'We Felt Like Spies': Read an Excerpt from Jonathan Lethem's 'Cellophane Bricks'
Museum Pieces
BY JONATHAN LETHEM
This excerpt first appeared in Harper’s Magazine on August 1, 2024
The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the domain of my semi-feral childhood as the Automats and the soda counters and the used-book stores and Washington Square Park. I grew up going to the Museum of Natural History every year—it was a pro forma class trip for a public school kid, even one from Brooklyn. My father was a painter, so if we hit the museums uptown instead of the SoHo galleries, it was MoMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. I remember MoMA’s epochal Picasso show in 1980, and the Whitney’s Alexander Calder exhibition in 1981. The Metropolitan I went to with my grandmother once or twice and knew from reading From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In high school I made myself such a familiar at the Met that whenever I needed an afternoon nap and didn’t want to leave Manhattan, I’d drop in on its tranquil Chinese garden, where I knew which rock crevice was best for resting my head. Entry was easier then, and it wasn’t just me who was sleepy—the museums were a little sleepier, a little emptier, and sometimes a little dustier than they are now.
The Frick was a secret left for me to encounter with my best friend the last year of high school. We were painting and carving marble at the High School of Music and Art, on 135th Street in Harlem, and had gotten into college already, and weren’t paying attention to anything other than making paintings and carvings and getting stoned after school and wandering Central Park. We thought the name was funny. Though we paid admission, it felt as though we were sneaking in. Peter knew the Frick. He had his favorites already, and he led me to them. It felt like a kind of rebellion against modernism, to be so interested in virtuosity—in photorealism before photography, in the Vermeers, the Dürer drawings, the Holbeins.
Peter and I did this three or four times, enough that it seemed like a rite: We blew joints on boulders in the sweaty, busy park, then threaded our way among the roller skaters and blaring boom boxes, moving west to east (we’d have gotten off the C train at 81st Street, probably) toward Fifth Avenue. Then, giggling, we entered the hushed, cool stone temple. We weren’t, as I say, sneaking in, let alone spending the night there after hours in the manner of The Mixed-Up Files. Yet we felt like spies, like invaders—termites in the elephant temple, worms in the bud. We alone understood that the art was psychedelic, talking to us through the centuries. These painters were freaks of devotion, providing eyeball kicks for acolytes like us.
We’d been born into a world covered with paint: walls, baseboards, moldings, even radiators might be six or seven layers deep with it, architectural edges and corners dulled into globs, approximate shapes. Sometimes you’d find paint over old black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor of a bathroom, or covering leaky pipes beneath a sink. Old landlord strategy: throw on another heavy coat. It might be holding the building together.
The layers peeled and flaked; we were warned not to eat them. That made us curious: Were they good to eat? At the dawn of gentrification, some of the layers were being undone, chipped at or stripped away. We watched parents drag sinks or sections of marble fireplaces onto the street and pour and scrub poisonous solvents, hoping to free the objects to their old forms. A summer afternoon went rank with solvent. Soon enough, some of us headed out armed with paint and shouted back with our own application. These efforts only invited more layers of paint, in a struggle to conceal the visual funk we had birthed overnight.
While many of the grown-ups on my scene were painters, many of my friends, my brother, and seemingly all of my brother’s friends were graffiti artists. (The explosion of graffiti in the Eighties caused the IRT to slather its rolling stock with graffiti-resistant paint, first flat white and later burgundy. Not that this stopped anyone.) They didn’t call themselves painters; they called themselves writers. Broadcasting your adopted name, however gnomic or illegible to those unschooled in the stylistics of graffiti, was a language act. Writing graffiti was not only an action in visual space but a gesture aloud, a signature on the city’s face. It was a way of flying both over and under the radar, of saying “I exist” and “I’m a secret” at the same time.
When I left New York for college in Vermont, where I’d change from a painter to a writer, I stood one day with some friends beside a dorm-room wall as one of them unveiled a spray can and undertook a little vandalism. (He spray-painted a dick.) When he handed it to me, almost without thinking, I threw up a simulacrum of a tag I’d used in Brooklyn—on a warehouse wall or two, and once in a train tunnel—while accompanying friends who really wrote. The response from my college friends was startling. They thought I’d hidden the fact that I was a graffiti kid. I explained otherwise, which they took for modesty. But I simply wasn’t a graffiti writer; I hadn’t done the time. The ethos of graffiti was one of endurance, repetition, diligence. You claimed it in hours, in miles, in numbers of train cars or subway-station pillars bombed. There were days when I’d ride to school on a train Zephyr had hit the night before; I’d count what seemed like a hundred fresh, dripping tags, as he’d roamed from car to car filling each available panel and door. Far more than doggedness, this was art itself, a practice of days that resembled my father’s studio discipline.
Jean-Luc Godard said somewhere that every film is a documentary about a certain period of time in the lives of its actors. Equally, every novel is a diary of a sequence of days, usually years, in the life of the person piling up the sentences. It may not be carving stone, but it has a certain devotional quality. And like all devotion, it makes hours, and then a life, disappear. As I’ve gotten older, my writing has gotten more commemorative, or reconstructive—that may be the better word. I find myself wishing to suspend the world I’ve known and to amber it in language. To be able to stroll around moments and view them from all sides: to make the chapters of a novel serve as vitrines in a museum into which I’ve placed excavated fragments of past feeling.
From Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, which was published last month by ZE Books.
