by John Updike
“Wonderful,” Kathryn repeats, more weakly, watching Hope’s face to see that she doesn’t offend, doesn’t trespass.
“Maybe because,” Hope volunteers, “I saw how he suffered making them, those early ones, when they still had names and were more vertical than horizontal in shape, are among my favorites. Galaxy—they were all galaxies in a way. We could see the stars out on the Island in a way we could never in the city. Full Fathom Five, Sea-Change, when there was still some brushwork mixed in with the drips. Cathedral, Phosphorescence. He had discovered aluminum paint, gallons of it sold right off Henry Drayton’s shelves. There had never been anything like those paintings he did in the cold those first winters. He said it was cold but the light, with the snow, in the barn was glorious. He was so excited how they were turning out, so proud that, as you know, one of the first mural-sized ones, he slapped his hand loaded with black paint along the top as if to say, ‘I made this.’ It became a cliché, painting with your body, but Zack was the first. All alone in that barn with his sticks and hardware paints, he was inventing performance art.”
After a reverent pause, seeing that Hope for the moment has no more word pictures for her, Kathryn asks, “And what were you painting at this time?”
“Nothing. Zero, dear. Zilch. My easel was upstairs, in the little room Zack had vacated, but it basically gathered dust. I was busy with the sort of woman’s work that leaves no trace. Cooking, as I said. Zack expected square meals like his mother made, and I had to learn almost from scratch, my own mother had always had cooks, and the cooks would chase me out of the kitchen once I had passed the age where my being there was cute. To be fair, other girls might have insisted on learning more but I liked being out, playing with boys. And then I married an artist and became a house slave for his sake. We would give little dinner parties, mostly in the summer, when we could have drinks outdoors, sitting on the boulders in the shade. Eight, ten people at most, counting us—maybe one other painter and his wife and a critic and his and somebody from the gallery world—all designed, you see, to advance Zack’s career. I was on the phone a lot, trying to generate more sales; the smaller works on paper were the best bet, being cheaper, and you could hang them on a small wall, an entrance hall or a bedroom. They didn’t demand all the oxygen in the room the way the big poured works did.”
“Some of them are lovely, the smaller works on paper. Like Chinese ideograms. The ones where the black enamel dried with a silvery edge, the ones with an unexpected color like orange or teal. Quite Zen in feeling.”
Hope agrees but resists admitting it. What isn’t Zen in feeling, looked at blankly? “He didn’t much like doing them, he thought they were gimcrack. I think that was his word. They weren’t big enough for him to muscle himself into.”
His airs, his vanity got worse after the Life article, and the world showed signs of coming around to his naïve over-estimation of himself. Collapses would occur, sometimes at one of the dinner parties she so carefully constructed, sometimes in a trip to New York, where the sense of a spotlight on him, of bright lights and fortunes to be made as post-war prosperity seeped into the art market, panicked Zack and he fled to the dark depths of a bar and allowed himself to be found only when sodden and abusive. Bed-wetting: Hope has tried to forget this aspect of his drunkenness, but it was for her the most humiliating. Her skin in her clothes shrinks from the remembered touch of clammy wetness, warm when issued out of his unconsciousness but cold when it reached and woke her, the liquefied mattress and sheets rendered impossible for sleep, and Zack impossible to wake in order to change the bed. She would desert him for the sofa downstairs or the guest room, her wool nightie half soaked and entirely unwearable, the blankets she could find not warm enough in the cooling house, the pre-dawn saturated with her humiliation and infantile discomfort. Her angry, churning mind would finally impale itself on her shame and defeat and wifely captivity, and in the morning she might rouse to the sound of Zack rustling and humming as he draped the polluted bedclothes on chairbacks for the revived furnace to dry. He took pride in awaking from however degrading a binge with his manly energy intact, hungry for breakfast, a fresh slate before him, his bedwetting for him a discharge, a release, a restatement of his contract with the earth. There is nothing more wonderful about alcoholics than the way they get the world to assume the burden of their misbehavior.
Hope decides to tell Kathryn, “When I did try to take up painting again, he accused me of imitating him. And he said I was lousy at it, any woman would be.”
“When was this?” Kathryn asks sharply, her eyes darting down to make sure the tape in her Sony is still running.
“ ‘Forty-eight.’ Forty-nine. It kept happening. Everything kept happening. He would drink, he would paint, we would go to parties, we would give parties, we would both go to psychiatrists. His brothers and their wives and children would show up at Thanksgiving and Christmas, bringing their mother in tow. She was like a float in a parade, impressive and disconnected—you know, the crowd lining the curbs cheers, the people on the float smile and wave, the parade moves on, the same thing happens farther up the street. His mother had all these domestic skills—cooking, laundry, crocheting, découpage, doing all these dear little artistic things, setting up house in one rough Western town after another, trying to be above it all, creating this island, you see, ignoring the neighbors, drawing the curtains, ignoring the sand and dirt and desolation outside the door, ignoring the way her boys were running wild and her husband hadn’t been on the premises for years. She was—what’s the word?—‘impervious,’ she had this lovely shabby-genteel gift for denial, and I think Zack got his power of concentration, of shutting things out, from her. He got his artistic gift from her, if you think of his drip paintings as a huge kind of crocheting. I liked her, though she wasn’t much of a conversationalist and had no way of pegging me. To her I was a silly rich girl from Philadelphia. The only reason she had for liking me was that I had taken Zack and his drinking off the family’s hands. He was her baby, and big babies get to be a chore. She had this absolutely eerie way of calming Zack when she was around. I think as the youngest he had never got enough of her attention and was still hoping for it. She was like—oh, these words! never get old, Kathryn, everything flies out of your head—a ‘basilisk,’ isn’t that what I mean? She had a stare. Anyway, you didn’t ask me about that. You keep trying to ask me about me and my work, and I keep hiding behind Zack—the fact is, my work wasn’t very interesting at the time, Zack had made this stunning breakthrough and there wasn’t room for two interesting artists in one little farmhouse, I took up painting again mainly to give myself a little self-respect, a tiny space where I wouldn’t be absolutely crushed by the tremendous thing Zack was doing, and the hangers-on who were beginning to crowd around, and the interviews he was supposed to give, and he was right, my attempts to do the big gestures weren’t very convincing. I would get fussy, and try to retouch, to smooth out the holes as Hochmann used to call them, and it pained me to have splotches, it just didn’t fit my philosophy to be that much out of control, some on Zack’s canvases were so big and thick that the paint would curdle and corrugate in drying, these Duco enamels he brought home were never meant to be poured together like that, with sand mixed in, and cigarette ash, and bugs that made the mistake of wandering into the barn. Also, I didn’t have a barn, I had a tiny upstairs room with one window the silver maple shaded so it was always dim, it would have made a great room for developing photographs on cloudy days, or a sewing room with a bridge lamp, so I was stuck with brushes, and collage, which is daintier still—I couldn’t imitate him, I didn’t have the equipment, which I suppose is what he was saying. I didn’t have a prick.”
Kathryn’s long face gathers a waxy glow to itself as the clouding day shifts past noon. Hope back at Cooper Union used to struggle with skin and skin color, skin’s translucence and the way it takes light at different depths and glows from within. If she were to paint Kathryn she would have to use a lot of green, t
o catch the matte dullness, the otherworldly tint. In summer such skin would take a deep even tan miles from Hope’s pink freckles. The woman shifts a little in the big plaid armchair that Hope had measured herself in as a child, and clears her throat of a collected dryness. Perhaps she is framing a question to ask, but Hope continues rapidly to prevent her: “So I was floundering in Zack’s shadow and got quite interested in what the other painters were doing. They had all come out to the Island, mostly all, here and there within ten miles of East Hampton. By ’48 or ’49, let’s say, after Zack had made his breakthrough though none of them liked to admit it, they had each settled on their shtik, a signature style they hoped would be as identifying as Zack’s drips were. I mean, they all still spoke of painting in terms of self-exploration and an agonized authenticity that would revolutionize the world and whatnot, but the results were a little like company logos, everybody working on the scale of nineteenth-century academic art but each of them having come up with some eye-catching simplification. Phil Kaline had his black-and-white girders, and Jarl these flaky flameshapes in two or three flat colors, vertical canvases getting so tall he had to convert an old disused Methodist church in Amagansett to work in, and Seamus, poor sweet fat Seamus, who even when doing his ’thirties urban realism—his marvellous subway scenes!—painted in a kind of Thomist grid, you could say, had turned to these floating rectangular clouds in a fuzzy milky color, the same hardware paints Zack used but thinned way down, curators say they’re desperately unstable, which could have been part of his intention: vita brevis, ars brevis too. Roger, who was always thinking so hard, and full of French theory—symbolism, existentialism, structuralism before anybody else had ever heard of it—really only had one painting, oval black shapes like giant beans squeezed between black upright bookends with swatches of color peeping out behind, and Bernie, the other very clever one of us, took to doing colored strips the width of masking tape between giant flat fields of color. It seemed to me and most other people rather arid and doctrinaire, but he always spoke of the great passion with which he painted, and actually Bernie’s was the direction painting took in the ’fifties, he was the most influential and least arid in that sense. I loved Bernie, but felt closer to Roger as a painter, stuck with those huge squeezed beans, over and over, though in truth he had another thing he kept doing, he called them rather grandly ‘portals,’ they were rectangular, a single rectangle, partially outlined, on lovely big sheets of wove paper, each sheet must have cost dollars—well, you’ve been to museums, you’ve seen all this, but at the time it wasn’t so clear that this was it, American art’s coming of age, these big cartoony abstractions, to me it almost looked like a giving up, a reduction of a complex subjective process to ideas, compared with what Zack was doing out of his instincts. Two who wouldn’t stop painting, painting the old way, with brushwork and variety and a sort of representation, and still giving titles to their paintings—Dwarf, Woman—were Mahlon and Onno, and they suddenly seemed quaint, neither here nor there. What’s that thing from the Bible—lukewarm I spit thee out? I must have let something of my reservations show, because over in the purple carriage-house that Onno and Renée had inflicted on the landscape, I remember him putting his arm around my waist and pulling me close and saying, “Dunt you vurry for me, Hope. Mondrian is dead, Picasso keeps on goink.” Meaning that what he was doing, these mad multicolored flurries you could just barely see were seated women, with crossed bare legs and high heels, would survive the devices invented by people like Roger and Bernie, who were intellectuals who really couldn’t paint at all in the old art-school way. Zack he respected—he knew Zack wasn’t taking it easy on himself, and didn’t let it get mechanical. If Zack had been willing to turn himself into America’s marvellous drip machine, he wouldn’t have gotten stuck after 1950. He wouldn’t have killed himself. Zack’s behavior was repetitious, but not his painting. He wouldn’t let it be, and it killed him.”
Onno was handsome, in a pale-haired Netherlandish style, with white eyelashes and full lips and a long chin and bottle-green eyes whose glance felt like a flick on the skin of Hope’s face. His hand around her waist was broad and workmanlike; though he drank and smoked recklessly enough to be one of the gang and had adored madcap, doomed Korgi, he was sane, Hope felt, sane as Zack was not. Onno’s brushwork looked wild and was subject to such expedients of dérèglement as painting with his left hand or pressing a newspaper over a wet canvas and transferring the imprint to another canvas and beginning again, these were all rational maneuvers to suppress his natural facility, his Picassoesque childhood as a precocious product of classic European art-training. He had learned to imitate American violence; Zack, born into it, was its captive. Onno’s hand rested long enough on Hope’s waist to send a message. He and Renée were one of those Continental couples who looked too good in public to be true. Hope was twenty-six, twenty-seven, old enough to believe she deserved a genius who didn’t need a nursemaid. She could do with a little care herself. The breath from between Onno’s fleshy, inquiring lips possessed beneath the stale tobacco smell a sort of licorice sweetness.
“Onno de Genoog,” Kathryn pronounces. “Would you like to talk about your relationship?”
“Not really. He was a dear, kind, hardworking man and a wonderful painter. He was supportive to me when I needed it, when Zack”—how to say it?—“was falling apart.”
Kathryn leans forward to check that the Sony is still running and asks in a voice from which all fellow-feeling has been edited, “Is it true that he thought in the early ’fifties of leaving Renée for you?”
“No. Never. He and Renée were too much of an act, I would never have wanted to break it up. She has been the perfect great man’s widow, chastely tending the flame, never remarrying, unlike me.”
“You came to the role much younger than she,” Kathryn points out. “What about the time in the early ’fifties when Zack broke his ankle wrestling with Onno. Were they fighting over you?”
“Not at all. My dear, as I said earlier, women didn’t count for much in that macho world. They were drunk and fooling with each other, they had an artistic rivalry, and Zack came down hard on a low spot in the grounds around the famous purple house.”
“Is it true,” Kathryn went on, humorless and relentless not an hour after drinking Hope’s tea and using her bathroom and appearing awkward and guilty in the corridor to the studio, like a lost child, “that Onno called Zack’s work ‘pissing on canvas’?”
Hope smiles. “That was not an unkind remark. Anybody who knew Zack knew he was always pissing, in public if he could. He used to tell of watching his father urinate off some rocky ledge in Arizona, it made a huge impression on him, in his child’s mind it defined masculinity, the great golden, glinting arc of it. You will remember, Kathryn, that when one of the Pop artists, I forget which but it wasn’t Guy, tried to parody Zack it was by urinating on canvas covered with copper metallic paint so the oxidation created patterns. The patterns were spattery and ugly, though, whereas Zack’s drip paintings are beautiful, stunningly beautiful, don’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes. Certainly.” But Kathryn is affronted, being called onstage this way, to give an opinion into her own tape.
“The early ones, as I perhaps said—do forgive me if I repeat myself—are my favorites. The canvas on the floor but still cut to human scale, six by four or so, before he began to give them numbered titles. Before a show he would call me into the barn to help him name them. It was one of the things we did together, one of the few ways I could be a collaborator. He used a lot of aluminum paint early on, and there was a skyey, spinning feeling to them, so I would suggest names from a star book Zack had bought when we first went out to the Island and he could see the stars the way he had seen them out west. Sirius, we called an especially cold-looking one, and a reddish one Betelgeuse, and another I wanted to name Cassiopeia because I remembered that she had bragged about how beautiful her daughter Andromeda was, or perhaps she herself, but Zack didn’t want people
to look for constellations in the spatters, so we used more general terms like Galaxy or Comet—and there really is a comet in it, his drips were straighter then than they became in the ’fifties, when he got to do what he called drawings in air, which that German whose name I keep suppressing photographed. One little one done in blues and aluminum paint on a black gesso we called Magellanic Cloud. Zack had very little interest in travelling—one of his insecurities—but he did use to talk about going to South America so he could see the Southern Cross and the Coal Sack and the Magellanic Clouds from his star book. And I tried to think of fairy-tale names, like Sinbad or Wotan. He liked the Jungian idea of mythic prototypes but didn’t want people to think his paintings were in any way portraits, so, beginning in ’48, he and Peggy labelled them with numbers and the dominant colors: Blue, Red, Yellow; Yellow, Gray, Black. The sad truth is, which I’d tell only you, Kathryn”—a dash of irony, to see if her interviewer is still paying attention—“is that I liked the later canvases a little less in part because I was locked out of the naming. And it wasn’t long after that that I began to take up my own painting again, which Zack interpreted, not altogether incorrectly, as a hostile gesture.”
“Yes. I wanted to get back to that.”
“You needn’t bother, dear. It was rather paltry, the good wife in me fought the painter all the way. As I said, I tried being Abstract Expressionist, as people were beginning to call it—I think that big red-headed art critic The New Yorker had, Coates, Bob Coates, was the first, and he capitalized only the “e”—but as Zack pointed out, I wasn’t very good at it, there wasn’t when I did it that eerie control Zack had, no matter how many beach pebbles or cigarette butts he dropped in; he had a sense of balance, of balancing rhythms, that critics since have traced back to his years under, of all people, Benton. The things I did, trying to be free, came out looking like I had burned the dinner, so I began to follow Roger’s lead—imitate him, I suppose you could say—and do these austere collages, paper on paper, with a few black lines in Conté crayon or a Japanese calligraphy brush, looking for the point of balance, the look of quiet. The strange thing, Kathryn—I know you didn’t come all this way for my, oh, what’s the word, vaporing about works that have already had bushels of criticism dumped all over them—the strange thing about Zack’s drip canvases is that, for all the violence of the details, the spattering, the gummy pooling, the overall effect has this, this quiet. Someone somewhere, maybe it was Frank O’Hara, funny old Frank with his poems scribbled on odd bits of paper in his pockets, called Zack our Ingres. Our Ingres. It made me think, it made me cry in fact, years after he was dead, when the turmoil Zack always created around himself had died down. There was this peace, this balance and calm, in his paintings, and I can only think that that was his mood, out there in the cold in the barn, away from me, away from the clever critics, away from the bitchy rich women and cagey foreigners who ran the galleries, away even from his need to drink: he was at peace, drooling one design on top of another until he had to stop and wait for the paint to dry. And there is so much innocence in that man dancing and kneeling around the piece of canvas on the floor, such sweet childish absorption in the doing, that I want to hug him and beg his forgiveness for bringing him out to where he could wrestle beauty to a fall and yet being unable to show him how to get any lasting happiness out of his having done it.” The image of Zack painting, and then the two of them side by side bestowing names on his canvases as upon a set of babies, afflicts Hope so that her throat catches and she has to pause. Perhaps happiness cannot be lasting. Perhaps the nugget of woe and confusion within Zack was beyond dissolving. Yet the memory of him with his habitual scowl (that baffled crease of extra skin between his eyebrows) and paint-spattered old shoes making those beautiful things in a style never before known, for a public that almost never bought one, for a gallery owner who was losing interest in him, while cigarette smoke dribbled back into his squinting eyes and the cold numbed his hands, seemed in her mind the image of life lost, beautiful life that erases itself, like her young body emerging into besmirched pallor as the coal dust was rubbed off by those hours of sweaty dancing.