Musa McKim Guston’s recently published journals are an uneven but often moving artefact, recording a pivotal decade in her marriage to the painter Philip Guston. Edited by the couple’s daughter, Musa Mayer, Life With P: Journals, 1966–1976 is the first volume of hers to appear since the posthumous Alone With the Moon: Selected Writings (1994). Those familiar with that long out-of-print book will recognize the voice: witty and hurt, with sharp insight cloaked in an air of bemusement. Her poems, in contrast to Philip’s paintings from the period, exemplify the adage of Marianne Moore: ‘The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint’. Such modesty and self-effacement make it difficult to approach McKim Guston’s work on anything like her own terms. She is, inescapably, the wife of the artist, destined to remain in his shade.
The opening pages of the journals find her at a loss. Philip is in the middle of a creative crisis and has run off with a young photographer. He’s just had a successful show at the Jewish Museum in New York, large canvasses of grey and black abstractions offset by pinks, blues and oranges. It is still the heroic period of abstract expressionism, but Guston is moving in another direction, holed up in Florida producing sheet after sheet of one-line drawings. ‘I have looked for you everywhere’, writes Musa in a poem, as she visits the haunts of their relationship, ‘Woodstock / East Hampton, the Cape / and New York.’ She goes to Wah Kee’s, his favourite Chinese restaurant, the site of celebratory meals after exhibition openings. But there’s no trace, no letters or calls. The poem ends on a bittersweet note of resignation and resolve:
I ease the pain by trying to evolve
into something else.
What could that be, though,
since I am fitted only
for looking for you?
Why, instead of distress
signals, don’t I broadcast
the news, the weather report,
some music?
This impulse plays out across the rest of the book, where pain and distress seem to be sublimated into precise descriptions of the natural world, the notation of daily routine. Yet writing is a faulty instrument of distraction: calamity always finds a way to creep in around the edges.
Five years his senior, Musa met Philip at Los Angeles’s Otis Art Institute in 1930. Neither completed their studies, and for a time they went their separate ways. Musa had been raised in the US-occupied Panama Canal Zone, and in 1933 she accompanied her father, a civil servant, on an anthropological expedition to the San Blas Islands. Philip, meanwhile, threw himself into the socially engaged work of the John Reed Clubs. With his friend Reuben Kadish he travelled to Mexico, where they produced a huge antifascist mural, The Struggle Against Terrorism (1934–35). Back in LA his work attracted the attention of the authorities, with exhibitions disrupted by the police and menaced by the Ku Klux Klan. Though Guston was never a Party member, his political loyalties would remain constant throughout his life.
According to Mayer’s memoir of her parents’ marriage, Night Studio (1988), Musa sought Philip out again by letter, writing to him by care of a local bookstore. She returned from Panama to be with him; they got married in New York in 1937. At this point, Musa was still painting, and they worked together on several Works Progress Administration-era mural projects, including a panel each for the Department of Forestry in New Hampshire in 1941. Philip’s shows men logging; Musa’s a wildlife scene. Life With P. records a trip they took together to see them thirty years later, and Musa offers her assessment:
Philip’s is remarkable, faithful to life and at the same time beautiful as painting. I think he was surprised and pleased . . . Mine was decorative, and it was easy to see that, with the animals, birds and foliage, it would appeal to the public. I was quite flabbergasted though at Philip’s. The men, what they are doing, the horse – the ground! It’s Renaissance in quality.
There’s a similar episode in Night Studio, where Mayer takes her mother to see her solo mural in a Post Office in upstate New York: ‘reluctant to come in the first place, she thinks we are silly for making such a fuss.’
By the early 1950s, Musa had set painting aside, apparently without rancour, and turned to poetry. She studied writing at the New School with Kenneth Koch, and published in Locus Solus, the house journal of the first generation of New York School poets. But further publication of her work was sparse. A poem, ‘Winter’s Canine Hotel’, appeared in Art and Literature (1965), a journal so classy the price on the back cover is in Swiss Francs; a final selection of work was gathered in the scrappier mimeo magazine Fire Exit (1975). Its editor, William Corbett, tried unsuccessfully to coax a book out of her. Two years later, Musa suffered a serious stroke. Mayer explains that her mother still had the capacity to edit and organize her papers – and spent time before her death in 1992 typing out material in manuscript – but there would be no more poems.
Such a curtailed body of work is, again, hard to judge. If we situate McKim Guston in the loose genealogy of women associated with the New York School, perhaps she is closest to someone like V. R. ‘Bunny’ Lang, who died of Hodgkin’s aged 32. Lang’s name has long been known to readers of her beloved friend Frank O’Hara – who dedicated several poems to her – but her own work has received scant critical attention. As Rosa Campbell, editor of Lang’s The Miraculous Season: Selected Poems (2024), notes: ‘This is often the fate of women who happen to be connected to famous male artists and writers, regardless of their own professions or talents; relegated to the status of auxiliary, passive inspiration, they freeze into silence.’
But this is not, I think, the whole story when it comes to Musa and Philip’s relationship. After the marital breakdown with which the journals open, there’s a prolonged period of repair. They expand the studio at their home in Woodstock, New York – including a writing study for Musa – and take a trip to Yucatán. They look at pyramids and ruins, and delight in a gaudy statue of a shrimp near their motel. Now in his early fifties, Philip’s health is starting to decline after years of heavy drinking and chain-smoking. He falls in the bathroom; his back hurts; he walks with a cane. Musa observes these incidents as if out of the corner of her eye. On the trip home, driving through South Carolina, they learn of the Orangeburg massacre of student Civil Rights activists the previous evening. The first section of the journals ends with them attending a march following the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Guston’s return to figuration at the end of the 1960s has become one of the central legends of post-war American art. Abstract painting, Guston quipped, had begun to smell of ‘mink coats’. Facing up to political reality, he started producing a violent burlesque of KKK hoods, heaped body parts, blank clockfaces, everyone smoking like chimneys. The spirit of the mural work of the 1930s comes back in a new barbaric palette, bright and unsparing. The paintings are vulgar, full of uneasy comedy and self-interrogation. Critical opprobrium soon followed, even from intimates. Musa records the painter Lee Krasner – surviving wife of Guston’s childhood friend Jackson Pollock – dismissing the work as ‘an embarrassment’ during the famous opening at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970. The composer Morton Feldman, one of his closest aesthetic allies, felt so betrayed that they hardly ever spoke again.
The work remains controversial. In 2020 Tate Modern postponed Guston’s retrospective, apparently concerned about displaying Klan imagery in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter uprisings. It was a cowardly and wrongheaded decision. The paintings from this period are ferocious, demanding works of antifascist art, which respect the critical intelligence of the viewer. They marked something of a break, too, with the workings of the commercial artworld. Guston’s reputation barely recovered before his death in 1980, and he sold almost no work, relying instead on teaching and lecturing. The family home at Woodstock – visited by new younger friends like the poet Clark Coolidge and novelist Philip Roth – became the base for a torrent of creativity and invention.
Although visitors remember Musa as extremely shy, speaking in a whisper, her writing is firm and matter-of-fact. She has a taste for the absurd, noting passing phrases before they slip away: ‘Big tank truck of blackstrap molasses swings past. P. remembers a truck in New York that had doll’s eyes.’ She registers aspects of the natural world that rarely make it into Guston’s paintings, tracking the shift of seasons. ‘The leaves are doing their finger exercises’, she writes at one point, as if autumn were tuning up. Her writing about Philip is loving and protective, and the portrait she gives is of mutual affection and camaraderie. He shows his paintings to her first; they’re not finished until Musa’s reaction has been gauged.
This is not without complications. I was often reminded of a poem that used to be in all the anthologies, ‘The Heavy Bear That Goes With Me’, by Delmore Schwartz. An anatomy of neurosis, it portrays ‘The hungry beating brutish one / In love with candy, anger and sleep / Crazy factotum, dishevelling all’. When Philip is at work on a painting, Musa records his comings-and-goings with the vigilance and worry you might accord a real bear. At the start of June 1969 he spends 36 hours or more at the canvas, occasionally coming into the house dazed and shirtless to eat an egg or swipe some coffee. He calls Musa in to look, but it’s not done yet. Eventually she finds him in the kitchen, making a hamburger, and weeps with relief.
The entry following this episode, some six weeks later, notes dryly of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission: ‘They took off for the moon, of course.’ It’s as if Musa and Philip were headed somewhere else, sinking to the depths. Loneliness, madness, alcoholism, ill-health, infidelity: the narrative components of tormented genius are all present and correct. In works of Guston’s like Source (1976), Musa’s monumental head peeks over the horizon, eyes cast upwards, as if ignoring the vast sea in front of her. By Ladder (1978), the water is up to her hairline, but this time Guston has helpfully placed a ladder in the foreground, as if he might climb in and join her. Painting might be lonely, but life isn’t, and Musa’s writing is a way of keeping composure. ‘This diary is a weather report primarily’, she writes in 1973. ‘The weather outside. It never alludes to the weather in us.’
At the risk of sounding ungrateful, the lavish production of the book – courtesy of Guston’s gallery, Hauser & Wirth – threatens to overwhelm the thing it’s supposed to be foregrounding. More than half of the 400-some pages contain full-colour illustrations. Many are a distraction, and the heavy hardback format is more awkward than it needs to be. Mayer writes in the introduction that her hope is to allow her mother ‘to speak for herself’. But the ‘mythic presence of Philip Guston’, as she phrased it in Night Studio, does tend to dominate the illustrations, despite some welcome examples of Musa’s own paintings and drawings (which have not, to my knowledge, been exhibited).
One of the images I was glad to see is part of a series of collaborations, in which Philip did calligraphic illustrations of Musa’s poems. An untitled poem, it reads in full (though Philip ignores the linebreaks – a habit he shares with Cy Twombly):
I thought I would never
write anything down again.
Then I put on my cold
wristwatch.
The opening expresses real dread, something like the crushing of the spirit. Never writing again is a common creative anxiety; but to ‘never / write anything down again’ seems like a much more drastic withdrawal. Perhaps it evokes the prospect of disability, though the poem appears to predate the poet’s stroke. Yet this fear is dispelled by the resolve of the following couplet, which reaches for something material, sensuous, the shock of metal on flesh. A poem is a special sort of timepiece: it can be a way of stopping time or keeping time, even measuring it, as in the little moment of suspense in the final linebreak. The poem pulls off that most difficult trick: it’s as if it’s being lived, written down and read simultaneously.
We might wish that Musa could have struck out on her own, left Philip and kept painting, or at least produced a collection or two. But one of the things that makes her work distinctive is its resistance to narratives of heroism or triumph. ‘Strong smell of pencils’, she records Philip remarking of the harbour at Siracusa in Italy. Precise and humane, it’s a register that makes room for others, treats language like it’s a precious shared object, to be saved for later.
In one of his very first paintings of Musa, from 1942, Philip portrays her sitting in three-quarter profile with some seashells in her lap. At various points in her journals, she records her weakness for collecting shells and stones. She greets the bees, the pileated woodpecker, writes: ‘Remembering how the earth looks when you’re flying, I try to avoid stepping on ants.’ The journals end in classic pastoral fashion, with the artist at rest. It’s 17 June 1976, and Musa is trying to decipher from evidence in the kitchen whether Philip has been working all night. He comes in and takes her to look at the painting. ‘It’s one of the magical ones, the latest magical one’, she writes. A week later he’s at it again, in the humid days of midsummer. ‘P. is asleep: painted all night.’ Musa keeps watch, writing it down.
Read on: Hal Foster, ‘Art Agonistes’, NLR 8.