When Marca-Relli heard the news, he was “sure the conversation at Jackson’s did Tomlin in.” Reluctantly, he brought the news to the Pollocks. “Gee, it’s too bad about Tomlin dying,” he offered. “What do you want him to do,” Jackson snapped, “live for your convenience?”
By the fall of 1953, Jackson was virtually alone. He had even broken off with the miracle worker, Grant Mark—although not because of any personal epiphany. Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, the “final authority” on such matters, had undergone her own “crisis of realization” (including a genuine breakdown), packed her files, and left Mark’s posh Park Avenue offices for good. (Not long afterward, Mark gave up his practice in New York.) With few friends, fewer visitors, little work, less money, and no easy cures to keep hope alive, Jackson began to talk openly of suicide. Several times he sought out Dr. Wayne Barker, a concerned, straight-talking psychiatrist who had rented a house on Fireplace Road that summer. Although never formally Barker’s patient, Jackson shared with him the urges that increasingly preoccupied him. “I’m no damn good,” he told Barker. “What do you think of suicide?” Barker thought the question was just Jackson’s “way of sizing you up.”
Lee had already done her own “sizing up” and decided that, once again, the only person who could save Jackson from himself was Stella Pollock.
42
ABANDONED
For once, Lee and Jackson agreed. With the next show at the Janis Gallery scheduled for November and the studio almost bare, Jackson had to quit drinking and get to work. In August 1953, they invited Stella to Springs. But this time the invitation wasn’t for a week or even a month. Desperate, exasperated, and shell-shocked by the long, harrowing summer, Lee yearned for a more permanent solution. She asked Stella to live with them.
In Deep River, Stella, now seventy-eight, stood poised in gloves and traveling veil, eager to accept the invitation. She was fed up with her grim, impoverished life in a small Connecticut town. Years of rheumatism and bursitis had left her weak, unable to walk long distances, and virtually imprisoned in the McCoys’ tiny apartment. Her relationship with Arloie had deteriorated to the point where, according to Marie Pollock, “when Stella came to visit, it took her six weeks to get Arloie out of her system.” In letters to other family members, she fumed over Arloie’s “selfishness,” accusing her of “wasting” money and stealing the checks the other brothers sent. The two women fought a fierce guerrilla war over the mail, racing each other to the mailbox to claim whatever contributions it might contain. The recriminations spread to every corner of their life together in stiflingly close quarters. “Stella didn’t like the way Arloie raised her kids, the way she kept the kitchen, or the way she did the washing,” recalls Marie Pollock. “Everything grated.”
To Stella, Springs represented escape. The days she had spent on Fireplace Road and MacDougal Alley—sitting at the edge of parties, meeting Jackson’s artist friends, listening to the highflown talk, shopping in the mornings, gallery-going in the afternoons—had been among the best of her life. Clement Greenberg, who saw her often during that time, called her culture crazy, and commented that her idea of paradise was Greenwich Village. “Whenever anyone mentioned subjects like art or architecture, or anything cultural, she would move in and listen intently to every word.” To Stella, Springs seemed to offer the life of refinement she had been searching for since leaving Tingley half a century before.
To Jackson’s brothers, however, Springs represented something else entirely. When news of Stella’s proposed move reached them, objections ricocheted around the country. Was Jackson in any condition? Did Lee really want Stella as a permanent houseguest? Could their relationship bear the strain? They had all heard the chilling stories of Jackson’s recent downturn: the hospitalizations, the car wreck, the threats at knifepoint. Frank had recently visited and found “Jackson drinking beer and abusing Lee verbally, unmercifully, calling her a slut, a whore—all kinds of goddamned ugly things.” In the three years since the family reunion, all the brothers except Sande had made the trek to Springs to “take Jackson under their wings and talk to him and get him to straighten up,” according to Charles’s daughter Jeremy, a high school student at the time.
Beneath the stated concern for Stella’s welfare, however, were deeper, older, and more potent objections. Jackson still had made no contribution to the fund the brothers had set up to help Sande defray expenses and provide Stella with a small allowance. On several occasions, both Charles and Frank had made pleas on her behalf, and Jackson had promised to help, but the money never followed. Meanwhile, Jackson blindly pursued his campaign to impress his brothers with his affluence and importance. But the more he wanted to be seen as an adult and an equal, the more they saw him, in the words of one relative, as “a cantankerous child who, if he can’t get his way, throws himself on the floor and kicks his heels.” Lee was no better in their view. No one had forgotten her superciliousness at the family reunion. Far from encouraging Jackson to contribute to Stella’s upkeep, like the other wives, Lee actively opposed it. “I tried to talk with him about his responsibilities toward his mother,” Frank recalls, “but Lee wouldn’t let me. She said, ‘Jack’s got his own responsibilities.’” When Lee discovered that Jackson had given Frank a painting, “her displeasure was perfectly clear,” Frank recalls. (No one in the family yet knew about the terms of Jackson’s will.)
The brothers also resented Stella’s willful blindness. Even though they themselves had tried to protect her from the worst of Jackson’s problems, they resented her refusal to acknowledge those problems and her Panglossian praise of his every effort at improvement, no matter how halfhearted or short-lived. She made excuses for his failure to contribute to her upkeep—“She talked about how he needed this special diet and how expensive it was,” according to Marie—and reveled vicariously in his affluence. Even as she carped at Arloie for squandering Sande’s meager earnings and misappropriating her allowance, she took perverse pleasure in Jackson’s profligacy; the very fact that he was rich enough to waste money became a point of maternal pride. For Jackson’s brothers, this was the story of Jackson and Stella in a nutshell. Whatever Jackson did, whatever lives he disrupted, whatever pain he inflicted, in Stella’s eyes, he could do no wrong. For years Sande had sacrificed for her, endured poverty and domestic strife for her, yet, said Elizabeth Pollock, “the one she loved and adored, the one she always longed for, was Jackson.” Now, after years of excusing his misbehavior, suffering his arrogance, and capitulating to his tantrums, they saw a chance to strike back. The fact that Stella wanted to go and Jackson wanted her to come so badly only made them all the more determined to prevent it.
On the other hand, something had to be done, and quickly, about the deteriorating situation in Deep River. In addition to domestic friction, the brothers worried about Stella’s “old age quirks popping up” in a way that could be “unhealthy for Karen and Jay.” Yet she couldn’t live alone—on damp days, her arthritis left her virtually immobile—and none of the other brothers wanted to take her in.
Faced with such a “perplexing problem,” they finally relented—at least temporarily. “Staying with Jack might be alright for a short time,” Jay conceded in a letter to Charles, “provided it is during one of his sober periods, otherwise mother will be placed in a very awkward situation.” Frank concurred. “In general,” he wrote Charles at the end of August, “we do not believe that we ought to expect more than a temporary stay for Mother at Jack’s.” All parties agreed that two months was a fair trial. That, at least, would carry Jackson through preparations for the November show.
On Tuesday, September 1, Charles drove Stella to Springs. “[Jack] was in good shape,” he reported to the family on his return. “We had a long private talk during the afternoon. My impression is that he is more ready than ever before to willingly assume some obligations towards Mother.” But Charles had been through too many turns with Jackson not to harbor reservations. “I am fully aware,” he wrote Jay in the
cryptic circumlocutions typical of Pollock family correspondence, “that intangible events, seemingly beyond his control, may make a prolonged stay for Mother unpleasant or inadvisable.” The next morning, before leaving, Charles had another “long talk,” this time with Lee. He found her “cooperative and realistic.” “She feels the decision to have Mother with them is Jack’s,” Charles wrote, “and that he may be ready to shoulder the responsibility.”
For a while, Charles’s reservations seemed misplaced. The weather turned fair and balmy, Stella’s rheumatism disappeared, Jackson divided his time between harvesting the garden, painting, and tending to his mother’s needs. Later, Stella would brag that Jackson and Lee “did more waiting on me than I ever got from [Arloie] in all the eleven years.” Eager to put the family doubts to rest, Stella mailed a barrage of letters detailing her contentment and Jackson’s good behavior. “I have just had my breakfast cantelope from Jack’s garden very good,” she wrote Charles. “It is a beautiful day. … Jack turned on the sprinkler and [the neighborhood children] got out there all bare even the little tike … then toasted hot dogs out in the yard Jack said how in the Devil did you ever raise five boys.”
The paintings Jackson began under his mother’s gaze reflected the same obsession with the past, both personal and artistic. In Ritual, he combined the totemic figures, fractured anatomies, and personal nightmares of Naked Man with Knife (Stella’s favorite painting) with a palette and a “spiralic” composition that echoed back to Benton’s classroom. In Sleeping Effort and Easter and the Totem, old core memories resurfaced and assumed the same biomorphic, semifigurative form and dulcet coloring that they had in the mid-forties in paintings like The Water Bull, The Tea Cup, and The Key. In Four Opposites, the most fully abstract work of the winter, he concealed the figures in a lush tapestry of brushed color and aluminum paint evocative of the great drip paintings of the early fifties. Although some were decorative and derivative, others were as close as Jackson had come in years to the masterpieces of the past. Lee, who had yielded the kitchen to her motherin-law for the duration, told a friend that the salutory effects of Stella’s visit were “too good to be true.”
Lee, Stella, and Jackson in the kitchen at Springs
She was right. In late September, the bubble burst. Details, of course, were never mentioned in family correspondence. Whether Jackson, in a drunken outburst, finally bared his darkest side to Stella or, like Roy Pollock, fled to the barn and drank himself furtively into unconsciousness once too often, no one in the Pollock family—least of all Stella—was willing to reveal. Perhaps a month of abstinence was more than Jackson could tolerate. In the past, Stella had never stayed for more than a week at a time. Whatever the reason, on Sunday, September 27, Charles arrived at the Fireplace Road house and, without explanation, returned Stella to Deep River.
After a series of frantic phone calls, Jackson and Lee succeeded in persuading Stella to return the following week. Once again, Charles accompanied her, ostensibly because “he wanted to see Jacks’s work and Lee’s too,” but primarily to reassure himself that Jackson wouldn’t make the same mistake, whatever it was, a second time. Once again, assurances were given all around. But the mood had changed. Even Stella, despite her determination to leave Deep River, now realized that Springs could never be a permanent solution. She treasured her illusions too much. If Jackson was truly self-destructing, she didn’t want to witness it and, on her return, resisted his contrite entreaties to extend her stay beyond the end of October. “Jack had asked me to stay with them through Sept. & Oct,” she wrote Frank at the end of September, “now they want me to stay longer.” To cover her hasty retreat, she offered lamely, “I think it is to damp here fore me and I have to get back to Deep River and get some clothes fixed nothing fits any more.”
Ritual, 1953, 90½” × 42¼”
As soon as Stella left, Jackson plunged into another round of drinking, distinguishable from previous extravaganzas of self-abuse only in its supporting cast. This time, when Jackson disappeared or came home at three in the morning drunk and threatening, Lee called John Cole. The son of a “slightly down-at-the-heels society family” from East Hampton, who had gone to war and to Yale, Cole and his wife Cynthia had moved in 1951 into Berton Roueché‘s old place only three houses away on Fireplace Road. Neither could have imagined what life near the Pollocks would be like. Cole first earned Lee’s confidence when she hired him to do some house painting. “I walked in every morning,” says Cole, “so it was inevitable that I got involved in their lives.” Soon he was being summoned on nights when Jackson disappeared to search the roads for his car “because Lee feared it might be overturned somewhere,” or just to sit with her while she waited by the phone “for the cops calling to say that Jack had been killed.” Sometimes the police called Cole directly, and he would go in his Model A to fetch Jackson out of a ditch. When he arrived at the house, Cole sensed “this tremendous tension,” later comparing the experience to his wartime missions in a bomber over Germany. The few times he could coax a coherent sentence from Jackson, it was usually about his family, about his brothers—especially his “neurotically fraternal feeling” for brother Sande—and about his mother.
Jackson wanted Stella.
And he knew how to get her. With Lee in terrified pursuit, he would crash holiday parties “and make a pig of himself,” according to one witness. “People would flee as soon as he appeared at the door.” Only brave new friends, like the Coles, dared invite him to dinner anymore. “Then, of course, after we’d asked him, we’d spend the next two or three days wondering about whether he was going to be sober or not,” says Cole. “Half the time he was and half the time he wasn’t.” At one such dinner, Jackson replayed the Thanksgiving debacle. “He just banged his hands down on the table and kept pushing,” Cole recalls. “Everything slipped over towards him and off the edge, including all the lobster stew and white wine, which just about broke my heart.”
Once, in a rare moment of sobriety, Jackson tried to explain his behavior in terms of “the effects of the moon.” Lee nodded understandingly; “because the moon had quite an effect on me, too,” she said. “It made me feel more emotional, more intense.” But even Lee must have known that the moon had nothing to do with the intensity of Jackson’s depression or the momentum of his drunken temper. He wanted Stella.
Because he couldn’t work—or refused to work—his career, long in jeopardy, fell into irreparable shambles. So far he had sent only four works (Ocean Greyness, Unformed Figure, Sleeping Effort, and Ritual) to Sidney Janis for the November show, and even these he wasn’t proud of. For two group exhibitions that season, Janis’s “5th Anniversary Exhibition” and his “9 American Painters,” Jackson chose paintings from the previous year (Number 12, 1952 and Blue Poles) instead of current works. Looking back on the paintings of this period, he later told Elizabeth Wright Hubbard that “he wondered whether he was saying anything.” By mid-October, Janis had no choice but to cancel the November show. This would be Jackson’s first year without a show in a decade. The cancellation also forced him to borrow even more money from Janis to finish paying George Loper for the shingling job. Although the show was tentatively rescheduled for the following February to avoid the public humiliation of missing an entire season, no one, not even Lee, was confident Jackson would be ready, then or ever.
Jackson’s plight attracted much attention and sympathy. No doubt recalling the enthusiasm he had always shown for renovating the house on Fireplace Road, Lee had the interior repainted. This time, however, Jackson ostentatiously ignored the entire project. Sidney Janis sent a series of supportive notes, complimenting the new works (“they are great!”), reporting the return of a few works from the illfated Paris show, relating some lukewarm praise from Clement Greenberg (“Clem reacted very nicely to your new things”), and generally trying to balance his concern for Jackson’s spirits with his anxiety over the declining quantity and quality of his output. In one letter, he dangles the possibility o
f a sale (“we have at least one client who is most interested”), while at the same time explaining tersely why he hasn’t sent any of the new paintings to the Whitney Annual (“it wouldn’t do any good”). “We are keeping the 1953s for a grand coup, your one-man show,” he wrote with patronizing cheeriness. “I have a hunch you are doing some painting. I am of course eager to see another bang-up Pollock show and I am sure I’ll get my wish.”
Clyfford Still, hearing of Jackson’s depression and work block, tried to rally his spirits with a letter.
Went up to Janis’s gallery with Barney [Newman] the other day & took the liberty of pushing into the office to see some of the paintings you did this summer.
What each work said, what it’s position, what each achieved you must know. But above all, these details and attentions, the great thing, to see, came through. It was that here a man had been at work, at the profoundest work a man can do, facing up to what he is and aspires to.
I left the room with the gratitude & renewal of courage that always comes at such moments. This is just my way of saying thanks, & with the hopes that some of my work has brought some of the same to you.
Clyff Still
Jackson was too enamored of Still, too hungry for approval, apparently, to notice that the wordsmith Still had carefully avoided complimenting the new paintings. Instead, in gratitude, he rose from his creative inertia long enough to paint The Deep, a large, vertical canvas on which he transformed one of Still’s jagged, paint-encrusted fragments of color into a dark, womb-like opening in the middle of an organic, sumptuously brushed white field. It was a tribute to Still—unlike anything else Jackson had done—yet, arguably, freer, surer, more evocative, more profound than anything Still had done. In late November, Still called Jackson to announce that he had joined the Janis gallery. Undisturbed by the apparent contradiction (the pioneer-artist of pure motives joining the most aggressively commercial gallery in New York), Jackson congratulated Janis: “it puts your gallery in the big league,” he wrote, revealing just how incompletely he had absorbed Still’s Puritan preachments.
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