A Grave Talent

he seemed to be holding off Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with an effort.

Miss Vaughn [he wrote] has proven highly popular with the masses, those who grumble that they know what they like, that their five-year-old can do as well, those who like their bodies three-dimensional and their emotions simple. Eva Vaughn has legitimized classical forms for the twentieth-century proletariat. That the forms are empty of anything but nostalgia matters not.

Ouch. The writer went back to another bout of technical language, which Kate skimmed in self-defense, although some passages stood out:

In The Creek Vaughn achieves a level of sensual sentimentality that would render a male painter suspect of pedophilia. Quiet belongs in the pages of a specialist journal of female erotica. The derivative Troll Bridge looks as though Bouguereau had set out to finish Munch's Scream: horror prettied up.

Finally, he concluded:

Miss Vaughn's refusal to see and be seen makes her highly suspect in the world of art, where dialogue and criticism are the only things that save an artist from drowning in her own vision. Instead of learning from her century, she seems determined to turn her back on it, to the extent of an eremitical existence somewhere, apparently, in California, judging from the recurrence of redwood trees, Hispanic farm workers, and unrecon structed flower children gone somewhat to seed. Her motto seems to be 'Eva Vaughn, mystery lady of the brush,' as carefully nurtured an idiosyncrasy as we have seen for a long time, on a par with Dali's moustache and Warhol's collections. The public is beginning to know her by her characteristic absence. Perhaps the walls of certain galleries should follow suit, and recognize Miss Vaughn for the absent, imitative would-be that she is.

Scalpel and bludgeon. Kate wondered if Vaun had seen it, and if so whether she had difficulties picking up her brushes the next day. She took herself and her reading to bed, and tackled the third writer.

The aristocratic gentleman's style was more accessible than the anti's, but his enthusiasm was cautious. It would have been easy, Kate realized, for the editor to have chosen for this section an author whose effusiveness undermined his case but, despite her own reservations, the editor had not done so. His praise was unstinting, but he was sternly prepared to demonstrate the flaws and inadequacies of Miss Vaughn's work.

The names that come to mind [he wrote] are not those of the moderns, not Rauschenberg or Picasso or even Monet, but the noble and formal names of centuries past and styles no longer taught, or taught only as a dead language, for the purpose of translation. For Eva Vaughn has taken an outmoded, classical, dead style, imbued it with the idiom of the twentieth century, and restored it scintillating to life.

Her images are classically simple: a man, a woman, some children, a kitchen. Landscape is background, allegorical in its overtones but secondary to the humans who dominate all her work. The figures are generally unposed, or informally so, and so intimately known as to embarrass the viewer.

Aside from that, it is difficult to reduce the Eva Vaughn style to mere description, even to say that she belongs to one school or another. The lesbian lovers of Quiet are caught in a shaft of light from a window, two fresh bodies pinned into the still, silent moment of a Vermeer, a suspension of movement before life sweeps in again to animate and discomfit. Her farm laborers— Strawberry Fields, Three P.M., and Green Beans—rival Van Gogh for lumpen grittiness. The surface beauty (how seldom does a critic use that word in a review!) of Cos, Asleep could have come from Bouguereau's brush, and the voluptuous pleasure of the woman's sprawl could be an early Renoir, but whence comes the vague sense of unease? Is there menace in the shadow that falls across the bed, or is it merely the drapes? Is that a man's shoe in the corner, or the arm of a chair? Is the scarlet stain a part of the multicolored bed cover, or something more sinister? Is Cas actually asleep? Or does she lie there, murdered in her bed?

This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn's work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones. It is no accident that the structure of Troll Bridge echoes Edvard Munch's The Scream, but in this case the androgynous figure is caught in an innocuous, sunny stretch of bridge, with a normal couple approaching along an everyday bit of roadway. The woman/man has obviously been seized by a fit of insanity. Or is there something dark lurking under the bridge, something the couple has yet to see? Or, worse yet, that they are a part of?

Is there any style this painter has not mastered, any field she will not enter? Well, yes. She will have nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism; and she is not a Romantic. Romanticism is emotion for its own sake, and leads nowhere outside the frame that surrounds the canvas. Eva Vaughn fascinates, disconcerts, lays a hand on the hearts and minds of her viewers. That, after all, is what art is meant to do. She employs the light of Vermeer, the vigor of Caravaggio, the massive, sculptural drama of Michelangelo, and the eyes—no one since Rembrandt has painted eyes like this, eyes the depth and breadth and fullness of the human soul, of devastating honesty.

Objections to her art abound, and valid objections they are. She is naive, and she does largely ignore everything art has said over the past century. She is a painter of immense power, yet she is curiously passive. The agony and passion she paints, the menace she evokes, the madness and the sheer impossibility of life belong to others. She sees agony; she paints passion; whether she lives them or not cannot even be guessed.

It is this sense of distance, of noninvolvement, that may keep Eva Vaughn from joining the ranks of the truly great. She is young, true, but inhibitions and formalities have a way of becoming more ingrained with age, not less. A great artist leaves one with no doubt—he (and the pronoun is used advisedly) has borne the sufferings and ecstasies of his subject, himself, alone and without relief. When Eva Vaughn finally decides to paint herself with her pigments, then we shall see if we have here the greatest artist of the post-Picasso age. Even—say it quietly—of the century.

Tired as she was, this man's personal and authoritative analysis of the woman she had met as Vaun Adams kept Kate from sleep, kept her from noticing the storm building outside her window until she closed the magazine, when she suddenly noticed the rattling windows and gushing downspouts. She fell asleep as soon as she heard Lee come in, and her dreams were of strawberries.

11

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Across town Hawkin worked late in his office and eventually had himself driven home. He poured himself a drink and sat in the darkened living room of his rented house, watching the rain slant down in buckets like some B film of a storm at sea. At eleven o'clock the streetlights flickered, dimmed, and strengthened again, and the low hum of the aquarium pumps behind him hesitated, then clicked back on. In San Jose a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning.

The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o'clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o'clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor's badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.

At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler's Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.

At three o'clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had