Jackson Pollock

by Deborah Solomon

  His stay in Bucks County proved to be an abject disappointment. His first week there he set up an easel on the front porch of the house and made every effort to dedicate himself to his work, only to find that his heart wasn’t in it. His housemate Reginald Wilson later recalled Pollock as a “private, lonely person” who had difficulty applying himself to his work. He often went for long drives by himself, disappearing unaccountably for hours at a time. On the days he stayed home he was easily distracted and would drive into town a few times a day to run needless errands. Then, three weeks into his stay, he wrecked his car. “Jack had the misfortune of colliding with some bastard and as a result the old Ford has been permanently laid to rest,” Sande reported to Charles. “The other man’s car was damaged to the extent of eighty bucks which it appears Jack will have to pay.” Depressed by the car accident and the general bleakness of his situation, Pollock decided to return to New York a month after he had left, even though he had already paid rent on the farmhouse for the winter.

  Back in the city, Pollock was as disconsolate as ever. He was in debt to his brother, who had helped defray the cost of the accident, and had fallen far behind in his work on the Project. He could no longer pretend that leaving New York was the solution to his problems; his trip to Bucks County had merely exacerbated them. It was at this discouraging moment, in October 1936, that Pollock met a woman who was to divert him from his worries, at least for a few months. Her name was Becky Tarwater. She was four years older than he was, and like other women in Pollock’s life, Becky was a talented musician whom he admired from the moment they met. “He was really in love with Becky,” Arloie later said. “He wanted to marry her.”

  Pollock first saw her at a party in Greenwich Village to which Sande and Arloie had taken him. A banker’s daughter from Rock-wood, Tennessee, Becky was a singer and banjo player who happened to be performing at the party. “He asked me if he could walk me home,” Becky recalled years afterward, adding that she declined the offer since he appeared to be drunk. Later that night Becky was walking toward the subway on her way home when she heard a noise behind her. She turned around suddenly and saw Pollock standing in a doorway, peeking out and smiling at her. She laughed. She walked another block and turned around again. Pollock had advanced to another doorway and was still smiling at her.

  Becky took an instant liking to Pollock, while recognizing him as a “troubled, sad person” whose problems went beyond her understanding. They usually got together at his apartment, with Pollock insisting that she join his family for dinner. Arloie, who did the cooking, never complained; she and Sande both felt relieved that Jackson finally had a girlfriend. But not much came of the relationship. On most evenings Becky showed up with her banjo and played for Jackson and his brother and sister-in-law late into the night. By midnight Sande and Arloie would have gone to sleep, and Jackson would still be sitting in the living room, listening to Becky play. For all his intense affection for her, he was far too shy to act on his feelings, and as Becky later said, “It’s almost embarrassing to think how unphysical we were.”

  Pollock was always reticent with Becky on the subject of his artistic aspirations. He never took her inside his studio or showed her his work. “It was the strangest thing,” Becky recalled. “We never talked about his art, or what he wanted to do.” Becky didn’t bring up the subject herself, having sensed that Pollock felt thwarted in his work and would be disturbed by the mere mention of it. Curious nonetheless to see his studio, one night she wandered into the room. She was startled to find that there were no paintings in sight except for a single canvas lying on the floor. She picked it up and was about to admire it when Sande rushed over to her and gestured for her to put the painting down. “Don’t say anything,” Sande whispered to her, concerned that Jackson would become upset if he knew she had been inside his studio.

  That January, after they had been going together for almost three months, Becky stopped by the apartment one night to tell Pollock that she was moving back to Tennessee to care for a sister who had Hodgkin’s disease. Pollock was deeply shaken by the news, no matter that he had failed to establish even a semblance of intimacy with her. In a mood of desperation, he impulsively asked her to become his wife. Becky, while flattered by the proposal, politely explained to him that marriage was out of the question. “You felt this great suffering that he had,” she later said. “I was troubled myself because my sister was sick, and I knew I couldn’t help him.”

  On the day Becky left New York, Pollock took her out to lunch, at Schrafft’s, and gave her a white gardenia as a going-away present. When he returned to his apartment that afternoon he found Becky’s banjo lying on the couch; she had accidentally left it behind. “I will do what you wish with the banjo,” he assured her in writing. “Keep it, love it, send it, etc.”

  After Becky left New York toward the end of January, Pollock entered a severe depression. By now he was no longer painting, and the sight of a canvas filled him with anxiety and dread. Whenever Arloie glanced into his studio, he was hunched in a chair, his face buried in his hands. “Jackson,” she’d call, “do you want to come have coffee with me?” But he didn’t want to be disturbed. Unable to work, he took to heavy drinking, heading out at night to neighborhood bars and coming home so drunk that Sande, awakened from sleep by the familiar sound of him clambering up the stairs, would get out of bed to help him. One morning Arloie went into the kitchen and was startled to discover that the tablecloth had been ripped into shreds; Jackson had stabbed the table with a butcher knife. His condition had become sufficiently troubling to convince Sande and Arloie that he needed professional help, and at their urging, Jackson went to see a psychiatrist.

  Sande thought it best to spare his other brothers as well as his mother any news of Jackson’s problems; there was nothing they could do to help and there was no point in having them worry. But that July, Sande finally confided to Charles—who was now living in Detroit and working as a cartoonist for the newspaper of the Automobile Workers Union—that their brother was having “a very difficult time with himself.” He went on to specify that in the past year Jackson had been drinking heavily and undergoing “a succession of periods of emotional instability” and that six months of psychiatric care had failed to stem his drinking. Sande’s comments were made in response to a suggestion from Charles that he and Arloie consider moving to Detroit, as there were several job openings on the union newspaper. But Sande felt obligated to remain in New York and care for Jackson: “I would be fearful of the results if he were left alone with no one to keep him in check.”

  These were clearly difficult months for Pollock, but at least he could look forward to a month-long summer vacation with the Bentons. His supervisors on the Project had agreed to give him a leave of absence, and on July 21, 1937, he traveled to Chilmark. The visit started out on an inauspicious note—his first day on the Vineyard he was arrested for disorderly conduct after drunkenly chasing some girls on his bicycle—but on the whole it proved to be a relaxing, happy time for him. He ended up staying a week longer than he had planned to: “I found I loved the island too well (life, flowers, real love of the earth).”

  During his stay in Chilmark, Pollock received a letter from Becky Tarwater informing him that she had become engaged to a doctor in Tennessee. The news did not upset him; to the contrary, he appears to have been genuinely happy for her. It was clear to him in retrospect that he was in no position to be her husband. Writing to Becky on August 21, a few days after returning from Chilmark, Pollock sent her his best wishes and assured her that she had made the right decision by declining his proposal earlier that year. “At this time,” he wrote, “I am going through a tremendous emotional unrest. With the possibility that I will do better in the future. I realize very well now that I couldn’t have made a happy life for you. With the help of the broad Atlantic Ocean I have come to realize this.” He enclosed a tiny painting of two red roses.

  No sooner had Pollock returned from Chilmark than he
found himself beset by familiar worries. “It has been very depressing,” his letter to Becky continues, “coming back to this unnatural mass of human emotion but I am making all effort to settle my self to some good creative work.” He felt ready to undertake some serious painting, and to help him along, Sande decided to close off Jackson’s studio from the rest of the apartment, thinking that the added privacy would enable him to concentrate better. But it was only a matter of weeks before Jackson was once again stalled in his work and had lapsed into “serious mental shape,” as Sande reported to Charles.

  Early in December, while visiting New York on business, Benton stopped by the Eighth Street apartment and invited Jackson and Sande to join him in Kansas City for the Christmas holiday. While Sande declined, Jackson eagerly accepted and soon had convinced his supervisor on the Project to give him another leave of absence. Toward the end of December he left New York on a Greyhound bus; by the twenty-fourth he had arrived at the Benton’s home on Valentine Street, from where he wrote to his brother Charles: “I am out here for a week or so, I like Kansas City a lot. Saw some pretty swell country coming thru—I want to go back by Detroit and see what your doing.” His last-minute decision to travel to Michigan seems reflective of a larger restlessness afflicting him at this time. In Kansas City the Bentons quickly noticed that something was wrong; Pollock no longer seemed content to spend his time with the family. He went out drinking almost every night, hanging out with a group of students from the Kansas City Art Institute, where Benton was then teaching. Early one morning he returned home from a party so sick from drinking that Rita took him to a doctor later that day. “He began escaping with alcohol quite early,” Benton later wrote, “though my wife and I did not recognize this as a disease until he visited us in Kansas City.”

  Back in New York, Pollock’s problems persisted. While he managed to stop drinking his first few weeks back, he was suffering from a constant feeling of anxiety and strain. Only one month after returning from his visit he felt he needed another vacation. As Sande put it to Charles in February, he “needs relief badly from New York.” Pollock’s one consolation was that Benton had already invited him to come along on a six-week sketching trip that summer. He was greatly looking forward to it, hoping it might provide him with fresh material and ideas.

  But then everything went awry. That May the Project informed Pollock that it was unwilling to give him another leave of absence, given all the work days he had already missed. The news was more than he could tolerate. Devastated by the prospect of a summer in the city with no place or no one to escape to, he began a period of heavy, continuous drinking. Within two weeks, on June 9, he was fired from the Project for “continued absence.” Two days later, at his own request, he became a patient at the Westchester Division of New York Hospital, in White Plains, New York—then known as Bloomingdale Asylum—a psychiatric institute specializing in the treatment of anxiety disorders.

  At the hospital, a rambling stone mansion situated on a working farm, Pollock was given a private room overlooking the garden, and he began treatment for alcoholism. He remained there for four months—two months less than the average stay. The hospital’s program was a fairly traditional one in which the main emphasis was on occupational therapy; tranquilizers were not yet in common use. Patients were encouraged to work with their hands and perform simple tasks as a means of regaining their confidence, and Pollock took well to the program. Dr. James Wall later described him as a “very gentle young man” who was anxious and depressed when he first arrived but quickly made progress. “There was a lot of calming down to be done and building up of his self-esteem,” the doctor said, adding that Pollock was a cooperative patient who seemed appreciative of the care he was receiving. Clearly he was pleased with the treatment; he gave the doctor a plaque and a bowl that he had made himself.

  As part of his treatment Pollock was encouraged, along with the rest of the patients, to participate in the hospital’s art program. But he did not paint during his hospitalization, choosing to avoid the agonizing problems he was facing in his painting. He did spend some time in the hospital’s metal shop, where, working with sheets of oxidized copper, he made two plates and a bowl. It is significant that he chose sculpture over painting at this point, for he had always considered sculpture his natural medium. While painting tended to frustrate him, sculpting fortified him, reminding him of his earliest ambitions. As a high school student he had dreamed about “sculpting like Michelangelo,” and it was to this monumental vision that he now returned. Among the works belonging to this period is an untitled round plaque on which he hammered a male figure that bears an unmistakable likeness to Michelangelo’s Adam from the Sistine Chapel murals. Like the Michelangelo figure, who awaits the touch from God that will bring him to life, Pollock’s Adam also awaits his own creation. He presses his palm against the rim of the plate, a womblike form from which he is about to be delivered. It’s a telling image for a young artist who was struggling to break free from the past and be reborn as his own creator, as himself. Dr. Edward Allen, whom Pollock met twice a week for therapy during his hospitalization, later recalled him in terms of his “strong creative urge.”

  That September, on his release from the hospital, Pollock returned to 46 East Eighth Street and resumed his routines of the previous spring; he was soon rehired on the Project and continued to work at home. But something had changed irrevocably. Never again would he paint in the Regionalist style. Nor would he continue his friendship with the Bentons except in the most superficial sense. While Benton and his wife, as one might expect, continued to feel protective toward Pollock—“Tom & I & many others believe in you,” Rita wrote him that fall—the world of security they offered him was one he had finally outgrown. Fortified by his four months in the hospital, Pollock felt ready to dispense with Benton’s influence and begin the long search for a style of his own. He was about to start what can safely be called the second phase of his career.

  6

  Still Struggling

  1939–41

  By January 1939, four months after his release from New York Hospital, Pollock was drinking heavily again. It was clear to his brother Sande that he needed further professional help, and he took him to see a psychotherapist named Joseph Henderson, on East Seventy-third Street. The doctor, a Jungian by training, who had been in practice less than one year, at first doubted that he could be of any help as Jackson was so reticent. “Pollock was extremely unverbal,” he has written, “and we had great trouble in finding a common language.” Then one day Pollock brought the doctor some of his drawings. Intrigued by his work, the doctor encouraged him to bring in some more drawings and, in the course of the next eighteen months, analyzed them as if they were dreams. Pollock was usually quiet as the doctor offered his interpretations. He neither agreed nor disagreed, and there were long silences. But he seemed to appreciate the care he was receiving; he liked Henderson and was relieved to find somebody he could trust.

  Pollock had been referred to Dr. Henderson by a friend of Helen Marot, the elderly teacher who had hired him some years earlier to work as a janitor at the City and Country School. Marot, an amateur psychologist then in her mid-seventies, took an active interest in Pollock’s well-being, and the two of them became rather close at this time. She often stopped by 46 East Eighth Street to look at Pollock’s work and was invariably impressed by it; she told all her friends that Pollock was a genius. Pollock sometimes returned her visits but usually on nights when he had been drinking. Her friend and neighbor Rachel Scott recalls one occasion when Pollock woke up the entire block by standing outside Marot’s apartment shouting “Let me in, let me in,” until the elderly woman got out of bed to open the door for him. Another time he showed up at her apartment in such a frightening condition that Marot telephoned Dr. Henderson to ask what she could do to help him. The doctor, who felt that Marot was helping Pollock satisfy an unfulfilled need “to give and receive feeling,” told her the best thing she could do was to contin
ue to be Pollock’s friend.

  There were other problems besides his alcoholism that year. His main worry was his job. As public criticism of the WPA mounted, layoffs were becoming increasingly common. Employees of the WPA were ridiculed in the press as “boondogglers” and “leaf-rakers,” and there were rumors that the whole program was about to be shut down. For Jackson and Sande, who were each earning about ninety dollars a week on the easel division, the situation was nerve-racking. “Of immediate concern around here is the lay-offs,” Sande wrote to Charles in January 1939. “There are one hundred and ten pink slips in the mail right now. The union is stirring and raising hell but frankly I can’t see that we can do so very much about it.” Two months later Sande wrote again to say that he and Jackson had been “investigated” by the government, presumably for Communist activities, and while neither was a fellow traveler, such inquiries kept them “in a constant state of jitters.”

  For all his troubles, Pollock was making genuine progress in his art. Many of his paintings belonging to this period show the influence of José Orozco, to whom Pollock turned at the end of the thirties in an effort to break free from the style of his past. It is not hard to understand his attraction to Orozco, an idealist obsessed by injustice and oppression. His theme was eternal conflict, and he slammed it on wall after wall. “Christ, what a brutal, powerful piece of painting. I think it is safe to say that [Orozco] is the only really vital living painter.” So wrote Sande Pollock of Orozco’s frescoes at Guadalajara, which he saw in reproduction early in 1939. Jackson left no written response but certainly shared his brother’s admiration of the Mexican. Around 1939 (the paintings are undated so one can only speculate as to the year) Pollock started painting violent pictures that owe a lot to Orozco. He painted scenes of people on fire and women giving birth to skeletons; he showed ritual sacrifices in which the victim tries to get away or else clutches himself in fear. The paintings mark a radical break from the lonely little landscapes that Pollock had been painting throughout most of the thirties.