by Paul Theroux
All my photographer friends who in other times would have been here—dead. The people I had photographed: Mr. Slaughter, Huxley, Eliot, Teets, R. G. Perdew, Lawrence, Marilyn, Harvey and Hornette—dead. Editors and journalists and gallery-owners—dead. Orlando and Phoebe: now I knew I had driven them into the sea. I had killed them with a picture. I deserved this contempt—the people shunning me or treating me like a waitress; I deserved worse—to be treated like a criminal bitch who had hounded my brother and sister to death. I put the tray down and lurked in the crowd like the murderess I was.
Scuffing paper underfoot I bent to pick it up, although my first thought was to leave it so that one of these partygoers would trip and break his neck. It was the catalogue, a thickish manual with my name on the front just above Frank’s and a different picture (Negro Swimming to a Raft—but “Negro” had been changed to “Person,” making nonsense of the picture). I had refused to write the personal statement Frank had requested and had told him that I would have nothing to do with the rest of the catalogue either. I should have gone further and said that I wouldn’t be at the preview party. I felt ridiculous—guilty, stupid, ashamed—having come so far on false pretenses. I belonged in jail.
I had made a virtue of being anonymous. I had abided by it; and why not? Anonymity had done for me what a lifetime of self-promotion had done for other photographers. It was too late to reveal myself, for there was a point in obscurity beyond which exposure meant only the severest humiliation. It was better to continue anonymously and finally vanish into silence. I had spent my life in shadows as dense as those that hid me at this party. I had entered this room as a stranger—I had to leave as one. If the place had not been so impossibly crowded I would have done that very thing.
Acknowledgments, I read, opening the catalogue. There followed a list of money-machines, not only the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, but the National Endowment for the Arts and five others, including the Melvin Shohat Photographic Trust. If Frank didn’t make a go of his curatorship there was always room for such a financial genius in the International Monetary Fund.
My career, spent in attacking patronage, ended with these cash-disbursing bodies footing the bill. But I had forfeited the right to object. I was dead. They were all dancing the light fantastic on my grave.
Maude Coffin Pratt, Frank’s Preface began, is probably one of the most distinguished American photographers of our time—
“Probably”? “One of”? “Our time”? He was pulling his punches. Quite right: I had blood on my hands.
But there was, after all, a message from me, titled Statement from the Artist:
The Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word.” The Bible is in error. In the beginning was the Image. The eye knew before the mouth uttered a syllable; thought is pictorial.
Photographic truth, which I think of as the majestic echo of image, originated in the magic room known as the camera obscura. This admitted the world through a pinhole. Man learned to fix that image and photography was born with a bang. Painting never recovered from the blow. It began to belittle truth and, faking the evidence, became destructive.
One knows a bad picture immediately. All you can do with bad pictures is look at them. The good ones invite you to explore; the best drown you and keep you under until you think you will never return. But you do. I have had this experience myself.
Photography is interested solely in what is. What am I? you may ask. I can answer that question. You are a “Pratt.”
On a more personal note, I was born in 1906, in Massachusetts.
Frank’s work, the catalogue shorthand that left my life in the dark and my crime unstated.
“There he is,” said a man next to me to his lady friend. They nearly knocked me down as they moved past me.
I got behind them and followed them across the room and saw, at the center of the largest huddle of people, the Veronica Lake hairstyle, the white fretful face, the string of beads. He wore a torn denim shirt and under it a T-shirt saying It’s Only Rock and Roll; and bright green bell-bottoms and, I knew—though I could not see them—his platform clodhoppers. He had come a long way since the day he had turned up in a barnacle-blue three-piece suit on my Grand Island piazza. “I’d be deeply grateful if you’d allow me to examine your archives.” And I had thrown the picture palace open to him.
Edging forward, I caught some of the chatter. The people surrounding Frank were talking in low voices, trying to lend sincerity to their guff by whispering it.
“It’s perfectly marvelous, Frank, every last bit of it. It’s got density, it’s got life, and it’s just about the most exciting thing I’ve seen for ages.” This from a purring pin-striped heel, obviously a foundation man.
Frank said, “I couldn’t have done it without your support. It was a long haul, but I think you’ll find that your money’s been well spent.”
“The whole committee’s here to give you a good send-off.”
“It was a risk, of course, but from my point of view”—Frank made howdying haymakers with his free hand—“Hi, Tom. Hello there, Charlie. George. Norman, good to see you. Susan, glad you could make it—a risk worth taking.”
His face’s fretfulness had a pinch of pride. He wore a tight little smile, as if he were sucking a cough drop. His eyes were vacant with self-love.
“It must have been quite a summer up there on the Cape.”
“Pretty unbelievable,” said the peckerhead. “But I feel we’ve broken new ground.”
“It’s certainly a great coup for the museum.”
Frank said, “The work was crying out to be seen. She had no idea.”
“The presentation—”
“Presentation is incredibly important,” said Frank. “I knew the minute I saw the pictures that I was on to something very big and very exciting.” Saying this, he shook his head, rattling his beads, and took a tango-step forward to plant a kiss on an admiring hag.
“Frank’s an amazing guy,” said a young man on my right.
“Don’t I know it,” I said.
“He’ll make a fortune out of this, but you’ve got to hand it to him.”
“Sure do.”
“Hassles? He’s been getting a hand-job all summer from our friend whatsit.”
“Jack Guggenheim?”
“No, um, the one who took the pictures. Pratt.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Frank’s the one who took the pictures.”
“Yeah.”
The party had thinned out. The remaining people gravitated over to the crowd around Frank, where I was lost. Two of the photographers I had spotted earlier were snapping pictures, and Frank’s face was briefly incandescent as he said, “I just hope people pick up on it in the right way.”
He loved every minute of it and seemed so engrossed that he surprised me a moment later by saying, “Hey, has anyone seen Maude?”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. No one heard me—they were also saying no. I crept across the room to the retrospective.
32
Retrospective
I WASN’T HERE, either. The place was empty, a vestibule with a stack of catalogues, more posters, a passageway like a funhouse labyrinth, and beckoning sounds: Twenties music, surf, gulls, traffic, clangs; and the sharp smell of strong light on fresh paint. No people. I looked for myself among the pictures.
The first room was book-shaped, my early shots pasted on the walls as if into an album. They were family scenes, done long ago, the boat, the beach, the house—full of wonder which, because it was innocent, looked clumsy and appealing. Not here.
A trolley bell gonged in the next room; city noises, voices half smothered in traffic. New York, 1923, said Frank’s sign, and there was Lawrence Retreating, Mott Street, The Battery, Broadway, Chinese Grocery, Wolfpits Furriers, and my Grand Central sequence.
The surf I had heard on entering the show was now so loud it seemed to be pounding on the adjoining wall. I walked in expecting to be dragged away by the und
ertow, but it was a mock-up of my Provincetown exhibition—Mrs. Conklin, Clamdiggers: Wellfleet, O’Neill at Peaked Hill, and the fifty or so negative prints I had called Boogie-Men: Teets, Doolum, Pigga, Frenise, and more.
The sea-sounds poured isolation upon me. I could not hear the party. I had entered my own world, but I felt ghostly in it—I did not exist there among Stieglitz, Boarders, Stoker, Alligator Wrestler, Thunder over Boca Grande. An entire art-deco room was given over to the Pig Dinner. There was Papa and Mr. Carney, Harvey and Hornette, Mrs. Fritts, Mr. Biker, “Digit” Taft, and Glory. They were slightly smoked and blurred, as they were in my memory, and yet they were less than I remembered. I was touched by their trapped faces, by the naked ones’ nakedness. And I knew what was coming.
A blind wall, nothing, then Firebug. I did not go close. I feared entering any of these pictures and being submerged to suffer them again. I strolled, keeping my distance, and saw Frost, the Hollywood pictures of Huxley and Mann and Alan Ladd crying, the creepy pieta of Ray and Cissy Chandler, the other actors in tears. Stiffs.
The Whose Room? shots Frank had retitled London Interiors, rather spoiling the point. But what a rogues’ gallery it was! The rooms and then the faces: Eliot, Ackerley, Waugh, Forster, and further on Patton, G. Stein, Cocteau, Maugham, Picasso. They were not looking at me—not surprising: the subject does not see the photographer, only the peepstones of her Third Eye.
I was not here, not here, nowhere, and yet I knew that I had entered the picture palace of my own memory. I regretted my absence, but I was astonished by how much there was here—all the forgotten pictures Frank had not troubled himself to show me: Apple-Seller, The Sneeze, Junk Shop Window, Phil Rizzuto, Mailman’s Shoes, Orthodox Jewish Boys, the impoverished glamor girls series, scores of blind people, and the picture that had been inspired by an old cartoon, Man Eating Peas with a Knife. Spendid stuff, but where was I? Not in the group photos—Graduation: Woonsocket High School blown up across one whole wall, John Hancock across another—and not in Dancing Partners, Deliverance, Busing, Refugees, Butcher’s Apron, Move Along, Baggers, or the twelve pictures of Vietnamese refugees hurrying toward the door. I looked for more and saw Exit.
But I didn’t want to leave. I headed back through the exhibit and it occurred to me how many were missing. Although to the casual viewer it was complete, an entire life, I knew there were gaps—years and years missing. Frank had left out my six erotic pictures, Eel in a Toilet, the ones of my family that I knew best (vivid in my mind because they were snapshots, set for infinity). Was he trying to save my reputation because he found them amateurish, or prettify his own because he thought they were vulgar?
And the murderous one of Orlando and Phoebe naked in the windmill—the only one in fifty years that truly mattered: suppressed! How like a masturbator to hide his imagery in shame.
“What retrospective?” I said aloud. To see this show, one would have thought, as I so often had, that my life had been rich and happy, full of travel and excitement, fifty years of achievement. No failures, no tears. But this was the lie of perfection imperfectly concealing that it was mostly failure. And it was hardly surprising that no one at the party had recognized me. I was not one of my pictures, or even the sum of them.
I wandered back to the Provincetown room. Frank had mounted a slide projector behind a wall, and as the sorrowing gulls cried and the waves sloshed the timbers of an invisible jetty (and was that a whiff of saltwater taffy in the air?), the pictures changed: Dunes, Clamdiggers, Cummings, Pigga, Sunday Bonnets, Hurricane Damage. Not mine—they were the world’s property and the experience of whoever cast a glance at them. But no life was this neat.
Footsteps in the vestibule. I listened hard. One pair of clodhoppers.
“Maude!”
I turned and tried to smile.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding. I’ve been looking all over—”
“Dry up,” I said.
Yet I wanted to reassure him, to hug him and say, Forget it—it’s all yours! You’re welcome to it! Then I saw his smugly patronizing face and cough-drop sucker’s mouth. I had the impression he wanted to kiss me.
I said, “I’d like to be alone.”
“You’ve been drinking again.”
To spite him, I burped, bringing the gas up from the depths of my gut. Then, pleased with this piece of theater, I wanted to go.
“Come on out and take a bow.”
“No. It’s time I went home.”
He looked relieved. He cleared his throat. “Say, what do you think of the show?”
“Very nice, but it ain’t mine. Anyway, there’s one missing.”
He blushed and touched at his face and left a chalk-white fingerprint of pressure on his cheek. His eyes were glazed with shame. He said, “Give it to me. I’ll make room for it.”
“Get a job, Frank!” I said, and couldn’t help laughing. I started to walk away—and my mind raced ahead of my feet: I was home, in my room, drinking alone in my nightie and reflecting that if the pictures were his so was the guilt; and I was at last free.
“Which one?” he asked, but he didn’t want to hear.
“You wouldn’t know,” I said. “Besides, I haven’t done it yet.”
I chose to leave by passing once again through the exhibition. And it struck me that the pictures told me more about Frank than about myself, for the mind was revealed by the way it distorted, or suppressed, or seized upon a particularly telling travesty. Literally that: a man in a dress spoke volumes, while a woman with a camera seemed to have few secrets. I was merely a spectator, stinking of chemicals. I had to be seen to be believed.
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
