Lives of The Bohemians:
Growing Up With My Father's Paintings

by Jonathan Lethem

I learned to think by watching my father paint. I wrote that sentence five years ago, in a brief essay for the catalogue of a ten-year retrospective exhibition of my father’s paintings by a small museum in New England. More recently I’ve helped him archive a cache of his canvases from the 1970’s, many of which I’d not seen since he painted them – that is to say, since childhood. Confronting an array of pictures spanning my own life on this planet, I was struck again with their implicit challenge to my understanding. Could I think about the paintings themselves? Tell Richard Lethem something about them he didn’t know? I’d begun to see my father’s work (and his life) as being defined by a resistance to – and reluctance to assume – conventional authority. To write about him while he still lived, I’d need to borrow some of his disobedience. I wanted to try. Want to try, I should say.

So, merely speak. Yet I find myself in relation to father and paintings as the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey stood before their monolith. Dumb, though making noise. Weren’t those apes supposed to grab an implement and get to work? After all, it was me that put think and my father paint in the same sentence.

As a teenager I revered Stanley Kubrick, and Arthur C. Clarke – at some point I’d have called them my favorite director and favorite writer, each (though Clarke was shed years sooner than Kubrick). And probably, as choices of favorites, Kubrick and Clarke formed an armor against threatening aspects of my father’s art, and of my parents’ world, and of our family’s life. They offered images the surfaces of which were clean of the paint-drippy, hippie-drippy, Bob-Dylan-raspy-voiced imperfection-embracing chaos surrounding me everywhere. And as images of the artist, Kubrick and Clarke felt somehow absolute in their stances of confidence, of magisterial indifference. (I know better now, but it doesn’t seem mistaken that each of these artists particularly wished to make that impression – enough to fool a kid.) So, they made an antidote for the drug of proximity to my dad – an artist whose authority was for me both bigger and smaller, more problematic in every way.

Like a Kubrickian ape gazing at a monolith, my attempt here is in the nature of a scientific inquiry under impossible conditions. I set out to write about a painter. He happens to be my father. Who was married to my mother. Who – parents, together with my brother and sister – make my family. All I know comes from the ground I gaze across, and am rooted to, helplessly. What’s to keep the paintings from slipping out of view below the horizon, as my planet of memory grumbles on its axis?

As late as 1966, at the age of 34, my father’s trajectory was a fine and ordinary one, for a serious painter of his generation. I mean, rather than for a person of his small-town-midwestern upbringing, which might not have indicated that a serious young man would look to become a serious painter of his generation. The last of six siblings raised in Missouri and Iowa, Richard Lethem’s childhood straddled the Depression and the Second World War, the war in which two of his elder brothers, and sisters’ husbands, fought – men vacating the scene while a boy stayed behind with sisters and sisters-in-law, who might have seemed more like a batch of adoring young aunts.

My father’s own European tour was on a Fulbright to Paris, in 1959, where he studied at the Grand Chaumiere. That, following a bachelor’s degree begun at the Kansas City Arts Institute and completed at Columbia, and a Masters, also at Columbia. I own a student painting from that time, not an ‘original’ Lethem but rather a tricky quotation-canvas, done to accompany his undergraduate thesis on Di Chirico. In it my father, painting in Di Chirico’s style, has replaced the Italian’s vacated piazzas and marble busts with midwestern-American iconography: a warehouse, some farm machinery, a kernel of candy corn. And a bare blue light bulb dangles from a socket, harkening forward to Guston.

My father would soon make much both of this surrealist-pictorial impulse, pointing from Di Chirico to Guston, and of his eagerness to paint farm machinery and other tools. But, a young painter at the end of the fifties, he first had to add his hurried contribution to the waning stream of abstract expressionism. De Kooning was his prime hero. Kline and Gorky not far behind. The first ambitious paintings (meaning, in that era, the first large paintings) of his life were warm, dappled abstractions, painted with a dripping brush, evocative of landscapes. They were good. They were shown. They made no huge dent in the world, as new abstract paintings mostly weren’t in 1960, and before I was born he was done making them.

My maternal grandfather, who I would never meet, fled his wife and New York when my mother was three, to repatriate in East Germany. The improbable gesture likely speaks to how much more German than Jewish he felt – and how Communist, as well. My grandmother was another secular Jew and defiant leftist, but also a born New Yorker, irascible as Thelma Ritter, buddy to cops and cab drivers, lover of pizza and egg creams. She worked as an accountant in a pickle factory in Sunnyside, Queens, and raised her single child to share her secular passion for Abraham Lincoln, for books, arguments, and causes.

My mother dropped out of Queens College in 1962, drawn to Greenwich Village thrills. There she pierced ears, with a pin and ice cube, at a jewelry shop on MacDougal Street, and palled around with folksingers: Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs. In 1963 she met my father, the bearded painter. By the time I was born, in early 1964, they lived in an illegal loft on West Broadway. In that loft, in that year, high on love, sex, and procreation, and on the cultural possibilities in the air (in my firm opinion), high on William Blake (by his own testimony), and likely sometimes high on pot (my mother, like John Lennon, loved to turn you on), Richard Lethem changed his painting style entirely.

In what became, from 1963 to ’68, a first major phase in his art, my father started painting stuff. The Di Chirico influence realized now, the pictures featured functional objects charged with a mysterious significance, and raised to the level of the iconographic: basketball hoops, vises, stereopticons, and salesman’s or traveller’s trunks. My father also painted a series of struck matches, beheld from one side, their sizzled black heads surrounded by a penumbra of sensationally colorful flame. The presentation in the paintings of this period, though hard-edged, never bore even a trace of pop chill; his brushwork held to expressionist drama, his pallette to earthly, or fleshly, warmth.

That work, beginning the year of my birth, became an explosion of canvases in 1966 and 67, in his studio in Kansas City, Missouri. There, my father had taken a teaching job at the Art Institute. He’d converted the barefoot Jewish folksinger girl into a campus wife, was on track for tenure, and jubilantly painting in an individual and highly recognizeable style – as I said, my father’s trajectory was, at one point, just about perfect for a serious painter of his moment, and for a serious bohemian. A dashing professor with a beard and, as yet, no dangerous affiliations.

Five year ago I wrote: In my father’s earlier ‘symbolist/surrealist’ phase, the work, though physical in its voracious painterliness, speaks of the human presence mostly by implication and absence. The empty trunks and lonely vises and stereopticons of this period have a Magritte-like conceptual/literary authority, but their owners and makers have flown the coop. My father himself has written: “I see those images of trunks, vises, and basketball hoops as enchanted erotic objects which came from a period of great personal fulfillment and love.”

What I want to admit now is that as a child I always preferred the paintings from 1964 to 1967 to the work I witnessed my father making in Brooklyn, in the 1970’s. I fetishized the clarity of that depopulated world of fetish objects. The paintings seemed clean to me. I likely associated them with the emotional reality of an infant who has his parents all to himself; in Kansas City we lived in a vast stone house on campus, surrounded by a sculpture garden. It made a citadel for the triad of mother, father, and child. It was the perfect opposite of a neighborhood.

The ‘Fort Hood Three’ were U.S. Army privates who declined to be returned to Vietnam. The war, they explained, never officially declared, was “illegal and immoral”. Court martialed in July, ‘66, their defense attorneys tried to call Robert McNamara to the stand. The judge made it simple: “This is a case against the United States, and the United States has not consented to be sued.” The soldiers got three-to-five. When the Three were shifted to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, in January, of ’67, a small group of peace marchers showed up too. These ninety-odd peaceniks were greeted with snowballs and jeers from other citizens, who’d come to rain contempt on the dissident soldiers. The marchers sang “We Shall Overcome”. A blare of Sousa, played from a truck, drowned them out.

My parents were among those ninety, and even partly responsible for the march. My father, who stood at the microphone at the scuttled rally, had become faculty advisor for a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, while my mother had begun draft counselling (i.e. “It’s better to run to Toronto”) draft-eligible art students. That same Spring, my father organized an all-Saturday teach-in on campus. That Saturday the institute’s president, inflamed by phone calls from trustees concerned about his grip on the faculty, arrived in person and got into a comical shoving match with my father, in a stairwell.

C’est la tenure. My parents, though, had already decided to throw over Kansas City, and my father to throw over teaching. As Dylan would say, I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough. For my mother, who didn’t drive a car (cast-iron New Yorker, she never learned), the midwest isolation was suffocating. And my father? He explained later, “I wanted to reject the establishment institutions that were going along with the war. And I found the strident voices of opposition in my head were making it hard to listen to students.”

I retain discontinuous memories of Kansas City: I recall the sculpture garden, for instance, but no protest marches. I remember petting a dog, and riding on my grandfather’s tractor, but no hippies. The hippies I got to know later. Yet I’ve rehearsed my father’s break with his teaching at Kansas City because it seems a key to my father’s painting (or, sometimes, lack of painting) in the fifteen years that followed.

The key to more than that, really. In my parents’ ‘rejection’ of ‘establishment institutions’ I sense the parameters within which my personality grew; the parameters that, like those of any childhood, (apart from the most exalted or depraved) I both bloomed within, like the windows of a greenhouse, and rattled against, like the jaws of a trap. Anyway, the place our family delivered itself to – a debilitated but gorgeous row house in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Gowanus, or Boerum Hill – was to be the stage for it all: painting, family, childhood.

Once in Brooklyn my parents’ lives were not just overtly political. They became countercultural, as opposed to merely hip. Baby Jonathan’s eerie little modernist world was soon filling up with siblings, neighbors, commune-housemates (for our home became a commune, of sorts), and the terrifying richness of a neighborhood full of race and class juxtapositions. My parents also opened their marriage, and my world had to make room for the inkling, later the certainty, that some of their friends were lovers. My father’s canvases, when he resumed painting in the early seventies, were loaded with human figures, many unclothed, all of them embodying in different ways the forms of human chaos, the daily politics, that our lives had become.

I don’t think I was autistic, but like an autistic child I wanted the human volume turned down. Though consciously thrilled by the adult lives around me, and the odd but definite privileges my communion with their variety had bestowed, I was unconsciously seeking hiding places. I developed a craving, not only in my father’s work but generally, for remote, depopulated art, for images of sublime alienation. I held out hope of cultivating a discrete and unaffiliated, even solipsistic persona. No wonder I wanted Di Chirico back, or pined for Stanley Kubrick. My own early writing was the pure product of this taste, emulating Clarke, Kafka, Philip K. Dick, Graham Greene, Stanislaw Lem, and Borges.

We lived in the house while my father renovated it by hand, teaching himself the carpentry skills, the laborer’s trade, that would become his livelihood for the next twenty years. Our home was soon a stopping-off point for former colleagues and students of my father’s who’d arrived in New York and needed a place to stay, as well as for old friends from Greenwich Village, recontacted after the Kansas City interlude. My mother’s instincts as a host and raconteur made our kitchen table a site of meetings, transformations, flirtation, argument.

We found comrades in the neighborhood. Alongside shabby rooming houses, alongside black and Puerto Rican families entrenched in a neighborhood that had been mostly abandoned by New York’s white-immigrant middle classes many decades before, and alongside the new white renovators who’d launched an unsystematic gentrification a stone’s throw from a jail and two housing projects, Boerum Hill was home to communes. At least five or six of the cheaply-rented row houses within the immediate blocks had been colonized groups of radicals, singles and couples just out of college, and making their home in an affordable quarter. These houses had flavors: one might be firmly Marxist, another druggy, another more familial, given an anchor, say, by a divorced mom raising a kid or two.

Ours was a quasi-commune, one with a family at its center and a painter’s studio on the top floor. My parents extended their commitment to causes along every open path: my father taught home repair to teenagers at a settlement house, and art workshops to prisoners in the Brooklyn House of Detention. They both went on protesting the war until the war ran out, and marched in favor of day care centers, and against proposed Robert Moses freeways and nuclear power. Each time my mother went to the supermarket she shifted heads of Iceberg lettuce and bunches of grapes picked by exploited migrant workers into the ice cream section of the supermarket, to be destroyed by freezing. She had that streak of Yippie in her, and was also once ticketed by a transit cop for using a slug in place of a subway token – her protest, I suppose, against fare increases.

The neighborhood was a laboratory, a zone of mixing, never defined by one ethnicity or class. Mongrel by deep nature, the place absorbed the first scattering of hippies, homosexuals, and painters pretty ungrudgingly. But with signs of a real-estate boom, and a broad displacement of the existing population, the changes were politicized. Our family was drawn into the discomfiting issue of gentrification. We were against it, ideologically. Yet my mother’s native-outerborough gregariousness was a force in making of a new community; by helping knit the white families to the existing neighborhood, she encouraged pioneers, I think. And my father’s trade was a paradox. Having fled ivory tower for blue-collar solidarity, he soon became a highly-sought renovation specialist, a cabinetmaker and sash-and-jamb restorer with an artist’s touch. So, he was engaged on a daily basis in rehabbing the brownstones of Boerum Hill for their new owners, gentrifying with his hands.

Sure, we felt the risk of involuntary complicity. We were white families in a minority neighborhood, no way out of that. Symbolic alliances were therefore everything, and neighbors could become rather paranoid. Those who shared our devotions monitored others for insensitivies or worse. New homeowners galvanizing themselves against a rash of burglaries, or urging the sprucing-up of a vacant lot, might be guilty of collusion with establishment institutions, and those, we knew, led straight to Nixon, and the war.

I don’t mean to be flippant. Boerum Hill, like any zone ‘revived’ by white homeownership, was prey to cynical speculation. And, as many an enemies list or secret memo has shown, the paranoids were right. The idealisms of that hour actually now impress me as a gossamer lost world, Proustian in their delicacy. Those shades in the spectrum between radical and guilty liberal, parsed with such intensity at the time, strike me as poignant from this vantage. That’s to say, even the uptightest adults I knew as a child nonetheless regarded Watergate and Vietnam as proof our leaders were corrupt, and probably sexually hung-up as well. And my parents’ reluctance to be seen as gentrifiers was connected both to a vibrant passion for civil rights, exemplified in action as well as speech, and an instinctive pleasure in the neighborhood as they found it.

My father’s art also became communized. His studio was opened to family and friends and to other artists, as well as to a stream of nude models. For a few years he merely drew, dodging, for a time, the ambition and expense of oil-on-canvas. Or were canvas and oil also suspect, for a time, of being in collusion with establishment institutions? Instead he drew portraits and nudes, in oil crayon and pencil and sometimes with a wash of brushwork, on sheets of vinyl. The portraits collected our friends and neighbors, of all colors, frequently with their lips parted in mid-conversation. The nudes, of both sexes, were delicate, and sometimes explicit. A few were exhibited in a show of erotica in 1974.

At the center of my father’s art practice, at the start of the ‘70’s, was ‘drawing group’. This was a weekly gathering, sometimes in his studio, but most regularly in the Brooklyn loft of a couple of friends, Bob and Cynthia, of artists who wished to work from a model in the nude. Taking turns arranging for a model, they’d then each chip in the five or six bucks it took to pay the fee. On nights when a model didn’t show up, a few members of the group might take turns shedding clothes to serve in their place. These artists, a shifting cast of seven or eight regulars, were younger than my dad, and none as trained. Yet there was no question they gathered as other than peers. The drawing group wasn’t quarantined from the life of our neighborhood, but rather included people I knew from communes, from my mother’s table. Cynthia ran a local children’s bookstore. Bob was one of my father’s carpentry partners. The group also included one of my family’s own housemates, Nancy. And, for a while, me.

When my father began painting again in the ‘70’s he made the drawing group his subject. The new canvases featured nude models, often, but not always, female. Many also presented some figure of a painter, or watcher, always male. In one sense, this ‘artists-and-models’ subject was highly traditional. (My father, in a dismissive moment, called these paintings “European”). The work nudged Courbet, Manet, Picasso, calling up an old self-validating drama of the male spectator, recessed in the shadows or glimpsed at one side, in the self-portraitist’s mirror. Here was the painter as an implicit figure of authority, a step apart from life, and for the viewer a flattering surrogate: Apollonian, noncommittal, masterful.

Yet these pictures also undermined or teased that authority. Just as he’d thrown over teaching, and now worked in the company of those who could have been his students, by making the group his subject my father abjured the privilege of an artist’s exclusive sensibility. “Drawing Group #1” is an example: while the male artist considers a model stretched prone, limbs flung for a gaze-banquet, in the foreground a female artist refines a sketch from an earlier pose. On her pad the nude sits, elbow-on-knee, an asexual crouch. The disagreement gently mocks erotic wish-fulfillment: the pose we’re shown in the painting is just one among many, hardly inevitable. The painter making use of the model hasn’t disregarded the group who’ll chip in to cover the cost (each, we hope, having gotten at least five bucks worth of poses they liked too).

Or take “Turning”, finished in 1979. This scene, which began as a simple life-study, evolved into a self-conscious drama of mortality, inspired by Rilke’s Sonnets To Orpheus. A heroic and vulnerable male nude glances backward at Death-the-Watcher, who takes the form of an artist standing dispassionately at a drawing table, in deep shadows. A spark of birdlike light has lit on the nude’s shoulder – a spiritual flare between the strider and his shrouded double. But leavening the scene is, again, a series of confessions of a painter’s studio shared with other bodies, with other agendas. A sketcher’s pad intrudes from the lower right. A hand pokes in, to pat the head of a wolfish dog. The model’s robe hangs on a peg, alongside a claw hammer. Robe and hammer forecast the future of the players in this allegory: one will don the robe (it’s chilly in this studio), then his street clothes. The other, resume his labors as a carpenter. There are kids to feed. The dog, too.

Variations in degrees of ‘realism’ confound these paintings. So do weird conflations of planar space – shades, again, of Di Chirico. In my father’s own thinking, recaptured for me in a recent letter, he’d framed a couple of questions: “How to capture the psychic energy and urgency implied in realism without the dead end of imitation. Not being satisfied to reduce things to generalities – instead wanting the unpurified, tangible quality of experience to come through.” And: “How to eliminate the narrow confines of modernist style without falling into sentimentality.”

My father had seemingly disabled the symbolic and conceptual levels in his painting (all the stuff I pined for, as a child, in preferring the sixties work). In truth, though, his ‘realist’ paintings were full of gestures of grotesquerie and invention. Imagined figures crept onto the canvases, and cartoonish expressions of lust, impatience, or childlike reverie crept over the faces of the artists and models. At the same time, backdrops are strewn with the prosaic: books, workmen’s boots or gloves, coffee mugs, playing cards, documentary touches to decant any psychosexual theatrics. And that shaggy grey dog, mooning at the feet of the models. The dog’s name is Blue. He must have been lonely when we kids were off at school.

As a puppy, Blue was rescued from the street. My mother found him in a state of cringing fear, and near starvation. The dog’s condition wasn’t a mystery, though. He’d been kept in the side yard of the home of a Puerto Rican family two houses away, and my parents had seen him cowering under the hand of their teenage boys’ merry violence for weeks before he’d been set loose on the street.

“The Green House Kids”, as my family called the teeming inhabitants of that ramshackle structure, were a foul bunch. Not that we allowed ourselves to say so at the time. Instead, I and my siblings fostered what now strikes me now as a hysterical myth of displacement: we credited our discomfort to the dog, who, we were positive we could determine, “didn’t like Puerto Ricans”, and of course couldn’t be blamed. We got to marvel at his prejudice, guilt-free. The parable of Blue’s grudge was a container for our reluctance to give a certain thing its name: We liked plenty of Puerto Ricans, but the nearest-at-hand, the Green House Kids, were pretty awful.

Blue bore this responsibility nobly, as he did everything. He was a beautiful member of the family.

Open marriage turned to separation in 1975. My father moved out of the house for a while, at one point into another Brooklyn commune, a neighborhood away. I’d say this was the worst thing that could have happened, except that denial has obliterated all but the curiosity I felt, to a point of exhilaration, at the expansion of my world to this new turf. Just for instance, one of the guys in the new commune was just out of NYU film school, and deep into Star Trek, my favorite television show, after The Twilight Zone. He put my brother and I into his movie, which was being shot on three adjacent rooftops of differing heights, to symbolize the class system in America. My brother and I played the middle class kids. We got to fling garbage off our roof, onto the heads of the poor.

Anyway, the worst thing that could have happened happened next. My mother fell ill, suffering seizures first taken for epilepsy, but soon diagnosed as symptoms of a brain tumor. This drew our family into one place again, and my father’s studio back into our upper floor. My father’s intensity of purpose didn’t waver; in fact, the body of late-‘70’s work really begins after her diagnosis. This was with my mother’s passionate encouragement. She sat for him constantly, in her robe, and out of it. The portraits from that year record the patchwork progress of her hair’s regrowth, after being shaved for incisions on her skull, and after her follicles’ damage by radiation.

With the drawing group, and his wife, in this era my father also painted his kids (always fully clothed, though it was a reasonably nudist household). I recall sitting for a portrait with my hands folded, wearing an orange Mets wristband. Though I usually killed posing time by reading in his studio, my father didn’t want a book in this painting. He wanted to see my eyes. In the painting that resulted I sit in the crossroads, bracketed by my father’s pallette table and a mirror in which he could see himself; both table and father appear in the portrait.

My father had opened the doors of his studio to the ordinary days of his house. While chasing a “European” theme, his voracious brush gobbled life into the frame. The subject, literal and sublimated, is family, community, and the counterculture, that circle of sympathetic souls into which he’d dissolved his pipe-and-elbow-patches authority. The questing, pensive, contradictory attitudes of the models and the artists, the friends and family and imagined figures arrayed in these pictures tell of the nourishing warmth but also the tenuousness, and sometimes the sexual disarray, of a life lived in the embrace of communal ideals.

In one of the most free and instinctive paintings from this period, “Loft”, the cast is reduced to painter and model (not to mention the dog). She reads, while he greets the viewer head-on, fingers full of brushes, and stripped of reserve in the simplest way – he’s naked too. The title, and the youthfulness of the bemused, tousled painter, link it to a halcyon year of discovery: 1963-64, to Richard and Judith alone in the loft on West Broadway. It’s no self-portrait. The woman doesn’t resemble my mother, or the painter my father. But the rhapsodic brushwork emphasizes the unguarded intimacy of the scene, a page torn from a dream-diary in the lives of the bohemians.

Judith Lethem died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. Her death was, of course, piercing, singular, and for her a private passage, yet the long illness which she and we endured seemed inextricable from the battles of our family’s life in those years. The souring of utopian optimism in the mid-70’s, a culture-historical cliché, was for us true, and personal. Even before her illness, my family’s difference ensured we could feel superior and magical, or freakish and tragic, but never ordinary. What set us apart as artists or potential artists, and as hippies, protesters, commune-dwellers, Quakers, white-kids-but-in-public-school, all seemed to fortell our special fate, an uncanny story destined, not justly but perhaps somehow appropriately, for an end in hospitals and jails, or an early funeral.

How personal? My mother was one of “Capital Steps Thirteen”, a group wrongly arrested during a Washington D.C. protest for occupying what the A.C.L.U. would later prove, in lawsuit on their behalf, to be public space. She was pregnant with my sister Mara at the time. We three kids bragged of this legacy, relishing details such as the slices of baloney the arrestees liberated from their jailhouses sandwiches and slapped up against the wall in protest of their treatment. But we also must have been haunted by the tale, by images of our mom and dad as inhabitants of a sphere of jubilant stridency (electrified by bolts of persecution mania) so beyond the usual boundaries of a family’s life.

If my mother was remarkable then it had to cut both ways. The horrendous diagnosis could only be more evidence of how remarkable she was, signal, not noise, in our interpretation of our family’s place in the world. If our sense of special artistic and political purpose was to be preserved, it would have to conform to tragic destiny as my mother fell ill, just as it would need to encompass the world’s resistance to our standards, made official a few years later by the ascendance of Reagan. The conflation was made, briefly, explicit: we, or at least I, succumbed to the temptation to blame my mother’s brain tumor on Ulano, the toxin-belching solvent factory two blocks away on Bergen Street, and tangible like a punch to the nose for many more blocks around. Here was a chance to widen the circle of chaos and catastrophe from the family, outward to the environment, the political moment.

Ulano, a squat, windowless monstrosity situated exactly between the Wyckoff Gardens housing projects and the gentrifying street I grew up on, had been listed in an EPA report as one of the nation’s ten worst urban polluters. After my mother’s death my father spearheaded the neighborhood’s organized resistance to its undiluted foulness, really the last of his and therefore my family’s sequence of great causes. In truth, if my mother’s brain cancer had an external cause it was likely a bad batch of polio vaccine, whose nightmarish delayed effects on its recipients, neatly matching my mother’s case, were only traced three decades later. The faulty vaccine was distributed in Queens and Brooklyn in the mid-50’s, the span when my mother would have been immunized.

As a parent, Judith was a passionate advocate, never abdicating an inch of her ferocious scrutiny of our lives unless illness made that scrutiny impossible. But what she advocated was paradoxical: freedom, and responsibility for the results of our own choices. She debunked custodial authority, as my father debunked painterly authority. An example: my first chance to to smoke pot came in her presence, when I was eleven. I’d been sitting with a group of her late-night friends around our kitchen table when a joint was produced and lit. One of the guests, a newcomer, a man (I mean, he was probably 21 or 22; he wouldn’t impress me as a man now) seemed surprised she didn’t object to my presence – titillated too. Raising the stakes to provoke her response, he passed the joint to me.

“He’ll make his own decision,” my mother announced, with pride. It was a declaration that dictated its own truth. She bet right; I passed the joint along, unpuffed. I saved my own first drug experiences for late nights with my peers, instead of hers, a couple of years later. Fate then robbed me of my chance to smoke my mother’s drug-of-choice, and my own, with Judith. But I grasped my options. And my stance toward drugs, inscribed in that moment, was her testament: No right and wrong outside the user’s (or refuser’s) personal sense of rightness or wrongness. The only certain wrong at my mother’s table was the hippie’s hypocritical gesture, his drug-prurience. And, with my help, she’d put him in his place.

I joined the drawing group in the year before my mother’s death, and attended sporadically for a year or so after. In this same period I applied to Music and Art High School, got in, and went. I’d drawn and painted since before I could remember (and I would carry on for a while after my focus had shifted to narrative, to film, comics and fiction). But at thirteen I wanted to be my dad in the most literal way.

I was also a fake, being thirteen. At the Thursday night meetings of the group I drew but also soaked in the scene. Ever eager for talk to resume, I hated the long poses, rooting most of all for that moment when someone would go around the corner to the German delicatessen for beer, soda and imported chocolate cookies. I felt watchful, but I’d be flattering myself to claim I was a fly on the wall. The truth is I strolled around between poses as everyone did, making quasi-astute comments on the grownups’ sketches.

You’d think I was taken with the bodies. I kept a partition, though, between my typically churning curiosity and this sober feast of blatant nudity all laid out before me. I was sure the kind of women’s bodies I ravished in mind’s eye had nothing in common with the model’s bodies to which I had regular viewing access, dumb as that sounds. In fact, I entertained crushes on a couple of the women in the drawing group, who never stepped out of their clothes. They were alive to my imagination. The naked ladies shed a light that blinded.

Encouraging me, my father also inadvertently funded a grotesquely exuberant ego. When I was fifteen, my mother dead for less than a year, I said something that upset him. My father and I were walking together, down Nevins Street, in daylight. I was bragging, I think, about the quality of my figure drawing, when I suggested that I was ready for a show. An exhibition of my drawings.
I got as far as asking whether his own gallery would be interested. The work I had in mind was done in the drawing group, a series of brightly-colored pastels on thick white boards, which were in fact the discarded centers of picture-mats, salvaged from some framer’s shop, in the jackdaw manner of both my father’s studio and his carpentry workshop.

He stopped us on the sidewalk. “Are you serious?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Do you really think you’re ready, Jonathan?”

I’d located that rarity, my father’s open temper. It was as though I’d probed for the limit of his anti-authoritarian ethos, and found it: an ape may grope a monolith, or a cat look at a king, but a child was not yet an artist. I think all of Richard Lethem’s training, his degrees, his Fulbright, the pride of his guild, reared in him in that moment. The look on his face then seemed to encompass a disbelief in all that living had cost this artist, since the journey from West Broadway and Kansas City to Brooklyn, and from professordom to carpentry. Most of all in the unfathomable loss of his wife, that champion of his painter’s prerogatives, his painter’s days – and the mother of this damnable stripling.

The first question I remember asking about my father’s painting is: “Why are the drips there?” I asked it of my mother. I knew it wasn’t impossible to neaten up the drips; I’d seen my father’s care in stretching a canvas, stippling a perfect pen-and-ink daffodil for an announcement of my sister’s birth, or grouting tilework.

My mother’s explanation was partly tautological. She told me that in paintings, drips were good. They gave evidence of the painter’s hand at work – well, they sure do, I thought. Rather than offer words like immediacy or expressionist to an eight year-old, she tried an analogy: the paint drips were like the squeak of accoustic guitar strings audible in recordings of the folksingers we loved to play in that house: Phil Ochs, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger. Once she pointed them out I wasn’t sure I liked the guitar squeaks either. But her comparison has never been completely out of my mind since.
Seven or eight years later I was an adherent of what seemed to me dripless, squeakless art. The aforementioned icons of alienation – Kubrick, Borges, and Rod Serling. I was into punk, but not messy punk: I liked The Ramones, and Devo, and Talking Heads; above all I identified with David Byrne’s grooming. When no one was looking I sold my mother’s old Cream and Delaney & Bonnie LPs, which no one was playing now anyway. For my father’s birthday I gave him a monograph on Magritte, a painter I knew he regarded as slick and illustrational. The gift was a heavy-handed suggestion he ought to reconsider everything, come over to the glossily paranoid and solipsistic side of life before it was too late, as though only I knew where the action was.

I was utterly the product of his and my mother’s sensibility, of course, but I desperately needed to convert it into something unrecognizeable as such, to my father and myself. So I poured my graphic talents into hand-drawn comic books, my neophyte writing into science fiction, aspirations calculated to fly under the radar my father’s generationally typical notion of what could and couldn’t be regarded as art.

Discomfort with my parents’ politics I converted too, into a blithe and arrogant certainty that some advance in human evolution was the only hope for the species. This was a blend of Kubrick’s mordant certainty as to the human need for self-destruction and the optimist view of Arthur C. Clarke (and of the whole space-goofy wing of the science fiction genre), that humanity would outgrow its wretched cradle – the same mixture that lent 2001: A Space Odyssey such an enthralling ambivalence.

Sometime in the eighties, when my father’s outrage was focused on Guatemala or Nicaragua, he gleaned my indifference to the latest cause. I explained by loftily quoting Arthur C. Clarke (who was, I think, quoting, or paraphrasing, the British scientist J.B.S. Haldane): “Man must not export his borders into space.” We’re talking about the period in my life known as ‘high school’, so this was loosely translatable as fuck you, dad! But I hadn’t used those exact words, so we managed to eke out the following exchange, my father’s incredulity mushrooming as it had when I requested an exhibition at his gallery.

Son: “That’s why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is so important, dad. When we meet an alien race we’ll understand that we’re all one planet, and wars will be looked on as primitive behavior.”

Father: “Are you saying that a world government is likely anytime soon? Or would be a good thing?”

Son: “If not in your lifetime, certainly in mine.”

That’s all I can bear to remember. Anyway, the point about space, I see now, was this: in space, no one can hear the guitar squeak. Or see the paint drip.

Evenings in our communal household, in the years after Judith’s death, we cooked and washed dishes according to a weekly schedule. One of my dish-nights, after a dinner where I’d not spoken a word, radiating sullen-teenage deathrays instead, my father dried dishes in exchange for a moment alone with me. Piercing my cone of silence at the sink, he asked what was wrong. I played dumb – my behavior seemed normal enough to me. He pointed to my silence at dinner.

I offered another patronizing, Kubrickian explanation: “You have to understand, dad, I’m a misanthrope.”

I probably thought the word meant someone who doesn’t live in a commune.

I’d never stopped looking at his paintings. I looked at them in sessions with him in the studio, dispensing approval and criticism with a teen’s certainty. And I looked at them by myself, afternoons when he was out of the house. I often skulked in his studio, not only because, as I grew older, less interested in adults than in my own adultesque drama, the telephone there was the most private for marathon phone mopes with out-of-town girlfriends.

One day I committed a ridiculously Oedipal crime: I ‘fixed’ a line in one of his paintings, while it hung in a near-finished state on his studio wall. It was a picture that engaged and, I guess, irritated me. The line at a woman’s calf was interrupted – cruddy, it seemed to me – where it could be lucid. More cartoonish and perfect. So, drunk on my own gall, I swirled a brush in moist paint and clarified the line. The adjustment was neglible. That didn’t keep me from spending the next month or so in terror I’d be caught.

Whether my gesture was detected or not, I was never confronted. I’ve lost track of which painting I touched, now, if it still exists. The moment is barely an episode, a flicker of a brush. Yet, between my certainty, until I was twelve or thirteen, that I would be a painter like my father, and my certainty now, that I am a writer like my father is a painter, stand those years when I wanted to be Stanley Kubrick instead. And in the middle of those years, that flicker, that sole brushstroke, stands to confess the wish to climb inside my father’s hand, inside his eye and hand and brush, to clamber inside the canvases themselves and live where I couldn’t help living anyway.

In my lampoon of his ambition, that earlier day on Nevins Street – my suggestion I was ready for a show – my father might have thought he heard a mouths-of-babes indictment of his own choices in dismantling so many structures of authority and order. In the appalled glance I drew in return, maybe I glimpsed my father’s regret. I at least glimpsed the ambivalence, even depression, that would for a time shade any talk of those years. The same ambivalence, I think, caused him to underrate until recently the best paintings from that chapter of his art.

But who am I to talk? I vamoosed to California, in the wake of my family’s 1970’s, and stayed away from Brooklyn for most of fourteen years. All that stuff I wouldn’t go near in my own work, at least not directly, for most of twenty. Whereas my father, in 1983 or thereabouts drew from somewhere, from who knows where, a deeper breath, and began again.

What resulted was a third phase, if that’s not an inadequate name for the most sustained outpouring of his life. And, though his work in the eighties (and beyond) relies on motifs and methods developed in each of the earlier phases, and is dense with worldly emotion, it’s also the most youthful. He’d earned a deeper authority, one which didn’t rely on authority’s noxious postures. Richard Lethem had shrugged off any last debts to Europe, and licensed himself as an American artist instead.

This flood of images opened along two avenues. First, my father replaced artist-surrogates with laborers. In “The Wall and the Worker”, from 1982, the claw hammer has come down from the studio wall, to be wielded by a carpenter slapping nails into sheetrock. The subject’s bluejeans and toolbelt could be my dad’s, except they might as easily be any of his partners’ – Here Comes Everycontractor. In “Shadow Hammer, Bone Ladder”, “Hazard”, and “Eerie Basin”, the worker dons a signature dust-mask, a bit of realism which also freed the figure as an archetype: the routine handler of poisons, a wader in urban detritus. If my father had been the uneasy conscience of a gentrification, he now offered a glimpse of its underbelly. The laborer pictures were dispatches from the Gowanus Canal and Red Hook, our zone’s margins, where neglect and decay had been pushed by the growth of the renovater class. Where the earlier paintings had been porous to the life of our home, he’d now opened the door to the street, and to intimations of urban strife, racial and otherwise.

The second wellspring was historical. In my father’s hometown, in western Missouri, a black man named Raymond Gunn, accused of the rape and murder of a teacher, was burned alive on the roof of her one-room schoolhouse. The lynching took place the year before my father’s birth; two men soon to become my uncles by marriage were, as high school boys, at the mob’s fringes. By the time my father came of age the story was a communal legend suffocated in silence. Lurking in his moral imagination, 1930’s-Midwestern-trauma now arrived as an explicit subject in his work, as if called out by the 1970’s-Brooklyn-trauma which had just begun proliferating there.

By now I was out of the house. First, off to college, then to my California self-exile from all things Brooklyn. My visits to my father’s studio became more sporadic, more ceremonial, and kinder. I’d fly into New York to stay with friends in Manhattan, then take the subway to Brooklyn, and trudge to his new studio, under the Manhattan Bridge, often, it seemed, in fresh-fallen snow. He would give me coffee, then invite me in to consider his art.

In this period my father allowed me to play prodigal. We became relative strangers for a while, in order to make our friendship. And I had to make myself a writer to show my father and myself some autonomy – which freed me, soon after, to confess my debt to his work. So, I encountered the marvel of his ‘80’s evolution in a sequence of punctuated equilibria. At first the variety of imagery felt anarchic. Now I grasp the sense of it all. The ‘worker’ and ‘Raymond’ motifs had merged. The new paintings took an accounting of American violence and sufferance, embodied in a darkly fantastical series of male figures from both the urban and the rural undergrounds of my father’s imagination: circus strongmen, hospital orderlies, travelling salesmen, crypt-keepers, secret agents, handymen, henchmen. They form a gallery of suspects as personal as Guston’s hooded legion. Here’s “The Beekeeper Panics”: the worker’s dust-mask has now morphed into a beekeeper’s veil, though the title figure is beset by an ominous encirclement of wood-saws, tools maddened like yellowjackets. Or consider “Locksmith of Hurry”, a rather cooler customer. Though one leg has dwindled to a skeleton-limb, and his previous keys moulder in the shop’s ancient gloom, the locksmith keeps a slitty-eyed calm beneath his hat’s brim – perhaps his current production will be the key to the problem. In “Trueblood Trips Up”, out of a gothic Missouri anecdote, a rural housepainter spontaneously combusts on the job, yet seems intent on completing his task.

These were Men With Tools, working feverishly to greet disaster with professional dignity intact, even if some of their tools were as feeble as a kite or banana, or as booby-trapped as a gun, or a can of solvent. It was as if my father had adapted William Carlos Williams’ dictum – “No ideas but in things” – to his turn from ivory tower to a carpenter’s earthly savvy: No authority but in implements. But with the insight came the warning: dodging complicity with establishment modes of power through violence wasn’t a cinch. Homo Faber might also be Homo Wrecker.

Richard Lethem had reclaimed, from the depopulated tableaus of the ‘60’s, his insight into the yearning gravity of inanimate objects. But, having worked from live models for ten years, his brush fixates on bodies. My father had learned a lot, by then, about community, violence and disease, and about trying to put human flesh and human life on canvas, and discovering how it resists being put there. So, every fabulation is run through what he’d found to be the bottom (and top) line: the physical absolutes of human experience. If he’s a surrealist it’s not the drawing-room gamesmanship of Magritte, but of Julio Cortazar and Bob Dylan and early Cormac McCarthy, where a personal phantasmagoria is made necessary by an immensity of emotional response not encompassed by realist methods. The results are some of the least rarified artworks I’ve had the privilege to know.

Have I broken into the studio again, just to neaten up the drips? All this may be no better than a cartoon rendering, a pass with my ape’s bone of language over the impossible intersection of Richard Lethem’s painting and my wishful thinking. The account’s not half full. Where in this is my father’s passion for John Berryman’s Dreamsongs? Where’s his ritual of finding workmen’s gloves, abandoned in gutters, and pinning them his to studio wall, or glueing them to his canvases? His scattering of well-worn Lightning Hopkins and Elmore James cassettes, his green painting table with its molten-Vesuvius pyramids of petrified colors? What’s missing here is only the whole matter: my father in his studio, painting, as he has always been, as he likely is this morning. I’d only need to pick up the phone to find him there. To interrupt him, though I know he’d be glad to talk. See him: my father painting. My father painting, in a converted barn in Maine now, adjusting the space heater, listening to the Cds, still his favorite blues or gospel, that have mostly replaced his tapes, stepping back from canvas to palette table to mix a color, or just to have a look, to see what he’s done, to judge whether the expression on the face of that acrobat or feral goat or Tupoltec God (he’s been inspired by Mexican art lately) is just right, conveys the shade of greed or delight he’d intended, carrying the story just that bit further. My father in the studio in a mustard-colored sweater. My father in the studio with a mug of coffee, long since cold. My father in the studio painting. My father in his studio, pausing to read a sonnet. My father in his studio, half-finishing a letter to his brother, then picking up his brush. My father, in his studio, layering act upon act, color upon color, practicing his art.