First my father’s death, then my mother’s death, within a year of each other, and all the sick dreams, floods of them, all night, every night — the flashes of teeth and bone and blood that leaked from under countless doors that took me down hallways into rooms I should have recognized but didn’t.
Time. How can I be so old? Where’s little Harriet? What happened to the big, ungainly frizz-head who studied so hard? Only child of professor and wife — philosopher and helpmeet, WASP and Jew — wedded not always so blissfully on the Upper West Side, my left-leaning, frugal parents, whose only luxury was doting on me, their cause célèbre, their oversized hairy burden who disappointed them in some ways and not in others. Like Felix, my father dropped dead before noon. One morning in his study after he had retrieved Monadology from its home on the shelf across from his desk, his heart stopped beating. After that, my once noisy, bustling mother became quieter and slower. I watched her dwindle. She seemed to shrink daily until I could hardly recognize the tiny figure in the hospital bed who in the end called out, not for her husband or for me, but for her mama — over and over again.
I was an agitated mourner for all three of them, a big, restless, pacing animal. Rachel says that no grief is simple, and I’ve discovered that my old friend, Dr. Rachel Briefman, is mostly right about the strange doings of the psyche — psychoanalysis is her calling — and it’s true that my first year of living without Felix was furious, vengeful, an implosion of misery about all I had done wrong and all I had wasted, a conundrum of hatred and love for us both. One afternoon I threw away heaps of expensive clothes he had bought for me from Barneys and Bergdorf’s, and poor Maisie with her bulging belly looked into the closet and blubbered about saving Father’s presents and how could I be so cruel, and I regretted the stupid act. I hid as much as I could from the children: the vodka that put me to sleep, the sense of unreality as I wandered among the rooms I knew so well, and a terrible hunger for something I couldn’t name. I couldn’t hide the vomiting. I ate, and the food came blasting up and out of me, splattering the toilet and walls. I couldn’t stop it. When I think of it now, I can feel the smooth, cool surface of the toilet seat as I grip it, the gagging, wrenching paroxysms of throat and gut. I’m dying, too, I thought, disappearing. Tests and more tests. Doctors and more doctors. Nothing to be found. Then the very last stop for the so-called functional ailment, for a possible conversion reaction, for a body that usurps speech: Rachel referred me to a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. I wept and talked and wept some more. Mother and Father, the apartment on Riverside Drive, Cooper Union. My old and flattened ambitions. Felix and the children. What have I done?
And then, one afternoon, at three ten, just before the session ended, Dr. Fertig looked at me with his sad eyes, which must have seen so much sadness other than mine, no doubt so much sadness worse than mine, and said in a low but emphatic voice: There’s still time to change things, Harriet.
There’s still time to change things.
The vomiting disappeared. Don’t let anyone say there aren’t magic words.
I. There is no documentary evidence of an artist by that name. Why Burden twists the name of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch (ca. 1450–1516), thereby fictionalizing an autobiographical story, is unknown. In Notebook G, writing about The Garden of Earthly Delights, Burden comments: “perhaps the greatest artist of corporeal borders and their dreamlike meanings. He and Goya.”
II. See Arthur Piggis, Notes on Artists, 1975–1990 (New York: Dreyfus Press, 1996).
Cynthia Clark (interview with former owner of the Clark Gallery, NYC, April 6, 2009)
Hess: Do you remember the first time you met Harriet Burden?
Clark: Yes, Felix brought her around to the gallery. He was divorced from Sarah by then, and he walks in with this gigantic girl, big as a house, really, and va-va-va-voom shapely, but with a long, peculiar face. They used to call her the Amazon.
Hess: Were you familiar with her work then?
Clark: No, but to be honest, no one was familiar with her work. I’ve seen it now, the early pieces, but the truth is nobody in the art world would have picked it up back then. It was too busy, too off the beaten track. It didn’t fit into any schema. There were a lot of art wars, you know, in the late sixties, early seventies. She wasn’t Judy Chicago either, making a feminist statement. And I guess Felix was a problem for her, too. He couldn’t represent her, after all, it would have been nepotism.
Hess: Is there any other impression of her, besides her appearance, that you noted and would like to share for the book?
Clark: She made a scene once at a dinner. It was years ago, around eighty-five, I think. She was talking to Rodney Farrell, the critic — he faded, but he had some power then — anyway, something he said must have set her off, and this woman, who we all thought of as very quiet, burst out and rattled on about philosophy, art, language. She was very loud, lecturing, unpleasant. I don’t think anyone had the slightest idea what she was saying. Frankly, I thought it might have been gibberish. Everyone stopped talking. And then she started laughing, crazy, nutty laughter, and left the table. Felix was upset. He hated scenes.
Hess: And the pseudonyms? Did you suspect anything?
Clark: Absolutely not. After Felix died, she disappeared. No one talked about her.
Hess: Weren’t you surprised by the sophistication of Anton Tish’s work? He was only twenty-four at the time, seemed to come out of nowhere, and in interviews he was strikingly inarticulate and seemed to have only superficial thoughts about his own work.
Clark: I’ve shown many artists who weren’t able to say what they were about. I’ve always believed that the work is supposed to speak and that the pressure put on artists to explain themselves is misplaced.
Hess: I agree with you, and yet The History of Western Art is a complex joke about art, full of references, quotations, puns, and anagrams. There is an allusion to Diderot on a Chardin canvas shown at the Academy’s annual Salon show, taken from the French edition. That particular essay had not been translated into English. The boy did not speak French.
Clark: Listen, I’ve said this before. It’s all very well and good to look back now and ask how on earth we could have been taken in. You can cite all the examples you want. I wasn’t pondering how he did it. He gave me the work. It caused a stir. It sold. I visited his studio and there were works in progress all over the place. What would you have thought?
Hess: I’m not sure.
Clark: There’s nothing cut-and-dried about this, you know. One can easily argue that the posing, the performance, was part of the work itself, that it all goes together, and as you well know, pieces from that show signed by Anton Tish command high prices. I don’t regret for a second that I showed them.
Hess: I think the real question is: Would you have shown them if you had been aware of who had really made them?
Clark: I believe I would have. Yes, I think I would have.
Maisie Lord (edited transcript)
After she moved to Brooklyn, my mother collected strays — human strays, not animals. Every time I went to visit her, there seemed to be another “assistant,” poet, drifter, or just plain charity case living in one of the rooms, and I worried they might take advantage of her, rob her, or even kill her in her sleep. I worry too much; it’s chronic. I became the worrier in the family — my job. The man who called himself the Barometer lived with Mother for a long time. He had spent two weeks in Bellevue not long before he landed on her doorstep. He rattled on about the words of the winds and made peculiar gestures to lower the humidity. When I mentioned my anxiety about him to my mother, she said, “But, Maisie, he’s a gentle person, and he draws very well.” She was right about him, as it turned out. He became the subject of one of my films, but there were other, more fleeting and unsavory characters who kept me up at night until Phineas came along and put her affairs in order, but that was later. My mother’s place was immense, an old warehouse building. She had two floors, one to live in and one to work in. When she renovated the place, she made sure there were several bedrooms for “all my future grandchildren,” but I think she also had a fantasy about supporting young artists directly, putting them up, giving them space to work in. My father had his foundation. My mother had her ad hoc Red Hook artists’ colony.