Jackson Pollock (3 page)

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 fragrant 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.