interviewer peers at the little gray Sony, holding it nearsightedly close to her face to check if the fresh tape is turning, then replacing it on the old sea-chest, among the brass nailheads. “A church wedding,” she prompts.
Hope bridles at this re-emphasis. “As I said, we could scarcely, in 1945, live together in a rural community like the Flats without a marriage license. You couldn’t even do it in Hollywood, that’s why all those stars like Lana Turner and What’s-her-name—the one with the purple eyes—kept getting married. The locals were suspicious enough of us. They couldn’t understand how Zack earned a living. And in fact he scarcely did—the agreement with Peggy paid him a hundred fifty a month, which was less than the twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week he had been collecting from the Federal Arts Project plus the sixty a month my father had been sending me. That stopped, of course, when we got married. As to the church part, Zack had these touching pockets of conventionality. Maybe he thought it would please me. And actually it did. I got to wear one of my hats.”
“Your work. How much were you painting at that time?”
“Some. By the fall of ’44, I had dropped out of Hochmann and was waitressing at an Italian restaurant, Eugenio’s, south of the Park. Weekends and evenings I tried to paint, but once Zack entered my life there wasn’t much time for myself.”
“He was demanding?”
Hope sighs, feeling this to be tired terrain. “He had been the youngest of five and was like a child in that you had to be paying attention to him every minute; except when he was painting, he had no inner resources. Even when he wasn’t there, you had to keep worrying if he was going to get killed, hit by a car or his neck broken by some guy in a bar he would pick a fight with. He was always picking fights and always losing. It was like his drinking—he was poor at it. My theory was, he had been the runt of his litter and being beaten up reminded him of home. I mean, he came home to it.”
“Or perhaps he thought,” Kathryn says, “that this time he would win.”
Hope is enough accustomed to the subservience of interviewers to be piqued. Does this girl think that, through her research, she knows Zack better than his wife, who steered him up from those Village gutters into greatness?
Kathryn senses Hope’s stiffness and says meekly, “It did happen with his painting. Winning.”
“It did,” Hope concedes. “But then he smashed it all up. He hated success, it seemed tawdry to him. It got him too much out into the open, he felt painfully exposed, though he had thought it was what he wanted.”
“Your painting,” Kathryn says, as if bringing Hope to heel. “Was it abstract at this time, around the time you moved?”
“I kept backsliding, how did you know? Fragments of the city—faces from the restaurant in Little Italy, neon light reflected on the wet pavements, the silhouettes of midtown you saw from the walk-up on East Ninth Street—kept working their way in, through what Hochmann used to call ‘holes’ in the canvas. Zack was contemptuous. ‘What’s this representational shit?’ he’d ask. ‘Who you think you are, Hopper?’ He’d tell me, ‘Let Levine and Ben Shahn do the political cartoons.’ Jack Levine was big before the war and in the ’forties, and Zack had an especial dislike for him, I think because he could do all those Old Master-ish things—draw anatomy, work with shadows and light—that Zack couldn’t do if his life depended on it, any more than he could assemble an evenly lit pseudo-Renaissance tableau like Benton.”
“There was a lot that Zack couldn’t do as you saw him.”
She thinks she knows Zack better and loves him more. “But there was something,” Hope says, “he
could
do, a kind of impacted emotion, a sort of strangled truth dug up from that hardscrabble childhood with that weird, dominating mother. Even Alfred, at the Modern, was
Hope bridles at this re-emphasis. “As I said, we could scarcely, in 1945, live together in a rural community like the Flats without a marriage license. You couldn’t even do it in Hollywood, that’s why all those stars like Lana Turner and What’s-her-name—the one with the purple eyes—kept getting married. The locals were suspicious enough of us. They couldn’t understand how Zack earned a living. And in fact he scarcely did—the agreement with Peggy paid him a hundred fifty a month, which was less than the twenty-three dollars and eighty-six cents a week he had been collecting from the Federal Arts Project plus the sixty a month my father had been sending me. That stopped, of course, when we got married. As to the church part, Zack had these touching pockets of conventionality. Maybe he thought it would please me. And actually it did. I got to wear one of my hats.”
“Your work. How much were you painting at that time?”
“Some. By the fall of ’44, I had dropped out of Hochmann and was waitressing at an Italian restaurant, Eugenio’s, south of the Park. Weekends and evenings I tried to paint, but once Zack entered my life there wasn’t much time for myself.”
“He was demanding?”
Hope sighs, feeling this to be tired terrain. “He had been the youngest of five and was like a child in that you had to be paying attention to him every minute; except when he was painting, he had no inner resources. Even when he wasn’t there, you had to keep worrying if he was going to get killed, hit by a car or his neck broken by some guy in a bar he would pick a fight with. He was always picking fights and always losing. It was like his drinking—he was poor at it. My theory was, he had been the runt of his litter and being beaten up reminded him of home. I mean, he came home to it.”
“Or perhaps he thought,” Kathryn says, “that this time he would win.”
Hope is enough accustomed to the subservience of interviewers to be piqued. Does this girl think that, through her research, she knows Zack better than his wife, who steered him up from those Village gutters into greatness?
Kathryn senses Hope’s stiffness and says meekly, “It did happen with his painting. Winning.”
“It did,” Hope concedes. “But then he smashed it all up. He hated success, it seemed tawdry to him. It got him too much out into the open, he felt painfully exposed, though he had thought it was what he wanted.”
“Your painting,” Kathryn says, as if bringing Hope to heel. “Was it abstract at this time, around the time you moved?”
“I kept backsliding, how did you know? Fragments of the city—faces from the restaurant in Little Italy, neon light reflected on the wet pavements, the silhouettes of midtown you saw from the walk-up on East Ninth Street—kept working their way in, through what Hochmann used to call ‘holes’ in the canvas. Zack was contemptuous. ‘What’s this representational shit?’ he’d ask. ‘Who you think you are, Hopper?’ He’d tell me, ‘Let Levine and Ben Shahn do the political cartoons.’ Jack Levine was big before the war and in the ’forties, and Zack had an especial dislike for him, I think because he could do all those Old Master-ish things—draw anatomy, work with shadows and light—that Zack couldn’t do if his life depended on it, any more than he could assemble an evenly lit pseudo-Renaissance tableau like Benton.”
“There was a lot that Zack couldn’t do as you saw him.”
She thinks she knows Zack better and loves him more. “But there was something,” Hope says, “he
could
do, a kind of impacted emotion, a sort of strangled truth dug up from that hardscrabble childhood with that weird, dominating mother. Even Alfred, at the Modern, was
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