Becoming Ezra Jack Keats by Virginia McGee Butler

Author:Virginia McGee Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

Chapter 8

Starving Artist?

Keats would later refer to his next few years as a big sleep. His old struggles with finances, health, and relationships seemed to have been held in abeyance for his return. He saw his work in this period as derivative rather than springing from his creativity. His disorganized search for himself continued.

Landlords learned that artists, writers, and actors who needed low-rent apartments improved them while they waited for jobs so they could pay the rent, but when the artists ran behind in their payments, they still received an eviction notice. The landlord wanted more than improvement to his property. As Jack walked home, he might hear a shout from a neighbor, “Brace yourself, Keats! There’s another greetin’ for ya.” He’d find a sign in Old English type on his door: “NOTICE OF EVICTION.” Jack would tear the notice into tiny bits, throw it into the air like confetti, wave at the neighbor, and find another apartment.

One night, Jack arrived to visit friends before they got home and happened to meet Mira, who was babysitting the friends’ children. She had an abusive husband who had shared her experience of fleeing from the Holocaust. Jack began dropping in at his friends’ house to visit when Mira babysat. When she separated from her husband, she and Jack moved in together in a walk-down, a few steps below street level. Jack caulked and sanded the floors, plastered and painted the flaking walls, sowed grass in the backyard and sealed the windows. Mira became a casserole expert, creating dishes from fish heads, organ parts, rice, tomato sauce, and vegetables, which they paired with day-old bread and cheap wine. In the evening, they recounted the events of their days, read to each other at bedtime, and tried to outwit the mosquitoes. In the darkness, they lured those pests, attracted by the smell of the garbage cans outside the window, to the light of a flashlight and snatched them with their fists. After the boon of a well-paying assignment, they bought window screens, which left them with only the odor of the garbage.

The two were relieved when Mira’s husband agreed to a divorce, and they began to make friends with their neighbors, including the artist Henry Koerner, who was beginning to make a name for himself in the art world with a feature in Newsweek magazine.

Slowly and with some help from his friends, Jack began to make deals in a hodgepodge of places for his art and illustrations while Mira picked up babysitting jobs. The National Academy accepted Jack’s gouache of Place Saint-Michel for a show. The Associated American Artists Gallery hung more of his paintings, with an ad featuring “the Plaza” in their brochure below a signed lithograph with a quotation from Jack: “Typical of the unexpected and dramatic contrasts of New York City is the phenomenon of the Plaza. Here one finds the serenity and quietude of the Hansom carriages, trees, pigeons and the fountain. Behind loom tall gray buildings. I was particularly moved by the first snow of winter.

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