the Army, might take my bride there for a honeymoon. He was Concert Master of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and so must have been a romantic man. My bride, whose name was Jane Cox and who was of English ancestry, confided in me that one of her own relatives had asked her, ‘Do you really want to get mixed up with all those Germans?’

  “Jane has gone to Heaven, too, now, like my sister. She had me read The Brothers Karamazov during our honeymoon. She considered it the greatest of all novels. It was appropriate reading for a farewell visit to an old family property, since it was all about the state of people’s portable souls and accorded no importance to immovable real estate.

  “It was chilly but sunny. It was late autumn then.

  “We went out in an old, leaky rowboat, which all my life I had called ‘The Beralikur,’ a mixture of my first name with those of my siblings, Bernard and Alice. But that name was not painted on the boat, which would have been redundant. Everybody who was anybody at Maxincuckee already knew that the name of that leaky boat was the Beralikur.

  “ ‘I swam all the way across this lake when I was eleven years old,’ I said to Jane.

  “ ‘You told me,’ she said.

  “And I said, ‘I don’t think you believe I could really do a thing like that. I can’t believe it, so why should you? But you ask my brother and sister if it isn’t true.’

  “Jane was a writer, too, by the way. Angels Without Wings, a book she wrote about raising all our kids on Cape Cod, was published posthumously last autumn, forty-two years exactly after our honeymoon.

  “She asked me on our honeymoon what influence Culver Military Academy, which I haven’t even mentioned, had on my thinking when I was a child. It was at the head of the lake, after all, and was the principal employer of the town, which is also called Culver. It was like a little West Point and Annapolis combined, with a Cavalry troop and a big fleet of sailboats and noisy parades and so on. They fired a cannon every night at sunset.

  “ ‘I thought about it when they fired the cannon,’ I said, ‘and hoped I would never be sent there. I didn’t want to be yelled at and have to wear a uniform.’

  “A loon popped up to the surface of Lake Maxincuckee during our honeymoon, and gave its chilling, piercing, liquid cry of seeming lunacy.

  “Only now do I realize that my answer should have been this: ‘Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!’

  “I lived on Cape Cod for twenty years, and so caused to be imprinted on the minds of my own children all there is to know and feel about the harbor at Barnstable and the marsh it feeds at high tide and, only two hundred yards from our house, a very deep puddle made by a glacier and called Coggin’s Pond.

  “Those children, close to middle age now and with children of their own, have not had to learn the hard way that the harbor and the marsh and the pond are for them as portable as their souls. Their childhood home in Barnstable is still in the family. They own it jointly now. Their mother left it to them, along with the royalties from her book, if any, in her simple will. One of them, a painter, lives there all year round with her husband and their son. The other heirs visit it frequently with their mates and children, and especially in the good old summertime.

  “Their own children, whether by the harbor or the pond or the marsh, which has patches of quicksand, are themselves learning how to get safely home before the sun goes down. They are so numerous! They are monolingual and of mixed ancestry, and no doubt have several words in common which will never appear in any dictionary, since they themselves invented them.

  “And here is almost the last word in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Hurrah!’ “

  (That piece, too, was published by Architectural Digest. I like to write for it because my father and his father were architects. My appearing in a journal celebrating their profession may be a reproach, a way of saying to their ghosts that if only Father had encouraged me, I could have been and should have been the next in a long line of Indiana architects named Vonnegut. There is in fact a young architect named Scott Vonnegut working in Vermont now, the son of my big brother Bernard. But Vermont is nothing like Indiana, and Scott is not and cannot be what I might have been, which is a partner of my father.)

  V

  I never met my architect grandfather Bernard, but I have been told that he so disliked his native Indianapolis that he was relieved to die there when he was still fairly young. He would have preferred to live in New York City or Europe, where he had spent much of his youth and early manhood. My guess is that he would have been bemused by his barbarous Hoosier grandchildren, always yearning to be elsewhere—in beautiful Dresden on the Elbe, perhaps.

  My father, as I have said elsewhere ad nauseam, said I could go to college only if I studied chemistry. How flattered I would have been if he had said instead that I, too, should become an architect.

  (My goodness! What a lot of heavy psychological stevedoring I have done so early on! Already I have explained why I am secretly frightened of women and why I wear a shit-eating grin every time the subject of conversation is architecture.)

  At a memorial service for the brilliant author Donald Barthelme (who w
as surely sorry to die, since he was going from strength to strength), I said off the cuff that we had had a secret bond, as though we were both descended from Estonians, say, or Frisian Islanders. (This would have been in November 1989.) Barthelme and I had known each other for many years but were not particularly close. Often when our eyes met, though, there flashed between us an acknowledgment of the secret bond and its complex implications.

  This was it: We were the sons of architects.

  This explained why we were aggressively unconventional storytellers, even though we knew that literary conventions were a form of politeness to readers, and on no grounds to be despised. (Literature, unlike any other art form, requires those who enjoy it to be performers. Reading is a performance, and anything a writer can do to make this difficult activity easier is of benefit to all concerned. Why write a symphony, so to speak, which can’t even be played by the New York Philharmonic?) As sons of architects, though, Barthelme and I tried hard to make every architect’s dream come true, which is a dwelling such as no one has ever seen before, but which proves to be eminently inhabitable.

  Casualties have been heavy among American writers I have cared a lot about. (Actuaries for life insurance companies would be unsurprised by such an announcement by a man sixty-seven years of age.) There was a memorial service for Bernard Malamud, dead at seventy-one, four days after Barthelme’s. (I missed it. I was sick. If I had been there, I would have read aloud from his own work.) My Long Island summer neighbors James Jones and Nelson Algren and Truman Capote and Irwin Shaw have all been augered in. Barthelme was the youngest and the least used-up to be forced to leave. He was only fifty-eight. (The average age of a killed American in World War II was twenty-six. In Vietnam it was twenty. What a shame! What a shame!)