An Essya Takes the Place of a Mountain

My father's father lived in a red-brick ranch house in Hamilton, Massachusetts, at the dead end of a wooded suburban street. There is a photograph of him sitting in a lawn chair in the back yard, smoking a cigar and holding his cocker spaniel Dixie in his lap. He seems neither happy nor sad,
just old and patient, and this is essentially how I remember him, because I didn't know him very well. He always seemed distant from me. It was very quiet at his house, and green, and the bricks in the walls and doorstep were neat and tidy. We drove down from Maine occasionally to visit him, though I never knew or understood exactly what compelled us to drive that tremendous distance.
His house was pleasantly dim inside, except for the kitchen which was light and green. In the living room the furniture and paintings on the walls were neatly arranged and smelled of cigar smoke. There were several big, dark stuffed chairs which we sometimes pushed together for me to sleep in. His chair was old and covered with shiny red vinyl, and he used to put his feet up on a red vinyl hassock, read the newspaper, and smoke cigars. The living room walls were dark wood, actual wood, not paneling, and there was a brick fireplace with an iron fencing and gray ashes. The lamps, especially the floor lamp behind his chair, had dark red shades which dimmed the light to a glow at night, and he would sit watching television or reading or listening to my father, and curls of smoke rose slowly and pleasantly around his small, bald head. He wore thin spectacles and had a gray mustache, I remember.
He was usually very kind to me. When I went to bed in the guest room just off a tiny hallway from the living room,I stayed awake as long as I could, listening to his rough voice and smelling his cigars, and hearing Groucho Marx on television. The bedroom was so clean and sweet and dark, with a little reddish lamplight coming through the half-opened door, and the front yard outside was so quiet and green, and the sound of his rough laugh or his murmuring was so pleasant and calm, above all calm, that I could not keep awake. I fell asleep, and it seems to me that I dreamed extraordinarily pleasant dreams every time I slept in that bed.
I was not allowed to go in the room at the end of the tiny hallway off the living room. It was filled with easels and canvases and jars full of upended paintbrushes and tins of thinners and the pungent stink of oil paints and turpentines. The project of being a painter fascinated me. Even when I was caught in the studio and scolded for being there, I didn't feel guilty or remorseful in the least, which means something, because in my childhood I was in a constant state of guilt and fear about my behavior. But not in my grandfather's painting room. Later, or during the next visit, I would go into the room again and look around. Dutifully I never touched anything, but soon my mother or father would discover me and angrily hustle me out.
It was a strange world, a kind of ghost world, dark like all the other rooms in the house, with square shapes looming on giant easels, and paintbrushes bristling everywhere. Moreover, shapes and colors were taking form on canvases. Landscapes, pictures of fields and autumn trees, bluish mountains and covered bridges. My grandfather drove into the countryside of Massachusetts and New Hampshire and took color photographs of scenery which particularly moved him, then brought the pictures back to be developed. With the photo propped on an easel beside him, he painted the landscapes. The studio was littered with curled photos and landscape paintings, some apparently finished, some not finished, some framed with carved wooden frames, others bare, leaning against easels and walls and, as I remember, hung on wires to dry.
I remember wanting to go with him to take the pictures, and once I asked him why he didn't paint them right on the spot. He told me, as I remember, that by the time you got there and set everything up, the sun went down, and so it was better to bring a camera. This is the only conversation I actually remember having with him. I wanted to learn about these paintings, but could not. Something else was happening.
The house was amazingly warm and comfortable, and I remember it now with tremendous affection. I remember my grandfather with affection as well, though I remember only hearing his voice and smelling his cigar smoke and kissing his scratchy face, and one conversation between us. I remember, now, that he seemed to like me and to dislike my father. They always quarrelled when we

visited, and my memory explains to me that my grandfather always kept distant from me because I was my father's son. My father, as it came clear many years later, was petulant and offputting to most people who knew him well.
In reality I know nothing of my grandfather's character or personality, except the warmth and dim pleasure of his little house. But for years after he died (in 1962, I think) his paintings hung over the mantelpieces of our various fireplaces in southern Maine. I kept a couple of his paintings myself, until I was about 24. There was a beautiful image of a blue Vermont mountain in the distance, a paved road bending around a hillside in the foreground, green and strongly suggesting the road traveled to some significant place. There was another very flat painting, with strange perspective, of a bare elm tree on the dark green embankment of a river, an angular black boulder in gray motionless water. I studied these paintings in great detail until soon after my mother divorced my father. I looked for my grandfather's character in them, looked for his view of the world. I never found it, I believed. I gave the paintings back to my mother.
There is a sense in which I've spent my life trying to see around my father, to my grandfather who has always seemed very far away. There is a sense in which I've felt deprived of some knowledge, or some tutelage, that grandfathers are supposed to provide but can't, given the confines and needs of the way life was lived in the twentieth century. Life occurs at too great a distance. I lived in Maine, my grandfather lived in Massachusetts. I lived with my father, and my grandfather lived by himself, with his paintings. And in any case, his art was a great distance from the exigencies of life - the exigencies of life being largely financial in nature. There was and is no particular economic need - no survival skill - for me to know about my grandfather's paintings. In fact nothing particularly compelled accuracy in his paintings; I know this because if accuracy were really a compelling motivation, he would have painted from the scenes themselves instead of from photos, which are a great distance from the actual fields, mountains and rivers.
In the late 1950s when we visited my grandfather at his warm, dark house in Hamilton, nothing in our circumstances compelled my grandfather to narrow the distance between us, and I was prevented from spending much time in his studio. From the perspective of those with the responsibility to raise me properly, my interest in the studio was simply a matter of boyhood curiosity, nothing to do with life, or even art. Art was merely my grandfather's hobby.
My memory explains to me now, from this distance, that my grandfather's paintings resulted not from his perfunctory retirement hobby-shop, but from an older, more fundamental exigency: the desire to create. He felt compelled to create, even from the distance of a photograph, the round Vermont mountain and the road wrapping around the hill before it. This alone signifies more than the busy activities of old age. He felt compelled to identify, even from the distance of a photograph, some exact rock that, despite his own inexactnesses, would be complete. He recomposed pines, shifted stones, and picked his way among clouds for a certain view. If he ever completed his view, it went unexplained to anyone, least of all me, his grandson.
Somehow the landscapes were figures, I'm guessing. But simply, the blue-green views of old age were not important for little boys. In any case they were not comprehensible, and we did not discuss them. They were figures of his own solitary home, perhaps, outside the exigencies of life as we all understood them. Beyond his lifetime and soon, I would grow up to have a family and make a living as well. What could he teach me about that?
I knew him little better than this. Whatever I have preserved of him and his paintings is here, now, without the help of any other words or images. For some incomprehensible reason I have learned more about art from Wallace Stevens, who died when I was two years old, than I have from my grandfather, who made oil paintings of New England countrysides. He died when I was about nine. I was very bored when we spent the afternoon of his funeral at a strange house in Salem, and later I remember thinking of the smell of oil paints and cigar smoke.

© Dana Wilde, Puckerbrush Review 1989
The Mind Errant
Forays in Reading