From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky - Softcover

Spender, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520225481 ISBN 13: 9780520225480

Publisher: University of California Press, 2001

Synopsis

An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood―his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915―he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Spender is a writer and sculptor. He married the eldest daughter of Arshile Gorky in 1968. His previous book, Within Tuscany, is a memoir about the Sienese countryside where they live.

From the Back Cover

"One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read."―John Ashbery

From the Inside Flap

"One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read." John Ashbery

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From a High Place

A Life of Arshile GorkyBy Matthew Spender

University of California Press

Copyright © 2000 Matthew Spender
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520225480

Chapter One

KHORKOM

* * *

1895-1910

GORKY OFTEN TALKED about his childhood: the beautiful lake onwhose banks his village used to stand, its poplar trees like sentinels,the distant mountains whose shoulders supported the sky. Graduallyhis stories built up into something not quite real, and he always chose amoment when his audience was hardly listening: pupils busy at their work,or friends talking politics in the local café. Nobody kept notes. Ifanyone tried, Gorky broke off. A note-taker was to him a "book-keeper."Words were free when spoken, but to write them down imprisoned them. To beheld to his words made him instantly furious.

    In 1936, contributing to a book about some murals painted for theFederal Art Project, he produced a rare written piece. It starts with adescription of his family house back in Turkey:

The walls of the house were made of clay blocks, deprived of all detail, with a roof of rude timber.

It was here, in my childhood, that I witnessed, for the first time, that most poetic of operations?the elevation of the object. This was a structural substitute for a calendar.

In this culture, the seasons manifested themselves, therefore there was no need, with the exception of the Lental period, for a formal calendar. The people, with the imagery of their extravagantly tender, almost innocently direct concept of Space and Time, conceived of the following:

In the ceiling was a round aperture to permit the emission of smoke. Over it was placed a wooden cross from which was suspended by a string an onion into which seven feathers had been plunged. As each Sunday elapsed, a feather was removed, thus denoting the passage of Time.

As I have mentioned above, through these elevated objects, floating feather and onion, was revealed to me, for the first time, the marvel of making the common?the uncommon!

    The "elevation of the object" was an idea put forth by the Frenchpainter Fernand Léger: the artist casually chooses an object and"elevates" it to a higher plane. It was typical of Gorky that he saw anactual object raised on high, rather than a metaphysical transformationimposed by the artist on any found object. It was also typical that achildhood memory should take precedence over a more recent one. He carriedhis childhood perpetually with him, and its values were forcibly imposedupon the present. "Extravagantly tender" and "almost innocently direct"were expressions he often used, imbued with a deep emotional charge.Tenderness: the ability to make yourself ever more receptive to theoutside world. Innocence: that quality which could never be contrived in apainting, but which had to be there.

    Arshile Gorky was born Vostanig Adoian, the son of a poor farmer wholived in the village of Khorkom on Lake Van, in eastern Turkey. The househad been built by its owners, and was many times rebuilt after earthquakesor the attacks of Kurds or Turks. The roof was supported by poles ofpoplar cut from trees that grew on the shore. The ceiling consisted ofinterlaced branches, some with their leaves still on them, now dried andyellowed from years of smoke. On top of that, there was a thin layer oflakeside mud. In summer the women of the house used to spread apricots outto dry on this surface, shielding them with a ring of prickly bushes sothat the goats wouldn't climb up and eat them. Gorky's expression for aman in a nervous state was "He has goats on his roof." An unlikelypredicament in Manhattan, but in Khorkom it would have been enough to makeanyone fretful.

    Khorkom was built near the mouth of the Khoshab river, which flowed intothe southeast corner of the lake. The buildings of mud and stones flankedpaths running parallel to the river, each family separated from the next bysheep pens and enclosed orchards, wherein a few fruit trees were pruned toa certain height by the teeth of the ubiquitous goats. During the fewsummer months, everyone lived outside to absorb as much sunlight aspossible. The fields were plowed in the autumn and sown with winter wheat.As the weather became colder, the animals were brought into the barnsflanking the houses, and their warm breath filtered around the doorways inpatient sighs. In winter the snow weighed down the roof. The side roomswhere they lived, one room for each family, were abandoned and everyoneslept around the hearth at night, their feet toward the embers like spokesconverging on the hub of a wheel.

    The hearth, a clay vessel called a tonir set into the ground,was the center of the house, and the Armenians retained a pre-Christianreverence for fire and for the sun. There was nothing to do in the longwinter months but listen to the traveling storyteller, who earned his keepby relaying gossip from the neighboring villages and reciting long epicpoems about fiery steeds, whose hooves struck sparks when they pawed theearth, and young heroes of incredible strength and carefree courage. Notmany villagers of the generation preceding Gorky's could read or write,but some could recite long passages of verse by heart. A child could dozeoff by the tonir and wake up hours later, and the storytellerwould still be reciting.

    "It was a simple life," a cousin of Gorky's told me, and when Iprotested, what about the Turks, the persecutions, the massacres, shesmiled and went on talking about the peaceful moments. She, too, recalledits "innocence." Remembering the Adoian front door opposite, Arax Melikianthought that the family must have made some money at some point, for oneither side of the door were two windows of real glass. The village schoolat Ishkhanikom had no glass in its windows, nor did the library atAkhtamar, the monastery which lay on an island a few miles due west ofKhorkom. A British visitor in the 1880s noticed that the monks used oiledmanuscripts in place of glass to let in the light. Akhtamar was animportant see of the Armenian Gregorian Church, and its buildings arestill among the most beautiful of eastern Turkey. Low reliefs of fruitsand vines are carved into its warm limestone exterior, surrounded by thepeaceful serenity of the lake.

    The Armenians of eastern Turkey shared the lands where they lived withKurds, who since the 1880s had been encouraged to take over their housesand fields. The displacement took place spasmodically, and many of thenomadic Kurds resented the pressure placed on them to give up theirpastoral existence and become farmers. Left to themselves, the two sidesoften came to an agreement whereby a local Kurdish leader gave theArmenian villagers protection in return for tribute. Some villages faredbetter than others in this respect. Khorkom had no Kurdish inhabitants. Onthe other hand Vostan, the nearest agricultural center south of Khorkom,was in the process of becoming, by force, an exclusively Kurdish townduring Gorky's childhood.

    The Turks put more trust in the Kurds than in the Armenians forreligious reasons, but the Kurdish idea of Islam involved many strangebeliefs borrowed from other faiths. Outside Vostan, for instance, at thelittle monastery of Charahan Surp Nishan, where Gorky's mother was born,the nearby Kurds revered the Christian saints as their own. Gorky'smaternal uncles Aharon and Moses, who often visited Surp Nishan, countedKurds among their friends. In spite of their persecution at the hands ofthe Kurds, many Armenians of Van, including Gorky, remembered them notwith hatred, but with a certain admiration.

    Gorky's childhood was shaped by two disasters. The first was themassacres of 1896, during which his mother and father both lost theirfirst spouses. Had it not been for this tragedy, they would never havemet. The second was the genocide of 1915, during which the entire Armenianpopulation was either driven out of the country or killed. Kurds took aleading part in the slaughter on both these occasions, but it was clear toboth sides that their participation was dictated from above.

    Over the previous century, a pattern had evolved. Whenever a Christianminority in some other part of the Turkish Empire had succeeded in winningits freedom, the authorities would decide to punish those Christians stillliving within the confines of Anatolia. An increase in acts of banditry byKurds on Armenians was the first sign that matters were deteriorating.Resistance in such cases only made things worse. As the official reportwould subsequently put it, an "incident" had taken place, but the Turkisharmy had succeeded in restoring "peace and tranquility." The realitybehind these bland words was usually terrible.

    In 1895, the Catholicos of Akhtamar described in a letter the gravesituation building up south of the lake. "The country has been devastated;many of the villages are in ruins. Here and there you find a fewhalf-ruined churches and many graveyards, which are often used by theKurds as farms and gardens." They had seized a field belonging to themonastery of Charahan Surp Nishan. "There is no monastery, either ruined,deserted, or occupied which is not, directly or indirectly, under theinfluence of some Kurd."

    The letter mentions Gorky's birthplace. "The villages of Khorkom,Kiushk, and Ishkhanikume have been so much oppressed by the Turks ofArtamed, that the inhabitants are already planning to move away." Khorkom,Khiosk, and Ishkhanikom were adjacent villages along the bank of theKhoshab river; Artamid lay on the lake road to Van City. "In 1893, inKhorkom, a barn belonging to Nishan Der Simon was burned, and the yearfollowing, all the wheat of Mardiros Yaghmainyan in the same village."

    The British vice-consul in Van wrote that in the Shadagh region south ofthe lake, the situation was even worse. There, the Armenians were livingunder "a regime of organized brigandage of the worst and most intolerabledescription." A captain of the Kurdish irregular cavalry was constantlyprovoking them. He had carved the Christian cross on the back of a dog andlet it loose in a village, hoping to instigate a riot. He was known to havemurdered at least six Armenians of Shadagh with his own hands.

    Several months before the massacres of 1896, the Armenians who had beenworking in Istanbul were told to return to their villages. It was not easyto travel such great distances without being robbed, and the journey washard. When Arax's father, Dikran Melikian, arrived back, he found that thevillage had just been sacked. All the men had been assembled in one place,he was told, and offered a chance to change their religion. When they hadrefused, they were killed. Gorky's uncle Vartan, who had arrived back fromIstanbul only a few days before him, had been found dead under a heap ofcorpses. There was no mark on him: he had died of fright or suffocation.As night fell, Dikran looked around for a place where he could sleep. Bedswere broken, blankets and pots and pans had been stolen, sheep drivenaway. Eventually he found an old blanket with a hole in it. As he lay downto sleep, he used his soft felt cap to plug the hole.

    Dikran had arrived back just a few days after the tragedy, yet everyonewas already hard at work. After repairing the damaged houses, thevillagers went off to search for the stolen animals. One heard from afriend: Oh, I saw your sheep with a Kurd at such-and-such a place. Andthen one walked, talked. Sometimes the Kurds gave the animals back,especially if one handed over a little money.

    Everything had happened before. And it would happen again. There hadbeen massacres in the time of grandparents, great-grandparents, as farback as anyone could remember. Over the centuries, a strategy for recoveryhad evolved. Across the country, the priests and village elders wouldarrange marriages between the survivors. At a church celebrating the nameday of a saint, the visiting village priests and the elders sat in thecourtyard after the ceremony and said: That man comes from a good familyand has one child; and she, too, has two children. They will surely dowell together. And so it would be arranged. In such circumstances, thefeelings of those involved were not the prime concern. Often the bride andgroom met for the first time at the altar.

    One such marriage was that of Sedrak Adoian of Khorkom, a widower inhis late thirties with a seven-year-old son called Hagop, to Shushan derMarderosian, a widow aged sixteen or so, with two small daughters.

    Gorky's mother, Shushan, was a strong-willed woman of medium height,with clear, expressive eyes. An English cleric who visited the areadescribed in these words the Armenians who lived to the west of the lake:"They had the frank and direct look which we are accustomed to see only inchildren, and were quick to detect and resent evil, even with violence, asthe intruder would find to his cost." This observation fits in with whatis known of Gorky's mother. Forthright, but also utterly honest, detestingany devious act, Shushan der Marderosian had a powerful character and wasimmovable if crossed.

    Shushan's late husband had come from the mountains of Shadagh, south ofthe lake. Her father had been a priest, and she was born at the monasteryof Surp Nishan, southwest of Khorkom. Her father had also been killed inthe massacres, outside the church in Van City where he had been serving atthe time. In a dark moment, Gorky told his second wife that hisgrandfather had been crucified on the door of his own church.

    Shushan had three brothers: Moses, Aharon, and Nishan. The elder twowere placed in the American orphanage in Van after their father's death,while Shushan went back to her mother at the family monastery. Hermarriage to Sedrak must have been arranged a year or two later. She had nosay in the matter, and there was a condition attached: she would have toleave one of her daughters behind. Thus her elder daughter Sima was sentto an orphanage in Van, where a year or two later the child died. Shushanhad even less control over her children's destiny than she had over herown. Had she borne sons to her first husband, they would have stayedbehind with his family in Shadagh, where they would have been brought upby their paternal grandmother until they were old enough to cultivatetheir father's land, inherit it, and continue the line.

    Shushan's eldest daughter by Sedrak was called Saten, or Satenig. Thencame Gorky, who was christened Vostanig after the city of Vostan, where hismother's family church was situated. Finally her youngest daughter,christened Vartoosh, meaning rose. Behind the back door of the Adoianhouse, where Shushan lingered before walking down the path to the fountainto collect water every morning, grew a rose of which she was particularlyfond.

    Shushan was the youngest married woman of the Adoian house, andtraditionally this figure occupied a subordinate position in the familyhierarchy. She was expected to rise at dawn and pour water for the men towash themselves, before they went out to work in the fields, then scruband clean the main room before tackling the needs of her own family. IfShushan ever cooked, it would have been under the watchful eye of hersister-in-law, Yeghus, who was in charge of the house.

    In the 1940s Gorky described to his dealer Julien Levy the kind ofthoughts that occurred to him as he drew. He said that as he worked, hewatched the line travel over the paper and told stories to himself, like achild who explains as he draws: This is the sun, here is a path, this is"a cow in the sunlight."

    As he spoke to Levy, a second idea occurred to Gorky: that thethoughtless narrative without beginning and without end had something todo with the stories his mother had told him as a child, "while I pressedmy face into her long apron with my eyes closed." She had possessed twoaprons, he said: a plain one and an embroidered one. As she talked, herstories and her embroidery became confused in his head. All his life, saidGorky, her stories and her embroidery were intertwined in his memory.

    Shushan's everyday apron had a design of flowers printed on it. Theembroidered one was textured, with raised stitches. A child with his eyesclosed and his face hidden could have traced the embroidery with his hand.Though the story does not contain any overt act of violence, there is anunsettling aspect to the memory: the child running to his mother in orderto bury his face in her apron, the mother speaking words intended tocomfort and distract. Vartoosh remembered that her uncle Krikor was ashort-tempered man. Once, he hit Shushan so hard that she fell to theground and cut her head on one of the flagstones outside the front door.Being a woman of strong character, Shushan probably did not accept thehumble role the other members of the household imposed on her. If she madeher obstinacy too apparent, it would have been considered perfectly normalto teach her a lesson.

    With so many responsibilities and three children of her own, Shushandelegated the care of Gorky to Akabi, her daughter by her first husband.Even in later life, Akabi was always his champion and protector within thefamily. Like many Armenian girls, she went from taking care of youngersiblings to becoming a mother herself, with no pause in between. A richconfusion of roles took place in Armenian households. Sisters were likemothers, uncles were like fathers. The father figure for the children wasoften an uncle, an elder brother, or a grandfather. It was a way of copingwith the absence of real fathers who had left to work abroad, or who hadbeen killed.

    Not much is known about Gorky's grandfather Manuk, who was the headof the family until Gorky was about four years old. When he died, Gorky wasgiven the name Manuk in his honor, and this was the name used by oldfriends from Van, even in America. The violence which Shushan occasionallyreceived from her uncle Krikor probably took place after old Manuk'sdeath, when there was a struggle as to which of his two sons was to becomehead of the family. Krikor, Gorky's uncle and the elder of the twobrothers, was the winner. Sedrak, Gorky's father, subsequently kept clearof the house if he possibly could. He used to sail a boat across the laketo sell wood on the northern shore, and often he was absent for weeks at atime.

    It does not sound as though Gorky's mother and father ever developed aliking for each other.

* * *

ESCAPING FROM the chores of the Adoian house, Shushan went to churchas often as she could. She used to walk along the path which led from theAdoian house to Khorkom's little schoolhouse, past the village church ofSt. Vartan, whose bell was a plank of walnut wood. Sometimes she went tothe church at Khiosk, the next village along the Khoshab river. In Augustthere was the big festival for the Assumption of the Virgin at Akhtamar,and she took the boat over to the island. The feast was a favorite of thepeople of Shadagh, so it was a chance to catch up with news of her firsthusband's family.

    Whenever she could, she visited her family church of Charahan SurpNishan. The town of Vostan emerged as a few scattered houses surrounded bytrees as she walked, some two hours away across the river, up a long stripof arable land, through orchards of apricot and almond trees. The pathskirted the lower slope of Mount Ardoz on the south side of the big mainroad. The monastery stood a mile or so up the mountainside. A stone wallsurrounded the exterior sleeping quarters, making an enclosure in which topen the sheep.

    Charahan Surp Nishan was not much larger than a chapel. Two heavycolumns in the middle supported a cupola pierced by four small windows. Thewalls were bare, unfrescoed. Within, there was a dark room about twentysquare feet, unadorned and perhaps blackened by fire. Outside in thecourtyard stood a stone with a hole in it, associated with a martyredsaint whose headless body had been found on the hillside eight centuriespreviously. The suppliant whispered prayers through the hole, and thesaint, hopefully, intervened. Behind the buildings there was nothing but ahillside covered with rocks and herbs, with a few weathered beehives andneglected fruit trees. The rooms surrounding the courtyard were halfabandoned, and during Gorky's childhood the entire property was rented fora small sum to a priest who was not a member of the family.

    Shushan was passionately attached to this place, so intimatelyassociated with memories of her father and her ancestors. When her brotherMoses married, his wife Markrit wanted to take over the task of caring forthe church. She was the wife of the eldest male and the head of thefamily, and the job was rightfully hers. But Shushan would have none ofit. Sweeping the church was her job and hers alone. Her brothers used tosay, admiringly, that Shushan had a fearful temper.

    South of Charahan Surp Nishan were the slopes of Mount Ardoz, andbehind these, a slithering goat path wound in and out of the mountains tothe district where Shushan had lived during her first marriage. Shadaghwas a country of tall peaks and deep ravines, where the houses clung tothe sides of cliffs like swallow's nests, the roof of one acting as theterrace of the house above. The villagers looked out onto a landscape ofrock, with just a hint of cool green deep down in clefts eroded by windingtributaries of the Tigris river. Bears plundered their flocks in spring.Wild boar rooted in their gardens. The farmers had to hack out the fieldsfrom the surrounding wastes and ring them with stones to prevent them frombeing washed away. Not even donkeys could reach the more remote wheatfields, whence the harvest had to be brought out on the villagers'shoulders. In the summer, they came down the mountainside bearing hugestoops, like haystacks on legs.

    The men of Shadagh were "wide-awake industrious mountaineers," accordingto one of the American missionaries who later taught Gorky in Van.Both men and women participated in producing shal, a cloth wovenfrom a mixture of wools from sheep and Angora goat. The men sheared thewool, which they washed and carded on the roofs of their houses. The womenspun it into thread, dangling the spindles over the edge of the houses totake advantage of the height. The men gathered natural substances to useas dyes for flatweaves: lichens for orange, insects for red, the root of aplant for yellow. Men wove the shal, while women wove flatweaverugs, called kilims.

    Enclosed gardens, the tree of life, flowing water?these were themes thevillage women wove into their kilims. Each weaver varied her compositionusing signs whose meanings had been eroded by legends. There was a"dragon" theme, the vichap, which may originally have been copiedfrom Chinese silks. Centuries ago, the themes had once possessedrecognizable features, but by constant repetition the dragon on the carpetbecame no more than an evocation. In a similar way, Gorky often used thesame sign again and again in his paintings, until it lost its recognizablefeatures and became merely an unexplained symbol within the storytellingatmosphere of the canvas.

    Thoughts about places and beasts occupied the minds of the weavers asthey worked. If the summer had been arid, the colors tended toward the redand the brown. If it had rained and the pastures had kept their green,then the color green found its way into that year's rug. Like the weaversof Shadagh, Gorky transmitted the light he had absorbed in the open airinto his work. His paintings may not be accurate to the day, but they areusually faithful to the season in which they were painted.

IF NOSTALGIA FOR a lost paradise is one of the qualities which sustainedGorky in America, then perhaps he acquired this emotion from his mother'sown nostalgia, long before his own fragile world came to an end. Unhappyin her second marriage, Shushan idealized her life with her first husband.She often told her children about the courage of the mountaineers ofShadagh and their passion for dancing, and about the Kurds of Shadagh, whosang when they rested at a fountain, sang in certain valleys to make theechoes respond, sang in celebration and in mourning, head held back,beginning on a high note and descending gradually through slides andquarter tones down to a mumble of half-sung assent among the listeners.There were songs of winged horses leaping the mountains at a single bound,and of maidens kidnapped and revenge dutifully wreaked, down to the lastappropriately severed limb.

    When Gorky was tall enough, Shushan sent him back into these samemountains of Shadagh to work as a shepherd boy for the local Kurds. "Theshepherds there live in the mountains with their sheep and Gorky oftenremained with them overnight. From them he learned their language which isKerdman, their folk songs and dances. They are like gypsies." In that partof the world everyone danced and sang.

    Tomas Prudian, Shushan's first husband, was one of those who, before themassacres of 1896, had taken up a gun. Probably he belonged to arevolutionary group of some kind, although in Shadagh a man needed a gunmerely to protect his flocks from wolves and bandits. A photograph whichonce belonged to Akabi, Shushan's elder daughter, shows five mountaineer"revolutionists." One of these may be Tomas.

    Though they resisted the attacks of the Kurds as best they could, whenthe time came the Armenians of Shadagh found that there was nothing to bedone against the Turkish army. Seizing the villages, the troops held thewomen and children hostage until the "revolutionists" came down from thehills and laid down their weapons. In November 1895 Tomas Prudian waslined up with the other men of his family in front of their house inShadagh. After they refused to change their faith, they were all killed.

Shushan's devotion to the monastery of Surp Nishan involvedanother memory on which she dwelled. Her younger brother Nishan, who hadstayed behind with their mother at the family church, was murdered there,around the time of Gorky's birth. When he was about fifteen or sixteenyears old, Nishan began courting a Kurdish girl. The girl's brothers feltinsulted, and Nishan was killed and his body left at the door of themonastery.

    Nishan was Gorky's grandmother's favorite. In her grief, she raised herhands to heaven and cursed God. Her son Moses, still only a young man butnow the head of the family, urged her to keep silent. He had been warnedin a recurring dream, he said, that if she did not keep quiet, her familywould be accursed. Unable to control her grief, she then tried to burndown Surp Nishan. Appalled, the villagers of Vostan rejected her. Behindher back they called her "God-killer," and no one would speak to her.Moses and Aharon had to take her away, to a part of the country where hersacrilege was not common knowledge.

    Gorky's grandmother died when he was still a small child. It must havebeen one of his earliest memories. At the funeral, he was offered somespecial delicacy, for a funeral was a feast as well as a sacrament.Politely, he refused. Again food was offered to him, and again he refused.He knew that it was good manners to accept food only when it was offeredfor the third time. In their confusion, however, his elders failed tooffer the plate to him again. The chance to eat well in this part of theworld did not occur often, and Gorky often mentioned the fact that he hadgone away from his grandmother's funeral still hungry.

    He turned the experience into a funny story, though its black humor wasnot always apparent to his listeners in New York. It was not his uncleNishan's murder, nor his grandmother's insanity and early death, that wasthe high point of the story, but his own hungry cravings. The only otherevent from his grandmother's life which he ever mentioned?and withadmiration?was her attempt to burn down Surp Nishan. He thought this wasone of those magnificent, carefree gestures which took life right out ofits normal cautious round, and he could never make a fire in a hearthhimself without creating a tremendous whoosh of flames and sudden heat.

GORKY DID NOT UTTER a word before he was about five years old. He hadno disability as far as any of his family could tell: he was merely slow.One story has it that his uncle Krikor forced him into speech by takinghim up onto the roof and telling him to jump off. His first words, then,were "No, I won't." Another story has it that a thirteen-year-old cousintried to frighten him into speaking. Little Manuk took up a stick todefend himself. His cousin pretended to be wounded. He cried out, "Angu la," "He is crying." Bewildered, Gorky ran to his mother Shushan,repeating the words.

    In the 1940s Gorky named a painting Argula. After this work wassold and given to the Museum of Modern Art, Gorky received a letter askinghim what the title meant. He replied, "No specific scene but manyincidents?The first word I spoke was Argula?it has no meaning. I wasthen five years old. thus I call this painting Argula as I was entering anew period closer to my instincts." There was no need to tell the worldthat "Argula" was a child's garbled version of "he is crying." It wouldonly require a still longer explanation, and one easily misunderstood bythose who had no experience of life in that part of the world.

    Gorky told friends in New York that his mother used to call him "theblack one, the unlucky one who will come to no good end." Sometimes hetalked as if his mother's reproaches weighed heavily on his head, and evenat an early age, Gorky resisted the stark world of angels and devils atthe core of his mother's religion. Her equivalent for "naughty boy" wasthe formidable "Oh, you child without God."

    Once, at a dinner party in 1942, Gorky resurrected a certain incidentfrom his childhood.

I remember myself when I was five years old. The year I first began to speak. Mother and I are going to church. We are there. For a while she left me standing before a painting. It was a painting of infernal regions. There were angels in the painting. White angels. And black angels. All the black angels were going to Hades. I looked at myself. I am black, too. It means there is no Heaven for me. A child's heart could not accept it. And I decided there and then to prove to the world that a black angel can be good, too, must be good and wants to give his inner goodness to the whole world, black and white world.

    Apart from the church of Akhtamar, there were no frescoes of the LastJudgment in any church which Gorky visited as a child. But the image was acommon one in the family Bibles of the Van school, and Shushan possessedone of these, inherited from her father, the priest of Surp Nishan. Beingilliterate, she showed this Bible to her son for their illustrationsalone. The line which he described to Julien Levy as traveling over thepaper, making a sun, a path, a cow in the sunlight, would in this casehave traced the image of Mary, Mother of God, and the angel bringing theGood News. And as Shushan toldhim the story, there would havebeen no difference to her betweenthe thing drawn and the angel itself.

    The idea that lines on paper could become as real as facts wassomething Gorky learned from Shushan. In the old Byzantine tradition,a father gave to his daughter when she married a book which he himselfhad copied. She was then to pass on the cultural heritage to her children.In Armenian households, it was the mother who transmitted the mysticalside of things, whereas the father taught the practicalities of tendingthe fields. In both cases the transmission of knowledge was physical.Culture was to be touched, was to be shaped by hand.

    The illuminated manuscripts of the Van school are simple, "innocent"works, as if the monks who drew them were content to represent theattributes by which the actors of the story could be recognized, withoutworrying themselves unduly over the composition. St. John the Baptist hadto have a hairy coat; otherwise who could recognize who he was? The Magialways carried gifts, and the entry into Jerusalem was recognizable becausethe picture always included a man perching in a tree. In Van, the goldused in the background of grander volumes produced by the Cilician schoolwas replaced with a yellow color boiled from the root of a plant, and thebrown was made from a certain clay, ground between two stones. Theminiatures of the Van school are close in spirit to Gorky's description ofnarrative drawing.

GORKY'S SECOND WORDS WERE more mundane. Walking with his familyby the shore of the lake, he turned to Krikor and said, "Money! All youever talk about is money." They were amazed, not so much by the meaning ofhis words as by the complicated phrase which unexpectedly had come fromhis mouth.

    Passing near Khorkom along the coast road early in 1908, the Britishvice-consul thought that the Armenians he saw there were "no better than aset of cringing beggars, ragged and filthy," an observation which is borneout by a photograph of children in a village near the monastery of Narek,some thirty miles from Khorkom. Gorky as a child must have looked verymuch like one of these boys.

    It was hardly surprising if Krikor talked obsessively of money. Thevillage had almost nothing in the way of cash. It survived on barter. Allcash went to the government, and the farmers were forced to take out loansat exorbitant interest rates in order to pay their taxes. Grain seed wasloaned to poor farmers by Kurdish Aghas and redeemed immediately after theharvest. Armed tribesmen stood over the threshing floor and rode off withtheir percentage as soon as the wheat had been winnowed. If there was anywheat to spare, it was taken into Van to be exchanged for cloth, for therewere no looms in Khorkom. Sometimes salesmen used to ride out from thecity to sell women needles and thread in exchange for chickens, leavingwith the chickens slung across the backs of their mules.

    The massacres of 1896 instilled into the Christian minority of Turkey asense of terrible urgency, and the twenty years preceding the finaldisaster of 1915 was a period of ferment. The Armenians were engaged in arace against time, to become better educated, better organized, betterinformed about the outside world than the Turks and Kurds who surroundedthem. Two options were open to them, and both were pursued simultaneously.The first was to prepare for an armed uprising as quickly as possible. Thesecond was to make themselves indispensable to those who ruled them. Itgoes without saying that the two strategies were incompatible, but thestate of confusion imposed on them from above was so great that it wasimpossible to establish a unified front.

    In 1904 the local wing of the Dashnak party?the Armenian RevolutionaryFederation?took over the island of Akhtamar, where it opened a politicalschool. Their ideology was socialist and initially anticlerical, and therewas talk of selling the manuscripts and silver belonging to the monasteryin order to dedicate the proceeds to the revolutionary cause. Khorkom wastheir base, being the closest exclusively Armenian village on themainland. The villagers had to take sides. Shushan, with her strongattachment to the church, was against the Dashnaks, but her brotherAharon, now teaching in the carpentry department of the American MissionSchool in Van, used to travel across the water to the island to studythere whenever he could.

    The American missionaries thought that the "revolutionists," as theycalled them, were atheists, and they disliked them intensely. The archivesof the mission are full of the difficulties they were encountering withDashnak teachers in their schools, disseminating "atheistical" propaganda.Ironically, whereas the Americans called these freedom fighters"infidels," the Turks called them "Fedayee," meaning those who wereprepared to die for their faith. The missionaries began to make theirpresence felt in the villages outside Van, especially in Khorkom, which"has suffered perhaps more than any other from the baleful influence ofTashnagist infidelity."

    Yet, like everything else in that part of the world, there wereexceptions and paradoxes and personal solutions to ideological problems.Aharon taught carpentry at the American school in Van, but themissionaries made no objection if he occasionally went over to Akhtamar tolearn about the Revolution from the Dashnak teachers. Aharon was a strong,serious man, and the missionaries trusted him. To the end of his days hemanaged to remain both a Dashnak and a staunch supporter of the church. Ipossess a hymnal which used to belong to him, filled with hymns written bythe missionaries and their wives, and it is a well thumbed, much lovedlittle book.

    In 1908, about the time Gorky was beginning to speak, about fiftyArmenians in Van City were killed during a three-day clash with thepolice. The Turkish militia was called out and the surrounding countrysidewas searched for hidden weapons. So many Armenians were hurt during thisaction that they gave it a name: the Khozarkutiun, the "Big Search." TheBritish vice-consul noted that the Turkish militia which searched thevillages near Van "behaved in an abominable manner, beating, pillaging,robbing, and raping."

    Hagop, Gorky's half brother, Sedrak's son by his first wife, was bythis time a strong young man and a member of a band of Dashnak freedomfighters. During the Big Search, he was involved in a scuffle with thepolice. According to his own fantastic version, he "pulled the TurkishPasha from his horse" and had to take to the hills, where he must havereceived help from Kurds. He and a cousin called Amu eventually made theirway to Cairo, where they obtained money for the fare to America throughthe help of an Armenian priest.

    Van was saved from a general massacre by events which took place athousand miles west of the lake. An insurrection by Turkish troops innorthern Greece turned into a general revolt against the sultanate. Withina few months the Young Turks succeeded in forcing a reform of theconstitution. As their ideas on political reform ran parallel to those ofthe Dashnak party, for a while the two opponents became allies. TheArmenian "revolutionists," from having been a troublesome brotherhoodperpetually on the brink of provoking another massacre, blossomed into apolitical party keen to register all Armenians as voters and to return asmany deputies as possible to Parliament in Istanbul.

    Emigration from Turkey to America suddenly became much easier. Initiallythe Young Turks approved of emigration, as it brought in cash from abroad.Thousands of Armenians took their chance and left. It was simpler to earnmoney in Boston or Niagara Falls and send it back via a bank in Van thanto go on, year after year, paying new taxes, bribing policemen, makingdeals with Kurds.

    It was at this point that Gorky's father left the country.

    Early one morning, Sedrak woke Vartoosh and Gorky. He took them downto the edge of the lake. A soft mist was rising from the surface of thewater. They ate a meal together of flat bread. Sedrak then gave his son apair of brand-new slippers. After a while he told the two children toreturn to their mother. Then he mounted a tall horse and rode away intothe mist, never to return.

    There was no preamble or sequel to the story. Though it was one ofGorky's favorites, he never said a word about the political confusionbehind his father's departure. As de Kooning said once, "It was likefolklore." When he read Ethel Schwabacher's biography, de Kooning wasshocked to discover that Gorky's father had been a man of flesh and blood,who had lived quietly near Boston until 1948. Why had he never heard ofhim? What else had Gorky kept to himself all those years?

    Gorky's mother and father had not developed an affection for each otherduring their eight or ten years together, but even so, to say good-bye toher husband must have been a hard experience. The Adoian household was nowshorthanded. Shushan had to assume a man's role and work in the fields,instead of walking across the river to sweep the courtyard of Surp Nishan.That autumn they had to find a man to help with the plowing. They enlistedthe help of an Adoian cousin, nicknamed "Rus" because he had red hair. OnlyRussians had such coloring. Rus had five children and lived east of theAdoian house, toward the church.

BEYOND THE CHURCH LAY the village school, to which Gorky was sentsoon after his father left. The path led past the priest's house, in whosegarden stood the best pear tree in Khorkom. A spring bubbled up in theroad on the far side of this building and the way became boggy. Thechildren had to hop from stone to stone to keep their feet dry.

    Shushan handed over her son to the teacher on the first day with thewords "Flesh to you, bones to me. Teach him something." Her son could bebeaten in the name of instruction, but no bones were to be broken. Theformula was a traditional one, and in later life Gorky repeated it withenthusiasm. The writer Vahan Totovents describes exactly the sameexperience from his own childhood: "The blows from the stick would onlyland on the fleshy and tender parts of the body. All the parents weresatisfied with this method. It was often they who proposed and encouragedit."

    The villagers of Khorkom were proud of their school. It had been builtafter the massacres of 1896. The head of the village had had a hard timeconvincing the young hotheads of Khorkom that the money, which had beenraised for the good of the village, should be spent on a school ratherthan on guns. Girls as well as boys studied, and prospective brides in theneighboring villages tried to find husbands in Khorkom so that theirdaughters as well as their sons could acquire an education. In Gorky'schildhood, the fact that Khorkom had a schoolhouse, and even a littlelibrary?just a cupboard with about twenty books in it?gave the village aprogressive reputation.

    There was only one room, and the teacher taught all gradessimultaneously. During their first year, the children copied theiralphabet from lettering inscribed on a wooden palette with a handle.Gorky's cousin Arax remembered him as taller than the other children. Hesat at the back of the class, out of the teacher's eye, carving a stickwith a penknife. Whittling a stick, Gorky used to say later, empties thefretful mind. He told his second wife that at school he preferred topretend he was stupid as it left him free to dream. "He liked school,"according to his sister Satenig, "but was very active, 'fresh.' Every dayafter school he went swimming in the lake which he loved to do."

    The beach lay north of Khorkom, where the women did the washing. Thewomen of Khiosk and Ishkhanikom often joined them, and it was an occasionto exchange all the local news. By the time the surrounding bushes werewhite with clothes, all the women knew everything about everything. Afterswimming, Gorky modeled animals from the soft clay found near the shore, orcarved tops to spin on rocks, or made frail fans to turn in the breeze atthe edge of the fields. He whittled propellers out of poplar, stuck theminto an apple, and suspended the toy on a long stick over the irrigationcanals so that they would whir and scatter water pleasantly.

    The children ran around barefoot and always had cuts on their feet.Pausing in their games, they watched soldiers escorting caravans along themain road on the far side of the Khoshab River. One road led straight overthe mountains, inland, and there was also an old coast road around theridge between Khorkom and Artamid, where more Turks than Armenians wereliving. Then on to Van, three or four hours away on foot. In Van therewere schools, a bank, a telegraph office, newspapers, and governmentoffices. Beyond Van, right at the top of the lake, Mount Ararat, on thefrontier with Russia. It was from Russia that the Vanetsis prayed thathelp would come when times were bad. Russia was Kedi, was "Uncle."Their protector. Their savior.

IT WAS OBVIOUS THAT GORKY was not studying. It worried Shushan. Fromtime to time on her way to the fountain, she took Gorky into a littleabandoned garden and tried to lecture him about his future: everyone wasbusy learning; it was the only way in which Armenians could rise out ofthe degrading state into which they were so rapidly falling. According toGorky, she "put him on a marble seat" and urged him to study. Nothing inKhorkom was made of marble, though Khiosk had a marble fountain. The"marble seat" must be Gorky's way of saying "she put me on a pedestal."Making it into a funny story, Gorky implied that scholastic ambition wasfar from his thoughts as a child.

    Shushan wanted Gorky to become a varbed, a word which signifies"instructed," or "capable," in the sense of learning a craft. A "master,"in the sense of "master builder." Even blacksmiths stood a better chanceof survival in that part of the world when massacres started, as Turks andKurds always needed somebody to shoe their horses. When, in themid-thirties, Gorky painted a portrait of a student of his who was aplasterer, he called the painting Master Bill, because of thegrand sweeping strokes with which he covered a wall. "Master" was a titlehe gave to anyone who exercised a manual skill with a certain flourish,even a cook in a little Armenian restaurant he frequented.

    Near the garden where Shushan rested with her children was a fallen treewhose lateral branches pointed straight up into the sky. The villagerstreated this "tree of wish fulfillment" as an object of worship, tyingfragments torn from their clothing to the branches as votive offerings,returning thanks for recovery from snake bites or as a prayer for thefuture. Nearby was a large rock against which Gorky often saw his motherand other village women rub their breasts, praying to the saints forintercession on their behalf.

    The whole countryside was interlaced with strange pagan beliefs.Whenever a villager swore a solemn oath, it was not by the authority ofGod or his angels but "by the green sun of my life." North of the lake,the village women practiced a "salute to the sun," walking between thehouses holding a loaf of bread and a special stick under the approving eyeof the village priest, who blessed them as they went by. It was a ritualof Zoroastrian origin that had been absorbed into Christianity. In onevillage, during a dry year, the women were yoked to a plow and togetherthey plowed a furrow in the dried-out bed of a stream, to encourage thewater to flow.

    By 1910 these arcane religious practices were no longer followed by theyounger generation or by those who had a wider experience of the world. Inthe photo, one or two of the men in the background, grinning not veryrespectfully at the piety of their womenfolk, are dressed in hats andcloaks acquired in Russia. These old beliefs were the domain of women whonever left the village.

    Once, Gorky told his friend Aristodemos Kaldis this story. At night, hismother used to mix flour and water together in order to make bread. Beforeputting it in a warm place so that the dough would rise, she made the signof the cross over it. She used to say that without the sign of the cross,the dough would not rise and the bread would be ruined. And when he grewup and married, he was to chose as his bride a nice Armenian girl withcheeks as soft and as white as his mother's dough.

    What Gorky remembered most of his mother was the simple way in whichshe took for granted the extraordinary and the poetic in their lives.Though as a child he resisted her scholastic ambitions for him and doubtedthe dramatic world of saints and devils in which she believed, from thevantage point of Sixteenth Street in New York, everything about Shushanseemed tinged with a poignant beauty. She summed up a whole world ofstrange but beautiful beliefs which, though he often joked about them, henever abandoned.

TWO YEARS AFTER her husband left, Shushan arranged a marriage forAkabi, "to get her out of Krikor's clutches," as Akabi's daughter put itto me recently. Her husband was called Muggerdich Amerian, agedtwenty-eight, from Shadagh. Shushan had made friends with the Amerianfamily during her first marriage. Muggerdich was the only survivor of ninesons. He had been overlooked during the massacres because his mother haddressed him up as a little girl. They were married on February 10, 1910.The bride and groom saw each other for the first time at the altar.

    Aharon wanted his sister Shushan to come to Van with her children. Asher son preferred carving to studying, she could put him into the missionschool, where he could keep an eye on him.

    School inspectors from the mission appeared in Khorkom on their annualvisit: Miss Grisell M. McClaren and Miss Whittlesey, of New Haven,Connecticut. They stayed in the house of the Melikian family, the Adoians'neighbors. Arax Melikian peeped around the door at them as they recoveredfrom the journey. Here were two tall, strange women: Miss Whittlesey,whose name nobody could ever pronounce, no matter how fond they became ofher; and Miss McClaren, always so self-assured. Their clothes?so manyfolds of beautiful cloth, which rustled so differently and smelled soclean. The next day when they visited the schoolhouse in Khorkom, MissWhittlesey slipped into Arax's hand a small porcelain doll.

    Shushan decided to take Aharon's advice, so they moved to Van City andfound rooms near the newlyweds. With her brother's help, Shushan's otherchildren were admitted to the American school. Sitting on a bench in themission school, Gorky already began to think of Khorkom as a remoteparadise, a source of reverie, even before his childhood had ended.

Continues...

Excerpted from From a High Placeby Matthew Spender Copyright © 2000 by Matthew Spender. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520225481
• ISBN 13: 9780520225480
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 450