Chapter Five
CLEMENT POLLOCK Shameless Divinity
In a letter to my father, Peter, when he was away on a research trip, my mother describes her history of what she calls, “exaggerated empathy.” She had a tendency to cry about things. Hitting a dead dog in the road when we were driving to Florida, reading the dedication of The Little Prince to me, and a hunting afternoon where her father killed a bird caused “a flood of tears.”
She drolly writes, “You will admit that some self-disciplinary measures were necessary,” and describes the tactics learned from her second husband, Clement Pollock. This was by way of explaining to her third husband, Peter, why he sometimes detected coldness in her. It was an exaggeration on his part, most likely a defensive one, compared with his conduct during their marriage.
She goes on, “I first got onto a way of accomplishing some objectivity when I lived in Canada. I had been to a bar with Clem watching a boxing match on the T.V. Each blow made the tears run down my cheeks and Clem said no more fights for you. I hated being so helpless, so unable to stop myself from reacting. Time to toughen up—and then I remembered what Clem had told me about when he was in the marines during the war in the South Pacific as a medical corpsman. Their job was to pick up the bodies and bring them back either to the doctors or to burial. He said when they’d go into a tank burned out or shot up, to pick up the various pieces of what was left of the men, before going in he would mentally flip a switch. That way he could do it without being slowed down by or having to overcome a personal reaction.”
As a child and throughout my life until recently, I didn’t have access to letters like this. My half-sister Jessie Pollock, (ten years older, and from his first marriage), had mentioned something about our father and Iwo Jima, but I knew nothing more than that. From other writings (his), from writings about him, (my mother’s), from stories his childhood friend John Sherry told me, and even people I didn’t know told me, there was more to be unearthed. Over the years, a picture of Clement Pollock came together in my mind, a persona that was macho, swaggering, and tragic. It was almost a caricature, which can easily happen to one who leaves a vivid impression and does not live long. It was a bit cinematic, a cross between Marlon Brando on a motorcycle in “The Wild One,” and Hemmingway at the end. In between the dramatics, there are of course subtleties, vulnerabilities that are never seen. I certainly did not see them, but when I was younger they were not afforded to me. That came through other channels, especially a striking poem that my mother wrote about him, that was given to me by my father Peter when I was in my thirties.
As for direct memories, I have only scraps. An occasional red, kindly face. A smell of alcohol and cigarettes. On the rare occasion I saw him, he was pleased with the fact of me. He called me “Brigitte Bardot with muscles.” When he met my then very young brother Alex, he said of our mother to John, who knew them both well, “She’s a bitch, but she sure throws (gives birth to) good kids.”
The most memorable scrap was when he came to visit me at my mother and father Peter’s house, in Sagaponack. It was about 1969, a cold, blustery day. He was around forty-three, and sodden with drink. He had only a few more years to live. Still, a kindly face. A person not in my life who wanted to go for a walk. We went out to the horse farm nearby. He grabbed the electric fence and grabbed my hand, sending a violent shock through me. Though in the way of children, I didn’t make a big deal of it, to him or to my mother. We just went back and he dropped me off and that was it. I never saw him again. I didn’t tell her, but it hurt enough that I remembered it always. Which might have been exactly what he wanted.
Clement Wilkin Pollock Jr., by the mid-fifties, would have known my mother for years through the John Burroughs school in St. Louis. Their mutual friend John Sherry was at Burroughs, along with my sister, Jessie’s, mother Marian Wallace, my uncle Kenny Love, John Ney and Lucien Carr. They were all in the class of ’41 with Pollock, who was nicknamed “Bub” or “Bubba.” My mother and Aunt Mary were three grades behind, in the class of ‘44. If Pollock and my mother didn’t pass each other in the hall, they would almost certainly have met at the football games, because she and Kenny were close, and when she was well enough, she was raring to get into the social mix, in any way possible, having missed so much of it due to her eczema.
1956, two big things came to fruition for my mother and Pollock—events that each in their own fashion, reached beyond the borders of St. Louis. In December my mother appeared in Life Magazine again. The issue was called “The American Woman, her Achievements and Troubles.” The caption read, “St. Louis is a sophisticated city and that quality is mirrored in the warm attractiveness of Debbie Deacon.” That was as much as Life had to say about her as an American woman. At that point, she was twenty-nine. Her marriage to first husband Bill Deacon had lasted a year, and was due to end soon. For Life she was photographed in a baby blue sports car, by Howell Conant. **Footnote: Conant went on to become Princess Grace’s principal photographer.
Also in December, at thirty-three, Pollock published his only novel, The Victors, with Random House. He was then a good looking divorcee around town, who showed a fair amount of intellectual promise. He had also been married before, after the war, to his classmate Marian Wallace, who was a great beauty and extremely troubled. She had been widowed at twenty-one, having lost her first husband in WWII. Two years later, on her wedding date to Clement Pollock in January 1947, she was three months pregnant with my sister Jessie. The circumstances around this first marriage were triply fraught. Two weeks before the wedding, on Christmas Day, 1946, Pollock’s father, Clement Wilkin Pollock Sr., for whom he was named, suddenly died of a brain tumor. My grandmother, Maizee Rue Pollock, was left a widow at fifty-six. My grandfather had been a salesman by trade. The Pollocks were not part of the Clayton country club set. But they did send their two sons, Scott and Clement, to the prestigious Burroughs school. This might not have been entirely to Clement’s advantage. Due to the bad influence of his friend, John Ney, (later also married to Marian Wallace), Clement was pulled from the school in his junior year and sent to Avon Old Farms school in Connecticut to finish his education.
In this period of the early fifties, I was never able to find a record or accounting of any sort of work Pollock did besides writing. Unfortunately, his novel The Victors did not do well. A Kirkus review, opened with “A prurient first novel which grovels in gratuitous obscenities…” and ended with “Is this necessary?” I too was confounded by The Victors, billed as “A novel of young American expatriates and European aristocrats in postwar Salzburg.” My first father had no tenderness or compassion for any of his characters, which made it dull. On the obscenity-front there were just a few, and mild by today’s standards. The Victors has somewhat the flavor of all of his writings, an assumption of a superior knowledge base on the part of the reader, (i.e. lazy writing), together with obliquely worded sentences and esoteric ramblings that are designed to fill the reader with awe over how much they don’t know. That is not to say—especially in his stabs at philosophy—there aren’t a number of prophetic insights around the subjects of Eastern religions, Fourth Way philosophers, American history, social hierarchies and relations between men and women. There are. But most of the time he didn’t trouble himself to bring his quite interesting inner life and thoughts into real coherence, which is too bad.
Still, the word around St. Louis was that he was brilliant, and would reach great heights on the literary scene. **Footnote: John Sherry. This would’ve been catnip to my mother. Nine years earlier, at eighteen, she had been disappointed with Kenny’s pilot school friends, “I expected to meet someone that knew more, could tell me something, was superior…” That same year in Boulder, she met Walter Mann, the erudite Ivy Leaguer who had impressed her so, and then blew up their relationship by belittling her. At a time when she was discovering her own considerable intellectual ability, Mann had opened the door to the idea of a life of the mind—a way for her to find the answers she was seeking. After Europe and the acting stint, coming off a first marriage that seems to have been half-hearted at best, she found herself back in St. Louis, exactly where she didn’t want to be. As Nathalie said, “Debbie was always kind of in the bigger world. St. Louis was never going to hold her.”
Enter Bub Pollock. He would have been comfortably familiar and a ticket out at the same time. He wasn’t cut out for St. Louis in the fifties any more than she was.
Bub Pollock and his father, Clement Wilkin Pollock, in about 1933
From his early school pictures at Burroughs, and especially a school event where he was photographed with his father, (the only photo that I have of my grandfather), I get the impression of a tall, well built, cheerful boy with an open face and an amazing head of hair. This is where the element of tragedy, of wasted potential comes in.
I never will be able to say whether he suffered from PTSD from the war, alcoholism, character flaws or a combination of some or all. As I came of age my mother portrayed him to me as a worthless person who “never gave a damn” about either one of us. I’d hear the story of his third wife, homely heiress Helen Rand, who told my mother that instead of having the money leeched out of her by him bit by bit, had signed over her entire bank account to him. I heard of the Italian count that paid off Pollock to leave his daughter alone. I know from Dorothy Sherry (John’s wife) that when he moved nearby to East Hampton, one time he came up the driveway in Sagaponack crying and drunk, yelling for me, my little girl! Only to be driven away by my mother. Regarding occasional scenes like this, my mother would be hissing mad, and at me too for indulging in what she thought were false sentiments. Asking about my “real father,” was very definitely a hot button issue. When I was six, around the time my mother married my father Peter, it was explained to me that I was adopted by him only because Pollock had allowed that, by signing the papers to give me away.
But back in St. Louis in the fifties, Pollock was not from country club society she abhorred, and had no aspirations within it, beyond what he could get out of it. For her, that would not have detracted from his appeal. In those early days he would seemed to have embodied the experience and the “bigger world,” that she hungered for. The contrasts between them are plain. In 1943, when he was training in the Bone Fracture Ward of the Naval hospital in Newport, RI, she, four years younger, was getting photographed with a chihuahua for the society pages. In 1949, when she was on the S.S. Washington, crossing the ocean for the first time, he had been a veteran for four years, and had lived in Salzburg and Rome. He was well read, and must have been a good conversationalist because he was invited everywhere in St. Louis and well beyond. From the Avon Old Farms yearbook in his senior year: “Bub has been with us two years, and we all agree that they would have been duller years without him. He is indeed the sine qua non of the Avon Club. “I have seen the dumb men throng to see him and the blind to hear him speak.” [sic] A member of the Nimrod Club, Bub was elected vice-president of the Riding Club, and this year rode to the exclusion of football. We missed him in the game with the Alumni. He played polo last year, and ju-jitsu this year. Besides acting as a dormitory inspector, Bub took over the store on Oscar’s departure to engage in war work, and we phophesy [sic] that the profits will merit a congressional investigation. “The public be damned.” ---W. H. Vanderbilt.”
Avon Old Farms Yearbook 1941
Aside from his rebellious bent, it didn’t hurt that he was good looking, like a cross between William Holden and Carey Grant, with a leonine, lazy quality all his own. Seven months after her second appearance in Life, my mother was pregnant by him. In mid-summer, 1957, they picked up stakes and moved to Montreal, Canada. Three months later, reader—she married him.
This was called the marriage to give me a name. But, judging from the intense emotions that swirled around the subject of Pollock, and the 950 word poem that she wrote in Stockbridge, I am convinced that she had understood who he was from the start. He had a reputation as a rebel, someone who wanted to do things his own way. At some early point, along with his drinking, this began to manifest in destructive ways. Her poem, dated 1960, was written to me at two years old, after they’d left Canada. Called “Rue II,” it was written after she’d been granted a divorce, in 1959, on the grounds of “gross and confirmed habits of intoxication, cruel and abusive treatment, neglect to provide suitable maintenance. Complainant prays for alimony, and custody of and allowance for minor child.”
It appears though, that they were living in the same house.
Rue II Stockbridge, Massachusetts 1960
The snowy ground dappled bare in spots
Bears white belled flowers on shadow stalks.
The Robin thrusts his beak in the earth
And father walks away down the road towards town
His struggle contained in his measured walk.
Thick wet flakes fall on his heedless head
And in the pockets of his pale coat
Charred in polka dots by forgotten cigarettes
His ungloved fingers knead months’ old bits
Of tobacco and broken seals of vodka pints.
Shod in summer shoes
Into the unlit distance of the wind-crazed snow he moves.
It is not yet eight o’clock.
I hear you in the room next to mine begin to make your
cheerful chirps of morning
With sometimes a word that you know mixed in
Becoming then a song very loud of pure sound
And of honor between you and the earth.
Hers to sustain you and yours to remember.
Your father is a man who has heard that song
When the blood whispers to the brain
In time-told rhythm of timeless things;
Of molten tars and starry pools
And hissing crust of granite cooling in the cloud hung gloom
Of leaching rains and the plucking wind
Of swelling sea and sucking tide
And rocks that burst in hunks as huge as mountains
Born of mineral depths.
Of laughing man and crying babe
Of seeing cat and hearing bat and copying woman;
Rich dung of lifeless clay.
He heard and gave an order to his life:
(You must understand you who are two that almost never again do the notes
come through to be re-sung as you have done today)
"Not for one waking minute will you forget and you will extinguish remembering more clearly.”
The secret of its own sea-solution that the blood sang to the brain.
The snow ceases. I see two fences and a field away
A boy coming alone towards the school; alone because he is early
Later the children will be in twos and fours
Throwing snow, absorbed in one another.
Your father is alone because he is late.
The life of the people has already happened
Even to the thousandth power.
Ah he looks like the man among men
But he moves among them never having been one.
His muscles shine and his moustache tickles
But the man is not there for he is distilled
As the vodka upon which he rides his return
From his morning’s vigil
In silent ritual
Before the fire of that terrible song.
He says to us “It is painful to be weak,
But it is agony to be strong.”
With this strength the spark in his soul he fans
And begrudges the attention that living demands
(He hated driving the stakes of your playpen)
Even that of his own life
(He begs his bread)
And will have no wife
(I have said he is no man)
At all times two things
At the same time he is
Deep as spirit’s voice
And reasons as superficially
As a Freudian’s cause of effect.
He feels the pulse of the world
And cannot feel yours or mine at all.
Our temper and response he catalogued
As a long ago baffled boy.
We pertain without intimacy
In the rigid roles of his fantasy.
An aristocratic mind moves through the great spaces
Never bogging in the interstitial places
Between vast rods of thought.
He does not answer questions of the mob.
But he has the vulgarian’s smile where desire falls
Like a child no ruse is too crude
In the shameless divinity of his survival.
Genius is exempt from honor.
Con of petty lies and short term gain
Common heart in service to a classic brain.
And now on earth no one sustains her minister.
This prophet of possibility at the expense of solvency
Now scans the world’s defection,
“I am too early, my spirit from an unborn generation.”
Destruction did not become resurrection
For those masochistic followers from despair
Who found a paternalism of power, not of care.
(When the son finally called to the father, there was no father there.)
He preached to them “Our ancient dream of return to the garden of our loss
Is a dream of unforgivable children and is false.
Where I go lies forward and there lies the big swamp.
However beautiful it is useless to cultivate your little garden.”
That they sickened on their diet was plain
So vomiting on each other this latest generations of vipers
Crawled toward the voice granting pardon,
Crying in their wilderness of pain.
Thus into the swamp of hope they prepared to follow
this piper
Gaily selling sovereignty for his hire.
Then carefully provisioned for their sojourn
They learned that under these burdens
They sank in the bottomless mire.
There was no savior there.
You who grow in the garden will feed on the fruits of
its tree
Biting love, tasting hate, digesting joy, melancholy
Pouring from your eyes. If you should tire of the garden
Listen to your father, but look for no one there.
Your blood is his but duty lies elsewhere.
A grove of trees stands beyond the road,
Winter black; as giant stalks rooted in snow
They stroke the sky. A lone gull flaps low
Flashing bright on black, disappearing in the white
Spaces between: in traceless weaving of flight
It passes the trees and finds its height.
The snow now whirls in no direction, shaken dry as dust
Distorting the world, hiding the ground
Where the robin found a first spring worm.
From your room there is no sound.
It is time to fix your breakfast.
In Stockbridge
Pollock and me, Stockbridge
My uncle Kenny did not like Pollock, but like many who knew him, was sort of amazed
by the phenomenon of him. I remember meeting people older than me, at parties at John Sherry’s house and being introduced as “Pollock’s daughter” though I was by then, Matthiessen’s. I specifically remember their reaction to me, which began as with an assessment of my physical person, and then ran the gamut from slack jawed to sneering, usually followed up with a story of some macho contest he had staked them to, and most often won. It made me feel like a bad seed, except for the part that noticed their admiration. It was the seventies, and it seemed that Pollock, unrepentant hedonist, was living the life most of them coveted. I took note of that, not without a bit of pride. They were hypocrites. They hated him, but they also wanted to be him.
Pollock Pinup
By way of trying to explain Pollock to me, my uncle Kenny said that my mother was “philosophical” about the divorce. I don’t believe it. Mainly I don’t believe it because of what I remember, and the poem. It takes the form of a warning to me about what to expect from the man who was responsible for half of me—what to expect in the hard light of day. I am to listen when the blood whispers to the brain, in time-told rhythm of timeless things; in molten tars and starry pools—the song of the earth that he “has heard” but cannot bring to the earthly realm. It’s an attempt to explain him, contain him, and write him off all at once, saying in many words, “He is not of this world, but you are.” She loves the part of me that she imagines is him.
It is not a distancing, philosophical treatment. It is deeply intimate, it is an attempt to take words and wrap them around something that happened to her—him. If it were as simple as describing a person who drank and was selfish and could not be bothered with practicalities, it would fit more into the modern day frame we use to talk about pathologies like alcoholism. It is not simple, because it is specific. It attempts to describe where he was instead of the earthly, practical plane, where they were, what drew her to him, how she believed in him, and how I was made.
She alludes to a “false paternalism,” of power, not of care. With circuitous empathy, it describes someone of personal influence and charisma, who lacked the internal structure to deliver on a sort of promise that radiated from his being. In the poem he has no spiritual core, he can’t come through. She calls the dream (hers) of returning to the garden of our loss, a false dream of unforgivable children. She’s disdainful of herself, but he isn’t disdainful, he is disengaged. He lacks the will, he lacks the drive, he lacks the empathy, but in an America reeling from its losses, he could talk a very good trip, gaily selling sovereignty for his hire. He knows what is needed but he continually disappoints. A true nihilist, for him nothing lies ahead but the big swamp. There’s arrogance there, and dejection. This con of petty lies and short term gain, is embattled. People shouldn’t allow themselves to be conned, but they do. People should not follow him, but they do. He’s miles ahead, and behind, the quotidian existence that swirls around him like dry snow. (A similar condition to hers.) He feels the pulse of the world, yet he can’t manage winter shoes, or a connection to the people around him.
At the risk of aggrandizing, I will say that it seems rather extraordinary that not one person, not even his best friend, John Sherry, (also a veteran, a bombardier, who flew 60 missions), ever mentioned that Pollock was in the war. Aside from her letter to my father Peter, it was never once alluded to by my mother. I don’t think that my father, Peter, ever considered it. It could be that in the post war years there were many veterans, and Pollock’s service was overlooked because it was unremarkable. Like many veterans, he rarely talked about it. By the early sixties, anti-war sentiment was brewing, another reason to avoid the subject.
In the poem Pollock tells us: It is painful to be weak, but it is agony to be strong, I remember hearing this around in John Sherry’s house in the years after Pollock was gone, and indeed later I found it in another version in his writings. At the Sherry house it was said to me by way of explaining Pollock—the essential Pollock that everyone was always trying to explain. It seems as though my first father, leaving a trail of destruction, abandoned children, wives, girlfriends, drained bottles of vodka, drained bank accounts and a flurry of books and incomplete manuscripts, had made a sort of bargain in his life, and had assumed, quite completely, a passive stance. After unearthing his war record, I found that he enlisted at nineteen, and at twenty-one was a medic on the ground in the battle for Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest theatres of WWII. It is possible that “it is agony to be strong,” is what a person says who had to be strong, while in shit up to his eyeballs.
Pollock very young with his mother, my grandmother, Maizee Rue
Pollock and my sister Jessie
Before he enlisted, Pollock had had only a few months of college, at the university of Arizona. Like my mother’s first husband Bill Deacon, he left to enlist—Deacon in ’42 and Pollock about a year later. Neither one was drafted. Like Deacon, he wanted to be an aviator, yet didn’t see it through, and when the war was over, again like Deacon, he didn’t finish his education, instead taking a few courses at Washington University and the New School in New York City. The comparisons end there, for Deacon never saw battle, and acquired no medals. There is no dispute that Pollock, for all of his dissipation, did an exemplary service for his country.
1943, the year that he enlisted, was a turning point in the Pacific Rim theatre. The Battle of the Midway in the central Pacific ocean, fought almost entirely with aircraft, had been a pivotal win for the U.S.—most of Japan’s carrier fleet and best trained pilots were destroyed. But two years and six bloody battles later **Footnote: Guadalcanal, Attu, Bismark Sea, Saipan, Leyte Gulf and the Philippines Campaign, Japan had still not surrendered. The Bushido code (loyalty and death before dishonor), the disproportionate power of the Japanese military, and the civilian view of the Emperor Hirohito as a God incarnate, (who must be protected at all costs), were ingrained in its culture. Months after Hitler’s death and Germany’s surrender, they were still fighting.
Early in boot camp training in Rhode Island, Pollock decided to become a medical corpsmen. Though it is true that some medical corpsman chose the job because they were pacifists and wouldn’t have to carry guns and kill, I can’t claim that for him. He completed six months of training in Medical Field Service, Medical Field tactics, Medical Field Equipment, Field Sanitation, Military First Aid, Chemical Warfare, Anatomy & Physiology, Nursing, and Military Topography, with good grades. There were a few wobbles.
*At camp Pendleton, in January of ‘44 there was this notation on his record, “AOL (absent over leave) from 0600, 25 January 1944 to 1400, 26 January 1944. A period of 1 day, 8 hours. Awarded: Four days confinement on bread and water.” In other words, punished.
*In April, 1944 he was advanced to “fill vacancy in division.” Which was the Marine Fifth Division. **Footnote: It should be noted that the Marine Fifth was mostly veterans. He was not.
*He reported to the field, meaning ground battle at Iwo Jima, on the 19th of February 1945. He was twenty-one years old.
*The record: “Participated in the assault and capture of Iwo Jima, Volcano Island, as a member of the 5th Marine Division during the period 19 February, 1945, to 27 March, 1945.”
Iwo Jima, a barren eight square mile terrain of rock and ash, was important for its position halfway between Japan and Saipan, which had been taken in June of 1944. From Saipan, the U.S. new B-29 Bombers were now within striking distance of Japan, but Iwo Jima and its two airstrips were needed to maximize efficiency and to refuel on 3,000 mile round trip bombing runs. The island has no fresh water and is dotted with hundreds of underground caves. It has a dormant volcano with eight stories of subterranean caverns that, along with the caves, had been rebuilt by the Japanese over a year into an elaborate defense system. Around the volcano and on the flat terrain, hundreds of pillboxes, blockhouses and gun sites had been constructed by the Japanese above ground, with the network hidden below. General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s strategy was to keep his troops mostly inland, rather than heavily defending the coastline, so that U.S. troops would suffer surprise attacks when they least expected it.
On February 16th 1945, the U.S. bombarded the island from the air for three days, to little effect. On the February 19th, 70,000 Marines, of whom Pollock was one, began to land on the black sand beach, many of them in amphibious tanks that had been launched from eleven warships. A bit of the way inland they were surprised to find mountains of volcanic ash that were virtually impossible to scale, especially as they were peppered with fire from the Japanese. U.S. General Harry Schmidt brought in bulldozers to clear the ash, unaware of the defenses the Japanese had prepared that lurked behind. (U.S. intelligence had estimated only 13,000 Japanese soldiers on the island, because of course, they hadn’t seen all that were there.) The Marines were at first confounded at where enemy fighters were coming from—they’d manage to wipe out one blockhouse, only to find it populated again not long after. The fifth division was tasked with taking possession of the cavernous volcano. As the soldiers advanced inland, an auspicious start quickly turned into a rout.
The medical corpsman were called “medics.” On the battlefield, the call for them were moments of high drama that brought them running. Unless they and their litter bearers were carrying the soldiers back to the Surgical Hospitals tents in the back, medics were on the front line under extremely hazardous conditions. They administered first aid, slaked thirsts, injected morphine and plasma, applied tourniquets, and soothed fears while stabilizing the wounded. They picked up pieces of the men and transported them. They marked the dead. **Footnote: In bootcamp the medics were sometimes ridiculed by the gun-bearing “grunts.” However things quickly changed on the battlefield, where their value became apparent—and they were generally beloved by the soldiers.
In terms of lives lost, Iwo Jima was the most costly in U.S. Marine corps history. What was supposed to have taken four days took thirty-six. Some veterans tell of the island’s volcanic powdery sands pooled with blood, and many, in retrospect, identify the nightmares and mental illnesses they suffered for years as untreated PTSD. 7,000 U.S. soldiers died, 19,200 were wounded, and 18,500 Japanese were estimated dead, out of an original 21,000. A battle like this had to have been hell on earth. I wonder if it was indeed possible to “flip a switch” to block the magnitude of it. Pollock did this every day for thirty-six days, bearing witness to terrible losses and suffering at a young, impressionable age. He won the WWII Victory Medal, the American Campaign Ribbon, and the Asiatic-Pacific ribbon with a Bronze Star. A Bronze Star is awarded for “heroic or meritorious acts of service in ground combat.”
But all of this seemed to go underground upon his return, as it did for many servicemen of WWII. Though I can’t speak in detail regarding his post war years, there were identifiable forks in the road. He didn’t return to the university. His father, my grandfather, died very suddenly two weeks before his first marriage, and that marriage was over soon after that. After his second marriage to my mother dissolved, he came off macho and tough, though Nathalie didn’t think he meant to. Others did think he meant it. Along with the drinking, the macho rebel stance became something that he was, or was perceived to be. He didn’t work, he didn’t want to work, and didn’t pretend to give a damn about it.
With army buddies and school friends. John Sherry is at the lower left.
His disinterest in the machinations of St. Louis society was total, despite the pressure to use his education and good looks to ascend socially. Nathalie always admired that—she’d felt trapped by “St. Louis,” too, but she didn’t have the strength or opportunity to reject it until she moved away for good. By the time my mother and Pollock’s paths crossed again in the mid-fifties, she had written her rebellion journals. Following, for once, her sister Mary’s influence, she became interested in Eastern Religions, Zen, and Alan Watts in particular. Footnote: Nathalie said that in the fifties Mary had a gathering at her house in St. Louis, where Watts gave a talk, and my mother attended. Pollock had been divorced for at least five years, while continuing to attempt to make a living out of writing and beginning to assemble a philosophical treatise called Consciousness Essayed, (unpublished), as a follow up to The Victors.
Consciousness Essayed is undisciplined and underbaked. But there are some gems in it. A number of lines of thought concerning its subject, can be found in my mother’s later ruminative writing style, and her absorption into Zen Buddhism. He’s grabbing at things that he has glimpsed, that he has no name for yet. He is drawing on his study of Mahayana Buddhism, Rigveda, and the work of Nietzsche, Sarte, and Gurdjieff to name a few. In the wake of the war, similar ideas were taking hold across the nation. Though old his school mate, Lucien Carr, was not a writer **Footnote: later an editor. Carr’s friends, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were writers and poets of the Beat movement, rejecting the standard narratives and materialism of the fifties. In his thinking, Pollock was on this wave.
Voyage
The vessel of the individual exists
for movement toward consciousness,
Yet, underway, is sabotaged by social edict
And guided against the vaulting of its time lines.
And the process of becoming begins.
Consciousness is but the faintest of glimmers
seen through the swaddling of usage.
With manners, man attempts a reversion
To some prime instinctual form.
If generous within manners, he is exhausted
by society’s importunities;
If miserly within manners, he must acknowledge
That the end of self is the end of all.
And the process of becoming begins.
Man inverts the greater part of his energy to confirm his static nature midst the
space-time rows of social gardening.
If the individual goes far, he is forgotten;
If he stays close, he is ignored.
But let him hold a point of high tension
Between self and society, then each will conspire
To destroy him as he reflects the adulteration of both.
So the process of becoming proceeds.
Man must deliberate a perspective into consciousness
Or ever be lost within the vast coordinates
Of the life he would investigate.
All this but the beginnings of becoming.
And man’s first immortal will be he who
Did not become a mannequin.
“Voyage,” is really about enlightenment. A repeating theme in his other writing is “part man,” and “particular man,” both of which are in “the whole,” without knowing that they are, yet sensing it. **Footnote: The whole is universal consciousness. It’s as if he’s on the outside of everything, wanting to warn about what he sees of a societal poisoning of man’s potential. It is his justification for not participating, but is not only that. He sees the whole, he feels it, and I do believe this is genuine. This is a person who is experiencing his life and his place in time uniquely, and has gone to lengths to express what that is. My mother very much continued in this vein. In each of their writings, I found an inquiry into new paradigms of thought, brought about by a longing for freedom. At this stage, his dissatisfaction is deeper than hers.
The Big Bang
We’ll not get it I think.
It is too alien in its effects.
Perhaps our children will broach the morbid challenge.
But it is as impossible for particular man to
estimate the suicidal compulsion of the next
generations.
As if would have been impossible for men three
generations past,
to conceive the degree of present insanity.
On the subject of the bravado that was his:
BRAVADO
One aspect of alcoholism,
is its spurious contempt for
the verities even of death.
One is only justified in leaving a life,
having lived it.
Not died it.
More on the subject of his own problem:
ADDICTION
If the addict faced honest aspects of death
And dissolution through his abuses,
Addiction would prove an excellent disciplining
path toward the examination of that that is.
However he actually promotes a Grande Guignol
of death—a sickly romanticizing of dissolution.
Creating false anxieties (such as the neurotic lives with and by)
effecting to obscure the enormity of reality.
On the subject of love and sex:
ALCHEMY
When a woman ceases to smell of her childhood
conflicts,
Then she’s your own.
And so, as well, the transliteration of those
conflicts.
TE DEUM (We praise thee)
Salute those lonely ones who scarcely live
But are conscious on the periphery of life,
Have fallen in love with vacuum,
So alternate between depth euphoria and phobia.
Their tone be harsh and awkward,
Their designs as strangely empty as Blake’s;
For such learn little aesthetics,
Dreaming in empty galleries,
Listening to the rehearsals of time.
THE WRECK
The individual of conscious evolution says,
“I know not what it is but what it isn’t.”
The socially evolving individual says,
“I know not what it isn’t but what it is,”
and proceeds within its limitations.
Nevertheless the latter is the first
at the scene of the disaster,
For destruction is the living end to limitation.
Of course, Schrodinger’s cat makes an appearance in these pages. Clement Pollock was a paradox walking, so much so that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t just get down to the business of living. Though more active in almost every aspect, my mother was similarly frustrating and brilliant.
My favorite is this one:
ZOOLOGY
Any gazelle is a gazelle deity.
Of all animals man is alone in that he
Achieves not in grace.
That is to say, at no time in his living
span does he achieve his potential.
Consider any wild creature.
It has arrived.
It reminds me of a passage from my mother’s only published book, Annaghkeen, about the summer of 1965, when we all lived in Ireland. She and my father had had dinner with friends, Don and Carol Braider. As usual the talk was earnest, around the subject of metaphysics. She writes of “centers of orientation.” These are constructs of patriotism, politics, power, and the common emotions about other humans—anger and desire, and “the more subtle centers, mystiques of blood and destiny.” She finds that they do not hold. Where for the Braiders and my father, Peter, it might have been just another dinner and another discussion, for her it’s a crisis. In the same way Pollock was on the edges of “reality,” she too was not in this world—beyond it, behind it—but not completely in it. The problem was separateness. The problem was, as Pollock wrote, “Man inverts the greater part of his energy to confirm his static nature midst the space-time rows of social gardening,” thereby obliterating the possibility of any sort of insight into the nature of things.
After the dinner she’d found so frustrating she wrote her own version of the gazelle.
“But we, demigods, blinded in the searchlight of intellect’s discrimination, cannot find our shape in time. Set before the complexity of the pieces, we become insane with the decisions they demand.
The flower hasn’t this burden. The flower fulfills its immanence, intelligence implicit in its unfolding. There is a discipline. The flower grows without mistakes.” **Footnote: My mother loved me so much that I never had many of these metaphysical problems. When I read that passage, I know that I am the flower that grows without mistakes. Even though I have made mistakes aplenty. However, on a purely philosophical level, I am that flower. And so was she, but didn’t know it. Her life was centered around doing the work of understanding her own buddha nature.
Pollock was always working on something. In the mid sixties, when he was putting together Consciousness Essayed, it was clear that his output wouldn’t exceed one novel. Along the way he had let down a lot of people, including my sister Jessie, with whom he never lived or provided for. She spent more time with him; he was younger with her. He was healthier, not as far into his addiction. At least once a year he would come to visit her in the different homes that she grew up in, especially at her maternal grandparents’ in Vermont. They’d had her legally declared their ward, in order to “save her,” as she put it. Because when she was five years old, her mother, Marian, married Pollock’s classmate, John Ney from St. Louis. Jessie, a beautiful and talented artist, has a cleft palate. Unfortunately, her new step-father didn’t want her around because of it and her mother didn’t fight for her. During all of this Pollock realized that he wasn’t cut out for parenting. “He just couldn’t do it,” was how Jessie explained it. He did visit her and she looked forward to these visits. He’d bring little gifts, and take her out to eat. When she was newly married in New York City he came to her apartment. He was still healthy, and well dressed. She remembered watching him walk from one side of the apartment to the other, noticing his strength and looseness of limb. “I was discovering that I was visually oriented, and I thought how very much like a lion he was.” She remembered the warmth of his hugs, and that they’d go out to eat. And sit at bars and drink. “That was his thing,” she said. She never remembered or heard of him being abusive to anyone, and wasn’t abusive to her. In fact, not one person reported him being abusive, except my mother when she sued for divorce. It is possible that her lawyer recommend that she filed a complaint of abuse, to make the suit successful. In any event, Nathalie said that my mother was distressed that her lawsuit was made public in the Berkshire Eagle.
Pollock second from left, John Sherry second from right
There were peers that appreciated him, and thought him a good, amusing, and interesting friend. Dorothy and John Sherry, D.A. Pennebaker, Ruth Costello, a devoted friend from St. Louis, who ran the Alan Watts foundation from a permanently moored ferry in Sausalito. In the pictures, mostly in Europe, there are a host of army buddies. Nathalie was fond of him, and he her, as Debby’s little sister only. In the bars of Stockbridge he taught her “The Zen way of throwing darts,” she told me. And that when he came to that town the police were immediately on the “qui vive.” I asked her what she meant. “It’s his atmosphere, it’s just him. When he walks through a nice little New England Village. There is something about the way his atmosphere is that looks threatening. He looked like a guy that might go wild. I do remember all those people keeping their eye on that guy. He was harmless, really. Other men tended not to like Bub because he got the girls you know.”
The filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, was a mutual friend of my mother and Pollock. When she finally left Stockbridge, she moved into his house in the upper nineties in Manhattan with me in tow. As her divorce had just come through, Penny asked her, “Why would you get together with a guy like that?” and she answered, “Why—it was like tying up a wild horse in my backyard,” as if that was the most natural thing in the world.
John Sherry said that Pollock spent time with William Inge, the playwright, when he took a literature course at Washington University in St. Louis with him in the early fifties. And that Inge created the character of “Hal Carter” in his play “Picnic” based on him because he was in love with him. Hal Carter was the guy who comes into a little town in the fifties, and turns everything upside down.
John also had the turkey story, which says a lot. On a particular day in the fifties, starting early I guess, he and John went to some little country bar to begin the day’s festivities. Pollock brought a big, cooked turkey and some knives, plunked it down on the little table, and proceeded to rip into it. Nobody stopped him, but John noted the reaction. Customers in disbelief, bar owners angry—Pollock ploughing through this turkey anyway. John laughed at his friend’s brazenness. Was Pollock trying to make a scene, or did he just have a craving for turkey? Probably a little bit of both. It seems that everywhere he went he created a sort of sensation, and sometimes it was not pretty.
Compared with the high flying crowd he ran with, Pollock was from the other side of the tracks. In St. Louis his friends were more advantaged —the offspring, mostly, of industry titans and bankers, and in Europe, many were titled. While in the bosom of these grand surrounds, he helped himself to whatever he wanted. After what he had been through, he might have thought, well, what did you do? His subversive streak was not such that when his nation needed him, he found a way to get out of it. It could have been that he didn’t have the channels or connections to get himself a cushier post, and it could have been that he was fatalistic about it. To have experienced such sacrifice first hand might’ve made him contemptuous of the wealth and the nice life that he exploited so freely. Perhaps he felt entitled to exploit it, in compensation for what it had cost.
I never saw his medals or even heard about them until I unearthed his record. They are lost. Though he likely never killed anyone, he did provide his service in a brutal battle for a world that we can all live in. But somehow it wasn’t enough to shore him up, to shape him into a presentable option for anything, anything at all. In fact, it might have had the opposite effect, and broken something in him that could not be repaired. It is hard to speculate about the interior life of someone I barely knew. William Styron wrote a book called Set This House on Fire, in which his main character, Cass Kinsolving, is an alcoholic who has been in battle. Styron never makes a direct connection between the trauma of war, and being in a state like this, but I’ve never read an accounting of the inner lift of an addict that rang more true. In this passage, Cass Kinsolving ruminates on the reasons for his drinking.
“And I suppose its true, some twisted connection or crossed up circuit between love and hate in me is the secret of it all, & to go in on my own from day to day like some scared electrician & try to fix the circuit will be in the end, I mean if there is an end, my only way out. I could not give up my thoughts or my dreams even to a Slotkin. It is awful & desperate enough to give them up to myself. A man must be chary with his daemons & who knows whether it is not better to suffer a dream & see Hell fire & the gulf and sink in the perishing deep & have volcanos exploding around ones head for a lifetime, than to know its final meaning. Who can say that its meaning once made naked and clear, won’t make a man anything but triply damned & free him not into love but into a hatred so immense that all before would seem tender & benign.”
This has a ring of accuracy about trauma so severe that there is no returning from it. I do not have an alternative to suggesting that the war played a role in Pollock’s passive refusal to engage in his life. I believe, and so does my sister Jessie, that he might have been an entirely different person if he had not gone into such a battle at twenty-one.
At first, meeting on the same restless road, and affected, as everyone was in those days, by the war—each of my parents sought a sort of perfection in the other one. But the rebellious spirit that drew them together unfortunately manifested in opposite directions. I am too early, my spirit from an unborn generation—sounded interesting to her at first. But these defeatist words were words he lived by, not just said, which was another matter entirely. His rebellion was to be more and more passive. Hers was to be active. Their divorce was out of differing ideologies as well as practical considerations. Beyond his ineptitude as a family man, it also became clear that he had no future in letters, and she strove for a literary milieu, one that was primarily about ideas. ** Footnote: When she came out to Long Island soon after her divorce, she said to their mutual friend John Sherry, “When I marry again, it will be to a writer.”
She met my father Peter soon after the divorce, and she never looked back. Pollock was roundly rejected from my life, by both of them. Of course, they didn’t know that she would die young, and they didn’t know that he would. They believed he’d be a bad influence on me and wanted to protect me. They were ambitious, and he was just a drunk. They didn’t want him around. My father just shook his head on the subject. Pollock’s lack of discipline, his emotional pitch, his need, his desperation, his bad books, his smell, and lack of any sort of practical future were not to his taste, or to their taste. There again, my mother’s ruthlessness was at work. I don’t blame them, given the circumstances, and the way they were.
But some families are not so ambitious or so hard. Some families allow for failure, softness, stumbles, and “twisted up circuits,” a little more. Even if it isn’t convenient. Even if it doesn’t further the collective agenda. There are families that function very well—where even if a wholesale embrace is not possible—a little bit of understanding is.
When I lived in San Francisco, Ruth Clarkson Costello, a friend from St. Louis days, talked to me at length about her beloved friend. She was a nurse by trade, and in her later years ran the Alan Watts Foundation in Sausalito. Her story of how Pollock met his end can never be verified. Yet when I ran it by sister Jessie, she believed it was true. When I asked why, she answered, “He was always picking fights in bars,” and “you don’t want to do that in Mexico.”
In the late sixties, divorced for the third time, from heiress Helen Rand of St. Louis, Pollock left the states and re-located to Ajijic, a small town inland from Puerto Vallarta. He lived in a little blue house at Independencia 20, a short walk from lake Chapala, where he swam every day. As always, he was at work at various writing projects, and his listed occupation was “photojournalist,” though I never saw any of his photographs. Ruth Costello made a point of visiting him when she could, because she was worried about him. As the sixties drew to a close, the drinking was catching up with him. He was bloated and unhealthy and had lost his good looks. **Footnote: I remember people reporting that to me at his friend John’s house, in a meanspirited way. I had no reason to care whether or not he was still handsome, but it seemed to matter greatly to them.
On her visits to Ajijic, they’d frequent the bars in the little town. And it was in these places that she saw a deteriorating situation—an increase in hostilities between Pollock and the police. On one occasion, she saw him directly insult the chief of police. He was instructed to apologize. She was there the next day for the apology that Pollock offered, which she described as so false it was worse than not apologizing at all. Ruth knew what had eluded her fellow St. Louisan, Nathalie, back in Stockton—trouble with the police was chronic with him, he couldn’t seem to help himself. Ruth went back to California, at first pleading with him to stop playing what she saw as a dangerous game, especially in Mexico.
A few weeks later, the news reached her, that on April 7th, 1972, he had died. She went back as soon as she could, but she was not in time to question anyone. He had already been buried. The reason listed on the death certificate was “cardiac syncope,” and she believed it had been rushed through by the local doctor. She had a key to Pollock’s place and there she found what she said was the damning evidence. The little house had been completely trashed, but not (intentionally) by him. His papers and books were everywhere and among the whirlwind of broken glass and bottles, papers, books, there was a tremendous amount of “sign” (bodily fluids), and again all over the floors and the bathroom. She was sure that he had pushed things too far with the Mexican police, and that he’d come to this violent end by poison—they’d poisoned his pot supply that he kept on the porch, or his booze or both. They’d rushed the inquest into his death in order to cover it up, and when she tried to ask about it, she was discouraged heavily by the authorities.
At the time she delivered this story she was drinking quite a lot of wine, and was misty eyed with her thoughts. It was late at night on the houseboat. I felt unequipped to make a judgement about it, but did believe that Ruth cared about him, and was one of the few that stuck by him to the end when he was falling apart. I can’t really think of why she’d make such a fabrication. She believed that this terrible thing had happened, and furthermore, was furious that he’d brought it upon himself.
Ruth was a St. Louis native and she knew both Pollock and my mother from early days. She told me also of a memory from sunnier times, well before Ajijic and this purported tragic end. It must have been soon after their marriage, and they were back in St. Louis, probably to have a celebration with my grandmother, Maizee Rue, who would have missed the perfunctory wedding which had taken place at the registrar’s office in New Hampshire. Ruth ran into them at the St. Louis zoo. She said, “They had just gotten married and joked that the zoo was their honeymoon. They were the most beautiful couple I have ever seen.” When I think of that, I see them, exactly. My mother in one of the cotton cinch waist dresses she liked, the top with spaghetti straps. Her hair soft around her face like Jackie O. Heels, tan, no stockings, nails perfect ovals light pink. My birth father, muscular and tan, flushed with drink, his hand around her waist, a cigarette dangling from his fingers, his brown wavy hair streaked with sun. They see Ruth at the elephant pen. They share a fabricated little joke, that they ducked out of their own wedding reception, which represents their collective refusal to do what’s expected of them. Ruth is dazzled and they, used to dazzling, barely notice. They thank her for her well wishes. They walk down the path, my mother’s skirt swinging, my father’s stride ambling and sure in the suit his mother bought for him. He flicks his cigarette end at the ground near a trash bin, and pulls my mother closer.
