Jackson Pollock by Deborah Solomon

make art, he taught them how to shape rough, natural stones into square
     blocks—how to prepare a stone for sculpting rather than actually sculpt it. “So far
     I have done nothing but try and flatten a round rock and my hand too,” Pollock noted
     good-naturedly to his father, “but it’s great fun and damned hard work.” He found
     it easy to submerge himself in his work, while recognizing that sculpture, with its
     cold-blooded, mechanical procedures, held none of the possibilities inherent in a
     single charcoal line. “I like it better than painting—drawing tho is the essence of
     all.”

    One Wednesday morning in March 1933 Pollock and his brothers received a telegram from
     their mother informing them that their father had died. The news was a shock to Jackson.
     He had known that his father was sick with endocarditis, but no one had told him how
     serious it was. Only a few weeks earlier he had naively sent his father wishes for
     a hasty recovery. “Well Dad,” he had written, “by god its certainly tuff getting laid
     up. I hope you are better now . . . and for heck sake don’t worry about money—no one
     has it.”
    It was immediately agreed upon by Jackson, Charles, and Frank that they would not
     attend their father’s funeral. They couldn’t afford the trip to Los Angeles. Naturally
     they considered borrowing from friends, but a federal “bank holiday” had been declared
     that week and depositors had no access to their savings. Stella felt terrible. “I
     am so sorry you boys could not be at home,” she wrote them soon after the funeral,
     “but knew it was impossible.” She went on to offer a moving account of her husband’s
     death. LeRoy had died at home, having joined his wife in Los Angeles a few months
     earlier. She had set up a bed for him in the dining room so he could look out the
     windows and see “the snow capped mountains with the beautiful green hills below sunshine
     fresh air and flowers.” The day before LeRoy died was aSaturday. At ten that morning he listened to a radio broadcast of President Roosevelt’s
     famous inaugural speech (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . .”) which
     he thought was wonderful. Sunday, after listening to the Tabernacle Choir on the radio,
     he started to have trouble breathing. A doctor was summoned. The doctor was standing
     in the doorway when LeRoy looked up at his wife. “Mother,” he said, “I don’t think
     I can last till morning.” Stella cradled him in her arms and he died.
    Contemplating his father’s death, Pollock felt a keen sense of remorse. “I always
     feel I would like to have known Dad better,” he confided to his mother, “that I would
     like to have done something for he and you—many words unspoken—and now he is gone
     in silence.” He had never had a chance to prove himself to his father, and dejectedly
     he reflected on how little he had accomplished in his twenty-one years. He was still
     a student, “lazying” about the League, studying sculpture while waiting for Benton
     to return to New York. Suddenly it seemed to him as if his last three years at school
     had been spent in idle dreaming, and he vowed to his mother to get on with his career.
     “I had many things I wanted to do for you and Dad—now I’ll do them for you, mother.
     Quit my dreaming and get them into material action.”
    A few weeks after his father’s death Pollock left the Art Students League and set
     out in search of “material action.” Exactly what he hoped to find he did not say,
     but the matter was irrelevant anyway. It was three years into the Depression; families
     were living in Central Park. With his schooling behind him and no prospects ahead,
     Pollock joined the ranks of the unemployed.

4
Life with the Bentons

1933–35
    In September 1933 Benton and Rita returned to New York and moved into an apartment
     at 10 East Eighth Street, across from the Hotel Brevoort. It was easy to