The Bait Camp Visionary

Forrest Bess sold shrimp from a tin shanty on a spit of sand in East Matagorda Bay, reachable only by boat. He could not swim. He had built the shack himself from the salvaged hull of an old tugboat and copper sheets stripped off an old ferry, with a slanted concrete prow out front to deflect hurricanes.

He was also one of the great American visionary painters of the twentieth century.

For eighteen years his small canvases hung at Betty Parsons's gallery in Manhattan, on the same walls as Pollock, Rothko, and Newman. He shipped them north in boxes from Bay City. He carried on a thirty-year correspondence with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia. He wrote to Carl Jung. In January 1955, from Chinquapin, he wrote President Eisenhower to recommend his research as a Cold War weapon and to suggest Ike meet his art historian.

The research was this. Bess had concluded, from Jung and alchemy and Aboriginal subincision rites, that a man who became a pseudo-hermaphrodite would live forever. So in January 1952 he drank some whiskey, sat down in front of his kitchen mirror with a razor blade, and got started on himself.

In 1960 he wrote Betty Parsons a short note. Recently, he said, he had undergone a minor operation. Dialation was proceeding.

She kept showing the paintings.