�Curious, Odd & Interesting�

The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West

By Wesley Wehr

University of Washington Press

2000, 301 pages

Paperback, $17.95

�You have known some remarkable people during the years I have known you,� the pianist Berthe Poncy Jacobson told Wesley Wehr one day, �I was just wondering to myself how you came to know them?�

�Opportunities arose,� Wehr answered her.

�That�s it! That�s it exactly!� Mrs. Jacobson exclaimed, �Opportunities arose, and you were quick to recognize them as such.�

Unaggressively yet persistently, Wesley Wehr took advantage of such opportunities to make friends with some of the most important artists, writers, and musicians in the Northwest, beginning from the time he entered the University of Washington in 1947 up through the 1980s. Wehr, while just an undergraduate, had the chance to serve as a stand-in music composition tutor for Mark Tobey in 1949. Wehr seized that opportunity and over time became friends with Tobey and Tobey�s circle of artists.

Inspired by the examples of James Boswell�s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. and William Hazlitt�s Table Talk, Wehr began in the mid-1950s to take notes on the conversations he was having with his creative friends, starting with Tobey, who though he criticized the idea of turning into an �advice factory� ran one at top speed. Now Wehr has turned those notes into a compelling series of portraits in The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Wehr�s literary sketches are invaluable additions to Northwest cultural history. He recounts personal stories that enliven our understanding of luminaries such as Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Imogen Cunningham, and Theodore Roethke.

He tells the story of Tobey�s short marriage to a woman who had respected his painting before their wedding day, but afterwards declared that he�d have to give up his artistic pretensions and get a real job. �Good God,� Tobey told himself, �I�m going to have to listen to this for the rest of my life!� So instead Tobey immediately packed his things, left her, and moved out to Seattle.

Wehr describes how Guy Anderson accosted him when he and a friend knocked on the door of Anderson�s studio in La Conner. Anderson, dressed in a maid�s uniform and wig, demanded to know, �What gives you the idea that Mr. Anderson would have any time for the likes of you?� then slammed the door on them. Minutes later, Anderson, now dressed in more typical clothes, let them in with apologies for �that terrible maid� whom he said he had just fired.

Wehr recalls how Morris Graves, with his physical charisma, could capture the attention of an entire room of people while remaining aloof from everyone.

Wehr�s portraits also remind us of other significant Northwest artists from that period whose reputations are now fading, like Helmi Juvonen and Pehr Hallsten. Juvonen was a very public artist; who would hang up her latest prints each morning on a clothesline outside her apartment in the University District, priced at only fifty cents each. Her linoleum block prints and watercolor paintings won the admiration of critics and local museum curators. Juvonen�s unconventionality, which included a wild infatuation with Mark Tobey, was the primary reason, according to Wehr, for her institutionalization in a state mental health center in 1960. Pehr Hallsten was a scholarly, cosmopolitan Swede who became Tobey�s life-long companion. Inspired more by Juvonen�s playful artistic approach than Tobey�s seriousness, Hallsten taught himself to paint at the age of fifty-six and in less than a decade gained an international audience for his colorful paintings of childhood memories��unforgettable realms of reindeer, Lapps and snow, nights of darkness where trolls stole the light of day and Baldur was slain by an arrow made of mistletoe.�

Wehr also sets the historical record straight and credits the flamboyant art dealer Zoe Dusanne as the originator of the notion of a Northwest school of painters. Dusanne had a friend on the staff of Life magazine and suggested that the magazine do a story on the �solitary, �mystical� painters living and working in the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest.� A year later, in 1953, Life ran the feature �Mystic Painters of the Northwest� that made Mark Tobey, Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, and Kenneth Callahan nationally famous.

Surprisingly, and refreshingly, Wehr is a memoirist who ignores Freud. He offers no psychosexual exposes, violates no confidences, and refuses to categorize these artists and thinkers by sexual orientation. While demurring from writing about sex, he does write about love. He tenderly describes Elizabeth Bishop�s longing for her friend Lota back in Rio de Janeiro that first dismal January when Bishop had come to Seattle to teach poetry at the University of Washington, and then Bishop�s surprise when he asked her some advice about love. �If you ever were to know much about my personal life,� Bishop answered, �you certainly wouldn�t come to me for any sagely advice about a thing like love. I�ve usually been as confused about it as just about anyone else I�ve known. If you really are concerned about that subject, I�d suggest you go and read W.H. Auden. If he doesn�t know something about love, I just don�t know who else does.�

The title the �Eighth Lively Art� refers to the art of conversation, yet none of Wehr�s friends and acquaintances is a genius of the bon mot; none is an Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker. Wehr doesn�t present a full defense of the idea that conversation is an art. But what he does do is accurately capture the energy and intelligence that can be found in conversations with very talented people, with their common human need for contact. And he gives us a primer in the ways of friendship, how dinners, calls, courtesies, letters, and simple gifts can braid strong bonds. In a memorable visit to Morris Graves� beautiful home in Loleta, California, Graves proudly retrieved a note Wehr had written to him years before, a note Graves had kept in his eyeglass case ever since.

When Wehr was a young man, his mother challenged him �to decide� whether I was going to have a rich and interesting life, or merely a dull and conventional existence.� Elizabeth Bishop testified to Wehr�s decision in a 1974 letter to the poet James Merrill in which she wrote, �Wesley is older, but a very curious, odd and interesting painter and person so mad about fossils the university has given him some sort of position telling them about fossils.� Wehr seized the opportunities that came his way and has made an interesting life for himself, and in sharing it he has also passed his mother�s challenge on to us.