As far as Avedon’s work is concerned, there will undoubtedly be a shift of some sort, and then another and another, for he has a horror of formulas. “He never brings the same mental attitude to the same problem twice, and in fashion photography, where a certain amount of repetition is taken for granted, this is a trait that amounts to genius,” a Harper’s Bazaar editor observed a while ago. It is also a trait that Avedon deliberately cultivates. Even when his gift of improvisation fails him, he refuses to fall back on routine procedures; at least once, he has given up photography altogether for as long as six months, simply because he felt that his pictures were becoming monotonous. Notwithstanding the elaborate dramatic scenarios he invents for his models, he seldom knows just what scene in them he is going to photograph until he arrives at his studio. If nothing unexpected strikes him and he feels that he can’t lay hands on a completely original idea, he is more than likely to abandon the project. One of his few theories about photography is that if it does not provide a lot of fun for both him and his model, it is not worth bothering with, because his work will become static, methodical, and dull.
Perhaps the Harper’s Bazaar portraits that Avedon takes of celebrated people constitute his most valid claim to consideration as a serious artist. They, too, have an improvised look, and no two of them are alike in pose or treatment. Here, Avedon is under no obligation to make his subjects look elegant, and some of the portraits are almost caricatures—photographic impressions that probe for every psychological weakness and theatrical affectation in the sitter’s character. Curiously, Avedon has never had much success in attempting to photograph specimens of heroic masculinity, such as Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando. “I suppose it is because of unconscious hostility on my part, or possibly a sense of rivalry,” he says, with his customary frankness in passing along the findings of his psychiatrist. On the other hand, the ravaged face of the late Humphrey Bogart stirred him to such pity that he achieved a truly memorable portrait, one that conveys an almost pathological sense of fear. In his portrait work, Avedon appears to be inspired mainly by subjects in whom he can find qualities that excite his compassion—advanced age, physical debility, ugliness, or the pathos often underlying the surface insouciance of professional comedians or inveterate poseurs. Avedon portraits in Harper’s Bazaar have shown Frank Lloyd Wright carelessly and arrogantly wearing a day’s growth of beard, Truman Capote apparently impersonating St. Anthony, Elsa Maxwell in bed with a telephone and a pet skunk, and a head of Charles Laughton so enlarged that it looks like something seen through a microscope. None of Avedon’s subjects seem to resent this kind of treatment; most of them move in circles, both here and in Europe, where being selected to sit for one of his Harper’s Bazaar portraits ranks as an accolade.
From time to time, people watching Avedon’s smooth day-to-day performance on his secure and tranquil plateau are inclined to wonder where he can go from here. He is still a young man, and one whose restless imagination and inventiveness might be expected to urge him on to the exploration of other branches of photography. His wife, for instance, believes that he ought to devote more attention to realistic reporting, in the manner of Henri Cartier-Bresson. He has already, in the case of Funny Face, flirted with the movies, and a year or so ago he directed a television show starring Judy Garland. During the first four minutes of this production, Miss Garland carried on in stark splendor against a standard Avedon blank white background—a scene that Variety praised as an entirely new development in television—but in general the show was less enthusiastically received, and Avedon soon returned to his own snug studio, happy to be back where he could work as an individual and control the elements of his art. The answer to the question of where he goes from here may be “Nowhere.” He may already be there—if by “there” is meant a state of exuberant, tumbling transition between one photographic inspiration and the next.
A NOTE BY JILL LEPORE
T WAS A jumpy time. “Said Mr. A to Mr. B, ‘I doubt the loyalty of C,’ ” E. B. White wrote in “The ABC of Security,” in 1953, the year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as Soviet spies, and Joseph McCarthy, blustering about subversion and perversion, began holding hearings on security risks in the U.S. Army and the federal government. Un-American activities, atomic bombs, blacklists, loyalty tests: everyone was rattled. The anti-anti-Communists were uneasy, the anti-anti-anti-Communists uneasier. “The first actually means men who are against men who are against Communists, and the second, when you unravel it, means men who are against men who are against men who are against Communists,” James Thurber explained helpfully. Neither was to be confused with an ex-ex-Communist, “a man who may have ceased to be a man who may have ceased to be a Communist,” or, when you pare that down, a man who may have ceased to be a man. This gobbledygook must have seemed at the time to be on everyone’s lips, but, in retrospect, some of it came, one way or another, from the National Security Agency, the postwar, top-secret counter-counter-intelligence agency formed in 1952, although not many people knew about it: its existence was classified. All the same, already, the word “security” and the catchphrase “national security” were degenerating into meaninglessness. “In politics,” Thurber wrote, “ ‘security’ itself has come to mean ‘insecurity.’ ” It wasn’t so much gibberish (which is how Mencken would have described it), or bunk (a Harold Ross-ism), or doublespeak (in the Orwellian sense), as it was an atomic-era epidemic of overclassification.
The year 1955, when Thurber wrote “The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now,” was also the year of Ginsberg’s “Howl”: the “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks.” A lot of magazine writing from the decade aims at being hip, if not hip to the howl, hip to the lingo about the lingo: to be unbewildered. In a Profile of Dorothy Day, Dwight Macdonald described the Catholic Worker movement this way: “Politically, the Catholic Workers are hard to classify. They are for the poor and against the rich, so the capitalists call them Communists; they believe in private property and don’t believe in class struggle, so the Communists call them capitalists; and they are hostile to war and to the State, so both capitalists and Communists consider them crackpots.”
No one wants to be labeled. But the trick of writing during an epidemic of overclassification, wishing to be heard above the howl, is to say something that holds its meaning—to say something certain—without appearing to be a crackpot. That’s what drew Macdonald, the critic, to Day, the believer: her conviction. Not her religious faith, per se, but her belief in the moral idea “that it is possible even today to live in peace and brotherhood.” Say what he would about Day, devotion set Macdonald back on his heels. “The Catholic Workers are religious in a way that is hard for most people even to understand, let alone sympathize with,” Macdonald wrote. “They practice their faith on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, as well as Sundays.” The jab at Sunday churchgoers is misplaced: those “most people” are Macdonald. He knew Day wasn’t a crackpot; still, he wasn’t sure what she was. He didn’t find her serenity consoling; he found it discomfiting.
Bernard Taper had something of the same flustered, deeply admiring response to Thurgood Marshall when he flew with him from New York to Atlanta in the winter of 1956, to attend a meeting of the NAACP. “He is a tall, vigorous man of forty-seven, with a long face, a long, hooked nose above a black mustache, and heavy-lidded but very watchful eyes,” Taper wrote about the man who had argued Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. Two years later, Marshall was serving as the NAACP’s special counsel. On the flight, Taper orders a Scotch and soda; Marshall, observing Lent with an amused abstemiousness, drinks a cup of coffee. Taper expects Marshall to be furious and impatient and terrified he’ll be killed; he isn’t. Instead, Marshall, lighting one cigarette after another, is mainly worried that smoking won’t be allowed at the upcoming meeting. Taper: “Of all the worries that might beset a Negro leader setting out for Georgia, this wa
s one I had not anticipated.” At the meeting in Atlanta, Taper watches as delegates from every state report on the state of school desegregation. “West Virginia was doing extremely well,” he wrote. “The news from Arkansas, Kentucky, and Texas was rather less encouraging.” In the face of this, Taper is only more awed by Marshall’s faith: “The concreteness, the calm, the serene feeling of assurance that the law would eventually prevail—these I had definitely not expected.” Taper thought Marshall would be edgier, angrier. How could he be so cool?
Accounting for the challenge to segregation and the rise of the national-security state hadn’t exactly been in the brief of Harold Ross’s New Yorker. “I guess The New Yorker hangs on, but it is a hell of a different magazine from the one I went to work for in the twenties,” E. B. White wrote in 1950, the year The New Yorker celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. “Ross worries about this constantly but always ends with the remark: ‘Ah Jesus Christ it’s still worth 20 cents.’ ” But long before Ross’s death, in 1951—beginning, really, with the war in Europe—the magazine had been covering politics and the world. Richard Rovere started writing his Letter from Washington in 1948. The idea had come from William Shawn, who told Rovere not to write like a reporter. “I should not, he said, think of myself as being in competition with Time or Newsweek or the dailies; they were in the news business, and we were not,” Rovere later explained. “My job in Washington was not to ‘report’ on the White House or anything else—except in the way that a reviewer might ‘report’ on a book.”
Rovere wrote as an outsider. He didn’t live in Washington. He lived in upstate New York, with his wife and three kids. Every few weeks, he’d take the sleeper to D.C. and stay for a day or two. Like Thurber, blowing his stack over the “classificatory degradationists” who talked, unendingly, about creeping Socialists, ritualistic liberals, massive retaliationists, agonized reappraisalists, and unorthodox thinkers, Rovere knew his left from his right, but he didn’t have much use for political taxonomy. He’d always wanted to study eighteenth-century English literature; he liked farce. “Lack of excitement and inspiration is, of course, the general rule at political conventions, and more often than not any enthusiasm manifested is contrived and bogus,” Rovere wrote from the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1956. “Still, there is more to politics than rhetoric and stage management,” he wrote from the Republican Convention, later that summer, in San Francisco, “and the key political fact about the gathering now breaking up is that it has made Richard M. Nixon the symbol, if not the center, of authority in the Republican Party.” The reward, reading Rovere, is appreciating the acuity with which he could see, past the swagger, what was genuinely at stake. “People have been bothered by Nixon without being able to say precisely why,” he wrote. Then, there’s his evenhandedness. The civil-rights planks on both 1956 party platforms, he explained, “scarcely go beyond acknowledging that the Founding Fathers saddled us with the United States Supreme Court and that we are obliged to honor its decisions—though not necessarily today or tomorrow.”
Tomorrow came soon enough. In the fall of 1957, Rovere took the sleeper to Washington again, after Eisenhower sent troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, where the governor had deployed the National Guard to prevent nine black children from attending a city high school. “He doubtless reckoned, as almost everyone here reckons, that it was a mite better to uphold the courts with bayonets than not to uphold the courts at all,” Rovere wrote about the president. Still, “there is a taint on justice whenever it has to be enforced at the point of a gun.”
There’s an interregnum, in the middle of Taper’s Thurgood Marshall piece, during a break in the meeting when most of the delegates go to get dinner at “the Negro Y.M.C.A.” It was snowing when Taper and Marshall left New York. In Atlanta, it is hot. Taper goes for a long walk, into a white neighborhood, and ends up eating a sandwich and drinking a beer at a restaurant. In a pretty park across the street, white children are playing in the grass. Time passes. “The sky was pink now, and I started back,” Taper wrote. “It was dark by the time I reached the church.”
It got darker. Taper had asked Marshall what the NAACP would do if it kept winning in the courts but losing on the streets. “I don’t know what we’d do,” Marshall answered. “It would be anarchy. It would be the end of the country.” Who wouldn’t be jumpy?
FROM
Dwight Macdonald
OCTOBER 4/11, 1952 (ON DOROTHY DAY)
ANY PEOPLE THINK that Dorothy Day is a saint and that she will someday be canonized. In 1933, with the late Peter Maurin, a French-born itinerant preacher, who has been affectionately described as “an apostle on the bum” and who advocated “a Utopian Christian communism,” she founded the Catholic Worker movement, and, despite her best efforts to the contrary, she still dominates it. She is a rangy woman of fifty-five whose thick gray hair is braided tightly around her small, well-shaped head. High cheekbones and slanting eyes give her a Slavic look, although her ancestry is Scotch-Irish. Her face—patient, gentle, and understanding—might suggest a passive temperament were it not for her wide, mobile mouth and the expression of her eyes, which is at times dreamily remote, at times as naïvely expectant as a young girl’s, but always alive. She smiles a good deal when she talks, and she often makes little jokes about herself and her movement. “We Catholics talk about the saints and martyrs, but I’ve heard it said that the Catholic Workers are made up of the saints, and the martyrs who are willing to live with the saints,” she said once. Her own patron saint, after whom she named her only child, is the gay and impetuous Teresa of Avila, who used to pray, “May God deliver me from surly saints.” In her sensible shoes and drab, well-worn clothes, Miss Day looks like an elderly schoolteacher or librarian; she has the typical air of mild authority and of being no longer surprised at anything children or book-borrowers may do. She also looks like a grandmother, which she is, for her daughter now has five children. Upon first meeting her, most people who are familiar with her career are surprised to find that, far from being dynamic, she is quiet and almost diffident. Although she has been speaking in public for years, her platform manner is retiring and hesitant, and she makes not even a stab at rhetorical effect. She has no “presence” at all, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she is impressive to meet or hear, communicating a moral force compounded of openness, sincerity, earnestness, and deprecatory humor. She has lived with intellectuals all her adult life, from the time when, at the age of nineteen, she established herself in Greenwich Village society as a writer for radical publications, but she is not one herself. She is more a feeler and a doer than a thinker. Not that she does not constantly deal with ideas, and often most fruitfully, but her mind works by free association rather than logic, and her writings and public talks—“speeches” would hardly be the right word—are as haphazardly put together as her clothes. Her temperament combines mystical feeling and practicality in a way not common in the everyday world but not uncommon in the annals of hagiography.
The physical manifestations of the movement that Miss Day and Maurin founded nineteen years ago consist of the Catholic Worker, a monthly paper with an anti-capitalist, anti-Communist viewpoint and a circulation of fifty-eight thousand, together with fifteen so-called Houses of Hospitality, in New York and other cities, here and abroad, and eight communal farms, scattered around the country—a total of twenty-three centers where the homeless are sheltered, the hungry are fed, and the ragged are clothed. New York is the headquarters of the movement, offering benign advice and encouragement to the centers elsewhere but, with the exception of two nearby farms, exercising no direct control over them. The whole organization is operated by perhaps a hundred men and women who give all or most of their time to it without pay, living cheerfully in voluntary poverty. All are lay Catholics, and almost all are under thirty and will presently leave, after a few years of the work, to go into the world again, usually to get married and raise a family, and their places will be fi
lled by new young volunteers. The movement is thus a kind of university, constantly taking in freshmen and graduating seniors. It is also a large family, in which the voluntary and the involuntary poor, the helpers and the helped, live together in the houses and on the farms with no more distinction in the matter of dress, manners, bed, and board than is to be found in any other family. Miss Day combines the functions of a headmistress—the cheerful glad-handing, the bringing out of shy individuals, the deft restraining of unruly ones, and even the fund-raising—with those of a fond and watchful mother. She writes a lot and travels a lot, trying to persuade people that it is possible even today to live in peace and brotherhood, and recruiting new members for her staff. Wherever she is and whatever else she does during the day, she always spends from one to two hours in prayer and meditation; her religion is the center of her life, and it is significant that the one touch of luxury in dress she permits herself is a handsome black lace mantilla she sometimes wears to Mass.
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