by Robert Stone
THIRTEEN After a spell of thinly subsidized unemployment, it became necessary for me to reach out once more to the world of com- merce. I had pretty much had it with hack writing for a while. In the days before the MFA programs spread like Irish monas- teries in the Dark Ages, replicating themselves, ordaining and sending forth their novices, aspiring writers often did a mea- sure of hack work, the way farmers inevitably ate a pound or two of dirt every year. A little isn’t fatal; if no one did it we wouldn’t have our celebrated popular culture. In moderation, hackery can even be good for you, tune your
ear, provide useful experience and so on. But contrary to what some have said, it’s obvious that too much is artistically and spiritually enervating. It seemed to me that a lot of the failed playwrights nurs- ing their cheap cognac through the lobster trick on rewrite at the N.Y. Daily News would have been better off if they had never been hired. Anyway, in the name of variation, I thought I’d try for some- thing else. I still had my seaman’s ticket but I also had two small children. My wife was trying to raise the kids, attend pre–open ad- missions City College, and hold a job at the welfare department; for brief periods she was doing all three at once. Just before our friendship broke up after a bitter quarrel over the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mike the Mime from the National Thunder told me there were guard jobs kicking around at the Mu- seum of Modern Art. Some of his actor friends were doing it. I briefly flashed the image of Mike in the uniform of a Red Guard, with a red-starred cap and a Little Red Book, sternly pacing the gallery in front of Guernica. It did seem to me that bug-looking art lovers who couldn’t keep their mitts off the Picasso beat waiting ta- bles. I had done a lot of that. (One day in Calais, Maine, a restaurateur who employed me took me aside to explain that I would never make a waiter. He thought I imparted some kind of strange atmosphere to people’s dinner, a fate- ful tension or pessimism about dinner and life. It was the kind of thing hateful tin-eared people say about my novels, but it was true about my serving style.) I went down to MoMA to offer my services. The security chief, a man who struck me as surprisingly coplike, was interested in my custodial experience. I told him I had stood shore patrol and served, for a couple of days, at what the Navy calls “prisoner chasing” while awaiting discharge in Norfolk. This was true; the “chasing” con- 164 robert stone
sisted of three of us rigged out with clubs and whitewashed spats, SP brassards and .45s, marching court-martial prisoners (CMPs) to breakfast at Camp Allen, the infamous Marine Corps brig. The secu- rity chief must have known that sounded more serious and demand- ing than it was. He remained unimpressed. What I didn’t know, although Mike the Mime, as an honorary Chinese revolutionary, should have known, was that the world was changing fast. MoMA was not hiring posy-picking artists between inspirations. It seemed to want someone who looked as though he could subdue mad canvas slashers and generally keep the stuff on the walls where it belonged. I was out. On the way to the elevator I chatted with a young woman who worked in the museum offices. She had overheard my rejection. “Do you know anything about art?” she asked. “Well, certainly,” I told her. “Of course. Me?” She told me there was a job going as “associate curator” at one of the galleries on Madison. As I would discover, the “associate cura- tor” of an art gallery has duties little different from those of the as- sociate curator of loafers at Thom McAn. So I was hired. In spite of the startling lacunae in my art-appreciation background, I was kept on, mainly, I think, because I could write pay-up-or-else letters that were very polite but quaintly menacing. The gallery that hired me was what remained of a leftist art col- lective founded in the thirties that had represented many of the best-known East Coast radical painters. It had recently come under the ownership of one of the founder’s relatives, a droll, good-natured man who had spent years in the glass business and who kept a cool and humorous perspective on both art and politics. Neither engaged him passionately, which is not to say he was indifferent or unin- formed about them. In fact, having coexisted a little uneasily with prime green: remembering the sixties 165
two underemployed political fanatics at the National Thunder, I had approached this scene with hesitation. I was surprised to find most of the work at the gallery very con- servative, even decorous. There was a lot of romantic realism: young ballerinas en pointe, downright Brueghelesque central European vil- lagers ring-dancing in some sweet not so very long ago. There were many sentimental portraits. The political dimension seemed to con- sist of a commitment to the figurative. The word that suggested it- self was “humanist.” Another school of the same movement was also represented. Some of the most arresting paintings were the candy-colored agitprop so- cial satires, cartoonish and sometimes the work of actual cartoonists. These were busy and predictable and seemed guided by conventions, a vocabulary of icons and symbols and instant narratives like those governing early Renaissance religious art. Later I found that many of our artists and their customers, the collectors and supporters, valued orthodoxy for its own sake and looked for authoritative direction. Some of them attacked “art for art’s sake,” citing fifteenth-century religious art to show the inescapable nature of ideology. One regular contributor to the gallery had spent the late depres- sion years doing post offices around the country and had a lot of sto- ries to tell. His paintings still looked like studies for murals, a combination of Mexican revolutionary art and postwar Picasso. Somehow the work of this ex-muralist stays with me; he might have been the best of the bunch in terms of talent and the use of it. Also I liked his unself-conscious eccentricity. He wore suits so cheap look- ing you’d swear they were made in Russia; the sleeves looked like clownish tearaways that would fall off if you shook his hand too hard. He also gave the impression of having his hair cut in Smolensk. 166 robert stone
The gallery represented the Old Left pretty much in repose. The McCarthy years had less effect on painting and sculpture than on other arts, except perhaps in museum sales. Many radicals were driven out of their professions, but the artists of our gallery and their sympathizing customers seemed to have survived to live well on the east bank of the Hudson River. It was there, I suppose for the beauty of the place, that they tended to make their homes. The gallery, in its most engagé period during the thirties, had not catered to the unaffiliated Left. There was pressure from many of the artists not to show the work of anyone whose work the Party did not approve. During the openings, when artists and art lovers reminisced, they tended to boast about their orthodoxy. Earl Brow- der’s dismissal from the American politburo put the kibosh on the Yankee Doodle fife-and-drum Americanism of the Popular Front, and all the art that went with it. Gathering dust downstairs we had scores of Paul Bunyans and John Henrys and Johnny Apple- seeds. When Browder fell, and Zhdanov, in Moscow, became Stalin’s arbiter elegantiarum, all that bourgeois chauvinism went down with him. Much of this I learned at the cocktail parties that attended the gallery openings; regulars reminded each other that they had never fallen for Bukharin and certainly never fallen for the unnameable archfiend, the Zionist crypto-Nazi and agent of the mikado, for whom the ice pick was too good. Jay Lovestone had never fooled them for a minute, and they had never thought much of Browder. Khrushchev had given a secret speech, it was whispered, but that might have been disinformation. A few years before, some of the gallery artists and customers had left for the Soviet Union, Mexico, or Western Europe. A fascist coup from Washington was rumored, to be followed by a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union. This prime green: remembering the sixties 167
treacherous capitalist attack would fail; the agents of the people were on guard for peace everywhere. America would suffer for its designs. I had always been interested in politics. Belief fascinated me, be- cause of my own experience of lost faith. But somehow, as I lived along with the century, the more interested in politics I became, the further I moved from accepting any kind of transforming ideology as an answer to my fundamental questions. I was never able to ad- vance (if that’s the word) beyond the old boring liberali
sm of the two-cheers-for-democracy sort. Like most people, I never trusted anyone who offered a formula that transcended the instincts of ordi- nary decency. Ordinary decency, I thought, was about the best of which I, and again most people, were capable. And it was not so easy at that, not so ordinary. During the sixties and seventies, many people close to my heart, people whom I deeply loved and respected, thought they recognized truth in different political formulas of the Left. Since people who be- lieve they have encountered Truth, no less, call failure to recognize their salvific doctrines “cynicism,” I became sensitive to the charge. I insisted during that time that it wasn’t true of me. Nor is it now. Religion was more the thing for me, if only I’d had the sense of humor and good sportsmanship to believe in any. It’s reported that Flannery O’Connor and Mary McCarthy once fell to talking about their common background in Irish Catholicism. In fact, it was damn little these two shared. But they had both made their First Holy Communions, receiving the Body and Blood of Our Lord, at differ- ent extremities of America. So they discussed the Eucharist, which Mary McCarthy offered was a fine metaphor. “If it’s a metaphor,” said Miss O’Connor, “the hell with it.” Blazing, blinding faith, that is. The faith itself had to be some- thing real; it could measurably inform O’Connor stories such as “A 168 robert stone
Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But there was also something barren about it, something that reduced the infinite variety of the world to a spare grim narrative of human sacrifice. It was admirable in its hu- mility, most of all. But the other side of it, the corps of aggressive know-it-alls who alone had the right to give the orders, was repul- sive even at a distance. Later, encountering late-twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism, in the Socialist bloc, I knew it was not for me. Gatherings at openings drew a few progressive celebrities, but most of the attendees were old-timers. The gallery in the sixties was in a curious political and artistic backwater. But forces were stirring in the larger world, beyond Fifty-seventh Street, beyond Croton-on- Hudson. The intensity of the cold war was fading, and the “para- noia” of the fifties was falling into disrepute among the younger educated classes. Also, by the mid-sixties, the failures in Vietnam were evident. The prestige of America was declining; its heroic role as slayer of police states was being questioned. The other important empowering force that was restoring mili- tancy came from the civil rights demonstrations in the American South. Our gallery was a little piece of time past. Some of the Party old-timers were encouraged by what they saw as a rallying of the Left on the horizon. Others found the new political activism uneasy- making, druggy, unproletarian, and generally nyekulturny. But it was an interesting place to be in the mid-sixties. The gallery sometimes hired a part-timer for the big opening par- ties. It was always the same chap, a tweedy, sad Ivy League type. He had been young, gay, and substance abusive when all of these things were attached to penalties. At the openings, I was in charge of the booze, and I usually managed to help myself to a few shots before serving the company. G., the temp, would sometimes take Antabuse and then drink alcohol behind it. This would make him sick, and we prime green: remembering the sixties 169
would make him space among the frames where he could recline with wet cloths full of ice. One time, out among the guests, I recognized an old acquain- tance. Our encounter partook of absurdity, even absurdism. Getting the next tray of drinks, I had to share this recognition with G. “You know who’s out there? Alger Hiss.” G. was unsurprised. “Yeah. He comes in a lot. He collects.” “Political art? No kidding.” “He likes political art. He was radicalized when he lost his job. At least that’s what he says. Oh, and he’s gay.” I went back out with drinks. Mr. Hiss was holding forth, talking to two salty old ladies, Party toughies from the days of Youngstown and Seattle. They were laughing at the things he said. I couldn’t hear them. He had a drink in his hand, and he looked not at all like Willy Lo- man or the American Dreyfus. His expression was what would be called arch, or saturnine. He looked like a Quaker, I thought, old- stock American, purse-lipped, fluty-nosed, with cupid-bowed eye- brows supporting a righteous high forehead. Like a Quaker who was virtuous and sly. “Do you know him?” I asked G., back in the frame room. G. smiled and shook his head. He didn’t know Alger Hiss to talk to. Later, I found out that Hiss had done some really good things in the Agriculture Department, gotten the government to pay farm subsidies directly to poor sharecroppers and not just to landowners whose tenants they were. Next time I see him, I thought when I dis- covered that, I’ll have something cool to say to him. But we never met again. 170 robert stone
FOURTEEN The day A Hall of Mirrors was published in New York I put in a couple of hours at the gallery, signed for my last unemploy- ment check, and went to lunch at the Algonquin. Candida Donadio, my sainted agent, was with me. Joyce Hartman joined us to represent Houghton Mifflin, my publisher. The book had generous reviews. One, in the Sunday New York Times, came from Ivan Gold, whose collection Nickel Miseries was the defining fiction of the postwar occupation Army. Another fa- vorable notice was from Granville Hicks. I received an encour- aging letter from Joyce Carol Oates that put me on the moon.
It was time for me to face the second book’s necessities, although I had nothing quite as substantial as a second book in mind. George Rhoads, a painter whose work I’d managed to place in the gallery over the objections of some of the comrades, told me not to worry. I’d written a book, George said. Maybe it was time for me to do something else. Learn a trade, maybe go to veterinary school or take up oil geology. George himself was at that time a Scientologist, one of those whose careers were supported by infinite time lines and in- numerable lifetimes. He could have been a court painter in one in- carnation, a gondolier in the next. I knew perfectly well I had one life to squander, that there was nothing other than writing that I wanted to do, nothing else useful that I could do reasonably well. I knew there would be another attempt, at any price. But where to begin? When A Hall of Mirrors was published in London by Bodley Head, in 1968, we went over there, figuring to spend a few months. When work is due but not being done, writers are subject to fits of compulsive motion. To sustain an illusion of progress, any idle jour- neying or pointless change of circumstance will serve. That writers change publishers, agents, spouses, to dull the nerve that throbs when work stays unwritten is well known. Writers also change cities. Subject to this fidgeting, I now realize, I very nearly changed my life and fortune beyond all recognition or hope of deliverance. We rented a flat in Hampstead. Its dining-room windows faced southeast, commanding a view down Haverstock Hill, over Kentish Town, Islington, and beyond. By night, our view presented a socio- economic chart of north London. The streetlamps lighting the hilly terraces glowed phosphorescent white. Down on the flats, the lights burned the color of red lead, refracted in the mist and reflected on 172 robert stone
the pavements, lowering and brightening the sky to a sort of insti- tutional brick color. Our rent was reasonable; it was a time when London was still less expensive than New York. We were half a block from Hampstead Heath, and our kids learned to ride their bikes there. Most evenings, at about half past nine, six of us or so, Britons and American expatri- ates, got together and talked about the things we ought to be doing. Every few months we would go to north Wales to the house of our friends Jeremy and Eleanor Brooks. Eleanor was a painter, doing landscapes and portraits that gave nothing away to the work I’d been seeing in New York. Her special dedication was and remains to the mountains and forests of Gwyneth, in north Wales; her works in oils and watercolors are among the most beautiful things I own. Her work has been shown in museums all over Britain and on the Conti- nent as well. Jeremy was a novelist and playwright, and later a col- laborator with the Russianist Kitty Hunter-Blair on some highly successful translations of Gorky that ran in the West End. He was for some years during our time in London the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company. We gathered and talked about what we were doing and what we wanted to do. A group of Britons, Americans, Australians, colonial
s of varying sorts, South Africans, Israelis, Irish, we drank and sought the same refuges to which we’d fled in California. A relentless con- spiracy theorist we knew, more than a collector—a connoisseur— justified his exquisite assembly of plots, plans, and stratagems by getting himself registered as one of England’s tiny band of mari- juana addicts, a brave happy few, resurrected from the shades of De Quincey or Fitzhugh Ludlow, whose condition entitled them to a legal measure of bottled tincture of cannabis—this to be provided prime green: remembering the sixties 173
by prescription, courtesy of the Ministry of Health. It was lovely stuff; the bottle was true bottle green, “just,” as he lyrically put it, “like a carrion fly’s ass.” A touch to the gum with the little glass pestle in the vessel and presto—hours of profound visual and psy- chic confusion. Filling a prescription was good for hours of talking shop with fellow devotees at Boots Pharmacy Ltd., Piccadilly, the sanctum sanctorum in London of psychopharmacology. In retro- spect, perhaps we had lost our way. But it was not time wasted. One of our London friends was the ex- patriate songwriter Fran Landesman, who wrote “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most,” a hip rendering of Eliot’s “Gerontion” that crowns many a cabaret act’s closing encore in every time zone from Ronnie Scott’s to the Cafe No Problem in Phnom Penh. She and her husband, the writer Jay Landesman, were responsible for the 1959 Broadway play called The Nervous Set. They then expatriated to Lon- don, where they held what must have been one of the hippest liter- ary salons in the world. When Ken Kesey arrived in London, together with several of the California Hell’s Angels, we were able to introduce them to some long-distance admirers, including the Landesmans and the Brookses. Kesey and the Angels wandered the storied British land- scape, discovering people and occasions to celebrate: solstices, equi- noxes, the Raising and Burning of Viking Boats, Gypsy sacrifices and Gypsy switches, dolmens and Green Hands, crop circles, sibhs, silkies, and witchery and horned men. One day Kesey and I went down to Savile Row, an odd angle of haberdashery and helter-skelterdom where the disappearing Beatles had their headquarters. Inside the Beatle Building, which I believe was the location of an entity called Apple Corp., there were hoarse whispers about some kind of Prankster-Apple-Beatle amalgam. It 174 robert stone