This isn’t the end of the gondola. Two days before I left for America-1927 or ‘8-we held a big session at the house. It was at the height of my water-color career.
It began in a peculiar way, this water-color mania. Through hunger, I might say. That and the extreme cold. For weeks I had been hanging out with my friend Joe in poolrooms and comfort stations, wherever there was animal heat and no expense. On our way back to the morgue one evening we noticed a reproduction of Turner’s in the window of a department store. That’s exactly the way in which it all began. One of the most active, one of the most enjoyable periods of my barren life. When I say that we littered the floor with paintings I am not exaggerating. As fast as they dried we hung them up-and the next day we took them down and hung up another collection. We painted on the backs of old ones, we washed them off, we scraped them with the knife, and in the course of these experiments we discovered, by accident, some astonishing things. We discovered how to get interesting results with coffee grounds and bread crumbs, with coal and arnica; we laid the paintings in the bathtub and let them soak for hours, and then with a loaded brush we approached these dripping omelettes and we let fly at them. Turner started all this-and the severe winter of 1927-‘28.
Two nights before my departure, as I was saying, a number of painters come to the house to inspect our work. They are all good eggs and not above taking an interest in the work of amateurs. The water colors are lying about on the floor, as usual, drying. As a last experiment we walk over them, spilling a little wine as we go. Astonishing what effects a dirty heel will produce, or a drop of wine falling from a height of three feet with the best of intentions. The enthusiasm mounts. Two of my friends are working on the walls with chunks of coal. Another is boiling coffee in order to get some nice fresh grounds. The rest of us are drinking.
In the midst of the festivities-about three A.M.-My wife walks in. She seems a little depressed. Taking me aside she shows me a steamship ticket. I look at it. “What’s that for?” I said. “You’ve got to go away,” she answers. “But I don’t want to go away,” I said. “I’m quite happy here.” “So I see,” she says, rather sardonically.
Anyway I go. And when we’re pulling up the Thames the only thought in my mind is to see the Turner collection at the Tate Gallery. Finally I get there and I see the famous Turners. And as luck would have it one of the halfwits there takes a fancy to me. I find that he’s a magnificent water-colorist himself. Works entirely by lamplight. I really hated to leave London, he made it so agreeable for me. Anyway, pulling out of Southampton I thought to myself-“the circle is complete now: from the department store window to here.”
However, to get on… . This gondola is going to be the piece de resistance! But first I must clean up the walls. Taking the bread knife and dipping it into the laque carmine I apply a liberal dose to the windows of the houses. Holy Jesus! Immediately the houses are in flames! If I were really mad, and not simulating the madness of a madman, I’d be putting firemen into the picture and I’d make ladders out of the bold diagonal planks of the bridge flooring. But my insanity takes the form of building a conflagration. I set all the houses on fire-first with carmine, then with vermilion, and finally with a bloody concoction of all three. This part of the picture is clear and decisive: it’s a holocaust.
The result of my incendiarism is that I’ve singed the horse’s back. Now he’s neither a horse nor a zebra. He’s become a fire-eating dragon. And where the missing tail belonged there is now a bunch of firecrackers, and with a bunch of firecrackers up his ass not even an Ionian horse can preserve his dignity. I could, of course, go on to make a real dragon; but this conversion and patching-up is getting on my nerves. If you start with a horse you ought to keep it a horse-or eliminate it entirely. Once you begin to tamper with an animal’s anatomy you can go through the whole phylogenetic process.
With a solid opaque green and indigo I blot the horse out. In my mind, to be sure, he’s still there. People may look at this opaque object and think-how strange! how curious! But I know that at bottom it’s a horse. At the bottom of everything there’s some animal: that’s our deepest obsession. When I see human beings squirming up toward the light like wilted sunflowers, I say to myself: “Squirm, you bastards, and pretend all you like, but at bottom you’re a turtle or a guinea-pig.” Greece was mad about horses and if they had had the wisdom to remain half horse instead of playing the Titan-well, we might have been spared a great many mythological pains.
When you’re an instinctive water-colorist everything happens according to God’s will. Thus, if you are bidden to paint the cemetery gates a clear gamboge, you do it and you don’t grumble about it. Never mind if they are too vivid for such somber portals. Perhaps there is an unknown justification. And truly, when I paint in this bright liquid yellow, this yellow which is to me the finest of all yellows (even yellower than the mouth of the Yangtsze Kiang), I am radiant, radiant. Something dreary, cloying, oppressive has been washed away forever. I would not be surprised if it were the Cypress Hills Cemetery which I passed in disgust and mortification for so many years, which I looked down on from the bend in the elevated line, which I spat into from the platform of the train. Or St. John’s Cemetery, with its crazy leaden angels, where I worked as a gravedigger. Or the Montparnasse Cemetery which in winter looks as if it had been shellshocked. Cemeteries, cemeteries…. By God, I refuse to be buried in a cemetery! I won’t have any imbeciles standing over me with a sprinkler and looking mournful. I won’t have it!
While these thoughts have been passing through my head I have been inadvertently smearing the trees and the terraces with a dry brush. The trees gleam now like a coat of mail, the boughs are studded with silver and turquoise links. If I had a crucifixion on hand I could cover the bodies of the martyrs with jeweled pockmarks. On the wall opposite me is a scene from the wilds of Ethiopia. The body of Christ crucified lies on the floor covered with smallpox; the bloodthirsty Jews -black, Ethiopian Jews-are pounding him with iron quoits. They have a most ferociously gleeful expression. I bought the picture because of the pockmarks, why I didn’t know at the time. It’s only now that I’ve discovered the reason. Only now that I recall a certain picture over a cellar on the Bowery, entitled “Death on Bugs.” Happened I was just coming away from a lunatic, a professional visit which had not been altogether unpleasant. It’s broad afternoon and the dirty throat of the Bowery is choked with clots of phlegm. Just below Cooper Square three bums are stretched out flat beside a lamppost, a la Breughel. A penny arcade is going full blast. A weird, unearthly chant rises up from the streets, like a man with a cleaver fighting his way through delirium tremens. And there, over the slanting cellar door, is this painting called “Death on Bugs.” A naked woman with long flaxen hair lies on the bed scratching herself. The bed is floating in the middle air and about it dances a man with a squirt gun. He has that same imbecilic air about him as these Jews with the iron quoits. The picture is stippled with pockmarks -to represent that cosmopolitan bloodsucking wingless depressed bug of reddish-brown color and vile odor which infests houses and beds and goes by the formidable name of Cimex lectularius.
And here I am now with a dry brush applying the stigmata to the three trees. The clouds are covered with bedbugs, the volcano is belching bedbugs; the bedbugs are scrambling down the steep chalk cliffs and drowning themselves in the river. I am like that young immigrant on the second floor of a poem by some Ivanovich or other who tosses about on the bedsprings haunted by the misery of his starved, wasted life, despairing of all the beauty beyond his grasp. My whole life seems to be wrapped up in that dirty handkerchief, the Bowery, which I walked through day after day, year in and year out-a dose of smallpox whose scars never disappear. If I had a name then it was Cimex Lectularius. If I had a home it was a slide trombone. If I had a passion it was to wash myself clean.
In a fury now I take the brush and dipping it in all the colors successively I commence to smudge the cemetery gates. I smudge and smudge until the lower
