While he was absent from school, Jackson also plunged back into religion, even more deeply than before.
On Monday, May 27, 1929, he set out with Schwankovsky, Tolegian, and Goldstein on the seventy-mile trip to Ojai where, for an entire week, they would hear Krishnamurti speak. As the car descended into the scenic valley, they could see the campground at the far end of the table-flat fields, row after row of carefully pitched tents—enough for two thousand followers—a grove of oak trees, a few low buildings, and the blue hills of the Sierra Madre beyond. At fifteen hundred feet above sea level, the air was drier than on the coast, warmer during the day, and cooler at night. “Imagine Italy, the Riviera, and the best parts of India rolled into one,” wrote Lady Emily Lutyens, wife of the famous British architect, Edwin Lutyens, and a Krishnamurti intimate, “and you have this place.”
The Star Camp at Ojai, California
The camps were organized more like military engagements than religious revivals. For the $45 entry fee, members received accommodations in a two-person tent and three meals a day. They were expected to bring their own “sheets, blankets, soap, towels, etc.” or buy them at the camp shop. Banking services were provided, as was mail delivery. The members performed all of the camp work, from preparing food to standing night guard, on a volunteer basis.
The next morning, on the light-flecked ground beneath the oaks, Jackson gathered with the others for the first of Krishnamurti’s talks. When the “Divine Spirit” finally appeared, the crowd fell into such a profound silence that the rustling of leaves could be heard even in the faintest breeze. Some members fell at Krishnamurti’s feet, “overwhelmed by this marvelous rush of force.” “It reminded one irresistibly of the rushing, mighty wind, and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost,” wrote a witness at a similar meeting. “The tension was enormous. … It was exactly the kind of thing that we read about in the old scriptures, and think exaggerated; but here it was before us in the twentieth century.” At the center of this vortex of attention was a thin, fragile man who looked only half of his thirty-four years. “An odd figure,” according to Lady Lutyens, “with long black hair falling almost to his shoulders and enormous dark eyes which had a vacant look in them.” Although he had undoubtedly seen photographs and heard Schwankovsky’s descriptions, Jackson could not have been prepared for such an elegant, asexual presence. Krishnamurti wore a custom-made white shirt, sometimes open at the collar, with an impeccably tailored suit that Charles Pollock would have envied. When he spoke, the words came effortlessly, without notes or pauses or false starts. “Like many others who have tasted mystical reality,” explained an admirer, “the experience gave him a sense of inner authority and self-confidence.” When he finished, he took questions from the audience:
QUESTION: Isn’t the theory of individual freedom really anarchy?
KRISHNAMURTI: If the individual is not happy, as he is not at the present time, he is creating chaos and anarchy around him, by his selfishness, by his cruelty. …
For six days, Jackson attended these daily talks, wandered with his friends through the surrounding countryside, listened to concerts of Bach and Oriental music, watched plays by James Barrie and George Bernard Shaw and a dance interpretation of Krishnamurti’s poems, and ate at the long tables beneath the timbered pergola. In the evenings, he sat with the others around a campfire and listened to followers of the Master bear witness to his message. On Thursday evening, Krishnamurti appeared again, lit a fire, chanted two Sanskrit hymns, and, while a trio of concealed musicians played classical music, recited some of his own poetry:
Ah, come sit beside me
Open and free.
As the even flow of clear sunlight,
So shall thine understanding come to thee.
The burdensome fear of anxious waiting
Shall go from thee as the waters recede before the rushing winds.
Ah, come sit beside me.
In the midst of so much emotional turbulence, both at school and at home, Jackson quickly succumbed to the sunlight, serenity, and soft voices of Ojai. He may have met Krishnamurti personally on this trip, but even from a distance he must have been reassured by the sight of the “vague and dreamy” teacher who looked the same age as Jackson yet spoke with confidence and fluency; who was, in his way, as much a misfit as Jackson, and yet held thousands in thrall; who dressed like Charles, yet spoke a language of revolt. It was as if Krishnamurti had taken the jagged fragments of Jackson’s world and magically assembled them into a life of serenity and self-fulfillment.
Krishnamurti didn’t recruit disciples—“Be rather the disciple of understanding,” he told his audiences—but such humility was lost on Jackson. By the time the Ojai camp concluded, he had found a new ambition: to “follow the Occult Mysticism.” He grew his hair long and combed it back behind his ears as the Master did. He began to wear his shirt open at the neck, the long collar wings folded out over the peaked lapels of his well-tailored jacket—the way Krishnamurti wore his. He refused to eat meat.
Krishnamurti
Jackson at Manual Arts, 1929
It was in this “spiritual” state that Jackson went to meet his father and begin work on the road crew at Santa Ynez.
On the first of July, Jackson and Stella drove up the coast, past Ojai and into the Santa Ynez Mountains. Stella spent two weeks at the road camp, “cooking and washing dishes,” before returning to Los Angeles. On July 22, she left to visit her mother in Iowa.
The month that Jackson spent living and working with his father—what Roy called “batching together”—wasn’t anything like the long-sought reconciliation it might have been a few years earlier. Jackson later told a friend that he had gone to the camp only to earn money and, from the moment he arrived, “wanted to come back.” Nevertheless, the first few weeks with Stella in camp went smoothly enough. On July 20, Roy wrote to Charles and Frank in New York, “[Jack] is getting along fine he reads quite a lot of good magazines & doesn’t seem to get lonesome for the city.” Even after Stella’s departure, Roy’s grim optimism and their common Pollock reticence combined to create the appearance of tranquillity, even when the temperature reached an incendiary 106 degrees in the shade. “[Jack] is a very good & pleasant companion,” Roy wrote a week after Stella’s departure, “always in a good mood.”
The mood didn’t last. At some point during the summer, a fistfight erupted between father and son, ostensibly over Jackson’s desire to return to Los Angeles. Perhaps Roy disapproved of his son’s exaggerated self-involvement. “I do not think a young fellow should be too serious,” he had written Jackson the previous fall. “It is no use to worry about what you can’t help, or what you can help, moral ‘Don’t worry.’” (It was the credo of a man who, unlike Jackson, had come to terms with himself, however unfavorable those terms might have been.) Perhaps Jackson’s indecisiveness seemed to Roy too much like indifference. “The secret of success is concentrated interest,” he had also written. Perhaps Jackson’s dismal school record and vague ambitions smacked too much of laziness, or, at least, a laxness of spirit that must have seemed a grave sin to a man whose pride had survived so many indignities. Whatever the spark, clearly Roy felt profoundly disappointed by his son. The truth, bitter as it must have been for Jackson, was that Roy Pollock thought, and perhaps had always thought, that his fifth son would never amount to much. “Dad would have been astonished,” says Charles, “that anything ever became of Jackson.”
All that’s known for sure about the fight or about what followed is that Jackson came home from Santa Ynez, by himself, a month early, and never worked with his father again.
Back in Los Angeles, Jackson was more alone and lost than ever: Stella lingered in Iowa, the Manual Arts gang dispersed over the city, and Schwankovsky spent the summer at his studio in faraway Laguna Beach. Sande, the only brother within reach, inhabited a distant world of salary checks, expensive suits, and friends he never brought home. He still spent his weekends at the big Victorian house o
n Pennsylvania Avenue in Riverside where Arloie nursed her sick father and dropped hints about marriage. In response, Sande pled penury—then returned to Los Angeles, spent $600 on a new Model A roadster coupe with a rumble seat and lent Robert Cooter several hundred dollars to buy a gas station in Phoenix.
With no one to buoy him up, Jackson drifted deeper and deeper into depression and, in all probability, drink. Behind him was the painful memory of his father’s rejection; ahead, the dismal prospect of another school year. In his desperation, he reached out in the most unlikely direction: to Charles. In a long, disjointed letter, he poured out his problems to his brother, detailing the turmoil at Manual Arts, his involvement with Krishnamurti, his experiment with radical politics, and even his now waning interest in art. That Jackson would turn to Charles, whom he had not seen in fours years and who, before that, had barely acknowledged his little brother’s existence, betrays the depth of his desperation. The two had not exchanged a single letter in the eight years since Charles left home.
During all those years, though, Jackson had never lost faith in his big brother, the artist, who had gone to the big city—first Los Angeles, then New York—to become famous. “[Jack] held Charles in reverence,” says a friend from this period. “He had picked his bags up and gone to New York, and he had done things that were so professional, and so accomplished. All the way up and down the line, whatever Charles had done, that was the thing to do.”
Jackson’s letter was not only an offering, it was a dark, pessimistic chronicle that alarmed the usually sanguine Charles. Within days, he drafted a long and thoughtful reply and, as was his practice, copied it in careful calligraphy onto fine paper.
From the moment it arrived, Charles’s letter was a turning point in Jackson’s life. His rekindled interest in art and his decision to become an artist both began to take conscious shape in the hours he spent reading and rereading—“with clearer understanding each time”—this rare, lengthy, and fatefully well-timed token of Charles’s concern.
Your letter has confounded me and I am inescapably lead to write you a long letter to attempt if possible to persuade you of the folly of your present attitude towards the problems of life. I do this without wishing to meddle in your own personal problems, but only because I am interested in you and because I have myself gone through periods of depression and melancholy and uncertainty which threatened to warp all future efforts.
I am sorry I have seen so little of you these past years when you have matured so rapidly. Now I have the vaguest idea of your temperament and interests. It is apparent tho that you are gifted with a sensitive and perceptive intelligence and it is important that this quality should develop normally and thoroughly to its ultimate justification in some worthy endeavor and not be wasted.
In his letter, Jackson had apparently described at some length his frustration and alienation at school, as well as his intellectual insecurity. It’s clear from Charles’s response that Jackson was contemplating not returning to Manual Arts in September.
I know well this is no easy matter and that the problems of adjusting oneself to the standards of the contemporary school system, if one is equipped with intelligence and a sensitive spirit, are at times almost insuperable. Still wisdom and understanding we must achieve one way or another. …
It would be well to finish school if you can if at all possible or tolerable not because it means anything in itself but because ground work is necessary however ineptly it is provided. …
Charles had little patience for Krishnamurti or for his views, and even less for Jackson’s proposal that he follow Krishnamurti to his camps in India and Holland and, monk-like, dedicate his life to the search for his “individual truth.”
The philosophy of escape to which you have momentarily succumbed is a negation which should have no place in twentieth century America. If one thing is more certain than another it is that we are born into potentially one of the most magnificent countrys in all of history—into a material prosperity before unheard of … [that can be] the possible means to an ideal and humane civilization. I am unwilling to believe that with your gifts you are willing to forego the challenge, for a contemplative life that can have no value because it ignores realities—for a religion that is an anachronism in this age—for adherence to an occult mysticism whose exponents in this country are commercial savants. …
In an effort to counter the despairing tone of his brother’s letter and offer some constructive advice, Charles seized on Jackson’s statement that he was still interested in art—a statement that must have come as a revelation to Charles who, when he left home, knew only of Sande’s budding artistic ambitions.
I am delighted that you have an interest in art. Is it a general interest or do you consider you may wish to become a painter? Have the possibilities of architecture ever interested you. This is a field of unlimited rewards for a genuine artist, once intelligence and the unaccountable wealth of the country begin to command real talent. One of the finest architects in the country Lloyd Wright is living and working in Los Angeles. I do not think he is finding an outlet for his capacities but the time may not be far away when such men will be recognized. If architecture appealed to you there might be a splendid opportunity to serve an apprenticeship.
My interest in mural painting definitely related to architecture has lead me lately to think of returning to Los Angeles if I could get work with Wright. Are you familiar with the work of Rivera and Orozco in Mexico City? This is the finest painting that has been done, I think, since the sixteenth century. “Creative Art” for January 1929 has an article on Rivera and “The Arts” October 1927 has an article on Orozco. I wish you could see these and also an article by Benton in Creative Art December 1928. Here are men with imagination and intelligence recognizing the implements of the modern world and ready to employ them.
Charles’s letter may have been a plea for accommodation with the world, but it was the tone of self-assurance, even defiance, that stuck with Jackson and gave him renewed strength as he began the school year. Without realizing it, Charles had added his persuasive voice to Krishnamurti’s call for revolt.
Do not believe so early that you are ill placed in this world and that there is nothing you are fitted to do. There are many pursuits supremely worthy of your best efforts and for which the qualities you possess, are a first necessity. Finding your way may be difficult but in the end the torment of uncertainty will be only a part of experience. Do not believe in an easy way to freedom. The way to freedom physical or spiritual, to be enduring, must be won honestly. …
I would be very glad if you would write me in greater detail of your interests.
Armed with his brother’s reassurance, Jackson returned to Manual Arts on September 10, 1929, cocky and defiant. Left uncut since Ojai, his hair had grown provokingly long. He wore his loose, open-collared shirts in the style of Krishnamurti while the other boys wore cardigans; and high, lace-up surveyor’s boots instead of saddle shoes or wingtips. The effect was that of a “ham actor,” one classmate recalls: everything seemed calculated to attract attention—most of it unfavorable. “I really think he did it just to rebel, just for the heck, the kick of it,” said Manuel Tolegian. “Restrictions were all right for some people but not for him.” Friends like Tolegian must have sensed the self-destructiveness in Jackson’s desperate clamor for attention. Why else would a quiet, painfully reticent and “seclusive” youngster, comfortable only “in the background,” invite such public ridicule?
Jackson flouted the school’s course requirements as blithely as he ignored its dress code. Under rules that applied to all Los Angeles high schools, students were required to take courses in English, history, laboratory science, math, and the arts. In the fall of 1929, Jackson ignored the requirements, enrolling instead in two English classes, both taught by a favorite teacher, and two art classes: Schwankovsky’s life drawing and Hazel Martin’s clay modeling. Even in this, Jackson seemed to be courting humiliation. His sketches were
still embarrassingly crude—“rotten,” “cold and lifeless,” he called them—and the two English classes, American Literature and Contemporary Literature, both required oral presentations: “[When I had] to talk in a group,” he admitted in a letter to Charles and Frank, “I was so fightened that I could not think logically.” For Jackson, however, enrolling in a course didn’t necesssarily mean attending. Tolegian remembered that, no matter how much Jackson juggled his schedule, “he just wouldn’t attend any classes.”
If Jackson was looking for a confrontation, whether to prove himself or to punish himself, he soon found it.
On the first day of school, fifty Manual boys responded to the notices posted by Coaches Sid Foster and Jim Blewett recruiting “prospective gridiron heroes.” With only five of fourteen starters returning from 1928, the turnout was disappointing, and word soon began to circulate that the coaches and varsity players were scouting the student body for additional “beefers”—big kids who hadn’t played the game but who had the necessary bulk to block the line. This year there was an added urgency to the call because Manual’s “purple and grey hoghiders” were favored by local sportswriters to win the city championship if they could win their season opener against the Parrots of Poly High, a game already being billed on campus as “the battle of the ages.” In the frantic, informal draft that preceded the game, Jackson was an obvious candidate. With his broad, vaguely bullish face, big-boned limbs, and square-set body, he looked like a football player despite the long hair and eccentric clothes. Even if he wasn’t directly approached by coaches or players, he was a walking reminder of the plague of “slackers” that beset the school: a beefer who wouldn’t play ball. In an editorial that appeared shortly before the decisive game, the Weekly publicly castigated—perhaps with Jackson specifically in mind—such traitors to school spirit.
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