by John Updike
Kathryn lifts her luminous matte face and bats her lubricated eyelids one beat, to register Hope’s hostility and to show that she can take it. “Not entirely,” she admits. “Did you love him?”
“Oh, of course, I’m sure. Isn’t that what one does, a young woman, early twenties, romantic about art and artists? I will say this for Ruk—he showed me things. He showed me New York. He had a yellow Lincoln, God knows how he got gas for it. He drove me up and down the avenues, all the way up to the spots in Harlem, the cafés, the parties. He would dress me. I absolutely submitted—he knew what he was doing. One costume party, he had me go as a nun, an outfit he had made or stolen. Maybe he stole it from a real nun—he told me his sisters were Russian Orthodox and very fanatic, like the Empress Alexandra. He liked me in black dresses, with bright stockings to show off my legs. Legs—though I wasn’t tall I had a tall woman’s legs, he said. He would paint stripes of color on my face, and put a few feathers in my hair; he called me his Quaker Pocahontas. He made me a presence, in our little set at Cooper Union. He took me to openings, and told me what was good, what was not so good: Picasso not so good, he could do too much, too easily. Matisse was good because everything was at the outer limit, attained with effort, by a simple bourgeois man. Picasso was a gypsy, a bandit, a Bolshevik.” She can begin to hear Ruk’s voice, his skimming voice with its deep tonic, a Russian choir voice, vibrant through his screen of sophistries. “He said the Surrealists were right in that the subconscious must do the moving, the talking, but wrong in that they were all literary, and wanted just to play word games and politics. At the same time, he was turning out these society portraits of pampered women and their pretty children and even their pretty dogs. Ruk was at his best with dogs, certain breeds. But he drank. I had never seen a man drink like this, my grandfather didn’t drink at all and my father just wine at the occasional special meal; the fathers of my friends maybe had a whiskey in their hands when I’d peek into the library, but I thought it was just a prop, I didn’t know it could be a religion, drinking. I drank, too, as I said. But if it isn’t a religion to you you aren’t a real drinker. At any rate, Ruk—I was too young to see that he was going to seed, getting puffy, his hands shaky, yellow from nicotine, despairing that he wasn’t a rough genius, one of the great brutes. Also, any man of that time who wasn’t in the armed forces, it made you a subspecies. Men felt it, even if they laughed at feeling it. Ruk had a rheumatic heart, I guess. Rheumatic as well as romantic. There was a lot he didn’t tell me, or made up lies about.”
“I have read,” Kathryn interposes with a considerate smile, adjusting by an inch the Sony’s position on the varnished yellow sea-chest, “that he bragged of sleeping with the society women he painted.”
“He did sleep with some of them. I knew it, though I didn’t want him to describe it to me. He wanted to. That was his thing, showing off. But it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, I had flings too, those two years we were together. Maybe I was trying to make him jealous. Or just doing it for its own sake. I had come late to sex, and it was like a glorious toy. It was power and submission and danger, it was a way of getting to know somebody and having them know you. It was a way of weaving a kind of costume of secrets. Isn’t that how it still is?”
Did Kathryn blush? Certainly she moves her head a bit away, adjusting its angle as she had that of the tape recorder. “Yes, perhaps,” she says, “I suppose. But we have AIDS now, and there’s very little of the glorious-toy feeling left. The idea of its being part of some revolution is quite gone. The quality-porno-film idea. Sex as a cause.”
Hope says, feeling rebuked and taking a brisk chastising tone in self-defense, “Well, my dear, we didn’t have AIDS, but we had pregnancy. And the clap, they called it. There wasn’t all that talk of crabs, as there was in the ’sixties. And syphilis if you were ever so unlucky. I was always lucky, I figured because my heart was pure. And I didn’t sleep with just anybody, as some of the girls and models did, I had to respect the man. I had to think he was serious, at least about painting. Anyway: Ruk, whom you seem to care about a great deal. He was kind to me, as kind as a self-infatuated alcoholic can be. He broadened me, he showed me around. God knows what he saw in me.”
“If he was sinking, as you say,” Kathryn supplies, “you were a straw he was grasping. You were Hope.” Another joke; her eyes, heavy and opaque like plums, widen and glisten, watching the older woman’s response. Kathryn’s jokes are spoiled for Hope by the suspicion that they are maneuvers and not the spontaneous, selfless embrace of absurdity that humor should be. Ruk and she, on a night of champagne and vodka, would laugh and laugh; everybody looked ridiculous and pathetic, his rumbling choir voice with its slurred consonants slipping one caricature after another into her ears. “His portrait of you shows what he saw. You look extremely vital and confident.”
The closeness of this approach—the fact of another person in the room breathing, like a humidifier softly hissing—makes Hope uncomfortable. She is used to the dry quiet of solitude, of parched pure winter days. She says, to restore a distance, “It was through Ruk that I first met Korgi, and Onno de Genoog.”
“And what were they like?”
These vanished dead men, why does Kathryn’s voice grow warmer, evasively slack, as if contemplating stealing them for herself? “Alike, really. They were both immigrants, and had that Continental élan; they assumed the world was made for human pleasure, a very snobbish and barbaric view, of course, but it made them attractive; it gave them swagger and freed them up to paint in those lovely light colors they used. They were the same age, oddly, though you think of Korgi as a generation older. He got there first. I mean, there had been Kandinsky and Malevich and Mondrian, of course, doing abstraction, but they were like flares at sea, lonely signals, religious in a crazy way no one could be seriously expected to imitate—I mean, think of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, what we are being asked to swallow! It all goes back to Kandinsky—his essays, and Der Blaue Reiter, spiritualism rescuing us from materialism and the dreadful perspective-mad Renaissance and so on, as I’m sure you know better than I, since you’ve just been studying everything. But all it brought Kandinsky to was a lot of ugly, jumpy geometry, whereas the place that Korgi got to turned out to be an island, a large island full of these fantasic, edible flowers. I mean, everybody could eat them, and grow and grow. After Korgi committed suicide—when was that? ’48, just when his influence was triumphing, really—Onno would talk about the first time he visited Korgi’s studio, in Union Square, sometime in the ’thirties. He said the atmosphere was so saturated with beauty it made him dizzy. ‘Dissy,’ he pronounced it. It was a revelation he never got over. You can see it in the colors both men used—those coral pinks, those baby blues, the darting strokes between oval forms like amoebas or lily pads, floating across the canvas like, what?, those things in the vision when you look at a blank wall, in the vitreous humor—though in Korgi of course it all becomes transparent, whereas Onno tried to thicken everything, a ferocious thicket of strokes, but the colors are still playful, childlike even. Korgi, like Ruk, was strikingly tall, almost freakish, and his English could be witty. He called the Regionalist School ‘poor painting for poor people.’ ”
Hope laughs, remembering the velvety accent, the cape and broad-brimmed hat, the haughty indignation, the searching light in the Armenian’s mournful long-lashed eyes as he respectfully searched Hope’s face for his opportunities there. He was, through maintaining a parasitic connection with the Art Students League, a considerable harvester in the ripe fields of the art-struck. He would say to a girl, “Come to my studio, be my vooman.” But Hope would laugh. She was never tempted. He was simply Ruk again, though with a naïve, unnegotiable genius that Ruk lacked, and she sensed in him reserves of nihilism that Ruk’s butterfly nature did not threaten her with. She was too young, she thought, to take on a troubled man, though in a few years she would take on Zack.
“And it was Ruk,” she informs Kathryn, “who put me on to Herman
n Hochmann and his little school, where the real action was. I don’t think we said ‘where the action was’ then. Or ‘cutting edge.’ What did we say? ‘Most advanced,’ maybe. There was this military notion of advance. Hochmann had set up shop in a single big third-story room on West Ninth Street. The day I walked in, the whole school, about twenty at their easels, was gathered around this most odd still life—some broken pottery, a crumpled Kleenex, a playing card, and a ball of string from the hardware store, with the paper band still on it, and the whole thing backed by cellophane raked by a side light so that it all was fragmented reflections and shadows. It was almost impossible to look at, let alone paint. Yet, everybody was painting away, and after a year of drawing plaster casts at Cooper, the smell of real paint was heavenly. Like wind on your face when you ice-skate.”
“What was Hochmann like?”
“Oh, Kathryn, you’ll think I’m so silly to keep saying this, but he was handsome. Every man I ran up against in those days seemed to me handsome. Even though Hochmann was over sixty by then, he was tall and broad, with hair left long like a musician’s and tremendous big features—a wonderfully sensual, imperious mouth—and still very Germanic, very solemn, very hard to understand. Both his English, and what he was saying with it. He hadn’t come here until he was fifty, and then to the West Coast. He was a missionary, bringing the gospel of modernism to an art scene that, of course, was very much American Wave—Benton’s farmhands in the style of El Greco, Grant Wood and Rockwell Kent and that mock-epic stylization. Mural style for the Common Man. Hooray for democracy. Some of it, John Steuart Curry, the Soyer brothers, doesn’t look so terrible now, it’s become art history, but at the time we despised it. The thing about Hochmann was, a lot of people were vaguely talking about abstraction as the only ethical way to paint, but he offered a concrete prescription. He said astonishing things—astonishing to me, at least. He said when you put a single line on a piece of paper there is no telling what its direction is. But if you put a shorter line under it, the longer line moves, and the shorter one goes in the opposite direction. He said the piece of paper had now become a universe, in motion. He said the edges of paper became lines, too. And—this must have been Hegel, or Kant, thesis and antithesis and whatever—that when there was a third thing, as in music when two notes combine to make a third sound, this third thing was spiritual, non-physical, surreal. This was magic, he felt. The two lines moving in different directions had tension between them, and that made them a living thing, what he called ‘a living unit.’ With color it got more complicated. Color, he said, made us feel certain ways—buoyant, depressed. Some colors receded, others came forward. He kept talking about ‘push and pull.’ Poo-oosh und pool.”
Hochmann’s ponderous slow English, like concrete dripping in clumps inside a turning mixer, the handsome big face vulnerably lit by his daily hope of communicating to the students the spiritual depth of paint, the students in their dirty smocks, salmon or oatmeal in color, white socks and penny loafers and saddle shoes peeking out below, the boys leaning against the smirched hallway walls smoking, the girls in stiff ’forties imitations of Hollywood hair as it was then, pageboys, bangs, stiff waves done with those long-nosed curling irons, you plugged them in and they opened like birds’ beaks, all those listening young heads buzzing with hopes, with frayed connections to the past and future, the streets outside brown and gray and jostling in her mind’s eye like village rows in a Chagall or a Kirchner, even the spires in distant midtown—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State—caught up in the soot, the toxic war clouds, while Hochmann strove to impart his saving message: “Begrenzung. What do you say in English? Limitation. The canvas is a limitation. Without consciousness of limitation there can be no expression of the Infinite. Unendlichkeit. Ewigkeit. Beethoven creates Eternity in the physical limitation of the symphony. Any limitation can be subdivided infinitely. This involves the problem of time and relativity. A single star seen alone in space tells us nothing about space. Space must be vital and active. The space on the canvas must have a life of the spirit, the life of a creative mind. Pictorial space exists two-dimensionally, only. When the two-dimensionality of a picture is violated, it falls, how do you say, into parts—it creates an effect of naturalistic space, a special case, a portion of three-dimensionality, and this is an incomplete expression of the artist’s experience. Thus it is inadequate. The layman has difficulty in comprehending that plastic creation on a flat surface must not destroy this flat surface. Depth is created by a recession of apparent objects toward a vanishing point, as in Renaissance perspective, but in absolute denial of this doctrine by the creation of surface forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor should one try to create depth by the use of tonal gradation, any more than one should create depth by carving a hole in the picture. To create the phenomenon of push and pull on a flat surface, one has to understand that by nature the picture plane reacts automatically in the opposite direction to the stimulus received, as long as it receives stimulus in the creative process. The function of push and pull in respect to form contains the secret of Michelangelo’s monumentality. Cézanne understood color as a force of push and pull, and in his pictures he created an enormous sense of volume, breathing, pulsating, expanding, contracting through his use of color. Color is a plastic means of creating, ah, Abstände. Intervals. Intervals are color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. The whole world comes to us, as we experience it, through the mystic realm of color. Our entire being is nourished by it. The mystic quality of color should likewise find expression in a work of art. The life-giving zeal in a work of art is deeply embedded in its qualitative substance. The Geist, the spirit, in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly geistig, spiritual.” On and on he would preach, pausing where a German word, a Kantian concept, occurred to him first and had to be painfully, inaccurately translated.
“Still,” Hope tells Kathryn, “he had us believing that to make art was the highest and purest of human activities, the closest approach to God, the God who creates Himself in this push and pull of colors.”
Yet his lecturing, his handsome, fervent, weighty presence, had a hollow side. He did not let students see his own work. He was shy, the enterprise was so great, the Ideal was so stern a taskmaster. As he aged, and others reaped the glory he had foretold, his own work went oddly dead in its cradle of theory: squares and rectangles of raw color looking like manufacturers’ samples, without push or pull. At the time of his teaching her, his forms were still organic, bulbous and swooping like early Kandinsky but without that Russian wandering, those wandering drifts of brush-work, all the colors at once, like peasant decoration. “Flat, flat,” Hochmann would say over her shoulder. “Keep the picture plane flat. You’re losing the plane. You’re growing holes. Make the colors,” he would say, “sing.” Sing like Beethoven, those shimmering doom-laden chords impossible to do in paint, in palette-knifed rectangles. In the late ’sixties, after his death, Hope went to a giant Hochmann retrospective, a whole floor of the Whitney, and the paintings around her didn’t exist. They had evaporated, they had become walls of dust-catchers. Zack had not evaporated like that, though Hochmann had looked down on him, as an American ruffian, an out-of-control ignoramus. As Ruk would have said, a bandit.
“Push and pull,” Kathryn repeats in polite bemusement. “Did you feel, ah, close to him as a man?”
“Did we sleep together, do you mean? Please. He was over sixty, I was—what, twenty-two? Yet you’re right, I would have if he had asked; I loved him. He made us see what a noble calling painting was. Someone of your generation probably can’t believe how crucial, how important, how huge painting seemed then. It was like sex, yes, you’re right to suggest that. It hadn’t been domesticated yet. It hadn’t been put in its place, its page of the Living section, with a pat on its little fuzzy head.”
Her companion snorts, so vigorously that a liquid snuffle emerges in follow-up from the long wh
ite nose. Kathryn peers down and fishes in her black pocketbook, almost as big as a tote bag, which sits gaping at the side of the plaid chair, for a Kleenex. Hope likes her the better for this embarrassment. Snot is human, one of our secretions. She likes Kathryn less for being too ready to laugh, for finding this old lady being interviewed too amusing, a husk of a person in which any rustle of sauciness or pert phrasing is a comic surprise. Such readiness to laugh betrays a nervous jealousy. Hope had been alive in a naïve, blunt, fruitful way this young woman is being denied; Hope had loved herself, having been raised in the illusion of a loving God; she had found the facts of her body amazing, as they emerged from beneath the quilts and the Quaker silence concerning such matters. She would stroke her own naked, silken skin, leaving yellowish ovals of fingertip impression on her freckled pink surface, standing fresh-bathed before the cloudy spotted mirrors of the apartment on Jones Street she shared with Cindy Jasinski, the roach-ridden, cramped bathroom floored in tiny hexagonal tiles, its narrow window left open an inch or two like a mouth breathing the Village’s air with its morning smells of coffee and emptied garbage cans and its night sounds of jazz and taxis honking. Each new day, she wondered what marvel might befall her. Kathryn’s world is marvel-proof, pre-processed, all emotions and impulses analyzed and denigrated before they can blossom, chopped up into how-to books and television, everything reduced to electronic impulses, bits, information, information increasingly meaningless as brains shrink too small to gather it in, the processing all done outside the mind, the heart, by cool and noiseless machines. Kathryn’s nostrils do look a little pink as she pokes the balled handkerchief back into her big black purse. She has the sickliness of the city: the subways, the elevators, other people’s breaths, forever running tired, New York people have colds all winter long, Hope did too, when the children were bringing home germs from school, but, living alone in Vermont, in the antiseptic crackling cold, the mountain air rich in ultraviolet rays, she almost never has so much as a sniffle, her old system a hoard of antibodies on the far side of fertility and its chemical storms. Kathryn has brought into this chaste parlor the stains, the imbalance, of fecundity—the monthly egg flushed away, the hysteria of entanglement with males. It is good, Hope tells herself, to be beyond all that.