immediate family, not a single person was divorced, not one husband was unfaithful to his wife, or vice versa. There were no homosexuals, though my mother once murmured something about “your Uncle Len,” something I interpreted much later as “that.” Unlike his brothers, Uncle Len had not been in the Union Army in the Civil War. Could “that” really have been the reason? On my father’s side, in the coal-mining part of the family, people drank, caroused and were divorced. My parents did not drink and were probably among the few people in the United States during Prohibition who refused to have even a bottle of homemade wine in their house.
These “virtues” have been transmitted to us, the four children: we only tell white lies in the name of politeness; we scarcely drink and do not smoke; three of us are faithful spouses who had no premarital sex and frown on divorce. In short, we are real “ladies” and “gentlemen.” The reader will say that there are things about my siblings that I don’t know (little infidelities, etc.), just as there are things about me that they don’t know. We never discuss our lives with each other; in this sense, we are total strangers. Once, driving somewhere with me, my older brother looked at my bare knees while I drove. “Couldn’t you pull your skirt down a little?” he said. “Isn’t it a little immodest?” I answered by fiercely pulling the offending skirt higher and decided that no secret of mine would be safe in his keeping. Of the four children, my older brother was certainly the most tormented by sex, and perhaps he had almost yielded to its temptations. But if he had yielded, would he have been so disturbed by the sight of my sunburned knees? We were all haunted by the Puritan ideal of chastity, that living skeleton tapping on our shoulders or actually gnawing at our flesh, like Death with the Maiden. Sometimes I wonder if some of my hormones, so resolutely channelled in non-sexual directions, weren’t actually destroyed when I was a child, atrophied so that only a small percentage remained? After all, if a person has no experience of sex until she is twenty-five years old; if even, at that age, she has to be shown the “seat of pleasure,” as they say, and patiently taught that it is pleasurable; if, throughout her life, sex continues to have relatively little importance, something must have been killed. A sexual lobotomy, you might say. A psychoanalyst might be interested to know that it can be done without too much damage to the psyche, though it is much more likely to produce an obsessive counter-reaction.
If our family curse is Puritanism, the family virtue is “niceness.” We are all nice, even unto the nieces, nephews and grandchildren; whatever violence is in us is masked by good manners, a guileless good will and willingness to help our fellow man. We are gullible, easily taken in by people who pretend to be honest, endlessly taken in by promises; we cannot believe that some people lie as easily as they breathe. We (the generations of my siblings, parents and grandparents) denied and denied (who among us didn’t have a sneaking sympathy for St. Peter and the rich young man who cannot give up his whole fortune to follow Jesus?), but never lied; withheld, but never stole. We committed the sin of stinginess of spirit. Was it my grandparents’ and parents’ fault if the prevailing Puritanism made their fists clench, their eyebrows knit and their faces darken with disapproval, made the words shoot out of their mouths like serpents’ tongues? Was it their fault if their inherited prejudices against Jews, Roman Catholics and black people made them commit crimes against their own niceness? My brothers are free from racial and religious prejudice, but are saddened, let us say, by divorce, homosexuality, promiscuity, atheism, etc. Perhaps some of my nieces and nephews are prejudice-free, if such a thing is possible. It is obvious that prejudice diminishes as freedom expands, and that beliefs in general are like vaccines that either take or do not. Religion, which is the source of some of my brothers’ prejudices, took for them, but not for me. I become irritated and aggressive when the subject is raised. As for my twin sister, she has overcome our parents’ most blatant prejudices, but still believes, like my brothers, in fidelity, family and duty to the community, in all the articles of faith injected into our veins by our parents with excellent results, except in my case.
And yet, I have articles of faith—or non-faith. If I didn’t, why would I hear myself arguing in a high-pitched voice (just like other arguers in my family) about everything under the sun? Why, if a calm discussion of religion gets under way, does the adrenalin begin seeping into my veins until I actually begin to twitch and sputter? Why this rage? Am I that angry with my parents? Is it sexual frustration? I’ve noticed, though, that inexplicable rage lurks in many, perhaps in all human beings, ready to burst out at the most surprising times; in people who are not in the least sexually frustrated or angry with their parents. It is the infant in each of us, pure ego that cannot endure opposition of any kind. How do you explain otherwise the looks of black hate, the shakings of fists, even by strangers, drivers of automobiles who have been kept waiting for a few seconds, or the murderous fury of friends defending anything one has happened to attack? I still remember with astonishment an acquaintance turning on me when I made a slighting remark about Hemingway, the idea being that an insignificant piece of shit like me didn’t have the right to talk thus about a great writer. And I am the same, ferocious as a wolf when a friend speaks of Rodin’s “rubbery surfaces” and “big feet.” “I couldn’t see anything except those big feet,” a good sculptor friend of mine said. “I’m up to here in waterlilies,” he said about Monet. Why did I feel sick with despair? Do I feel that I’m wrong to love Monet if a good sculptor is “up to here in waterlilies?” It must be that. And just as we feel guilty about loving, so we feel guilty about not loving, or about the not-loving of others. “I’d give all of Matisse for one Clyfford Still,” said another friend about fifteen years ago, a double blow, pro and con, since I hadn’t learned to like Clyfford Still and worshipped Matisse.
Thinking of these threats to the ego, I recall a conversation in the early 1950’s with Mark Rothko about Rembrandt, another of my gods. Rothko, who once loved Rembrandt’s portraits, now preferred those of Tintoretto. Rembrandt, he said, imposed on his sitters something that did not necessarily belong to them, a deepness, as though he were saying, “Look how profound I am.” Tintoretto told the truth about human beings without trespassing on their integrity, and this was the duty of a great portrait painter. This conversation made me unhappy for days. I tried to free myself from it by resisting Rothko’s greatness as a painter, as I resisted the greatness of everything I could not understand. I underestimated his painting, seeing it as merely “serene.” “I want it to be like the minuet in Don Giovanni,” Rothko said, pointing out that the serenity I saw was the calm before the storm. Now I understand what he meant—that, in his work, the radiance of the minuet and the tragedy about to break are held in trembling suspension, one over the other or within the other. And his feeling about Rembrandt? Having just seen a big Rothko retrospective, I feel that, particularly in his late work, he is permeated by the spirit of Rembrandt, and that the great formal squares, as dark as death, are, in a sense, self-portraits, abstractions of Rothko’s inner torment. The catalogue speaks of “the Rembrandtesque obscurity of the upper portion” of the brown and grey paintings; and of Rothko’s reverence for Rembrandt. Was he, as so many men do with women, disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreement? Or did he really believe that Rembrandt was too present in his portraits? Wasn’t his own work a long struggle to withdraw himself, his personality and feelings, to reduce his statement to form and colour; wouldn’t he have been angry if I had said to him that the late paintings were self-portraits? For I think that the most resolute minimalist is there in his work, that Barnett Newman, for instance, or Ad Reinhardt, who went beyond Rothko in removing sensibility as an element of painting, are as present as Rothko; that even if one reproduces photographs of soup cans, those cans of soup proclaim not Campbell, but Warhol. The painter or sculptor enters into fluorescent lights, chunks of wood, electrical gadgets, steel girders, by the fact of his having given them new instructions and a new order.
Rothko was one of many good painters I have known, who, without intending to, had the power to summon up the vulnerable infant in me by reminding me of my nonentity as an artist. Even his kindness made me miserable. He liked a little still life I had done of green pears on a red chair, the paint laid on with a certain freedom which must have appealed to his merciful eye. But the fact that he liked them, instead of pleasing me, revealed their weaknesses, and I wanted to plunge a knife into them and punish their insignificance. In those days, when I was struggling with insufficient means, with no theory or sense of direction to be a painter, I was destroyed by the simple contact