The Disappointment Artist (10 page)

In a review of Joseph McBride’s eight-hundred-page master biography of John Ford, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that in the galley copy McBride had sliced through the thicket to provide a “Ford’s Top Ten Films”—but then cut it out of the final book. I wonder, was McBride afraid of being too final? Or was he embarrassed that, for all his scholarship, he had a fondness for “top-ten lists”? Let me not deny this service— after all, I’ve only been adjusting and polishing this list in my head for the majority of my life. So, the irv de la irv, in no particular order:
Castle
,
Stigmata
,
Ubik
,
Valis
,
Androids
,
Bloodmoney
,
The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer
,
A Scanner Darkly
,
Martian Time-Slip
,
Confessions of a
Crap Artist
—wait, shit, okay, fifteen—
Now Wait for Last Year
,
Time Out
of Joint
,
A Maze of Death
,
Galactic Pot-Healer
. . .

Perhaps I fear that if I ever finish this list—the making of which is an extension of my obsessive searching in bookstores for Dick’s books, even after I’d found them all—I will die. Or grow up. Similarly, this is probably the right place to admit that I’ve never actually read
Gather Yourselves
Together
. I suppose the truth is that I’m saving it.

Lives of the Bohemians

I learned to think by watching my father paint.
I wrote that sentence five years ago, in a brief essay for the catalogue of a ten-year retrospective exhibition of my father’s paintings by a small museum in New England. More recently I’ve helped him archive a cache of his canvases from the 1970s, many of which I’d not seen since he painted them—that is to say, since childhood. Confronting an array of pictures spanning my own life on this planet, I was struck again with their implicit challenge to my understanding. Could I think about the paintings themselves? Tell Richard Lethem something about them he didn’t know? I’d begun to see my father’s work (and his life) as being defined by a resistance to—and reluctance to assume—conventional authority. To write about him while he still lived, I’d need to borrow some of his disobedience. I wanted to try.

Yet I find myself in relation to father and paintings as the apes in
2001: A Space Odyssey
stood before their monolith. Dumb, though making noise. Weren’t those apes supposed to grab an implement and get to work? After all, it was me that put
think
and
my father paint
in the same sentence.

As a teenager I revered Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke—at some point I’d have called them my favorite director and favorite writer (though Clarke was shed years sooner than Kubrick). And probably, as choices of favorites, Kubrick and Clarke formed an armor against threatening aspects of my father’s art, and of my parents’ world, and of our family’s life. They offered images the surfaces of which were clean of the paint-drippy, hippie-drippy, Bob Dylan–raspy-voiced, imperfection-embracing chaos surrounding me everywhere. And as images of the artist, Kubrick and Clarke felt somehow absolute in their stances of confidence, of magisterial indifference. (I know better now, but it doesn’t seem mistaken that each of these artists particularly
wished
to make that impression—enough to fool a kid.) So they made an antidote for the drug of proximity to my dad—an artist whose authority was for me both bigger and smaller, more problematic in every way.

Like that ape, gazing at his monolith, my attempt here is in the nature of a scientific inquiry under impossible conditions. I set out to write about a painter. He happens to be my father. Who was married to my mother. Who—parents, together with my brother and sister—make up my family. All I know comes from the ground I gaze across, and am rooted to, helplessly. What’s to keep the paintings from slipping out of view below the horizon, as my planet of memory grumbles on its axis?

As late as 1966, at the age of thirty-four, my father’s trajectory was a fine and ordinary one, for a serious painter of his generation. I mean, rather than for a person of his small-town Midwestern upbringing, which might not have indicated that a serious young man would look to become a serious painter of his generation. The last of six siblings raised in Missouri and Iowa, Richard Lethem’s childhood straddled the Depression and the Second World War, the war in which two of his older brothers, and his sisters’ husbands, fought—men vacating the scene while a boy stayed behind with sisters and sisters-in-law, who might have seemed more like a batch of adoring young aunts.

My father’s own European tour was on a Fulbright to Paris, in 1959, where he studied at the Grand Chaumière. That, following a bachelor’s degree begun at the Kansas City Art Institute and completed at Columbia, and a master’s, also at Columbia. I own a student painting from that time, not an “original” Lethem but rather a tricky quotation canvas, done to accompany his undergraduate thesis on De Chirico. In it my father, painting in De Chirico’s style, has replaced the Italian’s vacated piazzas and marble busts with Midwestern American iconography: a warehouse, some farm machinery, a kernel of candy corn. And a bare blue lightbulb dangles from a socket, harkening forward to Guston.

My father would soon make much both of this surrealist-pictorial impulse, pointing from De Chirico to Guston, and of his eagerness to paint farm machinery and other tools. But, as a young painter at the end of the fifties, he first had to add his hurried contribution to the waning stream of abstract expressionism. De Kooning was his prime hero. Kline and Gorky not far behind. The first ambitious paintings (meaning, in that era, the first
large
paintings) of his life were warm, dappled abstractions, painted with a dripping brush, evocative of landscapes. They were good. They were shown. They made no huge dent in the world, as new abstract paintings mostly didn’t in 1960, and before I was born he was done making them.

My maternal grandfather, whom I would never meet, fled his wife and New York when my mother was three, to repatriate in East Germany. The improbable gesture likely speaks to how much more German than Jewish he felt—and how Communist, as well. My grandmother was another secular Jew and defiant leftist, but also a born New Yorker, irascible as Thelma Ritter, buddy to cops and cabdrivers, lover of pizza and egg creams. She worked as an accountant in a pickle factory in Sunnyside, Queens, and raised her single child to share her secular passion for Abraham Lincoln, for books, arguments, and causes.

My mother dropped out of Queens College in 1962, drawn to Greenwich Village thrills. There she pierced ears, with a pin and ice cube, at a jewelry shop on MacDougal Street, and palled around with folksingers: Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs. In 1963 she met my father, the bearded painter. By the time I was born, in early 1964, they lived in an illegal loft on West Broadway. In that loft, in that year, high on love, sex, and procreation, and on the cultural possibilities in the air (in my firm opinion), high on William Blake (by his own testimony), and likely sometimes high on pot (my mother, like John Lennon, loved to turn you on), Richard Lethem changed his painting style entirely.

In what became, from 1963 to 1968, a first major phase in his art, my father started painting
stuff
. The De Chirico influence realized now, the pictures featured functional objects charged with a mysterious significance, and raised to the level of the iconographic: basketball hoops, vises, stereopticons, and salesman’s or traveler’s trunks. My father also painted a series of struck matches, beheld from one side, their sizzled black heads surrounded by a penumbra of sensationally colorful flame. The presentation in the paintings of this period, though hard-edged, never bore even a trace of pop chill; his brushwork held to expressionist drama, his palette to earthly, or fleshly, warmth.

That work, beginning the year of my birth, became an explosion of canvases in 1966 and 1967, in his studio in Kansas City, Missouri. There, my father had taken a teaching job at the Art Institute. He’d converted the barefoot Jewish folksinger girl into a campus wife, was on track for tenure, and was jubilantly painting in an individual and highly recognizable style—as I said, my father’s trajectory was, at one point, just about perfect for a serious painter of his moment, and for a serious bohemian. A dashing professor with a beard and, as yet, no dangerous affiliations.

Five years ago I wrote: “In my father’s earlier ‘symbolist/surrealist’ phase, the work, though physical in its voracious painterliness, speaks of the human presence mostly by implication and absence. The empty trunks and lonely vises and stereopticons of this period have a Magritte-like conceptual/literary authority, but their owners and makers have flown the coop.” My father himself has written: “I see those images of trunks, vises, and basketball hoops as enchanted erotic objects which came from a period of great personal fulfillment and love.”

What I want to admit now is that as a child I always preferred the paintings from 1964 to 1967 to the work I witnessed my father making in Brooklyn, in the 1970s. I fetishized the clarity of that depopulated world of fetish objects. The paintings seemed clean to me. I likely associated them with the emotional reality of an infant who has his parents all to himself; in Kansas City we lived in a vast stone house on campus, surrounded by a sculpture garden. It made a citadel for the triad of mother, father, and child. It was the perfect opposite of a neighborhood.

The “Fort Hood Three” were U.S. Army privates who declined to be returned to Vietnam. The war, they explained, never officially declared, was “illegal and immoral.” Court-martialed in July of 1966, their lawyers tried to call Robert McNamara to the stand. The judge made it simple: “This is a case against the United States, and the United States has not consented to be sued.” The soldiers got three-to-five. When the Three were shifted to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, in January of 1967, a small group of peace marchers showed up too. These ninety-odd peaceniks were greeted with snowballs and jeers from other citizens, who’d come to rain contempt on the dissident soldiers. The marchers sang “We Shall Overcome.” A blare of Sousa, played from a truck, drowned them out.

My parents were among those ninety, even partly responsible for the march. My father, who stood at the microphone at the scuttled rally, had become faculty adviser for a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, while my mother had begun draft counseling (“It’s better to run to Toronto”) draft-eligible art students. That same spring, my father organized an all-day Saturday teach-in on campus. That Saturday the institute’s president, inflamed by phone calls from trustees concerned about his grip on the faculty, arrived in person and got into a comical shoving match with my father, in a stairwell.

C’est la tenure.
My parents, though, had already decided to throw over Kansas City, and my father to throw over teaching. As Dylan would say, “I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.” For my mother, who didn’t drive a car (cast-iron New Yorker, she never learned), the Midwest isolation was suffocating. And my father? He explained later, “I wanted to reject the Establishment institutions that were going along with the war. And I found the strident voices of opposition in my head were making it hard to listen to students.”

I retain discontinuous memories of Kansas City: I recall the sculpture garden, for instance, but no protest marches. I remember petting a dog, and riding on my grandfather’s tractor, but no hippies. The hippies I got to know later. Yet I’ve rehearsed my father’s break with his teaching at Kansas City because it seems a key to my father’s painting (or, sometimes, lack of painting) in the fifteen years that followed.

The key to more than that, really. In my parents’ “rejection” of “Establishment institutions” I sense the parameters within which my personality grew; the parameters that, like those of any childhood (apart from the most exalted or depraved), I both bloomed within, like the windows of a greenhouse, and rattled against, like the jaws of a trap. The place our family delivered itself to—a debilitated but gorgeous row house in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Gowanus, or Boerum Hill—was to be the stage for it all: painting, family, childhood.

Once in Brooklyn my parents’ lives were not just overtly political. They became countercultural, as opposed to merely hip. Baby Jonathan’s eerie little modernist world was soon filling up with siblings, neighbors, commune-housemates (for our home became a commune, of sorts), and the terrifying richness of a neighborhood full of race and class juxtapositions. My parents also opened their marriage, and my world had to make room for the inkling, later the certainty, that some of their friends were lovers. My father’s canvases, when he resumed painting in the early seventies, were loaded with human figures, many unclothed, all of them embodying in different ways the forms of human chaos, the daily politics, that our lives had become.

I don’t think I was autistic, but like an autistic child I wanted the human volume turned down. Though consciously thrilled by the adult lives around me, and the odd but definite privileges my communion with their variety had bestowed, I was unconsciously seeking hiding places. I developed a craving, not only in my father’s work but generally, for remote, depopulated art, for images of sublime alienation. I held out hope of cultivating a discrete and unaffiliated, even solipsistic persona. No wonder I wanted De Chirico back, or pined for Stanley Kubrick. My own early writing was the pure product of this taste, emulating Clarke, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Graham Greene, Stanislaw Lem, and Borges.

We lived in the house while my father renovated it by hand, teaching himself the carpentry skills, the laborer’s trade, that would become his livelihood for the next twenty years. Our home was soon a stopping-off point for former colleagues and students of my father’s who’d arrived in New York and needed a place to stay, as well as for old friends from Greenwich Village, recontacted after the Kansas City interlude. My mother’s instincts as a host and raconteur made our kitchen table a site of meetings, transformations, flirtations, arguments.

We found comrades in the neighborhood. Alongside shabby rooming houses, alongside black and Puerto Rican families entrenched in a neighborhood that had been mostly abandoned by New York’s white-immigrant middle classes many decades earlier, and alongside the new white renovators who’d launched an unsystematic gentrification a stone’s throw from a jail and two housing projects, Boerum Hill was home to communes. At least five or six of the cheaply rented row houses within the immediate blocks had been colonized by groups of radicals, singles, and couples just out of college, and making their home in an affordable quarter. These houses had flavors: one might be firmly Marxist, another druggy, another more familial, given an anchor, say, by a divorced mom raising a kid or two.

Ours was a quasi-commune, one with a family at its center and a painter’s studio on the top floor. My parents extended their commitment to causes along every open path: my father taught home repair to teenagers at a settlement house, and art workshops to prisoners in the Brooklyn House of Detention. They both went on protesting the war until the war ran out, and marched in favor of day care centers, and against proposed Robert Moses freeways and nuclear power. Each time my mother went to the supermarket she shifted heads of iceberg lettuce and bunches of grapes picked by exploited migrant workers into the ice-cream section of the supermarket, to be destroyed by freezing. She had that streak of yippie in her, and was also once ticketed by a transit cop for using a slug in place of a subway token—her protest, I suppose, against fare increases.