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219 23 Painting, Passports, and Protest If only France was in Connecticut If only England was in Connecticut If only Connecticut was in Turkey —Ruth Krauss, “If Only,” There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells (1968) With Ruth recovered from her bout with spinal meningitis, she and Dave decided to travel abroad, applying for new passports in the fall of 1964. She was sixty-three and he was fifty-eight: If they were going to see more of the world, now was the time to do it. Before departing, however, they began speaking out at home against the Vietnam War, which had begun to escalate with the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August. In late December 1964 or early January 1965, Johnson was among the seventy-five national initiating sponsors of the Assembly of Men and Women in the Arts, Concerned with Vietnam. Joining him were old friends Kay Boyle, Antonio Frasconi, and Ad Reinhardt; New Masses–era colleagues Maurice Becker and Rockwell Kent; and Ray Bradbury, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, E. Y. Harburg, and Tillie Olsen.1 In February, the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam galvanized the antiwar movement, and Krauss soon added her name to those calling for peace in Vietnam. This was an unusual step for her. She did not usually sign petitions, but she abhorred violence, even in cartoons.Along with four hundred others, Krauss signed a statement that ran in the New York Times on 18 April. Titled “End Your Silence” and subtitled “A Protest of Artists and Writers,” the fullpage ad called for “an immediate turning of the American policy in Vietnam to the methods of peace.” In addition to Johnson and many of the others who had already joined the Assembly of Men and Women in the Arts, Concerned with Vietnam, other signatories included Johnson-and-Krauss friends Remy Charlip and Nina and Herman Schneider; poets Donald Hall, Stanley Kunitz, Muriel Rukeyser, and Louis Untermeyer; novelists Joseph Heller and Philip 220 Painting, Passports, and Protest Roth; artists Hugo Gellert, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko; and critics Leslie Fiedler and Susan Sontag.2 By the time the ad appeared, Ruth and Dave had embarked for Europe. They traveled by ship to Lisbon, Naples,Athens, and the Greek isles of Rhodes, Delos, Santorini, and Astypalea. Ruth loved the seals on Delos’s shore, but the children of Astypalea impressed her most—so much so that she wrote two letters to Ursula Nordstrom describing the “children running down from the hills with flowers all kinds & colors known & unknown & putting them all over me.”Even when they did not speak her language, children were drawn to Ruth and she to them.3 Dave had never been to Europe before and relished learning everything about each place. After their sea voyage, they moved on to the European mainland, visiting Venice, Lausanne, and Vallorbe before crossing the border into France and arriving in Paris in early June. Dave seemed so at home there that a lost Frenchman came to him for directions in a Paris Metro station. A month later, they were in London, where Dave“poked around on every street north of the Thames from London Bridge to Battersea Bridge as far inland as Oxford and Holborn Streets and the Wall.” He was intent on absorbing as much of each new place as he could, walking the streets, looking at the architecture , visiting landmarks. Ruth was less thrilled, writing,“I hate London— noise, dirt, traffic, confusion etc. etc. Dave loves it.”4 While in London, Dave provided some wry “travel advice” for Harper’s Barbara Dicks, who had previously lived there. Knowing that Ruth had visited London before, Barbara asked in a letter “if you find London changed since you were last there.” Dave, who had never visited the city before, replied,“Of course there are so many new things for me to notice. Right between The Strand and Pall Mall there is a tall monument (in a circle they call Trafalgar Square) to some guy who was the boyfriend of Lady Hamilton, I think. This and a number of other things were not here in the London I knew back in 1765.” He was also amused by New England’s appropriations of old England’s architecture:“Near Waterloo Station I saw (from the train from Folkestone) a church that is an exact replica of a Wren church in Provincetown. It took me a moment to figure out I...

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