by John Updike
“Did Guy remind you, when you first saw him, of Ruk?”
This surprises her, it feels assaultive, though of course a similarity had been noticed at the time, by friends from the ’forties (Bernie, Onno) who remembered Ruk, and had been picked up by scholars specializing in the era, even to tracing stylistic similarities—the smoothness, the undertone of mockery—but at the time the resemblance had not been prominent in Hope’s own mind: she had been attracted to something new in Guy, a careless cleverness that she had not seen before in men, unless it was in some of Daddy’s idle-rich Philadelphia friends, who would sit all day at the Germantown Cricket Club playing backgammon. “Well,” she concedes, “both were tall, handsome, and fair, but Guy had this rosy smooth English complexion and Ruk that Slavic sallowness, a kind of fine-grained canvas color, and he was soulful and self-dramatizing in a way Guy would never bother to be; both men had a, how can I say, a lightness, but with Ruk you felt the lightness was a flaw, it would do him in, it was a doomed sort of lightness, his work for all its skill was society painting, à la mode, and modes change, whereas with Guy the lightness would help him float, he wasn’t anchored to any one conception of himself. He would always be ahead of you, one step ahead, without even seeming to run. It wasn’t a matter of irony, Ruk could be ironical, but it was half dark, a mistrust of the world, whereas Guy was, well, blithe—he came up with these ideas as if they were absolutely obvious, lying right there on the surface of things, which of course they were. But who else saw them? He was always picking up junk, everywhere we walked in the city, as if these scraps of paper and tin were flowers. ‘Everything is so lovely’—I often heard him say it. And he wouldn’t laugh. Guy rarely laughed, and when he smiled it was the way deaf people smile when they don’t quite hear what you say.”
“So you are Mrs. McCoy, the real McCoy,” he told her, at the party in his Pearl Street loft.
“I was.”
“It must have been wonderful.”
She felt her face jarred open by such cool, enigmatic, and cheerful effrontery. Surely all the art world knew that for five years Zack had been a torture to live with.
Guy smoothed it over: “Artistically, at least. The rest, mere life, we all have to lump. You should take pride in what you made possible. He’s where we all have to begin now. The gorgeous corner he painted himself into. I love your new work, by the way—those big runny canvases like meals being cooked in a hurry. They made me salivate.”
Hope decided she might as well enjoy this encounter with an apparently impervious, totally amused male. He had broad shoulders, a lilac turtleneck worn under a pink button-down shirt, a long upper lip, an unsmiling cool stare, and a slight English accent to go with his direct, clipped manner.
“Why is it,” she asked him, “that when women loosen up they’re called messy, and when men do it’s considered forceful?”
“It’s not quite fair, is it?”
“I’ve not thought so.”
“By the same principle, though, a man knitting on the subway makes us look twice, and a woman knitting only once.”
“Are you a knitter?”
“Oh, darling, no. I have nothing like the patience required. Everything I do I must do quickly, I think it pollutes it if a second thought intervenes. Contemplation kills—didn’t one of the Greeks say that?”
“I doubt it,” she said, brushing past him to inspect his arrayed work in this loft, with its eastward view of dreary brick buildings and, in the gaps between them, boats, water, and Brooklyn. His paintings were at first glance not easily distinguished from the street refuse gleaned from the curb-sides and back rooms of lower Manhattan. There were a number of stuffed animals—a fox, an eagle, a rooster inflating his chest to crow—that a taxidermist or his widow had disposed of, and a stack of cans—beer, soup, oil—pressed into pleated shapes by onrolling street traffic, and broken umbrellas abandoned in mid-downpour, striped fragments of splintered police barriers, begrimed street signs fallen or torn from their poles, cardboard cartons bearing stamped logos and lettering, useless appliances, old magazines, discarded photographs, torn posters. Some of these things had been mounted on sheets of primed composition board and spattered and daubed with color that seemed random and scrubby yet worked to produce a chaste, fresh impression: a human spectator had covered this refuse normally beneath notice, these scales shed by the dragon of industrial excess, with gestures of paint. Most startlingly, yet to curiously seductive effect, a bed had been counterfeited on a vertical panel—quilt, sheets, and sagging pillow thumbtacked to the top corners, the pillowcase scribbled with soft pencil and all the fabrics attacked with thin, dribbling paint. It was a narrow bed, neatly made, as by a prim bachelor. A cool inscrutable taste like a preservative varnish overlaid these smeared trouvés, these three-dimensional collages, in orderly homage to disorder.
“What do you think?” Guy asked at Hope’s side, his clipped tone hurried a bit by a wish for her good opinion. They had moved away from the brighter side of the room, where the party went on, the New Yorkers clustering tightly, as if in a subway or freight elevator. “Pretty bloody terrible, yes?”
Instead of confirming or denying his boyish judgment, she cautiously said, “I see what you mean about beginning with Zack.” She touched the hardened dribbles, the pasted cardboard and flattened tin. “Freedom,” she said. “The freedom of paint, paint on anything. But there’s an irony here that Zack never had. He was dead serious.”
The young painter protested, “I don’t feel ironical when I work. What did your late husband so famously say? ‘I am nature’? I’m not nature, but everything in the city around us is nature—the garbage, the adverts, the junk culture.”
“I like the bed,” Hope allowed, wanting to like Guy’s work more than she did. It mocked, at a fastidious remove from its materials that was the opposite of Zack’s approach, and Onno’s, and Hochmann’s, and Korgi’s. They each in their ways put themselves at the mercy of the evolving canvas, its active life. This same process with real objects intervening—spattered examples of taxidermy, or old-fashioned plastic radio fronts—took on quite another, a safer and more ingratiating, character. Having it, whatever it was, both ways. That was Guy. “It’s a single bed,” she observed.
“Like mine.”
“You should get back to your party. I’m monopolizing you.”
“You’ll like these better, I bet. I did them a few years ago.”
He led her to a set of canvases, not huge—four by six, six by eight—stacked in racks of pine one-by-twos and two-by-fours built with a neatness that Zack, for all his pretensions to being a man of the handy working class, would not have found the time for. As he moved close beside her, Hope felt Guy as taller than Zack, taller than she had first taken him for; his limbs and torso seemed to grow as he reached up to a canvas stored at the height of his head. He was careful sliding it out; little yellowing tufts of collaged newspaper stuck out from the paint, carefully buttered encaustic rather than slathered oil, with its shinier, more ridged impasto.
“What is it?” he asked her, holding the wide canvas in stretched arms, his pale face above its upper edge impish in its glimmer—the glass-blue irises, the downdrawn upper lip. His teeth were long, like an Englishman’s.
“It’s a—an American flag.”
“Is it? It doesn’t wave, it doesn’t go up a flagpole.”
“I see what you want me to say. It’s an image of the flag, like Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
“It’s a sign,” Guy told her. “I find it easier to paint when the subject doesn’t belong to me. When the image is as it were pre-established. I don’t want the painting to be about me, to be a disclosure of my feelings.”
Did he have feelings? She was curious. “But,” said Hope, aware—as she had been when first exposed to Hochmann’s lectures, and again when viewing in the drafty barn Zack’s first purely dripped paintings, and even when visiting Bernie’s house, where his great color fields and narrow vertical
stripes vibrated in the wide light downstairs, the radiant gulf beneath their adultery—of seeing something new, “how can it not be? You’re the creator.”
“There are ways of creating without being the subject. I’m merely a means,” the tall stranger told her, with that strange glazed modesty hard to distinguish from the height of conceit. “You—you’re an end in yourself. You and Zack and those other agonists.”
“Agonists. You see us as ancient. When were you born?”
“Nineteen twenty-five.”
“Do you want to know when I was?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“Nineteen twenty-two.”
“Within range,” Guy smiled, reading her mind unpleasantly but perhaps not inaccurately. From behind his shield of diffidence Guy saw shrewdly. She was sexually interested, excited by the fresh attack on beauty. When, at Leo’s brand-new gallery in the fall, Guy had his one-man exhibition, Hope registered again, in a public light, the impact, the impudence of the counterfeit bed, the bespattered eagle, the deadpan flag, and a flag done all in white, only the brushwork and subtle differences in yellow tinge defining the stars and stripes, and targets and maps serving the same purpose of offering their outlines to be painted within, images drained of their purpose and filled with painting, strokes that, she could see especially where they danced and flickered over half-hidden pieces of newspaper, were as expressionist as Zack and Onno and Phil, but in the tone of an underlying joke, a layer in a sandwich of oblique meanings. Guy contained a cooled-off Zack, Zack without the congestion and menace and naïve greed for glory.
Kathryn, in an accusatory, getting-everything-straight voice, as if there is an unseen jury, tells Hope, “Zack had been dead for only two years, then, when you took up with Guy Holloway.”
“ ‘Took up’ is a rather absolute way to put it. We saw each other here and there, mostly at Bernie and Jeanette’s but sometimes at Seamus O’Rourke’s loft on Mercer Street. Seamus was having his breakthrough right about then, the blurry rectangles, the floating patches of color, people spoke of them as modern versions of the Holy Spirit, there was that religious streak in Seamus, he was thrilled by the recognition he was getting at last, and of course began to drink much too much, I could see the signs even though it was a happier drunkenness than Zack’s, he had a spiritual background that sort of sanctioned it, and I was quite slow to take it seriously when Guy began to—what’s the phrase you use now?—‘hit on’ me, since I had assumed, as I told you, that he was gay, his scene was certainly gay, window-dressers and these minor actors not quite making it, and that was one of the reasons I let myself relax with him and enjoyed his company so. He was the best-tempered, most mobile man I had ever been with. We did silly things together, odd ethnic restaurants like Albanian and Ethiopian before everybody else was doing it, and there was a steam bath down below Delancey that had a co-ed section, which I certainly would not have done with a man I thought was straight. This was still the ’fifties, remember, and almost any little deviation felt daring. Early in ’58, the winter after he had had his show at Leo’s, which almost sold out was the amazing thing, despite the ridicule of nearly all the critics, Clem hadn’t even bothered to come—I was letting Zack’s poured works on paper go for a few thousand each, Guy told me I was giving them away, among his other skills he was an absolute wizard at knowing what the market would bear—that winter, I started to say, it must have been nearly spring, New York was cold and gray and horrible, he talked me into driving west with him, with him and a pair of younger men, one of them had a father who was in the movie industry, Hollywood was all falling apart, television was killing the studios, but this boy wanted a cushy job anyway, he wanted to be a director and later on did take part in some of Guy’s happenings, and his buddy was a pale Negro, I don’t think we called them blacks yet, who had been to ballet school and did have a most lovely body, we all saw enough of it, every motel with a swimming pool he would get into these French-style skimpy black bathing trunks, we’d be quite a local scandal, but I just loved seeing the country, especially the Southwest and southern California, it was another planet from the Northeast, all this light pouring down, and these straight, endless highways between purple hills like in O’Keeffe, and then vineyards and orange groves, and everything so open, including the manners. Maybe my impressions were enhanced because I was smoking pot for the first time, ‘grass’ we called it then, ‘reefers’ some still said, at least I wasn’t putting on weight—when I was trying to keep Zack company the alcohol would build up in my hips, and in fact never did go quite away, the five pounds you can’t lose becomes a platform to which after a decent interval you add the next five, right? But you’re too young, or too naturally slim, to ask that of. It was during this trip, as early as West Virginia, that I realized Guy was straight, quite straight really when he took it into his head.”
“You married him that same year,” Kathryn further accuses.
“Dear Kathryn, yes. One didn’t live in sin those days, and we were crazy about each other. He was everything Zack wasn’t, and yet a genius of sorts too, and I—well, who knows what he saw in me? A mother he could fuck, I suppose, classically enough. His actual mother was from Rhode Island, descended from one of the refugees who thought the Massachusetts Puritans were tyrants. They weren’t Quaker but something else—Antinomian, I think they were called, meaning they believed anything goes, or should go. Pearson had been her maiden name. His father, Mr. Holloway, had been English, that was how Guy got his accent, which he could turn on and off, and his feeling for America: he saw us as savages, really, full of vitality and appetite and an outrageous wonderful vulgarity, where my feeling about Americans is that what they are basically is conscientious, conscientious and usually exhausted, with the muggy climate and the work ethic and the expectations those heroic founding fathers saddled us with, though in fact they had rather low opinions of the common man, the founding fathers did. The average American is far less vulgar and bumptious than, say, the English themselves—we have nothing like soccer hooligans, for example. His father, Guy’s, had faded away early. His mother still lived in Rhode Island, in Jamestown, a rickety shingled house on the Bay with a view of a bridge, and one of the things Guy liked about me, maybe one of the main things, was that I could stand up to her. Like me, she was short and feisty—she twittered away with this seductive malice you acquire living in out-of-the-way pretty places, and we got along ‘rippingly,’ Guy would say, his mother and I, when we met, which we tried not to make too often. She saw me as taking him in hand, and assumed he needed it, staying unmarried into his thirties; she imagined his life in New York as nothing but folly and Sodom and Gomorrah, and was such a materialist and snob she was oblivious to the really quite remarkable success he was having. I supplied that omission, too; I told her how I had never seen an artist produce work and make money like her son did. Especially in the ’sixties: it seemed every city in the country over two hundred thousand in population had these new high-rises with blank apartment walls, and they all had to have a Holloway filling the space. The things he painted to make his frightfully clever point about representation and reality—‘This is not a pipe, or is it?’—they just took at face value; the flags and giant Coke bottles and blown-up comic-strip panels were things they knew and loved, American things. I must say—I can tell you this even though he’s still alive, he’s too Alzheimerish to be hurt—that I had my reservations about much of it. Those stencilled alphabet paintings, for example, with B-L-U-E spelled out in the color orange, and S-T-O-P signs painted green, struck me as Dada all over again; Zack and his generation had rejected the supercilious playfulness of the Surrealists who were here during the war, they were trying instead to extend, after Cubism, the legacy of Cézanne and Velázquez—the majesty of paint, of color and form. Guy had a good, professional eye—his compositions, even the combines with stuffed animals and so on, always balanced, and he knew when to stop, when enough was enough—but he was basically an idea man. After him,
American art became one idea after another.”
“Dripping paint was not an idea?”
“Kathryn, the tuna salad has made you so oppositional. Dripping, not touching the canvas, having it flat on the floor were all ideas, but the ideas were nothing without the execution. Nobody has ever imitated Zack without looking second-rate. Not even that—third-rate. Whereas Guy, once he got his full assembly-line down at the Hospice going, could give an idea to his assistant and have them turn out Holloways while he was sitting in the uptown apartment with me or going to a movie in Times Square. He reinvented the medieval workshop, he took art back from being a confession, something all yours, to being an artifact, something that belonged to everybody and anybody. In a way, he went beyond the concept of good or bad: if an assistant would use the wrong color or make a smear doing a silk screen, Guy would look at it and decide it might do fine, an artist wasn’t a judge, he wasn’t sitting there in robes and a wig ordering executions.”