His artistic ambition rekindled by the summer with Kadish, Jackson attacked his work and for a while at least, the obstacles seemed to yield. At the League, he registered again for Benton’s class, now called Mural Painting, but so unchanged from the previous year that decades later Benton insisted he had never taught a course in mural painting. Even more than the previous year, Benton’s favor worked to Jackson’s advantage. Between classes, unknown to the other students, the two met for private tutorials at the apartment on Hudson Street, where Benton corrected Jackson’s drawings and demonstrated technique by sketching directly on his student’s pad. Due in part to these special sessions, Jackson began to distinguish himself in class. While Mervin Jules’s academic versions of anatomy (the product of four years of training at the Maryland Institute) earned a “great heavy X” from the teacher, Jackson’s cruder but more energetic efforts were, by Benton’s laconic standards, lavishly rewarded. “I used one of his rough analytical diagrams as an example for my class,” Benton later wrote, “to show that it was not a copy that we were looking for, even a cubistic copy, but a plastic idea.”
Outside of class, however, Jackson continued to find nothing but failure and frustration. He joined the regular lunchroom crowd that craned to hear the lively dialogue between Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis, who had just joined the faculty. “Gorky had an influence on all of us without teaching us,” recalls Philip Pavia. “He really impressed Jackson.” When Jackson tried to mimic Gorky’s studio jargon and historical analysis, however, the effect was less than convincing. “Jackson tried very hard to become cultivated—to acquaint himself not only with the visual arts but with literature,” says Whitney Darrow, who came to the League in the summer of 1930, “but he had no academic skills whatsoever. For him, everything was a matter, not of the intellect, but of emotion.” Still, Jackson struggled with ideas, trying to make them his own by writing sequences of key phrases, like trails of crumbs, to help him retrace an argument. On the back of a page in a volume of the Publications of the Bureau of Ethnology that he and Charles had bought at a secondhand bookstore, he wrestled with the editor’s argument that any philosophy develops in three stages: discernment, discrimination, and classification. “Man starts with impression of general situations,” he scribbled in his barbed-wire handwriting.
Gradually handling things (getting familiar with
the content of such general situations) he makes distinctions
The distinctions he classifies. (names)
From these come inferences.
Such efforts left most of his circle unimpressed. Elizabeth Pollock, by now Jackson’s nemesis, recalls: “I never heard him carry on a logical conversation in which one and one added up to two.” Even his indulgent mentor acknowledged Jackson’s shortcomings. “His mind was absolutely incapable of logical sequences,” Benton said. “He couldn’t be taught anything.” But when Jackson grew despondent over his lack of verbal facility, Benton was quick to supply a defense: “The deep wellsprings of the visual arts are in fact nearly always beyond verbal expression.”
Jackson tested not just his verbal limits but his artistic limits as well. Having seen Goldstein’s deft paintings during the summer, he ventured into oil paints for the first time (Charles undoubtedly bore the additional expense) and found himself once again engaged in a “continuous running battle” with his tools. “Jack fought paint and brushes all the way,” classmate Axel Horn later wrote. “They fought back, and the canvas was testimony to the struggle. His early paintings were tortuous with painfully disturbed surfaces. In his efforts to win these contests, he would often shift media in mid-painting.” Horn recalls a particular portrait on which Jackson had tried, in succession, lacquers, oils, chalks, pencil, and ink in his struggle to make peace with the image. But even Benton’s generous eye saw little of value in the result. He called Jackson a “damn fine colorist”—a dubious accolade, given that most of Benton’s contemporaries considered Benton himself a dreadful colorist—but thought his paintings lacked “the human element.” Whether or not Benton expressed his bleak assessment, Jackson was acutely aware of it. He had only to look around his apartment, where Charles’s paintings lined the walls, to see how far his work fell short of genuine accomplishment—on Benton’s terms, at least. On one of his rare visits to the Horatio Street studio, Frank remembers being surprised to find only Charles’s paintings on display; Jackson had turned all of his to face the wall.
Not until the following spring, at the second annual Washington Square Outdoor Show, did Jackson summon up the courage to exhibit his work. In late April 1932, along a stretch of sidewalk on MacDougal Alley, Jackson Pollock had his first public showing. He waited all day, sitting on the curb, posing in his red bandanna for a charcoal portrait by Joe Delaney, and hoping for a buyer—only five to ten dollars for a signed original. But no one bought.
The single bright spot in Jackson’s life continued to be the Benton apartment on Hudson Street where T. P. listened in thrall to the further adventures of Jack Sass and Rita laughed her big laugh while stirring a kettle of her famous spaghetti sauce. In the fall of 1931, however, the coziness and exclusivity of life with the Bentons was threatened by the arrival of the Harmonica Rascals.
Tom had first conceived the group the previous spring. Depressed and listless following the completion of the New School murals, he had begun toying with his son’s harmonica and discovered that he had a natural talent for the instrument. That spark—Benton called it “a revelation from heaven”—touched off a conflagration of enthusiasm that eventually consumed all of his students as well as Rita and T. P. He began with pieces by Bach, Purcell, Couperin, and Josquin des Pres, but soon turned to more suitably rustic fare: folk songs, hillbilly ballads, and country blues. “We commenced charging a nickel when anybody missed a note,” Benton wrote in his autobiography, “[but] that became rather expensive as we increased the complexity of our music and we had to abandon it.” Benton had an almost comic enthusiasm for making music: he stomped, hooted, and “danced” through every number. Loosened up by bootleg liquor, others joined in until the floor shook and the lights shuddered.
Despite the circus-like atmosphere, Benton’s students ignored these Monday-night “musicales” at their peril. Sooner or later almost all of them joined in: Charles on the mouth harp (“I was no damn good”), Tolegian on the harmonica, Rita and Axel Horn on the guitar, Bernie Steffen on the dulcimer, and eventually little T. P. on flute, playing songs like “In the Good Old Summertime” and “The Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley.” For those with no training or facility, there was always a kazoo or a comb with tissue paper. Eager to outdo the others, Jackson (who had already tried and failed on the harmonica years before in Wrightwood) bought a used violin and tried teaching himself to play fiddle. After only a few frustrating hours of practice, he smashed the instrument to pieces and settled for the mouth harp, Charles’s instrument. With a little instruction from Tolegian, he learned to play it well enough to join the band, although real mastery eluded him. “[I] can’t play a damned thing—much,” he confessed in a letter to his father, “but it kinda puts me to sleep at nite and I kinda get a kick out of it.” In a phrase that could have applied to all of Jackson’s life at the time, Benton said he played “enthusiastically, if not terribly well.”
Portrait of Pollock by Joe Delaney, 1932, chalk on paper, 10” × 7¼”
Sometime after the first snowfall, the Harmonica Rascals were forced to suspend their rehearsals when Tom Benton took to his bed with a high fever. The illness—Jackson thought it was typhoid or “the grip”—couldn’t have come at a more inopportune time. Persuaded by the success of the New School murals and Rita’s backstage promotion, Juliana Force of the new Whitney Museum of American Art had asked Benton to paint another series of murals for the museum library. “Hard luck to get sick just as he gets a job,” Jackson wrote home. Hard luck for Benton, but not for Jackson, who, with Benton sick in bed, was able to spend more time alone with Rita—watc
hing T. P., assuming Tom’s share of the chores, even accompanying her occasionally on social outings. She flattered him endlessly—“from the beginning she called him a genius,” recalls her niece—cooed over his looks in her sultry voice, smoothed his frustrations, and tested his diffidence. “She was a very flirtatious woman,” recalls one of Jackson’s fellow students, “very vivacious, very Mediterranean. She had a way of making you feel, as you sat at a table with twenty other people, that she had cooked this meal especially for you.”
The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, Thomas Hart Benton, 1934, oil and tempera on canvas, 41¼” × 52½”. Jackson posed for the figure playing the harmonica.
For the first time in his life, Jackson felt the weightlessness of seduction.
It was not the first time Rita Benton had crossed the line between flirtation and seduction—not even the first time with a Pollock. In 1928, her fancy had been struck by Frank Pollock, who arrived in New York blond and suntanned from an eighteen-day cruise through the Panama Canal. Then as now, the attraction ran both ways. “She had winning ways that were pretty damned hard to resist,” Frank recalls. “Her lips were different than Mother’s. She had an angular face and polished skin, black hair and sparkling eyes—a voluptuous Italian, very voluptuous. I wasn’t used to being in such company.” Despite Charles’s warnings, Frank soon found himself alone with Rita in the Bentons’ kitchen. “She said she’d been reading a book, The Well of Loneliness, about lesbianism, and I said, ‘That’s terrible!’ But it was her way of bringing up the issue of sex, and I got very uncomfortable with just the two of us there.” Late one night, he accompanied Rita and some friends to a Harlem club. Halfway through the floor show and a dozen drinks, while a male stripper named Snake Hips bumped and ground through a twenty-minute “serpent dance,” Frank felt Rita’s hand on his knee. “I was unused to that sort of thing, and all I can remember is my embarrassment,” says Frank. “I couldn’t believe it was true.”
No doubt, Jackson wanted desperately to believe it was true. Six awkward months with Berthe Pacifico, culminating in a few family dinners, were all that stood between him and his worst fears of sexual failure. More than his pampered childhood, more than his exemption from chores, more even than his incompetence as an artist, it was his unconquered virginity that marked him as an outcast among the Pollock brothers.
At Martha’s Vineyard: Jackson in beret, Rita Benton in hat, T. P. Benton with dog
Tom Benton, too, set a demanding standard of sexual prowess. When asked about the “social life” on his sketching sojourns, he would respond with a lascivious chuckle: “You know how dogs are—well—I was like that. When the urge came on me, it came on me, that’s all. Nothin’ to it.” Jackson had no way of knowing that Benton’s whorehouse tales were as tall as Louis Jay’s cowboy legends told around a Kaibab campfire. All around him, he saw fellow students living out Benton’s Rabelaisian fantasy. “We were geniuses,” says Herman Cherry, “and we all had girls—we were either living with one or trying to live with one.” From the suave interloper, Arshile Gorky, who “liked sexy women and never had a shortage of them,” to Manuel Tolegian, who corresponded faithfully with Araks Vartabedian, his future wife, on the West Coast even as he scoured New York for more immediate gratification. Of the many attractive models who hung around the League, Mervin Jules recalls that “you rarely were turned down if you propositioned them.” Even fifteen-year-old Nathan Katz was a regular at the League’s twenty-five-cent Saturday night parties where girls sometimes ran naked and half drunk into Fifty-seventh Street and where the Midtown Precinct paddy wagons (“Black Marias”) made regular stops. “It wasn’t uncommon for girls to come to these binges without any clothes on,” Katz remembers. “I danced with one and all she had on was charcoal dust. When I walked away, I realized that half her costume had come off on me.”
Despite the sexual opportunities surrounding him, Jackson remained inexplicably aloof. “He was so handsome, as good-looking as any movie actor,” says Elizabeth, “but I never saw him with a girlfriend. I never could understand why he seemed so terrified of women.” Benton later attributed Jackson’s reticence to “‘blocs,’ psychic obstructions [that] constantly afflicted him. … He would get ‘stalled’ in drawing, in painting, in all kinds of activities he attempted, including those of sex.” In the end, sex was even more frustrating for Jackson than art. “The drawing at least he had an opportunity to struggle with,” says Axel Horn. “There weren’t too many women who were willing to let him struggle with them. There’d need to be some sort of follow-up. He’d have to offer something more if there was to be a continuing encounter. And there never was.”
Until Rita Benton. Whether Rita intended to seduce him or not, Jackson perceived in her attentions, for the first time in his life, the mixture of maternity and sexuality to which all the Pollock brothers were inevitably drawn. For the first time, sex seemed like a possibility.
As early as the forties, rumors of Jackson’s “affair” with his teacher’s wife were circulating in the art world—most of them started by Jackson himself. Frank recalls a conversation with Jackson in 1954: “He told me right outside the door to his studio that he had had an affair with Rita. I was kind of shocked, but then Sande came over and confirmed it. We just gossiped among brothers.” “I was very shocked,” recalls B. H. Friedman, Jackson’s friend and first biographer. “He said it just this way: ‘I used to fuck her.’ Period.” Rumors spawned plausible scenarios. “I could see her initiating him into sex as a favor,” suggests one of Jackson’s League classmates, “doing it to help him resolve some awkward problems—doing it in a motherly way. Spaghetti and sympathy, you might say.” Even Tom Benton later heard the rumors and deferred to their plausibility. “Of course, feeling the way [Jack] did about Rita,” Tom told an interviewer in 1964, “he came to resent me.”
In fact, it was an affair, like others to come, that existed only in Jackson’s imagination. That Rita flirted and teased, perhaps even tormented Jackson, is undeniable. (It would be years before she fully understood her role in his groping search for sexual fulfillment.) Her attentions may have been intended to flatter his masculinity and reinforce his sexual confidence, but they had exactly the opposite effect. Almost two decades later, in a moment of utter honesty, Jackson admitted to his wife, Lee Krasner, that “Rita Benton played with me and titillated me and got me all excited, but when it came to the moment of truth, she wouldn’t go through with it.”
Rita’s rejection, combined with the continuing creative frustration and a bitter cold winter, plunged Jackson into a deep depression. In the studio, he would sit with his head in his hands, unable to work, for days at a time. He had never stopped drinking, but now the gray, snow-laden clouds brought with them the old despair, the old emptiness that he hadn’t felt since Los Angeles. Occasional nightly binges became weekend binges, then weeklong binges. Sometimes he would disappear for days, waking up on a friend’s couch or in the sawdust on a speakeasy floor. Typically, the binges began with friends like Joe Delaney and Bruce Mitchell, somewhere in Chelsea. From there he would stumble uptown to Nathan Katz’s skylight studio in the Lincoln Square Arcade, with its Atwater-Kent and its upright piano for dancing. Katz was usually too drunk to care if Jackson wandered in for a few drinks, then wandered out again without making a contribution. “I was drunk for three solid years,” Katz recalls, “from the age of fourteen to seventeen. It wasn’t so uncommon.”
On Saturday nights, Jackson could pay his way into the League dance where flasks and bottles passed back and forth as briskly as girls. Lionel Hampton’s silver band filled the room with brassy jazz, and scuffles broke out like little whirlpools on the crowded dance floor. Jackson never danced: when sober, he was too shy; when drunk, it made him dizzy and sick. Mostly he watched the crowd, reeking of corn liquor, then turned and left for the next party. Afterward, he would push through the snow to a penthouse party on Central Park West or the Upper East Side where many of the League’s
rich-boy dilettantes lived—“Those were suave affairs,” says Joe Delaney who, as a black, wasn’t always welcome. Of course, by the standards of the day, anybody with a job was considered wealthy. On weekdays, the speakeasy on Fifty-eighth Street was always open if Jackson was sober enough to remember the password. With whatever dimes and quarters he could earn from Rita and occasional dollar bills from Stella, he bought bathtub gin from a bootlegger named Jack Frost. “It was all right,” remembers Katz, who drank his share of it. “At least we didn’t go blind.” Cheaper but more dangerous was corn whiskey, trucked in from North Carolina or Pennsylvania in barrels. And even that was nectar to the bums Jackson passed shivering in the street, who were reduced to squeezing Sterno through a sock.
On Christmas Eve, 1931, Jackson and Tolegian were reeling between parties, enjoying the holiday lights on Washington Square, when they passed a group of worshipers carrying candles down the dark corridor of Bleecker Street. They followed the group east, past the Bowery, and into the elegant Greek Revival Church of the Nativity on Second Avenue. “Jackson walked right up to the altar,” Tolegian recalled, “and knocked everything over—the candles, the cross, the chalice, everything.” When the police came, Tolegian accompanied Jackson to the police station where, in all likelihood, Charles bailed him out.
Jackson’s winter was filled with scuffles and brawls and Saturday night bouts, some as far as 125th Street in Harlem. More than once the binges ended when the police wrestled him to jail—or, if he was too drunk to walk, dragged him there. Tolegian was present one night on a Hudson River dock when Jackson, “angry at civilization,” flung himself into the icy water. “I had to jump in and save him,” Tolegian recalled. “Otherwise, he would have drowned.” As early as 1932, Katz remembers, “it was common knowledge that Jackson was suicidal.”
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