Morris Graves

Selected Letters

Vicki Halper, Lawrence Fong, Vicki Halper, Lawrence Fong

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806877
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Cartas literarias

Morris Graves is a major American painter with roots in the Pacific Northwest. Morris Graves: Selected Letters draws on a vast cache of the his unpublished correspondence, dating from his teenage years until his death in 2001. Few visual artists of any era have left such a rich and wide-ranging collections of letters, which makes this body of work an unusual and valuable document in American art. The Graves correspondence is remarkable for its scope, variety, and depth. Written to many correspondents over long periods of time, the letters include the artist's reflections on his art, the art world, philosophy (Zen Buddhism and Vedanta in particular), architecture (Graves designed his homes and gardens), and relationships with family, friends, and lovers. Graves himself preserved most of the letters, or copies of them, and put no restrictions on their use. Other letters come from a wide range of private and institutional sources. Among the correspondents are Graves's family; Marian Willard, his art dealer; Richard Svare, his companion in the 1950s; and Nancy Wilson Ross, novelist and Buddhist scholar. Other notable figures with whom Graves corresponded are poet Carolyn Kizer, art critic Theodore Wolff, curator Peter Selz, choreographer Merce Cunningham (for whom Graves created a set design), and painter Mark Tobey. Recurrent themes in the Graves letters are the tensions between sociability and solitude; the desire to be free of the material world versus the need for material comfort; the dismissal of commerce and the desperate need for money; the pleasures and pitfalls of love; and the difficulties of the creative life. The letters are organized topically under the broad categories of people (family, friends, intimates), places (homes and travels), and art (finances and philosophy).

PART ONE

PEOPLE

LEFT TO RIGHT: Morris, Wallace, Philip, and Celia Graves, ca. 1932. Morris Graves Foundation

1 FAMILY

Morris Graves was the sixth of eight children, seven brothers and one sister. The younger siblings—Russell, Morris, Celia, and Wallace (in descending age order)—were close, and corresponded throughout their lives. Graves and his mother, Helen, were deeply attached. Their letters begin as soon as Morris left home in 1929 to sail to Asia with Russell (see chapter 5), and continued until her death fifty years later.

Both emotional sustenance and great tensions are evident in these family letters. After Graves’s father committed suicide in 1935, his mother needed financial support for forty years, putting a strain on children whose fiscal status was often insecure. Resentments about Graves’s pacifism, fame, and lifestyle first surface in the 1940s when Graves’s enormous success as an artist coincided with his being interned for refusing to serve in the army.

In the only surviving letter from Edwin Graves to his son, written three months before Edwin’s suicide, Morris’s father touches on major themes of this book: Graves’s interest in architecture and gardening, his art, his way with words, and finances. Fir Crest was a property his father was developing in Edmonds, on which Graves hoped to build a studio. Painter Guy Anderson was Graves’s lover (see chapter 3).

Edwin Graves to Morris Graves

Seattle, Washington, November 21, 1934

Dear Son Morris:

Your fine letter arrived and pleased me very much. Wish you were accompanying Guy, but if that is not best, then I will be doubly nice to Guy for you as well as for his own sake. I like him.

It was fine of you to take time to give me a glimpse into your picture of the Fir Crest of the future. The one tree I moved is the only thing I have disturbed, which you planted, and it was so badly entangled in the other bush that it just had to come out to live. It can be planted there again when the stalk is long enough to reach about the bush, if you still want it, but I believe your second suggestion is better. I believe it would somewhat spoil that first fine glimpse of the water, while the maple will not; yet it will be a friendly tree with the mossy shade roof of the studio.…

Your description of the canvas you are now working on was much enjoyed by me. All you did not tell me was about the colors you are using. It must be most gratifying to be able to paint one’s conception of anything if the result is satisfying.

My mind leans toward writing and I think yours does too. I am judging now by your word picture of your newest attempt.

Wouldn’t it be fine if you can sell it for enough to finance yourself for a while?

Then your suggestion about painting at Fir Crest would be practical, for then, under favorable surroundings, you could create your best work.

The idea of beautifying the place while not busy at painting is very practical, from recreational and health standpoints, and you could still be creating something, which after all is the zenith of ambition.

TYPED LETTER, UO

In April 1942 Graves was drafted into the army against his will. After refusing to cooperate, he was placed in stockades in Fort Lewis, Washington, and Camp Roberts, California, for a total of eleven months. Despite fleeing the camp on two occasions, he was eventually given an honorable discharge in March 1943. See Chapter 2 for further correspondence about this period.

Morris Graves to brother Russell Graves

[ca. 1942]

The foregoing is not very simply said; hope you find its meaning. Anyway, today I write this brief answer to thank you for the letter and for your encouraging last line. I will hold to our ideals, not with a set-jaw stubbornness but prayerfully feeling my way in relationship to this new world-travail. I am heightened in my awareness to this relationship—because I am now physically confronted by it as well as abstractly confronted by confused and anguished men casting out for safety—and direction and protection—men wrapped in fear; and more desperate yet there are those who under the disguise of patriotism or under the sincere belief that they are giving their lives over to a great and honest cause, have submitted to the brutalizing philosophy of the army and have steeled themselves against and closed out all of the sensitive-humane responses.

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

Morris Graves to Helen Graves

Camp Roberts, California, December 4, 1942

Yesterday I was called to the hospital and given a very dull interview by their brilliant psychoanalyst and was told that I am to be discharged within the next two weeks under Army regulations Section 8 and that the army is not going to wait [any] longer for Washington, D.C., to make its red-tape decision.…

I should tell you that the diagnosis at the hospital read, “Individual philosophy and asocial religious convictions make M. Graves of no use to the army.”

and Section 8 reads:

(2) Does not possess the required degree of adaptability for military service.”

I want to believe that it is paragraph 2 that brings my case under Section 8, however, keep this in mind: IF I am discharged this way instead of through reclassification, I will be a civilian and not sent to a C.O. camp. I am satisfied that it is in God’s hands, not mine or the [army’s]!…

I will yet prove that I possess the required degree of adaptability to serve other branches of human interest.

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

The Rock was the home Graves was building on Fidalgo Island, near Anacortes, Washington, with money received from the sale of his work in New York.

Morris Graves to Helen Graves

Camp Roberts, California, December 26, 1942

I went to the commanding officer and said I could not celebrate the birth of Christ in an army camp and he was so flabbergasted that he signed the pass and I was gone in five minutes.…

[I] came back on the bus and walked into this drunken, drunken, drunken barracks at 6:00 last night—no one even noticing that I was a day late. This a.m. I talked casually with the first sergeant, and he had been drinking all Christmas Day and apparently didn’t notice my absence. Nothing would have happened even if he had of been aware of it, for he too thinks I am beyond hope.

Well now, here is my good news. This morning one of the clerks who works at headquarters office told me that yesterday (Christmas) the commanding general had sent this teletype message to Washington, D.C.: “Recommend discharge of Morris Graves WITHOUT further hearing.”…

If only Washington, D.C., answers by teletype I could be out of here—well, in a month anyway! It is reaching the point of obsession with me and this is not good—so I will turn again with patience and remember that discharge is an incidental only and I’ll try to reclaim more enduring thoughts.…

I remember writing you to make the November 1 Rock payment—well, this was the most absent-minded thing I have ever done—when I wrote you to tend to that for me, I totally forgot that I had paid in full the Rock contract way last February with Modern Museum [Museum of Modern Art, New York] money.…

If a man lives quietly he can receive good or dark news and take it into himself and deeply consider its meaning and its reasons and its bearing upon his life. But if a man is in a barracks with seventy-five confused and near-desperate surface-men and receives dark news, then it is like being at a carnival and on being told of the death of a friend saying, “I will ward off sorrow by buying more and more rides on the merry-go-round.”

This does not heal him but cheapens him in his heart—

What I try to say is that inside I am as if my “feeling instruments” had gotten all their wires crossed.…

If I, who have had “easy trouble,” feel this way, what must a fighting hatred and total war-blasphemy and defiance do to a man—for these days will leave deep scars—even though God holds us by our right hand.

Love for now,

M.

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

Morris Graves to Helen Graves

Camp Roberts, California, January 22, 1943

As for the new address, I may have told you that two weeks ago I stopped contributing my daily labor to the army—and yesterday was returned to the stockade because of it.

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

The Graves family were friends with the Nakashimas, who were interned at Minidoka Relocation War Center in Idaho in 1942–43. George Nakashima later became a renowned furniture maker in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and a dedicated peace activist.

Morris Graves to Helen Graves

Camp Roberts, California, February 22, 1943

Marion Nakashima’s sister Thelma sent me, in a magnificent letter … the following quote from Chas. Wood’s [Charles Erskine Scott Wood] “The Poet in the Desert”

“Young men—young women—there could be no war

If you would think—it is great toil to think.

It makes the tired soul sweat

the sweat of the soul is salt,

It keeps life sweet.”

And, while I think of it, letters from Geo and Marion and Thelma reveal a spirit that is inspiring and a suffering among the congested relocation centers that we’ve been led to believe was only possible in Germany!

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

Graves was released from the army in March 1943. Wallace, the youngest of the seven surviving Graves siblings, became an English professor and aspiring Morris Graves biographer. He died before his more famous brother and never completed the biography.

Morris Graves to Wallace Graves

May 27, 1943

Accept as right “a car, a full stomach, a girl, a fraternity, a baseball game, marriage, a society and a face in society,” but accept them in a new spirit—not the old spirit of materialism. They are no longer to be the chief symbols of affluence and success; they are to be rightfully and truthfully recognized as symbols of God’s abundance, creation’s abundance and God’s ever-presence.

HANDWRITTEN LETTER, UO

Graves could not tolerate interruption when he was painting. His letters are full of cancelled meetings. Friends and family were often both disappointed and tolerant.

Morris Graves to Helen and Wallace Graves

Anacortes, Washington, August 30, 1943

I do not dare chance any interruption, even as much as I want to help provide a destination for those RARE three days off for you, Wallace—but I remember that I once was ready to paint and listened to Milton [Ecke] instead and went to San Francisco with him and then did not paint for six months.… It takes constant work to keep “flowing,” but above that it takes concentration (which in our language is consecration). It takes waking prayerfully and working prayerfully and going to bed prayerfully each day with increasing ...