Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  The phrase “Twombly returns to Lexington” recurs, choruslike, throughout Nicholas Cullinan’s detailed chronology of Cy’s life in the last pages of Cycles and Seasons, the Tate Modern’s catalog for its Twombly show of 2008. In fact, there is hardly a year of his life that he did not visit and, for many years, live and work in Lexington.

  And he got a lot of work done here. For example, the epic saga of the fifty-two-foot-long painting Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), now at the Cy Twombly Museum in Houston, came to a triumphant conclusion in a warehouse across the street from our old house on the industrial side of town. The tripartite painting was begun in Rome, but remained unfinished for twenty-two years until it was shipped to Cy in Lexington in 1994.

  I can remember many afternoons walking to pick up the kids from school and seeing the tall, slightly stooped, densely overcoated and stocking-capped figure of Cy making his way down from his home on nearby Barclay Lane to the warehouse. It was probably the only place in all of Lexington big enough to house such an enormous painting, but he had to share the space with the table saws, paint cans, sawhorses, and wood shavings belonging to a local contractor.

  One Easter weekend, Cy unknowingly got a little help with the final panel of the piece from a seventeen-year-old carpenter named Josh Campbell who had come to the warehouse to prime some siding laid out on sawhorses next to the painting. Halfway through the job, Josh was surprised to see Cy, about whom he knew nothing, ducking in through the far door with some sort of army satchel over his shoulder, prepared to work. Recapping his paint cans, Josh offered to leave, noting the greater magnitude of the job left for Cy to do on his project.

  Ever the gentleman, Cy demurred and insisted that Josh keep on priming the boards, saying he would be back later. After he left, Josh, who himself worked by the job, glanced at the great expanse of canvas, much of it as yet unpainted, and thought he could help the poor guy out, since it was obvious he still had a long way to go on it.

  Setting down his big paintbrush, he picked up one of Cy’s small brushes and set to it, helpfully adding some paint to the third panel, which at the time had, as he put it, just a few big balls on it. He signed his efforts in tiny letters: JMC.

  Once the big canvas was finished and shipped off to the Gagosian Gallery for its New York debut, the JMC now largely obscured, Cy rented a small glass-fronted storefront in downtown Chitlin’ Switch, as he affectionately called Lexington. It was on Nelson Street, one of the four streets that compose the town’s elemental hash-sign layout. An unlikely setting for a studio, being right on the street, it gave the lie to Cy’s general proclivity to live and work “in a palace… but in a bad neighborhood,” as a friend had once remarked. This place was no palace; it was a dive, but in a good neighborhood, within walking distance of his house and, notably, next to a restaurant with treacly pecan pie.

  I photographed in that studio on many occasions, in part because of the coquettish quality of the light peeking through the tightly shuttered plate-glass windows, and in so doing documented, almost by accident, the artistic extremes of Cy’s productive last years; the mind-storming rapture of the canvases contrasted with the calm intelligence of the sculptures. He seemed able to get a lot of work done in that funky place, as he remarked to his friend Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate gallery:

  My favorite [cycle] is Sesostris.… I started them in [Gaeta] years ago. They were five or six years on the wall and then I took them to Virginia and finished them there. I finished a lot of things there.

  How, I don’t know. The lights were buzzing greenish fluorescents, the temperature control capricious, the drop ceiling low, and the noise level high; but all the same, he got it done.

  When I first began photographing in his studio, I remembered how Alfred Stieglitz, by making the altogether too-perfect images of Brancusi’s sculptures, provoked Brancusi to grab up his own camera and overexpose, blur, and generally screw up his way to photographic sublimity.

  Likewise, casually shooting with his dime-store Polaroid in the same space where I had Stieglitzly labored with my 8 × 10 inch view camera, Cy made affecting images of his own work, especially the sculptures.

  In doing so, he brought me around to a Brancusi-like freedom of interpretation, and over the years my work in his studio changed from documentary to evocative.

  In the earliest work, I simply wanted to record how Cy laid out his workspace.

  The studio then was uncluttered enough to pass through from front to back.

  In just a few years, jam-packed with sculpture, paintings, books, and junk from the Antique Mall, that same pristine space was barely traversable, joyful in its excess and misrule, flicking a casual bird to the compulsives among us.

  When Cy reciprocated by photographing in my studio late in 2007, he zeroed right in on the small areas of Cy-like disarray and made good use of them with his Polaroid, which in his hands made profound even the most mundane of junk heaps.

  Junk heaps in general he loved, and come springtime we would drive through the countryside around Lexington, stopping at the yard sales that sprang up along the roads like unnaturally fluorescent new vegetation.

  So it might seem odd that Cy would also love the highly regimented dress parades at VMI, but he did. Each Friday afternoon the entire corps of cadets forms up in pressed white pants sashed with maroon and topped with bronze-buttoned gray coatees. Low on their brows, they wear an anachronistic shako dress hat sprouting a waggling phalluslike pom-pom, which the cadets call a “donkey dick.” Cy delighted in the pomp, the donkey dicks, the crenellated barracks in the background looking like a Mexican War theme park, the melancholic wheeze of the bagpipes and, oddly enough, the orderliness of the proceedings.

  It’s not so odd when you think about it. Growing up as he did under the influence of the chivalric code and the lore of doomed military culture, it is no surprise that he responded to those parades or that we see an occasional martial strain in his work (Lepanto, Fifty Days at Iliam). I believe many diverse elements influenced Cy as he grew up here and that they came to be reflected in his art: the blaze of southern light on Lexington’s columned buildings, its cultural grace and languor, the region’s literary heritage, its pervasive sense of faded grandeur and venerated historical myth. As he put it once in a local interview, “It all came from here. All those columns… there are many, many things I never would have done if I’d been born somewhere else.”

  The VMI parades were best in the spring, by which time the corps had mastered the steps, and Cy almost never missed them. He loved the spring in Virginia, the way I do, with a hectic rapture at the beauty of it all. On pretty days, he would sometimes ask to be driven to the Walmart store, built on a commanding hilltop, where he would sit out on the benches by the exit doors and watch the spectacle of shoppers and the sun rays sweeping across the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. The light and mountains, the breezes and the green of the mayapples, the warmth of the sun finally soaking into the earth and into his sometimes painful bones—being in Virginia gave him great sensual joy.

  It gives joy to many of us, irrespective of the old bones, or of the generation. The experience of growing up here is timeless and universal in certain ways: Cy’s childhood experiences were remarkably similar to my own, despite the two dozen years that separated us. Like most southern white children of a certain economic and social class, we were both reared by black women whom we adored. I would wager that the woman who cared for Cy, whose name was Lula Bell Watts, gave him the same childhood experience of imperishable and bounteous love that I received from Gee-Gee.

  Lula was only about thirteen when she went to work for the Twombly family, and Cy at that time was a toddler. So, unlike Gee-Gee and me, they were relatively close in age, and much later in his life when Cy was in town, he and his driver, Butch, would frequently take Lula out for a spin in the country. Lula, then in her eighties, still dished out her kick-ass lessons in proper manners, turning from the front
seat, pinching a cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, and scolding Cy like a backseat child.

  It’s hard to imagine that Cy would need a manners tune-up from Lula, as he, much like my southern father, was exquisitely courtly, cultivated, and courteous. As Cy put it to Serota:

  It’s very funny, but when I grew up you always had to say, “Yes Ma’am” and “Yes Sir.” And you were never to talk about yourself. Once I said to my mother, “You would be happy if I just kept well dressed and [had] good manners,” and she said, “What else is there?”

  Cy grew up on tree-shaded Edmondson Avenue, just off Main Street and around the corner from Mrs. Lackman’s preschool. My parents, who moved to Lexington when Cy was fourteen, must have met him soon after they arrived, because this delicate little sweetie of a sculpture, dated 1946, was given to them by Cy, a senior at Lexington High School, when he came to dinner at their house on Washington Street.

  After they moved to Boxerwood in 1951, it found a home in the clutter of the living room bookcase and was soon thereafter joined by one of Cy’s house-paint-and-pencil paintings, bought in 1955 for $150 while he was living in Lexington and teaching at a nearby women’s college, Southern Seminary.

  Other people in Lexington also bought Cy’s work, including the reclusive Jack Roberson, who used to sit outside his unpainted, Boo Radleyesque house on Jefferson Street and offer blow jobs to the W&L students on their way back to the frat houses. I ran into Jack one Friday afternoon in the early nineties at the Stonewall Jackson Thrift Shop, located across from the bank in the basement of the seedy Robert E. Lee Hotel. He was struggling down the thinly carpeted ramp that led to the thrift shop with two brown paper bags, the big kind with handles, one in each hand. The bags were stuffed to capacity and apparently heavy, judging by the difficulty Jack was having even on a downhill slope.

  When he achieved the basement floor he pushed his way between the racks of jersey wrap dresses and shoulder-padded blazers and set the bags, their contents covered with newspaper, next to the checkout counter. Having gotten everyone’s attention, he wiped his brow in exaggerated Jack fashion and addressed his audience in a voice, alarmingly high-pitched at the best of times, but now beginning to trespass upon the dog-howling range. The damn fucking bank, he announced, had to choose this particular day to take a holiday and now he was going to have to spend the entire fucking weekend at home with ALL THIS CASH MONEY he’d gotten for selling that Cy Twombly painting he had kept behind his sofa for forty fucking years.

  Only in an honest little town like Lexington would Jack Roberson be able finally to deposit that money, both bagfuls, early Monday morning.

  It’s a naïve little town, too. When Cy’s mother, his last living parent, died in the late 1980s, his sister called Cy and asked him to come and get his stuff out of the attic so they could sell the house. Apparently Cy didn’t realize the urgency of the request, or maybe he just blew it off, but everything in the attic was eventually gathered up and handed over to a local auctioneer.

  The resultant Twombly auction was held one Saturday afternoon in spring 1988, at the Bustleburg baseball field behind the Rt. 252 Dumpsters, about three miles past our farm. It’s a desolate little patch of land, the bases barely visible in the scrub, an abandoned-looking cinder block building behind the torn and sagging netting at home plate. In that building the residue of Cy’s young life was spread out on long folding tables: boxes of papers, toys, and juvenilia of all kinds, as well as later stuff: paintings, photographs, and sculpture. There were two roughly foot-square gouaches from the late 1940s, one of which was an unusual orange color, but in bad shape. The other was in good condition and an antique dealer responded to the call of the auctioneer by raising his hand. He bid a dollar.

  Nobody else bid, but a friend of mine, observing the proceedings, felt it was disrespectful for a painting to go for a dollar. So he raised his hand and ran the price up to thirty-four dollars, forcing the dealer to cough up thirty-five for the painting. When a half-dozen Rauschenberg boxes came up for bid, painted and adorned with feathers and bones, “weird, magical things,” my friend said, the crowd laughed out loud at them. Naturally nobody bid, so he bought one for fifty cents, another for a dollar, and then for a few more dollars he picked up a cache of subtle still-life photographs from Black Mountain College by both Cy and Rauschenberg, some of them of Twombly paintings that had been destroyed. (Several of these photographs my friend recently made available to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. This is fitting since it was VMFA Professional Fellowships [1951 and 1953] that funded Cy’s travels to Black Mountain and Italy.)

  For years after the Bustleburg sale, Cy went from one local antique store to another, then broadened his search over the mountains into the Piedmont, asking after any sightings of a little painting he had done in his childhood which was special to him, and a toy he had loved, a sailboat. Both sold at the auction.

  The warehouse in which Cy completed the fifty-two-foot-long painting was one of those charmless metal affairs that spring up practically overnight in industrial parts of town, but from our house we couldn’t see it unless we walked up the driveway to the road. We had bought our little plot of marginal city land back in 1975 with the hope of putting up a blacksmith shop for Larry, who had become interested in metal sculpture in college and was sharpening plows, welding farm implements, and forging hand-wrought chandeliers for a living. Or something less than a living.

  While Larry worked with ninth-generation blacksmith Manly Brown, I had a somewhat more lucrative position as the photographer for Washington and Lee University. It required only a 35 mm Nikon, but that didn’t prevent me from trotting out my white Samsonite suitcase and setting up my 5 × 7 inch view camera to the complete bemusement of the sports teams I was there to document.

  At least we had a paycheck coming in, and when that raggedy scrap of dirt-cheap city land came on the market we thought we could afford it. It was in an ugly part of town, forbiddingly steep, overgrown and trash-strewn. The whole town thought we were crazy. In fact, the man who sold it to us, the owner of a local taxi service, told us after the ink had dried on the contract that he thought we were crazy, too.

  It lay below the old railroad line and abandoned rail station that served Lexington until the 1940s, at which point the track was used only for freight and finally torn up in the sixties. Something about the place must have seemed so bleak and unredeemable, even back then, that conductors and train crew felt it perfectly appropriate to toss onto this pathetic patch of scrub the trains’ accumulated refuse: crockery, empty bottles, bent silverware, clothing, iceboxes, satchels, broken push-brooms, umbrellas, and curling leather boots in which we expected to find the skeletal feet of a dead hobo.

  The Lexington residents followed suit with their trash. Since the late 1800s our land had been the unofficial city dump, its steep hillsides a cascade of more modern trash atop the train trash, and the flat bottomland mounded with dozens of honeysuckle-covered ex-taxis, paradise trees grown up through the windshields, snakes coiled in the seat springs.

  We had nothing except energy and hope, and set to clearing and hauling a century of garbage from the land, hacking down the trash trees and scything through the multiflora thickets. We made a few pleasant discoveries: hidden behind all the overgrowth was an undernourished creek augmented midway by a watercress-rich spring (which in turn was fed by the hillside of garbage, but we chose not to think about that). We toiled for a year to reveal a view of the creek and to clear the spring, sweating and itching with nettle stings, slicing our soles each morning on the shards of glass that emerged from the ground like some particularly malevolent nocturnal plant form.

  I had a vision of how I wanted to live. In 1969 my parents and I had visited Helen and Scott Nearing on their subsistence farm in Maine and I had made a heavily underscored mental note that this was exactly what I wanted for myself: a life of simplicity, pluck, seclusion, and soul-satisfying, ecological, sweat-of-the-brow, we’ll-vote-with-our-lives self-s
ufficiency. Seven years later, Larry and I were giving it a go.

  By 1977 we were digging by hand the footers for an impossibly perilous cliff dwelling, and then for the next half decade we scavenged building materials for it, learning as we went. By the time Cy moved back to Lexington in 1993, the resultant spindly, hand-built, Rube Goldberg–like passive solar house had bulked up with a succession of shed-roofed add-ons, living areas cantilevered out over the abyss and labyrinthine porches, covered with vines. A commercial pilot we know once remarked that from the air our house resembled those shantytowns on the edge of the Mexico City dump, and we were not offended. It was a totally cool Big Sur–ish house: impractical, whimsical, not to code in any respect, the kind of place that stopped passersby in their tracks and lured them, cautious and curious, past the basilisk sculptures to our slab-wood front door.

  Cy, too, would wander down from the warehouse to that door, calling out in his distinctive, hesitant voice, “Sally? Are you receiving?” We both liked to sit out on the wisteria-covered back deck overlooking the creek, especially on those sultry summer nights when the fog rose from the bottomland and wisped among the racemes of white bloom.

  One such night found a group of us with Cy and Nicola, his gentle, erudite companion, sitting after a late dinner on that porch, the newspaper-covered table nacreous with oyster shells, bottles of wine darkening the center. I mentioned my past fascination with Ezra Pound, an American who, like Cy, had found Italy his place “for starting things” and about whom I had written my master’s thesis. At this, Cy, sitting to my right at the head of the table, leaned over to me with the look of a confidence about to be divulged, so I pressed close.