Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Stewart Wolf was another person who helped me with introductions in New York. A leading American psychiatrist, he had been in New Zealand to address the college of psychiatrists and had had dinner with Fraser and myself at Carrington Hospital a year before I went to New York. He got on very well with us but I did fear that he might forget about the promise of an introduction to Isabel Bishop. As things developed, Isabel was one of my most rewarding contacts.

  Stewart Wolf rang about Isabel Bishop. Thank God I’ll be here long enough to really get to know people properly. It must work out. I just have to be more committed. Today everybody thinks I’m French. Perhaps Teschemakers did leave a mark on me. After all it was a French order. I’m glad they don’t think I’m English. I have fought very hard to keep what is myself against the Anglo-Saxon-cum-Wasp thing in New Zealand. Here I feel like a mixture of Lucille Ball and Katherine Mansfield. That leaves something missing and that’s because no women in the past have really had the chances that we are beginning to have for a full life. I suppose that the rest of that mixture has got to be a male. Oh, he doesn’t need to have a name. All the writers and painters who have helped to make my vision, a vision that I hope will not be deceived.

  I’m seeing Isabel on Monday at 5 for dinner, Tuesday Ann Stout, Wednesday I go to Central Park to a publishing party - I must get dressed now quickly and go to the Gallery in Greenwich Village. Thank God, I had the guts to come by myself. If I were with someone else I would not be writing this or drawing either. This is what life is all about, making my dreams come true.

  Why am I leaving out strange Patrick, am I trying to pretend he doesn’t exist? I met him in an antique shop. I was asking the way to the American Express office. I said I was looking for the American Express building and holding the plastic folder the card was in, he saw my name and hotel. He now rings me every night to see if I am alright. Perhaps he is trying to be helpful like he says he is - but perhaps he’s the Boston Strangler - how would I know. I am beginning to feel unhappy about it - an affair is the last thing on my mind. The ageing hippy thing here is everywhere. They are the new Skid Row along 23rd Street. Saturday and Sunday is the time to lay low. There is a hard blind look in the eyes of Mexicans, South American and black men out for a good time. I’m beginning to think that what stops me being cheated is my own stupidity. It’s not much fun cheating so obvious a mark like me. Taxi drivers, men in eating houses spell out just what I owe them and they warn me against all the other evil men. I think I have learnt about it all now before I ever come up against these great monsters. I know what you all think now - you will think that they have been cheating me all the time - but when I get back to my room I always do count up my money.

  Dear Rita Angus - she must have been about the same age as I am when she got her travel grant and I can remember her telling me about the hotel room she drew, the fruit and nuts she bought. Fruit and nuts - it’s funny, that’s all I want to eat too.

  I had a very pleasant lunch with Sylvia Sleigh. Sylvia is English and came to New York with her husband, the art critic Lawrence Alloway, some time ago. She gave me a pamphlet on the exhibition ‘Women Choose Women’. It’s a pretty good early ’70s selection - all sorts - although the photographs in the catalogue are not too reliable because so far with middle of the road painting in New York, the use of paint is often very poor, as if painting were not a constant enough occupation. It could almost be a New Zealand gallery group show, although the women here are more experimental than they would be in the New Zealand exhibition - more into the Don Peebles, Milan Mrkusich, Philippa Hutchinson is here too, Louise Gray. There is also the older woman painting the young male nude - no female nudes. Personally I like a bit of that sort of thing but not a whole lot of it. Lots of young male nudes makes one very conscious of course of the feeling behind the older male artist and the lovely young flesh of the naive girl, but having young men seen in that light as a young animal and for woman and knowing women at that - no I don’t think I want to copy the bad things about men. If I paint young men I want to paint them as people, even though I do indeed applaud the politics behind the other attitude.

  Sylvia Sleigh’s painting looks very good on postcards but in reality they lack punch. It comes across as emotionally shallow. They do not have the power, and the certainty that such an idea requires. The use of paint again. The paint use is a powerful language all of its own and that is what I am looking for. Marsden Hartley had it in his final painting. This will push me forward for, for me, the loneliness is an essential, the seeing alone and thinking about it alone. A.I.R. is a feminist co-operative gallery. They are more commercial about their work, which is, I think, a very good idea, plenty of slides, postcards, pamphlets. For the next 10 years I must do that. The power of beautiful vision is missing in most of the paintings.

  I do hope I like Isabel Bishop’s work. I had dinner with her on Monday. I liked her very much. Today I had a meal - $3.00. Bought nuts, had a small tin of sausages and spaghetti. Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it. Two oranges - about $3. Not bad for food for one day.

  Why this obsession with nuts? A dinner disgusts me, but nuts - well I love them. Talking of nuts, I was walking through Washington Square and I saw my first squirrel. There he was, or she was, russet brown, quick, self absorbed, and when she paused there was a golden nut in her paws. I was entranced, and exhaled, ooh! And then I felt quite vulnerable and ridiculous. The older man who had given her the nut thought I was trying to pick him up. Well, after all the men who’ve tried to pick me up here, why should I feel so upset. I scurried away as fast as the squirrel and certainly not as gracefully.

  Isabel Bishop, distinguished, elegant, charming and honest. Her life has been more sheltered than mine -sheltered by money and by custom. She knew that coming to the Chelsea to look and work alone was a good thing for me to do. I feel she is a satisfied woman but talking about that made her say automatically, ‘I envy you’, that I was young enough to do it and was determined to use the experience to finalise my choice about what I wanted to do in painting. She said that she had always remained experimental and regretted it, and that it had not hardened into something more deliberate and personal. I must not allow a small success to spoil me. I know that I have just started and as yet I have not done the paintings that I want to do. She has had a good and full life - in fact I feel that the pure class thing, though, is what has stopped her final commitment, not enough emotional isolation for her to see, too much refinement and stroking of her very fine psyche and no wonder - she has such a beautiful narrow, delicate, aristocratic face. And such an air of containment, pride and graciousness, and all of this is perfectly sincere.

  Brave Ann Stout, I hope she makes it. She took me to the A.I.R. Gallery. Good work, not marvellous. All the time I know what I am looking for in paintings. It’s got to be more like dancing, alive, real, body and vision working together. I haven’t seen it yet. Now, that’s not quite true - how about Marsden Hartley. I’m like a scientist who has his own private obsession, narrowing down his field. This is why I won’t be as charming as I can. I fear it will trap me like Isabel was trapped. Trapped by one’s own charm. However, on the other hand I mustn’t go out of my way to be too uncharming.

  Only pigeons, no sparrows, no seagulls. Another title is easy to understand. ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’. And talking of Brooklyn, I go to the Brooklyn Museum today. Perhaps birds come when spring really comes - I don’t know.

  I want to add here something about the family of Mr Bard, who ran the Chelsea Hotel. Eve, with her husband, managed the Chelsea. Well Mr Bard was top manager but Eve did the grassroots stuff. Eve and her husband came to America after the Second World War, survived the concentration camps in Europe and, in their youth, Berlin’s scary political scene. As they were ardent socialists, as many good Germans were at that time, they certainly did watch their backs. However, from the time I arrived at the Chelsea they were as kind to me as if I were a member of their family. If suspicious characters got in the
lift with me, Eve joined us. If I was hassled by a disturbed person in the lobby, Eve warned them off. When I went to visit my cousin Ted, a Carthusian monk, I asked if I could have my room on my return. The bus strike was on and every available bed in New York was priceless. Not only could I have my room on my return, they would keep my room for me. This was, I realise, not entirely due to our friendship, but because they were hugely impressed with Ted the Proctor of the Carthusian Order in Vermont. They knew how those monks had refused to give the recipe for their precious green and yellow liqueurs, neither torture or death could force a confession from them. This was impressive and they could relate to the monks as survivors of the same persecution that they had suffered in Second World War Germany.

  One morning Eve told me her husband had something to show me. He walked me maybe three blocks from the Chelsea. There on the corner he pointed out a large brick house where he said the last leaders of the American Communist Party were massacred by the C.I.A. The area was closed off and very little publicity came out about this grisly happening. When was it? The ’50s? The McCarthy era? But I remember him mentioning blacks so it sounds more like the late ’60s. He trusted me to say nothing about this but needed to tell me to have me understand how his America was not free. This could account for my vagueness about when because I never intended to write any of this down. While we were talking a guy came up to us selling the Street Communist Rag. My friend rejected it angrily. ‘Never changed the language in a hundred years. Who writes this crap.’

  There is no consistency in New York, none. Next I was on the train to the Brooklyn Museum. Mr Bard’s relation was determined to come with me, but he turned out to be a whole big hazard on his own. He had warned me of the chaos and desperation of the area around the museum, it was full of black radicals. And there they were sitting with us in our compartment.

  In a loud voice indicating these tall athletic and stylish guys, he announced their stupidity. Did he imagine they could not hear or understand him? He said how they put all their money on their backs. How much did those boots cost, a week’s good wages. Well I can’t say they looked undernourished but he seemed to think they didn’t eat to buy their clothes. He seemed to be deliberately provoking them. A Jew who knew, in the most awful way where racism led, was behaving like a brainwashed German peasant in 1935 would have behaved towards the yellow star on anybody’s clothing. He made no connection between his own history and the oppression of blacks in America, no connection at all. Blacks were descended from slaves so as human beings they didn’t rate.

  A lot of American political thinking doesn’t make, what would seem to a New Zealander, logical conclusions. There was no follow-through. I expect what it is, is a lack of empathy. But why would I expect empathy from a couple who had been so horribly abused for years? Why, now they are in America, would I expect them to make common cause with another abused group? By the time they got to America they were very keen to make common cause with some privileged group. They made common cause in Europe with abused groups and look where that got them.

  Towards me, the Bards were as kind, loving and familiar as aunts and uncles are in novels. I keep expecting people to be consistent but they are no more consistent than I am myself. We are all like the curate’s egg, some good bits and some bad.

  However, there were among the Jewish women I met in the women’s movement ardent supporters of the black liberation movement. The women’s movement was, nevertheless, slow to include black women as an effective policy. White women as such were self-conscious with black women in an equal social situation. Trying too hard, malapropisms and gaffes, all made for a strained atmosphere. I can well understand why black women opted out of the women’s movement and put their energy into fighting the system that oppressed all black people. That seemed to them to come first.

  But come, I have got so involved with the psychopathology of my companion on the train that I have forgotten all about the whole point of this exercise, the Brooklyn Museum.

  The Brooklyn Museum was like a grand old castle from the nineteenth century now abandoned to the encroaching slums. Its hours were uncertain and like everything else here they were close to bankruptcy. The guards acted wary to the point of paranoia, I expect worried about their jobs or maybe the riots when the hot weather comes.

  There were some good but predictable paintings and then a delightful find as if I had wished these treasures into existence. They glowed like perfectly crafted jewels among the dross. How many? Say eight or nine but what masters had painted them? The information beside the entrance door was brief. I gathered that these painters were young, privileged women from Boston and New York. Between 1880 and 1900 women of their sort studied painting in the studios of the masters in Paris. What they came up with was adept, suave, inspired. Very like Sargent, that American painting in England, that same clarity and control of the composition. It was truly absorbing and well worth risking assault and rape to get here. How well they illustrated my theme: in the right environment these women were dedicated gifted painters but back home their heart failed them and their vision faltered. They lacked the courage to confront their families with their aspirations. They married, became anonymous and never painted again. I know this because that is what these wonderful paintings were signed - Anonymous.

  I would have been content with my first revelation but stumbled on something more. At first I could not imagine what they were. Something sinister out of the Amazon, to do perhaps with voodoo from Haiti? But no, I quickly understood these heads came from New Zealand. They were dried heads preserved by the old Maori method; I had seen them before but not so many. I knew that bad things could happen to anyone who touched the head of a chief and now even in death the head in Maori lore remained intensely tapu. I entertained the cranky notion that maybe these heads were responsible for the bad luck the museum has been subjected to. The encounter, however, depressed me. I didn’t want those heads to be viewed as I had originally viewed them. I felt a strong allegiance to Maori as if this whole display was an affront and an exhibition of insensitivity.

  There were thunderstorms when we came out and torrential rain which all seemed appropriate. It was a black time in history when someone else’s sacred possessions became our curios. A bloody and murderous time all round. The selling and buying of someone else’s ancestors’ body parts and the buyer is as barbarous as anyone else.

  I didn’t sleep for thinking of those desperate little heads locked up in the stranger’s mausoleum.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Goya’s Demons

  I cannot resist quoting further from my diary–report from New York. It’s all here – my agony of mind, my astonishment at the medieval city, my alarm at the open display of power and money. Reading the report again brings it all back.

  When I first visited the A.I.R. gallery I just didn’t get it. They were welcoming and they did accept my work but there obviously was a problem. What that problem was I should have known immediately. I was aware that oil painting was considered a male pursuit by emerging women artists - that a long history of men painting women naked involved the male artist’s perverted games and there was inevitably the Freudian take on this. Something about the male artist flourishing his paintbrush as a stand-in for his penis. The theory went that rather then compete with men, women artists should find their own areas of creativity. Women must elevate time-honoured household skills such as art diaries, sewing, dying of fabrics, tapestries, pottery. Photography was not tainted and videos were fine. In this gallery multimedia was the thing. I myself was not influenced by these theories. I had no intention of giving up what skills I had in painting for somebody else’s theory. I didn’t see anyway why men should have all the fun and I really do believe painting can be a great deal of fun.

  However, the women in the gallery did read the ideas in my work and approved of them. Nevertheless, they were uneasy about my expressive paint use as it could be interpreted as an imitation of that rude male flourish. This was the
ir political stance; there was nothing personal about it. However, it all turned out very well. When I was invited to the next opening I was introduced to Joe DiGiorgio. Joe used paint and as a habitue of the Manhattan art scene took me on.

  Joe lived with his partner in his studio on The Bowery. His partner was the critic O’Keefe. Actually O’Keefe lived in his own apartment just upstairs on the next floor above Joe, but they shared a life together. It would seem they had emerged from a hippy life experience to plateau in an easeful place. Here they could work and, at will, socialise with like-minded people. Curiously in manner and appearance they reminded me of pilots from the Second World War, with the manner of those who had bravely faced up to the threats to their existence and survived, like those fighter pilots I met after the war at parties in Christchurch. Joe’s casual aplomb and O’Keefe’s immaculate attire encouraged for me this idea, that sense of presenting themselves to the world, like those fighter pilots, bravely with style, and Joe’s tended moustache encouraged that idea.

  A.I.R. Gallery is really highly admirable, a sort of AA to keep women painting or whatever. The standard is pretty high too. I certainly have the talent to get in but I don’t know if I have that excellence of organisation yet. I must make the most of this. I also must go on 28 April to an 8 o’clock discussion -work, life and politics, organised by Joan Braberman. Must draw - as Isabel said, ‘If you don’t get an idea down straight away it is lost.’ I must start taking photographs tomorrow, and just remember industrial England. That’s what it’s like.