Jackson Pollock Read online

  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.

  Though the Cody newspaper had reported in its “society” column that LeRoy had found a job in San Diego and purchased a piece of land, no such events had ever occurred. One imagines it was Stella who fabricated this news, unwilling to admit to the townspeople that her family was leaving Cody after ten years to live like drifters in a rented house in an obscure, fruit-growing suburb of San Diego. Better for people to think that the Pollocks were prosperous.

  “L. R. Pollock and family, from Wyoming, are recent arrivals in National City,” reported the San Diego Sun in December 1912. It was the last time the Pollocks would be mentioned in that newspaper, for their stay in National City was so short no one had time to take note of them. A month after the family’s arrival a blizzard struck the area, killing the orange crop, bankrupting farmers, and convincing LeRoy that he never wanted to be a citrus farmer. By the time the city’s 1913 directory was published, listing LeRoy as a “plasterer” who lived on Sixth Street, the family had already departed.

  Again LeRoy went by train ahead of his family, this time traveling east, to Phoenix, Arizona. He was immediately fond of the city, and it seemed to him that Phoenix, which called itself the “City of Progress,” really did offer hopes of advancement even to an impoverished farmer like himself. Land was cheap, loans were easy to secure, and the Roosevelt Dam, completed two years earlier, guaranteed that the land would be fertile. In September 1913, with a down payment of ten dollars, LeRoy purchased his first piece of land, a forty-acre truck farm six miles outside Phoenix, on the road to Tempe. Then he sent for his wife and sons.

  It was there, in the low-lying valley of the Salt River, that LeRoy and Stella spent the four happiest years of their lives. For the first time—and also the last—they were slightly prosperous landowners. They stocked their farm with Holsteins and Jerseys, the best dairy cows they could find. They planted corn, okra, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and other seasonal vegetables, which, in the growing months, LeRoy sold downtown at the farmers’ market. He paid off his mortgage, his savings grew. Besides selling produce at the market, LeRoy picked up extra money by selling milk to a nearby sanatorium and apricots to cities in the East. He won blue ribbons for his produce and was proud of his success. His sons recall how he’d lead them into the alfalfa fields and, pointing into the distance, tell them, “One day we’ll own that land.”

  The three-room adobe house in which the Pollocks lived was small and cramped, encouraging the children to spend most of their time oudoors. They slept in the yard from the spring through the fall, in a huge brass bed that the five of them shared. On nights when the sky crackled with lightning the boys would run into their parents’ bedroom all excited, dragging their rain-splashed mattress behind them. Most often, though, the sky was clear and glittery with stars, and the boys spent the nights beneath the tall cottonwood trees, with cottony wisps tumbling down around them. Though the outside world was already at war, LeRoy would later look back longingly on the four years the family spent in Phoenix, writing to one of his sons, “I wish we were all back in the country on a big ranch with pigs cows horses chickens. . . . The happiest time was when you boys were all home on the ranch. We did lots of hard work, but we were healthy and happy.” The fullness and richness of the years they spent in Phoenix is perhaps best captured in this postcard from Stella: “We are having lots of wasting ears [of corn] watermelon and such fruit just going to waste there is so much of it the trees are almost broke down with weight I put up 59 qt of apricots last week I am making crab bullion today and baking bread.”

  Though LeRoy has been characterized before as a lackluster farmer who drifted through life leaving little record of his existence, his sons would not agree with such a description. They considered their father an intelligent, sensitive, purposeful man and held him in high esteem. One day Frank, the middle son, returned home from school and reported that a teacher had denigrated the Industrial Workers of the World, joking to the class that IWW means “I Won’t Work.” LeRoy was outraged. Though by no means a political activist, he identified with labor’s struggles and was acutely sensitive to any form of injustice. He taught his sons that life is harsh and unfair but that one can rise above it through inner fineness. If cultivating the land “gave him a deep inner satisfaction,” according to his son Charles, so did the cultivation of his mind. He liked to listen to classical music, and though not a voracious reader, he traveled with a small library and often read aloud to his children from Dickens, Stevenson, and Huckleberry Finn. After LeRoy’s death his son Sande would write to his brothers that their father’s absence “will leave a gap in our lives which can only be filled by our untiring efforts towards those cultural things which he, as a sensitive man, found so sordidly lacking in our civilization.”

  While LeRoy tried to improve himself by cultivating inner qualities, Stella distinguished herself through appearances. Even in rural Phoenix she managed to live her life with style. Her sons recall how she loved to rub her face and hands with fragra
nt rosewater, put on a veiled hat and white gloves, and drive a team of horses into town. At the general store she would purchase her favorite magazines, Country Gentleman and Ladies’ Home Journal, and at Goldwater’s department store she would shop for fabrics, buying yards of fine silk pongee, imported from the Orient. She sewed her own clothes, as well as clothes for the boys: full, flowing shirts of gingham and chambray and knee-length corduroy trousers. In school photographs the Pollock children are invariably the best-dressed in their class, their clothes finely tailored and adorned with such details as military epaulets and fancy buttons. “You have to look important,” Stella used to say, determined to fashion her sons into distinguished young men.

  Not the least among the reasons for Stella’s satisfaction in Phoenix was her fierce pride in the talents of her eldest child. Charles, who was ten years older than Jackson, bore a distinct likeness to his mother, with thick, wavy hair, classical features, and a self-restrained, stoic demeanor that added to the sense of strength conveyed by his bulky figure. Like Stella, Charles was good with his hands and had shown an impressive ability for drawing from the time he was three or four years old. One day on the Phoenix ranch Charles picked up a grocer’s pencil and drew a picture of a hog on a paper sack. His brothers marveled: A hog. It looked exactly like a hog. To encourage Charles, Stella sent him to weekly art classes at the home of a “drawing tutor,” Mrs. Bidwell. Though LeRoy sometimes complained that the classes interfered with Charles’s farm duties, Stella invariably defended her son. “He’s entitled to it,” she would say, quickly silencing her husband. It pleased her profoundly that Charles had natural taste—reflected, she felt, not only in his interest in drawing but in his fondness for sitting beside her as she sewed and admiring swatches of fabric. She often told Charles that she thought he would make an excellent jeweler, which seemed to her an ideal profession for a boy who possessed an instinctive appreciation of rare, beautiful things.

  Jackson, by comparison, did not draw as a little boy. As much as he admired Charles, he made no outward effort to emulate his oldest brother, resisting the creative possibilities that lay within his grasp. A photograph dating from the time he was six years old shows him to be a pretty youth with fine blond hair, a dimpled chin, and a shy, sweet smile that hints at his sensitive disposition. His brother Sande, the closest to him in age, once described him as “the sweetest guy, the most unselfish boy. I never saw Jack cruel to any animal—dog, cat anything. He was gentle to an unnatural degree.” Sande, a dark, small, self-sacrificing boy, instinctively felt protective toward his baby brother, as though recognizing a certain helplessness in Jackson that left him unequipped for the rigors of farm life. On most afternoons, while his brothers tended to their farm chores, Jackson, who had no chores, would simply wander around the barnyard with Gyp, the family dog, a white mongrel with a patch of black around one eye. In his naïveté Jackson often got in trouble for allowing Gyp to drink from the buckets of fresh milk in the yard. His brothers all agreed that Jackson took after their father, for LeRoy too was fond of animals. He couldn’t stand killing them, not even a chicken. It was Stella who slaughtered the poultry on the farm.

  Four years after moving to Phoenix, Stella became disenchanted with the city. Farmers from the South were arriving in large numbers, planting fields once reserved for corn and alfalfa with long-staple cotton and replacing family-owned dairy farms with large operations staffed by itinerant farm hands. To Stella cotton farming was “low-down drudgery,” and she wanted no part of it. She complained to her husband that Phoenix was becoming a cotton town, and a cotton town was no place to raise a family; she wanted to move. LeRoy, however, was unsympathetic, pointing out to his wife that they had managed to build up a first-rate stock of dairy cows, chickens, and hogs and that their farm represented a foothold into the future.

  But Stella became obsessed with the idea of moving. One day she returned from town with a stack of postcards and a map of the western United States. She wrote to the chambers of commerce in most of the cities on the map and was answered with dozens of brochures. Night after night she read the brochures aloud to LeRoy, reeling off facts about distant cities, each with its promises of ideal climate and perfect location and opportunities for success. Though LeRoy still felt they had nothing to gain by leaving Phoenix, he grew tired of arguing with his wife, who, in her eagerness to leave Phoenix, could not be reasoned with. Besides, Stella had already made up her mind: she wanted to move to Chico, California. Though she had never visited the town, she had read in a brochure that Chico had tree-lined avenues and the largest oak in the world. She had read that Chico was the “Rose City of Butte County” and that Butte County was the largest olive-growing center in the state. What impressed Stella the most about Chico were its schools, which included a state college. She told her husband that Chico was a place where their sons could receive a good education.

  In January 1918, against his better judgment, LeRoy auctioned off his animals and sold his Phoenix farm. One month later he purchased an eighteen-acre fruit farm in Chico, California, a town he immediately disliked. The family’s large white house was their first with running water and electric lights, but such modern conveniences were no consolation to LeRoy. He resented having to work as a citrus farmer but had no choice, for Chico was a citrus town in which all human effort was spent growing fruit, entering statewide agricultural contests, and staging pruning demonstrations; the town of nine thousand desperately wanted to become the citrus capital of the Sacramento Valley. When the Pollocks first settled in Chico, LeRoy went to farm bureau meetings to try to learn new techniques for pruning and spraying trees, but the truth was he just did not care. He missed working with cows, chickens, and hogs, and he longed for the Phoenix farm. Sometimes, after dinner, he would take a bottle from the pantry and sit down in the living room. Stella would tell him to put the bottle back. LeRoy would start chewing tobacco, but Stella didn’t like tobacco any more than she liked alcohol. She would tell LeRoy to quit chewing tobacco in her house. LeRoy would end up sitting around the living room looking sad, and Stella would tell her boys, “Stay away from Dad. He’s got the blues.”

  LeRoy was desperate to get out of Chico. He spoke to a local real estate man, Chris Sharp, who offered to trade the Pollocks’ fruit farm for a small mountainside inn near Reno, Nevada. The prospect of running an inn did not particularly appeal to LeRoy but certainly seemed preferable to working as a fruit farmer. Less than two years after moving to Chico, LeRoy told his wife he wanted to move. Stella immediately opposed the suggestion, arguing that their sons were doing well in school and she had no intention of moving them to some backwater town whose educational system consisted of a one-room schoolhouse. But LeRoy was adamant, forcing his wife to agree to a compromise: they would move to the inn near Reno but leave their three older sons in Chico, arranging for them to board with a friend and continue at the local high school. The two younger boys would remain with their parents—though that too posed problems. Jackson, age seven, had just completed the first grade at the Sacramento Avenue School, and his mother was upset at having to disrupt his schooling so soon after it had begun.

  In January 1920 LeRoy acquired the Diamond Mountain Inn in Janesville, California, a tiny town near the Nevada border. The inn, named for the mountains that surrounded it and located on the town’s one road, was a twenty-two-room establishment catering for the most part to gangs of road surveyors who needed a place to spend the night on the desolate stretch between Reno and Susanville. Unlike the other towns of Jackson’s youth, Janesville really resembled the Wild West of legend. On cold nights old codgers who lived nearby would gather at the Pollocks’ inn, sitting around the wood-burning stove in the dining room drinking whiskey and bragging about gunfights. At the Janesville School, Jackson and Sande met their first roughriders. In the months when the town was snowbound, local cowboys, armed with six-shooters, would sit in the back of the classroom making eyes at the pretty teacher.

  As anxious as he had
been to leave Chico, LeRoy only became more discontented after moving to Janesville. The job of running an inn, which required mainly that he clean the guest rooms and assist his wife in the kitchen, gave him none of the satisfaction he derived from farming. In retrospect it seemed to him that he had ruined himself irreversibly by selling the Phoenix farm, losing not only his land but the modest financial security he had worked so hard to obtain. He was furious with his wife, who, in her stubborn desire to improve her situation, had seemed instead to have trapped the family in obscurity. Though Stella tried to assure him that they could always acquire another farm, LeRoy was long past the point of listening to anything she said. Early one morning he packed up his belongings and left Janesville with a group of surveyors.

  Stella was deeply upset by her husband’s departure. Whatever differences the couple may have had, she seems to have genuinely loved LeRoy and refused to accept the possibility that their marriage was over. In the next four years she would move her children to five different towns, following LeRoy around the West in hopes of bringing him back into the family. For Jackson, whose itinerant youth had already deprived him of any semblance of community or continuity, his father’s departure signaled the complete loss of childhood security. Despite his mother’s best efforts to see that he received the same advantages as his older brothers, Stella was incapable of providing Jackson with the attention and affection he needed. A rigid woman to begin with, she pulled deeper into herself in her husband’s absence, internalizing her unhappiness and becoming a remote presence to her children. The deprivations of Jackson’s youth left him with a weak, uncertain image of himself and an unfathomable sense of loneliness that no amount of acclaim or recognition could ever help him overcome.

  Soon after LeRoy left, Stella talked with Chris Sharp, the real estate man back in Chico. With his stylish suits, fat cigars, and gregarious nature, Sharp struck the Pollock boys as the very opposite of their father. “Tell me where you want to go,” he used to say to Stella, “and I’ll send you.” Stella asked him to find her a California dairy farm, thinking that her husband would return to the family if only they lived on a farm. She ended up trading the inn in Janesville for a twenty-acre dairy farm in the nearby town of Orland. In August 1921 the Orland Unit, according to its masthead “The Only Absolutely Honest Newspaper in California,” announced on page one that “L. R. Pollock . . . will come with his family to this place to take possession of their Orland property about the first of next month, bringing his family to make their home at this place.”