It now seems probable that my transfer to the class with tables was not a promotion, as I then thought, but a trial balloon: Seeing that I was getting nowhere (I was, but not their where) they sent me upstairs. At worst, two minuses (eventually) add up to a plus; in this (my) case, I was sent to see what a minus and a plus would come to.
The new teacher—although I thought that she eyed me with suspicion—gave me a place at one of the tables, said some thing about a project, and left me to the stares, quite self-assured, of the other students. Things were pleasant enough for a few days; I fiddled with finding a project, and practiced looking around. Then a girl at my table raised her hand: “That boy (pointing to me) is picking his nose. It’s disgusting and makes me feel like throwing up.” Well, how better to get at a Polish boy than to accuse him of nose-picking. I denied it, waving my hands and saying (I lapsed into my father’s accent) that I was merely touching my nose—and there the matter rested for a while. I could not look at the girl, nor at anyone—but after some moments my finger drifted, to my amazement, back up to my nose. “There, see, he’s doing it again.” “I saw you this time” said teacher, her eyes beady as a bird’s. (People often turn into animals when I get into trouble). Then there ensued a lot of “if you do this again,” “not decent,” “other people’s feelings,” “don’t you have a handkerchief?” (another ethnic slur), and I was put at a different table. I remember after that I left my nose alone; I had learned something and so I was not transferred back to the yelling class.
There was another room with larger tables where, twice a week in the afternoon, we would go to “art”—but it might well have been “science.” By that time, I could identify different subjects, although they sometimes got mixed up. The fault was not entirely mine however. In all our classes, teachers demonstrated success through tangible objects—“projects”—that could be spread about, pinned up on walls, and displayed to principals, important visitors, even to those occasional parents who had reason to come by.
So in each of our classes, whatever its nominal subject, we cut and pasted, folded and hammered, painted and drew. Although, in later years, I did a lot of cutting and pasting, I didn’t then. With so many hands in the act, everything was always being covered with paste and paint; my fingers and clothing would get sticky, which bothered me and upset my mother. So I drew—on clean white paper with a pencil.
We must have been studying electricity in another class—but the word came down, because I was given the project of drawing a light-bulb. This was no ordinary in-class job, but an over-the-weekend, on white matte-board, large scale, soul-is-on-the-line job. I remember spending Friday night holding a lightbulb, like Yorick’s head, in my hand, and thinking melancholy thoughts. Saturday I drew the shape freehand, stepping back from time to time to see how close to perfection I was getting. Much later I saw a movie in which an artist (Laughton as Rembrandt, I think) would step back to check on the progress of his masterpiece. I felt precocious. I drew the innards of the bulb very exactly: the filaments and coils, and the strange lumpy glass in which they were embedded—or emerging from—an ancient sprouting, as I thought. Yes, it was alive, my bulb, but with the eternal life of a fossil. I had, by then, been to the Museum of Natural History. My bulb was all bones, a dinosaur of pure form. Sunday I colored it sparingly using colored pencils that I sharpened with the kitchen knife. I used blues, greens, and grays, and I remember the result as cool, transparent, and distant, which I accepted as being what I wanted. There was a day of waiting, but I didn’t touch the drawing again. I had stepped back; returned to look; it was finished.
But I must tell you that I wasn’t the only one chosen for that assignment. There was another boy, someone I didn’t know (a dangerous omen) who was also coming in on Tuesday with his own light-bulb project. And then teacher, a big bustly chickadee, put them, his and mine, up on the wall side by side. It has always amazed me how my paintings look when away from my studio. They look comparative; not showing what they are, but what they do not have that others have. Such “not-having” is not always bad, of course; maturity, as I later learned, is a lot about not wanting what others have. But at this moment, I felt vanquished. The other boy’s light-bulb was yellow. He had painted the light, the glow, the radiance, the living life. I hadn’t even turned mine on; mine had no movement, no personality; I had made a corpse. Teacher asked for a show of preference, and mine lost; light and life is where it’s at, of course. Then she spoke at length about the impropriety of comparing (which she had just asked us to do)—and this because each drawing has its own qualities that are valuable—in themselves. But she didn’t believe it—and neither did the other students.
For me, however, a value of “in itself” was a new and appealing notion. Art became a subject I could understand—a first lesson in the conflict between empathy and abstraction, and a primer in the politics of opportunistic relativism.
The drawings hung side by side for a long time. Nobody looked at them after the first day (another lesson) and when the term ended and I took mine home, I found that I had come to like it because of what it did not have.
NAMES IN PROSE
I lived in my aunt’s house as a child. There were two Louis’s on her block. The one Louis—it could have been “Lewis,” I never saw it written—lived in the rental apartment that was the second floor of my aunt’s house. His insistence on pronouncing the “s” in his name much impressed me, for in that neighborhood of alliances, prejudices, and envies—what others made of one’s name—was a sign of one’s prospects. The other Louis was “Louee,” never an “s”—the name being a call-word, as in “Hey Louee!”
Compared to me, however, the two Louis’s had clear nominations. My “Lucian” began in my mother’s family’s Poland—in a small town called “Mielecz”—and Lucian, when spoken in Polish, sounds something like “Lootzyan.” But this was disastrous for the Brooklyn streets—what kind of bird is a “Lootzyan?”—and so other versions emerged. The one that distressed me most sounded like “Lucyann,” and as—for immigrant reasons—my boyhood shorts and Buster Brown haircut had lingered too long, this version of my name carried intimations of “sissy” with it. Had I been better planted, it would have passed quickly, but there seemed an unending string of increasingly large boys to keep it going, and I had to revert to silence and cunning—this being the first seed of the estrangement that, much later, would have me want to write about my different names.
Legally, I had been given other names; my first middle name is “Wladyslaw,” and the second middle name—a proliferation affected by those who enter the new world with heritage but no money—is “Edvard.” My parents didn’t tell me much about Edvard; oh, there were some whispers (children hear everything) about Austrian cavalry sweeping through the town; and there was uneasy mention of an ancestor who, for inscrutable European reasons, the family felt obligated to remember but not discuss. “Wladyslaw,” however, has an older, non-familial—past. The name, as I was often told, recalls Poland’s most successful king, Wladyslaw Jagiello, he who in ancient times defeated the Swedish armies on the ice (I struggled to find an image for that—they say he waved two swords) and it was even said that, at another time, he fought the Czar’s armies to a stand-still. “Wladyslaw” is unpronounceable in Brooklynese, and at one Christmas gathering, my cousin Florence—the first of our family to go to college—suggested that the English equivalent might well be “Walter.” I was dismayed, I am not a Walter; and my mother’s usual holiday gloom deepened at the sound of it. So, despite the link between its heritage and my present state, “Wladyslaw” did not become “Walter.”
The name, in fact, is a description: “Wlad-the-Slav.” But its polyphony did not play in Brooklyn—so it was restricted to baptism and vaccination certificates until, much later, after Poland had been trapped behind the Iron Curtain, it came out as a patriotic conceit.
A woman on the block—it could have been the mother of the Louis with the “s”—started calling me “Lokshen” which is Yiddish for “noodles,” and which, as I grew taller, became “Langer Luksh.” This version presented an image of affable goofiness, which secretly I did not relish—but it was easier to carry than the