Picture Palace

by Paul Theroux

  16

  Speed Graphic

  OR RATHER not my camera, which was why for a while I was celebrated but remained unknown.

  It happened like so many of my pictorial flukes as a contrived accident shortly after I arrived in New York. My morale was high. I felt I had freed Orlando and won him back. This was twelve hours after that battle of wits on the Cape with Blanche Overall, and I had intended to keep moving and continue on a train to Florida. Not that I was afraid of Blanche shadowing me and bashing my brains out for exposing her, but largely because I was so suffused with confidence and wanted to prove that I didn’t need the Guggenheim Foundation to get me up the lower slopes of Parnassus, much less to Verona, Florida. But I missed the train, and I found to my annoyance that I would have to spend a whole weekend kicking my heels in New York.

  My usual berth was still at the Seltzers’, but I didn’t want to answer awkward questions. I barely knew myself why I had chosen Florida. I didn’t like to think that it was because Mama and Papa were there. The idea of following my parents around struck me as being uncomfortably close to a domestic form of the Guggenheim disease. I was sure that something important awaited me there: jungle, alligators, swamps, Indians, new scenes—sights for sore eyes that I could carry back to overwhelem Orlando with. It was a continuation of the courtship I had been engaged in since the day, twenty years before, when I knew I would have him or go blind. I had turned his head with my camera: photography worked. Now I wished to be triumphant in it and to share my fame with him.

  With this mood came a desire to travel. Travel is a funny indulgence, the simple challenge of congenial strangeness to animate portions of the body and soul. Embracing the unknown to find the familiar; a way of remembering.

  This was my first taste of travel, and my best. I knew that America had a prodigious madonna’s body, and that though our literature had only hinted at what our photography had made explicit—that landscape was anatomy—no country could touch us in a physical geography lavish with brains, breadbaskets, heartlands, a whole wilderness of visceral rivers—so different from the ailing or infantile islands of the world that prevented us from matching view to mood. A country was not a country until you could lose yourself in it, camera-wise: the vagrant surrender of the eye to something flabbergasting. What attracted me then was that I could disappear for a few weeks in the hot green parts that had always reminded me of America’s appendix.

  But Florida would have to wait until Monday. I had missed the train. I checked into a hotel and lay down in my dark room and became anxious. I had not given my going a second thought, but in that square room with its smudges of reproaching dust, its threadbare seams of sealing wallpaper and the dead echoes of lovers stifling their moans against the bedstead—its history audible in cracks and stains and scorchmarks—in that dark room, that ghost-box of crucified passion and lively sorrow, I felt I did not exist. It was a feeling I had often sweated out: alone, I was sometimes invisible to myself; my inner eye was squeezed shut, I’d quickened and vanished into the obscure room’s obscurer dust. It was my art’s highest achievement, was it not? The solitary photographer conjuring with her instrument and disappearing at the tippety-top of her own Indian rope-trick?

  It was not what I had wanted. It was no joke. Spirited away from all that was habitual, and hooded by the wholly strange room, I was numbed by a sense of nonbeing and needed a witness. In the usual motion of travel this was no great problem, but every room is a six-sided colony of dark rules. It took wit even to remember your name in such a place, or to dissuade yourself that you might, like any lost soul, be paying an unwelcome visit to someone else’s body—a person you might yourself have invented.

  Ordinarily, it was a convenient panic: it had made me a photographer. In that distant doubting frame of mind I was forced to snap pictures to prove my own existence—make a world from my eye, bring it into focus, stop it long enough to say, “I see!”

  Because in my lonely love-struck way I had grafted the camera to my body. I was nothing but a two-legged prop for the winks of this Third Eye.

  But on that afternoon, in the New York room where I was no more than an atom of dust in a wisp of light, I needed more immediate proof. I called Orlando.

  “Adams House,” came the reply.

  “Hello there,” I said, as to a rescuer, and instantly was calmed: here I am, alive and well. “I’d like to speak to Orlando Pratt.”

  “Just a sec—I’ll get him.”

  It’s me! Now you know I love you. Blanche is gone. It’s all ours—

  “Sorry, he’s out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Who shall I say called?”

  “His lover—”

  Yurble went a noise in the throat of the line, an amiable chirrup of shock.

  “—and I am waiting.”

  In the rain, as it turned out. For professional reasons, as much as to kill time, I left the room and set out to buy a new camera. The rain was a handclapping sound, like applause at my feet. I made my way to the East Side, staggering as visitors to New York so often do—something about those right angles.

  It was a rolling city and not at all the populous and filthy ruin of traipsing photographers who sought children, derelicts, pigeons, Gushing Hydrant in Harlem, or that old favorite of the Guggenheim Fellow: Ragged Beggar on Wall Street. In my pictures, New York was an ocean liner, unsinkable and majestic, with a lovely curvature from port to starboard, steering seaward on the flood tide of its two rivers, New Jersey and Brooklyn the smoky headlands of friendly coasts. I envied New Yorkers as I envied sailors, and always portrayed them as adventurers with iron stomachs and sea legs, who regarded their glamor with irony and treated visitors as faint-hearted passengers who’d soon disembark. Today there was a gale and the decks were awash.

  Weston had recommended the shop Camera Obscura on Second Avenue. It was an uncompromisingly dingy place that catered to what he called “real artists like us,” though I doubt that he was including me in that description.

  “I want to see a Speed Graphic, please,” I said to the clerk, who had raised his eyes to me and spread his fingers on the counter.

  He sized me up, giving me a chance to decode his own features: polka-dot bow tie, elastic bands on the biceps of his sleeves, restless skinny hands, Harold Lloyd glasses, and too many teeth. His face fit his skull tightly like a zombie’s mask and chasing his smirk was a contradiction of irregular bone.

  “You don’t want anything as fancy as that,” he said, and plucked from behind the counter a goggle-eyed idiot box the size of a lobster trap. “Take this, madam. It’s so simple a child can operate it.”

  “Sounds just the thing for you,” I said. “Now show me the Graflex.”

  This annoyed him, and hoping to put me in my place he went to the stockroom and came out carrying an eight-by-ten monstrosity on a tripod. It was something between a whopping doodad for colonic irrigation and a kind of magician’s outfit of mirrors and slots out of which rabbits, boiled eggs, and nosegays of silk flowers were produced. Dangling from its snout was a long hose with a rubber bulb.

  “Course if you’re really serious about photography you’ll want one of these.” He piled the equipment on the counter—lens hood, lenses, filters, film, plates, film holders—then pursed his lips at me in smart-alecky satisfaction.

  “I said a Speed Graphic. Do I have to sing it?”

  “This is the best camera we’ve got—”

  He ignored my icy stare that was telling him, in a wintry way, to shove it.

  “—get beautiful results with this little number.” He grasped the rubber bulb and, leering at me, gave it a salacious squeeze. “I bet a girl like you could use something like this.”

  “Do I look like I need an enema?”

  “Hey, watch it,” he said. Anger made his face a membrane.

  “Ask the top photographers, if you don’t believe me. Stieglitz has one. He tells all his people to buy them.”

  “I’m not one of hi
s people,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t look very portable.”

  “You don’t look like you’re going very far.”

  I picked up a film holder, a metal sandwich with German words on the crust. “So Stieglitz has one of these, huh? I thought he was still in jail.”

  “That’s not funny. Stieglitz isn’t just a photographer. He’s photography.”

  I stepped back unconvinced. The clerk had that sour breath I couldn’t help associating with baloney, the liar’s inevitable halitosis.

  “If you believe that, you’d believe anything.”

  “Who are you?” he cried.

  But I kept my temper and demanded to see the Speed Graphic, and when I found the model I wanted, I said, “Wrap it up—and I’ll take a half a dozen of those,” indicating the film holders.

  “I’ve got news for you,” he said nastily. “They don’t fit that Graphic.”

  “I’ve got news for you, buster. I said I want six of them and some film, and if I get any more of your sass I’ll have a word with the manager. Now start wrapping.”

  It had been Stieglitz who’d refused to exhibit my work in New York—the Provincetown show I had had such hopes for. It seemed to me that Stieglitz in denying me this exposure was trying to thwart me in my courtship of Orlando. Of course, he knew nothing of Orlando, but the fact remained that my sole intention in studying photography was ultimately to persuade my brother that his proper place was with me in my darkroom. Stieglitz had spurned my photographs and in so doing had belittled me as a lover.

  If Stieglitz didn’t like it, it wasn’t photography. Though I considered him of small importance—simply a man who had bamboozled a doting group of people with his lugubrious attentions—I knew that when Stieglitz loaded his camera the world said cheese, or at least his sycophants thought so. He was enthroned in New York in An American Place, his own gallery, and no one could call himself a photographer who had not first wormed some approval from this dubious man. I supposed I could be accused of bias, but I believed the clearest example of his complete lack of judgment and taste was his failure to recognize me as an original.

  This early absence of recognition—I was now thirty-one—was the mainstay of my originality. I avoided photographic circles, and while students of photography gathered in “schools,” their very bowels yearning for “movements,” I had grown to loathe the cliques and seen them as nests of thuggish committee men, shabby and unconfident mobsters of the art world whoring after historians and critics. I blamed Stieglitz for this. His authority had weakened photographers to the point where they hadn’t the nerve to go it alone—they were resigned to being part of his legend. The movement—so frequent in the half-arts—implies a gang mentality; it is the half-artist’s response to his inadequacy, something to do with pretensions of photography, the inexact science that was sometimes an art and sometimes a craft and sometimes a rephrased cliché. The movements begged money from foundations and put themselves up for grants and awarded themselves prizes and published self-serving magazines. A racket, and poison to us originals.

  What got up my nose most of all was that many photographers I respected, and some I idolized, had had their work exhibited at Stieglitz’s various galleries. Even Poopy Weston had bought his forty-pound peepshow on Stieglitz’s advice. Weston had shown me how to use it and had said, “You’ll never get anywhere unless you meet Alfred.”

  “I hold the view that the work ought to precede the person.”

  “He’s seen your work.”

  “And he didn’t like it, so he ain’t seeing me,” I said. “I’m not a Fuller Brush man, Westy, and you can tell him I said so.”

  Pride is scar tissue. Mine made me wary of a further rebuff, another wound. Yet I was insignificant. I could turn my back on him, but who would notice? Not him. As far as I knew, his back was already turned. I would gladly have killed that man, if only to be given the chance to say why. In every murderer’s mind must be the innocent hope that he will have his day in court, to say what drove him to it.

  This homicidal impulse cheered me up at the hotel as I unpacked my trays and stoppered bottles of solutions. I examined my new Speed Graphic and took it apart until it lay exploded on the bed. I loaded the eight-by-ten film holders and futzed with my equipment. At last I sat motionless in the room I had deliberately darkened for my film’s sake. It was still raining in that applauding way but, outside, the luminous descent of liquefied light crowded at the pinhole of the window shade and cast through this imperfection a perfect cone of calm, an image of the windowy city on the wall that I studied until the day, red as a mallard’s eye, was lost in the blaring pit that sloped from evening into night.

  “Ever hear of Alfred Stieglitz?” I asked a taxi driver the next day.

  “Who? Look, lady—”

  “Just testing,” I said, and satisfied with this proof of his obscurity I gave him the Madison Avenue address of An American Place.

  A Saturday: the place was jammed. Weekends are for photographers, since most photographers are amateurs who spend the rest of the week working in offices to pay for the equipment the job prevents them from using. The ones at Stieglitz’s were bent nearly double with cameras around their necks, as ludicrous a sight to me as museum-goers studying paintings and sculpture with sticky brushes, mallets, and chisels. I cannot remember much about the exhibition: Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom must have been there—it was everywhere; some Walker Evans billboards—how that man liked a mess; a Berenice Abbott traffic jam, some of Strand’s peasants, maybe Steichen’s shadblow tree, an Edward Weston weather report (partly cloudy, scattered showers, bright patches later) and some of his peppers and seashells, some Käsebier dames in gowns made out of Kleenex, Oursler’s Admiral Byrd (glacial features, ice-blue eyes), and soft-focus Stieglitzes—hairy rose petals, nipple studies, and chilly little things that could not qualify as nudes since they didn’t have bellybuttons. There were some untitleds deservedly anonymous, too many fire escapes and quite a lot of photojournalism from the WPA slush-bucket (rivets, steam shovels, leaf-rakers, grease monkeys—the photographer’s keen embarrassment with manual labor). And the usual photographic clichés: Abandoned Playground, Rainy Street, Lady in Funny Hat, Torso with Tits, Shoeshine Boy, Honest Face, Drunken Bum, Prostitute in Slit Skirt Standing near Rooms Sign, Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch America, Flock of Pigeons, Vista with Framing Branches, City Snow, City Lights, Haggard Peckerwoods, Every Hair of a Bushy Beard, Spoiled Brat, Good-Humor Ice Cream Man, Country Road Leading to Bright Future, Muddy Field in Europe, Lovers on a Park Bench, Picnickers, House with Broken Windows, Sand Dunes, Obviously Unemployed Man in his Undershirt, Dog Lover, Wrinkled Eskimo, Mother and Child, Jazzman with Shiny Instrument; in other words, no Pratts.

  You could see more exciting things—in its simplicity, one of the most devastating pieces of art criticism imaginable—by sticking your head out the window.

  Instead of asking for Alfred at the front desk, I marched through the crowd of shufflers and pushed the first door I saw marked PRIVATE. I was full of confidence as I shoved it, as if this were one of the last doors I’d have to open to arrive at recognition. Room to room: in the last I would find Orlando waiting. I entered a rather gloomy back room. I was certain from its smallness and its shadows that the people in it were photographers.

  “—smudgy life studies that are a dime a dozen,” I heard, and saw beyond the speaker, who was a tiny man with very red ears in immaculate overalls, and beyond a woman dressed as a man, and a man in yellow spats—beyond this bunch, Stieglitz himself at a desk heaped with the scrolls of curled-up pictures. He moved—not his head or the fist at his cheek, but his black eyes. The speaker turned slightly and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. Seeing that I was of no importance, he made a face and went on with his story.

  Stieglitz stared at me, and before he opened his mouth I could see what it was that gave him so much authority. He was dark and displeased-looking, with a millionaire’s modesty, a dangerous ed
ge to his silence, and a grim little tyrant’s bite he had cut his mustache to match, as if he had patterned a template of hair to fit his sneer.

  I had seen his camera as a magic box. It suited him, for his scowl was that of a bad-tempered magician who considered no audience worthy to observe him at his tricks. But there was more to this cardsharp and rabbit-grabber than that, because in his look of unconcealed disdain there was a blink of suspicion. It emboldened me. Any sign of weakness in others made me brave. I could endure this disdain, for it was minimized by a suspicion I knew had to be fear. So this was the bluffing coward who wouldn’t hang my pictures!

  “Are you looking for someone?” It was the red-eared man who had been faltering in his monologue ever since I entered. He was fussed and umming.

  “I want to see Mister Stieglitz.”

  “Out to lunch,” said the man.

  “I have reason to believe that he is in this very room.”

  “Who are you?” This was the lady in the pin stripe suit. In her trousers and tie and slicked-down hair she looked madly attractive.

  “Gosh, you wouldn’t know me,” I said, and thought: If they recognize me I’ll tell them everything and beat it. “But I am very interested in photography and I’ve heard ever so much about Mister Stieglitz. Gee, he’s not just a photographer—he’s photography itself.”

  It was like smelling salts, this flattery. The dark man at the desk wrinkled his nose and tossed his head and said, “I am Stieglitz.”

  “Gee.”

  “I was telling a story,” said the red-eared shrimp.

  The woman lit a slender cigar; the man in spats crossed his legs and kicked.

  One look from Stieglitz froze them. He snorted and they were still. In that interval I had time to look around the room. Newspaper clippings, posters of past exhibitions—Stieglitz’s name on most of them—some pictures the color of turpentine of mousy Whistlerish women in plumes pining at bay windows, a few virginal girls coyly tormenting some rapist off-camera, Steerage; and snapshots—very bad snapshots which for all their gloss had more guts than anything else on view. Snapshots are the only true American folk art. I found fault with the intrusive gangway that bisects Steerage and moved on to the mementos and antiques, a burnt-out flash holder, a freckled daguerreotype, medallions of the sort I had seen on beer cans, and a very old and beautifully made wooden camera that looked like a Fox Talbot. Off to the right, in an otherwise empty corner of the room, was the magic box, an eight-by-ten plate camera on a tripod. Even from where I stood I could see it was a banger, standing not quite straight, all chipped, with a dangling rubber bulb on a pink perishing hose.