Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown (9 page)

L
AND’S
E
ND

Provincetown

Zero ground, fickle sandbar
where graves and gravity conspire
,

Beer bottle amber and liquor green
surrender their killing shards
.

Like ashes, dust, even glass
turns back into what it was
.

Skeletal driftwood and seaweed hair
beg for a body. Any body
.

Yet all you see is surf out there
,
simply more and more of nothing
.

If you must leave us, now or later
,
the sea will bring you back
.

M
ELVIN
D
IXON

Where All the Lights Are Bright

A
T ITS CENTER
, around the entrance to MacMillan Wharf, the town achieves its height of buxom tawdriness. This is the section that most resembles a carnival midway. It is where every store seems to sell the same souvenir T-shirts; where a shop with a prominently displayed saltwater taffy-making machine pumps furiously all day long and into the night. At the intersection of Commercial and Standish streets, where the traffic on a summer afternoon can resemble that in Calcutta, you may be fortunate enough to see a particular traffic cop, a hefty man well into his sixties, who keeps things moving, to whatever extent they can be moved, by means of a whistle, always in his mouth, and a series of pirouettes—he faces traffic in one direction, waves it forward, then abruptly pivots, performs a balletic half turn, stops traffic coming one way, and beckons the others forward. He is like a somber version of the dancing hippos in
Fantasia
.

T
OWN
H
ALL

The physical center of town (as opposed to its several different aesthetic, spiritual, and sexual centers) is the block that contains the sedate white bulk of Town Hall. The building houses various municipal offices on its ground floor, which open off a shadowy, dark-paneled hallway hung with time-darkened paintings of Cape Cod. A hush pervades there, always, even at the height of the business day. All activities are conducted behind massive wooden doors fitted with panels of opaque glass. It has always put me in mind of a small-town museum—it wouldn’t be surprising to open any of these doors and find not city workers at their desks but glass cases full of stuffed birds, Indian artifacts, and petrified shells.

Up a double flight of wooden stairs, past a mural of fishermen and cranberry pickers, is the auditorium, where town meetings are held. It is also available to anyone who needs to accommodate a large audience. The annual Provincetown AIDS Support Group auction is held there; Karen Finley, Barbara Cook, John Waters, and many others have appeared on its stage.

The auditorium at Town Hall is a big, imperturbably stodgy room, with a bare wood floor and a matronly brown sweep of balcony overhead. It is more classically New England than most of the interiors in Provincetown; more stolid and dim; stingier about comfort. It is sad, anachronistic, and somehow rather grand; a thoroughly indifferent room that seems, even when full, to be empty in its heart; to be waiting patiently for these fools to finish up their business so it can return to its dark, musty contemplation of itself.

The outdoor area in front of Town Hall, however, is far more gregarious. It is lined with wooden benches that were once, years ago, known as the meat rack, where gay men hung around after the bars closed. The benches are now mainly the province of weary tourists and the elderly, whether they are Portuguese women who’ve raised five children or former bad boys who have gotten too old to dance. In summer you will probably see someone performing for change there: a violinist or folk singer or mime, most likely. One summer a group called the Flying Neutrinos worked the bricks in front of town hall, a ragged group of adults and children (they said they were a family, and might in fact have been) who sang, in a way, and banged on various drums, tambourines, and xylophones. They were the rough local equivalent of Gypsies—they had that quality of treacherous seduction, that sly and defiant otherness. They lived on a houseboat moored off the East End, and all that summer you’d see one or more of them around town, dressed in motley clothes, cheerful if deeply odd, reminding Provincetown that even its people, in all their variety and outlandishness, were still part of a world larger and stranger than any of us can imagine. The next summer they were gone and have not been heard from since. Most recently the bricks were the preferred arena of a man in a clown suit who whistled incessantly and made balloon animals for children, and who was frequently drunk, which inspired him to shout insults at anyone he suspected of being homosexual. Next summer we feel confident that he too will have moved on and been replaced by someone else.

T
HE
M
AIN
D
RAG

The center of town is also the theater district—the place you go to see drag, comedy, and other sorts of shows, at the Post Office Café, Vixen, Tropical Joe’s and, back a ways toward the West End, the Universalist church, Town Hall, Antro, and the Crown and Anchor. The acts vary from season to season, but you can rely, every summer, on seeing men perform not only as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, et cetera, but as divas less often seen on the drag circuit, women like Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday. They generally do their own singing—drag acts have, I’m glad to report, evolved beyond lip-sync. Some, of course, are better than others. I am especially fond of Pearline, who can only be described as a Sherman tank in a wig; Varla Jean Merman, who does a truly filthy rendition of “My Favorite Things” and another number that involves singing while consuming considerable quantities of cheese; and Randy Roberts. Randy is the only one of these people I know personally. Out of drag (or rather in his male drag—as RuPaul once said, “We’re born naked, and everything after that is drag”) he is a kind, intelligent, unassuming man who lives in Key West in the winters and Provincetown in the summers. In drag he is most visible as Cher, riding up and down Commercial Street to promote his show on a motorized scooter. He is easy to talk to as Randy, somewhat more difficult to talk to as Cher, and I would have to say that I am friendly with one and only acquainted with the other.

Among these artists, but in a category of his own, is Ryan Landry.

R
YAN

Ryan has been a local celebrity for over ten years, which, as such things are reckoned there, might as well be a century. He is in his mid-thirties, a tall, dark-haired man with a handsome, equine face and an aspect of sly, wised-up innocence. I want to call him puckish, but he’s more substantial than that. Think of the circus performer played by Richard Basehart in Fellini’s
La Strada
.

Each summer he produces a show. At first he put on his own versions of Charles Ludlam’s versions of
Medea
and
Camille;
then he began writing his own, which have included his takes on
Johnny Guitar, Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby
, and Joan of Arc. He is always the star, as he should be. His sensibility falls somewhere between Ionesco and Lucy Ricardo.

He has also, over the years, put on a series of—what to call them?—revues, I suppose. For me, the greatest is Space Pussy, which appears and disappears depending on the summer and is seldom held twice in the same bar or club.

S
PACE
P
USSY

Space Pussy is presided over by Ryan and the Space Pussy band, which includes a straight man, a gay man, a lesbian, and a transsexual on drums. Anyone who wants to—anyone who gets in touch with Ryan sometime during the week before and agrees to come to one rehearsal—can do a number, but it has to be rock ‘n’ roll, you have to do your own singing, and you have to wear some sort of drag.

These events are hugely popular, and I try never to miss one when I’m in town. It’s wonderful, to me, to witness hoots and applause bestowed lavishly by large crowds on anyone who has the courage to get into costume and mangle “Little Red Corvette” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “White Rabbit” in public. And there is always the possibility of transcendence.

Occasionally someone who has never performed before and cannot, technically, sing at all breaks through to the sublime. The sheer, heady strangeness of it—here I am, in strange clothes, with a good band behind me, delivering a song to an eager audience—can inspire performances of which the person in question is not in any real way capable. I have seen a large, ungainly man, not young, deliver Patti Smith’s cover of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” with such force, it rattled the ice in my drink. I have heard a woman in girl drag (wigs, gowns, and makeup are, of course, every bit as much drag for some women as they are for men) sing “Ruby Tuesday” with a depth of wrenching melancholy Mick Jagger can only imagine.

N
IGHT
S
ONG FOR A
B
OY

Lock up the church
,
I feel as unasleep
as a dead cat: regards
are what I want
,
regards, regards, regards
.
A priest after boy’s ass
feels better than I
do: When I walk around
ladies on the stoops
think I am death: If I
had steel plates on my heels
Oh they would know it
.
I should rape a saint
and she could save me
from the dangers of life
.

A
LAN
D
UGAN

The East End

A
S YOU CONTINUE
east, away from the center of town, you’ll notice that your surroundings are beginning to take on what passes in Provincetown for staid respectability. The shops on this end generally aspire to a higher level of dignity. Here you are likelier to find antiques that are genuine antiques, and jewelry that does not intend to be whimsical. It is the only part of town where you could buy a nonsatirical necktie.

The East End is where most of the art galleries are. Charles Hawthorne taught painting on Miller Hill Road in the East End, and after his death the studio was taken over by Hans Hofmann. Franz Kline studied painting with Henry Hensche in the East End. Mark Rothko bought a house there in the late fifties, though he didn’t live in it for long. Milton Avery spent summers there in the fifties; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner came one summer before settling in Easthampton. Robert Motherwell summered in his house on the East End for the last forty years of his life. The East End is where Eugene O’Neill’s first plays were produced.

B
IG
A
RT
, L
ITTLE
A
RT

The light in Provincetown rivals that of Paris or Venice. Being in Provincetown is like standing on a raft moored fifty miles out to sea. Its light is aquatic; it falls not only down from the sky but up again from the water, so that when you stand there, you do so as if between two immense platters of mirror. Provincetown’s shadows are deeper and more complex than the shadows in most other places; its edges are sharper and its colors clearer. If you go there on a sunny day, you may imagine that you’ve been wearing tinted glasses all your life and have only now taken them off. Painters have been drawn to the light of Provincetown for over a century. Edward Hopper lived in Truro, and his paintings of Cape Cod will give you a good idea of the slightly terrifying purity of the light, its capacity to be exquisite, dazzling, beneficent, and merciless all at the same time. Like most things of great beauty, it is not entirely gentle and not merely pretty, not in any way.

Provincetown has long been a member of that rarefied breed, the artists’ colony. Like so many places and people of a certain age, it had a heyday, which can be marked with an unusual degree of precision: As a center for the arts, Provincetown reached its acme in the summer of 1916.

Provincetown’s metamorphosis from scrappy little fishing village to artists’ colony more or less began in 1873, a year before the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris, when railroad lines finally connected Provincetown to Boston. Until then Provincetown had been so difficult to reach that hardly anyone went unless they had business there (which would inevitably have involved whales or fish) or were true adventurers. Provincetown’s suddenly increased accessibility was a small part of a titanic shift in the dispersal of people everywhere. In the mid-1800s, railroads in particular and industrialization in general inspired people to abandon rural areas for what seemed at the time like better lives in the cities. Artists, moving in opposition to the larger trends, as artists tend to do, began fleeing the cities to live more cheaply, closer to nature, in the suddenly depopulated countryside. Artists were properly unnerved by the rise of mechanization and what it betokened about the extinction of the handmade, the particular, and the indigenous, which had never before seemed like endangered species. Painters began preferring the regional to the mythic and began leaving their studios to paint outdoors, where they could try and render life as it occurred and light as it fell. With trains—with easier travel across long distances—came the idea of the summer idyll, and rural villages all over Europe and Russia found themselves made into colonies by painters whose ambitions ranged from dabbling to dead seriousness, most of whom arrived determined to find whatever they could of feral and spontaneous beauty; to do justice of one kind or another to the local fields and mountains, the people and animals. At its highest it was the shift in method and intent that spawned the work of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Monet.

The same current of altered ambition ran through Provincetown, beginning with the railroad, though in Provincetown it all took a somewhat sterner, more New England—ish turn. The seminal event in Provincetown’s early life as an artists’ mecca was not the sudden appearance of a genius or two but the establishment, in 1899, of the Cape Cod School of Art by Charles Hawthorne, who produced vaguely Manet-like oils of Provincetown scenes and citizens and who was an early American advocate of Impressionism. Hawthorne was a “gentleman painter” who spent his summers in Provincetown and his winters in France and who was generally congratulated for being so unassuming and democratic as to be seen riding a bicycle around town. His Cape Cod School of Art, and several others that started up in Provincetown around the same time, was enormously popular, especially with the wives of wealthy men who began arriving in considerable numbers to spend a summer week or two as bohemians, capped and smocked, laboring at easels set up on the wharves, beaches, and streets.

Provincetown the art colony took a more serious turn with the outbreak of World War I, when artists who might otherwise have gone to Europe found themselves forced to search out some sort of domestic equivalent of the exoticism and low rents their forebears had discovered in Paris. Provincetown naturally suggested itself. And so a new breed of artist—poorer and shaggier, more radical—began turning up on the streets and beaches, elbowing out the matrons and dilettantes.

Eugene O’Neill arrived in the 1910s, as did John Dos Passos, Mabel Dodge, Edmund Wilson, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Max Bohm, John Reed, and Louise Bryant. They were wild men and women, prone to free love, open marriage, Marxism, psychoanalysis, peyote, and Eastern religion. The women bobbed their hair and eschewed corsets; the men wore berets and open-necked working-class shirts of flannel or corduroy. Charles Demuth sometimes sported a black shirt and purple cummerbund, and Marsden Hartley could be seen in an enormous navy blue coat with a gardenia boutonniere.

They rented the old houses that had once belonged to sea captains. They argued and drank at the A-House and the Old Colony Tap. Everybody slept with everybody. Some of the writers started writing plays, usually about their complicated love affairs, jealousies, and political disagreements. One night in 1915 the writers Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood produced two one-act plays for friends in their home. The first, Boyce’s
Constancy
, about the romance between Mabel Dodge and John Reed, was staged on the veranda, with the audience watching from the living room, and the second,
Suppressed Desires
, a spoof of Freudianism by Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook, was put on in reverse, with the audience on the veranda and the play performed in the living room.

They named themselves the Provincetown Players and began staging more elaborate productions in a decrepit fishing shack on Lewis Wharf that had been bought by Mary Heaton Vorse, one of the first writers to settle in among the fishermen of Provincetown. What had been a lark soon took a more serious turn—the Players realized that work no one would produce in New York could be done in Provincetown for little or no money, by and among themselves. Jig Cook, the leader of the group, had visions of an American version of the Abbey Players in Dublin. In what has become locally known as the Great Summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell said, “We would lie on the beach and talk about plays—every one writing, or acting, or producing. Life was all of a piece, work not separated from play.” It was during that summer that the Provincetown Players put on the first production of an O’Neill play,
Bound East for Cardiff
, which O’Neill directed.

E
UGENE
O’N
EILL, THEN
twenty-eight years old, the son of a successful actor, had been sent by his father on a tramp steamer to Buenos Aires, in the hope that a long voyage would help cure him of his tendencies to drink too much and consort with pariahs and derelicts. Young O’Neill, however, found Buenos Aires more than sufficiently full of alcohol, pariahs, and derelicts, and when his money and health ran out, he worked his way back to the United States on a freighter and ended up in Provincetown.

At twenty-eight he had already begun showing signs of wear; his face had already taken on some of the wounded stateliness he would wear into old age. He dressed as a sailor and did as much as he could to act like one—to eradicate the taint of privilege, to take up a life here in this new place as a rough stranger who’d washed up on the beach, who had never been pampered or cosseted, whose way had never been paid by a father or anyone else. He looked startled and sorrowful and aloof; he might have been a man in the very first stages of transfiguration into an elk. He was not large, but he looked bigger than he was, because he carried himself as if he were large and because he possessed that rare ability to occupy more space than his flesh actually did. Except when drunk, he was taciturn and vaguely disapproving; people who knew him then tended to love and fear him to roughly equal extents, and many believed—or hoped—that he harbored for them some special affection that he was unable or unwilling to demonstrate by the conventional means. Women adored him.

Bound East for Cardiff
, which concerns a dying seaman named Yank on a ship bound for North America from Argentina, was performed at Lewis Wharf on a foggy night in the summer of 1916, with the water of the incoming tide splashing audibly under the floorboards. It was revelatory. Those who attended the performance that night discovered what the larger world would learn soon enough: that even in his early efforts O’Neill was a transforming agent in American theater. He insisted on an American version of the grim, resolutely unflorid work of European playwrights like Strindberg and Ibsen, whom he admired; he was the first American to write about lower-class life in lower-class language, without condescension or cheap attempts at moral uplift.

O’Neill lived in Provincetown for eight years in various places, among them a room over the A-House. He wandered the streets in seaman’s clothes, in a riot of melancholy drunkenness. He had a tortured affair with Louise Bryant. He made Abbie Putnam, the strict and rather terrifying local librarian, into a character who murders her child in
Desire Under the Elms
. Eventually he married a woman named Agnes Boulton and settled with her in the Peaked Hill Life-Saving Station, a grand old barn of a building on the edge of the Atlantic that could be reached only by a half-mile hike through the dunes. (It has since collapsed into the ocean.) It had been renovated by Mabel Dodge, who painted the walls white and the floors blue and furnished it with antiques brought back from Europe. O’Neill wrote nineteen short plays and seven long ones in Provincetown, most of them while he lived in the house at Peaked Hill. He taught himself how to write during that time and had at his disposal a body of amateur actors and set designers who would mount everything he wrote. He became a great artist there, in what he called “a solitude where I lived with myself.” He was at home at Peaked Hill when he learned, from a neighbor, that he had won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize, the first of his four Pulitzers. He celebrated quietly, with his wife, in their capacious and remote house, with its blue floors and its two couches that had been bought by Mabel Dodge from the estate of Isadora Duncan.

F
URTHER
A
RT
, O
THER
A
RT

After World War I ended, after the preeminence of European painting and sculpture was toppled by the work of American artists, Provincetown’s remoteness turned fairly abruptly from its central virtue to its most prominent liability. Who wanted to live so far from New York City, when New York had become the center of the world? A few artists spent their summers there, Robert Motherwell prominent among them, but Provincetown had become a backwater, a retreat, and many of the famous names connected with the town—people like Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner—were there only a summer or two. Still, a body of serious painters and sculptors like Paul Bowen, Fritz Bultman, Nanno de Groot, Chaim Gross, Peter Hutchinson, Karl Knaths, Leo Manso, Jack Tworkov, and Tony Vevers all lived there during the second half of the twentieth century, and some of them live there still.

Since the 1940s progressive little galleries have opened, thrived, and ultimately closed: Forum 49 and Gallery 256 and HCE (for “Here Comes Everybody,” from Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake);
the Sun Gallery, which in 1959 showed Red Grooms’s
Walking Man
, possibly the first installation (known at the time as a “happening”) to involve live actors; and the Chrysler Museum, where Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground put on
Exploding Plastic Inevitable
.