The Disappointment Artist

by Jonathan Lethem

  As a puppy, Blue was rescued from the street. My mother found him in a state of cringing fear, and near starvation. The dog’s condition wasn’t a mystery, though. He’d been kept in the side yard of the home of a Puerto Rican family two houses away, and my parents had seen him cowering under the hand of their teenage boys’ merry violence for weeks before he’d been set loose on the street.

  “The Green House Kids,” as my family called the teeming inhabitants of that ramshackle structure, were a foul bunch. Not that we allowed ourselves to say so at the time. Instead, I and my siblings fostered what now strikes me as a hysterical myth of displacement: we credited our discomfort to the dog, who, we were positive we could determine, “didn’t like Puerto Ricans,” and of course couldn’t be blamed. We got to marvel at his prejudice, guilt free. The parable of Blue’s grudge was a container for our reluctance to give a certain thing its name: we liked plenty of Puerto Ricans, but the nearest at hand, the Green House Kids, were pretty awful.

  Blue bore this responsibility nobly, as he did everything. He was a beautiful member of the family.

  Open marriage turned to separation in 1975. My father moved out of the house for a while, at one point into another Brooklyn commune, a neighborhood away. I’d say this was the worst thing that could have happened, except that denial has obliterated all but the curiosity I felt, to a point of exhilaration, at the expansion of my world to this new turf. Just for instance, one of the guys in the new commune was just out of NYU film school, and deep into Star Trek, my favorite television show after The Twilight Zone. He put my brother and me into his movie, which was being shot on three adjacent rooftops of differing heights, to symbolize the class system in America. My brother and I played the middle-class kids. We got to fling garbage off our roof, onto the heads of the poor.

  Anyway, the worst thing that could have happened happened next. My mother fell ill, suffering seizures first taken for epilepsy, but soon diagnosed as symptoms of a brain tumor. This drew our family into one place again, and my father’s studio back into our upper floor. My father’s intensity of purpose didn’t waver; in fact, the body of late-seventies work really begins after my mother’s diagnosis. This was with her passionate encouragement. She sat for him constantly, in her robe, and out of it. The portraits from that year record the patchwork progress of her hair’s regrowth, after being shaved for incisions on her skull, and after her follicles’ damage by radiation.

  With the drawing group, and his wife, in this era my father also painted his kids (always fully clothed, though it was a reasonably nudist household). I recall sitting for a portrait with my hands folded, wearing an orange Mets wristband. Though I usually killed posing time by reading in his studio, my father didn’t want a book in this painting. He wanted to see my eyes. In the painting that resulted I sit in the crossroads, bracketed by my father’s palette table and a mirror in which he could see himself; both table and father appear in the portrait.

  My father had opened the doors of his studio to the ordinary days of his house. While chasing a “European” theme, his voracious brush gobbled life into the frame. The subject, literal and sublimated, is family, community, and the counterculture, that circle of sympathetic souls into which he’d dissolved his pipe-and-elbow-patches authority. The questing, pensive, contradictory attitudes of the models and the artists, the friends and family and imagined figures arrayed in these pictures tell of the nourishing warmth but also the tenuousness, and sometimes the sexual disarray, of a life lived in the embrace of communal ideals.

  In one of the most free and instinctive paintings from this period, Loft, the cast is reduced to painter and model (not to mention the dog). She reads, while he greets the viewer head-on, fingers full of brushes, and stripped of reserve in the simplest way—he’s naked too. The title, and the youthfulness of the bemused, tousled painter, link it to a halcyon year of discovery: 1963–64, to Richard and Judith alone in the loft on West Broadway. It’s no self-portrait. The woman doesn’t resemble my mother, or the painter my father. But the rhapsodic brushwork emphasizes the unguarded intimacy of the scene, a page torn from a dream diary in the lives of the bohemians.

  Judith Lethem died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. Her death was, of course, a private passage, yet the long illness which she and we endured seemed inextricable from the battles of our family’s life in those years. The souring of utopian optimism in the mid-seventies, a historical cliché, was for us true, and personal. Even before her illness, my family’s difference ensured we could feel superior and magical, or freakish and tragic, but never ordinary. What set us apart as artists or potential artists, and as hippies, protesters, commune dwellers, Quakers, white kids but in public school, all seemed to foretell our special fate, an uncanny story destined, not justly but perhaps somehow appropriately, for an end in hospitals and jails, or an early funeral.

  How personal? My mother was one of the “Capitol Steps Thirteen,” a group wrongly arrested during a Washington, D.C., protest for occupying what the ACLU would later prove, in a lawsuit on their behalf, to be public space. She was pregnant with my sister, Mara, at the time. We three kids bragged of this legacy, relishing details such as the slices of baloney the arrestees liberated from their jailhouse sandwiches and slapped up against the wall in protest of their treatment. But we also must have been haunted by the tale, by images of our mom and dad as inhabitants of a sphere of jubilant stridency (electrified by bolts of persecution mania) so beyond the usual boundaries of a family’s life.

  If my mother was remarkable then it had to cut both ways. The horrendous diagnosis could only be more evidence of how remarkable she was, signal, not noise, in our interpretation of our family’s place in the world. If our sense of special artistic and political purpose was to be preserved, it would have to conform to tragic destiny as my mother fell ill, just as it would need to encompass the world’s resistance to our standards, made official a few years later by the ascendance of Reagan. The conflation was made, briefly, explicit: we, or at least I, succumbed to the temptation to blame my mother’s brain tumor on Ulano, the toxin-belching solvent factory two blocks away on Bergen Street, and tangible like a punch to the nose for many more blocks around. Here was a chance to widen the circle of chaos and catastrophe from the family, outward to the environment, the political moment.

  Ulano, a squat, windowless monstrosity situated exactly between the Wyckoff Gardens housing projects and the gentrifying street I grew up on, had been listed in an EPA report as one of the nation’s ten worst urban polluters. After my mother’s death my father spearheaded the neighborhood’s organized resistance to its undiluted foulness, really the last of his and therefore my family’s sequence of great causes. In truth, if my mother’s brain cancer had an external cause it was likely a bad batch of polio vaccine, whose nightmarish delayed effects on its recipients, neatly matching my mother’s case, were only traced three decades later. The faulty vaccine was distributed in Queens and Brooklyn in the midfifties, the span when my mother would have been immunized.

  As a parent, Judith was a passionate advocate, never abdicating an inch of her ferocious scrutiny of our lives until illness made that scrutiny impossible. But what she advocated was paradoxical: freedom, and responsibility for the results of our own choices. She debunked custodial authority, as my father debunked painterly authority. An example: my first chance to smoke pot came in her presence, when I was eleven. I’d been sitting with a group of her late-night friends around our kitchen table when a joint was produced and lit. One of the guests, a newcomer, a man (I mean, he was probably twenty-one or twenty-two; he wouldn’t impress me as a man now) seemed surprised she didn’t object to my presence—titillated too. Raising the stakes to provoke her response, he passed the joint to me.

  “He’ll make his own decision,” my mother announced, with pride. It was a declaration that dictated its own truth. She bet right; I passed the joint along, unpuffed. I saved my own first drug experiences for late nights with my peers,
instead of hers, a couple of years later. Fate then robbed me of my chance to smoke my mother’s drug of choice, and my own, with Judith. But I grasped my options. And my stance toward drugs, inscribed in that moment, was her testament: no right and wrong outside the user’s (or refuser’s) personal sense of rightness or wrongness. The only certain wrong at my mother’s table was the hippie’s hypocritical gesture, his drug prurience. And, with my help, she’d put him in his place.

  I joined the drawing group in the year before my mother’s death, and attended sporadically for a year or so after. In this same period I applied to Music and Art High School, got in, and went. I’d drawn and painted since before I could remember (and I would carry on for a while after my focus had shifted to narrative, to film, comics, and fiction). But at thirteen I wanted to be my dad in the most literal way.

  I was also a fake, being thirteen. At the Thursday night meetings of the group I drew but also soaked in the scene. Ever eager for talk to resume, I hated the long poses, rooting most of all for that moment when someone would go around the corner to the German delicatessen for beer, soda, and imported chocolate cookies. I felt watchful, but I’d be flattering myself to claim I was a fly on the wall. The truth is I strolled around between poses as everyone did, making quasi-astute comments on the grown-ups’ sketches.

  You’d think I was taken with the bodies. I kept a partition, though, between my typically churning curiosity and this sober feast of blatant nudity all laid out before me. I was sure the kind of women’s bodies I ravished in my mind’s eye had nothing in common with the models’ bodies to which I had regular viewing access, dumb as that sounds. In fact, I entertained crushes on a couple of the women in the drawing group, who never stepped out of their clothes. They were alive to my imagination. The naked ladies shed a light that blinded.

  Encouraging me, my father also inadvertently funded a grotesquely exuberant ego. When I was fifteen, my mother dead for less than a year, I said something that upset him. My father and I were walking together, down Nevins Street, in daylight. I was bragging, I think, about the quality of my figure drawing, when I suggested that I was ready for a show. An exhibition of my drawings.

  I got as far as asking whether his own gallery would be interested. The work I had in mind was done in the drawing group, a series of brightly colored pastels on thick white boards, which were in fact the discarded centers of picture mats, salvaged from some framer’s shop, in the jackdaw manner of both my father’s studio and his carpentry workshop.

  He stopped us on the sidewalk. “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you really think you’re ready, Jonathan?”

  I’d located that rarity, my father’s open temper. It was as though I’d probed for the limit of his antiauthoritarian ethos, and found it: an ape may grope a monolith, or a cat look at a king, but a child was not yet an artist. I think all of Richard Lethem’s training, his degrees, his Fulbright, the pride of his guild, reared in him at that moment. The look on his face then seemed to encompass a disbelief in all that living had cost this artist, since the journey from West Broadway and Kansas City to Brooklyn, and from professordom to carpentry. Most of all in the unfathomable loss of his wife, that champion of his painter’s prerogatives, his painter’s days— and the mother of this damnable stripling.

  The first question I remember asking about my father’s painting is: “Why are the drips there?” I asked it of my mother. I knew it wasn’t impossible to neaten up the drips; I’d seen my father’s care in stretching a canvas, stippling a perfect pen-and-ink daffodil for an announcement of my sister’s birth, or grouting tile work.

  My mother’s explanation was partly tautological. She told me that in paintings, drips were good. They gave evidence of the painter’s hand at work—well, they sure do, I thought. Rather than offer words like immediacy or expressionist to an eight-year-old, she tried an analogy: the paint drips were like the squeak of acoustic guitar strings audible in recordings of the folksingers we loved to play in that house—Phil Ochs, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger. Once she pointed them out I wasn’t sure I liked the guitar squeaks either. But her comparison has never been completely out of my mind since.

  Seven or eight years later I was an adherent of what seemed to me dripless, squeakless art. The aforementioned icons of alienation— Kubrick, Borges, and Rod Serling. I was into punk, but not messy punk: I liked the Ramones, and Devo, and Talking Heads; above all I identified with David Byrne’s grooming. When no one was looking I sold my mother’s old Jimi Hendrix and Delaney and Bonnie LPs, which no one was playing now anyway. For my father’s birthday I gave him a monograph on Magritte, a painter I knew he regarded as slick and illustrational. The gift was a heavy-handed suggestion that he ought to reconsider everything, come over to the glossily paranoid and solipsistic side of life before it was too late, as though only I knew where the action was.

  I was utterly the product of his and my mother’s sensibility, of course, but I desperately needed to convert it into something unrecognizable as such, to my father and myself. So I poured my graphic talents into hand-drawn comic books, my neophyte writing into science fiction, aspirations calculated to fly under the radar of my father’s generationally typical notion of what could and couldn’t be regarded as art.

  Discomfort with my parents’ politics I converted too, into a blithe and arrogant certainty that some advance in human evolution was the only hope for the species. This was a blend of Kubrick’s mordant certainty as to the human need for self-destruction and the optimist view of Arthur C. Clarke (and of the whole space-goofy wing of the sciencefiction genre), that humanity would outgrow its wretched cradle—the same mixture that lent 2001: A Space Odyssey such an enthralling ambivalence.

  Sometime in the eighties, when my father’s outrage was focused on Guatemala or Nicaragua, he gleaned my indifference to the latest cause. I explained by loftily quoting Arthur C. Clarke (who was, I think, quoting, or paraphrasing, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane): “Man must not export his borders into space.” We’re talking about the period in my life known as “high school,” so this was loosely translatable as Fuck you, Dad! But I hadn’t used those exact words, so we managed to eke out the following exchange, my father’s incredulity mushrooming as it had when I requested an exhibition at his gallery.

  Son: “That’s why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is so important, Dad. When we meet an alien race we’ll understand that we’re all one planet, and wars will be looked on as primitive behavior.”

  Father: “Are you saying that a world government is likely anytime soon? Or would be a good thing?”

  Son: “If not in your lifetime, certainly in mine.”

  That’s all I can bear to remember. Anyway, the point about space, I see now, was this: in space, no one can hear the guitar squeak. Or see the paint drip.

  Evenings in our communal household, in the years after Judith’s death, we cooked and washed dishes according to a weekly schedule. One of my dish nights, after a dinner where I’d not spoken a word, radiating sullen-teenage death rays instead, my father dried dishes in exchange for a moment alone with me. Piercing my cone of silence at the sink, he asked what was wrong. I played dumb—my behavior seemed normal enough to me. He pointed to my silence at dinner.

  I offered another patronizing, Kubrickian explanation: “You have to understand, Dad, I’m a misanthrope.”

  I probably thought the word meant someone who doesn’t live in a commune.

  I’d never stopped looking at his paintings. I looked at them in sessions with him in the studio, dispensing approval and criticism with a teen’s certainty. And I looked at them by myself, afternoons when he was out of the house. I often skulked in his studio, not only because, as I grew older, less interested in adults than in my own adultesque drama, the telephone there was the most private for marathon phone mopes with out-of-town girlfriends.

  One day I committed a ridiculously Oedipal crime: I “fixed” a line i
n one of his paintings, while it hung in a near-finished state on his studio wall. It was a picture that engaged and, I guess, irritated me. The line at a woman’s calf was interrupted—cruddy, it seemed to me, where it could be lucid. More cartoonish and perfect. So, drunk on my own gall, I swirled a brush in moist paint and clarified the line. The adjustment was negligible. That didn’t keep me from spending the next month or so in terror I’d be caught.

  Whether my crime was detected or not, I was never confronted. I’ve lost track of which painting I touched, if it still exists. The moment is barely an episode, a flicker of a brush. Yet between my certainty, until I was twelve or thirteen, that I would be a painter like my father, and my certainty now, that I am a writer like my father is a painter, stand those years when I wanted to be Stanley Kubrick instead. And in the middle of those years, that flicker, that sole brushstroke, stands to confess the wish to climb inside my father’s hand, inside his eye and hand and brush, to clamber inside the canvases themselves and live where I couldn’t help living anyway.

  In my lampoon of his ambition, that earlier day on Nevins Street—my suggestion I was ready for a show—my father might have thought he heard a mouths-of-babes indictment of his own choices in dismantling so many structures of authority and order. In the appalled glance he delivered in return, maybe I glimpsed my father’s regret. I at least glimpsed the ambivalence, even depression, that would for a time shade any talk of those years. The same ambivalence, I think, caused him to underrate until recently the best paintings from that chapter of his art.

  But who am I to talk? I vamoosed to California, in the wake of my family’s 1970s, and stayed away from Brooklyn for most of fourteen years. All that stuff I wouldn’t go near in my own work, at least not directly, for most of twenty. Whereas my father, in 1983 or thereabouts, drew from somewhere, from who knows where, a deeper breath, and began again.