LOUIS TOOK TO TAKING PHOTOGRAPHS AT MIDDAY; BLANCHING FROM them those details he might otherwise have captured in the milder light of the early morning or pre-dusk hours, and lending a slightly windswept quality to even the photographs that had been meticulously posed. He was particularly proud, for example, of a photograph entitled “Dust Storm,” because, in actuality, it been taken on a very still day. Southern Oklahoma: his subjects—a father and three of his sons. They had posed patiently for him all afternoon, while Louis shouted orders like a general, made endless rearrangements, and shot through four rolls of film …
Hot and tired, Sutton had asked: How much is the truth worth if you insist on sacrificing reality to it every day? As her own faith flagged, she was, perhaps, beginning to resent Louis’s continued enthusiasm. (Though even he, as time wore on, began to agree: the more they persisted in their attempt to capture the “true,” or the “real,” the further away they seemed to get from anything at all.) Still, they tried. Staged shots, candid ones. Long exposures, short ones. And still, just as Sutton suspected, each, in the end, turned out the same. Nothing more than a photograph; flimsy and alterable as a word. How could she ever have expected anything else? A photograph was only, after all, an object like any other, meaning very little on its own. In fact, it seemed to Sutton that any photograph they took, or could take now, would require not only—like a word—a complete sentence, if not a whole book, to lend to it meaning, but a whole world; that it would require the entire state of Kansas or Oklahoma to stretch itself again just as it had in the moment it had first been “captured” on the page; for the dust to blow again through the flattened landscape; for the bodies of the people in the photograph, if there were any, to, once again, take on their proper dimensions and forms; for their thoughts to reach as far as they ever did into the invisible corners of their minds.
At the beginning, though, whenever she expressed this sort of doubt to Louis, he would only grind his teeth and swear.
Well, dammit! he would say. What do you expect? You’ll go mad if you think you can draw the whole world, like that, on the head of a pin.
But he was just as guilty as she was in that regard—more so. If anyone was going to go mad, Sutton told him, it was him. A reporter, she said, drew lines whenever she could between what was “visible” and what was not; an artist attempted to push past those lines. It was only a madman, she said, who attempted to eliminate them entirely.
LOUIS HAD CONTINUED —MORE and more urgently, perhaps, as the weeks and then the months began to pass—to devote himself to his study of F. W. H. Myers. At night, camped out in the back of their 1931 Willys Knight (a gift from Louis’s father), he read particularly persuasive sections of Human Personality to Sutton out loud—making it even more impossible than usual for her to sleep.
There existed, Myers and then Louis explained, continuities between the living world and the dead that had long been overlooked. How could she not see it, Louis wondered in genuine confusion, just as clearly as he? Photography, after all—he added after further reflection, in an argument all his own—was direct evidence of Myers’s claim! Just think of it, he begged. How everything we’ve done—all our efforts to date (here he gestured loosely toward the back of the Willys Knight, where box upon box of as-yet-undeveloped film lay jumbled together in packing crates) sit spooled in darkness. And will continue to—he said—until, one day soon, with the correct application of water and light, they—the past itself—will rise again to meet us!
Why is it so hard to imagine? he would ask on other occasions, when Sutton laughed outright, or—afflicted suddenly, as she often was in his mad moments, with an almost asphyxiating boredom—turned impatiently away. If they are intent, he said, on science providing the answers only to the things we already know, then it isn’t of any more use to us than religion! The surrealists, Louis argued further, had not gone far enough. They pursued their investigations the way they pursued everything else—as an approach, a pose. They plumbed the unconscious only for the purposes of surface ornamentation; they skated, in this way, Louis said, right over the truth, which—if they had only looked a bit deeper—they would have easily found. (Incidentally—it was by this logic that Louis defended the manipulations of the photographs he took—a photograph fails, he said, as everything fails, if you depend only on what is immediately apparent to the eye.)
It was not just conjecture, either, insisted Louis. Myers supplied “hard proof”: dozens of transcripts of the communications he and his friends had conducted over the years with the dead. That this “proof” had been largely discredited or (worse) ignored by academic scientists—a fact Sutton often pointed out—did not bother Louis one bit. It was not because the research wasn’t valid, he said; guided by the same principles as all modern science has been, ever since Aristotle woke up one day and discovered the universe in particular, and from there began to reason, then to extrapolate, and finally to dream! No, it was not science but politics that had clamped down on Myers’s research—trivializing his efforts in the same way that, once, Galileo and Copernicus had been sidelined and condemned!
Think of it, said Louis. What Myers discovered threatens the very structure of our current state! If it were to actually get out, if we were suddenly to make use of these findings, in a broader and more systematic way, think what upheaval there would be; what final, total revolution! If Alexander the Great or Napoleon, say, suddenly reared up their mighty heads once more and gave counsel (or denied it) to Franco or Roosevelt! Think of it! Louis exclaimed. If Galileo came back and described for us, in detail—based on his personal experience beyond the grave—the music of the spheres, and Poincaré reported on relativity and the proper measure of infinity, and Goethe discussed his latest postmortal notions of the transmutation of the soul!
THE MORE DISTANCE THEY covered together—north again: Rock Hill, Summerfield, Lynchburg; then east, toward home—the more certain Sutton became that the problem was not, as it seemed to Louis, that nothing succeeded in going deep enough, but just the opposite: in not being able to pause anything for long enough that what existed at the surface could be properly seen. Perhaps Alden (she thought) was right after all. There existed at any moment much more than could ever possibly be witnessed, let alone understood, but that what escaped was not hidden. It might indeed even be quite evident, were we not so obsessed with looking for it in the wrong places. Sometimes she would take Louis’s face in her hands so he could not turn away; look at him, very squarely, like that. And she would be sure—quite sure—in those moments, that he was wrong. That it was a mistake, a madness—in art as equally as love—to assume that the truth existed somewhere beyond or beneath the surface of things. Because the harder, the deeper, she looked into Louis’s eyes, the less sure she was that she was seeing anything at all. When, on the other hand, she let her gaze rest on him only lightly—letting the spray of colors around his black pupils (they were ringed like small suns) dance in the light and the shifting focus of her own eyes—she felt it. A powerful surge of something in her, which she knew could be nothing other (as in that first moment of contact, when the two of them had burst like clouds in each other’s arms) than purest love.
—
FOR SOME REASON, AS THE MONTHS PASSED, AND THEY BEGAN—INCREAS-ingly, and for very different reasons—to sense how ultimately “empty” the photographs they took were, or would soon turn out to be, they could no longer bear the thought of parting with them. They began to develop and, each month, send to Hopkins in Washington only a fraction of the film they shot over the same period. By the time, therefore— in late fall of 1937—they arrived back in New York, they’d amassed several crates’ worth of “stolen” negatives. These they printed in a crumbling one-bedroom they rented on the Lower East Side before laboriously cutting each print into tiny pieces and arranging them according to light and shade on the living room floor.
When, for the first time, they stepped back to observe the result— their efforts of the last six months
arranged around them in luminous abstract shapes; each appearing almost three-dimensional, as though collapsing in on itself like a dying sun—they were overcome (again, for their different reasons) with a strange mixture of devastating sadness and indescribable joy.
THANKS TO HOPKINS, WHO had personally recommended her, Sutton landed a job almost immediately upon her return to New York with Federal One. They started her off with the Writers’ Project—the guidebook series, in copy—but within two months she was promoted to managing editor, everything from Maine to Maryland suddenly under her domain.
Louis had declined a similar offer. He spent his time running up everyone they knew, trying to get them a private show for their work. Finally, he managed it: at a small gallery owned by the Polish artist Franz Wilhelm—an old acquaintance of Louis’s, who, it was rumored, was a direct descendant of Ferdinand I. In defiance of his own extraordinary size—he was as big as three men and had fingers like piano keys—Franz Wilhelm painted miniatures on fragments of pottery and glass, which were sometimes so small one needed a magnifying glass in order to see that anything had been painted on the surface at all.
He displayed his own work in an emptied shop front in Red Hook attached to an old factory building. There he collected art the way scientists collect rare specimens of insect or gemstone: the “factory” was a jumble of the work of every artist he had ever met, many of whom—as he bragged, unusually, when he showed Louis and Sutton the space—no one had ever heard of. But they didn’t argue when Franz Wilhelm purchased two of their “exploding stars” to add to his collection.
Even with the patronage of Franz Wilhelm, however, and the absentminded support of Louis’s father, after only a few weeks their brief career sputtered to a halt. Finally, Louis admitted that he, too, would need, at least temporarily, to support himself by other means, and shortly after landed a job at Life magazine—which was just then becoming famous for its glossy photo spreads.
That was the beginning of 1938; Europe was boiling. At any moment war might break out. Sutton was loath to spend it—if and when it did— editing the “Major Points of Interest” sections of New Jersey or Maryland.
With this in mind, she went back to Walker at the Herald Tribune and asked for a job.
A real job, she said. I want to report from London, or Paris—or Berlin.
Walker laughed appreciatively and shook his head. So long as I live, he said, I won’t be sending any woman overseas; you have my word on that.
But he gave her back her old job.
SO SHE RESIGNED FROM the Writers’ Project, and a month later was called up to testify for Martin Dies. She should have seen it coming. The Dies Committee had been investigating “un-American activities” in Federal One projects for over two years, and was famous for tracking down just the right witnesses—those who, for one reason or another, had a bone to pick with Federal One or the WPA. Having abruptly quit the Writers’ Project (where, indeed—having no Communist Party affiliation herself—she had found herself in the minority), she must have looked a likely candidate to Dies.
Just the year before, another former employee—the recently retired Edwin Banta—had aided Dies’s personal crusade by testifying that thirteen of the fifteen supervisors of the New York section of the guidebook series were Communists. Lou Gody (Banta testified), who had been Sutton’s supervisor, had never written a line of his own, and Mr. Kingman, of the Foreign Language Division, did not speak a single foreign language. All of this may have been true, as Sutton wrote to Alden— searching for advice on the issue—but as far as she was concerned, it spoke more than anything of the disorganization of the project than anything else. The thought that anyone in that office could have held a significant threat to the government—or anyone, for that matter—was laughable, she wrote.
Alden wrote back to say that, though he would be careful making any grand pronouncements (it was always impossible to know what you were looking at, after all, he said, when you really started looking at a thing), she should be just fine if she told them exactly what she knew. And who can tell—he added—perhaps she knew more than she thought; that her testimony would even do someone, somewhere, a little bit of good.
Despite this encouragement, Sutton wrote to the committee requesting she be excused from the hearing. It had only been a matter of months, she wrote, that she’d worked for the project: she knew of nothing untoward about either the project or the organization under question, and had nothing to report.
The idea of appearing in front of the committee frankly horrified her. The only employee whom she knew personally who had done so was Ralph De Sola—a former zookeeper from Miami. Unlike Banta, he had stayed on at the project even after his testimony—earning himself the nickname “Reptile” because of the way he continued to slink daily into his corner of the office in order to continue work on his pet projects: Who’s Who in the Zoo, and American Wildlife. The last thing Sutton wanted was to align herself with De Sola. She wasn’t a party member, but she certainly wasn’t a “reptile,” either.
DESPITE HER PERSONAL APPEAL, however, Sutton appeared in front of the Dies Committee—which consisted of Dies himself and a nervouslooking girl of about twenty, charged with the task of typing up the transcript of their exchange—in September 1938.
Let’s get straight to the point, Dies had said, after Sutton had been directed, opposite him, to a straight-backed chair, and the typist, her fingers poised above the keys, had indicated with a worried nod that she was ready to begin. Were there, in your work with the Writers’ Project, Dies said, and in particular in your role as editor of the state guidebook to New Jersey, any … particular guidelines about what should be included and not included in the text?
Sutton had badly wanted to appear aloof, to answer calmly and coolly, but right off the bat she stalled.
How could there not be? she asked. It seemed like a trick question. We could hardly include everything.
Enlighten me, Dies said—a smile playing at the corners of his lips, which looked chapped and dry.
The guidebooks are … intended—Sutton began, hesitatingly slow—to convey only the most basic information, sir. They are intended, you see, as … objectively as possible, to show—
Ah! Dies said, raising a hand in the air. As objectively as possible, you say. May I perhaps here inquire after the limits against which this effort of yours—to be as objective as possible—may have been pressed?
Again, Sutton hesitated. I can’t say I know what you are getting at, sir, she said.
Dies cleared his throat and shifted his attention to a folder in front of him. Very casually, he began leafing through the pages the folder contained, as though he had forgotten the question himself.
Finally, he found what he was looking for.
Were you, or were you not, he asked, peering over the top of the sheet of paper he now held between them, responsible for the sentence in the New Jersey guide claiming that a certain factory—he glanced down, consulting the page—was, and I quote, “the biggest buyer of tear gas in the state”?
The chair felt suddenly very hard beneath her, and Sutton shifted uncomfortably. I can’t quite recall, sir, she said.
Well, said Dies cheerfully, let’s say for the moment that it is true— because I have it on record that it is so. Would you say that this was an … objective statement?
It was—Sutton said quietly, her voice tight in her throat—the information I was given.
What was that? Dies asked, though it was quite clear he’d heard.
Sutton cleared her throat and repeated her reply. Louder this time.
And did you—Dies shot back, satisfied—check that information against the facts available to you?
Now Sutton could feel her cheeks grow hot. They were the facts available to me, she said.
Dies sighed exaggeratedly. Miss Kelly, he said—as though all at once he had grown tired of the exercise. It is my duty to inform you that there is no record of the factory in question acquiring, let
alone using, tear gas against strikers or anyone else. What, then, I wonder, was the purpose of including this claim in your “general interest” touristic guide to the state?
Sutton said nothing.
Let me stick a little closer to the point, continued Dies. We seem to be having a little difficulty understanding each other. Are you, or were you at any time, Miss Kelly, under the impression that the Federal Writers’ Project, or the WPA more generally, had as its express purpose the intention to spread communism throughout the United States?
No, sir, Sutton said. It was hardly the express purpose—she began.
But a purpose, Dies said, leaning slightly forward in his chair, nevertheless?
Listen, Sutton said. She felt terribly impatient with the whole thing suddenly, and experienced a powerful urge to simply get up and walk out of the room. Would Dies follow her if she did? Would the girl? Her typewriter still rattling?
Listen, she said again. I don’t see what the purpose of an inquiry is if you know exactly what you want to hear from the beginning.
Dies smiled. Ah, yes, he said. I do apologize. You were saying …
I was saying that … it was hardly the express purpose of the Writers’ Project or any Federal One organization so far as I know to spread communism or any other political doctrine, in this country or abroad.
Dies nodded his head slowly. The typewriter rang. There was a slight pause then, as her inquisitor gazed upward, as though in deep contemplation of what she had just said. Then, in a changed tone, his voice suddenly bright, as though the two of them had just been introduced at a party by mutual friends, he asked: Have you, by chance, read—Miss Kelly—the essay by Mr. Richard Wright that was recently commissioned by your organization?
Sutton hadn’t the slightest clue where this was leading. She had never had any association with the book American Stuff, in which Wright’s essay had been included, and to which Dies now referred—it had gone to press before she’d landed the job. She knew of Wright only by reputation.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 29
