Jackson Pollock (2 page)

Stella grew up at a time when the railroads were changing the country. When she was
seven years old the first locomotives had arrived in Tingley. She and her sisters
Anna and Mary had spent many afternoons walking along the freshly laid tracks, picking
wildflowers and watching the trains pull away. They listened to stories about young
newlyweds who had gone west, and surely the McClure girls wondered when their turns
would come. Mary McClure, four years younger than Stella, was the first of the sisters
to leave, marrying a railroad conductor and moving to Denver. Anna McClure, two years
younger than Stella and the first in the family to graduate from high school, never
left at all; she died of tuberculosis when she was twenty-two. Stella was twenty-six
when she finally left Tingley, but the circumstances of her departure were different
from the ones she must have imagined as a girl. She was pregnant, and she was unmarried.

Stella McClure left Tingley to hide the secret of her illegitimate pregnancy from
the local farmers and their wives; she was too proud to become the object of their
gossip. Alone, she rode the train to Denver, where she moved in with her sister Mary
and awaited the birth of her first child, who was born on Christmas Day. She named
him Charles. She sent news of the birth home and two weeks later traveled halfway
back to Tingley, to Alliance, Nebraska, where she was met by the father of the baby
boy. The
Tingley Vindicator
reported early in 1903: “Word has been received by Tingley relatives of the marriage
of Mr. Roy Pollock and Miss Stella McClure, which took place January 13 at Alliance,
Nebraska. They are now living in Wyoming.”

The newspaper announcement made no mention of Stella’s infant boy, and the details
of her marriage would remain a lifelong secret. She would never tell her children
that she had left home pregnant and unwed, and she would never confess to having been
married in Alliance in a service conducted by a Methodist minister she did not know.
She told her children that LeRoy Pollock had courted her on moonlit sleigh rides through
snow-covered fields. She said she had married him at the United Presbyterian Church
in Tingley and the entire town had turned out for the happy event. The truth about
her marriage, like all the disappointments in her life, Stella kept to herself.

LeRoy Pollock was a quiet, serious, and sensitive man, a year younger than his wife.
His marriage to Stella McClure, however imperfect, at least offered him the illusion
of escape from the cruel indignities of his childhood and the town in which he had
spent it. LeRoy was born in Tingley, in the township of Eugene, in February 1876,
the son of Alexander and Rebecca McCoy, poor, coarse, Scotch-Irish farmers who had
married in Pennsylvania and raised two sons in Peculiar, Missouri, before LeRoy, their
youngest child, was born. According to the 1880 agricultural census, LeRoy’s father
owned only “two horses, one milch cow, and ten swine.” His farm machinery was valued
at a scant $30, and his forty-acre farm was valued at $700, which placed the family’s
total worth sixth from the lowest among the township’s ninety-six farmers. When LeRoy
was three years old his four-year-old sister Nina died of tuberculosis, and her death
was followed two months later by that of his mother. LeRoy’s father, broken by hardship,
felt he could not care for the little boy. He gave him away to neighbors and eventually
returned to Missouri. LeRoy never saw his father again.

LeRoy grew up with James and Lizzie Pollock—uneducated, religious, Ohio-born farmers
who were no better off than the McCoys. The Pollocks, who were in their mid-forties
when they took LeRoy in, believed they should be compensated for raising the orphan.
They exploited him during his youth, sending him out with a horse and plow to labor
for local farmers and demanding that he turn over his earnings to them. To the young
LeRoy the Pollocks were small-minded, hypocritical people, and it made no sense to
him that they forced him to study the Bible and attend services at the local Presbyterian
church while keeping him out of school a few days a week so he could attend to farm
duties. He managed to graduate from the Tingley School at the age of nineteen.

Twice during his childhood LeRoy ran away from home. Once he went to Missouri, where
he worked as a harvest hand; he returned home starving a few weeks later. Another
time, inspired by the story of Huck Finn, an orphan like himself, LeRoy and a schoolmate
named Ralph Tidrick built a rowboat and traveled down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
They checked into a cheap hotel and worked in the kitchen for their room and board.
Two weeks later Ralph’s father mailed the boys train tickets back to Tingley. To keep
LeRoy from running off again and abandoning his farm duties, his foster parents adopted
him ten days before his twenty-first birthday. They didn’t want to lose a cheap farmhand.

On the day he left home to meet his bride in Nebraska, LeRoy knew he would never return
to Tingley to see his foster parents, nor would he ever practice their faith. He didn’t
even want their name. He visited a lawyer to request that his name be changed back
to McCoy. The lawyer asked him for a large fee,
and it was more than LeRoy had. He could not afford his real name.

After marrying in Nebraska, LeRoy and Stella and their infant son traveled by train
to Cody, Wyoming, the last stop on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. The
prairie town of five hundred had been founded six years earlier by Colonel William
“Buffalo Bill” Cody, who, in an attempt to draw settlers to Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin,
was constructing canals, irrigating the soil, and promising free land to anyone willing
to build a house. For people as poor as the Pollocks, however, the boomtown offered
virtually no opportunities. As LeRoy and Stella quickly learned, they could not claim
land, for they could not build a house; they could not afford the considerable expense
of freighting raw timber to Cody from across the Shoshone River. They ended up renting
a tiny frame house on Bleistein Avenue, two short blocks from Buffalo Bill’s new Irma
Hotel, where LeRoy found work washing dishes.

The Pollocks remained in Cody ten years, but their situation hardly improved. LeRoy
eventually left the Irma Hotel to join a friend from Tingley in a rock-crushing business,
hauling boulders by horse and wagon from the banks of the Shoshone River to a plant
where they were ground for construction. It was hard manual labor, and after six years
he was too sick to continue. Meanwhile he had a large family to support. Besides Charles
there were now two other sons, Jay and Frank, who had been born in 1904 and 1907.
For lack of a better alternative, LeRoy accepted a job in 1908 as the manager of the
Sanford Watkins sheep ranch, on Lower Sage Creek, and moved his family onto the ranch.
Here, in a two-room frame house surrounded by wild sagebrush, at the base of the twin-peaked
Hart Mountain, the Pollocks’ last two sons would be born, the first of whom they named
Sanford after their employer.

Stella went into labor with her fifth and last son early one afternoon in January
1912, and though the birth should have been her easiest, it was her most difficult.
Later that day LeRoy rode into town on his horse to ask a Dr. Waples to come out to
the ranch and assist the midwife with the birth. Stella struggled with
the delivery all through the night, and the following morning, in the predawn darkness
of January 28, 1912, a healthy boy was born. He weighed more than Stella’s other infants
had, almost twice as much as the average newborn. As the Cody newspaper reported:
“A fine son, weighing twelve pounds and a quarter, was born Sunday morning to Mr.
and Mrs. Roy Pollock of this city. This makes five sons that have come to live in
this happy family and the Pollocks are quite the envy of the whole community.”

They named the boy Paul Jackson Pollock, although by the time he was three everyone
called him Jack. The name was probably chosen after his mother’s favorite town—Jackson,
Wyoming, an open valley swept with sagebrush at the base of the Teton peaks. Stella
was particularly enamored of Jackson from the moment he was born. She knew he was
her last child, for Dr. Waples had told her that at age thirty-six, she was too old
to have any more children. “He’s my baby,” Stella used to say, “Jack’s my baby.” Though
Stella was not outwardly affectionate, she adored her sons and expressed her feelings
by doing things for them. She was never idle. She had large, capable, graceful hands,
described by one of her children as “the busiest hands I’ve ever seen,” and Jackson’s
earliest impressions of life may well have been the image of his mother’s hands in
motion: churning butter, pumping water, canning preserves, pouring candles, kneading
bread, sewing clothes, crocheting the unadorned edges of bedspreads, curtains, and
handkerchiefs.

Many years later, when Jackson was in his twenties, he would offer a symbolic version
of his birth that shares some interesting parallels with his actual birth. The painting
Birth
(
Fig. 12
), an early, undated work, is a semiabstract painting in which it is possible to decipher
several recognizable forms. The central image consists of a woman lying flat on a
bed, with an oversized fetus, painted fiery orange and blue, reeling inside her body.
In the lower right corner a claw-shaped hand reaches toward the fetus, threatening
to yank it from the womb. Beside it is a second hand, raised in a stop gesture, as
if trying to stop the birth. Did Stella actually tell Jackson the details of his birth—how
she labored through the night trying to force him from her womb?
How her efforts were impeded by his unusually heavy weight? Whether or not she did,
Pollock envisioned the act of birth as a terrible ordeal, thrusting the fearful infant
into conflict. That he chose two hands—the yanking hand, the halting hand—as symbols
of this conflict is altogether appropriate, for it was the very problem of what to
do with his hands and the abilities he was born with that would put Pollock in excruciating
conflict with himself.

Soon after Jackson was born his father was diagnosed as having rheumatic fever and
was advised by Dr. Waples to move to a warmer climate. That October, after the sheep
had returned from pasture, the local newspaper reported: “LeRoy Pollock took the noon
train out of Cody Thursday, his point of destination being San Diego, California,
with a view of looking up a location.”

The following month the newspaper noted: “Mrs. L. R. Pollock and five sons expect
to leave in about two weeks for San Diego, California, where they will make their
home. Mr. Pollock went out to San Diego about a month ago, where he is now at work
at his trade. He has purchased a lot in the city and expects to build in a short time.”

From mid-November through Thanksgiving Day, 1912, this notice appeared in the classified
section: “For Sale—All my household goods, baby buggy, canned fruit and everything.
Call at the house. Mrs. L. R. Pollock.”

On Thanksgiving Day, 1912, Stella and her five boys took the train to San Diego. Jackson
was ten months old. He never returned to Cody, and his memories of the town were based
on photographs and the stories his family told. So the fact that Pollock was born
in Cody, a town named for a frontiersman who slaughtered 6,570 buffalo, had virtually
no influence on his youth, considering how little time he spent there. In later life,
however, Pollock referred often to his Cody birthplace, mentioning it in every interview
and usually before he mentioned anything else. “I was born in Cody,” he’d start off,
in a flat, soft, slightly strained
voice, as if the comment was supposed to mean something. He liked being identified
with the fabled town of Cody and the wildness and virility of the American frontier,
even if it wasn’t his real heritage. On the other hand, Pollock’s connection to Cody
was perhaps more profound than it might have been had he grown up there, for in his
imagination and in his art he really did live on the frontier, a place that was all
the more authentic because he had to invent it for himself.