Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  One of them was a medical friend of mine that I’d introduced her to a few years earlier. He was now director of a cancer research facility. This made a bond. However, during his visit he casually mentioned that she was on the terminal floor. She hadn’t known this and she wasn’t going to take any of that shit. She certainly wasn’t going to die or do chemo, the last resort. Many such patients were on her floor and she didn’t want to ever look like them. Hell, she was a doctor. She checked herself out and went home. Serengeti crazy.

  But she couldn’t breathe on standard portable oxygen. She needed supersaturated. Back to the hospital and last-ditch chemo. It was brutal. Some day — it can’t be too soon — poisoning tumours and the body by chemotherapy will be as crudely obsolete as trepanning and bloodletting. When I next went to see her at Toronto General Hospital she had shrunk like a mummy and was wearing a wig. The future was clear. There wasn’t one.

  As a physician she was no stranger to death and she faced her own without fear or complaint. In her nearly three score and ten she had lived several lives and always flat out. She’d extended each day by only sleeping four hours a night so that she could practice her cello or piano or edit her photographs before commuting to her patients. This pushing hard exacted its toll. She could fall asleep in her noodle bowl at one of her favourite Chinatown joints or in the middle of a noisy party. She had often shared her beloved brother’s unused symphony tickets with me. I always kept an elbow at the ready to arrest her snoring two bars into the overture. She once lost her OR privileges because she fell asleep during an operation. She was perpetually exhausted.

  By the time one has reached the three score and ten there have been many losses. At least half of my colleagues in photography are gone. I think of them all periodically. They’ll suddenly come to mind at the most unexpected times. They are each missed but some weeks on I’m surprised at the space that her death has left in my life. Several times in the early days she asked me to marry her but I couldn’t imagine being in such a relationship. More than once I swore I never wanted to see such a difficult woman again. Now I really wish I could. I can’t believe that such a vital person is gone. She was a force.

  ***

  The great clock and calendar that once sent these birds north and later south chimes no more. The cranes reach this inlet and fly no more. The geese have forgotten their Vs. The seasons turn to a different tune.

  Jeremy

  A photographer friend has just called with news of another death. Our years of lying to ourselves that 60 is the new 50, 70 the new 60, is catching up with us. None of us has seen Jeremy, a fellow photographer and spiritual searcher, for some years. And those years, like many before them, of his patient, craftsman-like master printing of black-and-white negatives, bare hands in the chemicals, breathing heavy metal vapours while compulsively chewing his blackened nails have rendered their due. Now we are gathered in an unctuous funeral home far out on Bloor West staring down at Jeremy in a padded box. No amount of makeup can disguise the leaden cancer look on his face.

  I have always found the practice of open caskets barbaric — the body is not the person. This one is particularly discomforting. I turn to take in the précised survey of his work clumsily strung out around the viewing room — large format urban views, a series of Lake Ontario reduced to horizon and sky. One of his last shows had been an old series done in 1960s Montreal of a young woman named Suzanne, she of the “tea and oranges that came all the way from China.” After an hour we slip out just before the service to try to resume the rhythm of our lives. It’s our knowledge, subconscious and unspoken, that we’re going to die that allows us to create what we do — in defiance of death. Otherwise we’d be like any other animal.

  ***

  It’s a spectacular morning with an uninflected blue sky. As the land’s big granitic shoulders begin to heat, columns of rising air spiral up from the heat-sink rocks of the Shield. I can’t see these vortices but a dozen circling turkey vultures are drawing them for me. Their gliding paths on the thermals reveal the invisible.

  “Dave Heath, Photographer of Isolation, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, July 1, 2016

  “A haunted genius behind the camera Dave Heath: Photographer/teacher, 85.” The Globe and Mail, July 23, 2016

  “He’s a creep!”

  “No, he’s a jerk.”

  “Well, David, I find him extremely creepy.”

  “The problem with you, Mitchell, is that you never use language precisely. The man is a jerk!”

  “Creep!”

  “Jerk!”

  “Creep!”

  “JERK!!”

  Heath’s face is turning red. He’s shouting. I’m in trouble. For the next couple of minutes we yell at each other until I suddenly have a vision, a kind of mirrored infinite regress of three decades of arguments with David Heath about photography, photographers, movies, books and now an extremely creepy American lawyer, photo collector and aspiring photographer. It’s all finally come down to whether this guy is a creep or a jerk. I can’t help myself. I start to giggle. Heath flies into a rage. Heath is the most intense human being I’ll ever know.

  We first met in 1970. David had just arrived in Toronto to teach at Ryerson and I’d just made a big life decision to abandon a career in field anthropology to see if I could become a photographer and filmmaker. Dave Heath was to be one of my teachers. It clearly wasn’t going to be easy.

  No more tweedy, pipe-smoking academics supervising my Mexican doctoral thesis. No more predictable, anonymous hurdle jumping. Suddenly who I was as a person had become everything. Did I have any talent, any vision, any original ideas? This guy could read my photographs and tell me who I was — and what I wasn’t. I had entered the program with a couple of degrees and the slimmest of portfolios. I’d swallowed my pride and enrolled at a mere polytechnical school after years at University of Toronto and UNC at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. I’d worked in Mexico alongside colleagues from University of Michigan, from Stanford and for an elite Mexican university. Now I was at “Ry High” and it was harder.

  David taught me how much more a photograph could be than a mere formal statement. A great image could resonate down through the years, its meaning shifting to suit the times. Without question some of his did that. But this seeming facile medium was not generous. The lifetime work of the medium’s greatest practitioners came down to perhaps a dozen memorable photographs each — at most. It was tough.

  David wasn’t always right. One of the earliest photographs that I brought to his class was one I’d made in a five and dime. In 1970 some of them still had a burger and soda bar down one side of the store. In those days the east end of Toronto was a working-class cultural backwater. The women behind the counter in my picture wore clothes and hair from the late 1940s. Heath launched into a technical attack, singling out areas of my print where I’d clumsily burned and dodged the image. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that I’d only been photographing for six months prior to entering his class and I didn’t have a clue what burning and dodging were. It was just a straight enlargement.

  We got through it — two years. And then I left to try to survive taking pictures. I had the sinking feeling that nothing I ever did would meet Heath’s standards. They were unobtainable.

  Our paths continued to cross. I’d meet him at openings. We ended up on the same magazine editorial board. I organized an exhibition of his SX70 Polaroid work at a gallery I’d helped start at Harbourfront.

  One evening in the late ’80s David invited me over to his little house in Riverdale. We spent all night drinking liqueurs and going through boxes of his vintage prints. They were black-and-white masterpieces, virtuosic examples of burning and dodging, bleaching and toning and, above all, seeing. When I got up to go home he pulled a beautiful 1962 print of Allen Ginsberg and Barbara Morath in the old village’s Seven Arts Café. He took a Rapidograph and carefully wrote a dedicatio
n on the border of the print. It’s a stunning image. Many years later when he’d finally surrendered to digital photography he did the same with a colour image of the legendary photographer Robert Frank and artist June Leaf and gave it to me. The interesting thing about these images is that although made many decades apart, both have exactly the same formal structure. The later print substitutes Frank for Ginsberg and Leaf for Morath. I have a salon wall of photographs in my dining room that slowly changes as I acquire new images or tire of the old. The Heaths are always up there.

  And despite the many tongue-lashings I got from him he could be very generous with praise when he felt you’d exceeded yourself. In the mid-’80s he unexpectedly phoned me to tell me he’d gone to see my Nicaragua exhibition and that it was a “beautiful show.” He was also very generous in his praise of my Molly Fire book. I can’t deny what those calls meant to me.

  But the bumpy times weren’t over. As the years slipped by David’s belly got bigger and his scowl deepened. Gossip had him harassing his female students. He was said to have abused one and thrown another off his porch. There was a restraining order against him. Whereas he’d once turned up for any event related to photography he was now seen walking the streets less and less. Always a troubled man — he’d been an orphan — he became angrier and depressed.

  In the early 2000s there was a period when various people would ask me if I’d seen Heath. What was he doing now that he’d been retired? I was curious myself so I decided to organize a dinner. It would be in David’s honour. As the guest list expanded — there were fellow photographers, curators, professors — I realized that I couldn’t cook for so many. I hired a chef with an assistant. I spent serious money. It would be my thank you to David who was feeling somewhat neglected and abandoned. Everybody came, a couple even flew in from Paris. The long table was beautiful, the food excellent, my Heaths were on the wall. At the end of the dinner I returned a book that I’d borrowed and failed to return some 35 years earlier. It was my little joke. He couldn’t handle any of it.

  Many months later he sent me a long email. He said that none of the people at the dinner cared a fig for him. That the evening had been the most embarrassing one of his life. That I’d done it all out of ego. This was all in the first couple of sentences. As I read it I thought, “Here we go again.” Now I’m the one who can’t deal with it — with him. Without reading the balance of the letter I pressed delete. I had crossed the transom at the end of a long corridor in the middle of my life.

  Arnaud

  He lies motionless, wrapped in a white sheet on a hospital bed. His eyes are closed.

  I look down at Arnaud Maggs’s body. It is frighteningly frail, incredibly pale.

  Then he opens his eyes.

  Recognizing me he whispers, “I love you, buddy.” And asks me to turn him over.

  I don’t really know how to do this. I don’t fully understand the nature of the cancer that’s killing him. I mess it up. He screams in agony.

  Arnaud and I had known each other for a very long time — decades. I don’t even remember how or when we first met but we had definitely long ago become photo colleagues and good friends. As he came from a graphic design background he often had technical photo questions to which, in his mind, I would always have answers. I sometimes did. Also, he would occasionally call to borrow a wide-angle camera I owned in order to document his impeccable gallery installations of his work. The installations shared equal intention with his art.

  That camera, a 1966 Hasselblad Superwide, had a very sharp lens plus fit and finish like a great Swiss watch. I’d bought it from Kryn Taconis, at the time the only Canadian member of the legendary photo agency Magnum. Kryn had several times lent it to Magnum’s great master, Cartier-Bresson. I liked the idea of sharing a tool fingerprinted by so many giants of the medium. Arnaud was definitely one.

  He mined a very narrow theme in his photography — comparative typologies. Initially he’d gotten interested in the shapes of people’s heads. After trying to draw them he realized that photography would be a superior medium with which to document their form and a gridiron layout the best for comparatives. He remained true to this interest until the last year of his life when he broke ranks with himself to masquerade as the great 19th century Parisian portrait photographer Félix Nadar’s Pierrot. Arnaud’s self-portraits as that master’s clown were supremely beautiful pictures.

  Arnaud Maggs in his Toronto studio

  Another longtime friend, photographer Geoffrey James, used to speak of “keeping the faith.” This meant believing in oneself and carrying on despite no support, no money, no response, no glory. Arnaud managed to do that. He’d had early financial success as a celebrity designer. He’d done famous jazz album covers and hobnobbed with the greats. He was profiled on society pages. Then he decided to become an artist.

  That’s when it got wobbly. “I’m living on air,” he’d say on the phone as he called from his latest austere studio in yet another half-abandoned industrial building with no heat on weekends. “Nobody calls anymore.” But he kept working. Kept the faith. I loved him for it.

  “Michael, do you miss fucking?” Arnaud was 80 when he asked me this. I was just a pup in my 60s. There were so many assumptions peeking out behind the inquiry that I was still flipping through sticky index cards in my brain when Arnaud saved me a reply. “I just discovered Viagra.” He smirked.

  My family doc, who was almost my age, told me the year after Viagra became available that almost his entire downtown practice became writing scripts for guys who could no longer get it up. He’d had no idea what a huge and ubiquitous gender issue this was. I thought of all the years I’d listened to young women making disparaging cracks about men and their erections and then the same women decades later saying, in the wake of failed marriages and bored singledom, that they just wanted to get laid. Suddenly there were no guys to do it. Some women I know began seducing teenagers.

  Arnaud’s late life relationship with Spring Hurlbut, despite the decades that separated them, seemed to have been a happy and enduring one. They were both collectors of objects destined for later elevation in their art-making. Having gone prospecting in a flea market in the south of France with them both I can report that it was conducted with near military precision. Arnaud especially worked the tables like a strategic campaign. Years of doing this had yielded many “Maggsian” treasures — collections of enameled steel water jugs, of three-dimensional letters, of funnels, diagrams, death notices. He had very high standards, all of his own creation.

  A few years before he died he gave me the last oil lamp he’d saved from years of accumulating a vast range of examples. It was beautiful but lacked a glass chimney. Assuming that he hoped I’d use it at my cabin, a place he visited yearly, I set out to replace the missing part. As it required a non-standard diameter, this was no simple search. Many months later I finally found a fit at the big Mennonite hardware store in Kidron, Ohio. It was a straight glass cylinder with a global bulge a third of the way up that echoed the lamp’s round oil reservoir. The following September when Arnaud encountered it at my island he made the stentorian announcement that he didn’t like it. So the lamp now stands uselessly without a chimney. I wouldn’t dare.

  When I sold my last house I had a little money and bought a small motor-sailer. This funky little vessel had a beautiful sheer line, a vertical stem and an hourglass transom. Designed by one of the 20th century’s greatest yacht designers, Canadian William Garden, it had been very well built in Collingwood. However, a previous owner had sullied the stern with a stupid name, Minnow, and some cartoonish graphics. As the river I travelled down to reach my island was crossed by a bridge that sheltered many swallow nests I renamed the boat after them. I asked Arnaud if he could do the type for Swallow’s transom. What he did was simple, original and very handsome.

  In the end Arnaud triumphed. During his last couple of years he produced the strange an
d wonderful series of Dada portraits based on a most unlikely source — antique French construction drawings. He had a radiant retrospective at the National Gallery, won a major prize, was published in his own monograph and starred with Spring in a wonderful documentary. Finally, he was vindicated. He’d kept the faith.

  Arnaud Maggs and his lettering for Swallow

  The last time I saw him he was wheelchair-bound in a beautiful hospice, a converted church, just off College Street. Eve Egoyan had come to play for Arnaud and the small group of friends surrounding him. She might have played some Bach and Satie, I don’t precisely remember. Arnaud then asked if she could just play and improvise. She did. Later, driving me home — we’re neighbours — Eve expressed regrets about her improv. For her it had been a mere pastiche. She was being professional but her music had put Arnaud at peace even though less than a handful of days remained. It was a generous act.

  For a number of years Spring and Arnaud would join a small late September gathering on my little Georgian Bay island. It is from those get-togethers that I have the most enduring image of him. Every year Arnaud and Spring would be up at first light and while others slept they’d launch my canoe and paddle into the morning mists. It was a photograph that I never took and never needed to. Unforgettable.

  Mary

  I don’t really remember exactly how it all began. Mary and I would find each other in a corner during a party and end up talking all night. I’d known Marcus, her photographer husband, for many years. He and I had worked on several book projects with photographer Ed Burtynsky. So we were well acquainted but I was just getting to know Mary.

  She was dying. Like all too many of my women friends, she was struggling with breast cancer. However, Mary’s was truly running amok, metastasizing everywhere. She was very, very ill.

  But she glowed like a ripe peach. She radiated energy, enthusiasm and even hope. She embraced a strong Buddhist faith, using it to help her cope with her increasingly bad hand. Mary was determined to maintain a quality of life and remain a productive artist right to the very end. We were both focused on the same question — how to live. But also on its corollary, how to die. We decided to make a film about the last year of her life.