I met Jonatha Newcomb, now getting on to ninety years of age, through what she liked to call "co-incidents," a mixing of ingredients she likened to baking: flour alone and butter alone make nothing; mix them and crust appears. Our meeting made crust.
We met via radio commentaries I recorded for the local public radio station, 22-minute stints on pretty much whatever I wished to talk about on the megahertz forum. She had heard and liked them, wrote me a letter saying so. We began a correspondence and wrote many letters before we ever actually met, I on my computer and she on a Smithsonian Institution-vintage manual typewriter, never using white-out if the letters bobbled their positions. Sometimes she wrote by hand in a printing that often used all caps but did not look too helvetica -- instead, the serifs had a minimal but noticeable grace, and the progress of letters across the page had the flux of lynx footprints in the snow, rounded, bossed, imperative.
While technically we both wrote "letters," the truth soon became clear that her letters occupied a different genre than mine. I wrote letters in the conventional sense, with newsiness and deeper thoughts wrapped in a pastry of motif and theme. I crafted my letters from left to right down the page, indented my paragraphs, kept a ragged right margin and a courier type that looked sturdy and impersonal. True, I told her very person things, but the formality of my presentation bubble-wrapped whatever intensity these thoughts and feelings had, gave them a nice roundedness which both explained and betrayed them at the same time. My letters very much copied my character.
On the other hand, Jonatha's letters demonstrated almost instantly a refusal to conform and perform. Filled with musings, dashed-off poems, late-breaking addenda creeping vinelike in the margins -- in short, flavors, tastes, tints, calliope music, warm baguettes of observation and advice -- they had as much delight for the ear as the eye. I read them aloud, read them silent. A letter from Jonatha, like Jonatha herself, impeached sobriety and convention, drove them from the place, and installed a regime of delight.
Her letters flowed differently than mine. Mine, canal-like, went straight from source to source, the phrases and comments, like power locks, raising and lowering levels of meaning incrementally. Her letters, like the arterial river systems drawn on maps, took their waters from everywhere. Ports where thoughts docked appeared around the bend unexpectedly; a small phrase tucked in the margin linked, through some subterranean network, with a comment in paragraph three. If my letters looked and felt like a Mercator map, hers had the three-dimensional geography of a child's flour-and-water-and-salt map troweled onto cardboard and painted with oranges, greens, and blues -- and perhaps not even a land that actually existed.
She sometimes signed her letters simply Jonatha. (Aside: I mistakenly addressed my first letter to her as "Jonathan," having filled in the last letter through the blindness of assumption. She replied, "If I had a dime for every >n' someone added to my name, I'd be rich." Point taken.) Sometimes she signed them simply JFN, done (of course) in a script of her own device. I have kept every one, filed (as is my wont) in chronological order, knowing that when she dies, these will hold back the tendency of memory to turn hagiographic, the way grief, in order to stop its own pain, smoothes down the rough edges that originally attracted the soul so as to soften their eternal loss and in their place fixes a halo: anodyne through abstraction. They will help me continue a correspondence with the person I knew.
A motorist on Route 104 in Bridgewater, NH, unless he had had his eyes instructed to look for JFN's house/cottage/bungalow behind the roadside fringe of scrub pine trees, would never have conned its presence. Painted a brown concocted from bark, reprocessed leaves, calcified pine needles, and loam tinted with tannic acid, it chameleons into its surroundings. Only the mailbox, "405" in regular stencil, and a rust-flaky two-inch metal pipe with the nozzle of a housefly-green bottle upended into it, signifies a human presence. A glance, a blink, not even a retinal burn, and the driver would be around the bend, gazing at the lake.
In fact, I did exactly that the first time I went to visit her. Several miles down the road I realized I had blundered; it took several more passes until I spotted the driveway to her house, exactly where she told me it would be. I pulled in and, while the metal of my car ticked down to coolness, I waited and looked.
To my right, her house, and it looked exactly as I expected it to look, though until the moment I saw it I had had no established picture of it in my mind at all. A side door led into a small attached covered walkway that led to the real entrance to the house. On the outside wall Jonatha had affixed various pieces of wood, stone, and glass that suddenly melted into a cat's face in profile and birds flying. They appeared exactly as that picture included in psychology texts, where a grizzled crone emerges from a drawing of a coy and fashionably hatted young lady. Natural objects in one guise morphed into others, erasing categories, mocking conclusions.
I got out of the car. The house really did seem to dissolve into the woods that surrounded it. Part of it rose to two stories; the rest held level at one. A collapsing garage, with a swaybacked ridgepole, sat in front of me. I ducked into the walkway and immediately smiled. She had taken the door of a wood or coal stove and attached a black-painted plywood body of a lion to it. Immediately, the resemblance shone through -- the wrought iron filigree and blackened knobs suddenly turned into the carnivorous visage of a lion guarding the front door, albeit a lion only about two feet tall. I instantly started seeing the associations she had seen, not only visually but poetically as well, the door as a mouth that eats the wood that kept some house warm long ago. Her point became very obvious: why shouldn't our eyes see in multiples?
She had also lined the walkway with a row of glass insulator knobs; their thick aqueous greens and blues and blue-tinted whites soaked up the chlorophyll light filtering through the palisade of pines between the house and highway. She had scattered other objects around as well, everything seeming to stand for both itself and something else.
I knocked on the door.
I did not know what to expect, what who to expect, because I had never seen Jonatha or spoken to her. I stood waiting for the word made flesh.
The woman who opened the door spiked slightly over four feet tall, perhaps four and a half total. Her white hair, short and fashionless, arched over a face both gaunt and fiercely alive, not skeletal, not desiccated, but distilled to just the amount of face she needed. Her eyes, slightly rheumy, carried indeterminate color, and her frame, like her face, held nothing in reserve.
She greeted me kindly, did not give me a facile hug or shake my hand, asked me in. In a ritual that we tended to follow each time I visited, we headed to the kitchen for tea and talk. But the living room, low-ceilinged and exuding "summer cottage" in its shape, had more of the same kinds of natural ornaments on the walls and tables: driftwood turned into a sea-bird, curved stove legs (from the same stove as the lion's head) paired with leather flaps and nailed to the wall for a caravan of elephants, a spider's web drawn with the thermostat at its center.
More of the same addressed me in the kitchen, paraphernalia exhibiting their secret selves all over the place. I sat at the kitchen table, and she asked if I would like some tea. I did, not because I liked tea, but because it suddenly seemed the most appropriate beverage in the world for where I sat, in a kitchen surrounded by wit and in the company of a person who wanted to see me.
That table, that kitchen -- harbor.
She does not reveal her life easily. The rough geography of it settles out like this: She grew up in Texas, near Austin. Much of her childhood reveals itself in "Georgia's Miss Baby," a series of stories she wrote about her life with her mother and a black housekeeper, Georgia. (The "Miss Baby" part comes from the pet name Georgia had for her.) The stories reflect Jonatha in several ways. First, she composed them on her clunk of a typewriter, with the occasional hand-drawn strikeout and overtyped words or letters. Nothing word-processed here - instead, mind-processed. Second, she wrote each story at a single sitting, that is, when she sat down to compose, she composed all at once, with rare editing (mostly confined to several words or a phrase re-arranged or recast). Third, she wrote them without punctuation, or at least conventional syntax. She said she wanted to capture the voice of the child, but I think differently: she used, not the voice of a very young girl, but of an almost ninety-year-old girl, done not so much as a recapture of memory as a new draft of that memory, the way a composer might re-use an old theme scratched out one evening at dinner on a leaf of thumb-smudged sheet music. Not reinventing but rehearing.
Assuming that the stories are "truthful" to some degree, then her life as child seems to have had one constant imperative: the freedom to explore whatever came into her mind and body to explore. Not that she lacked signposts and mandatory directions: adults surrounded her who gave deflection and spin to her caroms. Her mother appears as an independent woman with her own job in a department store (Jonatha's stories about going to visit her mother at the store reveal a keen eye for foible and venality), who entertained young troops at Sunday dinners (troops stationed nearby, this being World War I) and abetted her daughter's explorations. Georgia often comes off as a "mammy," but not because Jonatha wants to Aunt Jemima a black person making the life of a white person better or easier. Georgia seems like a big pillow of a woman, giving rest and comfort and cushion to this young girl who must have seemed both strange and delightful. After all, she titled the stories "Georgia's Miss Baby," not her mother's Miss Baby or anyone else's. Georgia gets first billing, and Jonatha must have treasured Georgia's attention a great deal to have taken Georgia's term of endearment as her title.
But except for the stories, Jonatha doesn't reveal much about her early years. When it came time for her to go to college, she originally took off for Wisconsin but only stayed there briefly; after that, she moved to New York to work. Why she moved, she never makes clear; what drove her to move on the way she did never unfolds. And whenever I try to probe a little, to get the chronology or retrace a route, she shies away from my questions or looks at me as if I've made a small, but forgivable, breach of etiquette.
But I've learned a trick about Jonatha. She always wants to hear about what I do, what I experience, which absolves her of having to talk about herself. But if I don't unfurl the words as promptly as she would like and drop some silence into the stew, she fills the gap. Then I hear about her varied jobs in New York, her almost-contract to illustrate for the New Yorker, her teaching, her residence in a house once owned by Diamond Jim Brady (a house that an admirer offered to her and which she refused, disliking both the weight of ownership and attention), her work with a man experimenting with electric light as an artistic medium -- all of which comes out elliptically, in hints and dodges, aural crumbs dropped along the dim historical path. When she moves into that mode, I sit and watch her politely, letting my silence stir the pot; almost against her will she spills some beans. I can hear and see it in the way she narrates. At first I sense a build-up of pressure. She waits to see who will drop the first word on the table -- if I, then she can retreat; if not, then the hydraulics of the silence press in on her until she must talk since, for some reason, remaining silent cannot be a choice.
She never really gets into a high gear. Words on paper come relatively easily to her, but she speaks haltingly, pausing for two- or three-second stretches to either think a thought or find a word -- I have images of her rummaging around a drawer filled with the most wonderful bits, colored glass, half a blue robin's egg shell, rounded nibs of pastel chalk, tentacles of ribbons, and so on, looking for that one which will get what she wants across, all the while muttering to herself, "I wish he would talk instead."
As she dredges up her bits I hear her life -- sort of. Never the practice of the confessional with Jonatha, never the one to trace out the scars of a dilemma, to spade down through the layers of a hurt or a loss and exhume a vulnerability. Which means never talk by her of love, of physical desire, even of doubt or second thought. She presents a life lived, a report or communiqué with sometimes helpful marginal annotations, and doesn't allow much, if any, interrogation.
Saying this, however, does not mean that she offers herself in amber, a crystallized memoir, keeping me at a distance by giving me her lecture notes. Instead, she keeps herself at a distance from herself, from whatever in her life taunted and pleased her, as if to say, "All that is done and over, and I can find no reason to relive either the anxiety or the delight. All that is too bothersome. Much better to suspend myself in the present tense." That is what I think I hear in her hitches and hesitations, a resistance to reminiscence. And when someone she cares for asks a question or wants to know about something, and then waits for an answer, she cannot quite ignore him and must therefore move against her own grain to answer. Perhaps that is how one feels after ninety years of living: enough already of the past, my present days are far too precious to waste energy on time travel.
As near as I can tell, she had a celebrated life in New York, in whatever circles her kind of artistry flourished. She had connections to many people -- I've seen the letters and signatures. For example, on one visit she had just finished reading Lincoln Kirstein's memoirs, and she wrote him a letter about an appointment they had once had at the Museum of Modern Art (where Kirstein was curator of Latin American art) that they did not keep. A friend of hers had shown him some drawings of her dancers; he showed interest. As she tells it, people there had analyzed the portfolio and declared her an "essentialist." Now, as a person for whom boundaries had always tasted sour, hearing that simply propelled her out of MOMA and up to New Hampshire in retreat.
The move to New Hampshire -- that perhaps has the most murk circulating around it. Again, as best as I can glean, she came to New Hampshire because she stood on the verge of actually becoming successful, "known," a person of some consequence, and she did not want the burden of that. As far as this goes, I believe her. I can see in the lineaments of this woman someone who would not tolerate the insult of labels and limits. She has said many times that what she did, she did; it required no categories. Abdicating New York declared her intention to commit an act of freedom and live by it. I see this in her -- she does not take kindly to others telling her what to do and how to do it.
(Illustration: One winter when I visited her, she had a cardboard template on the kitchen table, curved with a slit in it. I asked her why she'd made it. She wanted to build a form by which she could bend a piece of aluminum flashing to fit a valley on her roof where ice tended to collect in a dangerous way. The flashing would wick the water away so that the ice would form away from the eave. She not only wanted to fashion the piece itself, she had planned to climb on the roof and nail it in place. This at the age of eighty-seven.)
Yet I can't also help wondering something else -- and this something else could never become a topic of conversation between us. Could she have handled the rigors of the fame? Did she have the heart for the fight, the "fire in the belly," as they say of politicians? Did she make an advance to New Hampshire or a retreat from New York? Did she get scared?
I've so often wanted to ask her about this because it appears that the move to New Hampshire also signaled the end of making art. When I first met her she was cataloguing her work, most of which had made it up from New York packed in heavy crates. She made a point of saying that she no longer had any supplies or equipment and didn't exercise the craft, said in a tossed-off sort of way as if the decision had caused no pain. All the work she has shown me (more on this in a moment) dates from early on in her life. The only recent work I've seen her do comes in the form of illustrations for poems she wrote to entertain residents of a local nursing home; they'll be published through the generous donation of a large insurance corporation. Otherwise, the things she has shown me are forty and fifty years old. Why did the fount dry up? Or maybe, why did the challenge of making art seem too large to bear? Again, what scared her?
I will most likely never know this. I could ask her and insult her. I could possibly write it in a letter so that at least I would not embarrass her by asking it face to face. And perhaps she might even address it, given our friendship now of many years. But I doubt it. Not that the question demands an answer. The reason for the intrigue comes from wanting to get beyond what she has allowed to surface -- and I have to recognize a whiff of the voyeur here, the prying journalist, the person who cannot abide a mystery. To press for details ultimately demeans the friendship, if she has chosen not to reveal them. Some things have to rest, no matter now ornery the curiosity becomes.
She has shown me a lot of what she has done, all of it striking and innovative in large and small ways. She worked in many media, many of them simply unconventional. For instance, she did a series of paintings based on people she'd seen and met in Mexico. For a canvas she used a cellophane-backed fabric-like material she'd picked up in New York's garment district. Because of the way it took paint, she had to paint from the back of the cloth with the picture reversed and from the most forward detail back. That meant that if a figure kneeling on one knee had a touch of light on his kneecap, that had to come before anything else. This meant conceiving of the picture in elements -- essentially storyboarding it -- before applying paint because she had no way to erase mistakes. Of course she never physically made the story boards -- she simply kept them in her head. She did a couple dozen of paintings like this.
She liked to capture dancers, which she did in many ways. To get the flow of movement from a two-dimensional surface, she would use lines and washes or a board inked black and then scratched to reveal the white underneath. She did very good pen and ink drawings and wonderful renditions of Cuban dancers. Some of her pictures captured Doris Humphrey's dancers -- these went on exhibit a couple of years ago at Jacob's Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts. The sea and sailors and bodies of water of any kind attracted her.
And many other things as well -- sketches and bronze sculptures and scenes (again from Mexico) painted on adobe tiles (these frame a doorway in her kitchen). All through her work runs a sprightliness and a free flow of energy, never mannered or academic in any sense. Yet subjects never look simply sketched in or dashed off -- instead, she captures essentials, all the eye really needs to see and nothing extra. The essentials, though, do not dissolve into minimalism -- everything has the human touch in it so that the lines and washes and sketches never siphon off the human compass of things but instead clear out the clutter so that the viewer can actually see a seagull against the sea sun for perhaps the first time.
I mentioned the kitchen table earlier -- this is where Jonatha and I do most of our talking. Describing it resembles Jonatha doing one of her sculptures, where the figure takes it shape from bits of clay added over time, carved and fingered into form. I want to focus on the table and the chair for a bit because each time I came to them, they gave me a circumference filled with peace, a place where I believed, if only briefly, time would suspend its distractions and let me reach center.
Nothing special about the chair -- a K-Mart, circa 1950 bent-tube and synthetic covering kind of chair, comfortable for about the length of a dinner, if eaten hurriedly. But from my vantage point it faced a plate glass window about the size of large architect's desk. The window let out onto a series of birdfeeders, but before getting to them, the window casing held a wrought-iron rectangle around the perimeter of the glass, painted a rustoleum red (now scoured down to weathered umber). A web of twine skeined from side to side in an intricate lopsided honeycomb of loops and crossings, sort of like Ashley's Book of Knots seen with an astigmatism. Oddly, the loopy cat's cradle didn't interfere with seeing out the window -- the eye easily slipped through it. But when the eye noticed it, it gave the window, and the unbounded sky beyond it, a local circumference. A person looking out that window would not have to worry about drifting away -- the netting would delay and anchor.
She had erected several bird feeders, using her own inimitable patchwork style of scavenged poles, dead saplings, rope, cable, and inventiveness to foil the squirrels (especially Rodney, a red squirrel who shamed his greyer compatriots by his audacity). One of the feeders served hummingbirds. Propped in that chair, hands cupping tea-warmed porcelain, watching the birds barn-storm the seeds (and occasionally rooting for the squirrels as they scooted and dived and angled) filled me with a feeling that I can only describe by analogy: jumping under the caressing weight of a quilt on a cold winter night and having the rising warmth glove the body; a deep, unexpectedly deep, breath of clean air that reaches into and fizzes the brain; the haven formed by the most-favorite ratty sweatshirt settling in a lush attendance of air on the shoulders. That chair, that window, made time and all its picadores go away.
The birds made the place safe, darting, nibbling, flashing away again -- the iridescence of purple finches, the flick of chickadees, the dapper greyscale of the nuthatches, the sassy blue of the jays. Occasionally a pileated woodpecker would sidle up to the suet, and hummingbirds edgerton'd around the feeder. The squirrels provided the keystone cop relief, balancing on the wires like famished Wallendas, always angling to see what they could get for the least effort.
But I can't say I thought any of this as I sat there -- for once, in this place away from all the other places filled with "had to" and "should," I could see without being required to report on anything, I could watch without the command to explain. Instead, I became invested with what happened, clothed in the simple, beautiful mechanics of birds foraging, squirrels scrounging, light sieving through twine, steeped tea in the nostrils, eyes cleared for take-off, nowhere special and nothing required.
The table -- another matter. Again, nothing Better Homes would include, looking as if she had salvaged it from the dump while affairs of greater concern occupied the manager. But she had covered the top with a pane of thick glass, and some very interesting items exhibited themselves under it. One time she had a swath of beautiful embroidered cloth, oriental-looking, which the actor Yul Brenner had given her as a gift. Currently she has another slice of cloth, orange and green and looking Islamic, dappled with pressed butterflies (a favorite motif of hers). She has also added to it a book-jacket sized hunk of tree bark, trimmed and rectangular, that had fallen from one of the large, hand-squared beams supporting the older part of her house. Its whorls and perforations spread open like a text, Talmudic in complexity, yet unlike the Talmud, none of it required annotation or sermon. The eye only needed to delight in the pattern, the visual riffs, the cellulose weave -- essence without marginal notes.
Beyond her window, carved from the three-quarter acre of land she owns, spreads her garden -- more on that in a moment. Since the kitchen and its window sit at the back of the house, the cars hydrocarboning away on Route 104 never intrude by sight, sound, or smell. In that chair at the table, I sit at the eyepiece of a distinct telescope, except that instead of bringing distant objects near, it excludes all the buzzing distractions that defuse the eyes. The jelly that leads to retina that prompts the optic nerve that feeds the brain can now jettison the acquired cataracts called experience; light laced with the balm of real vision can now pour through the breach. In Jonatha's kitchen, to look became the only imperative.
Jonatha's property, according to survey lines, covers three-quarters of an acre -- deeded and recorded. Over the years she has terraformed the place, literal inch by literal inch, managing by layers and tiers and looped paths to fill the place with a roominess that seems at odds with its official dimensions. Like any of the art she has done, her garden bends and funnels the eye, letting sight play the lead dog on the body's sled.
Several paths lead to benches under trees or wind along the perimeter of the property or skirt an island full of lush green plants and bordered with irregular stones. I walk along flagstones and bricks; several short pylons of granite curbing stand like mileposts; at some curves and junctures she has spread colored marbles in the grout-grooves between stones; at another a green glass bubble the size of billiard ball sits half-submerged in the sand, like a jade egg waiting for a jeweled bird to hatch it. Again, like sitting at the window, the garden infuses itself in the blood, like a deep inhale of pure oxygen that clears away the hangover headache and freshens the spirit.
The garden, the how of it, tells a lot about Jonatha. Take, for instance, the flagstones -- the local building supply owner in Bristol donated them to her. The story goes like this. She had bought several flagstones from him for her garden but found them so expensive that she couldn't purchase as many as she wanted. Last winter, she went to his store to get something. He had set in front of his store an old granite step extracted from some old house, gnawed down in the middle by years of shoes. On one end of it stuck up a bootscraper. As she walked out of his store she slipped on ice near the front door and banged her head on the scraper. Nothing serious -- a slight bump. The owner, understandably, worried about the coming law suit, but she assured him she had no intention of siccing a lawyer on him. He insisted that he do something for her, at which point his laconic yardman, who had delivered other material to Jonatha, said, "Give her some flagstones."
Soon after, the yardman, whenever he had a delivery out her way, would drop off a load of stones for her. She appreciated the gesture, but she had a problem with them -- too geometric, not chewed up enough. So as he came in one day, she told him, thank you very much for what you've been doing but I was wondering if I could have the ones you would throw away and can't sell. He looked at her and said, "I've been especially picking out the good ones for you. I suppose I can bring you the other ones." From then on she got the quirky looking stones she wanted, which now jig-saw her walkways.
Take, as another instance, the bricks. Several of the stopping places on her walkways have brick paths and floorings, made up of neat, trimmed, ruddy-red bricks. The bricks, like the flagstones, came her way as a thanks. A brickmaker she knew (and she does not always clearly outline the lines of magnetism that draw her and others together) had a contract to face a theatre, and he wanted to know if she could come up with a good idea how to do it. (The theatre had a motif -- Aztec imagery.) She had him construct a box roughly two feet square and fill it with the clay he used for his bricks. She then carved a relief in it that he simply raved about. He used the relief to create a stamp that he could use to produce the bricks en masse. In thanks, he would periodically drop off a load of bricks.
A roadhouse had once stood at the edge of her property, and the owners and patrons had dumped their trash down the small hill that bordered the two parcels. Over the years, according to her uncoercive master plan, she carved away at the hillside to make her grottoes and way-stations. In the process she lifted to light bits and pieces that had stratified themselves over the years: a blue porcelain horse lying down, the size of two sugar lumps, a hole through a nipple in its back for a chain; the bottom of a bottle watermarked with "Marvin's Magic Toothache Drops" (provoking a vision aching travelers dabbing the elixir on their sore cuspids); a drinking cup etched with a prayer to God and a joyful picture; the head of a pipe carved in the likeness of a cigar-store Indian; a hollowed out chunk of bone about the width of a napkin ring -- or a human femur. And more and more, all of which she keeps, some on display at the window, others spread on other tables throughout the house, some in boxes in her room. She doesn't care for systematic archaeology -- shapes, colors, stories, these interest her.
And interest me as I sit at the table, taking the objects as she passes them to me, listening to her words dart like the birds at the seeds. We will, as usual, take a walk in the garden later and fill the bird feeders. For now, stories, tea, catching up on all the strata.
Though not on the periodic table, the garden, the window, the birds, the elasticity of the moments, the gift of unfracture in her house -- an element as necessary to preserving life as any set of initials on that chart. New element: JFN.
I don't know how many more years Jonatha has -- she has accumulated almost ninety of them already. I remember telling her one time, after not hearing from her for a while, that it struck me that I would not have any way of knowing if she had been hurt or had died. She laughed and told me that she had arranged it so that someone would tell me. That touched me, but it also demonstrated how our relationship worked -- I would hear things about her indirectly even though I might very well wish to be at her side when her time to die had come.
But I don't think about not-Jonatha much, if at all. Instead, I wait for her letters, printed in kid-like block letters with drawings and addenda posted to the margins. I visit her when I can, selfishly re-filling my cistern, and send her lengthy letters of my own detailing my usually not very parlous trials and tribulations. By whatever mechanics, celestial or otherwise, she has arced through the orbit of my life, and like in those old experiments where scientists volted ancient gases with electricity, life-making chemicals rain down upon me from her energy. If any grace informs this life, JFN dispenses it with liberal and unornamented generosity. Lucky me.
(January 1996)