Jackson Pollock (13 page)

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.

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.