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