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By Root 1969 0

student named Jason Sample stopped me on the sidewalk in downtown Conway and introduced himself and apologized for his forwardness and asked me to allow him to be my escort for the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. I smiled sweetly and thanked him and declined, not on the grounds that I didn’t know him and hadn’t been properly introduced by a responsible party but that I didn’t know how to dance…which was true. He smiled engagingly and told me that he didn’t either, that the two of us could watch the others and use the event as an excuse to get acquainted, because all he wanted to do was learn my life’s story. I smiled again and said that my life had no story. “Then I would like to start its story,” he offered—and I loved that, the way he said that, and I wanted to say, Oh yes I’d love to go with you to the Christmas cotillion (any of my Fourcie classmates would have given an arm to have been invited), but I said that since the cotillion was on a Saturday night and my presence was required in Little Rock each weekend, I would have to forgo the kind invitation. Any other young man, after half an hour attempting such persuasion, would have abandoned the effort, but Jason Sample persisted, and at length I admitted that it just might be possible for me to get out of the trip to Little Rock, and the next day I wrote my father (I could have waited until the weekend and spoken it to him, but I thought a letter would be more effective) and told him I was going to the Hendrix Christmas cotillion. My father did not reply, nor did he mention it when he saw me that weekend, and I wondered if he had received the letter. I waited, and two more weekends went by without mention of the letter. As I was leaving Little Rock the weekend before the cotillion, I said simply, “I won’t be home next weekend.”

“Yes you will,” my father said.

“No I won’t,” I said, and I was not. I went to the cotillion with Jason Sample, and I loved it. But Daddy came to Conway the next day and told me he was taking me out of school. And he did.

In the months and months following, Jason Sample wrote to me several times and asked if he could come to Little Rock to see me. I attempted to discourage him and told him it was unlikely that we could continue to see each other. He wanted reasons, he demanded explanations, and all I could do, eventually, was ignore him. Alone in my turret studio I was learning more about art than I had in Miss Dearasaugh’s classes, and I did not miss Conway at all; it was such a provincial village compared with Little Rock.

By accident, in conversation, Daddy’s boss Henry Worthen learned that I was interested in art, and he arranged for me to meet his “daubing cousin” Spotiswode Worthen, who was a legendary Little Rock eccentric, a strange old man in his seventies and virtually a recluse. Apparently, Henry Worthen was in charge of Spotiswode’s financial affairs, and he thought it would be “useful” if his “unemployed” cousin agreed to give “lessons” to the daughter of his vice-president. Spotiswode Worthen had not given lessons during the previous twenty years, nor had he made any sort of social contact, and I remember how terribly rusty his voice sounded at our first meeting. He wasn’t an unkind man, and he knew much about the entire history of Western painting up to but not including the time of the Impressionists, who, he felt, were demoralizing the visual culture of civilization. Do you know the Impressionists, Latha? No? Well, they had revolutionized the art of that time, but Spotiswode Worthen had no use for them. The last great painter, he believed, had been Fantin-Latour—a mediocre academic hack—but Bouguereau—a somewhat more talented hack—remained “promising,” although he was in the last year of his life (Bouguereau, not Worthen, who would live two more years).

Spotiswode Worthen was the first “real” artist that I had ever known, although the few paintings of his that I was permitted to see did not impress me, except with their technical facility. His style was…oh, what can I call it if you don’t know art? His style was constipated.