Life and Times in Leschi
Frink Park 8: William Cumming, Part 1
“Sometime in an autumn in the late fifties … I was living in a disintegrating house on Thirtieth and Yesler [126 30th Avenue, Apt. 2], painting again after a fifteen-year exile occasioned by tuberculosis and a mad desire to change the world for the better, and I felt an ancient hunger to see and hear a friend twenty years out of the past who, more than anyone, had formed and shaped me out of the raw sewage of small-town youth. So, enveloped in the meager warmth of a lemon-yellow October sun, I walked up to the ridge overlooking Lake Washington …”
This description of a walk through Leschi opens William Cumming’s “Sketchbook, A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School.” The notional School was a pack of artists that he ran with, including Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Kenneth Callahan, who were the best known. Cumming described the School, which he had earlier denied existed as such, as a group of individuals who exerted a certain amount of influence on each other, who all worked “within the matrix of Northwest air and light and earth and water,” leading to some common approaches.
Cumming himself was quite the youngest in the Northwest School, and his memoir is full of his lack of self-confidence as part of that crowd. He said that painters in his circle have all known the utter despair that says to you in the night, “After all, isn’t it just a bit of mud smeared on a flat surface?”
But he learned from the others and turned out to be considered quite good himself. I’m no art critic, so who am I to say. But he certainly was a writer, and his delightful memoir drew me in, with what one reviewer described as his “richly allusive references,” even if his overlong sentences can sometimes be a challenge.
For years he was literally a starving artist, sketching passersby in Frink Park, living in little shacks where he would set up a studio; he was a sometime habitue of Skid Road and greasy spoons until that breed of eatery vanished, its place taken by “the modern fern-filled gourmet establishments where you have difficulty telling whether you’re eating your salad or the décor.”
He didn’t lack for wild companions. One fellow artist was working on display cards for a department store. Arriving at work falling-down drunk, the friend was barely able to crawl up on his stool, tottering dangerously. Somehow, he would get ahold of himself and accomplish his lettering perfectly. Asked by Cumming if he could have pulled that off sober, he replied, “I don’t ever recall being sober.”
Late in the Depression years he fell in with an older sculptor, Irene McHugh, who he would have known from the Federal Art Project. She had a tiny Leschi cottage at 414 Lakeside Avenue South, where Cumming spent much of his time in the summer months.
His work, like that of the writer Carlos Bulosan, his contemporary (profiled here last spring), was interrupted by a bout of tuberculosis, for which he spent time at Firland Sanitarium, in Shoreline, a decade after Bulosan. Also, like Bulosan, he was involved in leftist politics, though for Cumming it was a wrong turn, as he became a shrill Stalinist rather late in the game, in the early 1940s, by which time a lot of people knew better. (My mother had left the Communist Party orbit in 1939, at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact.) Cumming finally left the Party in 1957, in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and had to repent his membership at length. (That invasion finally turned my grandfather, too, against the Party. He was more stubborn than my mother.) Bulosan’s activism, on the other hand, was earthier, more abiding and grounded.
After he left the Party and took better care of his health, Cumming’s artistic productivity resumed. By the early 1960s he had won all the major prizes in Northwest painting.
Cumming also taught art lessons at his 30th Avenue apartment. One of his students was the young Tim Patrick, son of Josephine Patrick, previously mentioned here with respect to her relationship with Bulosan, who lived with her and her sons for a time in Leschi. The Patrick family knew Cumming through their Communist Party memberships—a common thread in a lot of pre- and post-war Leschi relationships.
Continued next month
~Roger Lippman
The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over his 48 years in the neighborhood.
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