Beatrice Wood: Sophisticated Primitive Helen Dixon Hennessey

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2004 Beatrice Wood: Sophisticated Primitive Helen Dixon Hennessey

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BEATRICE WOOD:

SOPHISTICATED PRIMITIVE

HELEN DIXON HENNESSEY

A Dissertation submitted to the Program in the Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004

W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Professor Directing Dissertation

Nancy Smith Fichter Outside Committee Member

William Cloonan Committee Member

Karen L. Laughlin Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I am grateful for the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research year (1997-1998) and a professional development leave from Florida A&M University (Fall 2003). I am also beholding to several people who greatly assisted my completing this work: Francis M. Naumann, exacting art historian and loyal friend of Beatrice Wood; Judith Throm, head librarian of the Archives of American Art; and especially my major professor, W.T. Llamon, Jr., consistently patient and kind. Many others helped through interviews: notably Otto Heino, Beth Hapgood, Margot Wilkie, and Garth Clark. Many others unnamed are remembered.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures v Abstract vi

1. ART: OBJECT AS SUBJECT 1

2. ARTIST IN SEARCH OF A MEDIUM 16

3. TOE-TO-TOE WITH NIHILISM: THE SHOCKS 45

4. BALANCE ACHIEVED 74

5. SEEING IT HER WAY: THE VISUAL ARTS 104

The Ephemeral: Drawings 112 The Grounding Medium: Clay 126 The Vessels 129 “Sophisticated Primitives” 133

6. OUT ON HER OWN: WRITING IT DOWN 141

The Autobiographical Writing 151 The Plays 152

7. “I THINK OF ANOTHER POT. . .”: THE KINAESTHETIC 171

APPENDIX 182

NOTES 234

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 239

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 255

iv LIST OF FIGURES

Plate 1 Beatrice Wood at the wheel (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace 1

Plate 2 Blindman’s Ball poster; B. Wood dancing: photograph 15

Plate 3 Un peut [sic] d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap) (1917/1977): replica: pencil, colored pencil, and soap on cardboard 39

Plate 4 Marriage (1987); Bureaurcracy [sic] (1970): sophisticated primitives 44

Plate 5 Beatrice Wood posing as poster (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace 73

Plate 6 Gold Luster Footed Bowl (1968): vessel 103

Plate 7 Lit de Marcel [Marcel’s Bed] (1917): watercolor 114

Plate 8 Dieu protege les amants [God Protects Lovers] (1917): watercolor 119 and ink on paper Plate 9 Journee (1917): watercolor and ink on paper 121

Plate 10 Beatrice et ses douze enfants (Beatrice and Her Twelve Children) 124 (1917): watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper

Plate 11 Gold Chalice (1992): vessel 131 Plate 12 Settling the Middle East Question (1958): sophisticated primitive 136 Plate 13 Is My Hat On Straight? (1971): sophisticated primitive 137

Plate 14 Autobiography cover: Beatrice Wood, age 15 140

Plate 15 “Yes, you are Minerva on a toothpick.”(1982): illustration 147 for travel book

Plate 16 “Last night seems far away from a search for the absolute.” (1982): 148 illustration for travel book

Plate 17 Poster for Beatrice Wood Memorial Folk Dance (1998) 170

v ABSTRACT

Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), at 104, was declared a “Living Treasure” in her native California and “Esteemed American Artist” by the Smithsonian Institution in 1997. She was an internationally recognized ceramicist, known especially for her trademark luster glazes, and was the last surviving member of the New York Dada group of 1915-1923. Featured in “late-bloomer” books, she did not begin pottery until the age of forty, and according to her dealer and art historian Garth Clark, created her “masterpieces” in her last two decades. Her involvement with the New York Dada group and especially Marcel Duchamp was, in a sense, rediscovered by another art historian, Francis M. Naumann, in the late 1970s who wrote several articles usually concerning her drawings and her association with the Arensberg Circle and curated a bi-coastal retrospective of her work. She was quite celebrated at the end of her life, evidenced by over 600 articles about her work and her life. She also worked in other media beyond the luster pottery: often humorous sculptural forms in clay she named “sophisticated primitives;” professional acting in French in her youth; and writing, including four plays (one published here for the first time), an autobiography, three travel books, among others. But the pieces and the performances were not the whole of Beatrice Wood’s appeal: her dramatic persona, wit, and openness to people kept her doors open to hundreds of visitors a month toward the end of her life. Part biography and part analysis, this study considers issues such as her aesthetic approach, choice of media, being a woman and an artist, balancing career and life, spiritual thought and feeling, and politics. I extend a phrase Naumann uses to describe her drawings, “compatible contradictions,” to much of her other work and her life as well. Her “Dada state of mind” is joined to the Victorian, Romantic, as well as the

vi Pragmatic. While she is not, unlike Picasso or Duchamp, the single most important artist of the twentieth century, she can be seen as a “little artist” (her term) who bridges and is an exemplar for many contemporary concerns.

vii 61

Plate l Beatrice Wood at the wheel (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace

1 CHAPTER 1

ART: OBJECT AS SUBJECT

But if you were to hide the world in the world so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things. -Chuang Tzu (Burton Watson, tr.)

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life. -A.S. Byatt, Possession, 416-7

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

Beatrice Wood died on March 12, 1998, nine days after her 105th birthday. She died warm in her own bed, in the manner Jack Dawson predicted for Rose, the Titanic character she inspired, in excellent spirits and in good health until a few days before her death. Unlike Rose she had no children, but she passed surrounded by loving friends and associates. Hundreds of people had attended her birthday party on March 3rd and three days later she had given a party for director James Cameron and actress Gloria Stuart to whom she gave the fifth annual Beatrice Wood Film Award. In 1994 the governor of her native California, Pete Wilson, had declared her a "Living Treasure" and the Smithsonian Institution named her "Esteemed Living Artist" that same year. She had been awarded two honorary doctorates and held, as she said, "a Ph.D. in Lying." She was an internationally recognized ceramist, known especially for her spectacular lustre glazes, and was the last member of the New York Dada group of 1915-1923 to die. Featured in "late-bloomer" books, she did not begin pottery until the age of forty, and according to her dealer and ceramic historian Garth Clark, she achieved her "masterpieces" in her last two decades. Her involvement with the New York Dada

2 group and especially Marcel Duchamp was, in a sense, rediscovered in 1976 by another art historian, Francis M. Naumann. Naumann has since written several articles, usually concerning her drawings and her connections with the Arensberg Circle, and curated a 1997 bi-coastal retrospective and edited the book for it, held at the American Crafts Museum in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, close to her home of fifty years in Ojai, California. Two weeks after her death, the show opened again in Lake Worth, Florida, this time with twelve pieces donated to the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art by Mr. Lannan, South Florida art collector and philanthropist (Naumann, telephone interview, 26 March 1998). The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio presented the last show of the retrospective in June that year. Her celebrity before her death was evidenced by over 600 articles in newspapers and magazines (many repetitive) and by three videos documenting and evoking her work and life. Also, her life inspired, in muse-like fashion for both men and women, other works and artists: the various documentaries; a musical play Chocolate and Young Men (1997); the ceramic mask sculpture of Ojai potter, Ronda LaRue; the work of a former employee, David VanGilder, who claims to be her apprentice; the poems of Los Angeles poet Mira Adjani; in part, the Francois Truffaut film Jules and Jim (1961) based on the novel of the same name by her important friend, Henri-Pierre Roché, but certainly the novel Victor Roché was working on when he died; as well as James Cameron's Titanic (1997). She also inspired less "known" people to be creative in their lives. Beatrice Wood worked in several media. As a visual artist, she created often humorous sculptural forms in clay, quite different from her lustre ware. She drew, made lithographs of her drawings, and documented East Indian folk art in photographs. Drawn early to the performance arts as well, as a young woman she acted professionally in French in Montreal and New York in over sixty roles and danced, though not professionally, until she was at least eighty-three. Just three years before her death, at 102, she produced an audio tape of herself reading Mama Lola’s Pleasure Palace as her alias Countess Screwvinsky and singing Chanson de Folle as herself. She also wrote a daily diary since 1912, from the age of nineteen, and voluminous correspondence. She

3 wrote three illustrated "travel" books, which she sometimes referred to as "novels," illustrated albums, stories, an autobiography, a fantasy alphabet book, and four plays (1927-1933). But the pieces and the performances were not the whole of Beatrice Wood's appeal: her dramatic persona, wit, and openness to people had kept her doors open to hundreds of visitors a month until shortly before her death. She knew many luminaries of the twentieth century. In a 1997 article in the LA Times Mark Ehrman wrote: After all, she did go to high school with President Grover Cleveland's daughter. When Dada was all the rage in the teens and ‘20s, she began her well-documented tryst with the movement's Wunderkind, Marcel Duchamp. She danced in front of Nijinsky, shocked Method icon Konstantin Stanislavsky with her unladylike vocabulary, acted alongside Edna St. Vincent Millay, knitted a scarf for Isadora Duncan (though not the one the dancer died in . . . ), and followed early theosophists Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti (16).

On the occasions I visited her, a glance at the guest book showed the names of people from the neighborhood as well as from Europe or Australia. Once Alan Ginsberg had just left, another time the stage director Peter Sellars was on his way, and on another I was kept waiting while the crew from "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" was filming. She had marriages (of convenience and inconvenience) and great loves (of endurance). She continued to express herself as an artist and as a woman all those years, and through personal struggle and certain "mistakes" was forced to learn to be "practical" so that she became a masterfully playful artist and career woman. Yet she felt that the highest calling for a woman is to be happily married with a family-- thus piquing some feminists. Her life intersected her art and her art intersected her life, much of which is recounted in her 1985 autobiography I Shock Myself, but more examination is warranted to understand how she achieved the balance, energy, and discipline to maintain an artistic life for close to ninety years, spanning almost the entire twentieth century. By considering issues such as her aesthetic approach, media choice, and her female-ness as an artist, I have shown her in the context of her time. By focusing on her lesser known works, the plays and other writings, and aspects of her life that have not been highlighted,

4 the years of struggle and "cataclysm" and her involvement with theosophy and education, I hope to shed some light on her entire process. The equilibrium she maintained between career, personal and public life was remarkable. She was extraordinary and in some ways quite ordinary as well. A phrase that art historian Francis Naumann used to describe the style of her drawings, "compatible contradictions," could be extended to describe much of her other work and her life as well. Her "Dada state of mind" is joined to the Victorian, Romantic, as well as the Pragmatic. While Beatrice Wood was not the single most important artist of the twentieth century, like Picasso or Duchamp, she can be seen as a "little artist," her humble term for herself (Ramljak 10 ). Through her own resources and the influence of trusted friends, she confronted decided issues of the modern century in an exemplary way: she thought of herself as an artist when the field was dominated by men; she ultimately balanced the creative and business sides of the field successfully; she sidestepped the fine art/craft dilemma by working in a traditional craft yet approaching it as a fine art, creating, for example, distinctive recognizable glazes difficult to duplicate; she insisted on continuing to work even when her work was out of style; she also insisted on keeping open to all media. For example, she continually made her ceramic sculpture, which she called "sophisticated primitives," despite negative criticism about it even from friends. In her last two decades while doing her ceramic "masterpieces," she also published several books, returned to drawing regularly, produced her play written in 1927, kept dancing (until the last few years), and was willing to act the part of Rose Dawson in Titanic. For a girl who passionately, yet naively, wanted to become an artist, the twentieth century was an open invitation for her self-realization. It would be known as the modern century: modern as being influenced by the “now,” a la mode, rather than by the traditions of antiquity and, on the other hand, modernity as a state of mind coming out of the Enlightenment that knows reason and its extension, technology, have made a new civilization grounded in perpetual progress, even if in fits and starts. Wood came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century when modernity was confidently pressing forward: hope was endemic. Western civilization had extracted a positive self-image

5 from the Enlightenment. Achievement was open-ended with ever-changing technologies bridging every new gap. Social progress translated into freedom of individuality, especially in America. One can easily imagine a young American nouveau riche girl leaving from or arriving in New York Harbor with her mother on the latest ocean liner. As so many others had, she would have passed the Statue of Liberty, installed only seven years when the family moved to New York, as she passed through the harbor. Its meaning to immigrants, as an icon, trademark even, of America and “Liberty Enlightening the World” was hopeful; to a willful girl with many advantages it represented solidity and an open future, a woman as lighthouse with a torch in the sky. While conservative in iconography, as public sculpture paid for by the people, French and American, not the governments, it represented the possibilities of technological and populist freedom for all, an alliance she would soon test. The century that Wood negotiated was one of faith in progress, yet change often brought uncertainty. Although historians dispute the official beginning of the modern age, each point yielded, toward century's end, a paradoxical reversal. Some say it was the crisis between science and religion that emerged from Darwin's theories (1859) and in previous geological discoveries; that crisis finally gave rise, in part, to worldwide fundamentalism.1 For some it was in the 1870s with the first industrial inventions; those inventions and ones that followed brought in sweat factories, war armaments, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation. For others it was in the loss of class distinctions with the Bolshevik Revolution; mass culture, totalitarian regimes and collapse into capitalism followed. For many it was World War I with technology turned against civilians and the gassed trench fighter, the atrocity of modern war; wars more than ever are being fought, often televised, "Post-traumatic stress syndrome" by any other name is still with us, and war has become at times an upgraded computer game. The clear beginning is uncertain, but, whether direct or indirect, all views focus on science and technology setting a dominant "new" course. Psychoanalysis struggled with the alienation and the dark side of the psyche, challenging reason as the governor of human action (Freud and Jung differed over the positive value of religion in satisfying human beings' deepest psychic desires).

6 We have come to know that prognostications of human behavior are a true leap of faith. The certainty that science and technology promised yielded more uncertainty, yet the subtle faith in progress produced a sense of the “modern.” Wood was aware of these conflicts, and many found their way into her work. But for a young educated American full of dreams it did not matter how it began but rather how it affected her life. Modernism began for her in the family, the prestige of new American wealth, and the ability to have the latest things: electricity, telephones, sailing to Europe. Western civilization had perfected a technique, the scientific method, for the study of nature which was so reliable, producing so much certainty, that it was applied to all social aspects and contexts. Wood would grow into adulthood knowing tradition (her mother and father) and yet would be swept up in the new world of advanced progress and all that glittered with it. At the same time, driven by a desire to be an artist and aligning herself with a rebel faction of society, Wood was open to change. By the end of the century there would be an enormous backlash to the naivete of the positive sciences. Had the Enlightenment gone aground? The Darwinian and Heisenbergian discoveries were provoking a new fundamentalism which diametrically opposed secularism, technology had been responsible for more death and destruction than all previous history, the Bolsheviks (and other idealists) had themselves turned into tyrants (nothing new), and young men would refuse to go to war in greater numbers during the Viet Nam War and some there would refuse to participate. For every rational intention there seemed to be contradiction. The idea of consensus was evaporating. Eventually, the only consensus was that no set consensus exists. This would become more evident by the end of the century and full-blown uncertainty would become integral to pluralism. By the end of the century philosophers and others were remarking that "the belief in an unmitigated good through technological progress has been shaken and replaced by a sense of ambiguity" (Ihde 82). Several prescient thinkers addressed early this situation’s relationship to art. One of the most prophetic modern voices of the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche, had warned of the burgeoning problem of the ambiguity in culture. He had foreseen the negative side of the Enlightenment. For Nietzsche the inability to integrate the creative

7 impulse and the unpredictability surrounding it with the repetitive form of certainty, would propel the species into an endless spiral of artificial values (Nihilism) that would eventually exhaust and polarize the human being. Yet in The Will to Power Nietzsche says the "blending of these very delicate nuances of animal well-being and desires" not only "constitute[s] the aesthetic state" but is necessary for the "high point of communication" (427-428). We know that high point when the poles achieve equilibrium. As he wrote, “It is to the honor of an artist if he is unable to be a critic– otherwise he is half and half, he is ‘modern’” (429) . The return to art that he proclaimed was not a call for everyone to produce art works but to reexamine the fundamentals in the art process and how they emerge from everyday experience. This is not to assert that Beatrice Wood is the Überfrau. She was all-too-human. Humility balanced by assertion, concern for herself balanced by concern for those she loved, the drive to assert herself in form balanced by the whimsical, kept her on an even keel. Recognizing the contradictions and the ability to laugh at her lack of logic kept her honest. She said in several interviews: "I never meant to be logical." Playing with the truth kept her youthful despite her age. Beatrice Wood’s “now” was predicated on listening to and being true to herself. Further, she avoided the “Oscar Wilde syndrome,” refusing to commodify herself or other people (Intimate 19). For example, she resisted writing her autobiography, strongly suggested by her friends Desikacharya Rajagopal and Alan Watts, until her mid-eighties, thinking "for inevitably one becomes one's own heroine" (Shock 170). Early modern artists would also turn away from the methods of the academy and demand experimentation and discovery; like the scientists, they accepted the outcome, regardless of where it took them. When did the modern movement in art begin? Certainly the parameters are telling. Impressionism to Pollock was as extreme a shift as alchemy to chemistry. Was it the “terrifying” portrait of Yvonne Landsberg by Matisse that Beatrice Wood saw “almost . . . in trance” shift into “a creature of wondrous beauty”? (Shock 28). The shift in perspective was clear, but what did it mean? The accelerated rate of change that was emerging in Western socio-political life became the “stuff” the art world would express. If enlightened minds sought answers to

8 irrationality, artists found inspiration and vindication in their juxtaposition. Cubism expressed the intuitive/rational dilemma in perception, Surrealism countered the real with the dream, and Dada called for a transformation of all perception. Beatrice would learn this very well at the hands of Duchamp and the early New York Dadaists. If in the art world of twentieth century America, one had to find a flashpoint, it would have to be in the Dada movement. The spontaneous and surprising reality of the accelerated world lent itself to the Dada movement’s pronouncement that “anything goes.” Duchamp and the readymade were the ultimate concept: Duchamp’s famous question: How does one make a work of art which is not a work of art? Some talent was necessary, but individual expression was highlighted. Readymades opened the floodgates to everyone. For a girl whose romantic yearnings were to be an artist, who had no noticeable abundance of talent, the idea that anyone could pick up an item and declare it art just for its own sake was empowering, even if she said she did not understand it. Ironically (or fittingly), the Dada movement flourished briefly on ambiguity and contradiction. From Zurich to Cologne, from Berlin to New York the Dadaist championed freedom and all its bifurcations, especially uncertainty. For the Dadaist, science measures and validates the things in the world accurately but when it comes to human behavior full of emotions and feelings, the imagination triumphs. The meaning of truth in Dada is the impulse for free imagination. Dada has been defined as anti-art, protest, and despair. Although it embraced these ideas, it also enthusiastically embraced their opposites. The lasting legacy, its myth, is that everything ever said or written about Dada is probably true. The rational achievements of mankind were not rejected by the Dadaists but mocked enough to allow for natural impulses, the play of uncertainty. In life as well as in their performances, the necessity for spontaneity and surprise intertwined with forethought and expectation. An evening at the Café Voltaire for both audience and performers was an experience. Although the general program was vaguely mapped out, spontaneous impulse would have its experiential say and way. Whether in Europe or New York, the Dada conspirators were a contradiction in themselves. Their art and lives were a whirling dervish, a St. Vitus dance, where individuality was necessary for the group, just as the group was necessary for their individuality. For Beatrice, the

9 Blind Man’s Ball was full of memories, chief of which was the gang flopping on Duchamp’s bed at the end of the evening. She immediately drew a memorable drawing that captured her triumphal feeling. The Dada experiment, like all twentieth century art, was fleeting (1916-1923). It set the tone for rapidly begun and ended conceptual “movements.” By the middle of the century, a relatively small group at the center of the contemporary art movement in New York swung toward abstraction, expression, and unbridled creativity, generating its own apologists. The rift grew between what Arthur Danto and others have called the artworld and everybody else. With good reason the public knows the phrase, “Is it art yet?” Following ideas laid out by Duchamp, popular culture, advertising, everyday objects, and nature were often “appropriated” for art. Foreseeing the problem posed by modernity, Nietzsche, in effect, had asked: How can true individuality, with its natural impulsiveness, flourish under the weight of technology, with its rigor? Nietzsche's vision of the future man implied it would be the unusual person to break out of herd, to create an individual path not in contradiction with the social fabric but in juxtaposition with it. A contemporary of his, Charles Baudelaire, reverses Nietzsche’s universal vision of the individual and concentrates on how an individual interacts in the “now,” how the moderne can coexist with its history (modernity). Baudelaire was, in effect, asking the question: How can true individuality flourish, with its natural drive for closure, under the weight of creative chaos? By the end of the twentieth century, not only was uncertainty present, regardless of science’s progress, art’s non-stop explosion of new ideas and sensations had left many individuals feeling left out of that world. The poet Baudelaire noticed in the painter Constantin Guy qualities of authenticity that an individual can attain despite the pressure of constant technological change and moving with the (dandy) herd. While specific to Monsieur G., some of these qualities are suggestive of the manner in which Beatrice negotiated her approach to art. In "The Painter of Modern Life: The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child" (1863) Baudelaire describes his contemporary's character and behavior, pointing toward what he sees as a new attitude or sensibility to which he ascribes (first) the term

10 'modernité.' Monsieur G. came to drawing late in life. He is to Baudelaire a “man of the world” and not an “artist,” for the former expresses the breadth of his vision while “artist” implies “a specialist, a man wedded to the palette like the serf to the soil.” Baudelaire eulogizes this man of modernity who is able to passionately embrace his time, who is aware of the ideas of the world around him, yet at the same time engages with particular sensual pleasure no matter how seemingly innocuous and small the source. He does not seek fame or notoriety, quite the contrary, being engaged instead with the expression of the moment. Because of his great curiosity, he is a “spiritual citizen of the universe,” his genius is "childhood recovered at will. . . for which no aspect of life has become stale [Baudelaire’s emphasis]" (139). Beatrice Wood's character or style coincides on particular points with this quintessential modern artist. Monsieur G. was very much of the moment: Beatrice Wood was of many moments. Like M. G., Beatrice came late to the medium (ceramics) that sustained her for the rest of her life and while she may have wished for fame in her early life, especially having known personally many people who were famous, she let that notion go with grace. Despite starting late (and to some critics her never achieving the ability to throw pottery well, for example), she set upon the task of learning the craft and disciplining herself diligently. At every stage of her life she connected to the ideas of the world around her, but for her it was often the personal, sensual, particular moment that inspired her work. Ironically, her ceramic vessels, those practical objects with stunning glazes, in some ways, were her most abstract work, yet many people remarked that looking at them was like looking at her. Beatrice Wood responded in a hermaneutical fashion to the attitudes regarding the new against tradition. In what was perhaps her first modern moment: La Belle Epoque attitude clashed with the modern that evening in 1913 when primitivism and overt eroticism caused what some called a riot. She cheered "Brava!" with that half of the audience for Stravinsky and Diaghelev's "Rite of Spring." (Duchamp was there too.) Yet she embraced and held onto tradition: The obvious is pottery and her often pointedly calling it that, not ceramics. (Karlstrom, interview 1992, 40). Also, in young adulthood she was attracted to Peruvian textiles, Navaho pottery and sand painting, and despite

11 Duchamp gently poking her toward abstraction, she returned to her taste for elegant line and Art Nouveau style in her 1930s drawings. She just as easily could straddle worlds: a New York friend had suggested she wear traditional “professional” clothes, like suits, but she discovered that she did not feel comfortable. Later in life, after a trip to India she started wearing saris and was told by friends they suited her: she followed a tradition not hers but it became hers through repetition, and she ended her life with saris as her only attire (Karlstrom interview, 1992 27). Beatrice learned perhaps from her friend Duchamp (and others, as well as her own nature and experience) not to be afraid of contradictions or risk. Octavio Paz has said about Duchamp: "He was possessed by a will to contradiction . . . that nothing and no one escaped, not even himself and his work, and there were long periods in which he almost totally lost interest in his idea. His ambiguous attitude to the work [the Large Glass]--whether to realize it or abandon it--found a solution that contained all the possibilities that he could adopt toward it: to contradict it" (Appearance 13). Paz wrote this in the 1950s when it appeared that Duchamp had chosen chess as his exclusive métier, long before the post-mortem unveiling of "Etant Donnés." Duchamp was the master of radical contradiction; Wood was his willing student. She was seeing Duchamp frequently during the time he was actively working on the Large Glass, was present during the urinal debacle, and took his advice to add actual soap to her painting in the Independents' show, thus becoming, for that and other reasons, the scandal of the show. One piece of advice Duchamp gave her at that time that she repeated all her life was that in art "there are no rules." But Wood did not simply follow Duchamp's lead. She (like Duchamp) did not seek the scandalous nor wish to shock--perhaps only ruffle some prim feathers. She took his advice, but she was following her own will and whims, as well, which he and other friends in the New York Dada circle encouraged. Duchamp realized his individuality through the artistic choices he made, even through contradiction, and Beatrice likewise learned to make her own individual choices. (She realized through the course of her life that Duchamp’s proviso on art rules could be applied to life in order to approach even it artfully.) Her association with Dada, with its tendency to break down the boundaries

12 between art and reality, with its dangerous international connections, and Theosophy, with its intended goal of being an international “philosophy” which breaks down boundaries between East and West, religion and science, reveals a rebellious bent. However, she found her metier in a classic art form. In her embrace of Theosophy, idealistic and optimistic, she was simultaneously aligning herself with a movement that “reflects a belief in progress,” and in her closeness to Krishnamurti learning the lessons of the great “anti-guru guru” (Morris Berman 313).2 One obvious contradiction for Wood as with modern society was the relentless pursuit of the new against tradition. While Wood may not have been completely familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, she often did successfully integrate the poles and worked a balance into "compatibility." Richard Tarnas, a contemporary interpreter of Nietzsche, has written succinctly of Nietzsche's individual who is not satisfied with accepted formulas. That person “had to transform life into a work of art, with which he could forge his character, embrace his fate, and recreate himself as heroic protagonist of the world epic. He had to invent himself anew, imagine himself into being . . . Truth was not something one proved or disproved; it was something one created ” (370-371 [author’s emphasis]). Baudelaire’s insight is that ideally one must be present and engaged in the moment, an experiential truth. The great modern century would leave its mark on art. Like the century, Wood would come to loggerheads with the polarity. The everyday world of experience would gravitate more and more toward a rational approach to experience and yet the art world would follow the swing of the pendulum to abstract presentation. Wood and many of her contemporary Dadaists shied away from a set formula, leaving behind the spotlight and following their own aesthetic choices. Beatrice Wood succeeded, however, through various contradictions (chief among them the dada state of mind and the belief in theosophy which she contended had nothing to do with each other until the end of her life), in living an artistic life to the end. By shuffling the narrative of her life and art production somewhat, I will show how she arrived at a dynamic equilibrium between the experiential and the rational in her art and between her life and her art. In her nineties she made the statement: "Once I believed an

13 artist had a sacred right to be protected from distraction. But since I have managed to create a life dominated by interruptions, I now accept that these interruptions are as much a part of the creative process as formulating a glaze" (Shock 170).

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Plate 2 Blindman's Ball poster; B. Wood dancing: photograph

15 CHAPTER 2.

ARTIST IN SEARCH OF A MEDIUM1 Beatrice Wood was often buffeted between worlds. She was bi-coastal, long before the word existed, by the time she was six months old. Born in San Francisco March 3, 1893, she moved to New York with her rather wealthy parents later that same year, twelve years before the Great Fire. She became bi-lingual as a child, learning to read French before English, the result of many early trips to France. At the age of seven she was taken by her mother to Paris to study for five years in a convent school.2 Her memories of that experience focused on the fact that she was one of only three girls who were not Catholic and on the visual memory of the "beautiful watered ribbons" with medals that were given weekly as prizes for good conduct. The attraction she felt for the ribbons was purely sensual. She said in an interview with Paul Karlstrom of the Archives of American Art, "And then the Catholics had little wax figures of Christ and cradles. And with my interest in objects, it bewitched me. But I'm not a religious person, and though I learned to memorize the New Testament in French, I'm very anti-religious" (1976 2). Even as a child, then, she was attracted to the sensuality of the objects, pointedly independent of their religious meaning. She had the childlike quality of Baudelaire's painter who as a child was "already . . . obsessed and possessed by form" (139).(Apparently this was a lifelong attraction: in a letter to Newark Museum curator Ulysses [sic] Dietz March 15, 1986: "It is hard to explain my work. I just have a lust for objects and not having time to find or finance them, make whatever comes into my mind. It is an indulgence for I never think a piece will sell" (AAA, unpublished letter).) But, of course, she had an attraction to the color as well. She was also aware of being out-of-place, an unbeliever in a believer's world, a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, an American child in Paris who spoke fluent French. She returned to New York at twelve to study at the fashionable Ely Court. Even

16 though the school was in Manhattan where her parents lived, she boarded there "because they fought terribly and did not want me to witness their battles," she wrote (Shock 13). There she met one of her lifelong friends, Elizabeth Reynolds, who was eleven at the time. Although Elizabeth's mother was "aristocratic," because of her modest income, she took the position of housemother at the school; naturally, Elizabeth boarded there as well and asked Wood to room with her. Miss Wood recalled feeling socially awkward since her mother had not allowed her to play with other children. Mrs. Wood had made her spend summer vacations "dragged by a governess through museums" and winters in private girls' boarding schools. Miss Wood said she was attracted to Elizabeth's poise and beautiful hair and consented to be her roommate, but she must have also been attracted to Elizabeth's intelligence and facility with languages.3 They quickly become friends and Elizabeth became Beatrice's trusted counselor. While at Ely Court, Miss Wood gained a reputation for being a bad influence on her schoolmates to her mother's "horror." On the surface "a good little girl. . . curtseying every time [she] met an older person," she revealed her secret thought years later that "nothing was more revolting" than to have to be "good." (Karlstrom interview, 1976, 4 ). As she wrote, at Ely Court while never [breaking] a single rule, I refused to study subjects I did not like- algebra, geometry, German grammar and Latin-and proudly sat through those courses doing nothing, a smile on my face. Fortunately, I excelled at the subjects I did like, primarily literature and history, and at fourteen began reading extensively and collecting fine books. James McNeil Whistler's "Gentle Art of Making Enemies" was my bible (Shock 13).

At her next school, the Shipley School on Philadelphia's Main Line in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she was further captivated by great world literature, some of it relatively contemporary: But I was no doll beneath my childhood lace. At fourteen, my secret accomplices had been Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, deMaupassant, Colette, Shakespeare, Freud and Oscar Wilde. I have no idea how I found out books by such writers existed, but I lost my virtue reading Madame Bovary by a spirit lamp (Shock 3). While there at the Shipley School, she also demonstrated her penchant for "individuality and whimsical creativity" (Naumann, “Other Side” 23). Given the assignment to draw a

17 diagram of the blood's circulation, an examination to be graded on accuracy by her biology teacher, she drew a man in a trench coat exposing his torso with a not-quite- accurate rendering of the circulatory system. She was surprised by a passing grade.4 Beatrice Wood's privileged education and travel, such as the usual annual trips to Europe, served more her rebellious spirit, intact since early childhood, than her mother's intended goal for her: to take her assured place in Park Avenue society. As she said, "I was born radical. Even when I was a little girl I had a feeling of antagonism toward my mother. My family used to look at me and say, 'She doesn't belong to us. She's entirely different'" (Personal interview, 30 Nov. 1997). Her father, Benjamin Wood, author of two books on business, provided a good income by buying and selling New York real estate which funded the education and travel. Mr. Wood, described as relatively passive regarding decisions made about his daughter's life, interfered very little, with a few exceptions, with his wife's strong ideas as to how his daughter should behave. Beatrice Wood had one sibling, a younger brother Jefferson, who is not mentioned at all in her autobiography. He was recalled by Henri-Pierre Roché as the person who loaned him a vest for a costume for a Ball he attended with Duchamp late in 1916, and alluded to in passing by a fortune teller in Thirty-third Wife of a Maharaja, her India travel book. When asked about him, Wood remarked she "was never close to him" (Personal interview, 30 Nov. 1997). The story of her relationship to her brother was that as children they had a secret they vowed not to reveal to their parents. Beatrice said that Jefferson told their mother that secret and that she never trusted him again after that. The rupture was so complete in her mind that she could not even recall when he died when asked about it much later in life (Naumann interview, 18 April 1998). (The ferocity of her sense of betrayal by her brother might foreshadow the fierceness of her sense of betrayal by others in her life years later.) Perhaps the son received most of the directive energy from the father, since he also went into business as a stockbroker, but it is clear that by Wood's teen years a combative relationship had developed between her and her mother. One senses that she felt like a lonely only child, alienated especially from the material and social values of her aspiring mother; one also senses that she was being treated like an object, especially by her mother. ("But I was no doll. . ." Shock 3.)

18 Her relationship with her father was quite different. That she continued her entire life to love men could be explained by a statement she made to Naumann just a few days before she died. He asked her why she glossed over her relationship with her father in her autobiography and didn't mention him much. She replied that her relationship with her father was "perfect" and thus there was not much to say. The relationship was just the sort that should exist between a father and daughter, she said. She "hated" her mother and therefore had plenty to say about that relationship. At the age of sixteen Beatrice seized on the idea of becoming an artist in Bohemian Paris. Her staid Victorian mother threatened suicide (Shock 4), but after a few more scenes Mrs. Wood "finally relented," as art historian Francis Naumann has described the period: Following high school, she went to Paris with her parents. There, she was allowed to enroll in drawing classes at the Academie Julian, once a highly progressive school, but by 1910 become a traditional art academy where students were expected to render accurately from a model. The few charcoal sketches preserved from this experience display the hesitant hand of a novice, guided more by determined optimism than by the discipline required to produce facile academic renderings (“Other Side” 24).

At about this same time the young Beatrice was also allowed to leave Paris to paint, safely chaperoned, in the village Giverny. She describes this incident at length in her autobiography emphasizing the advanced age (30) and slowness of her chaperon, Miss Osborne, the joy of throwing herself into her work, and the thrill of glimpsing through leaves the aged Claude Monet painting in his garden. Her dream of "painting in a garret" was realized when three days into the adventure she quarreled with the "elderly spinster" about starting early in the morning and left her for new digs in an inn with other art students and models. The only space left, however, was the attic which she convinced the reluctant proprietor to rent to her. As she described it: "It was a large space with a ceiling at uneven angles and small windows that allowed just enough light to create shadows, like in a Rembrandt painting. It was 'full of promise'". If she lacked discipline in her Academie Julian drawings, she at least discovered tenacity and productivity in her new artistic freedom:

19 At last! Alone with art, living in a garret like a real artist. This was paradise. I lifted my arms to the sky, picked up a paintbrush and attacked the canvas. An outdoor scene in the morning, a still life in the afternoon, a fantasy at night. The walls quickly became lined with paintings and more were stacked on the floor. All disasters. But it did not matter. I lived in an attic and was blissfully happy.

What added to her happiness was the secret sighting of Monet. Aspiring to the community of artists, making real for her the famous creator and his creations, appreciating, perhaps, the importance of tradition and a long career in painting, but, most certainly, acknowledging her excitement at "the promise" of engaging in art are all contained in her words: "Once I peeked through the leaves and saw his glorious head with its white hair as he painted in his flower beds. His canvases looked exactly like the oils I had studied in the museums. I trembled as I spied on this master" (Shock 4). Her paradise clouded when Miss Osborne wrote Mrs. Wood about the situation; the mother appeared quickly and unannounced. Miss Wood later satirically drew her mother, clicking in her high heels and fashionable Parisian hat, climbing the stairs to the attic where she made her judgment: Beatrice: As she surveyed the room full of the ghosts of Botticelli, Whistler and Sargent, and dreams of gold medals from the Academy, I awaited her exclamation of approval at the evidence of my talent. Mother: How can you live in such filth? Look at those cobwebs! (Shock 5). Her mother took her back to Paris. After this halting start at art study in 1910, Miss Wood gave in to her mother's demands and returned to New York to study for a year at the Finch School, a finishing school especially suited to New York debutantes. After finishing school Beatrice Wood became, at eighteen, interested in another artistic medium. She became "mad to be an actress" (Shock 5). But in the 1976 Smithsonian interview she says that she was interested in becoming an actress, "not because I was stage struck but to earn money so that I could get away from home." Once again, the mother imposed her views on her daughter's new passion. On the mother's social scale, acting was better than painting, but acting in French had a certain "cachet [sic]." A deal was cut. Miss Wood recounts her mother's words: "If you want to go on the stage I'll take you to Paris, and you'll study

20 under the Comedie Française, with the understanding that in two years you'll come back and make a debut. And then, if you--we'll see what happens. But I'll cooperate with you that far." (Karlstrom 4). At this point there is some confusion in the chronology of the two events: of studying with teachers from the Comedie Française in Paris and her attempt to study with Gordon Craig in Italy. She states in the 1976 Smithsonian interview with Karlstrom that she studied in Paris first but she found the Comedie Française "very academic and I heard about Gordon Craig" (Shock 5). In that version when her plans for studying with Craig were squelched, she went home disconsolate. The version in her autobiography (1985) states the reverse order. There, when her mother discovered from women at the American Club in Paris the day before Beatrice was to leave for Italy, that Craig was an "immoral" man, being the illegitimate son of the actress Ellen Terry and having fathered one of Isadora Duncan's children, the mother offered as a consolation that she could live in Paris another year and study with the Comedie Françaises. Regardless of the order of events, Wood did not go to Italy, but she did study in Paris with various teachers. The mother arranged for her to study with Frances Duff "who had coached Mary Garden in her triumphant role in the opera "Louise". Miss Duff, who "walked with the grace of a swan," was an important influence: "She taught that the diaphragm was the center of emotion, and drilled me in breathing, walking, sitting, falling down, getting up and mastering broad, operatic gestures." But she also commented to Beatrice: You move like a stick, as if you had never been in love. How can you act if you know nothing of men? You must dance, take up ballet and learn the tango. It is important to know what it is like for a man to hold you close.

Her mother found a French diction teacher for her with whom she worked hard so that she ended the lessons speaking French like a native. Her mother also arranged private lessons with Mr. Leitner, a leading actor in the Comedie Française who could not "conceal his disgust at [her] heavy, high-laced gripper shoes and inhibited poses" (Shock 6). Miss Wood's living arrangements during this period (1912-1914) were also

21 controlled by her mother. Protected but also free in Parisian high society, she was safely ensconced, her mother thought, with a respectable family, the Nieuports, who had recently lost both sons in separate aviation accidents within a year of each other and wanted some youthful company in the house. Had Mrs. Wood known the full details of her daughter's "cultivation," she might have ordered her home. "The moment I met Madame de Nieuport, I loved her," Beatrice recalled in her autobiography. "She was round like a chocolate drop, her white hair meticulously marcelled, and her handsome features made up to perfection." The Viscountess was married to a retired colonel twenty years her senior who buried himself in his study reading classics "trying to forget the tragedy of his two sons" (Shock 5). Madame took it upon herself, along with Frances Duff, to cultivate the young woman. Beatrice was acting-in-life, for under the two women's tutelage, her days were: choreographed . . . as if I were a courtesan. Both were loving tyrants. Madame, a coquette, dwelled in a world of high fashion and horseracing. She took me to the dressmakers and would never let me out of the house without first checking to see if my hat was on the right angle, my veil taut. I began resembling a professional--though I still did not understand exactly what the "profession" was (Shock 6).

The implication here is these two women, unlike her mother, were embracing Wood's emerging freedom, womanhood and sexuality. Miss Wood was also introduced to a Parisian culture into which few Americans were invited. With Madame de Nieuport and her daughter, the wife of Guimet who had started the Oriental Museum, Wood was taken into the Fauborg St. Germain set, going into homes filled with antique furniture of the mostly titled French. She recalls one particular count who took her riding often in the Bois de Boulogne who pressed her "close to his heart" as he lifted her off her sidesaddle perch before taking their refreshment in the park. In her "adolescent romanticism" she fantasized he would "defy his aristocratic family and the Church in order to marry me." She remembers men tipping their hats and whistling at her while walking Colonel Nieuport's dog, Frigette, in the Bois. "If my immaculate clothes did not give the impression of a courtesan, the dog did, for it was a hint of the métier" (Shock 6).

22 She was taken to the opera, the theatre, and the famous premiere performance on May 29, 1913 of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Her memory: "Scandalously innovative, half the audience booed the piece, while the other half cheered. I recall shouting "Bravo!" (Shock 6). (She did not know him yet, but Marcel Duchamp was in the audience as well.) Miss Wood continued her acting study in Paris and began to practice her new craft. She was an extra in a play with Sarah Bernhardt, meeting her backstage. The critical young Beatrice found the famous actress' mascara-blackened eyes "hardly alluring." The following spring Madame de Nieuport thought she would enjoy a month in Etretat, a seaside town near Le Havre, and made arrangements for her to go. That July there she met another American girl, Fannie Fleurot, also studying to be an actress and living with her family in a villa by the sea. Fanny's parents entertained diplomats in Paris and it was rumored "that they were spies for America," but of more interest to the curious but naive Beatrice was the fact that Mme. Fleurot wore a wig. "It was rumored that she lost her hair in an unfortunate love affair that left her lover in a wheel chair. I did not understand why, but it was also whispered that a strange disease sometimes followed love.” The etiology of syphilis had just been discovered in 1913, the year before, and her recollection reveals the mystery and fear still surrounding that disease, especially for a young girl. Very innocent (though curious), she and Fanny roamed around freely, swimming, eating pastries, and running around the boardwalk of the Casino (Shock 7). The two young women met on that boardwalk a group of actors about to open a play, among them a flirtatious actor named Maurice. He was attached to a blonde, the leading lady in this "second-rate traveling company," but Beatrice was convinced since he put his arm around her "that he planned to dismiss his blonde, make me his leading lady, and develop my extraordinary talent." He was coaching her as an understudy for the lead in the play, which was opening in days, when notices outside the Casino alerted everyone that World War I had broken out and that all eligible men were called to report for duty (Shock 7). Her recollection of the opening days of the war further illustrates not only her sexual but also her political naivete at the time. She opens her autobiography, the first chapter entitled "Kissed," with the departure scene from Maurice:

23 The train whistled. While people crowded around one another sobbing goodbye, I wept for Maurice, beautiful beyond description in his uniform. He came close, took me in his arms and put his lips on mine. Volts of electricity ran through me as I melted in his embrace. I was stunned at the ravishing pleasure it gave. Because it was a sensation I had never imagined, I was afraid I could now have a baby (Shock 3).

She was twenty-one years old. In the general confusion, the resort town which had been full of people emptied. It was the end of July. Beatrice did not want to return to New York, but she had some problems. Since her mother was planning to be in France at the first of August, Beatrice had not received her monthly allowance and had seven dollars left. Cable communication to her parents was cut off and no one knew how long that would last. Food was scarce in the town. Not wishing to be a burden on the Fleurots, she moved to an inn where the innkeeper extended her credit. She joined the Red Cross and started making bandages, "trying to lift [France's] sorrow." For, as she said, "My heart bled for France. I loved and felt closer to her than to America." Madame de Nieuport said Wood could stay in her Paris apartment if she intended to stay in France. The Fleurots, however, advised against her going on the train alone, although Beatrice was secretly excited at the thought, with all the handsome young soldiers moving through France. Moreover, three weeks after the cable disruption, her money had arrived, and the Fleurots felt strongly that, now that she had money, she should at least try to book passage home even though it was rumored to be very difficult. She did go to Le Havre, more or less going through the motions of trying to leave when clearly she did not want to go. She went to the shipping office, but found no tickets readily available. The clerk told her diamonds could not get her a ticket. She then went to the Consul's office, gleefully and dutifully fulfilling her obligations to the Fleurots, who were much like another set of surrogate parents, though less permissive than the Nieuports. The Consul, another fatherly figure, patted her on the hand and told her that her parents must be wanting her home. Beatrice expounded on her love of France to him and her willingness to serve Her cause: "I love France and will do any kind of work. I will translate, make bandages, care for the wounded, go to the battlefield, anywhere you

24 wish to send me." But she adds her reflection seventy years after the fact: "My notion of caring for the wounded was sitting near good-looking patients, dreamy-eyed, holding their hands" (Shock 9). When the Consul easily procured a ticket for her on the ship sailing in a few days, she was disconsolate. As she said, the Fleurots "were as impressed as I was disappointed." Standing on the deck of the departing ship among the cheering Americans and hearing someone whisper they would not be out of danger of mines until the next day, she remembered thinking, "I hoped we would strike one." She returned reluctantly to America and, as she said, it took her a year "to get used to New York. I resented America's indifference to the war in Europe, its carefree ways and frivolous parties" (Shock 11). She was soon, however, to attend gladly some of the most famous series of parties in American art history. Even though she went back to living at home with her parents, the freedom she felt in Paris spilled over into her life back in New York. With her French acting training she easily joined the newly formed French Repertory Theatre. She did not fit in with the troupe, however, since, thanks to her mother, a waiting maid went with her to the theatre. Over the next two years, however, she succeeded in acting in over sixty roles, principally as a country ingenue. In her case, the roles were not much of a stretch. (Working in a traveling vaudeville show a few years later she was cast as the society lady and was called "the duchess" by the other actors, again set apart from the others. She had some experiences, however, that brought her some understanding and compassion for the working actors who had been raised in that environment.) She also started choosing artistic friends, often in clear defiance of her mother. Mrs. Wood wanted her to date and marry a stockbroker or a banker; Beatrice was having seduction fantasies of men like the leading man in one of her plays, Reuben. The only scene that she had ever felt won the audience was a love scene with this actor. The audience responded audibly to the kiss while his girlfriend, the leading lady, looked on "with beady eyes from the wings." Wood flirted with being seduced by him, going to his seedy room alone, had second thoughts almost immediately, and was saved by the interruption of a phone call from the jealous leading lady. Tellingly, she seemed to

25 remember exactly what she was wearing that day: "I arrived drenched in perfume, wearing a soft blue suit and a white velvet hat trimmed with ermine tails" (Shock 12). Since Wood still lived at home, it would have been difficult for her to defy forever her mother's most consistent demand. The long-avoided social debut finally occurred, "that horrid day," but with disastrous results. Again, she remembered exactly what she was wearing. As she described it: I wore a pale blue taffeta dress and a Juliet cap with pearls in my hair. Four of my schoolmates, Marion Cleveland, daughter of President Cleveland, Beatrix and Constance Buel, and my best friend, Elizabeth Reynolds, stood in line with me while a small orchestra played. The conversation was a sugar bowl of triviality. I was impatient if one could not discuss world starvation in the first sentence. Annoyed and arrogant, I fled to my room, locked the door and wept. Mother missed me and commanded my return to the receiving line, where I wore a frozen smile through the rest of the evening (Shock 12).

After going to parties and being too shy (or miffed) for small talk, she consulted her socially poised friend Elizabeth Hapgood about conversing with men comfortably. Elizabeth gave her practical advice: take any subject the person might be interested in and ask questions and let him talk. It was even easier to converse when Elizabeth introduced her to "interesting people," especially creative, open ones. She met Isadora Duncan, for whom she batiked a scarf and found tragically sad after the death of her children. Anna Pavlova in rehearsal had "a movement of the head and shoulders that no other dancer could touch." She met Nijinsky, "who had the genius of standing perpendicular, in elevation, and touching stillness." He sat "politely" through her performance of one of two Russian folk dances Ivan [Clustine] Cloustine, Pavlova's choreographer, had taught her (Shock 14). Elizabeth Reynolds also introduced her to Charles Crane and his wife, he an elderly millionaire interested in European affairs and Eastern philosophy, the latter a subject that had no attraction for Wood at the time. Further, she met Elizabeth's future husband, Norman Hapgood, an editor at Collier's and drama critic. Hapgood gave her letters of introduction to theatre producers and famous actresses of the time, like Minnie Maddern Fiske and Elsie Ferguson, but her mother managed to squelch many of those connections.

26 One strange contact was made with a certain "Count Rodwan, hypnotist." Using Hapgood's name, Rodwan contacted her and said that he was looking for the perfect subject to hypnotize into being the "finest actress of the day." She met him at a well- known theatrical agency. After a series of tests and her recitation in French of a La Fontaine fable, he declared she was the young woman he was looking for and that they must begin rehearsals immediately. He then asked her how much money she would need before the performances began. Embarrassed, having been taught never to discuss money with people, she told him that she did not need money and that she still lived at home. She never heard from him again and later Hapgood puzzled over how the whole incident had happened. Wood commented: "I have often thanked my guardian angels for protecting me from my own foolishness. I was willing to do anything that would release me from the iron hold of my mother, even if it meant giving myself up to the grasp of another!" (Shock 16). She continued to take lessons and gain more discipline. She took ballet lessons, remembering perhaps Frances Duff's admonition. Yvonne Guilbert, a chanteuse of the Comedie Francaise now in New York and famous for her "naughty songs," coached her in acting, but once again Miss Wood found the lessons academic. When Wood did an interpretation of one of Guilbert's songs, however, she was asked to go on the Guilbert tour as a pantomime, but the French Repertory Theatre wanted her for another season and she felt committed to finishing her obligation. Wood also began to meet "interesting people" on her own. She frequented a particular New York bookstore, the Sunwise Turn, owned by two women, Mary Mowbray-Clarke, wife of the sculptor, and Madge Jennison. They held poetry readings and one night Wood did a recitation of Amy Lowell's "Patterns." In this downtown environment a few years later, she also met another important lifelong friend, the actress Helen Freeman who was then founding the Theatre Guild. Wood was given small roles to play in new Guild pieces, but she quit after the first play when it was clear she would not get leading roles. She shared a dressing room with Edna St. Vincent Millay and both discreetly did not discuss their men. By the time Beatrice Wood met Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché in

27 1916, at age of twenty-three, she was still living at home in New York with her parents on East 63rd Street and still struggling with her family's repressive attitude toward her interest in art. Her mother did not want her to engage in "improper" activities: she did not want her to become a professional painter, dancer or actress; she did not want her to become part of the marginal world, downtown, of Bohemian artists, with their questionable morals and loose lifestyle; most of all, she did not want her to lose her virginity. Beatrice Wood was curious about it all. There is another discrepancy in the order of events of her life, this one surrounding her first "two great loves"--Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché. This is understandable since, as the autobiography’s editor Lindsey Smith admitted, the time frame of some of the events recorded was guessed at. The chronology page was added late in the process and some dates are approximate (Personal interview, Memorial, May 1998). Beatrice Wood suggests in her autobiography that she fell in love with Roché first, then met Duchamp who had already known Roché in Paris, and that the three of them had a kind of amour a trois, though she "only slept with one at a time." Part of the problem is reconstructing events after so much time and another part is that, even though Wood kept a three-line daily diary since 1915, some of the entries were abbreviated or non- committal in order to throw off the possibly spying eyes of her intrusive mother. Also, so much was happening so fast. According to Calvin Tomkins, working with several sources, the sequence of events most likely was this: Beatrice Wood met Duchamp in September; sometime in the fall Duchamp introduced Wood to his downstairs neighbors, Louise and Walter Arensberg (who were paying his rent in exchange for art), the center of what was becoming a circle of important writers and artists; one evening in December Duchamp ate dinner at the Brevoort with the Stettheimer sisters and met the recently arrived Frenchman Henri-Pierre Roché who was brought that night by Edgar Varese; not long after that Duchamp and Roché attended a Village fund-raising ball at the old Vanderbilt Hotel where Roché, impressed by Duchamp's charm with women, nicknamed him "Victor" and more familiarly "Totor" by the end of the evening, as in victorious with women; at some point after meeting Duchamp, Beatrice Wood met Roché and he

28 "relieved her of her troublesome virginity, and she fell ecstatically in love with him" (175). It is certain that Beatrice Wood met Marcel Duchamp (before he met Roché at least in New York) on September 27, 1916, on her second (some versions say her third) visit to St. Vincent's Hospital to see Edgar Varese who was laid up with a broken leg. The first visit with Varese is memorialized by a drawing Wood made after the occasion. She was attracted to him, but also taken aback since one leg was in a cast and the other, a hairy one, was sticking out from under the sheet. They were talking, her mouth was open, and a fly flew in her mouth; she didn't know what to do since she was a "well-brought up young lady" who was taught never to spit in front of a man. What she did was swallow the fly whose wings beat in her throat all the way down. Varese was not aware of what had happened at the time and was not particularly impressed when Wood told him of it later. The drawing she made, however, is one example of how she recorded everyday events, but memorable and often humorous ones, after the fact. She had a strong impulse to express and document what she perceived as key events of her life. Journalist Alissa Frank, Beatrice's friend, had originally suggested that Beatrice go to the hospital since Varese spoke only French and was isolated there. (In the twist of memory, Wood recalls in her autobiography that Alissa's suggestion to see Varese was "devious," since Alissa was then sleeping with Roché and was attempting to supplant Wood's attachment to Roché. Actually, Wood had not yet met Roché who had not arrived in New York yet.) Even though Wood was attracted to the virile Varese, when she met Duchamp in the hospital room, her attraction for Varese dissolved. Her memory of the day she met Duchamp was indelible and retold in several memoirs. One account: "A cough made me turn to face a man sitting at the far end of the bed. With a slight shock, I became aware of a truly extraordinary face. He did not exhibit the hardiness of a lifeguard flexing his muscles, but his personality was luminous. He had blue, penetrating eyes and finely chiselled features. Marcel smiled. I smiled. Varese faded" (“Marcel” 12).

In that first conversation when Duchamp and Varese started speaking of modern art, she entered the conversation: "I shrugged my shoulders and put in: 'Anyone can do

29 such scrawls.' Marcel replied wryly: 'Try.'" As Tompkins says, “ the gentle sarcasm was softened by his use of the familiar 'tu'" (171). Another account from her autobiography suggests she might have known who he was at the time: The most celebrated painter of his day, due to the sensational success of his Nude Descending a Staircase, Marcel at twenty-seven had the charm of an angel who spoke slang. He was frail, with a delicately chiseled face and penetrating blue eyes that saw all (Shock 22-23).

They met the following week for dinner with Alissa Frank, and went to dinner several more times, sometimes in company and sometimes alone. After one dinner, she went home and drew "Marriage of a Friend," a piece she later described as a "tortured abstraction." The subject of the drawing was the recent marriage of that childhood friend Elizabeth Reynolds to Norman Hapgood, twenty-seven years her senior. Despite its abstraction, the drawing, revealed by its title, again demonstrates her approach to drawing as often based on personal experience. Even though Wood did not like it, Duchamp did and had it published in Rogue, an avant-garde publication edited by the poet Alan Norton. Duchamp told her that she did not know what was good and what was bad in her drawings. Duchamp encouraged her to paint, even offering her his studio to work in since, as she told him, she had no room at home. Of course, Duchamp did not want her to "follow" him, but he was instrumental in helping her see. As she described the sessions: If Marcel was out when I came, he would leave the key for me. If he was in his studio, he sat quietly in a chair with his legs crossed, smoking a pipe, and watching me passively as I worked. Then, at the end of the afternoon he quickly surveyed my sketches, one by one. 'Good. . .bad. . .bad. . .bad. . .good. . .bad.' Through his eyes I began to discover that the obvious was not art. He instilled in me an appreciation for independence in my approach to the making of images. In the beginning I was puzzled by what he liked and disliked, for the drawings I considered good-- realistic heads of women with curly hair--he disdained. He liked the ones that were free expressions of the unconscious. I had no idea what they meant (Shock 24-25).

From this beginning, an artistic as well as a personal relationship flourished between them: he became her friend, her model of the modern artist, and her best critic. He

30 seemed to her in the words of Henry James "a person on whom nothing is lost." But she also noted a certain detachment and coolness about Duchamp, even revealed in his face. As she wrote: "When he smiled the heavens opened. But when his face was still it was as blank as a death mask. This curious emptiness puzzled many and gave the impression that he had been hurt in childhood" (Shock 23). When Tomkins cites Wood’s description, he says she “could not help romanticizing his reserve” (171). Duchamp’s relationships with women has been much described and speculated about: from his troubled relationship with his mother (Tomkins 19) to his bachelorhood much of his life to his presumed incestuous passion for his sister Suzanne (Tomkins 53). This last example, the interpretation of Arturo Schwarz, using “Egyptian hieroglyphics, Gnostic texts, the Hebrew Cabala, Tantric yoga, Greek mythology, Plato, the Upanishads, Buddhism, alchemical texts dating from medieval times to the sixteenth century” to demonstrate this, horrified Duchamp’s wife’s Teeny, and apparently made Duchamp laugh (Tomkins 53). Duchamp has been recently scrutinized under a feminist lens.i Tomkins' conclusion on this point is that “his enormous personal charm derived in no small part from an ability to reconcile, without apparent conflict, the male and female aspects of his complex personality–the MARiee with the CELibataire” [of “The Large Glass”] Duchamp's relationship with the young Beatrice Wood was largely encouraging, supportive, and caring. Her diary records one rare but mysterious discord just two days before her 24th birthday: March 1 1917. Sunwise Turn. Show drawings. Paint at Marcel's evening. Duncan there. Isadora’s brother. Marcel horrid. Most unhappy, but [I] deserve it. March 2. Whole situation with Marcel normal. My emotions are bound to shudder. Marcel like a knife but he is right (AAA, Reel # 530 3).

They had a rapport, often in silence, Wood said, that did not remain ruptured long. Meeting and working around Duchamp had a powerful impact on Wood. Part of her struggle to become an artist, against her mother's wishes, was the burgeoning creative spirit within herself joined with youthful defiance against, in her mind, a staid materialistic world. She desired to experience, to understand firsthand, how the artist creates the object, how the actor holds the audience, how the dancer "touches stillness."

31 She exhibited that youthful ambition to be seen, to be known, to be acclaimed. Although, of course, this was not her first experience with artistic instruction, Duchamp's personal and somewhat directive (encouraging her, for example, to give up acting for drawing) approach combined with her attraction to him made a lasting impression. This was the moment he made the statement she quoted all her life: "Never do the commonplace. Rules are fatal to the progress of art" (qtd. in Bryan, “Ceramics” 28 and other places). Defying the rules of Victorian society, she was also toying with the idea of being seduced by a European. In other words, she was open to life, new and even forbidden knowledge and experience, and, more importantly, she was open to what he could teach her about art and the art process, as well as love. Duchamp, as mentioned before, had a reputation for success with many women and by the time he met Wood had settled into the role of the confirmed bachelor. Wood noted that he told her that before coming to his studio, she should always call first, and if he said that she should not come, she assumed that he was with a woman. Duchamp made it plain to her that he preferred ugly women for sex. But beyond that, Duchamp's middle- class French upbringing precluded his taking advantage of a "jeune fille" like Wood, no matter how much she might have welcomed it or wished for it. When she met his new friend Roché, older at thirty-seven and frankly worldly, she was primed and her "improper" behavior invited her deflowering. It easily could have been further sparked by comments from her mother. As she recalls in her autobiography, the Woods often had open house on Sundays. One Sunday she invited her friend Alissa Frank, and after she left, the mother commented that she should not be invited back since she was "common." A few Sundays later she invited Roché. After he left, the mother accused Beatrice of "falling in love with that man." Not long after that, Beatrice insisted on coming to his room to visit, against his mild protests. He removed her hat. She recalled that she "asked to see his etchings." Many intimate afternoons followed, but even though she was in love with Roché, she told him that she "dreamed every night of Duchamp" to Roché's delight since "he was in love with him too." Both men having become fast friends, they then took up the project of cultivating the young woman. Both Duchamp and Roché, French diplomat, writer and art

32 collector, encouraged her to give up her acting for visual art (Shock 18-20). Certainly the prominence of visual art was in the New York air after the stunning Armory Show of 1913. That show, curated by the American artists, Walter Pach, Arthur B. Davies, and Walter Kuhn, exhibited European paintings in the "modern" style of abstraction, particularly the Expressionists and the Cubists, to the American public. It also showed a full range of mostly French painting in Impressionist, Post-impressionist and Fauve styles as well, "all mixed together. . . in a rich collation which was predictably indigestible" (Marquis 90). The most shocking and controversial of them all had been Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase #2. The painting had been derided in the New York press as "an explosion in a shingle factory," "a collection of saddle bags," and "leather, tin and broken violin" (qtd. in Marquis 93). When the show went to Chicago, a local critic suggested that readers "eat three Welsh Rarebits and sniff cocaine," if they wanted to understand the work. Actually, the title of the work was as shocking to the 1913 audience as the image, or perhaps more accurately the yoking of that image with that title-that a nude would move. Because of the media blitz over the show generally and Duchamp's painting particularly, Duchamp became a household word almost overnight. His and his older brothers' work also sold at fairly high prices. Duchamp's friends Francis Picabia and his wife Gabrielle had been the only European artists to attend the show, but by the time Duchamp arrived in New York for the first time in June 1915, his reputation had preceded him. As Marquis noted, that one painting "so casually sent, like a message in a bottle, to a foreign shore, was to be Duchamp's passport to notoriety, the validation stamp for his chosen identity as an exotic, maligned, sensitive, elegant, misunderstood-- and unemployed--genius" (92). Roché commented in "Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp" in 1959: "At that time, Marcel Duchamp's reputation in New York as a Frenchman was equaled only by Napoleon and Sarah Bernhardt" (Lebel 79). Roché, a journalist by default and "dilettante" had given up the idea of painting when he discovered he did not have the talent but was quite gifted with people (Tomkins 174). He might have met Duchamp briefly at the Salon D'Automne in 1911 (Lebel 79). In Paris, Gertrude Stein had called him a "general introducer," having introduced Pablo Picasso to her and her brother (Tomkins 174). Roché did, however, have an eye for

33 modern art and dealt in art for several collectors for much of his life after leaving New York. (At some point later, he and Duchamp worked together as collectors.) Only in his seventies did he write two novels, both adapted as screenplays by Francois Truffaut, that gave him recognition: Jules et Jim and Two English Girls on the Continent. The inscription to his last unfinished novel Victor, unquestionably based on his time in New York with Duchamp and Wood, reads: "Ce qui a été est encore." It was dada time, New York style. Dada was a legend of freedom only after the fact; in the act it was a gnostic myth of the twentieth century (Marcus 194).

Dada was nothing more than the theory and practice of the right place at the right time (Marcus 242).

In an age like ours, when people are assaulted daily by the most monstrous things without being able to keep account of their impressions, aesthetic production becomes a prescribed course. But all living art will be irrational, primitive, and complex; it will speak as secret language and leave behind documents not of edification but of paradox--Hugo Ball, 25 Nov. 1915 (qtd. in Marcus 196).

Greil Marcus has remarked that for the Zurich Dadas, in answer to Hugo Ball's pre-Dada pronouncement, "were never masters of the paradox, but simply messengers--or as the years went on, victims. . . They tried to understand what happened to them. They never got over it" (197). Dada appeared in Zurich that Spring 1916 and to the European dadaists Duchamp was the exiled prince. The fervor that was Dada spread from pacifist Zurich to other European cities, such as Paris and Berlin, and also in a different form to New York. Duchamp remembered reading Tristan Tzara's Antipyrene late in 1916 or early 1917--at the time that he was seeing Beatrice Wood regularly--and saw in Dada "the spirit of Jarry, and long before him, Aristophanes--the antiserious attitude, which simply took the name of Dada in 1916" (qtd. in Tomkins 192). Tzara, who as Tomkins notes largely defined the movement through his statements and polemics, had insisted that Dada was "not at all modern," but was "more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhistic religion of indifference" (191). Moreover, Duchamp insisted that what he and his friends were doing in New York, far from the battle fronts, was nothing particularly

34 new and was different from what the European dadaists were doing. He said, "It wasn't Dada, but it was in the same spirit. You see, the [European] Dadas were really committed to action. They were not just writing books, like Rabelais or Jarry, they were fighting the public. And when you're fighting you rarely manage to laugh at the same time" (Tomkins 192-3). Despite her earlier annoyance at the lack of seriousness she found on her return to New York at the beginning of the war, this spirit of play and laughter was something that Beatrice Wood responded to and was eager to join once Duchamp and company showed up. Wood also responded in her own way to what Tomkins described as Duchamp's point of view: "Dada's rejection of all traditions, its nose-thumbing attitude toward social values (including art), its indifference, and at a deeper level its denial of art's interpretive function--Dada demanded that art be a part of life rather than a commentary on life or an improvement on life" (192). It may be that Beatrice Wood became the mistress of the paradox simply by being in the right place at the right time, not trying to understand what Dada was about, and going along on the roller coaster ride with glee. "I know nothing about Dada. I was simply in love with the men who were doing it," as she said in a lecture in Philadelphia in 1978. Part of the reason for Dada's emergence in New York was a result of the flood of European artists escaping the European war theatre when the war broke out. Varese, Duchamp, Roché, Picabia and others met the American artists Charles Sheeler, Man Ray, George Bellows, and especially the American art collector and poet, Walter Arensberg and his wife Louise. The Boston psychoanalyst Ernest Southard mixed in the crowd with Arthur Craven, poet, pugilist, and reputed nephew of Oscar Wilde, the infamous Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Frederick Sides, Lebanese purveyor of rugs. The “now” of Dada and people who resonated to it were the appeal. What emerged out of those meetings became known later as the Arensberg Circle. For five years an almost nightly salon often ending around 3 a.m. occurred at the Arensberg's apartment, several flights downstairs from Duchamp's studio at 33 West 67th Street. European poets and writers and later painters and musicians met with their American counterparts. They all sat among the many contemporary paintings and African

35 and Pre-Columbian pieces being collected by the Arensbergs and displayed on the high walls of their sitting room. Unlike the formality of Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris where the guests needed a calling card and were introduced when they entered, the Arensberg's nightly party was very informal. Guests understood that anytime after 6 p.m., they could drop by unannounced. Even if the Arensbergs were out ( for example at the theatre), the maid was instructed to let people in and to serve them drinks and food. A party would be in progress, then, when Walter and Louise came home. Working upstairs often at Duchamp's studio, Wood easily became a regular guest at the Arensbergs' evenings, especially since she immediately felt close to Louise. The two of them were often set apart from the rest of the group. Like Beatrice (who always said that she wanted to be sober when she was seduced), Louise did not drink and was a little concerned over the level of alcohol consumption. Consequently, around midnight she rolled out a tray of hot chocolate, chocolate eclairs and rice pudding, intended as a sop for the liquor. Wood often helped Louise with the desserts and during the evenings often sat at Louise's feet while she sat on the couch. Walter would often coach her in her acting roles. As Wood commented later on her diary entry: "Walter loved to help me with diction. In New York we had often gone to his study, while he had me recite various poets, Shakespeare, Mallarme, and the eighteenth century poets. He had subtelly [sic] of interpretation, and I felt it great priviledge [sic] to have him thus work with me (AAA, Reel # 544). Even though they were not that much older, to Wood the Arensbergs were another set of surrogate parents, but this time they were artistic and permissive. Walter and Louise Arensberg were wealthy and privileged and had no children. Louise Stevens Arensberg, heiress to the New England Stevens' textile fortune, had more money than Walter who had inherited a smaller Pittsburgh steel fortune. Class Poet in Harvard's 1910 class (which also included Wallace Stevens), Walter Arensberg was avidly interested in art, especially after moving to New York, as well as literature. He soon began collecting pieces in the new "modern" style, as well as Pre-Columbian and African work. Louise went along with his interest but was not as fervid as he. Her interests were more musical and she played the piano quite well but never publicly. Louise was, nevertheless, quite willing to help fund the collection, create an

36 accommodating environment for the ongoing gatherings, and serve as hostess. Wood's education in “seeing” was furthered during those nightly parties. At first she was nervous and self-conscious about her perception and comments about the works she saw displayed at the Arensbergs. As she said:

One by one I confronted each disconcerting image as it shrieked out to me. The most awful, if I had to choose, was a Matisse, an outlandish woman with white streaks--like daggers--surrounding her entire body. Near the balcony was a Picasso filled with broken planes supposedly depicting a woman, and a Rousseau with a horrible dwarf in an unnatural landscape. Marcel's Nude Descending a Staircase, a wild bedlam of exploding shingles, as it had been called, had the place of honor. With great pride they pointed it out to me. I mumbled that it "seemed to move," praying they would let me get by with that comment. Nearby on a pedestal was a Brancusi brass that shot up in the air out of nowhere and made me uncomfortable. Scattered throughout the room were works by Picabia, Gleizes, Braque, and Sheeler, African carvings and pieces from a mixture of periods. It made my head spin in disbelief (Shock 26).

But through nightly exposure and belief in the gifts of the new friends around her, Beatrice's eyes opened and trained to the revelations of modern painting. But I decided that since these beloved people thought the paintings had merit, and the artists whom they entertained spoke about them in hushed voices, the least I could do was try to enter their world of understanding. One night while Sheeler and Stella discussed color theory, I gazed at the terrifying Matisse over the fireplace. It was his Portrait of Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg. Willing myself to be open-minded, I almost went into a trance. My eyes locked on its angular lines, until suddenly out of the canvas appeared a creature of wondrous beautyspoken, and at last, I listened (Shock 28).

In another account of the event she described that her "conversion" happened gazing at this Matisse: "out of its stillness emerged a new dimension of space and composition" (“Marcel”13). She is describing in these accounts her approach of using will to maintain openness to understand, and she was doing this bodily, viscerally and visually, as well as mentally, to some degree in the tradition of the mystic. What had happened to her in that moment, after years of travel, education and exposure to art and culture, and even after yearning to become an artist herself, was that

37 through her will and her belief in the right understanding of her new friends, she had confronted the art object, and experienced something different and new. It was as if she had finally been inoculated with the virus of modern art. In discussing that moment in later years with Francis Naumann who has called it her epiphany, Wood drew attention to the hands in the painting. Matisse had not finished the hands, she said, in a realistic manner. It was exactly the unfinished quality that gave the painting life. Had the hands looked like actual hands, represented photographically, they would have been fixed, not have been able to "move" further. This experience, recorded as it was several times, was important to Beatrice Wood in the birthing of her own artistry. It reveals the importance, for her, of the power of beauty, of belief, of understanding that belief, of relationship, both with people she loved and admired, and with the interplay of the outer and inner worlds as she perceived them. It expressed perhaps her first experience of the transvaluation of all values. For the next two years (1916-1918), Beatrice experienced a "magical existence," in which "the Arensbergs brought me the culture of the day; Marcel revived my interest in painting, and Roché was teaching me the depths of a love relationship" (Shock 28). But the Arensberg Circle was not engaged in idle intellectual talk; it was a life of involvement, but not like the politically inspired actions of the European dadaists. It was a continual party in which Wood was directly involved with several nose-thumbing gestures toward art. Beatrice Wood was not part of the formation of the Society of Independent Artists and its show, which advertised "No Jury, No Prizes," at the Grand Central Palace, but the Arensbergs and others encouraged her to enter the show. According to the "rules," anyone paying six dollars could exhibit two pieces. Duchamp urged her to submit "Blanche Nuit," a drawing she saw later in Philadelphia hanging in the show6 and "Un peu d'eau dans du savon," a drawing of a headless nude with a bar of soap

38 Plate 3 Un peut [sic] d'eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap)(1917/1977): replica: pencil, colored pencil and soap on cardboard

39 attached at the feminine triangle.7 She had intended to paint a bar of soap, but Duchamp suggested finding an actual bar to affix to it, telling her to shop carefully for just the right color and size.8 Duchamp had also suggested retaining the "wrong" title, the phrases of which she had inadvertently reversed, as well as keeping the inscription of the title directly on the canvas, in the shocking manner of his famous nude. This drawing became, for other reasons as well, the scandal of the show despite the fact that there were many other works displayed. In the ninety reviews Naumann found of the show, Wood's piece was mentioned prominently. Men left their calling cards on the piece and she was called often to come and remove them. The prominent brand name of the popular soap also disturbed the show's officials since it was free (if unwanted) advertising (Naumann , Personal interview 18 April 1998). The most famous work of the Independents Show, never even displayed, was Duchamp's "sculpture," a ceramic urinal placed on its side submitted with the signature R. Mutt attached and the title "Fountain." Beatrice was, again inadvertently, privy to the discussion that followed as to whether it would be accepted or not, which she records as well in her autobiography. Against the art historical argument as to whether Duchamp had actually submitted the work or not9, again, in her memory, she had gone with him to Steiglitz's studio when he photographed the piece against the background of the Mardsen Hartley painting "The Warriors" (Naumann, New York 184-185). Whether she "understood" the implications of the whole argument is debatable. She said herself much later that Duchamp's readymades, a term in English he applied, after his arrival in New York, to several pieces he had "created" in France, were "beyond me." At the time, when she questioned him about them, seeing, for example, the bottle rack nailed to the floor of his studio, Duchamp had answered her, in characteristic style, "Cela n'a pas d' importance." --it doesn't matter. What does matter is that she was in on the joke or the probe or whatever one wants to call it to report her version. But, of course, we recall that she knew nothing about Dada. She was also involved in the writing, editing, publishing, and distributing of one of the little magazines of the New York Dada period, The Blindman Roché. This was the single recorded instance of her father's interference with her life. When stacks of the

40 printed magazine were delivered to her father’s house, her father, finding “three words in it no young girl should ever hear,” told Beatrice she was “going to be put in jail” and must disassociate herself from all dealings with it. They distributed it by hand and never sold it (Karlstrom interview, 1976 16-17). While none of their names were listed there, Roché and Duchamp being concerned over their visas, the letters "P B T" were on the cover at the top: "P" for Henri- Pierre, "B" for "Beatrice" and "T" for "Totor," Roché’s and then Beatrice's nickname for Duchamp, a shortened form of "Victor." That nickname, spontaneously given to Duchamp because he was so naturally victorious (Tomkins 175) by Roché after the ball at the Vanderbilt could have been over his victory with women or over the "halo" he seemed to wear with everyone, an aura made up of "his outward calm, his easygoing nature, his keenness of intellect, his lack of selfishness, his receptivity to whatever was new, his spontaneity and audacity"10 (Lebel 79). The party that night continued into the next day. As Roché tells it: By that evening we were pretty tired out. Marcel Duchamp and his retinue had just arrived at their favorite bar when they encountered another group of exhausted disciples following their equally authentic prophet, the charming painter Pascin. Finding themselves suddenly face to face, the two heroes solemnly slapped each other as a simple application of the principle of Ghengis Khan: 'There can be but one Khan under the sun.' They parted oblivious to what had happened (Lebel 79).

Roché also assumed that Duchamp was rich since he reached for the check so often. By 3 a.m. Roché was applying the nickname and Duchamp did not seem to object. By the end of the evening Duchamp insisted that the three of them, including "Bea," start the new magazine immediately. The first edition was something of a disappointment to the Arensbergs, but the second (and final) one was another story (AAA, Reel # 532-5). The second edition was graced by Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of the rejected urinal inside, represented as a "veiled Madonna" or Buddha as some have called it. Among other things, that edition contained a fabricated letter written herself, Wood claimed, in the voice of an outraged mother.

41 All of the little magazines of the time, many short-lived, marked the end of their publications with a ball. Wood did a drawing for the Blindman's Ball, now famous, which epitomizes both the spirit of Dada and her personal reaction to the strictures of her family: "I drew an insolent stick figure of a man thumbing its nose at the world" (Shock 33). Thus, Beatrice Wood was involved in the artistic culture of the day, through the Arensberg Circle and especially through Duchamp, in making and exhibiting her visual art. She continued to act, discouraged by Duchamp and Roché but encouraged by Walter Arensberg. (That medium would be her exit from New York and the repressive attitude of her mother shortly, but would not ultimately satisfy her artistic impulse.) She was also involved in a love relationship with Roché (and Duchamp) which marked her life indelibly. Roché had taught her the importance for a woman to have a good first experience with love (sex) for which she always expressed gratitude, but that relationship was also the source of a "shock" from which she never recovered. Beatrice Wood was always a little annoyed that people focused on Duchamp almost to exclusion of Roché. In some ways Wood and Roché were similar. Roché always told her that she was like an artichoke with leaves of interest falling everywhere (AAA, letter to Francis Naumann, 24 Sept. 1976). He was commenting on something he knew quite well about himself. They were also similar in the need to document in writing what was happening around them. They were both excellent with people as well. When Beatrice Wood discovered that Roché had also slept with her friend in the Village, Alissa Frank, she broke off the sexual relationship with him, even though she remained friends with him for the rest of his life. The famous photograph of Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Beatrice Wood at Coney Island on June 21, 1917, published in Lebel in 1959, records the men's attempt to console her over that shock. She said that they made her ride the roller coaster again and again until she could control her screams. She also recalled walking home ahead of them that night and when three sailors parted as she walked between them, a policeman was about to arrest her for soliciting as a prostitute. Duchamp and Picabia came to her defense, the latter characteristically getting angry. She concluded: "To be mistaken for a prostitute crowned the dreamy evening, and we ended

42 the night with roars of laughter. It was a respite from my depression and lingering unhappiness over Roché" (Shock 37). Buried in that incident are themes that run through her art and her life from then on: finding a way to laugh at absurdity and disappointment and marveling at the relationship between men and women. As a result of the break with Roché, Wood became physically closer to Duchamp and for a time the three of them were close. Some have thought that Roché’s novel Jules et Jim written at the end of his life, which become famous as Truffaut's film was based on the relationship of the three of them, but that has been discounted. Most likely the novel was based on a longtime relationship Roché had with a German couple Frantz and Helen Hessel. (Helen Hessel, in her eighties, accosted Beatrice Wood at the 1977 Duchamp retrospective in Paris, accusing her of spreading the story that it was Wood not Hessel who was the source of Jeanne Moreau's character in the film.) It is certain, however, that the novel Roché was working on when he died, Victor, what Tomkins has called a meditation on the freedom Duchamp expressed in his life, is based on that "magical" time (175). Roché’s character, Pierre, is speaking to Wood's character, Patricia (Beatrice Wood's stage name) about Duchamp's character's (Victor's) work, "The Large Glass" in chapter 19, "The Glass and Patricia": -C'est la Mariée. -Voilà une note: "C'est la Mariée, apothéose de la virginité. C'est le desir ignorant, le desir blanc, avec une pointe de malice." -Oui, dit-elle, comme moi (70).

(-It is the Bride. -Here is a note: 'The Bride, apotheosis of virginity. It is ignorant desire, blank desire, with a touch of malice. -Yes, she said. 'Like me.')

43 Plate 4 Marriage (1987); Bureaurcracy [sic] (1970): sophisticated primitives

44 CHAPTER 3.

TOE-TO-TOE WITH NIHILISM: THE SHOCKS

Celebrated as an artist and author, her work eagerly sought out by collectors, Beatrice Wood would seem to have it made. However, hers has been a life of great struggle: the struggle to escape the controlling tendencies of others, beginning with her mother and extending to a number of her male acquaintances; the struggle to find love, and to cope with its loss; the struggle to overcome her limitations, to express herself, to make a living; the struggle to find meaning in life. Through friendship, through romance, through art, she has worked to understand and give form to the vitality that is at the center of her being. It is this vitality in her work that makes us look, makes us laugh, and makes us wonder about her secrets.

-Tim Schiffer, Curator Ventura County Museum of History and Art (Beatrice Wood . . . a la Carte, 1995)

Indeed it is not usual for the young to grieve. -Euripides "Medea", ll 47.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. . . -Theodore Roethke

After the first World War ended many of the French artists exiled in New York during the fighting returned to Paris, including Duchamp in 1918 (by way of Argentina) and Roché in 1921. The "magic years" ended. The Arensbergs moved to Los Angeles in 1921, according to Wood (Shock 67).1 But before they did a situation arose that was the source of shock and embarrassment for her. In fact, Beatrice Wood experienced a series of shocks, disappointments, and frustrations over the next several years. Those times were called years of "cataclysm" by her friend Elizabeth Hapgood (107).2 They could just as easily be called nihilistic experiences, that is, the emptying out of values previously held. Certain values like romantic love, marriage, loyalty, honesty, friendship, and even

45 the stability of material life, much as she mocked it, were seriously called into question during the next period of her life. She experienced them as shocks. The first large shock she experienced had been Roché’s sleeping with her friend Allissa. Chapter 5 of her autobiography is entitled "The Lowest Point," and it recounts the aftermath of the shock of his betrayal and other events that followed. Even though she then felt free to become physically close with Duchamp after being so attracted to him and so emotionally close, the relationship did not satisfy her longings. As she said, "it was not the kind of romantic attachment that could cure a lover's headache" (Shock 37). Even though she refused to take seriously her mother's intention for her to "marry well," she had still flirted with the idea of marrying first Roché and then Duchamp. She recounted the first conversation in Roché’s room before they slept together. He said, she remembered: "But you are a virgin. I must not ruin your life. I love you. We will lie here and I will think what to do. I would marry you, but I cannot." She replied, "I have never believed in marriage," but that could have been a reaction to her parents' constant fighting or the Bohemian values she was trying on for size (and that she wished to be free of the vaunted virginity). Roché went on to explain to her that he could not marry since he had a former mistress in Paris "from a lower class" whom he could not marry for that reason. It "would kill her" if he married someone else, he said. With her romantic ideas still intact, Wood responded with a generous thought: "Henri's loyalty to another woman three thousand miles away was not a problem for me. I felt an affection toward her and included her presence in our magical circle" (Shock 19). What she did not know until later was that Roché was a notorious womanizer, keeping a coded journal that detailed every encounter, that the drawing she had just looked at in his room had been done by his lover, Marie Laurencin, and that he would be sleeping with Louise Arensberg while he was sleeping with her and Alissa Frank. Marriage (or the tactful avoidance of it) was in his mind, though, for he recalled in 1959 an event that happened later in their relationship. Going to city hall to register The Blindman, according to Roché, they almost got married (Lebel 80). His account: "Some housepainters, working on the building, being practical jokers, misdirected us to the marriage bureau one flight higher. We were in such a hurry and so excited about the

46 magazine, that we started filling out forms before we knew what they were, and just missed getting accidentally married." (Roché did finally marry that mistress “to give her status,” had a son with another woman, and when the first woman died, married the mother of his son (Karlstrom interview, 1976 13)). Wood's fantasy of marrying Duchamp emerged again even years after their affair. In July 1920 Duchamp apparently had heard that she had no money. He took her to dinner and when he left her at her door, he gave her an envelope telling her to open it when she was alone. Even though she was married (further on), she recorded her thoughts at the time: "What on earth had he written? Could it possibly be a proposal of marriage? Indeed, we were close enough at one time to have thought about it, but marriage did not hold much importance for either of us" (Shock 46).3 Inside the envelope from Duchamp were five 10-dollar bills. Even though she may have been dissembling over the possible marriage proposal, the recollection of Duchamps’ bottom line friendship was reassuring. Certain ideas were current at this time in New York's New Bohemia with its mixture of leftist politics, feminism, and modern aesthetics (Watson 143). Washington Square-ites discussed ideas like Free Love, Human Sex, and the New Woman, who "supported everything from practical clothes and birth control to progressive education and sexual parity with men" (143). Other definitions of the New Woman describe her as college-educated, sexually liberated and financially independent of her man. Marcel Duchamp, not long off the boat from France but obviously having had time to appreciate New York women, told one reporter: The American woman is the most intelligent woman in the world today-- the only one that always knows what she wants, and therefore always gets it. Hasn't she proved it by making her husband in his role of slave-banker look ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world? Not only has she intelligence but a wonderful beauty of line is hers possessed by no other woman of any race at the present time. And this wonderful intelligence. . . is helping the tendency of the world to completely equalize the sexes, and the constant battle between them in which we have wasted our best energies in the past will cease (qtd. in Tomkins 151-152).

47 Duchamp had not met Beatrice Wood at this point, but when he did, he must have appreciated her ability to speak French, her intelligence, and her "beauty of line." During Wood's early skirmishes between the sexes, he would be briefly in the trenches, as well as watching from a safe distance. Set against other women in the Village, like Emma Goldman, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, or even Mina Loy, Beatrice Wood was not as radical as she felt she was. She was also not a protoypical New Woman since she did not go to college and she struggled with both her financial and sexual independence. Despite her patriotic expressions in France at the beginning of World War I, she was not particularly political. A diary entry from April 2, 1917 reads: Work with Roché on magazine for Independents. War declaration with Germany. Am curiously untouched, too far (AAA, Reel # 531, 4).

She was much too touched by the act of art at the time. Wood said that she never thought along feminist lines, but certain issues were of concern to her. Issues such as birth control and treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases were important to her. Edna St. Vincent Millay introduced Wood to her doctor, Mary Halton, who "felt women had a right to lead their own lives and told patients if they knew of someone in trouble to bring her to the office, any time of the day or night." For years Wood and a few other women assisted with Halton's fund-raising ball that supported a private hospital room for unmarried mothers. In that private room the woman "could have privacy, for in those days an unmarried mother was put into a public ward, made to scrub floors to earn her keep and was watched by police who, after the baby was born, returned her to her hometown, whether she wanted to go or not," Wood tells us (Shock 44). Also, she exercised her right to vote once it was gained for women. It was, however, in the area of modern aesthetics that she "willed" herself to understand and, thus, what became her lifelong passion for progressive education had some of its roots here in New York Bohemia. Her educational understanding broadened later into a recognition of the value of education for young people, especially in the arts. She willed most of her estate, valued at five million dollars, to the Happy Valley School

48 Foundation which administers the arts-oriented boarding school in Ojai, California (Sprengelmeyer A1). Her sexual education with Roché which she insisted was positive, in true Romantic style, had a dark side. After his betrayal she recorded in her diary that she was depressed. The celebrated Coney Island outing with Duchamp and Picabia was meant to lift her spirits, and it did, but did "being taken for a prostitute" really crown the evening? Or was it that she was not a prostitute and she had two handsome young artists to defend her honor? (Joseph Stella reputedly had fought a duel over her, although she never found out the circumstances.) This was flattering to a romantic (some might say spoiled and/or vain) young woman. What her curiosity with prostitution reveals is that sexuality was an issue for her. She was experiencing contradictory impulses: to engage in sensual (and romantic) pleasure but trying not to feel like a "loose woman" in the process. She wondered, was she the virgin with the touch of malice or the whore with a touch of compassion. The last few lines in her autobiography state: In a way, my life has been an upside-down experience. I never made love to the men I married, and I did not marry the men I loved. I do not know if that makes me a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl gone good. All I know is the I have loved five men--and that I shock myself (Shock 170).

This was the second recorded instance of her being fascinated with being taken for a prostitute. The first, we recall, was in Paris under the tutelage of Madame de Nieuport and Frances Duff. It was certainly not her last recognition of prostitutes. She mentions in a letter to her husband Steve seeing her first prostitute "in operation" in Spain on her 1958 trip and gives a lengthy description of the event, even making a drawing with the caption "This was the first time I had seen a tart in operation" (Pinching 61-62). She mentions streetwalkers in Portugal on the same trip and does a drawing of one (Pinching 74). Later, in East India her American diplomat friends drove her past the Cages in Bombay and she wrote a lengthy meditation on the institution (Maharaja 253- 254). The caption for the drawing she made of them reads: "For looking at the women their faces were neither hard nor coarse; they appeared just the way I did, and my friends" (273). They are the subject of some of her last written and taped works: Kissed

49 Again and Madame Lola's Pleasure Palace, for example. They often became the subject of her ceramic figures when she began pottery, often rendered as jokes. She seemed to revel in the fact that some of her friends and dealers found these "sophisticated primitives" distasteful. All this suggests that she was experiencing some emotion, excitement or anguish, guilt or shame, at her sexual activity early in her life. The Victorian values of her mother were not completely annihilated. As she willed herself to understand modern art, so she willed herself to assume the "Why Not" mentality regarding social values of her Dada contemporaries, but not without an internal struggle. The struggle, however, sparked art, humor, and wisdom. Perhaps more shocking than her realization of Roché’s betrayal, simply because it was the first one related to him, was a conversation she had with Roché before she found out about Alissa. He told her what he thought was the difference in the way men love and the way women love. With Roché, she had imagined that since he was older he must have been in love twice or, to be open-minded, three times. When he told her that he could not remember how many women he had slept with, maybe one hundred, she was shocked. When he said that having sex and being in love with a woman were different things, she responded, "Oh, no!" She "could not conceive of being in the arms of a man without love" (Shock 35). She had probably already had a similar conversation with Duchamp, but because she was not sleeping with him at the time, it did not have the same impact. Her world was beginning to crack, with some of her romantic ideas falling out into stark daylight. The white knight she would talk about much later in life became besmirched. She had had several smaller shocks before, of course. For example, the outbreak of World War I while she was in France was a shock that changed her world quickly. To understand how naive she was, one can simply recall the episode at nineteen, her age at the beginning of her autobiography, of the young soldier Maurice's kiss at the Etretat train station as he departed that "I was stunned by the ravishing pleasure it gave. I was afraid I would now have a baby" (Shock 3). World War I itself, of course, was a larger but more diffuse and pervasive shock. But the personal, especially sexual, shocks are the ones she most remembered: the Count taking her seductively off her horse; "losing her

50 virtue" reading Madame Bovary by candlelight at 14; the sight of the virile Edgar Varese's hairy leg sticking out of the sheets in his hospital bed; and the "slight shock" of seeing Duchamp in Varese's hospital room (“Marcel” 12). But the shock over her first great love remained for her the most powerful one in reflection: it constituted her real loss of innocence, her entry into the "worldly." She recalled the shock much later: "When the bowl of my heart broke, laughter came out" (Mama of Dada videodisc). The laughter, however, may have not emerged immediately. She wasn't laughing a lot during a number of years before an even greater earthquake: the shock of the triple betrayal by her first husband, Paul. Not long after the love relationship fell apart with Roché, in the late summer of 1917, a theatrical agent approached Wood to perform in Montreal for three weeks. She felt the need "to get out of town for a while" and accepted the job. She then had to deal with the objections of her mother who "went into such a fit of hysterics we had to get a nurse to put her in bed for two days." She recorded the attempted intervention from her father while she was packing: "You're killing your mother," he said. "She is killing me. Since I am younger, I should have a chance to live," she replied (Shock 38). She left in January with fifteen dollars in her purse telling her parents money was not important. Having always had access to money, she did not realize the grim realities yet. Theatre would be the means to free herself from her family, she thought. Once in Montreal she quickly realized how little the fifteen dollars would buy. She paid in advance for a week in a cheap boarding house, but the ugliness of the room, the ashtray full of cigarette butts, and that night's bedbugs sent her the next day to a clean hotel that extended her credit toward her first paycheck due in ten days from the theatre. She intended to fulfill the three-week contract and return to New York, but the letters from her mother "ordering her home" pushed her to stay with the theatre until the end of the season. The Canadian winter was brutal and she found her counterparts "more vagabonds than actors," but the break from her family seemed important to maintain. The manager of the theatre, Paul Ransom,i a Belgian, looked like "a faded copy of Mussolini." [H]e said he owned a canning factory, but he had the bearing of a gambler,

51 not a gentleman. He neither read books nor cared for art; he had a passion for good food and talked about it most of the time. We had nothing in common, but I was so desperately lonely I started going to dinner with him (Shock 38).

The dinners continued and one day Ransom asked Wood to move in with him "to save money." She thought it was time for her to be a "woman of the world and become someone's mistress," so she "recklessly" moved in. To her surprise he never tried to make love to her, so even though the people at the theatre thought they were lovers, she was pleased, "as it labeled me a 'bad woman'" without having to be one. Her mother's insistent letters continued. When she complained about them to Paul, he casually said to tell her they were engaged and her mother would back down. Mrs. Wood immediately announced the engagement in the New York newspapers and wrote asking for the date of the wedding. As Beatrice wrote: The last thing I had in mind was marriage. Paul was merely a welcome refuge from loneliness and the torment of my mother. I had affection for him, but we often quarreled because he was drinking, and his lack of taste annoyed me. In time I would surely have returned to New York, but mother put the fat in the fire (Shock 39).

Her mother came to Montreal and discovered they were living together. She also told Beatrice that she had had Paul investigated and that he did not own a canning factory. Paul suavely denied the allegation and moved more stridently toward marriage as a means to remove the control asserted by Mrs. Wood. He also argued that they could have the marriage quickly annulled since neither of them had any intention to consummate it. "Terribly upset and confused," Wood questioned him thoroughly on his past: whether he had been married before; whether he had any children, legal or not; whether any mistress or old girlfriend would be upset at his marriage. "Annoyed," he denied that he had any responsibilities to anyone, although his parents were Catholic, his mother very devout, and it would be better not to let them know of the marriage since Wood was not Catholic. According to Wood, she called Elizabeth Hapgood who told her to come to Connecticut where they could marry at her and Norman's home. Elizabeth Hapgood gave a long account of the engagement and marriage in "All

52 the Cataclysms" that differed somewhat from Beatrice's. According to Hapgood, after Beatrice's parents presented the detective's report, "Then came a painful scene when they gave Beatrice half an hour in which to choose between them and him. Having still so little knowledge of the workings of her heart, they said, hoping to tip the balance in their favor: 'That man hasn't a friend in the world!' To their chagrin and dismay their sensitive daughter, now an independent young woman, replied quietly: 'Then I think he needs me.' And she walked right out of their lives" (2). The wedding was in New Hampshire, not Connecticut, where Elizabeth, pregnant with her second child was preparing to teach Russian at Dartmouth College. It was in June towards the summer solstice. Again Wood remembered exactly what she wore: Paul and I took the train. I wore a dark blue dress with embroidered white flowers at the neck, and wept all the way. The wedding took place two hours after we arrived. Elizabeth had arranged an altar covered with roses in her sitting room. I wore the same dress I have traveled in, perhaps as an insult to a marriage ceremony I really did not want. Though Paul spoke English fairly well, he was unable to repeat the words of the priest. His fumbling and stuttering all during the ceremony made me both giggle and weep.

After the ceremony the bride and groom took a carriage ride. Beatrice had a "dreadful headache" and threw her ring into a field. "No bride could have been unhappier," she wrote. After dinner she went upstairs to bed where the groom was under the covers, snoring, and made no moves that, or any other night, to consummate the marriage (Shock 39). Back in Montreal they checked into the Ritz, generous wedding presents arrived, including three thousand dollars from Wood's family which she gave her husband to deposit in a bank. They took an apartment and Beatrice settled into a domestic life of reading cookbooks and making ice cream. Three months later Paul suggested that they move to New York, arriving June 12, 1918, where he chose a less expensive hotel and told her he would be making $10,000 a year (at what she was not told). She reconnected with her old friends, such as the Arensbergs and artists she knew. She ate dinner with her parents twice a week, but neither Paul nor what she was doing was ever discussed. The first breaking point came when the morning after eating lobster and wine at

53 the Beaux Arts, a fine restaurant, Beatrice told Paul that she wanted to buy the dress that she had told him about. He refused to let her buy it, finally telling her while smiling that he had twenty-five cents left. As she wrote: "He continued to grin, 'I had to send every cent to Canada. It is not serious, Coco.' I stood there in complete shock, wondering if I was hallucinating" (Shock 40). It was the first betrayal. In the argument that ensued, Ransom convinced Wood that she should borrow five hundred dollars from Walter Arensberg, insisting that he would pay him back, promising with his "word of honor." Wood was aghast at the idea because she had been taught by her father never to borrow, she did not want her friendship with the Arensbergs "sullied," and she did not want to become one of the many painters who had borrowed from him and never paid the money back. But Paul was able to wear her down. As she wrote: There are times when reason and feeling stop and the weight of the world makes a person numb. After twenty-four hours of Paul's pleading and haranguing, I was totally exhausted and gave in (Shock 41).

She went to Walter Arensberg and borrowed five hundred dollars, believing that Ransom would repay the money weekly as he told her he would. After three weeks, supposedly having paid all the money back, he asked Beatrice to borrow another five hundred dollars. She "felt like a hot iron was searing her" (Shock 41), but she did it. Ransom continued to tell Wood that he was repaying the debt on schedule. Almost two months later Beatrice broached the subject over ice cream with Louise Arensberg, who had never mentioned it, and said how relieved she was that the debt was almost paid back. Louise, whom Beatrice had been seeing regularly since coming back to New York, said that Paul had not only not paid back the original loan, but had borrowed even more on his own. The debt was then four thousand dollars. In shock, Wood burst into tears. This betrayal was even deeper than the first one by Paul since it involved her dear friends the Arensbergs. Louise consoled her when she realized Beatrice knew nothing of the situation, but it did not allay Wood's anguish. She saw her parents regularly for dinner, but carefully hid the debt secret from them. Paul likewise kept Beatrice ignorant of his financial situation. As she wrote:

54 When I confronted Paul about the exorbitant debt, he brushed aside my concerns saying that Walter understood his position and that there was nothing to worry about. Paul never told any of us what the money was for, nor what he did with it. One thing was certain: He was not using it for our comfort. We had nothing to live on; the three thousand dollar wedding present was also long gone (Shock 41).

It was a situation some might say she allowed to happen, by giving over complete control to this man by marrying him and trusting him so naively. She certainly had not become the New Woman in this situation; she was enmeshed in an Old Testament style marriage without even the conjugal intimacies. It was such a source of embarrassment and dismay that it remained a secret divulged only to her closest friends until much later in life. The next chapter of her autobiography is entitled "Lost in Darkness" and she was, although out of the mud some seeds of realization were germinating. Wood remained with Ransom, amazingly, for the next three years, described as those of "despair" in which "the disgrace of owing money to my dearest friends was an everpresent weight on my shoulders" (Shock 42). They had been forced to move from the Hotel Seymour to Greenwich Village where the rents were low. Beatrice took odd jobs. As she wrote: "I modelled, packed gift parcels, helped a woman move, took in sewing and accepted anything that would bring in some money" (Shock 41). Living now in the Village, Wood returned to the Sunwise Turn Bookshop often and met that summer with Mrs. Charles Coburn with whom she had acted on Broadway in The Yellow Jacket (Hapgood 107). Wood commented on her diary entries from this period: "Later in complete despair, for I had touched the bottom of unhappiness in marriage, [I] was without funds, through Mrs. Coburn's mother I was in touch with mystical and occult books. The first thought of that kind I had found. Profoundly impressed, slowly my life began to take another turn" (AAA, Reel # 536). She also reconnected with Dr. Ananda Coomeraswamy whom she had met the year before when she had no interest in Eastern thought, but this time gratefully accepted a signed first edition of his book Dance of Shiva (September 30, 1918) which she described as "too scholarly" for her to enjoy then (AAA, Reel # 536). She returned the friendship by

55 writing an illustrated mystery story for him. The Arensbergs were also interested in "fortune tellers." One diary entry from this first year back in New York: "December 17, 1918- With Lou to Olga, medium, impressed. Rehearse Russian dance." Wood's later comment on this: "Lou was as interested in fortune tellers as I. Throughout the years we exchanged notes on the ones we saw" (AAA, Reel # 537). Mired in material problems, Wood began to seek solutions beyond the material. The problems continued, but Wood had several large realizations. She records how her attitude toward money was shifting. As she wrote: Often Paul and I did not have even ten dollars and I had no idea how to go about earning a living. I applied for jobs but my timid bearing got me nowhere. For someone like myself, who had always known plenty, poverty was crippling and left me in a trauma. One day on a bus, I noticed a woman opening her purse to pay the fare and it was full of dollars. I coveted the freedom this money represented, for I had none. My once casual remarks about the value of money haunted me daily (Shock 42).

She was dismayed when, hungry, she watched her mother send the food on the silver tray back to the kitchen with the Chinese servant when a potato was out of place. Wood was tempted to steal money from her mother's purse when she was sent to retrieve a card from it. She felt anguish when Paul made her sell (or took them when she was not looking, according to Elizabeth Hapgood) some of her prized first editions and art books and bought marron glacees for her with the money. One true "turning point of [her] life" came when the landlady approached her about the rent. Wood had assumed Paul had paid it which, of course, he had not. The landlady said to her, "It is about time you came out of your dream world and faced reality. Some of us are pretty tired of your irresponsible attitude." Wood's response was that "It was as if she had cut me in two." From that point on "I made it my business to see the rent was paid. I realized that being practical came before art, before anything, and that carrying one's own load was the first requirement of life," she recorded (Shock 43). She tried even harder to find work. She wrote an article for Women's Wear Daily which paid her ten dollars. That editor, Morris Crawford, was the first to draw attention to Peruvian textiles, she wrote. Even in her abyss she was alert to beauty, in this case folk

56 textiles. She packed books for the step-daughter of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mrs. Austin Strong, who "told [her she] was the most negative person she had ever met." Mrs. Strong's lecture on positive thinking did not help. "She had enough to eat and was not married to Paul," Wood complained (Shock 43). Perhaps that consciousness of self-pity brought her to the point of realizing that she could leave him. Nevertheless, she felt stuck when she said, "I felt I had touched the nadir of my existence. I knew I had to leave Paul, but my pity for him left me immobilized." It was in this "hopeless state" that she came across a passage in a story by Hugh Walpole called Fortitude. Feeling "like those devout souls who can at random insert a finger in the Bible and miraculously find exactly the solace they need to deliver them from the brink of desolation," she repeated the phrase over and over to herself, once she found it, "like a mantra." The passage said: "Nothing that happens to a man from the outside is of importance; all that matters is the courage with which he goes through life" (Shock 43). The following month brought a change in circumstances. The landlady asked them to leave since they could not pay the rent. Elizabeth Hapgood's mother offered her tiny Greenwich Village apartment, but since it was only large enough for one, Paul returned to Montreal and Beatrice moved in alone. The next three months, in an even more reduced financial situation without Paul, brought more change, despair, and realization to Beatrice. For one thing she embarked on a sexual relationship with a lawyer, Johnny, with whom she had interviewed for a job before Paul left for Montreal. He seduced her after they attended a small afternoon party of politicians and a couple of buxom blondes at the Hotel Astor. Her description of the event: I was mortified, not for having slept with him, but for the way it had happened. I had broken the taboos of my youth. I had done what my mother had brought me up to abhor. I had been a loose woman. With Roché there had been love and affection. This was something else. At last there was a crack in the gilt that encased me. Curiously, in the degradation I found release, which is not something one would normally find under such circumstances. I felt alive, like another person. I was living my own life! (Shock 44).

It was the next day that she saw Doctor Mary Halton to find out if she had a venereal disease, wishing to protect others if she did. Wood was convinced that she was more likely to be infected since she did not love Johnny as she had Roché. Dr. Halton laughed and said the disease would take longer than a day to show up, but since Wood had come to see her she would give her some birth control protection. This is an indication that Wood was starting to take charge of her life in an active way. Beatrice continued meeting this man frequently for the next two years in the afternoons, never letting him know that she was in need financially or that she was hungry. Even so, at one point Johnny tried to "help" her by asking if she would like to become "the official White House mistress" of Jesse Wilson, close to Warren Harding who they were sure would win the next election. Wilson liked well-read "educated girls." Despite several attempts on his part to set her up in this situation, Wood refused, again setting clearer boundaries for herself (Shock 45). This was also a period when Wood began to appreciate old friendships and start new ones, especially with artists. This was exactly the time that Marcel Duchamp, apparently hearing that she was broke, tactfully pressed the fifty dollars into her hand. This was the time that she met Constantin Brancusi, in New York for his first exhibition, striking up with him an "immediate friendship." Beatrice would shop with Brancusi who chose the food carefully "like a peasant." Helen Freeman would often meet them at Wood's tiny apartment and Brancusi would entertain the women with "long tales full of fantasy and absurdity." One night Wood took Brancusi to meet the Arensbergs who owned several of his pieces and Roché was there. Wood and Roché had not seen each other since their "sad parting." She recalled the encouragement he gave her, especially regarding her art in balance with her life. As she said: "We were overjoyed to see each other. As always, he was intensely interested in my life and my painting. He insisted I needed the stimulation of someone near to release me from my banalities!" (Shock 47). That they had moved to a strong friendship was an indication to her that they had experienced "true love." Because of her financial straits, not long after this at the suggestion of an actor friend, she went on tour with a vaudeville troupe. It was considered "invaluable

58 experience" at the time by many actors as well as being lucrative. Despite Wood's statements that she was acting to get away from her family and to support herself, no doubt some of her intent was to grow in her craft and to act in more serious drama than the French Repertory Theatre offered. She made comments late in life about the Theatre Guild production that illustrate this: "Quickly seeing the Guild did not have the superb dedication of the Stanislavsky group, and did not vary much from the cast [sic] system of other theatres, I left" (AAA, Reel # 538-11). She played Lady MacBeth to an extremely small audience in the sculptor Mowbry-Clarke's studio in Rockland County (AAA, Reel # 538-11). She was frustrated apparently that roles were often gained not on the merit of the acting. A diary entry: December 15, 1919. See Dodge. Tells me role I wanted goes to Yvonne Garrick. Fear I will never get roles, managers only want to sleep with me" (AAA, Reel # 540-13).

Film-acting was an avenue she also explored for a time. Apparently many in the Arensberg Circle went to films regularly. Charlie Chaplin was particularly loved. In March 1920 Charles Sheeler made screen tests of Wood three different times, none of which were particularly good (AAA, Reel # 541-542). Thus, film-acting was a quick dead end at that time. Despite that, Wood continued an interest in doing theatre. Her venture with vaudeville once again took her out of New York, but this time she controlled more of the situation and made some gains, financial, artistic and humane, in the process. She returned to New York five months later having saved $550 which Paul was able to extract from her within days. The other gains were more lasting. When she sloughed through a performance to an almost empty house, she was upbraided by one of the professional vaudevillians. Wood now played the society lady; the ingenue who had been in vaudeville all her life, as well her parents before her, told her: 'You are letting down the act. . .If only one man is there and he has paid for his seat, he is entitled to the best we can give him. Besides, in these out-of-the-way houses, agents come to watch acts. One never knows when one is in the house. In vaudeville, one is constantly watched. Every day reports go back to headquarters. If you do not watch your pace, you endanger the living of the rest of us. Every performance is the best. That is

59 its tradition' (Shock 48-49).

Wood internalized the advice and learned the discipline of vaudeville, realizing that working in those "out-of-the-way dumps. . .allowed one to polish a role like clockwork" (Shock 49). She also discovered one night when she laughed at the comedian in the middle of their stage fight that she was indeed being watched. The next day she received a telegram from headquarters that read: "What are you doing to the act?" (Shock 51). She never fell out of character again. Having been recently in Bohemian New York, she assumed vaudeville people were "loose," but she soon discovered that the old vaudevillians were "quite respectable. They did not know enough to be otherwise. They never read the newspaper and the dressing room was their universe" (Shock 49). It was only the short-term performers like her who "were willing to spend casual nights together." She indulged in a little of that, but there was a juggler in Buffalo, a minister's son who had run away from home to whom she was very attracted. "He had spent several years in the Orient and spoke several languages," and he stirred up her memories of being with cultivated people in the past. At the crucial moment of going with him for the night, she watched her internal struggle and decided to keep walking home. Her comment on this: "This episode was a turning point in my life. I no longer wanted superficial encounters. I wanted love. No physical relation, without it, had any value for me. I was beginning to find myself" (Shock 50). She bought herself a typewriter and taught herself to type. She began to write stories, taking the most interesting performer of the week and writing a story about him or her. Asking questions of the person, she ended up becoming friends with "clowns, acrobats, jugglers, singers." Her previously judgmental attitude, often thinking the worst of people she initially presumed to be beneath her, began to shift. When Wood heard through the thin walls, for example, the sobbing of the ingenue Patsy, she thought the comedian was trying to seduce her. Wood discovered the next day that she had heard the young woman's distress at the news of her mother's death. Wood was beginning to discriminate between self-absorbed, self-serving people and those who were not, even within herself.

60 Returning to New York, after not having seen her husband Paul for five months, she resumed living with him. She found out that contrary to her parents' estimation he did have at least one friend in the world, or at least someone who knew something of his past. After dinner one night walking down Broadway with George, while Paul walked ahead with the woman who had come with George, the final betrayal came to light. "Casually taking my arm, he said, 'You are good for Paul. His wife was somber, a religionist. She prayed most of the time'" (Shock 52). Wood slyly extracted the truth from George, who obviously did not know of her and Paul's "marriage," without his ever knowing what she was doing. Paul was married to a Belgian woman; being Catholic he was still married and thus a bigamist. It was a huge shock to Wood, but suddenly things made sense: why he had stammered through the ceremony and why he had not written his aged mother about their marriage. She could not understand why he had married her when he didn't need to since they didn't even have sex. The thought never occurred to her that he might be using her for access to money and her influential friends. Her response, however, was a clear patient calm. As she wrote: I was neither angry nor hurt. I was relieved. Now I knew that before long I would find the courage to leave him. I decided not to let him sense that I knew the truth. I would wait and let him betray himself. I needed legal evidence and he was clever at hiding everything.

Ten days passed and finally Ransom brought up the subject, saying that George had told her he was married, but that it was not true. "Swinging his arms like a madman," Paul denied that he had a wife in Belgium, asked what she was going to do, and told her she was "crazy." Certain of the truth, Wood was "beyond fear" (Shock 53). She went to Elizabeth Hapgood who was so furious she wanted him put in jail, but Wood would not think of that. Still vulnerable, she said, "I wanted not only to protect him but to keep the knowledge from his ancient mother." A few days later Wood became ill, took to her bed, and was seriously afflicted with a neck and back pain which would plague her the rest of her life. While in bed she reflected on her situation and her thoughts moved back to her evenings spent with Duchamp and the Arensbergs. She came to a

61 realization: "I belonged with people who loved art and music" (Shock 53). She also realized that she had to leave him or she would be destroyed. It was not, however, an easy thing for her to do. She described it: No decision had ever been so hard for me. It had taken years to find the courage to defy and leave my mother, but that was hardly comparable to leaving Paul. With Paul I was walking away from an emotionally retarded, helpless person, leaving him alone to face the world. All my maternal instincts were involved and I felt immeasurably sad (Shock 54).

Despite its distorted shape, Wood had given herself over to the marriage. She was beginning, however, to realize within herself how her artistic friends might be seeing her situation. In one of the last chapters of the roman à clef Victor, "Alice and Pierre Visit Patricia Married," Roché describes Wood's character Patricia as "pale, lifeless. It was as if she had taken vows in a religion and had not as yet had enough time to become accustomed to its canons" (Jones, transl., 97). The character Patricia describes her domestic order and state of mind: "Now I do only useful things. I'm paying for my past life. My imagination no longer rules my life, and that is very restful" (98). Patricia's imagination was resting in the grave, but in time in Beatrice it would be resurrected. It did not happen immediately. First she had to leave him and that path was strewn with more shocks. She moved to a hotel five blocks away but continued to see him daily. He kept insisting he was not married when she asked for information to start legal proceedings to dissolve the marriage. In the middle of this wrangling with Paul, the Arensberg's lawyers got in touch with Wood to settle their New York affairs. Louise had given Walter an ultimatum over his philandering and squandering her money: either move to California with her or end the marriage. The lawyers presented to Wood Ransom's current debt to the Arensbergs: over nineteen thousand dollars not including interest. Further, Paul had pledged as security for the debt an anticipated legacy of ten thousand dollars from Wood's grandmother who was still living. Wood was horrified at this disclosure and said to the Arensbergs: "If my grandmother dies before I do, of course I will hand over the legacy to you. But I am not sure she has left it to me. My father only mentioned it once as a possibility, and carelessly I mentioned it to Paul. My only wish is to pay you back every cent Paul has borrowed" (Shock 54).

62 The lawyers, to protect the Arensbergs, went to Benjamin Wood who knew nothing of Beatrice's "terrible and chronic dishonor" (Shock 54). The lawyers wanted Beatrice to be legally responsible for the entire debt. Her parents and Elizabeth Hapgood argued that Beatrice should not be responsible beyond the first five hundred dollars that she had solicited. Her mother argued that since Beatrice was not legally married to Ransom, she was not legally responsible for any of it. Beatrice accepted full responsibility for the debt. She said to them, "It is not a question of legality. . .It is one of moral responsibility" (Shock 55). She felt that strongly about her relationship to the Arensbergs. The repercussions from this stand had far-reaching consequences. As she recounted, "When my parents saw how intractable I was, they decided I was a fool with no judgment. My father took me out of his will and left everything to my mother--which turned out to be an unfortunate mistake" (Shock 55). The motivation for this, however, was not malice. In fact, both parents were trying to help her out of the mess she had created. Her mother decided that the only way to solve the problem was to go to Europe and meet with Ransom's family.4 When Ransom got wind of this development in an accidental meeting at a department store downtown with Beatrice who "gently implored" him to be reasonable and give the needed information, he became "violently agitated" and threatened to "kill all [her] family" if they approached his mother. He still clung to the lie that he was not married to anyone in Belgium; instead, he begged her to move back in with him and "be near me." After Beatrice's mother had left for Europe, one day Ransom phoned "shouting like a madman" and saying "that he was on his way to kill [her]." She had already experienced violence from him before. One night he spit on her from the window above when a male friend walked her home and then pulled and shoved her against the wall when she walked into their room. So on this occasion, she was very frightened. She wrote a note and put it under the blotter which read: "If I am killed, Paul has done it" (Shock 55). Once again her "guardian angels" were on call, for the phone rang and it was a male friend whom she asked to come over immediately. Paul arrived before the man,

63 shouting about Mrs. Wood in Europe: "Has she been to see my family?" "I do not know." His face had turned purple. He pounded on the walls, screaming: "I am going to kill you!" "All right," I said, unmoved, "but an old friend is on the way here. He will arrive any minute." He leaned forward and studied me suspiciously, then muttered, "And you cheat me besides." How he could twist the truth.

Paul was pounding the wall when the friend arrived. The friend offered his hand which Ransom refused, "gaped" at Beatrice, "struggled for breath and ran down the stairs" (Shock 56). She did not see him for weeks. Clearly, she was trying to escape an abusive relationship, and her life had become a melodrama. Mrs. Wood's trip to Belgium was the denouement. Her meeting with Paul's family "was handled with gravity, but without bitterness." She met with his parents, his wife, and also the son he had left there. Back in New York, the annulment proceedings were perfunctory, the case clear-cut: Ransom was a bigamist and the marriage was unconsummated. Beatrice was "nervous," the judge "bored and irritable," and her parents probably as relieved as she was. It was over. "It took only fifteen minutes for the court to dissolve the marriage that had lasted four miserable years," she wrote. One of the very few instances when Beatrice appreciated her mother's actions toward her is recorded about this incident: "Had it not been for my mother's persistent and loving efforts, I might never have untangled this sad chapter of my life." This was tempered, however, by the recognition that she would never have married him in the first place had it not been for her mother's grip. The family never mentioned his name again and the episode became a buried shame: "[I]t was years before I could talk about him, even to close friends." (The "heartbreak" over the Arensbergs lived on, however.) Beatrice saw Paul the day after the annulment, told him the whole story, and watched him respond "like an animal caught in a trap" as he walked away in silence. She never saw him again nor ever heard what had happened to him (Shock 56).5 Wood divided her life from this point: Part II of her autobiography begins with the chapter "Another Great Love Comes into My Life." She had been involved with a

64 married man with a son (Paul) but those details had been hidden from her. Now she was falling in love with a man, Reginald Pole, who was openly separated from his wife and son in California. The solid distinction she made between this situation and the last was based heavily on the facts that Pole was a "charming and sophisticated" artist, that Beatrice was seeking him out, and that they shared a quest for "answers to [her] deep, unresolved questions," such as "Why do we have to go through so much pain and suffering?" (Shock 59). This is not to say her pain and suffering ended with him. Reginald Pole, stage director and actor, was a tall Englishman born in Japan to missionary parents. He had gone to Christ College in Cambridge at the same time as Rupert Brooke with whom he had founded the Marlowe Society. He was passionate about music and lectured at Harvard and Yale on art, literature and philosophy. Beatrice met him as the director, fresh from California, of Helen Freeman's play in which Beatrice had agreed to play two small parts. The play was a diversion from the legal wranglings still ongoing with her annulment. (Shock 59). Dinners, long conversations, and browsing in bookstores followed. Beatrice unburdened the story of her recent marriage disaster to Reginald who was sympathetic and said he had noticed "the weight" she seemed to be carrying. They were together in one bookstore when she found two volumes by the theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms and Man's Invisible Bodies whose ideas' excited them both. Wood had already investigated other spiritual areas and found them lacking: "I read some Christian Science literature, but it seemed to deny the matter which it served. Nor did I respond to books that turned truth into a formula, or lulled the mind with mantras, or gave lessons on what to think" (Shock 59-60). Even though Wood insisted at the end of her life that theosophy had nothing to do with dada (Personal interview, 30 Nov. 1997), her approach to truth-seeking at least seems to echo Duchamp's adage "Rules are fatal to the progress of art." More than anything, Beatrice responded to Annie Besant's face. She studied her photographs and found her very beautiful with "eyes of great purity." Reginald had heard of her when he had been in England and was able to give some of her history: that she was "courageous," having done a lot "for the working girl" in England, and had gone to

65 India to work for its liberation from the Empire. They flirted over Besant's reincarnational thinking: Beatrice: Do you believe in it? Reginald: Probably, since we obviously knew each other when we met. Beatrice: (I was elated.) You really think we knew each other before? (He grinned.) You were probably a dancing girl in the Renaissance. No, I was your wife! How dare you refer to me as just an episode! He leaned over, put his hand on my arm, lifted my chin and said with emotion: Since when have you concluded men do not love their dancing girls? (Shock 60).

A few days later they went to the Philosopher's Bookshop run by Russell Jones and bought every book they could find on clairvoyance, Theosophy, and eastern thought. Later that year (1923) they both joined the Theosophical Society. Beatrice was thirty years old. Her mother was now urging her to move home after the annulment, but Beatrice was "in love" and refused, pushing another rift between them. The tête-à-tête with Reginald were too stimulating, although they were not lovers-- yet. In fact, she wrote, "Though he showed great interest in my company, there was nothing romantic in his conduct. On the contrary, he was quite impersonal" (Shock 61). She moved to change that. She had the love interest, they shared theatrical and other artistic interests, but it was the mutual interest in theosophy that bound the relationship from the start. Although it has claimed ancient roots, Theosophy, as it is generally thought of, is a product of the late nineteenth century, linked especially to the American spiritualism movement of upstate New York and surrounding areas. Spiritualism had offered the possibility of certainty of a world beyond death to many people (eleven million in 1870) (Field 84). It was in Chittenden, Vermont that the charismatic Russian mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky met the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a veteran of the Civil War and head of the investigation surrounding Lincoln's assassination. Both were investigating, for different reasons, some apparitions at the Eddy brothers' farm.6 Their association resulted in the formation of the Theosophical Society first in New York in 1875 and then they took it on the road to India and Ceylon in 1878. Like one of the stories of the origin of the term "Dada," theosophy was found in the dictionary after

66 Egyptological, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian were rejected at a formation meeting in New York. The three Objects of the Society stated publicly in the 1880s were: To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; To study the ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences, and the demonstrations of the importance of such study; and to investigate the unexplained laws of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man (Field 90).

Amid the heated discussions of the day between evolutionists (since the recent publication of Darwin's books) and fundamentalist Christians, Theosophy proposed, through its belief in the existence of "Adepts" or "Masters" who were not "miracle workers" but examples of the highest possibilities of spiritual evolution, to sidestep that problem. Since Eastern philosophies, according to Blavatsky's alleged direct experience, were more evolved than Western, Eastern thought should come West. It was conceived of not as a new religion, but a philosophy. The East could also benefit, since with its current troubles between Eastern religions and Christian missionaries in Asia, they foresaw a resolution of those problems through the promulgation of theosophy. From the Asian view, the theosophists, Blavatsky and Olcott, were called "White Buddhists," referring to their race and their respectful embracing of Buddhist views, a new experience for the Asian Buddhists. The second generation Theosophists, Annie Besant, a former Fabian socialist whom George Bernard Shaw described in his unpublished diary as the greatest woman orator of the century (Shock 60) and Charles Leadbeater, clairvoyant, were the ones Wood and Pole were most familiar with. They became especially close to the young man who was hand-picked in India by Besant and Leadbeater to be the highly evolved person "to bring truth in new forms to the world," Jiddu Krishnamurti. Some said he was to be the "avatar of the age." Wood met him when Pole brought him to dinner at her tiny apartment, insisting that she serve him raw potato salad, to Wood’s chagrin. Krishnamurti was polite but obviously surprised and amused by the menu (Shock 73). A relationship began then that would last both of their long lives. Wood said, "Krishnamurti had an electrical magnetism around him, and he seemed put together like a

67 stainless steel spring" (Shock 74). Wood approached him as a teacher and counselor, but she was never prey to the glamour and adulation many people lavished on him. Through the years she often asked him questions, particularly related to relationships and work. Apparently she took to heart his teaching that spiritual evolution was up to the individual, and that he was simply an elder brother on the path. She was also present during several crises regarding his relationships and work, and thus had a different perspective than many people. She was, for example, in Holland in 1930 when he delivered the speech in which he renounced the mantle that had been placed on him by Besant and Leadbeater. Interest in theosophy was pronounced at the time, particularly among artists through the German Expressionist school. Wassily Kandinsky's book The Art of Spiritual Harmony first translated in English in 1914, for example, was influential. In discussing Kandinsky's and Katherine Dreier's (also a member of Arensberg-Duchamp circle) attraction to theosophy, Ruth Bohan described the reasons: [I]ts emphasis on the inner self, its anti-intellectualism and antimaterialism, its idealism and its basic humanitarianism. It instilled in him a profound interest in and sensitivity to the spiritual oneness of the universe. Theosophy also helped convince him of the important role art could play in man's search for spiritual knowledge (20).

Although theosophy was attractive to abstract artists for these reasons, Wood (and Pole) found it appealing as well. While she did not discuss her involvement extensively, except with other theosophists, she obviously found it sustaining and maintained her membership in the Society until her death. She had donated several pieces to the Theosophical Society in Illinois (Theosophical Society. E-mail to the author. 26 May 1998). She had become involved at a precarious period of her life, and in certain ways it inspired her determination to organize and discipline herself into an artist. You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. - J. Krishnamurti

By contrast, the relationship with Reginald Pole did not prove to be sustaining or sustained. It was a slow, low-voltage shock. She had boldly (for her) initiated the love

68 relationship by bringing her comb and toothbrush with her on a jaunt to New Jersey where he was lecturing one day a few months into their acquaintance. She hinted at her intentions and he gladly complied. As she described the beginning: Four months of incredible happiness followed. We met every day and went away on trips over the weekends. There was a continual flow of ideas between us; the surroundings fell away and laughter and conversations swept us through time and space to a land of communion. We were so much in tune that our communication was almost telepathic. We read books together and went to the theatre and concerts or to see friends. We acted like a married couple, although Reginald wanted to remain single.

But they were not married, and he was. The wife he was separated from and the son Rupert he "adored" were in California. But, as she told it, "He insisted I was his wife in front of God, but I said I did not care. In truth, I was so in love with him that I longed for us to be married--I, who always insisted marriage was a nuisance. The walls of Jericho were crumbling down, but I kept this to myself" (Shock 61). Hints of other problems surfaced. He decided to put on a performance of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and she found he was "not a good administrator" and the rehearsals were confused. Wood, not Pole, was able to extract the promised production money of two thousand dollars from the woman who had offered it and was given the job of stage manager based on her organizational skills. He "was drawn" to the leading lady, Estelle Winwood, who was playing opposite him, and he "found excuses" to visit Tallulah Bankhead who lived in the same hotel. He loved to take long walks at night in "dark, isolated places" and expound on subjects of interest to him such as Beethoven or Wagner, but he seemed oblivious to the danger; one night he and Bea barely escaped being mugged. (The Idiot was, however, a great critical success.) Pole began to take trips away from New York and Wood. The first, a blow to Beatrice, was one to California to see his wife and son. Beatrice was nervous. She said to him, "I understood the separation was final," and added her thoughts: "It sounded funny for him to refer to another woman as his wife. I could not understand why, when we were so happy together, he would think of returning to her for a visit" (Shock 63). He went and she did not hear from him for two weeks. She then received a letter saying his wife had

69 fallen in love with his best friend Lloyd Wright, son of the architect, and that they were going to divorce. Another letter followed saying he was returning to New York. Wood was elated and he "came back more devoted than ever, but he never mentioned marriage." They lived together in Wood's small apartment on 46th Street although Pole kept a hotel room to keep up appearances, fooling no one. Comparing this relationship to the "magical" one with Roché she wrote: We created a wonderful life, reading to each other continually, going out, talking endlessly. It was as close a relationship as Roché and I had enjoyed, except that Roché had been a teacher, beckoning me to come with him into the stream of life, helping me cross the currents, and always concentrating on my development. With Reginald neither of us was the teacher. Though his mind was burning with intellectual concepts, I challenged his philosophical flights and brought him down to earth. Sometimes we were more like two scholarly brothers instead of man and woman (Shock 64).

Pole punctured Wood's bliss by announcing a trip to England to see his aging parents. More separations followed. At the end of winter (1923) Pole went to Hollywood to direct the annual Pilgrimage play, but wired Wood to join him after being there a few days. This became a "spring ritual" for them for the next five years. During the first trip Pole's previous concern for his reputation in New York took on ludicrous proportions in California "as the director of a religious play about the life of Christ". As Wood told it: He wanted me with him all the time, but wanted no one else to know I existed. Once he insisted that I follow ten paces behind him as we walked down Hollywood Boulevard. I consented to play the Indian princess for a while, although the deception was ridiculous. The fact that I laughed irreverently at his childish nonsense kept him on an even keel; he was a charming and distinguished man who everyone else took quite seriously (Shock 66-67).

Pole apparently did not, however, take their relationship seriously, at least for marriage. His Romantic notions revealed to Wood a gap with reality: Although he loved to speak of creating spiritual links with me, he was forever romanticizing about falling in love with various damsels--like the lovestruck poet Shelley had done. . . 'I cannot love a woman once I have touched her,' he would spout. 'Byron

70 fell out of love with the woman who inspired him when he saw her eating.' 'Rubbish,' I answered. The night before, touching a woman had not bothered him in the least (Shock 74).

While Wood became more involved with Theosophy, Pole became more involved, over-identified to Wood's mind, with the Biblical roles he was playing and with various "damsels". Back in New York from California before him, Wood had three dreams that he was in love with someone else. He didn't answer her letters. Finally, a telegram arrived saying that "he was in love with a twenty-two year old poet and planned to marry her." Wood's shocked response: I was stupified [sic]. For some reason I wrote him a note sending my love and wishing them happiness. Then it was as if I died. I sat in a chair for two days, unable to speak or eat. For nights I lay in bed with my eyes wide open. How could this have happened? For six years Reginald convinced me that we were weaving ties that would hold forever. He told me that I was his wife before God. Why do women believe men? (Shock 75).

Another telegram a week later said he was returning to New York. While he and Leslyn still loved each other, he told her, they decided that Beatrice needed him more than Leslyn did, and that since she was a college student, it was better that they separate until she graduated. Pole went back to sleeping with Wood, although platonically, all winter, writing Leslyn daily and speaking of her incessantly. Finally a letter arrived in which the young poet announced while she "still loved him, she was not in love with him" (Shock 76). Asking Beatrice to take over for him, since he was collaborating with modern dancer Maud Allen on his one-act play then in rehearsal for a performance at the Metropolitan Opera, Pole took off for California "to appeal to her." He stayed one day; a telegram arrived saying she did not love him and he was returning immediately. Beatrice's response was to laugh, thinking his "sophomoric gesture" appropriate to some young men's aping of Shelley but not suited to "a person who read the Bhagavad-Gita and talked at length about detachment" (Shock 77). Wood's involvement with Theosophy intensified the next year. After meeting Dr. Besant in Philadelphia, Wood was preparing for an important initiation in Chicago. Pole, out west again, urged her to come. Despite her fear of his going off with another woman,

71 she went, being careful to warn him how important the upcoming initiation was to her and how important it was to control her emotions. Once out there, she found her premonitions borne out over the eighteen-year old woman he had mentioned in a letter she had received on the day of the first meeting with Besant. During a picnic at Palm Springs Beatrice, seeing Frances in her bathing suit looking like a "wood nymph," she "knew." On the drive back to Los Angeles, Pole confessed that he had "fallen in love" with Frances. Beatrice begged him not to make any rash decisions about marriage until after her initiation meeting in Illinois. He insisted he would not. Her meeting was at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday; the telegram arrived in the morning which said Pole was marrying that afternoon at 2:30. Not long after this, in 1928, Wood packed her things and moved from New York to California. It was not because Reginald Pole was there. Krishnamurti was speaking often in Ojai and the Arensbergs were in Los Angeles. It was, after all, her birthplace and, as she said, "The land was beautiful and the city was wide open" (Shock 80). Among her belongings was a manuscript for a play she had been researching in the New York Public Library for three months called Torch in the Dark. She was still seeking her medium. Little did she know that in just a few years, at the "advanced age" of forty she would find the medium, pottery, which would sustain her in many ways for sixty-five more years. Reginald, now married, did come to see her in California. One morning she heard him coming up the steps: He entered impressively, stood tall and ethereal at the foot of the couch and started lamely: 'Frances is right for me. I need youth.' He waited for me to agree. I said nothing and contrived a Mona Lisa smile. He repeated: 'I need youth.' He waited for me to protest, but what could I say, I was still young myself. His eyes shifted, searching for certainty. 'My marriage is a great success. Frances is giving her life to me.' That hurt. I, too, had given up my life for him--seven years. 'I need youth,' he said for the last time. The more impassive was my face, the more I laughed inside. What can one do when one is up against the absurdity of life but laugh! (Shock 85).

72 Plate 5 Beatrice Wood posing as poster (1993): photograph by Marlene Wallace

73 CHAPTER 4.

BALANCE ACHIEVED

Roché on Duchamp: "His finest work is his use of time" (Lebel 87). Beatrice Wood on time: A scientist once said there is no such thing as time. So perhaps we do not exist in time as we know it. We cannot hold on to the past or grab onto the future, and the present is ever gone. (At 100, 68)

Liberation is not then a process of evolution, but the realization of the whole of life, in which there is no longer object or subject, in which there is no longer the sense of separation (Krishnamurti qtd. in Angel, "Food for Thought" np).

When many close beloved people die in rapid succession, especially when one has lived a fairly long life, the grief must have a different quality from that of youth's sense of loss. To find oneself always the one left behind is a mixed blessing. Duchamp's epitaph, which he wrote himself, must have held special meaning (and a chuckle at the Duchampian word play) for Wood: "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent" (Besides it’s always the others who die). Certainly in her youth Beatrice Wood had lost or feared she would lose people she loved. A diary record from January 16th, 1920: "Asked to go on tour for 12 days. Lunch Lou at Schrafts. We fear for Walter's health (and life.)" (AAA, Reel # 540). She recorded in her diary in the following month the sudden death by pneumonia of the fairly young E.E. Southard, an "old and close friend" of Walter Arensberg and the head of a psychological hospital in Boston. Wood had been close to him. "He was especially interested in my dreams, for he said they had an unusual continuity. He insisted I write them downs [sic], and whenever he came to New York Walter saw I was on hand to read them to him," she commented later on a diary entry. (AAA, Reel #538). Diary records attest to their many meetings especially during the year before his death. In March Beatrice, Walter and Lou worked a "Ouija board, sure [they had] a message from Ernest

74 Southard" (AAA, Reel # 541). Years before this, while twelve years old, Wood had witnessed the frailty of life. Her meeting Elizabeth Reynolds at all was the result of Elizabeth's older brother's death as he was about to graduate from college. Mrs. Reynolds was struck hard by the loss and disillusioned with her marriage. She decided to focus her attention on her only daughter's and youngest child's education; she took a job in admissions and enrolled Elizabeth in the Ely School where they both stayed from 1905-1910. Even though Beatrice went on to the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1907, a deep friendship had been established between the girls, and they corresponded every week until the end of Elizabeth's life in 1973. Elizabeth's study at Ely was interrupted often by trips to Europe where her great talent for languages, especially Russian, became evident. During the Spring and Summer of 1910 Elizabeth and her mother spent a great deal of time in Paris. The girls were apparently together that summer when Beatrice was studying art in Paris before the charmed but brief trip to Giverny. During that stay Mrs. Reynolds took her daughter, age sixteen, on her first trip to Russia where with the right introductions from a close Russian friend, Madame Ragozina (Langlois 6), they were able to listen to discussions of the Duma at the Winter Palace and hear Stolypin speak. That first trip set firmly Elizabeth's future course of studying Russian language and culture. When Reynolds returned to America for her first year at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1910, she became ill. While she did not die then, Elizabeth's illness, a result of a bad reaction to a vaccination, dogged her and she suffered from pain and abscesses for the following five years (Langlois 8). After that one year at Bryn Mawr, Elizabeth, with her mother acting as chaperone and mentor, went back to Paris where Elizabeth enrolled as an "auditrice libre" at the Sorbonne for the next two years. Beatrice also left Bryn Mawr the year after Elizabeth became ill, going back to New York and the Finch School for one year. Beatrice, who was called "Bice" (with an Italian pronunciation) by the Reynolds family, was also close to Elizabeth's mother. The older woman, living separately from her husband, created a small salon-on-a-shoe-string atmosphere of study and conviviality

75 among "interesting" international young people at the Pension Vesque while in Paris (Langlois 5). Chinese students taught them calligraphy, for example. Both mother and daughter were adept at cultivating intelligent, interesting friends. Wood, being shy but curious even then, must have admired Margaret Reynolds' independence, admiring as well her devotion to encouraging Elizabeth's gifts and the harmony of the mother- daughter relationship. She was a model to Wood of a different style of mothering and something of a surrogate mother.1 Since they were all so close, Beatrice felt deeply Margaret's grief over the loss of her son and Elizabeth's concern over her own health. This recognition of suffering made an impact on the young, still healthy Beatrice. (Her chronic neck ailment, the seed planted, as she has said, in her difficult breach birth, had not fully emerged yet.) Consequently, when Beatrice observed the wigged and diseased Mme. Fleurot a few years later, she was not completely naive of issues like these. Further, the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, with 22 million dead world-wide, and the atrocities of World War I in a pre-antibiotic world must have made the precariousness of life palpable and horrific to her and to other young people of that time. (The male population between the ages of 15-35 in France was decimated, times five, during that war.) Once Wood's youth was clearly over and once she had experienced enough loss and had recognized (in part) that certain dreams, like a happy complete marriage, were not sureties, she had a turn of mind and a solidification of certain values informed by her personality, her associations with Dada and her devotion to Theosophy. Some changes in life are natural and relatively easy, and some are forced by circumstances. For example, Wood mentioned that when she was young she had some prejudice about older people: She did not want to be friends with anyone visibly older. As she aged, however, she saw the error of her youth and had to rethink this one. And keep rethinking. This aging process, of course, had as much to do with her mental acuity as her physical body. She once told Francis Naumannn that a point came when she felt her brain shrinking and she fought, hard, against it. Her first trip to India, a place of highly visible poverty, disease, death, and spirituality, was a pivotal point in her life. In many areas of her life, she might have felt

76 uncertain before that trip. For example, her lustre glaze pottery had been in fashion during the previous two decades, the forties and fifties, but suddenly it was not (Garth Clark interview, 20 Dec.1998). The trip, however, reaffirmed her faith in her work and self-worth, both by the honor of the invitation by the Indian government and the clamoring reception from Indians to her and her pottery. The visible sign of change was the adoption of saris, after her second trip, as her only apparel for the rest of her life, but other shifts occurred although they might be less apparent. By the time Beatrice Wood made that first trip to India, late in 1961, she was 68, already beyond standard retirement age. By that point in her life she had experienced the loss of many people important to her. Much of her family had already died. Her wealthy physician aunt, Esther Rosencranz, had died in 1950, leaving her a small trust which gave Wood her first financial foundation since she had broken with her family (or her family had broken from her). This was not the only time problems surfaced in her family surrounding death, relationships, and money.2 Rosencranz's sister, Mrs. Wood, had died many years before, around 1935 or 1936. Beatrice's memory at the end of her life was not clear about the exact date, but she did vividly remember the circumstances in her autobiography. Her mother had been ill with cancer and had returned to San Francisco to be with her sisters, facing "her death heroically and rarely referr[ing] to her illness." Beatrice had been visiting her every few weeks from southern California and had begun "meeting her on new ground, one without barriers" (Shock 100). Humor and understanding were actually creeping into their relationship. The way she told it: The morning of her death, I found her on a narrow couch, white as a sheet and motionless. Only her eyes moved, from side to side, more brilliant than I had ever seen them. I approached her bed, holding out my hand, and said with a grin, 'I have a little present for you.' She opened the tiny package in which I had put a piece of chewing gum. She burst into laughter. Mother was the last person who ever would have chewed gum. The rest of the family was horrified and thought my gesture obscene, but my mother smiled and said, 'Beatrice is the only one who understands.' I did. She and I knew that one can do nothing in the face of the ultimate, but laugh (Shock 101).

77 After telling Beatrice she would not have to worry about money in the future, her mother looked to Beatrice "beautiful as marble, at peace." Mrs. Wood, in her last moments, rose slightly, tried to smile, said "Oh, am I still here?", and finally said to herself "Oh, it is so beautiful, so beautiful" before sinking into a coma. Having witnessed her mother's death and having achieved a humorous rapprochement with her must have been strangely reassuring to Beatrice after their earlier troubles-but only in retrospect. The promise of a legacy that would relieve her artistic poverty might have given Wood some material peace of mind. But in the moment, even though she had been "completely prepared for [her] mother's death, . . . it was the most awful shock." Wood's one regret was she had not told her mother that she would "leave her name on the social register," thinking it would have been a small lie "to ease the passage to the other side" (Shock 101). Beatrice's easy financial passage through life, assured by her mother, was not in the cards at that time, however. Through her mother's poor business judgment and the financial times, very little legacy came to Wood. Her father, who had died in 1930 while Beatrice was on the trip to Europe with Helen Freeman, had cut her out of his will years before over the marriage/debt debacle. (Her brother had died long before her death, but she could not remember when at all; he had not been financially, or emotionally, supportive of her.) Even closer to home, Wood also had had her own brushes with death, often coming in proximity to others' deaths. One was thinking that she might have a cancerous tumor on her kidney a few months after the 1958 summer trip to Paris to see Roché, then ill, and his wife. He died not long after that in April 1959. Wood told her husband when she got this unexpected news, "All right,. . . we will make a date for surgery immediately. If you find cancer, don't keep me lingering. I want to go as quickly as possible. I have no fear" (Shock 143). She had already gone through the surgery experience before, in Santa Barbara in September 1953 at the time both Walter and Louise Arensberg were ill and about to die. Many years before that, in November 1937, she had also had surgery, not long after her mother's death, for an ovarian tumor. That was the surgery, associated as a close call with death, that sparked the collage Christmas card. She was understanding the

78 precariousness of the body in her own. She was understanding it as well with friends. The loss of close friends in the decade before her Indian trip was particularly heavy. Roché, despite the way he had hurt her years before, certainly qualified as one. Of course, Beatrice Wood had said on many occasions that she never got over the shock of Roché’s infidelity with her friend Alissa. It ended the relationship as it had been for her, but she continued to maintain a friendship with him until his death. First, she had roistered about with him and Duchamp during the winter of 1916 and spring of 1917, after her break from the romantic attachment. While married to Paul she was "overjoyed" to see Roché a couple of years later on a visit he made to New York from Paris, running into him at the Arensbergs. She continued to correspond with him after his return to France. All through World War II Wood sent food, clothes, soap, and other hard-to-obtain useful articles to Roché, then married for the second time, and his wife Denise. When Beatrice visited them on the 1958 trip, she may have been flattered that Denise felt so comfortable with the friendship. After that visit in Paris, she suggested that Beatrice join them in the south of France and that Wood and Roché share a room so that they could talk early in the morning. Wood's reflection on this: This generous suggestion revealed her true love for Roché, whose happiness was her first consideration. However, I had already enjoyed several weeks with them, and longed to see Portugal. Besides, I had made it a rule never to flirt with a married man. Together again--in the same bedroom--I couldn't take a chance! (Shock 141).

So their last visit together in Paris had been a noble and endearing one. During that same Parisian summer Roché arranged for Wood to visit with her old friend Constantine Brancusi. She and Helen Freeman had had those frequent "peasant" dinners with him, where they had all shopped in the market, cooked, and told stories into the night, years before in New York. He was then eighty-two and laid up with a broken hip, but, according to Wood, "except for some grey in his beard, he seemed little changed . . ." and they "talked of temples, gurus and magic, for he was deeply involved with Eastern philosophy and life." He spoke of the relationship between art and spirit: "Art today is without depth. It is born of intellect, or skill, without any spark from the soul of

79 man." Interrupting Wood's prattle, "with a faraway light in his eyes, he muttered morosely, 'If one is free of self, one comes to a great consciousness, a comprehension beyond that of most men. I have done nothing that matters, but in the great consciousness I create beautiful things. I cannot bring them down from there to here’”(Shock 140). He ended with the statement, which he repeated, "Je nage dans la misère" and Wood, thinking that he wished to speak on serious subjects, opened the topic of death. Musing over life after death, Wood expressed some doubt of its existence to which Brancusi countered excitedly with a story of his drowning death as a child and being "allowed to come back." He asserted his view that "Life and death are the same,. . . just different vibrations. There are rays we do not see, but know exist, so there are vibrations of being man cannot reach." Brought back to the present moment by the sound of rain on the roof, Brancusi then lamented that "when this deluge gets worse" his "work would be gone," but Wood doubted that. Looking at his "Bird in Space," which she saw as "soaring into the unknown" and "[t]ransported by its beauty,. . . already off this earth," Wood was convinced of his work's endurance and the man's brilliance. Their parting was silent. She held his warm hand and looked into his eyes which "were [also] warm and guileless like a child's" (Shock 140). It was the last time she saw him.3 Other losses had preceded these European friends' departures. One chapter in her autobiography was devoted to the painter and collector Galka Scheyer, who brought the paintings of the "Blue Four", Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alexej Jawlensky, and Lyonel Feininger from Germany to America before they were well known here. Wood had met her late in 1930, through the Arensbergs, not long after the move to California. Scheyer was astute, sophisticated and knowledgeable of contemporary European art but truculent, putting Beatrice off the first time she met her. Wood described the meeting at the Arensbergs: When I met Galka Scheyer I wanted to run, for she impressed me as the rudest person I had ever met. Short, with a large head of dyed henna hair and Semitic features, the unconventional beauty of her face escaped me. Her voice was strident and her manner so intense it was abrasive. Yet, she was so alive in a room, and scintillating, that no one else counted. I went home and scolded myself for so readily disliking this woman.

80 The scolding was so successful that the second time they met Wood "saw through her rudeness and perceived a person of enormous tolerance and dignity. She was [to Wood] like a gourd, rough on the outside, but full of rare delicacy within" (Shock 87). Scheyer became an important artistic ally and spirited adversary to Wood at a time when Los Angeles was expanding culturally. When Wood's bad neck would allow it, she would make the tortuous trip up the rough road to the Outpost where Scheyer had built a place.4 Wood’s drawing of the interior, "Chez Scheyer," memorialized the feeling. Perched high above Hollywood on a lot for which she paid $200, Scheyer's place was "a paradise" to Wood. She had asked Richard Neutra to design the house, which was actually one very large sitting room gallery, used to display the Blue Four paintings. There was little furniture. To one side there was an anteroom to store paintings and to the other a small bedroom opening on to a garden. She had extraordinary taste. On the hills she discovered weeds and arranged them with decorative skill in empty pickle jars, which sat on the floor. She opened the door of art to many, showing us a creative way of living. I visited there often, and came to appreciate Klee as well as American primitive and folk art (Shock 88).

The painting classes that Scheyer gave in 1938 to Wood and about nine other students were held there and in others' houses as well, including Wood's small house on Acama Street in North Hollywood. The classes were "fun [and meant to] free the individual to creative expression." Scheyer had been working with children, preferred teaching them actually, and "had an extraordinary collection of their drawings." For Wood, however, it was not a Duchampian style class. No longer willing to change her style or listen to criticism no matter how well-meaning, Wood was defiant, even mischievous, with her teacher. Her air was freedom and individuality. Because we were good friends, almost like sisters, in that we scolded each other, she was not detached where I was concerned. She did not leave me free to draw that way I wanted, which was doing grayish line drawings. She insisted upon changing my style, advising, and it did not work. Therefore I spent most of my time in her classes drawing rather vulgar ladies. This annoyed her. She got good results however from her other students (AAA, Reel # 574, 47).5

81 Something of a women's group, which included Wood, Scheyer, Helen Freeman, Ruth Maitland, a wealthy collector, and Rosalind Rajagopal, wife of the long-time associate of Krishnamurti who edited his writings, had formed around these classes. All were interested in art, Theosophy and Krishnamurti (AAA, Reel # 577). For Wood the friendship with Scheyer was important for several reasons other than purely artistic. Wood learned, for example, “that the accident often provides desired effects in art and pointed out that the Japanese treasured flaws in a glaze” (Shock 110). A tough sisterly relationship, it expressed for Wood, who did not have a sister, a compromise with the other. It signaled in many ways Wood's opening to loving difference if she felt there was fruit or worth to be found. Wood had had several close women friends, like Elizabeth, Louise and Helen, but none of them had been "abrasive." Scheyer's assertive even aggressive personality was something Wood had to pierce to find the "rare delicacy." But another aspect of Scheyer's identity must have held Wood's attention, whether spoken or not: her Jewishness. For Wood herself was possibly Jewish since it was rumored that her mother was, and, according to Jewish law, that made her Jewish as well. Wood "never admitted it," although some people close to her in her youth supposed it was true. Mrs. Margot Wilkie, who had met Beatrice (and Reginald Pole) in 1928 through her parents when she was ten and Beatrice was thirty, was always a "special child" in Wood's life; she spoke of the difficulty of being Jewish in a wealthy Anglo New York world at the time they met (Telephone interview, 14 November 1998). It is difficult to ascertain whether she was Jewish or not: on the strength of the rumor, Francis Naumann contacted William Rubin, former director of the Museum of Modern Art, who reported that Rosenkrantz (her mother’s maiden name) and Rosen were not Jewish names in San Francisco “at that time.” Naumann also contacted Beatrice Wood’s nephew, Robert Wood, who reported that he did not know of that, but also noted that the family name (Wood) had been German and might have been changed and that he did know that several pages in a family album on the father’s side had been curiously removed (E-mail to the author. 31 Dec. 1998). Apparently, however, the family in New York did not practice the faith. If the family was trying to assimilate into the Anglo New York world,

82 this must have caused some internal conflict for Wood. As noted before, Beatrice Wood had an aversion for organized religion since childhood. Although speculative, it is tempting to draw some implications from Wood's possible Jewishness. It is possible that Beatrice Wood partially inspired Duchamp's celebrated alter ego, Rrose Selavy. Duchamp told Tomkins he had first considered changing his name to a Jewish one, to "offset his Catholic background. 'But then the idea jumped at me, why not a female name? Much better than to change religion would be to change sex'" (231). [If Wood was Jewish she was not the only Jewish artist Duchamp knew in New York: he did make friends with the Stettheimer sisters who were Jewish artists, but not particularly identified that way; he was also very close to Man Ray, who once told Francis Naumann that he (Man Ray) had changed his name from an obviously Jewish one because he did not want to be associated with the painters in the Jewish Painters League in New Jersey who were “so bad” (Personal interview, 18 Dec. 1998)]. One can easily imagine a kind of flirting banter, however, between Duchamp and Wood during the many dinners and meetings they had that could have sparked Duchamp’s creation of Rrose. He and Beatrice had dined at the Brevoort in late July 1920 after "[h]er brutish husband had left her, [and she was] estranged from her family and sleeping with another man she did not love [Johnny] (Tomkins 227). (This was the occasion he had slipped her some cash in an envelope that she thought might contain a marriage proposal.) As Tomkins said, "Rose Selavy sprang full-grown from the mind of Marcel Duchamp during the late summer or early fall of 1920." But Wood could have indirectly helped birth her. Tomkins described Rrose as “[i]nsouciant, mocking, a bit of a slut perhaps, with her talent for elaborately salacious puns,” a persona Beatrice Wood was intrigued by (231). Another possible implication of the impact of her potential secret: Why did Wood not go to Europe from 1930 to 1958? She had spent much of her childhood in Europe, yet, except for the summer 1930 trip with Helen Freeman, she did not return until 1958. Certainly some of what might have held her back were money and family constraints, but she could also have had some fear of being in Europe. Her sending food and goods to Roché and his wife in occupied Paris during the war was generous, certainly, but it is

83 striking how important sending those regular packages were for her. She kept detailed lists of what was sent and when (AAA). Wood had formed friendships with other Europeans, mostly French, in New York before the first World War, but meeting Scheyer in 1930, most likely after Wood's summer trip, could have been startling. Scheyer, being German, Jewish, and the person she was, represented to Wood quite a different culture and one that was, curiously, hers and not hers. As the first world war had brought European exiles to New York temporarily and permanent residents later as the stirring of another war loomed, so too Los Angeles became another important relocation area for European Jews. The cosmopolitan nature of southern California culture was growing. The various strata of California culture-Native American, Spanish/Mexican, Frontier, Gold Rush, Asian, Dust Bowl exiles-took on a new layer of European intelligentsia. Wood had made many European excursions as a young girl, had welcomed her European contacts in New York, and now, getting in touch with her Californian roots, began a process that would fix her identification as an American in the idealistic sense of merging many peoples--all as brothers and sisters from her Theosophical perspective. She was not, however, naive but very judicious in this process. She had various experiences during the war in California, for example, with Japanese-Americans who had been interred in camps, hiring them when others eschewed doing that while the war was still raging, taking each person on his own merits and often seeing the injustice of the situation. One such case was Henry: He was a man of dignity who had been a merchant, never a servant. Having come to America as a young adult, he still held old world sympathy for his country and was convinced Japan would never surrender. His pride never bothered me. Short and wiry, his face was full of lines, as if he were constantly sucking in his cheeks. He treated me like a child, telling me what to eat and when to work. He sternly disapproved of my notion to move to Ojai, which pleased Steve no end. A few months later, I was working on the wheel when over the radio came the horrendous news of the first atomic bomb being dropped. I knew it would end the war. I went to the kitchen and gently told Henry. "Japan never give up!" he insisted and walked away. I ached for him. The day Japan surrendered Henry sat at the kitchen table, overcome with grief. I stood by him wanting him to know that by my presence he had a

84 friend, and in the silence between us neither was an enemy (Shock 116-7).

She had also, unwittingly, harbored in her house a Mexican-German spy who abruptly left one day, followed a month later by FBI agents asking questions about him. She found this incident amusing whereas her sympathy for Henry had made that incident difficult. The melting pot American ideal, then, combined with the first Theosophical object "to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color," allowed her to embrace Scheyer, for example, despite her abrasiveness, and to feel totally at home when she visited India and surprise many Indians by not seeming "like an American." The physical beauty of the Indian landscape was something else Wood could appreciate when she arrived since connecting with her native California had much to do with her appreciating its ample natural beauty. Pre-smog Los Angeles was fruitful, shining, and still partially wild. Southern California was a place that many, from an East Coast perspective, described as culturally void, but Duchamp described it when he first saw it in 1936 as a "white spot in a gloomy world” (Arthur Millier, Los Angeles Times, 16 Aug. 1936 qtd. in Ephemiderides np). If Los Angeles was beautiful, isolated Ojai was to Wood "the pot of gold at the end of a long obstacle-strewn rainbow. . .[where] time ceased" (Shock 123). Scheyer's bold move to the isolated Outpost by herself could have partially inspired Wood's courage to make the move to Ojai. Georgia O'Keefe, whom Wood had known in the Stieglitz circle in New York, had made her own move to the country isolation of Taos. Famous as she was, O'Keefe and her movements were not lost on Wood who watched from a distance. Models for women artists were relatively scarce at the time. Many of Scheyer's artistic ideas mirrored some that Wood already had, and some expanded her purview. An independent woman, insistent on expressing her views even abrasively, Scheyer yoked "fine art" and American primitive and folk art as both collectible, much as the Arensbergs had. She was an artist but taught children to make art, even preferring that to teaching adults. She moved between worlds, having come

85 from Germany with the energy to inspire cultural changes in her adopted southern California. She had an open mind about Theosophy, most likely akin to Kandinsky's view of the universal language of abstraction, and an interest in seeing Krishnamurti with Wood. But beyond that, Scheyer, through her interest in architecture and design, solidified in Wood a recognition of the manner in which art could be joined to one’s daily life, which produced creativity, beauty, and surprise. When Scheyer died on December 13, 1945, she and Wood had been friends for fifteen years. Her illness with cancer lasted for over a year and Wood was particularly close to her during that time, staying in her room during the first surgery for which she was unable to have anesthesia. Wood was the first person Galka told that it was cancer. Almost immediately after that, however, Scheyer denied to herself and others that that was what was wrong. The disposition of her collection was up-in-the-air until right before her death because of this denial, and Wood, with the aid of the no-nonsense Dr. Knauer, succeeded in getting Scheyer to write her will which gave her collection to the Pasadena Museum of Art. (She and Walter had decided for some reason it was better that their two collections be separated.) Wood was not present at her death but recounted in her diary a commentary on her last moments: [A] new nurse came the night before the end. The following morning Galka is supposed to have said two things. I do not know which was last. 'Now I die, no friends near. I am all alone.' The nurse is supposed to have said, 'You are not alone, God is with you.' Thereupon Galka closed her arms on her chest, smiled and off she went to where pain is said to cease.

The other remark was, 'Tell Walter ‘There is no afterlife, for I see nothing.' Her mind thereby functioning to the end. But she may have been wrong with her remark, for she was not dead yet” (AAA, Reel #586-60E). Apparently discussions and contentions over the afterlife were common among some in the group around the Arensbergs. Walter, always interested in "fortunetellers," since moving to California had gotten even more interested than he was in New York in his arcane studies in cryptography and trying to prove that Francis Bacon had been the true author of Shakespeare's works. Walter's absent-mindedness caused by his

86 concentration on this work became the source of light jokes between Louise and Beatrice. After pushing his body during the New York party years, Walter Arensberg's health declined during the early 1930s in California. He was plagued by various illnesses, much to Louise and Beatrice's dismay. He had serious sinus surgery and then his tonsils removed in 1931, back problems in 1932, and near-pneumonia in 1933. This was presaged more health problems to follow in the next decade. Wood's conversations with the Arensbergs during this period were as much about doctors as art. Beatrice spent much of the end of 1944 and all of 1945 visiting the hospital. Ruth Maitland, the friend from Scheyer's painting group who was having emotional and marital problems, had been hospitalized for third-degree burns sustained in a fire probably set by her husband at their house in Bel Air before Christmas 1944. She told Beatrice she had almost died. Walter's health had seemed to even out after his illnesses of the 1930s (even though he appeared to be drinking too much), but he again had surgery over which Beatrice was "very worried," this time on his prostate gland in 1945 (on the same day Russia declared war on Japan). Galka was dying, but refusing Dr. Knauer's suggestion that she try the Kock treatment in Detroit, insisting that she did not have cancer (AAA, Reel #585-59). Wood's husband Steve had broken his hip and it was not healing well. Meanwhile during this year of others' failing health, Wood was trying to figure out how to assemble enough money to build a house and move to Ojai where she had bought a lot in 1944. (She finally did on her birthday in 1948.) Since Steve did not want to move, she took this as an opportunity to annul the marriage which had never been consummated. Hearing that an annulment of that kind was easily done, she wondered: How would the judge know? The five-hundred dollar legal fee precluded the dissolution; every penny was needed for the Ojai house. Even though the Arensbergs often spoke of moving to Ojai from Los Angeles, even before Wood had bought her lot, they remained in the city until their deaths. The almost daily contact between the three of them and the stream of new artists and writers, especially after the Arensberg’s collection was hung, had mirrored somewhat the New York days. But the salad days were over and even if California had better lettuce, it was

87 lonelier for the Arensbergs there.6 After Wood's move to Ojai their contact shifted to long-distance phone calls every five days and less frequent visits, of course, than before. Walter, still ill, never made the trip to Ojai after Wood's move although Louise loved the place, drove up for visits, and wanted Walter to move there with her. Beatrice described her view of the mountains and valley to Walter and he replied, "Oh, to be able to drive without signals through orange groves." Beatrice commented, “I rarely drive to the village through the orange groves that I do not think of him” (AAA, Reel # 589). Ojai, isolated as it still is without freeways, to some Angelinos was the road’s end, to others, Beatrice included, “rainbow’s end” (Shock 123). Despite her love for the place and her friends, Wood could not convince the Arensbergs to make the shift. The relationship between Wood and the Arensbergs was like family, marked by active compassion. During the few months around their deaths, the Arensbergs demonstrated it strongly. When Beatrice had that operation in Santa Barbara in September 1953, the Arensbergs acted "most solicitous," as if her health was more "precarious than theirs." Walter's health had been failing for the last year; he had had four operations. In July Walter had phoned to say Louise needed to go the hospital "for an examination" and the same month as Wood's operation, Wood found out Louise had cancer and probably had only three or four months to live. Wood's commentary: "This bad news came as an awful shock. They had actually talked little of their own bad health, shown such concern for mine, that I could not adjust to the seriousness of what they were facing. The grief we feel when someone we love is ill, is partly our inability to help, to lift the pain" (AAA, Reel # 590-64). Her close friends, the Arensbergs, died within two months of each other in 1953-1954, first Louise on November 24th and Walter following on January 28th (AAA, Reel #591-65). When they died, Wood commented: Part of me died too when they both left. For years they had been my family. Their friendship had sustained me through my darkest periods. Not only had we met on the daily little things, but they opened my eyes to the vast world of art; it was a privilege to be in their home. Their friendship had done a great deal in forming me as an artist. My work would have lost a certain quality had I not known them. I never attend a museum exhibition where I do not think of

88 them (Shock 135).

Wood experienced more "transitions." The loss of the Arensbergs was fairly sudden and devastating, but immediately before the India trip two other people very important to Wood died whose health had been failing for years. On May 30, 1960, her husband of twenty-seven years, Steve Hoag, died, having been blind and ailing for several years. Later that year, on Christmas, her friend Helen Freeman succumbed after thirteen years of suffering with cancer. Both losses worked deeply on Wood in different ways. Hoag had been her husband in name only and had been something of a burden with his illness the previous twelve years, but she loved him. Freeman, who died in a Christian Science rest home, who had once been "the most famous person she had ever known," exemplified for Wood the quixotic whims of fortune (Naumann, Personal interview. 18 April 1998). Wood had met Steve Hoag, the man who would be her second husband, in November 1931. He was a real estate appraiser and business man who had lost his money in the crash and lost his health as well. He knew nothing of art when she met him. She took him to the Arensbergs, as she took most of her friends, and he was silent all evening, in shock himself over the startling paintings on display there. Wood berated him and he went to the library and studied up on what he had been seeing and on subsequent visits amused both Wood and the Arensbergs by giving mini-tours to other guests on what they were seeing. His personality was irascible and his mouth was foul, but he endeared himself to her friends by his honesty and integrity. Helen Freeman, echoing the Arensbergs' views too, said at one point, "We don't like Steve, but we love him." He also had a good practical sense and told Wood he would balance her checkbook, but not harass her over what she was spending although he often did. They were friends, not lovers (although Wood toyed with the idea), and married at Steve's suggestion after the 1938 flood that took away her first studio and their house in the San Fernando Valley. Hearing that the Red Cross was giving flood aid, Wood arranged getting some money from it to rebuild. Hoag argued they should get married

89 since the Red Cross would assume they already were by living under the same roof, to make it all above-board. He also argued (shades of Paul) that since neither intended that the marriage be consummated, they could have it annulled at any time. If her first wedding had a farcical/melodramatic edge, this one was noir. Her description: A moth-eaten justice of the peace married us in Las Vegas with two seedy underworld types as witnesses. I had such a fierce headache after the ceremony that I wished I were dead. We agreed that we would tell no one about the marriage, for we planned to continue living independently. I particularly wanted to keep the marriage a secret from my aunt in San Francisco. I was due to receive an inheritance when she died and was certain she would never allow it if she knew I had tied myself to a man without an estate of his own (Shock 104).

When, much later and after having lived together for about 10 years, Wood was intent on moving to Ojai and Hoag was sick and reluctant, she did press for an annulment. In the end, he moved with her. Given the state of his health, she did not think he would live long, but he lived on for twelve more years. Hoag’s death was long and difficult, compounded by his personality and comas. The day he died Krishnamurti, compassionate neighbor, sat with him all day. The evening he died, despite the years of mild annoyance at him, Wood records that she "broke into sobs." She remarked further that "[n]one of my friends thought I mourned his loss, but one does not surrender a companion of twenty-seven years easily" (Shock 145). One of her oldest woman friends, Helen Freeman had been with Wood since the New York days after Dada, and she had been, aside from Louise Arensberg, more continuously physically close to Wood than anyone through the years. Freeman was one of three women Wood considered her best women friends. They had had the bond of their trip to Europe together in 1930. Despite Helen's parents' objections that she was getting involved in a "cult," they went on the adventure. It had been three years since Krishnamurti had renounced the mantle of "World Teacher," but Helen and Beatrice still behaved like devotees, discussed how their men friends disdained the trip, and tried to interpret Krishnamurti's words, especially as they related to love relationships. Girlish, they hitched a ride to Amsterdam with an older couple, more staid followers, in their fancy car. Beatrice had shocked the man by bringing her

90 knitting and appearing to him "like an immigrant" when her bag of toiletries had spilled out in the lobby of the hotel (Angel, "I Learn About Food and Its Importance" np). Wood described Freeman, however, as "graceful as Sarah Bernhardt" and as the kind of friend who could relate painful truth. Beatrice Wood described herself as falling into a dreamy state, putting people off by that, and countering their response with her statement of "being an Artist." Once on the road with the Cunninghams, the young women, playful, feisty artists on a holiday, peevishly countered the strained silence from the front seat by remarking on the beauty of the landscape and windmills. Neither had money nor marital attachments at the time, but this would change later when Helen married the (younger) writer Edwin Corle and became his "muse" for many years until he left her for a younger woman. The feeling was footloose, even though they both looked over their shoulders at the possibility of another war on the ground they walked. Small dramas were somehow connected to large historical ones and both had at least glimmers of that recognition. Many people dear to her were still living, of course, but death in different forms had touched everyone. Some friendships were still long-distance. She maintained a weekly correspondence, often illustrating her letters, with Elizabeth Hapgood, then long- widowed but happy with her translation work, her children and grandchildren. When they could see each other they did. After the Krishnamurti Camp in Holland, Beatrice visited Elizabeth and Norman in the Black Forest the summer of 1930. Elizabeth was working there with Stanislavsky, translating his work. (Beatrice shocked him with her “unladylike vocabulary.”) Her friend journeyed to see Wood in California in June 1934. Elizabeth was a continuously supportive friend, in more than one way. She bailed Wood out financially several times. It was Elizabeth who had given her $100 for her first kiln, and when that one was a dud, since hand-built kilns were a novelty and the system was not perfect yet, Elizabeth insisted on giving her $200 for another one, saying that a friend had died and insisted Wood should have the money. And when, the following year, the first studio was flooded out, Elizabeth, as well as the Red Cross, came to her aid again. Duchamp, though often far-flung, remained Wood's lifelong friend: like Roché, he had always encouraged her work and happiness in life. He had given her that money, unasked, in 1920 when she desperately needed it; he had seen her frequently in Los

91 Angeles when he visited the Arensbergs for three weeks in August 1936, looking at her current drawings and encouraging her pottery; he had seen her several times in New York in 1943 for the opening of her ceramics show at the American House, complimenting her on what she called "conventional pieces" and taking her to Rose Fried's "ultra-modern avante garde gallery" to introduce her (Shock 118-119); he had seen her again in Ojai in April 1949 but only once for lunch with Helen Freeman (who drove) and Bill Mercer, another friend, since it was difficult for him to get to Ojai without ready transportation from Los Angeles where he was visiting the Arensbergs; he had designed her catalogue cover, a form of roto-relief of fish, for her exhibition at the American Gallery in Los Angeles; they met in New York in March 1953 and ate lunch at MOMA; they saw each other for the last time at his Pasadena Retrospective in 1963, after her first trip to India and Japan: Duchamp, who did not dance, there with his wife Teeny, watched Wood dance all night with handsome young men. She held a "luncheon" in his honor at her home on that visit. Midway between her second (1965) and third (1972) trips to India, Duchamp died in October 1968 in a "magic way," according to the account in Teeny Duchamp's letter to Beatrice Wood: "As much as I miss him, I am so grateful for the almost magic way he died. I am quite sure he did not know when it happened, and that was the way he always wanted it" (Tomkins 450).7 Once again Beatrice had become bonded with the wife of her "great love." Wood also had old friends still living near her in Ojai. When she moved there in 1948, she was moving close by Rosalind Rajagopal whom she had known since 1931 (AAA diary, Sept.1931). Rosalind was married to Krishnamurti's close associate and fellow Indian, Rajagopal. Their only child Radha was the baby who had given her the nickname "Beato," not being able to pronounce Beatrice; Wood was a close family friend. But immediately before Wood's trip to India, Rosalind announced their divorce. Wood's autobiography cites another woman, Raja's assistant who was "slim, with dark hair and had the grace of an exotic flower" as the cause of the divorce. What Wood did not know until daughter Radha R. Sloss' book Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti came out in 1991, two years after Krishnamurti's death, was of the long-time liaison between her mother and Krishnamurti. No matter what Wood believed to be the cause of

92 the divorce at the time, the break-up of that family had a large impact on her: Shortly before I left for India, Rosalind told me they were getting a divorce. The world came crashing down for all of us who loved them both so much. Their break had a curious effect on me. I began wondering what it meant to live a "correct" life and I went off to India with a strange new attitude. I was ready for adventure, should it come (Shock 147).

Krishnamurti himself would live a long life, and Wood saw him several times while she was in India and lived close by him when they were both in Ojai, seeing him periodically. While Wood had been close to Krishnamurti, she had a strong familial loyalty to the little family of Raja, Rosalind, and Radha. Wood tried to maintain a non- judgmental attitude toward all the upheavals she had witnessed in these friends' lives. Krishnamurti himself had experienced little deaths, especially of relationships: his early break from Theosophy and his disappointing the Founders, especially Annie Besant; his secret affair with Rosalind which ruptured open communication between her husband, his friend and associate from youth, and him; and, finally, his lawsuit late in life against Rajagopal which broke the community around them into camps. On these issues Wood went with the teachings, not necessarily the teacher. She held it as a value, derived in large part from both Theosophy and Krishnamurti's teachings, to struggle to keep the mind in a diplomatic poise, wrought from clear-sightedness. She wished as much as possible to avoid what she called often "the cunning of the mind." She had gotten better at dealing with the cunning of others' minds as well. At the time of her first India trip her third "great love" Reginald Pole was still living close by in California and just a few weeks after Steve's death had attempted to "rent Steve's room." Steve had warned her before his death that Pole would attempt that and begged her not to do it. He did call. She told him someone had already rented it. Small lie. Someone had called about it. He followed up with two love letters: “I write to tell you that I love you. I believe you knew this all the time; you knew it when I married Frances. I want to be with you again, etc.” (Shock 145). Wood was not fooled or moved. This was not the first time Wood had rebuffed Pole's attempts to rekindle their "love." Over the years Wood had seen him and his second wife Frances fairly often at

93 social events and was proud of the fact that she held no grudges. When Frances decided to divorce him after many years, she came to Wood for counsel, knowing that Wood liked her and "held no hard feelings about the past." Frances announced her decision to divorce, saying that she still loved him, would never love another, but that he would not work and she did not want to be legally responsible to support him. Wood was silent with no advice to give, thinking it was between Frances and Pole although she might have deserved a small gloat. After the divorce Frances moved East, got married and had a son; immediately after the divorce Reginald started driving to Ojai on the weekends for visits and writing letters about his son and his wife Anais Nin whose writings Reginald disparaged. Beatrice thought he must be "jealous of her accomplishments and popularity." Having learned by then the value of time and time well-spent and how to say "no," as well as Steve's being firmly ensconced, Beatrice was easily able to thwart his intentions (Shock 117). Even so, before Reginald finally died, not long after Marcel Duchamp's death, he was still trying to regain her affection. He had broken his hip and she found him, except for the visits from his son and Anais Nin, alone in a rest home in Los Angeles. Bent, aged, but wearing his brown tweed suit with "distinction," Reginald melted her reserve when he said, "Dear, I am so glad to see you," and clung to her hand. Wood began writing him long letters and sending sweets that she found out he shared with no one. Three months later when she returned she found him "noticeably deteriorated." Making her sit on the bed next to him, he "clung fiercely" to her hand and with "desperation" and "passion" in his voice said: 'You are so beautiful! I love your beautiful face. . . It has not changed much. . .I have done you wrong. I know that. . . but I have always loved you. . .You do not know what it was like to see Steve near you. You must have known how jealous I was. . .' Then he laid back, closed his eyes and mumbled: 'Sex is a funny thing, isn't it? It diverts. . .' He opened his eyes, sat up. . .'but my love for you has always been with me. . .' .

Wood's response was embarrassment, feeling great compassion for him but not the love as it had been so long ago. "I felt it almost indecent to recall it and bring back a hurt I had completely discarded," she wrote. He spoke of dying alone and Wood tried to comfort

94 him. "You know as well as I do that death is not the end," she said and told him to call on her in any way to help. He did die alone in his sleep. Wood wrote an answer to Anais and Rupert's letter saying in part: "Such a beloved person, so inwardly gentle--and so selfish. So wound within himself when it should have been otherwise" (Shock 157). Her view of death and what would follow it was shaped in large part by her acceptance of the "eastern" influence adopted by Theosophy. She often spoke at the end of her life of her belief in reincarnation, although she always maintained something of a skeptical attitude. What began as a mere flirtation in youth with reincarnational beliefs deepened into faith as the years drew more of her family and friends into death. The humor and skeptical perspective of Duchamp, which she resonated strongly with, also worked deeply on her. In fact, if art historians, like Naumann, find "compatible contradictions" in her work, the key bridge between two apparently disparate areas of her life, Theosophy and Dada, is rooted in a discussion of death--and laughter in the face of the absurdity of it. Beatrice Wood insisted at the end of her life that Theosophy and Dada had nothing to do with each other. On the surface, historically, that is quite plain. But in the crucible of Wood's life, they served as perfect foils to balance the other. Here it might be appropriate to make a distinction between faith and belief. Fenton Johnson's essay on American monasteries, "Beyond Belief," makes an eloquent case for the difference. Quoting Zen philosopher Alan Watts (who together with Rajagopal suggested to Wood that she write her autobiography) there: Belief. . . is the insistence that the truth is what one would 'lief' or wish it to be . . . Faith. . . is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. . . Faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception" (qtd. in Harper's Sept. 1998, 40).

Johnson modifies Watt's view that "belief in God is antithetical to faith, because God, conceived as omnipotent power, necessarily stands between ourselves and complete letting go" by pointing out that this view: ignore[s] the role of belief as a means to the end of faith. Usually expressed in metaphor (the burning bush, the resurrected Christ, the reincarnated essence of being), belief challenges the imagination to

95 conceive and embrace a universe larger than what we immediately perceive. It engages a community in a collective imaginative act, one of the most powerful ways of binding a people into a shared identity (40).

We have, then, on the religious (“to bind”) side a tension between the individual and the collective, the practitioner and the tradition. The attitude toward death and the search for meaning are the crucial talking points here. That Beatrice Wood associated herself all her adult life with Theosophy, a “religion” based heavily on Eastern thought and reincarnation, but had no overt knowledge (gnosis) of the truth of it, bespeaks, for Wood, an embrace of both Watts’ faith and Johnson’s belief. On the “secular” side, Dada, for the true Dadaists, was closer to Watt’s faith, a leap into the unknown, not a belief. Dada is often described as disbelief (of traditions), yet a more accurate description (in practice) is that it was a kind of faith as defined above. Also recall, however, Greil Marcus’ genuine insight of Dada as a gnostic myth (41). Wood worked the contradictions into compatibility. Johnson writes, based on his experiences, not "about doctrine (the Virgin birth, the infallible pope, reincarnation) but about the subsuming of self to the greater order" (40). In practice, Beatrice Wood approached the various doctrines espoused by Theosophy, such as reincarnation, Root Races, karma, with curiosity but skepticism. Through that faith, as she developed it, she was able to, as some other early Theosophists did not, reconcile loyalty to both the Society and Krishnamurti, after he removed its mantle of World Teacher, for example. Informed by the "Why Not?" spirit of Dada, Wood could go to India armed with her pottery and ready for surprises. (“I first lost my virginity in India.”) At the time of her invitation to India (and Japan) Wood, despite the upheavals and deaths of the previous years, was settled into her life as a potter. At that point she had been working in the medium for many years, having had many exhibitions in California, Hawaii, New York and elsewhere. From the beginning of her career she had made both vessels and what she came to call her "sophisticated primitives" and they had sold. The sale of the latter was particularly surprising, but that kept her working. She did not know until much later that her friend Helen Freeman had bought those first pieces (Naumann.

96 Lecture. Palm Beach, FL. April 1998). Friends, discipline and the need to be practical were what kept her on her new course. She often said that she came to the clay medium by chance and by love. During the 1930 summer trip to Holland with Helen Freeman to hear Krishnamurti speak, almost as an afterthought she bought six lustre plates in an antique store. At the time she was engaged to an avocado rancher back in Los Angeles named Ralph, and she thought she should buy some things to start furnishing their new home together.8 She had promised Ralph she would return in three months, which she did, but not before she realized that she did not love him and that the engagement was a mistake. In discussions with Helen Freeman there, especially about Krishnamurti's views of honesty and integrity, she cut her trip short. This was despite the invitation by Stanislavsky, who was in the Black Forest with Elizabeth Hapgood doing the translation work, for Wood to visit some friends of his in Italy. Once again she did not go to Italy, but returned dutifully to the "blond mustached young man." She still had the lustre plates, however, and she decided after not being able to find a teapot to match them, she would make one herself. (She also learned to drive at this same time period, October 27, 1930.) Back home a few years later in 1933, an actor friend suggested that she take an Adult Education course in ceramics at Hollywood High School. It was a three-day course and she was convinced that she would have a teapot the next week. What she discovered very quickly was how difficult it would be to make the teapot she envisioned. She became aware of the many technical difficulties, the practice that the craft required, and the physical training she needed even to handle the clay. What she also discovered in trying was that she loved the medium. She sought out a teacher, and as luck would have it, the "noted craftsman" Glen Lukens was then beginning to teach at University of Southern California in the School of Architecture. She began studying with him in 1935 and continued for three years, making the long trip from Hollywood down to USC twice a week. The journeys ended temporarily when her first house and studio, painfully and recently acquired, were swept away by a flood in February 1938, the property bought with her Platonic soon-to-be husband Steve. The loss was devastating since they lost all

97 their property and feared for their lives. The Arensbergs put them up for several days. Beatrice responded inwardly to Walter’s remark at dinner on the importance of the color of wallpaper: How could wallpaper matter when my home, my workshop, my hopes, my future were gone? Suddenly I saw how relative everything is. Wallpaper is important to one who already has security. I had none. I had fifty dollars in the bank. Yet, never had I felt so free, my only estate being my spirit and the air I breathed. I had faced death; now I faced life and with every breath I felt fulfilled (Shock 103).

Ironically, perhaps presaged by the sun coming out on her birthday March 3, 1938, through the help of the Red Cross, “the disaster afforded [them] a better home and studio than [they] had had before.” It did come at a cost, what Wood described as a “mortgage on my life,” with the sexless marriage to Steve (Shock 104). The important thing was to get her studio back so she could continue with her life and work. She happily continued Lukens’ classes. Lukens, who exhibited regularly in the Ceramic Nationals recently begun in Syracuse, New York, was winning awards. At the same time she met Vivika, who was Lukens' lab assistant, soon to be married to Otto Heino. Both later became her teachers and friends, Vivika helping her with throwing and Otto teaching her glaze, especially lustre, and clay formulas. The small world of California ceramics was building a sense of community, producing perceived rivalries as well as connections. She also studied briefly with Gertrud and Otto Natzler, established potters who emigrated from Austria in 1940. After a short time, however, Wood had a rift with them, never quite understanding the reason for it. That did not deter her devotion to making her pottery for decades, focusing as she did on lustre glazed vessels and her sophisticated primitives. If Wood began making pottery by chance and love, she went to India by chance and pottery and found, once again, love there. She had been invited by a friend to dine with a visiting Indian woman. Kamaladevi was "unsmiling" at the dinner, but came to see Wood's pottery after in her studio and was impressed. She said "We must have your pottery in India. Do you want to go?" Wood agreed and then did not think about it until a few months later when she was contacted by the State Department. She was to be an

98 official cultural ambassador. Her role was to display her pottery in many places, urban and also rural, all over the vast country, meet with local officials, and lecture on her work. Her work of almost thirty years is what brought her to India; her ability to make and keep friends made it a transforming experience, for her and for many people she met. Traveling alone for such an extended period to so many exotic places would have been bold for a younger woman; for Wood it was downright daring. Even though she had never traveled to Asia before, she had some knowledge of the place before going. She knew it through art books. Also, some of her long-time friends, like Rosalind married to an Indian and Rukmini Devi, an Indian married to an American, had described their experiences. (One of the by-products of theosophical thinking had been intermarriages at a time when it was unthinkable in India and could cost the American married to an Asian her citizenship. Rosalind, but not George Arundale, Rukmini's husband, could have lost her citizenship by marrying an Asian.) Rukmini, whom Wood had known since 1932, along with the woman who originally invited Wood, Kamaladevi, were both guides and mediators for her Indian experience. Women friends once again shaped Wood's experience. Reflected in the dedication to them of Wood's book Thirty-third Wife of a Maharaja: A Love Affair in India are key issues for Wood as well: craft/art connecting to people's lives. Kamaladevi as Chairman of the All India Handicrafts Board has made crafts a living part of contemporary Indian life, and given economic substance to thousands of villagers and others who otherwise would have no means of livelihood.

Rukmini Devi who, in founding Kalakshetra in Adjar, resuscitated the traditions of ancient temple dances and the weaving of beautiful textiles, arts which had fallen into decay, thereby pointing the way of life through art and beauty.

Another key issue, that of Romantic love, was also in the (aging) wings. Wood took side trips to Hong Kong, Japan, and Thailand before arriving in India. Her visit to Japan, with its rich history of ceramics and its extraordinary post-war transformation, set the tone for the entire trip of serendipity and being in the right place again. She had wanted to bring some small pieces in her bag to show the Minister of

99 Culture. One, a turquoise pot, a friend had discouraged her from taking since it was not "shibui" enough was the piece the Minister "loved the most" because it was different from Japanese work. She shared a show with Kyoto Kusuda, "an exquisite beauty who stepped out of feudal Japan to take up painting and become a modern woman," at the Takishamaya department store in Tokyo, the venue of the best exhibitions (Shock 149). Wood witnessed the bridging of cultures and was a bridge herself. As a child she had been buffeted between worlds; at this point in her life she was not only striding gleefully over suspension bridges, but also building them herself. It was a time of maturing of interests. In Thailand where she saw poor, “illiterate” but content Buddhists, she questioned the nature of her world of psychoanalysis and television and thought that “illiteracy might be an important way of life” (Shock 149); in India the beauty of the folk art she saw and the reception those Indians gave her own work overwhelmed her; her association with Kamaladevi, close to Gandhi and Nehru and imprisoned for her political work based as it was on compassion for the people of India, chastened her by its integrity and purpose. As mentioned in the first chapter, Beatrice Wood exhibited, according to Francis Naumann, "compatible contradictions" in her work: her drawings, pottery, and writing (preface, Angel). (This will be explored more fully in the next section.) Not separate, the values she held (and practiced) in her life often informed that work. One obvious value was love, in its various forms. The most flamboyant, of course, was her desire for Romantic love which, ideally for her, would lead to a fulfilled marriage and family. In India she consulted nine astrologers (integral in that culture) with that question and all had the same answer: not in this lifetime. The "White Knight" fantasy, however, was voiced all her life. But was this ingenuousness or drama? She practiced, however, love for her many friends and brought loyalty, generosity and compassion to the relationship. As she experienced the death of others, she cherished those remaining in a revered light as well as being open to new friendships, especially colorful, "interesting" people. (Towards the very end of her life, she kept her door open to whomever wished to visit, often five hundred people a month.) In fact, friends became the family from which she had become estranged.

100 Balanced against what might seem, in the extreme, a frivolous engagement with people was a pragmatic call to work, discipline, and organization. She had said that she organized herself into an artist. She survived (and thrived) as an essentially independent woman: the irony was that she never gave up yearning for her match. Garth Clark tells a story of taking a feminist writer to lunch with Beatrice: It all went well until Beatrice announced that the role of a woman was 'to kiss the toes of a man.' The writer spluttered over her vegetarian platter (Beatrice had not eaten meat since she was 19 years old) and said, 'But what about your work, your career?' Beatrice responded, "Oh that, I'd give it all up tomorrow for a chance to dance the tango with a handsome Argentinian.' The man for who Beatrice would have given up her career did not exist--art was her life--and Wood's teasing was pure Dada. She had learned games, or irony and perversity, from the Duchampian master. But part of the statement was real. It expressed a longing for that one special relationship that more than a hundred years of life could neither deliver nor erase ("True Romantic" F6).

But she had another side as well. She often asked questions of Krishnamurti regarding relationships and work. It was his view that they cannot meet: she worked at keeping them in balance. While she strove to support herself and create works of beauty in her pottery, the clay, the material world had to be balanced with the spiritual world of right understanding, right thought, right action (Buddhist phrases). Despite her often quoted statement that the reason for her longevity was "chocolate and young men," Clark, her dealer, remarked in that obituary that she was "the most moral person" he had ever known, and that she "loved cultivating the myth of her wickedness" ("True Romantic" F6). Although others exist, one more apparent contradiction, of current interest in aesthetics (cf. Donald Kuspit, Arthur Danto) is that of the relationship between fine art and craft. While this will be explored more fully in the next section, suffice it to say that Wood bridges those worlds as well and raises questions concerning their supposed distinction. She began pottery as a means to support and express herself but in a manner many have described as an artistic approach. Yet she always prided herself on the fact,

101 unlike many in the California art pottery movement, that her vessels could actually be used (even if some people would never dare). Beatrice Wood crossed borders and often had the advantage of being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes she even got there earlier. Many so-called California counter-cultural values she anticipated: vegetarianism, Love, eastern philosophies, non- violence, minority and women's rights, friends as family, animal rights, ecology, art/craft as a way of life, divination, and the power of the imagination. 'But you do understand, darling,' Helen insisted, sitting on the edge of her chair and clasping her hands around her knees. 'Don't you see, the present is a moment complete in itself. It holds a totally different dimension when we are not afraid. The paradox meets. Then we experience an effortless state of being. I know it. I see it absolutely clearly as I speak to you.' 'You have the mind of Pluto in the lovely body of Aphrodite.' 'Plato, darling,' she corrected, smiling.

The world and the individual are one. If the individual problem can be solved by understanding, so can the problem of the world be solved. Before you can give understanding to others, you have to understand yourself. Krishnamurti (Angel in Black Tights "The Stillness of the Mind Escapes", np).

It does not matter. Marcel Duchamp

102 Plate 6 Gold Luster Footed Bowl (1968): vessel

103 CHAPTER 5.

SEEING IT HER WAY: THE VISUAL ARTS

Pottery makes for self-discipline. If one errs, a bowl is out of line. It takes patience to follow the road of life which leads in the right direction. -Beatrice Wood (Shock 24)

An empty stomach is one of the secrets of any creativity. -Mohandas K. Gandhi

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. . . -Mallarme

Beatrice Wood was in search of an artistic medium that would suit her talents and interests. From painting in her early days; to stage acting and dancing as another avenue; to drawing inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché in her twenties; to an attempt at screen acting1; to a brief foray into lithography; to pottery, arrived at by chance, when she was forty, she was searching for a medium in which to express herself as an artist. She was also searching for a way to support herself. She engaged much of her life in activities that are debatably artistic: clothing design2, garden design, architectural design (on her houses and studios), interior design, photography (of folk art), even cooking. Galka Scheyer’s influence in making conscious to Wood the possibility of integrating art, in a personal, expressive manner fully into one’s life made a large impression on Wood, a realization, even. Some media, like dancing, writing, and drawing, she continued as parallel roads all her adult life. The visual arts for which Beatrice Wood is principally known are drawing and especially ceramic work. Although Wood was certainly not the only person to work in both media, by doing so she stepped into an aesthetic contention: craft versus fine arts. Despite protestations to the contrary, a privileging of fine art (including drawing, but especially painting) over “mere craft” had surfaced in America especially since John

104 Singleton Copley’s observations in the nineteenth century. That privileging has been challenged. An argument from the craft side was expressed by Jonathan L. Fairbanks (in 1987): “Most serious art critics and historians understand that the issue which separates fine arts from crafts is an illusion of nomenclature” (The Eloquent Object 167).3 The distinctions are sometimes blurred; taste and time can affect the judgment. Through much of the twentieth century, potters (much like photographers) struggled to have their work thought of as art as well as craft. However, pieces have sometimes been classified as “art pottery” or “sculpture.” This happened especially in the 1960s and 1970s with young California ceramicists, like Peter Voulkos for example, who often freed the medium from “function” and added novel, surprising imagery. Other media like fiber, glass, and metal followed in breaking down the barrier between craft and art. (The issue continues, however, with the recent renaming of the American Craft Museum in New York to the Museum of Arts and Design.) The problem has also been argued from the other direction, from the fine art side of the fine art/ craft issue. Donald Kuspit, Professor of Philosophy and Art History, one of several thinkers interested in the gap/confluence, has discussed the contemporary situation. He sees now (1996): a new emphasis on craft in the “fine” arts, to the extent that many so- called fine artists have begun producing craft objects, or objects in which the boundary or difference between fine art and craft is not easy to determine. The vogue of furniture art is an example, as is the renewed sense of the autonomy of the ceramic object, functional or not (14). He sees further “a new emphasis on the craft involved in the making of the fine work of art- a new emphasis on how well or poorly it is made. . .” (15). He sees this new development as a result of the exhaustion of avant-garde ideals in a Postmodern context. Following the historian Peter Gay who identifies three dimensions to art, “tradition, privacy, and craft,” Kuspit concludes that: just as avant-gardism indicated the exhaustion of tradition (as an idea as well as a functioning, influential reality), so Postmodernism signals the exhaustion of privacy (or the subjective) as a source of Modernism. . .The idea of art as craft has become a defensive fall-back position, even a cynical idea of art. Nonetheless, it is of great theoretical interest, and awaits new intellectual justification (17).

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Many of the aesthetic discussions of art (and the artist) over time in the Western tradition have been concerning its purpose: from Plato’s nature of art and the place of the artist in the Republic to Aristotle’s description of the art work that expresses human values to Kant’s famous “purposelessness of purpose,” which places art as a separate category in human experience and understanding, having no “practical” but only aesthetic “purpose.” Kant’s legacy since the eighteenth century has been an “elitist ideology” of art, being something created by geniuses that can only be truly appreciated by geniuses (sophisticated taste). Now in Postmodernism, in Kuspit’s and others’ views, this issue is large.4 In their analysis, this ideology has been “debunk[ed] or discredit[ed]. As Kuspit says: Aesthetic perception, being a “different” and in effect privileged mode of experience, depends on the idea that some of us are more privileged to feel and recognize good form–in general are more inherently “artistic”-than others. Postmodernism disputes this idea; indeed, it involves de- idealization of the artist as well as the subjective mystery of art and the authenticity of unique form. Feeling and form no longer being to the aesthetic point, art must only be significant as craft-no doubt by default (17).

Part of this new “anti-aestheticism” has been to see art as a “social text” with such “objective and pragmatic purposes” as “being an instrument of ideology, . . .a sign of status and authority, and. . .a commodity–sometimes the most precious and presumptuous of all commodities” (Kuspit 17). Arthur Danto and other philosophers have been examining the rift between philosophy and art, especially in academia, and highlighting the nature of the “artworld,” a kind of self-perpetuating circle of collectors, curators, and critics.5 This is not a totally new dilemma, but one that has reached extreme proportions. Kuspit, similar to the writers from the craft perspective, sees the renewal of craft as just that: the second time in the twentieth century, the first being the Bauhaus’ attempt at “avant-gardizing of the craft object”(15). He also cites William Morris’ and John Ruskin’s ideals, the human value of engaged hand work as a counter to the alienated work of industrial society, from the nineteenth century. He concludes, finally, that: Craft remains a viable response to the problem of work, and the new craft

106 ideal that is slowly infiltrating contemporary society, as an antidote to the Postmodern society that unwittingly generated it, posits a craftsperson who is more whole–has more integrity-and works for a different purpose than the Postmodern artist, who has become a specialist in creativity, perverting its meaning, as his or her ironical appropriation and reification of the creative work of the past suggests. The new craftpersonship is the last-ditch attempt to defend the idea of art as work and a way to wholeness, and a rejection of the Postmodern notion of the art object as one that bespeaks alienation, with its fragmenting effect-an object that hides its unwholesomeness behind its commodity value (53).

The reification of meaningful work is what Kuspit sees as the by-product of this new development, by default. Baudelaire had exulted that M. G. was not a “specialist” and now Donald Kuspit is welcoming the specialist back: [T]he key point is the re-professionalization of art. It is worth remembering that is was de-professionalized only in the twentieth century-anybody could become an artist, or one was an artist if one said one was, or, as artists as different as Duchamp and Beuys have said, everyone could be creative. The craft definition of art makes it once again the privilege of the few; namely, craftpersons (17-18).

One thought, however, of the privileged position of the “first world” artist with time, money and freedom to develop a craft, to become a specialist, highlights the elite nature of the description. It is worth noting, as Garth Clark has quoting anthropologists, that the place of the craftsperson in traditional societies is usually the most conservative force in the community. The distinction between the craftsperson in traditional societies and the artist/craftsperson of the developed world is not necessarily complete. Taken on the surface, Kuspit’s emphasis on craft has an almost Protestant work ethic attitude, except he refers to the works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ( Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience) and the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut (Restoration of the Self), psychologists who are concerned with the “current epidemic of social pathology” (53 n). Kuspit is trying to envision a yoking of meaningful work and psychological “wholeness” within the artist, these “craftspersons.” Kuspit is focusing on a problem of alienation in art, attempting to get at the subjectivity of the artist, but searching primarily (perhaps naturally) in the object itself. Kuspit says the mystery of art has been explained away in our time –that privacy or the subjective has been exhausted.

107 Yet when he says: “In the end craft is mystic participation in the material, which is the rock bottom of art” and cites Jackson Pollock as a “craftsman, as it were, when he is at his best, as in the all-over paintings” (19) he is inferring the subjective, the process, choice /chance as part of the endeavor, even though he is still purportedly looking at the object to get to that inference. However, film documentation of Pollock working facilitates that inference of the creative process. Kuspit is attempting to understand and fill certain gaps in Western art. Further, this reduction of art to the work or craft of it, even by “default,” to some extent minimizes the possibility of any “modernist” novelty and surprise. Perhaps surprise-for-surprise’s sake, the too-clever, is exhausted in pervasive irony, but this attitude could be a swing of the pendulum away from the Dionysian toward the Apollinian, one that will inevitably swing the other way. It further suggests that a great work of art can only be accomplished with serious craft now. As John Dewey has noted, however, craft alone is never enough to make art. As he says (in 1934): Mere perfection in execution, judged in its own terms in isolation, can probably be better attained by a machine than human art. . . Craftsmanship to be artistic in the final sense must be “loving”; it must care deeply for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised (46-47).

The title of Kuspit’s article is “Craft in Art, Art as Craft” and has examined the issue from an art perspective, but he hasn’t explored the possibility of a craft approached as an art. This is what Wood said she did with her pottery, almost from the outset. Particularly in her vessels, she always prided herself on their function. She was attempting to yoke, and often did, the practical to a Kantian aesthetic experience, creating the autonomous, functional ceramic art object which has been collected, curated and criticized in art AND craft journals. Yet once again contradictions arise: Was it to apologize for her lack of training and skill to say that she approached pottery as an artist? She never went to college or art school in a formal, extended sense. She didn’t start early, apprenticing for a long time with a master potter. She struck out, more or less, on her own. She applied discipline to learning the craft, studying with the best teachers she could find, studying clays, glazes and different firings, working at improving her ability

108 to throw on the wheel; yet, particularly with the vessels, her infatuation with luster glazes moved into the realm of the painter. As Garth Clark, her last dealer describes her pieces: The essence of Wood’s pottery is that she painted form with light. The result is not just a glamorous object but one that is visually alive. As the day progresses, her luster surfaces change color as the light illuminates different color spectrums within the glaze. In the morning a pot will seem predominantly gold; by afternoon it may have picked up a pink or purple cast. This makes living with Wood’s pots as unpredictable as her firings (Gilded 92). Monet’s early fascination with capturing changing light in color seems realized in Wood’s mature vessels. At the other extreme of her work are her figures, almost folk art. Refusing to call them “sculptures,” but “sophisticated primitives” instead, she prided herself on their unschooled nature and was defiant (in a charming way) toward any objection to their subject matter: brothels, faithless men, obviously pregnant brides, prostitutes, among other themes. Naumann records a question often asked her: Why does the artist continue to make these figures? That presumptuous question has been repeatedly asked by people who intend high compliment of Wood’s stunning lusterware creations. Ignoring the implicit belittlement of her figures, she answers, ‘After I do a number of bowls, I become stale. Then I make some primitive figures.’ To my own question as to whether or not she considers herself a serious sculptor, she exclaimed, ‘Good god, no! I just make little figures. I’m not even a craftsman. I am an artist, which has saved me’(“Other” 39).

Naumann’s comment on this reveals the dynamic equilibrium of her approach: This declaration, at once charmingly humble and confidently proud, invites us to enjoy the objects in this exhibition-objects that record a long apprenticeship in the artistic life and in life itself. They convey both swift impressions and deep convictions concerning the human comedy. If they evoke smiles of recognition or provoke tolerant laughter, they will have justified their creation. . . (“Other” 39).

Any systematic description of art and the creative process can work within its own boundaries, as a metaphysical system, and can be a helpful guide to understanding them, but it cannot approach the element of chance, change, the quixotic. With that in mind, I propose a different way to bracket art with interdependent categories which are separable but not separate: the work, that is: 1) the art object which includes the making,

109 the choosing of material, form, color, the setting apart from other objects, the naming, the destroying–including tradition and going against tradition; 2) the artist which includes the intention and process. Subjectivity, “privacy” or individual feeling, or a cool detachment whether from intellect or tradition are some possibilities; and 3) participation which can include pleasure, perception, judgment which can be experienced by the artist herself. This also includes the possibility of community or cultural appreciation. This expands the definition of the creative process and possibilities for a more flexible view. The artworld as described by Arthur Danto and others has become a rarefied elitist circular relationship of critic, collector, and curator. Yet all roles can have positive and negative aspects: the critic can praise justifiably or not and can warn against, again, justifiably or not; the collector can collect for love of the art or investment purposes or status or some mixture; the curator can believe in and understand the mission of the institution and/or have a personal hobby horse that appeals to a very small audience. Not one of these courses is inherently bad: hierarchy and judgment are traditional and likely necessary, yet the horizontal, experiential aspects of the creative process should not be lightly dismissed. Beatrice Wood said to her interviewer Paul Karlstrom in 1992: And Neutra, the great architect, once said, “In designing the house, a wrong line affects people.” So I think that beauty is important, and man is tied up creatively, whether he’s making a painting, which in a way is secondary. Look at the beauty of aeroplanes, look at the beauty of highways, look at the beauty that mankind has brought into activity. PK: Well, two things come to mind as you’re talking. One is that you don’t make a sharp division, or a distinction, between different forms of creative expression or. . . BW: No, I don’t. PK: . . . or of beauty. BW: I don’t. PK: Whether it’s designing a house or choosing a color scheme, or making pots and . . . BW: I think it’s all creative energy. I may be wrong. I’m just answering the way I feel (5). In other words, taste (judgment) is not abandoned in her view here, but the traditional boundaries of “fine art” are softened. Beatrice Wood’s arrival at this view had a trajectory that she charted. At first, when she was asked to judge a pottery at the Ventura Fair early in her ceramic career, for

110 example, she was very critical of the mundane molded pots and refused to judge them. She remembered “an official’s” remonstrance that “these figures are the first gesture towards esthetics from the rancher’s wife and at that level you must evaluate them” (Shock 109). She put her judgment in brackets during that experience and learned something about the distinction between and overlapping of the art object and participation.. Wood’s relatively new association with Galka Scheyer and her painting class at that time, whose purpose was “to free individuals for creative expression,” also served to expand her thinking. However, according to Wood, since they were friends and Scheyer could not be “detached” with her, the teacher insisted Wood change her style. Wood, ever the rebel, unable “to talk her down . . . took vengeance by drawing vulgar ladies of the night, a phase that annoyed her and gave Rosiland [Rajagopal]-who also took the class- moments of sorrow.” Despite the teasing rebellion, Scheyer made Wood “see that the accident often provides desired affects in art and pointed out that the Japanese treasured the flaws in a glaze” (Shock 109-110). Wood went on to embrace the medium, pottery, which allowed her to not only follow a tradition but also forge her own way, make her own rules, which could be broken. It finally served her well as a living and as an avenue to make many stunning objects. Finally, she had “a career that grew to span seven decades, establishing Wood as one of the greatest exponents of lusterware in the twentieth century,” according to Garth Clark, but she also made pieces satirizing career women (Gilded 14). Beatrice Wood took Marcel Duchamp’s dictum, “In art there are no rules,” internalized it, and began to apply it, haltingly at first but with increasing boldness, to her life as well as her art. This was one of her secrets that many yearned to understand. But with each turn a choice is made. Wood chose a medium and a craft that grounded her and being an independent woman (despite being married in-name-only and caring for a sick husband dependent on her) understood the dangers of going too far. As she said: Pottery for me is not a pursuit of glory, but a daily discipline of pursuing accuracy. In India it would be called my dharma. Life is dual. There is matter and spirit and one cannot function without the other. For creativity, the spirit side, to work, the matter side must be strong enough to hold the

111 spirit side. If the form has cracks, the spirit leaks (Shock 133).

The Ephemeral: Drawings Since drawing is a medium usually solidly in the “fine art” camp, Wood’s approach and attitude toward it recapitulated to some extent her changing attitude toward aesthetics and judgment. Drawing was a medium for Beatrice Wood that had stages and different purposes, and some might say, mixed results in terms of value: personal (a sentimental question), historical, aesthetic, or monetary. Her ceramic dealer, Garth Clark, for example, thought that her drawings got worse over time, that her early ones were the best (Personal interview, 19 Dec.1998). He has written, even about the early drawings that: Wood’s drawings from this period lack formal skill-the mechanics of perspective always eluded her-but they are spontaneous and magical, imaginatively composed arrangements of sketchy figures (often documenting gatherings of figures from the Dada circle) drawn in a spidery line swathed in mists of translucent watercolors, which give the figures an ethereal ghostlike appearance” (Gilded 75).

Francis Naumann has divided the drawings into periods or groups: student years, Dada years, the Pole and post-Pole years, utilitarian sketches for pots during years of ceramic planning, and the late years’ drawings, inspired in part by Naumann’s interest in her work. Naumann inspired the reconstruction of “Un Peau” for the Philadelphia show, but she hadn’t done any “fine art” drawings for years, only sketches for proposed pots. The many years’ lapse in drawing was the result of disappointment in lack of sales from her first Los Angleles show at the Stendhal Gallery in 1933. The show, curated by Merle Armitage, included mostly lithographs, derived from her drawings. (Walter Arensberg came the last day and bought the only one sold (“Other” 31). In my discussion of the drawing and pottery that will follow, I will select a few representative pieces only. Some are chosen for availability of the image (and thus are more well-known) and some for their pivotal nature in my argument. Francis Naumann who knows her drawings best also has a key insight into how she worked: There is something unique in what Beatrice Wood does. Whether she's sketching a figure, throwing a pot, or writing a story, she somehow manages to combine formal elements that are generally regarded as

112 mutually exclusive. In her sketches, for example, an elegantly rendered and highly controlled line can sometimes end up on its other end looking like a child's scrawl, yet the resultant drawing ingeniously fuses these opposite techniques into a compatible reading of the whole. Critics have recognized this same quality in her ceramic works, which often combine elements borrowed from primitive or naive sources with an elegant and highly sophisticated glaze that is many a potter's envy. (Angel, preface, np)

Naumann goes on to find the possible source for this contradiction in Dada and her friendship with Marcel Duchamp, yet "[w]hereas the Dadaists presented these opposing elements without excuse, Beatrice invariably masks her creative message in an aesthetically pleasing package" (Angel, np). He further finds no contrivance in her work or her personality: "Just ten minutes of conversation with this remarkable woman will reveal a penetrating intelligence presented in the guise of whimsy and innocence" (Angel, np). The work is often seen as an extension of her personality, inextricably bound. Like her writing, much of her drawing was personal. As Francis Naumann has said in the film documentary, “The Mama of Dada,” “From the very beginning, Beatrice Wood used her drawings really to record the events of her life, and not just casual events but important events, particularly her relationships” (“Mama of Dada” Videodisc). For example, “Lit de Marcel” (“Marcel’s Bed”), watercolor and pencil on paper, drawn only two days after the fact, May 27, 1917, memorialized one of those moments, stumbled into, that one experiences as groundbreaking, exciting, sensual, emotional, becoming a large piece of personal history: the diary entry is characteristically bland: May 25, 1917. Webster Hall Blindmans’ [sic] Ball. I dance Russian dance. Also Misha Itow [sic]. To Arensbergs after. Five of us try to sleep on Marcels bed. (AAA, Reel #533). The later autobiographical description of the event was expanded: The Blindman’s Ball was a riotous affair; the whole art world attended. Micho Ito, the famous Japanese dancer, gave an impressive performance and I repeated my Russian folk dance. Marcel climbed up on a chandelier while the Arensbergs, Roché and I applauded from a box. Joseph Stella had a duel over me, though I never found out why–something about protecting my honor, which no longer existed! It was three in the morning when we gathered at the Arensberg’s apartment

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Plate 7 Lit de Marcel [Marcel's Bed] (1917): watercolor 114 for scrambled eggs and wine. Since it was too late to go home, Mina Loy led several of us off to spend the night at Marcel’s apartment. Sleepily, we threw ourselves onto his four-poster bed and closed our eyes like a collection of worn-out dolls. Mina took the bottom of the bed with Arlene Dresser against her, and Charles Demuth, the painter, lost no time in draping himself horizontally at right angles to the women, with one leg dangling to the floor, a trouser tugged up revealing a garter. Marcel, as host, took the least space and squeezed himself tight against the wall, while I tried to stretch out in the two inches left between him and the wall, an opportunity of discomfort that took me to heaven because I was so close to him. Lying practically on top of him, I could hear his beating heart, and feel the coolness of his chest. Divinely happy, I never closed my eyes to sleep (Shock 33).

We can see the drawing now, almost 100 years later, as a visual expression of an exuberant experience–an attempt to capture the image and feeling of that moment. The art historian Naumann has described it thus: “Rather than depicting the incident naturalistically, Wood captured its spirit in a jumble of freely intersecting lines and swatches of color” (Intimate 28). Her friend, the painter Lee Waisler, describes her method: “She draws the emotional contour of the form. Beatrice is involved with what the feeling of the form is, not with the idea of replicating the actual form–and all of her drawing becomes, as a consequence of that, autobiographical” (“Mama of Dada” Videodisc). As Wood has said of her own drawing: “The only time, evidently, I do a good drawing is when I’m not trying to represent the person but project the feeling that I get” (“Mama of Dada” Videodisc). Her ceramic dealer Garth Clark, a stern critic of her drawings, considers it her finest drawing. John Dewey, lecturing, a few years after the creation of this drawing, on “having an experience” with art said: In an emphatic artistic-esthetic experience, the relation is so close that it controls simultaneously both the doing and the perception. Such vital intimacy of connection cannot be had if only hand and eye are engaged. When they do not, both of them, act as organs of the whole being, there is but a mechanical sequence of sense and movement, as in walking that is automatic. Hand and eye, when the experience is esthetic, are but instruments through which the entire live creature, moved and active throughout, operates. Hence the expression is emotional and guided by purpose (Art 50).

Another such drawing was the one requested by Marcel Duchamp for the poster

115 for the Blindman’s Ball in May 1917. Wood’s description of the making of it: I sat on a stiff chair in the middle of the room and made sketch after sketch. When I was finished, he took them and threw them on the floor. To my astonishment, he chose an insolent stick figure thumbing his nose at the world, which I had tossed off. He took it to the printer, arranged for its size and color, and years later the poster became a highly treasured collector’s item (Shock 33).

Naumann cites a “graphic freedom” in her drawings of this period “rare in the work of her contemporaries (“Other Side” 28). Yes, but looked at more closely the stick figure has certain gestural articulations, in the fanning of the raised hand, the hip-to-torso bend, and especially in the feet, flexed extended foot and the articulation of the supporting foot in releve: drawn by a woman who knows both bio-mechanics and how to dance. Indeed, the drawings are a doorway into understanding the kinesthetic nature of her “process of doing or making” and her “experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying.” (As Dewey has observed, “[w]e have no word in the English language that unambiguously includes what is signified by the two words ‘artistic’ and ‘esthetic.’ Since ‘artistic’ refers primarily to the act of production and ‘esthetic’ to that of perception and enjoyment, the absence of a term designating the two processes taken together is unfortunate” (46-47).) Yoking artistic/esthetic and monetary value, especially in the “artworld,” can highlight the rare, the rarefied and the elite. Speaking and writing early on as a true Bohemian, Dada, and Theosophist of the trap of materialism, Beatrice Wood said, “Money and art go in different directions.” However, before she died Wood accumulated a small fortune generated by selling the work from her hands. Ironically, she told her dealer Garth Clark that she never expected a piece to sell, and that she even loathed selling them (Gilded 99). (Necessity ruled, of course.) Another view is reflected in Garth Wood’s statement that Wood made hundreds of fine pieces, but thousands of pieces that should have been destroyed (Personal interview, 19 Dec. 1998).6 Beatrice Wood’s sense of purpose for her drawings changed somewhat over time: ambition to be an artist and a desire to please artist friends were some early motivations. The drawing, Marriage of a Friend, one of the drawings that was sparked by those sessions in Duchamp’s studio, comes under these categories. As stated previously, she

116 called the drawing, despite being published, a “tortured abstraction” and it is abstracted, but it is still figurative even though the figures are stick like. Adding the title, however, as she did makes it more personal and expressive of her feelings of the recent marriage of her friend Elizabeth Hapgood to a man much older. Naumann had also concluded that the disparity in size between the figures was a reference to the disparity in their ages. Yet his overall “reading” of the drawing takes it beyond the personal: This published sketch–or “scrawl” as Wood insistently refers to her drawings–portrays a vertical, vegetable-like stalk, around which is twisted a red zig-zagging shape, all of which in turn is set against the background of vaguely indicated architectural forms. Though the precise meaning and subject may never be known (Wood says that the sketch was purely imaginative), the juxtaposition of abstract elements within a realistic spatial setting is remarkably prophetic of the ambiguous imagery common to much Surrealist painting, which of course would not develop for some years to come (Arts 1983,108).

This drawing, as well as others of the period, has been analyzed from a Freudian angle by Paul Franklin in “Beatrice Wood, Her Dada . . . And Her Mama.” He justified his approach, despite its being “highly problematic” regarding “female sexual development” by “invok[ing] him . . . as a cultural marker and historical palimpsest” (137 n.52). Since Freud’s theories were often discussed seriously at the Arensberg’s parties, and Wood was often the center of those discussions, this approach was justified thus. Franklin is asserting Wood’s placement in Dada, the history of which has marginalized the women involved, as well as invoking Freud. Thus, the difference in the figures of Mariage D’une Amie is also “a gendered one: the diminutive, curvaceous, feminine figure of Reynolds is immobilized and entrapped by the hard-edged, towering, jagged, phallic figure of Hapgood” (110-111). He analyzes “Un Peut” as firmly dada for the appropriation of the actual soap as well as the scandal surrounding it in the Independents’ Show. He ties Duchamp’s encouragement to use soap with Duchamp’s erotic investigations with it (132 n.19). Further, it “contains an autobiographical element that bridges the gap between art and life, a central tenet of Dada.”(116). With that criterion many of drawings from this period qualify as dada (or at least documenting a dada moment). Drawings, such as Soirée (1917), an evocative visual diary of a specific

117 gathering at the Arensbergs, is dated with the labeled figures, Duchamp and Picabia playing chess, Gleize, and “Tango.” (She would do a similar set-up in the drawing Chez Scheyer later, the impulse similar to Baudelaire’s Monsieur G.) But perhaps more intriguing are three other drawings done in 1917: Dieu Protège Les Amants (God Protects Lovers), Journée (Day), and Beatrice et ses douzes enfants! (Beatrice and her Twelve Children). All three drawings, rather cryptic and/or whimsical, she created surrounding the “shock” from Roché. They are less journalistic and more therapeutic, in the sense of working out problems of emotional intensity. Again, as in Un Peut she has inscribed mostly French words, sometimes inadvertently misspelled, onto drawings with figures. Paul Franklin has analyzed these drawings as well in his article within the context of her life, Dada, and Freudian questions. One of numerous drawings done with the encouragement of Roché and Duchamp, Dieu Protège Les Amants, most likely done before the break from Roché, ponders the loss of her virginity and her passion for Roché against the judgment of society and especially her mother. It enshrines the dilemma of unmarried sex and love belying the conflict she experienced as a would-be-if-she-could dutiful daughter. Franklin has described the drawing as: portray[ing] a bearded male deity descending from the heavens with his arms outstretched as if to envelop the two lovers and either to shield them from the outside world or usher them into a new one. The figure of Roché, who was tall and lanky, displays a pole-like torso on top of which sits his egg-shaped head. He towers over the short, curvaceous figure of Wood who, with her eye wide open and a knowing smile on her face, occupies the center of the drawing (118).

This is an apt description, but Franklin goes on to describe some French words in the drawing and calls attention to the “typically Dada gesture” of her inscription of “the non- word pipan on the abdominal region of her body” (118). He dismisses the word as “Dada gibberish” yet finds much etymological fruit as: The two arm-like forms that emanate from Wood’s body in the drawing just so happen to cross over and touch Roché precisely in the area of his

118 Plate 8 Dieu protege les am an ts [God Protects Lovers] ( 191 7): watercolor and ink on paper 119 penis. Perhaps Wood is about to pipe her lover while God, shielding them from public exposure, looks on with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye (118-119).

Yet, looking at the illustration, we can see that the word is LAPIP or VAPIP or ZAPIP or perhaps even 2APIP. Even mirrored writing would not yield PIPAN unless the p’s were reversed and the n was pivoted. Why not believe Wood that it was dada? Even as a nonsense word, given its placement in the drawing, next to Ingenuité, it could certainly suggest its opposite, or knowledge of the sensual and sexual. Further, rather than seeing the curved lines as her arms, why not see the whole form as two curled spooning lovers in the swoon of bliss? In that case, the word AMANTS is rendered on the curving back of the front figure and on the arm of the rear figure, at their clear point of juncture. The unbroken lines suggest they are the outer figures in front of figures with broken lines, behind them, as if to see through layers. We see the pole-like figure of Roché, with the prominent inscription of CONVENTIONS down his torso and clearly in God’s hot pink armpit, and the figure of Wood, who shorter, is all head and broken line and directly behind the lovers. The word on this figure, INGENUITÉ, clearly refers to her naivite and her virginity, and forms a narrow V with the mystery word. The head of the Wood figure that Franklin describes as “her eye wide open . . . [with] a knowing smile on her face” could just as easily be described as timidly and anxiously looking away with a furtive, yearning glance toward the lovers. This figure, however, is clearly separated from the “Conventions” figure and clearly in the lap of God. While Franklin sees the drawing as a veiled sexual fantasy (perhaps from the male’s perspective), I prefer to see it as an attempt to come to terms with the conflict between stultifying public opinion and the pleasures of sex, especially with love, as “heavenly.” The following year she appeared to resolve the conflict, at least in addressing Roché, in her illustrated love letters/journal to him, Pour Toi, in which she wrote, like a true Bohemian, next to an illustration of her being embraced by Roché in bed: “Now I am convinced virginity is stupid! One goes through life with the idea of virginity, instead of sleeping with men when they have the desire. The more we exist outside the system, the more creative we are” (Shock 35)

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Plate 9 Journee (1917): watercolor and ink on paper

121 The two drawings, Journée and Beatrice et ses douze enfants!, Franklin rightfully yokes as meditations on motherhood. However, again, some of his conclusions I would argue with. In Journée, presumably the course of one day in August 1917, once again a large figure with arms outstretched holds the center of the picture. It is similar to the figure of God in Dieu Protège Des Amants; however, there God seems to be looking down in beneficence and pleasure. This figure in Journée is a woman with head facing skyward with Mon Dieu! (My God!) written across her breasts and the second part of the exclamation written beneath forming an oval over her heart region, Donnez-moi du courage (Give me courage). Four figures surround her. If the drawing is a recounting of one day’s events, the question is how to “read” it. Franklin begins with the upper left image of the headless nude torso of a woman, similar to Un Peut D’Eau Savon, but in this case with blood spurting from her heart in two directions, to shoulder and navel. Franklin sees an implied downward displacement of the blood, to indicate menstruation. Given that idea it could also be childbirth or miscarriage. Le coeur blesse par son grand amour (Her heart is wounded by her great love) is written around the figure in a reversed S movement. He then moves to the bottom left figure of the woman eating a banana in bed. The writing from this drawing moves the eye inexorably to the right, to the figure of a fetus in utero. The text reads: En prenant son petit dejeuner sa première pensée est à . . .? (Having her breakfast, her first thought is of . . .?). The text around the womb is L’enfant qui dort ( the baby who is sleeping), then coming out of the womb in a J (or hook) shape are the words partout en elle (everywhere in her). Perhaps she meant to write peut-être (perhaps) and this was a malaprop, yet both meanings suggest a questioning that she might be pregnant or is. The figure on the upper right corner is of a hatted, smiling woman holding a piece of paper with the inscription Lettre du son bien aimer la fait sourire. . . (A letter from her lover which makes her smile). Reading as he does from the upper left corner counterclockwise, Franklin sees the first image as “[o]verwrought with despair too grave to bear alone, the figure has stabbed herself with a dagger in an attempted suicide” (122) He uses evidence from Wood’s knowledge of an untitled poem about the “bloody reality of female suicide” by Frances Simpson Stevens, the American futurist painter, in the second number of The Blind Man

122 that Wood had edited. (136n44). Starting there, the final illustration and text for Franklin “suggest the possibility of a reprieve for the young, abandoned, pregnant woman who is smiling after having received a letter from her lover” (122). The final central figure of a “kind of misericordia, makes it abundantly clear that the only dependable and trustworthy father is God the Father” (122) An alternate reading of the drawing might be, though less outwardly dramatic, to begin the story in the morning with the figure in bed, eating and musing perhaps about the possibility of being pregnant by her love, later in the day receiving a letter which makes her smile, but after the contents, some rejection, is read, her heart is wounded, but not literally to the point of attempted suicide. [As she said, much later, “When the bowl that was my heart broke, laughter came out” (“Mama of Dada” Videodisc).] The strength she might have needed from God was to survive the shock and emotional wounds. Wood certainly felt concern for unmarried pregnant women (Shock 44), but since we have no record of miscarriage or birth of a child, the drawing most likely was a momentary pondering of the possibility which was reversed shortly, being created at the time of the breakup between her and Roché. Franklin’s presumption is that she might have wished to be pregnant to “catch” Roché, quoting Linda Gordon, “Pregnancy is woman’s burden and her revenge” (123n43). However, Wood’s compassion for the “lower class” woman in Paris that Roché “couldn’t marry” probably precludes that kind of thinking on her part. She was more likely to be worried about being “outed” that she was sexually active to her mother; losing the man was more crucial than losing a potential baby, despite the societal push for motherhood as noted by Franklin (120n40-41). The other motherhood drawing, Beatrice et ses douze enfants!, whimsical as it is, is probably a more accurate rendering of her attitudes toward mothering. Franklin has spawned two different readings of the drawing which once again show Beatrice Wood as the central figure. In this drawing all the children, labeled there, surround her. They are of different ages and doing different activities, but one of the surreal aspects of the work is that “Pierre” (Roché) appears four times: as an infant in arms; as a boy in a sailor suit

123 I 0 (Beatrice and He r Twelve Ch 1.ldren) (1917): Plate Beatrice et ses watercd o uze olenfantsor' ink and pencl.I on paper

124 looking small by comparison, standing as he is next to “Cravan” (Arthur Cravan, the boxer); as a young girl with a bow in her hair holding one end of jump rope with “Reeves” (the actor from California), also a girl; and as a young woman standing behind the mother figure with perhaps her hand on the mother’s shoulder, bow in hair with head down, demurely talking to “Sides” (the Lebanese rug merchant). Wood’s obsession with Roché at this time is reflected in how many times he appears. But the question remains: Are they fantasy children from many fathers, including one by Mme. Picabia? Franklin explores this possibility from a lesbian perspective, including the figure in the upper left corner with no label but only question marks all over him, or her. Franklin identifies this figure as Louise Arensberg , since Clara Tice did a drawing in 1917 of Louise as a question mark (136 n. 49). Franklin then arrives at two possible conclusions: that these are her fantasy children “fathered” by these people (thus four by Roché) and at least one woman; or, taking a hint from his discussion of a link with the birth of Venus and the shell-shaped soap from Un Peut, that these are children that have sprung into life parthenogenetically. I would propose one more possibility: that these children are the people named in a transgendered, trans-aged essence. In other words, Beatrice has revealed their child-like essence. In that case, the four figures of Roché, all in close proximity to the “mother,” would illustrate four different aspects of his childishness. If the figure with question marks is not Louise Arensberg, but perhaps some unknown future “child” that she will know, it is telling since Louise and Beatrice were the sober ones at the parties ministering to and mothering all the “children” at play. In this reading, the figure of “Totor” (Duchamp) is the most self-sufficient one, intent in his investigations. His feet almost touch the extended gown of the mother, suggesting a connection, but he is turned away engrossed in his sand pile. “Mme. Picabia,” curious, looks on. Beatrice Wood, though an ingénue, already had some maturity. She had some understanding of the bliss of children truly at play (dada) and the power of “mothering” while not actually bearing children, being at the center of their play. [Roché’s fictionalized version from Victor omits the figure of Mme. Picabia but highlights the figure of Alice [Louise Arensberg], interpreting all the figures, numbered on the drawing

125 and indexed with names on the reverse side, as literally “fathers” of the children. In Victor, however, the score is Roché 1 to Duchamp’s 3 children; in the drawing it is clearly Roché 4 to Duchamp (as Totor) 1 (43-44).] After the New York party days ended, after the disastrous marriage to Paul ended and she had taken up with Reginald Pole, she was inspired to do another series of watercolors, of tango dancers and more, but especially illustrating the vicissitudes of that relationship. When that bond ended and she had moved to California, the failed attempt to sell lithographs of those drawings and her move toward pottery both worked to move her away from drawing, except for preliminary drawings for pottery she planned to make. Only when she had met Francis Naumann in the 1970s did she direct her attention to drawing again. Many of those sketches continue the figurative, whimsical line of earlier drawings. One single late drawing is particularly different. This was the first drawing she did after being released from intensive care for a lengthy serious illness in 1996. Mandala-like, done in muted pastel colors, the drawing was a rendition of what she claimed that she saw when she was in the coma. Naumann has made another distinction about Wood’s work: the figurative art vs. the non-figurative. This drawing was the strikingly different one on that count. While she did make unadorned vessels (unadorned except for their glazes), this drawing was her most truly abstract one. After she returned home from the hospital, she reverted to her earlier Giverny pace of sketching several drawings a night, but these were recognizable figures–women, cats. It was as if a door had opened to the inevitable, and she wished to record that vision, but she returned, grateful to be on the planet still. The Grounding Medium: Clay What was her attraction to pottery? To copy those luster ware plates was the initial impulse, but it became a way to make some additional income to supplement what she was receiving from her small legacy. Ultimately, however, it became a discipline that she could stick with once she was “on her own” despite, or perhaps because of, her marriage to Steve. Pottery was also the perfect vehicle for her since in it she could cleverly sidestep the art/craft question. Her emphasis on the luster glaze, having as it did

126 a long tradition, not only linked her with artisans of the distant past, but it also put her in touch with practitioners in different parts of the world. Once she fully appreciated the chancy passion and discipline of luster glazing, breaks in its “fashion” did not faze her. It got her out of the craft bind of not having started early and not having developed completely, to some, the skill of throwing. Also, the sheer physical nature of the medium had a great appeal to her. As she said, I think sincerely, “I never expect a piece to sell,” she was additionally relieved from the trap Donald Kuspit observed: “The sense of being engaged in a process of work that is at economic bottom a means of accumulating capital undermines one’s existential sense of individuality. It is ultimately altogether deindividualizing-robotizing. Craft means repersonalization of work in a world of depersonalized work” (19). For that, and other reasons, creating pottery was a grounding experience for Beatrice Wood. Pottery is created out of the obvious: the five elements of earth, water, air, wood (fuel) and fire. The final ingredient is the touch, the hand and the eye. The eye and the hand work together to throw the pot. It is a process: mix the clay, form the pot, prepare the glaze, fire the kiln, see and hold the results. But before that comes the intention, the vision: Toward the end of her life, Wood made the comment that sometimes she felt she might be dying and then she would “think of another pot" that she wanted to make and get up and go to the studio. The pottery record is the most consistent for giving us information about earlier cultures. Fabric, wood, leather, even metal are prone to deterioration, to impermanence-- but pottery, fired earth, is capable of being buried in sand or ocean and remaining more or less intact for thousands of years. It can, of course, be shattered. It is an ancient tradition, probably one of humankind's oldest. The oldest civilizations stored their superfluity of grain and oil in giant clay pots many of which still stand. It is so old that in the most ancient texts of Sumer, themselves inscribed on clay tablets, in lists of the "me," the gifts of the Gods, it is not even mentioned. Perhaps it is so old as to be the given. It is likely one of the oldest crafts. It is practical, can be enduring, and capable of revealing (often anonymously) great skill and beauty. Technical discoveries have marked

127 the tradition's movement, for instance, the luster glazes of ninth century Persia, in the same region as Sumer. These discoveries were shared and transported; artisans traveled and moved to be at the center of activity; regional and even national traditions were established and guarded over the centuries. Several Asian cultures, like China and Japan, have had long distinguished traditions of pottery, both in the aesthetic style and in the manner the tradition was passed down, from teacher to disciple. For example, in Japan’s culture earth colors, imperfections, signs of age are valued as good. European traditions, French, Spanish, English followed, cast their aesthetic and fashion. Finally, American ceramic culture, early following other traditions, has in the last century created distinctly American forms. At the time Beatrice Wood became enchanted with her luster plates, the style was not in fashion. There had been a fin de siècle revival of it since it meshed so well with the "opulence" of the Aesthetic Movement and the "eroticism and decadence" of the Art Nouveau. During the 1920s lustre had made a "comeback" in commercial work in which it mimicked metal, but few serious craftspeople were working in the medium. The aesthetic poles in ceramics in the mid-thirties were between the modernist, Bauhaus, "machine art" aesthetic and the earthy, "rustic brown stoneware glazes from the Anglo- Oriental school of Bernard Leach and his followers"(Clark, Gilded 13). Back at home in California, something of a backwater in ceramics at the time, the teachers were either European exiles or graduates and affiliates of the burgeoning American movement back east, in Cleveland, Ohio, upstate New York, and Michigan (Clark, Century 114-115). Fashion did not matter to Wood at the time she became involved; her style would come in and out of fashion during the sixty-five years she would ultimately work in the medium, but that did not matter either. By the end of her life she would be "established. . . as one of the greatest exponents of lusterware in this century" who brought “to this lively tradition an artistry, theatricality, modernity, and adventurousness that exceeded anything previously produced (Clark Gilded 92). When Beatrice Wood came to pottery, she knew little of the medium or its traditions. She came to it, as she admitted many times, by chance, and I would add, by desire. As mentioned before, Beatrice Wood had, since childhood, a lust for objects.

128 When she tried to make that teapot to match the lustre plates she had found in Belgium, she found a challenge and a dharma. She also found a way of making a living, especially with her early department store commissions of dinnerware sets. However, she had also tapped into a medium that satisfied her desire for fun, chance, the unexpected, poking- fun-at-the-ridiculous, an on-going process, a sense of community, and contribution of herself (Many people remarked that looking at one of her pots was like looking at her!). She insisted that her vessels be usable, yet, ironically, they became so valuable once she was famous she would be one of the few willing to actually drink from them. Because of “their exaggerated scale” the late chalices are too unwieldy to drink from actually, according to Robert Kushner, artist and critic (“Letter” 42). He also stated unequivocally, “Your Dinner Service for Eight (1982-92) is an uncontested masterpiece of late 20th- century art” (42). Beatrice Wood’s attraction to and success with pottery merged contradictory aspects of her personality. The clay object, the earthiest of media, grounded in traditional forms allowed her to play with chance, experiment, invention, and drama in the form of the elusive luster glaze. (“I cook the glaze.”) When successful, she was drawing with light, the momentary shifts of light and color. But the pull toward the artistic in that medium was inevitably countered by the humorous satire of the blatantly figurative work in the same medium. From the subjective, experiential side, the creation of ceramics is a very physical activity, yet Wood always recognized the ephemeral nature of it: her vision of the pot could not be realized, it could shatter in the kiln, it could break later (as Clark hinted many should have been). It appealed to both her recognition of the importance of discipline and endurance and her meditative recognition that while the result may not be permanent, it is still important to strive for beauty and expression. The Vessels People think a sugar bowl doesn’t have a physiognomy, a soul, but that changes every day. . . .Objects never stop living. Paul Cezanne (qtd. in Smithsonian Mar. 2002, 84)

Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician. They have strength even while iridescent and transparent. They have the rhythm and luster both of jewels and human eyes. Water

129 poured from one of her jars will taste like wine. Anais Nin This often quoted comment from the end of Nin’s January 1965 Artforum article is quoted because of their personal connection, Nin’s fame, and the astuteness and poetic nature of her observation. It focuses on, once again, how Wood seemed to cross boundaries between media and, in a subtle way, conflated art and life. Garth Clark in Gilded Vessel selectively quotes (without noting that fact by ellipses) from other parts of this article: People sometimes look wistfully at pieces of ancient ceramics in museums as if such beauty were a part of a lost and buried past. But Beatrice Wood is a modern ceramicist creating objects [today that would enhance your life] [sic]. The colors, textures and form are at once vivid and subtle. . . The decorative ability is extended into portrayals of humor, euphoria[,] or contemplation. . . Her colors are molded with light. . . Some have tiny craters, as if formed by the evolutions, contractions and expansions of the earth itself. Some seem made of . . . shells or pearls, others are iridescent and smoky like trailways left by satellites (92).

He edits Nin’s article, emphasizing her vessels and leaving out references to the sculptural nature and humanity of her work. He left out: “But more important, perhaps because of her training as an actress, Beatrice Wood is able to portray a sculptor’s range of dramatic presences, from tragedy to comedy” and “She constructs a vase of the purest esthetics and then carves around it a string of witty abstract clowns on a trapeze” (25). (Clark has called her clowns “sentimental.”) The largest passage excised, which could be perceived as negative (or wordy), highlights her range: Some pieces have dignity and graciousness, some are homely and fat and contented. Others are mellow, yielding, suave or mobile and alive. They are both ornamental and entertaining. They fill an empty space with the same individual presence as a piece of sculpture. Finally, Clark omitted the two sentences, “The warmth and range of her moods would bring relief to our harsh Cubistic architecture. The Japanese say it is the irregularity of the potter’s clay by which the sculptor reveals his humanity” (25). These omissions reveal Clark’s bias: he preferred the stunning lustre vessels and highlighted them in his book. In fact, he divided his book into two sections “The Art of Beatrice Wood” and “The Life of Beatrice Wood,” the first section being a

130 Plate 11 Gold Chalice (1992): vessel

131 brief introduction to how she came to pottery followed by 54 pages of large color plates of vessels (along with one page illustrating two early figurative plates); the shorter second section, interspersed with black and white photographs, is text concerning her life including her drawings and figurative work. It is clear, perhaps understandably as a dealer and ceramic historian, that he considers her vessels her art. I suggest that some of these omitted comments provide keys to understanding what is hidden in the method of Wood’s success: her theatricality, her humor, her willingness to take chances. This astute review was written by Nin when Wood was 70 years old, conceivably toward the end of her career. Yet she went on to pot for 35 more years, making her “masterpieces” after the age of 85. Robert Kushner made observations similar to Nin’s in his “Letter to Beatrice Wood” in Art in America published in January 1998, just two months before Wood’s death: [T]wo themes come to mind- nature and history. The vesssels’ reflective surfaces conjure iridescent Roman glass buried for centuries. But you offer us a wilder carpet ride of ceramic history, careening deftly from Japanese tea ware to 16th-century Nishapur bowls, with long stops in the Middle Ages (of particular resonance to you) to sip from ritual vessels. Every now and then you throw in a form from nowhere. . ., and I smile at your pleasure in having discovered and perfected it. But as we look at the work, we recollect our individual experiences of nature: the ocean’s bioluminescence, the metallic reflection of a beetle’s shell, the lazy crawl of an oil slick on a wet sidewalk, the flash of the hummingbird’s throat, the restless shift of light on an abalone shell. Who else has captured these ephemera? And more to the point, you have succeeded not by mimesis but by concocting their ceramic equivalents (41).

Kushner describes the pieces visually but also adds associational and experiential responses to them which many people report.. Her main interest and fruit were borne in the chancy luster glazes of which she became the “greatest exponent,” but the glaze needs a form on which to light. She created “an impressive variety of forms”(Naumann, Centennial np): classic bowls, footed bowls, bottles, handled vessels, teapots, dinner sets, chalices but “her forms carried a more relaxed and playful line” than the work of some of her most important teachers, the Natzlers ( Clark, Gilded, 87). In traditional pottery cultures, when the labor is divided,

132 the creation of the form usually falls to men, the glaze, the decoration, falls to women (Vincentelli 47). Like her first teacher Glen Lukens, Wood did both. In the two husband- and-wife teams she studied with, the Natzlers and the Heinos, the wife did the throwing. Wood struggled with the task of the form (as well as the difficult glaze experiments), but to aspire to become a potter at forty was no small feat since the training is generally started in youth. Some younger potters have noted her lack of skill in throwing (Matthew Leeds, personal interview, May 1995). But as Kushner noted: Your thrown forms have been criticized as mundane, and there have been complaints about your self-admitted bad craftsmanship. Those critics have missed the point: the forms are meant to be foils for the glazes. They are intentionally modest-simplicity itself-but with an extremely playful twist. The shapes of the vessels hug the earth. Defiantly handmade, they celebrate the force of gravity and the innate reluctance of clay to take flight. But then you allow the glaze surfaces to merge with the air. You give us a frisson of both the earthbound and the heavensent, and it is here that we, your viewers, either join you or diverge. Your enthusiasm for the union of opposites is offered freely and extravagantly (42).

Although photography does not completely capture this “frisson,” a glance at a few of her mature vessels reveals some of their striking appeal. One aspect of pottery, sometimes overlooked, is the sheer physical strength needed to accomplish the work. Having an advocate like Francis Naumann since 1976 and a friend and dealer like Garth Clark since 1981 spurred on the work, despite the physical challenges, responding as she did favorably (and famously) to attractive, younger men. Wood worked hard to create a beautiful pot, but also said, “I make too many vessels and I become stale. I make some sophisticated primitives to ‘get my naughtiness out’”(Dudar 90). “Sophisticated Primitives” Beatrice Wood’s ceramic work falls into two distinct approaches: making the vessels, the first being that Platonic teapot, aspiring for beauty of form and color; and the figures, what she came to call later her "sophisticated primitives," through which she "[got] the naughtiness" out of her system (but really the peevishness). It was surprising to her that the latter sold immediately; she did not know, however, until much later that it

133 had been her friend Helen Freeman who had bought that first attempt. Most likely, even had that figure not sold, she would have continued to work in that vein. In fact, it was the movement between the two poles of her sophisticated primitives and the “aesthetic” glazed vessels that fueled her creative vitality–her ability to get stuck neither in the object (the form) nor the subject (experience). It was her capacity to take neither completely seriously that kept her working and laughing. The response to Wood’s “sophisticated primitives” was decidedly mixed. Many friends quietly suggested that she not make them anymore. Kushner, reviewing her "Centennial Tribute" at the Whitney said, "Despite my admiration [of your pottery], I have tried and failed to love your numerous figures and tableaux. . . .The recurring school girls, prostitutes and priests seem rooted in a prissy 1920s sentimentality, like coy, off- color spinster's jokes" (2). Even though Garth Clark clearly preferred her luster vessels aesthetically, he still admired the sophisticated primitives thus: Even as Wood’s skills increased, she consciously retained her naive, illustrative style to communicate her commentaries on life and love. In the hands of another artist this style may have seemed contrived and mawkish, that deadly pseudo-primitiveness that the French rightly deride as faux naif. But with Wood, the result was charming–in part because she was one of those rare individuals who managed to keep a childlike innocence alive and untouched within what was otherwise a woman of considerable sophistication. This, combined with Wood’s genuine fascination with all types of non-Western folk and primitive art, her sly wit, and her love of deadpan Dadaesque tongue-in-cheek provocation, lent her figures eloquence, integrity, and, at times, a biting irony (93).

Naumann agrees that despite the critics Wood “[felt] that everyone has a right to their opinion, including herself, which is why she [kept] making them; they represent a virtually unlimited outlet for the artist’s spirited and wonderfully wry sense of humor” (Centennial n.p.) One influence that both Clark and Naumann minimize, however, is the meditative detachment from Theosophy that equilibrates the “Dadaesque . . . provocation” and provides a discourse stance from which to comment. Concepts like karma and reincarnation were part of her belief system as evidenced by her affiliations, writings and conversations (see next chapter). The esoteric and relatively marginal nature of

134 Theosophy (with its history of some scandal) minimized her discussion of those beliefs with potentially unsympathetic listeners. Yet those beliefs did not dispel her perennial curiosity in trying to understand the undeniable reality of the shocks that she experienced. Detachment and laughter were her modi operandi. Clark charts the history of these pieces: from the 1930s and early 1940s figures such as “clowns, portraits of the Duchess of Windsor (both before and after her divorce), dancing ladies and lovesick maidens, etc. and portraits of friends and autobiographical pieces . . . illustrating her marriage with Steve” to making molded pieces briefly to, finally, what he describes as the theme she had always been interested in: “the relationships between men and women and the fierce battleground of sexuality on which their games are played” (Gilded 93). Naumann also sees the figures as getting increasingly “generic” and as “tokens of sexual identity” (Intimate 39). As Clark noted, “Figures were an important part of her output” in the early years, but she continued making them throughout her career. Clark’s observation that “[i]n 1970 Wood began to bring prostitutes and bordellos into her figurative realm” should be balanced by the fact that the sexual battleground had been explored in pieces like “Decoy” (1948), “Innocence is Not Enough” and “Settling the Middle East Question” (both 1958). As Naumann describes the last piece: perhaps Wood’s best known, a man and a woman, both fully clothed, cleave rigidly in a recumbent embrace, the ensemble colored uniformly by a rough green glaze resembling the patina on a time-weathered bronze monument. The rigidity of their bodies preserves the tension in their relationship, while the superior position of the woman suggests that her partner has for the moment renounced his advantage of greater physical power. The title, of course, emphasizes the impermanence of any “settlement” of the lovers’ differences and at the same time reminds us of how complicated those differences are (35-36).

Clark has called this piece her most controversial, perhaps for the political implications and futility of resolution. Who exactly, for example, is (or should be) on top, Israelis or Palestinians? Here is satire: the complexity of both situations, the sexes and the middle east, are clearly, tragically, absurdly bound. We can infer from the statement she made repeatedly the older she got, “Violence begets violence” that she was lobbying for an

135 Plate 12 Settling the Middle East Question (1958): sophisticated primitive

136 Plate 13 Is My Hat On Straight? (1971): sophisticated primitive

137 alternative. This piece also makes visible a sly statement she sometimes made: that women were really the superior sex. She could throw idea bombs: Beatrice Wood often confounded feminists by her view that the highest creative calling for a woman was to be married with children and to create a beautiful home. Of course, that is not what she did, maintaining a career by herself for many years. She had liberal views and fun with her subjects: Sensitive to violence of another sort she created “Innocence Is Not Enough,”a small blond girl sitting on the lap of a villainous dark, moustached man and “Is My Hat on Straight?” which laughs at “propriety.” Her “ceramic soapbox” did get bolder over time, often in the manner of satire. Especially after her trips to India., after seeing the prostitutes at the Cages in Bombay, the erotic religious sculptures, and Indian folk art, she was inspired and emboldened. Her experience moved her to empathy and compassion: The Doves drove slowly through the streets, not knowing that I was in a state of shock. For looking at the women I found their faces were neither hard nor coarse. They did not appear to be different in any way from other women. . .Some had been misled, or stolen, or sometimes sold when young by parents. . .Unless a person has been without hope, how can he know the choices others are forced to make? (33rd Wife 253-254).

The pregnant brides, “The Naugty [sic] Snake”(1972), and especially “Good Morning, America (1988) “naughtily”confront shamed sexuality, human suffering surrounding that, and the “business.” One feminist writer, Iris Bunsch, in “The Reality of Women” (in Women, Creativity, and the Arts, 15-23) has outlined the historical roles of women as “the saint, the mother and the whore,” all circumscribed and controlled by the dominant male world. In fact, Beatrice Wood assumed none of those roles herself. She was either the good girl gone bad or the bad girl gone good, but she was not sure which it was. Steve Watson called her the “Pulchritudinous Saint of the era,” but she herself did not claim beauty nor sainthood. (“Mama of Dada” Videodisc). She never had children except in her vivid imagination, but she “mothered” many people (and animals) through her life. She was never paid for sex, but she recorded a kind of exhilaration in her youth on Coney Island with Duchamp and Picabia having been taken for a prostitute; as an older woman at the

138 Cages in Bombay she was shocked but sympathetic. The new historical role, pioneered by people like Annie Besant, was the career woman, one that Wood delighted in satirizing visually. At the age of 99 Wood gave a second interview to the Smithsonian and said that she was convinced she was born “very eye-minded,” that colors and forms always meant something to her (Karlstrom interview, 1992 8); however, she also insisted that she continued to be driven by “ideas” (not ideology). She was not an “intellectual” painter like Duchamp; she began with the sensual–the visual and the tactile–but getting a “ fun idea” for a piece spurred the discipline to realize it. She also enjoyed playing with words: Remember, “Celibacy is exhausting.”

139 Plate 14 Autobiography cover: Beatrice Wood, age 15

140 CHAPTER 6.

OUT ON HER OWN: WRITING IT DOWN

Dada is our intensity. . . Dada is life without carpet slippers or parallels. . .What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of life. But here we approach a great secret. Dada is a state of mind. . . Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE. -Tristan Tzara

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. -Jiddu Krishnamurti

Like Bill Clinton, whose arts policy she admired, Beatrice Wood was capable of compartmentalization. Some people in her life, who might have had no knowledge of, nor interest in--or even antipathy towards--theosophy, had little understanding of the importance it had for her. Likewise, some theosophical friends might not have fully appreciated her importance to art historians of the New York dada period or art pottery. In her mind until the end, certain boxes did not intermingle: "Dada has NOTHING to do with Theosophy," she insisted with fervor (Personal interview, 30 November 1997). On the surface, of course, she was correct. However, it sometimes takes another's view to see the larger pattern in one's life and work. In the lived life, in her confluence of artistic interests, in her contradiction, Beatrice related them all. Both informed and balanced the other: the dada state of mind stayed with her; she stayed with Theosophy, and she maintained respect for Krishnamurti despite his defection from it. As Greil Marcus has noted, albeit about the European dadaists: Dada was grace but not for the asking, not by faith and not by works. Grace was up to God, and God was indifferent to the paltry, self- destructing ethical systems humanity has fashioned in imitation of the

141 natural order. Thus the dadaists experienced grace as chance, as a matter of the-right-place-at-the-right-time, a bolt of lightning, a fall in the street. Like a fall in the street, grace came forth disguised in the gestures of ordinary life; like a bolt of lightning, it came to no one more than once, this moment of change in which the whole world was wiped clean and reborn within the New Man, if only for a moment–that was why they never got over it (209-10).

Marcus is discussing the main European dadaists like Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Richard Huelsenbeck. In Paris, especially, a few moved to surrealism. Hans Richter became a psychiatrist and memoirist of the experience. Marcel Janco emigrated to Israel in 1940 and in 1953 founded Ein Hod, “an artist colony dedicated to promoting a greater integration of the arts and society” (Naumann,“Janco” 80). He saw his work there as an attempt to continue the dada experiment.1 New York dada was softer, kinder, funnier, more drunken perhaps. Both Beatrice Wood and Marcel Duchamp, perhaps because they were so far physically and temperamentally from the European dadaists, found ways to move through dada. Duchamp seemed like one of the few who, if not over it, maneuvered through it: chess was a strategy. A game between Roché and Francis Picabia was published in a chess review; in answer to a complaining reader as to why “such a thing” had been published at all, Duchamp (Roché imagines) responded that the match which he had painstakingly recorded was an exceptional event, one which turns in ordinary life, yet still bringing something lyrical, heroic, romantic, something full of miscarried valor and ill-advised forays, sudden panics of mysterious origins, abundant imagination, and even an admirable move here and there. In short, it was proof that one could arrive at great emotions in chess without the strategic command of an expert (Victor 17-18).

Of course, the myth was that Duchamp, not long after this, had abandoned art for chess. By loving and relating, Beatrice Wood strung Dada and Theosophy together like pearls. Perhaps it was also part of Beatrice's incendiary nature, as seen by Roché, that she both embraced the drama of the “bolt of lightning” but maintained the detachment/engagement of the actress, born of disappointments. Although ostensibly fiction, but really a roman à clef, Roché’s last unfinished work gives a portrait of her as

142 “Patricia," Beatrice's stage name: Breakfast with Alice [Louise Arensberg] was a circus performance, thanks to Patricia. She was in her best form, radiant, quite the grand actress, prophetic, teasing, even troubling. Then she tied her hair back into two tight braids, like a wreath, and became the modest Patricia once again. She put her foot next to Alice’s. “Look,” she cried. “Mine looks like a potato and five little sausages. Hers is like a swan’s! Mine is meat, hers is alabaster. I’m simply not pretty enough. You can’t know how I suffer from it, and there’s nothing to be done about it. The only thing I can do is to take the best advantage of my eyes, and of my voice. I have to resort to eccentricities to force attention on myself. I need to know where to stop, that’s all. If I were as sure of my beauty as Alice is, I would not move a muscle. I feel I’m serving a sentence of forced labor. As a clown! (Victor, transl., 47-48).

New York Dada was less political, was noted for chess games, parties, and protests against bourgeois attitudes toward art, yet the spirit of the right-place-at-the- right-time certainly held. Despite Wood’s late protestations about knowing nothing about dada, the state of mind was a natural for her, or at least one part of her mind, the irreverent part. The other part yearned for answers to questions of great mystery, the large questions, questions of soul or spirit: meaning, benevolent sense, finding beauty, peace and love, not only the Romantic ideal, but also the Victorian quest, for she had her share of that as well. Theosophy provided a framework for her questions, "infinite worlds" to explore with her curious, imaginative, yet sometimes skeptical, mind. She gained, if not certainty, at least some peace and equilibrium with the process provided by Theosophy, for it is, from a practitioner's standpoint, encompassing of one's entire life. While some dadaists became Catholic (Jannings and wife) or returned to Jewish roots (Janco in Israel), friends report Wood loved God, but "God uninstitutionalized, unfettered, and uninhibited" according to Helen V. Hooper (Angel, foreword, np). Being a member of the Annie Besant lineage of the Theosophical Society and trying to encompass Krishnamurti’s “whole of life” became Wood’s way through Dada and the suffering she had experienced. Honesty, humor, and compassion were her tactics. Whereas Dada, especially in New York, was play, light, but with serious, radical

143 intent, Theosophy was work, serious practice, but, from Wood’s perspective, with a playful center. That Beatrice Wood was able to maintain her Theosophical Society membership for her entire life, being finally the longest continual member, while being cognizant of the rift between it and Krishnamurti and not exactly choosing sides, as some did, speaks of a balancing act.2 But this was not exactly a balancing: it was working an equilibrium of compassion. Very late in life, finding out about certain indiscretions of Krishnamurti and her friend Rosalind from her daughter’s book Lives in the Shadow of the Master, she did not judge, preferring to laugh at human frailty (P. Johnson,10).3 That “whole of life” for Wood certainly included using words. While Beatrice Wood gained recognition and acclaim for her ceramic work in an ever widening spiral, culminating in almost cult proportions late in life, she engaged in another medium for her entire adult life: writing. Her writing was not primarily literary in intention, but it satisfied various needs: practical, communicative, documentary, imaginative, expressive, playful. It is in the entire scope of Beatrice Wood's writing that one finds (perhaps ironically) polar extremes and the "compatible contradictions" that Naumann noted in each medium she engaged. This 'compatible contradiction,' Naumann says seems "to consciously inform her writing" and the book that he was introducing, Angel in Black Tights. The scope is wide in all her writing. One finds the highly grounded and practical in her diary and some of her letters, the recording of everyday events and the disciplined need to answer quickly every correspondence, the most outrageous imagination, to some minds, of reincarnation and communication between worlds of the seen and the unseen in her plays, and, for a finale, the frivolous, even doddering, game-playing of a primer for illiterate prostitutes. The range between is wide, between the practical/disciplined and the whimsical/speculative. She kept a three-line diary every day from 1912 until her death. She wrote letters religiously, to dear old friends, like Elizabeth Hapgood until her death, and to anyone who wrote her (including me). She bought a personal computer when she was 85 to keep up with the ever-growing correspondence. She took pride in how quickly she answered letters, generally within forty-eight hours.

144 She wrote stories: an illustrated mystery as a gift for Ananda Coomeraswamy, who had given her a copy of The Dance of Shiva hot off the press; stories about other performers whom she met when she worked in vaudeville to occupy her spare time and imagination, but also to set those characters down on paper, none published.4 She combined words and images in several books and albums created for friends, like Roché and Helen Freeman. The books were published late in life but based on much earlier experiences: the illustrated book, The Angel Who Wore Black Tights (published 1982), about her trip with her friend Helen Freeman to Holland in 1930 to hear Krishna- murti lecture, a year after his refusal of the World Teacher mantle; an illustrated book of letters to her husband Steve during that solo summer trip to Europe in 1958, Pinching Spaniards (published 1988); an account of a 1961 trip to India sponsored by the U.S. State Department to show her pottery and to lecture on it, 33rd Wife of a Maharaja, subtitled A Love Affair in India (published in India in 1992). The last book she published was a whimsical, fantasy alphabet book, Kissed Again: Part of the Bargain (published 1995) under the "pseudonym," Countess Lola Screwvinsky, written and illustrated with her assistant David Van Gilder. None of these books was published by major American houses, the first two and the last being published locally in Ojai. Personal albums created for friends like Henri-Pierre Roché and Helen Freeman, (housed in the Archives of American Art) as tokens of friendship, as a way to share memories from a distance, became springboards for later, more public, expressions of those memories. Because publishers thought it fit into at least seven or more different marketing categories, too many, she struggled for several years with several publishers to accept the manuscript of her autobiography, finally re-issued in 1985 with Chronicle Books after having been published locally with the Dillingham Press, by Rick Dillingham, a local artist and friend . She did find easy publication for several articles over the years on pottery in various journals, especially Craft Horizons, and three one-act plays with the Theosophical Society in 1933, but her play Torch in the Sky, written between 1928 and 1931 was not published, was shelved, and was not produced until 1993, also with some difficulty. Perhaps writing was not her forte, yet she felt some ambition, aided by others'

145 encouragement, to see her writing in print, especially late in life. She gave me permission to print her play in this dissertation (Letter to the author, 16 Oct. 1997). She had a heightened sense of legacy (and play) the longer she lived. Several ideas stand out in her relation to words and writing. Like much of her visual art, much of the writing is tied to her personal life. Some writing specifically records and documents events, some of keen interest to art historians and others, as in the case of the diary. In the early entries, while she was still under her mother's thumb, some details were judiciously omitted, she told us later, but she did annotate some of those entries in the years before she died, especially those related to the Dada years (AAA, Reels # 528-543). The particular design of the diary, a kind she lamented at the end of her life was no longer manufactured, was a five-year diary of three lines; thus, even though she made the entries daily, the information is brief, sometimes abbreviated, and generally not reflective. One can easily imagine her reflection on repetitions, patterns, and diverging points, since with that design she could look forward or back as she was writing to the next or previous years on that particular day. Part of the appeal of that kind of diary was just that connection of the years and the events. Her keen attention to time is reflected as well in her coquettish (or keep them guessing or laughing) dancing, from middle age on, with the truth of her age, allowing mistakes (in her "favor") stand as to her birth date. She held fast at thirty-two. Inspired by close friends and wishing to share with them, Wood created documents such as The Angel in Black Tights especially for her friend Helen Freeman to commemorate their gleeful last-time-single trip. It "lay dormant" for years until her friend, Helen V. Hooper, the wife of a Connecticut Senator, envisioned it in print and conspired with two other friends to have it published. Wood also lauds Francis Naumann, then a relatively new friend, for "encourag[ing] [her] when [she] was doubtful about the road that leads to art" (author's ack. copyright page). Dedicated to her old friend Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, the book combines captioned drawings, a narrative of their adventures, and quotations from Krishnamurti. Her first published book, Angel set the trend for more collaboratively conceived and executed publishing projects through the 1980s and 1990s when Beatrice was in her 80s and 90s.

146 Yc5 you arc 1\hner\'a on an JCepJck.''

Plate 15 "Yes, you are Minerva on a toothpick." (1982): illustration for travel book

147 "Last night seems far away from a search for the absolute."

Plate 16 "Last night seems far away from a search for the absolute." (1982): illustration for travel book

148 Particular other people inspired other projects. The purpose of the mystery story for Coomeraswamy was to cultivate an interesting friendship, and Pinching Spaniards came out of a request from her husband Steve to write back letters from her solo 1958 European trip. Her friend Jack Case had suggested that she keep notes on her first trip to India. Alan Watts and Rajagopal had suggested that she write her autobiography. The few works she published more or less on her own were relatively early in life, like the three one-act plays published by the Theosophical Society in 1933, or articles related to ceramics. The plays were intended as an educational vehicle for the ideas she was intrigued with at the time. At least one, "The Door That Did Not Close" was produced by the Hollywood Actors' Club in 1933, with Jason Robards, pere, a silent film player and the father of the famous actor, playing the lead. Her first play, a three-act based on the life of Giordano Bruno, never published, was begun in New York in 1927, worked on in Los Angeles for the next few years with Walter's help, shelved, and finally produced for one run in Ojai in 1993, just after her 100th birthday. Over 100, Beatrice collaborated on three different book projects. She illustrated the cookbook, California Herb Cookery (1996), from the famous Ranch House, to many the source of nouveau California cuisine. Those drawings, whimsical sketches with captions, are hot pink, a color by then her signature, and black. For example, the beginning of the chapter on eggs shows three stylish thin ladies, a mock version of the monkeys or monks who see, hear, or speak no evil, with the caption: “Touch no eggs, use no sugar, eat no fat” (107). On the cover of the book is a photograph of her ceramic tableau entitled “The Last Dessert”(1977), a visual nod to Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and a documentation of perhaps a memorable dinner, of course with dessert, preferably chocolate. Almost caricatured portraits of Beatrice, in the center, and eleven of her friends, men and women alternating, including Rosalind Rajogopal, Anais Nin, and Angela Davis, pose in the triptych for the potter. Beatrice was also the subject of Marlene Wallace's Playing Chess with the Heart: Beatrice Wood at 100 (1994), with photographs by Wallace facing quotes by Beatrice. The title is an echo of Duchamp and all those manly chess players of the Dada days, as well as an acknowledgment that the game goes on. For example, a quote from her Bruno

149 play originally from the mouth of Queen Elizabeth is repeated here: "Celibacy is exhausting." The quote faces a photograph of the saried, bejeweled Beatrice reclining like a calm, bemused cat on her pink velvet couch. Even though the photographs are black and white the sense of color still seeps out. Marlene Wallace, as a girl, had been a student at the Happy Valley School, on the same property as Beatrice's last house. Seeing the colorful dancer, Beatrice, clanking in boots and Native American silver jewelry in her ballet class, stunned the 16-year-old Wallace. The last publication, Kissed Again, as well as an audio tape, “Madame Lola’s Pleasure Palace,” her reading from a private album and singing a chanson she had performed in her youth, were provoked by her assistant, David Van Gilder, originally hired as an archivist. The “Why Not?” spirit prevailed. All these last projects, then, came out of personal relationships. Thus, much of her work sprang from relationships and came from a sense of community. She was disturbed somewhat, recall, until the end of her life by the rift between her early teachers Otto and Gertrude Natzler and her. Most of her books were published late in life at the prompting and encouragement of others, the first of those when she was almost ninety: the impulse for recording the moment was the primary goad, but the connection to others and the decision to record for "posterity" was part of the impulse to publish, coming as it did toward the end of her life. It was an action of reflection, a grounding of experience outwardly, and a kind of surprise that she was still around to do this sort of thing, with the support of old friends and new friends, like Naumann and others, to aid the projects. The breadth of the kinds of writing she did, while not literary per se, demonstrates a certain facility and playfulness with language (that she shared with Duchamp). The truly shocking nature of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase #2" in the Armory Show of 1913, for example, was the title, that a nude would move (Tomkins 80). She also shared the autobiographical impulse, the need to record, and the late-in-life output with Roché.5 Their brief Jules-and-Jim style menage was cross-fertilizing and fruitful, especially for Beatrice. The Autobiographical Writing

150 At the end of her autobiography Beatrice Wood states explicitly that the impulse to write it came from other people. Alan Watts and Desikacharya Rajagopal, Rosalind’s husband, had encouraged her to write it several years before, but she had "resisted" because "inevitably one becomes one's own heroine" (Shock 170). Historians often see memoirs (especially of politicians) as self-serving. Shaping a story whether “true” or not, can give a certain satisfaction to the reflector or writer. Thinking in terms of story often gives a coherence to the quixotic chaos of life. That she wrote and published it at all, reveals the New Woman in the aging one: the American woman testing her freedom--in career, in thought, in expression. The title itself of her 1985 autobiography, I Shock Myself, is rich in implication. One's first response is laughter, over the unlikely confluence of the three words. [Beatrice Wood was well-known for her wit and use of language in an unusual and striking manner. Her friend Elizabeth Hapgood attributed that to the fact that she learned French as a child and never quite got her two languages untangled or never quite got clear on multi-syllabic English words (“All the Cataclysms” [catechisms])107]. After the shock of laughter the title elicits, one realizes the source of the humor. The phrase is reflexive, coming back on itself. One realizes that shock usually comes from outside oneself. Electricity, cold water, and news (extremely bad or good) are shocking. But the recognition here is that the shock comes from within herself. It is as if she is saying, "If you think my life has been shocking (or was shocking to my mother or anyone else who might judge my life from the outside), think about how it might be to have lived it." While the early shocks, like the one she experienced with Roché, might have come uncontrollable external circumstances, she took responsibility for her own equilibrium more and more; as time went on this became a lifetime practice. Moreover, the title also suggests that she is stating: "I am capable of coming up with ideas, situations, and art work (her drawing with assemblage, perhaps the first put on view by an American, from the Independents' Show or her "figures" that shock some and dismay others) that shock even me”: a reflection on the serendipitous nature of how others might react to the thoughts and actions one puts out in the world. And, even further, she seems to be saying, "I am sometimes capable of freeing

151 myself from the 'cunning of the mind' and find it amazing that I have thought those earlier thoughts, been the person that I was, done the things I have done, and now I am shocked by the reality of my consciousness of that previous existence." Lindsey Anderson, the editor of the autobiography, commented that in working on it some details were skewed and the chronology was not quite right, but that they were working with diary notations and 80-90 year old memories (Personal interview, May 1998). For example, the date of her European trip and her meeting with Brancusi do not correspond to art historical records. Wood’s memory seemed clear, but the date was off. Anderson’s conclusion was that it was not crucial or feasible to be entirely historically accurate. The point was not accuracy but documentation and expression of what had happened, even if it was "shaped" into a story--especially if it is shaped into a story. Wood’s reluctance to become "one's own heroine," false or not, reveals perhaps Everywoman's fantasy, given enough time and reflection. It also reflects an ongoing struggle with gender identity–-her relationship to men, especially, and women--and to succeeding or not in her work and in her life, struggling with her own and others’ judgment. Her play, Torch in the Sky, to some extent, was an attempt to make sense of these issues. The Plays "Contradictions are our hope!" (Brecht on Theatre 47) And new philosophy calls all in doubt, And element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th' earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary," lines 205-8.

Berowne: For valor, is not Love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical And, when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; Make Heaven drowsy with the harmony. L.L.L. IV, 3, 337-42.

152

Carl Sagan once asked the present Dalai Lama, "If we could prove scientifically that reincarnation does not exist, would you accept that statement? The Dalai Lama replied, "Of course!" His Holiness walked away, but then came back and said to the physicist, "But how would you prove that?"

Beatrice Wood’s dramatic work, relatively unknown, reveals not only the influence of Theosophy explicitly, but also implicitly the Dada state of mind she retained from youth. Her dramatic work had mixed intentions too. Even though the one-act plays, sketches really, were intended to serve an educational function within the Theosophical Society and were published by its press, they have a certain Dada spirit--perhaps as it edged into surrealism-- of "Why Not?" They investigate subjects like communications from the dead, children’s psychic sensitivity, and the power of divine intervention. The closest Wood came to a strictly literary attempt was in her three-act play A Torch in the Sky, but even that had a personal, imaginative purpose: to examine the purported previous incarnation of Annie Besant in the form of Giordano Bruno, heretic. The writing of that play, begun in New York in 1928 at the end of the relationship with the actor and director, Reginald Pole, had different motivations: to fill the vacuum of the loss of the relationship, to investigate reincarnation and karmic relations, to wonder about gender roles even in the same "soul," and to try to understand what went so wrong with her relationship with Pole. Beatrice Wood and Reginald Pole had gotten involved together with the Theosophical Society in 1923, the beginning of the last ten, crisis-filled years for Annie Besant. Wood had developed a strong admiration for Annie Besant and had read that Giordano Bruno had been one of Mrs. Besant's previous incarnations.6 After the relationship with Pole ended, Wood went to the New York Public Library for months, researching Bruno's life. Discovering that Bruno himself had written some plays, she herself began writing a play with the idea that this man was to become the woman Beatrice knew and admired. With her acting background and her recent theater work, including assisting students performing Shakespeare, with Pole on Staten Island at the

153 school started by Mrs.Wilkie’s father, Wood had a new project to occupy her mind and time (telephone interview, 14 November 1998). Once she moved alone to California and was re-united with the Arensbergs, Walter consulted with her several times as she continued to work on it there. His interest in the Baconian authorship of Shakespearean plays, the Renaissance period, the School of Night poets, and cryptography kept the sessions going. Previously, in New York, Walter had helped her learn her lines for various plays and helped her with interpretation of poetry readings she was preparing, and she found him helpful and astute (AAA, Reel # 549-550). While not followers of Theosophy, the Arensbergs were both intrigued by the occult, so Walter easily could have involved himself in her historical and imaginative speculations. Whether obvious on the surface of it or not, in the Bruno drama Wood was playing with the conflation of two personalities and sexes into one "soul" or spirit, spinning out her fascination with dreams and interpretations of 'occult' meanings, as well as playing with her personal hobby horse of trying to balance romantic love and spiritual seeking. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), who was burned for his views by the Church and the Inquisition in Rome, began his life near Naples and entered the Dominican order as a monk early in life but by the age of 28 was accused of heresy and fled Italy for other European countries where he lectured at universities and published writings often in dialogue form. He went to England where he met Sir Phillip Sydney (and perhaps Elizabeth I). Finally, in 1591 he was enticed to return to Italy by a Venetian nobleman who wanted Bruno to teach him his "art of memory," but was ensnared by the Inquisition, taken to Rome, tried, convicted and burned on heresy charges, partly on his belief in the Copernican theory. The historical figure of Giordano Bruno, while not as famous as Galileo with whom he shared certain heretical views, continues to fascinate people. The scholarly literature is vast on him (Yates, Bibliographia); he continues to be a folk hero in Italy for standing up to the Pope; and dictionaries of philosophy dutifully list a short entry. However, he and his ideas are still not well known. Without a doubt, both historical figures, Galileo and Bruno, had a crucial impact

154 on what is considered the beginning of modern thought. Ernst Cassirer describing "the crisis of man's knowledge of himself" as the place of human intellect in relation to the "new cosmology" of the heliocentric universe, places Bruno as "the first thinker to enter upon this path, which in a sense became the path of all modern metaphysics" (15), to turn the curse into a blessing. Bruno's contribution, according to Cassirer, was to turn the concept of infinity which to the Greeks had been negative (as in incomprehensible) into the "immeasurable and inexhaustible abundance of reality and the unrestricted power of the human intellect" (15). His work was expressed, however, in a poetic and not a scientific manner, and he attempted to operate, more or less, within the church. Cassirer noted that the mathematical theory of nature was not known to him, but later sources in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy cite Bruno's castigation of Copernicus as a "mere mathematician" and mathematics "as a 'pedantry' lacking in deep magical insight into nature" (406). This reading of Bruno sees him within the Hermetic tradition and that the contradictions of his thought are resolved in this light. Galileo, perhaps a better known figure, is more clearly understood historically as one of the many figures who forged the new model, with the emphasis on mathematical and empirical proof, that became modern science. Understanding the impact of these two men historically is important background to understanding the treatment of them in Beatrice Wood's Torch in the Sky, in Brecht's Galileo, and in Snoo Wilson’s More Light, yet it is equally important to recognize that the playwrights (one of the issues of historical plays) are interpreting the historical figures in a particular light. Of importance to Wood is that one of the goals of the Theosophical Society was to bridge contemporary scientific views with the spiritual understandings of mystics and "masters" as Blavatsky described. What Beatrice had access to in the New York Public Library in 1927 most likely were a few biographies and entries from philosophical and theological histories. Scholarly interest in Bruno was piqued by the publication of Bruno's Opera latine in Naples and Florence in 1879-91 (three vols. in eight parts). The four volumes of W. Scott's edition of Hermetica was in the process of being published (1924-1936) as was Lynn Thorndike's six volumes of A History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923- 1941) at Columbia University Press. However, Wood was primarily interested in

155 biographical material, searching for parallels between Bruno and Besant. She obviously did not benefit from the first spate of scholars’ work published in the 1930s and beyond: Frances Yates and M.C. Bradbrook were doing their studies of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and the School of Night poets, respectively, at Cambridge University, both converging on the peripheral but important connection with Giordano Bruno; or P.O. Kristeller and the work at the Warburg Institute. Wood and her collaborator on the revision of her play, Hall Powell, San Francisco director and producer, however, had certainly read Frances Yates' book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) because the revised play incorporates a quote opening Act II, not discovered until 1960 in a letter calling Bruno a "juggler" (356-357). (See Bellarmine’s speech in Torch in the Sky p. 248.) Yates’ book argues that despite Bruno’s association with Copernican heliocentricity, he did not arrive at that view on scientific grounds, as Galileo did. As she says: Bruno’s philosophy cannot be separated from his religion. It was his religion, the “religion”of the world,” which he saw in this expanded form of the infinite universe and the innumerable worlds as an expanded gnosis, a new revelation of the divinity from the “vestiges.” Copernicanism was a symbol of the new revelation, which was to mean a return to the natural religion of the Egyptians, and its magic, within a framework which he so strangely supposed could be a Catholic framework (355).

Yates concludes on the legend that “Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker. . .[that] [h]e is thus really the last person in the world to take as representative of a philosophy divorced from divinity (355-6). His Spaccio della Bestia trionfante, dedicated to Phillip Sidney, is, above all, about universal religious and moral reform. Yates is convinced that the character in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, Berowne, and his famous speech in praise of love, are an echo of Bruno’s visit to England and the gods’ praise of love in one of the constellations in the Spaccio (356). As Yates says: Yet on moral grounds Bruno’s position remains strong. For it was the descendent of the Magi of the Renaissance who stood for the Dignity of Man in the sense of liberty, toleration, the right of man to stand up in any country and say what he thought, disregarding ideological barriers. And Bruno, the Magus, stood for love, as against what the pedants, of both

156 sides, had made of Christianity, the religion of love (Yates 356).

Thus, the key heretical ideas relevant to Bruno regarding Beatrice Wood’s play, are the innumerable worlds and the movement of the earth, as well as magic (the “optimistic gnosis”), “good works,” and love. Despite not having Yates' interpretation to guide her thinking of Bruno in the first version, and despite (or perhaps because of) her choosing to investigate "romantic" love as part of his trap, Wood's play highlights those views of Bruno. Further, the conflation of the figure of Annie Besant, as the recent incarnation of the monk, in Wood's mind at least, draws together these ideas of the radical speaker despite "ideological barriers" and love in various forms: passion, charity, and devotion. One parallel between Giordano Bruno and Annie Besant is that their ideas are better known than their particular works or personages. Annie Besant, despite being the subject of a number of biographies, including one in the Penguin series Lives of Modern Women, is relatively unknown now although she was quite famous in her lifetime. Rosemary Dinnage asks: Can we call Annie Besant a ‘modern’ woman? She was a phenomenon; a pioneer of pioneers. Yet in many ways she remained a product of the Victorian age into which she was born. The Victorians, so near to us in time, often seem extraordinary to us, and there can hardly have been a more extraordinary example of the breed than Annie Besant. At sixteen, she was a passionate Christian who flagellated herself and begged Christ in her prayers to ‘let him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth; for Thy love is better than wine’. At twenty-eight, she was notorious as a leader of militant atheism, and was to have her children forcibly removed from her because of her pernicious influence. At thirty, she was publicly tried for publishing an ‘obscene’ pamphlet outlining methods of birth control. At thirty-six, she was converted to socialism; she fought the police on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Trafalgar Square, and she went out in support of a strike of women workers. At forty-one, as a member of the powerful London School Board, she introduced free lunches and medical treatment for the first time in elementary schools. At forty-two, she was converted for life to a ‘religion’ hastily patched together by a psychic Russian aristocrat on the basis of occult messages from Tibetan gurus in the Himalayans. At sixty-six, after many years in India spreading the Theosophical gospel, she took up the cause of Indian independence and later presided over the Indian National Congress in Calcutta (11-12).

157

She is now an oddly unfamous, strong woman of the period--even Madame Blavatsky, perhaps because of her flamboyance, has maintained more fame.7 Beatrice Wood’s admiration for Besant, coming as it did after Besant had done all the things noted above, was rooted in Besant’s willingness to go her own way at each turn, despite going against the grain of public approval. Another parallel between them is a form of martyrdom to the ideas: Bruno’s is obvious; Besant gave up much of her personal life to work diligently in her succession of causes. While not an accomplished play, being a first attempt at writing in that form, her play on Bruno apparently was a work that held her interest enough to continue working on it from New York to California and to discuss it with Walter Arensberg. It was put aside and like the other works that had been put aside, picked back up to try to produce much later. She may likely have been aware of Brecht's famous play on Galileo, translated and written with Charles Laughton in 1947, not far from her in California. In the 1980s, through Marlene Wallace, her friend and photographer, Wood started approaching successful directors like Gordon Davidson of the Mark Taper Forum to produce her play, with no result (AAA, letter). She was aware in 1984 that there was a renewed interest in the figure of Giordano Bruno. Since she subscribed to many magazines, journals and the Los Angeles Times, she could have easily seen or read about the production of Snoo Wilson's Los Angeles production of his play on Bruno, More Light, in 1989. (Dorothy Lyman's ADT Theatre production). The progress was slow but Torch in the Sky was finally produced in Ojai in 1993 for one run of three performances. (There was discussion of a production in St. Petersburg, Russia.) To put Beatrice Wood’s play in context it might be helpful to compare it to Brecht’s and Wilson’s. The parallels between the two heretical figures are easily made; but the difference gives an understanding of that pivotal point in history (the sixteenth century), of how that point still affects our contemporary crises, and how differently that can be handled dramatically. First, Bruno is mentioned in Scene 3 of Brecht's "Galileo" in this way: Sagredo: Then where is He?

158 Galileo: I'm not a theologian. I'm a mathematician. Sagredo: You are a human being! (almost shouting) Where is God in your system of the universe? Galileo: Within ourselves. Or--nowhere. Sagredo: Ten years ago a man was burned at the stake for saying that. Galileo: Giordano Bruno was an idiot: he spoke too soon. He would never have been condemned if he could have backed up what he said with proof. (Scene 3)

Bruno is also alluded to two scenes later when Galileo, in Rome, has narrowly escaped the censure of the Church by the support of Christopher Clavius, the Church Astronomer, and by the hint of the usefulness of Galileo’s new telescope, especially in navigation. The level of crisis in the Church on this issue is revealed in the “Old Cardinal’s” rant: Old Cardinal: . . .I am informed that Mr. Galilei transfers mankind from the center of the universe to somewhere on the outskirts. Mr. Galilei is therefore an enemy of mankind and must be dealt with as such. Is it conceivable that God would trust this most precious fruit of His labor to a minor frolicking star? Would he have sent His Son to such a place? How can there be people with such twisted minds that they believe what they’re told by the slave of a multiplication table? Fat Prelate (quietly to Cardinal): The gentleman is over there. Old Cardinal: So you are the man. You know my eyes are not what they were, but I can see you bear a striking resemblance to the man we burned. What was his name? Monk: Your Eminence must avoid excitement the doctor said . . . Old Cardinal (disregarding him): So you have degraded the earth despite the fact that you live by her and receive everything from her. I won’t have it! I won’t have it! I won’t be a nobody on an inconsequential star briefly twirling hither and thither. I tread the earth, and the earth is firm beneath my feet, and there is no motion to the earth, and the earth is the center of all things, and I am the center of the earth, and the eye of the Creator is upon me. . .

Bruno is the shadow to Galileo’s light in this play, the line and the blur between magic and science and between religion and science and between magic and religion. Since Brecht's play is so well known critically and Wood's so unknown, I would like to emphasize the Wood play, but lay Brecht's, a classic “modern” play, and also Snoo Wilson’s More Light, a postmodern one, alongside to highlight Wood’s perspective. On the surface, similarities emerge between Brecht’s and Wood’s plays.

159 They are both written about historical figures, both Italian heretics (Berman calls it the Italian model) who held to Copernican theory against the pressure of conservative and/or corrupt church and monied power figures in the Renaissance period. Both were incarcerated by the Inquisition, but the crucial difference for Galileo was his recantation, perhaps the key reason for Brecht's interest in him as a subject. Since they are both from the same period, Cardinal Bellarmine appears in both plays, but beyond that, similar conflicts echo: teacher-student rivalry, women wanting marriage, the power of authority, money and political influence versus the power of ideas and writing, and the conflict of competing "truths" and right action. One of the major themes that both plays deal with is seeking "truth," yet through very different means. Beatrice Wood's play, which is primarily a realistic to almost melodramatic rendering of Bruno's life, is set in three acts. The 1927 version was more traditional than the revised 1992 script which was changed with the help of San Francisco director/producer Hall Powell. The changes involved reworking the chronology of the events of Bruno's life which now have a filmic flashback-flashforward effect, adding certain surreal elements (such as the vision Bruno has at his trial toward the end of the play, of his love, Marie-Anne now dead, floating into the scene), and through lighting effects shifting the focus from one set of characters to another on the stage. Certain stage directions call for the character to address the audience, to break the fourth wall briefly, but the overall surface impression of the play is realistic, although the treatment of the relationship between Marie Ann and Bruno and his burning on stage at the end edge into melodrama. (It may be that Wood has written a play in the style that she was most familiar with at the time she had been an actress, the French melodramatic pieces that both Sartre and Artaud railed against.) But, of course, the dedication to Annie Besant and Wood’s statement that she was investigating reincarnation connections put the play in a different light. Both Brecht and Wood were trying to use historical figures, not so much to recreate events out of history, but to speak to something in the present. Yet the intention and theory may not always bear the intended fruit. For Brecht, as Sidney Homan notes, "Galileo" was "the one play that gave [him] the most trouble, his only work based on

160 actual historical events." He says further: For despite Brecht's revising "Galileo" after the dropping of the atom bomb, thereby converting the romantic scientific hero of the pre-war version to a vastly contradictory character in the post-war revision, audiences for almost forty years now have usually felt an emotional identification with the character of Galileo. Even when performed before people sympathetic to Brecht's avowed politics, the play seems to contradict the doctrine of the playwright. (78)

For Brecht revised his play several times over his lifetime, the first version being written in 1938-39 and performed in Zurich in 1943. The first revision, usually called the Laughton version, was written in Los Angeles and opened in Beverly Hills in July 1947 in collaboration with Charles Laughton. This was after Laughton's success in the role of Henry VIII and the character of Galileo after the recantation in Scene 13 is turned into a glutton. Walter Kaufmann quotes Brecht on the revision: “Intent on showing that crime makes the criminal more criminal, Laughton insisted, as we revised the original play, that there should be a scene in which Galileo is shown to the audience collaborating with those in power.” Kaufmann recounts that “Brecht obliged him by having him dictate to his daughter a letter ‘in which he suggests how the Bible can be used to hold down starving artisans.’ Brecht admired Laughton for so boldly bucking the current by defying the public that would sympathize with the hero” (338). Kaufmann is describing Brecht's antipathy to the "Aristotelian" plot and tragedy and his desire to create an "epic" theatre. The fourteen (or fifteen) episode structure of the play illustrates this quite well and "[a]s an epicist, Brecht enjoys telling a story and painting these scenes. But he is also a moralist intent on indicting Galileo--not primarily as a historical figure, but as a symbol of what Brecht considers reprehensible about twentieth century physicists" (337). The creation and use of the atomic bomb may be the moral and existential metaphor (in external reality) of our time and the logical extension of the power of the human intellect. There is a question, however, of whether the play works in the way he intended: Could it be that despite himself, Brecht has created a "modern hero" that despite his contradictions (or because of his contradictions) audiences sympathize with?

161 Brecht’s avowed intention in his Epic Theater was to detach the viewer from identification with the character by breaking the plot into many episodes, introducing poems, banners, songs, and by having the actors abstract their delivery, against the Stanislavsky method, as performers, not as identifying with the characters. It is generally acknowledged that Brecht’s approach influenced many subsequent modern playwrights in staging and conception. An obvious inheritor of Brecht’s radical staging, Snoo Wilson’s play More Light was written as a spin-off from a failed commission piece for the Royal Shakespeare Company, to adapt and mount Bruno’s play, Il Candalajo, a Commedia play. The mock tone of his approach is evident even from his description of the play: In my play, Bruno is faced with the mock-serious problems of having his play performed in Heaven to secure his immortality, which in the end is in any case secured by his ideas which I have done my best to honor and put in their context. I found there was something exhausting and naive as well as exhilarating about his cosmic optimism, but what is a hero without a tragic flaw? It was an optimism which kept the Inquisition at bay for seven years. Evil is only folly to Bruno, and hell is a more or less illegible footnote in the great book of life, not the grossly enlarged, concave mirror images of eternal suffering of his cadaver-obsessed contemporaries. Eternity, too, that pillar of the godhead, takes a knock, in fact I don’t know of anyone for the next three hundred years, let alone the sixteenth century who argued so convincingly for an optimistic modern viewpoint of universal relativity. Bruno is an Einstein before modern physics and it is plausible that they kept him alive that long to find out if the English had magical control of the weather, the sixteenth century equivalent of nuclear fission (intro. np)

Wilson’s play, in two acts, set in “English heaven,” has seven characters only: Bruno (presented as a “randy monk”), Queen Elizabeth (naked in the opening scene except with a red wig, is very concerned with her power and getting rid of her virginity), a barmaid (who lusts after Bruno), the Pope/Bidello (a character from a play of Bruno’s), Shakespeare (cast as a woman), and the white Magician John Dee and his lascivious assistant, Kelly, who copulates with a feathered angel, and thus opens a hole between this heaven and earth so that the Pope may grab Bruno to burn him at the stake. By comparison, in conception and staging, Beatrice Wood’s play is tame and

162 straightforward. In Beatrice Wood's interpretation of the historical figure of Giordano Bruno, the key addition to his story that drives the whole plot of her play is adding a love interest. In no accounts of his life and work have I found any mention of Bruno being involved with a woman, yet her play hinges on this element. Snoo Wilson too has either found other sources or has invented trysts for comic effect. (She also adds the character of Elizabeth I who was also the subject of several plates she made later.) The woman in this case is Marie-Anne, an orphan who has lived with Bruno's mother in the hills out from Naples and who has known Bruno most of her life. She is introduced early in the play as an 18-year old girl who comes to the monastery looking for Bruno but who must first run the verbal gauntlet of lascivious monks, jealous of Bruno's fame abroad. Bruno's mother is trying to arrange a suitable marriage for her, and she has come to tell Bruno that she is in love with him and does not want to marry the other man, and that she would even come to him outside of marriage. Bruno, serious about his vows, tells her that he loves her, but is a monk and loyal to the church, sending her back home, but unknown to him she is taken by the Inquisitor as his mistress. Sir Phillip Sidney, in the same scene has just arrived from London, looking for Bruno to discuss his works with him--"His magic memory system and the formation of a Magus, the worship of "God in things," the transformation of souls--it's all wonderful, mysterious!" (7) --and to convince Bruno that the Inquisition will arrest him if he doesn't leave Italy. He leaves for England, hears that Marie-Anne has been killed by the Inquisition, and spends time lecturing and debating in Elizabeth's court and other places. Years later, in Act II, the Venetian ambassador comes to England to persuade Elizabeth to send Bruno back to Italy. Having no luck with her, he tries to influence the French Ambassador toward the same end and finally convinces Bruno to return to Venice by telling him that Marie-Anne is still alive and that he will arrange their meeting. Further, he tells him that the Venetian nobleman Moncenigo will protect him for he wants Bruno to teach him his theory of memory. The nobleman keeps him for months and complains that Bruno is not teaching him the real material and delays the meeting between Bruno and the woman. (Wilson adds Black Magic in his play.) Finally, it is revealed that she is the nobleman's mistress. The meeting takes place at which she, in her

163 opulent dress, acts coolly and disdainfully toward Bruno until she realizes that Moncenigo intends to turn him over to the Inquisition. Alone on the stage at the end of Act II she says: The world calls me a bad woman. Yet, Giordano still thinks of me as a child. I know now... I do know it didn't matter to him that I'd changed. He saw through to my inner being, and I confess, it frightened me. God, what have I done?!

In Act III Bruno is in prison and confused, having been imprisoned in the dark for seven years, thinking that he is being brought to see the Pope when it will be the Cardinal Bellarmine. Throughout the play are interspersed small scenes of Bruno and Bellarmine: the opening scene of the play is Bruno taking his vows from Bellarmine; the very next, sixteen years later, Bruno is again prostrate in front of him and it is clear that the Inquisition is arresting him; many more scenes of the two of them, lit up and then faded out, often discussing Bruno's views form a thread of continuity in the play, one of the revisions made with Hall Powell to update the play. They have something of a dream-like quality and the two seem to serve as alter-egos of each other, a realism against an idealism, two world views: Bellarmine, corrupt, sensual, lascivious and powerful in the world; Bruno, unswerving from his ideas and with a kind of foolish devotion to the church and his vows. The climax of the play is the trial during which Bruno, while describing how one comes to know God, has a vision of Marie-Anne "dressed in virginal white" floating into the room. They have a conversation that ends with: Marie Anne. Yes, yes, the need for reform, Who says you were chosen?! You're dying for reform...(a beat)...and no one will remember you for it. Why did you ever become a monk? Why pick the very thing that can destroy you? I was there...You could have turned toward me. Bruno. Marie! I'm a priest-- Marie Anne. You're dead inside, all plugged up with the Holy Spirit. Bruno. I believe in the Church. They can't get around it. They'll spare me. I'll continue to serve God, continue to do His Work-- Marie Anne. There's no need for them to kill you. Bruno. What? Marie Anne. God hasn't forsaken you. You've forsaken yourself. (Bruno reaches for her, and she disappears)

This last idea is one espoused in theosophy and Krishnamurti’s writings.

164 A laugh from the Bishop brings him back to the present moment and the trial continues. Bruno, knowing how he is going to die, tries to deliver a message through Bellarmine to Marie Anne at the nunnery where she has gone. Bellarmine is evasive but finally tells him that she has hung herself. Bruno, as the flames begin, says that he will tell her himself, then, and that they will all remember him. This plot summary, focusing as it does on the relationship with Marie Anne, does not mention other scenes such as the Elizabethan court portraying its tolerance, scenes at the monastery revealing the corruption and pedantry of the Roman Catholic Church, and scenes with the noblemen and ambassadors showing their greed, power and ignorance, but the bulk of the play is a vehicle for Bruno's ideas and various responses to them. The play, then, is a realistic/melodramatic rendering of Bruno's life with many characters who have fairly clear motivation and, in a sense, are close to the social/political roles that Brecht often intended: lustful, jealous monks; a self-serving prior who wants prestige and stability for his monastery; power-hungry, pedantic and callous cardinals; plotting courtiers; ignorant, greedy and shallow noblemen; a virgin who is corrupted and fallen. Several factors, though, move the play beyond a simple representation of an interesting historical period. The treatment of the women, Elizabeth and Marie Anne, adds a certain deviation from a standard historical account. (Of course, these figures pale next to the wild imaginings of the women in Snoo Wilson’s play.) The figure of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, is strong, smart, assertive, in control, humorous, and unswerving in her tolerance and protection of Bruno and his ideas. Moreover, she is shown in extended scenes attempting to secure a husband for herself, even if he is twenty years younger and Catholic (brother to the King of France), and speaks openly of her sexual desire, while never seeming foolish. It is a positive representation of an older, accomplished woman. The figure of Marie Anne, while following, in some sense, the proverbial course of the virgin raped (by Cardinal Bellarmine), corrupted in her ideals, and captivated by material security, is also transformed at the end of the play by Bruno’s compassion for her, but, more importantly, by her own integrity. The possibility of personal transformation is another (though not exclusively) theosophical idea.

165 Bellarmine and Marie Anne argue with Bruno throughout the play: Bellarmine attempts to convince Bruno to recant and give up his foolish (and deadly) ideas; Marie Anne argues for him to live his ideas and get off his impractical course. Both tell him pointedly that he should never have been a monk. The emphasis here, from the play's perspective, is that he had a real choice to change his course without being untrue to his ideas. Both Bruno in Torch in the Sky and Galileo in Brecht’s play, then, are presented as having hubris: Galileo’s work intensity ruins Virginia's possibility to marry the nobleman and turns her, by the end of the play, into his sour mock wife who takes care of him, spies on him, and patronizes his excesses; Bruno in Torch in the Sky rebuffs Marie Anne, inadvertently causes her downfall, and stubbornly refuses to see that light until the end of the play when he understands her love and her perspective, right before his death. Snoo Wilson, skewing sequential time and reality, also creates a play to highlight Bruno’s radical ideas (now commonplace) within “the fact of his heroism.” His perspective is clear: “[H]e was taken to the stake after seven years, still refusing the charade of piety offered to him by the anxious, do-gooder, sadistic creatures who were so carefully setting him up to be burnt.” Yet Wilson’s “metaphysical” view is sarcastically realistic: “I would welcome the arrival of real angels in the theatre, but since the collective realization dawned that we killed god, there seems fat chance that one of his feathered host are going to drop in to the place where consensus reigns”(Intro. np). The play, however, is full of comic incantations, ascensions through the spheres, the Mysterium Cunjuntis, falling angels and rising Popes. Robert Brustein sees "Brecht's obsession with the darker side of man stem[ming] from his struggles with his own character, and so does his relationship to ideology." (232) He sees him as a contradictory man: The Communist ideology helps him objectify his feelings and rationalize his art; and it encourages him to attribute an external cause to the cruelty, greed and lust that he finds in life; but it is never fully adequate to Brecht's metaphysical Angst. Brecht may try to convince us that man's aggressive instincts are an outgrowth of the capitalist system, but he never seems wholly convinced himself, especially when his own aggressive instincts are so difficult to control. Even at his most scientifically objective, Brecht

166 continues to introduce a subjective note; even at his most social and political, he remains an essentially moral and religious poet. (232)

Brustein sees this contradictory struggle continuing through his life and reflecting in his plays. Brecht's revolt, therefore, is double-layered. On the surface, it is directed against the hypocrisy, avarice, and injustice of bourgeois society; in the depths, against the disorder of the universe and the chaos in the human soul. Brecht's social revolt is objective, active, remedial, realistic; his existential revolt is subjective, passive, irremedial, and Romantic. The conflict between these two modes of rebellion issues in the dialectic of Brecht's plays; and the conflict is not fully resolved until the very end of his career. Part monk, part sensualist; part moralist, part diabolist; part fanatical idealist, part cynical compromiser, Brecht is a compound of many different simples; but he combines the discords and uncertainties of our time into a product which, being dramatic poetry, is always more than the sum of its parts (232-233).

Perhaps the lengthiness of these quotes can be forgiven when we see that the contradictions of Brecht spill over into his character Galileo, and that a similar (but different) contradiction is evident in Beatrice Wood’s character of Bruno. Both historical figures were brilliant and their ideas far-reaching: Galileo's emphasis on mathematics and empirical proof set a tone that ultimately helped create modern science and another extreme faith in the power of the human intellect to change the external world; Bruno's shift in thinking from the external world to what he refers to in the play as the "Internal" and a revision of the concept of the infinite as the source of truth created, historically, a space for that science to emerge. But is Galileo brilliant or a thief when he appropriates the telescope? Is Bruno brilliant or oblivious to the natural world, including Marie Anne, that he speaks so glowingly about? Is Galileo sensually alive (and Italian) or gluttonous, practical or self- serving, clever or devious to recant his views, to keep living and publish his work? Is Bruno a true visionary or totally impractical; concentrated on his devotion to his visions and the reform of the Church or a fool not to understand the need to change direction and choose a different form? All three plays grapple with the elusiveness of truth. Brecht sees truth as a

167 political issue manifesting in the external world and shown by the capacity of human beings to identify problems and work them out in political action and change, yet he is aware how imperfect and chaotic that process often can be. Wood sees truth as a spiritual issue emerging internally in a soul change that will manifest change (ideally) in the greater world, but aware how difficult that change can be for mere mortals. Adding the dimension of more than one life to accomplish the task makes the work at least feasible, and the work (ideally) more like play. The issue of reincarnational thinking for Wood, is evidenced in the impulse for the play; the strong connection of England to Bruno (the future Annie Besant); the introduction of a "karmic" relationship , that is, the implication that Bruno and Marie Ann will work on what transpired between them in the future; and the obvious last act references: the vision of the dead Marie Ann speaking to him, Bruno’s statement to the Inquisitor that he will give his message to her himself after he is dead, and the final statement that they will all remember him. These theosophical ideas were important to Beatrice Wood as a salve in that period of emotional distress and spiritual seeking in the early part of her life. The fact that she took the effort to revive the play, rework it and produce it toward the latter part of her life reveals a continued interest in that kind of thinking, with, perhaps, even more insight after having felt the stretch of time herself. Yet to actually go through all the work of production speaks loudly of the Dada spirit of ‘Why not?’ as well. Marcel Duchamp first created his alter ego, Rose (the second “r” was added later) Selavy, in 1920, after first thinking he might change his name to a Jewish one “to offset his Catholic background” (Tomkins 231). A gender change, even cosmetically, was more visible and appealing. Martyrdom to a cause, fame and infamy, and the search for fulfilled love, in various forms, all come together in the imagined merging of Giordano Bruno and Annie Besant as the same soul. Beatrice Wood’s invisible gender merge of Besant/Bruno in her play suggests fluid imagination. She admired in Mrs. Besant her public speaking, her devotion and diligence in her public work, her organizational skills, and her openness to change direction. Wood identified with her, feeling hemmed in by her family early in life, her loss of husband and family, and the difficulty of being a

168 woman alone confronted with crises. She may also have learned something to remember in Besant’s acknowledged flaws: humorlessness and credulity. She may have learned the knack of compatible contradiction in that crucible. As she wrote late in life, “It is curious, but if one smiles, darkness fades” (Chess 52).

169 IN LOVING MEMORY OF ｊｄｸ･｡ｾ｛ｃ･ｒｅｅｩ｡ｯｊ＠

MEMORIAL FOLK DANCE May 31 - 6 to 9 pm Ojai Art Center THE RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION "A CENTENNIAL TRIBUTE" IS CURRENTLY ON TOUR AND MAY BE SEEN THROUGH AUGUST 98 Museum of Contempory Art at: The Butler Museum

Plate 17 Poster for Beatrice Wood Memorial Folk Dance ( 1998)

170 CHAPTER 7. "I THINK OF ANOTHER POT..." THE KINESTHETIC

The dancer knows no age. The body's dance is age. -D.F.

And if you should survive to a hundred and five, think of all you'll achieve just by being alive. . . if you are among the very young at heart. -Johnny Richards and Carolyn Leigh

The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage Supposed to be written by one at the point of death

Give me my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope's true gage, And thus I'll take my pilgrimage. Sir Walter Ralegh

Beatrice Wood smiled into what many people think of as darkness, death. She had said many times that, while she herself was not clairvoyant, she believed in reincarnation and did not fear death. After her 105th birthday party, March 3, 1998, and after the Titanic party a few days later with James Cameron and Gloria Stewart, as a result of the excitement of the parties and people gathering, she developed an infection, as she had several times before. Rather than go into the hospital, take the antibiotics which would not only cure the infection but also wreak havoc on her intestinal tract, she chose to deny the treatment and stay home. She told the people around her to just stay with her, turn on the heating pad, and rub her feet. It took her several days, but surrounded by caring people and her animals, she died calmly. She was cremated, in Indian fashion, and her

171 ashes scattered around a favorite tree on the Happy Valley property. She had averted the worst fears of aging, especially for a woman: to be incompetent, alone, destitute, frail and in extreme pain, incontinent, uncared for, unnoticed, and unloved. If one can have a successful death, she did. A few caretakers were convinced, however, that she could have lived several more years had the situation around her been more harmonious. Contentions had arisen around her celebrity and her wealth. Mark Ehrman, who avoided signing the consent form required of journalists by the Happy Valley Foundation, discussed the trouble in Paradise and recounted that “[m]any, in fact, compare this situation to the morass that surrounded Georgia O’Keefe at the end of her life” (44).1 The situation at the end of her life was that she had amassed a fortune, small perhaps by some standards. The figures on her estate are not easily available, most left to the Happy Valley Foundation. Court records in 1995 placed its value at about $4.5 million (Ehrman 44). This wealth, unlike the inherited comfort of her youth, was wrought from her hands and imagination. At the end of her life, one pot could go for $40,000. She never “retired” although she slowed down production at the very end. However, from her 30s to her 80s, for almost sixty years, she did not have much money. In fact, when she met her final dealer, Garth Clark, in 1978 (at the age of 85), she had not sold a pot in over two years. Her health had been declining, especially after a lengthy illness in 1994, which left her with impaired hearing, balance, and stamina. However, she had also averted the large illnesses, like cancer, that had taken many of her close friends earlier. She had always, when necessary, consulted medical doctors and hospitals. After one doctor commented that she had the organs of a 60-year-old, Wood, in her 90s, quipped to Naumann that perhaps she should show her organs and not her face (Personal interview, 1 June 1998). She was also open to “alternative,” now called “complementary” medicine, such as massage, homeopathy, and chiropractic. She had habits most of her life that now we would consider health-giving: She had been a vegetarian since a teenager (for spiritual and other reasons); she never smoked since, she said, with great foresight, that she did not want to spend her life quitting; and she did not drink alcohol because she

172 wanted to be sober when she was seduced. She also was very physically active with her pottery and her dancing. She once told me that she belly-danced until she was 85, when the class disbanded. “It’s very good exercise, you know,” she said (Personal interview, 14 June 1995). She was highly celebrated at the end of her life. As with love and money, she had an unusual relationship to fame. She had known the famous and would-be famous in her youth. She had (secretly) desired it for herself, in painting, in acting, but let the idea go with grace. She probably recognized that the sacrifice to fame was privacy of a certain kind. She was highly recognized in ceramic circles since the 1940s, and she was well- known in the Theosophical/Krishnamurti community and in artistic/spiritual Ojai. Her recognition, like a jazz musician’s, grew slowly but steadily, based as it was on steady discipline and being true to her Dionysian impulse. But once her pottery “penetrated the art world stratosphere” in the 1980s, “the Beatrice Wood phenomenon began to snowball.” As Garth Clark told Ehrman, "It was like riding an out-of-control horse. Of course, she has several irons in the fire. She has her age, the fact that she’s one of the top ceramicists in the world and that she’s the last surviving member of the Dada community" (Ehrman18). Friends like Francis Naumann warned her that things might get more intense when she turned 100. She replied that there was good fame and a bad kind. On a trip into Los Angeles the two were accosted by a woman on the street. She said, “You’re Beatrice Wood!” and, according to Naumann, practically assaulted Wood for an autograph. Finally free of her, walking away, Wood said to Naumann, "That's what I mean about the bad kind" (Personal interview, 31 May 1998). The difference was that the woman was treating her like an object, with something to be gained. Wood’s influence on some famous examples in another medium, film, are somewhat hidden. Duchamp had been aware of her desire to be involved in it in 1919 when he wrote Louise Arensberg from Buenos Aires: “Regards also to the lovely Beatrice whom I will no doubt one day see on the screen” (qtd. in Naumann, ed. Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century 212). As mentioned earlier, she had been credited (somewhat inaccurately) as the inspiration for the Jeanne Moreau character, Catherine, in

173 Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), based on the novel by Roché who also wrote the screenplay. The most famous ménage à trois on film bored Wood when she finally saw it. If the character Catherine is the embodiment of the theme of freedom in love, as several critics have observed, that was not exactly the form the young Wood embraced (Insdorf 112; Cavel 138-139). The mystery and the beauty of the character (“She was all women”) certainly could have been partially inspired by the young love struck Wood, in love with Roché and Duchamp. The celebrity of that film brought her some attention, she thought mistakenly. Perhaps nothing can bring celebrity quite like the association with a successful film. The means have not changed considerably (although it is usually measured in grosses today) since Penelope Houston, writing in 1963, described them: To be really successful, a film has to cut across all the barriers of age and class and nationality, whether it fills the world’s specialized cinemas (like a Jules and Jim or a L’Avventura), or runs for four years in a single cinema (like South Pacific), or floods the mass market in a short, sharp exploitation campaign (like Hercules Unchained or Dr. No) (176).

Another way for a film to be really successful is for it to enter film history and become a classic (perhaps for different reasons): Jules and Jim and Titanic (1998) no doubt have that status. Wood’s association with the blockbuster of all times, Titanic, is not widely known although her influence is indisputable. The meeting, six days before her death, with Cameron and Stewart was to give them the Fifth Annual Beatrice Wood Film Award. She had created a ceramic broken boat to give them. (The story of the origin of the first award was that an independent film maker in Los Angeles was complimented on his work by Wood He said, “If you like my film so much, why don’t you give me an award?” She did. (AAA). When Cameron was working on the conception of the film, he wanted to make it a frame story told by a survivor, but he was not convinced that a character that old, having to be at least 100, could not be believably lucid and coherent to an audience. He went to nursing homes to speak to the oldest old and was depressed by what he experienced since the people he spoke to were depressed and void of energy. His friend

174 who lived in Ojai, the actor Malcolm McDowell, suggested that Cameron go talk to Beatrice Wood. When he did he was totally charmed by her, read her autobiography, and was obviously influenced in the direction of the screenplay. Originally, he had planned for Beatrice to play the part in the film, but she got ill not long after that meeting. She recovered from that illness but felt she would not have the energy to play in the film. Cameron, however, decided to model the character on her and make the character, Rose Dawson, an artist, a potter: the resulting film is in many ways an homage to her as well as the actress, painter and art book maker, Gloria Stuart, who did play the part. In an interview on National Public Radio, Gloria Stuart stated that she got the part because she was not a famous face, and Cameron did not want the audience thinking of a "Hepburn" when it was watching the young Rose. Kate Winslet was chosen for the part because she looked so much like the 15-year old Beatrice in the cover photo from her autobiography (Francis Naumann lecture 19 April 98). Despite its great box office success, Titanic has been disdained by intellectuals as a shallow action film by the director of “Terminator,” that is, low brow. (There was a heated exchange between Cameron and Kenneth Turan in the New York Times.) Yet at least one university study was done the following year to study why it was so successful (Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster Rutgers UP, 1999).2 Like Beatrice Wood’s autobiography, the film could fit in many categories: history; frame story; adventure; action; special FX; horror; romance. The Leo DiCaprio factor certainly, among adolescent girls was widely reported. (The influence was not restricted to girls: in late January 2001 it was reported that 28 barbers were arrested in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for cutting hair in the DiCaprio Titanic style (Parade 25 Feb. 2001, 22). This last subject, as well as issues of class, women, the Millenial Myth, mass media, music and cross- promotion, historicity, and diamonds, were some approaches the scholars took to understand the film’s popularity. The cross-class romance of the artist who dies for love and the rebellious rich Rose who gives it all up for love are given prominence in many discussions, however. For an example, in Adrienne Munich and Maura Spiegel’s article “Heart of the Ocean” in which they are discussing what they call “democratic desire” and the large

175 diamond that figures so largely in the plot in the film, they say: Rose’s rebellion finds its object in Jack, from whom she draws courage and a model of agency. As an embodiment of American liberty, Jack is multiply coded. As an artist he exists outside the class system, observing all classes and putting them in their place. He is a natural aristocrat who “cleans up like a new penny,” according to Molly Brown, a knight whose chivalric code requires that he rescue the damsel in distress. He also knows how to play with the masses–cards, games, dances. But Jack, an orphan, is actually neither classless nor working-class; he emerges, the film suggests, from the solid middle class of the Middle West. Bohemia here is itself linked to the middle class and to upward mobility (consider in this light the reference to that unknown artist, “somebody Picasso”). Rose herself, in her old age, has traded the jewels of the elite for “arty” Native American handcrafted silver and semiprecious stones. We first encounter her as the camera focuses on her hands working a piece of clay; as the camera tracks back, she is situated in a very comfortable house, a middle class house where the television is aimlessly blaring, while her granddaughter, Lizzy, is busy at housework. A middle-class life, the movie tells us, is the creative life. The middle class in this film is the unmarked site of fulfillment; so thoroughly do its values saturate the film that they are naturalized, almost invisible (160).

What is not mentioned in this article nor in any of the others in the volume is the inspiration of Beatrice Wood for this character. Perhaps this fact is peripheral to the film, yet it is noteworthy how many subtle details suggest Wood. The colors of the room in the film the authors just described match the colors of the room in her house where she displayed her large collection of folk art. Many small details in the film mirror Wood. Larger aspects of the film like Rose’s motivation and temperament also suggest a knowledge of Beatrice’s life. Rose’s shocking the dinner table with a discussion of Dr. Freud on the ship conflates the party conversations Wood had at the Arensbergs’ evenings and the manner in which she shocked Stanislavsky with her unladylike language. One question that Freud never asked: What does an aging woman do? Six years before her death the Smithsonian interviewer, Paul Karlstrom was interested in this conundrum: why was she attracting so much attention? He asked a long question: One of the things that strikes me about the nature of this attention is that it focuses often on your age, your longevity. People are more and more

176 impressed that this sort of exotic woman in the saris, makes art, and is. . . This age, they are intrigued by this. In some cases I think there’s more interest in that than in the work itself–in other words, what you make. So there are two parts to Beatrice Wood. There’s Beatrice Wood, the older woman who has managed to survive, and survive with style. And then, on the other hand, there are these works that she has created. Now I don’t want to try to separate those two, but I’m interested to know how you feel about that. In other words, would you prefer that these be separated? Beatrice Wood as a public figure who has a certain lifestyle that is like a work of art, and Beatrice Wood the creator who makes these objects? I asked a long question. I’m sorry.

Wood replied with an even longer, but to Karlstrom an indirect answer:

Well, I don’t think very much about what people think about my work. I’m not conscious of it. I think of myself as a tired. . . .I don’t think of myself as an old woman. Yes, I know I am, but I don’t think about it. I don’t let it touch me. I let ideas touch me. And I am involved in ideas. And in a way, I lead a quiet life as much as possible. And every night I’m alone in my workroom, and I’m unconscious of being what you call, thank God, a public figure. All right, every night when I go to bed, I think, “Now tomorrow I must do four things I must phone so and so, I must see that Stephanie phones somebody, I must start my kiln, and there’s one letter that has to be answered Then if those get done, then I plan other things. When I wake up in the morning, I say, “Four things. Remember what they are.” I do this kind of thing with numbers. How many things that I have to remember. And then I plunge into the activity of the day. And I’m not concerned with the outer world–what people think–because I don’t know it. All I know is my activity here (Karlstrom 1992, 24).

Details and discipline in her everyday life produced art work. She could not seem to separate the two. The interviewer continued the same question concerned not “to overwork this question” but it was a source of curiosity to him: “And I guess my question again is: Would you prefer that that wasn’t the case, that they were separated? That people would just focus on the work and forget sometimes about Beatrice Wood, the interesting person?” (25). Wood answered: “Well, I don’t know; I’d never thought in those terms. . .None of us realized then that it could be in any way historical fifty years later. But that is due a great deal to my publicity, plus the fact now that I’m such an old cronie. Certainly I accept that. But I’m not concerned with it, you see” (25). The field of Wood’s “compatible contradictions” includes, then, many single drawings; the relation

177 between her lustre vessels and sophisticated primitives; between her visual work and her writing; to her stance regarding Dada and Theosophy; and Theosophy and Krishnamurti. Indeed, she played with the subtle differences and confluences of art and life in a grand style. In many ways Beatrice Wood was an outsider. From childhood she felt alienated from her mother and brother, never gaining closeness to his family. She never had children herself. Aligning herself with Bohemian New York and Dada, she yanked herself out of mainstream culture. Attempting to become an artist, as a woman, she was a minority in a predominantly male art world. If she (or her family) was Jewish–and especially if that was hidden–she would have been shunned by the New York “society” her mother yearned for her to join. Joining the Theosophical Society, despite its relative popularity at the time she joined, put her at odds with organized American religion. Moving to Los Angeles from New York put her somewhat out of the art world, but moving to remote Ojai to be closer to Krishnamurti further removed her from that art center. Even after years of ceramic acclaim, Garth Clark described her pottery style as outside the mainstream (Personal interview 18 Dec.1998). Yet Beatrice Wood was often on the inside. She was in on the New York Dada experiment. Her work is collected in museums, galleries, and private collections (some by prominent artists). She was in love and sometimes in love with love. She was usually in on the joke. She held love relationships, friendships, and being in a community of like- minded people in high regard. (Both Dada and Theosophy, radical at the time, were international movements.) She rarely left a letter unanswered or a visitor unentertained. The question here is how did she achieve her equilibrium? What were the secrets of which many people spoke? The secret may lie in her body: in her body knowledge, in gnosis. In Morris Berman’s radical and unconventional work Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (1989)3 we can glean some insight. Berman's book, a critique of the mind/body rift, lays out the cultural dilemma of this gap which comes, he says, from the fixity of binary thinking. Berman rewrites western history from the vantage point of the human body, investigating several gnostic heresies, responses to what he calls “the basic fault,” the shift from the kinesthetic to the

178 visual. He explores the hidden history of somatic experience, showing how Christianity had its origin in certain Jewish ascent (body) techniques, how the idea of romantic love grew out of a medieval French Christian heresy, how modern science arose from Renaissance mysticism and magic (paying close attention to Giordano Bruno), and how Nazism was the most recent instance of a repeating cycle of orthodoxy and heresy. (He warns of potential repetitions.) The first three of these discussions are particularly germane to decided interests of Beatrice Wood: somatic practice to experience God presence; Romantic love as a blessing and a curse; and magic/science (and love) in the “heretical” life of Bruno/Besant were compelling issues for her. They may not all have been obvious in her life and work yet they were the substrate. Berman lays out a chart early in his book that elucidates much of the previous discussion in this dissertation. If this material seems added late to the discussion, I would assert that these observations have been the hidden ground of my attempt to present “the secrets” of Beatrice Wood. Induction is a better approach here. Berman says that the kinesthetic precedes the visual, and while Wood said that she was born “eye-minded” in the practice of her life she remembered the kinesthetic. Her training in acting and dance were mostly somatic in import; love making for her, she said often, was a sensual and ecstatic experience; theosophy attempts to root the practitioner strongly in the body and present moment. Her hidden media consisted of dancing throughout her life; acting, that is performing her daily drama, sometimes tragedy but increasingly comedy; and, as a skilled raconteur, story-telling in an attempt to touch memory (and other people). As Berman says: Heretical practice is first and foremost a body practice; its emphasis is always on essence as opposed to form. The essence/form distinction is, of course, a manifestation of the deeper kinesthetic/visual split. . .All the following pairs are variations of the distinction between spirituality and religion, God-realization and dogma:

Essence Form Love/sex Marriage Learning School Health Hospital Creativity Academy/genre

179 Motivation Career Social relations Government Friendship Club/organization Playfulness Entertainment

In the heretical worldview, the items on the right arise when the items on the left fail. As Lao-tzu says somewhere in the Tao Te Ching, ‘Law’ and ‘Justice’ become important when love and trust have collapsed (141).

Clearly, Beatrice Wood tried to stay to the left. Berman also does an analysis of creativity in light of his project, hoping that what he calls horizontal consciousness and reflexivity will bring about “the transformation of the creative act itself into something else” (328). As he says: Horizontal consciousness, as well as reflexivity, also implies a society of tools rather than worldviews. The minute anything–science, feminism, Buddhism, holism, whatever– starts to take on the characteristics of a cosmology, it should be discarded. How things are held in the mind is infinitely more important that what is in the mind, including this statement itself. For there is a big difference between ideas and ideology. An idea is something you have; and ideology, something that has you. All of these beliefs, techniques, and ideologies are useful; but they are not “true” What is true is our need to stuff the gap, our longing, our drive to create worldviews out of tools so we can be “safe.”. . .In this new culture we would observe this need for “safety,” but would refuse to give into it. Safety would come from the body, not from this or that system (312).

Wood had strong liberal or progressive views on many political issues, but at the core of those views was a statement she repeated increasingly often as she aged: Violence only brings more violence. It was her understanding of the interconnectedness of all life and her love for that life that inspired her. She engaged, however, in little overt political action, preferring to make her views known through some of her “sophisticated primitives,” letter writing, and engaging with people. One of her quotes which has now been placed on the Internet: "You can't change the world. You can only change yourself" (“Women Past and Present: Incredible Quotations.” 27 Dec. 1998. Online posting). How can Wood be categorized? Was she Romantic, Victorian, Modernist or even Post-modern? Was she an artist or craftsperson? She described herself as “just a little artist.” Certainly that describes her physical stature and reveals her humility and shock

180 that she was still around. She said that sometimes she thought she was about to die and then would get an idea for another pot she wished to make and rally. Perhaps Beatrice Wood did, indeed, have the last laugh: it is impossible perhaps to separate out her celebrity at the end of her life from the anomalies of her advanced age and increasingly productive output of astounding work. It was principally out of her sense of humor, verging toward the absurd, and her honesty, especially with herself, grounded in body knowledge that kept her moving and making a sweet end. For years she had told interviewers, half jokingly, that she wanted three words on her tombstone: Three sentences. The first is “now,” because I think it’s in the present as we’re focused that things happen. The second is “shit,” because nothing really matters with time whether I’m known or not. Nothing matters with time. And the third thing is, “I don’t know,” because none of us really know anything. This is my tombstone. This is how I wish to be remembered (Karlstrom, 1992, 43).

181 APPENDIX

TORCH IN THE SKY

A Play about Giordano Bruno

By Beatrice Wood

182 ACT ONE Scene one

Gregorian chant interspersed throughout. Giordano Bruno, bare from the waist up, sprawled facedown in prayer before a candlelit altar. Cardinal Bellarmine, in billowing ceremonial red robe, conducts Bruno's ordination. BELLARMINE: ...And know ye, Giordano Bruno, whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For that which is perfect is come, and that which is in part shall be done away, and in parting thou shalt be whole; thou, one with God, never again apart. So shall it be. (beginning vow) "I, Giordano Bruno..." BRUNO: I, Giordano Bruno, do promise obedience to the Church, and remove myself from all earthly affects... BELLARMINE: O Lord Jesus Christ, who, taking upon Thee human nature for our salvation, didst vouchsafe to put on the clothing of our flesh, pour out, we beseech Thee, Thy holy blessing upon this Thy servant, who we have clothed in the garments of penance. (beginning vow) 'I, Giordano Bruno...' BRUNO: I, Giordano Bruno, pledge obedience to Our Holy Father, to fear God and keep his Commandments... BELLARMINE: For this is the whole duty of man... BRUNO: For this is the whole duty of man. BELLARMINE: For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil... FADE TO:

Sixteen years later. Cardinal Bellarmine, in flowing red robes, and his entourage ceremoniously march through a cloister, and once there, Bellarmine leaves the parade to enter his private chambers. An obsequious monk brings food and wine, attends briefly, as Bellarmine unbuttons his cassock.

MONK. Are we changing now, Your Eminence? BELLARMINE. Wait a while... MONK. There are oranges and an apple... BELLARMINE. Vinegar and a sponge for my friend? MONK. (missing it) You- say something, sir?

183 (Bellarmine hands over his cassock) MONK. A lovely sermon, Your Eminence. Life's metaphors... 'God is a metaphor for Life.' This was clever. An ongoing inspiration. I think they understood you... BELLARMINE. Bring another chair... MONK. (surprise) A chair, yes... (turning to go) Fra Bruno is waiting outside, Your Eminence... (when he gets no answer:) Shall I inform the council of your decision? (another beat) Your Eminence? (another beat) Will the Inquisition convene? BELLARMINE. (waving the monk away) Let him come in. (Bruno enters, prostrates himself before Bellarmine) BELLARMINE. Get up. You're no longer a monk. BRUNO. (Getting to his feet) My return to Italy after so many years should've been proof of my faith - BELLARMINE. It proves nothing. Sixteen years you were in flight from the Church, excommunicated... There's proof enough in that. BRUNO. Only that I returned in the interests of Truth... BELLARMINE. Did you really? (Bruno doesn't respond) You've led us on a merry chase... (gestures to the table) Have some wine. Please do... Have an apple, then. (Bruno demurs; Bellarmine sits, regards him) Well... You were brilliant. People came to you from all over Europe, and you abused your privilege. I'll tell you... people looked to you as a way out, not a way in.. and that has damaged Us. Had you turned away from Us already at the monastery...? BRUNO. I never turned away... Not now, not then. BELLARMINE. What did you think? The Inquisition would never touch Giordano Bruno?! (The lights dissolve to:) A reception room in a monastery. In an alcove upstage, two MONKS work at a PRINTING PRESS. On each side of the walls are small statutes of saints. The door on stage right leads into a chapel, on stage left, into the garden. A procession of chanting monks passes, enroute to the chapel. FRA SERAFINO. I'm weary of musty books. Much better, the strong scent of earth that makes me glow all over with the thrill of spring. FRA DOMINICO. Pay attention to your duty and you'll grow to love the parchment rolls. Nowhere can one find as many ancient manuscripts as here. FRA SERAFINO. If only I could go to town... FRA DOMINICO. You'll soon get over that. It's a great thing to belong to the Church. Only here can one find learning -the best minds of Italy are Holy Fathers. FRA SERAFINO. Yes, yes... here we are... growing pious on the juice of purple grapes. FRA DOMINICO. Here, we have peace -

184 FRA SERAFINO. Tiresome old thing. It's two weeks now since I've been to town. The sight o£ a maiden quickens my blood. FRA DOMINICO. Mine, too. Only then can I say the mass. FRA SERAFINO. Is the press fixed?

FRA DOMINICO. There was nothing wrong with it.

FRA SERAFINO. Did you find out where Fra Giordano had his latest pamphlet printed?

FRA DOMINICO. I can assure you it was not here.

FRA SERAFINO. I'm told he pokes fun at the monks in it. The Prior is furious.

FRA DOMINICO. And should be.

FRA SERAFINO. Oh, Giordano hardly means half of what he says. He believes in God - - but it is his own God.

FRA DOMINICO. He would speak another tale, stretched upon the rack.

FRA SERAFINO. (suddenly remembering) We have a visitor in the garden.

FRA DOMINICO. Another woman to the secret chamber?

FRA SERAFINO. Ssh! A Protestant has arrived..

FRA DOMINICO. Tell me, for god's sake. My lunch is cold.

FRA SERAFINO. Sir Philip Sydney from Queen Elizabeth's court. (makes a funny face and the sign of the cross) What is he doing in Italy?

FRA DOMINICO. The Pope had the Queen excommunicated because she crossed him about the Gospels.

FRA SERAFINO. Grace of God, a virgin! What can you expect? Show me a country that can be run without a man!

FRA DOMINICO. I heard she has a will like a Pope with his hat on backwards. I wouldn't lie down with an English woman.

FRA SERAFINO. I pray St. Francis sends me a young woman instead of a wise one. It's a sacrilege for women to have brains. Back to the press! The nobleman will be here shortly.

(A knock at the door. Serafino looks through the opening in the door)

185 FRA SERAFINO. The devil must've heard me!

FRA DOMINICO. I'm busy! Open it! (Serafino pulls the door open. An innocent-looking girl of about eighteen enters.)

FRA SERAFINO. (bowing low) The blessing of God be with you.

MARIE ANNE. (crossing herself) Thank you, father. I've come to speak with Fra Giordano. Would you tell him I'm here? FRA SERAFINO. You don't mean Fra Giordano Bruno, the Nolan? MARIE ANNE. Yes, Father. FRA DOMINICO. (to Fra Serafino) Virgin Mary, I never guessed he had a girl! The heretic has fooled us! FRA SERAFINO. I like his taste in women. FRA DOMINICO. Go find him. FRA SERAFINO. (approaches Marie Anne) I doubt whether he is here at present. He's usually gazing out at space. You've seen him in the hills...? He likes to say he finds God in the trees! MARIE ANNE. Could someone tell him I'm here?

FRA SERAFINO. I'll see what I can do. Be seated, child. MARIE ANNE. Thank you, Father. (she touches the hem of his frock, crosses herself, sits down and begins telling her beads. FRA SERAFINO exits.) FRA DOMINICO. (to SERAFINO) What's she got to do with him? And he says he's a man of God...! FRA SERAFINO. Her mouth is as red as a poppy in the dew. FRA DOMINICO. I'd like to hear her little shoulders crackle under me. FRA SERAFINO. He must be her first lover... Why else would she have him? FRA DOMINICO. Probably wears her out with talk. Oh! I've splashed a drop of red on the parchment. FRA SERAFINO. It's an omen! FRA DOMINICO. (rubbing it furiously) Water may take it out...

(Enter Father Anselm and Sir Philip Sidney.)

186 FATHER ANSELM. (an older, kindly monk) This room, Sir Philip, is where, for ages, the ancient books have been copied that made Italy so famous. (Mocenigo enters opposite.) FATHER ANSELM. Sir Philip, this is Zuane Mocenigo, our most important benefactor.

SIR PHILIP.(bowing) You've a great deal to be proud of.

MOCENIGO. Have I? (beat) What for?

SIR PHILIP. Your monastery has become quite famous in London.

MOCENIGO. Famous? That's good to hear. (beat) Why? (exits) FATHER ANSELM. (back to Philip) You probably mean the two of our brethren have won fame for their manuscripts. Fra Dominico and Fra Serafino, the renowned Sir Philip Sydney of England. FRA DOMINICO. It's a very great pleasure, indeed, to be honored by your visit. Perhaps you'd like to see more of our library?

SIR PHILIP. I didn't come so much to glance at your exquisite manuscripts, but to meet one of your order who is arousing a great deal of curiosity throughout Europe. FATHER ANSELM. My lord, we rejoice that you should find such a one amongst us. FRA DOMINICO. Must be Fra Mario. He's the most learned theologian of us all. SIR PHILIP. No, it's a young monk... Fra Giordano Bruno. FRA SERAFINO. Fra Giordano! FRA DOMINICO. My lord, isn't there some mistake? Fra Angelico is esteemed the most brilliant of our order. SIR PHILIP. And I acknowledge his erudition, but today I'm interested in the recently published works of this young man, whose words have shone like a beacon light to darkened Europe. His magic memory system and the formation of a Magus, the worship of "God in things", the transformation of souls -- it's all wonderful, mysterious! FRA DOMINICO: A Magus! FATHER ANSELM. You astonish me, Sir Philip, but I am pleased. Fra Giordano is my youngest pupil. Fra Serafino, will you fetch him? FRA ANSELM. While awaiting my young brother, may I show you the old manuscripts in our chapel. SIR PHILIP. By all means. (They exit.) FRA SERAFINO. (aside to Dominico, chuckling) A nobleman calling on the heretic! This comes from being a Protestant. He knows nothing of what he speaks.

187 FRA DOMINICO. The Prior wouldn't tolerate him were it not for the Court of England. FRA SERAFINO. Elizabeth is powerful, God bless her pious soul -- and help her to become Catholic! FRA DOMINICO. Sir Philip will soon find out what high-sounding nonsense Bruno preaches... (Bruno enters, with papers in hand) FRA DOMINICO. ...He pollutes the peace of holy places. I know scores of men, scores, yet he doesn't speak like one of them.

BRUNO. Though a thousand men think on a subject, brother, yet if they know nothing of that subject, their opinion is of little value. FRA DOMINICO (muttering to Serafino). See? Just as I said. FRA SERAFINO (to Bruno) There's a young woman to see you. (leads Marie to Bruno) BRUNO. (surprised) My child, what brings you here? MARIE ANNE. I had to speak to you. Your mother and I have quarreled. BRUNO. Wait a moment, Marie, so we can speak alone. The monks will be leaving soon... (Marie waits, apart; Bruno returns to the Monks) FRA SERAFINO. (whispering) You're a sly one. You, with a nice young girl... FRA DOMINICO. We're just beginning to find out about you... BRUNO. You know very little about me -- nor anything else for that matter. FRA DOMINICO. We know Greek, Latin, Aristotle -- what else would you have us learn? BRUNO. A Truth that's found by investigation, not by dogmatizing.

(Father Anselm and Sir Philip enter)

FATHER ANSELM. Fra Giordano, a distinguished visitor -- Sir Philip Sydney- SIR PHILIP. I've come a long way to meet you. All England is excited about your theory of the transmutation of souls. FRA DOMINICO. Transmutation of souls! Get me my beads! FRA SERAFINO. All we need to know is in the Holy Books - BRUNO. An new world lies beyond book covers. Rub the ink off your noses - FATHER ANSELM. (intervening) Sir Philip, many of us in the Church stand amazed at modern thinking. SIR PHILIP. It is indeed the dawn of a modern age. A revolution of thought --

188

FRA SERAFINO. I'd say the old thoughts are just as good.

BRUNO. There are still some who prefer to discourage freedom of thought - FRA DOMINICO. It isn't very wise to encourage people to think beyond the things they already know. You confuse them. It's enough to know the common Good. BRUNO. Why then, are some men so good they're good for nothing? FRA DOMINICO. (looking around) Is that directed at me? BRUNO. Isn't it true, the only things you consider good are the things you understand? FRA DOMINICO. I'm not embarrassed to say so. BRUNO. Then the things you don't understand, you consider evil? FRA DOMINICO. What can't be understood, must be. BRUNO. Then how do you judge it evil? Because you don't understand it? FRA DOMINICO. What's he saying now? Not judge evil? He's twisting my words -- Keep it up, think what you like. It'll get you in trouble.

(The SOUND of CHANTING. The brothers leave. Father Anselm comes up to Sir Philip.) FATHER ANSELM. Will you join us in the garden? BRUNO. I'll take him there presently. I'd like to speak to Sir Philip first. (Father Anselm nods, exits. Sir Philip waits until he is alone with Bruno:) SIR PHILIP. I don't think you realize what a fuss you've caused in Europe. Your books have truly lit a fire in England. BRUNO. And your visit honors me. I have a great deal to tell you.

SIR PHILIP. It must wait -- It's more serious than I thought. I have important information for you. The Inquisition is close by.

BRUNO. This isn't new... SIR PHILIP. They've turned their attention to you.

BRUNO. I've been warned twice about my writing... There's nothing in it. A formality; it's the stamp they put on everything. SIR PHILIP. Be warned. They're stung by your writing. You're not safe here... Come to England with me. There's tolerance in Elizabeth's court. Our universities would be honored by your visit. No one man is strong enough to withstand these superstitious times. Come to England! BRUNO. And exile? This is my home. I only know life here.

189 SIR PHILIP. You can't work from prison. BRUNO. I belong with the Church, which protects me. SIR PHILIP. Does it really? The same Church that denies your every idea? BRUNO. It's true they're slow to change - SIR PHILIP. Slow! BRUNO. If the Pope can just read one of my essays - SIR PHILIP. The Pope! This is pure folly! They mean to kill you! BRUNO. I need more time. SIR PHILIP. You haven't got any time left. BRUNO. Wait a moment... (Bruno crosses to Marie Anne, who has been sitting apart, out of hearing) BRUNO. Marie... I need to spend a few more minutes with our visitor. MARIE ANNE. It's play to rest here gently, not like home. Your mother haggles me till I'm ready to scream. (Exit Bruno and Sir Philip. The Chanting grows louder. Three monks pass through the room. One remains behind to stare at Marie Anne, who ignores him.) FRA DOMINICO. (Curious, but hesitant) Dio Gratios. MARIE ANNE. (crossing herself) Immaculate. FRA DOMINICO. A vivid day outside... The lark was singing fiercely. (Marie nods) Did you hear him? (Marie shrugs, no). No? The spring flowers have bloomed under the sunshine and rain. (Marie continues to ignore him, and he moves around, wondering what it will take to attract her attention.) Is there anything I can get you? A copy of the epistles? (Marie shrugs, no) You've been waiting so long. Haven't I seen you somewhere else? Weren't you at the Holy Communion yesterday? MARIE ANNE. No, Father. FRA DOMINICO. You have a look about you -- I'm sure I've seen you somewhere. MARIE ANNE. (demurely) Perhaps in the face of another girl. I live outside town with Fra Giordano's mother. I'm her niece. FRA DOMINICO. Her niece... Hmm... There is something more about your eyes. Come, surely we've met. MARIE ANNE. You might've seen me walking in the hills with Fra Giordano. FRA DOMINICO. With your uncle. MARIE ANNE. Yes. No, we're distant relatives... FRA DOMINICO. Hmm. So, you've known the heretic for some time.

190 MARIE ANNE. He's not a heretic!

(Enter Fra Serafino, chiding Fra Dominico) FRA SERAFINO. Off with you, brother! Weren't you the one who said the statue of St. Peter wants new candles?

(Fra Dominico exits) (Lights up on the 'present'. Bruno and Bellarmine in Bellarmine's private chamber. Bellarmine pulls out several cassocks, undecided about what to wear.)

BELLARMINE. Have some fruit. What a mess you are.

BRUNO. I haven't eaten.

BELLARMINE. Don't they feed you in prison?

BRUNO. I think you have an idea what they do.

BELLARMINE. You've brought it on yourself, my son...

BRUNO. You want me to retract, actually.

BELLARMINE. It's puzzled me, why you didn't leave with Sir Philip Sydney when he invited you... Bewildered me, actually. Something held you back... You knew, of course, that We were displeased. BRUNO. You took my vows. I had to come back. My obligations were to the Church. BELLARMINE. A Church that you despised in yourself... BRUNO. A Church in need of reform - BELLARMINE. You had better need of reform than I. BRUNO. I've simply suggested we might each have an identity separate from the Church. Through me, through us, the Church can be reformed. - BELLARMINE. It's a dangerous idea. Have to admit I almost like it. BRUNO. You're not completely accepting... BELLARMINE. You should've stayed in England. Why didn't you? BRUNO. My duty in faith. BELLARMINE. You see your duty destructively, individually. BRUNO. I had no impulse to look outside myself for the Truth.

191 BELLARMINE. A kind of blindness, surely... Did you think of anyone else besides yourself? BRUNO. Insight, it's called... I looked within. BELLARMINE. And you found what? Did you find God? Did you find a cure for loneliness? Did you find love? I think not... You weren't even aware of it, were you? Were you? (Bruno stares at him.) BELLARMINE. (suddenly realizing) Love. That's why you fled... (Bruno is silent)

(Back to the Monastery, sixteen years before. Fra Serafino hovers over Marie Anne ingratiatingly.) FRA SERAFINO. Your friend hardly fears to keep you waiting. If I were you, I would resent his absent-mindedness. MARIE ANNE. I don't mind waiting for him, Reverend Father.

FATHER SERAFINO. Why aren't you in the hills today? MARIE ANNE. The hills? FATHER SERAFINO. Come... doesn't your blood beat wildly for a walk? MARIE ANNE. What? No. I have to wait here for Giordano. FRA SERAFINO. Speak with him another time -- Now, the sun is shining -- we hardly ever see it break through the clouds. (Bruno enters) Madonna! No doubt he'll lecture you on the configuration of the earth. (As he leaves) What a way to speak to a girl! (Exits) BRUNO. Marie Anne, I'm sorry for keeping you waiting so long. I'm just so busy... MARIE ANNE. Yes, I think you are... BRUNO. You said you had to talk to me? MARIE ANNE. Your mother is making herself ill with worry about you. BRUNO. I saw her a week ago -- I had no idea she was worried... MARIE ANNE. You didn't notice, did you... She prays for you continually. There are so many awful rumors. She trembles every time Rome is mentioned Why did you become a monk, Giordano? BRUNO. You didn't come to ask me about that...? MARIE ANNE. No, well, yes... I don't know how to tell you... But I am completely in love, with all my heart - BRUNO. And that's wrong?

192 MARIE ANNE. Your mother says it's wicked. BRUNO. Wicked to love?! MARIE ANNE. And now she's making me marry someone I don't love. BRUNO. Do you want me to have a word with her? Will that help? (Bruno senses Marie Anne's impatience) BRUNO. I'm trying to understand... Of course, this isn't like her. She's getting old. Maybe she's misunderstood you, but she means well. I'm not the one to tell you about affairs of the heart but if you love him, that's a situation only you can solve for yourself. The Lord blesses true love between human beings: there's no sin in that, certainly. But what we often call love is something else. MARIE ANNE. What do you mean? I love him. I know what love is... BRUNO. No, you're fighting me on this, I can see... It just caught me by surprise. You never mentioned him before this. MARIE ANNE. How could I? BRUNO. Who is he? You don't have to tell me... MARIE ANNE. (low) You know him... BRUNO. (surprised) I do? MARIE ANNE. Listen to me... BRUNO. Someone from the village? The baker? MARIE ANNE. Listen to me. You've said all that matters is truth and love... BRUNO. Sorry, it just startles me... how grown up you suddenly are. Of course a man would be interested. This should be a joyful occasion. But you're as close as a sister to me -- I never saw you interested in any man. (Marie Anne suddenly grabs Bruno and kisses him passionately.) BRUNO. My God... ! MARIE ANNE. And what's wrong with that?! I've loved you ever since I was a little girl -- ever since my mother died and I came to live in your house. BRUNO. (firmly) Marie... MARIE ANNE. You make me feel so near to God. BRUNO. You can't know what you are saying. I'm a monk! MARIE ANNE. What difference does that make? Look at the other monks! Are they different from other men?! I'm sick of hearing this, this dedication! What about you life!? What about me?!

193 (Marie-Anne clutches Bruno, who recoils) BRUNO. No, Marie. As long as I live, there won't be anyone dearer to me than you. That my secret heart will admit.

MARIE ANNE. Words! Empty words! Emptiness! Show me your speechless heart! Show me that! BRUNO. I mean it, Marie -- the love of one has become the love of many. I love the light on the cloud, the flight of the singing bird, the wind as it murmurs softly to the flowers, the trees as they lift their hands to God. These are the things that I love. MARIE ANNE. You can love those things... and me, too. BRUNO. My mother's right. You should marry someone else. Don't go through life alone -- That's not your path. I want you to know happiness. MARIE ANNE. If you can't marry me, I'll come to you outside of marriage. BRUNO. With true love in the highest sense between people, there can never be separation. MARIE ANNE. You're hiding behind theories --! I don't want your 'true love'. I want real love between two people - BRUNO. Marie-Anne, I've pledged myself to a jealous God -philosophy. MARIE ANNE. Philosophy ! We love each other! Can't you see?! Deny that you love me! Can you deny that you want me? Please! (Chanting is heard outside) BRUNO. (turning away) I can't talk about this any longer. Come back in an hour. MARIE ANNE. Don't leave me! (Bruno turns, looks at her) BRUNO. Come back in an hour. We'll walk to the hills. Perhaps God will bring comfort to our problems. (He kisses her on the forehead) You are very, very dear to me. When you return, I want you to tell me about the man mother wants you to marry. MARIE ANNE. (miserable) I'm not in love with him.

(Lights up on Bellarmine in his chamber, who speaks across the stage to Bruno)

BELLARMINE. Scared of your own shadow, weren't you? BRUNO. There were certain feelings, events, certain facts I didn't see clearly at the time.

BELLARMINE. Indeed you didn't... BRUNO. I had to go to London. Couldn't have done it here -the pressing issues -

194 BELLARMINE. Your 'great ideas'? Pledged to a jealous god, were you? BRUNO. Was I expected to give it all up --? BELLARMINE. The Church embraces sacrifice, selflessness... Wasn't it ego? The girl, for instance. Why did you leave her behind? You were attracted to her, weren't you...? Just a little bit? And now you've come back. To Us. To her. It was all ego, you can say it now... BRUNO. It's not true. BELLARMINE. You never should've been a monk. An academic, perhaps... But never a monk.

(Lights down, then up on Marie-Anne, as Father Anselm enters)

FATHER ANSELM. Leave us now, my child. Go with the protection of the Virgin, of God and the Holy Ghost. (Marie Anne crosses herself) MARIE ANNE Goodbye, Reverend Father. Goodbye, Giordano, I will come back for you shortly. (she exits) BRUNO. Where is Sir Sydney --? FATHER ANSELM: Giordano, come with me! All the foolish things you've been saying have been whispered to the Prior's ears. BRUNO. Fear nothing, Father -- I'm not afraid. FATHER ANSELM. Now, listen, Giordano. You are young and headstrong, but your courage will not avail you here. The Holy Inquisition has arguments I would loath see applied to my favorite pupil. BRUNO. The Church strangles every liberal thought - FATHER ANSELM. Enough of that! Not even the thought of death will put a stop to your rash tongue! You disappoint me... You're running from the saintly authority of the Church- BRUNO. Dear Father, the soul of man must soar -- you can't tie it down with orthodoxy –

FATHER ANSELM. I don't agree with everything the Inquisition does, but it is trying to bring law into the world.

BRUNO. It canonizes ignorance. FATHER ANSELM. You can't question all the traditions of Rome. Stick to what's found in the Bible. Leave it at that. I can't understand this talk of the Earth moving in space -- such views have nothing of moderation -- if that were so, where would Hell be? BRUNO. (laughing) Exactly! Of course, there is no Hell, save that of the soul's degradation. Why trouble ourselves with Satanic geography? FATHER ANSELM. Why, indeed? Explain how our blessed Lord could ascend to

195 Heaven from a whirling globe? BRUNO. He withdrew from the lower consciousness into the higher, which is of heaven and about us all the time. We have it within ourselves to transcend - FATHER ANSELM. (sternly) My son, this has the mark of heresy. Read your breviary. Chant your offices. (A bell rings. Cries are heard. A priest comes rushing in) FRA DOMINICO. (beside himself) Father Anselm! A mouse has just been caught eating the Holy Sacrament! FATHER ANSELM. What are you talking about?! FRA DOMINICO. God help us! Shall we kill him...? FATHER ANSELM. Good lord! I shouldn't - FRA DOMINICO. Or worship him? BRUNO. By all means, worship it. Teach it the sacred names. Why not dress it in cassocks and give it a rosary! FRA ANSELM. My son, careful, you blaspheme - BRUNO. It enrages me. (Other monks come rushing in.) FRA SERAFINO. Sacrilege! The mouse has eaten the entire Holy Sacrament! BRUNO. Is there none left? FRA ANSELM. (to Bruno) Take care... FRA SERAFINO. It has within itself the Body of our Lord.

BRUNO. Pure superstition! This is nothing but Holy ignorance and idolatry! Bow down to a mouse and, next, it will be a calf, or a tree. Go meditate with your folded hands on your bloated belly. Perhaps the Angel Raphael will descend from his lofty abode and knock some sense into you. FRA SERAFINO. (sternly) It's a desecration, that much I know. BRUNO. (laughs) You know nothing. FRA DOMINICO. Has it happened before? Not to my knowledge. FRA SERAFINO. The Pope will have to be informed. BRUNO. Well, then... (Taking charge) Shouldn't we sit in judgment first? (The monks exchange uncertain looks) FRA SERAFINO. What kind of judgment? BRUNO. Hold court about the mouse_

196 FRA SERAFINO. Well... Shouldn't we? FRA DOMINICO. When it comes to the Holy Sacrament - BRUNO. Tell me first, this is important, too: which holds the first rank, a man who has become a donkey, or a donkey who has become a man? FRA SERAFINO. Seriously? FRA DOMINICO. (to Bruno) You've got a way of twisting words... FRA SERAFINO. What was the question? BRUNO. Aren't you rather ridiculous with your fears? True religion is abandoned amongst you. FRA SERAFINO. That's heresy. FRA DOMINICO. You really are the devil... FATHER ANSELM. (to Bruno) Better restrain yourself, my son. BRUNO. All right. But who has the Word to save the skin of a mouse?

FRA SERAFINO. Shouldn't we keep it for the people to revere? BRUNO. Revere? A mouse? FRA SERAFINO. A mouse with the Body of our Lord in it, yes... BRUNO. Let me just get the mouse -- (the monks angrily block his path) (Prior enters.) PRIOR. What's all this fuss about? FRA SERAFINO. Father, a most astounding thing has taken place! FRA DOMINICO. This isn't good - BRUNO.(pushing away the monks) Nor anything to speak of... PRIOR. All right, all right -- tell me. FRA DOMINICO. Our holy altar has been desecrated. PRIOR. Desecrated? How? FRA SERAFINO. A most extraordinary - BRUNO. An ordinary mouse has been in the chapel. FRA DOMINICO. Reverend Father, we were just now praying. Before we could do anything about it, a mouse ran across the altar and swallowed the holy wafer. FRA SERAFINO. Fra Curio caught it. FRA DOMINICO. Is it right we should kill the mouse for swallowing the wafer -- ?

197 FRA SERAFINO. Or has it become holy! BRUNO. Only if it preaches... PRIOR. You easily dismiss this - FRA SERAFINO. He laughs at us. FRA DOMINICO. And possibly the forewarning of a miracle. FRA SERAFINO. A miracle, yes, it could be. BRUNO. A miracle of the animal kingdom taking orders! Why not ordain the mouse and settle it that way? (he laughs) PRIOR. That's enough. Go now and chant your offices. (All exit except Prior, Father Anselm, who turn when a monk comes up, followed by a dandified, oily nobleman and financial backer of the Priory, MOCENIGO.) FRA SERAFINO. Signor Mocenigo...

PRIOR. (acknowledging him) Mocenigo... We've missed you lately... (Mocenigo kisses the Prior's ring) MOCENIGO. Have I interrupted a miracle? Or perhaps, a heresy? PRIOR. Fra Giordano's got a warped desire to think for himself. MOCENIGO. Is it miraculous...?. PRIOR. Is it what? MOCENIGO. The mouse - PRIOR. Ah! Something must be done about it. But first, I would talk to you about the new cloister you've promised us.. MOCENIGO. And your private chambers... PRIOR. Yes, and my chambers - (Father Anselm, interrupts, takes Bruno aside) FATHER ANSELM. You were wrong to make fun of the mouse. Who are we to say it hasn't become the channel of spiritual force? BRUNO. Who are they to say it has? FATHER ANSELM. (worried) You haven't turned against the Church? BRUNO. Of course not. FATHER ANSELM. The Church teaches "believe and ye shall be saved"! BRUNO. And I cry out to the heavens: "Doubt and ye shall know!"

198 PRIOR. This goes against the Church. BRUNO. As a good Catholic, I do not. But as a philosopher, I do. As Pythagoras said, the soul is not a body, but a life that passes on from form to form. FATHER ANSELM. Be silent, my son. PRIOR. This is dangerous talk... MOCENIGO. I stick to Aristotle, myself. BRUNO. And what do you do with him? MOCENIGO. You don't approve of Aristotle? BRUNO. Less to approve and more to disprove. FATHER ANSELM. You've said enough... BRUNO. Posit a finite world like Aristotle's, and we would have to have a Void, for the space in which we find our world would without it be itself a void, since where the world is not, we can only infer a void. Thus, each of the innumerable worlds within is finite - (a beat) PRIOR. What dark sophistry is this -- ? BRUNO. Should we deny infinity simply because our sense perceptions cannot sensibly apprehend it? PRIOR. You've said far too much, Fra Giordano. Something really must be done now. Fra Anselm, come with me... MOCENIGO. (lingering behind) I'll join you presently... (Exit Prior, closely followed by concerned Father Anselm) MOCENIGO. I think you know a lot of things... more than other people. I have a great deal of money. Did you know that? Perhaps your knowledge comes from God, perhaps, the devil. Which is it, may I ask? (when Bruno fails to respond:) I sometimes feel that money comes from the devil. Never could prove it, just felt it. I simply have a need... to keep it coming. (laughs, pointedly:) Perhaps, a sort of devil-worship. You might be aware that I am building the new cloister. My donation, that is. I look forward to meeting you again to find out just what you are. Might be of some help to me. (he goes, then turns back) By the way, the Bishops are watching you... quite closely, I've heard. (Mocenigo exits) BRUNO. (coming downstage) Perhaps, so... but only I can really save them now... The Church must be reformed, re-considered from its beginnings. Only I can inform them of the Immortality of the Soul and the Five-Fold Sphere...

(Chanting and bells. Bruno goes to the printing press and prays.)

BRUNO. (fervently) Touch me, God! Make me a flame of fire! These blunderers would poke out my eyes if they could...

199 (Father Anselm rushes in)

FATHER ANSELM. Prior has summoned the Inquisition - BRUNO. What!?

FATHER ANSELM. You must leave - BRUNO. Dear Father, you alone have been my friend here - FATHER ANSELM. (pushing Bruno toward escape) Better to go now, my son -- Flee before they arrive!

(It has grown darker. Anselm lights a candle, prays in a corner, half-hidden by a post and shadows. Two monks enter, fail to see Anselm.)

FRA SERAFINO. Never seen such a day in all the time I've been here. FRA DOMINICO. I only wish it were midnight. A woman is waiting for me in Naples. FRA SERAFINO. A good thing the Prior is only strict with the Liturgies... FRA DOMINICO. Isn't beneath his dignity to chase the girls, either, is it - FRA SERAFINO. And he's pretty gallant with the married ones, too. The last girl he took moaned all night for her husband. (They laugh) FRA SERAFINO. The wives of heretics become brides of the Church, don't they? FRA DOMINICO. They do. Some say if a woman has a child by a monk, her soul is saved.

(A bell rings. Fra Dominico answers the door. Marie Anne hesitates, then steps inside.)

MARIE ANNE. Father, will you tell Fra Giordano that I'm back? FRA DOMINICO. If I can find him. He can get very busy at this hour. MARIE ANNE. He told me earlier he'd be free... FRA DOMINICO. Why do you want Giordano? Any one of us is nearer to God than he. FATHER ANSELM. (coming out of the shadows) Go, both of you, and do what the girl asks! Giordano should be in the chancellory... (Fra Dominico and Serafino exit) FATHER ANSELM (taking Marie-Anne by the arm) Go to the chapel, quick, and pray for our beloved friend. He's in great danger - MARIE-ANNE. Danger!?

200 FATHER ANSELM. Go to the chapel and hide -- I'll see if I can bring him to you. (He pushes her (Serafino re-enters) FRA SERAFINO. I can't find him. The scoundrel! We never know where he is or what he says - FATHER ANSELM.(nervously) Try his cell, then, and if not there, try Fra Raphael's. Mind, don't you miss him, nor come back without him. FRA SERAFINO. Where I ought to look is in the cellar, for that is where his thinking belongs. (exit)

(A noise is heard, bells ringing)

FRA DOMINICO. No sign of him anywhere. The girl will have to come back another day.

FATHER ANSELM (keeping Dominico away from the window) Have you looked in the library? Perhaps he is dreaming amongst his books? Or at the altar, where perhaps he went to say his Ave Maria...?

FRA DOMINICO. What's that awful racket?! Do we have more visitors?

FATHER ANSELM. Oh, Holy Virgin, protect him with thy celestial forgiveness!

(Enter the Prior, and Bellarmine in flowing red robes with two attendants, perhaps two choir boys, and several monks)

PRIOR. Where's Bruno? Isn't this where I left him? FRA DOMINICO. He's not in his cell...

BELLARMINE. I'm waiting. Patient. But not too patient.

PRIOR. (to Dominico) Go look again. (Serafino goes off) PRIOR. I regret keeping Your Excellency waiting. (to another monk) Look in the garden. Bring him here immediately. Go on!

FATHER ANSELM. He just came back from the garden -

201 PRIOR. You saw him? FATHER ANSELM. He isn't there. BELLARMINE. (testy, to Prior) He isn't there? PRIOR. We are bowed down with shame that one of our order should bring disgrace to the monastery. BELLARMINE. Doubtless... you all are. PRIOR. Yes, we had suspected - BELLARMINE. (wry) Had you? For how long? For some time we have been hearing profane sacrileges from your Bruno. Had you heard him say the soul goes from one body to another? PRIOR. Yes, Your Excellency. BELLARMINE. And what did you do? PRIOR. I - BELLARMINE. You heard him challenge the teachings of Aristotle? FATHER ANSELM. Not exactly challenge - PRIOR. What? That in itself is almost as heretical as challenging ceremonial scriptures. And now he proposes we ordain a mouse as Bishop? FATHER ANSELM. Surely, in jest - PRIOR. Silence, brother. (Fra Dominico rushes in) FRA DOMINICO. He's escaped! (going to the window) The brothers in the garden saw him climb down here. He ran out the gate - PRIOR. (appalled) You're certain?

BELLARMINE. Outrage! This, this -- I will not go back empty-handed to the Pope. PRIOR. (frightened) No... FRA DOMINICO. (tentative, with cunning) Just a minute... BELLARMINE. Yes? FRA DOMINICO. We might arrange... if you will... your excellency... so that you will not have to go back, as you say, empty-handed... to the Pope... PRIOR. What do you mean? BELLARMINE. He means well. FRA DOMINICO. By the forethought of God a friend of the heretic's is at the moment

202 praying in the chapel, waiting for his return. FATHER ANSELM. Be quiet - FRA SERAFINO (whispers). Clever... PRIOR. The will of God be done. I am his humble servant. FRA DOMINICO. The culprit has fled, but heaven offers you someone in his place. BELLARMINE. Who? FRA DOMINICO. His mistress. FATHER ANSELM. Silence - PRIOR. On the contrary - FATHER ANSELM. Please, Your Excellency, this is not true. She is an innocent girl and knows nothing of his beliefs... PRIOR. They'll hardly put her on the rack -- (to Bellarmine) Holy Father, would you see her? (to Anselm) Hold your tongue, this could be a way out for all of us. BELLARMINE. A bride for the Church. Bring her to me -- If she is young, it will not fare badly with her. (Monks hurry back to get Marie-Anne) BELLARMINE. As for the heretical young rebel, know ye, that in the Sacred Name of Jesus, he is herewith unfrocked, excommunicated from the Holy Church, and considered henceforth a heretic by all. Omus Apus Domini -- (Monks reply in Latin chant as the two other monks re-enter, dragging Marie-Anne between them) FRA DOMINICO. Behold the flower of innocence, Your Excellency. BELLARMINE. Hold her steady. (Marie-Anne is terror-stricken) Child, do you know what happens to the wives and mistresses of heretics? (Marie-Anne shakes her head) You will learn then at my house tonight. (Marie-Anne struggles to break free--) Good, you have the spirit of the devil in you - MARIE-ANNE. Help me, Giordano! BELLARMINE. Only God can help you now, my dear.

CURTAIN

203 ACT II

London. Several years later. A spot comes up on the BELLARMINE, center- stage.

BELLARMINE. Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus, magis elaborata Theologia Doctor... one fellow said it was a name longer than his body -- in short, he thought himself a great man. But I say any such hybrid is already a half-cracked intellectual... At Oxford, the professors had the opportunity to hear the great man's opinions on Copernican theory, that the earth did go round, that the heavens did stand still, whereas, we're also told, 'in truth it was his owne head which rather did run round, and his braines did not stand still'. He stood on the stage and ranted for some minutes, 'stripping up his sleeves like a juggler' and throwing different balls in the air -- "chentrum"!... "chirculus"... "circumferenchia" -- there was much debris in his opinion, and even more the opinions of others before him, which he had neatly stolen. How could I know this? Why, I am a juggler of sorts myself, and I know what it means to have all my balls in the air. Drop one, you might lose a toe. Drop two, you could lose your foot, and, in these times, three, you could lose your head.

(As Bellarmine recedes into the shadows, Bruno emerges from the shadows, apart) BRUNO. Yes, 'Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus', and yes, 'approved and honorably received philosopher, doctor of a more abstruse theology, noted in the best universities of Europe, professor of a more innocuous wisdom', the waker of sleeping souls, and stranger nowhere but amongst the barbarous, hated by the hypocritical and foolish, but sought out by the wise and honest, whose genius the more noble applaud...' (beat, addressing the audience) That, in a sentence, says it. Humility ends in anonymity... and so on... (beat) In truth, I get very depressed with my alone-ness. I touch this terrible darkness. All great teachers have made this damnable remark, "Man know thyself." But to face it, we're the villains. We're the ones who always want to change the world -- we, the vanquishers of presumptuous and persistent ignorance... (stops suddenly, turns to the audience:) Yet, do I perambulate...? BELLARMINE. (appearing on the scaffold, Bruno's shadowy dark angel). A little bit... The less they comprehend, the more they like. You're difficult to follow. BRUNO. Real change requires effort. BELLARMINE. A great deal too much of it, evidently. (As Bruno looks heavenward, the disk-like "figurae -Mentis, Intellectus, Amoris", begin to spin) BRUNO. I've been writing a book in answer to the claims against me. To present to Pope Clement VIII... a book that will turn a few heads in the Church - BELLARMINE. Or, perhaps remove one... BRUNO. (pressing on) Why, I ask in my book, has no one understood the Internal Power? He who sees in himself all things, is all things. Here, for instance... (he gestures toward a disk/image) An image of the universe must first be reflected in the soul. Blasphemy!, says the Church. Heresy!

204 BELLARMINE. (pondering; to himself) Heresy? I admit that's a handy catchword for us -- "heresy". An easy label. I use it myself. BRUNO. The best thing about the Church is that it produces heretics!

BELLARMINE. I'd have to let that one pass... BRUNO. Why am I so attacked? Laggards, niggardly pedants weighed down by their long velvety cassocks... Pox-ridden priests whose only education lies beneath their belts... A confusion of cutpurses, cheats' intrigues, rogues enterprises!... has singled out me. There's a spiritual rot in the Church, and I've come to cure it. BELLARMINE. Or disease it... BRUNO. (hearing Bellarmine) Oh, Lord, quiet my doubts... (beat, as Bruno catches his breath. The disks slow; he turns to us) BRUNO. In England, I argued with the famed Oxford doctors of theology. How wittily I countered their arguments. How rudely they received my public lecture on the immortality of the soul and the disposition of spheres... I will tell you... I am a lonely man. But did ever a happily married man have anything meaningful to say? (beat) Still, I do confess... I doubted myself in England. The Queen, it seemed, it really did seem... Indeed, she took a special liking to me... Impure thoughts overwhelmed me, confused me. If God is everywhere, why am I so alone? Where is the love faith promises me? The Queen professed she values me, a courtly love. This is just a spectacle of love, a kind of ribbon she flaunts where proof is needed. She has within her, though, this threat, a shadow of her losses. Can't help but be drawn to her... For I confess, too... am at a loss. BELLARMINE. Oh, go ahead and confess! BRUNO. The Spirit ran out of me. A Voice came to me: I was an argument without a home, a jestering exile from myself. It gnawed at me. Home, home to Italy, the Voice said. Was I there as Queen's entertainment? My bow was taut, my arrows targetless.

(The disks "figurae -- Mentis, Intellectus, Amoris" spin wildly, then fade...) FADE TO: A room in Elizabeth's palace. A dance troupe entertains the Queen, who enthusiastically joins in. As the dancers winds offstage, the Venetian Ambassador is announced. PAGE. Your Highness, the Venetian Ambassador is here. (exits) VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Your Majesty had a desire to speak with me? ELIZABETH. Yes, I do. In my kingdom, I pride myself a man may think as he will. And even the Queen, if she thinks it right, may marry as she will. And I'll be damned, but the Queen is beginning to think marriage is the only thing left for her to do. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Your Majesty would be a shining jewel whose brilliance would inflame the heart of any prince. ELIZABETH. I'm pleased that you go so warmly with me on this score.

205 VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. With your high character you only choose wisely. The Pope even says it publicly: you and he are the only two rulers capable of your tasks. ELIZABETH. Pretty speech. You please me. (pause) What then would you think, if at my age, I took a husband? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. That there would be one man luckier than all the rest. (Seizing an opportunity, confidentially) Lady, one of your subjects was caught red- handed plundering a church! ELIZABETH. Sir, I would have you know that this kingdom of mine is not so short of men but that there may not be a rogue or two amongst them. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. I had one particular rogue in mind, Your Highness... ELIZABETH. Did you? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Giordano Bruno. ELIZABETH. Hah... VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. You could persuade him to return to Italy, please the Pope. He's a heretic. ELIZABETH. Should I fear heretics...? Or Holy Men? My friends speak nothing but good of Bruno. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. The Inquisition knows better and would like Bruno within their reach. ELIZABETH. Yes, and every other thinking man. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Bruno's a coward. ELIZABETH. Is he? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. He uses women for his own ends. ELIZABETH. (interested) Does he really...? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. You mock me - ELIZABETH. I don't concern myself with the private lives of other people... VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. It's not a private tale. Everyone knows how he let a girl give herself to the Inquisition in order to save himself from the rack. ELIZABETH. Though you startle me, this sounds conniving to my ears. Bruno is a man who doesn't concern himself with matters outside his books. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. But Madam, what do you know of his youth? (beat) A woman trusted him once. He sold her to the Holy Fathers, and cunningly escaped here to England. ELIZABETH. That's a bold accusation. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Madam it's my concern to have Bruno back in Italy. Strengthen your cause with all Catholics and show him no more tolerance at your court.

206 ELIZABETH. Never, never have I permitted any evil done to a man over his faith. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Indeed, gracious lady, your liberality of heart is revered throughout the World. I am only here as a loyal friend to discharge my duties for the good of England - ELIZABETH. I think I know better than a Venetian what is good for England. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Then, Your Majesty knows the French King is not pleased with England's friendship with a heretic. ELIZABETH. Are you a loyal friend of the French King's, then, too? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. (pressing her) France, a Catholic country, is seeking alliance with England, a Protestant country. ELIZABETH. How do you know this? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. The brother of the King of France has made no secret that he would marry the Queen of England. ELIZABETH. Sir, my own bed is a cold one, but for no man would I change my faith -- or liberty of thought. No more plotting in my house!

(Venetian Ambassador exits) FADE TO: (Bellarmine's private chamber.)

BELLARMINE. This attraction women had for you, what's the mystery here? Look at you. You're pathetic. What does a woman see in it? And would you even notice? Why didn't you seduce her? BRUNO. The Queen? BELLARMINE. The Queen, the girl... What were you after? I'd be delighted if you'd tell me. It bothers me. All these squandered opportunities to love and be loved in return. BRUNO. God was my only opportunity. BELLARMINE. Why didn't you just smash your skull against a stone? Lord, but you're insufferable! I like you. Have some wine. (he pushes a cup on Bruno, makes him drink it) It's good wine. From the garden. Now, what was this about you seeing God in yourself? You don't think you're God, do you? You're not one of those? BRUNO. I meant we all had to search. BELLARMINE. Good, good. BRUNO. The Church can't provide it for us. BELLARMINE. (frowning, disapproving) Hmmm. BRUNO. Whence God as a whole is in all things. But an infinite universe has no boundaries, no center. Therefore, we on Earth are not the center of the universe.

207 BELLARMINE. (sing-song) I think that's Blasphemy...! BRUNO. No -- the truth. BELLARMINE. The truth is, the Church is at the center - BRUNO. We're at the center -- all of us at the center of surrounding space. Imagine yourself in a barrel. Only one of us fits inside, and as it begins to roll, everyone else has to find their own barrels, each rolling at different speeds, different times. All motion and all matter are the expressions of a Necessity which is an inward force, not an outward constraint. BELLARMINE. The Church provides that Necessity - BRUNO. Dogma -- it's only to be found within us. We've all got the innate right to follow the dictates of our own souls. Watch out for the priest who ranks either divine freedom or our own freedom as merely contingent and possible. What we're given by God is this: Universal cosmic free will. BELLARMINE: Have an apple. Picked from the cloister garden just this morning. BRUNO. No... thank you. BELLARMINE. I don't imagine you get much fruit in your cell... BRUNO. God preserves me. BELLARMINE. So he does. (beat) I'm thinking about your cosmic free will... BRUNO. And...? BELLARMINE. (gently) Aren't you forgetting something? BRUNO. Forgetting what? BELLARMINE. The rest of us. We may not want your cosmic free will. Better the All- Knowing, forgiving God who leads the way... Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. I prefer that, myself. BRUNO. But it isn't what's real. BELLARMINE. Will you now tell Us what's real? You really are an arrogant fool. BRUNO. I'd thought -- BELLARMINE. Yes, you thought... altogether too much - BRUNO. No, I'd thought you'd understood. FADE TO:

(Queen Elizabeth's Court. The Queen with French Ambassador de Mauvissiere)

ELIZABETH. Now Monsieur de Mauvissiere, what have you done with that God- intoxicated Italian of yours? You promised him for two o'clock. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I know he will come, your Majesty. He may be detained at Oxford. ELIZABETH. It excites me to discuss philosophy with a brain sharper than my own. . . like him.

208 FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Indeed, the months he has been a guest at my embassy, I've had nothing but admiration for his character. Except that he works too much. Often I hear him pacing the floor at night, reciting his incantations... Never seems to sleep.

ELIZABETH. Nor do I. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Dance, then! Let's do a few steps and forget there are such things as ministers of state! ELIZABETH. Monsieur. How cunning... You've guessed that I love dancing. Very well, I won't have it said that Elizabeth bows to any tyrant, even age. Take my hand. (They do a few steps together, the Queen leads forcefully. De Mauvissiere struggles to keep up with a pretense of grace) FRENCH AMBASSADOR. My lady's as light on her feet as a spider's web. ELIZABETH. A spider's bite makes a man light in the head. ELIZABETH. (Spinning de Mauvissiere away in mid-dance) Monsieur de Mauvissiere, excuse me. I need a word with Sir Philip. I'll join you presently -- perhaps with joyful news for your kingdom. (The French Ambassador bows, exits)

ELIZABETH. Now, my Philip, why the despairing look? SIR PHILIP. Your Majesty, I hold your honor more precious than my own. You have received, alas, another letter from France. ELIZABETH. Another! Give it to me! No reason to pull so long a face. Let me read the letter. I've a woman's curiosity and haste. (A glance at the letter) Ah, the Duke D'Anjou woos well and fast. Stand here by me. I want to talk to you as man to man, instead of Queen to subject. (folding the letter, weighing its contents) When a woman remains single, the world assumes there must be something wrong with her! There is no reason why my bed should be an empty one. This letter confirms what I've been anticipating. My mind is made up. (Takes a deep breath and announces.) I shall marry Anjou, brother of Henry III. He makes my cheeks flush as if I were a girl. What do you think of that? SIR PHILIP. Dear Lady, you cannot. He's twenty years your junior! ELIZABETH. Then he can keep up with me -- or restore my youth! SIR PHILIP. Madam, never before have I known you to think unwisely, nor heed the words of idle courtiers. ELIZABETH. Don't I have passions like anyone else? Am I not a woman, too? SIR PHILIP. A queen. A powerful, stately queen. Then, a woman. ELIZABETH. What if I'd like to have children?

SIR PHILIP. A worthy goal.

ELIZABETH. Then, why not Anjou?

209 SIR PHILIP. Because your subjects would be galled if you take a Frenchman and papist to bed. ELIZABETH. Rubbish! My subjects know too well, I revere only the Protestant faith. SIR PHILIP. I urge you -- take your mind off this alliance with Anjou -- As a boy, I witnessed the horror of St. Bartholomew's massacre. The Seine ran red with Protestant blood. ELIZABETH. Bruno has just come from France, and he tells me the French King is tolerant toward Protestants. SIR PHILIP. And then he fled France when he found the country transformed into a scaffold. ELIZABETH. Why is it I see through all my suitors? Celibacy exhausts me. SIR PHILIP. Didn't you swear you were married at your coronation? That England is your bridegroom? ELIZABETH. Where matters of state are concerned, yes. In private life, I have another nature to unveil. SIR PHILIP. Then, I'll speak more frankly. If you marry Anjou, you'll make yourself ridiculous, for the young Duke would soon have none of you. He'd be ashamed to have a wife as old as you. ELIZABETH. Still more rubbish! SIR PHILIP. Noble Lady, 'tis your royal kingdom more than yourself that is sought after. ELIZABETH. I'll quickly show you how mistaken you are -- Ask the Venetian Ambassador to come in. Now, there's a man who understands a woman's heart. SIR PHILIP. And knows how to twist it. He's an adventurer. You've said so yourself. You wouldn't heed him where your kingdom is concerned. I pray you, do not heed him about your bed. ELIZABETH. My bed is my concern. You may go. (Sir Philip Sydney EXITS) FADE TO:

(Back to Bellarmine's private chamber. A monk comes in to dress Bellarmine and comb his long hair. Bellarmine considers his choice of cassocks)

BELLARMINE. (to Bruno) I'd thought my ceremonial red, at first, then considered the everyday purple. Actually, it's up to you. BRUNO. To me? BELLARMINE. Why do you think I had you come to me? BRUNO. (confused) Well... to hear the Truth.

210 BELLARMINE. Oh, I hear that every day... BRUNO. Then, you do agree with me. BELLARMINE. To the extent you believe in Church reform... perhaps -- only not your methods, my son, We can't condone your methods. BRUNO. I haven't got any methods. BELLARMINE. Innocence agrees with you, disagrees with me. I have my Flock to consider. The real innocent ones, the ones without a leader, the faithful, the ones who - BRUNO. Don't think -- yes, you've said. BELLARMINE. It's more a matter of what they should think, and how the Church provides. BRUNO. Haven't I said the same? You agreed with me. BELLARMINE. (deviously) As a friend. Unfortunately, the Church comes between us. (A beat. Bellarmine considers Bruno for several moments. A KNOCK on the door interrupts them. Bruno turns in consternation as Mocenigo is shown in by a MONK.) BELLARMINE. Ah, Mocenigo! Perhaps you'd like an apple... (Bellarmine tosses an apple. Mocenigo catches it.) FADE TO:

(Queen Elizabeth's court. Queen and Venetian Ambassador. Enter Bruno with the French Ambassador)

ELIZABETH. Well, Sir, we're glad you've arrived. The French Ambassador assured me you would not fail us -- Did you meet with success at Oxford? BRUNO. To conceal nothing, your Majesty, I did not. There Oxford men are a group of pedants, and Oxford, an impossible place for free discussion. They somehow manage to see clearly what isn't there. A faculty of empty hats. ELIZABETH. Oh? Well, I am glad to hear you say so, for I've long suspected as much. Did you not, however, find the students eager to hear your ideas? BRUNO. They were more familiar with beer than with Greek. The printing press is becoming a medium of moral distortion -- the teachers think by multiplying ignorance they can factor it into intelligence. They choose not to think... ELIZABETH. You're certainly not afraid to speak the truth. BRUNO. For truth's sake, I am in exile, your Majesty. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. I rather thought you were in exile to escape your monastic duties.

211 BRUNO. Sir, I am in exile because a monk is not supposed to search for truth outside the Church. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Is it such a search? And what truths have you found? BRUNO. (bowing coldly) Each man has the right to interpret God according to his own temperament. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. You don't deny it - (The Queen laughs, approving Bruno's argument) BRUNO. One man shouldn't dominate the mind of another. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. What veiled attack are you launching? Your Majesty incites the situation. ELIZABETH. Yes, doesn't she. BRUNO. Noble Lady, you are kind,. ELIZABETH. Tell me why you left Paris -- The French King paid you great honor. BRUNO. Lecturers had to attend mass. I couldn't do it, knowing I was excommunicated and unfrocked. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Makes sense... ELIZABETH. (taking Bruno aside) When you were in France, did you meet the Duke D'Anjou, brother of the King/ BRUNO. Yes. ELIZABETH. What did you think of him? BRUNO. Though his face is blotted with small pox, he does manage a gentle soul -- but I found him uneffective in action, without much fire or distinction in his thinking. ELIZABETH. (mock displeasure) He was distinct enough to report that you are a teacher who makes study interesting... BRUNO. He said that? (beat) I've only tried to point the life behind all things, inanimate as well as animate. And for that, priests called me an atheist. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Well, they're the experts. (Elizabeth, irritated, waves off Venetian) BRUNO. If I could awaken Europe from the oppressive righteousness of orthodoxy -- why can't they see what I see, and rejoice? Their faces are jammed too much in the prayer book -- they're unable see the love within us -- the Pope will hear one day what I can offer the Church. ELIZABETH. Why not stay here? You know your life is in danger in Italy. BRUNO. I'm touched by England's friendship - ELIZABETH. Tell me one thing: What would you think if England made an alliance

212 with France through marriage? BRUNO. Dear lady, I can read your thoughts... ELIZABETH. Then, give me your honest opinion. But wait a moment -- I would talk to you in private. (Bruno hesitates. Elizabeth takes him by the arm, drags him in; they EXIT) (The Venetian Ambassador turns to the French Ambassador) VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Monsieur de Mauvisierre, will you tarry? I'd have a word with you. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. (slightly annoyed) I'm in a hurry. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. But I value your opinion, and there's a matter that weighs upon me. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Go on... VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Rumors of the Queen's marriage... FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Excellent for France, should it happen. England would no longer remain Protestant. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. The Pope does not look smilingly on the union of a Protestant Queen with a Catholic Prince. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. You're fishing for something else... VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Indeed. (beat) The Holy Fathers want Bruno back in Rome. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Bruno is my friend. I am a Catholic, and he, too, still considers himself part of the Catholic Church. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. How can he? He's unfrocked. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. All the more reason to stay in England. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Then, I have a bargain for you, for France. Use your influence to send Bruno to Rome, and I will use mine to procure the Pope's ready consent to the Queen's marriage. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I'm not a bargainer. Besides, the Queen has a natural aversion to the Inquisition, even more, a 'hostility' to it... VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Hostility enough to harbor an excommunicated monk who is also a coward? FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Caution, sir... I know the man well. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Well enough to know he is full of cunning? Ask him of the girl who died -- and I will tell you a truth... FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I know the story. What are you plotting? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Plotting? Nothing.

213 FRENCH AMBASSADOR. You're dying to tell me. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. The girl whom he says died... FRENCH AMBASSADOR. Speak up, if it's the truth - VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. That girl is very alive. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. It isn't true. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. But it is -- she's living a life of shame. Zuane Mocenigo, my friend in Venice, came across her recently and heard the whole story of Bruno's infamy. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. It's a lie - VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. He turns his impurity into purity -here, he comes. Ask him. FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I will not. I don't doubt him. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Then, I'll question him. I'll show the scoundrel for what he is. (Enter Bruno and Sir Philip Sydney) VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Giordano Bruno, here you are, just in time for our question -- Is it true you once loved a girl? BRUNO. What perfidy is this? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. The world knows you once loved a girl, and the shameful way you got rid of her. BRUNO. I once loved a girl. Yet she was like a sister. She died. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. A convenient lie. You know full well the girl lives. Everyone knows you left your love to a life of shame so you could flee in safety. BRUNO. (sadly, to the French Ambassador) There's no truth in this. The Inquisition killed her. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Not so -- the Inquisition is all kindness to the loves of heretics. That the girl lives is proof of their attention. BRUNO. (rushes to seize him) What treachery is this?! (As they grapple, the Queen enters) SIR PHILIP SYDNEY. Gentleman, desist! The Queen! ELIZABETH. What brawl is this! Is my court now a tavern?! VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Your Majesty, Bruno sins as other men. He quarrels over a woman. ELIZABETH. Speak, Sir, I pray you.

214 BRUNO. Your Majesty -- I beg you, this is not for the court. ELIZABETH. I sense it is. BRUNO. Dear Lady, years ago there was a girl to whom I was very close. When the Inquisition came for me, they found her, and took her in my place. Two years, I wandered outcast. She had become a sacrifice to priestly lust. When news finally came, I was told she was dead. ELIZABETH. God's death! If this be true, the Inquisition is indeed an abomination. BRUNO. I swear, by all I hold most holy, that what I say is true. The Venetian Ambassador has just told me the girl is alive. ELIZABETH. Sir, from whence came this news? VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. As I've said, from my good friend Mocenigo, in Italy. BRUNO. Mocenigo?! VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. (pointedly) She did what women usually do when they have no one to care for them. Mocenigo wrote her gown was rich with gold. BRUNO. This isn't true! FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I fear it is... BRUNO. I must return to Italy. SIR PHILIP. Dear friend, the time has passed for you to help. There is a price on your head. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Not anymore. For Mocenigo has graciously offered Bruno protection with his noble name if Bruno will only come to Venice, as his guest, to teach him his theory of memory. Mocenigo would protect him from the Inquisition in the name of scholarship. SIR PHILIP. This is folly. Mocenigo is an idle noble, not a scholar. You can't trust him. ELIZABETH. Signor, beware of bargains with the Inquisition. Stay here. I suspect there is more... BRUNO. God will protect me - FRENCH AMBASSADOR. I would have proof that this news is authentic. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. I assure you it is no trick. There is no doubt Mocenigo spoke to her. She admitted who she was... ELIZABETH. (sternly, to the Venetian) Enough. You have won for today. But I understand the Church's intrigues -- you have little idea -- this man's spirit will point the light for centuries to come, when all the rest of you are dust. VENETIAN AMBASSADOR. Your Grace, you mistake his value.

215 ELIZABETH. This is a Catholic plot.

FADE TO: ACT III, sc i

(Back to Bellarmine's private chamber. Bruno, Mocenigo and Bellarmine, as before. Mocenigo drinks wine, picks carefully through the apples for the best one. Outside the chamber walls, we can make out shadowy figures in monk's habits forming a perimeter around the chamber. BRUNO. What's he doing here? BELLARMINE. Mocenigo likes his wine... and knows his apples... MOCENIGO. Refreshing on a hot day. BELLARMINE. I asked him to join us. You've brought some information for me, I understand. MOCENIGO. (caught with apple in his mouth) Hmm-mm... BELLARMINE. It seems you weren't much of a teacher. He can barely speak. BRUNO. He wasn't much of a pupil. BELLARMINE. (waving it off) At any rate, he didn't learn a thing. He feels cheated. Can't blame him. MOCENIGO. Not what I expected. BELLARMINE. Actually, I'd have to agree. Signor Bruno is not what any of us expected. Not a monk, not a teacher... Provokes me with doubts. What, exactly, your purpose is... MOCENIGO. I didn't learn a thing from him. My question, too. BELLARMINE. A questionable fellow... adds to my doubts. MOCENIGO. (backing down) As you say, Your Eminence. Only trying to better myself. BELLARMINE. It behooves you to continue... elsewhere. BRUNO. This man means ill of me. Why is he here? BELLARMINE. In a moment, in a moment... I was struck by something you said... The larger part of faith is doubt. Doubt produces faith. Without doubt, we'd be certain, wouldn't we? There'd be no reason for faith. BRUNO. Exactly! Every man must seek out his own path to heaven. It's our individual responsibility. BELLARMINE. All the same, a callous point of view, don't you think, Zuane?

216 (Mocenigo shakes his head uncertainly) BELLARMINE. Appeals to me, though. I must say I find you... very engaging. Full of new ideas... BRUNO. I'm happy you think so. BELLARMINE. Frightening ideas... MOCENIGO. I, for one, didn't learn a thing from him. BELLARMINE. Yes, I can see that. (beat; indicating Mocenigo) I'm puzzled. Why, exactly, did you spend so long trying to teach this 'connoisseur'? I'd warrant he's unteachable. MOCENIGO. Excuse me, Your Excellence -- you're not forgetting the young woman... ? BRUNO. Wait! I thought we were discussing -- you were listening... We were coming to an understanding. BELLARMINE. All sorts of worlds, all sorts of pain... Time to move on.

FADE TO:

Several months later. A room in Mocenigo's house. Luxuriously furnished, but dimly-lit. Mocenigo sits, gazing meaningfully into a crystal while Bruno sketches one of his talismanic images.

MOCENIGO. There's a great deal to be found in a crystal. I carry it with me. When something happens I cannot understand, I take it from my pocket and gaze into it, like this.

BRUNO. And what do you see?

MOCENIGO. I see... peace.

BRUNO. Peace?

MOCENIGO. (angered) You're the astrologer. Tell me my future.

BRUNO. I'm not an astrologer -

MOCENIGO. I want to know my fate. BRUNO. It's known to God, not to me. MOCENIGO. I want to be a genius like you. I could be. With your help, with the magic at your disposal. Teach me about the Persian Magi, the Indian gymnosophists... I've had

217 you here two months, fed you, clothed you. What are we waiting for?.I want some results. You've taught me nothing. BRUNO. I've done everything I could to din some knowledge into your head. There isn't a philosophical theory I haven't discussed with you. If anyone has to complain, it's me. MOCENIGO. You've nothing to complain about. Haven't I brought you back to Italy safely? BRUNO. And broken the Venetian Ambassador's promise you would help me find Marie Anne. You've done nothing. Every day, you stall me. When I inquire, you avoid me, or smile strangely as you answer you cannot find her. MOCENIGO. Why should I help you find her, when you refuse to help me learn the meaning of the stars? You are keeping secrets from me - BRUNO. I? Here you are surrounded by an infinite universe, and you only think about the circumference of this room. Count your chairs and curtains. Stop asking me about stars. It's beyond you. MOCENIGO. (wheedling) A mind as great as yours could help a lesser mind such as my own along. BRUNO. Am I at fault if few can think? MOCENIGO. Some of the things you teach aren't safe. No one can understand you. BRUNO. Now what are you on about? MOCENIGO. Perhaps there are few things even a genius like you can't understand. BRUNO. You're grasping the sword at the wrong end. MOCENIGO. Am I? Has it ever occurred to you that your dear Marie Anne may no longer be the sweet girl you left behind? BRUNO. Every person has an essence. This was hers, pure and innocent. MOCENIGO. Bah, man changes according to circumstances. For all you know she may be happy with a rich man now. (beat) What would you do for me if I found your girl and brought her to you? BRUNO. I don't know... Talk to her. Save her. MOCENIGO. Maybe she's perfectly happy. BRUNO. The Inquisition took her. How could she be happy? You don't know her as I do. MOCENIGO. Well, if you really knew her, why did you leave her? I know a lot about certain things you do not. I am, after all, a finer man than you give me credit for. You've taught me nothing, I've fed you without rewards, and still I decide to keep my bargain. Doesn't make sense, does it? I happen to know where to find your girl. BRUNO. Where -- ? You talked to her? MOCENIGO. She's close by.

218 BRUNO. Take me to her. MOCENIGO. Not so hasty. It may be better if you don't see her. BRUNO. Stop dodging me! Take me to her. MOCENIGO. Have a little patience... Didn't you tell me a man has all eternity? Probably meant the time it takes to learn something from you... (beat) I will show you what a fine man I am. Generous. Self-effacing. I really do have everyone's best interest at heart, so... I've arranged for her to come. She knows you're under my protection. (beat) You've been warned. You may not be happy that you've found her. She's not much like you, who promises, then denies. She pays her debts and gives. A very dependable woman. I like her. She likes me... I've known her a long time... she is my mistress. BRUNO. Is it possible? MOCENIGO. You've told me over and over: anything's possible. I took it to heart. You must, too. Now listen carefully -I'll try not to lie about it: I've rung the bell and if you quiet down, you can hear her. (they listen) Yes, I'm right... Her footsteps on the stairs. The rustle of her beautiful gown. The jingling of her bracelet. I'd have her walk up and down the hall if I could. It's delicious, isn't it? BRUNO. 0, beloved master, I will bear any cup you have ready for me. I will not flinch at what my end will be -- but spare Marie Anne. (Mocenigo brings Bruno into a powder room, presents Marie Anne to Bruno; she's richly-gowned, older and harder. She stands there proudly, coldly regarding Bruno.) MOCENIGO Here she is! BRUNO. My dear one. MOCENIGO. You see I am an honest man. I follow through on my promises. BRUNO. Oh, this is a nightmare - MOCENIGO. Don't stand there like a stick! Sit down! (Bruno stands dumbly as Mocenigo leads Marie-Anne to a chair) MOCENIGO. Marie, at last you get to see your errant love. What do you think now of the man who fled Italy to save his own skin and left you to the Inquisition. MARIE ANNE. He has a button off his coat. MOCENIGO. He's a careless fellow - BRUNO. Marie-Anne... MOCENIGO. Always has something missing, either in his mind or on his person. Tell her about the transfiguration of the stars, why don't you? Normally he'd be running to his books for an answer... Doubtful you'll find anything about this in your library... (beat) Well. Now that I've brought you together, it's my pleasure to leave you together. (he kisses Marie's hand) Not for long, of course. My dear, you really are exquisite today. (Mocenigo exits)

219

BRUNO. Marie-Anne, my darling, I can't believe I've finally found you. They told me you were dead. MARIE-ANNE. As you can see, I'm not. BRUNO. Marie... I'm at a loss for words... MARIE-ANNE. What a relief! BRUNO. I'd forgotten how very beautiful you are. MARIE-ANNE. Years ago, it didn't move you. Don't speak of it now. BRUNO. I would have given my life to save you... MARIE-ANNE. Would you have? I loved you with all my heart. I laugh to think of the promises of men. What do you know about love? All I've heard are your theories of love.

BRUNO. I couldn't, can't share the love of a man with a woman with you. MARIE-ANNE. I've met other priests who put up no barriers against love... Every one of them more understanding of a woman's heart than you. BRUNO. What have they done to you? MARIE-ANNE. They brought life to me, with its sorrows and its joys. No heavenly speculations. Never once subjected to theories about the configuration of the earth. BRUNO. When I fled the monastery, I had no idea you were still in the monastery waiting. No idea! I'd hoped you had forgotten me and married Andrea. Two years passed before word reached me you were dead. Had I known what had happened, nothing would have kept me from you. MARIE-ANNE. If you'd found me, would you have given up your celestial contemplations? Would you have turned from your infinite universes and innumerable worlds... all for me? Love isn't an escape into the firmament. It's the reality of flesh and blood, the demanding touch between men and women. BRUNO. All these years, you've been near to me in thought. Often, as I slept under the stars, enwrapped in the dark vault of the heavens, I touched the exquisite joy of your being, and thinking of you, all the world melted into a breath of divine love. MARIE ANNE. I don't want to be in your thoughts. I'm not here to enlarge my mind. I've lived enough to know what men want. BRUNO. Please don't talk like this. MARIE ANNE. Even the mockery of what we call love has its moments of tenderness... look how many jewels I have... Pretty stones... Perhaps... I have too many jewels. No matter. You and I can no longer meet. You go in your one direction, I'll go in mine. BRUNO. You've fallen into darkness. Let me bring you to light. MARIE ANNE. You're deranged from your hardships.

220 BRUNO. I came back to help you. MARIE ANNE. You came back to get yourself published in Italy. To see the Pope: I just happen to be in your thoughts. BRUNO. You're unfair... MARIE ANNE. Then, you've finally touched reality. Life is unfair. BRUNO. I can't ask you to go alone in life. MARIE ANNE. Now what are you saying? Look at me. Doesn't it occur to you I may love someone else? BRUNO. No... I hadn't realized... I'd thought you were alone. MARIE ANNE. I haven't been alone for some time... BRUNO. Let me help you. MARIE ANNE. I don't want to be helped. You're the one who's in need of help. (beat) I'm well cared for. BRUNO. You appear to be. MARIE ANNE. Pretty dress, pretty stones... I'm glad you agree. I'm in love, it should be obvious... BRUNO. To me, no... MARIE ANNE. Well, I am. BRUNO. I fear I'm sorry to hear it... MARIE ANNE. This time, I'm certain you know the man. BRUNO. Do I? MARIE ANNE. Mocenigo. (Bruno stares at her, taking her in fully for the first time) BRUNO. Ave Maria, God forgive. MARIE ANNE. Can't you stop talking about God for just a moment? Open your eyes and see what's been given you. Mocenigo protects you at great risk to his own life. You should be grateful, show your gratitude. The Church watches you with suspicion, yet you continue to write your inflammatory essays. Perhaps you hope to die. I certainly can't explain it. (Mocenigo sweeps in) MOCENIGO. Ah, so you two are still apart. I'm a generous soul. Was it a happy reunion? MARIE ANNE. Still has his head in the sky_, I'm afraid. MOCENIGO. Well, didn't I say so? BRUNO. (to Marie Anne; gravely) For the present, there is nothing more I can say. In the

221 quiet of my mind, I will look for God's answer for both of us. If you'll excuse me now, I'll return to my room. MOCENIGO. Is this the way you act after all the trouble I've gone through to bring you two together? No wonder, I'm so impatient! BRUNO. Sir, I would go. MOCENIGO. My servants leave when they're excused. I've decided you will stay. BRUNO. Very well, if it so pleases you, I will remain. MOCENIGO. Good. (He kisses Marie-Anne ostentatiously as Bruno fidgets) You can go now. But only to your room. You are not to leave this house. (Bruno EXITS) MOCENIGO. (taking Marie Anne's hands) Well, mistress of many hearts... I'm glad you had your visit. Perhaps the last chance you'll have. I passed on his views to my confessor, who held counsel with his fellow priests at the Inquisition. MARIE ANNE. What have you done? MOCENIGO. I held off the Holy Office with the promise of further evidence of heresy. Now, the Holy Fathers are here. MARIE ANNE. In the house?! MOCENIGO. Downstairs, waiting to take him. It's up to you. Shall I hand him over, or put them off yet another week? MARIE ANNE. They'll kill him. MOCENIGO. Undoubtedly. MARIE ANNE. They will kill him. MOCENIGO. Suddenly, you seem concerned. (Marie Anne stares at Mocenigo in agitation) MARIE ANNE. Do what you must. I don't care. Please, I don't want to think about it any more. MOCENIGO. The devil! He deserves the rack! MARIE ANNE (torn). All right, please... get it over with... MOCENIGO. This is what you want? MARIE ANNE. For god's sakes, then... tell them to come back next week! MOCENIGO., (pleased; a beat) Too late. They're downstairs. We can't send them back now. Not empty-handed. I'll have to speak to them. No use in putting it off any longer. (turning to Marie Anne) Or... ? But we've shown enough mercy, don't you think? (Mocenigo kisses her hand, EXITS) MARIE ANNE. The world calls me a bad woman. Yet, Giordano still thinks of me as a child.

222 I know now... I do know it didn't matter to him that I'd changed. He saw through to my inner being, and I confess, it frightened me. God, what have I done?! CURTAIN.

223 ACT III, sc ii

(Bruno in a dark monastery jail cell.)

BRUNO. I’ve been summoned for a private meeting. With the Pope.

MONK/GUARD (DOMINICO). Not the Pope, the Cardinal.

BRUNO. Even so, I’m summoned for a private meeting.

MONK/GUARD. True.

BRUNO. Open the door. (beat) Let the world in . . . a little at a time, though. . .Give me some light. So I can prepare, so I can compose myself for the Pope.

MONK/GUARD. No need for that.

BRUNO. I must have some light! MONK/GUARD. You’ll have to wait.

BRUNO. No matter. I’ve got my writings. . .not here it’s true. . .What’s in my head? No need for light. God provides. . .Has, these seven years. . .provided me. Hasn’t forsaken me yet.

MONK/GUARD. You’ll have to wait.

BRUNO. No matter. I can dress without the light. Think without it, too. . .not what’s important, just the inner light. . .that’s what’s kept me, protected me. See now I’ve been right. Feel . . . strong . . .After so long in the dark . . . Yes, I can honestly say . . .I am happy. The Promise is fulfilled. The Pope awaits me.

MONK/GUARD. The Cardinal.

BRUNO. And then . . . the Pope. There’s so much to tell him. A good idea does have its season. I’ve waited, patiently . . . Patience brings the reward. (the Monk arrives to take Bruno to Bellarmine) Finally, he want to hear what I have to say. Tell him I am ready.

MONK/GUARD. Straighten your frock!

BRUNO. Shine a light here.

224 MONK/GUARD. Use some imagination. Follow me!

BRUNO. To the Pope.

MONK/GUARD. I told you, the Cardinal.

BRUNO. Yes, I’m ready now. (the stage goes DARK)

(A blazing LIGHT suddenly illumines Bruno, who squints, adjusting to the glare, then turns to the Holy Court)

(A Monastery conference hall. Cardinal Bellarmine and priests sit in judgment: Giordano Bruno stands upstage, facing the audience, bewildered.)

BELLARMINE. And know ye, Giordano Bruno, you are summoned by the Holy Inquisition to answer a charge of Heresy; you are charged with beliefs that We hold in contempt of our Lord in Heaven, beliefs that are offensive to His Universe and in defiance of His Instruction– When I presented you with your retractions, you suddenly withdrew them. How do you now answer?

BRUNO. (shaky, not used to the light) How do I . . .what? (Peering around) The Pope isn’t here? (The Monk shakes his head, disgusted)

BISHOP. The accused will answer. (Bruno stares at his accusers, gathering his scattered thoughts)

BRUNO. ‘Accused’? One moment . . . A trial, yes, of course . . . But I’d expected . . .something else. Not a trial . . .There’s more to discuss. (He looks around, trying to compose himself; to Bellarmine) We were having a ‘discussion’ . . .

BELLARMINE. All over now.

BRUNO. All over? Here, my own life now hangs on the discussion. . .There could hardly be enough . . . discussion.

BISHOP. Has the accused withdrawn his retractions, then?

BRUNO. Not exactly withdrawn. . . BISHOP. God, in his infinite Mercy, offers a way out.

BRUNO. I was on the rack– who could say no? Your Eminence. Surely . . .you see . . .

225 My own beliefs are mere signatures of God’s generous light.

BISHOP. Do you retract?

BRUNO. The Holy Fathers misinterpreted my views. I never wrote nor said anything heretical.

BISHOP. Giordano Bruno, you are called before the Holy Father to answer the following charges of heresy: claim that there are innumberable [sic] worlds; claim that Moses used magic to do his miracles; and claim that the Holy Spirit is the anima mundi.

MONK. Shall I summon the witness?

BRUNO. Most Reverend . . .You want an answer . . . of course. I believe . . .in a universe without end, beyond comprehension, and an earth, as Pythagoras says, that is one of many stars. (to Bellarmine) We spoke of this . . .

BELLARMINE. You spoke of it.

BRUNO. We did. Look, I’m very happy with the Catholic religion. It’s just in terrible need of change. Change the whole world needs.

BISHOP. These statements offend priestly ears. We know the world is finite and of supreme importance to God because he gave his only son to save it. That much God gave us.

BELLARMINE. Indeed, he did. And why wouldn’t God put his own church at the center of the Universe?

BRUNO. Your excellence, my struggle is not the Church . . .

BISHOP. No?

BRUNO. . . but with the ignorance and narrowness of priests.

BELLARMINE. A very slippery answer. . .

BISHOP. As good as heresy.

BRUNO. You lay that stigma on me because I demand freedom for the spirit of man to

226 find God in his own way.

BELLARMINE. How was it you said we understand God . . .?

BRUNO. You’re baiting me, but I’ll answer anyway. By freeing oneself from the body, raising oneself, becoming Eternity, experiencing his vastness, by making yourself expand beyond all measure, bound free from the body, above all time and matter . . .

(here, the light changes, we leave the trial and focus on Bruno, lost in his own thoughts.)

. . .only then could you understand God. By believing that nothing is impossible for you, that thinking yourself immortal, capable of all understanding, you draw yourself into every sensation, every element, fire, water, air, picturing yourself everywhere at the same time, not yet born, dead and alive. . .bring it all into your thoughts, and in such a way you may come to know God.

(Marie-Anne enters, floating, ethereal, dressed in virginal white)

BRUNO. Marie . . .you’re so pale!

MARIE ANNE. And you! To die for an idea! It’s such nonsense! What value is there in it? Ideas turn to dust as fast as human beings do! So why didn’t you just live this life fully–that’s why God put us here. All this talk of infinite universes. It’s infinitely boring. Perhaps you think they’ll reincarnate your conversations. Well, I’ll tell you now, the echo of these thoughts will fill all space.

BRUNO. How have I wronged you?

MARIE ANNE. (beat) I’ve become a nun.

BRUNO. You? A nun?

MARIE ANNE. Just what you wanted. BRUNO. Did I want that?

MARIE ANNE. When did you ever know what you wanted?

BRUNO. Through God’s generous light, I found my path–

MARIE ANNE. What’s generous about it? You know what I mean . . .

BRUNO. I don’t. Really.

227 MARIE ANNE. (mimicking him) ‘I love the light on a cloud, the flight of the singing bird, the trees’ song to God . . .all that chattering. Here it is, now what? (Bruno doesn’t respond) You’ll have to finish what you started. Too late to go back. My sadness. This is God’s path for you.

BRUNO. You’re trying to tell me something . . . MARIE ANNE. Nobody can tell Bruno anything.

BRUNO. No, tell me. MARIE ANNE. Which are you, really? The man who gives the self to God or the other who makes a god of the self?

BRUNO. I was chosen. To push for reform . . .

MARIE ANNE. Yes, yes, the need for reform, Who says you were chosen?! You’re dying for reform . . . (a beat) . . . and no one, no one will remember you for it. Why did you ever become a monk? Why pick the very thing that can destroy you? I was there . . .you could have turned toward me.

BRUNO. Marie! I’m a priest –

MARIE ANNE. You’re dead inside, all plugged up with the Holy Spirit.

BRUNO. I believe in the Church. They can’t get around it. They’ll spare me. I’ll continue to serve God, continue to do his Work–

MARIE ANNE. There’s no need for them to kill you.

BRUNO. What? MARIE ANNE. God hasn’t forsaken you. You’ve forsaken yourself.

(Bruno reaches for her, and she disappears) (The bishop laughs, and we’re back in present time. Bruno looks around disoriented)

BELLARMINE. And how do we do that? By magic? (when Bruno stares at him) Are you prescribing magic, after all?

BRUNO. Marie Anne . . .

BISHOP. What’s he said?

228

BELLARMINE. He’s asking for the young woman . . . MONK. Too late for that.

BRUNO. (realizing he’s back at trial) Ah! Yes . . . BISHOP. Hasn’t he claimed to be a Magus of some sort?

(Bruno turns on them, angry now)

BRUNO. You saddle me with your own prejudice. Any answer . . .would only reflect it. God shall pardon my sins, so I shall speak the truth in all things.

(A priest escorts Mocenigo to the front. Bruno, in spite of himself, is saddened by his treachery:)

BRUNO. Mocenigo . . .

MOCENIGO. (hesitating, to Bellarmine) Your Grace . . . BRUNO. The truth, Mocenigo . . .Tell the truth. MOCENIGO. I assure you I did not suspect the vileness of the man until I had kept him in my house two months . . .

BRUNO. Surely, not two months . . .Really were a slow learner.

BELLARMINE. And what nature of vileness did you observe . . .?

MOCENIGO. My lord, his treachery knew no limit . . .

BRUNO. (Sadly) Ah, Mocenigo, aren’t you forgetting something?

BELLARMINE. Hold your tongue!

MOCENIGO. (suddenly insecure) I? No . . . What?

BRUNO. Integrity, Mocenigo.

MOCENIGO. I can get by without it. Most people do. It’s not essential.

CARDINAL BELLARMINE. (to Mocenigo) Testimony, please! You’ve spoken about his Magic. What magic did you learn from him?

MOCENIGO. He kept his secrets well.

229 BELLARMINE. You were his pupil. Surely not all his secrets?

MOCENIGO. I learned . . . very little.

BRUNO. That, at least, is true.

MOCENIGO. I wish I had the money back I squandered on him.

CARDINAL BELLARMINE. You’re rich. The money’s of little account. Tell us how he spoke against the Church.

MOCENIGO. Most Reverend Paternity, I have heard him say that not one religion pleased him, but all religions had good, that the world was much larger than the Bible gave any idea of, because the world was infinite and that life continued eternally–

CARDINAL BELLARMINE. Yes, yes . . . BRUNO. In my own defense, I was hired to teach Signor Mocenigo the art of memory. He can remember nothing accurately. Barely remembers his own name, was constantly losing the keys to his own house . . .and now, he appears to have lost the Key to Heaven.

CARDINAL BELLARMINE. A view We don’t share with you.

FRA ANSELM. But most Reverend Father, before Giordano Bruno was put in prison, I met him often at the house of friends and I never heard him utter any word which made me doubt he was a good Christian.

BISHOP. He spoke against the Church. Signor Mocenigo points out he . . .

BELLARMINE. Constantly did so.

FRA ANSELM. I heard him say the Catholic religion was more acceptable than any other, only that all religions needed reform–

BISHOP. There are certain crimes here . . .

FRA ANSELM. What crimes?

MOCENIGO. O, Most Holy Father, constrained by my conscience, I think it best to let you know that he has also said the Friars of today are asses . . .

230 BELLARMINE. Colorful . . . possibly true. But not heretical. MOCENIGO. . . And he wonders how God endures the many Catholic superstitions.

BISHOP. Closer to heresy . . .

FRA ANSELM. A man often says in private things that are lightly meant and not for public ears. BELLARMINE. Did he not assert that man has more than one life?

MOCENIGO. He did so state, Your Eminence.

BELLARMINE. Well, you have learned something, Zuane.

BRUNO. You’re sending me to my death. BELLARMINE. Your own choice, my friend.

BRUNO. Friend? No friendship here.

BELLARMINE. You’ve said beauty exists in a murderer?

BRUNO. (growing defiance) Yes.

BISHOP. Evidence, enough, I should think.

BRUNO. The life of God is like the sun. The sun shines on us all day, but it we enter a darkened room, we shut it off. If, however, we open the windows, we find it, and it pours in on us again. This man, if he surrounds himself with evil, for the time being shuts off the life of God, but as soon as he recognizes beauty and goodness, he finds God, who is ever waiting for him. He need only throw open the shutters.

BISHOP. God waiting on evildoers? Preposterous.

BRUNO. But not heretical. I’m independent of the dogmas of the Church, like all philosophers–

BELLARMINE. Not a philosopher! You’re a monk, and that’s the problem. An unfrocked monk who refuses to retract. Had you not been a monk, had you not, none of this would have happened.

BRUNO. Yes. I’ve been told that. But I was, even now, I am a monk. Loyal to the Church, to God--

BISHOP. We have heard the testimony. The accused refuses to retract. Are there any

231 other witnesses?

MONK. No, Your Excellence. BISHOP. Then a decision will be proclaimed.

BELLARMINE. The accused will hear the judgment. (Bruno is brought forward by the Monk)

BISHOP. By the power invested in me by the Holy Fathers, I do declare Giordano Bruno a heretic and sentence him--

FRA ANSELM. Your Holiness! Surely some commutation can be found– He’s been in prison . . .He is not a bad man. Flawed, but not bad–

BELLARMINE. Enough! We sentence Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake. May God forgive your sins.

(the lights go down)

(Lights up on Bruno, center stage, as preparations are made to burn him. Bruno pulls himself up on a cross-like stake, surrendering to his fate. Bellarmine approaches, and the cross swiftly transforms into a simple stake, taking away whatever pretense of martyrdom Bruno had.)

BRUNO. I’m a forgiving person.

BELLARMINE. A touch of humility at the last moment?

BRUNO. You betrayed me.

BELLARMINE. Did I? I listened. The rest was your hopeless stabbing in the night, your wishful musings–

BRUNO. You’re betrayed your own better heart for a worse nature.

BELLARMINE. Oh, well . . . Still, I expect to live a long life. And when they ask, was Bellarmine ‘happy’, I would have it said, ‘he wasn’t unhappy’. It’s as much as one can ask in life.

BRUNO. Tell Marie Anne.

BELLAMINE. Tell her what?

BRUNO. Tell her I was wrong.

232

BELLARMINE. Wrong? About what? BRUNO. She’ll understand.

BELLARMINE. Tell her yourself.

BRUNO. Cruel . . .

BELLARMINE. You’ll see her before I might.

BRUNO. How? She’s removed herself to a convent.

BELLARMINE. She left.

BRUNO. Left? How?

BELLARMINE. Apparently wasn’t her sort of life after all. She didn’t actually leave–

BRUNO. What are you saying!?

BELLARMINE. She moved to another body. Hung herself this morning. At the nunnery.

(Bruno stares at Bellarmine, defiantly smiling through the horror of this news)

BELLARMINE. Nothing to say?

BRUNO. I’ll tell her myself after all.

(Bellarmine fumes, waves to Dominico to light the fire)

BRUNO. (passionately) You’re going to remember me . . . You’ll all remember me!

THE END

233 NOTES

Chapter 1 Art: Object as Subject 1. Recent work by the religious writer, Karen Armstrong, is instructive on this “new” fundamentalism. See The Battle for God. New York: Knopf, 2000.

2. As Berman says: “The argument for the “paradigm of no paradigm” can only be pushed so far; in recent times, Krishnamurti was the great exponent of this, and he became, in fact the anti-guru guru. [Quoting Marco Vassi, he says] . . .year after year, Krishnamurti would chide his aging fans for having made no breakthroughs in terms of their attachments, but he categorically refused to discuss how such a breakthrough might be made. . . As Vassi says, ‘his mission, ironically, may turn out to have been something like a Moses for the horizontal paradigm’(82-83)”(313).

Chapter 2 Artist in Search of a Medium 1. This chapter, primarily biographical, draws heavily from Beatrice Wood's autobiography. Certain discrepancies in memory (or deliberate misstating) will be noted between it and her other memoirs and others' memories, but my intention is to, as much as possible, rely on her words, choices of subjects, tone, and voice to illustrate her desire to be an artist, her struggle to find an appropriate medium to express herself and to describe her experience (Dewey's description) in relation to creating art.

2. It is likely that she attended the Convent of Sacre Coeur, a well-known convent school, founded by Sister Madeline Sophie Barat, with several locations internationally that attracted wealthy girls. The school in Paris was housed at the time in what is now the Rodin Museum.

3. Later, at twenty, Miss Reynolds taught Russian language and culture at Columbia University, the first person in America to do so; at twenty-five she started the Russian language and literature department at Dartmouth College; and she went on to translate key works of Stanislavsky, important in disseminating ideas on his acting method to an English-speaking audience, working directly with him for several years before his death. (Langlois, "In a Peopled Garden.")

4. She would much later render her own torso in a 1937 Christmas card called "What the Doctor Took Out", a mixed-media collage of string (intestines), construction paper cut- outs (stomach and heart), metal wire (Fallopian tubes), a rubber O-ring (vagina or

234 cervix), and a mysterious metal key sewn above the intestines. The circle of feminine lace surrounding the torso could allude to her childhood handmade lace underwear as well as the indignity of having all her organs exposed to the doctor. She revealed to F. Naumann that the operation was a hysterectomy and that she was relieved to no longer worry about getting pregnant.

5. See Amelia Jones, The Engendering of Marcel Duchamp. Also notice Tomkin’s comment that “[n]o wonder Duchamp has become in recent years one of the very few male deities in the new feminist pantheon” (454).

6. Her response to Blanche Nuit: “For instance, I made a painting of a nightmare. I still have it. A perfectly revolting, terrible thing. And he [Duchamp] chose it to be exhibited in the Grand Central Palace” (Karlstrom interview, 1976 19). This painting is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

7. The extant drawing is a 1976 reconstruction for the 1978 Philadelphia Museum of Art show of the original, destroyed in a February 1938 flood. It is presently in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

8. Wood remembered the brand as Italian, Vignola, but it was actually Vinolia, an English soap which was the brand stocked on the Titanic. The original shape was rectangular; the soap, still made, is now oval-shaped. The reconstructed version added the shell-shaped one, alluding to the birth of Venus perhaps. Naumann’s background in Italian painting could have influenced the choice. See Chapter 5 for more discussion.

9. For a discussion of this issue and the aesthetics involved, see William A. Camfield's "Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917" (64-94) in Marcel Duchamp Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann.

10. Another famous example of Duchamp's audacity was his slow shinnying up the flag pole that hung at a 45 degree angle over the dance floor at the Blindman's Ball the following year. When Duchamp reached the flag, all the revelers broke into applause.

Chapter 3 Toe-to-Toe with Nihilism: The Shocks 1. Apparently the exact date of their move is difficult to pinpoint. See Naumann, "Marcel Duchamp's Letters to Walter and Louise Arensberg, 1917-1921," in Marcel Duchamp Artist of the Century, 219 n 41.

2. The reference is also to Wood's "casual. . . grasp" of multi-syllabic words, a result of her early forced study of French. Hapgood described the phrases as "original and pointed," and they are often amusing. As Wood told it, the nuns at the convent school taught her "all the cataclysms" [catechisms].

235 3. This statement published in 1985 reveals the power of another "issue" for her and could be a cover for her true feelings and values in 1920. A happy marriage was one ideal she never actually shed, since toward the end of her life she often spoke privately (and sometimes publicly) of the highest ideal for a woman is to be happily married with children. She thought that existence extremely creative (interview, March 1994).

4. Francis Naumann discovered Paul's last name from Wood. (Personal interview, April 1998).

5. Naumann went to Belgium to find the family, but since Ransom is apparently a common name, had no success (Personal interview, April 1998).

6. For a full account of their meeting, see Field, Chapter 6 "The White Buddhists" in When the Swans Came to the Lake.

Chapter 4 Balance Achieved 1. The information here is from Elizabeth Hapgood’s granddaughter’s manuscript. She mentions that Elizabeth’s mother was like a second mother to Beatrice Wood.

2. The monthly check, reputedly around $1000 was a considerable amount in 1950 but dwindled in buying power as the dollar inflated during the 1960s and 1970s. She had hidden the fact of her marriage to Steve from her aunt fearing that she would not receive a legacy if her aunt knew of the marriage. Wood's last dealer, Garth Clark, said she always overstated her financial woes, but he knew her at a time in her life when she had achieved, with his help, financial success with her art. Her "overstatement" at that point revealed a fear of returning to her earlier struggle with money.

3. According to art historical texts, Brancusi died in 1957. This is most likely an error of Wood’s memory.

4. Beatrice's neck problem was a point of contention between them. Galka thought it was "psychopathic" [psychosomatic] but sent her to European specialists who injected her hip with gold (AAA, Reel # 574-575).

5. Scheyer especially encouraged Rosalind Rajagopal to keep painting (AAA, diary, Reel #574, 47).

6. Louise Arensberg, tired of Walter’s “chippies” and the never-ending party, gave him an ultimatum: they would move to California or she would leave him (Shock 83).

7. See Tomkins, Duchamp pp. 449-450 for a fuller account.

8. Apparently, Wood changed his name in her autobiography since the diary entries and

236 commentary later names him as Rodney Curtis, "an ineffectual young man" who had "talked [her] into becoming engaged" to him ( AAA, Reel #557, 30).

Chapter 5 Seeing It Her Way: The Visual Arts 1. She was clearly disappointed with the lack of success of the screen tests made with Charles Sheeler in NY in 1920 (AAA, Reel #541-2).

2. She thought of starting a clothing design business with Helen Freeman and a Cuban designer Helen had met, and Wood made hats for Louise as well as clothes and hats for herself.

3. This important volume, The Eloquent Object, companion to a show in 1987, is a collection of eleven essays. Written from crafts’ perspective, curators, craftspeople, independent scholars, anthropologists and artists attempt to dispel the prejudice against craft media. Fairbanks’ essay is “Crafts and American Art Museum. Yet the privileging of fine art persists when, for example, a preparatory drawing by a “master” is located: A recently identified sketch of a projected chalice by Leonardo da Vinci has become a prized possession of the Smithsonian.

4. Kuspit draws especially on Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

5. See Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art among other works. From the artist/critic perspective see especially Suzi Gablik’s Has Modernism Failed?

6. As to the market value of Wood’s work, as an example, after she died, a show was mounted of 86 watercolors, drawings and lithographs entitled “Beatrice Wood: Drawing for Life: 1910-1996” at the Achim Moeller Fine Art Gallery on the upper east side in New York City from March 3 to April 10, 1999. Twenty three of the pieces, the most famous, were not for sale, already being in collections. The average price for a small ink and pencil drawing from the teens and 1920s was approximately $16,500 at that time.(One drawing in the show was owned by Professor Arthur Danto and his artist wife Barbara Westman. Her pottery was collected by other artists like Viola Frey and Jasper Johns.)

Chapter 6 Out on Her Own: Writing It Down 1.See Francis Naumann’s articles in Arts (Feb. 1980) “The New York Dada Movement: Better Late than Never” and (Nov. 1982) “Janco/Dada: An interview with Marcel Janco.”

2. According to Clark she had a falling out with Krishnamurti late in life over his “growing materialism”(Gilded 82).

237 3. See K. Paul Johnson, Initiates, 10 on Krishnamurti’s contradictions.

4. These stories are in the Archives of American Art.

5. Roché’s coded diaries of his sexual encounters are in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

6. She had also purportedly been Hypatia, the female Hellenistic mathematician who was stoned to death for overreaching power and intellect.

7. Blavatsky is responsible for popularizing the word guru in English, (Geoffrey Nunberg, 84) and reincarnational thinking did not come into American Spiritualism until after her appearance (K. Paul Johnson, 227n97).

Chapter 7 “I think of another pot. . .” :The Kinaesthetic 1. See Mark Ehrman’s article for details of the trouble.

2. This is an excellent study, but a detailed examination is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

3. This complex and detailed study is worthy of comparison to and elaboration on the ideas raised in this dissertation; however, that is beyond the dissertation’s scope.

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254 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and moved to north Florida as a child, the writer went to public schools, earning a B.A. in English and Humanities and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of South Florida in Tampa. She studied for two years in Florence, Italy: at Florida State University’s program (1967-1968) and at the Pope Pius XII Institute of Fine Arts and the Scuola Cappiello (1969-1970). She has worked often as a teacher: at James Weldon Johnson Junior High, Jacksonville, FL; as a teaching assistant at USF and FSU; at Edison Community College, Ft. Myers, FL; and for the past eighteen years at Florida A&M University, of Humanities and English. But she has also worked many other jobs, including legal proofreader, monkey puppet salesman, and, most recently, licensed massage therapist. The subject of this dissertation requested and received several sessions over the last five years of her life.

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