QUIET, PLEASE

I WAS overwhelmed by the onrush and outrage of machine noise on the earth and, oh God, everywhere in the air," explained Morris Graves, and two years ago fled his Seattle home for a quiet place. His new retreat: a manor house in the green Irish hills near Dublin. There he could hear once again the little sounds of nature that are "essential nourishment" for him at 49. But the racket of the U.S. inspired some of the best pictures Graves has made in years.

Elegant and cadaverous, calm and withdrawn behind his beard. Graves does not sputter on reporters' griddles but speaks with sad, cold force. The intense romanticism of his paintings is absent from his public personality. Back in the U.S. for a brief visit last week, he explained that his Spring with Machine-Age Noises series was painted in anger before leaving the U.S. For him it represents the noise of "jets, chain saws, freight trains, trucks, bulldozers" sweeping over a grassy patch.

Procession of Sounds in the Night, done in 1943, was an imaginative effort to give shapes to bodiless little noises, to picture 'the creatures you thought might make the sounds you could not identify." The two pictures together seemed to prove what Graves himself denies: that both whispers in the grass and the roaring of machinery can be beautiful, in totally different ways. Vachel Lindsay, an earlier American romantic, once put the point in verse:

I find in the stubble of the new-cut weeds

A whisper and a feasting, all one needs:

The whisper of the strawberries, white and red

Here where the new-cut weeds lie dead.

But I would not walk all alone till I die

Without some life-drunk horns going by.

And up around this apple-earth they come

Blasting the whispers of the morning dumb:--

Cars in a plain realistic row.

And fair dreams fade

When the raw horns blow.

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