Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  The men of Tingley, of course, took no part in such pastimes. The world of art and literature, or self-improvement and learning—except as it related to “book” farming—was almost exclusively a female domain. A man’s community activities, other than church and holiday celebrations, began and ended on Saturday night when the stores stayed open until midnight and all the men gathered at Heyer Brothers General Store (on the porch in the summer, by the stove in the winter) to swap stories.

  Although Stella never learned to sing or play an instrument, she could have taken lessons from one of the traveling piano teachers like Daisy Smith, who hitched up her buggy in the morning and saw twenty or thirty students in a week. Both boys and girls were welcome, anybody with fifty cents, but the boys usually had work to do on the farm. There were traveling art teachers, too. Unlike the local music teachers, they were usually out-of-towners and more often men than women—a young single woman traveling alone would have scandalized a Presbyterian community like Tingley. Every student painted the same assigned scene, following the teacher step by step as he demonstrated and explained the technique. These strange and often single men who pulled into town with their colorful books and exotic skills made the hearts of young girls like Stella McClure race with anticipation. At least one old Tingley resident remembers Stella attending the watercoloring class of an itinerant art teacher and painting the Castle at Chillon, a scene that also served as the backdrop in a Mount Ayr photographer’s studio. For a girl who had seldom traveled more than a day’s ride from home, it was a faint but treasured glimpse of a broader, richer, more colorful world. Years later Stella told one of her daughters-in-law, “When I was young I wanted to study art but I never was able to.”

  About the time Stella left school and began to cast about in the small pond of Tingley for the makings of an adult identity, her aunt, Flora Estella, moved into the area. Although separated by seventeen years, the two women had enjoyed a unique affinity since Stella’s childhood, when Aunt Stella often journeyed from Fairfield to visit her older sister, Stella’s mother, Jennie. Their common name became, in young Stella’s eyes, a secret bond, one that was reinforced as she grew older and began to look more and more like her aunt: the same stout, big-boned body, the same broad face and strong features. In fact, as family members were quick to note, she looked more like her heavy-framed aunt than her diminutive mother. By the time young Stella was in her teens, the gap between their ages had become irrelevant. At Eliza Jane Speck’s funeral in 1889, fourteen-year-old Stella wrote in her aunt’s autograph book:

  When you are in a distant land

  And view the writing of my hand

  Although my face you cannot see

  Then think Dear Stella think of me

  Your niece Stella

  By now, time and fondness permitted young Stella the liberty of addressing her aunt by her first name.

  Whatever distant land Aunt Stella visited following her mother’s death, she returned to Iowa and moved to Tingley soon afterward. There she set for her young niece a daily example of what it meant to be a lady: promenading in fine dresses of silk and taffeta, using linen napkins, and inviting lunch guests by sending sealed invitations. She decorated her house in ornate Victorian style with flowerpots lining the staircase. Every afternoon, she would stroll into town for shopping or church or a social gathering, wearing a dark blue dress with a lace collar, a veiled hat, and white gloves. She sewed most of what she wore and was particularly fond of intricate lace and crochet work. Such exquisite finery, seen for the first time, made a deep impression on Stella and the other young girls of Tingley. Recalling a white collar of crocheted grapes that Aunt Stella wore to church, one of them later said: “I sat in the pew behind her and stared at those grapes all through the sermon. They fascinated me.” Although makeup was considered an irreligious sign of worldliness, Aunt Stella risked a dusting of fine European powder with a slight rose tint that accentuated the mask-like quality of her face. Unfailingly clean and immaculately manicured, she was “correct as much as she could be, living in such a small community,” recalls a woman who knew her. “She was among the few who served their meals well, on beautiful tablecloths, and kept their houses nice, and dressed up in the afternoon and walked uptown in their good clothes the way they did in those days.”

  Aunt Stella’s exaggeratedly ladylike demeanor may have been, in part, compensation for the bulk and indelicacy of her own body. Beneath her lace collars and veiled hats were broad shoulders; thick, straight arms and legs; a wide, curving back; a strong, protruding jaw; and heavy, masculine features. Aunt Stella may also have felt that she deserved better from life than Tingley, Iowa. She had seen something of the world beyond and knew there was more to it than Tingley could offer. The townspeople sensed her aloofness. “She was a big woman and very stern, and she walked real straight,” recalls one who knew her. “She was not a friendly type of person.” According to another acquaintance, “It was kind of hard for her to smile.”

  Young Stella watched her aunt with keen, admiring eyes. She saw the way Aunt Stella despised “shoddy” goods and shoddy workmanship, the way she insisted on the finest quality material when she sewed or the best ingredients when she cooked. She studied the severity of her aunt’s expectations, the rarity of her smile, the way she held back her words, weighing every sentence, giving away as little as possible. Stella came to see her aunt not just as a namesake and a look-alike, but as the inevitable fulfillment of her own inchoate personality, more so than her own mother. Jennie McClure made rag carpets and heavy cloth; Aunt Stella created fine lace and intricate crochet. Her mother cooked for a large family; Aunt Stella served fine meals for a few invited guests. Her mother was a pioneer woman; Aunt Stella was a lady. There was never any doubt which one Stella wanted to be.

  But years of playing eldest son to her father, and older brother to her siblings had left in Stella a deep stain of masculinity that resisted both her aunt’s lessons in refinement and her own ambitions. She had developed a masculine walk and a way of speaking that was “kind of short and loud, like a man’s.” She could be direct and forceful to the point of abruptness. “She knew what she wanted, and what she thought was worthwhile, and she knew how to get it,” recalls her son Charles.

  By 1893, when she was eighteen—an age when most Tingley girls were already married—Stella had shown little interest in the ritual of courtship. She wasn’t at all suited to the role of shy, self-denying virgin that the ritual seemed to require, much preferring the company of her younger brothers, Cameron and Leslie, whom she called Cam and Les. Jennie McClure had turned over to her the responsibility for disciplining the two boys, age seven and five, but Stella enjoyed the camaraderie too much to play the stern parent, even when their “devilment” landed them before the justice of the peace. (During the ten years Stella was responsible for him, Les fell behind four grades in school.) As the oldest and the biggest, she was entitled to pitch in their sandlot baseball games and even played the prankster herself from time to time. “Once, she dressed up like an old hobo or tramp to scare them,” recalls Cameron’s son, Dean McClure. “The get-up was so convincing that they chased her with a pitchfork.”

  Stella Mae McClure

  As she approached her twentieth birthday in 1895, however, Stella McClure was growing restless. Her aspirations to ladyhood were continuously frustrated by household chores and small-town routine. Her maternal instincts and sexual urges, increasingly intertwined and indistinguishable, could no longer be satisfied by roughhousing with her younger brothers. And always there were vague, persistent images, like the Castle at Chillon, of something better out there.

  In the summer of 1895, two events brought Stella’s growing frustration into sharp focus. In May, her sister Anna graduated from high school. Despite an accelerating, undiagnosed illness, she planned to attend Parsons College in the fall. Then, in August, Aunt Stella, now thirty-seven, married a local farmer and handyman, Benjamin Lorimor. The marriage of her mentor and
model to a relatively poor and charmless man might have had more of a disillusioning effect on Stella if she herself hadn’t already become involved in a relationship. Sometime earlier that year, probably at a school party or church outing, she had been introduced to one of her sister’s classmates, a slight young man with a boyish face named LeRoy Pollock.

  2

  SENSITIVE MEN

  If Jackson Pollock knew little about his mother, he knew even less about his father. When Jackson was nine, Roy Pollock abandoned his family and, except for occasional visits, did not return until after Jackson himself left home at the age of eighteen. Unlike the image of Stella that so dominated Jackson’s imagination throughout his life, his father’s image was never more than a vague silhouette moving in the distance of his earliest memories. “His father was a mystery to me,” says his wife, Lee Krasner. “Once, I said to him, ‘What was your father like?’—it was always mother, mother, mother—but he didn’t say anything that registered.”

  Even Roy Pollock knew very little about Roy Pollock. He knew that he had been born LeRoy McCoy and that, at the age of two, he had been given to a family named Pollock. If he knew anything more about his real family, he kept it to himself. Years later, his sons believed that their father had been adopted by the Pollocks because both his parents died at the time of his birth. The McCoy family Bible, dutifully kept for a hundred years, doesn’t even mention LeRoy’s name.

  Roy Pollock didn’t know that he was descended from a long line of idealistic, independent-minded men, the first of whom, Alexander McCoy, came to America from County Donegal in Ireland in 1774—the same year that Godfrey Augustus Speck was shanghaied in Saxony—and settled in Pennsylvania. The first Alexander McCoy (there would be one in every generation) was an intelligent and conscientious man. Although a devout Presbyterian himself, he was impressed by the religious tolerance in the Quaker colony. In the Revolutionary War, he supported independence, but refused on moral grounds to join the fight, volunteering instead to serve as a chaplain in the Revolutionary Army despite his lack of formal religious training. After the war, he read with Charles Nisbet, the first president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 1795, he was licensed as “reverend” by the Presbyterian church and installed in the tiny frontier outpost of West Alexander near the modern Pennsylvania–West Virginia state line.

  Of Alexander McCoy’s multitudinous descendants, many followed his lead into the Presbyterian ministry (including Roy Pollock’s brother, John McCoy), and all, including Roy, shared his legacy of social concern, progressive politics, and democratic morality. Among these was his grandson Alexander, who, instead of a life in the ministry, chose life with a minister’s daughter. In 1832, at the age of twenty-three, he married Martha Pattison and, over the next twenty years, a period of remarkable stability and calm for a frontier family, raised twelve children in Ohio County, Virginia (now West Virginia), just across the state line from West Alexander. In 1852, the McCoy family joined the wave of settlers who hopscotched their way west in the 1850s. They stopped for a few years in Knox, Ohio, before moving on in 1858 to Monmouth, Illinois, where they waited for the country to spend itself in the Civil War. The outcome of the war opened up new possibilities for settlers like Alexander McCoy. As long as Missouri was a slave state, his conscience wouldn’t allow him to settle there. But in 1867 he took his family to Jackson County, Missouri, on what he hoped would be the final leg of a fifteen-year journey.

  By this time, his seventh child, also named Alexander, was twenty-three and in need of a wife. Unfortunately, the younger Alexander had inherited his great-grandfather’s thoughtful, introspective conscience but not his strength of purpose. Throughout his life, Alexander’s moodiness and indecision would leave him vulnerable to more strong-willed souls around him, especially his first wife, Rebecca McClelland—Becky—a tall, robust, forthright woman of Irish ancestry, a year older than Alexander and filled with maternal fervor. After the birth of two sons, John and Joseph, the family moved to a more promising spot near Rebecca’s brother’s farm in south central Iowa. The year was 1874—the same year that John and Jennie McClure packed their wagons and headed for the same promising spot.

  Being a conscientious McCoy, the elder Alexander provisioned his son and his young family as best he could before they set out: a milk cow for the children, a horse, a few pigs and chickens, whatever furniture and clothes could be spared, and even a few pieces of family china to make the prairie life seem just a bit less desolate, all loaded in or tethered to a single wagon. It was not a hoard by any means, but it was at least a head start.

  Somewhere on the trip from Missouri to Iowa, in one brief, terrible moment, the McCoys lost everything. They were crossing a river, swollen with spring rains, when the raft carrying their wagon and stock broke loose and capsized. The children swam safely to shore and Alexander helped his wife to shallow water, but everything they had brought, except the little money he had with him, was swept away by the river.

  It was only a taste of the hardships to come. Although he did manage to secure a small farm, Alexander McCoy was caught at the bottom of the economic and social ladder in Ringgold County. In 1875, Becky had a third child, a girl she named Nina, and, two years later, on February 25, 1877, a boy, LeRoy. Soon after his birth, she complained of fatigue and began to lose weight. A nagging cough grew more persistent until, by the time LeRoy was two, he had become accustomed to the sight of his emaciated mother coughing up blood.

  At some point in her struggle with tuberculosis, Becky McCoy sent word to Missouri for her mother, Elizabeth McClelland, now seventy-six, to come and look after her four grandchildren. The task wasn’t an easy one. Sometime in 1878, three-year-old Nina began to show the same symptoms that had reduced her mother to a pale, withdrawn ghost. Sitting in the closed cabin, unable to escape, LeRoy watched his mother and sister being slowly consumed.

  On February 28, 1879, three days after LeRoy’s second birthday, Nina died. She was buried in the little cemetery behind the Presbyterian church in Eugene, Iowa. Two months later, Rebecca McCoy was placed beside her.

  Within a year of his mother’s death, LeRoy McCoy was no longer living with his own family. In the official Iowa census of 1880, he was listed as belonging to the household of James M. Pollock, age forty-five, and Lizzie J. Pollock, age forty-four. Exactly how LeRoy McCoy came to be in the Pollock house has been a source of speculation among family members and local historians ever since. Some stories claim that both of LeRoy’s parents died; some that he was formally adopted (not true); some that the McCoys and the Pollocks were in fact related (also not true). Several focus on the deathbed declarations of Becky McCoy. In the tenderest terms, they tell of Becky summoning Lizzie Pollock to her bedside and begging her to take care of little LeRoy after her death. One story tells of the tragic death of Lizzie Pollock’s own son and how Alexander surrendered LeRoy to her as an act of compassion. The number of explanations is an indication of how fundamentally inexplicable the event was: with his motherin-law and two older sons still in his household, Alexander McCoy gave his three-year-old child to a couple who were not related, not wealthy, and considered “a bit on the scruffy side” by other townspeople. Although he soon moved back to Missouri, married a landed woman, and continued raising a family in relative prosperity, as far as is known, he never sent for, communicated with, or acknowledged the existence of his son LeRoy.

  At age three, LeRoy McCoy suddenly found himself in a new world, a world even colder and more alienating than the old one. His new father, James Madison Pollock, called Matt, had come to Iowa from Ohio in 1871 with only a wheelbarrow full of belongings, his wife, Lizzie, and an adopted son, Frank. After a decade of hardship and sacrifice, he had managed to double his acreage and fill his barn with livestock. Despite his apparent success, however, Matt Pollock was not a popular or even respected man in Ringgold County. He attended church every Sunday, but avoided the ancillary church activities that earned a man his neighbors’ respect.
He was considered single-minded to the point of ruthlessness in his effort to improve his lot in life.

  Lizzie Pollock easily made up for her husband’s slack attention to “God’s work.” Her fellow believers revered her as “strong and courageous”; the uninitiated considered her “a religious fanatic,” determined not only to do God’s will but to enforce it on others. As president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Lizzie—with her tall, angular figure, her deep, harsh voice, and reputation for severity—became a well-known figure throughout the county. “She was very strong in her ideas,” recalls her nephew. “She made everybody toe the mark.” A family member who knew her says with some understatement, “She didn’t approve of everybody.” Most of all, she didn’t approve of weakness, physical or moral, in the face of adversity. She once scolded a woman for jumping at the sight of a mouse. To her sons Frank and LeRoy, Lizzie Pollock was a loving mother in the same way she was a loving Christian: righteous without compassion, demanding without compromise. “She had a very loyal heart,” says a woman who knew her, “but she was too severe to show it.”

  Growing up with a distracted, obsessed father and a stern, undemonstrative mother, LeRoy withdrew further and further from the world. Although very little is known about the early years after his “adoption” by the Pollocks, the image that emerges is of a small boy alone in a house he never considered home while the father he feared but never loved worked in the fields and the mother he feared and loved but never understood, threw herself into God’s work. At an age when a year is a lifetime, LeRoy Pollock spent lifetimes alone, laying the foundations of his adult personality: solitary, introspective, fearful, uneasy with people, and sensitive “to an unnatural degree.”