Seek My Face

by John Updike

  She tells her interrogator, “The moment you describe, when America came into its own in terms of art, artists had been saying ever since the Armory Show that it must happen; what was Regionalism but an attempt to make it happen?—Benton and so on, the WPA murals. We were terribly marginal, abstraction was a pipe dream like Communism. The media—they weren’t called that then—played us for laughs; we were mad fools. America was titillated. Those pictures of Zack in Life, and then the little movie that terrible, bossy German made, Hans something—those were what killed him, really. He hated himself for becoming a celebrity, the new Dalí. For being made to see, I suppose, that becoming a celebrity was what he had wanted all along. He really had very little talent, the way most art students have it—just this terrible drive to be great. He was desperate to be not just good but great. Others thought they had it, too, the drive, but they didn’t stick with it, they got distracted by their talent. Zack wasn’t distracted that way; he stuck. He had nothing but this—” She does not want to say “hope.” She goes on, “He was terribly clumsy with a pencil, with a brush. His hands seemed to be too thick for them. And he didn’t know anything, compared with most people. He’d gotten in with Benton at the Art Students League; Benton saw himself in him, I suppose, the braggart part of him, the west-of-the-Mississippi thing, and Zack’s talent was no threat, and then when back in California Zack had actually met Siqueiros, and picked up on the messiness, the new industrial paints, the social protest or whatever, everything messy and new, and he had driven out to Pomona College to see a mural Orozco had done of Prometheus; when he was east again he drove up to Dartmouth to see those Orozcos, he loved them, those earth colors, the bad drawing, and like everybody in New York in the ’thirties he inhaled Surrealism, but without having much sense of the psychological theories behind it, it was all just as it applied to him, the would-be great Zack McCoy, personally. You mentioned politics, but I don’t remember that we much noticed it, the things people talk about now. Truman, and the Marshall Plan, China going under to Mao, and Europe on the brink, and all those tests, the test sirens, the talk about annihilation: it didn’t have to do with us. We were utterly selfish. Even the war—though not everybody got out of serving, many did. The board doctors classified them as crazy or homosexual, even when they had wives. I was so shocked, coming to New York when I was twenty, by how nobody mentioned the war, in the worst year of it, when it looked like we really might lose and Hitler and Tojo would rule the world. All we talked about was painting and who was fucking who.”

  “But a lot of the group,” the interviewer objects, with her prim book-knowledge, “were very political. Very ’thirties lefty. Bernie Nova and Jarl Anders, especially. If you read their post-war manifestos they’re downright—what’s that word?—apocalyptic. They saw what they were doing as a revolution. Anders said—I don’t have the quote right here—he said he was going to undo two thousand years of mendacity and betrayal of the human spirit.”

  Why is this young person reciting Hope’s own life to her? And not getting it quite right. Bernie loved to issue pronouncements, the more outrageous the better, but was also a terribly funny, enfolding, kindly man, a bear with his waxed mustache and clownish hip-hip-old-man monocle, words just flying from him, avuncular touches and hugs quickening her when she stood close. Jarl was more distant, more limited, gray and gaunt like a corpse unearthed, a bit paralyzed in his motions, staring out of those eyes, eyes shadowed like a movie vampire’s, monomaniacal but capable, too, of a certain hawk-swoop tenderness, a sudden seeing into a woman, in a way impossible for Zack. Zack saw only a mother, an intimate enemy, whoever the woman was he looked at: a threatening softness, a suck underfoot at the rocky beaches, where he would make impromptu sculptures of the rocks, especially if there were other people’s children there to entertain. He did love children, but with no sense of responsibility. He thought his own would be like somebody else’s, you turn your back on them when playtime is over.

  Hope admits, “They were all older than I, I was the baby, they had struggled through the Depression trying to be artists, they might have starved or turned to something else but for the government and the FAP. Twenty-three dollars a week was a fortune back then. They were a generation older in some cases, and, yes, there was a lot of the Old Left left in them. They believed there must be a better society than this one, with a third of the men out of work and the rich wearing top hats and being vile about Roosevelt. The war suppressed all that. But not really. It persisted underground, the need for revolution. It moved into art. Wartime was deprivation, but so was the artistic life. The news all somehow glided by, apart from art. I was so surprised, coming to New York at the age of twenty, by the fact that art schools were still going so strong. Rationing and war bonds and propaganda everywhere you looked, and the streets full of uniforms, and nevertheless …”

  “Of course,” Kathryn smoothly interrupts, mistaking Hope’s pause for a senile trailing off, “there were all the émigrés, Duchamp and Mondrian and the Surrealists, Breton, Max Ernst—”

  “Yes,” Hope snaps. “We—I, at least; you might have gotten to them—never saw them. The rich made pets out of them, they hung out in Connecticut and the Upper East Side, of all of them only Mondrian wasn’t a snob about American life, thought he might learn from it—but they were there, yes, on our side of the Atlantic, upping the ante, making an atmosphere. There were exhibitions. That was one of our complaints, that the galleries gave all their space to Europeans. And Barr at the Modern of course could only think European at that point.”

  Who was this young woman, Hope wonders, to come pushing (she must be Jewish) into her life, reading it back to her from her studious sheets of printout? As Hope ages, the outer facts of her life, including her legendary marriage to Zack, seem to have less and less to do with her inner life, a life that began with her noticing the paintings and reproductions that hung in the Germantown house, quaint things collected by a timid Quaker taste—a few examples of Pennsylvania Dutch Fraktur, crabbed wedding certificates with the doll-like figures watercolored in spots, framed magazine-quality oleographs of Lawrence’s Pinkie and Vermeer’s Woman with a Water Jug and pink-cheeked heads with powdered hair, possibly Copley portraits from the big brooding caramel-colored museum in Philadelphia she could see from the back of Daddy’s Packard as they drove to Center City along the coal-black Schuylkill. And her grandfather’s house held some original paintings: hanging hushed in velvet boxes, oval miniature portraits of Ouderkirks long dead and crumbled in graves, tiny shiny stippled presences with eyelashes and ear folds and ringlets if she looked hard, and watercolors of tumbling nasturtiums or the Brandywine glimmering between heavy overhanging trees whose reflected shadows she could trace on the water, the work of some cousin or aunt of her grandparents who had taken art lessons at the turn of the century and was considered among her gentlewomen friends very gifted, and oil paintings holding visible peaks and ridges in the hardened paint, there had been one of a bowl of fruit posed on a checked tablecloth, which Hope even when very little could see would be very difficult to get right, the checks going up and down the folds and wrinkles of the cloth, and larger ones of woods, of fallen trunks like crusty rotting bodies, dark paintings these, not pleasant but powerful in that the child could feel the damp gloom, the strange truth that this mossy shaded tangle, this loose scatter on yellow-brown leaf mulch, this untended patch of forest, of Penn’s original Indian-haunted wilderness, would be here whether anyone was standing here with an easel or not. The paint hardened, Hope saw, touching (the child was alone in the room, there was nobody to tell her not to touch) its little rough spines. The hardened paint carried a glimpse forward into a radiant forever, along with the groping, stabbing movement of the painter’s hand and eye. She felt an infinite, widening magic in this, and also the element of protest which made people want to nail down pieces of a world that was always sliding away from under them; the world was an assembly line that kept spilling goods forward, into a heap of the
lost and forgotten. With the protest came a gaiety, that of small defiant victories over time, creating things to keep.

  It was her mother who kept her careful drawings and suggested that a neighbor in Ardmore, where they had moved from her grandparents’ Germantown house to a newly built big mock-Tudor on a curving shady street, come give her drawing lessons. She was eight, nine. However hard Hope looked, she failed to see what this thickset man, with his unaccustomed smells of pipe tobacco and cooking sherry and tooth decay, saw in the shadows, the greens in the reds, the blues hidden in the browns. Her little “gift” tended to crumple under the heaviness of his masculine attention—his name was Rudolph Hartz—and it relieved her when her family’s summer rentals in Maine ended the summer lessons, held in the head-hurting hazy Philadelphia sun in the side yard or in the shade of the willow or English walnut, vegetation crawling with subtleties of color like garter snakes and toads. Their indoor lessons occurred in the library; pages of the Evening Bulletin were spread over the coffee table, whose inlay formed a long square chain of paler bits, triangular and rhomboidal, of wood. It was as if her slender, quiet father had grown thicker and put on an odor of German vices and brute force and was leaning over her shoulder, a hairy hand seizing her brush and impatiently dabbling in the water glass and the scooped rectangles of raw color in the watercolor set’s little folding tray and mixing up a muddy color that looked all wrong but when dashed into place did make the subject—the vase, or the Kewpie doll, or the yellow pepper—jump somehow into solidity. Little Hope felt too slight to bear up under Mr. Hartz’s passion, she felt herself a waste of his time, she smelled along with tobacco and stale armpits his mediocrity, his disappointment; he was one of Philadelphia’s legion of frustrated illustrators, consigned to an occasional portrait commission from a friend or a set design for suburban amateur theatricals.

  The lessons, even on winter weekends, ceased. Her parents must have spoken, politely, as grown-ups do, to Mr. Hartz. Hope tactfully let herself drift away from art, its muddy yearning—the water glass clouding from the dipped brush, the slick lindenwood palette with its circlets of stirred oils going gray from mixing with each other—as from a boy who, however fascinating, would never be a suitable husband. She was ten, eleven. As part of a proper upbringing she visited museums: the treasure house on the top of Fairmount felt inside like a great marble bank with a few customers shuffling and whispering under the skylights while high out of reach a naked slim Diana balanced on the ball of one foot; the more churchly—Daddy said “Byzantine”—Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had long stairs rising up between the two frightening big canvases by Benjamin West that somehow came out of the Bible, and beyond them rooms of white statues naked because they were goddesses instead of real people and of old pictures of cliffs and waterfalls and portraits of Ben Franklin with his mischievous little lips and George Washington looking pained and flushed; the farthest rooms displayed Academy student work, charcoal drawings of Negro faces monumental and sullen and staring and industrial workers posed outside closed factories wearing thick cloth caps whose bills were lowered over brows shamed by unemployment, creased by injustice, the foreshortened perspective working to hunch and dwarf their bodies like an unseen industrial press squeezing all color from the world; in nearby Merion a certain Dr. Barnes had turned his Argyrol millions into a painting collection and to house it had built a Doric-columned mansion wherein, admitted by careful pre-arrangement, a select few, including tittering classes of Shipley girls in their pleated green jumpers and matching green kneesocks, could view walls covered as many as four paintings high by French flesh and Provençal sunlight, Impressionism and its wilder children, polychrome thrusts into a new paganism, art disrobed of its duties to history, to piety, to anything but the glory of each day and its dappled skin of color. These hushed visits, these sanctioned contacts, kept Hope in touch with her childhood wonder at the glimmers called art.

  At Bryn Mawr, in the first two years of the new decade, with the European war blackening the horizon beyond the Atlantic, the art history department, still haunted by the recently departed Georgiana Goddard King, a personal friend of Gertrude Stein, revived Hope’s interest in man-made beauty—revived it enough for her to realize that Bryn Mawr was not enough, studying and admiring was not enough, there was a world not two hours’ train ride away where art was life, where her virginal young body with its brain and eyes could be an instrument, could do and make and be, somehow, in a style that her faded, gentle Philadelphia would never allow. At the end of her sophomore year, while her mother was dithering over the details of this year’s move to their Maine island, where, tired of unprofitable rentals, her father had bought a shingled property whose upkeep cost more than rentals ever did, Hope headed to New York, at the height of the summer heat, to become an artist. Her parents were shocked, but it was a time of shocks, and she was twenty and it was 1942. Her older brother let himself be drafted; her younger had already enlisted. Quaker pacifism was superseded, and female passivity too. She went forth with a retrospectively absurd panoply of matched blue luggage including two drum-shaped hatboxes to engage the creature, colorful life, its pigments and snares. As she walked the dangerous streets, making her way among eyes in which she registered with a flick like that of a brush, her freedom enthralled her.

  Kathryn’s voice overtakes her on those crowded evening pavements; it is keeping pace with Hope’s mind. “Let’s leave the galleries and the Modern for later.” She looks at the printouts in her long black lap. “You were a student first at the Women’s Art School of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.”

  “I was. They were doubtful but let me in, on the strength of some sketches I had done at college, and a self-portrait with bared breasts, in acrylics. Cooper Union in those days was very academic, very practical-minded. The training was organized in ‘alcoves.’ In the first alcove, students drew from plaster hands and feet. In the second, from casts of torsos. For the third, they had casts of the full figure. Not until the fourth alcove did you get live models. I dropped out before we got to the live models. The second-alcove instructor, I forget his name, didn’t even want to promote me to the third alcove; he said I was too linear. But he promoted me to get rid of me. I was trouble, I suppose. I was so thrilled to be in New York, in the Village.”

  “The instructor’s name was Leonard Wilton, the sculptor,” her interviewer tells her, having consulted the notebook. “But before you left you, uh, became involved with another instructor, the portrait-painter Gregor Rukavishnikov.”

  “Ruk was really only a substitute instructor, the other had been drafted.” Hope suppresses a longing to be outdoors, bathing her brain in colorless fresh air. Through the window, beyond her imprisoner’s head of hair with its silver combs, she sees in the forsythia bushes that arch against the sills a set of birds abruptly beginning to flutter and fuss, excited by some current among themselves: it is the animal kingdom that feels the excitement of spring first, a stray squirrel emerging from nowhere and managing to find a nut he or another squirrel buried in November; sitting on a warm flat rock in the wall, he holds it in two paws corn-on-the-cob style and chitters at it like a tiny electric typewriter.

  “I mean,” she tells Kathryn, “he made enough doing society portraits, his stuff was chic, he didn’t need to teach, unlike so many artists. He did quite well, actually, until drink got to him. As a teacher he didn’t try to conceal his indifference but was kind, one on one, flirtatious enough but never gross—we girls all loved him, needless to say, though we distrusted his painting style. It was commercial and, by the ’forties, rather sweetly old-fashioned—long necks, fine outlines, sheaves of sculptured hair in stylized stripes, an Art Deco bas-relief look. Streamlined. His portraits had, how can I say, that false roundedness you used to see in Vanity Fair caricatures.”

  “The pastel he did of you, now at the Corcoran, is lovely.”

  “Yes, the profile. Those gleaming metallic bangs. The muscles in my throa
t, I suppose. But it seemed to Ruk, his facility, too much of a trick; he sneered at his own work and admired the rough brutes—Soutine, Kokoschka, Picasso when he wasn’t neoclassical, the late half-blind Monet. He thought Dubuffet, who was getting some notice in America, was on to something. He told me to loosen up.”

  Hope senses that Kathryn is dissatisfied. She wants her to do more, somehow, with poor dear aimless Ruk. Does she want her to tell her how it was to fuck him? That was not what Ruk was about—his lovemaking was good, when he was halfway sober, but had less heart in it than his dancing; he had to be on show, that was his weakness, and even though he was Hope’s first lover she soon felt herself bringing the greater conviction to their bed, the greater willingness to risk embarrassment for the sake of sensations that couldn’t be sprayed with fixative and put on display, that were beautiful but not lasting. She says, “He was beautiful,” which was what he would have wanted her to say. “He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Six foot four at least, high white forehead, these almond-shaped Russian eyes, pale blue like those of a husky dog, frosty around the pupil. The hair on his head was as lank and pampered as a woman’s, and he loved his own legs, they were so long, the ankles so skinny. He was always taking off his pants at parties, not to be sexy but the way a male ballet dancer shows his legs. He said he was White Russian, but, then, that means so little to an American, all the Russians one met back then were White, as opposed to Red. The Red ones were in Russia, slugging it out with the Germans. Does that do him for you?”