Читать книгу Unlikely Paradise - Alan D. Butcher - Страница 13
ОглавлениеON BOARD THE NIGHT TRAIN bound for New York City, Frances gazed out the window and felt slightly miffed that her first sight of the American northeast should be shrouded in darkness. Albany was behind her; ahead, New York. The ambivalence she had felt in Toronto — the security of the known and the insecurity of the new and unknown — was a thing of the past. She felt the excitement of a new life, poised on the threshold of it, boldly knocking on the door.
“I went directly down the Hudson River, which was very exciting, even though I couldn’t see anything. Still, the exhilaration was there, and the impatience to arrive, to see this great city.” She couldn’t afford a sleeper — she wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway — so she sat up all the way, staring out the window. There had been a mix-up at the border, a problem with her visa, but that was eventually resolved. This was an illustration of a problem that Frances encountered throughout her life: she seemed incapable of travelling anywhere without encountering confusion, or getting lost.
“Trains, buses, and boats never seemed to be where they were supposed to be!” On the rare occasion when she caught the right train, she’d end up in the wrong compartment or the wrong seat. Indeed she would often find, in the end, there was simply no such train at all, and in the small hours of the morning, as the cleaners pushed their brooms across the empty station, they would see the solitary figure standing by her suitcase beneath a dim light, waiting for the train that would never come.
By the time she arrived in Grand Central Station she was awed by the incredible size of the city. At a time when Toronto’s population was only slightly more than 600 thousand, New York City was home to eight million, and Manhattan Island alone had a population of two million.
Frances took a taxi directly to the YWCA, hoping they would have room for her. They didn’t, but they did have a list of people willing to accept roomers, and in this way she met Mrs. Berkovitz.
She was scheduled to see Mrs. Berkovitz the following day, but first things first: “Went to the Art Students League on West 57th Street, just east of 8th Avenue, and registered for Monday. It gave me a strange feeling. The atmosphere was like OCA in Toronto.”
Frances stayed overnight in a nearby hotel until she got settled in with Mrs. Berkovitz. “The hotel maids didn’t have watches. They opened my door to look at my clock!” How odd, she thought. You’d think in a sophisticated city like New York they’d be able to afford wrist watches.
A dark and dingy elevator delivered Frances to Mrs. Berkovitz’s apartment which was situated on 56th Street, close to 8th Avenue. “It was within easy walking distance of the Art Students League, less than ten minutes. I was a good walker in those days, so I walked back and forth all the time.” Frances’s room looked out onto a blank brick wall. Not very inspiring. But there were compensations, not the least of which was Mrs. B. herself.
“Mrs. Berkovitz was a real education,” said Frances. “She liked to have a non-Jew in the house to turn on the lights on Fridays, because her religion did not permit her to do it. The first night, she took me walking along the East River, and every time I remarked on something she would say ‘Honey, dat’s New Yoik.’ Mrs. Berkovitz was very proud of New York.
“She and her daughter were wonderful,” said Frances. “Strangely, Mrs. Berkovitz’s chief pleasure was watching Bishop Fulton Sheen on television. This was the first television I had seen. It was a colour set, and Bishop Sheen was splendid in his red robes. She thought that was wonderful entertainment!”
Mrs. Berkovitz’s daughter Sondra worked for a Broadway play producer, a Canadian named Whitehead, and it was through Sondra that Frances frequently got press seats for Broadway plays that she never could have otherwise afforded.
“October fourth. First Sunday in New York. All alone. Except for a man who tried to pick me up while I was sketching in the Central Park Zoo.” After that brief “romance,” she strolled down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South. “While waiting for a traffic light on Fifth Avenue, a toothless old lady gave me her life history.” A lifetime in a New York minute.
In the southeast corner of Central Park, facing Fifth Avenue, was the zoo, a favourite sketching place for Frances. “It was wonderful because you could get within a few feet of the animals.”
One day she was sitting near the tiger’s cage, sketching. The tiger wasn’t going anywhere, so it was a good model.
While Frances was drawing, a lady came and stood for a moment near her. She looked over Frances’s shoulder. “That’s a good likeness,” she said.
Frances nodded amicably, though she felt that if you’ve seen one tiger, you’ve seen them all. “I’ve done a lot of cats,” said Frances, “but this is my first tiger.”
The lady watched for a minute, then went up to the cage and called softly to the tiger, “Mary,” and again, “Ma-ry.”
“The tiger immediately got up and came over to the bars,” said Frances. “It rubbed up against them, and purred! Did you ever hear a tiger purr? Like a vacuum cleaner!”
The lady whispered lovingly to the tiger, then, turning to Frances, she said, “We were in the circus together, but we all have to retire sometime, and she was put here in the zoo.” She laughed quietly. “They don’t want me to put my hand out and stroke her. Children might get the idea they can, too, and their parents would have heart attacks.”
Frances stopped sketching, touched by feelings of sorrow at the passing of a relationship that must have been so close.
The lady turned back to the cage with a sad smile. “I come back here every few days to see her.”
“I sat there,” said Frances, “and cried, the tears falling on my sketch pad, blurring the image of Mary, the tiger.”
Many of the zoo sketches were developed further in the studio of the Art Students League, where John Hovannes, one of her instructors, would pronounce his criticism. “He talks incessantly,” said Frances, “but then again he has a lot to talk about.” Looking at one of her renditions, he said, “Your transition to freer expression will be slow because of your former training at OCA.” Well, thought Frances, so much for you, OCA, my terribly staid and academic alma mater. But Frances was fortunate in having as her instructors two of the country’s most outstanding artists: William Zorach, recognized as the dean of American sculptors; and John Hovannes, a sculptor of striking originality and imagination.
Hovannes’s strength lay in his ability to “stretch one’s thinking.”
He challenged his students by giving them tasks that exceeded their abilities. He demanded new thinking, individuality, experimentation. “He was a master carver,” said Frances. “I took classes with him in the morning. He was Armenian, and he was wonderful. He talked a lot, and I learned a tremendous amount from him. He was very dapper, very short; he had black, black eyes and black hair. And he never shut up.”
William Zorach came originally from Lithuania. He was born Zorach Samovich, but when his family immigrated to the United States in 1891, his father changed Samovich to Finkelstein. When Zorach Finkelstein started school, his teacher arbitrarily changed Zorach to William, and eventually, when the boy became a man, he changed his name to William Zorach, a labyrinthine exercise that must have kept later genealogy students on their toes.
Zorach grew up in a rough area of Cleveland. “Those were the days of a saloon on every corner,” he said. “And livery stables. Kids would jump from the upper windows into soft manure piles.”
He studied art in Paris, where he met his future wife, Marguerite Thompson, a refined young lady of a wealthy American family and extremely genteel upbringing, who had probably never seen a manure pile, would never have uttered the word manure, and had certainly never jumped into a pile of it.
“Zorach was very cool at first,” said Frances, “until he realized I was serious about sculpture. There were many students who were wealthy and came part-time, then they’d go and play golf, so he was very cool toward me at first.” Frances remembered him as often harsh; poor work or indifferent effort earned his contempt.
Frances felt that conditions in the studio were very good. Zorach’s views, on the other hand, were not quite so positive. “I found the basement studio at the League very inadequate in earlier days,” he said. “It was full of pipes of all sizes going everywhere, and the ceiling was very low. It was wonderful training in how to work under the most adverse conditions.”
The classroom in which the students worked was approximately thirty metres long by fifteen metres wide. “Often we had fifteen people working there,” Frances remembered. “Doesn’t sound like many people, but if everyone was working on a piece, they took up a lot of room.” There was a stage for models right in the middle of the room, and the students would be ranged around it. There was a division which separated the working area from the storage of materials, like plaster, equipment, and a great clay bin. The students would scoop out the clay they needed, do their work, then at day’s end, cover the work with oilcloth to keep it moist. “Can you believe it? Oilcloth! That was a big problem; it was so stiff. Like trying to fold a steel plate.”
Zorach once, on his daily round, paused beside Frances. He glanced over her shoulder, and frowned at the small figure on which Frances had been working. It sat, motionless, almost apologetic, on the stand in front of her. It, too, seemed to wait apprehensively for Zorach’s opinion. He continued to frown. “The figure,” he said finally, “is good.” Frances felt a brief flicker of pleasure. “But,” he added, “no punch; it lacks the impact of interpretation.”
What does that mean? she thought in panic. Impact? Interpretation? She gritted her teeth. She looked at the figure. In agony she saw it had no interpretation at all, none. None! Not a shred of … of … impact. She tore it down in disgust and began again.
She developed a second figure, and anxiously awaited Zorach’s criticism. And got it. Taking a tool, he made subtle additions to one side, deletions to another, describing and advising as he worked. Frances sighed. “Now it’s more or less a Zorach sculpture. Not quite sure what to do with it now.” She gazed at it sadly; the figure gazed back at her. She sighed again. “Still lacks punch.”
Despite the negative critiques and the equally negative-leaning results, Frances’s tenuous optimism fought back. “I really feel I’m making definite progress in these classes,” even though she found the students a frigid group. This would pass quickly; Frances had a natural ability to make friends easily. With time, her address book would become one of the most extensive in North America, a multi-volume work that would rival the telephone book. Yet, paradoxically, her years were filled with frequent periods of desperate loneliness, alone in an empty house, prey to depression and inexplicable despair.
But the joy she found in sculpture inevitably brought the pendulum back. “I am making progress. I know I am.” Though she saw the coolness of her fellow students, and her pitifully small circle of friends, at the same time she knew her friends would soon expand in number.
Then the pendulum would swing back again. It’s an early mid-October evening, and outside the school all is noise and movement. Groups hurry by; some are students from her studio. One of them waves quickly, “Hi, Frances,” and continues on without an invitation to join them. She walks toward Fifth Avenue. She feels isolated, as if the city were empty, a ghost town. In the cool dusk Frances turns at last and walks home alone. “And when I get there the house is still. No one home but me.”
Good criticism, and the not-so-good, and sometimes the frankly negative, were a regular part of Frances’s day. Yet she was haunted by thoughts of failure. Failure? Negative thinking? If you had seen Frances you would have been surprised. “Surely,” you would have said, “you are talking of someone else.” Just look at her. She is leaning backward, not quite in challenge, rather as if secure in the correctness of her position on the subject in question. Her feet are slightly apart, planted firmly; her head is back, her smile confident. Why, she’s the very picture of self-assurance. You sense immediately that this woman knows what she’s talking about, and knows that you know she knows, too. The cynic will say this is classic insecurity: the bluff that hides a lack of belief in herself. And maybe the cynic is right; he’s been right before. And yet, she radiates a no-nonsense attitude; she’s frank, but not offensive. No deviousness here. Rather, naïveté. And because of this, in the course of her life many will take advantage of her.
Negative criticism of her work often generated self-doubt. She thought back to the previous summer when she stood on the threshold of the great adventure in New York City. She recalled her last days with The Girls, and Frances Loring’s parting words: “If you find that it’s too overpowering, and you don’t want to be a sculptor, it’s all right by Florence and me. We’ll have work for you when you get back.” In the grip of one of her many periods of despair, she thought What if I should fail? And, though conscious of melodrama, she would still cry “I must not!”
She recognized that “must not” was easy to say, but not so easy to execute. Work on the morning figure, one that fell within Zorach’s instruction, was very slow and discouraging. Frances sighed in exasperation. “Looks like a bowl of porridge.” Later the same morning, however, her spirits rose. “Looks better, I think, but lacks oomph.” The following day: “Zorach’s figure pleases me more now.” Zorach agreed. “You’re doing fine,” he said. “Now do some more!”
To take a break from classes, and regain the imagination she sometimes felt she lacked, she turned frequently to the Central Park Zoo — the animals, the broad stretches of greenery, and peace — and there sketched happily for hours. To her surprise and pleasure, she met friends from earlier days in Canada, and strolled through the park with Joan Rowland, well-known classical pianist whom she knew from the Tannamakoon summer camp north of Toronto. She also met Mary King, a friend from her time in the Canadian navy. Mary had been an officer, and Frances had worked with her on a number of artistic projects. They had met again shortly after Frances’s arrival in New York. Visits to Mary’s home in New Rochelle, just north of New York on Long Island Sound, soon became a haven from the ups and downs of Frances’s creative life. It was in October that she spent the first of many wonderful weekends there; days that Frances never forgot. “Those weekends were so good; it was like home. It seemed so far away from New York, but it was only maybe twenty miles or so. And her house was wonderful. Over 250 years old. It was huge, almost a city block long, with a lovely garden. It even had a resident ghost.” When the weekend was over, there was the easy drive back in the dawn mist, the East River shrouded in fog.
“I seem always to be either elated or in the depths of despair. This morning Hovannes tried so hard to be helpful.” Full marks for Hovannes, but he was still “firmly noncommittal” when it came to her current work. So was she. “Zorach tore my afternoon figure apart and rearranged it.” It was one of those days. “I just wish I could get myself straightened out, but he did give me a lesson in observing and drawing.” The next day Hovannes spent almost the entire morning working with her on the drawing. “I really think I learned a lot,” she said. Then her constant self-doubt rose up. “Can I keep on the right track?”
A few days later, in what seemed to be her perpetual cycle of hope, black despair, and soaring euphoria, she still was able, sometimes, to fling aside all self-doubts. “Inspired this morning! Threw up a life figure that I definitely feel is a step in the right direction!”
Zorach agreed. “Good work, and well carried out! In art,” he stressed, “you must not do what someone else thinks is good and right. You must listen, and then make your own decisions as to what is right for you.”
Hovannes, too, appeared to like what she was doing. “Good day,” she said with satisfaction. “Started my seventh life figure. Seems to be going okay.” Then, once more, the agonizing slide down to uncertainty and loss of conviction. “Lack of energy throughout. Wish I could learn to think, damn it. I guess one is born with an IQ. Or without one.”
Then up again: “Both figures are coming along well. Went all out and bought some tools. They’re expensive, but lovely.” Then down: “I seem to be awfully low on energy. Don’t know what is the matter. Wish I could do more, but don’t feel like it.” Then up: “Zorach liked my afternoon figure! He said it would take subtle handling. I know I can do it!”
Hovannes was also delighted with her morning figure, and had it photographed. Frances took the photos home, and with a certain pride, showed them to her landlady.
Mrs. Berkovitz looked at them critically. “Will you be getting your instructor to sign a certificate to say you really did these?” Then she realized she was veering away from the really important information. “When you go back to Canada, how much money will you be able to make?”
Later that afternoon, back at the school, Frances sat back and felt that it had been a fairly good day in most respects. “But I’m absolutely beat by four-thirty. Should get a shot of something to put in my coffee.”
The last weekend in November was spent with Mary King in New Rochelle, a restful Thanksgiving and a welcome break before Christmas. “Beautiful day. Sawed wood, pruned bushes. Ate too much, bad night, will I ever learn?”
Back in New York she balanced her budget. “Very much in the red, but I’ll clear that up with more casting for the other students.” Her Toronto patron had financed her time in New York, but the grant wasn’t quite sufficient for all her needs. “I did a lot of casting for my fellow students. They were all very rich, and they didn’t know how to cast. Thanks to my years at the Ontario College of Art, I did, so it was to my financial advantage to do it for them, and I became a very good caster! I could finish a mould in an hour. One would think the students had never seen a proper mould! I got offers right and left. Everyone was suddenly asking my advice on casting. I cast a head for eight dollars. Eight dollars was nothing to them, but it was really welcome money for me.”
To supplement her grant and extend her time in New York she decided to economize on meals. She switched to dog food. “It was only twenty-five cents a can, and I could get three meals out of it.” Over the months, she would augment her meals with dog food for weeks at a time. “It was very good. Well-cooked. Good beef. Probably better than the Americans would have for themselves. Add a few vegetables and things. Very good. Quite nutritious.”
“Hovannes was in this morning. He didn’t think much of my figure. Started casting after lunch, had a light supper, then worked through the evening till ten. Joined some of the night class members for a coffee in their studio.”
Outside on the street she still felt the pleasure of Zorach’s words earlier that day. “We’ll make a thrilling sculptor out of you yet,” he had said. Nice to know, she thought. The night around her reflected her contented mood. It was fairly quiet around 11:00 p.m., crisply cold, a lovely night. She strolled east along 57th Street, crossed Seventh Avenue, passed Carnegie Hall, and continued on to Fifth Avenue, the Mecca of the upscale shopper. More money in their pockets than I have, she thought, but without bitterness. More money, yes, but are they happy? She laughed. You bet they are! Rather than turn south toward her room and bed, she crossed Fifth and continued east to Park Avenue. “Such a beautiful night, actually a couple of stars in the sky,” and she felt the growing yuletide spirit in her heart. Then, at Park Avenue, she gazed south, and in that instant was happier than any moneyed shopper on Fifth Avenue: “Suddenly, there, spread out before me, sparkling against the buildings of lower Manhattan, were big Christmas trees all down Park Avenue!”
December’s end saw Frances at New Rochelle with Mary King and her mother, Norma. Christmas day was sunny and clear, with no snow. And Santa Claus was generous. Frances’s gifts were a reconditioned radio, two cartons of cigarettes, ten dollars cash from Norma, and from The Girls — the sculptors Wyle and Loring in Toronto — came a cheque. Frances could not read it through her tears. “The Girls were so kind. And all this time they were probably wondering how they were going to pay the rent. Yet, they were giving the money they didn’t have to people like me.”
She spent a quiet, relaxed weekend, loafing. “The birds out on the lawn were hilarious, sliding around on the frozen surface of the bird bath. Each morning after breakfast I chipped the ice off it. ‘That’s enough skating, fellas,’ I told them. ‘You’ll never make it to the National Hockey League anyway, you’re too small. Time for a nice sub-zero bath.’”
Then came the return to the problems at school. “Tore down the morning figure,” she said, aggravated with herself. “And the next morning, after hours of work, it was still no good.” Hovannes, unfortunately for her spirits, was quick to agree. “You like long slim muscles; this fat chunky figure (the model) is too much for you.” His critique was prophetic. Later (and more successful) examples of her work would mirror Hovannes’s words: Tall, thin female figures, slim-waisted, some might say under-nourished, though not quite as much as Giacometti’s sculptures; rather Giacometti on a fuller diet. These slim figures would sometimes be found in Frances’s sculpture of the late fifties and sixties. But in these New York days, Hovannes’s views were not the critical response that pleased.
She packed her bag and left for the New Year’s weekend in New Rochelle.
In Manhattan, winter was moving slowly into spring. Frances’s days were filled with work and study, museums and galleries, and thanks to Mrs. Berkovitz’s daughter Sondra and her Broadway contacts, Frances’s evenings often saw her attending plays, Broadway musicals — the premiere of Fiddler On The Roof, for example — and concerts, like her friend Joan Rowland’s recital on the twenty-eighth of February. But mainly her days revolved around the school. The Art Students League was her world, where she felt she was growing and learning and succeeding.
Her hours at the school never seemed enough. She was doing more and more castings for her fellow students, and was producing new works of her own almost daily, which generated criticism. “Felt happy about my morning figure, but Hovannes frowned at one mean little angle. Careless; threw everything off.”
March 1, 1954: “Both works much better. Tore into afternoon figure and think it much improved. Good drawing this morning.” March 2: “Good figure. Hovannes? Said nothing. Must use more free expression.” March 3: “Worked on my Frieda sculpture. She’s one of the models. Zorach likes the figure very much.”
This almost continuous activity had its effect on her diet. “I was never a good cook, and frankly, I just didn’t have time for food. Could have made time, I suppose, but (shrugs) I simply wasn’t that interested.” And she paid the price. Most of March was spent “feeling absolutely lousy and faint … weary … feeling ill after breakfast …” Breakfast, generally, was pausing for a moment outside a restaurant and taking a deep breath. “Very nutritious. Great time-saver and you can’t beat the price.” These senseless eating habits contributed to an endless catalogue of various gastric illnesses. She seemed almost constantly to be getting sick, being sick, or recovering from something. Colds, stomach ailments, sore throats, flu, ulcers, muscular problems, and repeatedly bumping into, bouncing off, falling down on, tripping over, every hard object imaginable. And finally tennis elbow or carpal tunnel syndrome from sculpture, sculpture, sculpture.
“Simplify! Too complex!”
Zorach’s view in three words. Other instructors would stress it just as strongly: Don’t copy blindly. The subject should be a guide, to inspire your work. Exaggerate some aspects, eliminate others. Simplify. “The concept, the idea, is what is really creative,” said Zorach. “The rest is work. The real act of creation is in the design.” To attempt to recreate each and every detail of a subject was fatal, he said; the endless detail would hinder her impression of life, of vitality.
This was a view that Frances accepted. At this period in her training, she was prepared to follow Zorach’s ideas, but tended to be open also to other methods, treatments, and new ways of looking at art, even the avant-garde, even what some might call the absurd.
She attended a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in mid-January of 1954. The subject was abstract and cubist art. “Abstract art,” said the cartoonist Al Capp, “is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” But then Al Capp was a humorist and would be expected to say that. Frances, on the other hand, thought about it seriously. To appreciate abstract art, she thought, on her way back to the studio, I have to consider that a thing can have a beauty of its own without having a resemblance to anything I know.
Zorach, however, wasn’t buying any of that avant-garde, no-talent, “no resemblance to anything” bafflegab. “The non-objective art of today is a purely visual thing,” he said. “The importance it has is the importance you, yourself, give it. To read meaning into it is comparable to reading meaning into tea leaves.” Zorach was not the man to leave you in any doubt. Just in case you missed that last remark on art and tea leaves, he expressed his utter amazement at how the work of some artists can be taken seriously. “Today we encourage the most infantile efforts, and admire them.” He agreed that it was natural to enthuse over the daubs and splashes of a four-year-old, “but when a so-called artist does the same thing and exhibits it, to me it is retarded development.”
In spite of Zorach’s modest to favourable opinions on many of her compositions, Frances was always prone to self-criticism, little of it positive. “A good feeling,” said Zorach of one of her figures. Try not to go overboard, thought Frances with a grim smile of acknowledgement. She worried that the gains in one area were lost in another. “I used to get a good likeness,” she said, “but not a good drawing or sculpture. Now I get a good drawing and sculpture, but lose the essence of the subject.”
A number of visits from Ontario friends and relatives nevertheless lightened her mood. The arrival of Keith Collver, her cousin and childhood friend, still well-loved, brought wonderful memories, and they sat over drinks till the small hours of the morning, after which he poured her into a taxi.
Her father and mother came for a two-day check on their daughter, the inexplicable sculptor. She was happy, banished the negative thoughts of their past relationship, and felt quite the cosmopolitan, almost-professional artist as she showed them the Big Town, and drew their attention to points of interest with a casual familiarity.
When she saw them off at the station the next day, she found she only had twelve cents in her pocket. Entertaining friends and relatives in New York was an expensive business.
On the nineteenth of February, she sat alone in her room. Mrs. Berkovitz was out and the house was quiet. A feeling of retrospection settled over her. A time for soul-searching. She recalled that earlier that day Zorach had said that she still hadn’t “the punch of first impression,” no “rhythm or emphasis,” no “pulling together.” Well, she thought grimly, I will have it; I know I will, tomorrow, next week, next month. I will have it. I have to believe that. Her thoughts drifted back to the time of her father’s visit. Showing him the sights, telling of her days at the Art Students League, the things she learned, her enthusiasm, the compliments of the instructors; holding her treasures in her hands and offering them to her father, waiting for appreciation from the man who never gave it.
She heaved a sigh that was almost a sob. “For God’s sake, I’m almost thirty years old. I have to stop substituting superficial things for the real. It’s time I grew up,” she said to the quiet room, the empty house. “Time to start thinking for myself.”
Frances sat looking critically at the two compositions in front of her. “Hmm, fairly pleased with the afternoon figure.” Notwithstanding Zorach’s guarded “It is passable,” she felt the morning figure was “not so hot.” She had begun casting a fellow student’s figure and was also busy on her own, which Hovannes had said was “a good figure.” Nevertheless her constant dissatisfaction with her work, even in the face of approval, albeit grudging, continued to fester in the back of her mind: “I must buck up!”
Always the mood swings: “Both figures improving. I think. Zorach says I have a good start.” Then: “I’m working so slowly! Lack ambition, not sure of my composition.” Finally: “Composition blah.”
Then the sudden news: “Zorach said if I wanted to return next year, I could probably get a scholarship!” And the thought of what that could do to her painfully stretched budget brought an exciting ray of sunshine into her day.
Frances felt that her current sculpture, a torso of Melba, one of the models, was shaping up very well. Zorach praised it, with the qualification that it was too static. So much for criticism, thought Frances. Much more satisfying, from the standpoint of appreciation of her abilities, was the invitation to assist him in casting at his home studio in Brooklyn. In early March she spent a day there, working with him. “A wonderful place. Filled with lovely New England pine furniture, and animals!”
Toward the end of March, Zorach looked at the two figures on which Frances was working. “Technically, you are okay,” he said, and nodded briefly, a fleeting suggestion of approval, “but you have no imagination.” Thanks a lot, Bill, she thought, looking bleakly at the two works. “These are studies,” he said. “You have to get ideas.” All right, she thought grimly, enough studies; from now on I will develop ideas from the model’s pose.
And yet, she was unhappy. She felt she was still depending too much on other people’s decisions. But what could she do? Do? She knew what she could do, and indeed had to do: Listen and learn; accept the decisions of Zorach and Hovannes; profit from their knowledge, expertise, and experience. Time enough to reject the decisions of others when you’ve learned, when you know what to do, and what you’re capable of doing. Then, and only then, can you go your own way.
Good news followed bad, as good news often does. She was told, after X-rays and a lot of medieval poking and prodding, that she had a stomach ulcer. Then she received a letter from her Toronto patrons inviting her up for the weekend. Reports from the doctors in early April were happily positive, so her days in Toronto were carefree. “Lunch with The Girls. Oh, it was so wonderful to see them all!” She also took time to see the administrators of Tannamakoon, the summer camp in Algonquin Park, and firm up her position as counsellor for the summer months. “It felt so wonderful, spiritually, to get all my problems settled. The ulcer seems to be a thing of the past, summer camp is ahead of me, and I’ll be back in New York with a scholarship, I hope.”
Notwithstanding his mention of a scholarship, Zorach was not wildly enthusiastic about offers of financial assistance. “I do not believe in subsidies to artists,” he said firmly. “There is only one way to subsidize art, and that is to buy it.” But Frances did not subscribe to this at all. “That’s all very well and good, I suppose, among established artists,” she said, “but it doesn’t work so well if you’re a penniless student who isn’t going anywhere without assistance.”
This, though, was a passing response to Zorach’s views; things were going too well for her to entertain negative thoughts for long. “Work is coming along better than ever, and it’s nice to know that my stomach is officially all right. Now,” she exulted, “now for some food!” She spent the weekend in New Rochelle “and ate too much.”
She sent in her letter for the scholarship on the nineteenth of April, then banished it from her mind in the flurry of work on Melba, a piece that excited her immensely and gained Zorach’s approval: “You have improved a lot this year!” Hovannes, too, liked her Melba: “It’s the best yet,” he said. And the final accolade: “The Art Students League,” said Frances, “have taken an option on my Melba! That means they want to buy it! I am walking on air!”
After a celebratory supper with friends, she returned home late after perhaps a couple too many. “Woke up feeling terrible. Guess I shouldn’t drink so much. But …” She brightened. “… tonight the committee will decide on my scholarship.”
Later she met her friend Rowlie (Joan Rowland) for lunch, and they walked along the East River. It was a crisply cool April day and the sun sparkled on the river as they sat on a bench, watched the boats, and reminisced of their days in Ontario and at Tannamakoon summer camp. “Rowlie was a great pianist, international reputation, toured all over Europe. She studied under Mona Bates in that big old Massey mansion on Jarvis Street —519 Jarvis Street, where Barbara Howard and I lived after we graduated from the Ontario College of Art.” Publicity photographs of Joan Rowland show a wide happy smile, lots of teeth. “Rowlie was kind of fat, freckles. She looked just like a little girl — until she sat down at that big grand piano. I met her at Tannamakoon. She was a good swimmer.”
Rowlie laughed, recalling the days at the camp. “Remember the time I almost drowned you?” she said. “Talked you into swimming way out.”
“Remember?!” said Frances. “How could I forget? I could have died!”
“Come on. I towed you in, didn’t I?”
More laughter as Frances cried, “How very considerate of you!”
