Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

  These three beautifully produced and exhaustively researched “coffee table” books, each by way of Yale University Press, weigh in at over thirteen pounds in all and are not for the faint of heart or the casual browser, particularly the seven-hundred-page Selected Letters—which is only the first volume of the O’Keeffe-Stieglitz letters. In all, the lovers, married in 1924 but frequently living apart, Stieglitz in New York City and Lake George, in the Adirondacks, and O’Keeffe in New Mexico, exchanged more than five thousand letters, which comprise more than twenty-five thousand pages; the present volume contains letters written between 1915 and 1933. The reader will learn, from Hoffman’s biography of Stieglitz, that Stieglitz was an indefatigable letter-writer to many friends, acquaintances, and associates, not only to Georgia O’Keeffe; he seems to have been a virtual graphomaniac, whose handwritten letters sometimes ran to as many as forty pages which, as he said, he never reread or revised.

  “Finally, a woman on paper. A woman gives of herself. The miracle has happened.” So Stieglitz allegedly exclaimed, seeing a portfolio of abstract drawings by the then-unknown Georgia O’Keeffe, for consideration in his Fifth Avenue gallery 291, in 1915. So enthusiastic was Stieglitz, he arranged to exhibit O’Keeffe’s work in the spring of 1916 without consulting her; at first the young woman artist was upset by the gallery owner’s impetuousness, then, meeting Stieglitz she was mollified, and uncharacteristically deferential: “Nothing you do with my drawings is ‘nervy.’ I seem to feel that they are as much yours as mine”—an extraordinary statement from O’Keeffe who so prized her independence and self-reliance.

  O’Keeffe left New York City, eventually moving to Canyon, Texas, where she had a position teaching art at West Texas State Normal College, and so begins the massive, astonishing correspondence between O’Keeffe and Stieglitz—then married, and the father of a daughter whom he’d once photographed obsessively; a daughter who would suffer a mental breakdown in her early twenties, regress to “the mentality of a young child,” and was institutionalized for the remainder of her life. In their fascination with each other, both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz hardly seem aware of other people, let alone of their responsibility to others; their letters are extravagantly narcissistic, exhibitionistic, often brilliant, uncensored cries from the heart that more resemble stream-of-conscious journal entries than composed letters. Breathless single-sentence paragraphs careen down the page of O’Keeffe’s letters to Stieglitz, at times reminiscent of the seemingly dashed-off lines of Emily Dickinson:

  Of course it is all right for you to put me in Camera Work if you want to—but it hurts—Do you understand how? Oh it’s very bad—Then—my hard crust gets to the top—and I don’t care—Write a whole book about me if you want to— I guess I hate myself when I don’t care—Then I look around helplessly at my disgusting independence—and find myself asking—what can I do about it— And have to laugh—for there is nothing— And tonight—let me ask you something else—I don’t know— There is never anyone to ask the things we most need to ask—I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me—

  (NOVEMBER 4, 1906)

  In his typical grandiloquent manner Stieglitz writes to O’Keeffe:

  You are a very, very great Woman. You have given me—I can’t tell you what it is—but it is something tremendous—something so overpowering that I feel as if I had shot up suddenly into the skies & touched the stars—& found them all women— Women like you are a Woman. . . . There never was a letter like the one here before me—a Woman’s Soul laid bare in all its beauty—pulsating—crying out into the starlight night.

  (NOVEMBER 4, 1906)

  Stieglitz is a romantic visionary, in his art and in his life; it seems reductive to say that he was a notorious womanizer, for his religion seems to have been Woman as Muse, first formed by his reading of Faust as a young man: the concept of a woman who might embody all Women, “whose purity might redeem a man’s soul.”

  Soon, Stieglitz confides in O’Keeffe that he has been married for twenty-three years without believing in marriage—“Nor have I believed it since.” He isn’t fit for marriage, he says; even as his appeal to O’Keeffe is frankly sexual, as well as visionary and idealistic; often, startlingly intimate:

  I hope you haven’t had that headache.—But being a woman you are probably damned to those periodic headaches, frightful ones, that so many women must stand. And you with your nature are doomed to the worst kind. . . . One ought to sleep during the day—When one is mad as I am.

  By nature Stieglitz is an enthusiast; his truest nature is celebratory, Whitmanesque. Repeatedly in his letters he describes New York City, or Lake George, or his own interior weather, in exclamatory terms: “What a magnificent day for me!”—“Power—Color—Vision—Elemental Force—Greatest Delicacy—Intensest Passion—Killing Love!!—” “I wish I wasn’t so damn sane—It borders on insanity to see too straight—”

  O’Keeffe is most intriguing when she writes, ostensibly to Stieglitz but perhaps primarily to herself, about herself as a rebel and iconoclast:

  I’ll be damned and I want to damn every other person in this little spot (Canyon, Texas)—like a nasty pretty little sore on the wonderful plains. The plains—the wonderful great big sky—makes me want to breathe so deep that I’ll break—There is so much of it—I want to get outside of it all—I would if I could—even if it killed me.

  Yet more intriguing are O’Keeffe’s spontaneous remarks about her art:

  I don’t understand—I get the shapes in my head—can never make them exactly like I want to—but there is a fascination about trying— And then too—there is the delicious probability that I don’t know anything about what Art is—so it’s fun to make the stuff—

  The next one is already whirling in my mind—

  You know—I’m just living—I just sort of plunge from one thing into another—so often—so very much afraid—

  After Stieglitz separates from his wife, he and O’Keeffe live together for several years until his divorce is final; but their marriage doesn’t alter their fundamental relationship, nor even the flood of letters they write to each other when they are apart. One feels that for each, the other was a kind of alter ego, or soul mate; in confiding in the other, one confides in oneself, in terms otherwise inaccessible. For years, the mutual tone is both operatic and tender; though the initial romance becomes qualified by marital problems, primarily Stieglitz’s penchant for becoming infatuated with (and obsessively taking pictures of) ever younger women, it is difficult not to believe that Stieglitz writes sincerely to O’Keeffe, in explanation of one or another heartbreak he has caused her:

  You suffered when I didn’t want you to suffer—& through me. I suffered as horribly as you Sweetheart—& didn’t understand—suffered because I did not understand & saw your face! . . . but I suppose I was “hurt”—& stupid—wounded vanity maybe—(September 3, 1926)

  And, at a time when O’Keeffe had moved to Taos, New Mexico, to pursue a life of art largely independent of her aging husband:

  Eleven years have passed by.—I see all its phases—all the days and hours & moments of ecstasy & pain—the growth—of something very exceptional & very beautiful between us—I see the studio in 59th St.—291 (no man’s room)—our sitting there that first Sunday afternoon—Yes all those days & hours & really minutes still existing vividly for me, All the wonder & beauty & life—& all the terrible ordeal.—Life—your innocence—Emmy [Stieglitz’s wife]—Kitty [his daughter]. . . . And I see myself—And you. . . . My Holy Mountain invisible within.—Another part of me tossed about like the waters of the sea. And yet quiet. A contradiction ever. (June 8, 1929)

  And, in Whitmanesque grandiloquence, shading perhaps into bombast:

  You grand Woman—You say you are my Woman. Yes I know on Aug. 9th it will be 11? Years that you gave me your virginity. During Thunder and Lightning. It’s as if it were yesterday. It’s a wonder I didn’t give you a child. We were made to have one, but it was not
to be. . . . You gave me your virginity, that’s the reason you are my Woman for all time. You are not like other women—and I am your man for all Time for I am not like other Men . . . you gave me your virginity. . . . I love you my wild Georgia O’Keeffe. (August 5, 1929)

  And, a few years later, when Stieglitz is sixty-eight:

  Good morning my ever unsettled body—beautiful—

  Gentle—so—lovely soft one—ever sacred.

  (AUGUST 29, 1932)

  Except now, the beloved isn’t Georgia O’Keeffe but a young woman named Dorothy Norman, forty years Stieglitz’s junior, whose presence in her husband’s life would precipitate a nervous breakdown in O’Keeffe in February 1933, and cause a permanent rift in their marriage. Norman, who assisted Stieglitz in his gallery, An American Place, and worked with him closely on a number of publishing projects, was Stieglitz’s model for another series of intimate photographs, of the 1930s, not nudes, and none so strikingly sensual as those of O’Keeffe a decade before. (For some reason, one of the least interesting photographs of Dorothy Norman is reproduced on the cover of A Legacy of Light, when clearly the cover photograph should have been of Stieglitz himself, who was a strikingly photogenic man; or, indeed, of one of the famous O’Keeffe nudes. The photograph of Norman depicts a woman in black, her back to the camera, head bowed, shoulders slightly hunched and a row of singularly ugly large buttons down her back—a curious choice of an image for a book celebrating Stieglitz’s career as a great photographer.) Perhaps the single cruelest thing that Stieglitz did was to exhibit recently taken photographs of Dorothy Norman as a young, beautiful, “adoring” woman side by side with recently taken photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe that depict her as older, wary, plain, “sexless.” If O’Keeffe could forgive Stieglitz for his love affair with Norman, about which he allegedly talked openly, to anyone who would listen, including O’Keeffe herself, it isn’t likely that she could forgive him for an act of such thoughtlessness, which had the effect of embarrassing this dignified woman artist publicly. Dorothy Norman, married and the mother of several children, would nevertheless remain in Stieglitz’s life until his death in July 1946, at the age of eighty-two. At this time O’Keeffe, still Stieglitz’s legal wife, returned to take over his estate as his executrix, summarily banishing Norman from the scene in what must have been a kind of belated triumph. O’Keeffe would spend years going through Stieglitz’s immense collections of art, personal documents, and memorabilia, and would give away most of his collected work to museums, primarily to the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. O’Keeffe was extraordinarily generous in giving away such priceless work: “I did not wish to keep the collection and preferred not to sell it. I had no choice but to give it to the public.” Of course, O’Keeffe had had a choice: she could certainly have kept some of Stieglitz’s work and some of the highly valuable art he’d collected over a period of more than fifty years.

  In speaking of her brilliant, charismatic, loving and yet chronically unfaithful and impetuous husband, O’Keeffe said:

  There was a constant grinding like the ocean. It was as if something hot, dark, and destructive was hitched to the highest, brightest star. For me he was much more wonderful in his work than as a human being. I believe it was the work that kept me with him—though I loved him as a human being. . . . I put up with what seemed to me a good deal of nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.

  [Legacy of Light]

  As A Legacy of Light and Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe make abundantly clear, Alfred Stieglitz had a life and a career wholly distinct from his relationship with Georgia O’Keeffe. If she had not met him, one can only speculate whether she would have acquired the reputation she did; certainly, she would not have attracted such early, exhilarating attention, resulting in early commercial success, if she hadn’t been showcased in Stieglitz’s highly regarded “avant-garde” gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. Yet, if Stieglitz hadn’t met O’Keeffe, it seems likely that his reputation as a major American photographer would be more or less the same; if he hadn’t photographed O’Keeffe obsessively in the 1920s, he would have photographed another young woman, or women, very likely with comparable results. Certainly, the photographs of Stieglitz contained in these books are surpassingly beautiful, some of them strange, eerie, and arresting: winter scenes in New York City of snow falling in the streets, the early “sky-scrapers” and building construction of Old and New New York (1910) and The City of Ambition (1910); the famous The Steerage (1907), which Stieglitz photographed on an ocean crossing in which he was traveling, of course, in first-class accommodations; moody sky-scenes, The Aeroplane (1910), A Dirigible (1910), Songs of the Sky (1923), and the ambitious sequence of abstract cloud pictures, Equivalents (1920s); meticulous, near-mystical photographs of Stieglitz’s beloved Lake George, titled Later Lake George (1930s); brilliant photographs of Stieglitz’s artist- and writer-friends Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Francis Picabia, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, with whom O’Keeffe had an intensely romantic friendship for a brief while in November 1933, writing to him afterward: “I like knowing the feel of your maleness. I wish so hotly to feel you hold me very tight and warm to you.” Stieglitz also took numerous photographs of friends, companions, and associates, including the wife of his friend Paul Strand, Rebecca Strand, with whom both he and O’Keeffe seem to have shared a romantic infatuation in the early 1920s.

  One has the impression, studying Stieglitz’s work, of a man of genius inventing, or helping to invent, an entirely new art form, photography, at a time when only paintings, drawings, and sculpture were considered serious art. With his younger photographer-friend Edward Steichen, Stieglitz helped to formulate what became known as Pictorialist photography with its dreamlike subjects, soft-focus nocturnal scenes and atmospheric weather reminiscent of French Impressionism and of certain of the effects of Whistler. “My photographs are born of an inner need . . . an Experience of Spirit. I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it sometimes in the form of photographs. . . . There is art or not art. There is nothing in between.”

  Quite apart from his creative gifts, Stieglitz had a perhaps equally rare charismatic gift for gathering first-rate artists to him, showcasing and selling their art, persuading wealthy collectors to collect them, and creating “public relations” for photography as a new, vital, exciting art-form very different from ordinary “picture-taking.” Stieglitz and His Artists, which documents a recent exhibition of that name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art taken from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection that took “decades to complete,” suggests the astonishing range of Stieglitz’s interests as an American-born but German-educated follower of European and avant-garde trends: these include early works of Kandinsky, drawings and watercolors by Matisse, ink-on-paper drawings by Picasso, paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Félicien Rops, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and of course Georgia O’Keeffe, among many others originally exhibited in his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. (Despite its fame, Stieglitz had to close 291 in 1917, with the economic downturn after the start of the war; he would open other galleries, and continue with art publications, through the remainder of his long life.)

  Stieglitz: A Legacy of Light is fact filled, like a compact encyclopedia of Stieglitz’s era; it contains photographs of places and scenes vital to Stieglitz’s life, like Lake George, taken by the biographer—(and inadvertently providing a sharp contrast to the “artistic” photographs of Stieglitz); clearly, Katherine Hoffman knows her subjects intimately, and is excellent at drawing together seemingly disparate aspects of their lives. Still, her staid, tidy, resolutely “academic” prose seems inadequate to convey the sheer vitality of the remarkable Stieglitz, whose erotic attachment to his art might require a different sort of perspective. And the sheer quantity of breathless, dashed-off, hyperbolic and repetitive letters collected by Sarah Greenough in My Faraway One has the effect of those enormou
s magnified portraits by Chuck Close that are so dauntingly close-up, they can barely be seen for their disintegration into pixels. Less is more might have been a principle for collecting the letters, which are fascinating to read at the start, but soon become much less fascinating as the years pass; there is an epic journey here, a tumultuous love affair settling into a kind of long-distance marriage of mutual regard and respect, but significance is lost in a welter of details, and the prospect of hundreds more of these letters is indeed daunting. Fortunately, Greenough provides helpful transitional passages and footnotes to aid in our understanding of what might be really going on, beneath and behind the letters.

  The last letter in My Faraway One is this touching, typically breathless one from Stieglitz in New York City to Georgia O’Keeffe in Lake George, where she has retreated to recover from a breakdown that was very likely precipitated by Steiglitz’s love affair with Dorothy Norman:

  Midnight. It’s New Year—1934—the City is agog with whistles & bells—sirens—I have been in bed—I jumped up to say Hello—If I didn’t feel you were asleep I’d phone now. . . .