The Castelli Gallery was situated in a dark townhouse. Marilyn wanted to spend an hour looking at some new pictures: we’d heard a lot about the artist, this thirty-seven-year-old jazz fan called Roy Lichtenstein. As soon as we entered, Mr Castelli came over and kissed Marilyn’s hand. He had a very Italian willingness to be charming and I could see, from my level, that he had put a lot of thought into his shoes, a pair of velvet slippers that still blushed with the cobbler’s pride. Curious: there was black and white tiling on the floor and Mr Castelli only walked on the white tiles. I wondered if that was Masonic or something. In any event I took up residence on one of the black ones and watched with pleasure as the impresario talked to his famous guest about the wonderful new work. Not since Duncan Grant had I heard anyone be so eloquent about the transitoriness of beauty. Unlike Duncan, though, and unlike Vanessa Bell or the critics, who always talked about meanings, Mr Castelli mainly enjoyed pointing out that the paintings in his gallery had no meaning at all. They were meaningless. ‘It is an optical experience. Humour is the only acknowledgement possible.’
* Marilyn pulled me away too quickly. I wanted to say something to the man about Lincoln’s dog, Fido. He was a freedom-loving animal, a golden retriever. He lived in Springfield, Illinois, and stayed there after the great man got the call to Washington. It was Fido who gave the future president his love of the untethered, but the dog was later killed by a drunk man only months after his master got the bullet in Ford’s Theatre. Incidentally, Lincoln played an important part in my moral education. Marilyn was friends with Lincoln’s biographer Carl Sandburg. He came to the apartment once and I picked up a whiff of knowledge about young Lincoln walking all the way from Pigeon Creek to Rockport to borrow books. According to the story I absorbed from Sandburg, the future president’s favourite books were Aesop’s Fables and one other, The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen.
He was epigrammatically inclined. Everything he said was a fast brutal truth, a clean stab of insight. He took a breath between each word. For those who live in the grey areas of life, it could prove a very exciting but strangely emptying kind of talk. Castelli dispensed his great utterances as a child might sprinkle sugar on their Frosties. ‘These are post-historical history paintings,’ he said. ‘No ideas but in things.’ ‘Visual genius is simple-minded,’ he said. ‘Laughter and colour are the only answers to modern life.’ We walked further into the room where the canvases he was talking about had been stood against the walls rather than hung up.
‘These are the Lichtensteins?’ asked Marilyn.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Cartoon objects. Cartoon characters.
Cartoon meanings. Lightness is the new profundity.’ ‘Wow,’ she said.
‘That’s right. Wow is right. Wow is the new Why.’ I sniffed the base of a canvas called Washing Machine,
1961.
‘Back, Maf Honey,’ she said. ‘Stand back.’ The one hanging up was very yellow and blue and it showed a chatty Mickey Mouse fishing with Donald Duck. ‘But it’s all so different . . . so different from what you used to do, Leo?’ she said. She bit her lip and laughed to make clear it wasn’t a criticism. Her breathiness was a cartoon, too.
‘We are like sharks: we must keep swimming or else we die. Immediacy is everything, darling. Everything. Roy started by doing bubblegum wrappers. He’s so sweet. I mean, sweet. They are more real than the real thing. I mean, they have a better reality. I love them.’
‘Are they hand-drawn?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Castelli. ‘But Roy would be happier if they were done by a machine. The thing is, with these new boys, they don’t really believe in death or they don’t understand it. It’s not like Picasso, who exuded death, no? Who was like Goya – emitting death, no? These boys don’t understand that. They only know life. All the pop artists want to burn, burn, burn, you know, and repeat everything. They’re so caught up in life they just don’t have time for death. Poor Pablo. Poor Pablissimo.’
‘Mmmm,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s time to start looking into death. We’re all pop artists while the lights are on.’
The gallery room had deep brown panelling and Marilyn wondered what it would have been like to come to a salon here, maybe at a showing of Whistler or somebody, when the visiting ladies wore puffed sleeves and large, beautiful hats. ‘Some people say it is anti-art,’ continued Mr Castelli. ‘They say the material is not transformed and the pictures are not composed, but I say to hell with that. I say drop dead.’
‘I think it’s cute,’ she said. ‘But isn’t it kinda cold?’
‘Oh, Marilyn, baby – don’t sound like them. Some curators say it’s fascistic and militaristic. They think it’s despicable. What else are they going to say, these men from Mars or Harvard Square? I think they ought to see a lot more, do more seeing.’
‘Do you think the pictures are very American?’ She twisted the waistband of her skirt and bit the stem of her sunglasses, tilting her head. Mr Castelli looked at her blue scarf and thought it very Klein.
‘They’re the acme of industrial. Cartoons are the only politics we recognise. They are anti-contemplative, antinuance, anti-getting-away-from-the-tyranny-of-the-triangle. They are anti-movement-and-light, anti-mystery, anti-paintquality, anti-Zen, and anti all those brilliant old ideas that everybody understands and depends on so thoroughly.’
Marilyn’s cherry-coloured smirk bloomed into a laugh. ‘That’s a helluva lot of anti to put into one washing machine.’
‘It’ll take,’ he said. ‘Disposability is the new permanence.’ A column of ants was marching round the frame edge of a lovely sash window, talking like the critic Clement Greenberg. They just went round and round the window casing, failing to get away from the tyranny of the rectangle, the window framing the bustle of New York. The ants were speaking the name Jasper Johns and they said something about the influence of old Willem De Kooning. They marched together and talked over each other, trying to get a word in, blinded by light, eager to hit on a theory about the prodigiousness of American invention.
When Mr Castelli and Marilyn came from the back room he had his arm around her and they were still talking. I snoozed for a time on one of the black tiles while he showed her some drawings. My dream was grey and I woke up startled. ‘Gee, you’ve been so kind to us, Leo. Hasn’t Mr Castelli been kind, Maf?’ She looked down at me and I tilted my head. ‘I have an appointment with my analyst,’ she said. ‘Better not be late or that will figure.’ Mr Castelli smiled and kissed her in a very European way as she reconstructed her disguise. The sunshine popped with whiteness outside, and, as we touched the sidewalk, I saw a young, pasty-faced blond man come past us onto the stoop. He was carrying a folder marked ‘More Popeye’. ‘Everything is so glamorous,’ he said to the person walking at his side. ‘Gee. I think we should go to Bergdorf Goodman after this.’ The man who spoke was wearing a bow tie. He didn’t notice Marilyn. His skin was poor and his eyes were pink and filled with wonder.
The black man with the harmonica was reading a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book.* ‘They say I should feel liberated,’ he said. ‘How’m I meant to feel liberated if I ain’t got no car?’ This seemed to me a very low-grade comment.
‘That’s one noisy dog you got there, lady.’
‘I’m shocked,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got better things to think about?’
‘Come on, Maf,’ said my owner.
I barked at the man. ‘Don’t you know there’s a revolution coming down, brother?’ I sniffed his shoes and growled, turning to Marilyn. ‘As I thought. When he’s not reading the racist driving book, he’s reading Uncle Remus. I mean that is some goddamn stupid nonsense made up by some human to prove the baseness of animals, is it not? All that “Brer Rabbit he tuck de chilluns by der years en make um set down”. The wise old bespectacled darky telling tales to the kid of Miss Sally.’
‘Yo’ is buzzing, little dog. Quit molestin’ me. Come here
and I’ll kiss yo’ nice white face. I ain’t no bone.’
‘Maf!’
‘The dog he likes to say his piece, Miss.’
Marilyn was quite puzzled by the man’s words. She reckoned he was one of those refugees out of Bellevue, mad or half-mad. She put me up on her shoulder and I yapped at the man as we walked away. Certain human things are beyond me, like sticking out my tongue.
Marilyn loosened Pinker’s collar and placed me back on the ground. ‘You are a bad dog.’
‘Trotsky said there is no place for self-satisfaction at the point of revolution.’
‘Stop yapping, Maf,’ she said. ‘Be quiet now. Quiet. Gee. What’s got into you today?’
Every human has his day. Yet they forget we are all animals. Let me tell you, speciesism is no better than racism; it comes from the same dense briar of unimagination. Non-human animals outnumber man by trillions, yet we are assigned successively lower places in Aristotle’s great scala naturae, the great chain of being. But I say – at least, I said as we walked towards Central Park – let us not assume that the great outnumbering beasts must always bow down before the opinions of man, which are often dumber than anything we could manage. We entered through the gate at 79th Street and my mind reached out to the kinds of human who were better at animal reason. Those, indeed, who had a stomach for the greatest good for the greatest number. ‘The day may come,’ Jeremy Bentham wrote in his Principles of Morals and Legislation, a book I knew via the old lady Stodge, ‘when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day old.’
The baseball players were shouty in Central Park. Marilyn got nervous about snoops and shutterbugs, so we walked more quickly than usual and I had no time to sniff around the trash cans or worry the ducks at the edge of Belvedere Lake. My friend moved her lips. ‘I love to watch the ships passing.’ It was clearly a day for walking and for being incognito. She seemed to be addressing an audience that wasn’t there. ‘I’m going to tell you a story . . . no, I’m going to tell you a funny story. A funny story. I’ve been meaning to turn it loose on him every time he gets my goat with his bull about keeping me safe inland.’
She was trying to learn some lines as she walked, getting anxious about forgetting them, feeling turned inside out by them too and wondering why. She was due to do a scene at the Actors Studio that afternoon, Act III of Anna Christie, and her lips were moving and her eyes were filling up as we walked in the park. ‘I want to tell you two guys something. You was going on’s if one of you had got to own me. But nobody owns me, see?’
I looked over into the trees, where a small girl in red mittens was hitting a spruce. Her father seemed so perfectly made when he walked over to her, so constructed, so complete, with his Brooks Brothers suit, a brushed hat and a raincoat over his arm, and that morning’s aftershave still scenting his hands and face. Under all this a naked soul was present, a person nobody ever saw or spoke about, a ghost in his early fifties who wondered if the little girl was the only good thing he ever did.
In a single moment, the park began to speak of its own past, the long-ago past of New York before it was called anything like that and before there was Central Park or us, the noise of car horns or the snowdrops surrounding the trees. We sat on a bench and the day faded out, replaced with a vision of a forest after the Ice Age and swamps filled with boulders that nature had carried here from Maine. In the gloaming I could see elks and moose, mammoths, mastodons, the giant beaver and the musk ox, the great brown bear standing up in a clearing and looking down the hill to the mouth of the Hudson. In the soil beneath where the bench now stood there were layers of sand in which stone scrapers could be found buried, the tools of the first Americans, people who had crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska. ‘I think you are all Russians,’ I said to Marilyn in the midst of my dream. The coloured feathers once worn by the Munsees and the Algonquin were lodged deep down in the sand along with their wampum beads and their charred bones. I could see it all from the bench as we sat there: the tall buildings disappeared and I saw only scattered trees and small fires reaching down to the tip of Manhattan. As I watched I saw it grow and change with time, a ship rounding the hillock at Tubby Hook and sailing into the harbour. The oyster shells and the old canoes were covered over now, the ancient elephants were long dead and the moose had departed. Sand and silt, landfill and leaves, tons of asphalt – in their turn they had covered everything I was thinking of. At a corner near the West Side Highway and Liberty Street, they found underground the wooden beams of a house, and lying on a broken table were tobacco pipes and Dutch coins. When they wiped the coins they shone in the sun. My thoughts cleared with that glint of silver and I saw the openness of Central Park in front of us. The girl in the red mittens had gone and her father too was gone. I think it was the only time in my whole life when I saw the colour red as it was.
Dogs love public parks. We spend half our lives in them, being ‘walked’, though I have found that the creatures being walked are more often our owners, who use the occasion to inhabit their secrets. Owners like to imagine a dog enjoys nothing more than leaping after a stick or chasing a tennis ball; in actual fact, we like nothing more than lying by a roaring fire chewing a bone, listening to conversations and imbibing opinions. But, given the paucity of stimulating conversation in most English and American households, we are happy enough to be taken off to some large expanse of yellowish grass, where we can meet and debate with other flatulent slaves of enchantment. The perfect park must have grass to prowl in as well as a pond where one can worry the supercilious geese. It should have a water fountain and a decent variety of ancient trees to piss against. Benches are a complete must and so are little cafes, where a sausage may be gruntled or a cake procured for the price of a yearning look.
My top five:
* A not entirely un-obnoxious publication, first published in 1936. It was invented by an enterprising New York travel agent named Victor Green, who saw what we were learning, in the early 60s, to call ‘a gap in the market’. It listed the restaurants, barber shops, nightclubs, and so on, that catered to black customers. It was said to be very helpful, in the years before better help came along.
1 . Central Park, New York
2. Regent’s Park, London
3. Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
4. The Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton
5. Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
I admit to a certain degree of sentimentality in my choices. These are the places where I have been happiest. Not Paris: I have never been to Paris, but Duncan Grant was never away from it, and his love rubbed off on me despite my ignorance. In any case, is it not a fact among creatures, each and every one of us, that we are often happiest where we have never been?* I might have chosen Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but I was kicked there once while walking with Marilyn and her friends the Rostens. I would have said the Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico City but thinking about it makes me feel too sad, on account of the Old Man. I might have chosen Hyde Park in London, but Vanessa Bell got into a state of nervous exhaustion the one time we went there together, leaving me panting with thirst. I think it was something to do with the drama of forgetting, the resurgence of the past, the remaining reminders, or some such thing. At least that’s what Cyril Connolly said with a mandarin grin. Vanessa spent the evening warbling about the last issue of Hyde Park Gate News and the park as viewed in her childhood, past a windowpane and a ledge of chimneypots.
* And perhaps that is the most sentimen
tal position of all. Proust, for example, conjured a whole life and an excellent novel out of such nonsense. Those of us who tell stories are committed slaves to the past’s dominion, to the fresh echo of the little bell which announced M. Swann’s arrival. We hear it now, though its peal rings out in the far distant past. It is never quite a place we have been and is always a place we imagined.
Marilyn was reading her Russian novel, then suddenly she shifted on the bench and looked at me. ‘What’s the story, Snowball?’
‘The novel is our daily bread,’ I said. ‘That’s Trotsky’s opinion, not mine. He loved the old spiritus papyri. I have it on good authority, too, that his favourite novel was from the German, the book they call The Adventures of a Simpleton. The thing was written by a certain Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Very lively. Very tart. My breeder was reading it the day I was born.’
‘I could swear you hear me half the time. Okay, little guy. I guess it’s time to face the music.’
We walked round the path and she laughed when I began dancing with a nearby shadow, this dark event on the ground, a real character with a life of its own and absolutely determined not to leave my side so long as we walked. It changed sides and I wondered if it had a story, the four-legged friend that liked to keep in step and never speak. Plato has a lot to answer for in this world of dogs, men, and other ruins. Your average person ignores his shadow, but it might be the best thing about him. It might be his ideal self: there but not quite there, and dense with reality. The asphalt path at the top of West Drive held a very recent memory of snow. I could feel the lingering cold and the grit under my paws. A grey squirrel appeared at the bottom of a tree with half a sandwich in its little claws. ‘Peanut butter,’ it shouted over with a toothy grin. ‘Life is sweet.’
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 9