What, Exactly, Do You Mean by "Cheese"? A Story

John Anthony West

This comes as an apology, Alain; writing after all this time. Why have I done nothing before? I don’t know, or, at any rate, am not sure. I have followed your posthumous progress with anger, sometimes with an ironic smile. My desk, as I write, is elbow deep in drivel: articles on you from the major magazines — your delicately executed but huge canvases are sad stuff scaled down and badly reproduced.And the art magazines as well. Several critics have found “unmistakable evidence” that you were going stagnant; that your last paintings, though great, could not conceivably have been carried further. One savant hints that your purely accidental death was not accident but (in some subtle psychological fashion understood only by art critics) the result of an unconscious death wish. I wince to think how some hack may whip your uneventful days into maudlin tragedy, and who knows, it may not be long before you stalk bearded, obsessed, and doomed, doomed, across the Cinemascope screen. Despite all this, I wrote nothing. Then, yesterday your brother, Ronald, called me. A hundred oddly shaped, lopsided bits of memory mesh and form. Form what? Neither biography, study, eulogy, nor epitaph. A little recherche, perhaps; and Ronald’s call becomes my tasteless madeleine.

Ronald. Well, to give Ronald credit, he did hedge before coining to the point. There were several I’m-sure-you’ll-understand’s; an I’d-rather-not-do-this-but-you-see-this-project-of-mine; and it-might-not-seem-like-the-sort-of-thing-you’d-sell-but-it-was-a-joke-and-hell-I-can-take-a-joke.

The gist of this was that Ronald owned a portrait Alain had done of him eleven years ago, and since he needed the money, and since Alain had finally received his deserved recognition (Damn shame, isn’t it? The kid had to get killed first; well, he always lived crazy, but we always knew he had it in him), he, Ronald, wondered how much the painting was worth. He had called me, Alain’s best friend, thinking that I might handle the sale, since he didn’t trust “those pansy guys at the gallery.”

That portrait was Alain’s farewell to his childhood, and thus its background was his own life. He was the second of three children; Ronald was thirteen years his senior, and there was a younger, mentally retarded sister. The family was poor and lived in a borderline slum in the Bronx; formerly there had been some money, but his father, stricken with a bone disease, had been an invalid through all of Alain’s memory. His mother, a well-meaning, none too bright woman, was always on the verge of a breakdown keeping the family alive and respectable. On his mother’s side, the family were Sephardic Jews; on his father’s, a melange of Russian and Polish Jews (Marsh was derived from Mankiewicz).

Marsh had been painting since the age of ten; by fifteen he wanted to be a painter; by seventeen he knew he could be nothing else. The main stumbling block, of course, was Ronald.

“Look, Alain, I can see painting as a hobby, hell, lots of guys in the community paint in their spare time. But painters starve to death, you know that. If you wanted to be a commercial artist I’d say OK; a fellow down the block pulls down ten, twelve thousand a year, but you’ve got to be practical. Sure, I know, you think I’m stuffy—”

Outside of school Alain was attending spiritualist sessions; the religious aspects didn’t interest him, but he was fascinated by telepathy and clairvoyance. It tied in somehow, he felt, with theories of time and space. He was reading a book based on the hypothesis that time is serial but found himself lost at the upper reaches of mathematics. Then, too, he wondered how Vermeer learned to make an object come alive with one spot of light in exactly the right place. Did he learn after practicing with innumerable spots of light, or did he awake one morning possessed with the certain, startling knowledge that he could do something no other painter had done before him?

“And you know how tough it is for the folks here, Alain. The least you could do is get a job after school and kick into the kitty. When I was your age —”

And he wondered why the stony perfection of Piero della Francesca appealed to him more than the sweet grace of Raphael.

“After school I work,” he said.

“What work?”

“I paint.”

“I mean some useful work, hell, when I was your age —”

His mother, at least, had faith in him, but blind faith.

“Believe me, Alain, painters starve.” (Ronald, Alain noticed, was getting fatter.) “Oh, I know, everyone wants to rebel, I did it myself. But you ought to shave that beard off and put on some clean clothes.” (Ronald was balder, too.) “You want people to think that you’re a character?”

The big break had been the scholarship to Barclay; tuition and enough spending money just to scrounge along. It was a women’s college; a few men were accepted each year in the fine arts, but Alain was an immediate pariah. No one, not even the professors, had encountered a student with Marsh’s self-acquired erudition in art, but all he owned in the world were two pairs of jeans, two denim shirts, sneakers, a sweater, and a World War I horse-blanket overcoat — too sloppy to be attractively Bohemian.

Both Polanyi and Makropoulous taught at Barclay. In the composition class, Polanyi ignored Marsh for several weeks, though he spent a good deal of time with the girls. One day he approached and said, “You’re not making paintings, Marsh.” Until then, the girls, dabbling away, had felt squeamish before Marsh’s flaring, sprawling efforts; confidence was restored. But in mid-December Polanyi approached a second time. “Now you’re making paintings, Marsh,” he said.

“You know the chances for painters, Alain. Like betting on the daily double.”

“Polanyi likes my stuff.”

“Who’s Polanyi?”

Marsh gave up.

“All right. We won’t talk about the future. We’ll talk about right now. You live in the house, you eat the food —” It went on until their mother began to cry.

It was Christmas vacation. Alain awoke the next morning very late; the session with Ronald produced a feeling somewhat worse than a hangover. He understood that Ronald’s semilogic had some truth in it —he did live in the house, he did come home drunk — but didn’t Ronald see? God! “Who’s Polanyi?” and just the week before, Barclay had honored Marsh by assigning him a studio; the first freshman ever to be awarded one.

He ate breakfast in silence. After, he packed his few paint-spattered belongings and left the house. When the door clicked shut behind him he knew what he was going to do; go away and stay away. But stay where? He didn’t know. Friends would put him up for a while.

HE FOUND himself on the subway that took him to school. It was foolish; Christmas vacation, and the place would be locked. But when he tried the door it opened. The school was deserted. He walked on tiptoes, though there was no reason for it; he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He stopped often, listening for other footsteps, heard nothing, and took the elevator to the top floor.

He sat on a rickety chair in the middle of the studio and felt his heart pounding. But when the knot in his gut finally untied he found himself reveling in solitude. There were street noises sixteen floors below. And the visceral sounds of the building itself; grumbling plumbing and steam gasps and sighs. Thin snow whipped past the windows.

The painting he had finished a week ago looked muddy and inept, but the next would be better. He was alone, not lonely, but self-sufficient. For the first time he felt that surge of power that concentrated simultaneously in head, heart, and hands.

And as he sat, envisioning the paintings he would one day create, his breath blowing fume animals into the air, he thought of Ronald. To his surprise, without rancor; a puffy, frightened little man with a mortgage and a belly; overnight the stronger elder brother had become an object of contempt — worse, an object of pity. Yet, had it not been for Ronald the decision to leave home would have been put off — who knows? — until graduation, and he saw with glee that Ronald had been his unwitting benefactor. There, in his studio, he was omniscient. He was, finally, where he belonged.

A battered divan slouched in the corner. Marsh tried it for size. His feet hung over the edge, an errant spring nudged his rib cage, but otherwise it wasn’t bad at all. He weighed the consequences of being caught, but briefly. It was superb, and all, curiously, Ronald’s fault.

There were five days to Christmas; Ronald deserved a present.

Alain cut a three-by-four-foot piece of canvas from the roll and tacked it to the wall; he made some preliminary sketches, then drew on canvas with charcoal. He worked rapidly but with precision; the hand had already been trained to follow the inner eye, and in this case the inner eye saw with delicious clarity.

The portrait would not be abstract; exactly the reverse, representational to the nth degree. He wanted Ronald to say, now that’s what I call painting, none of those blots and wiggles, that’s real, just like a photograph. Van Eyck with a good dash of Dali.

He worked, and stopped only when he had gone as far as he could for the day. A day to dry, a day to complete it, another day for touching up, and it would be ready by Christmas.

He stood back and regarded the painting with a critical eye. Precisely what he had had in mind. His brother, Ronald, emerged from the oils; balding, a trifle more obese than he was in reality. He stood stark naked in his Great Neck living room and stared dully at the hideous ceramic ashtray next to the fetus-shaped lamp.

IT WAS the last time Marsh took out His minor aggravations on canvas. He never regarded art, his own or anyone else’s, with sententious reverence; jokes creep into many of his paintings (the one reproduced in so many magazines, called “Blah”), but the portrait was the last he painted as a joke. Irritation, boredom, his hopeless poverty were reserved for hilarious collages and drawings, and for letters.

Marsh, twenty-six years old: “Brussels is a great town. No kidding. It’s wild. The Philadelphia of Europe. I’m broke as usual and running up debts impossible to pay. I don’t care anymore. Or I wouldn’t care if the art supply store would give me credit. They won’t. I’m out of paint, canvas, inspiration, energy, and food. I know four people here. Everyone I meet is a fink. They don’t smoke, they don’t drink, they don’t horse around. All they do is sit around and talk about ART.

I spread the gospel. I tell them that in New York painters would rather get drunk and be millionaires. I don’t know why I’m here. The only places to be are Paris and New York. I can’t afford either of them. I can’t afford Brussels. Kathryn is in her eighth month and can’t work anymore so our only money comes from those stupid translations. Now I’m in the movies though. Last week I was a mob. This week I’m a type in St. Germain. Five bucks an afternoon and carfare. I was depressed as hell about the kid, but now I’m used to the idea. There’s a foundation helping us. They were founded to give aid to fleeing French aristocrats during the revolution, but they ran out of aristocrats. So now they help escaped convicts, unwed mothers, psychopaths, and artists. They came up to the studio the other day. Very sympathetic. Said no one could live like this. We agreed. So there we were expecting tins of ham, and caviar, and beer, and pretzels, and you know what they sent? Brooms, and mops, and soap, and window putty, and floor wax so we could get the place looking decent for the baby. Also some baby clothes. No whiskey.

“If I had some paint, the paintings would be different. The stuff in the show was the logical conclusion of what I started in Jviza. The show looked damn good, by the way. Even if nothing sold. Anyway, afterward I knew I’d have to do something else. I’m at the point where I know I can do anything I want with the brush. I sat around for a while wondering what to do with the brush. I was tempted to do the obvious. I saw that if I went on refining. . . . Hell, it sounds stupid trying to put it into words. The last things I did were different from what you’ve seen; stronger but awkward and harder to look at. When are you coming back to Europe? You ought to sec the stuff before I burn it to keep us warm in the winter.

“You know what I have? Piles. It doesn’t surprise me. I can’t afford a doctor, so each day I offer a candle to St. Awdry. I discovered her in a book on medieval magic. She’s the patron saint of people suffering from piles. It’s the truth. I’m starting a cult. . . .”

Marsh’s letters were works of art in themselves; scraps of wrapping paper folded into envelopes, half collage, half drawing, crawling with Marsh animals. The above letter boasted a scraggly, indignant behemoth on ice skates accurately labeled by Marsh “The Shaggy, Short-trunked, Saber-toothed, Ice-skating Elephant.” Some time ago I brought a sheaf of letters to Metzger at the gallery, and he offered me a hundred dollars apiece for them. (What do you think of that, eh. Marsh?)

The paintings in the show that Alain refers to closed out what critics call his Garden Period. Gigantic, emotional, elusive canvases; kings and queens enthroned in running glaucous sea bottoms; impossible birds flickering in thickets of glaze; flying machines like primeval bats; luminous cats in their catdoms; nightscapes browbeaten by moonlight. As he progressed and his control over technique became absolute, the actual figures disappeared, but their essences somehow remain and form, vanish, and form anew under a surface of living color.

MARSH lived happily in his studio haven. After school he painted. In those days his capacity was limitless; he could paint fourteen, sixteen hours at a stretch and finish exhausted but elated. When he forgot to eat for a day or two, he’d awake ravenous in the middle of the night and, no matter what the weather, midwinter, would wrap himself in his horse-blanket overcoat and walk ten blocks to an all-night Nedick’s. Each furtive exit and entrance was an adventure, and walking the dark deserted corridors he was prince of some desolate, ultramodern underworld.

But one blue Monday he was taking a midnight shower, and, forgetting himself, was singing. His archenemy, the Polish washerwoman, heard the caterwauling (“I had her schedule figured, she should have been on the tenth floor by midnight”). A Slavic stubbornness conquered a Slavic superstitious fear (the woman had been ghost-ridden for a year — those were footsteps she heard slipping down vacant corridors; that was the water running and the toilet flushing in bathrooms occupied by no one), and she went to investigate. Gingerly she opened the door, peered into the steam.

“Who dot dere?”

Marsh’s heart sank.

His only hope was to win the hag to his side. Accordingly, he stuck his long, bearded, hooknosed, soap-streaming face out of the shower and smiled a winning, vulpine smile at the woman. She took one look at him, shrieked, knocked over her wash pail (Marsh remembered that it clattered an interminably long time down the marble corridor — a tinny note of doom), and fled.

In vain did Marsh explain to the dean. It hadn’t been Alain Marsh taking a shower at midnight but some other student who looked just like him. Marsh had been at an all-night movie on Forty-second Street. There was some talk of expulsion, but his record showed a neat picket fence of A’s broken only twice by filigree B’s. Polanyi and Makropoulous put in a good word. Finally even his stipend was restored.

It was, however, the end of the only security Marsh ever knew and the beginning of a nomadic existence from garret to hovel to loft; a life in places where, with few exceptions, no one but Marsh would consent to live.

There was a reeking, leaking barn of a place without heat or running water, in the shadow of the West Side Drive, redolent of the slaughterhouses. Alain took a perverse pride that year — junior year — in being the only resident of New York to suffer from chilblains. Only later did he realize that for a dollar he could have bought an old coal stove; even he could have afforded coal, and stayed warm. It never occurred to him.

Alain was twenty-three when I first saw him. He had just left his first wife and was brooding in a bar called Clean Domingo’s (on the Paseo de Vara de Bey, on the island of Iviza, a sort of sunny Siberia forty miles south of Majorca). He was a painter, obviously; he had paint all over him, but Marsh overdid it; the other painters I knew looked like bums or stockbrokers. But Marsh! Over six feet tall and excruciatingly thin; his face was dramatically elongated, high-checkboned, and strong; a fascinating mess of highlights and pocks of shadow; a face gouged, rather than chiseled, out of pale, rough metal. His nose was thin, immense, and hooked; his hair, jet black, curled over his collar; a pointed Vandyke accentuated the hatchet face. His eyes were alarming — incongruously pale, a copper color; visionary eyes, gentle, obsessed, and focusing slightly (weirdly) askew. His hands were thin-boned, lumpyknuckled, veined, and gnarled beyond his age, and far too long. His feet obeyed the same law of misproportion (he wore a 14 AA shoe). He was twenty-three but could have passed for thirtyfive. He looked like a shabby El Greco Christ.

We didn’t meet for several weeks, and then, one day, we started a conversation (Marsh mooched a cigarette — he was living on thirty dollars a month). I was invited to the studio, and we became friends.

Michelangelo produced towering rages, Raphael was a notorious libertine, Piero di Cosimo was a recluse and lived on hard-boiled eggs, Van Gogh, that biographer’s darling, cut off his ear, Gauguin cooperatively ran off to Tahiti. What shall I say. Alain, that is amusing, bizarre, or telling?

Once, broke in New York, he put on dark glasses, painted a sign BLIND, and went begging in the streets.

And there is the story of how Anderson ate the pot. That was in Brussels. A well-meaning friend had given Marsh a rabbit for Christmas dinner, but the rabbit arrived a week in advance, and in the interval it hopped about in the company ot two cats and a turtle named Marvin. It tore through unconscionable amounts of lettuce and lelt large deposits of buckshot about. He was christened Anderson, and when the eleventh hour chimed neither Alain nor his wife had the heart to kill him. Anderson became part of the family and went his way, eating voraciously.

Marsh, at the time, was trying his hand at horticulture and had several window boxes of hashish ready to harvest. But one night, after a few beers, he returned to find Anderson slumped in a corner and his proud crop cropped to a pitiful stubble. He was livid. “Now we eat the bastard,”he shouted. But when he placed Anderson on the kitchen table his sentiments got the better of him.

“Who can murder a rabbit in a state of euphoria?”

Anderson slept it off — it took three days — and he remained.

Then there is the time Marsh and I fell down the stairs in Amsterdam.

Iviza palled on Marsh, despite the prices; it was too hot, too bright; there were merely contrasts, no degrees; the sky was too blue, the houses too white, the land too dry. He needed surroundings he liked, or lacking that, surroundings he could ignore. During the summer he had had a brief affair with a Dutch girl, and so he made up his mind to hitch to Amsterdam.

The trip took six days, and he arrived improbably at five in the morning (a truck from Breda) absolutely penniless; his last few francs, destined for a loaf of bread, had gone for a beer the day before. He found his way to the girl’s house, but she was with someone else.

It was a typical Marsh situation. He rummaged through his pockets for the hundredth time hoping to find money he had overlooked. There was nothing there. He sat down by a canal and went to sleep hoping that when he awoke something good would have happened. It didn’t.

He had some Dutch friends, met in Iviza, and got through a few weeks. Then an atypical stroke of luck saved him.

The Amsterdam Municipal Museum was running an exposition for paintings by artists living in Amsterdam; there was a stipulation that entrance depended upon at least a two-year residence in the city. Marsh ignored the stipulation, borrowed money for wood, stretched three vast paintings, and with the help of a friend, carted them to the museum. He simply left the canvases there with his address and walked out without speaking.

Three weeks later the judging was over, Marsh had heard nothing, and he was desperate. He had run out of credit and welcome. He went to the museum feeling that he had reached the end of his very short rope. Only two of the three paintings were stacked against the wall. The friend spoke to an official while Alain waited, unwilling to allow himself the luxury of hoping — but a painting had been sold for 1500 guilders. He ran to the bathroom and was sick.

He paid off his debts, got himself and his friends drunk, found an enormous studio, bought an acre of canvas, and settled down to work.

But by December: “I know all the young painters here. They had their first show at the age of eleven. By thirty you’re an old man. Everyone is supported by the government. Everyone is serious about ART. I’m drunk most of the time and bored the rest. Also about out of money. Why don’t you come up and share expenses, plenty of room in the studio.”

Iviza was getting tedious, and it was cold (warm Mediterranean winters are a myth). I went to join Alain.

The studio was a converted machine loft, lacking heat and hot water. Marsh bought a secondhand coal stove and erected a labyrinthine but ramshackle system of rusty pipes that carried a portion of the smoke from the room. The stove (bête noire) would glow cherry red for a time, raising the room temperature to eighty-five, and then would extinguish itself without warning and let winter blast through the ill-fitting but spacious windows.

The studio’s only compensation was that it was half a block from the zoo. When the weather was nice we used to sneak in (it cost a guilder fifty — paying for a zoo was outrageous), and we spent much time watching an animal called Mitchell’s wombat.

So Amsterdam was dull, I wasn’t working, Marsh was, we were both short of money, our only luxury was a nightly bottle of barely potable Dutch whiskey, and even had we been wealthier, there was nothing to do. The city, except for the brothels and bars along the Zecdijk, closed tight as Cromwell’s England at midnight. Marsh met the situation with one of his most delightful animals: the Amstel Monster, a genial, doltish dinosaur who emerged, dripping, from the Amstel at midnight and in immense wooden shoes went plodding the streets of Amsterdam, poking its serpentine head into snack bars in search of war me worst — a tasteless Dutch sausage served tepid — the only item in its diet. The Amstel Monster, since he only emerged after midnight, had never been seen by a Dutchman. As I look back, the exploits of this amiable saurian occupied an inordinate portion of our misspent time.

One evening, our bottle gone, sitting around morosely, we noticed a name painted on the wall. Neither of us knew to whom the name belonged, so we went to pay a visit.

We were received with cool cordiality — it was one in the morning. We insisted upon another bottle of whiskey, and our host consented to join in the fun. Soon I was on a conducted tour through art books. The owner of the name on the wall was a student, and he illuminated his commentary with notes cribbed from his professor (“Notice how Chagall uses this recurrent symbol in the upper left-hand corner of his paintings”). Marsh, meanwhile, was trying to seduce the girl friend. Counterpointing the Chagall lecture, he staunchly maintained that Dutch women, all Dutch women, were sexually illiterate, and he dared her to prove herself the exception. A point was reached where even Chagall could restrain our host no longer. Alain was about to rape the girl. We were ordered to leave.

Alain was incapable of walking, so I tried to support him. We navigated three stairs successfully — narrow, impossible Dutch stairs, steep as Jacob’s ladder — and then my legs gave way. We crashed down the full flight and ended in an inert lump at the bottom.

Doors flew open. There was a storm of angry Dutch. I heard our erstwhile host explaining — not without pride — that two drunk, foreign artists had fallen down the stairs. We discovered that all bones were intact; somehow we managed the other three flights without mishap and made it back to the studio — neither of us remembered how. And that is the story of how Marsh and I fell down the stairs in Amsterdam.

Anecdotes! But Marsh knew better. Once, both of us numb, bored, half drunk, cold, too lazy to light the stove, sooty, he broke a silence of several hours. “You know,” he said, “if we ever make the grade and someone comes along in twenty years and says, ‘Boy! You were in Iviza and Amsterdam and Europe in the fifties, that must have been great,’I’ll tell him the truth, you know. I’ll tell him it was lousy.”

MARSH was never quite unknown, never quite ignored. His talents were too striking to allow him to live in absolute obscurity; happy events always teetered on the brink of occurrence, but then, always, some ill wind blew them back into the realm of daydreams.

Who can say what would have happened had his opportune death not given the drama-doting world the chance to exploit him? I believe, though, that the New York show would have brought him a measure of success. Certainly it would not have sold out (as it did), nor would the paintings have doubled and trebled in value as soon as they left the gallery (as they did), but it is safe to suppose that, were he alive today, he would be painting away, financially safe for a while, and the owner of an incipient reputation. The word was out. Through that curious telepathy whereby a painter or writer is suddenly and simultaneously “recognized” everywhere (though he may have been doing admirable work for decades), the art world was ready for Alain.

Marsh spent four years in Europe and during that time had expositions in Amsterdam, Brussels, London, and Düsseldorf. Occasionally he sold a painting. Collectors came to see his work and were impressed, but when they learned that he was still in his early twenties they held off buying, hoping that the next one would make the initial big step (Marsh never got accustomed to being considered an investment). He couldn’t buy paint, or milk for the baby, but encouragement always poured in from one quarter or another.

Often potential buyers came directly to his studio, sent by one of his galleries, and Alain botched these sales single-handed.

I was present at one of the fiascoes. In Amsterdam, a man who worked for Time-Life came up to see the paintings, a fat, colorless man, very friendly. Marsh, of course, was drunk. Our visitor was first visibly taken aback by Alain — a wildeyed, bearded apparition — and then by the studio itself. And, it is true, for the uninitiated, the first emotion experienced upon entering the studio was shock. You walked up four flights, opened a door, and one step took you out of the familiar world, into Alain Marsh’s.

Our Time-Life man looked about, obviously at a loss. Yes, he thought he was interested in buying a painting, in his own small way he had been collecting paintings, and he had heard Alain’s paintings were large but hadn’t expected this. Marsh showed him some smaller paintings. It wasn’t going well. Our Time-Life man thought he saw the “message.” Marsh winced and showed him a portfolio of drawings and collages; there was a cold pall as prices were quoted. Our visitor retreated before Alain’s potent breath.

A series of collages hung on the wall made of scraps of inane advertisements and blatantly absurd newspaper headlines and pieces of junk that amused Alain; all held together with suns, splashes, lines, and colors. One was “Cheese,” a second “More Cheese,” a third “Still More Cheese,” a fourth “Further Cheese.”

Our Time-Life man studied these for quite a time and then turned to Alain in perplexity. “Tell me,” he said, “I am just a businessman, and I don’t know much about art — that is, modern art — though I know what I like, and perhaps it is not right to ask this sort of question about art, but you will excuse me, I hope, since, as I say, I am just a businessman and 1 don’t really know much about art, but what I would like to ask — what I would like to ask, if you will excuse me, is: What, exactly, do you mean by ‘Cheese’?”

Marsh issued him out of the studio with a glazed smile.

And once, while he was still in New York, a cooperative gallery was interested in him, and a committee visited the studio, headed by a woman Marsh later caricatured as a hysterically grinning giraffe. The committee examined the paintings. Marsh slouched in the middle of the room.

“You paint thin,”the woman proclaimed, finally. “Most painters today paint thick, but you paint thin. I’ve never seen an abstract painter who painted so thin.” Alain stayed drunk for a week.

Before he graduated from college, he was taken in hand by Wilfred Levy, his professor in medieval art history; dilettante, privately wealthy, amateur art collector and dealer. For the first few years, when finances reached nil. Levy came through, and he initiated a contract with Benjamin Shoat, the Philadelphia collector. Over a period of three years, for six hundred dollars a year. Alain handed over ninety paintings and innumerable drawings and collages.

“What can I do? I can’t live without the bastard. Per square yard I’m not getting the price of corduroy.”

To compensate for the humiliating contract with Shoat he proceeded to spite himself with others who might be interested in his work. He calculated the price a good New York gallery would charge, subtracted the gallery’s commission, and quoted the result as a firm price. Unless he was desperate he wouldn’t condescend to haggle.

“Goddamn, but I’m sick of being broke. When I was a student they patted me on the back and stuffed my pockets with money and the paintings stank. Now that I’m making paintings the millionaires come up and look and then go out for a beer. Oh, hell, it isn’t even that I mind being poor. Since the Renaissance, painters have always been poor. And l don’t mind being a freak. Since the impressionists, painters have always been freaks. But I don’t like being a poor freak.”

Marsh, broke, in Amsterdam.

Of course, the thought of a grant occurred to him, but he couldn’t face the applications, the requisite insincerities, and the ignominious interviews. And his chances, at best, were slim; he lacked the fame for the more coveted prizes. He wasn’t mediocre enough for the others.

So it went. Everyone waited for someone to recognize Marsh; meanwhile, he worked on, in that state of exalted sobriety romantically misnamed obsession. There had to be a reason to paint, and Marsh knew his reason. In the beginning, at twenty, he painted to justify himself to the world; then, more self-assured, he painted to justify himself to himself; an artist finally, he painted to justify his own endless and ineluctable isolation. “The show looked great, no kidding. People loved the stuff. For all the wrong reasons. Not one single critic said anything intelligent. No one bought anything. Christ, John, I feel like a Martian. I say it’s just Brussels, but New York would probably be the same.”

He broke with Levy, and even that pitiful six hundred was lost (rent, materials for half a year).

“Got a letter from Levy. Listen to this. About possible show in New York.

“ ‘Alain, let me urge you to try and do good work.’ (What’s he think I try to do — bad work?) ‘Try to scale down your thinking, there is no reason why your painting ideas must be on so grand a scale, and you must make your small canvases self-contained and self-explanatory, and not fragments of large paintings. . . .

“ ‘As for a show in New York, I do hope you will not be too disappointed when I tell you that at present the indications are not at all favorable. I have spoken with several galleries but as yet have found none willing to pay the expenses for an unknown painter. As I have told you many times, and I wish you would be reasonable about this, it would be much easier if you would change your mind and agree to finance your first one-man show.’ (NEVER!) ‘You honestly can’t expect a gallery to take risks until you have established some sort of reputation for yourself. And you understand, certainly, that with paintings as large as yours, merely finding a gallery to hang them is difficult, and frankly Alain, good though your work may be, and you know I consider you a painter of exceptional promise, I have not dared approach the top galleries, for I do not feel that you have as yet achieved your painterly identity. . . .’

“My painterly identity! Jesus Christ! What the hell is my painterly identity! You’re a writer, you tell me. I told him what to do with himself, Shoat, and all the ninety paintings they stole from me. If I don’t sell anything in this London show (one aquarelle, one small painting), I’ve burned my last bridge. I don’t care. And that’s from Levy, damn it. He’s supposed to be intelligent. He’s supposed to know paintings. Sometimes I agree with the New York Junkmen. The question isn’t why should you build a bidet into your painting, or why should you make a sculpture out of old tin cans and inner tubes, but why shouldn’t you. Why the hell not? Tomorrow I hope I know why not again.”

DURING his brief life, Alain managed to be married three times, and I now parry imaginary enemies, that horde of buffoons who think painting is merely chromatic copulation. Then, too, I shudder to think of what may bump and grind across the Technicolor sands of his time. We come, inevitably, to the women in Marsh’s life.

His first wife, Charlyne, he met at a party (“I knew it was a mistake — how could anyone seriously marry a girl named Charlyne?”); a Village type with a remote expression, a curiously disconnected manner of speech, and long black hair. Marsh invited her to come to the studio to model for him; she agreed, appeared the next day, and immediately disrobed. Despite that most ancient of painter’s ploys, Alain had honestly wanted to draw her, not necessarily in the nude (“I was serious about painting her but, Christ, not that serious”).

Charlyne moved into the studio. A month later her mother began making trouble, so Marsh married her.

After a month he was bored with her; after three months he took a positive dislike to her. “She’d sit there with that way-out expression, and when I asked her what she was thinking about she’d say: ‘What was I thinking about, oh, I was thinking about — the moon.’

“I thought that was weird but sort of nice. But she was lying, damn it. I found out. She wasn’t thinking about the moon. She wasn’t thinking about anything. She never thought about anything. She was the dumbest goddamn girl I ever met.” It lasted a year.

Though Alain was a lone wolf, possessed by his work, he was a miserable bachelor. Obvious reasons aside, he was incapable of caring for himself. Wash a pair of socks? Sweep the floor? Cook a meal? Unthinkable. After three womanless months his studio was an Augean stable, and Marsh a gaunt efhgy of himself.

He was at his worst with beautiful women (the only ones he admired). Either, feeling the sudden overpowering need to find someone who spoke his own language, he confounded her with talk (unchecked Marshian was a slangy, chaotic, incredibly learned torrent of words); or else, bolstered by a bottle, he decided to forgo the tedious preliminaries and jumped on top of the girl. Yet, had he been capable of practicing the art of seduction, he would have been successful. Women, especially pretty women, were fascinated by that cross between scarecrow and prophet, but he never knew how to take advantage of it. And he could never understand how lesser men and inferior painters found such charming wives and mistresses. It was, perhaps, his only serious naivete.

His second wife, Kathryn, was English; one of the plain, quiet girls who rescued him, cared for him, believed in him, loved him, and whom he tolerated in return. When he left Europe for the Caribbean, she remained with his son.

Marsh told me once (very drunk) that he had been in love once, but I know nothing of the girl except that he never slept with her and, as he said, attempting a shrug, almost everyone else did.

NEWS of the recently redicovered island of Escondite sounded, to Marsh, like the cavalry bugles. By that time he had had four expositions and no money, and he had reached the point where he honestly no longer cared whether people saw his paintings. It no longer mattered that his work might be stacked in oblivion forever; what mattered was the accomplishment. Reports told him that Escondite, though primitive and remote, was incredibly cheap. It was enough. Somehow he scraped up the fare.

By then he had left his lovely, sensual gardens behind. From a painter of gardens he became a painter of jungles; beauty was there, but now ugliness as well; joy became ecstasy and gloom became horror.

Escondite was all he had hoped for — almost free, and the European galleries made an occasional sale to keep him in materials. His studio was an abandoned fortress, and at last he painted the gigantic canvases he dreamed of. twenty, thirty, forty feet long.

At one point (the worst in his life) he knew that he had achieved what he wanted. He had attained zenith and nadir; the next step was Nirvana and a negation of painting. It took a month of purest agony before he realized that at that point, at zenith and nadir, there was infinity of quality. He would repeat the same painting endlessly, endlessly improving. Monet had done it, and Bonnard. He picked up his brush and went to work.

And he was happy, living under a blazing sun, in a ghost town. His work from that period is filled with feral suns and erotic moons; his jungle is a green phoenix, rising from its steaming ashes.

Marsh was dancing on the high wire. True, the arena was empty; and so no one saw that what his paintings said was a desperate Yea.

I have the story of his death from Suzanne. (Her book will be out soon, about her life with Alain, called I Cried Every Morning.) Sweet Sue, his third wife. I could tell it in less time in my words, but I prefer hers.

“This fellow, you know, Paulding, the one who writes guidebooks, came there, he heard about it somewhere and was going to do an article or something, anyway it turned out that he was an art collector, so I told Alain, for God’s sake the least you can do is talk to him and ask him up to the studio and Alain said leave me alone I’m busy. So I went to see him myself and brought him up to the studio and he went wild about the paintings and Alain quoted him some ridiculous price and I tried to say Christ, Alain be sensible for once in your life but this Paulding didn’t care. He bought two of them right on the spot and of course after that you couldn’t talk to Alain for a week he was so drunk, he was a complete manic-depressive anyway.

“Then everything calmed down but after a month along comes this let ter from Paulding and what does he say but that he showed the paintings to Metzger at the gallery and that Metzger had heard of Alain anyhow from someone in Europe but after seeing Paulding’s paintings he wanted to give Alain a show, all expenses paid and a contract, and was Alain interested. Well you know everyone thinks Alain didn’t care about success, you should have seen him throw people out of the studio and he wouldn’t talk about art with anyone, not even with me, but when he got this letter he got all excited and went to this kooky bar to get drunk. So I told him look Alain you’ve been drunk practically every day for months and it isn’t good for you and I was getting sick and tired of it and wasn’t going to put up with it for much longer. Well, all due respect but our marriage was on the rocks anyway. I mean, Alain was a great painter. I wouldn’t have married him if I didn’t think he was a great painter, but he wasn’t a great human being, he only wanted me for my body, and I said if you get drunk don’t expect to find me here to take care of you when you get back but he left anyhow. Naturally he got blind and when they saw him last he was staggering up the road to the studio singing dirty songs. Then I don’t know what happened, he must have passed out, right on the road, and he got run over. People said I should have gone along with him but he always got drunk and managed to get home, I mean you couldn’t say it was my fault.”

“Did he die instantly?" I asked, after a time.

“I think so but I don’t know, I mean they didn’t find him until the next morning so nobody’s sure. I thought that he was angry at me and was staying the night out on purpose.”

“It was a hit-and-run accident?” I asked. “The son of a bitch ran him over and just left —”

“God, no. It was Victor who did it, he wouldn’t do a thing like that, he felt awful when he found out, he didn’t even know he hit anything, I mean Alain was lying there —”

“How do you know?” 1 asked. “Maybe he thought he could get away with it. Damned easy to make excuses the day after. When you’re caught.”

She made a slightly contemptuous sound — tongue clucked against the front of the upper palate. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know that island. Everybody knows everybody. Nobody could get away with it. Besides, Victor’s was the only car there.”

What could I say to that, Alain? I said, “Oh.”