Sex, lies and oil on canvas

SEEK MY FACE By John Updike 276 pages Available at National Book Store

John Updike who left behind some 35 novels, memoirs, poetry, short story and essay collections when he died last year possibly never had an unpublished thought in his life. But one of the prolific writer’s abiding interests was art: Updike studied graphic design at Oxford early in life, supposedly to become a cartoonist.

This perhaps serves as the fuel for 2002’s Seek My Face, Updike’s novel about Hope Chafetz, a septuagenarian female artist who is interviewed in her Vermont home by a young online journalist named Kathyrn. It’s old world meets new, but the real pulse here is that Hope is not-so-loosely modeled on Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s wife. So there’s a reflective, sometimes salacious quality to the novel: it reads like a survey course on Modern Art History mixed with a supply of biographical dirt.

Hope talks about her marriage to the muscular, balding, alcoholic abstract expressionist who died in a car crash just like Pollock and she doesn’t spare the details. Well, maybe some, as Hope keeps wandering down flashbacks of their worst arguments, the end of their love life, his ballooning ego and chaotic drinking and how it took a toll on their life together. (She edits some of this from her answers to Kathyrn.) All of this could probably be found in juicier detail in any Jackson Pollock biography; but here Updike is more interested in a character study almost a still life in motion of Hope, a woman who doesn’t exactly grow in complexity over the course of the day-long interview so much as reveal more of herself. In fact, it’s her unchanging nature and art’s durability that’s the point of Seek My Face, and how this nature comes up against nature itself: aging, death, the elements.

But what keeps the pages turning is its gossipy take on Modern Art. We are plunged, through Hope’s memories, into New York of the early 1950s, a post-war period in which artists took up separate camps art was the only politics for them, according to Hope. How did New York become so central to art after WWII, replacing Paris, asks Kathyrn? “To be simple about it, the war had left other countries ruined. The same way we dominated the ’48 Olympics everybody else was still weak with hunger.” Hope talks about how some young artists rejected the Surrealists (“we despised Dali”), the realists like Hopper, and early Abstractionists like Kandinisky. In the background is Zack McCoy, a Midwesterner of modest means, whose paintings Hope is not too crazy about. But he has a “breakthrough” with paint, something tied to the physicality of the artist, the physicality of the times. He flings his paint at the canvas, inspired by Jungian imagery, perhaps. And the resulting threads, dripping with violence and personal expression, are an instant hit. Action painting is born.

The two of them take up in a wood-frame Long Island house with a nearby barn where Zack paints (just like Krasner/Pollock). There, Hope and Zack spar like prizefighters, and the word war revolving around the (alleged) female inability to paint, Zack’s drunken, boorish behavior is uglier than any spattered canvas. (At one point, a drunken Zack slashes paint on one of Hope’s unfinished works, saying “It’ll give them value.”)

At the fore, perhaps, is Updike’s well-known chauvinism, the kind of name-calling meanness that fueled Rabbit Angstrom’s worst tirades. It’s titillating to hear about Zack/Pollock’s affairs and possible homosexual experiences, his disregard for Picasso’s waning work, but it’s actually only an appetizer: the main course is Updike’s take on American art (which, post-WWII, dominated the art world). Hope gives her take on performance art (“It goes against my every sense of what art is. Life is the performance; art is what outlives life.”) At the New York bars in the ‘50s, there is a raging debate about art’s future direction. They reject the socialist realism of Benton, the Americana of Grant Wood, Wyeth. Psychoanalysis is popular, and many artists tap into Freud or Jung for symbols. All these are blind alleys, argues Bernie Nova, a fervent abstractionist: “Self a rag doll, a fetish. The painter’s feelings, personality who cares? Your Surrealist friends are French playboys, playing with Freud, who was playful enough. Who says that being asleep is more profound than being awake? Dreams are a muddle brain-slime. What matters is not the psyche but metaphysics. Penetration into the world mystery; for this the painter’s mind should be as pure as the scientist’s and the philosopher’s.”

Zack’s work fits somewhere in the middle: taking abstraction as far as it can go, yet imbuing it with a carefully controlled trail of “brain-slime.”

While reading Seek My Face, you begin to notice the big elephant in the room: What about Hope’s painting? Do women count for anything in this male-dominated art world? Was Krasner’s work merely derivative of Pollock’s (as some I’ve seen clearly was), or did she have her own breakthrough?

Updike gives her a breakthrough, but not until after decades of living, suffering, subjugating herself to another male artist (Pop artist Guy Holloway, i.e. Andy Warhol with a heterosexual streak). When Zack dies in a car crash in the late ‘50s, Hope sells off his remaining work piece by piece, living off that, but still tentatively painting. She meets up with Holloway in the ‘60s New York art scene. Strangely, Updike makes him straight; they marry, have two kids, then he leaves for a “tight-bummed” younger woman. It’s as though the novelist can only chart art’s forward motion by having a woman on the inside, recording it all. That’s Hope’s role. Holloway (his name also echoes the surface nature of Pop art) has his own place in history: like Warhol, he sees that art as commodity is really the only new art. The symbols of his culture Coke bottles, soap boxes, telephone booths, electric chair images are like the everyday details in Old Dutch Masters’ paintings. Except they’re the only details. Holloway has his NYC loft converted into a studio that attracts young drug users and artists, just like Warol’s Factory (Holloway calls his The Hospice, “the place where art comes to die.”) Hope finds Guy more “an idea man” than an artist, constantly spieling off images and silkscreening them. But Updike clearly thinks Pop art was the final, major chapter in art’s history.

Or was it? When Holloway leaves her, the 50-ish Hope takes up with a businessman named Jerry, a collector of art. (“Was he collecting you?” Kathryn asks, a bit rudely.) Perhaps a moneyman is the appropriate symbol for art’s current state, its current caretaker.

Throughout Seek My Face, Hope struggles with her own identity: Who was she during this whole historical period? Just a Girl Friday? An appendage? A curio to be collected? The non-linear narrative zig-zags from man to man, but after it all, Hope finds a kind of peace and serenity in her life. The last image of Seek My Face (a quote from Psalm 27) is Hope remembering what it was like, as a child, digging for shiny coins hidden by her grandfather behind their sofa cushion. For years, she kept looking for more coins when he wasn’t there; at age 79, at the end of the novel, she considers searching the same sofa cushions, in the same old house, but “fears she will find nothing.”

You can take that as art’s enduring spirit, its ceaseless effort to find the face of God; or merely the fear and trembling of an old woman wracked with doubt in her final years.