Maatstaf. Jaargang 36

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Ethel Portnoy
Portfolio/What Happened to Scott Neary

If I had the power to go back to the past to set a few things right, I think I would go back carrying a doctor's bag. Oh, how I would run through the centuries with my little satchel, administering an injection here, a course of antibiotics there! I would be on time to inoculate Egon Schiele against the Spanish flu, to cure Schubert and Maupassant of syphilis, to pump a few hundred thousand units of penicillin into Mozart, or later, Géricault.

Géricault, who spent something like eighteen months on his deathbed, was only thirty-three when he died. What a waste! I learned that, among other things, from his biography by Charles Clément. That biography is full of interesting anecdotes; they not only shed light on the artist, but on his times. That is why I am going to tell you what happened to Scott Neary, who is just about as old now as Géricault when he died, but who, thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, has at least had better luck.

I met the very young Scott Neary some ten years ago, when he was still living in Amsterdam. I was looking for someone who could do the illustrations for my collection of urban folktales, Broodje Aap. Not only do I like illustrated books, but I felt instinctively that such a book needed illustrations. A catalogue of many such tales, page after page, could only become tiresome if it didn't have some kind of added attraction. I had seen a few drawings by Scott Neary before visiting him in his Amsterdam studio. You couldn't mistake his work for that of anyone else, always a strong point in an artist. As he showed me more of his drawings, I became convinced that he was the illustrator who could best do justice to the sort of atmosphere that pervaded those little stories about the horrors of modern life.

His performance surpassed my wildest expectations. Stories and pictures together, the book made a homogeneous unit, became a work of art in itself. After it appeared, I asked a friend of mine, a person whom Time has consistently proved wrong, what he thought of Scott's pictures. ‘Ugly,’ he said, his voice full of emotion. ‘Hideous!’ Work that is powerful, original and new is often rejected like that at first glance and called, in those exact words, ugly and hideous.

I knew then that I had made the right choice.

Slowly I have been getting new material together for a companion volume to Broodje Aap. Of course I shall ask Scott Neary to do the illustrations. But will it be the same Scott Neary? While in the intervening years things have been happening to me, the life of Scott Neary has also not stood still.

In April of last year I visited him in his apartment in New York. We spoke a bit about future collaboration on one project and another, and all seemed well. With the feeling that, as the Dutch so neatly put it, everything was in kannen en kruiken, I flew off to Russia. It was only later that year, in October, that I saw him again; he was paying a visit to Holland and he also came to The Hague to see me. And the tale he unfolded made me realize how all our mutual plans, how life itself, can hang by the slenderest of threads.

A few weeks after I had left New York, Scott discovered that he wasn't feeling very well. That's an understatement. He couldn't breathe, he was turning blue, he had terrible pains in his chest - in short he had all the symptoms of what appeared to be a full-fledged heart-attack. With his last strength he dragged himself over to a big hospital in his neighborhood and took a seat in the emergency-room among drunks,

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junks, victims of stabbings and car-accidents, and all the other flotsam that shows up in a big hospital on a Friday night in one of the ‘worst’ neighborhoods of New York - a very nice neighborhood by the way; it reminds me of Amsterdam.

It soon became clear that Scott wasn't having a heart-attack at all, but that he was suffering from some kind of pneumonia. Pneumonia: wasn't that one of the last stages of Aids? Scott is both young and good-looking, his appearance was against him. ‘Impossible,’ he protested, and a blood-test soon proved him right. So he was popped into bed and it was only on Monday when he was at death's door that a clever doctor came back from a weekend in the country and established a diagnosis: an unusual form of meningitis that attacks the lungs. Nowadays in the usa the policy is to tell the patient the truth, straight from the shoulder. An operation might provide surcease, said the doctor, but one couldn't be sure. Practically none of such cases survived, he told Scott cheerfully. He went off and left him to think it over.

Scott's parents showed up, to see their dying boy. They were brave. He himself was almost too surprised (and also too sick) to comprehend the magnitude of his misfortune. Did he get religion? Did he pray? Scott is the product of a mixed marriage and religion had never played a role in his upbringing. He was quite stoical, he was strong enough mentally not to ‘get religion’ now, and he was also quite strong physically, it turned out.

Scott was wheeled into the operating-theatre. His chest was cut open on one side. Masses of rubbish, practically solidified, were taken out. A few days later another big incision was made and more of the same was removed from the other side. ‘You should see my chest now,’ he told me. ‘Diagonal scars from side to side. It looks like the back of an envelope.’

While I sat there wringing my hands and thinking that where Scott was at present sitting there might have been a large empty space, he continued with his story. One morning he had looked at his face in the mirror and gasped. He had lost so much weight he looked like he had just been released from a concentrationcamp. But he was recovering. In the end, his operation made medical history and was published in a learned journal.

‘But how were you able to pay for all that?’ I asked. I know what medical care costs in the United States. Scott is an artist, and probably not in some insurance-scheme. ‘Oh, but I was,’ he told me. ‘If not for that, I might really have been dead now.’ It had been a matter of true luck, and sheer coincidence. The first thing they asked him when he appeared at the hospital was whether he was in a position to pay the bills. If not, they would have sent him on to a charity-hospital like Bellevue. And that would have been the end of Scott. But as fate would have it, he had recently been employed by the Time-Life organization. (An unwitting pun on the part of Providence.) Although his job had been terminated, his medical insurance was still good for a few months more. And of this information, the hospital made grateful use. At one point a nurse appeared in his room and asked him to blow in some contraption. He blew, she left. Total elapsed time, two minutes. Later, on his bill, he saw an item ‘Test of lung-function: $ 3000.’

After his release from hospital Scott took a long vacation lying in the sun and became once more the hearty, healthy Scott I saw before me. He started painting again, in fact he was here in Holland to open an exhibition of his latest work. He showed me slides of it. Maybe Scott hadn't got religion, but his work had changed. It was more relaxed, freer, looser, it had also become - how can I describe it? - bigger, grander. It had, in a word, developed. This, at least, was one positive result of the sudden blow of fate, the catastrophe that befell Scott Neary.

So here it is.

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The lost children
oil on canvas, 1987

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Summer 1986
pastel on paper, 1986

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The keeper of the flame
pastel on paper, 1987

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Portrait of Jean Pavan
oil on canvas, 1987

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The sacrifice
oil on canvas, 1987

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The avenging warrior
oil on canvas, 1987

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Shipwrecked
oil on canvas, 1987

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Fresh meat
oil on wood, 1987