Jackson Pollock (10 page)

Besides stopping by for casual visits, Pollock showed up at the Bentons’ every Monday
night to play in a band called the Harmonica Rascals. It had been founded by Benton
a few years earlier after he had casually picked up a toy harmonica belong to T.P.
and tried to play it. With the first few sounds he conceived a new ambition, deciding
to collect folk songs on his trips across the country and teach them to his students
and friends in New York. Using his own system of musical notation—he referred to the
notes of the scale by number—he managed to collect hundreds of folk songs, and it
wasn’t long before his Monday-night gatherings were attracting some of the best fiddlers
and guitar strummers in the city. Among his followers was Charles Seeger, whose son
Pete once said that the first time he heard the famous traditional song “John Henry,”
it was played by Benton on the harmonica, with the elder Seeger accompanying him on
the guitar.

For Pollock the main attraction of the Monday-night musicals was listening to Rita
play the guitar and sing. He loved watching her perform, and his appreciation of her
talents was no doubt heightened by his own ineptitude at singing or playing an instrument.
As Benton later wrote, “Jack tried to play the harmonica with us but ran into some
kind of ‘bloc’ about reading or playing the notes.” To keep him from dropping out
of the band, Benton gave him a Jew’s harp, thinking it would be easier for him to
play since he wouldn’t have to read notes; all he had to do was hum into the instrument
and pluck a single string. That too gave him difficulty, but at least he enjoyed it.
“[I] can’t play a damned thing,” he wrote to his family, “but it kinda puts me to
sleep at nite and I kinda get a kick out of it.” It surely must have pleased him to
discover that Benton thought he at least
looked
like a musician:
The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley
(
Fig. 6
), which was named after a folk song and exhibited at the Ferargil Gallery that April,
includes a portrait of Pollock playing the Jew’s harp, his blond bangs hanging in
his eyes.

By now Pollock was living at 46 East Eighth Street, on the same block as the Bentons.
He shared the fifth-floor apartment with his brother Charles and his brother’s future
wife, Elizabeth England. As the one who did the cooking and cleaning, Elizabeth came
to resent Jackson and often complained to Charles that she failed to understand why
he had to live with them. She was embittered by the fact that Jackson didn’t have
a job and couldn’t contribute to household expenses. Sometimes Elizabeth returned
home from work to find Jackson lying on his bed, lost in reverie and oblivious to
the condition of his room. “Clean up this stinking mess or I’m calling the health
department!” she’d scream as Jackson just lay there silently. Other days she found
him sitting by the coal-burning stove in the kitchen, his feet propped up on a chair,
waiting for his brother to come home. Elizabeth would lash out at him: “You’ve used
up all the coal!” Pollock didn’t bother to defend himself, knowing that Elizabeth
hated having to live with him and that nothing he could say would change her feelings
toward him. He was polite to her, thanking her for dinner on the nights she cooked
and offering to help with the dishes. But he spent increasing amounts of time at the
Bentons’.

Charles never criticized his brother, assuming all blame for the trouble he caused
while continuing to encourage him with his art. One day Charles suggested to Jackson
that he consider designing a mural for Greenwich House, which had just announced plans
to commission an artist to decorate the building’s lobby. The prospect of painting
his own mural held a definite appeal for Jackson, and he quickly got to work preparing
a proposal. On a sheet of heavy brown grocer’s paper he painted two scenes, one of
which, presumably based on Benton’s Harmonica Rascals, shows a group of five musicians
writhing to the beat of their music (
Fig. 7
). One of the musicians plays a fiddle, another a clarinet. The other instruments
cannot be made out, however; the forms in the painting are so crude that even the
musicians are barely recognizable. Pollock, as usual, sacrificed detail to the whole,
ignoring the outward appearance of the scene while managing to capture the rhythm
and animation underlying it.

Whatever the merits of his mural study, Pollock felt dissatisfied with it, realizing
how inappropriate it was as a design for the
lobby of Greenwich House. He decided not to submit it after all and didn’t even bother
to finish it. It certainly would not have eased his frustration to read in
The New York Times
that May: “Greenwich House is exhibiting sketches submitted by Charles Pollock for
a series of proposed murals . . .”

That summer Pollock was invited by the Bentons to join them at their beach home in
Chilmark, Massachusetts, an isolated fishing town on the western edge of Martha’s
Vineyard. He arrived in August after accompanying Charles on a drive to Los Angeles
to see their mother. The Bentons’ place on the Vineyard was strikingly scenic, consisting
of a weather-beaten cottage perched on a high hill that overlooked the harbor of Menemsha
and a rickety barn, overgrown with roses, that served as Benton’s studio. No sooner
had Pollock arrived on the Vineyard than Benton and Rita told him that he too could
have his own studio as well as private living quarters—providing he was willing to
live in a chicken coop. Thrilled by the idea of having his own place, Pollock went
to work renovating the coop, a small, squat, dilapidated shack adjacent to the barn.
He cleaned it out, built a small table, and covered the dirt floor with wooden boards.
He cut a large window in a wall. Benton helped him out by building a few shelves,
soon to be stocked with painting supplies, and Rita brought over an army cot from
the house. The coop was nicknamed “Jack’s Shack,” and it would be Pollock’s summer
residence for the next three years. “I am inclined to believe,” Benton later wrote,
“that he was happier during his Martha’s Vineyard visits than in any other time in
his life. Contented maybe is a better word.”

Pollock’s days on the Vineyard could not have been more simple. Mornings he helped
out around the house, pumping water, mowing the grass, and volunteering to take on
such projects as painting the trim of the house. Fond of gardening, he weeded the
flower patch and planted new varieties. By noon Rita would have packed up a picnic
lunch, and the foursome would set off on an outing, Benton and Rita walking side by
side and
Pollock carrying T.P. on his shoulders. Pollock and the boy usually strayed off on
their own after lunch to sail T.P.’s boat in Menemsha Pond or swim naked beneath the
cliffs, accompanied by their make-believe friend Jack Sass.

In these peaceful surroundings Pollock found it easier to concentrate on his work.
It was a highly productive time for him, and he turned out a series of watercolors
and oil paintings loosely based on the view of Menemsha Pond from the window of his
hilltop studio. Most of his Chilmark seascapes are small in size, crude in execution,
and solitary in mood, and they bear far less resemblance to the actual landscape than
to the ghostly, lonely “in-scapes” of Albert Pinkham Ryder. Typical of Pollock’s Vineyard
scenes is
T.P. Boat’s in Menemsha Pond
(
Fig. 8
), a very small painting (it measures only 5” × 6”) in which a tiny white boat floats
on a still pond, oddly isolated from the harbor and clouds that swirl around it. In
Seascape
(
Fig. 9
)—widely regarded as one of Pollock’s strongest early works—the mood is more urgent,
with a small white sailboat heading into turbulent waters. The painting is dominated
by the image of waves, which are rendered almost abstractly in thick, rough, roiling
strokes of turquoise and black, each one intertwining with the next to form a flowing
whole.
Seascape
offers a good example of Pollock’s instinct for “allover” composition—practically
every inch of the canvas is charged with equal intensity or emphasis—a significant
feature of his later work.

Among the people Pollock met through the Bentons was Helen Marot, an elderly social
reformer who summered in Chilmark and was a longtime friend of Rita Benton. At sixty-nine
she was still attractive, with shiny auburn hair, a light complexion, and a caring,
deferential manner that made people feel appreciated. She had achieved prominence
earlier in life as a labor leader, author, and editor of the
Dial
but had grown disillusioned with social causes. As Lewis Mumford later wrote in his
autobiography, “Overnight the Helen Marot I had known on ‘The Dial’ dropped the preoccupations
of a whole lifetime, as if they were so many soiled garments.” Seeking more fundamental
insight into the human condition, she turned to psychology. By the time
she met Pollock she was teaching at the City and Country School, a progressive private
school in Greenwich Village founded by her lifelong companion Caroline Pratt. The
two elderly women took an immediate interest in Pollock, recognizing in his shy, hesitant
manner a person of unusual sensitivity, and offered to help him however they could.
They already knew his brother Charles, who taught art at their school on a part-time
basis, and suggested to Jackson after meeting him in Chilmark that he too should consider
working at the school. They offered him the job of janitor.

Having found his first full-time job, Pollock didn’t hesitate to move out of Charles’s
apartment after returning from Martha’s Vineyard in September 1934. In his eagerness
to escape a strained living arrangement, he left the spacious apartment on Eighth
Street for markedly inferior accommodations: a small unheated room one flight above
a lumberyard at 76 West Houston Street, where he slept on a mattress thrown on the
floor and cooked simple meals for himself on a tiny wood-burning stove. Impoverished
as he was, Pollock was still better off than many of his neighbors. Houston Street
was lined with Depression-style shanties, and it was rare that Pollock left his building
without stepping over a sleeping derelict in the entranceway.

That October, Pollock’s brother Sande arrived in New York from Los Angeles intent
on pursuing a career in art. He had wanted to join Jackson and Charles in New York
for many years, partly because he had missed them so much. It had made him sad to
have to say goodbye to them at the end of each summer, and the last time had been
the hardest. “I felt so sorry for Sanford,” his mother had written to her sons in
New York, “he broke down and cried he hated to see you leave would loved to [have]
gone with you.” Now Sande had finally come to New York, hitchhiking across the country
and arriving in Manhattan with “34 cents in my pocket, and California clothes—not
even an overcoat.” He headed directly for Jackson’s apartment and was startled to
find his kid brother living in abject poverty. Excited anyway to be in New York, Sande
moved into Jackson’s apartment and, for lack of a job, accompanied Jackson every night
to the school where he worked as a janitor.

Every afternoon around four the two brothers set off for the City and Country School,
at Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue. They shared Jackson’s job, Sande helping him
empty garbage cans, sweep floors, and, once a week, mop the hallways of the five-story
building. “Much as Jackson hated the janitor job,” Sande later recalled, “he did it
conscientiously. If he was committed to doing something, he would do it right and
not loaf.” The job paid ten dollars a week, which was hardly enough to support the
two brothers and forced them to depend on government handouts. They managed to get
on the rolls of the New York Emergency Relief Administration—better known as Home
Relief—a state-run welfare program that provided them with a meager stipend and a
limited amount of food, consisting for the most part of bags of cornmeal and occasional
scraps of meat. With the onset of winter their situation worsened. They stole to survive,
sneaking coal and wood from neighborhood markets.

One winter evening Jackson and Sande were on their way to work when they stopped in
front of New York University to observe a scene that had caught their attention. The
university then housed the Gallery of Living Art, a leading collection of contemporary
European paintings belonging to A. E. Gallatin, a wealthy Cubist painter and pharmacologist.
Through the windows of the gallery Jackson and Sande could see Matisses and Braques
gleaming against the walls, an odd backdrop to the pathetic group of hoboes clustered
in front of the building, huddling between pillars to shelter themselves from the
wind. The two brothers were moved by the scene—the beautiful paintings, the homeless
men, art’s utter uselessness in the face of hardship. At Sande’s suggestion he and
Jackson each painted the scene (the latter’s work has since been lost) and exhibited
the results at the John Reed Club, a center of radical art and politics on Sixth Avenue.