He dressed pretty much according to Brooks Brothers: oxford shirts, khaki pants, brown Weejuns, a roll-collared over-sweater. But the shirts were at war with his neck and belly, and he frequently looked faintly tipsy or rumbustious in them, the sleeves carefully folded up two turns, his cigarettes—Camels—crushed down into the breast pocket.
His face, head, and torso were thick, projecting great mass. Slightly bowlegged, he walked with a rocking side-to-side motion. But his fingers were delicate. He used the index and middle ones together like a snake, a baton, a staff, a smoker’s apparatus, a This-Way-Out sign; and had a way of laying them across his cheek like a resting, watchful animal. When these two fingers appear in his paintings, however exaggeratedly, they have something of the still and commanding authority of Dürer’s two straight digits laid upon his sable collar in the epochal 1500 Pinakothek self-portrait.
Guston had an uneasy relationship with his body at best, at worst a punishing one. Other than his arm, he seemed not to have any great trust in its parts, and perversely he’d enjoy coaxing it to the edge of disaster. A diet of rich foods, of too much vodka, of pack upon pack of Camels ran roughshod over his health. He had numerous what he called “breakdowns.” During the time I knew him he checked himself once into Johns Hopkins, another time Massachusetts General, looking for and finding ulcers and fatigue (masking alcoholism and manic-depression) and being duly warned not to smoke cigarettes, to moderate his habits. He’d then tell the doctors, I am not a man of the middle, and retell the story later to anyone who would listen. To his friends it was a ritualized, disheartening melodrama.
Especially when he was in Manhattan, Guston could operate as one large oral appetite. He was not indiscriminate, yet it pleased him to elevate small ethnic restaurants—a Yorkville Hungarian place, Chinatown storefronts, unpretentious southern Italian joints he’d discovered—into private shrines. After he’d been awarded an honor by Brandeis University at a public ceremony at the Guggenheim Museum Auditorium, a group of us ended up in an Italian place that was a good deal fancier than what Guston normally approved of, not peasant-y enough but the only place nearby that could seat a party of eight. Immediately Guston set to charming the waiters (in Italian) into a conspiracy of excellence. They were to steadily convey to the kitchen that it should turn out the real thing, outdoing itself by cooking as though it was a night in Umbria.
In the city he seemed always to be at his most manic and talky. Making the rounds of gallery shows of old students, shopping for supplies, eating in restaurants, drinking in bars, visiting old friends—a New York day spent boulevardiering with Guston was essentially an exercise in raconteurship. Old set-piece stories about the thirties and the fifties tumbled out of him as he passed this place or that. But ultimately Guston’s New York was like an old comfortable raincoat he could take or leave home. It was only when I first went to visit him in Woodstock that I found myself provided with Guston whole.
Afternoons in Woodstock were largely spent in running errands involving the next upcoming meal. Guston drove around in a small Toyota Corolla, a no-frills car that delighted him inordinately. (He’d earlier owned a rare Rover sedan, and the challenge to maintain it in a small upstate town had completely defeated him. “I’d drive down the street of the garage. Just the street. The mechanic would spot me. With a look of panic in his eyes he’d run out and wave me off: No! No!”) Together we once drove over to a butcher shop in Saugerties. One of the many emptied-out Hudson River towns that resembled the stunned arcades of de Chirico, downtown Saugerties seemed barely alive. Guston was greeted effusively by the butcher, who knew him so well that at one point he seemed to be on the verge of inviting him over to the other side of the counter in order to grab a knife and help cut the roast. You saw this kind of thing with Guston not infrequently. He was at home in the world, which in turn tended to welcome him. He had unusually democratic, uncondescending social skills, tending to most people as though they too were artists or at the very least holders of individualized knowledge it was a waste not to try to elicit from them.
Back in Woodstock, in the kitchen, Musa would have made a salad and the vegetables she anxiously tried to get into Guston—to counteract the cholesterol-sodden main dishes: the spaghetti carbonaras, the pork loins, the sauerbratens and schnitzels that were Philip’s domain to prepare on one of his vanities, his restaurant-quality Viking stove. With these meals the identical Sicilian wine was served always, Corvo, either red or white; then, after the dishes were cleared and washed and maybe a ripe pear was eaten with pearl-handled Italian dessert knives and forks, the real visit would begin.
In Woodstock the Gustons lived in a small cedar-shake cottage, a summer cottage fashioned into a year-round home. There was just barely enough room inside to contain them both. Yet across a gravel drive, ten or so yards to the west of the house, was Guston’s long low cinder-block studio. Its gigantism and additionalness clearly stated where the largest and most unbuttoned part of Guston resided. Warehouse-sized by the time I knew it, it had begun as a smaller structure. Two-thirds of it, separated by heavy walls and a fireproof, heavily-alarmed door, served as storage space. The other third had been broken in half as a spare, pleasant guest room and as Guston’s work space.
This work space lent credence to Guston’s often repeated belief in Leonardo’s maxim, La pittura es una cosa mentale: painting is a thing of the mind. There was a painting-wall that canvases-in-progress were tacked to, as well as a long table to draw at, plus a rolltop desk for writing, and several worktables filled with paints and brushes. But you came away with the overwhelming sense that Guston worked in a physically modest, almost restricted amount of space, no grandly gestural openness required.
What was unrestricted was the storage room. Temperature-controlled, high-windowed, bathed by fluorescent tubes, it was raw, soulless warehouse-y square-footage. But it was also where Guston’s imagination literally had collected—and at this stage in his life quantity of work had drawn even with quality in significance, a majesty to both. For from 1975 onward Guston was unstoppable. The storeroom held the residue of frenzy.
Musa would go off to bed while Guston and I would walk across the gravel and go through the store-like glass front doors of the studio building. Not even for a minute did Guston ever want to talk in the comfortable guest room or in the painting area. He didn’t want to talk about himself or about me or about art, philosophy, poetry, or politics. Those all could wait. He as much wanted me to see his new work as to see it again himself.
A guest could have a canvas director’s-chair placed near a support post midway in the storage room. Next to it was one Guston himself sat in, and beside it was always one of a number of floor-standing ashtrays the studio contained. The room was cavernous and invariably chilly, its fluorescent fixtures humming and ticking. Guston would sit for a perfunctory moment, then be up to show what he’d been up to: knees and legs, piled-up heads, autobiographical pictures of himself and Musa, bugs, pyramids, overcoats. Sometimes we brought the chairs nearer to a particular painting, and he might loosen his belt around his paunch while he sat. A minute later, rising excitedly to point out a detail, he’d come to his feet and find his pants around his ankles. Retrieving them with one hand, he’d nonetheless be pointing with his cigarette in the other and just go on talking.
A painting of 1979, Talking, is to me almost an emblem of those nights. In the picture Guston’s sleeves are rolled up to the length he habitually rolled them, as in the dark he is going to put on a light. Of course he cannot possibly pull the light on with so much in his hand. The thumb seems to reach back for the chain impossibly, giving it a doomed shot while at the same time a sense of strain is expressed by the bluish tint to the clenched bottom fingers.
It’s also a now-and-later diagram, this painting. The watch’s single hand says that the time is resoundingly, unambiguously now. Guston was a great reader of Henry Green and a profound appreciator of Green’s gerundive titles: Loving, Living, Concluding, Party-Going, etc. He’d say that to him the titles and the novels themselves were embodiments of fluidity, of states of being experienced in time and therefore subject to no easy capture. In this painting, talking also means always being in some state of relative darkness or ignorance or half-knowledge: Guston would wake in the night to go back and look at his work of that day, and here the thrust of the hand, so burdened, fumbles and misses the chain completely. And as a modern poet of the cigarette equal to Svevo in The Confessions of Zeno, the cigarette for Guston was the most homely, appealing clock of them all: burning down, fitfully drawn at, used, disposable yet addicting—a kind of little life held between the knuckles.
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Toward the night of a visit he’d already have had Musa or his handyman Ed Blatter help him turn out the larger canvases to be viewed. These showings had none of that highly doubt-wracked, worried weather his friends had reported from the earlier decades. If even a seminal picture such as Monument (1976) (now in the Tate) or Tomb (1978) (now in the Museum of Modern Art) struck him as significant it wasn’t as a catch basin for any aesthetic dilemmas or victories. He’d largely gone past those. “Cross-grain” was how Guston described his basic artistic temperament—“You want to fight against what you do well”—but back when he was a modernist-impossibilist this meant swatting at ghosts and shadows, resulting in existential dramas. Now he was hungriest for seeing something new in a regular way.
This was maybe why to see the pictures for the first time while standing beside Guston wasn’t nearly as unnerving an experience as it could have been. Having the door to that big chilled room opened for you was instead a sumptuary experience, and I often found myself at ease in an almost lulled way. Though the paintings were rife with “subject-matter,” their profound, even crude unmannerliness and obverse beauty did not require any kind of formal or solemn notarization. Guston was so available to his own scarifications that a visitor like me was more or less let off the hook, not even really expected to take it all in, since the images of those years had come out of Guston almost clatteringly. If he’d been bespelled enough to write to me in a letter about a particular picture, by the time I got there, there would be three more just like it, and two more that extended these into a new area altogether. Guston once said to me about Head and Bottle (1975): “I’m just seeing how much I can stand.” On those nights of my visits I sensed he must have also marveled at just how much in fact it was that he could stand.
Usually I’d have something to say to Guston about the canvases either by way of lifting out a detail that spoke of the whole (“Anna May Wong,” I noted to him once about one of the first-rank heads in Group in Sea (1979), to which Guston coughed his way through a small laugh, liking that one of his cheesier obviousnesses had been smoked out)—or by a kind of reading back to him of what he’d turned toward my eyes. On my part there was less inspiration to this than an odd and recent kind of personal routine. Around the time I first met Guston I had begun to write a half-dozen book reviews a week for the prepublication review service, Kirkus Reviews. My wife was in medical school during those years; I was trying to do as much freelance work as possible. The partial clue to writing for Kirkus was being able to reconstitute the situation and plot of the book being reviewed by brief summary, by a kind of re-narration. You were free to lard-in whatever critical, qualitative judgments you wished, but the basic craft was of retelling stories not your own. And Guston’s pictures certainly were stories, or parables, or jokes—mysterious narratives in any case.
I didn’t like every picture I was shown. The most allegorical ones (no surprise) usually defeated me, or else the more overtly literary ones. Guston paid homage to some of his literary heroes—Kierkegaard, Eliot, Jules Supervielle—with canvases that would always be titled with initials. One of these was a picture that I remember leaving me especially cold: “For I. B.”—I. B. being Isaac Babel.
“Too much your territory?” Guston asked me mischievously.
The word “Odessa” had been painted in, and the planetary rump and waxy tail of a Cossack’s horse taking up most of the canvas’s center. It wasn’t literariness or illustrationism that I objected to but instead obviousness. Yet obviousness by that point not only was not taboo for Guston but occasionally strictly necessary, even crucial. To make obvious was sometimes the byproduct of making see-able.