In Rough Country

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The photographic image would seem to be the most chameleon-like of all images, deriving meaning almost entirely from the context in which it appears, from its size vis-à-vis the viewer, and from its position in space: on the museum or gallery wall, or in a book. The glamorous celebrity photographs for which Annie Leibovitz is best known, that appeared originally in or on the cover of Vanity Fair, appear, on the museum wall, in a vast white space usually designated for “art,” ludicrously overblown and synthetic, glossy and flat as movie posters; yet, in the book, surrounded by Leibovitz’s low-keyed, candid, “artless” personal material, the identical images, greatly reduced in size, function as the memoirist intends them: as specimens of her professional work, bulletins from a distant country. The much-hyped celebrity photographs of Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, Sylvester Stallone (in the nude, muscled and headless) are most successful as magazine photography, scaled to the page, or on the cover, where amid mundane or trashy newsstand rivals, Leibovitz’s meticulously staged portraits glow like gems; in the museum exhibit, exposed on the museum wall, the famous cover of the very pregnant Demi Moore seems but a parody of Hollywood self-exhibitionism on the part of an actress of unexceptional talent in collusion with the buzz-oriented magazine (at that time edited by Tina Brown) and a high-tech photographer who routinely employs a crew of assistants and much equipment for one of her colossally expensive “shoots.”

  Enormous brooding photographs of such celebrities as Mick Jagger (posed topless, on an unmade bed, with cinched-in waist and darkened lips), Brad Pitt (posed sprawled atop a rumpled bed in a Vegas hotel, in a gaudy striped shirt and what appear to be faux-ocelot-skin pants and cowboy boots), and baby-faced dreamboat Leonardo DiCaprio (posed with a swan cradled in his arms and the swan’s neck looped about his own neck: live swan? stuffed swan?) exude an air of comical inflation on the museum wall, while in the book, reduced to something like human scale, they might be read as individuals who have succumbed to garish fantasies about themselves. Some of the celebrity photographs verge upon kitsch-caricature, like the portrait of a fatuous-looking Jack Nicholson gripping a golf club, in a wind-ruffled bathrobe and dark glasses, reacting as if he’s surprised by the camera; and the reclining B-movie pose of the young actress Scarlett Johansson in a garish Hollywood glamor costume and abbreviated satin panties. The celebrity photographs are usually portraits in isolation, as if the condition of celebrity-hood is self-enclosed, autistic; where two celebrities are photographed together, a dark-garbed Johnny Depp slung upon the naked body of the “super-model” Kate Moss on an unmade bed in the Royalton Hotel, the effect is of two exhibitionists who have found each other, in a display of sexual intimacy for the benefit of the photographer looming over them. The effect of a sequence of such photographs is numbing, if not exasperating: for all her skill, the photographer has made no attempt to “reveal” character but merely to expose or exploit fantasies. In an interview in 7 Days, Leibovitz acknowledges being barely able to look at her commercial work, which was on display in her studio in preparation for A Photographer’s Life: while insisting that she is still proud of the work, Leibovitz expresses the wish that “it had more meaning, more substance.”

  It is a curious fact: the more you ponder Annie Leibovitz’s high-tech commercial work, the less you see in it; viewer, celebrity, and photographer come to seem crushed together, suffocated in non-meaning.

  On the museum wall, these photographs predominate; in the book, they are bracketed by far more interesting personal material like pictures—to use Leibovitz’s modest term—from the photographer’s trip to Sarajevo in 1993 with Susan Sontag, where the women met with editors of the newspaper Oslobodjenje, and of the photographer’s country place in rural Rhinebeck, New York. (In the book, as distinct from the museum exhibit, upstate New York with its densely wooded hills, mist-shrouded ponds and vistas romantically empty of human figures, functions as a much-needed contrast to the claustrophobia of the studio.) Leibovitz includes several panoramic photographs of the ruins of 9/11 followed immediately, and unabashedly, by a photograph of an enormously pregnant fifty-one-year-old Leibovitz (taken by Susan Sontag) and delivery room photographs of the birth of Leibovitz’s daughter Sarah in October 2001. The symbolic meaning is blunt and yet appropriate: thousands of people have died in the World Trade Center terrorist attack, there is death in the world, but Annie Leibovitz’s first daughter has been born, and the lineage that includes Leibovitz’s admirable parents Marilyn and Samuel will continue. Harshly criticized by the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith for both the “pedestrian” nature of her personal photographs and for her exhibitionism, Leibovitz would seem to have little choice about including in her memoir such intimate material in which the “public” and the “private” intersect. How dark, how suffocating in its images of debilitating disease and death A Photographer’s Life would have been, without the irresistible “baby pictures” of Leibovitz’s three daughters! Recall Henry David Thoreau, a Transcendentalist predecessor: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

  Unguarded, unposed and painfully intimate photographs of a desperately ill Susan Sontag in hospital beds in New York City and in Seattle, in the last days of her life unrecognizable, face ravaged and stomach grotesquely bloated, appear, on the museum wall, too close by the glamour celebrity photographs of “perfect” bodies not to be cruelly diminished by them. In the public space that is the museum wall, viewed by a neutral observer who knew nothing of the photographer’s longtime relationship to Sontag, such raw work reads like an exploitation of the subject’s helplessness that would constitute an outrageous violation of Sontag’s privacy if snapped by paparazzi who’d breached hospital security to get to her room: the viewer recoils in dismay, revulsion. Yet, in the book, where many pages of memoirist material involving Sontag and Leibovitz and their years of traveling together have prepared the viewer for such intimacy, these photographs of an aging woman in physical distress, like those of the deceased Sontag on a bier in a Fortuny-like dress, take on another, far more nuanced and poignant significance:

  I forced myself to take pictures of Susan’s last days. Perhaps the pictures completed the work she and I had begun together when she was sick in 1998. I didn’t analyze it then. I just knew that I had to do it…I cried for a month [while editing the pictures]. I didn’t realize until later how far the work on the book had taken me through the grieving process. It’s the closest thing to who I am that I’ve ever done.1

  The photographs of Leibovitz’s that work most successfully in the museum exhibit are those of bodies in motion: an astonishing leap by the (unclothed) dancer Bill T. Jones, another leap by the silhouetted Michael Jordan, close-ups of the beautifully sculpted bodies of members of the U.S. Olympics athletic teams including swimmers, gymnasts, runners and pole-vaulters, whose heroic exploits seem to transcend merely personal identity, as in the sculpted human forms of antiquity. While a close-up of the elderly Eudora Welty showing the writer vacant-eyed and seemingly without affect is a cruel exposure of Welty in an unguarded moment, close-ups of the elderly, seemingly moribund William Burroughs exude an air of something like primal terror, and human resignation in the face of such terror, as if the prankster Burroughs were peering at the viewer through the eye holes of his own death mask. There is a witty juxtaposition of President George W. Bush and his advisers followed immediately by a feisty-looking Michael Moore and his assistants, who would mercilessly lampoon Bush and his crew in the satirical film Fahrenheit 9/11; and there are close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Avedon, Colin Powell, Daniel Day-Lewis, and a craggy, bewhiskered Willie Nelson that gain from the exalted-heroic treatment. The museum exhibit ostentatiously concludes with a separate room containing eight gigantic landscapes that loom above the viewer with the portentousness of greeting card pictures monstrously inflated; yet, in the book, accompanying the starkly intimate photographs of the last days of Susan Sontag and of
the elderly Sam Leibovitz, these identical images, in particular an Ansel Adams–inspired photograph of birch trees taken in Ellenville, New York, are beautifully understated and “Transcendental.”

  As a book, A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005 has the heft and intransigence of a grave marker. As befits a dream sequence, its pages are unnumbered; maddeningly, there is no table of contents, no index. Should you wish to locate certain of Leibovitz’s photographs, you must page through the book, turn these enormous pages repeatedly. Still, where the museum exhibit offers, as its glitzy poster proclaims, a sensational experience, or, more precisely, to employ Samuel Johnson’s remark about the Metaphysical poets, an experience of violently yoked-together images, few of them very deep or abiding, the book offers a protracted and unmistakable emotional experience. The moral of the exhibit is implicit in its staging: celebrity trumps family, public trumps private, glamour trumps the quotidian. But the book tells a very different story by rearranging images and bringing them into the same approximate scale, of the eclipsing of the public/professional life by the artist’s private life: the arduous but spiritually restorative act of memorialization. In this version, the “offensive” photographs of loved ones in extremis are necessary components of one’s own suffering; the dying individual is a part of oneself, reluctantly surrendered to death. Where an unsympathetic observer might recoil from what appears to be the ghoulish avidity with which the photographer takes “pictures” of her dying, and dead, loved ones, now corpses from which life has vanished, the sympathetic observer might interpret the act as homage, akin to a descent into death: the primitive, instinctual, visceral initial refusal to acknowledge the finality of death. The unsympathetic observer resents being forced into the position of voyeur; the sympathetic observer is willing to be forced into the position of a fellow voyager.

  Granted that the memoirist impulse is fundamentally narcissistic and that the memoirist is obliged to make much of human experiences—losses of loved ones, births of babies, happy family reunions, sorrowful graveyard scenes—that are common to us all, yet the effect, in the hands of some practitioners, is an art that can speak to others. Though a project’s range may be narrow, yet its roots can go deep. In On Photography, Susan Sontag remarks: “As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality.” But “sentimentality” may be the risk that the more reckless and more aggrieved among us must take in the pursuit of the elusive memoirist vision.

  “THE GREAT HEAP OF DAYS”: JAMES SALTER’S FICTION

  [I]t was in me like a pathogen—the idea of being a writer and from the great heap of days making something lasting.

  —JAMES SALTER, FROM BURNING THE DAYS: RECOLLECTION

  Born in 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, a graduate of West Point and a fighter pilot in the Korean War, James Salter is the author of a relatively small body of prose of uncommon subtlety, intelligence, and beauty. Especially in his deftly rendered shorter fiction, gathered in Dusk and Other Stories (1988) and now Last Night, as in the remarkable Light Years (1975), Salter suggests not the heavy hitters of his era—James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Robert Penn Warren, John O’Hara, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Saul Bellow, for whom prose fiction is an arena for sinewy self-display and argumentation—but such European sensibilities as Proust, Colette, Woolf, Nabokov, Marguerite Duras. Salter remarks with a kind of offhanded regret in his memoir Burning the Days (1997) that no work of his is filmable, but in fact Salter’s elliptical, impressionistic prose suggests the films of Antonioni and Bertolucci, who may well have had some influence on his fiction. Rare in a male writer of his generation, Salter has virtually no interest in politics and social issues and very little interest in reigning ideas, popular obsessions, psychology. In his shimmeringly sensuous meditation upon mortality, Light Years (1975), which reads like an eroticized To the Lighthouse, the concerns of Salter’s Caucasian-bourgeois protagonists are exclusively familial, aesthetic, sexual; though the novel moves through the violent upheaval in American society that was the 1960s, Salter’s characters are untouched by assassinations, civil rights demonstrations, the Vietnam War and its protestors, the disintegration of drug-ravaged communities. A Sport and a Pastime (1967) is a lyric account of youthful erotic love in “[g]reen, bourgeoise France,” imagined by a voyeuristic American observer, and Solo Faces (1979) is an impassioned account of the mystique of mountain climbing, seen primarily through the consciousness of a fanatic devotee for whom “what mattered was to be a part of existence, not to possess it.” Salter’s characters inhabit, not history, but time; not a snarled world of politics and events but a pastoral world forever beckoning, and forever elusive, like the highest and most treacherous peaks of the Alps.

  As an Air Force pilot, James Salter flew F-86 fighter planes in more than one hundred missions during the Korean War, an interim of his life described with oneiric precision in Burning the Days and in his first two novels The Hunters (1956) and The Arm of Flesh (1961, revised and republished as Cassada in 2000). When he resigned his commission at the age of thirty-two, he’d been in uniform since the age of seventeen; he had just published, under a pseudonym, The Hunters: “Salter was as distant as possible from my own name. It was essential not to be identified and jeopardize a career…I wanted to be admired but not known.” Though Salter seems to have renounced these early realistic novels in favor of his later, more experimental work, both The Hunters and Cassada are riveting works of fiction, deserving of the general praise they received at the time of publication, when Salter was favorably compared to Saint-Exupéry, one of his models. Passages from both The Hunters and Cassada, as well as previously unpublished excerpts from Salter’s Korean War journal, are included in the miscellany Gods of Tin: The Flying Years (2004), an excellent introduction to Salter’s variegated yet uniformly eloquent work. Like Salter’s compelling memoir Burning the Days, Gods of Tin is so rich in its observations, so poetically precise in its language, one can open it virtually anywhere and be drawn into its haunting prose:

  12 Feb 1952. Korea…. Watched a mission take off at K-14—two at a time booming down the runway, then two more, and two more. Col. Thyng was leading, north to the Yalu. A second squadron followed. They streamed out, turning, disappearing into the overcast.

  Come now, and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they have got none. We arrived in Korea, as it happened, on a gloomy day. It was February, the dead of winter, planes parked along sandbag revetments and bitter cold lying over the field adding to the pall. Davis, the ranking American ace—mythic word, ineffaceable—a squadron commander, had just been shot down. With the terrible mark of newness on us, we stood in the officers’ club and listened to what was or was not fact. We were too fresh to make distinctions…

  We had come, it turned out, to join a sort of crude colonial life lived in stucco buildings in plain, square rooms, unadorned, with common showers and a latrine even the wing commander shared.

  We were there together for six months, cold winter mornings with the weak sunlight on the hills, the silvery airplanes gliding forth like mechanical serpents not quite perfected in their movement and then forming on the runway amid rising sound. In the spring the ice melted in the rivers and the willow became green. The blood from a bloody nose poured down over your mouth and chin inside the rubber oxygen mask. In summer the locust trees were green and all the fields. It comes hauntingly back: silent, unknown lands, distant brown river, the Yalu, the line between two worlds.

  And again,

  You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried with you into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

  A Sport and a Pastime, published when Salter was forty-two, is a radical departure from Salter’s e
arly novels both in subject matter and in language. A perennial on those lists of “most neglected” masterpieces, this tenderly/obsessively erotic romance might be seen as a kind of homage to the Parisian publisher of scandalous novels by Sade, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) and Pauline Réage (Story of O), Maurice Girodias of the fabled Olympia Press, “a sort of lanky Falstaff” as Salter recalls the man, whose books “one leafed through…in a kind of narcotic dream.” A Sport and a Pastime has as an epigraph a quotation from the Koran: “Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime.” It’s an ironic and yet literal commentary on the novel’s preoccupation with sensuous experience in a sequence of set pieces evoking, with the same lyric intensity, the countryside of France and a highly charged love affair of a twenty-four-year-old American, a Yale dropout, and a younger French shopgirl. The novel suggests Nabokov’s Lolita, though lacking Nabokov’s brilliant nastiness and allusiveness; its narrator is intrusive in the way of narrators in experimental fiction of the 1960s, a self-described “somnambulist” whose relationship to the avid young lovers is enigmatic: