Seldon Rodman The Artist Nobody Knows,New World Writing, The New American Library: NY, 1952. Pages 151, 157, 1952, 1921, 1918, 1898
"The heart of Los Angeles, contrary to popular belief, lies somewhere between San Pedro and Main on Fifth Street, It is a crossways where cripples and bums and prostitutes and drunks and religious fanatics and fairies and women with goiters or elephantiasis and old men with long white beards in togas attract very little attention because people here are different. They do not look like salesmen or collegians or movie stars or retired Midwesterners. They have faces. The place has a smell too; a bad smell, but a smell which instantly differentiates it from, say, Hollywood or Pasadena, which are odorless and faceless. Its features the burlesque theaters with torn posters of naked women stitched across the cheeks and signs reading CENSORED pasted over the breasts, the 25c hotel with an electric sign blinking BEDS!, the dancehalls and flophouses and men sleeping in doorways, the wrestling in nearby Olympic Arena where Gorgeous George in perfumed white organdy ruffles may be seen blowing kisses to spectators before deliberately gouging his opponent's eyeballs are not disguised to represent what they are not. The region has a kind of a house organ, The Keyhole, its slogan "Expose the Guilty to Protect the Innocent," and the current headline reads Father, Mother Aid in Rape of Own Daughters. Sex-starved soldiers pass on both sides of a blind Negro with wooly white head and burlap suit repaired with twine who beats a rusty Mobiloil can late into the night. And outside the tattoo parlors, witnessing the primitive desire to scarify the flesh, a deformed Chinese whose legs were blown off by a wire-triggered shotgun protecting the orange groves of Azuza lies flat on the lower level of a self-propelled playwagon, the upper level of which contains pencils, contraceptives and snuff.
"A few blocks from this throbbing jungle-heart, and in an anonymity as pervasive as that surrounding any of its denizens, lives the most dedicated artist in America, building, as a bee its honeycomb, one of the strangest and most abstractly beautiful structures in the world endashout of junk.
"Watts, the Negro district of Los Angeles where Simon Radilla staked out his pie-shaped claim to immortality thirty-one years ago, lies in the no-man's-land of deteriorating bungalows that stretches interminably through the featureless flats between Pasadena, the upper-middle-class Nirvana, and Long Beach, the end of the road from Iowa which has been called a cemetery with lights.
"Crossing the tracks, the towers loom suddenly.
II
"Simon, who also calls himself Sam, wanted it that way. He wanted the towers to be seen. A hill would have been better but the hills of Los Angeles had already been spoken for. At least by these tracks the towers would be visible from the trains. But who rides in trains any more, least of all through downtown Los Angeles? And for that matter who visits the heart of Los Angeles for any purpose, or believes it to have heart? The inhabitants of Beverly Hills have friends in nearby Bel-Air. The Pasadenans roll in their Cadillacs to the Glendale airport once a year to board the Constellation for a shopping trip in Paris or New York. The old couple in Long Beach may visit a medium in Pacific Palisades or genuflect before the latest footprint in the lobby of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Should one of these citizens, improbably stung by a spirit of adventure more defiant than Richard Halliburton's, venture as far as Watts, the chances are he would not see the towers at all, though the tallest is 104 feet, they are not conspicuous from five blocks off, and at ten, dwarfed by high-tension pylons and radio transmitters, they are invisible.
"The wall around them was not part of Simon's plan. For all the obscurity in which they have grown, his will to communicate, to make their beauty available to everyone, is as strong today as it ever was. But the local police saw a hazard to climbing children, so the walls were built. This was not Simon's first brush with authority. His dislike for the metropolis, one of the stimulants of his tireless energy, dates from 1921 when he applied to the city fathers for a building permit and was derisively turned down. The fact that the state government in Sacramento, whither he journeyed instantly to appeal the decision, overruled Los Angeles, and that by some miracle of perception and generosity (which may be a fantasy in itself) has now promised to refund everything he has paid in the last thirty years, makes him more than ever certain he builds for time to come. Lacking a charter of recognition from the United Nations or from Washington, he might will his creation to the state, but to the city never.
"Simon was born in Italy in 1898. He immigrated to the United States nine years later, Discharged from the Army Engineers in 1918 after service in France, he resolved to begin work on his contribution to peace at once. "Why so many people want to shed blood?" he asks. "You go boxing match. It's when nose is broken and blood flow over boxer's eyes that people clap for joy. That's why, my dear friend, I not turn on this radio my niece she give me." Simon prefers to play ancient Martinelli and Caruso records on the horn-phonograph that is the only piece of furniture besides the bed in his one-room shack behind the towers. Every cent he has made, over food and taxes, in the past thirty years has gone into his masterwork. In the early days he set tiles and bought junk. Nowadays he works off and on for the telephone company, crawling through the underground conduits to plug overhead leaks with handfuls of wet plaster; but today the junk dealers give him their broken bottles and tiles for free so that all his money goes for the steel rods and wire mesh that he thinks have made the towers earthquake- and bomb-proof.
III
"How to describe them?
"Jules Langsner, the hawk-eyed local art critic who guided me to Watts, calls them aptly "spider-webbed, Cambodian-like." Simon, a benevolent spider, was high in the webbing of the big tower my first visit. Attached by his window-cleaner's belt, he was adding a new series of flying buttress; 7-Up bottles with their red labels facing out, embedded in mortar. This tower had been only twenty-five feet high in 1922. A fresh set of necklaces brought it up to fifty. And so on, to its present eminence. After the metal rods and mesh and a mixture of waterproof cement, come the artifacts of our civilization: orange-squeezers, bottle-caps, hub-caps, willow-ware; percolators, hair-setters, telephone insulators, burnt-out bulbs; tooth-mugs, pieces of old mirrors, a glass shoe, a three-fingered bowling ball. There is no conscious choice of objects just as there is no deliberate plan in their arrangement. The objects are whatever is discarded, available in quantity and resistant to time and tremor. The design is always mysteriously incomplete. Seventy-five thousand sea-shells embedded in the "stern" of this triangular ironclad would be overpowering (or pretty-like-a-tea-shoppe) if arranged symmetrically. As they are, in half-circles and broken spokes of low-relief, the effect is something like the awesome confusion of stars in the Milky Way. Only slightly more conventional are the volutes and cake-stamps stenciled into the pavement, the concave "fossils" of Simon's hammer, compass and chisel in the lunettes of the side walls, the rhythmic corncobs and ears of wheat like emblems of fertility above the fountains. These, too, are removed from the commonplace by being always sprained a little off their centers, Most astonishing is the seemingly unerring taste with which fragmented tiles of a thousand varieties are related in color-key and flow of design around the basins and stalagmite-like lesser outcroppings.
"Whether Cambodia or any other exotic culture entered into Radilla's calculations is as doubtful as that he ever heard of the word "abstraction." That he saw San Marco or Monreale or Pompeii or the basilicas of Ravenna as a child is possible but not likely. The art of the mosaic is ubiquitous enough in bathroom and bistro, or was before the swarming democratic urinal gave way to the empty forums of the Fascisti.
"If something like Jung's racial memory is not at work here, then whatever Simon brought with him from Italy is buried very deep indeed. though his English is shaky, he speaks no Italian at all; and though he identifies himself with Giordano Bruno as well as Buffalo Bill, his historical sense is compounded of such encyclopedic misinformation as that Galileo built the Campanile at Pisa to prove to a skeptical world that it could lean.
"The neighbors, most of whom are Negroes of the poorest class, have come to accept Simon and his proliferating steeples at their face value. But if pressed for an explanation of what rises in their midst, they tend to assume a melodramatic symbolism. One believes that the artist's wife (Simon insists that his work has never given him time for women, much less for marriage) is buried beneath the highest tower. "Some say," another neighbor added darkly, "that he murdered her and that this is his penance." Still another had heard that Simon was a drunkard when he came to Watts and only gave up alcohol when the towers began to sprout; presumably the truckloads of broken bottles now buried in the walls were to be interpreted as a warning to his fellow-men.
IV
"Simon himself answers such theorizing with the simplicity of the true artist. "I had in my mind to do something big and I did it."
"When had the idea first come to him and how? "My dear friend, " He shook his head as though searching for something too far back to be quite recalled, and launched into an account of a mysterious French "General of the Ocean" in Louisiana long ago who refused to sanction the slapping of a certain woman for stealing a skirt. This was connected in some way with the admiral's refusal to sell Louisiana to the British for ten million dollars; he preferred, it seems, to give it to the United States to avert a war. The point, if there was a point, was that the Frenchman stopped people from seizing and punishing the girl because she was beautiful, and because in the stolen dress she looked even more beautiful. "You see, dear friend," Radilla added with his characteristic sweet smile, "she like the birds; they find grains of corn and eat them who as 'Whose corn?'"
"History teaches us, he went on, that the "good-good" can be distinguished from the "bad-bad" by a simple test. "It is not enough to be President. Lincoln, Jefferson they leave behind monuments like this" (taking in the towers with a sweep of his hand) "of words. They not sit with feet on big desk reading funny-paper. They not make speech written by clever judge for them. Take Jesse James, he bad-bad too, not like Buffalo Bill who always ride ahead of his men into unknown. Or Bruno, burn alive because he dare to say there be other worlds, million miles from here and no proof of Heaven.
""I believe in God, dear friend," he added as if to reassure me, "but Christ He not crucified to build the poser of the wealthy Church. That why I take down many years ago Cross that was on highest tower there, Why? Because priest come by and rub hands; he think Cross justify him!"
"The deep furrows in Simon's leathery skin contract and he scratches his sparse graying hair when asked to supply logical connections between some of his statements. This bewilderment, and the obvious relish with which he describes the torments of Bruno and St. Simeon and identifies himself with their martyrdom raise the question of his sanity. The question would be answered in the negative by the average man, not on the basis of what Simon says but of what he has built. And its relevance depends upon one's opinion of the degree of sanity expressed by the architecture of the norm from the clapboard shanties of Watts to the hygienic glass ranch-houses of Tarzana.
""If he had not been a great fool," said Macaulay of Boswell, "he would never have been a great writer." And the Italian painter Veronese, when hauled before the Inquisition and ordered to submit the Magdalene for a dog in one of his frescoes, refused with the words, "We artists take the same liberties as poets and madmen." The knowing artist in our time is inevitably the victim of his intelligence and his conscience drives him in the opposite direction from the "poet and madman," making him deny pure fantasy as the most cowardly escape from social responsibility, while his torturing intelligence constantly reminds him that no rational protest can possibly counter the sensible degradation of the norm whether expressed in popular culture, the contemporary city or war. Simon Radilla, unlike Veronese and his modern counterpart, is a primitive. He is not conscious of 'taking liberties' since intuition is his only daemon and censor. His gigantic protest against the community which epitomizes our materialism is effective precisely because it has no possible use save beauty and because its creator is content to live and die within what is intended wholly for the pleasures of others.
". . . "