The Night Stages (10 page)

F
ive years before he began to work on the mural, Kenneth had moved with his young family to the small community in rural Saskatchewan. He bought a simple stone house and built a frame studio in the adjacent yard where he worked on paintings in which landscapes remained representational but figures and animals were abstract in nature. During the winter he taught at a college in the prairie city ten miles away, and in the summer he and a handful of other artists held summer classes in a recently abandoned TB sanatorium situated in a river valley one hundred miles from any kind of urban settlement.

It was at this time that his ideas about distance and migration began to solidify. He would walk out his door toward the railway tracks and stand looking at the two converging lines that seemed on certain summer days to stand upright like a giant’s apple-picking ladder and, on others, particularly in winter, to be Masaccio’s carefully determined lines of perspective progressing across white paper toward
the vanishing point. Everything about the landscape was clear and well defined, the flat wheat fields in the foreground, and the city visible in miniature, framed on the horizon against a too-perfect sky of a ridiculously pure blue.

He had no idea how to transform such unreachable space on the canvas, so began to document the details of the place instead, attempting to capture the intimacy he had come to believe he was interested in. He drew railway cars and signals and grain elevators, coils of rope and wire and the railway station itself. The curve of tracks moving toward a siding and the great iron wheels of the cars waiting there caught his attention for a while, but the resulting drawings were, ultimately, unsatisfying on the page.

As time passed he found it impossible to ignore the extreme, unreadable, and seemingly irreproducible distances. There was some echo in all this of his remembered pre-marital travels in Europe, and the sense that, no matter how far or how fast he moved, the destination, whatever it was, would always recede. Unfulfilled potential and missed opportunities began to absorb him. In the town, he found the teaching repetitive and unrewarding. And in the long, echoing, and still faintly medical halls of the summer school, he was haunted by thoughts of those who had lived and died there, of lives cut short or narrowed by circumstance or bad luck. He feared that his own life would be of the narrower variety, and that it would be made that way because of lack of courage, not even having the excuse of disease. And then, as if by magic, an alternative narrative presented itself, for it was here, of all places, that he met the famous critic.

The man had come up from New York to the summer school almost on a whim. Intrigued by an invitation to such an out-of-the way locale, and bemused by the whole notion of the old sanatorium, the critic agreed to give a lecture and to stay for a couple of days to speak informally with the students and teachers there. He had arrived wearing a city suit and a narrow tie and had worn that costume for the entirety of his visit. Kenneth was somewhat disappointed by the man’s physiognomy, having expected someone thinner and more obviously the aesthete. This man was tired, overweight, and world-weary. Still, his reputation had preceded him, and it was this reputation that intrigued Kenneth, that and the cold voice of authority that presented itself whenever the critic began to speak.

As they sat side by side on a bench in the neglected grounds drinking a beer at the close of the second day, the critic told Kenneth that the purity and quiet of the situation was soothing to him after the noise, the commotion really, of the art scene in New York. The unselfconsciousness of the art being produced here in this prairie province, the utter lack of ego, and, in some cases, even the lack of skill was refreshing, he said, smiling, a column of smoke emerging from his mouth and dispersing in the clear air. Absolutely nothing has ever happened here, he added, which is what makes it so appealing. Nothing has been
built
, he said. Then he made a quick, insistent rectangle with his hands.

On the third day of his stay, the critic agreed to look at some of the paintings Kenneth was working on in the vacant ward
that was acting as his temporary studio, and after only a glance or two, the critic announced that he believed that Kenneth had the potential for a full career beyond this half-life of part-time teaching and full-time rendering of landscape. But he must, the critic insisted, move fully into the abstract. He should look at Olitski, Pollock. He should discard subject matter – it was no longer relevant, hadn’t been for some time – and concentrate on the purely plastic elements: line, shape, colour, texture. It was the only way forward, he maintained. Anything else was backward-looking, and redundant, and told us nothing new about the world.

The critic looked for some time at the diminutive, realistic egg tempera of the beautiful Qu’Appelle Valley, which Kenneth had been working on at the same time as the three landscapes in oil. “Good God!” he eventually said. “You’re not seriously breaking eggs! Messing around with yolks and pigment. It is admittedly charming to think of you in this bucolic valley attempting to resurrect such an ancient medium. But it’s a supreme waste of time and effort. You need to work with something fast and free; you must learn to use paint extravagantly, as if there were an unlimited supply of it gushing from a tap nearby. There’s just no place anymore for the painstaking.”

Kenneth immediately agreed, said that the exercise had been purely recreational anyway, and that he had never intended to show the results to anyone, anywhere.

“Look at Deibenkorn, Barney Newman,” the critic continued. “They may not always achieve what they set out to do,
but they would never be held hostage by technique.” He lifted a double-zero-point brush in his hand. “You must throw anything smaller than two inches into the garbage,” he said.

As the famous critic spoke, the magnificent subjects of European paintings faded and then withdrew from Kenneth’s consciousness. Gods, landscapes, battles, shipwrecks, towns on rivers, beautiful naked women, bleeding saints, mounds made of fruit and dead rabbits, skating peasants on frozen millponds all turned and filed, obedient as schoolchildren, out of the room that had held them in his mind. The simple prairie subjects – railway tracks, farms, grain elevators, this valley – that had occupied him all year followed in suit until everything in the perceived world seemed small and banal. He found himself apologizing for his recent work, and all the work that preceded it.

“Not at all,” the critic said. “I can see rumours of the abstract in some of these.” He pointed to a roughly painted prairie sky in one of the oils. “Here,” he said, “the brushstrokes are moving toward something a little more interesting, aren’t they? And here,” he said, running his fingers over a wheat field busy with wind.

Kenneth was electric with engagement, watching the plump white hands swaying over the beginnings of paintings he was now mostly embarrassed by. And he was filled with relief that the man had been able to discover even one brushstroke he approved of. He could actually see himself creating fierce, undomesticated works of art, the required muscular activity in front of the canvas, quantities of molten paint
being flung by him from the end of a large, angry brush, his brain on fire.

“You are absolutely right,” he said to the critic. “I can see it now. That’s where I was heading.”

“But don’t use yellow,” the critic said. “I despise yellow.”

After that, the critic was persistently present in the room in his mind that had been previously occupied by Europe. Kenneth wrote long, eager letters to the New York address, explaining the current series of paintings, the choice of various colours, the prevalence of one shape or another. He waited weeks, sometimes months for a reply, a reply that often arrived in the form of a postcard with two or three lines hastily scribbled on the back.
Stop rendering
, one of these read.
It is a habit left over from the time you wasted making pictures. Nothing important can result from this, so let it go. That which is truly abstract recoils from rendition
. Some of the postcards were sent from places that made Kenneth itch with desire.
Am writing from Pollock’s place in the Hamptons
, one card began breezily,
where I am walking him through some necessary changes
. Another was sent from Coutt’s Gallery in New York, though the image on the front was of a slightly askew Empire State Building.
Get down here immediately
, it commanded,
and see the Jack Bush show. It goes in far too many directions, as he realized himself with a pang once I pointed this out to him. In truth, it is so uneven and spotty, I feel there would be a world of things for you to learn from it
.

Kenneth could not get down there immediately, and likely not for some time what with his family and the teaching, and he suspected the critic knew this. He replied, instead, with an invitation for the critic to return to Saskatchewan the following summer.

A card from Los Angeles arrived the following week.
Delighted to come back
, it read.
You have no idea how much I am betting on Saskatchewan as New York’s only true competitor, especially after seeing the tripe here
. Then a P.S.
Take some slides of your work and send them down to me
.

The next few weeks of Kenneth’s life were spent both desperately attempting to squeeze a decent fee for the critic’s visit out of provincial officials and those at the university, and waiting for the perfect light to enter the studio so that he could photograph the paintings in an acceptable way. Neither was completely successful. Officials in both places were reluctant, and he was able to manage only half of the money the critic wanted. As for the light, the prairie winter produced day after day of blinding sun reflected from a pure white landscape, and in the end he simply could not put together a full set of slides that was free of glare.

He sent the package anyway, along with an explanation about the weather and the critic’s proposed payment. Then he began to wait. Weeks passed. A month went by. Finally a card depicting the New York Public Library arrived. The critic had nothing to say about his reduced fee; in fact, the summer was not mentioned at all. It concerned, instead, Kenneth’s paintings.
Square shape of
the canvas is wrong
, the critic wrote.
Never take the shape of the canvas for granted
.

He wrote the critic another long letter, setting out what he intended to do, and asking which dates the man might want for the school. The critic did not reply, perhaps, Kenneth conjectured, because of the fee. He wrote another letter in which he suggested that the Arts Council might be able to come up with another couple of hundred dollars because of the importance of Saskatchewan art being recognized in New York. Still no response.

Reworking the now-rectangular paintings proved to be a design problem more complicated than Kenneth had anticipated, and he often laboured in the studio until one or two in the morning. His wife was beginning to feel neglected and said so during the few moments, usually at meals, that they spent together.

Finally he was able to send off a new set of slides to the critic along with a letter explaining that although the Arts Council was not able to come up with all of the funds every man, woman, and child in Saskatchewan was hoping that the critic would return. He wondered if he should block out time for the critic now. Perhaps for the last week in August?

Kenneth heard from the critic only one more time. By then, the summer school had come and gone and the winter sun was once again blazing in through his studio windows, making him wince, and causing a glare on the rectangular paintings
stacked against the wall. He had stopped painting altogether, having found himself unable to continue without word from New York. He taught in the daytime and at night he walked along the tracks as he had before abstraction entered his life, but without the attentiveness he had brought to his previous rambles. He was becoming increasingly distanced from his wife, and his marriage began to falter. Finally in midwinter an envelope with an American stamp arrived. Inside it was a single piece of paper with a typed message, one that was longer than anything he had ever received from the critic.

The opening paragraph asked after Kenneth’s health and that of his family, and contained some references to people in the critic’s own personal life, names that Kenneth did not know.

The second paragraph got down to the business of the paintings.
There really is nothing that I can see of any worth in the slides you sent me. Immature, unrealized work, and entirely derivative. Too much green! And the amount of rendering is insupportable and gives an unhealthy three-dimensionality to the canvases even though there is no subject matter. It would do neither your career, nor indeed my own career, any favour to exhibit these paintings in New York
.

Two years later, when he began to work on sketches for the Gander mural, Kenneth found himself placing a huge, pasty, ghostlike figure in the centre of the picture plane. Painted cylindrically, and with great bulk, the figure held a wooden decoy in one raised arm as if attempting to persuade the
inanimate to take flight. His expression was pugnacious and his white costume resembled the military garb of a dictator. Almost everything around him that wasn’t painted green was painted yellow.

As he moved toward a final version for his submission, however, Kenneth would paint the critic out altogether, using as a substitute a man he had seen once in Domodossola, Italy. Or, at least, what he remembered and felt about him. But, in the beginning, it had given Kenneth great pleasure to make a portrait of the critic by breaking every rule the critic had tried to enforce, making him vivid, real, ignoring pure shape, pure colour, making him speak, pretentiously.

When he replied to the letter that came a few months later offering him the commission, he wrote that he hoped that there were a lot of chickens in Newfoundland. The mural, he wrote, would be executed in egg tempera.