Jackson Pollock by Deborah Solomon Page B

number—he managed to collect hundreds of folk songs, and it
     wasn’t long before his Monday-night gatherings were attracting some of the best fiddlers
     and guitar strummers in the city. Among his followers was Charles Seeger, whose son
     Pete once said that the first time he heard the famous traditional song “John Henry,”
     it was played by Benton on the harmonica, with the elder Seeger accompanying him on
     the guitar.
    For Pollock the main attraction of the Monday-night musicals was listening to Rita
     play the guitar and sing. He loved watching her perform, and his appreciation of her
     talents was no doubt heightened by his own ineptitude at singing or playing an instrument.
     As Benton later wrote, “Jack tried to play the harmonica with us but ran into some
     kind of ‘bloc’ about reading or playing the notes.” To keep him from dropping out
     of the band, Benton gave him a Jew’s harp, thinking it would be easier for him to
     play since he wouldn’t have to read notes; all he had to do was hum into the instrument
     and pluck a single string. That too gave him difficulty, but at least he enjoyed it.
     “[I] can’t play a damned thing,” he wrote to his family, “but it kinda puts me to
     sleep at nite and I kinda get a kick out of it.” It surely must have pleased him to
     discover that Benton thought he at least
looked
like a musician:
The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley
( Fig. 6 ), which was named after a folk song and exhibited at the Ferargil Gallery that April,
     includes a portrait of Pollock playing the Jew’s harp, his blond bangs hanging in
     his eyes.
    By now Pollock was living at 46 East Eighth Street, on the same block as the Bentons.
     He shared the fifth-floor apartment with his brother Charles and his brother’s future
     wife, Elizabeth England. As the one who did the cooking and cleaning, Elizabeth came
     to resent Jackson and often complained to Charles that she failed to understand why
     he had to live with them. She was embittered by the fact that Jackson didn’t have
     a job and couldn’t contribute to household expenses. Sometimes Elizabeth returned
     home from work to find Jackson lying on his bed, lost in reverie and oblivious to
     the condition of his room. “Clean up this stinking mess or I’m calling the health
     department!” she’d scream as Jackson just lay there silently. Other days she found
     him sitting by the coal-burning stove in the kitchen, his feet propped up on a chair,
     waiting for his brother to come home. Elizabeth would lash out at him: “You’ve used
     up all the coal!” Pollock didn’t bother to defend himself, knowing that Elizabeth
     hated having to live with him and that nothing he could say would change her feelings
     toward him. He was polite to her, thanking her for dinner on the nights she cooked
     and offering to help with the dishes. But he spent increasing amounts of time at the
     Bentons’.
    Charles never criticized his brother, assuming all blame for the trouble he caused
     while continuing to encourage him with his art. One day Charles suggested to Jackson
     that he consider designing a mural for Greenwich House, which had just announced plans
     to commission an artist to decorate the building’s lobby. The prospect of painting
     his own mural held a definite appeal for Jackson, and he quickly got to work preparing
     a proposal. On a sheet of heavy brown grocer’s paper he painted two scenes, one of
     which, presumably based on Benton’s Harmonica Rascals, shows a group of five musicians
     writhing to the beat of their music ( Fig. 7 ). One of the musicians plays a fiddle, another a clarinet. The other instruments
     cannot be made out, however; the forms in the painting are so crude that even the
     musicians are barely recognizable. Pollock, as usual, sacrificed detail to the whole,
     ignoring the outward appearance of the scene while managing to capture the rhythm
     and animation underlying it.
    Whatever the