All the time I was growing up in Statesville, I never went to an art museum. There was none; the weekly art teacher in public schools contented herself with the color wheel and the hope of proportionate good likenesses.
What hung in my own home were not paintings but illustrations: Columbus’s three ships, that wolf howling on a snowy hill above a lamplit house, the big dog that has just pulled a drowning child ashore, a sepia Victorian lady removing love letters from a hollow tree, and a pinkish Gentile Jesus carrying the lamb ahead of His obedient flock. Even better than these, I liked the Doré Bible engravings, especially of David holding aloft the curly head of Goliath and Jehu’s companions finding what little the street dogs had failed to devour of the corpse of Jezebel.
Count me in the multitude of those southern writers whose childhood spent with the King James Bible taught that ordinary concrete objects could take on timeless meanings.
Realism—in art or fiction—is not mere illustration, not just a copying of flower and barn and face. In fact, the artist’s attempt to change the eccentric into the general, into how things “ought” to look or how stories “should” turn out, is the death of art, as Hallmark cards and cute garden gnomes and sentimental pastel bird/cat friends on stationery demonstrate.
Those of us who had it dinned into us at Sunday school that this everyday world was good enough for Jesus to spend thirty-three years in will probably never respond properly to Abstract Expressionism. In our storytelling as well as in the paintings we hang on our walls, we still join with Wordsworth in awe at “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us, — the place where, in the end / We find our happiness, or not at all!”
What hangs in the Betts living room now is a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth’s Evening at Kuerners (drybrush watercolor, 1979), its loneliness relieved by the one lighted window and the muddy earliest hints of spring thaw. I know I should admire its composition, analyze the elements of light and dark, the artist’s technique—and Heaven knows I’m delighted when a reader understands why a certain verb in a particular sentence is exactly the very best choice—but my readers and I are not specialists, just people moved by the wedding of eye and ear, word and image, glad to pass through the surface of a painting to the story behind it, then back again to see if art exceeds its sources. “Beauty is not so plentiful,” wrote Willa Cather, “that we can afford to object to stepping back a dozen paces to catch it.”
Many who are experts in the art world no longer step back to appreciate Wyeth ‘s out-of-fashion canvases, dismissing him as an illustrator who persists in photographic realism long after the camera has made such paintings obsolete. His silent, melancholy work sometimes seems the visual counterpart of lines from Thoreau and Frost. Critics groan when barbarians pick as their favorite painting Christina’s World, knowing these uninitiated only like “the story” it seems to tell; and I sometimes groan myself when teenagers prefer Sylvia Plath’s poetry primarily because she killed herself, and thus reveal an appetite more for literary necrophilia than anything else. I want them to look at the language of many poets. There’s death enough to read about. Be at the bedside of. Be on the pillow oneself.
Yet Plath’s poems and the others’ and Wyeth’s lonesome people and places also connect with an answer Surrealists used to give in die thirties when asked, “What does that picture represent?” They would answer, “The person who did it.” This painting, Winter 1946, is realistic in the world it depicts but also in its representation of young Wyeth at the time.
N. C. Wyeth and his wife produced three painters, a musician, and an engineer, with Andrew the youngest. He and his sisters and brother grew up in the Maine and Pennsylvania he was to paint. Harriette painted their famous father sometime in 1937, but Andrew never did, and he regretted that. From childhood he had developed his skills under tutelage in his father’s studio, but in 1945 he called himself “just a clever watercolorist—lots of swish and swash.” That year, just on the other side of the hill in this painting, N. C. Wyeth’s car was struck at a railroad crossing and he was killed.
I was in eighth grade then and had barely moved up from reading Nancy Drew to rereading Forever Amber and was also beginning to notice that some of Doré’s angels ascending and descending for Jacob had irritable faces. Andrew Wyeth
was twenty-eight.
The “realistic” background is that in 1946 a Lynch family with nineteen children lived in a house on the edge of the woods, and one day Wyeth, then twenty-nine, saw Allan Lynch running down the hill toward him. In this, his first tempera (dry pigment mixed with distilled water and egg yolk) after his father’s death, he wanted to prove “that what he had started in me was not in vain.”
First he painted the boy at a distance, tiny, but die hill finally “became a portrait” of his father. He spent the whole winter working on this particular painting until the bulge of the hill seemed to be “breathing—rising and falling—almost as if my father was underneath.” He moved the boy forward, made him darker, dressed him in an old World War II uniform (his father’s?), made his headlong run almost a tumble downhill, out of control, gave him a pursuing shadow, pocketed one hand, flung out die other. At the time Wyeth was feeling “disconnected from everything,” and the Lynch boy became “me, at a loss,” on die downside of a gigantic grave.
Wyeth has quoted his friend the pianist Rudolf Serkin, who said he didn’t thin of “striking” the keys, but of “pulling” them with the fingers. Wyeth has said he tries to “pull” a mood from a painting rather than trying to strike or force something into it; and while some have seen die boy’s race downhill as joyful, they must not have looked at his mouth.
Wyeth has also said he wants his work not to be melancholy so much as thoughtful, that he does not wish to paint photographs but to capture the spirit of objects. In fiction writing, too, this is the goal of a realist—not to settle for being pictorial or naturalistic, but to elicit from the facts of our ordinary lives their incandescent meanings. It’s not surprising that Joyce Carol Oates, another prose realist, likes Winslow Homer (one hangs in our den).
I’m told that the hill in Winter 1946 is now covered by small houses, though just out of sight the railroad tracks remain. So the hill Wyeth saw is all memory now, and so is Valley Forge—only twenty miles away.
Sometimes this realist points out to student writers at the University of North Carolina that writing fiction is already an abstract art, the alphabet already far removed from real experience. Grief for one’s father is an experience very far removed from the a-b-c marks we scratch onto paper trying to capture that experience, just as Winter 1946 is fifty years gone, and its use of color and light now depict themselves and can never reproduce the death of N. C. Wyeth nor how that felt to his son.
But Wyeth’s colors and shapes are not diminished just because the viewer shares something of what was in the mind that so arranged them. At readings, poets—too—often tell how a poem got started. I sometimes admit, with some amazement, that you can get to three hundred pages because of driving past a chicken-truck wreck in North Carolina!
Such commentary never improves nor explains away whatever is in the poem, the novel, the painting—these stand alone, succeed or fail on their own, now or never; art always exists in present tense. And what we see now is a boy, not yet full-grown, wearing somebody else’s suit and careening downhill across the tracks of some unknown vehicle in a season where snow still lingers, and greenery and blooming seem a long way off.
Doris Betts was a creative writing and English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 35 years. Betts published six novels and three short story collections, including Beasts of the Southern Wild, a finalist for the National Book Award (1973).
Header Image: Andrew Wyeth, Winter 1946, 1946. Tempera on board, 3 1 3/8 x 48 in. North Carolina Museum of Art.
Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina 72.1.1
