Read Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown Online

Authors: Michael Cunningham

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #History, #United States, #Massachusetts, #Travel, #Essays & Travelogues, #Northeast, #State & Local, #Sports & Recreation, #Walking, #ME, #NH, #VT), #New England (CT, #RI, #Provincetown (Mass.) - Description and travel, #Cunningham; Michael, #Provincetown, #Provincetown (Mass.), #MA, #Walking - Massachusetts - Provincetown, #New England (CT; MA; ME; NH; RI; VT)

Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (10 page)

BOOK: Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown
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By the late 1960s, however, Provincetown had devolved into a straightforward tourist town, albeit one with a slightly higher incidence of foment and creation than most other places whose main occupation was being visited. All the edgy little galleries had gone out of business, and the people who emigrated there were likelier to be seeking peace and quiet than inspiration, agitation, or argument. Those who went to the A-House and the Old Colony Tap went only to drink.

In 1969 Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, and other artists and writers who were upset about Provincetown’s decline set out, essentially, to restock the town with younger artists and writers the way a forest service restocks a lake with fingerling trout. They raised a modest sum of money and bought Days Lumber, a defunct lumberyard on the East End. They converted it into studios, which they offered to artists and writers, along with a small but livable monthly allowance, and called it the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. It is still there.

The buildings of the Work Center, on Pearl Street, are agreeably disorderly. They include the long flat-roofed buildings that were once Days Lumber, a shingled barn that has been made over into studios, and two cottages fading among the weeds. Among the writers, painters, and sculptors who have received fellowships early in their careers, lived for a while in Provincetown, and gone on to more visible careers are Richard Baker, Maria Flook, Nick Flynn, Ellen Gallagher, Louise Gluck, Marie Howe, Denis Johnson, Tama Janowitz, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jenny Livingston, Elizabeth McCracken, Sam Messer, Ann Patchett, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jack Pierson, Louise Rafkin, Kate Wheeler, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Due partly to the Fine Arts Work Center, and partly to the increasingly imponderable cost of living in New York City, Provincetown has to a certain extent been revived as an art colony. Still, it is not what it once was. Provincetown today is something like an elderly bohemian who once knew people of great influence, who still dresses eccentrically, still lives in defiant poverty, still paints or sculpts with heroic optimism, and flirts only on bad days with bitterness about having been gifted and dedicated and having been left behind.

As far as literature is concerned, O’Neill remains the town’s great-grandfather, its most venerable ghost. Tennessee Williams summered there in the forties—he stayed at Captain Jack’s Wharf, on the West End—but as far as I can tell, none of the more hopeful rumors about his relationship to Provincetown are true. He did not write
The Glass Menagerie
or anything else there; he did not seduce the young Marlon Brando there, as a condition for getting him the lead in
Streetcar
. He came, it seems, for the same reasons so many have—for the sun, the quiet, and the boys.

The poets Mark Doty and Mary Oliver live in Provincetown today, and Stanley Kunitz spends each spring and summer in his house on the West End. Norman Mailer lives year-round in a big brick fortress of a house on the East End. Alan Dugan lives just over the line, in North Truro.

A
LTHOUGH FEW OF
the visual artists living and working in Provincetown are internationally known, some of them are in fact very, very good. On the one hand, Provincetown offers every form of artistic travesty, from landscapes and seascapes painted on assembly lines in Korea to dreadfully earnest Impressionist-style paintings of sunlit gardens and village streets. But on the other, it shows and sells work that is much edgier, work that engages the world in more complicated ways, that takes in not only the beauty of the skin but the existence of the skull beneath. I am looking, right now, at a shadowy charcoal drawing of a nocturnal Provincetown street by John Dowd, which I keep close by for inspiration when I write, along with a miniature lamp sewn into a square of white silk organza by Melanie Braverman; a series of mysteriously compelling random snapshots by Sal Randolph; a great cartoonish painting of an empty stage by Polly Burnell; a haunting photograph of a cottage by Marian Roth; and two little ceramic houses by Pasquale Natale that speak to equal extents of comfort and menace.

The painters, photographers, and sculptors of Provincetown need to sell their work as urgently as any artists do, but because the scale is so much smaller and the market so much broader, they are free to do whatever they feel moved to do, without the obligation to Be Important or to Move Art Along. Beauty as a subject in itself doesn’t sell very well in the larger world these days—you’d be hard pressed to find a serious gallery in New York or Los Angeles or another big city showing many newer artists whose work isn’t ironic, defiantly ugly (if
defiant
is the right word for such relative unanimity), and intended as commentary on the state of the culture at large. These are lean years for young still-life and portrait painters. A frank love of the visible world and a determination to pay tribute to it won’t get you very far just now. But you can do fine in Provincetown.

What passes for a dowager on the Provincetown art scene is the Provincetown Art Association, a gracious, rambling old white building in the East End with a trove of work by the luminaries and semiluminaries of Provincetown past and present. The galleries of Provincetown are not averse to showing work that aspires unashamedly to the rendering of the visible world, but at the same time some of them also show the work of artists who might be a little too far out there for most galleries in New York. Provincetown is where Kathe Izzo can get permission to live for several days in a gallery and arrange herself as a living tableau. It is where Michelle Weinberg could make a gown in the shape of a giant pink While You Were Out slip for opera singer Debbie Karpel, who wore it and stood in the window of a gallery on Halloween night, singing arias. It is where Sal Randolph could, last October, curate a show of free art, in which dozens of artists from town participated and at which you could take anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, for free.

T
HE
F
AR
E
AST
E
ND

As you walk past the stores and galleries of the East End, your most dicey aesthetic interlude will occur as you pass a four-story hotel that spans both sides of Commercial Street, a minor monument to ordinariness, with its sad little swimming pool surrounded by a cyclone fence. This place is known, locally, as the green monster, though it is no longer green. Directions are often given in terms of whether the place in question stands before (east) or after (west) the green monster. When it went up over thirty years ago, the selectmen quickly passed legislation forbidding any further structures more than two stories tall.

East of the green monster you are on solid sightseeing ground. You will walk for about another half-mile past the houses that line the bay, the best of which are dreams. They are old and slightly precarious, as houses on water often are. In calamitous weather, they would be the first to go. They are not generally much ornamented; they are sensible New England houses, content with their salt-weathered shingles, their shutters and porches and dormers. They eschew fancy moldings and woodwork. There is not a cupola among them. Wooden houses (only one, Norman Mailer’s, is made of brick) subjected to this much weather are built like boats, with a bit of sway—the fact that they move slightly in strong winds is part of what keeps them standing. You can see through some of them; that is, you can look into a streetside window and see the bay through a rear window, like a living painting the owners have hung, one in which clouds shift and gulls glide by. The houses on the water in the East End, standing as they do on their sandy strip between asphalt and salt water, are not only dreams but are dreaming. With the exception of an occasional newcomer stuck in among them, they have been here long. Some of the children who played in summers on these porches eventually died of old age in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The houses here are not just unusually vulnerable to weather and tides. They are prone to an extra degree of ephemerality, as if one or two of them might, after all this time, forget that it was a house at all and simply dissolve into the bay.

H
ELLO
H
ELLO
H
ELLO

Several summers ago my friends Marie Howe and James Shannon lived in a cottage on the East End. At the end of their block, two weather-beaten houses faced each other across the street. A pair of elderly women lived in one of the houses. They were always inside, always watching television, wrapped in blankets. They ate their meals from trays in front of the TV

Two old men lived in the opposite house. We could see, through their windows, that their house was full of what I would call junk but what they, surely, considered their holdings. Their living room was full of old radios and television sets, among other things, none of which appeared to work. One of the men, who might have been eighty, sat every day in the scrap of yard before his house on a dirty white plastic chair that had conformed itself to the shape of his body. He did not hear very well, or at all—it was difficult to determine. Every time anyone passed his house, he would smile, nod, and shout, “Hello hello hello,” in a cracked but resonant voice. James, Marie, and I agreed that when we grew old and infirm, if we were lucky enough to live that long, we would not be the sort of old people who huddled all day in front of a television set. We would be the sort of old people who set up chairs outside and yelled “Hello hello hello” to everyone who passed.

T
HE
E
ND OF THE
E
AST
E
ND

Eventually you’ll reach the forked intersection of Commercial and Bradford streets. The town line is a short distance away. Ahead of you is the long, languid stretch of Beach Point, with its gaggle of waterfront motels and cottages. Beach Point is lovely, in its corrupted way. Most of the motels date back to the forties and fifties, long one-story wooden buildings that tend to sport modest neon signs involving seagulls and to offer each guest a pair of metal lawn chairs, rusty at their edges, their backs molded in the shape of scallop shells. At the far eastern end, well beyond your range of vision here, across the Provincetown line, there’s a line of beach cabins, twenty or more, white, perfectly identical, with the precise shape and pro portions of the houses in the Monopoly game. A sign on each of them proclaims that it is named after a particular flower: rose, daisy, zinnia, marigold, hollyhock.

We, however, will stop here. Stand for a minute or two just east of the last waterfront house, where the bay splashes right up to the foot of the road. To the east, ahead, is a small harbor within the harbor, formed by the jut of Beach Point. If it’s high tide, you’ll see a body of calm water giving back the sky. If it’s low tide, you’ll see an expanse of wet sand, still bearing the ridges made by the subsided water. The sand will be modestly hillocked, shaped as it is by currents, so that in the lower parts oblongs and parabolas of clear salt water shine. If the weather’s warm, the sand will be full of the people staying at the motels on Beach Point, and a good number of them will be children. The elderly may sit in folding chairs they’ve brought out with them. The younger adults, parents of the children, will be watching their children and looking out at the water, one hand raised to shield their eyes. The children will be running around, digging in the sand or kicking at it, splashing in the pools, heeding or ignoring their parents’ admonishments not to go too far, not to abuse their brothers or sisters, not to make quite so much noise. People have been doing exactly this, in just this way, for the last two hundred years.

N
OW
Whatever the foghorns are
the voices of feels terrible
tonight, just terrible, and here
by the window that looks out
on the waters but is blind, I
have been sleeping
,
but I am awake now
.
In the night I watch
how the little lights
of boats come out
to us and are lost again
in the fog wallowing on the sea:
it is as if in that absence not many
but a single light gestures
and diminishes like meaning
through speech, negligently
adance to the calling
of the foghorns like the one
note they lend from voice
to voice. And so does my life tremble
,
and when I turn from the window
and from the sea’s grief, the room
fills with a dark
lushness and foliage nobody
will ever be plucked from
,
and the feelings I have
must never be given speech
.
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson
,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet;
almost ready to see
how at each turning I chose
this way, this place and this verging
of ocean on earth with the horns claiming
I can keep on if only I step
where I cannot breathe. My coat
is leprosy and my dagger
is a lie, must I
shed them? Do I have
to end my life in order
to begin? Music, you are light
.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word
,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks
,
I am what it says
.
D
ENIS
J
OHNSON
BOOK: Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown
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