Finding Everett Ruess

by David Roberts

  It was not Dixon who had the crucial impact on Everett’s development so much as his wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange. Not yet famous for her portraits of Dust Bowl refugees and victims of the Great Depression, Lange at the time was far less well known than her husband, whom she would divorce two years later. She took Everett under her wing, introducing him to other artists (including Rockwell Kent and the composer Ernst Bacon), and attended concerts with him. Lange was evidently taken with Everett’s looks, for, as he wrote home on October 31, “On Thursday I have a sitting with Dorothea Lange, who wants to make some photographic studies.”

  The series of portraits of Everett that Lange took, posing him against a black backdrop, are by far the finest photographs ever made of the young vagabond. Lange captured, as Everett’s own snapshots failed to do, the beguiling mixture of innocence and sensuality in his countenance. Seventy-six years after she made the portraits, they would play a pivotal role in an ongoing controversy about Everett’s ultimate fate. At the time, however, Lange seemed dissatisfied with her work, for Everett wrote home on January 2, “I would have sent you one of Mrs. Dixon’s photographs, but she did not think they were good enough, and wants to make some others.”

  With his blithe self-confidence, in October Everett knocked on the door of Ansel Adams’s studio and introduced himself. He wrote his family, “Ansel Adams waxed very enthusiastic about my black and white work. He could not exhibit it in his gallery, but he gave me a number of suggestions which I am following out. He is going to trade me one of his photographs for one of my prints.” The composition that Everett chose was a picture of “a mysterious lake” at Kaweah Gap, a pass in the Sierras that he had traversed in July.

  Even Everett’s staunchest devotees have wondered whether his claim about trading pictures with the great black-and-white photographer was a fictitious boast. But at a conference in southern Utah in 2009, Gibbs Smith, founder of Peregrine Smith Books and the publisher of Rusho’s A Vagabond for Beauty, related an intriguing story. Many decades after Everett had met Adams, Smith studied with the master. “One time I asked him,” Smith recalled, “ ‘Did you ever meet Everett Ruess?’ He said, ‘No.’ But then his wife, Virginia, asked him to come into the bedroom. There on the wall was Everett’s woodcut.”

  By the end of the year, Everett was getting restless. “I am tired of the place where I am staying,” he wrote to Waldo just before Christmas. And to his parents, even before that: “As to the duration of my stay [in San Francisco], I am not yet certain.… I would like to spend a whole year in the desert, but I might not go until March or April.”

  With the restlessness came a renewed curiosity about basic matters of morality and purpose. On December 4, in a letter addressed solely to his father, Everett opened, “I have been asking myself some questions latterly, and I wrote some of them down, thinking you might be interested.” The document that Everett’s questions provoked is one of the most extraordinary in the chronicle of his life. It is, in fact, the only letter from Christopher to Everett after the age of fifteen that has survived. In it, Christopher copies Everett’s eighteen philosophical questions and answers them at length and with passionate earnestness.

  It is characteristic of his ambivalence about intimacy that Everett turned to his father for answers to what seem like veiled but intimate questions. Among them: “Must pain spring from pleasure?” “Is bodily love empty or to be forgotten?” and “Can one be happy while others are miserable?” In Christopher’s answers, the Unitarian pastor comes to the fore. To Everett’s inquiry “Is it possible to be truly unselfish?” Christopher answered, “No, because even Jesus fed his ego: a man who dies for a cause does express himself, achieve his goal, perhaps. God does not ask unselfishness in an absurd sense.” As to whether bodily love was “empty,” Christopher asserted, “No, it is a part of life. It is not all of life. I do not see that it should ever be outgrown, but it changes form; it begins animal and always remains healthily animal, but it is refined and sublimated.”

  There is something excruciatingly awkward about this extended colloquy. Everett seems in effect to be asking his father about his parents’ sex life. He may even have been seeking permission to have a sex life of his own. Christopher himself was a bit nonplussed by Everett’s far-ranging but impersonally phrased probes into the meaning of life. “Now you tell me,” he closed the long letter, “where did you get all these mind-twisters anyway?”

  Everett wrote back like a dutiful schoolboy—or perhaps schoolmaster: “I was very pleased with your carefully considered replies to my questions, and I think you have answered them well.”

  By December, in fact, Everett’s life had taken what may have been a momentous turn. On the thirteenth of that month, in a letter to Waldo, he alluded to it in a guarded fashion: “I have met some fine, sincere men, and several fine women, and one girl with whom I am intimate.”

  In 1983, after transcribing this letter in Vagabond, Bud Rusho wrote, “This girl was undoubtedly Frances. Who she was or how Everett met her, remains unknown. But for a brief period, at least, romance had entered Everett’s life.”

  Rusho copied five of Everett’s letters to Frances, three written in December 1933, two in May 1934. They are unmistakably love letters. On December 14:

  I have just acquired the most heart-rending symphony you ever heard. You must come out to my mean hovel Saturday night to hear it, for I have to share it with you. In addition, there are two things I want to read to you, and a new picture I want you to see. Don’t refuse, for I must see you, and I have laid in a store of Roquefort cheese as a special inducement.… I saw two girls on the streets this morning who reminded me of you.

  A second letter, only one line long, is dated simply “Monday Afternoon”:

  Frances dear,

  Teresine dances tomorrow night at 8:20, so sleep sweetly tonight.

  Everett.

  And another one-liner on December 19:

  To Frances,

  I wish the most blithe and serene Christmas that anyone could wish. Everett.

  From these fragments alone, one must conclude that Everett had fallen in love. Whether he had a brief affair with Frances (if so, probably the only affair of his life), or merely nursed a crush on her, it is impossible to say. Something did not work out, for on May 5, 1934, from an outpost in Arizona, Everett wrote a long letter to Frances in which he voiced a lament:

  I was sorry, though, that our intimacy, like many things that are and will be, had to die with a dying fall. I do not greatly mind endings, for my life is made up of them, but sometimes they come too soon or too late, and sometimes they leave a feeling of regret as of an old mistake or an indirect futility.

  The whole Frances business is one of the knottiest and most baffling riddles in Everett’s life. Sometime since 1983, the five letters to Frances, like so many other primary documents, have gone missing. The obvious puzzle, which Rusho did not address in 1983, is why the texts had survived for half a century in the keeping of the Ruess family, and yet no one knew who Frances was. The letters to Bill Jacobs survive because Jacobs gave them to the family after Everett’s disappearance, as did several other family friends to whom Everett had written. If Frances too had donated the love letters, then surely Stella or Christopher or Waldo would have known who she was, or would at least have known her last name.

  When asked in 2008 about the Frances letters, Rusho had no answers. He was not aware that the letters had gone missing, or where they might be. He could not recall how he had gotten hold of them in the first place, although he thought it likely that Waldo had lent them to him. When asked how the family could have gained possession of the letters without knowing who Frances was, he confessed to his own complete bafflement.

  An extremely bizarre theory was advanced around 2003 by the filmmaker Diane Orr, who in the 1980s began to work on a movie about Everett. Orr unfolded the scenario to Nathan E. Thompson, who was writing a master’s thesis about Everett. In Thompson’s summary, Orr argued �
��that Frances, the woman Ruess was supposedly in love with, was actually the young wife of one of Ruess’ father’s friends. The love letters, argued Orr, were merely a cover up for Everett Ruess’ sexuality.” Orr further argued that Everett had confessed to Waldo, and to Waldo alone, his homosexual tendencies.

  This summary does not explain how Orr came into her special knowledge of the situation. Nor does it clarify who would have perpetrated the cover-up—Everett himself, or Christopher and Stella, or Waldo in later years, presumably to hide evidence that Everett was homosexual. Given that Orr is convinced that Everett was gay, her theory of fake love letters to the wife of a friend of Christopher must be taken with a healthy dose of salt. What is more, the five letters to Frances that Rusho published, in all their detail and specificity, sound genuine, not the sort of thing one would concoct as a smokescreen to hide a guilty homosexuality.

  In January 1934, Everett continued his philosophical discourse with his father in several long letters. From them emerge the first hints that Christopher and Stella may have started to lose patience with their prodigal son’s wayward course in life. On January 2, lashing back at criticisms his father had voiced, Everett wrote, “There is no need for fearing that I will be a ‘one-sided’ freak artist, to use your phrase, for I am interested almost equally in all the arts and in human relations and reactions as well.”

  Everett’s financial dependence on his parents had apparently started to exasperate them. In a defensive voice, in the first paragraph after pleading for yet another money order, Everett rationalized:

  As to the way I’ve spent my money, I think it has done credit to my emotions, and I don’t regret it. On occasion, I have calculated things to a very fine point, but you may well cease hoping that I will ever be practical in the accepted sense. I would sooner die.

  In his hyperintellectual way, rather than bluntly accuse his son of being a freeloader, Christopher couched his strictures in a cloak of moral responsibility. “What you say is partly true,” Everett wrote his father on January 27, “in your remark that I have done what I wanted in spite of the world crisis.” Everett rebutted the accusation obliquely, by mentioning three friends who were involved in the “world crisis,” only to deride them: “They have been wallowing in the shallows of life this past year—not growing or having new or enlarging experiences.”

  His father was not the only one who had leveled this charge against Everett. In an earlier letter to Christopher, Everett recalled:

  A year ago my Communist friends were firing it at me when I told them that beauty and friendship were all I asked of life. I am not unconcerned with the crisis of our civilization, but the way of the agitator, the social leader, and the politician is not my way.…

  So, instead, during this last year, I have continued to seek beauty and friendship, and I think that I have really brought some beauty and delight into the lives of others, and that is at least something.

  Whether or not he grudgingly acknowledged the selfishness of his quest, or the entitlement implied in expecting his parents to foot the bills, Everett knew himself. Beauty and friendship were indeed all that he asked of life. It was a credo he would carry to his untimely grave.

  Christopher’s most aggressive attack, however, focused on trying to persuade Everett to go back to college—and this brought out in the stubborn son some of the angriest and haughtiest remarks he would ever direct against his parents. “As to this half-baked pother about my always feeling inferior in the presence of college graduates,” he wrote to his father on January 2, “that fear is groundless too. I am not nonplussed in the presence of anybody, and I am seldom at a loss with anyone I am interested in.”

  Christopher had apparently badgered Everett with the monetary rewards a college degree would guarantee for the rest of his life. Again Everett lashed back: “As to the million-dollar endowment of going through the college mill, I have three million dollar endowments already, that I am sure of, and I don’t have to go begging. I have my very deep sensitivities to beauty, to music, and to nature.”

  Everett had clearly been stung by his father’s complaints. “You can be ashamed of me if you like,” he went on, “but you cannot make me feel ashamed of myself.” And: “As for me, I have tasted your cake, and I prefer your unbuttered bread. I don’t wish to withdraw from life to college, and I have a notion, conceited or not, that I know what I want from life, and can act upon it.”

  It is a tesimony to the complexity of Everett’s relationship with his father that in a letter filled with such proud and sneering rejoinders, he could write on, lapse back into chatty news, and sign off, as always, “Love from Everett.”

  By January, Everett was at loose ends. Only nine days after announcing to Waldo the existence of “one girl with whom I am intimate,” he wrote to his brother, “After various turnings, twistings, and recoils, I still have not been able to find any proper outlet for my feelings. Perhaps there is none and perhaps it is necessary for my feelings to die of weariness and refusal.” This may be a veiled confession that already his liaison with Frances had fallen apart, or it may be only a declaration of the existential despair that always lay just beneath the surface of Everett’s flights of transport.

  On March 2 he bragged to his family that he had sold a painting and spent four dollars on a ticket on a boat that would soon convey him from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Could one of his parents meet him at the dock with the family car? “I will have a great deal of luggage,” he warned them.

  Everett spent about a month at home on North Kingsley Drive. During that stay, he celebrated his twentieth birthday. In an undated letter to Waldo, he mused, “These last months in the cities have been very strange; there have been many beautiful moments.… [M]y relations with people have been riper, with more complete understanding than before.”

  Waldo had offered to drive his brother to Arizona. Everett could not wait to get started on another journey across the desert Southwest. For 1934, he had planned a more ambitious expedition than any of his previous jaunts. Sometime in early April he loaded his belongings into the car of a friend who would drive him east to San Bernardino, where he would rendezvous with Waldo. In the undated letter to Waldo, he had closed, “I look forward to the time when we will be going places, together on the road. You are surely a good brother to me.”

  His gear packed, in a hurry to leave, Everett said goodbye to his parents. Christopher and Stella would never see him again.

  FIVE

  “I Have Seen More Beauty Than I Can Bear”

  WALDO AND EVERETT ARRIVED IN KAYENTA on April 14. From this small town on the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona, Everett had launched his first Southwest expedition three years earlier. And here he had met John Wetherill, who had given him his first tips about backcountry ruins in remote canyons such as the Tsegi Canyon system. Kayenta was far more congenial to Everett’s spirit than touristy Roosevelt, where he had been stuck for two months in 1932 as he tried to get his journey under way, while Clark dithered and then lost the heart to join Everett on his rugged trek.

  In Kayenta, the brothers went on a couple of short walks, taking photographs of each other that they would trade by mail, before Waldo turned around and started back toward Los Angeles. About a week later, Everett made a deal with a local to buy two new burros. He named them Leopard and Cockleburrs.

  Everett kept a diary throughout his 1934 wanderings, but the leather-bound book would eventually disappear with him. A few tantalizing paragraphs from the journal that he transcribed into a letter to a Los Angeles friend survive. If they are characteristic of the kinds of entries he was regularly making, then the 1934 diary was utterly different from the 1933 Sierra Nevada journal, which had been so full of quotidian events, so lacking in deep reflection. The 1934 paragraphs soar into a metaphysical realm.

  Once more, as with the 1930 and 1931 excursions, it is chiefly from the letters home that we are able to reconstruct the last seven months of Everett’s wandering career. Th
ese letters, too, are strikingly different from the ones he mailed to family and friends from the Sierra the previous year. They amount, in fact, to a kind of high-wire act, for as never before, in 1934 Everett strove to match the beauty of the landscape with beautiful, crafted prose. The letters neglect the homely but concrete detail of daily life in favor of transcendent statements of spiritual belief, distilling the hard-won insights he had gleaned from his relentless vagabondage since the age of sixteen.

  From Kayenta around the beginning of May, Everett headed north toward Monument Valley. At once he suffered a misadventure not unlike others he had undergone with skittish pack animals in the past. In a “raging gale,” riding one burro and leading the other, Everett covered twenty-five miles that day. “The seas of purple loco [weed] bloom were buffeted about by the wind,” he wrote to Waldo on May 3, “and the sand blew in riffles across our tracks, obscuring them almost at once.”

  Ten miles north of Kayenta, Everett passed by the soaring plug of volcanic rock the Navajos call Agathla. Despite the wind and the oncoming night, Everett dismounted to make a painting of the imposing pinnacle. By the time he hit the trail again, aiming for a hogan he had discovered in 1931, in which he hoped to camp, it was almost pitch dark. Now he walked, guiding both animals by their leads. Just as he found a rock cairn that served as a landmark near the hogan, the burros “suddenly bolted into the night.”

  It was a potential disaster, right at the beginning of the trip. In the darkness Everett ran after the burros “until my lungs were afire.” He could hear the thumping noise of saddlebags slapping against the burros’ flanks, but he could not find Cockleburrs or Leopard. “I thought of the smashed saddles and broken kyaks,” he wrote Waldo, “their contents scattered broadcast, of the crushed camera and the paintings lying in the rain.”