Seek My Face (6 page)

“Still,” Hope tells Kathryn, “he had us believing that to make art was the highest and purest of human activities, the closest approach to God, the God who creates Himself in this push and pull of colors.”

Yet his lecturing, his handsome, fervent, weighty presence, had a hollow side. He did not let students see his own work. He was shy, the enterprise was so great, the Ideal was so stern a taskmaster. As he aged, and others reaped the glory he had foretold, his own work went oddly dead in its cradle of theory: squares and rectangles of raw color looking like manufacturers’ samples, without push or pull. At the time of his teaching her, his forms were still organic, bulbous and swooping like early Kandinsky but without that Russian wandering, those wandering drifts of brush-work, all the colors at once, like peasant decoration. “Flat, flat,” Hochmann would say over her shoulder. “Keep the picture plane
flat
. You’re losing the plane. You’re growing
holes
. Make the colors,” he would say, “sing.” Sing like Beethoven, those shimmering doom-laden chords impossible to do in paint, in palette-knifed rectangles. In the late ’sixties, after his death, Hope went to a giant Hochmann retrospective, a whole floor of the Whitney, and the paintings around her didn’t exist. They had evaporated, they had become walls of dust-catchers. Zack had not evaporated like that, though Hochmann had looked down on him, as an American ruffian, an out-of-control ignoramus. As Ruk would have said, a bandit.

“Push and pull,” Kathryn repeats in polite bemusement. “Did you feel, ah, close to him as a man?”

“Did we sleep together, do you mean? Please. He was over sixty, I was—what, twenty-two? Yet you’re right, I
would have if he had asked; I loved him. He made us see what a noble calling painting was. Someone of your generation probably can’t believe how crucial, how important, how
huge
painting seemed then. It was like sex, yes, you’re right to suggest that. It hadn’t been domesticated yet. It hadn’t been put in its place, its page of the Living section, with a pat on its little fuzzy head.”

Her companion snorts, so vigorously that a liquid snuffle emerges in follow-up from the long white nose. Kathryn peers down and fishes in her black pocketbook, almost as big as a tote bag, which sits gaping at the side of the plaid chair, for a Kleenex. Hope likes her the better for this embarrassment. Snot is human, one of our secretions. She likes Kathryn less for being too ready to laugh, for finding this old lady being interviewed too amusing, a husk of a person in which any rustle of sauciness or pert phrasing is a comic surprise. Such readiness to laugh betrays a nervous jealousy. Hope had been alive in a naïve, blunt, fruitful way this young woman is being denied; Hope had loved herself, having been raised in the illusion of a loving God; she had found the facts of her body amazing, as they emerged from beneath the quilts and the Quaker silence concerning such matters. She would stroke her own naked, silken skin, leaving yellowish ovals of fingertip impression on her freckled pink surface, standing fresh-bathed before the cloudy spotted mirrors of the apartment on Jones Street she shared with Cindy Jasinski, the roach-ridden, cramped bathroom floored in tiny hexagonal tiles, its narrow window left open an inch or two like a mouth breathing the Village’s air with its morning smells of coffee and emptied garbage cans and its night sounds of jazz and taxis honking. Each new day, she wondered what marvel might befall her. Kathryn’s world is marvel-proof, pre-processed, all emotions and
impulses analyzed and denigrated before they can blossom, chopped up into how-to books and television, everything reduced to electronic impulses, bits, information, information increasingly meaningless as brains shrink too small to gather it in, the processing all done outside the mind, the heart, by cool and noiseless machines. Kathryn’s nostrils do look a little pink as she pokes the balled handkerchief back into her big black purse. She has the sickliness of the city: the subways, the elevators, other people’s breaths, forever running tired, New York people have colds all winter long, Hope did too, when the children were bringing home germs from school, but, living alone in Vermont, in the antiseptic crackling cold, the mountain air rich in ultraviolet rays, she almost never has so much as a sniffle, her old system a hoard of antibodies on the far side of fertility and its chemical storms. Kathryn has brought into this chaste parlor the stains, the imbalance, of fecundity—the monthly egg flushed away, the hysteria of entanglement with males. It is good, Hope tells herself, to be beyond all that.

It is that time of morning, toward eleven, when the sun in its overhead slant outside triggers a thought of relief, of enough momentarily done, and her custom is to make herself a second cup of tea, with the used bag, carefully saved in the stainless-steel sink, sitting upright like a tiny black-brown handbag beside the round drain. Her first run of concentration would have slowed down and blurred since breakfast, and the re-used bag would fuel a second go, an attempt to squeeze some further good out of herself before noon joined her with humanity in the gross chores of daily maintenance, of shopping and tidying and tugging by telephone on the few threads left in her life, many of them tied to medical specialists. Her dentist keeps telling her her teeth, the few front ones still lacking root canals and
crowns, would be much brighter without that daily drenching in tea, but always there is, each morning, a hump of anxiety for the first cup to lift her over, and then, with the paler second an hour or two later, she can contemplate her still-wet work with the dazed self-adoration that so strangely alternates with her certainty that nothing she does is good enough or amounts, really, to anything. She is often seized by a dread that she has wasted her life up to now, a dread, at bottom, that she has displeased God, who is not there, or is there only in the form of light, which she rationally understands as a senseless rain of protons, a universe of particles that once upon a time burst into being for absolutely no reason. But she has a long life behind her that can’t be taken away, five grandchildren with some facet of herself embedded in them, works on display at the Hirschhorn and the Whitney, in Tokyo and Zurich and São Paulo, and a filing drawer full of reviews that are some of them very flattering, even adoring. Poor Zack had none of that, going out to the little barn, its loose and gappy boards leaking heat as fast as the woodstove could produce it, those first winters on the Island, for the single hour before the cold got hopelessly to his hands in the rough work-gloves he had cut the fingertips off of; he had only this desperate creative drive, this appetite for something even beyond fame and wealth, as blind as a sick animal’s instinct to seek privacy beneath the porch. He drank less in those years—he saw how she responded to his sobriety and still wanted to please her—but his smoker’s hack would take hours in the morning to clear.

Hope confides to this girl, to keep her off-guard, “You
do
understand that to have a real artistic advance there must be not only individual stout hearts but also a certain widespread—how can I say?—
rottenness
in things that only
an initiated few suspect. It’s this nose for the rotten, I sometimes think, that takes the sensitivity, and the courage.” She would get dread in her stomach before each of Hochmann’s classes, too—before her mind lost itself in the paint, in that druglike rapture of self-forgetfulness when things began to happen on the canvas,
in
the painting, Zack used to say. The push and the pull. Since Kathryn, lurching forward in the chair to inspect her tape recorder, gives no sign of having heard this abruptly issued oracle, Hope asks her, more kindly, “Would you like a cup of tea if I made it?”

Kathryn casts an annoyed eye at the little gray machine purring on the refinished sea-chest with its rows of brass nailheads. “Could we keep going,” the younger woman insists, “until the tape runs out? Would you like to tell me how you remember meeting Zack?”

Feeling pushed, feeling the other woman has been deaf to the subtlety of what she has said, letting the little machine listen for her, Hope says, modelling attentiveness, “I
like
the way you put that. How one remembers slowly replaces what really was. Like fossils.” She thinks she is unclear, and amplifies, “The same way that mineral particles fill in the shape where a body has rotted away—a kind of lost-wax casting process, as I understand it. Zack,” she restates, nettled to think that the girl will see her as an old fool wasting precious tape. “As I remember it, it was at one of the Saturday dances at the Artists Union loft at Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. This drunken man grabbed me and asked me if I wanted to fuck, that was his word, considered quite rude in those days, even among so-called bohe-mians. Pretending to dance, he pushed his body against mine to show me he had an erection, and I slapped his face. It seemed to wake him up, because he became suddenly very polite, like a little boy. He kept begging my pardon,
and I couldn’t get away from him. He was too drunk to remember me afterward, but I remembered
him
, and would see him at the Cedar Tavern, where Ruk used to take me before he suddenly deserted New York and joined his family in Minneapolis, where they had somehow landed on their feet. Or their boots. Their White-Russian boots. Did I tell you I never understood how his family got their money out of Russia? I mean, that yellow Lincoln cost somebody a bundle. Jewels, I supposed, sewed into their girdles. You know about the Cedar, I’m sure—it was a perfectly plain bar, painted one dismal shade of green inside, and looked from the outside just like a dozen other bars along University Place, but the painters took to it for some reason, or because there was absolutely no art on the walls, or because the management had made the decision to put up with temperamental artists. They would gather in the back, in the dark leatherette booths there, and argue about art.”

“Who, exactly?”

“It varied. The ones who liked to argue best, who were best at it, were Bernie Nova and Roger Merebien. And Mahlon Strunk, though he had a slower tongue and seemed older, it may have been more that he was getting some serious attention from the critics and galleries while the rest were still pretty much ignored. Mahlon was the one who took the Surrealist theories most seriously, even though he was from way upstate and very quiet and down-to-earth and
married
, which was a little surreal in itself. He and his wife, Myrtle, walked around in the Village like a working-class couple on a Sunday stroll, in matching gray overcoats. He always carried an umbrella, that’s the kind of cautious person he was, but he believed in automatism. Masson was in this country by then, and had an exhibition at the Buchholz
Gallery, and he was the Surrealist we could take seriously, as opposed to Dalí, who as I say was technically everything we despised, though after Photorealism I wonder now why we all felt so superior. He was such a different kind of Spaniard from Picasso might have been the problem, though both were showmen, in their ways. I’m sorry, this isn’t the kind of thing you want, is it?”

“I want anything you can give me. It all helps make a picture.”

“It’s so hard, to remember honestly. After over fifty years, nearly sixty. Mahlon was quite nice to Zack, I remember that, and of course the idea that by letting accidents happen on the canvas you could let your subconscious speak was appealing to Zack, who was so messy anyway. Even in the ’thirties, he would draw right on the canvas with the tube. And go over and over a painting till its original image was totally covered up. We were poor but didn’t scrimp on paint. We weren’t so much interested in the craft or the finished product as in what the painting did for the painter. That was the thing, back then, that everybody talked about—getting the
self
out, getting it on canvas. That was why abstraction was so glamorous, it was all
self
. I know it must all seem very naïve to your generation, who don’t believe in the self, who think the self is just a social construct, just as you don’t believe there are writers, just texts that write themselves and can mean anything.” Feeling guilty over her resistant, counter-transferential feelings toward her interviewer, Hope does try to cast her mind back, into that opaque murk of the past.

In the dim back area of the leatherette booths, Roger Merebien’s puffy round face, younger than his years, seemed a white moon, glazed with sweat, insisting on itself in the haze of cigarette smoke and beer vapors. “The so-called
‘aesthetic,’ ” he stated in his rather high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, “is merely the sensuous aspect of the world—it is not the end of art but a means, a means for getting at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception. These objects of perception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation. The impulse from the unconscious, the automatistic moment, is only a moment, a way to get the painting mind going—probing, finding, completing. Collage is another way of enlisting the random, but how the scraps are manipulated depends on
feeling
, and here an infinite subtlety enters in, a really quite
breath
taking”—his round head seemed to rotate on its neck like a lighthouse beam, as if he dared objection to this girlish word—“play of body-mind trying to free itself from mechanical social responses, and in this becoming essentially moral, in subverting and even overthrowing an established American social order which is inhuman in its drives and responses. Our own Fascism, you could say.”

“Exactly!” Bernie Nova pounced. “Regionalism is Fascist painting; it appeals to the same
Lumpen
, it labels everything else degenerate, just like Nazism it caters to injured pride and a warped national ego. It hates the French, it hates the immigrants, it’s rural America—the pitchfork, the fat cattle, the cotton fields, the Okie in his jalopy, the good simple straight-standing farm folk, good Christ, the tidy rows of corn, the tornado lowering on the horizon—rural America in all its anti-Negro, anti-Jew, anti-city isolationism. The war, bless it, has swept isolationism away; ditto American
Scene, though its cartoon populism makes good war propaganda. And good leftist propaganda, too.”