There's a Cow in Manhattan Part 08

Date: About 1961 to 1965

 

 

There's a Cow in Manhattan

 

 

Part Eight

In order to paint, or do any creative activity, the artist at one time must think over all the given mediums and all props to see if they agree with him. I had to investigate the easel and the palette to see if those props were really successful working tools. I drew by kneeling on the floor resting on my heels for years. Now I sit on a stool or I sometimes stand to draw. Mary Alice O'Neal thought it was very exciting when I did brush calligraphy on paper when it was placed on the floor and tried catching the brush as it moved. It was alright with me at first. How was I to know the outcome. After a while, however, the drawings with her footprints and uneven strokes didn't look like what I thought I was doing and I taught her how to leave me alone with a couple of well-aimed and forceful slaps. It's strange, a cat must be corrected twice, always twice. Before I got an easel I painted by kneeling also, with the canvas leaning against a wall. This worked well enough, but I couldn't figure out a way to deal with the lower part of the canvas. Even if I propped it up on boxes it was a flimsy situation. Fred Merida sold me his easel and some art supplies when he left for the Army and I began using an easel just like I had been taught at school. I read and saw photographs of many modern artists nailing their unstretched canvases to a wall and stretching them later -- I even saw how Jackson Pollock actually walked on his canvas while painting it. Then I knew if painting without an easel was such a novel and strange chore, surely painting on an easel was the most sensible. It is most sensible, now I can even sit and paint at an easel.

My palette was any polished surface that would not absorb paint. Here in the loft I have a baked enamel table top and it works very well. For a year I had the palette on my left side because I was by the window, which was on my right side. One day i saw how strange it was leaning over myself to work with paint on my palette which was at my left, so I turned the whole unit around and put the palette on my right with the window on my left. It seems so strange now that I had to go through such a clumsy and uncomfortable process, but one must do a lot of unexperienced things before he is experienced and I concluded the one was as good as another. I am right-handed.

I have two six feet by four feet paintings. They barely fit the easel but they end up fitting, though on one I had to stand on a chair to do details at the top. One, the first one, is shelves, just two shelves with unrecognizable calligraphic deposits sitting on them -- this is all in paint. The other is stripes, horizontal stripes with some calligraphic brush strokes here and there. I was very proud of this one when I finished it. It took only a few days to do and the last day when I saw it was completed I lay down on the bed here, and hung it on the wall near the bed to get a long relaxed look at it. I was very pleased and fell asleep thinking I was an abstract expressionist and if I no longer included the stipes everyone would think I was an abstract expressionist. So I went to sleep with this happy conclusion. When I woke up I found I wasn't really an abstract expressionist at all and went back to shelves and stripes.

Another investigation I made, not by thinking about it but by experience, was brushes. Everyone was painting with house paintbrushes and even house paint. At the art store, called Central Supply on Second Avenue and 10th Street they had a sale on house paintbrushes. I bought a small one, but only use it now for my lead white. I tried to use the house paintbrush, but I kept thinking if it were a brush to paint houses with, what kind of brush does one use to paint pictures with, so I went back to my artist's brushes, which I still think should be called picture brushes. Some brushes are better than others, like some films are better than others, but each one is one and you can do as much as you can about them. I had experience painting with all kinds of different devices, but found now that the brush is a very sensible instrument, and as I looked at other paintings, I always look at every painting I happen to meet, I began to see that the brush is really the best way to apply paint with if you are interested in controlling the paint. Anyone who can control paint with a brush has everyone knowing what he is doing because everyone knows about a brush.  Painting with a palette knife or a trowel or a house paintbrush was not interesting because it became so involved with the technique of the new instrument. At this time, lots of things were changing because of the new instruments. I had a girl friend at the Metropolitan Museum named Janet Reynolds who was singing folk music in the Village and she played an autoharp. Who ever heard of an autoharp. She sang well enough, and she sang familiar songs and everyone knew what she was doing until she brought out this crazy autoharp, then of course everyone lost interest because they couldn't tune into this strange instrument. It was while listening to Janet Reynolds I found I was going to paint with an artist's brush, not because everyone would know what I was doing, but because I would know.

Brushes are like surgical knives and if you know what you are doing with either of them, you are doing something, and you know if it is effective or not all the time. It is all to do with knowing how much paint you've picked up on the brush and how it's going to answer your plan, or begin a question. No artist that's a painter is concerned with the measure of paint on the brush, he's concerned with what he is going to do with the amount he has unconsciously arranged to have on the brush. There are times, of course, when he must know how much to pick up for certain conclusions. So, painting to a painter is all about picking up paint with a brush and applying it to a canvas. The meaning of painting is a trail of what artists did with a brush. Nowadays there are many new instruments for painting with, but there are also new musical instruments like dulcimers, and even if they are old instruments rediscovered, they are still not the real instrument that everyone knows. Rembrandt was so involved with his brush and what he could pick up and apply with it, his paintings are only about brush tracks. Certainly the subject matter is uninteresting. The same goes with Picasso who's only interested in what his brush could do. Of course Matisse is interested in what a brush can't do, and that has its importance. Any painter who has pictures for anyone to see shows it with the use of his brush. That's why Josef Albers is confusing, he paints with a palette knife and therefore is doing something else.

After thinking about this and trying any other kind of instrument other than Mary Alice O'Neal, I began very seriously painting paintings of calligraphy. Some I scratched through with a palette knife. Some I nailed strips of wood onto, just to give some tactile interest. One I stretched string very tightly across the canvas, the string was soaked in paint, then I would pop it like a string on a guitar and paint would plash off onto the canvas and I had a series of horizontal lines. The calligraphic paintings were all variations on writing and writing paper. I framed a piece of lined writing paper and called it composition. I even took prepared canvas and folded it into pleats so it would form lines through a bas-relief pattern. I stretched it while it was wet and it dried perfectly and it was a piece of lined paper in sculpture. This made up the thirty-one paintings I had by this time.

Calligraphy came to me naturally. I've always liked writing and especially writing I could not read, so I could see the pattern. The idea of it saying something too, was something not visual and I'm not interested enough in things that are not visual.

When I showed Lee Guilliatt my collection of paintings, a thing I had done many times, I told her I was going to paint so many paintings that the world would be weighed down, that there would be so many that something would have to be done about them, and that is the way to have something to begin happening. I even told her that there would be so many that when an airplane flew over those people would see that a great amount of earth was covered with my paintings. She enjoyed these kinds of statements, she was the only person I could dream aloud with, but I was shocked when she said she didn't know how I could ever manage such a task and continue working a daily job. She said it was surely possible but those were statements by an artist who was an artist every day including Sunday. She didn't know how white and bloodless I got inside. I hadn't been thinking that my work was being so much in the way, but I did notice how it started being in the way, and I started inquiries about working part-time. I even suggested not taking a vacation so that I could have each Monday off work. Of course a job is a job and Mr. Knotts looked at me in a military way and said the position I have is a position and it was made before I got it and it will remain this position all the while I have it.

Summer was coming in and Lee Guilliatt was planning her summer stock job in Iowa, where she was stage managing a theatre company. George Monk got an acting position in Pennsylvania and I was alone once more for the summer. I had acquired a vacation which was to be in August for four weeks. I was going home for one week, then enjoying painting the other three. Without thinking about it I told Mr. Knotts suddenly one day I was giving notice of leaving my job, that I was going to take my vacation and not return. He was not distressed at all, in fact rather proud. One man who was the main framer and mounter of prints and drawings who worked next to my office asked me to step over, because he wanted to talk to me. He had heard I was quitting. He only wanted to tell me he was an artist, and came to work at the Metropolitan Museum to make ends meet until he found a way to continue his art work. He forgot about the art work and had kept his job for twenty-five years. So he shook my hand patted me on the back and said Get out while you're ahead of the game. Everyone was on my side and wished me well.

I began spinning. I didn't know what to do about leaving this wonderful job and this Museum. What could I do about the Museum. How could two years employment benefit me somehow. After thinking it over I decided to apply for a Tiffany Grant. The people who wrote recommendation letters could be important people from the Metropolitan Museum, so I made appointments with Robert Beverly Hale, the curator of Contemporary American Painting. The Metropolitan was doing very little in those days about real contemporary American painting, but I peeked into Hale's office a lot and saw he was always having Gottlieb paintings on his easel, and other very new works. At least it was new for the Metropolitan Museum. I asked Mr. Hale if he would write a letter of recommendation for me to the Tiffany Foundation. He told me he didn't even know my work, so I told him he should come here to my loft and see it. Much to my surprise he said he would, and he did. He brought a new assistant curator named Henry Geldzahler who didn't say much and he and Mr. Hale talked mostly about their problem: if a curator should paint. Mr. Hale painted and Mr. Geldzahler didn't. Mr. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner had already been here. He and I became friendly and I invited him over a year before I thought of quitting. Mr. Gardner is very wise and extremely pleasant and I liked him for saying I should paint my Great American Nude just to have to show in order that people knew I had done the entire cycle. I told him I would and could, but why doesn't he just look at this calligraphy. It was he who suggested Mr. Hale, saying Mr. Hale would enjoy the calligraphic paintings more than he did, but he certainly wants to be invited back when I complete my Great American Nude.

When Mr. Hale saw the photographs I had had taken for the Tiffany Foundation Grant he said yes, yes, again and again as he looked through them. Not all were calligraphic, some were figure paintings and they were very clear. Yet Mr. Hale kept saying yes, yes and shuffling through them and they were all upside down.  Mr. Hale was practically blind, although I thought he could see paintings,  I got my rejection by return mail even though I had Mr. Hale and Mr. Easby's letters of recommendation to back me up. They said they would send letters. I was cheek enough to ask Tiffany to return the photographs, and they did, so I was really out nothing, and it didn't cost anything to get rejected this time.

For a long time I thought Mr. Robert Beverly Hale was a senile old fool who couldn't see, but I like the knowing about him now. He didn't need to know what those photographs looked like, he had visited me and did all the proper preparations for me. He needed his eyes to see other things and seeing was certainly an effort for him. I finally realized all this after talking to Mr. Easby, who was a businessman and had his office next door to Mr. Rorimer. Mr. Easby was an executive and asked me why he should write a letter for my application to a Tiffany Grant. It had been Mr. Hale's suggestion, but I couldn't tell him that, so I told him I thought I should have someone from the Metropolitan Museum who talked and wrote letters and knew all about business, I couldn't have both letters by people whose credentials were seeing. I told him he could see photographs of my work, but I was rather certain that this was not necessary, all he had to do was know I worked at the Museum in the Display Department. He laughed and seemed to understand and I guess he wrote a letter, I didn't really much care after my Tiffany rejection.

I had always been taught that one should take advantage of the position that a job could have and I felt I had done the necessary requirements that were expected. It was somehow like using my G. I. Bill to go to school because it was the advantage I had from my job in the Army. It seemed to be a good idea, but I didn't really know, I had been employed so little in my life.

The only other need I had for using advantages from the Metropolitan Museum job came when I needed expert advice for my painting. I telephoned Murray Pease, the restorer at the Metropolitan Museum and asked him, if he knew how to keep white from turning yellow, could he tell me how to make white turn yellow. I needed to know a process that would turn white yellow because my calligraphic paintings then looked most manuscript-like. I had tried mixing umber and sienna both at once and each separately, it worked alright, but if I knew how to make the actual white turn yellow, it would be the correct effect I needed. It would be more yellow in some places than others, and white having yellowed is not yellow, certainly not yellow mixed into white. Murray Pease was very impatient with me, he thought it was a joke. I told him he knew me, but of course that did not help, he didn't remember me, no one remembered me in those days. He finally told me that if I were an artist I should be able to paint the white yellow. I don't know if I was being silly or not. It certainly was a lovely thought to call the Museum and ask for information and be at the loft knowing where the phone was in the Restoration Department and even knowing Mrs. Long, the woman at the switchboard, who connected the call. She recognized me and that was more of a pleasure than if Mr. Pease had, but I still didn't know how to get my white yellow.

Mary Alice's litter box was in the studio and I hung a small painting over it hoping the ammonia in her urine would do something and it did. Within a week there was a noticeable difference and within a few more days most of the white was antiqued to an ivory. It was quite a discovery, but I never telephoned Mr. Murray Pease back to tell him. I had taken all the advantage I knew how to from my employment and was now certainly finished with the Metropolitan Museum as far as I knew.

That was one way to get rid of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the other way was more difficult. Sometimes I still feel I've made a mistake. Sometimes I wish I were still answering the phone at the Display Department or rushing to Florence Gordon's desk to have her retype a label. I missed Verdalee and our three-hour lunches, which I couldn't afford anymore, I missed Sandra Hutchins. She was Miss Morrow's secretary. Miss Morrow was in charge of personnel. Sandra was from North Carolina, she was very bovine and extremely beautiful. She had such energy and somehow together we saw how very strange and funny it was that we were working in such a serious establishment both doing our job well and achieving more and more respect, yet all the while knowing we were only us. I telephoned her each day for a long time. These were long days now that I didn't have a job to go to.

The fondest memory of working at the Museum was the employees' party. It was held in the main cafeteria and I took Sandra. We danced around the huge column base that is out in front of the cafeteria and drank cocktails and danced more in the presence of those Hellenistic sculptures in the next exhibition hall. During the supper two girls appeared in bathing suits and did a light water ballet in the pool of the cafeteria. The nicest part was that I knew the bathing beauties; Roberta Paine and Edith Whitney who both worked in the Junior Museum.

This was all over. I visited Vincennes and Selma was pregnant or not, her main interests were worrying about pregnancy in those days. She was always furious if she was and at loose ends if she wasn't. Aunt Renie and Aunt Stell didn't know what to say about my quitting my job, but they were sports about it, and sat with their hands in their laps listening to my enthusiasm explaining how now I was going to make a difference in the world.

The next three weeks were simple because I always knew I was getting paid; I was still on vacation and would soon get a check. Then something popped in my head like the sensation one has descending from the mountains and I was either able to see and hear much more clearly or I was seeing and hearing more vaguely, one is never quite sure what is happening when descending mountains or landing in an airplane, if they are relieved or constricted when the ear pops are they suddenly high in the sky or ready to land; near the top of the mountain or almost at sea level. It was Monday morning. I was up by seven and painting by eight.

Lee Guilliatt telephoned me from Iowa the day she received my letter announcing my new life. She tried to talk me into visiting in Iowa. She even had Norma Weatherford talk to me. Skip and Norma were with Lee because Skip was an actor, I just remembered and Norma was still his wife and she was there sewing costumes I suppose. I told Lee that I didn't quit my job to celebrate, but to work and refused to go to Iowa. I painted and drew so much the first few months that the paintings turned into bas-reliefs; they had strips of carved wood attached to the canvas, all horizontal calligraphy still, but some were actually nailed on. I attached the elbow of a stove pipe to a canvas and painted a horizontal stripe across the the entire canvas, even over the surface of the stove pipe elbow. I drew and painted whenever I pleased, any time during the night or day until I became numb. I couldn't see nor hear after a while, everything was becoming the same.

I don't know what would have happened to me if Lee Guilliatt hadn't returned from Iowa to bring me back down to some kind of realism. This kind of thing happened to me once before, when I lived on Avenue B. I was seeing the people I knew very seldom, although Benny Andrews and his wife were not living far away, I didn't know them so well. Lee was with Tracy and they were occupied. Mary Alice O'Neal and I were rather quiet in that Avenue B apartment until Marty Levy got in contact with me. He visited me there and told me I was really withering away. He said I wasn't in Manhattan at all, I was living like I was still in Chicago being a student. This was true, and he saw to it I began doing some Manhattan things, and indeed, life became more and more involved with living in Manhattan. This time Lee Guilliatt woke me up. She introduced me to a very attractive red-headed girl who had come visiting her from Iowa. Both Lee and I had a chance to show off, and it did me so much good. I painted a lovely portrait of the red-headed girl right then and there, and was so surprised I could do it. I had painted some portraits from life in Chicago, but they looked as though I was worried and also looked more like the people posing than a painting, which is not a portrait. A portrait must look like the artist, not the sitter. I did a portrait of Gretchen Benedict a very beautiful pregnant girl whom I worked with when I was collating Christmas Cards at the beginning of my Metropolitan Museum history. She looked pregnant even when she wasn't, which is a rare kind of beauty. When I was nearly finished with Gretchen's portrait, both Benny Andrews and Lee Guilliatt crowded around me and the painting like those doctors at an operating table and told me to stop, that it was finished. Benny told me that I should say it is finished and that is the way to finish it. Lee asked me what more I was going to do. I couldn't say, and she looked at me and said with her eyes, "See, it's finished." Lee has eyes that she can easily hide because she has so much soft wrinkled flesh above her eyelids. I put eye makeup on her once and the pencil kept staying in one part while all the flesh moved. I had to get an eye makeup brush, and paint it on. They are not swollen eyes, nor turtle eyes like mine, but they are way down there in her skull and if she lets you see them, she lets you see a lot. So, I quit painting on Gretchen Benedict's portrait and it became finished and that was such a thing to learn, at least about portraits. The red-headed portrait was much more simple. Lee and I snowed the redhead with all our Manhattan quick talk, so that the redhead liked the portrait before it began, and I don't know redheads well enough to know if they can be snowed or not. I think people all say they can't because they can.

Naturally, with Lee's return soon George Monk returned. Fred Merida was in the Army and he was not so far away that he didn't come and visit for weekends. Dick Lee was spending his last few weeks of his Army assignment in New Jersey and he began coming for a few nights. Suddenly my summer was over and Manhattan was returning. I could look down on the street and see hordes of people going to and from work. All summer when I looked down there were not so many as there were now. Dick Lee got discharged and stayed for a week or so here in the loft with me and George Monk until he found his own place or a job. Jim Zver wrote from Chicago that he was coming to New York to live, could he stay at our loft until he found his. George and I looked at one another and decided we were not a Sloane House YMCA and I wrote back and said no. Jim never forgave me for that and I could never explain that what we once had in our friendship was not what we had now. Gretchen Benedict and her husband telephoned and asked if they could come over with some friends from Columbia University. They would bring some wine, and have a supplied party. George and I were pleased, I invited Lee and the Benedicts brought four people, but more kept showing up later, until I began to see they were giving the party in some other person's house. They were like cuckoo birds. There was one guitar-playing girl whom I enjoyed very much and so did Lee and Lee began playing a little on the guitar and I was surprised because she was so fast at learning. Finally I told the group that the party was over and they all had to leave. Gretchen Benedict's husband John told me I was not serious, that such a good time had never happened to me before and I didn't know how to act. Columbia University people always talk like that. I told him that he was correct and would he please leave with his group before I remembered how to act. They all left and I felt good about owning my loft again. Lee Guilliatt had a guitar the next day and I've never seen her since without it. Now I know all about people who carry guitars, they are either learning to play or play very well and that is all there is to know about that.

One evening I went to Jenny Lou's and both Dick Lee and Fred Merida were there. When Fred asked if he could stay at my loft I told him Dick Lee was staying and I didn't have room. When Dick Lee asked I told him Fred was staying. George Monk and I left the party together and both Dick and Fred said goodby so friendly, and I don't think they ever realized what I had done.

I've often wondered what a writer feels when he is far enough in his book to begin knowing about its contents. Not actually know the ending, but know enough about it that the weight and size of the book are already developed, and whatever more happens he knows the book. Painters don't get that kind of feeling because they know what's going on up to the end of the painting, at least they know the size of the area all the while they are painting. Hans Hoffman's paintings are the only paintings that I know that look like reading a book looks. The entire working field shows all the way to the conclusion. All art forms are involved with a type of calligraphy.

The only thing I know about this book is that there is not going to be another volume, and regardless of what I do now, it will not have changed into a different kind of book than it already is now. I have always liked books and when I began seeing original manuscripts of books, I was very thrilled. Charles Dickens' manuscripts are always at the New York Public Library on display. Book manuscripts are much more exciting than historical manuscripts like the Declaration of Independence. These historical manuscripts are composed first, then copied by a good handwriter. Old manuscripts are different still. To look at them is to discover so much of the mentality of the people of their time. I can't read them, few people can, yet anyone can find a great interest in seeing them. I wonder if some day Hans Hoffman will be seen with the same interest. It is the same thing. Father Hilary loves to read books of collected letters. It think it is a bore. Once, when we were children, Selma and I discovered a box of Mom's letters. I have never seen Selma so excited, she read them again and again. I lost interest very soon, but found one special series of correspondence that Mom had with a French soldier from World War I. It was a story because during the series he told Mom of his marriage and there was a proper photograph. I wished at the time the soldier would have been my father, but that could never have happened, it is not possible in Indiana. There were two letters from Dad in this series, they were written in stubby pencil, I could never write letters in pencil, they both began, "Dear Woman."

I thought I would never read a book through in one sitting. I was always too impatient or enjoyed having a story move very slowly so I could be with it longer. One Sunday while living in Chicago I read "Catcher in the Rye" in one sitting and felt so good. On a plane once I read a book through, it was a Willa Cather book, but those are the only two I've read all at once. It's not as exciting as I thought. The first book I really read through was "Great Cats I Have Seen." I don't remember any of it, I was only determined to read it through. I found that if I didn't look at the number on the pages I could go faster, then I was thrilled to find all the left pages were even numbers and right pages were uneven, so I would only look at the right pages' numbers and make believe I was skipping numbers. The process worked anyway and Aunt Renie was so happy I had completed reading a whole book.

I have read "Vanity Fair" many times. It is the first book I found that didn't have such an important story as an important atmosphere. It is a thirst to me at times to open it and just read and get the smell of the era. All the time returns and it's so nice to be there again. The other book I've re-read has been "The Counterfeiters." It is so filled with transparent screens to go through, there is a time when the reader sees something happening and the writer sees the reader see it and the reader suddenly meets himself. I've never read "Gone with the Wind," but I've read "A Tale of Two Cities." They have always been together for me because Dad kept begging me to read them. I began "A Tale of Two Cities" time and time again and never finished it while Dad was alive. When I tried reading it in his presence, he often watched my face, and I would look up and see him watching for a reaction. A reaction doesn't occur until very late in that book, and Dad never saw my reaction. When I was on the troop ship in the Army, I read W. S. Maugham's "The Summing Up" and copied down his suggested reading list and finally read all of the list. The only thing I learned was that I think all while I read. I think all around each thing I read and it doesn't make my reading go fast, it takes time away. Bill Updike can read and never hear what's going on around him. I can't do that because I keep thinking all around while I'm reading. I don't know what it means, but I can't read just any book, it must be a certain kind of book that lets me think all around. One of the best books for this is "Jane Eyre." It has so many dark lines where I can stop and wait. This is how I got to reading "Kristin Lavransdatter." It took me a summer and a winter because it was more fascinating not reading it as it was being in it. I suspect I'll reread Proust's novels when I'm finished with them because it's so lovely being there and especially in Proust it's important to reread it in order to know where you are in it to begin with.

David Gamble was a writer. He didn't write anything while I knew him, but he was a writer. Ronald Vance is another writer but he writes. I knew David Gamble for almost a year and he telephoned me one day and told me he was moving, that I should go to his apartment and see if I wanted some articles he would be throwing away. Ronald Vance did the same thing after I had only known him for about six months. Writers are always moving and dispersing their belongings all about. I met David Gamble while all these people were going and coming in my loft. He seldom came here, I always visited him, and we would drink rum and listen to music. He did come here for portrait sittings, but nothing came of the portraits, I attempted two. It was very good for me to spend the time I spent with him. We didn't talk much, I couldn't talk very well then, at least to him. He even said I lisped, I guess I did with him. He told me of the book he had written and destroyed. I didn't believe it, I thought it was every writer's fantasy. He told me if he had a desk that was built high enough for him to stand and write, like Dickens, he would write, I didn't fall for this either. He told me he was interested in the Russian novels, not in the Russian, but in only their translations and went to great lengths telling me all kinds of things about those writers who translated the Russian classics. I told him that that was a subject for writers to discuss among themselves, I couldn't talk about that. So he would play more records and we would continue not talking much and enjoy ourselves very much. His apartment was old white and needed painting, and if it were repainted it would be wrong. It was one huge room, with tiny kitchen and bathroom. He would never let me go into the kitchen. He was always reading lots of books which he got from a rental library and I found that depressing, but he laughed about that. He held a book so well, I thought Fr.Hilary held a book better than anyone I knew, but David Gamble could do it better.

It was always nice to visit David Gamble, but terrible to go anywhere with him. He was from Virginia, had studied at the University of Virginia, but all he learned was to rave about how it was the most complete type of institution. It did teach him to keep his Virginia accent and clear it up and handle it in the most respectful way, but I couldn't see what else he learned there. He taught me the word "pastiche" and told me not to call any woman a lady because the word lady was specially used for a certain type of woman. When we would go somewhere he walked too big and talked too loud and I always felt like leaving. He had blue eyes and a round bony handsome face. His hair was not memorable. It was well-cut and just little, but his skull was the most well-formed skull I've ever thought about. He was in no way near being bald, but his forehead looked like he had taken his hand to his hairline and pulled his forehead up. Selma used to put her hair up so tight, it would pull her eyebrows up slightly and tighten her forehead until she had an Italian Renaissance fashion look. She didn't ever look like David Gamble, nor did David Gamble look like her, but that is the way his forehead looked all the time.

When he moved, he moved to Florence, Italy, but he didn't stay more than four months. He returned to Manhattan, then returned to his home in Virginia and that is the whole story of David Gamble.

Mary Anthony and David Gamble were the people whom I knew that none of my everyday friends knew. Although George Monk and Lee Guilliatt met these friends, they didn't have anything to do with them. Everybody thinks Fr. Hilary is this kind of friend, but he isn't, he's a cousin and can meet anyone I know and I don't have a feeling that he's a private appreciation of mine, but everyone else thinks he is a private friend, like Mary Anthony and David Gamble. Mary Anthony and David Gamble were my own discoveries and I got what I got from them and couldn't talk about it to anyone. It's necessary for anyone to do, and I was lucky to find such situations. There have been more since them, such as May Wilson.

Dancing classes kept me in such good shape and when I began taking Mary Anthony's course in choreography I got into mental shape. It was a simple course now that I'm remembering it, but I learned to spell choreography, which was a word I only dreamed of knowing about and never expected to get involved with. Like chemistry. I only choreographed dances for myself, then later for myself and a girl, and they were appreciated. What I appreciated was learning that if things are thought about in squares, they can be seen, if they are thought about in circles they can get away. I had been put into the intermediate class by now, and was used by Mary Anthony to lead the class. I had the same interest and excitement then as I had when in grade school I would work my standard up until I led the class. This did not apply to grades, only when our class stood up in a line to do a lesson. It could be spelling reading, or any lesson. If the student on your right missed answering a question correctly, the next person on his left who answered correctly was able to walk up to his right. I was usually midway in the lineup and when anyone was absent from school, they had to be last in line and work up. It was always exciting to see Loretta Vieck work up to the top all in one day. It took me a week to make it midway, but there were times I was first, like now, in Mary Anthony's intermediate class, where we danced combinations across the floor in twos and I was one of the two going first.

In August Mary Anthony closed the school because she was going to teach in Italy. This had nothing to do with David Gamble, he went to Italy much later than this. I guess every artist must go to Italy one time or another. Mary Anthony went to Milano to do some television choreography. I was at loose ends. Even though I took only two classes a week, plus one choreography class on Friday, I didn't know what I was going to do about dancing, not to mention Mary Anthony. I even found out she was from Henderson, Kentucky, which is right across the river from Evansville which is fifty miles south of Vincennes. She certainly was not like anything I had ever known in Kentucky, and she never talked about it like I talked about Indiana, but there's your difference right there. She had a flawless professional way of talking and her only reference to her past was when she danced in "Kiss Me Kate" when she was a favorite dancer of Hanya Holm. Now she was in Italy on television.

A girl named Ellen suggested I study ballet somewhere while Mary Anthony was gone and I discovered the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. It seemed the closest thing to the Metropolitan Museum and I had a sneaking feeling the same people were there.

They weren't. I first went there to watch a class and Mrs. Margaret Craske was teaching pointe work to the girls. It was very strange seeing an old lady in slacks and ballet shoes telling these girls to do very aerial movements only by using her hands and walking around. From then on I went early to my class to watch the girls in Mrs. Craske's pointe class. There was one pregnant girl in her practice tights on pointe, with a little skirt around her waist leading the class. The next class was taught by a man whom everyone called Mr. Rudolfo. I thought that was a bit too Metropolitan Opera Ballet, but there he was. At first I was very timid, stood in back of the class and mocked what I saw. I had always wanted to try on ballet shoes but never had the chance except when I bought a pair to wear to the Art Ball my first year at the Art Institute of Chicago. Finally I wore them as house shoes and certainly found they gave me some kind of energy because they fit the feet so snugly, the feet could feel any texture yet not be barefoot. I am famous for my bare feet. At home I was renamed "feet" and once, when Bill Updike snapped me with a wet towel I fell on a concrete floor because I caught my big toe much too big even when it was not swollen. The classic foot has the second toe a bit longer than the first toe. Finding this out did not bother me, I always liked my big toe. I thought it looked like Dick Rush, a man in the parish of St. Thomas. Now I was very proud of my feet and my big toe. Mary Anthony said I had very good feet and Ellen always asked me to show my feet to her dancing friends whenever it was possible. Dancing barefoot trains the foot to spread like a fan especially when the heel is lifted, and balance came easy because my big toe could span a space enough for me to balance without doubt. These feet in ballet shoes had to learn something new. I walked onto the dance floor at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, but when it was time to move in any combination, my feet felt so bound up I thought I was on ice skates. Everyone there knew where the basic energy comes from when their feet are bound in skins, but I only knew how to produce an energy using bare feet. I didn't fall, but kept feeling as though I was walking on eggs. The foot has much less to stand on for balance and when I was to lift my heels up to stand only on my metatarsal it was impossible. Ballet is bending and moving with a bound restriction. It is no wonder the girls finally dance on pointe where there is no grip nor any kind of span for actual balance. By the end of the first class I realized this I guess, because my energy was from something, I was doing ballet, I wasn't dancing, but I was doing ballet. Mr. Rudolfo told me I would have no trouble, I certainly knew how to move and I would find it more simple very soon. Ballet is the result of practice. It is like piano lessons. One cannot go fast and freely on purpose, he goes fast and freely finally when all the practice becomes part of the dancer and he quickens the pace and is dancing because of all he has learned. Modern dance starts with movement then works in the subtle details while the movement is occurring. Now I know why it is required to have had ballet training before going into any dance form. I began to see that I was not a dancer. A dancer has always been a dancer and nothing else and he doesn't even need to know that.

Mr. Rudolfo asked me after a few weeks if I would consider the honor of taking a class in partnering. In a ballet school the boys for a partnering class are invited and do not pay for the class, and on Wednesday nights I went to partnering class where I supported the girls on pointe. Again I felt like the Cow because I didn't know anything about supporting a girl. I've never learned, but the attempt was a very special experience. My greatest accomplishment was the finger turn, I was also able to hold a girl rather well and do a pose called "le poisson." The finger turn is simple, if the knowledge of what you're doing is known, like anything else. The girl holds your right middle finger loosely with her right hand and on one foot turns towards the right, staying in one spot. The man doesn't do any movement. In fact, the less he does the more turns a girl can get. She merely accelerates her turning power by shoving off with her left leg. She can continue pumping with her left leg, still held up off the floor and gain more turns. I've got up to eight, which was very good work and Mr. Rudolfo had me and my partner demonstrate again and again. "Le poisson" was picking up a girl and turning her upside down so that she presses against the man diagonally across his body. That was simple and all the girls knew how to be lifted. The horror was holding the girl at the waist and allowing her to turn on her own power very swiftly, but being experienced enough to know when to stop her and seeing she was not facing you when she stopped. I always stopped her at the wrong time and there we were very surprised looking at one another.

I didn't know at the time that the more I did, the more I had accomplished in ballet. It was common now to go to the stage door of the Metropolitan Opera House. The stage door is on Forty-first Street. The fright of the first class was never quite repeated and though it was slow and not measurable, I know how to position myself in a ballet attitude, and know the difference from where to think ballet from thinking modern dance. In December I went to an audition. A company was being put together from Washington D.C. It was a children's dance theatre and the season was from January until March. By mid-December I knew I had got a part and left Manhattan, and the loft to go on a Dance Tour.

There are ways in a planned life that one can get into that change the plan, but don't change the life. An artist always knows what he is doing, that is part of the meaning of the word, artist. He can get into situations that seem to have nothing to do with who he is, but in time everything comes about being frighteningly an inevitable part of the artist's description. I still don't know why I went on a dance tour, let alone it being for children. Like many things that occur in a life I can say I learned a great deal, but still can't explain just why I left Manhattan, even for a few months. Indiana people seldom leave their Indiana identity. Everyone in my family has stayed in Indiana and never changed the position they were born in. Aunt Renie married Ed Ottensmeyer and he whisked her away to Wisconsin then to Chicago, but finally here she was back to Indiana, to Vincennes. Dad worked with Uncle Big Boy after Uncle Big Boy married Aunt Mamie, and they lived in Illinois. Dad often talked about when he lived in Illinois, but I found out it was a mile across the Wabash, in sight of Vincennes. Fr. Hilary lived in Paris, France for almost four years. Now he's back in Indiana working at a seminary. Tooke and Tom are the only ones who really went away. They went to California and have never been seen in Indiana since. Aunt Hootie and Buck recently went to see them, Tooke and Tom didn't cover their tracks, and besides, Tooke is not really a Deem but a De Lisle. Rosemary Deem did go away to Georgia and stayed away. When she sees me she always tries to identify with me because she and I are the only Deems who went away to stay. Both Tooke and Rosemary married men from Vincennes and their going away from Indiana with them hardly made a change for them because they continue living their Indiana life with their Indiana husbands and look out their windows at the foreign scene, but remain in their Indiana atmosphere. Their children are the ones that change. I understand the Deem name came from Pennsylvania. There was Cyrus Deem, my great-grandfather who was supposed to have an unhappy home, so ran away, took a barge down the river and jumped off at Vincennes, and this began the Indiana Deem name. Cyrus Deem had a brother who was named George. None of the Indiana Deems know anything about this George Deem and they have all concluded that this is a grave problem. If Indiana people don't know about something, that something just doesn't exist and they feel bad because if it isn't known in Indiana it's just nowhere.

I had been in Manhattan long enough to have been forgotten. Selma's children had become good friends of mine but were very baffled because I was not causing New York City to get to Indiana. Finally I found everyone in the Deems were disappointed with me for not getting Manhattan to Vincennes and were all wondering what I was doing instead. None of them knew I was now on my way to Washington, D.C.

 

End of Part Eight