In spring 1941 the friendship among Noguchi; Gorky and his young fiancée, Agnes Magruder; and the art patron and mosaicist Jeanne Reynal was cemented by several country outings. One occasion was a luncheon at a Connecticut estate at which the four friends became bored and wandered off to swim in a pond and to smell the blossoming fruit trees. Noguchi picked a sprig of plumbago and wore it as a mustache. Gorky sang Armenian songs, whittled flutes, and talked about his childhood. Reynal decided that Gorky needed a change of scene and offered to arrange an exhibition for him in San Francisco. Soon a plan was hatched to head to California.
Early in July, the three friends left New York in Noguchi’s new Ford station wagon (Reynal joined them later in San Francisco). Noguchi remembered the trip as an “epic trek.” All three sat in the front because the back was packed with Noguchi’s sculpting tools. Since Gorky did not know how to drive and Agnes did not have a license, Noguchi took and kept the wheel. They followed a southern route via Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Oklahoma. Agnes recalled that they talked about gestalt theory, politics, and the role of the machine in society. Both Noguchi and Gorky were ardent and opinionated, and their discussions often turned to rants. “We argued all the way across,” Noguchi recalled.1 The fiercest arguments were about clouds. Gorky kept seeing old peasant women or Saint George slaying the dragon and other sorts of battles in the clouds. “Gorky, you turn everything into something else,” Noguchi said. When Noguchi pointed out that a cloud was just a cloud, Gorky would counter: “Oh no, don’t you see that old peasant woman up there?” Noguchi understood that “nature didn’t look the same to him as it did to somebody else … Gorky always was sort of elaborating and weaving a lacework of Armenian imagery into whatever he saw, which is very beautiful.”2 Gorky constantly compared his view from the car window with his memories of what he called the Caucasus. “‘Oh,’” he would say upon hearing Agnes or Noguchi praise the landscape, “‘but we have bigger trees in Van and the hills are far more beautiful, and the grass is higher, and the fruit is redder and everything is better’ … He drove me and Isamu crazy,” Agnes recalled.3
The people they encountered along the way must have been curious about the two foreign-looking men—no doubt Noguchi and Gorky would have been subject to prejudice. When they stopped at roadside diners, Gorky behaved in a way that surely horrified the waitresses. “They fry everything but the ice cream!” he would exclaim.4
In the twenty-one years since his arrival in the United States Gorky hadn’t been west of Philadelphia, and as the distance from Manhattan grew, he became more and more nervous. Noguchi would have understood that, as with Brancusi, Gorky’s Union Square studio was part of his identity, a safe and beautiful world. “He panicked,” Agnes recalled. It didn’t help that during arguments Agnes sometimes sided with Noguchi. As they were crossing a bridge over the Mississippi, Gorky exploded: “Stop the car! I want to get out. I’m going to walk home!” He got out of the car and began to walk. Agnes raced after him. “He almost threw me into the Mississippi River!” she recalled.
Eventually, the travelers made it to Santa Fe, where Gorky’s mood improved. Although they found Santa Fe overly precious, Gorky liked the surrounding countryside. He admired the Indian artifacts, the adobe houses and primitive ovens. They spent several days outside the city at the home of Oliver La Farge, the brother of their mutual friend (and Noguchi’s portrait subject) Margaret Osborn. On Osborn’s recommendation they visited the Painted Desert, where they were caught in a storm that blew sand into their faces. When the storm was over they couldn’t find the road, and they wandered until they found a Hopi settlement. “We slept the night in a very fine hut. The rocks around there and various earth formations sent the sculptors and painters into fits … the works were labeled Modern Art and canyon beds were set aside as studios.”5 When they reached the Grand Canyon both men sat with their backs to the canyon and refused to express any awe. “Gorky and Isamu behaved like two clowns,” Agnes recalled. “They felt the canyon was too big, that it looked like a picture postcard.” They discussed what could be added to make the canyon more interesting: a clown on a bicycle crossing the chasm on a tightrope, perhaps.
When they arrived in Los Angeles and installed themselves in a hotel, Gorky’s mood darkened. He wanted to find a cheaper hotel. Noguchi and Gorky went out to eat while Agnes, who was not feeling well, went to bed. She surmised that the two men had had another fight, because Noguchi came back without Gorky, knocked on her door, and came to her bedside to say good night. “Gorky suddenly burst into the room and dumped a whole bagful of lawn clippings on top of me. He must have gathered them from the hotel garden. He thought I was flirting with Isamu. But there was not a murmur of electricity between me and Isamu. Isamu would not have done that to Gorky. Isamu was just saying good night to me and asking whether I was feeling better. When Gorky dumped the grass cuttings on me, I said, ‘Well, it’s lucky it’s not horse shit.’ Isamu vanished promptly…”
In the days that followed, Gorky’s disgruntlement increased and he threatened to take a bus back to New York. He was scornful of Noguchi’s fishing for commissions in upper-echelon milieus and he took a dim view of the lavish portfolio that Noguchi brought out in order to make a sale. He and Agnes tagged along on Noguchi’s social engagements, meeting Walt Disney, lunching with Anatole Litvak, the Ukrainian-born Hollywood film director, and dining with Litvak’s former wife, the film star Miriam Hopkins.
Eventually, Gorky and Agnes made their way to San Francisco while Noguchi remained in Los Angeles. The tensions between Noguchi and Gorky heated up again during Noguchi’s visits to San Francisco. At a Spanish nightclub, Agnes asked Gorky to dance. Although he loved to dominate parties by dancing Armenian dances and waving a white handkerchief, Gorky knew nothing about the fox trot. After a minute or two he walked off the dance floor, leaving Agnes stranded. “Then Isamu came and danced with me, and Gorky spent the whole time eyeing me with horror.” Noguchi’s friend the Chicago art dealer Katharine Kuh remembered running into Noguchi, Gorky, Agnes, and Jeanne Reynal in San Francisco that summer and accompanying them to parties and nightclubs, to Chinatown and the Noh theater. Noguchi was, she said, “as beautiful as the dawn because he was young then, had all his hair, and was really beautiful … During those days, I was repeatedly puzzled by Gorky’s silence and his lethargic depression. Perhaps there had been a flirtation on Noguchi’s part with Agnes Magruder, but I sensed something deeper between the two men. Gorky was hostile and hurt, Noguchi blithely untroubled. I think they were in competition not as artists but as personalities. Gorky felt altogether superfluous; Noguchi shone.”6
While searching for portrait commissions in California, Noguchi moved in a circle that included successful writers, artists, filmmakers, actors, and wealthy citizens. One portrait commission came from Ginger Rogers, the movie star and dancing partner of Fred Astaire. Another came from the French painter Fernand Léger, who was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, and was preparing for a show at the San Francisco Museum of Art that would run concurrently with Gorky’s exhibition. Noguchi also made a series of driftwood constructions, some of which incorporated rocks and bits of rope and resembled the fantastic objects that a number of Surrealist-inspired artists were concocting. “He was fascinated by the idea of erosion,” Noguchi’s friend the critic Thomas B. Hess recalled. “He was attracted to objects that had survived from another era and that had been formed by the process of destruction. He thought of them as ‘time locks.’”7
If Noguchi had hoped to find his roots in his native city, he failed. His time in California became, he said, “more and more unsettled.”8 Something that must have upset him was the hostility toward the Japanese, which was much more palpable in California than on the East Coast. “The war in Europe,” he recalled, “foreshadowed worse things to come, and I became personally very much aware of its spreading to the Pacific.”9 In Los Angeles Noguchi was invited to a birthday party for Peggy Guggenheim, who, with her lover, the Surrealist painter Max Ernst, had fled Europe earlier that year. When Noguchi arrived Guggenheim’s sister Hazel refused to let him in. Although this episode took place before Pearl Harbor and before the United States had entered the war, Hazel told a collector friend, “We were shooting Japs at the time.”10
On December 7, 1941, Noguchi was driving from Los Angeles to San Diego to look for some onyx for a sculpture. “I happened to turn on the radio and that’s where I heard it.” He heard Upton Close announce that in a sneak attack the Japanese had bombed the U.S. Navy’s fleet in Pearl Harbor. In his autobiography Noguchi said, “Pearl Harbor was an unmitigated shock, forcing into the background all artistic activities.”11 “With a flash I realized I was no longer the sculptor alone. I was not just American but Nisei. A Japanese-American.” Noguchi turned his car around and returned to Los Angeles. He wanted to get in touch with other Nisei and see what he could do to help.
Soon California was abuzz with talk that the Japanese navy might attack the United States. Noguchi felt the growing racial hysteria in California and the threat of mob violence. He realized that like other Japanese-Americans he might be seen as an enemy alien. He introduced himself to members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and began to work with them in an effort to convince the American public that Japanese-Americans were loyal citizens. In January the JACL’s Anti-Axis Committee produced a radio broadcast: “The Japanese in America is on trial,” it said. “WE ARE AMERICANS and we know that this is the American way … the democratic way. THIS AMERICA WE LOVE. This is the America for you and for me.”12
At the many meetings he attended, Noguchi came to know his fellow Nisei, the majority of whom were much younger and came from a very different background. He even took Japanese lessons from his friend Shuji Fujii, editor of Doho, a progressive weekly Japanese-American newspaper. Most of the Nisei that Noguchi met didn’t know what to make of him, and he in turn was dismayed by their timidity and conservatism. “I don’t know whether they enjoyed my attention at all—I suspect probably not.”13
At Jeanne Reynal’s Montgomery Street apartment in San Francisco, Noguchi organized a group called Nisei Writers and Artists for Democracy. The group included his editor friend Shuji Fujii and Larry Tajiri, a leader of the JACL. Its purpose was, Noguchi recalled, to “counteract the bad press which we saw coming … to stop the hysteria that was developing.”14 A two-page typewritten text titled “Statement of Policy and Aims” set forth the group’s concerns: “The anger we American citizens of Japanese extraction who are writers and artists felt on that historical December 7, 1941, when the fascist military of Japan attacked our country, has now crystallized into a cold determination that the Berlin-Tokyo-Rome Axis must be exterminated from the face of the earth … we stand ready to offer our individual and collective talents for the service of the land of our birth.”15
Noguchi states in his autobiography that his involvement with the Nisei Writers and Artists group was “to no avail.”16 In a 1988 interview he said: “The Nisei don’t want to have anything to do with liberals. They say, ‘keep away! Leave us alone!’”17
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which decreed that West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry were now enemy aliens, and were to be evacuated from the Pacific Coast defense area. On February 21 the House Committee to Investigate National Defense Migration, chaired by Representative John H. Tolan, opened hearings in San Francisco to consider the advisability of the evacuation. In early March Noguchi represented the Nisei Writers and Artists group at the Tolan committee hearings. “I would go to these meetings … the Germans were represented by Thomas Mann and [German-born conductor] Bruno Walter. Thomas Mann made an impassioned plea and said it would be terrible ‘if you lock us up again, who have just gotten away from Germany … and in San Francisco, Joe DiMaggio’s mother spoke up for the Italians … that was a clincher! I mean that clearly fixed the Italians up. Who could they get to testify for the Japanese? For the Nisei? I remember saying a few words, but I was quite, not in my league.”18
On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority, which was to cooperate with the War Department in evacuating, relocating, and, under the auspices of the War Relocation Corps, providing work for the evacuees placed in internment camps.19 The evacuation of the Pacific Coast defense areas began on March 21. Some 119,000 people, two-thirds of them American citizens of Japanese descent and the rest Japanese immigrants, were ordered to leave their homes, their farms, and their jobs and to report to assembly centers such as the one at the Santa Anita Racetrack north of Los Angeles, where evacuees lived in stables until they were processed and moved to more permanent relocation centers. The War Relocation Authority published an upbeat circular for the evacuees that described the relocation centers as “pioneer” communities: “Within these areas you will have an opportunity to build new communities where you may live, work, worship, and educate your children. Life in these new communities will be as well-rounded and normal as possible under wartime conditions.”20 The opportunities for employment would be at factories producing clothing, wood products, ceramics, textiles, and building materials. There would also be clerical work, nursing, cooking, and work in construction, agriculture, and land reclamation. Pay was minimal—around twelve to nineteen dollars a month, depending on the type of labor. The War Relocation Authority chose ten sites in Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho in which to build internment camps. Since 45 percent of the evacuees had been engaged in agriculture, sparsely settled sites that could be developed for farming were favored.
On March 31, when the evacuation from the military area was under way, Shuji Fujii wrote on behalf of Noguchi, himself, and two other colleagues to Milton Eisenhower, director of the War Relocation Authority, and to Culbert L. Olson, governor of California. He asked for government support for a documentary film about the evacuation, for which they had already shot about one thousand feet of film. The film’s purpose was to counter anti-Japanese hysteria by demonstrating to Americans the evacuees’ “cooperative spirit,” and also to show the evacuation in a favorable light to calm evacuees’ fears. Years later Noguchi told an interviewer that he never saw the film and that the army had seized it.21
In late March, fearful that if he did not leave the West Coast he would be incarcerated, Noguchi left his car in Los Angeles and flew east from San Francisco to New York and Washington. He worried that his leaving California would be seen as cowardice. In Washington, he went to the State Department to ask if he could help. In his memory they said, “No, go away; there’s nothing you can do … you’re a half-breed; what do we want with you?”22
In Washington Noguchi met John Collier, the sympathetic and idealistic head of the Office of Indian Affairs, a man who for twenty years had fought for Native American interests. Collier had once visited the Interlaken School and he shared Rumely’s progressive ideas about education and the importance of arts and crafts. The largest of the relocation camps, situated in Indian territory in Poston, Arizona, was under Collier’s jurisdiction. Fired by his vision of an ideal community at Poston, Collier persuaded Noguchi that he could help build this community by joining it and designing a park and a recreation area. He also thought Noguchi could boost the internees’ morale by helping them to revive Japanese traditional arts and crafts about which the Issei (Japanese immigrants) knew something, but the Nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) almost nothing. Noguchi caught Collier’s enthusiasm and volunteered to enter Poston. “Thus I willfully became a part of humanity uprooted.”23