I must say it here.
Something about this account bothers me, because its topic finally lists toward the estheticizing of everything — and that way, as Benjamin first suggested and Sontag more recently reminded us, lies fascism.
But that’s the way the feeling world was presented, unrectified, to me. For better or for worse, that’s how it became mine. And by now we knew that Gwen lived in Greenwich Village. We knew her acquaintances were de Kooning, Bourgeois, Pollock, Nevelson, Frankenthaler, and Francis…
We also knew she was a committed and serious artist — serious enough that, when the school’s three art teachers (omitting Hugo) had an exhibition in the school lobby, several of our other teachers let it be known they did not like her work.
For the week of the show, Gwen’s three two-foot-wide, seven-foot-high canvasses hung with the paintings of the others, on the wall behind the maroon rail where, each morning, we marched by the nurse, Miss Hedges, to show our tongues and make sure we were all without stain.
Diagonally across from where the teachers had put up their paintings, under several arches, were some old wall murals. In blue and pink pastels, their style suggested the WPA: in the foreground, wearing long dresses, with bare feet showing from under their hems, highly stylized women picked up sheaves of wheat, while, in the background, in overalls and workmen’s caps, equally stylized men held aloft wrenches and hammers against a configuration of gears, smokestacks, and clouds. A faded rainbow arched over it all. The murals were, indeed, all shape and line (and ideology; though I couldn’t have read that then). They weren’t much on color, though. And they were simply wiped from the eye by Gwenny’s dynamic fusionings across the lobby.
Impastoed with massive horizontal strokes (wide enough to make you see her six-inch housepainter’s brush), rectilinear umbers, ochres, greens, and browns overlapped like amazing stairs, up the long surfaces, leading, in layered steps, to some apotheosis very much beyond that sacrosanct, upper, outside edge. Among the ochres and earths, squares of metallic gold recalled the utility of apartment radiators daubed over in winter, but with, as well, a patina of spirituality, like icons — the only objects that might justify such gilding. At once immediate and holy, their compositions were as solid as stone forts, energetic, sensuous, joyful, and vigorous — like the abstract passages in the lower-left-hand corners of Vermeer, as austere as non-figurative Klimt, as rich as Titian or Tiepolo.
To one side of them hung some impressionistic flowers and a painting of children — was Miss Andrews still at the school that year…? On the other, the high school art teacher had put up his several pictures of geometrically precise and vaguely surreal picket fences.
“Now that,” said our new, young history teacher — who, as a stab toward tradition, insisted we call her “Mrs.”—“I can relate to, at least a little.” As I stood beside her in my snow suit, not quite ready to go outside, still wet from swimming downstairs, she went on: “I mean — ” she bent her head to the side — “that’s obviously taken some skill to paint.”
I liked their skill, too.
But for me, Gwen’s was the only art in the show. To see it, you merely had to stand before one of her scalar, desiring towers, letting it pulse and suck and glimmer at you, while its tans, mochas, golds, and strawberries lifted you through the awful ascent of its lapped verticalities. Its sensuous awe, along with the average, uninformed, and uncomprehending disdain that the other teachers used to fight off its troubling intensity (one, in her gray suit, with her handsome gray hair: “I’m afraid I just don’t see them. What in the world are they supposed to be pictures of?” And one other, in heady purple: “They just look dirty, to me. Like what you’d expect from a child playing in mud.” And, as I did and do so often, I remembered Eric, the spring dawn, and the marvel the muck of his language had loosed) — surely that was the most important of Gwen’s formal lessons.
— Amherst
CITRE ET TRANS
I
… all that we have been saying is as much a natural sport of the silence of these nether regions as the fantasy of some rhetorician of the other world who has used us as puppets!
“All Greek men are barbarians!” Heidi jerked the leash.
Pharaoh’s claws dragged the concrete.
I laughed, and Pharaoh looked around and up, eyes like little phonograph records.
“Heidi,” I said, “you just can’t talk about an entire population that way.”
It was too bright to look at the sky directly — even away from the sun. The harbor was blue, not green. And if I stared into the air anyway, it was as though I were watching the water reflected in some dazzling metal, brighter than, but equally liquid as, the sea.
“Half a population,” Heidi said. “I like the women. They don’t have any style. But I like them.” She wore her black and white poncho — which, only after I’d been living with her in her Mnisicleou Street room two weeks, I realized was because she thought she was fat.
“Barbarians — hoi barbami — ” I pronounced it the way my classics professor back at City College would have, rather than with what had been the surprising (for me) Italianate endings, despite spelling, of modern Greek: “It’s already a Greek word — the Greeks gave it to us — for people who aren’t Greek, who spoke some other language — ba-ba-ba-ba-ba! — like you and me… Germans, Americans — ”
“They also wrote Greek tragedies.” The green ferry sign’s painted wood was bolted to the two-tiered dock rail. “From the way they behave today, though, I don’t think they still have it.” HYDRA, SPETZA, and AEGINA were painted in white Roman capitals. Below, the same names were printed in smaller upper-/lowercase Greek. Heidi shrugged her broad shoulders as we strolled by.
Once, when I’d commented on how strong she was, Heidi told me that, six years before, when she was nineteen, she’d been women’s swimming champion of Bavaria. She also told me she’d recently graduated from Munich University with a degree in philosophy and a minor in contemporary Hebrew literature: she’d arranged to study for the year in Tel Aviv, with special papers and letters of introduction. But because she was German Protestant, in Israel they wouldn’t let her off the boat. She’d ended up in Athens. Then, when we’d had some odd argument, tearfully she’d explained — while I showered in the pink tiled stall in the room’s corner — that she suffered from a fatal blood disease, not leukemia, but like it, that left no sign on her muscular, tanned torso, arms, or legs. But that was why she’d left the American artist she’d been living with in Florence to come to Athens in the first place: likely it would kill her within three years.