FOR DECADES, Jess seldom left the run-down Victorian house in San Francisco's Inner Mission District that he shared for thirty years with the late poet Robert Duncan. He didn't like to be with a lot of people and once told me that it horrified him that he might at some point be the subject of someone's attention. Jess had fewer shows and probably fewer articles written about him than anyone of his generation whose work is similarly represented in many of the finest museums in the country. In addition to his innate shyness, the radical infrequency of his exhibitions had a lot to do with the fact that his works are so dense with meaning and material that each one took inordinate amounts of time to make. He used to talk about "indwelling," which for Jess could mean years pondering the formation of a single work.
Well, at a certain point, Jess, who died in January at age eighty, went so far inward that he became naturally magnetic; his authenticity such that he didn't need promotion. Over five decades, a family of writers, poets, curators, and collectors talked among themselves of Jess's importance, purchasing his works when they could and secreting his address and phone number, passing it carefully along only to those deemed protective of his indwelling sense. He was both ultimate outsider and legendary insider
Jess has often been explained as a West Coast Joseph Cornell, but that is too easy. Not even American Surrealist eccentricity could explain an imagery that was the result of one of the most interesting biographies of postwar American art. It was in 1948 that Jess had what he referred to simply as "the dream"--an intensely real, Technicolor vision of the earth being destroyed in the year 1975 through nuclear Armageddon. Certainly he wasn't the only one who thought this a possibility following the bombing of Hiroshima (which, as it happens, had occurred on August 6, 1945, the same date as this superstitious artist's twenty-second birthday). At the time of his dream, Jess was employed by General Electric Laboratories on their Hanford Project in Washington State, involved with plutonium production. He had previously been drafted into the army to work on the Manhattan Project, helping develop the weapon that would eventually level that Japanese city.

Six months after his dream, the radio chemist and Sunday painter quit his job at GE and went south to become an artist and find, as he put it, "an antidote to the scientific method." He enrolled at Cal Berkeley on the GI Bill, and when the evaluators saw the extent of his scientific background in his application and his desire now to study art, they asked him to undergo psychological testing. He eventually ended up at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was exposed to the teachings of Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, David Park, Edward Corbett, and Ad Reinhardt, among others. He would learn about abstraction and various interpretations of the sublime from some of the best, but he would not follow the path of so many second- and third-generation abstract mannerists. Jess was an imagemaker and storyteller whose ambition was to redeem the high European tradition of mythic subject matter and symbolism. He would do so using images from the unlikely matrix of his neighborhood thrift stores and used bookshops.

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The house that he and Duncan shared was a literary Merzbau of disparate imaginations, engaging an incredible range of visual and literary culture, from Gnostic texts and Greek poetry to collections of Harper's Bazaar, Life magazine, and Scientific American. Among his prized possessions were various editions of the Oz books, including a first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its immediate sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). Other treasures included an early edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and many books by Carroll's lesser-known friend George MacDonald, such as The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883). The third floor of the house seemed the spookiest, containing a library of science fiction and neglected romantic literature, including the books of Mary Butts. A great-granddaughter of Thomas Butts, the patron of William Blake, she wrote stories that interwove ancient myth and ritual with a deeply felt spirituality that invariably verged on the surreal and supernatural.

Jess was particularly taken by authors who could evoke a foggy landscape where everything--animate and inanimate--reverberates with spirit and conscience and where trails are never quite clearly marked but invariably lead to narrative surprises and apparitions. In the children's stories that Jess and Duncan loved and would discuss for hours over breakfast, no element could be taken as benign. Everything had mythic implications. As Duncan once said, "You can't take a piss in this house without getting hit with a myth." It is that offbeat, as opposed to Beat, literature that suggests an analogy for the peculiar way boundaries are blurred in Jess's art and Duncan's poetry, between high art and kitsch, past and present, real and fantastic.