“Don’t mind, Monsignor,” his mother said, a touch of anger in her sweet voice, “it’s only the child’s father. He’s always been a bit late.”
“Galoot,” Mugsy Branigan observed affably.
“He just wants to try for Irish triplets,” the mother said. “Then he’ll flit off somewhere else in the world. Serves me right for marrying a professional photographer.”
After Kevin’s baptism and just before Christmas my first exhibit was to open in a gallery on Michigan Avenue, more proof that I was a professional photographer.
Dwight Eisenhower had been elected (without my vote). Vince was on the prisoner-of-war list and his daughter, Carlotta, and our April Rosemary vied for attention at “poor little Kevin Patrick’s” initiation into the Church. The “monster battalion,” as his mother deliberately misunderstood my reference to the “monstrous regiment of women” (“and John Knox meant ‘rule,’ not a military unit”), had already begun to dominate his life.
It was the fault of President-elect Eisenhower that I was not present for Kevin’s birth. The President-elect and Kevin himself, who arrived two weeks after he was scheduled to arrive.
“I see no problem with you going to Korea.” Rosemarie was holding April Rosemary in her arms, fighting with the grinning girl-child about whether her index finger belonged in her own possession or in A. R.’s mouth. “This little demon came on time, I assume her brother will too.”
Note that once again the question of the child’s sex was not subject to discussion. Poor little April was to have a brother “to take care of” and that settled that.
Dwight David Eisenhower was not my favorite president. On the other hand he was not certifiably mad, as were a couple of his successors. His treatment of Truman on inauguration day was bush league: he would not talk to the outgoing chief executive because the latter had arranged for Colonel John Eisenhower, the new president’s son, to be assigned to duty at the inauguration. “Ike,” incapable of being gracious himself, could not recognize graciousness in others and interpreted his son’s presence at the inauguration as an attempt to embarrass him.
That should have been a tip-off of what was coming. Consider three important issues of his administration: McCarthy, integration, and Suez. “Ike” left it to Congress to deprive the drunken junior senator from Wisconsin of his powers to preside over anticommunist witch-hunts; he lent campaign support to Joe McCarthy and William Ezra Jenner even though both men had smeared his patron and mentor General George C. Marshall. He never spoke a word in support of the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, other than to say that you couldn’t change people’s attitudes by law. Finally, he double-crossed our British, French, and Israeli allies when they invaded Egypt and, with barracks-room language, he pulled the rug out from under them, saving the hide of our implacable enemy Gamal Abdel Nasser, the scruffy Egyptian dictator.
He was also a drunk, as everyone in the Washington press knew and no one ever wrote. Mind you, he was not a compulsive womanizer like Jack Kennedy or a flaming nut like Johnson and Nixon. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a bourbon-swilling back-barracks gambler and a mean-spirited military bureaucrat who by accident had become a national hero. (The accident was that Roosevelt could not spare George Marshall from Washington to let him lead the invasion of Europe.) In his favor, it could be said that Eisenhower was not that other and even more dubious war hero, Douglas MacArthur, whom Truman had fired when he began publicly to disagree with his orders from Washington.
I often wondered during the hysteria of the welcome-home celebration for MacArthur whether the Republicans in Congress, the Luce magazines, and the people cheering in the street wanted to remove civilian control of the military—the issue at stake in the Truman-MacArthur fight.
Another good thing about Ike was that he probably will be the last war hero elected president. Televised politics has at least the merit of revealing the worst of the phonies and fakers.
All of this is by way of preliminary explanation of why I was not eager to accept Look’s assignment to accompany the President-elect on his promised trip to Korea.
The promise was a clever but petty public relations gesture—though more honest than Nixon’s “secret plan” twenty years later to end the Vietnam War. Eisenhower would have buried poor, hapless Adlai Stevenson anyway, because the public was fed up with the war and the seeming corruption of the Truman administration. (The Communism-in-government issue, like the abortion debate years later, attracted much attention from the press but never much affected the way people voted.) Eisenhower could not, however, promise to end the war because peace requires two sides to agree and he had no control over the North Koreans or the Chinese. So instead he promised that if elected, “I shall go to Korea,” a commitment devoid of meaning, but a wonderfully clever election campaign trick. (His secret warning to the Chinese that if they didn’t end the war quick he’d drop atomic bombs on them was much more effective in bringing to an end the Panmunjom negotiations.)
Look wanted me to do a photo story, “Ike Goes to Korea.”
“You’re an artist, not really a photojournalist.” Rosemarie considered the offer thoughtfully. “I suppose you have to do some of these things for the recognition. Your opening in December is more important.”
“I’ll be back in time for that” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go on a phony trip to Korea with a man I already considered a phony president. “I’m worried about being here when Kevin appears.”
“I’m the one who gives birth.” She frowned as though I had raised an unimportant question. “Who needs you?”
“If I’m in Korea, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Regardless.” She waved her hand dismissively. About my career there was no room for jokes, not with Rosemarie anyway. “Well, I suppose you ought to do it. And”—she brightened—“maybe you’ll be able to see Vince and tell him about his adorable daughter.”
“I don’t think they’re going to be released that soon.”
“Still… And, anyway, Kevin won’t keep his poor Mommy waiting, will he, April dear?”
April, unaware of the possibilities of sibling rivalry, cooed soothingly.
The wire caught up with me in Pusan, Korea:
MY BROTHER KEVIN PATRICK BORN AT 3:20 A.M. I TOLD YOU SO. LOVE. APRIL ROSEMARY.
The year between the two births had been a frantically busy one for both of us, needlessly, I conclude with the sophistication of hindsight.
Rosemarie had help in the house. She need not have preoccupied herself so totally with her placid daughter, whose only goals in life were food, adoration, and sleep. Nor did Peg and Carlotta, still at home with Mom, need the constant concern from “Aunt Rosemarie” they were receiving. However, unlike Mom, who thought relaxed attention was the best you could give, my wife felt that you were somehow a failure unless your devotion to others was tinged by frantic anxiety. Mom and Peg (and Carlotta) didn’t need the anxiety and our own brat ignored it. The last-named of the monstrous regiment was content when Mommy played with her, she chose to ignore all signs of maternal anxiety.
“Boring,” the kids would say today.
For my part, I had decided that, now I was a photographer, I must pursue the career with the same compulsive intensity with which I once added columns of figures for the Double O’s—and finish my course work at the University.
I was in the last, or perhaps the next-to-last, generation of photographers who did not “study” somewhere. I was also in the first generation who did not study under someone. The photographers before me learned by apprenticing themselves to someone (and often became unpaid slaves in the process). Those after me did what all the others in their generations do when they want to acquire a skill: they go to school—in the fifties and sixties for a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, since then for a master’s in fine arts. (I suspect that if I live a bit longer I will see the Ph.D. in fine arts as a requirement for earning your living with a camera.)
I had learned the
craft and perhaps the art (I’m not sure even today whether I’m an artist) by the simple expedient of pointing a camera at people and places, releasing the shutter, and playing with the results in my darkroom. By the means of a little luck and a lot of my beautiful wife’s charming persistence, I had, without any training or education, progressed sufficiently to publish one book, schedule a second for publication, and plan a one-man exhibition.
There were two possible reactions to this situation. I could have figured that I had earned my early success by sheer raw talent and that I ought to sit back and enjoy the rewards. Or I could have concluded that I had not deserved my initial good fortune and that I would therefore have to earn further triumphs by mastering all the arcane knowledge, vocabulary, and skills of my new profession.
I presume that I have been sufficiently candid about my personality that I hardly need tell the reader what was my choice. I bought and read all the books, did all the exercises, studied all the masters, touched all the bases, with the same compulsive faith with which natives of the South Sea Islands rub their amulets before they paddle canoes out of the calm waters of the lagoon and into the swell of the ocean.
“Why don’t you do your own stuff instead of imitating others?” Rosemarie, visibly pregnant again, had complained as she mixed chemicals in my darkroom. “Did Mozart read books? Did Puccini? Did El Greco?”
“I like the comparisons.” I kissed the back of her neck. “But I don’t have that kind of talent.”
“Kiss me again, please.” She leaned her head forward to make her neck even more available. “I need reassurance … that’s nice. Now what was I saying? Oh yes, I don’t understand why you have to pay your dues by doing junk you don’t enjoy or don’t want to do.”
“Everyone has to pay his dues,” I insisted.
“Nonsense,” she replied.
Her beautiful waist had reappeared as I’d hoped it would. It then disappeared again as Kevin grew inside her. She guaranteed its return. Having experienced her willpower I didn’t doubt that for a moment.
There was only one problem that did not seem to respond to her good intentions and single-mindedness, and that had apparently disappeared, thank God.
Did I learn anything during that frantic year of self-education when I was trying to catch up with what I thought a successful young photographer had to know?
A little bit of history and some of the vocabulary, not much else.
At least I didn’t try to imitate the masters. I didn’t try to do a Matthew Brady with the Army in Korea. I didn’t visit the national parks in the West like Ansel Adams. I didn’t do classical nudes. (My “available model”—lovely even in pregnancy—didn’t fit the classical paradigm either in shape or in personality). I didn’t search the streets of the slums. I didn’t experiment with various combinations of lines and hues. Yet I tried to imitate their work in my own context. If I didn’t succeed in imitating the masters I studied, the reason is not that I felt I didn’t have to. However, I failed in my efforts to discipline myself and become part of someone’s “school.”
I studied their work and tried to see through my lenses what they saw through theirs—but in my own environment. There was no El Capitan for me to photograph by moonlight, so in Oak Park, my Yosemite Park, I tried to capture the stark, liquid beauty of Adams’s work by photographing Frank Lloyd Wright homes. It didn’t work.
Then I turned to Minor White’s more mystical documentation—with L stations as my targets.
The results were even worse.
Perhaps I thought I was really an impressionist at heart, like my father. Maybe I needed some of the misty atmosphere of the English in my shots. So I turned to D. O. Hill and Alvin Langton in the Thatcher Woods Forest Preserve on the banks of the Des Plaines River.
Disaster.
I tried to imitate Weston’s shots of wrecked cars. A little better.
As Dad explained to me when I discussed the problem with him, “Chuck, you see what you see, not what Callahan or Stieglitz saw. And you see it pretty clearly. You can’t blot out your own vision even when you try.”
“Confusion, fear, hope,” Mom interjected as she plucked something from Handel on her new harp.
“Pardon?”
“April,” my wife, never silent for long, offered her exegesis, “means that is what your eye sees… and not a lot of silly calculation.”
“In me?”
“No, silly, in the people. That poor little blonde in Germany; the young trader. They’re both calculating all the time. And the thing is that they don’t need to. Either God will take care of them or they’ll destroy themselves. So they shouldn’t calculate.”
“I’m telling stories?”
“Don’t all photographers tell stories?”
“Well”—I thought about it—“Ansel Adams says that something gets into his pictures beyond what he sees when he takes them. Some people think it’s sex. But maybe it’s only a story we have to read into every picture.”
“What kind of story?” Rosemarie now considered me with interest—I was saying something philosophical for a change, no longer just the empirical shutter-snapper.
“Dad, do you know Fox Talbot’s picture of his wife and kids, standing at a door that seems to be set in a tree?”
“I don’t think so.”
Now they were all listening to me, even, it seemed, a satiated Carlotta.
“Fox Talbot was one of the founders—along with Louis Daguerre—of photography. Indeed, his calotype or talbotype, unlike the daguerreotype which was a two-step process, really is a lot closer to what we do today. Well, anyway, he has this wonderful shot, one of his earliest, of the wife and three kids standing by what looks like a door in a garden. In fact, it is based on Richard Bentley’s illustration of Gray’s Elegy. Talbot conceals what Bentley reveals: the entrance is to the cemetery.”
“Wow!” Rosemarie shivered.
“The passage in Gray goes something like this:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e‘er gave,
Awaits, alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
They were silent, pondering that insight. I finally saw what I was driving at and continued. “So maybe every photographer tells a story of some sort, at least a story of trying to preserve something from the corruption of time and death.”
“Precisely what I was saying,” Dad agreed amiably.
“So maybe I see something of myself in those people who are so compulsive and I want to preserve them and me from our compulsions?”
Everyone laughed at that. Uneasily.
“The trouble with you, Chucky”—Peg was nursing Carlotta, as contentious and feisty a young woman as her cousin was genial and relaxed—“is that you do all the calculation and then disregard it by doing something outrageous.”
“Like marrying me,” Rosemarie put in.
“Or planning that wild show,” Jane concluded.
“I think what they’re saying”—Ted McCormack was now in his psychiatric residency and using baseball metaphors with his clients—“is that you carefully touch each base till you get to third; then you ignore the coach and race desperately for the plate.”
“Sliding to make it just under the throw.” Michael looked up from the French theology book he was reading. “Safe, so far.”
“That part of it”—I thought they were all mad—“doesn’t show in my work, does it?”
“Not yet.” Dad filled my port glass; Rosemarie waved him away.
“Thank God.”
“It will in the show,” my wife added. “‘Rosemarie and April,’ wow!”
“When do we get to see it?” Mom took her fingers off the strings.
“When it’s ready.”
“I hope Vinny is home for it,” Peg said with a sigh.
We all promised her that he would be. Our guarantees, it would turn out, were not much good.
At least my year of academic self-training didn’t hurt my work. I suspect Dad was right: I couldn’t imitate anyone else. When I tried to the result was so bad that I threw the negatives away.
That night as we were undressing, Rosemarie returned to the subject of Fox Talbot.
“You were brilliant tonight, Chucky…unzip my dress, will you please …I mean about Talbot’s picture.”
“Didn’t know I could be philosophical, did you?”
“I never doubted that … Thank you.” She shrugged out of her maternity dress. “I was surprised how deep…are you trying to preserve me from corruption?”
Tears stung my eyes. I kissed the back of her neck.
“Forever and ever, amen.”
So I was busy learning how to do something I already knew and Rosemarie was busy being a mother, something that she did with natural and unselfconscious ease.
Her maternal preoccupations kept her out of the darkroom, where she had been learning how to develop and print with the same quick skill that she had acquired her competency in French cooking—now we had meat with Bernaise sauce in those weeks we didn’t have pasta. Soon she would be better in the darkroom than I was.
“I can’t do it,” she complained tearfully one night in the darkroom after she had run upstairs to make sure that A. R. wasn’t crying. “I can’t raise kids and be your assistant at the same time.”
“You can do anything, Rosemarie,” I said cautiously, not having realized that she had signed on as my assistant.
“That’s my line to you.”
I bought more cameras, notably a new Hasselblad and an old Speed Graphic, experimented with color, and flew off to the Western Pacific with the President-elect and his massive entourage.
“Remember,” Rosemarie told me as we fought our way through the crowds at Midway Airport (then the busiest in the world) this is not your career. You are not a journalist. You’re an artist. You do studies and portraits, not candid pictures of presidents getting off airplanes for the cover of Life.”
A Christmas Wedding Page 20
