Ruth Kligman

Ruth Kligman is portrayed through the diarist’s increasingly skeptical response to her accounts of intimacy. Her book about her relationship with Jackson Pollock prompts a film proposal, while a later encounter in which she describes a love affair with the diarist makes him question how much credence to give her story about Pollock.

The book and film proposal

On December 12, 1976, the diarist records reading Kligman’s book Love Affair, about her relationship with Jackson Pollock. He considers it so poor that adapting it, in his view, would require making an entirely new story. Kligman wants him to produce a film and Jack Nicholson to star, making her personal account the proposed basis for a screen project.

The diary also challenges the book’s presentation of distance and separation. Kligman’s account describes going as far away from Pollock as possible, but the diarist notes that she went to Sag Harbor while Pollock lived in Springs, about six miles away. He also doubts the account’s suggestion that Pollock’s discovery of her location was inexplicable, suspecting that she had shared her number with people who might pass it on.

Refusal and accusation

Kligman later calls the diarist while he is seeing Jack Nicholson and asks whether he will discuss the film with him. She also asks to be taken to meet Nicholson. The diarist refuses, explicitly connecting his decision to his negative impression of her book. Nicholson tells him that Kligman has already called him, indicating that she had approached the prospective star directly as well.

The diary records the diarist’s harsh belief that Kligman had driven Pollock into distress. That is his accusation, not an independently established account of responsibility for Pollock’s death. The episode shows how his judgment of the book becomes a judgment of its author: rather than treating the proposed adaptation as a separate creative opportunity, he rejects Kligman’s request on the basis of what he has read.

A claimed affair and renewed doubt

At a later gathering, Kligman kisses the diarist and speaks as though the two of them had once shared a love affair, apologizing for having ended it. He interprets this as a fantasy rather than a real shared history. Her claim changes how he reads her story about Pollock: he reasons that if she could describe an affair with him that he considered imaginary, her account of having had an affair with Pollock might also be unreliable.

The diary does not verify or disprove Kligman’s account of Pollock. Instead, it presents the diarist’s evolving suspicion, shaped first by his reading of Love Affair and then by an encounter he regards as invented intimacy. Kligman’s significance in these entries lies in that shift: she moves from proposing a film to becoming the focus of the diarist’s doubts about the boundary between personal history and self-dramatization.