How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review

[When I, we, were kids in the old 1950s growing up poor black and white television neighborhood we were always looking for that cowboy angel Adonis that we kept seeing flickering on the screen. Now we were far from being able to articulate our dreams, too say cowboy angel Adonis, maybe our hurts too since we were pretty hard scrabble kids but we kept wondering about the times when serious cowboy angels roamed the earth, roamed the West chasing bad guys and saving towns, and later damsels. Mainly we were looking for somebody, some adult who was not relative or one of the seemingly bland working- class stuffs outside of the old neighborhood to look up to. Funny that quest lasted far longer than we, I would have thought which is something that that film under review made me think about, think about the bad boys, the golden-haired Adonis.

That figure ultimately had a name, the name Dean Moriarty who went under many aliases mostly usually Neal Cassady or Cassidy you would see it both ways depending on the scam he was running. John Carter, Bill Cadger, Reed Wade and a few other names come back from memory depending on time and place, but he was the real deal back when I came of age and was looking for the father I never knew, literally. Dean, let’s use that since a novelist, a “beat” novelist Jack Kerouac used it for his mad daddy character in a few of his travelogues was born in the West, born of woman it was said on the Denver and Rio Grande which may tell something about that wild boy streak we all put up with just to be around the guy, or be around guys who had been around him later after he fell down, after he was no longer on the bus as the expression went. Hoboes call it “catching the Westbound” but anyway you call it still means going under the cold, cold ground. Before your time.            

I met Dean on Larimer Street in Denver as he was hustling some young woman who looked like a college student, far from a person you would expect from his demeanor and looks to be bothered with.    

Beyond that she seemed far too young for him, although I later learned he was only in his late 20s but already the drugs and booze were showing some early signs of dissipation. He had been coming out of the Cattlemen’s Hotel which back in the 19^th century was the place where all serious cattle deals were flushed out. Now it was a place for cheapjack winos, con men, failed at something guys, a few house hookers and guys on the lam like Dean. But that later. He came out all dressed in cowboy hat, blonde if dirty hair, dungarees, a well-worn work shirt and rounded heels cowboy boots of no distinction. So naturally being a naïve Easterner who cowboy ideas were grafted from television once Dean got the brush-off from that co-ed I went up to him and asked him if he was a cowboy. (By the way that so-called brush-off was just that he was to meet her later in the day after she finished classes, yeah, Dean had his ways with women that is for sure).

That was how I met Dean. Here is how he became a friend, although not always a purebred one from his end that is for sure (“that is for sure” a good expression whenever you mention his name to me):

Dean said “yep” to the cowboy question and started giving a whole line of ragtime about how he had just gotten in from Wyoming (which he had) bringing in a heard of cows and all that kind of cowboy thin talk. As I kept asking more questions, how it was to run cattle, ride a horse, sleep in the cold outdoors overnight with just a bedroll, city-slicker stuff like that he got more pronounced in what his cowboy career was about. Before long though we were sitting in Larimer Lou’s Bar with him sucking down whiskies straight-at my expense. (That endless “no dinero” his constant expression even when he had money meant me, with “poco dinero” paid and after a while I didn’t even bother to ask him to pay and even if I had no money I would just put the bite on the next guy with some kale). That went on for a few hours until he popped up with the idea of “hot-wiring” a car so we could go up to Boulder to meet a couple of gals he knew there (he had apparently, at least this was his line, already had his way with that co-ed) and did I want to come along.

Sure. Dean eyed some car, a fast one, maybe a souped-up Mustang I am not that good even now on model identification and within about two seconds he was done. I wondered that night, maybe still do, how a lonesome trail cowboy knew how to do such an urban kind of trick. As I recall we went to Boulder, fast, always fast, met the girls, did our thing with them, and headed back to Denver. I stayed in Dean’s room at the Cattlemen for a few days, he was in and out like a bird of prey. One afternoon he said he was heading for California to get some dope, to make a score in Santa Rosa and be on something like easy street for a while. Did I want to go. Sure. I had done more than my share of dope at that time so that was no problem but I was surprised that cowboy angel Dean who had previously given no indication he was even interested in dope was up to this. Some kind of what would be called later a drugstore cowboy, things like that.              

Some time I will go into various trips to the coast, up and down the coast, maybe Mexico too although I still feel I need to be cautious telling those latter tales. There are too many of them to fit in what is essentially an introduction to a film about modern day cowboys and cowboy angels. Once we hit Santa Rosa, once we made score and Dean made some money (remember never shared with me-ever) one night when he, maybe me too, was high he let out a great big roar of a laugh that his cowboy angel talk was all bullshit, all an act. The only truthful part was that he was born on the Denver & Rio Grande by a woman who would abandon him to a drunken father who put him into an orphanage. He knew nothing about horses, never ridden one, or any of the other tall tales he had laid on me that first night and later. What he was and had served various terms in reform school in different states for stealing cars, “the greatest car driver in the world,” his term and mechanic too. That was probably closer to the truth, but you never knew with Dean when he was being straight with you, or blasting your brain.     

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sam Lowell

All The Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Penelope Cruz, directed by Billy Bob Thornton, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy   

Unlike another tale, a coming of age tale if you like, of the modern American West, of the Texas west,  The Last Picture Show, where I read the novel by Larry McMurtry first then viewed the film I have seen the film under review the adaptation of Cormac Mc Carthy’s All The Pretty Horses without having read the novel. But after watching the film I will make it my business to read the novel which deals with a different aspect of the West, the cowboy West when ranch life goes south on its main characters and they are left to fend for themselves. A task which in true Western fashion has them groping to stay alive, although that was a close thing.   

John Grady Cole (hey that is the way he introduced himself to one and all), played by Matt Damon, was career-less, cowboy career-less after his grandfather died and his mother decided to sell the ranch leaving this young cowboy with horses in his blood with no place to go. No place but to go looking for work south of the Rio Grande, south of the border down  Mexico way with his longtime fellow cowboy Lacey played by Henry Thomas.     

Whatever adventure, whatever expectations they had about making a living as ranch hands down in Mexico were disturbed along the way when they met a vagabond Blevens who was strange to say the least.  Along the way Blevens losed his horse and then finds it again at a ranch. This brings in the factor of horse-stealing which will drive a lot of the action in the film, and which is as heinous a crime in modern day Mexico (and Texas too) as in the old days when horse thieves were strung up in an age when to take a man’s horse was to take away his livelihood, his means of travel and his manhood. Along the way because John Grady and Lacey are tarred with the same brush as Blevens they will see just what that meant. They were able to get work at a huge ranchero where John Grady got special recognition by the owner for his keen eye for horse flesh. Along the way as well they wind up because of Bleven’s actions in custody and eventually in the “you don’t want to go there” penitentiary after a corrupt Mexican cop wasted the unfortunate Blevens while John Grady and Lacey watched helplessly. They survive the prison ordeal somehow and Lacey decides to head home. John Grady decided he had some unfinished business and was staying to pursue that.       

That unfinished business was as to be expected getting his girlfriend to go back to Texas with him. This girlfriend Alejandra, played by fetching Penelope Cruz, a firebrand and well worth taking some grief for was unfortunately for John Grady the daughter of the ranchero owner and so they were fated to part, fated in part because the price of getting John Grady and Lacey out of that “you don’t want to go there” prison was that she would not see him again, certainly would not go away with him. That was that.

On his way back home across the border with his horse, Lacey’s and the late Bleven’s in tow as some sort of symbol of the experiences he had down south of the border he is stopped in Texas and essentially accused of that same horse-stealing charge. He got out of trouble once he told his story to a judge and then meandered back to Lacey’s place with those three damn horses. Yeah, the modern West is a tough dollar for a cowboy loving man just like in the Old West. See this one for the pretty horses, pretty scenery and pretty Cruz.        

Artie Hayes, Famed 1950s Hollywood Screenwriter Passes At 94 (1925-2019)-A Fragment Of A Remembrance

By Sam Lowell

[Several weeks ago I mentioned in my version of a film review of an old film noir Clash directed by legendary Fritz Lang originally done in this publication by Sandy Salmon the name of the famous old-time Hollywood screenwriter Artie Hayes. I mentioned in passing as well that he had also been something of a bit player in a number of movies, especially if it called for a scriptwriter or other minor literary figure.

The specific role that I mentioned was from the Oscar-winning Sunset Boulevard. Let me just quote that segment-“If you remember that far back Artie, in one of his few basically cameo film appearances naturally as a screenwriter for a Hollywood studio laid on some serious advice to the William Holden character in Sunset Boulevard  about avoiding the high numbered residences on that street. Of course, the character didn’t listen and wound up face down in a swimming pool with two or three slugs in him courtesy of the female addressee at one of those high-numbered places.”

Somebody unknown to me saw the piece and forwarded me Artie’s obituary from the Hollywood Express. He had passed away almost unknown at 94 earlier this year out in a nursing home in Del Mar. That got me to thinking a bit about Artie and an interview I had with him from my younger days when he was probably at the beginning of the downside of his illustrious career in the early 1970s. This industry chews up writers and others very quickly, but especially writers and their ilk so over forty and you are a has-been. 

Since we are on the subject of Sunset Boulevard I should mention not only the bit role Artie played but how he “saved” the film when things were at a stand-still. As I will expand upon below Artie was the fixer man, the guy, and it was almost all guys then, who tweaked the plot-line when it was sagging. Billy Wilder, not known to like outside help, brought Artie in when he was stumped about how to do the opening scene. Originally it was to be an aerial view of Hollywood with Joe, the failed studio scriptwriter, the role that William Holden played going on and on about how he had made some serious wrong choices taking a job with faded silent screen actor Norma Desmond. Made a serious wrong choice winding up very death in her residence on high-numbered Sunset after she put a few slugs in him. Then cut to the back story-line that brought him there. Artie knowing that all those Boulevard estates had swimming pools suggested that the lines would go down more smoothly, would peak the audiences’ curiosity more having him land in the pool after being shot. Once they tried that scene and Artie sensed it wasn’t strong enough he had Billy have Joe graphically facing down in the water as the coppers get ready to drag his corpse out of the deep. Beautiful.

Artie did a few things around the middle too when the thing was dragging by having the “kept” Joe (by Norma) start an ill-starred romance with a fellow female writer more his own age which enraged Norma and set up the downfall and some suggestions on having the ending, having Norma coming down the stairs like it was an old-time vintage movie opening. But that opening scene magic which may have been the tipping point for the Oscar was the key. Sam Lowell]   

   

Artie Hayes, one of the last of the old-time screenwriters from Hollywood’s “golden age” has passed on at 94. When I say old-time I meant he was unlike the teams that work through the material today out there was what they called, a fixer, a lone wolf, a rare breed of talent who came in at high wages to work out a “hook” on some film that was going nowhere, nowhere fast and some producer who had sunk a ton of dough in the stinker needed him to get it in the can, and occasionally past the Hollywood Code censors. That Artie could do with his hands tied behind his back.

I knew him when I first headed west to San Francisco in the 1970s to work on a series of what were then called alternative newspapers, all of them now long gone except maybe the Bay City Gazette although the last time I looked a few years ago you could not distinguish it from a Hearst publication or maybe something from the Kane newspaper chain. I had been assigned by Ben Gold (still going at it at Literature Today which I write for occasionally, but which is also a publication a long way away from those halcyon days when the world was young) to do an interview with Artie. He had been in town working on fixing up I think one of those Steve McQueen car chase movies (which he did by cutting out three minutes of chase filler which had been making a test audience sick to their stomachs with the cars bouncing over the seven hills of that city) and had agreed to an interview. Not because he was some devotee of alternative newspapers, he didn’t know anything about them and what he did know he didn’t like being from the older generation and that even he admitted was clueless about the youth generation’s actions on the streets.       

The interview was fascinating for a young guy who was “faking” it mainly in the film reviewing business. Mainly reciting the plotlines and giving some banana ball twists about some scene or usually about how some actor, some female actor, was hot or not, or some male actor had no chemistry with whoever his leading lady was. Mostly filler since I was obliged in order to be paid, which even in the best of times was an iffy thing, to write about three thousand words to make my meat. In those days I was deep into drugs and booze as well (clean for twenty years now but it was close, very close) so half the time I would take the studio press releases and write a few opening remarks, slide in the studio gaff, and close with some pithy sentiment. Yeah, bullshit. But even if I had been stone-cold sober, had been a health nut let’s say I would have still not known anything about the inner workings of a film. Like what a fixer like Artie, was or the cut and paste done on most film scripts. Artie clued me in a little and gave me reference material to chew on. I probably never got all of it right but a good part.

During the interview which lasted several hours (and over drinks which were mandatory then in interviews with Hollywood-types) Artie gave me a ton of examples of what he had done, what he had fixed in his career. Of course the one thing I did know from my lonely and poor 1950s growing up was movies since I would almost every Saturday hit the local theater for the matinee double-headers presented there (and kept body and soul together for the afternoon with candy or pastry snuck in after purchase at the local variety store against the outrageous prices at the movie candy counter). That was Artie’s heyday, so I knew most of the films, or the plotlines anyway. Artie as did most writers in those days before Iowa Writers Workshops sprouted up never went to college, winged it but knew he could write. Just after World War II before the veteran deluge a young kid could catch a break in the studios. Artie did and as far as I know never had to look back.            

  

Right from the beginning Artie, remember this is Artie giving his presentation of himself, saw that to get anywhere, to make dough you had to get out of the “stables,” get out of the factory-like writing rooms filled young, ill-paid young writers with train smoke and dreams. He caught on first with the film Out of the Past from 1947. Maybe making a few dialogue changes, a little scene setting nothing big. But after a few weeks everybody knew the thing was sagging of its own weight. Not enough tension for a late 1940s film noir with femme Jane Greer and tough guy Robert Mitchum going down the silky sheets road and some foregone doom (unseen of course then). After Jane got her claws in him down in Mexico where she fled, and he followed her after being hired by a Reno gangster to bring her back they decided to slip back into the United States on the low. There was something missing though, some “drag” as Artie called it while they went through their paces on the run.

Now femme Jane was not above firing a few well-paced gunshots. she had done that, winged the Reno gangster in her getaway. Who knows with a gun simple woman how many before she had bang-banged when they got in her way, or she tired of them.  But nobody saw that side of her doing her evil work. Artie to the rescue to lift the drag but also to make everybody know Jane was poison. He had an originally minor character, a detective partner of Robert’s get hired by that gangster to find his partner and dear Jane. And the snoop does. Except things don’t go as planned for him or Robert. Not when Jane feels cornered. Jane shoots the guy and leaves a knocked-out Robert to take the heat, and plenty of time and space to get over his wounded heart. The plotline moves again with everybody in the audience knowing that these star-crossed lovers are doomed. Beautiful again.             

I have already mentioned the film Clash where the drag was that restless Mae had no female to talk to until Artie mentioned that Fritz Lang would do himself some good if Mae talked to her younger brother’s girlfriend who turned out to be a totally photogenic young Marilyn Monroe lolling around who added eye candy to a basic slow-mo plot that was heading nowhere once Mae took up with some grifter once she tired of her oafish husband married on the rebound. Not beautiful but a nice trick. Coming right up against the Hollywood Code he was the guy who had Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in that hot beach wave fade scene and you can figure the rest out to show times were changing. Originally Burt and Deborah were to stay in the car and Burt was to grab Deborah for some big but awkward embrace and that was that. There were many others and now that I think about it I will do a separate piece on Artie’s fixer man works.

[I was rummaging through my old yellowed printed page files to see if I had anything left from the old days on Artie Hayes. Those were times filled with booze and drugs, all kinds of both so my archival sense and skills were minimal-the only thing I found was part of some notes Artie made on the plot of Clash the one where he gave, unintentionally, Marilyn Monroe much more of a part on camera than she was to originally play. Yeah, Artie was the fixer man when that meant something. Sam Lowell]      

She returns to her small family home where her brother, a commercial fisherman, remember old-time Monterey was the sardine capital of the world, is enthralled by Peggy, played by Marilyn Monroe, who is a lot more forgiving about the fate of a lost sister than her brother who nevertheless lets her stay. While keeping a low profile as something of a home body her brother’s boat captain, Jerry, played by gruff and throaty Paul Douglas, a regular stiff comes a-courting. After a while, succumbing to a strong desire to have somebody take care of her, to be settled she accepts Jerry’s offer of marriage. Even in accepting Jerry’s proposal though she warned him that she was spoiled goods.           

Things go along for a while with Jerry and Mae, about a year, during which they have a child, a baby girl, but Mae begins to get the wanderlust, begins to get antsy around the very ordinary and plebian Jerry. Enter Earl, or rather re-enter Earl, Jerry’s friend, who had been interested in Mae from day one when Jerry introduced them. He, in the meantime, was now divorced and takes dead aim at Mae. And she takes the bait, falls hard for the fast-talking cynical Earl. They plan for Mae to fly the coop with the baby and a new life. [This is where Artie’s magic enters the scene-SL] Not so fast though once they confront Jerry with their affair, with his being cuckolded. This is where the dialogue gets right down to basics. Mae gives Jerry what’s what about her and Earl, about her needs. Jerry, blinders off, builds up a head of steam and in another scene almost kills Earl before he realized what he was doing. 

This is the “pivot.” Jerry takes the baby on his boat. Mae suddenly realizes that the baby means more to her than Earl who as it turned out didn’t give a rat’s ass about the child. Having been once bitten though when Mae goes to Jerry to seek reconciliation he is lukewarm but as she turns to leave he relents. Maybe they can work things out, or at least that is the look on Mae’s face when she is brought back into the fold at the end of the film.  You really have to see this film to get a sense of the raw emotions on display, and on the contrary feelings each character has about his or her place in the sun. Nicely done Fritz and crew, nicely done.       

Traipsing Through The Arts-By The Numbers-Once Again On The Infamous "Portrait Of  Madame X"-John Singer Sargent’s Dirty Revenge

By Laura Perkins

Some paintings leave you mystified no matter what the quality may be and in the case of John Singer Sargent’s Portrait Of Madame X that goes double, more than double(everybody knows her name but the X factor makes it more exotic particularly for my purposes and for those who don’t go to Wikipedia ). Nobody is, or should question, Sargent’s tremendous technical skills as an artist although art critic John Updike has pointed out in several of his essays on the subject that at least in his portrait period, the period when he painted for hard cash and bitter haggling to get his dough, kale he might as well have taken a photograph for all the blandness, all the lack of psychological depth in his work. Of course if somebody wanted to mount a Sargent defense, except for a few younger Boston socialites they were hard, hard subjects to put in a good light especially when their contracts called for an austere and proper look for posterity.

Certainly, the Boit sisters, had plenty of reason to get rid of that foolish painting of them in their respective youths that their parents had commissioned. Some say the Boit parents really wanted to show off their beautiful Ming vases which travelled with them everywhere and the children were there for decoration. I have heard the story from several sources but have been unable to pin it down any time I run into a knowledgeable curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where the painting landed. They all seem to have been sworn to some Omerta secret blood oath by the upper echelons of the local art cabal to not say anything to tarnish the Sargent golden calf dough flow that keeps the place afloat in good times and bad. They have collectively responded on en masse to dismiss the story out of hand with the exact same answer saying, get this, that those who spread that story are just “haters.” At least in the old days before the current debasement of language by social media and sloth we would be written off as philistines and ignorant holy goofs.

There is another story that Cecelia, the oldest Boit girl hiding in the shadows in the famous painting either was ready to put the thing to the knife or burn it one night in a rage. The reason, a perfectly good one in teenage girl or boy eyes, was that Sargent who apparently felt t that he had all the time in the world and the same in regard to his  imprisoned subjects had all the time in the world would have them posing for hours while he sang and smoked horrible cheapjack five cent cigars and she missed a “hot date” with some Parisian kid who dumped her afterward when she was a “no show.” This story too seeks verification but has a certain better “cred” standing since all the sisters were only too happy to get rid of the albatross since none of them wanted it when they grew up. Another rumor that one girl’s Boston marriage partner was herself going to take the knife to the thing one night in a drunken rage if the damn thing was brought into their home up on Beacon Hill. 

That little interlude on the Boit girls to set up the fate of Madame X and why she (and her mother) hated that portrait and why he hated women from all the evidence leaving this well-groomed professional beauty (read: courtesan in Realspeak) with no reputation left in Parisian high society then and for eternity (or as long as the Met in New York City holds on to the piece) being gawked at by infidels and holy goofs for that hideous nose Sargent came on too strong with. But before that a quick cautionary tale about portrait paintings and clever artists. The famous Dutch artist Van Dyck made a pile of dough, kale painting portraits of the English Royal family under Charles I of England (the guy who got his head chopped off for his stubbornness by Oliver Crowell and the boys. The head never found from its resting place after agents, probably gypsies, now Roma, from a secret severed head cult grabbed it for their kinky rites.). One famous portrait was of Charles’ wife, Henrietta Maria, who Van Dyck made into some “hot” beauty for public consumption. Some princess with no ax to grind when she excitedly met her later started shrieking to the high heavens about what a real beast Henrietta Maria looked like in real life, complete with fangs from what I heard. Don’t tell me when dough, kale is on the line an artist, a non-starving artist is not above a few thousand touch-up so we get what amounts to “fake news” about what these high end denizens really looked like.  

Now back to dear Madame X. Of course everybody in Paris which meant then, as now, high society Paris knew the American transplant landed on French soil with one idea in mind- to get high up in the food chain as fast as she could. Using her, Jesus, always the coded words, professional beauty, which I have “translated” above as courtesan, she did just that. It is hard to follow all the details but it appeared at least from the co-written memoirs of her personal maid that the back door to her bedroom was something like a revolving door of all those in some position to help her up the chain (seemingly with her endlessly broke husband at least tacitly letting her do her thing. The only hard evidence though of her, well, whorish behavior was the revelation of the LeBlanc who was Sargent’s paint mixer, the guy who made those black, browns and greys which made even the little Boit girls look austere (and frumpy). He, backed by the maid, claimed he had been Madame’s lover when she was on her “plebian” mood.    

Of course, none of this would be relevant to Sargent since everybody knew that he had no sexual interest in the Madame and in fact consciously decided to bring her down in society by his devilish mastery of the painting surface. After years in the fog led by successive MFA art directors and the local cabal who  kept high-priced press agents busy keeping that fog from lifting we have been fortunate that blessed novelist John Updike and others have enlightened us about Sargent’s sexual proclivities. Those feelings centered around his fellow exiled American literary light Henry James and those countless dinners both would be invited to fill the bachelor chairs across from some old biddy after which they left together in merry old pre-World War I England. Also that he was extremely hostile to women making them, as he did with the young and innocent Boit sisters mentioned above which caused one of them to almost take the knife to the portrait, sit for hours in rigid positions and uncomfortable clothes while he “entertained” some “assistant” with singing, claret and what was universally agreed were horrible five-cent cigars.

(If you want to know about the clothes that Sargent imprisoned his women in with tortuous waspish waist corsets and horrible bosom-enhancers you need go no further that the John Singer Sargent Museum, oops, MFA. As if the joint didn’t have enough things Sargent from top to bottom down in the dungeon, down in the basement of the American Arts wing, the place where they stuff the Native American and Mezo-American art away from the paying clientele they had an empty room, empty since used for their small homage to the Summer of Love, 1967 they have set up yet another exhibit. An exhibit featuring the various torture chamber dresses the distaff side of the of Brahmins who sat for Sargent in his dough, kale portrait days. As a prelude to yet another “big tent” exhibit in a couple of years. The cabal has thoughtlessly not put warnings up that children should not go to that gallery without some parental guidance, some warning like that.)

Today we don’t care or shouldn’t care about a person’s sexual preferences but then with strict sodomy laws and deep social shunning it was best to keep any off-beat sexual business in the deep closet. My sense is that having to keep in that deep basket kicked some ugly movements in Sargent’s psyche, some desire to express his hatred of women without having to expose himself to social ridicule. In the end he would not get away with it. Would have to flee Paris like a rat for the sunny shores of England and Hank when he couldn’t make his dough, kale doing portraits even though he lowered his prices to something like Wal-Mart discount levels. The only example I can think of that fits and that might give today’s reader a sense of his desperation was that if he had not left France he would have been selling his stuff in competition with the Velvet Elvis paintings at local flea and farmer’s markets. He had too much talent for that fate, no doubt.          

With that recently unearthed knowledge, with a better sense of that seething hatred of women it makes perfect sense that Sargent did what he did to Madame X’s portrait. She was a parvenu, white trash really in his circle, and he could hardly have attempted to do such damage to the likes of Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge or Mr. Henry Higginson Wentworth in their portraits or else he would have been sleeping on the Thames or the Charles River. Bingo, he did two little tricks that brought her down low, taking a chapter from the previously mentioned Van Dyck’s handbook. The most daring, the one caused him to have to scurry like a wharf rat to other shores was the “slip of the brush” when he painted Madame shoulder dress strap just a little too far down the shoulder for prudish high society tastes. That seemingly slight “mistake” in rigid everybody the same high society reduced dear Madame to the equivalent of a “lady of the evening,” whore, maybe nothing but a street whore depending on what the high society women decided to lay on her. A bunch of merciless old biddies who had nothing better to do than keep the “riffraff” from getting ahead of them on the food chain.

In the long haul though that slipped strap business was nothing. Sargent’s real bastardly revenge on women was what he did to Madame’s nose. For some reason, whether hers or his, either Madame refused to have her portrait done from a frontal position like all the others by him or Sargent decided that side position would expose her horrible bird-like nose better. Or, maybe because she refused if she did refuse, Sargent decided to give her the full blast of his fury. Maybe in the days before plastic surgery saved many an ugly nose which caused even professional beauties restless nights nobody thought much about it one way or another. As long as they didn’t have to meet her in person like the cautionary tale story of Henrietta Maria above and realize that something was desperately wrong in the written descriptions and photographs of her. It was only recently, maybe twenty years ago, that famous art critic Roone York noted that in the several portraits of Madame by Sargent and later artists that same horrid nose turned in that awkward side position. And meanwhile Sargent’s golden calf operation is unsullied. Something is wrong, very wrong here.      

50 Years Gone The Father We Almost Knew One Jack Kerouac Out Of Merrimack River Nights-Searching For The Father We Never Knew-Scenes In Search Of The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- The Lonesomest Hobo Daddy Of Them All   

By Seth Garth, known as Charles River Blackie for no other reason that he can remember at least than he slept along those banks, the Cambridge side and some raggedy ass wino who tried to cut him under the Anderson Bridge one night called him that and it stuck. Those wino-zapped bums, piss leaky tramps and poet-king hoboes all gone to some graven spot long ago from drink, drug, or their own hubris which they never understood gone and the moniker too.  

Jack’s Merrimack River, Jack’s ancient stream, damn steamed river. Rough, white-capped torrents flowing without a break, coming from some unknown springs, creeks, rivulets, brooks and whatnot, storm-tossed in winter, rock-stepping rough, pock-marked with broken trees causing gushes and gaps in the steady stream, boulders pocked too up by the painted sprayed cliffs near the University, cliff names (Jimmy loves Janie, sigma phi forever,  Mary sucks, nowadays gives good head complete with telephone number, the Acre rules), etched in paint (Day-Glo now some odd Dutch Boy formula then)  going back to Jack time, (then, Jack time, just friendly old Lowell Textile, strictly for the textile trade wonks and wanna-bes, not Jack-worthy), undertow dragging against foolhardy feet for the unsteady and first understandings that the world IS a dangerous place but also, without embarrassment, that the river is the river of life. And no fears, no god fears, no mother church catholic fears, no consequence from those pagan sentiments.  Bridged, river bridged, bridged at strategic points bridged, brawny steel and trestle bridged to take on all traffics rumbling across the torrent below river, granite foundations stones placed, how placed a mystery, a construction mystery that some bright Lowell Tech guy (old days now U/Mass, ah, Lowell) could figure out in a minute just like how he got that rock-bound Jimmie loves Janie rock sprayed, in such a way as to defend against rising rivers, hurricanes, wars, and other earthly  disasters.

Bridged, not metaphor bridged, Jack would no heard of it, would smirk that devil’s smirk and dismiss you and your damn metaphor out of hand, would speak of golden colored bridges spanning , and name the colors, and the shades when they reflected against the day, fierce seas, name the seas, name the ships on the seas, name the parts of ships, name the horrors and beauties of the turbulent seas, would speak of traffic, of commerce of delivering goods, near and far, of bridge sounds, rumbles, honks, gnaws even,  so no to some Hemingway mind-wrought  big two-hearted Idaho idyllic river but real bridged, Jack London old time bridged, Call Of The Wild nights of the long knives bridged between poor, working poor, working textile poor Lowell on one side and the desperately, or repeatedly poor like clan Kerouac, chronically unemployed, semi-chronically drunk and disorderly, poor, Acre poor.

Blessed Saint Jean bon, Ti Jean, among the brethren,  cross his big god-head  heart, un-anointed, hell unadorned Adonis patron saint of the Acre poor, the Acre poor, scrabbly working poor   (and throw in some lumpen criminal vagabonds, scavengers, con men, lifeless corner boys , and just plain thugs to boot, they thrive in the easy pickings Acre, and a thousand other Acre-named  places too) known to kindred poor Josh Breslin (mother, nee LeBlanc, the LeBlancs from up Quebec City way, and north Saint Lawrence north toward the Gaspe ) in the French –Canadian Atlantic Avenue Acre over in Olde Saco, Maine and well-known as well to Irish stews Peter Paul Markin down in Acre projects in Adamsville, Massachusetts way. Yes, Saint Jean bon, patron saint muse of the Acre poor, wherever they are located. The back-biting, bitching, somewhere over the rainbow poor, the Botts Diner after midnight heavy-lidded after manly bouts with fugitive whiskey bottles poor, the pick up the fags (okay, okay here cigarette butts) from the Merrimack Street ground, and cadging (while the bartender is not looking) half- finished manly whiskies (or, hell, by midnight whatever was left on napkin-soaked tables and counters), poor. And one thousand, maybe one million other unspoken, always unspoken, pathologies, tics, and whatnots, never allowed to air in the sometimes fetid (although near no oceans or marshes but from mixed and matched industrial chemicals), damn stinking Lowell industrial summer night. And cold, pale blue cold winter too, except maybe not fetid. Pick a cold word, okay.                      

Jack rough river, working- class Jack rough all brawny and bustle, flowing to great unseen Atlantic shores (where real fetid smells, nature smells from churned seas and drowned marshes, periodically stink the air) and from there to great American homeland England before the fall and real homeland, France, ageless France bountiful and smart long before the bloody Anglos were made hip to using spoons for porridge, before Arcadian Plains of Abraham falls and hard English burnt offering exiles.  And damn cursed native tongues (patois they called it) banned just like with the gaelic Irish, the Breton wild men, and the keltic brogue Scots, what madness in Empire, that seaward sun never sets empire thumbing it beefsteak nose at culture brought from courtly France and well-bred manners. And strangers in a strange land (Longfellow homage poem exiles anyway) when Canad soils gave out, or no work prospects loomed, or the lore of two dollars a day (in real money, Anglo-derived money, damn) sent half of Quebec streaming down to the paper and textile mill towns, river towns, Olde Saco, Manchester, Nashua, and sainted, sunned, stunned, acid- stained canal- strewn river flowed Lowell.       

Merrimack (Jack play word Mary Mack, Markin play word Mary Mack all dressed in black), hometown river of youth, callous youth, question, going into young manhood. Hanging around corner boy Leclerc’s Variety,  mom and pop variety store cadging quarters from working men streaming out of the second-shift mills, occasionally stealing odd lots of penny candy (funny habit, always describing sweet tooth things, immense marbled cakes, chocolate frosted, huge bread puddings heated and served with whipped creams, shimmering jellos of six different flavors, also whipped creamed, hearty  apple pies laden with syrupy ice cream melts and on down to mouth- watering  movie time milk duds, for chrissakes, making word hungry eyes food hungry, cheap sugar food hungry), you know Baby Ruth, Butterfingers, Snickers (or, snickers), Milky Way, to avoid the heavy tariff at the Bijou Theater come Saturday afternoon double bill, double trouble, matinee specials. And Ma, Mere called so in the old-fashioned back home Montreal way from whence she came trotting for those dame yankee dollars,  having to sneak quarters to Mr. Leclerc to cover those sweet tooth penny candied larcenies . And you thought you were so clever, Jack old boy, old dog. But that was the life, the corner boy life, small stealing, small cadging, jack-rolling some drunken kid for his quarters (doled out by his Mere for his penny candy Bijou extravaganzas). Boys, always about boys, and adventures and thinking, and forever writing, some golf score pencil and Bridge Street Woolworth’s 5 &10 notebook, just in case. 

Later of dream stories, at those same corners or maybe further the river toward Pawtucketville across from Father Kerouac’s social club (and drinking bout hang-out) but always eternally corner dream stories now long gone to malls and fast food courts and no loitering, no trespassing, no skate-boarding, no breathing human unkind trances. To speak about jail break-outs, about small town prison escapes, the young always seeing even New York City as too small for their  outrageous appetites, and good luck, letting Lowell sun eat the dust of your tracks fill the night air, about big time jobs and celebrity (once the word was discovered). And then the talk turned serious as the wisp of a beard showed (more than five o’clock shadows for 

Jack, dark, French-etched two times a day shaved Jack) turned  to manly shavings and childish voice turned to deep bass, serious talk about girls, about what they were made of, and more importantly what made them tick. A lifetime of wonders and sorrows to spill the river-laden night. A clue though, a clue worth a king’s ransom would have been worth all that lucre if they could just figure out what the hell they wanted. The girls, okay. They, the corner boys, all sized, shaped, smarts, greek, French, ethnic corner boys (who else would inhabit the Acre in those days, the bloody Irish lived in Irishtown, just like they did in Olde Saco up in Maine and Adamsville, down in Irishtown South  Lowell way, down Maggie Cassidy way but more on that later)  found out soon enough after a few bouts of love dust at the old Starlight Ballroom, now famous, town famous, since Benny Goodman and his band had set its 1939 foot in the front door and blasted everything to be-bop, beepy-be-bop don’t stop, mad man music including soon to be front singing Jack-inflamed red dress Paula. Yah, Benny’s band that was where she got her start (okay, okay start with Jack on moonless nights singing, singing the then known American songbook, Tin Pan Alley songbook but that didn’t count. The moonless singing that is. The afternoon red dress and high heels come hither, yah, that counted, Maggie counted, too but later.)       

Jack’s river of sorrow, of Mere hurts and Maggie Cassidy hurts too. (I told you I would have more on her, of lace curtain vanities and father train conductor dreams of some little white cottage, a dog, and three point four kids, nah, not Jack-sized, not Jack-sized at all). Forgotten now Paula (forgotten even forgotten of red dress seductions which made him toss and turn many a night, many a night before Maggie devoured sleep). Forgotten Mere (and her old-fashioned Montreal French-Canadian, and before that some Gaspe wind-swept farm stories, that he would use later to bulk out his own stories when his brain ran dry, or maybe sad, big sad Tokay wet), forgotten although always hovering as a stark and real cut knives presence (and mixed in as with all mothers , mothers since Eve, generous helpings of immense love gifts bought with shoe leather- stained hands from working at that damn old mother-twisting shoe mill) really until the Maggie fever had subsided, subsided several years, later but that is a story for another time, a time after  New York City lights, Village mysteries, sea adventures and searches for the  blue-pink great American West night, and of Neal Cassady golden-haired cowboy west romps, and next million word adventures.

What mattered now though was that our boy, our Jack O’Kerouac, or Jack McKerouac, or Jack, hell, let’s leave it at Jack Keltic got himself all balled up over an Irish colleen, from over down in Irishtown down by the Concord River, history river not all brawny and dyed like Jack’s Merrimack river, well away from the Acre, and Acre small dreams, and well away from handy corner boys to hold his hand when old Maggie turned up the heat. Yes, Maggie, blessed virgin Maggie, of the pale blue eyes, of the pale blue heart, and of the lace curtain appetites. Of white picket fences, and houses, white too, to go with them, a spotted dog and a few stray whining kids to keep the cold nights warm. No sale, no Jack of the river sale, not our boy in the end but it was a close call and maybe if she had turned down those white silken stockings just once he would have wound up white fence- picketed through his heart in some cozy bungalow close by Dracut Forest, or hell, in up and coming Chelmsford (and then no on the road, no dharma, no big sur, no Mexican nights, tangier nights, just Maggie and pipe, tobacco pipe nights).

Yes, Jack would know manly hurts, huge manly hurts imposed by hard-hearted women, and men, after that one but not before clowning himself  before her with feats of modern athletic daring against black ravens , against arch-rival Lawrence gridiron, Lawrence also of the river and of history, of strikes and struggle of a different kind, of bread and roses. Of clowning corner boy clowning, deciding stay or go, stay or go, of drunken dance floor episodes (no, not when Benny Goodman, Hail Be-bop Benny, held forth and made the Starlight Ballroom quake, but other times, other Maggie pouting times, or Maggie tired times, or Maggie “friend” times, the list was endless, and he endlessly patiently impatient as each phase of the Maggie moon turned into ashes. And into Jack death pyre).       

Interlude: Jack’s low sun going down behind the river and before that the tree- strewn, living tree strewn river upstream, upstream where it all began and where Jack began. Pawtucketville, the Acre, South Lowell, the trolley tracks end, and the endless winter snow walks, the endless summer river ebb walks, the fret Maggie walks, the no dime for carfare (quaint word) walk, the walk to save for penny candy walk, the million word walk, the first school dance walk, the no money for prom car (or car or license, okay) walk, the night before the big game walk, walked in Dracut Forest to avoid mad crashing fans who wanted to know glory up close , if only Jack- reflected glory, yes, walk, walk too, get out of the house when Mere cursed his dark night.

But really prelude, training, cosmic training, okay  to million mile walks from New Jersey shores, looking out from broken down, oil-stained, oil smelled eastern piers and dreaming hookah Tangiers dreams, from Time Square dope blasts with every faux hipster who could afford a string tie, soft shoes, midnight sunglasses and a be-bop line of patter, pitter- patter, really, from rockymountainhills walks sliding down to Denver town in beloved Cassady country poolrooms and juke joints, from ghost dance walks in saline deserts channeling ancient Breton hurts and shamanic wanderlust, from dark bracero Mex walks waiting on broken down senorita love in some stinking Imperial Valley bean field, from Presidio fast by the golden gate bridge, fast by North Beach walks, from Big Sur hunger for oneness with the sea walks (never made really quite and serene Todo el Mundo a few miles south when it could have made a difference, from life walks, from death walks. Walks, shoe leather- eating walks, okay.           

******

Jack of Lowell hometown, Jack of some Micmac-traded ancient Canad French-Canadian fur trader beyond time and back to Breton woods and great fields of serf fellahin peasants plowing, cowing, milking, harvesting, corvee-ing some milord’s land seen in some far distance, since with river running. Ownership burned out in the Yankee mill night, the time-owned night, the day too. Mainly now of narrow (narrow life-making) triple and double-deckers squalid flats constantly changing renter-ship, constant babies squabble in six languages, but above all patois, beautiful lilt keltic fringe hard Atlantic seas and torrents of rain Breton coast patois. And so they established an outpost here, among the mix of mill-town hands, making mill things, dreaming non-mill things, and for the men working, working hard and long and then off to some card-playing (as disguise for heavy drinking, cheap cigar- smoking and rude talk of women, the ethnics, hah, and the world gone to hell in a hand basket) Franco-American Club, no women, no children, no kikes, no micks, no English (absolutely no English for there is a swollen Montcalm bone to pick over on that one), no oppressors unnamed and unloved allowed. A man’s life as befits a man whose people came down from places deep in Quebec woods and along the mighty Gaspe Saint Lawrence.  

Those are ancient myths of gentile beggar fellaheen birth among the Canad and pedigree not to be touted in non-pedigree Americas, and certainly not in non-pedigree Lowells (except by certain mill owners who spoke only to god, or to Cabots maybe). And so the mix of fellahin patois, of roasted fires, of sweet gentle wines to that good night, of sober work, of somber life explained the fate of that American mix, Lowell style. And explained too the greek, french, irish, break-out of ungrateful sons (and daughters but not as well seen). Sons with words to say, with American songs to sing, not Whitman song, that was another time, another place and another America but songs against mill stream night, songs against the death of personal dreams, of wayward sons, well-meaning wayward sons but wayward.    

Ah, Lowell setting sun Lowell and its time of great decline, great decline on Jack’s birth river. The stink of tannic acid, the blue dye, the red dye, hell, the yellow dye river dying for lack of work, for worked-out mills, for moved to cheap jack cheaper labor southern ports of call. And so the Lowell setting sun turned in on itself, turned to be-bop music and Botts midnight diners with guys, guys who used to work the midnight shift, and restless, now lingering over mad cups of joe to ward off the worthless sense of non-self. Fixed in place and the younger ones seeing that said no mas, not me, and spoke of flights of fancy, and of real flights, flights from Merrimack River roads to trash-strewn asphalt highways west.              

Lowell, water Lowell, canal Lowell, fresh-faced farm girl Lowell hands weaving the wicked weave of the loam and then to other pursuits none the worse for wear at least that was the call, the advertised call that brought them from Acton, Concord, and Littleton farms or maybe before those places had names, town names, just Farmer Brown’s rosy-cheeked daughter from over there where that dusty road intersected the corner of Brother Smith’s land. Later gentle waters, gentle confluence waters from high hill brooks and bramble, from flow Concord, Lowell sing, not some sing-song Shepard’s sing, not some cattle- lowing sing, not some elysian fields sing but the sing of great bobbed machines whistling late into the night, hell what night, whistling into daybreak and fearful noises for those poor tenement, double and triple tenement, dwellers who form the perimeter of the mill mile, sweet cloth and money-making mill mile.        

And Jack born, born and raised, to term an old phrase, a mere stone’s throw away along that same river bend as it curves up the cliffs near Pawtucketville, the old time Mere and Pere French quarter where Jack would get his fill of double and triple-deckers. And rosy tales of those ancient Breton fields and thieving thriving  French fur- traders amid the scream of broken whiskey bottles, a few broken by him, murderous wives bent on murder for having too many children, too many children too close together, too many short paychecks and too many long grocer’s bills, too many drunken husband nights without him or with him all sex hungry and stinking of anglo whiskies or greek anise, or just murderous to be murderous in fear of the lost Hollywood dream and no chance to pull a Mildred Pierce or even a lite Lana Turner twist against  some old drunken greek short order chef seaside road diner hell fate.

Jail-break midnight teenagers looking for quick quarters for the jukebox to play Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman  or some latest be-bop daddy, standing around in front of the Bijou Theater or the Starlight Ballroom to see if there are any dreams being manufactured inside, and  looking for a  way to make sense of a world that they didn’t create. That Jack, that Jack teen- age boy, teen- age corner boy like all the others didn’t create, that played and that ate at him, ate at him from crawl time to crawling down the gutter time. But if you are going to bust out you had better have something more than halfback hero’s good looks, if you are going to go toe to toe with the gods that is (and we know he was aching, bleeding really, to go toe to toe with them, for a while anyway). So he started, started early, a million word journey used stubbled pencils, and squirrelly inks until, until he got the hang of writing non-stop with a roll of newsprint and a squirrelly old typewriter. Praise Brother Remington             

And funny growth too, the sturdy, durable fleet youth, all black hair and ooh-la-la French good looks, verified, verified first by wistful small-breasted French-Canadian girls with long thin legs, also from the old Canad descended and maybe a few rascally fur-traders in the background too. Later wild red-headed Irish girls trying, a little, to break from heathen brown-haired sexless, sex-hate Irish boys murmuring novenas, stations of the cross, and smelling of altar wines and priest pokes would toss and turn dreaming of oo-la-la Frenchmen read about in some schoolgirl school book, or heard on unsavory streets from the older girls, the girls who no longer had the sign of the cross when they passed Saint Joseph’s, or Saint Jean-Baptiste, or Saint Brigitte’s, or Saint Germaine’s or Immaculate Conception, or Sacred Heart, Saint, saint, saint, Saint Mary’s, okay, or any of the three billion (but I exaggerate) other Lowell holy, holy places where a man can turn from saint Jack to shaman Jack in a wink of an eye.              

And that is when she came by, she Maggie she, but call her all girl-kind, no, womankind, with her pale white skin, her pale blue eyes, her dark hair and her well-turned ankles, and disturbed his sleep. And he never got over that, that way that she could keep him on a string while every other girl was ready to throw herself to the ground for him (in order that he could have the stamina to beat Lawrence on Thanksgiving Day, in order for him to write some little ditty for her, in order for him to dance with her at the school dance, in order, one girl claimed she had to “do it” in order to improve her voice so she could sing with some faux- Benny Goodman [all the rage then in the late 1930s be-bop night] quintet, in order, hell, at the end it was just in order to, what did they call it in Lowell High School Monday morning girls’ lav before school girl talkfest about what did, or didn’t happen on Friday or Saturday night, oh yah, to say they had been jacked by him).

Later, later when the reasons changed but the girls (no, women then) still thought jacked thoughts he feigned lack of interest, feigned writer’s cramp, feigned zen Buddhist abstinence, feigned, not so feigned maybe, drunk or drugged impotence. But no man, no real man, or fairy (term of art forgiven, please) or even lowly Time Square whores, hookers, drifters and  fags (term of art, not forgiven) knew that he had had his insides torn out by old Maggie, Maggie the cat with no downy billows ending long before Tennessee Williams ever put pen to paper. So say a prayer for Jack, Jeanbon Jack, if you are the praying kind and curse hellish dark-haired Irish colleens.           

Spinning wheels, million football goals scored, million girls jacked, million drinks drunk with clownish corner boys from age six on, million yards of pure textile loomed enough to satisfy even the haughtiest Lowell Textile School professor, million words written, million smokestack fumes emitted into the cold Lowell air night. Finished, town finished, Maggie finished, corner boy finished, home finished. Break out time, break out to great northern seas to write like some mad monk plastered on cheap jack vineyard wines, homemade, pressed fast and sipped fast (and on the sly). Neon sign break-out, New Jack City beckoned.     

Interlude: Four in the morning cold coffee slurps, percolator (quaint word) on the stove brewing up another break- speed batch to endure hours more of non-stop, non-connected, non-punctuated writing. Writing of Trailways bus stop waits, waits for continental visions (if one does not the mind the company, the inevitable, to be kind, too large company in the next seat), in search of that great blue-pink American West night (and later the international blue-pink night) in dirty washrooms filled with seven hundred manly stinks, and six perfumes to kill the smell, the urinate smell, street-wise rest room for weary travelers, hobos, bums, and tramps, take your pick, maybe some hung over soldier trying to decide on AWOL or frantic rush back to base and evaporated dreams, nightmares really. Of seasick sailors running overboard at the first wave heave, or first explosion in the dread Murmansk run North Atlantic icy waters night one sailor, seasick, no, sick of the sea, writing, writing in disregard of heaves, and lifeboat-worthy explosions.

Of Village flophouse lofts filled with chattering (to vanish fear) expatriate exiles, native born from Iowa, Minnesota, Denver, maybe, in ones and twos, trying to hold out against the impending red scare cold war night, the death night to destroy the promise of golden age utopias. Of Scollay Square whores ready to take your pain away, no questions asked, filled with stories, small dream from small town stories about easy lost virginity and local scandal, with jack-roller ready pimp/boyfriends just in case things got rough, or some easy dough was to be had.

Of some mad notion that writing two million words would take that pain away as easily as that whore promise, and finding some jack-roller instead when the brain ran dry, the pen ink ran dry, the newsprint roll ran out and there were no Mere or Gerald memory blasts to fall back on. Of some ache, some unfound ache to find that Adonis double (Janus, maybe, blond they say, maybe) zen master, gear master, chariot master that everybody in that Village loft, that San Francisco North Beach bungalow, that Malibu henhouse, that Tijuana whorehouse, that Tangiers opium den, hell, even that Trailways stink bathroom was waiting on.                      

********

New York City, Time Square of course, Columbia of course(before the heist of all property when it was merely an Ivy outpost in a brazen, bare knuckles  city), the Village of course (those who need to know what village just move on), of movies and movie theaters, and, uh, art films for the discreet, of men in raincoats stinking of urine or Thunderbird wines, of drifters, grifters, grafters, midnight sifters, hustling, always hustling like some rats on speed, of mad men and monks, and semi-monks disguised as poets, of street poet gangsters all shiny words and a gun at your head to say yes you liked  the last verse, of Gregory Corso, of muggers and minstrels, of six dollar whores for a quickie, of twelve dollar whores who will take you around the world, of neon signs, night and day, of neon cars and car  beams night and day, of trash spread every which way, of the flotsam and jetsam of human existence cloistered against 42^nd Street hurts, of Howard Johnson’s franks eaten by the half dozen to curve hungers, not food hungers but hungers that dare not speak their name, of Joe and Nemo’s two o’clock fatty griddle hamburgers, of fags and fairies, and, shade distant dreams, of quasi-Trotskyite girl lovers taking a rest from their bourgeois travels who loved truth, truth and dark-haired revolutionary French guys from textile mill lowells, all proletarian Lowell and can write too, write one million words on order, and of stalinite-worthy betrayals with some new found friend’s wife, or husband, of Siberia exile of the mind, and of second million word writes all while riding the clattering subway to and fro, and not to speak of Soho or the Village. And of junkies, of every description, morphine, speed, cocaine, and of hustlers pushing their soft wares, call your poison, step right up, of William Burroughs, of deadly terror at the prospects for the next fix, of human mules face down in some dusty Sonora town failing to make that connection to get them well, and of off-hand forgotten murders.  Jesus, suffering humanity.

And of men met in New York, really Times Square jungles (post- Maggie girls, women, frills, frails, dames, bitches, etc., etc., of no serious consequence except as pillows, weeps, dreams, and such). Of word magicians, maybe not two million but enough, of great earth-devouring fags (no offense here), chain-smoking New Jersey sodomites, reading Walt Whitman by day and wine drunk and man horny at night (or maybe day too) but mainly reading and infernal writing always writing like that was all that life could be except enough experiences to write about. Of Allen om Ginsberg. Of breaking out of silly Eliot great modern bean- counting words in need of glossaries of comprehension, of jazz-inspired be-bop high white words to take the whole red scare, cold war stalinite night away, and to calm the nuclear blast headed our way, butt up (no sexual reference intended and no spite) and chronicle each and every experience with that broken down typewriter, and that roll of low-grade paper ripped out of the be-bop 1950s night. And of Adonis all-american golden boy, Neal, meets all-american dark-haired boy in some Denver saloon, or pool hall yelling, “shoot pools ,” make some dough and off in some 1946 Studebaker in straight forty-eight hour gears-grinding search of the great blue-pink American West night, or maybe just Maggie, that eluded fugitive fragrance that he could never name of Maggie, who knows. Yes, the father that we knew, the father that we did not know. Jack, Jack of the Merrimack.   

Traipsing Through The Arts-All Serious 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Search For The Sublime-In The Time Of His Time-The Homoerotic Art Of Marsden Hartley-Portrait Of A German Officer (1914)

By Laura Perkins 

It is no secret at this point that I am wedded to the idea that all serious 20^th art, who knows maybe all art but I won’t go out on a limb for that proposition just as I have acknowledged that the jury is still out of 21^st century art that is massively influenced by digital technology among other trends, is centered on the search for the sexual and erotic courtesy of Mr. Freud’s insights. This seemingly rationale approach to an overview of 20^th century art has had many detractors, nay-sayers, who have not spared the cyber-ink in attempting to refute my theory and have to the extent that anybody has offered a viable alternate been promoting such ideas as the search for the sublime (or in the alternate if they are old-fashioned or if “sublime” seems too sexy a word-beauty) in this wicked old world or touted the now hoary “art for art’s sake” scam. (I am sorry but every time I write that term I have to snicker and think of all the rolled eyes and sneers of those fellow writers around the office water cooler when I mention the expression. Even those who don’t know art from a hold in the wall and last entered, trembling, into an art museum on a fifth-grade yellow bus field trip that they never got over.)   

Of course, the search for the sublime (usually called the search for beauty since most elementary and junior high school students would probably not know or relate to the word “sublime”) is the way art teachers in that just mentioned junior high school would present the subject for most of that century and certainly was a familiar term to me after I took art appreciation classes in college. That “sublime” language had been used from junior high school to the pinnacles of the modern art cabal (museum curators, directors, hired flaks, flattered and hired press agents and pundits, art critics for glossy journals, well-heeled art patrons and the key link in the chain the ever hustling art gallery owners) to avoid the then somewhat socially disturbing use of the word “sex” and “eroticism” to the uninitiated.

Certainly junior high school kids (and their prudish parents) would have freaked out at such terminology, would have red-faced laughed the teacher out of the room if she or he had used the word sublime since those racing hormones would have worked overtime to fathom that word in public. (Those parents would have been more forgiving talking about child molesters or running them out of town on a rail, things like that.) Hence the shorthand “beauty” business with the added distraction of “art for art’s sake” (what does that mean anyway except as gibberish to throw sand in the eyes by dunking everything created for whatever purpose from Impressionism to Op-Pop-Bop Art into the same cauldron). The attacks by the chief advocate of this “art for art’s sake” drone recently has been by one Clarence Dewar a professional art critic at Art Today (and who has made everybody very aware as if it needed comment that he is a pro and I am not, and I have never claimed such status).

(We have received communications from smaller fry spouting forth the same gibberish but either that bilious talk was from well-known art gallery press agents, hired guns to protect the value of unsold and unsaleable merchandise or art majors on the make who need jobs after graduation to get themselves or their parents or both out from that mountain of student debt when said student against all advise decided to cast his or her fate with the muses. We target, a very good word here, Mr. Dewar since he was an acolyte of the well-known late art critic Clement Greenberg who started all the gibberish. Beside we know from very close at hand sources that Mr. Dewar used to plagiarize, maybe still does, Greenberg’s articles merely throwing his name on the top for which he was summarily canned back when journalism standards were higher, and editors had more backbone.)     

Of course as usual with this denizen of the deep Dewar is once again retailing somebody else’s idea specifically if I recall the painter James Abbott McNeil Whistler’s back in the 19^th century (via that same Greenberg who added the theoretical flourishes and some nifty thefts from Vasari’s stockpile of odds and ends not seen since about the 15^th century and I remember waiting for the old “art is timeless” gag to buttress his argument but Dewar at least had enough sense to omit that noise). At least Whistler was using that idea to hustle money to ward off his creditors (and “advertise” his various mistresses’ availability for “escort service” as a high-end procurer of women for the artsy gentlemen clientele). I might add, which I do every time I can just as Dewar touts his professional status, and gladly do it twice here that earlier in his career in the days when he was nothing  but Clement Greenberg’s shill that he would submit copy as his own when he just was regurgitating his boss’ work and was fired for plagiarism. (Check the archives of Art Today for verification.)

What galls Mister Dewar these days is my statement in a review of one of the novelist John Updike’s three volumes of musings on art (the Looking series of 1989, 2005, 2012) that there was plenty of room for homoerotic art under the expansive art tent. I cited the late work of painter Marsden Hartley who whatever else grew immensely from his earlier Maine coast and mountains European rough trade blah-blah as he aged into a fully-coded partisan of homoerotic art as way to explain his personal sexual preferences. Totally legitimate then and now although then fraught with more danger given the extreme legal, social and political implications of revealing your sexual preferences to busy-body eyes, private and public. Dewar (and for this he only deserves to be called by his last name) claims, get this, that there has been no serious homoerotic art since Grecian times and one would have to look very, very carefully to see any such “closeted art,” his term worth the name in the 20^th century. Moreover, and maybe he had been drinking too heavily or gotten too deeply into the bong pipe, Dewar claimed that the coded art of (the few) known homosexuals in the 20^th century including Hartley did not prove decisive.

(To give a better idea what a total prude this so-called professional art critic is, a critic who seems only to have eyes to read my little scribblings and no other, a couple of reviews back I mentioned that 19^th century French painter Vuillard’s Woman In Stripe Dress was done in honor of their affair even though the musical Misia, the woman in the stripe dress, was married and her husband was paying the freight for the painting. A husband who was a patron of Vuillard’s work. Like it was impossible for a painter and what amounted to his model and muse to get under the silk sheets, married or not, friendly with husband or not. What art world does this guy live in. Doesn’t he remember the notorious Madame X painted by Singer Sargent which scandalized all Paris just a few years before. That is what the search for the sublime does to your brain, what is left of it after you smell the paints for too long. Misia and Vuillard would have had a good laugh if they heard about Brother Dewar’s musings.)                   

                  

Back to poor Hartley though who that same Greenberg (although I have never seen Dewar parrot his old boss on this subject) mentioned at a cocktail party in post-war New York long after the bugger had passed away had a face only a mother could love. From the few photographs I have seen when he was younger I am not sure what Greenberg was talking about although older photos show some serious dissipation, the tell-tale drug, drink, debauchery trifecta at work. (Sam Lowell, ever the class clown, responded when I told him about Greenberg’s comment said to me the famed art critic was a man only a mother could love.) Here is where Dewar (parroting Greenberg) is way off the line. He claims that the Greeks, all the various tribes but especially Sparta and Athens, were proud as shown on their dinnerware and earthenware to show all kinds of sexual antics, including scenes of men putting their penises in other men’s bungholes. (Fewer scenes of open lesbian love but what the heck was the isle of Lebos about anyway except to glorify that feminine love.)         

That was then when such sexual practices were rights of passages among certain classes of citizens, men. When even big named philosopher-kings like Plato, Socrates, Cynos had boyfriends morning, noon, and night. The Christian era, all forms of the doctrines and civil society together made such freedoms very danger to display in person or in art, public art anyway. Much easier to dangle the notorious severed head cults started by Salome taking down chaste John the Baptist, Jesus’ friend and some historians say lover and carried down to the present day through a drug-warped cult. Much easier to have a woman of the evening, a tart, like Mary Madeline, who got sainted for her efforts, half naked before repentance. Much easier to using the case of Whistler already mentioned above as a max daddy pimp (expression courtesy of Sam Lowell) and the wolf and fur used to advertise a woman’s availability for sex ever since the Whore of Babylon worked the palaces way back in the day. Much easier to have a painting disguised to the private initiates rather than bring edge of society sexual practices into public view.

Hartley, once he figured out his sexual preferences could hardly have been unaware of the social taboos to speak nothing of the risks of exposure in his growing up Maine, and even in Bohemian Greenwich Village one had to be cautious against getting caught doing the “love that dare not speak its name.” Some of Hartley’s earlier works from farm Maine times show a clear path to the coded language he would use to signal his sexual preferences and desires. The famous Portrait of a German Soldier from significant 1914 is what I want to decode today since it is unambiguous in its longings. It is well-known that Hartley was smitten with a young good-looking German officer who was killed early in World War I. (I checked with the English poet W.H. Auden whose other claim to fame beyond his poetry was his listing, private listings back then of gay men he claimed for a thing he called the “Homintern” Hartley and more importantly that young German officer were both on his listings even though the dates indicate that England was at war with Germany when he made the entries for the pair).               

I try, and maybe not always successfully, to not be too judgmental about the personal lives of painters and sculptors. (a big exception being that pimp Whistler and his art for art’s sake cover from running his mistresses ragged on the streets just to make rent money). Clearly Hartley was drawn, maybe addicted is the better way to put the matter to the “rough trade” side of same-sex relationships. The giveaway, remember everything is coded in 1914, is the triangle and the German cross inside which not only had military significance but was the “badge” of those who frequented the S&M cabarets on the back streets of Berlin. Some of that rough trade was pretty raw from what later devotees like French writer Jean Genet detailed about his wharf rats. The triangle itself means that the wearer is the “passive” one if that is all the badge shows. The iron cross means the wearer is the aggressor. Hartley was the punk and the German soldier did whatever he liked to him. If I am not mistaken Hartley took some social heat not because his was somebody’s slave girl but because his owner was a German at a time when that was not good in places like England or the United States even before the American entry into the war. That he never condemned his slave owner soldier boy was held against him even in Greenwich Village society.

Art critics have mistaken the bottles at the lower left corner for some kind of elixir before sex but I have it on good authority from Sam Lowell’s longtime growing up neighborhood friend Timmy Riley now known as Miss Judy Garland, a drag queen, who runs the notoriously famous KitKat Club in North Beach out in San Francisco that this is actually a “tool” used as part of the penetration process and let’s leave it at that. Maybe Hartley missed that, maybe he was sentimental about it. There is also a question about that number 24 with many assuming that it was Hartley’s lover’s regimental unit. Again the code comes into pay since those numbers usually represent the fact that oral sex is part of the proceedings. I think even this little without getting into the symbolism of the shield and the whips and chains that we are witnessing a great piece of pre-Stonewall coded homoerotic art.

Hartley would as his got older become more open in subject matter and aspiration concerning his sexual desires, look at his lumberjack on the beach, his fisherman, his fishermen with Jesus and a bunch more. Here is the funny thing, maybe not funny but sad in a way even Grady Lamont in the 1980s (not now) had to be coded in his heterosexual sexual references with his famous pine trees delving deeply into loose soil. Thanks Marsden for what you could do when you could do it.