Who Is Gorky? An Abstract Life Storyville

'My grandfather was a painter. He died more than 60 years ago.

'My mother was five and my aunt almost three.

'We're going to the last house they lived in.

'He killed himself here.'

Do you remember it, Maro?

Well, I remember there used to be a table, a big table here.

We used to draw here. Or maybe not.

-Maybe the dining room table was here.

-I think it was here.

This is where we did our crayons. The living room was always the living room.

The dining room table must have been here.

I remember him making us scrambled eggs.

Just a slight, dim, thing of jet lag.

THEY LAUGH

I dragged you up and we saw our parents having a horrible fight.

-But it's not that.

-Of course it is.

I forced you to go up the staircase.

You were much too scared. You didn't want to go up at all.

I'm beginning to feel things at the mention of the staircase.

SHE SOBS

'I've heard stories of him all my life -

'his art, his memories, his lies, his death.

'And always tangled family tales with no beginning and no end.

'The white noise of my life.

'Gorky was the last surrealist and the first abstract expressionist.

'He created himself as an artist

'and kept working as tragedies unfolded around him.

'His life was his art. His art was his life.'

DOORBELL RINGS

'The only remaining witness of his last years

'is my grandmother, Mougouch.'

-Hello.

-Hello, darling.

I was 19 when I first met Gorky.

I was told by Bill de Kooning

that I must meet Gorky.

That Gorky must meet me, was the way he put it.

So I went and I sat down,

quietly, in this room full of people

next to a gentleman with a moustache but nobody had described Gorky.

They said, "Oh, you'll see him.

"He'll get up and immediately start singing and dancing."

So I sat next to this silent gentleman.

I said nothing and he said nothing.

Finally, I decided, "Well, I don't know where this man called Gorky is.

"I might as well leave because I don't see anybody."

And then, when I stood up, he stood up.

The man I'd been sitting next to. He was nice and tall.

And he said, as we were leaving,

"Is your name Miss Maguida?"

I said, "Not quite. But it's Magruder."

And he said, "I was asked to meet you."

I said, "Well, hello."

He said, "As we haven't talked, shall we go and have a coffee?"

And I said, "I think that would be very nice."

'When my grandparents met in 1940, he was 20 years older than her.

'Gorky was part of the emerging New York art scene, working alone in his studio downtown,

'dining in the quick and dirty cafes

'with John Graham, Stuart Davis and Bill de Kooning.

'What we know about his life in the hard-living '30s,

'before he met my grandmother,

'comes from the letters he wrote to his sister living in Chicago.

'"Dear Vartoosh,

'"when you write that you're always lonely

'"my heart fills with great bitterness.

'"Surely, that was our destiny.

'"I, too, feel lonely always, even if I see lots of friends.

'"Even if I'm among thousands of people, I always feel lonely."'

He said, "Tell me about yourself." I said, "There's nothing to tell.

"I'm just beginning my life in New York."

He loved New York.

He took me all over New York. We explored every corner.

East Side, West Side, north, south, always by foot.

'Mougouch let me film her for the first time ten years ago.

'That's when I started to listen closely,

'to try and make sense of what happened.'

-I wish you wouldn't take that?

-Why?

-Because it's not my cigarette.

-Because you usually...?

An unusual cigarette.

'Mougouch was a spirited and adventurous young woman

'who'd grown up all over the world following her father,

'an admiral in the US Navy.

'When she got to New York from Shanghai, aged 19 and alone,

'she wanted to break away from her privileged background.

'She worked on a Maoist paper and wanted to become a painter.'

This was my street.

-This is where you walked every day.

-Every day. Where I walked my babies.

Every day.

So then, he took me to his studio. It was so big.

So vast and empty.

Three chairs and a round table.

And this wonderful big easel, great big one!

Like a crucifix.

And a big window coming right down

from the ceiling.

We had a room on the side, where he kept all his paintings.

-Which was the first one he showed you?

-Oh!

When he showed me his...

The first thing he showed me was his mother and himself.

That painting, that's in the Whitney Museum.

I guess his mother must have loved him a lot.

He lost her when he was very young.

I don't think he was very far in his teens.

His mother was very beautiful.

And she wanted him to be something special.

She took him to a marble seat

and said, "You must be a poet."

Poetry, you see, was the beautiful thing for her.

And he felt she had given him a proper mission.

He told me the story of his life and so on, with emendations!

They were very happy, on the whole, his memories.

That's what he chose to tell me about.

Climbing trees and looking for bird's nests.

'Gorky chose what to forget and made paintings with what to remember.

'He lied about his past. He was an Armenian refugee, but he hid it.

'He reinvented himself.

'He said he was the nephew of Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer.

'He said he studied with Kandinsky in Paris

'and was a graduate of Brown.

'He plagiarised his love letters to Mougouch.'

As he told me so many myths, and I believed them all.

I was a beautiful blank book that he could write anything he wanted in!

SHE LAUGHS

But he was so proud and high

and fine-looking,

and he had a mighty paintbrush.

I was smitten immediately.

Oh! I was absolutely stunned by his painting.

I had never seen painting like it. I mean, it was delicious.

'Mougouch once took down his words as he painted.

'"I measure all things by weight.

'"I love my Mougouch. What about Papa Cezanne?

'"I like the heat, the tenderness, the edible, the lusciousness,

'"the song of a single person.

'"I like Uccello, Grunewald

'"and that man Pablo Picasso."'

He used to go to the Metropolitan with his easel and paint there.

He learnt, really, by... call it imitation, I suppose.

He was totally eclectic, something from everywhere.

Everybody said that he was just making Cezannes

and making Picassos and making Matisses.

He really didn't care. He wasn't interested in being original.

I saw

this very proud and amazing person

who brought a dimension and a proof

into my life that I could never find in my bourgeois existence.

'"My dearest ones, this morning, Mougouch and I went with two friends

'"to the city to get married tomorrow morning. We are very happy.

'"Mougouch is a very beautiful and well educated girl,

'"and has studied in Switzerland, France, England, Holland,

'"and has visited every country in the world.

'"She is studying a lot and every day she reads Marx, Engels,

'"Lenin, Stalin."'

So, once I had a baby, a little girl,

it was all very well and he absolutely worshipped her.

But how was I going to live in that flat in that studio?

It was quite difficult.

I think it was down there that I took Maro to a nursery school,

where she claims she was pinned and tied up

and had all sorts of indignities.

SHE CHUCKLES But...

It took her out of the studio for a few hours.

The studio was quite small?

No, the studio was huge, but Gorky was trying to paint in it.

And there you are in dear dreary old Connecticut

in the woods, in the spring of 1945.

Before little Natasha was born.

-So Natasha wasn't even born.

-No.

-She wasn't a month old or something?

She was a month old in the other picture.

-I'm saying that this photograph...

-Darling, it's written here.

-"Spring of 1945." I know when he came.

-But all these photographs...

She was born after that, Natasha, in August, three months later.

-This was done at the same time.

-That's right.

They were all done at the same time.

He was like a mysterious person in a fairy tale.

I remember nice things, like...

..cutting out coloured paper and drawing with crayons.

But...it was pretty horrific. A lot of tension in the house.

At least I can remember. My sister Natasha doesn't remember anything.

It's far worse not remembering than to remember.

And did you know he'd committed suicide?

No, I didn't. I thought he'd died.

I found out by reading a clipping in a newspaper when I was about...

..12? Or 13?

And I was very shocked.

How did you recover so well, Mummy?

By isolating myself and not participating very much in the world, it seems to me.

I couldn't have done it without Matthew. Matthew was invaluable.

PEACOCK CALLS

-MALE SPEAKER:

-I've been in this family 48 years, a long time.

That involves a lot of Gorky, because he takes up a lot of space.

So I've written a biography of him.

I seem to remember a lot of dinner table conversation

to be about Gorky.

Do you?

Well, you know, my wife and I,

we get through a bottle of wine each a night,

and we talk about the same things again and again and again.

When you met Maro, did Mummy...did she speak about Gorky immediately?

Maro talked more about her mother than her father, to begin with.

We didn't know much about Gorky, except for what Mougouch told us.

Maro had just been born and... how was I going to deal with Maro?

How was I going to live in that flat in that studio?

I suggested to my mother, who'd just bought a farmhouse in Virginia,

I said, "Of course, we could come down and help you.

"Gorky can dig in the garden and I can cook, and so on."

So that was struck as a very good bargain. We'd go in the spring.

And we'd watch the fall turning.

We went back the next summer

and the next summer.

"Gorky has been thrashing over two particular canvases.

"Now, having ravaged and worn them down like an angry sea,

"he has left them to go out and draw, draw, draw.

"He's sitting perched on his stool out on the side of the hill,

"sitting for hours without seeming to move."

He fell in love with the grasses

and the cows and the trees and the weeds.

What was so exciting about it

was that he didn't know what he was doing himself.

He'd come back and he'd say, "Can you see this?"

Well, I'm looking at it. It's wonderful. It's extraordinary.

"It doesn't matter, does it,

"if you don't recognise anything?" I said, "No, I don't."

I recognise shapes, but I don't know what they refer to.

'With Mougouch,

'Gorky stopped projecting himself through an imagined past

'and had a chance to step into the present with new passion,

'new opportunities

'and new friends, like the painter Roberto Matta.'

Gorky was very influenced by Matta.

Matta helped him in many ways.

Matta had said to him, "Why don't you just take a clean canvas

"and just paint what you feel or see on that canvas

"without too much forethought or too much...?

"Don't work on it. Let it happen to you."

And he realised that... he ought to try it.

He'd never felt free enough to try it.

'"I've been well and been working, and my way of working is changing.

'"And for this reason I always feel extremely anxious.

'"I want to attain works which are more personal and clean."'

This was on his easel in the barn when I came to see him,

probably having put the children to their naps.

And was it a surprise to see that?

Yeah. Because, you see...he'd been working from the drawings.

And then, suddenly, he dismissed the drawing.

He was completely free.

He'd done it, I think, in two or three days.

Oh, I said it was splendid. "You're off."

I felt he was. He'd found his way out of the drawings.

You can see how nature was alive to him.

-He really didn't see what

-I

-saw.

He saw things IN it.

He looked at the spaces between things

as much as he looked at the object itself.

Like things that he might have seen in his dreams or imagination.

Or a mixture of his early memories and his new perceptions.

There was so much feeling in it,

and the feeling came through to one.

Having his own child,

his own house

and that trip to the country unstuck him.

It was a gigantic movement.

I gave him some kind of support that was more personal,

not just his art, but was...for him.

'Everything seemed possible at the end of that first summer.

'Gorky came back to the city with a portfolio of vibrant new drawings

'which opened new doors.

'Their friend, Jeanne Reynal,

'arranged an introduction with Andre Breton,

'the leader of the surrealists

'in exile from occupied Paris.

'It was a heady energetic milieu of established figures from Europe

'that included Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst.

'With the surrealists, Gorky found a group who not only recognised

'but also championed him as their bridge to America.

'Breton arranged his first solo exhibition in 20 years

'at the avant-garde Julien Levy Gallery.'

The opening was hardly what's called a success.

Julien didn't get the invitations out until after the show opened.

Imagine! So nobody came.

There was me and Gorky and my mother,

Andre Breton, Julien Levy

and I think Marcel Duchamp came.

Rather a nice little group of something like six people.

That was the opening of poor Gorky's exhibition.

"Julien told him that the critics had been stonier

"and more unresponsive than he'd ever known them.

"That usually he could handle them, but this time,

"there was a blind opposition

"he had never in his career come up against."

You see what a real sadist he was?

Julien's contract was for 175 a month.

He would have a certain amount of paintings a year

and a certain amount of drawings.

They were his, anyhow, whether he sold them or not.

We had 175 a month.

We paid 55 for the rent of the studio.

If that silly fool had given us a tiny bit more money

I could have lived not in that studio,

but we couldn't afford a living place.

-Did he need silence to work?

-Well, not so much he needed silence,

but he didn't need two little girls romping around.

How could I keep them occ...?

Sometimes it rains, it's impossible to go for a walk in the park.

You stay out all day and you're so tired you can't cook supper.

It's hard staying out for hours and hours

with two little children.

'As the studio in New York became too cramped for a family,

'they moved to the countryside.

'A friend put them up and found a space for Gorky to work in.'

I was at the mercy of the generosity of my friends,

constantly packing things up

and going somewhere which wasn't ours.

It was awful.

I sometimes think my great mistake in Gorky's life, really.

Except he got SUCH joy from the children.

What can I say?

It was tough on me. It was tough on him. It was tough on the children.

It wasn't stable.

The only stability Gorky had was in the studio in New York.

This was just after Natasha was born, wasn't it?

Well, it was during Natasha's... She was born...

We moved there when she was two months old - not even.

She was born in August and we moved there in September.

But thank God! She was a very easy, healthy baby.

-Do you remember Gorky?

-No.

Not, um...

-Not consciously.

-Hm.

I have no recollection of when Gorky was alive.

I have NO recollection.

Where did you find out that he killed himself?

I don't remember.

I was not quite three.

Not quite three.

I think now, from the perspective now,

I realise I've been in shock a lot of my life.

From the photographs I see, I was very angry, but didn't know it.

I felt... I just didn't feel connected to Mummy.

I just didn't feel like... You know.

I didn't want to be around her, basically.

She never paid attention to me.

She always thought I was OK and I wasn't a problem.

So I think that's what I just did. I sort of wanted to disappear.

MOUGOUCH: And here's Gorky with Natasha.

His little plumber.

Look at Natasha.

She always says she was so miserable.

She wasn't.

'As a child, I was told of a story Gorky's mother told him,

'a story of defiance and destruction.

'A family myth of how his great-grandmother,

'undone by grief at the slaughter of her last nephew, cursed God

'and set fire to the family church she tended.

'I was told Gorky's fires were always a little too big.'

"Darling Jeanne, anything that follows is an understatement.

"On Wednesday January 16, Gorky's studio in the country burnt to the ground. Everything was lost.

"Gorky smelled some smoke, but he was working with great passion

"and thought it was his cigarette."

He was just happily working away in the smoke.

Then he walked down, and he's passed by our friend, Jean.

She said, "Gorky, what are you doing with that water?"

He said, "I'm putting out the fire."

He'd walked by her three or four times

without saying, "Call the fire engines."

-How many paintings burnt, do you think?

-We really don't know.

Quite a few.

I thought he would be absolutely broken. Not at all.

He felt it didn't matter.

It was all inside him and it would all come out again.

Then came the operation - bang! Like that, on top of it.

It was a terrible operation for a colostomy, that's what it's called.

It wasn't something we had five minutes to think about. Not five.

He went to the doctor and the doctor rang me up and said, "I'm sending him straight to the hospital."

'"Dear Vartoosh, we thought that we'd have a house in Connecticut,

'"but that damn fire destroyed everything.

'"Mougouch and I thought that you were coming to us this summer,

'"but it didn't happen.

'"For us to come to you is quite difficult

'"because I have to paint a lot.

'"You know that after I went to hospital

'"for a long time I wasn't able to work."'

You've known people who've had cancer.

It is a kind of death.

I mean, it becomes very near death.

I think Gorky never thought he would ever be normal.

I know he never thought. He wouldn't let himself have anything that...

that any doctor suggested, in terms of how to deal with his cancer.

He did it his own way, which was exhausting.

'Gorky couldn't bear the humiliation of his body. He starved himself.

'He wrapped himself daily in tight bandages

'to try and control the fluids and noises from the colostomy bag.

'He retreated into himself.

'He was angry and ashamed, and friends began to avoid them.

'Mougouch couldn't reach him.

'She kept it together for a year and then began to crack.

'She was 26 years old.'

Things went very fast. We moved in wintertime.

We moved to the country as soon as we could. We moved to Sherman.

We should never have gone to the house in Connecticut.

To that house.

It was doomed.

Gorky was going into some dark place, as it were.

And his paintings were.

There's a painting, Dark Green Painting.

I know he painted it down there in that little studio in Connecticut.

Gorky couldn't work. He was tired. He didn't like the studio.

It was winter.

The children were in the house a lot.

He used to get terribly angry with Maro.

He kept saying things like,

"Do you want to kill your little sister?" when she would, you know, give her a biff or something.

SHE SIGHS

That whole winter that we were there before he killed himself,

several times he walked up that drive

with this great rope - I knew what he was going to do.

He was going to the barn, where he always went cos he loved that barn.

He took... He had his site all chosen.

I used to send the children after him, because I said, "Look at Daddy.

-"He's going to make you a swing."

-Hm.

"Go and run with him."

They'd run off to him and he'd come back, of course.

He did that...three times.

It was a terrible, terrible winter

and I was worn down to the ground.

Then he didn't know what to do, what to paint.

He kept asking me, "What can I do? What can I paint?"

I said, "Why don't you paint some portraits?

"I'll sit for you. You haven't painted a portrait for years."

"No! No!" He didn't feel like portraits.

Landscape was wrong. Everything was wrong. I was wrong.

The babies were making too much noise.

I mean, it was a very...

a most...upsetting time.

And I bust. I broke.

Finally.

'One of the few friends who still kept in touch was Roberto Matta.

'Mougouch turned to him for support.'

I didn't have anybody helping me.

Before I went off with Matta for a weekend... It was only a weekend.

It wasn't... I said I'd be back on Sunday night and I was.

I went off on Friday.

I didn't know where I was going until I got to the...

our local little shop

to talk to them and see the...

And you left the children with him?

Well, I left... No. The children had gone to my mother's.

I had to escape somewhere. I wasn't planning to escape forever.

I was planning to go for two days with somebody I knew would love me

and make me feel loved.

-I needed it more than anything.

-Of course, you're right, Mummy.

-You would never have stood what I stood.

-Of course I wouldn't.

I'm such a monster, compared to you.

Any man who treated me like...you were treated,

I would have buzzed off very quickly.

-Or I wouldn't have gone...

-He didn't treat me like that in the beginning.

-It's only because he became jealous.

-I think he overworked that summer.

I think he was worn out. And he was in pain, Mummy.

Oh, I do know how he was in pain. I know every bit of that pain.

I could tell you not only that, but the worst thing about Gorky

was that he had absolutely no self-control.

None.

Hm.

'I'd heard this scene so many times before.

'It had become like a piece of theatre in which everyone knew their role and was unwilling to let go.'

MACHINE WHIRRS

'As if that were all that remained of their relationship with Gorky.'

Christ! I have the same thing with my mum.

-Yeah, I know. It's discouraging, isn't it?

-It's not discouraging.

-You're 65, Maro. You ought to be grown-up.

-66.

-66.

I know. Grown out and about.

Your adolescences are over.

I know. She's over, too. I'm not giving her a present.

-She hasn't given me one for years.

-Oh, grumpy, grumpy, grumpy!

My love, I haven't had my coffee yet.

OK, cake, fruit tarts...

-Fish. She wants a big fish. She does not want mackerel.

-OK.

-From where? A supermarket?

-Where else?

Are you planning to fish it yourself?

-God! Baby's in really a bad mood.

-I had a sleepless night.

-What happened?

-I couldn't sleep. I felt asthmatic.

I felt suffocating.

-It's the past, my sweet.

-The past was sitting on me like a succubus.

Because it's not your mother, you can laugh. Agh!

I must cut some weeds.

My one flower bed is just a jungle of grass.

Don't do it now. You'll be too tired tomorrow.

This "doco" is a little bit like group therapy, isn't it?

You've stirred the muddy waters, Cosie.

-Anyway, you don't seem angry.

-No.

How could I be angry for something that happened?

I went through the anger. I was angry when I was young.

It's a question of knowing what happened. Knowledge is healing.

The worst thing is not knowing.

'As in all tragedy,

'there are points where things could have gone differently for Gorky

'on the way to meet his fate.

'While Mougouch was away, a car crash left his collarbone broken

'and his painting arm paralysed.

'Julien Levy, his dealer, was driving.

'They were both drunk.'

So then I brought this poor darling home.

That was it. And we had two weeks at home.

Or three weeks or four weeks

after my "escapade".

Yes. So we had those weeks of trying to live together.

And Gorky went on drinking

and... Oh!

It was... It was just awful.

He then told me that he discovered

that I'd gone away and spent two nights away with another man.

When he told me that, I wasn't going to pretend any different.

I said, "Well, if I did, then I did.

"But it isn't because I don't love you.

"It's because you've been so cruel to me.

"You made me feel as though there wasn't room for me in your life with the children.

"I don't know what to do about it."

He suddenly went... I remember.

Everything that I'd ever been given by a surrealist...

He tore up pictures and Matta's drawings.

And somebody...

The necklaces that Jeanne had given me, he ripped them apart.

Then he had sudden moments of trying to beat me up.

Then, of course, the children would hear it.

I tried to get down the stairs and out of the house and I did,

but he shoved me halfway down so the children heard me tumbling.

And then I ran out of the house and I stayed in the bushes outside.

SOBBING

Let's go and see where our bedroom is.

-I thought it was huge.

-God! It's tiny!

Yeah.

You, poor thing, I woke you up.

We came up the staircase and I saw Gorky

towering over our mother, who's crunched down,

kneeling, protecting herself, in front of the mirror.

SIGHS

I didn't want to leave the house. I wanted to be within hearing.

He'd gathered the children out of their beds, brought them downstairs

and was telephoning everybody saying I'd run away

and I'd gone to get the police.

So I came in and said, "Gorky! How could you say such a silly thing?

"Of course I'm not going to get the police. I just don't want you to be so angry with me."

The children, of course, were terrified,

full of tears and crying and crying.

So I said, "I'm going to put my children to bed."

I took the children and put them into bed.

Then Gorky came up and he sat on Maro's bed.

And he said...

"..Darling little Maro.

"You know I am an artist and artists sometimes lose their minds.

"And I... I...

"But it's not... It doesn't last.

"It's past. It's all over. I promise you it's all over."

And Maro said, "No, it isn't."

She knew!

Yes! Yes! Yes! This is where it all happened!

'When they left for New York to seek professional advice,

'it was to be the last time that the children saw that house

'and their father.

'They were dropped off at Jeanne's while Mougouch went to speak to Gorky's doctor.'

I told the doctor that I'd spent two nights away from Gorky.

But he was very upset. "Of course he is!" said the doctor.

"All I can do is say you must go away."

Well, I rang Matta to say that...

And Matta said, "I've just come back from seeing Gorky."

I said, "You don't mean to say you went to see Gorky?"

"Well, he called me up and asked me to meet him in Central Park."

So...

He, Matta, like an idiot, went to see him.

He wanted to beat Matta up with his shillelagh he'd come to town with.

He chased Matta around Central Park.

LAUGHING: Finally, Matta gave up

and they both sat down and started talking on a bench.

I mean, it was totally mad! LAUGHS

But Matta wanted to get hold of me cos he was terrified.

He thought that Gorky might beat ME up.

-And I wouldn't be able to get away. Well, he had tried already.

-Mm.

I told the doctor that and the doctor said,

"I'm not going to let you go back.

"I'll call Jeanne, tell her to put your children in a taxi."

Jeanne did. They came up to the doctor's, I joined them and we left.

Went down to my mother's.

He rang me up and he asked me would I come back?

And I said,

"I have to know that you'll forgive me.

"I can't come back if you're going to suddenly turn on me.

"And the children.

"I can't risk it, Gorky.

"What can I say?"

He was completely out of his mind.

But he did come back into his mind, to the extent

that he was definitely going to kill himself - he told me that he was.

And that I mustn't... I mustn't...

He was going to free me, that's what he said on the telephone.

And then I knew he would.

Mm.

As I'd been trying to stop him for...eight months,

and failed.

CLAPS HANDS What could I do?

And he did. There was nobody to stop him.

'On July 21st 1948, Gorky left this painting on the easel

'and walked into the woods to kill himself.

'He scrawled in white chalk on a picture crate,

'"Goodbye, my lovers." He wanted his last words to be great.

So he borrowed them from the Russian writer Pushkin.

-How beautiful, Natasha!

-Mm.

Huh?

-Look at this beautiful waterfall.

-Yeah.

-Beautiful.

Here it is, Nat!

This is a definite log cabin.

Peter Blume, when he came up here,

he knew this was one of Gorky's favourite spots.

He knew enough to come here.

I don't think he would have killed himself so near the house,

five minutes from the house, he wouldn't have done that.

-Well, we're at least half an hour.

-Exactly.

-I mean, a bit of privacy, don't you think?

-Yeah.

If you're going to do it,

it's a good place to do it.

You're in nature and the sound helps you sort of...

-..to, you know.

-And it's very quick.

His neck was broken anyway.

He just took his collar off

and it would have happened very quickly.

Hm?

'Gorky's suicide was his last heroic act.

'At the point in his life when his body failed him,

'he chose his ending.

'For his family, it marked the beginning of a journey of recovery,

'a discovery of who he was.'

Yes, it does. All right, dearie. Goodbye.

-Nice to hear you... Hello!

-Do you know something, Mummy?

It's been incredibly useful having five handsome young men...

-Course it is.

-..following us around these heart-wrenching places, like Gorky's suicide hutch.

The staircase gave me the heebie-geebies.

The staircase is very...

-Scary! Spooky staircase.

-It is for you, because it had lots of things.

-I went tumbling down it.

-That's it.

-Rather urged by your father.

So, Mummy, you must tell Mougouch your realisation

that you told us at dinner the other night.

What? That I'm pretty angry with my dad?

Yeah. I'm pretty angry with Gorky for having killed himself.

PHONE WHINES It's not a nice thing to do.

It's not nice for Natasha or for me. Where is it?

Here. I'll do it, dear. WHINING STOPS

You've only said half the story.

-You're unbelievable.

-What is the rest of it?

-You said you're less angry.

-You're less angry with me?

-Yeah.

-It's nice, isn't it?

-She can't say it. Go on. Say it!

MARO LAUGHS She can't say it.

Yeah, I am less angry with Mummy but...

Well, thank heaven. We've made friends.

Friends, Mummy? It's difficult for mother and daughter to be friends.

-We'll always be mothers and daughters.

-Well...

More than anything, I remember how fascinated he was with painting.

That made me want to paint as well because I thought, my God!

Painting is a magical world.

He would allow me to watch him painting.

I was allowed to paint on the back of his paintings.

Then I'd inevitably try and paint on the front and he didn't like that.

He used to throw me out of his studio and...

..onto the grass.

The more he became famous, the more people started speaking about him.

Including our family.

Then as he became more famous,

the deader he became, he resuscitated like an exciting ghost.

'Had he lived to witness his own success,

'my grandfather would have had to give up some of his secrets.

'As he became more recognised after his death,

'stories began to emerge,

'things he'd kept hidden from his loved ones.'

Of course, I didn't know his real name until after he was dead.

So that was that.

And found that his real name was...Vosdanik...

..Adoian.

Which is also a nice name.

He wanted to become an American.

He didn't want to ever say that he was an Armenian.

I wanted to take him the way he wanted ME to take him.

It never occurred to me that he would lie, for instance.

But I was frightened to death of Gorky, in a funny way.

'I remember my family was reluctant to visit the village where Gorky was born.

'They feared there'd be nothing there.

'They did not want to defy him, let real images replace their perceptions of Gorky's Armenia.'

How many people were killed?

Between one and a half million and two million, three million.

Anything.

And there are no Armenians left in Van now?

As far as I can tell, there aren't.

The position of Gorky in this is that he is a very symbolic figure.

You cannot deny that he went through the experience

which Armenians describe as being a genocide and the Turks define as being a displacement.

'Gorky's father fled to America before the massacres really started.

'Once he was there, he soon set up a new family.

'Gorky's mother sent him a photograph of herself with her son,

'to remind him of their existence.

'But the father never replied.

'Years later, Gorky found that picture forgotten in a drawer

'in his father's house in Watertown.

'He took the photo back, left his father and changed his name.

'He was 21 years old.'

He told me they had to leave their farm

with his mother and his sister, Vartoosh.

They had to walk all the way to Yerevan.

Torn apart, torn from home,

walking around Mount Ararat.

But there were enormous lots of them, of Armenian refugees

from Turkish Armenia over the border into Russia.

Gorky always said his mother died of starvation.

'The only written account by Gorky of his experience of genocide

'is a poem he wrote in 1944.

'"The song of the cardinal, liver

"Mirrors that have not caught reflection.

'"The aggressively heraldic branches.

'"The saliva of the hungry man

'"whose face is painted with white chalk."

'We went in search for Gorky's memories.

'This monastery had been in his mother's family for centuries.'

I think down there looks very like it.

Do you see? That tiny little island is just there.

The other picture, the mountains don't look like that.

Natasha, there are not many big stones everywhere.

And here there are no mountains behind us that are that shape.

-Well, let's just walk down this little path...

-Around the bend.

Why don't you go on ahead and explore?

I'll wait for Matthew.

Matthew! There's some tombstones.

WHISTLE

WHISTLING

All of your ancestors, my angel...

This is probably an ancestor of yours.

This is where my ancestors lived from 300 after Christ was born,

till when it was all destroyed.

I think it's here. The curve of the land is exactly the same.

Gosh! It does look like it!

-It looks just like it.

-Yes.

If you stand here, Matthew, come and look.

'Gorky's mother often walked to this family church

'from her husband's village of Khorkom,

'the last on the promontory.'

It's funny to think that so many ferocious things went on here.

The thing about Gorky's memories of Khorkom

is that they're very close to the ground.

You can almost feel that he's a child looking up at these things.

The gardens are these mysterious magical places with shapes.

'"The walls of the house in Russia where I spent my childhood

'"were made of clay blocks, deprived of all detail

'"with a roof of rough timber."'

Gosh! How beautiful!

Incredible.

'"I was taken away from my little village when I was five years old.

'"Yet, all my vital memories are of these first years.

'"These were the days when I smelled the bread, I saw my first red poppy,

'"the moon, the innocent seeing.

'"Since then, these memories have become iconography,

'"the shapes, even the colours.

'"Millstone, red earth, yellow wheat field, apricots.

'"On the road to the spring, my father had a little garden

'"with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit.

'"There was a ground constantly in shade,

'"where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots

'"and porcupines had made their nests.

'"But from where came all the shadows and constant battle

'"like the lances of Paolo Uccello's painting?"'

'The village where Gorky was born was called Khorkom.

'It was left empty in 1915 and in 1918, Kurds took it over.

'They rebuilt it using stones from the Armenian houses.

'Only one building remained intact.'

Beautiful!

-Here, they had the fire.

-HE SPEAKS IN OWN LANGUAGE

Then the smoke went up there.

-They lived here. It wasn't a barn.

-No, they lived.

They stored the grain there.

-The fire was here.

-It's a magnificent room.

And look at that beautiful goat!

-Look at the cobwebs.

-I know.

-They add to the marvellousness of it all.

He was small when he left.

Everything would have looked different

than if he'd come back as an adult.

Everything was done from memory. He never came back.

But he also, when he was in Virginia and he saw the weeds,

he was very excited by the weeds so he recognised bits of here

in other rural places, like Virginia.

He could make comparisons from his memories

and his observations.

Maybe it was that moment of comparison,

that exciting vertigo of your memory and what you're observing,

that moment which isn't quite the same, but almost.

This is so grand!

It may have been a mud hut, but look where it was!

It's unbelievably grand.

Look at the shadows on the...

The shadows on those low mountains, those foothills.

'Here was something my grandfather had NOT lied about.

'This was the view from his house.

'However brutish his circumstances,

'from the first moment of consciousness,

'he was surrounded by supreme beauty.

'On beauty, he pinned his lifelong perceptions.

'Beauty was his guide and the talisman he left his descendants.

'Now, I look at my grandfather's paintings and I ask different questions.

'An imaginary conversation can begin.

'The white noise has gone and we share some memories.'

When I look back, I see him

as this whole thing that he'd erected to protect himself

had been broken by the bad luck of his operation,

the slowness of his arrival -

because he wanted to arrive in the United States.

And look how long it's taken him to get as much applause as he now has.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd