by Paul Theroux
The Cape was empty, the fallen snow was black, the trees looked stiffer in the cold; and if I thought anything I suppose it was about having spent the day photographing snow scenes from the window and how easy and untruthful it was compared with being in it. I sang, but I stared at the low wolfish woods and the toppling flakes and heard the tire chains doing a smacking rhumba on the mudguards. At the brows of hills the snowy sky and storm clouds hung like a shroud. It was coming down hard, but it wasn’t freezing—this snowfall brought a somber warmth to the road, damp and temporary—so the car cut its own track and tossed the slush aside and I could see the flying blobs sink in the banks and plow-marks at the roadside. Every so often there would be a soft thud as a mound of wet snow slid down an evergreen bough; then the bough would shake itself and spring up sighing.
Orlando said, imitating Papa, “Gawjus.”
Outside Wellfleet, below the small village, the Overalls’ house was twinkling on the cove. It faced the Bay, where a commotion of waves, whiter than the snow, was rising to meet the storm and traveling in to beat against the low jetty: flecks of white on the swells highlighting the turbulence, peaks subsiding and beginning, a sound at the sea-wall like icy digestion, and from the house, laughter.
There was something barbarous about all those drunken people raising hell in the house on such a beautiful night, and as soon as I saw them at the windows I wanted to go away. I said, “I hate parties.”
“You might meet a nice fella,” said Orlando.
“I’ve got a nice fella,” I said. I squeezed his gloved hand. “I’m staying with you.”
He said, “What about you, Phoebe?”
“You know damn well what I want,” she said.
Orlando laughed, then yanked up the hand brake. The motor shuddered, coughed, spat, and died.
Inside, there were mostly youngsters, tearing around and sweating. They were ladling some sort of orange poison out of a punchbowl which had hunks of bruised grapefruit in it. It was a fairly typical get-together for those years: if people weren’t drinking there was a dead silence; if they were, they were drunk. There was no in-between.
Everyone cheered, seeing Orlando, and they swept him away from Phoebe and me. For the next hour or so it was a madhouse, the noisy college crowd making a night of it, one enormous brute pounding a ukulele with his knuckles, couples canoodling on the sofa, and some out cold and making a Q-sign with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.
I was deeply shocked. It dawned on me that I was seeing another side of Orlando: this person had been hidden from me, and I wanted to take him, then and there, and go home. Boys in crimson sweaters kept coming over and asking Phoebe to dance. She said no, but at last I said, “You might as well,” and she began dancing with Sandy. Then Orlando, who had not been dancing, snatched a girl’s arm and whirled her around in front of Phoebe. The dancers were jumping so hard the pictures shook on the walls. I sat there with my feet together thinking: I’m a photographer.
Later, Orlando came over to me. His eyes were glazed and his other self smirked. He said, “Where’s Phoebe?”
“Dancing her feet off.”
He made a face. “Why aren’t you?”
“No one asked me,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t want to.”
He dragged me out of my chair and whisked me to the center of the room. Then he did a kind of monkey-shuffle; I imitated him and we were dancing. I heard someone say, “That’s his sister,” and I tried even harder.
Orlando knew a trick that took my breath away each time he did it. It was this: he stood in one spot, clenched his fists at his sides and did a backward somersault, landing on his feet. He had done it for us in the garden or on the beach—I had a photograph of him where he appeared as a pair of whirling trousers above an admiring Phoebe. That night dancing with me he did three of them in a row and caused such a sensation that everyone stopped to watch him. He very nearly took a spill on his last somersault—he backflipped and I thought he was going to land on his stomach—but he came up smiling on two feet.
Phoebe said, “Stop it, Ollie, you’re going to be sick.”
Orlando, who was red in the face from all those jumps, said, “I’m all right—I can prove it.”
“Go ahead,” said Phoebe.
“Give me room.”
People had gathered around to listen, and after that wild dancing and those somersaults Orlando’s curly hair was damp with sweat and lying close to his head. He blazed with energy, his shirt half unbuttoned and his teeth gleaming. Someone kicked the phonograph and it stopped yakking “What’ll I Do” and Orlando said in his growly voice,
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber . . .
There was a hush—he had silenced them with his superb poem, one I had never heard before. And I knew why he was saying it. I was proud: he was declaring his love for me. I saw everyone watching, and even Phoebe, who had criticized him for his somersaulting and acted as if he was showing off—I saw her rapt attention. Her dress was open at her neck and she was breathing hard, her breasts going up and down. I tried to catch her eye, but she faced Orlando, her mouth rounded as if she were saying, “Ollie,”
Orlando’s voice teased and swelled and dropped, became emphatic on one word and nearly sang another. Each syllable had a different weight. Now he was hunched, and seemed to be listening as he spoke.
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
I heard It was no dream, and I knew, I remembered that summer night when I had stolen along the hall and thought the house was going to fall down, and he was in the dark waiting for me. So it had mattered to him, too, although he had been so young. What a beautiful memory he had made it in the poem. He had cast his spell over everyone, and outside the snow dust sprinkled at the window and the waves gulped as they tucked into the sea wall. He loved me. I stepped back so that no one would see my tears.
Phoebe was beside me. She said, “Don’t cry.”
But she was crying herself. It did not surprise me: we were sisters, and wept or laughed together.
“Let’s take him home now,” I said.
There was applause. Orlando had finished, but before we could get to him a boy stepped between Orlando and us and said to him, “You think you’re something.”
Orlando smiled at him, his bright devastating smile that shut people up.
The boy said, “I loathe the Elizabethans.”
“Wyatt wasn’t an Elizabethan,” said Orlando. “He was dead before Shakespeare was born.”
The boy spoke at large: “He’s a Harvard man!”
Orlando said, “I don’t think I know you.”
“Charlie,” said the boy, and put his hand out, and when Orlando didn’t shake it he said, “It’s trite and sentimental.”
“I like it,” said Orlando.
“Like it? What kind of literary judgment is that? Let’s take it line by line and see if it stands up.”
Orlando looked sad. I wanted that boy Charlie to stop.
Charlie said, “You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means—you’re just seduced by the tumpty-tumpty rhythm.” He looked around for people to agree with him. “It sounds important, but underneath it’s just Dorothy Parker.”
“Lay off,” said Orlando quietly.
“He’s getting mad,” said Charlie.
“Just shut up.” Orlando started to walk away.
“Look at the professor now,” said Charlie.
“You’ve had too much gin, sonny,” said Sandy, trying to quiet Charlie down.
Charlie said, “It’s the cadences that get me.”
I knew Orlando wasn’t going to say anything, because he never talked about poetry like that. He had been so happy, and now he looked as if he was going to walk into a wall.
> Phoebe said, “I’ll get his coat.”
But Charlie said in a wuffling critic’s voice, “He wanted to impress us. It sounds very sweet, but it’s just artifice, low cunning, a kind of trick—”
And Orlando, who had been walking in circles, went over to him and grabbed him by the lapels and flung him across the room.
Blanche screamed.
Charlie got to his feet. Orlando hurried over to him and hit him hard in the face, and as he fell back someone opened the door and out he tumbled, doing a frantic tap dance on the steps and struggling into the snow. Orlando descended the steps, waited for him to rise, and knocked him down again.
Orlando said, “It’s time to go.”
Seeing that we were leaving, Charlie picked himself up and laughed—a rueful and defeated snicker. He had snow on his back and snow on his head and looked punished, like a tramp in a storm.
Orlando’s was the best reply I had ever seen, and it taught me everything I needed to know about critics: a critic was someone you wanted to hit.
“I’m sorry,” said Orlando, when we were in the car. He started the engine and chuckled. “No, I’m not sorry.”
I had never loved him more. His poem had kindled a fire in me where there had been warm ashes. It was unlike him to fight, but it was unlike him to do somersaults in public or recite poems. He was full of surprises.
Frank said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re sure you want to go to Provincetown?”
“It was your idea.”
We were now beyond Truro, the road had widened, the sky was everywhere, propped magnificently on shafts of sunlight that held the clouds high. And soon we were sailing across the dunes into Provincetown. It had saved me before; it saved me again. I’d done it.
11
Boogie-Men
A PLACE I had plumbed with my camera had few memories for me. The pictures were definition enough, done at so many angles that the photographs were the whole; more was presumption, mere lies. If a person said, “I’ve seen your pictures—now I want to go there,” I knew I had failed. Only bad pictures made you look further. A great portrait to me was intimate knowledge, ample warning that there was nothing concealed, nothing more to say. I knew from Mrs. Conklin, Frenise, and Slaughter that my camera recorded surfaces, but that surfaces disclosed inner states: a person wore his history on his face, past and future, the mortal veil of lines and the skull beneath. There is a self-destruction, suicide’s wince, in the eyes of my Marilyn and my Hemingway, and my Frost shows an utter egomaniac. I never denied the truth of the savage’s complaint about photographers, that in taking their pictures we were stealing their souls.
I had always been interested in what people called savages. I thought of them as boogie-men. They bulked large in my first exhibition, which was held in a boathouse, formerly the Wharf Theater, in Provincetown. Frank wanted to see the place and hear about the show. I could tell he was rather let down by its size, the dinginess that gave it the look of a little chapel. If you didn’t have the faith you wouldn’t hear; you’d just find the acoustics awfully echoic and the stage too narrow and the whole building a firetrap.
Frank said, “Is this all there is to it?” I said yes, and he said, “It’s just the way I imagined it.”
“Sure it is.”
“But I wish I’d seen Provincetown before it got commercialized.”
“Bull-sugar,” I said. “It was always commercialized. It’s been like this for sixty years—vulgar, plastic, phony antiques, windows full of saltwater taffy, queers everywhere, and pennants saying ‘Provincetown.’ It was declared a national monument by President Taft, and he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. It’s been on the map ever since they started to sell egg-timers with Pilgrims painted on them and ashtrays made out of quahog shells. Don’t knock it—that’s its heritage.”
We were on the street, walking to the Town Wharf for lunch. Frank said, “Really strange people, too. They’re all on drugs.”
“Nonsense.”
“I blame their parents.”
“Bull. They’re carsick. Listen, it’s a long drive.”
Provincetown before my time had been an appalling fishing village of dull clapboard houses, narrow streets, creaking porches, one severe church, and sand blowing down from the dunes eroding the Puritan geometry. It had always had its Sunday painters: water-colorists change nothing. It was the poets, the queer antique dealers, the escapees, the actors and loonies and curio sellers who gave it life. The summer people in their roadsters carried frenzy here and saved the place from being just another sand dune.
Until I did it, Provincetown was portrayed as quaint and dead. The painters painted the dunes, the photographers took pictures of the wooden houses, the sculptors collected driftwood and made these warped sticks into lamps and horror-objects. The writers ignored it; they rented shacks and wrote about their terrible childhoods. But I had been born on the Cape; these houses and boats meant nothing to me, and I had seen enough fishnets and lobster pots to last me a lifetime. It was the rest that excited me—the funny little boathouse that had once been a theater, the fairies walking along Commercial Street with their pinky fingers linked, the visitors who stuck out a mile. Throughout the Twenties and into the Thirties I took pictures there. I saw a man with a perfect head and photographed him, and later I found out he was the poet Cummings—a wonderful memory because I thought he was a genius before I saw a single line he’d written: I liked his head and the way his jokester’s thick lips curled when he laughed. He was much funnier than the other one, who looked ruined and squinting, the sunlight removing half his face, O’Neill. Pugmire and his vast collection of medicine bottles, Bunny Wilson and his cronies, the tragic Bruno Bassinet who was found floating face down in his underwear in Hatches Harbor, the get-togethers O’Neill arranged above Peaked Hill Bar: this was my Provincetown.
And there was a direct link between Provincetown and New York City. In the space of ten years I did two sets of Robeson pictures, the first before the notorious hand-kissing scene in All God’s Chillun, the next in 1932 during the New York revival of Show Boat. Robeson sang (always “Lindy”) as I did him and he had more moods than anyone I had known.
“They want me to play Othello,” he said at our first session.
“That’s only natural.”
“I really want to play Hamlet.”
But in the event he played Emperor Jones.
He was my first boogie-man. Even as a celebrity, Robeson was considered a savage by most people, like the Ubangis my uncle Tod brought over from Africa, who were paraded out as freaks on the stage of the Old Howard in Scollay Square. “They were so sad,” he said. He guessed they were homesick, and to cheer them up Uncle Tod let them sit near the furnace in the basement boiler room where they sweated until one—the man—died; the woman was shipped back to Africa. This story infuriated Robeson, who had the idea—mistaken, I think—that the Ubangi man was an African chief in boiler-room bondage. “But it’s not your fault, honey.”
Next to Orlando, Robeson was the most complete man I had ever met. He was success-conscious, impressionable, and had no political savvy, and he had a fatal gift for rhetoric; yet he had a law degree, a corrosive intelligence, an athlete’s sinew, and a gentleman’s charm. He was fearless, dignified, and polite, the sort of superman envious weaklings gang up to destroy. He was bowled over by my photographs. He had dressed up in fantastic costumes, like an African prince, a statesman, a revolutionary, a convict, a pirate; he got the duds out of the wardrobe of the New York theater and made the right faces for them. He told me not to tell a soul, and he bought the more outlandish pictures from me so that I couldn’t exhibit them. I thought at the time that they were parts he wanted to play, because he gave little speeches for each one—jabbering like an African, orating like a president; but later it occurred to me that they were people he wanted to be, and it didn’t surprise me when he went to Russia, because one of the pictures (fur hat, o
vercoat, and growling minski-chinski) foretold that.
It was Robeson who introduced me to the other blacks in New York, the Show Boat cast, the hangers-on, girlfriends, spivs, and bookies. “My people,” he called them, “my brothers and sisters”—it was my introduction to those words used in their larger senses. Some of them were religious types, Holy Rollers and preachers and evangelists, with names like Father and Daddy; or sly fast-talking sharks with sharp teeth and an odd black puppety walk and names like Pigga and Doolum; others pretended they were real Africans, and one told me he was God. A few tried to interfere with me, but I said I would not stand for it and if they didn’t cut it out they could get their picture taken elsewhere. But how they dressed! Top hats and tails, earrings, blankets and war bonnets, leopard skins, bandanas, and one in his shorts, just a pair of boxer’s trunks. Strange as the others seemed, dressed up as Uncas and General Othello and Crispus Attucks and Shriners in red fezzes, it was the boxer who caused the sensation: no one had ever seen a confident muscle-bound black man before. He was a bizarre Negro who looked like a bullfrog and claimed he was an Indian and called himself Tashmoo.
“Maude’s cannibals,” people called them. Robeson had supplied me with New York subjects, Frenise helped me on the Cape. Many blacks lived then, as they continued to do, on Martha’s Vineyard, They were servants, houseboys, cooks, sometimes gardeners, but never chauffeurs (the Irish did that, though Papa disapproved: “I would never hire a man who believed in an afterlife to do a dangerous job”). For years I traveled around the Cape and out to the Vineyard doing blacks, and when I had my first exhibition in that wharf gallery in Provincetown people were astonished—not by the blind portraits, or the perfect one of Cummings or Clam diggers or the nasty one I had set up called Eel in a Toilet, but by the blacks, because they had never seen them before, so many of them, like human beings.
