Читать книгу Pollock - Donald Wigal - Страница 13

Jackson was the youngest of five boys in the family of LeRoy McClure Pollock (1876–1933) and Stella May (1875–1958). His brothers were Charles Cecil (1902–1988), Marvin Jay (1904–1986), Frank Leslie (1907–1994), and Sanford ‘Sande’ LeRoy (1909–1963). An abbreviated family tree is provided.

According to Jackson’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, Jackson’s mother wanted all five of her sons to be artists of some kind. She considered them potential geniuses. However, in a letter to Charles, Sanford said he thought the emotional problems their brother Jackson had “date back to his childhood, to his relations with the family and our mother.”[14]

The facts about the Pollock family and its origins tell something about their youngest son, ‘the cowboy’. He continued the mythology of his roots. His brothers – who experienced Cody and the Western culture longer than Jackson – seemed to have moved on, more able than Jackson to adopt and adapt to their new environments. Because of Jackson’s rebellious temperament and drive for individual and independent expression, it is possible he might not have cared to retain the urban cowboy tendency had any of his brothers continued the cowboy role.

Throughout his life Pollock would mention growing up in Cody; however, he actually spent less than his first ten months in the town before the family moved to National City, near San Diego, California. The move would be the first of several during Jackson’s youth. For example, after only eight months in National City the Pollock family moved. In 1913, at age thirty-seven, LeRoy bought a truck farm in Phoenix, Arizona. He sold it only four years later, and then moved the family to Chico, California, where he bought and sold another farm, and then bought a hotel in Janesville.

During his first decade, Jackson lived in six different houses as his father tried job after job, without much success, in three states. In California alone the Pollock family lived in eight different places.