1950s – Page 5 – Lake Chapala Artists and Authors

Ernest Alexander (1921-1974), artist and photographer

1950s No Responses »

Jun 042015

One of the more interesting characters that made Ajijic a lively place to be in the early 1950s was the black American artist Ernest Alexander, known to most people simply as “Alex”. Alex was a painter and photographer who, from about 1950 to 1952, ran the Club Alacrán (Scorpion Club), a restaurant-bar in Ajijic, the hang-out of choice for the resident artists and writers of the time.

Ernest Alexander: Untitled (Shop front and doors). Image credit: Richard Norton Gallery

Relatively little is known for certain about Alex, though he is the subject of a fascinating memoir written by Sean Wilder. Wilder first met Alex in 1958, when the latter was living on handouts in the North Beach area of San Francisco. Wilder, later a practicing psychoanalyst, was only a teenager at the time but spent much of the following two years trying to comprehend Alex, while simultaneously questioning his own motives and desires. Wilder’s book, Alex, provides some telling insights into Alex’s charismatic, almost guru-like personality. In an epilogue to the book, Wilder sketches out what little biographical information he has gleaned about Alex, either from Alex himself, or from a select handful of people who knew Alex both in Ajijic and in San Francisco.

Wilder recalls the first time he met Alex in the Co-existence Bagel Shop (noted for its fine breakfasts, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop was a social center for the North Beach Beats until it closed in 1960):

Alex was the man sitting in the corner seat, a long, lean, handsome, “black”… with alert, mischievous, seductively heavy-lidded eyes, probably wearing a khaki army surplus shirt and blue jeans with frayed cuffs, and badly scuffed brown leather shoes, but no socks. No rings, either, no watch, no jewelry of any kind decorated him.”

Alex intimated to Wilder that he had spent his childhood in Long Branch, New Jersey, and that there was, or had been, money in the family. Wilder describes how Alex spoke “educated Eastern Seaboard English”, with an impressive vocabulary, and used language colorfully, as a form of “oral poetry”. Alex was a verbal gymnast, giving quick retorts and enigmatic responses.

Following a period of military service in a communications unit in the Pacific, Alex returned to civilian life after the second world war, with a metal plate in his head, and used his G.I. Bill funding to take art classes at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. Alex’s magnetic appeal helped foment the nascent jazz and poetry scene of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. Among the poets that Alex became close to were Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry (inspired by Brooks), who attended a summer art school in Ajijic in 1949.

Alex’s influence on ruth weiss was profound. He is credited with persuading her to read her poetry to live jazz for the very first time:

In 1948 weiss took a room at the Art Circle on the near north side of Chicago. She began listening to Bop and reading her poetry to audiences there. In 1949 an African American painter named Ernest Alexander asked her to read with the Art Circle jazz ensemble. She accepted the invitation and has been reading to jazz ever since.” (Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture, by Preston Whaley, Harvard University Press, 2009)

Ernest Alexander: Sketch of Gwendolyn Brooks (frontispiece of Annie Allen)

Gwendolyn Brooks, a close friend of Alex, became the first black writer to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her second collection, Annie Allen, published the year before. The frontispiece of Annie Allen is Alex’s simple, yet powerful, portrait of Brook’s head, an illustration also used on the book’s dust jacket.

According to George E. Kent, the author of A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Brooks’s poem “A Lonely Love”, published in 1960, is entirely about her intense personal relationship with Ernest Alexander.

In 1949, the same year that his illustration was used for Annie Allen, Alex had a painting chosen for inclusion in the “53rd annual showing by artists of Chicago and vicinity”, a major exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago. This was a significant achievement for a painter who was apparently largely self-taught. The painting in question, entitled “Shop Front and Doors”, was priced at $350.

Among the other artists included in the exhibition were George Buehr (a professor of art for many years at the Art Institute of Chicago) and his wife Margo Hoff. Buehr, and possibly Margo, had spent some time in Ajijic a few years previously, and may well have provided the inspiration for Alex’s decision to transfer his G.I. Bill funding to the Fine Arts school of the University of Guadalajara later that year.

In Mexico, Alex studied painting, sculpture and photography, and also met Dorothy Whelan, a Canadian whose husband was serving seven years in a Mexican jail for passing bad checks. Alex and “Dolly”, as she was known, set up house in Ajijic, where Dolly, at least for a time, was a cook at the Posada Ajijic. Among their close friends were painter-potter David Morris and his wife Helen, a former dancer. San Francisco Bay area sculptors Robert McChesney and his wife Mary Fuller were also both in Ajijic at this time.

Dorothy Whelan in Bar Alacrán, Ajijic, ca 1952. Photo in collection of Katie Goodridge Ingram; reproduced with kind permission.

Dorothy Whelan in Alex’s studio in Club Alacrán, Ajijic, ca 1952. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.

In Ajijic, Alex opened a restaurant-bar named Club Alacrán (Scorpion Club), which was in operation from about 1950 to 1952. The club attracted locals and expatriates alike. Alex instituted a two-tier pricing system, charging Mexicans less than Americans for their drinks.

Katie Goodridge Ingram remembers the building well, because it had previously been the studio of her step-father, the artist and sculptor Mort Carl. The Club Alacrán, on Calle Constitución at its intersection with Ramón Corona, “was set up in a small two-room house with a patio and kitchen area. Alex was a very jolly, welcoming and bright host. It briefly became “the” place.” Ingram also recalls that Alex was a fine cook with a penchant for hosting massive barbecues on the beach.

While he was running Club Alacrán, Alex was visited by the ethnomusicologist Sam Eskin. The second part of Eskin’s sound recording entitled Mexican firecrackers: a prayer and a festival (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001) was recorded from the patio of the Scorpion Club and features a religious festival in Ajijic, complete with church bells and pre-dawn firecrackers.

Eskin is quoted in the cover notes as recalling that,

I was rudely awakened at three or four in the morning. The uproar was really deafening. I reached out from my bunk and flipped the tape machine on, set level and dozed off again. Fifteen minutes later firecrackers started going off, and sleep was no more that night…. Strangely enough, El Escorpion’s patio was infested with black widow spiders.”

Ernest Alexander: Photo of typical lane in Ajijic, ca 1949. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.

Ernest Alexander: Photo of Lake Chapala fishermen and nets, ca 1950. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Katie Goodridge Ingram.

Little is known about the whereabouts of Alex’s artwork from this time, though in the late 1950s he showed Sean Wilder some small masks that he had sculpted and some photos of paintings. Wilder describes one of Alex’s paintings, almost certainly of Lake Chapala:

His paintings were as calm and meditative as his sculpture was full of violent vitality. One of them made a particularly strong impression on me: what appeared to be a fisherman’s shack (I recall a net and floaters hung out on a wall to dry) in the full golden blast of a sun-drenched late afternoon, while above and behind it the sky was blue-gray with ominous storm clouds.” (Alex, p 173)

Unfortunately, the good times for Alex did not last long. In December 1951 or early in 1952, a serious altercation broke out in the bar during which he almost strangled one of his patrons. Even the birth of Alex and Dolly’s son Mark a few months later was only a temporary respite for the couple. Soon afterwards, Dolly’s husband (John Thomas Babin), having escaped or completed his sentence, returned to Ajijic demanding his wife back. Another huge scene ensued. Alex was forced to give up the Club Alacrán. By April of the following year (1953), he had been expelled from Mexico under the infamous Artículo 33, that section of the constitution which allows Mexican authorities to expel “undesirable” foreigners without due process. Dolly and Mark accompanied him to San Francisco. (Coincidentally, their friends David and Helen Morris returned to the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time.)

In 1953, Ernest Alexander was one of 14 artists (with Robert McChesney, Lenore Cetone and others) exhibiting in Sausalito, California, at the annual Spring Art Show at the Sausalito Art Center from 29 March to 12 April 1953. A Sausalito News piece in June 1953 refers to Alex and his wife as “the Ernie Alexanders of Marin City”, when listing the artists who attended an art show at the Tin Angel on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. In August 1953, the same newspaper lists Ernest Alexander, of “208 Second Street”, as the chairman of the exhibition committee for the second annual Sausalito Arts Center Fair to be held at Shell Beach in mid-September, alongside the annual Regatta.

By 1955, Alex’s world began to unravel. In February 1955, police were called to a “fracas” at the annual Sausalito Artists Ball. According to a press report:

“Charles Carmona, an employee of St. Vincent’s School for Boys north of San Rafael, was given first aid by the Sausalito fire department to check the bleeding from severe facial cuts. He told police that Ernest Alexander, former Sausalitan now living in San Francisco, hit him in the face with a beer bottle after he had danced with Alexander’s wife. Carmona claimed the blow splintered the bottle and police said the injured man had deep cuts on his forehead, nose, chin and both cheeks. Alexander denied he hit Carmona with the bottle and witnesses to the fracas said they did not see Alexander wield the weapon.” No charges were laid because “Carmona refused to sign a complaint against Alexander”.

At some point in 1955, Dolly died in hospital while undergoing a second mastectomy. Alex, distraught, began to fall apart. As Alex slid towards insanity (perhaps due to general paresis caused by late-stage syphilis), Mark was taken into the local foster care system.

For the remaining 15 years or so of his life, Alex was never the same. He stopped painting, spent time in state mental institutions, developed paranoia, and lived for extended periods on hand-outs. It is at this stage of his life that Sean Wilder first met him. Wilder recalls that while Alex no longer painted, he enjoyed listening to the music of Billie Holiday and loved cookbooks, reading and valuing them like other people read poetry or novels.

The final chapter in the tragic story of Alex’s final years ended in February 1974. The precise date is unknown because he died alone in his apartment at 138-6th St, San Francisco, and his body was not found until four months later. He was buried in Willamette National Cemetery, Portland, Oregon, on 25 July 1974.

While Alex’s contributions to the Ajijic art scene have been largely forgotten or ignored, his place in the Chicago art scene has been recognized by the inclusion of his paintings in two major group exhibitions: “Black on Black: The Works of Black artists from Chicago Black Collectors” (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1983) and “The Flowering: African-American Artists and Friends in 1940s Chicago: A Look at the South Side Community Art Center”, (Illinois State Museum, 1993).

Note and acknowledgments:

An earlier version of this post incorrectly named Ernest Alexander’s son as “Luke”. This has now been corrected to “Mark”.
My sincere thanks to Katie Goodridge Ingram for sharing her memories of Alex (and photo of his studio) and for permission to reproduce examples of his fine photographs.

Reference:

Sausalito News. 19 March 1953, p 7; 2 April 1953, p 7; 25 June 1953, p3; 27 August 1953, p 5; 25 February 1955, p 1.
Wilder, Sean. 2011. Alex (self-published via Lulu.com).

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

ruth weiss, American beat poet

1950s No Responses »

Jun 012015

Born in 1928, ruth weiss is a renowned American poet, playwright and artist, best known for reciting her poetry to the accompaniment of live jazz. She visited Ajijic and Chapala briefly during an extended road trip to Mexico in 1958-1959, with her husband and her dog.

weiss was born in 1928 into a Jewish family in Berlin. Her family left Berlin for Vienna in 1933 and then relocated to New York in 1938. weiss lived for a time in Chicago, but eventually settled in San Francisco in 1952.

Alex’s magnetic appeal helped foment the nascent jazz and poetry scene of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. Among the poets that Alex became close to were Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry (inspired by Brooks), who attended a summer art school in Ajijic in 1949.

In Chicago, in 1949, weiss was a resident of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. This is where she first met Ernest Alexander (“Alex”), who played a decisive role in persuading her to start reading her poetry to jazz. In I Always Thought You Black (a tribute to her African American artist friends), weiss wrote that,

ERNEST ALEXANDER long & brown listens to my poem. in my black blue-bulb room.
pulls me upstairs. sez now read to these folks. they gotta hear this.
my first own home. my first turntable. my first modeling nude. my first poetry aloud.
someone blows a horn. someone brushes a drum. i’m reading to jazz man.”

This quickly became a trademark of readings by ruth weiss.

A year or so after they first met, Alex left Chicago for Mexico where he lived and worked for a few years in Ajijic on Lake Chapala. weiss moved to San Francisco, where she became a prominent member of the counter-culture movement of San Francisco, and good friends with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Bob Kaufman and surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. In the 1960s, she started to use only lower case for her name in a symbolic protest against “law and order” since in her birthplace of Germany all nouns are capitalized.

weiss mentions Alex several more times in I Always Thought You Black.

For example, weiss writes about how she and Alex used to work together:

Oh ALEX lover of my first woman-lover JERI WANTAJA. your
paintings of birds. your studio bright & wild with their
flight. your studio a three-cornered touchstone where i
write in a corner. look out at warehouses trucks dawn.
come rain come shine.

weiss also describes how she met Alex again several years later, in San Francisco, after Alex’s return from Mexico in 1953:

oh ALEX. is it 1955 or 6 or 7. THE CELLAR. san francisco
north beach. where i had started poetry & jazz. you walk
in. i carry glasses & bottles. almost drop them. we hug.
your wife with you. your first-born soon after. it’s all a
blur. your wife and boy dead. mexico.

you become a legend. it’s the beat-time. day after day
in & out of the CO-EXISTENCE BAGEL SHOP. you stand outside.
you sit inside. you walk up & down. you talk at. you
talk at. you talk at. you hold my eye in your hand.
it slips from your hand. it is wet with tears.”

weiss’s links to the Lake Chapala area would be tenuous at best (and only by proxy via Alex) were it not for her extended road trip to Mexico in 1958-1959, with her husband, Mel Weitsman, and dog, zimzum. They left San Francisco on Tuesday 14 October 1958 and returned in early February 1959.

In Can’t stop the beat, the life and words of a Beat poet, published in 2011, weiss includes her narrative poem COMPASS, her diary of the trip to Mexico. Her entry for Ajijic reads,

oct. 31 … ajijic aside-town where many i have known have been … divided
… there the square and park … we leave the car … to wander slowly
pebbled street … sleepy hot … a place … a face familiar … we must have
known each other’s presence … then … the house to look for … he was in
it … bill filling the window now … the girl in jeans and black is smile
and small … ny to sf … mexico city … she is here now … art later …
bill and he split one scene for this one … we fill the house … it’s lori’s
… a legend … romana is the maid or more than … two nights around …
past halloween … the ghosts have dog-voices against the moon … another
stranger met again … she is blonde in the dark house … all in the hosue
… the glass room catches us … each one … the orange cat the guardian …
we leave the halloween by day … the lake around … the road is village …
the space between … the lake is low … or have the lake-plants grown this
noon … each cow a slow a sudden focus … the earth people move slow …
each step an earth-beat … the burro the boy the woman the urn … the man
the wood … eyes in the stone … blue mountains from the far red plain …
the sky the whirr the clouds … rain a shaft between two black mountains …
red road to a red town in a red plain … the corn is dry …

As Matt Gonzalez has written, “Part travel journal and part surreal dreamscape, no text of the beat era captures Mexico with more authenticity and immediacy than weiss’s 80-page COMPASS.”

Books by ruth weiss include: Steps (1958), Gallery of Women (1959), South Pacific (1959), Blue in Green (1960), Light and other poems (1976), Desert Journal (1977), Single Out (1978) 13 Haiku (1986), For these women of the beat (1997), A new view of matter (1999), Full circle (2002), Africa (2003), White is all colors (2004), No dancing aloud (2006), Can’t stop the beat (2011), Fool’s journey (2012). ruth weiss has appeared in several short films by Stephen Arnold, including Liberation of Mannique Mechanique (1967), The Various Incarnations of a Tibetan Seamstress (1967), Messages, Messages (1968), Luminous Procuress (1971); Pyramid (1972).

Weiss died on 31 July 2020.

Poet and writer Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994)

1950s, 1970s 1 Response »

May 252015

Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) was a poet and writer who lived for a time in the Lake Chapala area with her artist-author husband Paul Alexander Bartlett and son Steven James Bartlett in the early 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, the family revisited the Chapala area several times from their then home in Comala, Colima. Bartlett gave several poetry readings in the Chapala area, though the precise dates and locations are unclear.

In addition to her poetry, Bartlett is remembered as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor. She was also founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc.

Elizabeth Bartlett, circa 1973. Photograph courtesy of Steven James Bartlett, literary executor for Elizabeth Bartlett.

Eizabeth Roberta Bartlett (née Winters) was born in New York City in 1911. She was awarded her degree from Teachers’ College in 1931 and then undertook postgraduate studies at Columbia University (1938-40), before dedicating herself to writing and teaching.

She first met her husband in Mexico in 1941, and the couple married in Sayula (Jalisco) in 1943. Their son Steven was born in Mexico City two years later. The family divided their time between the USA and Mexico. In Mexico, the family lived in numerous different states while Paul Bartlett was researching his book on Mexican haciendas.

Elizabeth Bartlett had a distinguished teaching career, including spells at Southern Methodist University (1947–49), San Jose State University (1960–61), the University of California at Santa Barbara (1961–64), San Diego State University (1979–81), and the University of San Diego (1981–82). She was a visiting poet at universities in Canada, California, Florida, and Texas, and Poetry Editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics and for Crosscurrents.

Bartlett was founder and president of the international non-profit organization, Literary Olympics, Inc., which was established to reintroduce a cultural component to the Olympic Games. In relation to this, Bartlett edited three international multi-language anthologies to coincide with the Olympics, beginning in 1984. A fourth volume was published in 1997 in memory of Bartlett, to honor her for her work with the Literary Olympics, and to commemorate the 1996 Olympic Games.

Bartlett’s writing has been published in numerous journals, anthologies and books of collected poetry, including Poems of Yes and No (1952), It Takes Practice Not to Die (1964), Address in Time (1979), Memory is No Stranger (1981), The Gemini Poems (1984), Candles (1988), and Around the Clock (1989).

Acknowledgment.

Sincere thanks to Steven Bartlett for sharing his memories of the family’s time in Mexico.

Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990): artist and author

1940s, 1950s, 1960s No Responses »

May 182015

American artist and author Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) was a frequent traveler to Mexico who developed an obsession with Mexico’s ancient haciendas. Bartlett devoted years of his life to studying and documenting these haciendas (the mainstay of the colonial-era economy), gradually compiling an artistic record covering more than 350 of them throughout the country.

While it is not entirely clear precisely when Bartlett lived in the Chapala region, during his time there he painted and drew exquisite pen and ink drawings, such as this one of the Hacienda de Zapotitán, a short distance north of Jocotepec.

Pen-and-ink drawing by Paul Bartlett of Hacienda de Zapotitán, Jalisco

Bartlett explored Mexico with his wife, poet and writer Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994). The couple first met in Guadalajara in 1941 and married two years later in Sayula. Their son Steven James Bartlett (born in Mexico City and now a widely published author in the fields of psychology and philosophy) subsequently accompanied them as they roamed all over Mexico looking for photogenic and noteworthy haciendas.

Steven Bartlett recalls that the family definitely lived for some months in the Chapala-Ajijic area in the early 1950s. He remembers that his father knew author Peter Lilley (who, with first one writing colleague and then another, used the pen-name of Dane Chandos to craft, among other works, Village in the Sun and House in the Sun, both set at Lake Chapala). The Bartlett family also revisited the Chapala area several times in the 1970s, during the time they were living in Comala, Colima. During these later trips, his father gave lectures about haciendas while his mother gave poetry readings.

Bartlett eventually compiled the beautifully-illustrated book The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist’s Record, first published in 1990 and readily available now as a free Gutenburg pdf or Epub. The book has more than 100 photographs and illustrations made in the field from 1943 to 1985 and is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the history, economics, art and architecture of Mexico’s colonial haciendas. For a brief review of this book, see The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist’s Record on the Geo-Mexico website.

Bartlett’s hacienda art work has been displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum, the New York City Public Library, the University of Virginia, the University of Texas, the Instituto Mexicano-Norteamericano in Mexico City, and at the Bancroft Library, among other places.

An archive of Bartlett’s original pen-and-ink illustrations and several hundred photographs is held in the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas in Austin. A second collection of hacienda photographs and other materials is maintained by the Western History Research Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909-1990) attended Oberlin College and the University of Arizona, before studying art at the National University of Mexico (UNAM) and in Guadalajara. He was an instructor in creative writing at Georgia State College and Editor of Publications at the University of California Santa Barbara (1964-70).

Bartlett had dozens of short stories and poems published in magazines such as Southwest Review, Crosscurrents, Antenna, Etc, Greyledge Review, Prospice, and Queen’s Quarterly, and also wrote the short novel Adios, mi México (1983), and the novel When the Owl Cries (1960). Free online editions of several of his books are available via his author page on Project Gutenberg.

Acknowledgment

Sincere thanks to Steven Bartlett for sharing his memories of the family’s time in Mexico.

David Morris (1911-1999) and Helen Morris (1917-1992)

1950s No Responses »

Mar 312015

David and Helen Morris were well-known potters who lived for several years in Guadalajara and Ajijic in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before moving to the San Francisco Bay area of California.

David Morris was born in 1911 in Washington D.C., where his father was a doctor at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Morris graduated from Georgetown University and was then employed in the city to head the arts section of the Work Projects Administration, a New Deal program, in the 1930s. This is when he first met Helen, a dance student. The couple married in 1937, and spent their honeymoon in Mexico.

During the second world war, Morris served in the U.S. armed forces in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, they returned to the Washington D.C. area for a short time where David Morris studied at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, presumably on G.I. Bill funds. He transferred his G.I. Bill tuition for a Masters degree in Fine Arts to the University of Guadalajara and the couple moved to Mexico in the late 1940s. (Their son Nicolas was born in about 1949).

David Morris had several works – one tempera, one watercolor, one monotype, and four ceramic pieces – included in the end-of-academic-year exhibition at the Fine Arts school of the University of Guadalajara in June 1951.

David Morris: Railroad Station at Lake Chapala. 1950.

The family subsequently settled in Ajijic (they were definitely living there by mid-1951), where they became active members of the area’s growing artistic colony of the early 1950s. At this time, David was better known as a painter, though the couple were beginning to develop their extraordinary skills as potters. Among his Mexican paintings is an oil on board, entitled “Railroad Station at Lake Chapala”, dated to 1950, which was sold at auction in California in 2009.

While in Ajijic, the couple were good friends of black American painter Ernest Alexander (“Alex”), who ran the Bar Alacrán (Scorpion Bar) in Ajijic. Alex, his common-law wife Dolly and their son Mark, moved to the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time as David and Helen Morris did.

The couple returned to California in 1953, where they became political activists and began to work together as potters. Living and working initially at 701, Humboldt Street, David and Helen Morris began to produce exquisite ceramic pieces that quickly gained national attention.

David Morris was active on the committee behind the Sausalito Art Festival, held in November 1956, on the Casa Madroño grounds, and even performed as a singer at that festival. He continued to be actively involved in organizing several other Sausalito Art Festivals, including those held in May 1957, October 1957 (which drew record crowds of almost 20,000 over three days) and June 1958.

In June 1957, Morris was the spokesperson for a group of 60 freelance artists who objected to the regulations imposed for exhibitors by the organizers of the annual Marin Art and Garden Show, which, despite receiving public monies was open only to paid-up members of the Marin Society bf Artists. The freelance artists argued that entry should be open to all regardless of whether or not they were members; their petition was upheld by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.

They were riding the crest of success when, in 1960, their first joint studio, in a former boatyard in Sausalito, California, was totally destroyed by fire. According to the last verse of a song written shortly afterwards by Malvina Reynolds, the blaze was not without its silver lining:

In the midst of smoke and ruin, old David Morris stands,
A look of wonder on his face, a pot shard in his hands,
It has a wond’rous color never seen on hill or plain,
And they’ll have to burn the boatyard down to get that glaze again.

(From “Sausalito Fire” by Malvina Reynolds, 1960. The song was published in her Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs)

Undeterred for long, David and Helen Morris soon built a new studio in Larkspur, where they would go on to craft more than 10,000 pieces of stoneware and porcelain, some of which found their way into the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and other museums.

The couple worked closely together and shared a single wheel in their studio. A contemporary account says that while David worked on the larger pieces, Helen crafted the smaller, more delicate forms. According to art critic Tom Albright, David Morris was particularly adept at creating “rich, lush glazes”, based on ancient Chinese techniques.

David and Helen Morris and their work were regularly featured in ceramics-related magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. For example the April 1960 issue of Ceramics Monthly had a photograph of the couple at work in their studio on its cover, and an illustrated 3-page feature article about them and the “crystalline” stoneware glazes they had developed.

Despite their aversion to taking part in juried shows, their stoneware won numerous awards, including a first prize in the Berkeley Art Show in July 1957. In April 1958, David Morris was invited by the Artist League of Vallejo to highlight the official opening of their new building in Vallejo.

Helen Morris (born 24 February 1917) died on 6 December 1992, aged 75 years; David Morris died on 26 January 1999, his 88th birthday.

Sources:

Design Quarterly. 1958. “Eighty-Two American Ceramists and Their Work” in Design Quarterly 42-43.
Malvina Reynolds. 1960. Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs.
Sausalito News: 28 September 1956; 2 November 1956; 9 February 1957; 22 June 1957; 29 June 1957; 6 July 1957; 24 August 1957; 26 October 1957; 18 January 1958; 5 April 1958.
Stephen Schwartz. 1999. Obituary “David Morris“. 25 February 1999.
Yoshiko Uchida. 1957. Helen and David Morris: Pottery is Their Business, in Craft Horizons, December 1957 (Vol 17 #6)
Oppi Untracht. 1960. “David and Helen Morris”, in Ceramics Monthly, April 1960, (Vol 8 #4)

Joe Rayter’s “Stab in the Dark”, a murder mystery set in Guadalajara

1950s No Responses »

Mar 022015

American sculptor and art historian Mary Fuller (McChesney) and her husband Robert Pearson McChesney, also an artist, spent 1951-1952 in Mexico, living in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. Shortly afterwards, Mary Fuller wrote three detective novels, one of which was set in the Guadalajara art scene, using the pseudonym “Joe Rayter”.

She also wrote many short stories, poems, and articles, published in various prominent arts magazines including Art Digest, Artforum, Art in America, Craft Horizons, and American Craft. She was, at one time or another, a staff writer at Currant, a researcher for the Archives of American Art, a Ford Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the 1975 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Critic’s Grant. Another of her books, A Period of Exploration (Oakland Museum 1973), was written to accompany an exhibition of ab-ex (abstract expressionism) works from the San Francisco art scene from 1945-50.

In the 1950s, McChesney wrote several detective novels, three of which were published, using the pseudonym “Joe Rayter”.

These included The Victim Was Important (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954) and Asking for Trouble (M. S. Mill / William Morrow, 1955), both of which featured Private Investigator Johnny Powers, and Stab in the Dark (M. S. Mill / William Morrow, 1955), a murder mystery set in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Stab in the Dark is about murder, infidelity, and dope-peddling among a group of oddball expatriate artists in Guadalajara. The Kirkus Review of the book describes how “An excess of loose libido-tossing, alcohol, sex and art accompanies the death of Mike Cowper, about to become a cocaine pusher, in Guadalajara. The Mexican Inspector is not slow; young Madelene has to track down her husband and escape attack; Payne, a painter, and his wife get free of their little daughter’s death; and Madelene looses the marriage bonds for another heart interest. An AWFUL lot of running around.”

While Stab in the Dark is hardly a masterpiece, it is a fun read even today. The characters seem two-dimensional and their actions are somewhat predictable, but the book describes several expatriate artists working in Guadalajara at the time, and makes various mentions of the 1950s art scene in Guadalajara, including the “Galeria Moderna”, as well as the famed restaurant La Copa de Leche. The book also has a few scenes set in the coastal resort of “Puerto Ortega”.

McChesney also wrote several erotic books using Melissa Franklin as her nom de plume, including Courier of Desire and Murder In Her Thighs, both published by Greenleaf Books of San Diego in 1969. Coincidentally, Earl Kemp who ran Greenleaf Books at the time was then living in Ajijic, having been forced to leave the US for his activities. For more details, see chapter 29 of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village

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Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

Jocotepec in the mid-1950s: Lysander Kemp’s “The Perils of Paradise”

1950s No Responses »

Feb 232015

Lysander Kemp (1920-1992) was a writer, poet, professor and translator. He was head editor of the University of Texas Press from 1966 to 1975, during which time he collaborated with numerous great Mexican and Latin American writers to publish superb translations of their work.

Kemp lived for several years in Jocotepec, at the western end of Lake Chapala, from about 1953, and published a travel piece in House and Garden (1957) that described his life in the lakeside town, and from which these extracts are taken:

“I sit here in paradise in the shade of the verandah, gazing out into the brilliant noonday of Mexico. On my left hand, beyond the tile roofs of the village, the steep rough flank of El Moreno. the nearest mountain, is ochre and russet in the sunlight. On my right land, beyond the wide fields, the smooth flank of Las Majadas and the gashed cone of García are the smoke-blue of distance”

“Before me, beyond the fields and the guamúchil trees (I hope you like scenery), the great lake of Chalala shines between its borders of blue mountains. In a few minutes I will drink a small glass of tequila, the liquor distilled from the big blue-green sword-bladed magueyes which I can see in tilted rows on the lower slope of El Moreno. A little later Lola will serve me my dinner. After dinner, of course, I will take a siesta.”

“The house is brick and tile, six rooms in a line behind the long verandah, and the rent is 100 pesos a month, or exactly $8 in US currency. The Aguilar family — Cornelia, Lola and their three small daughters — lives in the two north rooms. I pay Lola 10 pesos, or 80 cents, a day, for which she keeps the house immaculate and serves me my three meals. By “serves” I mean that she buys all the food out of that 80c, as well as cooking it and bringing it to the table. I have other expenses, of course: my electricity bill is over a dollar a month, American-style cigarettes cost me almost a nickel a pack, and my weekly laundry bill with Chabela Flores has run as high as 40 cents.”

“The population of Jocotepec (pronounced Ho-ko-teh-PEH) is about 8,000, but there are only six automobiles in the village. Four are taxis, usually sound asleep in the shade of the plaza trees. There are also perhaps a dozen trucks and half a dozen buses. The life of the village moves in slow, ancient rhythms, marked out by the seasons — the time to plough, to sow, to harvest — and the calendar of fiestas. During three years in Jocotepec I remember only one day when the sun failed to shine for at least a few hours, and that was when a typhoon hit the Pacific coast, a hundred miles away, and it rained here for twenty-four hours. Otherwise the days are sun drenched all year round, but at this altitude, 5,000 feet, never sweltering. Modern life is hurry and worry, I hear, but in Jocotepec hurry means doing it tomorrow, or next week, or the hell with it, while worry means — well, I suppose it must mean something.”

Of course, not everything is perfect…

“I am not a gourmet, but I agree with Dr. Johnson that “he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.” Take even such a familiar and simple pleasure as ice-cream, In the States you take it for granted, but in Jocotepec I would take it only with terramycin, because the local milk is not pasteurized. To think of a hot fudge sundae is to drool. And then take all the other dishes not available here: roast leg of lamb, or fresh spinach, or country sausages, or broiled swordfish, or . . .”

And, life in Jocotepec in the mid 1950s was not all plain-sailing…

“A few nights ago I was drinking a beer in the plaza, at Ména Durán’s refreshment stand, when Gollo Bizarro came by to show off his new pistol. He handed it to Ména, and she said “I am Pancho Villa” and pointed it at my head, at a range of about a foot and a half. I ducked as she pulled the trigger, the pistol clicked, and Ména laughed gaily at my fright. Gollo took the pistol from her and inspected it with a frown. “Strange,” he said. “It misfired.”

“Misfired?” I asked. “You mean it was loaded?”
“Yes.” He still scowled. “A new pistol ought not to misfire.”

I could only nod. Perhaps I was agreeing. Perhaps I was practicing ducking.”

Extracts are taken from Lysander Kemp, 1957: “The Perils of Paradise.” House and Garden vol. 111 (April 1957) pp 172-4, 177.

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Abstract expressionist Robert Pearson McChesney lived in Ajijic in the 1950s

1950s No Responses »

Feb 192015

Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008) was a noted California abstract artist, a pioneer of the abstract expressionism (ab-ex) movement, and one of the leading figures of American Modernism.

Robert “Mac” McChesney and his second wife, sculptor and author Mary Fuller McChesney, moved to Mexico in 1951 as a direct result of losing their jobs during the McCarthy era. They drove south in their Model A Ford mail truck and lived in Mexico for about a year, first in Ajijic and later in San Miguel de Allende. Shortly after their return to California, McChesney exhibited, alongside Ernest Alexander (former owner of the Scorpion Bar in Ajijic), Lenore Cetone and others, in the Annual Spring exhibit of Sausalito Art Center, held from 29 March to 12 April 1953.

Robert McChesney silkscreen : Yermo Noche #1

McChesney was born in Marshall, Missouri, on 16 January 1913. He attended Washington University in St. Louis (1931-34) and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1936).

In 1937, he married one of his models, Frances, and they moved to San Francisco, where he was employed on the Federal Art Project. Together with 25 other artists, McChesney helped paint huge murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939).

During the 1940s he assisted Anton Refregier with murals in San Francisco’s Rincon Annex Post Office. During the second world war, McChesney worked as a merchant marine seaman, painting aboard ship in the South Pacific.

After the war, he taught silk-screening (serigraphy) at the California School of Fine Arts (1949-51) and at Santa Rosa Junior College (from 1947 to 1958, with a year’s break in Mexico). He also taught at California State University, Hayward, from 1958 to 1962.

McChesney married Mary Fuller in December 1949 and the couple lived in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for a year, 1951-1952. Mary Fuller McChesney, best known as a sculptor, also wrote short stories, poems, art history articles and several detective novels using the pen name “Joe Rayter”, including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s Guadalajara art scene.

On their return to California, they began to build their own home near the top of Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma, where they were still living at the time of Robert McChesney’s death on 10 May 2008.

Robert McChesney held more than forty solo exhibitions during his long artistic career, including many in galleries and museums in San Francisco, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum in New York, Sao Paulo in Brazil (1955), Oakland Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art (1994), and California State University, Fresno (1999). In 2009, a major retrospective of the work of both artists (Mac and his wife) was held at the Petaluma Arts Center.

His work can be viewed in numerous museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Oakland Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, and Washington State Art Commission.

Sources:

Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940.
M.V. Wood, It’s a colorful life / Robert McChesney, Mary Fuller celebrate art and their marriage with a joint show (SFGate, 2002)
Gretchen Giles, True Bohemians – Artists Robert and Mary Fuller McChesney found peace outside the limelight, (Metroactive, 2009)
Smithsonian Institution. Oral history interview with Mary Fuller McChesney, 1994 Sept. 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Bart Spicer, writer of detective and spy mysteries

1950s No Responses »

Feb 162015

Journalist and novelist Bart Spicer was born Albert Samuel Spicer on 13 April 1918 in Richmond, Virginia. He legally changed his name to Bart in 1964. He was married to Betty Coe, and died 15 February 1978 in Tucson, Arizona.

While the precise dates are unclear, Spicer certainly visited Ajijic several times, mainly in the early 1950s, and usually staying at the (old) Posada Ajijic. An author profile in a 1953 issue of Library Journal reported that Spicer was “holed up down in Mexico writing full-time.”

Spicer incorporates scenes set in Chapala, Guadalajara and Mexico City into his 1955 spy novel The Day of the Dead.

Bart Spicer spent his early childhood “in various parts of the British Empire”, and would later claim to have lived in England, India, Africa, France, Spain, Mexico and many parts of the United States. He was a journalist and radio news writer, prior to enlisting in the US Army during World War II. After the war he worked for three years in public relations for Universal Military Training and a year for the World Affairs Council. His first book, The Dark Light, was published in 1949, at which point he became a full-time novelist.

By the late 1950s, the Spicers were living in New York City where Bart was a member of the Players Club (jazz). In the mid-1960s, they moved to Spain, where they lived in Torremolinos and Malaga. In 1977, medical reasons forced them to return to the U.S. They settled in Tucson, where Bart died the following year.

The cover design of the Dell imprint of The Day of the Dead

The striking cover design (left) of the 1956 Dell imprint of The Day of the Dead is attributed to Arthur Sussman (1927-2008). Sussman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and after completing a BFA at Syracuse University, worked in New York from 1951 to 1960 as a designer and illustrator. He spent the winter of 1960-1961 in Taxco, Mexico. After 1960, he devoted himself more to his fine art, and held numerous solo exhibitions in Mexico and the U.S. between 1961 and 1991.

Arthur Sussman settled with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1965, and taught at the University of Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico Community College. He was also a regular commentator on art and film for local radio and television stations. Several of Sussman’s paintings and prints are in the permanent collections of museums, including the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and the Albuquerque Museum of Fine Arts.

Bart Spicer, ca 1949

Most of the early action in Spicer’s first spy novel The Day of the Dead (1955) is set in Guadalajara. The city’s Country Club, University, Parque Revolución, the U.S. Consulate, Hotel del Parque and fictional “Mercado Mexico” all feature in the novel.

The book is a tale of international intrigue and betrayed friendships. A retired spy and war-wounded Colonel Peregrine White (“Blanco”), who walks with a cane, is called back into service by a dour FBI agent Castle, to thwart a suspected Communist takeover of the Mexican government. Castle believes that one of the ringleaders is White’s best friend Paco Morado, a teacher at the university.

As the plot thickens, White attends a lively party at an expat-owned house on the lakeshore in Chapala, where the lake is fully “200 yards from its former shoreline”. (The lake was at its lowest ever level in 1954/55). One of the party-goers is looking for investors in a plan to “buy the old railway station, put in a pool and a nine-hole golf course and start a club.” (p 71). (In 1955, the old railway station became the clubhouse of the Chapala Country Club, with its nine-hole golf course in the adjacent grounds; the club was later relocated further east near San Nicolas de Ibarra. The former railway station is now a museum and cultural center.)

Most of the later scenes in the book play out in Mexico City. The language of The Day of the Dead now seems stilted at times, and the plot is dated, but the book was well received at the time, and still worth a read.

Bart Spicer also wrote: The Dark Light (1949); Blues for the Prince (1950); The Golden Door (1951); Black Sheep, Run (1951); Shadow of Fear (1953) aka The Long Green ; The Wild Ohio (1953); The Taming of Carney Wilde (1954); The Tall Captains (1957); Brother to the Enemy (1958]; Exit, Running (1959); The Day Before Thunder (1960); Act of Anger (1962); The Burned Man (1966); Kellog Junction (1969); Festival (1970); and The Adversary (1973).

In addition, he has also co-authored four books with his wife Betty Coe Spicer under the joint pseudonym “Jay Barbette”: Final Copy (1952); Dear Dead Days (1953); Deadly Doll (1958); Look Behind You (1960).

His books were widely translated and several of his books were adopted for television.

Sculptor and author Mary Fuller McChesney found inspiration in Ajijic in the 1950s

1950s No Responses »

Feb 122015

American sculptor and art historian Mary Fuller (McChesney) and her husband Robert Pearson McChesney, also an artist, spent 1951-1952 in Mexico, living in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. They moved to Mexico as a direct result of losing their jobs during the McCarthy era.

Mary Fuller McChesney was born 20 October 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. The family moved to California when she was an infant and she grew up in Stockton, California. Largely self-taught as an artist, she studied with Paul Marhenke at the University of California at Berkeley. During the second world war, she was a welder in the Richmond, California shipyard. She later apprenticed in ceramics pottery at the California Faience Company in Berkeley. She began to exhibit in 1947, and won first prize for sculpture at both the 6th and 8th Annual Pacific Coast Ceramic Shows (1947 and 1949).

Mary Fuller Sculpture of Frog and Owl (Photo credit: Kurt Rogers, SFGate)

She married fellow artist Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008), in December 1949 and the couple lived initially in the North Bay subregion of San Francisco.

After deciding to head for Mexico in 1951, they sold Mary Fuller’s house, bought a Model A Ford mail truck, and headed south complete with all their belongings. Safely across the border, they decided to write “artistas” on the side of their vehicle. Robert McChesney later told a reporter that, “People on the side of the road would wave at us. Kids would come running out of their house to see us. It wasn’t until later that we learned that Mexicans used the word artista to mean ‘movie actor’.” (SFGate, 2002)

In a 1994 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Mary Fuller McChesney recalled that the artists’ hangout in Ajijic at the time they were there was the Scorpion Club, run by Ernest Alexander, a black American painter from Chicago. Some of the artists “were going to the University of Guadalajara on the G.I. Bill. So– And some of them lived in Ajijic and they would go into Guadalajara once a week to pick up their checks and go in to school and that was about it.” The Scorpion Club was the popular watering-hole for “a bunch of writers, too. Some of them from New York. Some people who ran a bookstore. And they were published writers. And there was a mystery writer down there.” (Oral history interview with Mary Fuller McChesney, 1994 Sept. 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)

Best known as a sculptor, Mary Fuller McChesney was also a writer. Besides numerous short stories, poems and art history articles, she wrote several detective novels, including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s’ Guadalajara art scene.

On their return from Mexico in 1952, Mary Fuller and her husband began building their home on an acre of land near the top of the Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma. Largely self-taught as an artist, Mary Fuller McChesney had started to sculpt in the 1940s. She created many of her best-known projects in the grounds of their home on Sonoma Mountain. Many of her sculptures are made from a special mixture of vermiculite, sand, cement and water, which is then carved directly using a knife and rasp.

Much of her work is “reminiscent of pre-Columbian sculpture and African art, which profoundly influence her aesthetic and artistic guides.”

Her unique sculptures of enchanting animals and mythological women have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries throughout the USA, and in Mexico.Her solo shows include Artists’ Guild Gallery, San Francisco (1947); Lucien Labaudt Gallery, San Francisco (1950); John Bolles Gallery, San Francisco (1961); Ota Gallery, San Francisco (1972); and Santa Rosa City Hall, California (1974).

In addition her work has featured in numerous group shows in San Francisco and elsewhere, including Syracuse Museum, New York (1948); the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas (1976); and “Artrium 1976” in Santa Rosa (1976).

Her work can be seen in many public spaces, as well as in museums and private collections. Her public sculpture commissions in California include works for the Petaluma Library, the San Francisco Zoo, the San Francisco General Hospital, Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, Salinas Community Center, Andrew Hill High School in San Jose, Department of Motor Vehicles in Yuba City, and Squaw Valley.

Both Fuller and her friend Blanche Phillips Howard were among the ten sculptors commissioned to produce pieces for the San Francisco General Hospital when the building was under construction in the 1970s. Fuller’s “Dos Leones”, a cast stone aggregate sculpture dating from 1976 was installed in a courtyard at the hospital.

Mary Fuller McChesney died in Petaluma on 4 May 2022 at the age of 99.

This post was updated on 14 July 2022.

Sources

San Francisco Art Commission. 1978. San Francisco General Hospital Medical Center Collection.
The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California). 1974. “City picks artists for hospital.” 20 Jun 1974, 28.

Jack Gilbert, poet (1925-2012)

1950s No Responses »

Feb 022015

The American poet Jack Gilbert was born 18 February 1925, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and then spent some time in Paris and several years in Italy. From 1956 to the mid-1960s, Gilbert made his home in the San Francisco Bay area. during which time he worked with photographer Ansel Adams and took Jack Spicer’s Poetry as Magic workshop at San Francisco State College.

In the late 1950s or very early in the 1960s, Gilbert rented a house in Ajijic, Mexico, while working on Views of Jeopardy (published in 1962). Views of Jeopardy won the 1962 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and was nominated for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

After Gilbert won the Yale prize, Gordon Lish, the editor of the literary journal Genesis West devoted an entire issue of the journal to him.

Gilbert is sometimes considered as one of the Beat poets, a loose group also including Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth and ruth weiss. However, in this 1962 interview with Lish, Gilbert makes it abundantly clear that he was not:

– Lish: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?

– Gilbert: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.

It remains unclear precisely when Gilbert was in Ajijic working on Views of Jeopardy, and whether or not he was accompanied by his then partner, poet Laura Ulewicz (1930–2007), to whom the book is dedicated. (“To Laura Ulewicz, a kind of dragon”). Her Wikipedia biography records her as living in Europe from 1960-65, so if the two were together in Ajijic, then this was presumably in the late 1950s rather than the early 1960s.

Gilbert at first enjoyed his fame, but, “After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live. I didn’t want to be praised all the time.” He accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and spent much of the next two decades living and traveling in Europe.

Jack Gilbert in the early 1950s

While Gilbert’s work often reflects places he lived or visited (Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Mexico, Greece, Denmark, Paris), none of his published poems can definitely be linked to Ajijic.

However, he did compose at least two poems related, via their titles and subject matter, to the nearby city of Guadalajara. For example a seven-line poem entitled “Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara” appeared in Monolithos: Poems 1962 and 1982, his second book of poetry published in 1984. That poem describes a floor show in a nightclub called El Serape where, when the lights went off, “strong girls came like tin moths” to dance with the patrons. Monolithos won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and an award from the American Poetry Review.

In 2009, Gilbert’s poetry collection The Dance Most of All: poems included “Searching for it in a Guadalajara Dance Hall”, in which Gilbert describes how in “an empty, concrete one-room building”, men and women sit in straight lines of chairs on the opposite sides of the room. The dancing is not a prelude to anything romantic:

Nothing is sexual.
There are proprieties.
No rubbing against anyone. No touching
at all. When the music starts, the men
go stiffly over to the women…

From 1964-1970 or thereabouts, Gilbert was living in Greece with his former student and fellow poet Linda Gregg; the two remained close until his death. During that period, he co-authored with Jean Maclean, under the joint pseudonym Tor Kung, two erotic novels: My Mother Taught Me (1964) and Forever Ecstasy (1968).

In the 1970s, Gilbert lived in Japan with another former student, the sculptor Michiko Nogami. She died in 1982, the same year his second book of poetry was published.

Gilbert went on to publish several more poetry books including The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1994); Refusing Heaven (2005); Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006); Transgressions: Selected Poems (2006); The Dance Most of All (2009); and Collected Poems (2012). He was also a regular contributor to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.

The great American poet Jack Gilbert, who early in his career lived for a time in Ajijic, died in Berkeley, California, 13 November 2012.

Charles Pollock and his Chapala Series (1955-56)

1950s No Responses »

Jan 292015

Charles Pollock (1902-1988), the oldest brother of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who became an icon of the American abstract art movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was a fine artist in his own right.

In terms of longevity, Charles Pollock’s artistic career eclipsed Jackson’s. Charles’ work has been significantly reevaluated in recent years, thanks in part to the determined efforts of his second wife Sylvia, and their daughter Francesca.

Charles spent a year in Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala in 1955-56, returning to the U.S. only weeks before Jackson was killed in a car accident at age 44.

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 1 (1956)

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 4 (1956)

While in Ajijic, Charles produced numerous paintings and drawings, collectively known as the Chapala Series. The series was first exhibited more than fifty years later, in 2007, at the Jason McCoy Gallery in New York.

According to the exhibition blurb,

From 1955 to 1956, Charles Pollock, the older brother of Jackson, lived in Ajijic, a small village in Mexico. About ten years earlier he had abandoned his Social Realist style, inspired by his former teacher Thomas Hart Benton, searching for a new form of artistic expression. While teaching design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography at Michigan State University (1942-1967), he became increasingly focused on pure form and color relationships. It was in the quietude of Mexico’s Lake Chapala, when surrounded by ancient Mayan land, that he produced a body of work that would lay the groundwork for the art Pollock made from then on.”

“The Chapala series consists of thirty large drawings and fifteen paintings. All of these works are abstract and overtly inspired by calligraphy. They are immediately striking in their unique handling of light and form, which are employed to create distinct moods of atmospheric merit. In the paintings, both subtle color nuances and stark contrasts initiate a vibrancy that easily brings the Mexican mountain landscape to mind. Burnt sienna, earth brown, and translucent blues, for example, are fused into a harmonious mélange, while shapes reminiscent of simplified hieroglyphic fragments create a mysteriously codified language.”

While “ancient Mayan land” is something of a misnomer for the Chapala region of western Mexico, the peaceful surroundings of Lake Chapala certainly proved to be the ideal destination for Charles’ first, and artistically-fruitful, sabbatical year. In the words of art critic Stephanie Buhmann:

… the Chapala works unmistakably reveal the true quality and caliber of Charles Pollock. They document a mature understanding of materials and visual vocabulary that in its consistency is as impressive as it is authentic. Charles Pollock succeeded in formulating a unique sensibility that at once can draw us in and remains inclusive no matter how abstract and mysterious its poetry.”

Born on Christmas Day in 1902 in Denver, Colorado, Charles Cecil Pollock was the eldest of five boys (Jackson was the youngest). The family moved frequently and Charles spent his early years in Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona and California.

At age 20, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a copyboy for The Los Angeles Times while attending classes at the Otis Art Institute. In California, he developed an interest in Mexican art, particularly in the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. These, and other Mexican artists, would have a lasting impact on Pollock’s own art.

Charles and Jackson Pollock in New York, 1930

Pollock moved to New York in 1926 and studied at the Art Students’ League under Thomas Hart Benton, who became a life-long friend. In 1930, he helped persuade Jackson to move to New York and also study with Benton. In 1931, Charles married Elizabeth Feinberg (1902-1997); they had one daughter named Jeremy Capille.

In 1934, during the Great Depression, Charles and Jackson drive across the country to see what is happening for themselves:

Six weeks later, Charles and Jackson buy a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars and set out to visit their mother for the first time since their father’s death. (On returning to New York they would sell it for twice the cost.) Like so many other Americans they were taking to the road, not looking for work but to see how their fellow citizens were faring. Their elaborate itinerary, which took them through scenes of intense labor conflict such as Harlan County, Kentucky, and steel towns near Pittsburgh and Birmingham, indicates how politically engaged Charles had become. The ten letters he wrote to his first wife, Elizabeth, are really reports from the field to a keenly intelligent woman even more of an activist than he was. In the dry, hot landscape of Texas he is appalled by the grim condition of poverty-stricken blacks and Mexicans. “Even though this is beautiful country for these people [it] is indescribably barren and harsh.” (Source: All in the Family – Jackson Pollock)

In 1935, he moved to Washington DC to work with the Resettlement Administration and two years later he became a political cartoonist for the United Automobile Workers’ newspaper in Detroit, Michigan.

Between 1938 and 1942 Pollock was Supervisor of Mural Painting and Graphic Arts for the Federal Arts Project (WPA) in Michigan. After completing murals in the foyer of Fairchild Auditorium of Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in 1942, the artist joined the faculty in the Art Department, where he taught design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography for over two decades. He created a department of fine printing, working with a Washington Hand Press, and was book designer to the Michigan State College Press from 1942 to 1959.

In 1945 he spent three months drawing and painting in the desert of Arizona. This experience marked a turning point in his career as he abandoned social realism and began experimenting with abstraction. To escape the artistic shadow of his younger brother, he exhibited work in 1952s in the Circle Gallery, Detroit, under the name Charles Pima.

Later in his academic career, Charles was an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967, the recipient of a Guggenheim Grant in 1967-68 and a National Foundation of Arts Grant in 1967.

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series, Drawing 3 (1956)

His visit to Ajijic was the first of two sabbatical years from his university positions; the other one was in Rome, 1962-63.

Charles married Sylvia Winter in 1957. Their daughter Francesca McCoy was born in Michigan ten years later. After Charles retired from teaching in 1967, the family lived in New York. In 1970 Sylvia was offered a job in Paris. The following year, the family moved to Europe, and never returned. Charles Pollock died in Paris on 8 May 1988.

In his latter years, while living in Paris, Charles Pollock had major shows in France, England and Belgium. His work is found in numerous collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art.

Charles Pollock’s solo shows include: Ferargil Gallery, New York (1934); Circle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1952); Galeria Pogliani, Rome, Italy (1963); Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University (1964); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan (1964); Henri Gallery, Washington, DC (1966); Gertrude Kasle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1967, 1968, 1969); Acme Gallery, London, GB (1979); Art Center, Paris, France (1981); Jason McCoy Gallery, New York (1984, 1987, 1989, 2007 (The Chapala Series), 2008, 2009); Ball State University Museum, Muncie, Indiana (2003); American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, Germany (2008) (The Chapala Series); Espace d’Art Contemporain Fernet-Branca, Alsace (2009).

Charles Pollock was a fine artist in his own right, but also deserves recognition for his considerable influence on the artistic career of his famous younger brother Jackson. Charles’ influence over Jackson is evident from the correspondence among family members that forms the subject matter of American Letters: 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family (edited by Charles’ second wife Sylvia Winter Pollock). In his introduction to this volume, Michael Leja writes of Charles that,

His guidance helped Jackson early on, and the extent of his influence over his youngest brother is obvious from their exchange of letters in October 1929, the month of the stock-market crash. Charles told Jackson to forget the religion and theosophy he was learning from his high-school art teacher and accept the challenge of contributing to the progress of modern life and culture, He recommended looking up the art of Benton and the Mexican muralists in magazines such as The Arts and Creative Art and delving into psychology and sociology. Jackson took Charles’s advice very seriously: “I have read and re-read your letter with clearer understanding each time.” He “dropped religion for the present,” subscribed to the art magazines Charles mentioned, and fantasized about moving to Mexico City…”

Want to read more?

Summary timeline of the life of Jackson Pollock and his brothers, including Charles
Charles Pollock Archives
Biography of Charles Pollock for Jason McCoy Gallery (pdf file) – was at http://www.jasonmccoyinc.com/CP_Biography.pdf [29 Jan 2015]

Ned Polsky (1928-2000), Beat sociologist

1950s No Responses »

Jan 052015

Ned Polsky (20 October 1928 to 13 June 2000) was an American author who wrote the 1967 book Hustlers, Beats, and Others. The book was a sociological look at the various “deviant branches of American life”, ranging from pool-hall regulars to the beat sub-culture, pornography and uncaught adult criminals in their natural environments. The book developed a new theory known as “crime as moonlighting”.

In the late 1950s, Polsky lived for some time in Ajijic on Lake Chapala.

John Ross stayed for a short time with Polsky in the village. In the afterword of The Heart of it All (2004), Ross writes that, “Alex Trocchi, Scotland’s most accomplished junkie decades before Trainspotting, and a fellow barge captain whose Cain’s Book was one of Barney Rosset’s first titles at Evergreen, was hiding out in Ajijic. I bunked with Ned Polsky whose quibblings with Norman Mailer and his “White Negro” thesis were well-published on the Left.”

Polsky himself, in a letter to the New York Times in 1995, writes of his admiration for the work of Alex Trocchi, and describes how, in 1958 or 1959, “… Alex and I had seen each other virtually every day while we were living in Mexico; there he had no difficulty in obtaining drugs, and under those conditions got much of the work done on his best novel, “Cain’s Book” (1960).”

Polsky and Trocchi remained friends. Polsky relates how he and poet Diane de Prima were with Trocchi in a Greenwich Village bookshop on the fateful night a couple of years later when Trocchi decided to jump bail and flee to Canada rather than remain for the opening of his trial the following day on narcotics charges.

It is unclear just how long Polsky was in Ajijic, but his experiences and friendships there undoubtedly presented him with valuable first-hand insights into some of the subject areas of his book. Shortly after the publication of Hustlers, Beats, and Others, Polsky signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Polsky, who had a degree in linguistics and literature from the University of Wisconsin, and had undertaken graduate study in sociology at the University of Chicago, was professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. During his career he contributed to a variety of magazines and professional journals. In retirement, he opened an antiquarian book business specializing in biographies.

Carlos López Ruíz (1912-1972)

1950s, 1960s 30 Responses »

Jan 012015

Born 26 March 1912 in Chiquinquirá, Boyacá, Columbia, Carlos López Ruíz (sometimes simply Carlos López) lived and painted in Ajijic for several years in the early 1960s. He came from a well-connected family, but disappointed his father by not entering the military or the church. Instead he became an artist.

He began his artistic career by drawing cartoons for newspapers in Bogotá, as a sideline while working in the Cartography Department of the War Ministry from 1944-1951. His drawings and caricatures appeared in several newspapers including El Liberal, humor section of Sábado and the sports section of El Tiempo.

In 1948, he displayed two artworks – a pencil drawing entitled “Tumaqueña” and an oil painting, “Indígenas del Pacífico” – in the first annual group show for artists from Boyacá.

By the early 1950s, he had become an established illustrator and caricaturist in Colombia, though his radical cartoons had gained him a certain notoriety. He left Colombia in 1952 for the U.S.

In 1953, he began a two year scholarship at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, D.C.. He was awarded first prize for oil painting in a collective exhibit arranged by the school. He spent the next five years studying the old masters in the finest U.S. museums, as well as modern art in galleries from Philadelphia to California.

In 1956-1957, he had several solo shows in Washington D.C., including shows at the Collectors Corner Gallery and the ArtSmart Gallery. He also exhibited in New York in the mid-1950s.

He returned briefly to Colombia in 1957 to participate in the 10th Annual Show of Colombian Artists. In 1959, he moved to Ajijic, Mexico, looking for new subjects to study and paint. During his time in Ajijic, he held several exhibitions in Guadalajara as well as in local Ajijic galleries. It was in Ajijic that he first met fellow artist Tink Strother (1919-2007), a relationship that lasted about seven years.

Carlos Lopez-Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

Carlos López Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

Tink Strother’s son Loy remembers that his mother first met the hard-drinking López Ruiz when the artist was living with an aging, alcoholic, silent screen star… in the fabled “Casa Estrella”, a large house overlooking the village. When the movie star’s family arrived and insisted on taking her back to the U.S. to a detox clinic, Carlos moved down the hill and installed himself in the Hotel Anita, a couple of blocks from the village plaza.

López Ruiz gradually melded into the local art scene, and painted prolifically, specializing in fine portraits of horses and toreadors, as well as village scenes.

Carlos López Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

After he and Tink Strother became “an item”, they lived together in Ajijic, and exhibited together in a group show in the Alfredo Santos gallery in Guadalajara (1962). In July 1962, López Ruiz returned for a short time to Colombia. The Galería “El Automático” in Bogotá held a one-man show for him later that year with twenty oil paintings.

Tink Strother and Carlos López Ruiz left Mexico and moved to California in 1963/64, where they opened a joint studio and gallery, first in Pico Rivera and then in Whittier. López Ruiz lived in Whittier until his death in 1972.

Loy Strother knew Carlos López Ruiz in the latter stages of his life as well as anyone, and still has the artist’s notebooks, drawings and personal writings. He admires Carlos as a fabulous painter, whose rapid brushwork was in no way inhibited by his copious consumption of brandy. López Ruiz was choosy about selling his work and would refuse to part with anything unless he decided he liked the purchaser.

The magnificent works of Carlos López Ruiz have been exhibited in Washington D.C., New York, Virginia, Texas, California, Mexico and Colombia.

Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Scottish Beat Novelist

1950s No Responses »

Dec 292014

Scottish writer Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was born in Glasgow 30 July 1925 and died 15 April 1984 in London, England.

After graduating from the University of Glasgow, Trocchi lived in Paris, where in the early 1950s, he edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published the work of many noteworthy writers including Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda. In the late 1950s, Trocchi lived for some time in Ajijic, on Lake Chapala, while he was writing his controversial novel Cain’s Book, first published in New York in 1960.

Alexander Trocchi in about 1967

Trocchi had previously published an autobiographical book Young Adam (1955), made into a movie in 2003. In the preface to Cain’s Book, Trocchi reassured readers that the narrator’s heroin use and related adventures were unrelated to the author’s personal life or experiences. Joe Necchi, the heroin addict and writer in Cain’s Book, is living and working on a scow (barge) on the Hudson River in New York. Necchi has numerous flashbacks to his childhood/youth in Glasgow, London and Paris. The narrative of the book, including its sex and drugs scenes, becomes more and more fragmented as Necchi stuggles to reconcile his desire for creativity with the demands of his addiction.

Trocchi’s own addiction would prevent him from attending the launch party for Cain’s Book in New York and indeed, from ever completing another book-length work. Shortly after the publication of Cain’s Book, Trocchi shot himself up with heroin, live on camera, during a television debate on drug abuse. He was already on bail for having supplied heroin to a minor, and a jail term seemed inevitable. Trocchi’s friends (including Norman Mailer) smuggled him across the border into Canada, where he was given refuge in Montreal by poet Irving Layton and met Leonard Cohen.

This short Youtube video – Alexander Trocchi – A Life in Pieces – features comments from William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen.

When the U.K. edition of Cain’s Book was published in 1963, Trocchi was first “feted as a new star”. But, in February of the following year, the book “was seized, together with 48 other novels and 906 magazines in a series of police raids in Sheffield.” The police view was that the book was corrupting, since it “seems to advocate the use of drugs in school so that children should have a clearer conception of art.” (quotes from Green’s Encyclopaedia of Censorship). The publishers lost the case and Trocchi held a public bonfire to burn all unsold copies of Cain’s Book.

Most of Trocchi’s novels were published by Olympia Press, but many were originally published under pen names such as Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas. For example, the name Frances Lengel was used for several pornographic books including Helen and Desire (1954) and Carnal Days of Helen Seferis (1954).

Trocchi’s other novels include:

White Thighs (1955)
School for Wives (1955)
Thongs (1955)
Young Adam (1955)
My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume (1954)
Sappho of Lesbos (1960)
School for Sin (1960)
Cain’s Book (1960)

He also published a collection of poetry entitled Man at Leisure (1972).

John Ross (1938-2011), author of several books and a long-time resident of Mexico City, describes in Murdered by Capitalism : A Memoir of 150 Years of Life and Death on the American Left (Nation Books, 2004) how on one occasion (date unclear) he left Mexico City and met Alex Trocchi in Ajijic:

The road I was on took me west from Guadalajara out to Lake Chapala where Lawrence had set The Plumed Serpent. I kept staring at the dark surface, waiting for Quetzalcoatl to suddenly surge up from Chapala’s turgid, ancient depths.

Alex Trocchi, Scotland’s most accomplished junkie decades before Trainspotting, and a fellow barge captain whose Cain’s Book was one of Barney Rosset’s first titles at Evergreen, was hiding out in Ajijic. I bunked with Ned Polsky whose quibblings with Norman Mailer and his “White Negro” thesis were well-published on the Left. But heroin is a lethargic drug and weighty words did not spark much adventure. Ajijic, packed with dissipated gringos, seemed to me a kind of leper colony and I soon bid it adios and grabbed the puddle-jumper down to Puerto Vallarta, still a coastal backwater before Burton & Taylor filmed Night of the Iguana there, and caught a sail canoe out to the legendary Beatnik colony near the south cape of the bay at Yelapa.”

(Editor’s note: Richard Burton was in The Night of the Iguana (1964), but Elizabeth Taylor was not.)

Dale Van Every (1896-1976), author, screenwriter and producer

1950s 2 Responses »

Dec 152014

Dale Byron Van Every was the author of more than 20 books and movie scripts and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. He was born 23 July 1896 in Van, Michigan, served with the American Expeditionary Forces during World War 1 and died 28 May 1976 in Santa Barbara, California.

In about 1957, he spent at least six months living at what is now the Montecarlo Hotel in Chapala working on a novel (presumably The Voyagers). He was underwhelmed by the Chapala area, and afterwards described it as having “too many retired generals and admirals” for his liking!

Dale Van Every maintained indirect links to the Lake Chapala region for many years afterwards because his daughter Joan Van Every Frost, with her artist and photographer husband John Frost, settled in Jocotepec in 1966, and subsequently lived there for more than forty years. Joan inherited some of her father’s writing ability, publishing six novels of her own.

Dale Van Every’s first wife (mother of Joan and her elder brother David) was Ellen Calhoun. The couple filed for divorce in Los Angeles in 1935, with the mother being given custody of the two children. A few years later, certainly prior to 1940, Van Every married Florence Mason (1896-1969). Shortly before his death, Dale Van Every married Frances Robinson Hess, an actress singer, magician and TV pioneer better known by her stage name “Lady Francis R. Frances“. (In an interview late in her life, Joan referred to her, somewhat dismissively, as “a Mexican circus girl”, but it is interesting that in Joan’s own debut novel, This Fiery Promise (1978) the American horse-loving (like Joan) heroine marries a wealthy, much older Mexican hacienda owner but eventually flees the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution by becoming a Mexican circus girl!)

Dale Van Every was most active as a writer in the 1920s and 1930s, but continued screenwriting until 1957, the year he visited Chapala. His early screen writing credits (alone or in collaboration) included The Acquittal (1923), the film version of his Broadway play Telling the World (1928), following which Van Every moved to Hollywood. Later screen writing credits (alone or in collaboration) included Marianne (1929), Desert Nights (1929), The Duke Steps Out (1929), Navy Blues (1929), Those Three French Girls (1930), Trader Horn (1931), East of Borneo (1931), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The All-American (1932) and Airmail (1932), Saturday’s Millions (1933), More Than a Secretary (1936), the Oscar-nominated Captains Courageous (1937), Souls at Sea (1937), Spawn of the North (1938), George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town (1942) and Sealed Cargo (1951).

In 1934, Van Every added producing to his resume. His producer or associate producer credits include the Poor Rich (1934), Uncertain Lady (1934), I’ll Tell the World (1934), Dr. Cyclops (1940) and Rangers of Fortune (1940). In several of these projects he was also credited as writer or co-writer. He remained in screenwriting until 1957.

Dale Van Every was co-author of Charles Lindbergh – His Life (1927) and author of several novels and historical works, including a four-part series of books entitled The Frontier People of America:

Forth to the Wilderness: The First American Frontier, 1754-1774 (1961);
A Company of Heroes: The American Frontier, 1775-1783 (1962);
Ark of Empire: The American Frontier, 1784-1803 (1964);
The Final Challenge: The American Frontier, 1804-1845 (1964);

Other books by Dale Van Every include The American Expeditionary Force in Battle (1928); Westward the River (1945); The Shining Mountains (1948); Bridal Journey (1951); The Captive Witch (1951); The Trembling Earth (1952); The Voyagers (1957); Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian (1966); The Day the Sun Died (1971).

Many of Dale Van Every’s original manuscripts, together with correspondence, reviews, biographical information and research notebooks, are held in the Special Collections and University Archives of the University of Oregon.

Bruce Buckingham’s “Boiled Alive” (Dane Chandos)

1940s, 1950s No Responses »

Dec 082014

Bruce Buckingham (a pseudonym of Dane Chandos, the first pseudonym of the writing duo of Peter Lilley and Anthony Stansfeld) was the author of two detective mysteries set in Mexico:

Three Bad Nights(London: Michael Joseph, 1956; Penguin edition, 1961) and
Boiled Alive (London: Michael Joseph, 1957; Penguin edition, 1961)

Both novels feature a Mexican detective, Don Pancho (short for “Francisco de Torla Saavedra, Marqués de Langurén y Orandaín”), an eccentric, laid-back, huarache-wearing former federal detective who, with his manservant sidekick Crisanto, solves jewel thefts, murders and other glamorous international crimes. Both books also feature the British aristocrat Lady Kendal.

The cover design of the Penguin Crime edition of Boiled Alive is by acclaimed illustrator and book jacket designer Romek Marber.

Mike Grost, an American writer of detective stories, has published some interesting thoughts about the possible influence of Ngaio Marsh on Bruce Buckingham. For example, Grost cites the fact that both Boiled Alive and Marsh’s earlier Colour Scheme (1943) are “set in an exotic resort area centered around hot springs. Both novels mix international characters and visitors with members of the host country (New Zealand in Colour Scheme, Mexico in Boiled Alive). Both novels mix international intrigue with mystery fiction.” (For more, scroll down http://mikegrost.com/ngmarsh.htm to “Bruce Buckingham”).

According to Grost, Boiled Alive “is set in the apparently imaginary locale of Tuxpan, Mexico. There are at least four real-life cities in Mexico named Tuxpan; this book does not seem to be set in any one of them specifically.”

Actually, there can be no doubt that the setting of Boiled Alive is the hotel of San José Purua, once Mexico’s foremost spa-hotel, near the towns of Tuxpan and Jungapeo in Michoacán. The hotel is close to “La Curva de la Gringa (The American Woman’s Curve).”

Boiled Alive takes some liberties (as you would expect) with place names, but the hotel described in the book is undoubtedly San José Purua (see photo).

San José Purua spa hotel (from an early brochure)

The plot of Boiled Alive is relatively straightforward, but the authors certainly show a keen eye for detail and for characterization, making this an enjoyable read. The group staying at the “Gran Hotel Balneario de Tuxpan” include an American millionaire John Belton, accompanied by his wife, daughter, mining engineer and chauffeur. Belton is staying at the hotel to negotiate the mining rights to the residual mercury left behind after silver refining in colonial-era mines. Hoping to outbid Belton is tall British aristocrat Sir Nigel Heathcote, who arrives with his son Tom. A couple of Hollywood starlets, a young American journalist and assorted other guests are also present.

Cover of first edition (published by Michael Joseph)

Belton disappears and his body later turns up in one of the local hot springs. There is no shortage of action in this book with its mix of international intrigue, kidnapping, murder and subterfuge.

As Grost points out, two characters in Boiled Alive invite some gender-based speculation. The female friend of “the flighty Hollywood starlet” is nicknamed Butch, while the elderly spinster Miss Cloud is apparently an occasional cross-dresser.

It is tempting to suggest that this character may be a reference to the famous Mexico City “charwoman-businessman” Conchita Jurado, aka Don Carlos Balmori. It is quite probable that Peter Lilley would have been familiar with this sensational example of gender deception since it was featured in a 1945 issue of Time magazine.

Among those duped by Jurado was Mexico’s top detective of the day, Valente Quintana. Quintana had been invited by “Don Carlos Balmori” to a soiree because the host feared that someone there was actually an imposter. The detective assured Balmori that he was confident he would spot and unmask the trouble-maker before any mischief took place. However, when he was forced to admit defeat, Don Carlos revealed himself as Conchita, saying, as she always did in the denouement, “Nothing is exactly as it seems to be. Nothing is real. The truth is always hidden.” Despite his damaged pride, the detective saw the funny side, and subsequently joined the “Balmoris” in enthusiastically planning further adventures.

The San José Purua spa-hotel, world-famous in its day, opened in the early 1940s and was the epitome of luxury living, with European chefs and its own small night club for visiting cabaret and touring acts from all over the world. It was also the base for director John Huston in 1947 when he filmed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, starring Humphrey Bogart, in the surrounding hills.

The hotel closed many years ago, but its grounds and pools can still be admired. Attempts to relaunch the hotel as a luxury resort have so far proved fruitless.

Bruce Buckingham’s “Three Bad Nights” (Dane Chandos)

1950s No Responses »

Dec 012014

Bruce Buckingham (a pseudonym of Dane Chandos, the first pseudonym of the writing duo of Peter Lilley and Anthony Stansfeld) was the author of two detective mysteries set in Mexico:

Three Bad Nights (London: Michael Joseph, 1956; Penguin edition, 1961) and
Boiled Alive(London: Michael Joseph, 1957; Penguin edition, 1961)

Three Bad Nights introduces a Mexican detective, Don Pancho (short for “Francisco de Torla Saavedra, Marqués de Langurén y Orandaín”), an eccentric, laid-back, huarache-wearing former federal detective who, with his manservant sidekick Crisanto, solves jewel thefts, murders and other glamorous international crimes.

The designer of the hardback’s jacket (see image) was English artist, sculptor and writer Trevor Denning (1923-2009). Denning was born in Birmingham, UK., and was a key figure in the post-war Birmingham contemporary art scene. According to Jonathan Watkins, the current director of the city’s Ikon Gallery, “Trevor Denning was vitally important for the post-war Birmingham art world. His incisive mind, his radical skepticism and commitment to cultural life here made an enormous difference. Ikon will always be in his debt.”

The setting of Three Bad Nights is the fictional Quinta de las Rosas hotel on the shores of the equally fictional Lake Zirapan. While there are insufficient clues to claim that this is anything other than an invented locale, the authors were extremely familiar with the Lake Chapala region of western Mexico, and the Posada Ajijic hotel in Ajijic. Since the book refers to Don Pancho’s “big hacienda in Jalisco” named La Chavinda Paz, it seems likely that the authors intended readers to infer that Lake Zirapan was somewhere in the same state.

The hotel’s owner is Doña Lola, who one Xmas twenty years earlier, in England, had killed someone in self-defense with a paper knife. The hotel staff include the superstitious Juana, nightwatchman Rosario, house-boy Pablo and Senoña Delfina, the cook. The guests, each of whom comes under suspicion of murder at one point or another, include:

Light-fingered American tourist Mrs. Singer, who has left three ex-husbands in her wake, and is traveling with her niece Isobel Hesler
Lady Kendon, an English aristocrat, long separated from her philandering husband, who is accompanied by her two Aberdeen terriers, Scotch and Soda.
Colonel Rawlins who is due to meet his wife and daughters in Chicago within a few days, and who behaves more drunk that he really is at a hotel party.
Carlotta, “a beautiful Buenos Aires belle”, with valuable jewels to match, traveling with her “brother” Valentino.
Leslie King, a young American, who considers himself Isobel’s boyfriend, turns up part-way through the action.

Within a few pages, the first body is found. It turns out to be the hotel nightwatchman Rosario, whose body has been hidden in the reeds at the edge of the lake. The next morning, following a party that roared into the early hours, a second body is found. This time it is Carlotta, whose jewellery box has been broken into.

The food-loving Inspector Tovar (aka El Capitano) arrives from the big city to take charge of the investigation. As he, Don Pancho and Crisanto begin to investigate, they quickly find that everyone has something to hide. The following day, the body of Mrs. Singer turns up in the lakeshore reeds.

Slowly, patiently and methodically, Don Pancho manages to piece together what really happened, and who is responsible.

While the details are less keenly described than in the second Don Pancho book, this is a fun whodunit. It has long been out-of-print, but copies can still be found quite easily via secondhand book sites such as abebooks.com

Historical curiosity

In Three Bad Nights, the local mayor refers to the “twenty-eight United States of the Republic of Mexico” (Penguin edition, page 47). Assuming that the mayor kept up with the times, this dates the events in the book to sometime prior to January 16, 1952 when Baja California became the 29th state in Mexico.

Bruce Buckingham’s detective stories set in Mexico

1940s, 1950s 4 Responses »

Nov 242014

Bruce Buckingham is the pseudonym of Dane Chandos, in turn the pseudonym of the writing duo of Peter Lilley and Anthony Stansfeld. The pair used the Bruce Buckingham pseudonym for two detective mysteries set in Mexico.

James Gilbert Lilley, always known as ‘Peter Lilley’, lived from 1913 to 1980. He first visited the Lake Chapala region at the end of the 1930s. Lilley was a tennis-loving expatriate Englishman who built a beautiful home at San Antonio Tlayacapan on Lake Chapala and lived there for 40 years.

Prior to university, Lilley had attended Stowe School in the UK from 1927 to 1932. His first pseudonym, “Dane Chandos”, was on account of his schoolboy nickname “Dane” (referencing his Danish-looking square jaw) and the name of one of the school’s boarding houses. Stowe School is set in the picturesque market town of Buckingham which helps explain “Bruce Buckingham”, his second choice of pseudonym. “Dane Chandos” was first used by Peter Lilley and Nigel Stansbury Millett (1904-1946) for Village in the Sun.

Following Millett’s untimely death in 1946, Lilley’s writing partner became Anthony Stansfeld (1913-1998), a multilingual fellow Englishman who was professor of art history at Mercer University in Macon, Atlanta, Georgia. The two collaborated on a series of books, either as “Dane Chandos” (used for House in the Sun, the follow-up to Village in the Sun – and for several travelogues) or as “Bruce Buckingham” (reserved for their two detective stories).

The two detective novels, both set in Mexico, are:

Three Bad Nights (London: Michael Joseph, 1956; Penguin edition, 1961) and
Boiled Alive (London: Michael Joseph, 1957; Penguin edition, 1961)

Both feature a Mexican detective, Don Pancho (short for “Francisco de Torla Saavedra, Marqués de Langurén y Orandaín”), an eccentric, laid-back, huarache-wearing former federal detective who, with his manservant sidekick Crisanto, solves jewel thefts, murders and other glamorous international crimes. Both books also feature the British aristocrat Lady Kendon.

Friedrich W. Butterlin (1904-1981), photographer

1930s, 1940s, 1950s 5 Responses »

Nov 202014

Frederick (sometimes Federico/Fritz/Fredrick/Friedrich) Wilhelm Butterlin was born in Cologne, Germany, 30 November 1904, and was the middle of three brothers (Otto was older, Ernesto younger). He died in Tlajamulco de Zuñiga on 27 December 1981; his remains rest in the municipal cemetery.

Frederick was a well-known photographer and seems to have been the owner of what was almost certainly one of the first art galleries in Ajijic.

Frederick had not yet celebrated his third birthday when his parents brought him to Mexico in 1907. The family had a first class cabin on the “Fürst Bismarck” of the Hamburg-America line, which departed Hamburg on 14 October 1907 for Veracruz, via Southampton, Santander, Coruna and Cuba. The passenger list duly records the ages of each of the family members. Frederick was 2 years and 9 months of age, his older brother Otto was 6 years and 6 months. Their father Hans Butterlin was 37 and his wife Amelie 26. The family settled in Guadalajara but so far I have been able to find out nothing of substance about their whereabouts during the next twenty years which includes the Mexican Revolution.

Girls belonging to the Old Colony (Saskatchewan) Mennonites moving to Mexico. Photo by Frederick Butterlin ca 1948

What is known is that in 1929, Frederick was a witness to his older brother Otto Butterlin’s marriage in California. In the 1930 U.S. census, Frederick W. is listed as 25 years old, single, and is said to have immigrated to the U.S. in about 1920. His occupation is listed as “sugar operator”. It is unclear how long Frederick remained in the U.S. but by 1934, he had become a noteworthy photographer.

Among other achievements as a photographer, he contributed to the Amateur Competitions in the January 1934 and February 1934 issues of Camera Craft, (A Photographic Monthly). He was also active as a photographer in Mexico, though precise dates are lacking. For example he is mentioned (albeit with an incorrect nationality) in Olivier Debroise’s Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico (University of Texas, 2001): “Perhaps the most interesting contributor to Foto was the Frenchman F.W. Butterlin, another devotee of pictorismo (as he called it), whose interesting composition entitled “Railroad Wheels” recalls the early work of Paul Strand.” (p 65).

In November 1935, “Fritz Butterlin” gave a keynote address on pictorial art in photography, based on observations made on “his long trips”, at the Club Literario de Inglés in Guadalajara.

In 1936, Frederick, then aged 32, married 26-year-old Bertha Eimbcke Ferreira from Mazatlan, Sinaloa. She was a languages teacher, and was president of the Mexican Association of English Teachers from 1963 until at least 1971.

Frederick seems to have continued his photographic career for several decades. His published photos include some evocative portrait photographs of Mennonites in Mexico published in the Mennonite Life editions of October 1949 and January 1952.

In 1956, Butterlin, working for “Exclusivas Jimenez SA de CV” placed a series of advertisements in El Informador recommending the use of “ADOX” film for photography.

In earlier adverts in the same daily (eg 27 February 1951), “Federico W. Butterlin” was offering his services as a translator (English, German, French, Spanish) of all kinds of books, brochures, manuals, letters, etc., so it appears that photography alone was never lucrative enough to satisfy his financial needs.

There are also references to Frederick having owned one of the earliest galleries in Ajijic in the 1940s. According to Michael Hargraves in his 1992 booklet “Lake Chapala: A Literary Survey”, “Frederick owned the first restaurant and gallery in Ajijic in the 1940s, and was a painter in the classical style.” Hargraves appears to be misidentifying the photographer brother, Frederick, with his elder brother Otto, who was indeed a well-known painter.

[Last update: 1 May 2016 – This profile is overdue for an update]

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Iván González Barón (see comments) and his family for graciously sharing significant additional material relating to Frederich Butterlin. This profile will be updated in due course.

As always, we would love to receive any comments, corrections or additional information.

Related posts:

German-Mexican artist Hanns Otto Butterlin (1900-1956)

1930s, 1940s, 1950s 24 Responses »

Nov 132014

Han(n)s Otto Butterlin (or Otto Butterlin as he was usually known, at least in Mexico) was born in Cologne, Germany, 26 Dec 1900 and became an abstract and impressionist painter of some renown.

See also The important artistic legacy of Otto Butterlin, who lived in Ajijic from the 1940s.

He was the oldest of the three Butterlin brothers. Otto moved with his middle brother Frederick and their parents (Johannes and Amelie) from Germany to Mexico in 1907. (Otto’s youngest brother Ernesto would be born a decade later in Guadalajara.)

Woodcut by Hanns Otto Butterlin, Ixtaccihuatl (1921)

U.S. immigration records show that Otto Butterlin (5’9″ tall with blond hair and blue eyes) was resident there between August 1924 and October 1929, though he probably made trips to visit family in Mexico during that time.

Otto made his living as a chemist and supervisor of operations in various industrial plants for at least 15 years. At the time of the 1930 Mexican census (held on 15 May), he and his wife were living in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where he was working at the sugar refinery.

The following year, in 1931 Margaret gave birth to their daughter Rita Elaine in Los Mochis. Rita went on to marry four times. Her first marriage (1951-58) was to one of Otto’s friends – textile artist and silkscreen innovator Jim Tillett (1913-1996) – and her second (1959-1963) to Chilean film star Octavio Señoret Guevara (1924-1990). She was subsequently briefly married (1967-69) to Haskel Bratter, before falling in love with and marrying (1971-his passing) Howard Perkins Taylor (1916-1993).

Woodcut by Hanns Otto Butterlin, Ixtaccihuatl (1921)

While Rita was still an infant, Otto decided to formalize his permanent right to residence in Mexico and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in October 1935. Immigration records show that he continued to visit the U.S. several times a year.

It appears to be at about this time that Otto decided to spend more time on his art.

By the early 1940s, Otto Butterlin was based in Mexico City and working as an executive in the Bayer chemical company, a position which enabled him to supply several well-known artists of the time, such as A. Amador Lugo (who was epileptic) with needed medications, at a time when they were very hard to obtain.

During this period, Butterlin taught art with, or to, numerous well-known Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, Ricardo Martinez, José Chávez Morado, Ricardo Martínez and Gunther Gerzso.

Hanns Otto Butterlin. The Funeral (ca 1942)

In September 1945, Otto and his wife Peggy, together with daughter Rita, relocated to live in Ajijic. In a 1945 article, Neill James, who had arrived in Ajijic a couple of years earlier, described Otto Butterlin as a “well known expressionist and abstract painter who owns a huerta in Ajijic where he lives with his wife, Peggy, and daughter, Rita.”

Otto Butterlin: Modern Figure Study. 1949

The group of artists exhibiting watercolors in May 1954 in “Galería Arturo Pani D.” in Calle Niza in Mexico City includes a Butterlin (probably Otto) alongside such famous contemporary artists as Raúl Anguiano, Fererico Cantú, Leonora Carrington, Carlos Mérida, Roberto Montenegro, Juan Soriano, Rufino Tamayo and Alfredo Zalce.

Otto Butterlin died in Ajijic on 2 April 1956.

Note (April 2016): We thank the Registro Civil in Chapala which kindly emailed us a copy of the official death certificate of Otto Butterlin.

This is an outline profile. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this particular artist or have information to share.

Partial list of sources:

Monica Señoret (Otto Butterlin’s granddaughter), personal communications via email. April 2015.
María Cristina Hernández Escobar. “Gunther Gerzso, The Appearance of the Invisible”. Voices of Mexico. UNAM. n.d. [formerly at http://www.revistascisan.unam.mx/Voices/pdfs/5323.pdf]
Robert L. Pincus, “WPA captures the soul of a nation”, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 February 2006, page F-1.
Robert Hilton (ed). Who’s Who In Latin America A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women Of Latin America. Part I – Mexico. (1946)

As always, we would love to receive any comments, corrections or additional information.

Related posts:

Unraveling the story of Lake Chapala’s artistic Butterlin brothers

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s 4 Responses »

Nov 062014

While researching the history of the artists associated with the Lake Chapala region, I came across more and more references to the “two Butterlin brothers”. The problem was that different sources, including otherwise reputable art history sites, gave them quite different first names: Ernesto and Hans? Hans and Frederick? Linares and Otto?

There was very little evidence and it seemed impossible to tell which source was accurate, and why different accounts gave such different names, ages and details. They were usually described as “German”, but it was unclear whether they had been born in Germany or were the sons of German immigrants to Mexico.

Eventually, I compiled enough evidence to prove conclusively that there were not two Butterlin brothers, but three! Two had been born in Germany and were brought by their parents to Mexico. Safely ensconced in Guadalajara, the parents then had a third son, several years younger than his siblings.

The picture was complicated by the fact that two of the brothers used different names at different stages of their life, with the older brother rarely using his first name on his art once he arrived in Mexico, while the youngest brother adopted a surname for much of his artistic career that had no obvious connection to his family name.

Small wonder, then, that confusion reigned about the Butterlin brothers on many art history sites, some of which even failed to identify correctly the country of birth of each of the three brothers.

The three brothers (in order of birth) are:

There are still great gaps in my knowledge of this family, but the picture that finally began to emerge showed that the Butterlins deserved wider recognition as an artistic family of some consequence.

In future posts, I will show how all three Butterlin brothers contributed significantly to the development of the artist colony in the Lake Chapala area, albeit it in rather different ways.

Screenplay writer Robert Bassing lived in Ajijic in the early 1950s

1950s No Responses »

Oct 202014

Robert (“Bob”) Mitchel Bassing, born in Rhode Island on 3 January 1925, lived with his novelist wife Eileen and her two sons in Ajijic between 1951 and 1954. The Bassings had previously been living and working in Hollywood, where Bob had been assistant story editor at Colombia Pictures. In Ajijic they started Lakeside Players (forerunner of Lakeside Little Theatre); its first production was the comedy You Can’t Take It With You, staged in the open patio of a small inn, La Playita, in Chapala in 1953. And Bob was active in civic affairs, mentioned in the 13 August 1953 issue of El Informador as one of only two foreigners on the “Junta de Mejoramiento Moral, Cívico y Material” of Ajijic, together with ‘Carlos Moor’ (= Charles Moore).

Bob Bassing wrote short stories, fiction screenplays, and worked on numerous television projects. As Michael Hargraves has pointed out, “Although none of his [Bob Bassing’s] published works uses Ajijic or the Lake Chapala area as a locale, he nonetheless was influenced by his being there.”

Prior to living in Ajijic, Bassing had worked as an outside reader for Columbia Pictures, and edited scripts for the TV series Studio One in Hollywood (1948). He began writing while living in Ajijic, and completed three short stories, all of which sold. The first was “Lullaby” published in Discovery, No. 2 (New York; Pocket Books, 1953), a magazine edited by Vance Bourjaily. Bourjaily had himself lived in Ajijic, albeit apparently briefly, during the summer of 1951. Bassing’s other two stories from this time were “The Trouble with Arabella,” published in Woman’s Home Companion, January 1955, and “Summer Evening,” published by Mademoiselle, May 1955.

Bassing later wrote several screenplays, including that for his wife’s novel Home Before Dark (1958), as well as more than 120 scripts for episodes of numerous TV series including Ford Television Theater (1954-1957), The Millionaire (1956), Harbor Command (1958), Assignment: Underwater (1960), National Velvet (1960), My Three Sons (1961) and Shirley Temple’s Storybook (1961). He also wrote or rewrote more than a dozen scripts for a TV series based on Dr. Hudson’s secret journal: The Denby story (Los Angeles: Authors Playhouse, 1955).

Bob Bassing was the basis for the minor character “Beau Blissing” in Willard Marsh‘s Ajijic-based novel Week with No Friday (1965). Marsh and his wife had earlier been used by Eileen Bassing for two minor characters in her own novel set in Ajijic, Where’s Annie?.

After Ajijic, the Bassings moved back to California, where Eileen Bassing passed away in 1977. Bob Bassing, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, still lives in Los Angeles. In 2016, he threatened to sue the Academy for its alleged age discrimination in changing his membership category from active (voting) to emeritus. The change was apparently part of the Academy’s efforts to (finally) become more inclusive.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Bob Bassing for clarifying, correcting and expanding on the original version of this profile, first published 20 October 2014.

Related posts:

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the literary and artistic community in Ajijic.

Eileen Bassing set her novel “Where’s Annie?” in Ajijic, Chapala, Mexico

1950s No Responses »

Oct 062014

Where’s Annie? (Random House, 1963) is a novel entirely set in Ajijic, and based, at least in part, on characters and events witnessed by author Eileen Bassing during her residence in Ajijic, with two sons and husband Bob, from 1950 to 1954. In many ways, Where’s Annie? is timeless, touching on so many themes that have recurred and continue to recur in the lives of Ajijic residents.

The book opens with a description of the tensions created between a retired American naval officer and his much younger wife, the “Annie” of the title. All the main characters are expatriates from the United States. The cast of characters includes a middle-aged female novelist (Victoria Beacon) who has moved to Mexico in search of inspiration for her next novel; a cold, success-hungry young painter; a Negro guy hoping for self-fulfillment before his impending death from a brain tumor; and a group of young men addicted to jazz and drugs. As a contemporary review so aptly describes the Ajijic expatriate community “… most of them think of themselves as artists, and about half of them are.”

Where’s Annie? looks at some of the underlying tensions between local villagers and foreign incomers in Ajijic. Some expatriate residents choose to ignore such tensions and deny their existence, but this book proves that some things really have not changed much in the past fifty years!

The differences between the villagers and foreign settlers are bridged not only by maids and gardeners but also by the local medic, Dr. Obregón, who has to provide medical advice and comfort to both sides. The doctor, however, is torn between his love for his wife and his infatuation with Victoria Beacon.

There is an exciting array of characters and, as one reviewer put it, Eileen Bassing “writes with sympathy and insight–and without sentimentality or facile sensationalism.” The atmosphere is a heady mix of drink, drugs and intrigue, laced with jazz and attempts at literature, with all the forerunners of an A-set developing among the American residents.

Any hope of equilibrium is disturbed by a powerful rich newcomer who buys up properties, evicts some impoverished renters from their homes, and reports people to the authorities, hoping to get them deported. Money lending and shady real estate deals, such as those involving the use of borrowed names “prestanombres”, complete the picture. Betrayal, mayhem and even murder–nothing is too much for this motley crew of foreigners trying to escape from past memories and deeds. As a reviewer in Harper’s put it, Victoria Beacon eventually becomes aware of “how deeply she has been drawn into their sordid maelstrom and how destructive their whole way of life is.”

Many of the book’s characters can readily be identified as based on real people living in Ajijic at the time. For example, the woman novelist Victoria Beacon was based on Leonora Baccante, a fiction writer, and the rather unflattering portraits of Willie Chester and his wife Sam in the book are based on Willard Marsh, author of Week with No Friday (published in 1965) and his actress-turned playwright wife George. Marsh retaliated against the Bassings in his own novel by describing the wife of a minor character, Beau Blissing, as “a lady novelist with a lousy memory” (82-83).

Despite various newspaper reports that Where’s Annie was to be turned into a movie, that never happened. For instance, the 11 February 1963 edition of Daily Notes, published in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, noted that “Robert Bassing will both write and produce the screen version of Eileen Bassing’s Book of the Month Club novel, “Where’s Annie?”. Eileen is Robert’s wife. This will be Bassing’s first effort as a producer and he has formed Robert Bassing Productions for the film, which will be shot in Technicolor on location near Guadalajara.”

The following month, it was reported that “Bob Bassing is after Anne Bancroft to star in “Where’s Annie?” after she finishes “Mother Courage and Her Children” on Broadway…” (Pasadena Independent, 9 April 1963). Perhaps financing proved to be the stumbling block? Whatever transpired, the movie was never made.

Other twentieth century novels set largely, or entirely, at Lake Chapala include:

Charles Embree: A Dream of a Throne, the Story of a Mexican Revolt (1900)
D. H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Arthur Davison Ficke: Mrs Morton of Mexico (1939)
Ramón Rubín: La canoa perdida: Novela mestiza (1951)
Bart Spicer: The Day of The Dead (1955) (Scenes in Ajijic, Chapala and Guadalajara)
Ross MacDonald: The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) (several chapters set in Ajijic)
Willard Marsh: Week with No Friday (1965)
Barbara Compton: To the Isthmus (1965) – large section relating to Lake Chapala
Robert C Somerlott: The Flamingos (1967) (small parts allegedly based on Ajijic and Chapala)
Al Young: Who is Angelina? (1975) (Parts set in Chapala and Ajijic)

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Eileen Bassing (1918-1977) wrote “Home Before Dark” in Ajijic in the early 1950s

1950s 6 Responses »

Sep 152014

Eileen and her second husband Robert (Bob) Bassing, both writers of some distinction, lived in Ajijic between 1951 and 1954.

According to US Social Security records, Eileen was born 6 March 1918 (Bob says she was actually born two years earlier) in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated in New York, Ohio and California. She married young and had two sons from her first marriage, before marrying Bob in 1948. She died aged 58 (or 60) in February 1977 in Los Angeles, California.

In the early 1950s, Eileen and Bob Bassing left their Hollywood careers and moved to Ajijic with her two sons (then aged 11 and 14 respectively) to focus on their writing. The family lived in a $5 a month home in Ajijic, and supplemented their income by selling home-made fudge and operating a small shop and lending library, “Simple Pleasures,” of English-language books they had shipped from California.

Eileen Bassing, a brunette with green eyes, recalled in a 1957 newspaper interview that “It was an amazing success even though most of our books were texts on psychiatry and philosophy. We were only open three hours a day but out of our returns we supported our family, a maid, a cook, a laundress and a gardener. We rented everything—even the New York Times, section by section, at 15 centavos per section. And those who borrowed the crossword puzzle had to promise to erase it when the page was returned.” (The Marion Star, Ohio, 10 March 1957, p 18).

While in Ajijic. the Bassings started a theater group, the Lakeside Players (forerunner of the Lakeside Little Theater). The first production was the comedy You Can’t Take It With You, staged in the open patio of a small inn, La Playita, in Chapala in 1953.

Home Before Dark

Movie poster for Home Before Dark

Eileen Bassing’s first novel, Home Before Dark (New York: Random House, 1957), was originally written in California and then rewritten in Ajijic. It was later made into a Warner Brothers movie (1958) based on a screenplay written by Eileen and her husband, and directed by Mervyn Le Roy.

Home Before Dark is the story of a young woman (Charlotte Bronn) suffering from bi-polar disorder who has been confined to a mental hospital. She leaves the Maraneck State Hospital after a year to resume her life at home with her emotionally repressed professor husband. Making her life even more difficult, they share their home with Charlotte’s attractive step-sister Joan and Joan’s mother, as well as a Jewish philosophy professor boarder and a servant.

With her marriage floundering, and suspecting her husband of being overly interested in Joan, Charlotte looks to be headed for another breakdown when she attends a faculty dinner dressed and made up to look like Joan. Her husband finally reveals his true feelings. Summarized as a study of “a mind and marriage at a crisis point”, both book and movie were generally well received and are still very readable today. The book was translated into French as Retour avant la nuit (1958) and into Italian.

Where’s Annie?

Eileen Bassing’s second novel, Where’s Annie? (Random House, New York, 1963) is set entirely in Ajijic at Lake Chapala. It grew out of a series of unpublished short stories written in Ajijic, and was completed after the couple’s return to California in 1954. It was chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club; a French translation by France-Marie Watkins and Spanish translation appeared in 1964. This very interesting novel is looked at in more detail in this post. A screenplay for this novel was written by Eileen and Bob Bassing, but plans to realize the movie never worked out.

The dust jacket of Where’s Annie refers to a third novel “in progress” in Malibu at the time of publication of Where’s Annie, but this was apparently never published.

It may have met the same fate as some of her earlier unpublished works. An in-depth newspaper interview published in the 14 April 1963 edition of The Bridgeport Post in Connecticut, quotes Eileen Bassing as saying that, “My working habits are deplorable… I am not an organized writer. I work all the time, and I work very hard. It is impossible to measure the time I spend at the typewriter. There may be two days or so when I just stare and think. And those are the days when I really work.” The article goes on to say that “Several years ago. Mrs. Bassing did what some would consider a rash thing. She burned considerable unpublished work—short stories, three novels, including the first draft of “Home Before Dark,” and poetry written over a two-year period. “I wanted to have done with them so I wouldn’t go back and lean on them. I wanted to start anew.”

Excerpts of the first two chapters of Where’s Annie? appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1963. Bassing also had other short stories published, including “Our Strange Stay at Miss Pickering’s” in the 14 May 1955 issue of Maclean’s.

Children’s Books

Before embarking on her novels, Eileen Bassing had written four “Jamie” books for children, under the name Eileen Johnston: Jamie and The Fire Engine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); Jamie and The Dump Truck (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943) with pictures by Ora Brian Edwards; Jamie and The Tired Train (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), illustrated by Ora Brian Edwards; and Jamie and The Little Rubber Boat (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951) with illustrations by Lys Cassal.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Bob Bassing for clarifying, correcting and expanding on the original version of this profile, first published 15 September 2014.

Sources:

Jack Gaver. 1963. “Eileen Bassing a “Bleeding” Type”, in The Bridgeport Post, Connecticut, 14 April 1963, p 44
“It Paid Them To Get Away From It All”, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Tuesday, March 19, 1957
“Couple Leaves Movie Capital and Finds Success in Mexico”, The Marion Star, Ohio, 10 March 1957, p 18

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the literary and artistic community in Ajijic.

Writer and poet Robert Jere Black died in Ajijic in 1953

1950s No Responses »

Sep 012014

The son of a physician, writer and poet R. Jere Black Jr. was born 27 June 1892 at McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He would also live at different times in Chautauqua, New York; Washington, D.C.; Long Beach and Santa Monica, California; and Byron Center in Michigan, as well as in Mexico.

R Jere Black’s passport photo, 1922

During World War I, Black served as a machine gunner with the American Expeditionary Force in France from May 1918 to May 1919. He was gassed by the Germans, which left him in ill health for the remainder of his life, with numerous spells in hospital. He married Josephine Elizabeth Best (1894-1976) in 1920. By 1937, the couple had divorced and his former wife had remarried.

It is unclear when he first visited Lake Chapala, but R. Jere Black died of a heart attack at the home of Paul “Pablo” Heuer, in the village of Ajijic, on 7 September 1953, and was buried in the Ajijic Municipal Cemetery the following day.

Black made his living from writing stories and short pieces for a number of popular magazines, both “slicks” and “pulps”, including The Smart Set, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Breezy Stories, Battle Stories, Sweetheart Stories and College Life. His brother described him as “a brilliant, fascinating person.”

His most productive period in terms of published writings was the period 1928 to 1934. This period included three poems published in Weird Tales: “Lyonesse” (December 1928), “Masquerade” (March 1930) and “The Pirate” (August 1930), a non-fiction piece, “The Pseudo-Scientific Field,” for Author and Journalist (May 1930) which took a look at “science fiction” (a term still in its infancy at the time), and a novel, The Killing of the Golden Goose: A Christopher King Mystery Story (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1934).

Black’s wife, born as Josephine Elizabeth Best but better known as E. Best Black, was also a writer of genre fiction. Born in 1894 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, she and Jere Black married there in 1920, before traveling widely. Mrs Black wrote a story with the title “Flaming Ruth” (a pun) for Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine in February 1928 and also published two hardback novels featuring detective Peter Strangley: The Ravenelle Riddle (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1933) and The Crime of the Chromium Bowl (London: George Newnes, 1937). By 1937, however, she had divorced R. Jere Black and become the wife of Theron Lowden Kelley (1899-1967). Josephine Elizabeth Best Kelley died in 1976 in Monterey, California.

Source:

R. Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953)

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please email or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Kenneth Millar (1915-1983) aka Ross MacDonald

1950s 1 Response »

Aug 182014

Writing under the pseudonym Ross MacDonald, Kenneth Millar (1915-1983) wrote The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1962). The Zebra-Striped Hearse is a mystery novel, with several chapters (chapters 9 to 12) set in the village of Ajijic on Lake Chapala. The easy-to-read novel, with its largely accurate depiction of the Old Posada Ajijic, followed Millar’s visit with fellow author John Mersereau in the late 1950s, or very early 1960s. The novel won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1963,

Kenneth Millar was born in Los Gatos, San Francisco on 13 December 1915, but was raised in Vancouver, Canada, where he met and, in 1938, married Margaret Sturm, also a writer. His wife achieved her own success writing as Margaret Millar.

Kenneth Millar had begun post-graduate work at the University of Michigan (where he had completed his undergraduate degree) and published his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, before serving his country as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, Following the war, he returned to Michigan to complete his doctorate.

Millar went on to write numerous novels, with Ross MacDonald being only one of several pseudonyms he used during his distinguished writing career. Later in life, he was later elected President of the Mystery Writers of America, and given their Grand Master Award. He also won the Silver Dagger Award given by Mystery Writers of Great Britain. He is best known for his popular series of novels, set in southern California, featuring private detective Lew Archer.

Millar passed away in Santa Barbara, California, on 11 July 1983.

Other twentieth century novels set largely, or entirely, at Lake Chapala include:

Charles Embree: A Dream of a Throne, the Story of a Mexican Revolt (1900)
D. H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent (1926)
Arthur Davison Ficke: “Mrs. Morton of Mexico” (1939)
Ramón Rubín: La canoa perdida: Novela mestiza (1951)
Eileen Bassing: Where’s Annie? (1963)
Barbara Compton: “To The Isthmus” (1964)
Willard Marsh: Week with No Friday (1965)

Ramón Martínez Ocaranza (1915-1982)

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s No Responses »

Jun 082014

Ramón Martínez Ocaranza was born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, 15 April, 1915, and died in Morelia 21 September 1982.

He was a poet, essayist, social fighter and teacher, who used to joke that only a wall had stopped him from becoming President of Mexico–this was because Lázaro Cárdenas (President of Mexico 1934-1940) had been born in the house next door!

Martínez christened his native city of Jiquilpan as the “city of jacarandas”, a name that is still widely used today on account of the city’s many blue-flowering jacaranda trees.

He published numerous volumes of poetry, including:

Al pan, pan y al vino, vino, 1943; Ávido Amor, 1944; Preludio de la muerte enemiga, 1946; Muros de soledad, first part 1952, second part 1992; De la vida encantada, 1952; Río de llanto, 1955; Alegoría de México, 1959; Otoño encarcelado, 1968; Elegía de los triángulos, 1974; Elegías en la Muerte de Pablo Neruda, 1977; Patología del Ser, 1981. Works published after his death include the poetry volumes La Edad del tiempo, 1985; and Vocación de Job, 1992, which formed part of El libro de los días (1997).

He also wrote an autobiography, finally published twenty years after his death in 2002. He studied (and later taught) at Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Morelia) and studied at UNAM. His poems contain many pre-Columbian element and he researched and wrote about Tarascan literature.

Sadly, a campaign in 2010-2011 to turn his former house (Río Mayo #367, colonia Ventura Puente, Morelia) into a small museum and exhibition space has apparently failed, owing to lack of funds.

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