Jackson Pollock (4 page)

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.”

The Pollock family was considerably smaller than the newspaper item indicated. LeRoy,
who was working as a surveyor for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, never visited his
family in Orland. And Charles, the oldest son, had also moved away from home, to Los
Angeles, where he found a job in the layout department of the
Los Angeles Times
and where he would soon be joined by his brother Jay. More important, Charles had
enrolled at the Otis Art Institute, the most prestigious art school in the West. He
had decided, at age eighteen, that he was going to become a great artist.

Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art is almost startling considering the cultural
isolation of his youth. The towns in which the Pollock boys grew up offered no evidence
of a living tradition in the fine arts. Painting and drawing, if they were practiced
at all, were considered little more than leisure pastimes for women. As an example
of the frivolous status accorded the arts, one can look to the Fifth Annual Glenn
County Fair, held in Orland two months after the Pollocks’ arrival. The fair’s so-called
art department, according to the local newspaper, offered cash prizes for “paintings
on china . . . contestants are also invited to design a lampshade.” And it was not
only in rural California that art was defined as painted plates and lampshades; the
United States itself had yet to produce a self-sustaining tradition in the fine arts
and was still dependent on Europe for its cultural identity.

On the other hand, Charles’s decision to pursue a career in art seems almost inevitable
given his natural talent for drawing and the reinforcement he received from his mother.
Stella, as one might expect, was thrilled by his decision to study at a leading art
school and harbored grand visions for his future. In 1923, when Jackson was eleven,
the family visited Charles in Los Angeles and was immediately impressed by the suave
and sophisticated young artist who greeted them. As Frank once exclaimed: “He was
wearing spats, and we had never known anyone to wear spats before!” Inspired by their
brother’s example, the two younger Pollock boys, Sande and Jackson, soon declared
that they too were going to be artists. As Sande has said, “Charles started this whole
damn thing. He left home damned early. Charles was the fellow who had the intellectual
curiosity all along.”

Stella once told a newspaper interviewer that whenever Jackson was asked what he wanted
to be when he grew up, he invariably replied, “I want to be an artist like brother
Charles.” Unlike his brother, however, Jackson had not yet demonstrated a facility
for drawing. In his entire youth, according to his family, he did not produce a single
sketch. This in itself is significant. It’s almost as if Pollock suffered from “painter’s
block” years before
he ever picked up a paintbrush. As much as he wanted to be an artist, the subversive
aspects of his personality prevented him from even trying. He was a solitary, withdrawn
boy who seems from his earliest years to have felt dissatisfied with himself, as though
conscious of a certain unworthiness that set him apart from his talented older brother.
These feelings of inadequacy unleashed in him an anger so overwhelming that it all
but paralyzed him during these years, while hinting at the makings of the fiercely
competitive artist that Pollock would prove to be.

The farm in Orland, which the family had traded for the Janesville inn, soon fell
idle. The land went untilled, the crops unharvested, the cows unmilked. Depressed
by her husband’s absence, Stella simply watched out for checks from LeRoy and waited
for him to come home. To make matters worse, she realized after having purchased the
property that it lay outside the central school district. Rather than attending the
new modern school downtown, Jackson, Sande, and Frank had to go to an obscure one-room
schoolhouse on the edge of town, a two-mile walk from their house. A group photograph
of the Walnut Grove School’s entire student body—twenty-five kids in grades one through
eight—provides us with our first intimations of Jackson’s relations to his peers.
He is a large, intense, self-conscious blond boy who is standing by himself at the
end of the middle row, conspicuously alone. While other children appear to be fidgeting,
Jackson stands at perfect attention, his expression solemn, his arms rigid at his
sides, as though making a deliberate effort to assume the correct pose and to minimize
any differences between himself and the other children. This image of self-restraint
contrasts sharply with his brothers’ spontaneity, with Sande standing behind him (as
Sande always would), smirking at the camera, and Frank, who is next to the teacher,
obviously amused at having to stand there.

Unable or unwilling to run a farm by herself, Stella sold the Orland property in January
1923, eighteen months after purchasing it. As the Orland newspaper reported on page
one, at considerable embarrassment to LeRoy, “Mr. Pollock found it impossible to attend
to the development of the land and at the same time
attend to his duties in other parts of the state.” It was the end of the family’s
real estate holdings. As partial payment for the Orland property Stella accepted a
secondhand Studebaker Special, unwisely trading the security of farmland for the mobility
of the automobile. For the first time she had a car and could go wherever she pleased,
but she no longer knew where she wanted to go. She drove back to Chico to seek the
help of Chris Sharp, who, taking pity on the family, generously offered to board them
for the winter. In the spring, after LeRoy had visited his family in Chico and informed
them that he had accepted a job in the Sierra Ancha Mountains in Arizona, Stella decided
that she too would return to that state. Though LeRoy wasn’t sure exactly where his
work would take him, Stella was determined to be at least within a few hours’ drive
of him and moved her family to Phoenix.

The Pollocks’ second stay in Phoenix was a difficult period for them. They lived in
a small rented house on Sixteenth Street, in a rundown neighborhood, struggling to
get along on occasional checks from LeRoy. For Jackson, who was eleven, it was a particularly
unrewarding time. Whereas in Janesville and Orland he had attended school with his
older brothers and could depend on Sande to watch out for him, Phoenix had a modern
school system that separated students by grades. At the Monroe Grammar School, which
occupied the largest school building in the Southwest, Jackson was an outsider among
the other sixth graders. Besides being new to the school, he was a noticeably poor
student and was repeating the sixth grade. As Sande once said, “His grades weren’t
passing in any school he ever went to.” While this may be an overstatement, Jackson
made no discernible effort to excel at his studies, as though hampered by a poor self-image
that condemned him to failure before the school year even began.

One positive consequence of the family’s second stay in Phoenix was that Jackson developed
an interest in American Indian culture. He and Sande often visited the ruins near
Pueblo, where they explored the cliff dwellings and fooled around with arrowheads.
On Sunday afternoons the brothers sometimes stopped by a park downtown where Maricopas
and Pimas from
nearby reservations traded their handicrafts for practical goods. The boys felt sorry
for the Indians, who, as Sande later recalled, at times bartered their blankets or
jewelry for as little as “a bag of beans.” For Jackson, who grew up at a time when
the West was synonymous with rootlessness and change, Indian culture offered a connection
to the past.

The family’s situation in Phoenix worsened over time as LeRoy’s checks dwindled to
almost nothing. With no means of support, Stella proposed to a widowed farmer named
Jacob Minsch that she and her sons help him with his farm work in exchange for room
and board. The irony is that ten years earlier the Pollock farm had bordered the Minsch
farm. When LeRoy had stood in the alfalfa fields pointing into the distance and dreaming
about acquiring additional land, he had been pointing to the Minsch land, where his
wife was now working as a maid and his sons were reduced to farmhands.

One afternoon in the fall of 1923 Jackson was playing in the barnyard of the Minsch
farm when he picked up a branch from the ground and tried to break it. But it wouldn’t
break. He walked over to a woodpile on top of which rested an ax in a block and started
to remove the ax. A boy named Johnny Porter offered to cut the branch for him, insisting
he was too young to handle a heavy ax. Jackson, surrendering the ax, placed the branch
on top of the woodpile and pointed to the spot where he wanted it cut. As Johnny raised
the ax above his head, Jackson continued to point. When the ax fell, a third of Jackson’s
right index finger was severed from his hand. He ran inside the house to his mother,
who sewed up the wound and applied some sugar to it to help it heal.

Jackson’s finger eventually healed, but it would always be deformed. He felt self-conscious
about the injury. In later life, whenever he was photographed, he almost always switched
his cigarette from his right hand to his left and concealed the maimed hand in a pocket
or at his side or behind his back. One does not want to make too much of an accident,
except to say that from childhood on, Jackson showed a tendency toward self-injury
and that his first serious injury involved his hands.