Immeditately upon Ann’s arrival in Santiago, she began to receive impassioned letters from Noguchi that included everything from the details of his work and daily affairs to his hopes that she would marry him and return to New York with her children. He constantly asked her to call, to write, and referred frequently to the depression he felt without her. Everything he did, he said, reminded him of her. “I’ve been in such a deep blue funk since you went away, only your letters kept me going, now without a word from you for some time to come what’ll I do?… I’m absolutely figety, don’t know why. Maybe it’s the spring, maybe its my work which simply wont come out the way I want it to, maybe its my giving up smoking—the main reason I guess is that you are gone away and I am lost.”1
Noguchi’s next letter to Ann (March 24, 1945) told her that he had just gone out into his MacDougal Alley garden “dressed in nothing” in order to till the soil and that he had finally started working but “got so depressed at your not being here that I quit. I’m planning to cut that large piece of stone [Noodle] in the garden starting next week.” In one of her early letters from this time, Ann expressed a deep concern for her children. “I know that it is hard to make plans—dear—and carry them out. But I do think that we should both feel responsibility about our future. I know that when I get back I want to find a place and make a definite home—to make it as comfortable and beautiful as possible (naturally simple), and then to find some way to care for the children that I may be free enough to work at what I can do.”
As the correspondence continued, Noguchi made frequent declarations of his love. “It’s simply that I can not help it—you affect me that way even 6000 miles away—now that’s something isn’t it? It must be it!! O my dearest wire me telephone me yes meaning in case you didn’t get my previous letter will you marry me?” Marriage became a theme for Noguchi, and he was constantly thinking of ways to lure Ann back and convince her that he could help her care for her twin boys. Indeed, he said that he would like to adopt them so that Ann could be free of her ties to Matta. In April he wrote: “You know what I want of marriage: a home, children, independence without obligations or attachments to anyone outside. To give and take completely is what I desire … If you feel that you’ve got to hold on to some part of Matta, I will never feel that you are completely my wife … If I am to assume total responsibility I’ll have to make a lot of money—there’s the rub. I think I could eventually do so, but it will take some time, and I will have to get organized and stop spending as much time as I do just dreaming and ‘experimenting.’” In the meantime he said that she should feel free to have a relationship with someone “more suitable,” but he hoped that she would be as faithful to him as he was faithful to her. Ann’s response was “I haven’t found anyone who could compare with you—You know I love you—don’t you?”
Noguchi, Ann Matta Clark, her twin sons, Gordon and Sebastian Matta, and an unidentified friend at a bay beach on Long Island, summer 1944
On April 23 Ann wrote: “You know that the thing I want the most in the world is to be with you—and to find a life together—or rather to make it together. However, maybe you are right. It is a lot to ask of an artist. It puts too much strain on both art and love—which I doubt if it could stand.”
Remembering all the arguments they had had about why she was going, he wondered if it was his fault that she was gone. He trusted her opinion about his work and wrote that he was sometimes paralyzed with doubts. “You would be an enormous help in that direction; as well as in several others—that I can think of!!!” He told her of his wish to have a show. “I should have an agent or a gallery—I’m sure my bad luck in this respect is my own fault, but don’t know how to correct it—you could help me if you were here.” On May 19 he wrote: “I asked Julien [Levy] and he said no. And Pierre [Matisse] wont [sic] even bother to come down to see. And Peggy [Guggenheim] is not interested. And Kootz [Samuel Kootz] said no to Jean’s suggestion. And I havnt [sic] bothered to see even lesser fry and I say to hell with them all.”
By May Noguchi had begun to make his interlocking slab sculptures, works that were assembled out of several sections of carved stone or wood. On May 11 he wrote to Ann, “I just did a flat marble piece which I think you may like—I wish to god you were here to advise me about my work—I’m eager to get some more marble if I can find the mazuma.” Perhaps a week later he made sketches of three wooden sculptures and a drawing of the stone sculpture (Noodle) that he had mentioned to Ann in earlier letters. Of love he said: “O baby you are so wonderfull!—who else but you could stand so beastly a temper as mine—you must admit though that I have been provoked by your running off down there.”
Several of Noguchi’s sculptures from 1944 and 1945, the voluptuous Noodle and Time Lock, for examples, seem to reflect his attachment to Ann. His alabaster The Kiss, an abstraction of the idea of an embrace, and his semiabstract Mother and Child, carved from onyx, are particularly tender images. In 1945 Noguchi also made two rather humorous and affectionate sculptures titled The Bed. One is carved out of African Wonder Stone, the other is cast in bronze. Surely these semiabstract images of a man and woman lying side by side on their backs reflect his initial happiness with Ann.
Yet his financial troubles persisted. “I’ve had $250 for those costumes I did, and I’m getting another $250 for doing something for ‘Life’ [magazine]. I seem to get $250 for everything I do—I must snap into a higher bracket—at my rate I seem to manage to get approximately that much per month these days. It would be not nearly enough for the 4 of us…” In another letter he pleaded, “O baby, please have the strength and the courage for me. Please be willing to stand poverty as well as riches, illness as well as wellness, sadness as well as happiness. And don’t ever go away again.” He apologized for “sliding down into my depression again.” Often in the years to come Noguchi would refer to periods of misery. It seems likely that he suffered from severe clinical depressions.
Sometime in late May 1945, Noguchi wrote: “For the last two days I have been walking around looking at marbles out in Astoria—remember?… I walk the streets and can not settle down to work. O Lord why am I so miserable without you?… Must you go your way and I go mine, could we not work things out together?” He said that he had been in a room full of “belles but couldn’t seem to cook up any interest … Without you I feel absolutely alone … Love surges over me like the salt sea—” He signed off: “Honey, bring love back to poor Isamu.”
Ann wrote Noguchi on May 29 that her divorce papers with Matta would be signed on June 8. “And if you think I still have any yearnings in that direction, you couldn’t be more wrong. I hope that I never have to see him again. So I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that particular subject—it irritates me.” He responded: “I love you so much, I would give you the whole world and all the beauty it contains—for indeed I am enormously rich, the richest man in the world, capable of anything—or nothing. You are that way too, I know. Together how wonderful would be the world.”
Noguchi’s letters to Ann during the summer months are mostly about when she will return, how she will travel, and where they will live. He wrote of his fear that their long separation might damage their relationship. He spoke of a loneliness and “inertia” that was both physical and psychological. He reported on the films, plays, and concerts he had attended; his observations about these show a fine critical acumen. “I’ve been going to the movies a lot these days to kill the evenings,” he wrote on July 18. “The evenings are my unhappy hours…” In the following months, Noguchi would continue to move from hope to despair as Ann’s date for returning to New York was pushed back in letter after letter. He began to sound less insistent about her rejoining him in New York. He had no money and he had not found an apartment for Ann. On July 25 Noguchi warned her about how difficult life would be in New York. “I’ve been having the heebie-jeebies too, so I’m going off to the country.” Upon his return he wrote: “I begin to see your point that we may both be just too haywire to be good for each other—there are of course mitigating circumstances, (very mitigating) that make us need each other desperately—I wonder how they balance each other, our needing each other and our being bad for each other. I suppose your going would indicate that you had such fears as this but alas we can not know how things are until we are together again and then it may be too late.”
His August 11 letter was written five days after the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Noguchi was horrified by the carnage in his father’s country, but also relieved that “Wonderful Peace is here!!!” He told Ann that it might be unwise for her to give up the security of her situation in Chile for the “uncertainties” of life in New York and that she should perhaps postpone her return until spring, when he hoped to find a place in the country. “When the pain of parting has ground in sufficiently time does not seem to matter any more. I wouldn’t be surprised if with the coming of peace I may be asked to help out in Japan. If there is any likelihood of its being soon I would suggest you wait there.”
At the end of August his desire for Ann’s return appears to have been rekindled, but misgivings and “a sort of nervous indecision” were getting in the way of work. He was impatient, and given to quarrels with friends such as Ruth Page. Even though Ann insisted that everything would be better with the war over, Noguchi maintained that things would only be right when Ann returned to New York.
In September he told Ann that his sets for Ruth Page’s ballet The Bells had been postponed until mid-October, which pleased him: “I’m really only interested in doing sculpture, and sets are just another easy money pickup so far as I’m concerned.” He concluded his letter: “I wonder how it will be when you get back—what about miracles and Magic? O darling dearest I wonder and I hope!!!!!!” There was another subject that began to dominate his correspondence: Ann’s decision to see an analyst. “So your are being analized [sic]! I’m dreadfully sorry that you feel you need it—I think its awful. Its all in the mind, as they say, and once you decide that you’re ill one becomes victimized by one doctor or another.”
He was right to worry. Citing her analysis as part of the reason, Ann told him that she was not leaving Chile for a while. On September 20 Noguchi wrote: “My love—what can I say—the news that you are not coming back has knocked me out cold, in bed for the last two days, and I’m at a loss for words … time is that monster which is devouring us inch by inch and all the psychoanalysts and all the kings horses can not replace one wasted minute!”
When he wrote again on October 2 he had not heard from Ann in ten days. “Of course I am predisposed to be skeptical about this newfangled ‘psychoanalysis,’ especially in this case. As you know I am very simple, and may not know of the depths of your depravity…” He was broke, he said, but he hoped to get some money in a few days:
What a precarious existence! Maybe that’s what you are frightened of. But really, what could be more transient than our life on earth, this vale of tears—and yet we all search after permanence, immortality or what have you. The best we can do is to have some sort of a philosophy to see us through—Can an analyst give you that?… Oh my darling, we have so short a time!!! It is what we have left of days that we have to live—each day that we do not live fully leaves us that much poorer … there simply does not seem anything I can do to evoke the touch of your hand, your breath upon my ear—how cruel this is.
He added in a postscript, “My dearest love is yours. However, it’s silly of me I know, that I should be dubious about your actions when you say the sweetest things in your letters. By all means do whatever you think is best and stay as long as you want (not that I can boast of any influence).”
On the same day, Ann wrote that she was feeling “restless and homesick … Somehow, even from here I feel your disappointment, your resentment towards me for not being there. I feel your wordlessness—and exasperation. I, too, think it is inutile to try to explain—it is something you just feel—that’s all. This real fact of separation has taken on shape and form and color so that I can see it sitting there between us gloating. How I hate it! What a horrible, ugly beast it is.” Six days later she wrote again: “Darling, It was such a happy relief to have your letter today—including the scolding about psychoanalysis. It was really a masterpiece. Darling I see your point of view and of course neither analysis nor ‘my new confidant’ as you call him can take the place of you—or your love. God no! But it can make me a much more reasonable human being to live with. (I hope.)”
When Noguchi wrote Ann on October 13 he sounded as if the distance between them was insurmountable: “I cannot follow you any more where you have gone, much further now than Chile. I do not know the words, wordless, as you say—I do not know my way, a stranger … my mood is black as black, suicidal, the world frozen. But I know its no use breaking ones heart over ‘wishful thoughts,’ everything changes, the rocks and hills, only I wish you had not found it necessary to change yourself to the ‘better’ in any other persons [sic] immage [sic] than mine—Who sets the categories of love?”
On October 20 Ann wrote back: “My darling. I can’t bear to think of your present state of mind. Your desperation and destructive thoughts. Somehow I can’t imagine life without your love or my loving you.” She acknowledged the difficulty of their making a life together. It would, she said, require “planning and work and sacrifice.” She could cope with “black moments” if she knew that he was there. “Please don’t ask me to give up.” She then offered her perceptions of Noguchi’s character:
I would like to talk about you, sweet—I think I know some of your weaknesses as well as your strength. You have a wonderful intuitive insight into life—and you live by a well-defined philosophy of your own—your own pattern as you call it. I don’t think you need the help of psychoanalysis or anything like it.—of course everyone has a few quirks that could be ironed out by it—perhaps your attitude towards material success for instance—but the basic structure of you in front of life is strong, elastic, guided by your splendid intuition.
I can’t help but feel that you are in a crucial moment of your life too—perhaps your falling in love with me was partly because it happened at the moment when you felt an inward need to tie the loose ends of your life together—to concentrate all your forces—your emotions …
Your art too has reached a culmination—a peak as to technical ability and conception which is rich and pure and honest. You thoroughly deserve success now. More still, I am certain that you are on the threshold of accomplishing the really great work of your whole life … Please darling—try actively to make our chance of happiness come true. Because I don’t believe that happiness is something that is put in your mouth and all you have to do is let it melt there.
I love you and want you—
Ann
Noguchi answered Ann’s letter a week later: “I’ve been in the deepest depression of my life … So I’ll just keep working, my fingers to the bone—I mean it, my fingers are bleeding from being worn through—indeed I’m a mass of scars inside and out … I still haven’t been able to arrange a show. I suppose that too is psychological, as well as my inability to make money. It seems I fight with whoever offers me a job, as though they were infringing on my privacy. So I live like a bum borrowing a little here and there … the memory image of you keeps me entranced ruining all my pleasure…”
* * *
On November 1 Ann wrote that although his letters were “heart-rending,” the love he had expressed in his last letter gave her “fresh courage.” Much of her letter was a kind of soul-searching—the anxious introspection of a young woman in an early stage of analysis. She spoke of her “infantile attitude towards life in general … You said that you think it may be the child in me that you love—but I am sure that you do not fully realize the meaning of that … I will never forget once when you talked to me when I was living in Macdougal Street. Remember? The room was almost dark—and you said that there was probably two people in me—the ‘Pajarito’—and the Ann—and darling I will always love you for it that you instinctively chose the Ann which is the real me.”
Noguchi’s next letter to Ann was written in the first half of November: “By the time you get this I will be 41 years old; how awful!!!” His tone was less desperate, sometimes almost happy. His work was going well, and he was avoiding social life. Mostly his success came at the hands of Martha Graham, for whom he was regularly designing sets and costumes. But over the course of the month, as Ann remained in Chile, he seemed to grow more resigned to the idea that she might never return. “Even when you told me that you were not comming [sic] back till spring, it produced no shock, as though I had known that would be … By March it will have been a year since you went away—I wonder if you will ever come back, and what it will be like then.” He ended his letter: “My love and a million kisses into the void!”
Although Noguchi’s letters continue to profess his love for Ann, he seems more and more willing to relinquish her. Perhaps he was distracted. At a Surrealist party, he met the writer Anaïs Nin, a delicate, dark-haired Latin beauty with whom he had a brief affair in November 1945. In her diary she wrote of seeing Noguchi at a going-away party for André Breton: “Noguchi, with his startled, wistful air, tired from watching the moving of his big rose marble figure [Kouros] to the Museum of Modern Art…”2 She called his MacDougal Alley studio “one of the lovliest places in New York … intimate and mysterious.” When Noguchi showed her the miniature paper models for his current sculptures he spoke of the “tenderness” he felt for them. “They belong to me. They are human and possessable; they are near; they lie in the hollow of my hand.” By contrast, he said, when his larger sculptures left the studio they no longer belonged to him.
A letter that was probably written in early December told Ann that he had “a frightful case of claustrophobia and stuckinthemud feeling,” so he rented and fixed up a small, unheated space across the alley from his studio. After spending one frigid night in his new space he was in bed with a cold. “So I went back to my corner in the studio. Anyway the studio is considerably cleared out so I can get to work making the new sets for Martha Graham.”
Noguchi’s depression was worsened because his “haven,” his MacDougal Alley studio, was to be demolished in June to make way for apartment buildings. He told Ann that he hoped by then to have enough money to move to the country—“and if you were here that might even be pleasant.” He had been Christmas shopping for Ann and the twins. “Everybody has money and is buying like mad so there is nothing left in the stores but for much money.” He found a blouse for Ann and shorts for the boys. “Well I hope you will understand that my heart goes with these small gifts … How different it would be if you were here!”
He spent Christmas with Ailes and his intimate friend Luchita del Solar, and he must have telephoned Ann, because his December 30 letter said: “The telephone conversation as usual was quite unsatisfactory. What do you mean by saying you hoped to be able to come back in March? Is it the psychoanalisis [sic] that is going on ad infinitum?” He was, he wrote, “up to my ears in carpentry for Martha. Expect to leave for Chicago on the 10th of January. I’m disgusted to spend so much time away from my real work, but I want to recoup my finances a bit.”
From Chicago, where he worked on sets and costumes for Ruth Page, he wrote of his despair that Ann might never return. “If you really want to come back I don’t think anything would keep you away … but you have other loves besides—at least two very young men and who else besides I know not—So I guess you really don’t need me at all. Love is a responsibility and a selfishness, and you may think me lucky to be so alone. But I don’t, I would like to have a wife & children too—I may be getting too old for that now though, and I see no point in marriage without at least one child—do you?… It is not the atom bomb that will destroy the world, my world, in a couple of years, but time!”
On January 28, 1946, just after his return to Manhattan from Chicago, Noguchi wrote Ann about the premiere at Columbia University of Martha Graham’s new dance, Cave of the Heart: “It went well—though the critics seem to have been generally shocked by it—I think its her best so far.” He gave Ann news of various friends and art exhibitions, and of his work. He was fixing up his studio so that he could work inside with stone. He wished that he could concentrate on stone carving, but Martha Graham had a new dance for which she wanted him to design a set.
Two weeks later Noguchi wrote that he had had a cold for several weeks. “Also I’ve been blue and lonely and I couldn’t get to work.” In the weeks that followed he continued to bemoan his inability to work. In March he expressed his pointed suspicion that Ann’s lack of letters might indicate that she had found another lover. He had heard in December that Ann was seeing a Chilean architect. In April he gave a big party for his Indian friend Gautam Sarabhai, whom he had met through the India League when Sarabhai was in New York working on the expansion of his family’s cotton textile trade. He had also gone to various going-away parties for people bound for Europe, some of them Europeans who had found refuge in the United States during the war. “New York will be deserted excepting for the stick-in-the-muds [such] as I. I must say I get wanderlust too watching all these excited hopefuls.” He went on to tell Ann about Gorky’s operation for colorectal cancer. This was the second disaster for Gorky in 1946. A few months earlier his studio in Sherman, Connecticut, had burned down and he had lost much of his recent work. “They think they’ve gotten it all out. He will be out of the hospital in ten days … Now, if ever is the time for me to work, if only this goddamed lasitude [sic] would leave me!!”
As Ann’s return date came closer, she became distressed. Noguchi was clearly disappointed: “I am very disturbed that you are unhappy, the accumulation of your indecisions and postponements … In any case your apartment is ready for you.” He told her that he planned to see Merce Cunningham dance that evening. The following day he reported that the performance “was very pretty, suggestive and poetic but rather empty.” He was about to have lunch with Jeanne Reynal, who was just back from California. “Everybody asks after you. You really have a load of friends here. All agree that you are the most Normal person they know … The Spring will be gone, and summer too if you don’t decide to come back soon. O Christ what is it? That keeps you? My heart waits but time does not.”
On May 17 he wrote one of his more poetic letters:
Darling, I was awakened this morning by the sweetest song of a thrush, singing a long composition such as they used to sing in Amagansett. And there are several Orioles here too flying arround [sic] in an eratic [sic] way as they must be very young. I’m waiting now for Jeanne Reynal who is driving Gorky out to Amaganset to look for a place. I’m to be their guide. I’m afraid its too late to find anything, but it will be nice to be in the country anyway, what with this incredibly beautiful singing which is like a refrain from a distant and lovely past. Is it altogether past and only to be remembered with the song of a thrush? I wonder.
A few days later he wrote that he and Gorky and Reynal had gone to Long Island and found no suitable rental for the Gorky family. As soon as he was home he set about planting things that he had dug up in the woods. “Theres a bright orange and black oriole drinking from the fishpond. A thrush fliters [sic] around in the wisteria … I felt so lonely out in Long Island with all those happy people—especially when we stoped [sic] one night at the Griffin House—everywhere so filled with memory for me, walking along the beach picking shells … Do please write oftener.”
By the time Ann returned to New York in June, they had been apart for more than a year. “Dear Isamu, Here at last,” Ann began an undated letter. In the following weeks she spent some weekends with Noguchi in the country. But their love affair was over. Not long after her arrival Noguchi introduced her to a beautiful young Indian girl, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece, Tara Pandit, with whom he had recently fallen in love. Over the years he continued to correspond with Ann sporadically and to concern himself with her and her twin sons’ welfare, sending money when needed.3 When in October 1988 he received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government for his contribution to understanding between Japan and the United States, he invited Ann to come to the ceremony at the Japanese consulate in New York. She could not make it. Afterward he wrote her: “You would have expanded my family attendance by about 30% I guess … Anyway you are someone I treasure from the past.” He apologized for not being able to get out to Sag Harbor on Long Island to see her: “Time has got me by the neck! With ever love Isamu.”