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they got distracted by their talent. Zack wasn’t distracted that way; he
stuck
. He had nothing but this—” She does not want to say “hope.” She goes on, “He was terribly clumsy with a pencil, with a brush. His hands seemed to be too thick for them. And he didn’t
know
anything, compared with most people. He’d gotten in with Benton at the Art Students League; Benton saw himself in him, I suppose, the braggart part of him, the west-of-the-Mississippi thing, and Zack’s talent was no threat, and then when back in California Zack had actually met Siqueiros, and picked up on the messiness, the new industrial paints, the social protest or whatever, everything messy and new, and he had driven out to Pomona College to see a mural Orozco had done of Prometheus; when he was east again he drove up to Dartmouth to see those Orozcos, he loved them, those earth colors, the bad drawing, and like everybody in New York in the ’thirties he inhaled Surrealism, but without having much sense of the psychological theories behind it, it was all just as it applied to him, the would-be great Zack McCoy, personally. You mentioned politics, but I don’t remember that we much noticed it, the things people talk about now. Truman, and the Marshall Plan, China going under to Mao, and Europe on the brink, and all those tests, the test sirens, the talk about annihilation: it didn’t have to do with us. We were utterly selfish. Even the war—though not everybody got out of serving, many did. The board doctors classified them as crazy or homosexual, even when they had wives. I was so shocked, coming to New Yorkwhen I was twenty, by how nobody mentioned the war, in the worst year of it, when it looked like we really might lose and Hitler and Tojo would rule the world. All we talked about was painting and who was fucking who.”
    “But a lot of the group,” the interviewer objects, with her prim book-knowledge, “were
very
political. Very ’thirties lefty. Bernie Nova and Jarl Anders, especially. If you read their post-war manifestos they’re downright—what’s that word?—apocalyptic. They saw what they were doing as a revolution. Anders said—I don’t have the quote right here—he said he was going to undo two thousand years of mendacity and betrayal of the human spirit.”
    Why is this young person reciting Hope’s own life to her? And not getting it quite right. Bernie loved to issue pronouncements, the more outrageous the better, but was also a terribly funny, enfolding, kindly man, a bear with his waxed mustache and clownish hip-hip-old-man monocle, words just flying from him, avuncular touches and hugs quickening her when she stood close. Jarl was more distant, more limited, gray and gaunt like a corpse unearthed, a bit paralyzed in his motions, staring out of those eyes, eyes shadowed like a movie vampire’s, monomaniacal but capable, too, of a certain hawk-swoop tenderness, a sudden seeing into a woman, in a way impossible for Zack. Zack saw only a mother, an intimate enemy, whoever the woman was he looked at: a threatening softness, a suck underfoot at the rocky beaches, where he would make impromptu sculptures of the rocks, especially if there were other people’s children there to entertain. He did love children, but with no sense of responsibility. He thought his own would be like somebody else’s, you turn your back on them when playtime is over.
    Hope admits, “They were all older than I, I was the baby,they had struggled through the Depression trying to be artists, they might have starved or turned to something else but for the government and the FAP. Twenty-three dollars a week was a fortune back then. They were a generation older in some cases, and, yes, there was a lot of the Old Left left in them. They believed there must be a better society than this one, with a third of the men out of work and the rich wearing top hats and being vile about Roosevelt. The war suppressed all that. But not really. It