drawing was part of a continuous process of making art, like
breathing when you were asleep was part of life. After the
lecture a friend who was a painting student asked if I wanted
to go with her to meet David Smith. “I wouldn't want to
bother him, ' I said, not having a clue that the big guy was
David Smith and he was staying that night in Robert
Frost’s old house, owned by painter Kenneth Noland, rented
by the English sculptor Anthony Caro, who was teaching at
Bennington. We got into my friend’s truck and went. I felt
shielded by my painter friend. The visit was her brazen act,
not mine.
It was my first year at Bennington, and I did not know the
anthropology of the place. Anyone famous who came to
Bennington was provided with one or more Bennington girls;
my college was the archetypical brothel, which may have been
why, the semester before I matriculated, the English seniors
recreated the brothel in Joyce’s
for the enjoyment of the professors.
So my friend and I got to the old Robert Frost house. It
was deep in the Vermont countryside, old, simple, painted
white, with hooks from the ceiling on which, I was told, animals
had been hung and salted. There were bookshelves, but they
were mostly empty, with only a few books about Kenneth
Noland, at least in the living room. Mr. Smith was deep in a
bot le of 100-proof Stolichnaya and scat ered like inanimate
dolls were some of my fellow students from Bennington,
each in a black sheath, each awaiting the pleasure of her host,
Anthony Caro, and his guest, David Smith. As happens with
habitually drunk fuckers of women, Smith could not have been
more indif erent to the women who were there for him, and
he wanted to talk to me. I was trying to leave, embarrassed for
my classmates and too shy to talk to Smith. But Smith did not
have to be nice to the women acquired for him, so he wasn’t.
He dismissed my fellow students with a gesture of the hand
and told me and my friend to sit down and drink with him.
He said that he had always wanted to provide Bennington
with a graduate school in art; that his name had been on a
pro-Cuba petition signed by artists and intellectuals; that John
Kennedy had cal ed him up and told him to get his name of
of that petition or he’d never get his graduate school; that
he had removed his name and in so doing he had whored.
