As a parent, Judith was a passionate advocate, never abdicating an inch of her ferocious scrutiny of our lives until illness made that scrutiny impossible. But what she advocated was paradoxical: freedom, and responsibility for the results of our own choices. She debunked custodial authority, as my father debunked painterly authority. An example: my first chance to smoke pot came in her presence, when I was eleven. I’d been sitting with a group of her late-night friends around our kitchen table when a joint was produced and lit. One of the guests, a newcomer, a man (I mean, he was probably twenty-one or twenty-two; he wouldn’t impress me as a man
now
) seemed surprised she didn’t object to my presence—titillated too. Raising the stakes to provoke her response, he passed the joint to me.
“He’ll make his own decision,” my mother announced, with pride. It was a declaration that dictated its own truth. She bet right; I passed the joint along, unpuffed. I saved my own first drug experiences for late nights with my peers, instead of hers, a couple of years later. Fate then robbed me of my chance to smoke my mother’s drug of choice, and my own, with Judith. But I grasped my options. And my stance toward drugs, inscribed in that moment, was her testament: no right and wrong outside the user’s (or refuser’s) personal sense of rightness or wrongness. The only certain wrong at my mother’s table was the hippie’s hypocritical gesture, his drug prurience. And, with my help, she’d put him in his place.
I joined the drawing group in the year before my mother’s death, and attended sporadically for a year or so after. In this same period I applied to Music and Art High School, got in, and went. I’d drawn and painted since before I could remember (and I would carry on for a while after my focus had shifted to narrative, to film, comics, and fiction). But at thirteen I wanted to be my dad in the most literal way.
I was also a fake, being thirteen. At the Thursday night meetings of the group I drew but also soaked in the scene. Ever eager for talk to resume, I hated the long poses, rooting most of all for that moment when someone would go around the corner to the German delicatessen for beer, soda, and imported chocolate cookies. I felt watchful, but I’d be flattering myself to claim I was a fly on the wall. The truth is I strolled around between poses as everyone did, making quasi-astute comments on the grown-ups’ sketches.
You’d think I was taken with the bodies. I kept a partition, though, between my typically churning curiosity and this sober feast of blatant nudity all laid out before me. I was sure the kind of women’s bodies I ravished in my mind’s eye had nothing in common with the models’ bodies to which I had regular viewing access, dumb as that sounds. In fact, I entertained crushes on a couple of the women in the drawing group, who never stepped out of their clothes. They were alive to my imagination. The naked ladies shed a light that blinded.
Encouraging me, my father also inadvertently funded a grotesquely exuberant ego. When I was fifteen, my mother dead for less than a year, I said something that upset him. My father and I were walking together, down Nevins Street, in daylight. I was bragging, I think, about the quality of my figure drawing, when I suggested that I was ready for a show. An exhibition of my drawings.
I got as far as asking whether his own gallery would be interested. The work I had in mind was done in the drawing group, a series of brightly colored pastels on thick white boards, which were in fact the discarded centers of picture mats, salvaged from some framer’s shop, in the jackdaw manner of both my father’s studio and his carpentry workshop.
He stopped us on the sidewalk. “Are you serious?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you really think you’re ready, Jonathan?”
I’d located that rarity, my father’s open temper. It was as though I’d probed for the limit of his antiauthoritarian ethos, and found it: an ape may grope a monolith, or a cat look at a king, but a child was not yet an artist. I think all of Richard Lethem’s training, his degrees, his Fulbright, the pride of his guild, reared in him at that moment. The look on his face then seemed to encompass a disbelief in all that living had cost this artist, since the journey from West Broadway and Kansas City to Brooklyn, and from professordom to carpentry. Most of all in the unfathomable loss of his wife, that champion of his painter’s prerogatives, his painter’s days— and the mother of this damnable stripling.
The first question I remember asking about my father’s painting is: “Why are the drips there?” I asked it of my mother. I knew it wasn’t impossible to neaten up the drips; I’d seen my father’s care in stretching a canvas, stippling a perfect pen-and-ink daffodil for an announcement of my sister’s birth, or grouting tile work.
My mother’s explanation was partly tautological. She told me that in paintings, drips were good. They gave evidence of the painter’s hand at work—well, they sure do, I thought. Rather than offer words like
immediacy
or
expressionist
to an eight-year-old, she tried an analogy: the paint drips were like the squeak of acoustic guitar strings audible in recordings of the folksingers we loved to play in that house—Phil Ochs, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger. Once she pointed them out I wasn’t sure I liked the guitar squeaks either. But her comparison has never been completely out of my mind since.
Seven or eight years later I was an adherent of what seemed to me dripless, squeakless art. The aforementioned icons of alienation— Kubrick, Borges, and Rod Serling. I was into punk, but not messy punk: I liked the Ramones, and Devo, and Talking Heads; above all I identified with David Byrne’s grooming. When no one was looking I sold my mother’s old Jimi Hendrix and Delaney and Bonnie LPs, which no one was playing now anyway. For my father’s birthday I gave him a monograph on Magritte, a painter I knew he regarded as slick and illustrational. The gift was a heavy-handed suggestion that he ought to reconsider everything, come over to the glossily paranoid and solipsistic side of life before it was too late, as though only I knew where the action was.
I was utterly the product of his and my mother’s sensibility, of course, but I desperately needed to convert it into something unrecognizable as such, to my father and myself. So I poured my graphic talents into hand-drawn comic books, my neophyte writing into science fiction, aspirations calculated to fly under the radar of my father’s generationally typical notion of what could and couldn’t be regarded as art.
Discomfort with my parents’ politics I converted too, into a blithe and arrogant certainty that some advance in human evolution was the only hope for the species. This was a blend of Kubrick’s mordant certainty as to the human need for self-destruction and the optimist view of Arthur C. Clarke (and of the whole space-goofy wing of the sciencefiction genre), that humanity would outgrow its wretched cradle—the same mixture that lent
2001: A Space Odyssey
such an enthralling ambivalence.
Sometime in the eighties, when my father’s outrage was focused on Guatemala or Nicaragua, he gleaned my indifference to the latest cause. I explained by loftily quoting Arthur C. Clarke (who was, I think, quoting, or paraphrasing, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane): “Man must not export his borders into space.” We’re talking about the period in my life known as “high school,” so this was loosely translatable as
Fuck you, Dad!
But I hadn’t used those exact words, so we managed to eke out the following exchange, my father’s incredulity mushrooming as it had when I requested an exhibition at his gallery.
Son: “That’s why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is so important, Dad. When we meet an alien race we’ll understand that we’re all one planet, and wars will be looked on as primitive behavior.”
Father: “Are you saying that a world government is likely anytime soon? Or would be a
good
thing?”
Son: “If not in your lifetime, certainly in mine.”
That’s all I can bear to remember. Anyway, the point about space, I see now, was this: in space, no one can hear the guitar squeak. Or see the paint drip.
Evenings in our communal household, in the years after Judith’s death, we cooked and washed dishes according to a weekly schedule. One of my dish nights, after a dinner where I’d not spoken a word, radiating sullen-teenage death rays instead, my father dried dishes in exchange for a moment alone with me. Piercing my cone of silence at the sink, he asked what was wrong. I played dumb—my behavior seemed normal enough to me. He pointed to my silence at dinner.
I offered another patronizing, Kubrickian explanation: “You have to understand, Dad, I’m a misanthrope.”
I probably thought the word meant
someone who doesn’t live in a
commune
.
I’d never stopped looking at his paintings. I looked at them in sessions with him in the studio, dispensing approval and criticism with a teen’s certainty. And I looked at them by myself, afternoons when he was out of the house. I often skulked in his studio, not only because, as I grew older, less interested in adults than in my own adultesque drama, the telephone there was the most private for marathon phone mopes with out-of-town girlfriends.
One day I committed a ridiculously Oedipal crime: I “fixed” a line in one of his paintings, while it hung in a near-finished state on his studio wall. It was a picture that engaged and, I guess, irritated me. The line at a woman’s calf was interrupted—cruddy, it seemed to me, where it could be lucid. More cartoonish and perfect. So, drunk on my own gall, I swirled a brush in moist paint and clarified the line. The adjustment was negligible. That didn’t keep me from spending the next month or so in terror I’d be caught.
Whether my crime was detected or not, I was never confronted. I’ve lost track of which painting I touched, if it still exists. The moment is barely an episode, a flicker of a brush. Yet between my certainty, until I was twelve or thirteen, that I would be a painter like my father, and my certainty now, that I am a writer like my father is a painter, stand those years when I wanted to be Stanley Kubrick instead. And in the middle of
those
years, that flicker, that sole brushstroke, stands to confess the wish to climb inside my father’s hand, inside his eye and hand and brush, to clamber inside the canvases themselves and live where I couldn’t help living anyway.
In my lampoon of his ambition, that earlier day on Nevins Street—my suggestion I was ready for a show—my father might have thought he heard a mouths-of-babes indictment of his own choices in dismantling so many structures of authority and order. In the appalled glance he delivered in return, maybe I glimpsed my father’s regret. I at least glimpsed the ambivalence, even depression, that would for a time shade any talk of those years. The same ambivalence, I think, caused him to underrate until recently the best paintings from that chapter of his art.
But who am I to talk? I vamoosed to California, in the wake of my family’s 1970s, and stayed away from Brooklyn for most of fourteen years. All that stuff I wouldn’t go near in my own work, at least not directly, for most of
twenty
. Whereas my father, in 1983 or thereabouts, drew from somewhere, from who knows where, a deeper breath, and began again.
What resulted was a third phase, if that’s not an inadequate name for the most sustained outpouring of his life. And, though his work in the eighties (and beyond) relies on motifs and methods developed in each of the earlier phases, and is dense with worldly emotion, it’s also the most youthful. He’d earned a deeper authority, one which didn’t rely on authority’s noxious postures. Richard Lethem had shrugged off any last debts to Europe, and licensed himself as an American artist instead.
This flood of images opened along two avenues. First, my father replaced artist-surrogates with laborers. In
The Wall and the Worker
, from 1982, the claw hammer has come down from the studio wall, to be wielded by a carpenter slapping nails into Sheetrock. The subject’s blue jeans and tool belt could be my dad’s, except they might as easily be any of his partners’—Here Comes Everycontractor. In other paintings the worker dons a signature dust mask, a bit of realism which also freed the figure as an archetype: the routine handler of poisons, a wader in urban detritus. If my father had been the uneasy conscience of a gentrification, he now offered a glimpse of its underbelly. The laborer pictures were dispatches from the Gowanus Canal and Red Hook, our zone’s margins, where neglect and decay had been pushed by the growth of the renovator class. Where the earlier paintings had been porous to the life of our home, he’d now opened the door to the street, and to intimations of urban strife, racial and otherwise.
The second wellspring was historical. In my father’s hometown, in western Missouri, a black man named Raymond Gunn, accused of the rape and murder of a teacher, was burned alive on the roof of her one-room schoolhouse. The lynching took place the year before my father’s birth; two men soon to become my uncles by marriage were, as high-school boys, at the mob’s fringes. By the time my father came of age the story was a communal legend suffocated in silence. Lurking in his moral imagination, 1930s Midwestern trauma now arrived as an explicit subject in his work, as if called out by the 1970s Brooklyn trauma which had just begun proliferating there.
By now I was out of the house. First, off to college, then to my California self-exile from all things Brooklyn. My visits to my father’s studio became more sporadic, more ceremonial, and kinder. I’d fly into New York to stay with friends in Manhattan, then take the subway to Brooklyn, and trudge to his new studio, under the Manhattan Bridge, often, it seemed, in fresh-fallen snow. He would give me coffee, then invite me in to consider his art.
My father allowed me to play prodigal. We became relative strangers for a while, in order to make our friendship. And I had to make myself a writer to show my father and myself some autonomy—which freed me, soon after, to confess my debt to his work. So I encountered the marvel of his eighties evolution in a sequence of punctuated equilibria. At first the variety of imagery felt anarchic. Now I grasp the sense of it all. The “worker” and “Raymond” motifs had merged. The new paintings took an accounting of American violence and sufferance, embodied in a darkly fantastical series of male figures from both the urban and the rural undergrounds of my father’s imagination: circus strongmen, hospital orderlies, traveling salesmen, crypt keepers, secret agents, handymen, henchmen. They form a gallery of suspects as personal as Guston’s hooded legion. These were Men with Tools, working feverishly to greet disaster with professional dignity intact, even if some of their tools were as feeble as a kite or banana, or as booby-trapped as a gun or a can of solvent. It was as if my father had adapted William Carlos Williams’s dictum—“No ideas but in things”—to his turn from ivory tower to a carpenter’s earthly savvy: No authority but in implements. But with the insight came the warning: dodging complicity with Establishment modes of power through violence wasn’t a cinch.
Homo Faber
might also be
Homo Wrecker
.