It was in the Fifties that space gripped the American imagination, as shown by the long streams of paranoid genre movies, many of which have weathered surprisingly well. At this time, space and the Moon were still blank canopies across which you could spread the psyche (sometimes explicitly as in the classic The Forbidden Planet, a Freudian remake of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). Later, in the Sixties, some feared that Apollo would destroy the Moon’s value as the most elastic symbol or metaphor since God. In 1963 (by coincidence the same year that his poet wife Sylvia Plath committed suicide) Ted Hughes published a book of children’s poetry called Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, in which a menagerie of apparitions lies waiting to repel any assault on Luna’s sovereign mystique. There is something wishful about “The Burrow Wolf,” for example, in which Hughes warns:
Many a spaceman in the years to come
Will be pestled with meteorites in that horny turn
If he does not dive direct into those jaws
He may well wander in there after a short pause
For over the moon general madness reigns –
Bad when the light waxes, worse when it wanes –
And he might lunatically mistake this wolf for his wife
So the man in the moon ended his life.
The imminent Moon landings also functioned as a backdrop and philosophical engine for the playwright Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, which looked dated and irrelevant when I first saw it in 1985, but was asking interesting questions again in a 2003 revival. Interviewed in the Sunday Times, Stoppard explained what had been on his mind when he wrote it.
“The inspiration for the play,” he said, “was my private thought that if and when men landed on the moon, something interesting would occur in the human psyche, that landing on the moon would be an act of destruction. There is a quotation when the first landing occurred from the Union of Persian Storytellers … they claimed it was somehow damaging to the livelihood of the storytellers. I understood that completely.”
He worried that the landings would ruin the Moon as a “benign metaphor,” the chaperone of romance and unspoken feeling, and also that once we could see ourselves from such a distance, all the absolute ideas of what is good and bad would come to look like “local customs coming from a finite place,” and a kind of moral paralysis would occur. That neither of these things happened is fascinating. That it seems to have had the opposite effect on some of the few who actually went is doubly fascinating. The first thing you notice when you watch For All Mankind, the Oscar-winning collection of Apollo footage which the journalist Al Reinert spent years assembling, then set against a wondrous Brian Eno sound track and lunar astronauts talking about their trip, is that the magic never left for them. The second is how similar Deep Space talk is to psychedelic Sixties drug talk. If these cats had been allowed to pack beards and bongs in their “personal preference kits,” you couldn’t have improved upon:
“When the sunlight shines through the blackness of space, it’s black. But I was able to look at this blackness: I mean, what are you looking at? Call it the Universe, but it’s the infinity of space and the infinity of time. I’m looking at something called ‘space’ that has no end, and at ‘time,’ that has no meaning. You can really focus on it, because you’ve got this planet out there, this star called Earth, which is all lit up. Because when the sunlight strikes on an object, it strikes on something called ‘Earth.’ And it’s not a hostile blackness. Maybe it’s not hostile because the view of Earth gives it life …”
While you could get arrested in some states for saying:
“I know where I am when I look at the Moon … stars are my home.”
People have suggested that these similar vocabularies stem from the way drugs and space both promise shortcuts to nirvana (for Edgar Mitchell, this may have been true). Others hold that they both represent attempts to escape our eternal foe, gravity. It works both ways, too. In 1966, the Byrds were hit by a radio ban of their single “Eight Miles High” because it was assumed to be a “drug song.” In fact, band members David Crosby and Roger McGuinn were space and flying enthusiasts who spent hours lying on the bonnets of their cars watching airliners take off and land at Los Angeles airport. Like “Mr. Spaceman” from the same classic Fifth Dimension album, the song really was about flying.
Novaspace is unique, yet nestles in a parade of shops as archetypal and unassuming as any in America. Its grey walls are hung floor to ceiling with fantastical renderings of Jovian landscapes and hypothetical planets with chlorine-fluorine atmospheres that glow emerald green at twilight, and future-realist spacecraft that look perversely old-fashioned, as the future invariably does these days. I look around for a while; then proprietor Kim Poor appears and ushers me into his spartan office.
Poor is tall, about six foot four, with greying hair and a neo-Zappa beard that sets off his angular face. He has a ready smirk and a dry wit and walks with a cane and slight limp – the consequence, he explains, of a rare congenital disorder called Machado-Joseph disease, which affects his motor functions and equilibrium. It forced him to stop painting in 1994, which wasn’t as hard as he’d expected (“I think I enjoy scenery a lot more now that I don’t have the burden of trying to paint it”), but two years ago he had to give up playing guitar in bands, and that did hurt. I look up and notice that there are autographs of Paul McCartney and George Martin among the astronauts’ on the wall. On his flickering computer screen is an e-mail circular warning space collectors about a con man who’s on the loose selling fake Moondust. By U.S. Government decree, no one is allowed to own pure Moondust, not even astronauts. A few people have already been stung.
The place has been in business since 1978, after Poor gave up pursuing his music and political science degree at the University of Arizona to be a painter and musician, and the market led him to space art. It took off straightaway and a few years later he helped to form the International Association of Astronautic Arts, which brought together space artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. They’d convene for two-week summits “and drink like crazy,” until the Curtain collapsed and state funding for the Russians dried up.
“They could never understand that American artists, in this rich country, had to pay for everything,” Poor chuckles, “where the Russians, the Communists, were being subsidized. They’d apply for a grant and they’d get the money … it’s hard to imagine! I can see a bunch of them working at McDonald’s now.”
Soviet space art always had a different flavour from the American stuff, says Poor. They didn’t have access to the same detailed information, which is why he thinks their work was more heroic, less illustrative. The fact is, though, that the Soviets always had a more romantic attitude to space. Yuri Gagarin’s first words to his public after his craft’s recovery were: “The feelings which filled me I can express with one word: joy.” You could have coached Alan Shepard till his head exploded and never persuaded him to say something like that. The godfather of American space art is Chesley Bonestell, who lived from 1888 to 1986 and was claimed as an influence by both von Braun and Arthur C. Clarke, but Poor tells me that most of the successful Americans and Europeans are boomers like him and work to a style only half-jokingly described as “hypothetical realism.” This involves photorealistic renderings of places and things that you can’t get photos of.
“The real good space art makes you want to go there … it scares some people, too,” he says.
And this is what makes Alan Bean so different. Bean paints Apollo scenes, endlessly, over and over, but he’s an unreconstructed Impressionist who has studied under an impressive range of contemporary artists. Bean didn’t stumble into this any more than he stumbled into being a test pilot, and meeting him at a Houston art show was “a real apocalyptic thing” for Poor, because not only did he acquire the work of an artist who would become more commercially successful than anyone thought possible, he gained access to the other astronauts and the burgeoning memorabilia market, which has become the most lucra
tive part of his business. His face cracks into a grin as he remembers the first day of their acquaintance.
“He took me back to his place that night and made me critique his stuff. It was a tiny, tiny condominium, two point five per cent bigger than Skylab – he figured that out … you ask for directions to his house, he’ll tell you in tenths of a mile. But he was also the inspiration for the Jack Nicholson character in Terms of Endearment.”
“You’re kidding!” I exclaim.
“No,” laughs Poor, employing a delightfully obscene colloquialism to indicate that Bean, in his younger days, was attractive to women, and that the feeling was self-evidently mutual. “He drove a Corvette then, but he’s settled down now. And his wife, Leslie, raises Lhasa Apsos [tiny, fluffy dogs], so there’s ten of those little hairy things running around in this tiny little place. And Alan painted in the living room: I like to say that Alan spelt sideways is anal – and he is, too, boy! Most painters have their stuff everywhere, but he’ll have his brushes laid out, his paints all laid out, and he can paint on a shag rug and not get a drop on it. In a suit! I mean, I’ve got paint on my socks – when I wear white pants is when I feel the urge to paint. Alan’s not like that, everything was laid out perfectly. It was almost ridiculous. It’s the engineering, you know. Anyway, it all started from there.”
The For All Mankind director Al Reinert will also be laughing when he describes Bean’s home as “the lair of a fanatic.” I’m not sure if Poor’s right to blame the engineering background, though, because the LM engineers used to grumble about Bean (and Conrad – “a party animal, he was hilarious”) not taking them seriously enough. Anyway, when the spaceman artist came to Novaspace to sign copies of a book about his art, the queue ended up snaking all over the car park, because he insisted on having conversations with every one of the hundreds who turned out, where most signees don’t even make eye contact. And while he’s intense about his work, he’s no diva. Poor recently returned a painting of Pete Conrad clicking his heels on the Moon because he didn’t think it was working and he says that Bean didn’t even complain. Much.
The hypothetical realists don’t do much for me. My own taste in art is almost exclusively modern, something I’m much less proud of since discovering that it may be no more than a manifestation of the cult of the New I was born into – the same one which got Kennedy elected, bundled a nation to the Moon and shipped a ton of vacuum cleaners. Either way, I can’t respond to the hypothetical realists. Poor was right about Bean, though: his work couldn’t be more different. On the pages of a book, his paintings looked amiable enough, but up close you can see the intensity of feeling that has gone into them, the intricate texture and attention to detail. Sometimes he mixes fragments of a pin or patch he wore to the Moon in with the paint, adding part of his real, physical self to the scene.
The one I’d most liked to see isn’t here and I hadn’t expected it to be. That’s How It Felt to Walk on the Moon was painted in response to that question and has Bean standing on the lunar surface in a reflective haze of greens and violets and golds, a palette which no one will ever see on the Moon, because these are the colours of the euphoria he felt as he stood there. I’m still not sure whether I like what I see in front of me, and I resent the way that the Stars and Stripes intrudes on one picture, but I find it easy to respect them. Eventually, I’ll track down a book called In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet / American Space Art Book and be astonished at the difference between the two schools, because the Soviets, including the astronaut Alexei Leonov, the first person to walk in space and a very fine painter indeed, clearly see themselves as coming out of a tradition – out of a modernist tradition which they’ve been schooled in – and their work is rich and dynamic and constantly surprising. It seems to me that Bean has more in common with them than with the Americans. Yet this only serves to intensify a question I’ve had in my mind all along. Why is Bean, clearly a skillful artist, restricting himself to painting scenes from Apollo? Whenever I think about this, I get an image of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, wallowing in mud in his living room, obsessively trying to build a copy of the mountain from behind which an alien spaceship will ultimately emerge.
Is this Bean? An unholy cross between Dreyfuss and Naughty Jack Nicholson?
Houston would never win a beauty contest, but Bean’s neighbourhood on the edge of town is lovely, like a series of causeways cut through a friendly forest, saluted by all manner of towering, weeping trees, no one’s idea of Texas. Then there’s a gate with a guardhouse and a mazy network of Hansel-and-Gretel roads on the other side, onto which houses peek through the shrubbery. Dusk is falling as I find the simple two-story building for which Bean swapped the condo six years ago, when he must have been sixty-four. I make to park opposite and suddenly here he is, beckoning me into his drive and inexplicably admiring my hire car (a Dodge Stratus!) in his eurythmic Texan drawl as I climb out. He wears a candy-striped Ralph Lauren polo shirt and brown trousers, standing about five foot eight with a round dome head (the hair was receding even before he flew), round wire specs and trim but still somehow round physique. The first thing he reminds me of does me no credit at all: it’s Laa-Laa the Teletubby – even though I’d have recognized his Cheshire cat grin anywhere. Bean is seventy but looks scarcely older than me. From just behind him comes an enthusiastic yapping of dogs.
What do I know about him? That his ancestors were “MacBeans,” reputedly banished from Scotland after one of their number, John, bore arms against Cromwell. As Alan tells it, the most important formative influence on him was his mother, Frances, who had an inexhaustible reservoir of encouragement and love for her only son, whose confidence could be fragile. When he was a small child in Fort Worth, his parents had taken him to watch airplanes swoop in on Mecham Field, and he was enchanted by them. He joined the Naval Air Reserve in high school and spent weekends cleaning planes and talking to pilots. When he heard about naval scholarships to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas, he enthusiastically decided to apply. He remembers the morning of the exam clearly, because he woke up convinced that he hadn’t a chance of passing, but his mother coaxed him out of bed and drove him downtown. This was a rare gesture, because Frances preached self-reliance to her children, but she knew how badly he wanted to fly. He cites that day as a turning point in his life, because he won the scholarship and eventually a place at the test pilot school at Patuxent River in Maryland, where one of his instructors was his future Apollo 12 commander, Pete Conrad. He didn’t make the second selection of astronauts in 1962, but was included in the third and every photo of the Astronaut Corps thereafter included an image of him smiling, always smiling. He looked like the happiest man on Earth.
He remembers the aura surrounding the Mercury 7, whom you’d pass in the corridor and almost not dare speak to. They lived like movie stars, drove Ferraris and Lamborghinis, partied with millionaires, played touch football with JFK. And the people in the later groups, people like Ed Mitchell and Bill Anders, were smart. He claims often to have felt out of place and inadequate, and was at first cold-shouldered by Deke Slayton and Al Shepard, who helped assign him to a dead-end tributary programme. Then a slot unexpectedly became available on Conrad’s crew, when – and we’ve heard this before – a T-38 trainer jet being flown by his Lunar Module pilot, C. C. Williams, inexplicably went into a violent roll over Florida and crashed before he could eject safely. Conrad, an influential member of the corps by now, insisted that his former student fill the space. Slayton later denied underestimating Bean, but, like Armstrong before him, he was the last of his group to be assigned a flight and that time in the wilderness, he later admitted, had been “difficult and frustrating … I constantly felt I didn’t measure up to the other astronauts and that’s why they were flying before me, and I wasn’t sure why.” He has said that every time he thought about Apollo in those dark days, “it hurt.” But he was lucky. By his account, Conrad and Gordon taught him most of what he’s s
ince learned about life.
My spirit leaps as he walks me through a dark hallway into the living room, a light room with a vaulted ceiling and crisp wooden floor. At the far end, sliding doors lead out to the small garden, but just in front of them are three easels holding a trio of large paintings, one of which shows Pete Conrad clicking his heels … it’s the one Kim Poor sent back. In front of them is a long table covered with palettes, brushes, tubes of paint and small models of spacemen in suits, and on the wall to their right hang a dozen or so of his other paintings, moving from early, relatively monochromatic efforts, which appeal to me much more than I’d have thought, to more colourful and boldly Impressionistic later works. Best of all, That’s How It Felt to Walk on the Moon is propped against the wall. He offers me a cup of coffee in his bright Texan drawl and gently cautions against hanging my leather jacket on the coat rack, because that’s Lhasa Apso territory and my incursion upon it would play havoc with the house social order, from whence it would be but a small step to anarchy. So I sling the jacket on a chair as Alan introduces the dogs by names which would make Tinky Winky blush.
APOLLO 12, the second mission to the Moon, flew in November 1969, at the end of what had been a strange couple of years. The hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco had failed to pacify 1967 by declaring a “Summer of Love,” but 1968 was terrifying to most people. Thanks to the new satellite TV technology, the world now watched in real time as student protesters were beaten all over the U.S. and in Tokyo, Nairobi, Dacca and Prague, where Soviet tanks crushed Alexander Dubcek’s experiment in liberalization. Mick Jagger wrote the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” about the first violent anti-Vietnam demonstration in London, which he’d attended, while in the U.S. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been assassinated, finally tipping the balance away from nonviolence in the struggle for racial equality. The word “black” replaced “negro” that year and Palestinians were spoken of as a distinct people for the first time; full-scale war in the Middle East looked probable. Most Americans also heard the term “women’s liberation” for the first time when feminists stormed the Miss America Pageant.