Picture Palace by Paul Theroux
I indulged myself in the Star and Garter Mansion in the Mitty-dream I had seen in so many people of accomplishment—that feeling that underneath the glamor and achievement one was a very simple soul, saying “Golly” and “Darn it” and dotting on cheese and biscuits. I didn’t create pictures—I found them. What luck! But anyone with a good camera and a free afternoon could have done the same or better. I called them “Pratts” because the critics did, but “Pratts” were only the world in focus, the few feet of it I could manage with my peepstones. I could go to India or wherever and do the same.
I was setting out to do that very thing when the cable came.
I almost chucked it away without reading it. I’d had enough cables to last me a lifetime and I assumed it was just another one promising me the moon or saying I was swell. But thinking it might be an update on the India jaunt I ripped it open.
The message, in strips of tape, was brief and brutally glued to the flimsy paper. I did not understand it until I had read it three times and could separate the words and give them the right emphasis. Even then, I could barely translate the words: there had been a boating accident, Orlando and Phoebe had drowned, I was to go home immediately—boating accident? drowned? I had questions, but a cable has no nuances; it is a foreign language, cryptic at its baldest.
The paper I held in my hand was stupid, innocent, not comprehending its terrible news. Already I was looking around the room for support and in my hysteria saw the tiny curled squares of newly printed pictures—so trivial and mocking I screamed at them. My voice terrified me. It seemed to come from outside my room, where I had left my life, and its echo was a succession of other sounds, like the harsh gasp of a cat when it sneezes.
PART FIVE
28
Spitting Image
“ALL MANIACS have a spitting image,” I was saying to Frank. “And listen—not only maniacs!”
Our Guggenheim Fellow was still rifling the windmill. Though I had kept pace with him in recalling the circumstances of the pictures he had progressively unearthed, I had paused so often to frame these strange events in my mind that my own retrospective lagged behind the pictorial one he was assembling. I was like a child being led away, but delayed on her journey because she keeps glancing back to remember. Mentally, I was in London, reading the terrible telegram: I had no picture of that. What happened next? I was stuck in grief, and Frank had skipped ahead ten years or more, sorting pictures of yet another European visit. In his hand was the portrait of Ezra Pound which, a moment before, occasioned my remark about maniacs.
It was the crazy-haired old man portrait showing Ezra the ham-bone singing loony tunes with his eyes shut. Ro-hoses are bloo-hooming, Te-hell me troo-hoo.
“What I don’t get,” said Frank, rattling the picture—he had more under his arm, the morning’s harvest—“is why didn’t you have a retrospective ten years ago?”
“Because it would have meant,” I said, and I stopped. I looked at his silly searching face: if I told him some I’d have to tell him all. I said, “I didn’t go into the windmill ten years ago.”
“You don’t go in there now.”
“Troo-hoo,” I said, glancing at Ezra. Or twenty, when I did this European batch; or thirty, when I arrived after the long flight from London—too late to go to Orlando and Phoebe’s funeral. What was the point in my delving? The windmill, however palatial a structure—raised up on our Cape Cod lawn like a Dutch forgery—had become an anteroom of my memory, a catchbasin for my pictures, an attic, a shrine. It was to my work what a corresponding piece of my bunched-up brain was to my life, another set of crenelations and ramparts, containing the past. As a picture-taker I had ruled like a queen, but in this retrospective I wished to be a subject.
I had always been orderly: I threw nothing away. The windmill held my photos and the picture palace of my imagination another set, a different version of the past. I had thought that someday I would chance the windmill—I’d go in and have a good look. But I had not dared: ghosts thrashed on the floor, the double image of lovers who had not known what I had seen in those blinding seconds before the war. It had never been mine, not any more than Orlando had been mine. I could use it like an attic, but like an attic it was not a place I could live in. I would not deceive myself further or disturb those ghosts.
All Papa had said was, They went out too far. Of course: it was why they had been so happy and why they died. I accepted the explanation, and I wasn’t desolated, because a person’s death is easier to take if he had known a great passion. Only the death of children, of the ignorant and inexperienced, is truly tragic, the loss of people who die never having lived. I could not but feel that, out too far and knowing the risks, Orlando and Phoebe had capsized and danced on the waves for a while in each other’s arms. Celebrating their secret, they had known ecstasy.
It had nothing to do with me. They had lived without me and loved and died; and neither had seen me. It had made me solitary, which is the first condition of a photographer. I was, as I had always been, alone, just a peeping picture-taker. Don’t mind me—pretend I’m not here. And the windmill with its stilled sails, once alight with their love, was all that remained. I might stick my head in and leave my pictures behind, but I had no right to linger there. They had consecrated every corner. It was a shrine: I left my pictures as offerings.
Knowing what I knew, it was almost amusing to hear Frank ask me why I had never rifled the windmill myself and assembled a retrospective. Ignoramuses pose the hardest questions!
But I could not be angry with Frank. He was doing the spadework. Interested in my pictures he had interested me in my life, and his sifting and sorting had made it possible for me to re-enter the past without going into the windmill. He preceded me, cued me, triggered my memory; he was the mechanical medium by which I could examine my picture palace. But my work—as I had told him—was the least important thing about my life; and the rest, which had always been separate and impermanent, a source of ceaseless wonder.
The fellow knew nothing. He did not even know Orlando’s name. For Frank, I was my work, and short of autobiography there seemed no way of proving to him that my story was not in my pictures. It was all off-camera, in the pitch of my blind body’s witness. And yet I needed Frank to remind me of that contradiction.
“I’ve always liked this one,” he said, still looking admiringly upon the squinched face of Ezra Pound, that crumpled rubber road map.
“That’s just what I mean,” I said, following my own train of thought. I wondered if I should let him in on the secret. “There’s quite a story behind that picture.”
He became attentive in the cringing way that is characteristic of fellowshippers who are fearful, hearing a secret revealed, that their reaction might be wrong: they might laugh too hard or too soon or not at all, the cash a dead weight on their sense of spontaneity. “I’ve got work to do,” Frank was always saying—but if I found it hard to take my own work seriously, how could I keep a straight face about his?
“I remember when this baby appeared,” he said, holding Ezra up, sort of mounting him in the air. “It caused a sensation.”
“A certain flurry,” I said, and looked at Frank. Over several months, while I had been preoccupied with my life and Frank with my work, he had changed his image. Some wild access of confidence? The Guggenheim money? He had let his hair grow over his ears, he wore bell-bottom trousers with three-inch cuffs, and russet clodhoppers with four-inch heels. His pink shirt was open to the navel, so I could see on his skinny curator’s chest two strings of beads. Beads! They matched the beaded bracelet where his watch had been. Very stylish, but he could not quite bring it off. He looked uneasy in the clothes, like a damned fool in fact, who had gone too far and suspected that I might mock him. But I only found the clothes discouraging. As soon as I saw those beads and platform shoes I knew I could not possibly depend on him.
“Wasn’t it the first picture of Pound to appear after he was let out of the funny farm?”
I said, “One day I was in a magazine office in New York and the editor says, ‘Have a look at this—ever see anything like it?’ It was a picture of a turkey buzzard pouncing on a snake—three pictures, actually, the approach, the snatch, and the getaway. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he says. I agreed. But it was too amazing—so perfect I didn’t believe it. Anyway, wildlife photography seems as silly to me as talking animals. I says, ‘There’s something about that snake. Doesn’t it seem rather limp to you?’ He was annoyed. ‘You think it’s a fake?’ ‘Just dead,’ I says. He tried to defend the picture. ‘But it’s a fine turkey buzzard!’ he says. ‘What turkey buzzard,’ I says, ‘would want to eat a dead snake?’ We looked at the turkey buzzard, a rigged-up bird with crooked wings. I says, ‘Stuffed. And the mountain looks pretty suspicious, too.’ I thought that man was going to cry.”
“Wait a minute,” said Frank. “Does that have anything to do with this picture of Pound?”
“Everything,” I said. “It’s a turkey, isn’t it?”
Frank said, “You’re always so critical of your work.”
“You’d be critical too, if you were in my shoes.”
“They’re great pictures.”
“They’re stiffs,” I said. “They don’t matter. If you had any sense you’d see that.”
“You know,” he said, fingering the beads around his neck, “I’m glad I’m doing this retrospective. The way I see it, I’m kind of saving you from yourself.”
“Listen, buster. I took that picture in Italy around ’fifty-nine or so. I’d been sent to do a photographic essay on Cocteau and Picasso, but Venice wasn’t far from Cannes and my editor was screaming for a glimpse of Pound, who’d just been let out of his rubber room. The only thing was, he refused to see me. His wop servant slammed the door in my face. ‘We don’t want any!’ T. S. Eliot gives me a pep talk and two cups of tea, and Pound won’t even give me the right time. Anyway, a few days later, I’m on the coast in Rimini having some spaghetti and I look up and who do I see walking by the restaurant? Ezra! I whistled down my noodles and rushed off in hot pursuit. Ezra’s just strolling along, tapping his walking stick and singing. It was unmistakably him, whiskery and old, in a floppy hat and jacket. ‘Wait a sec,’ I said, ‘aren’t you Ezra Pound?’ He sort of grins and says, ‘Waal, bless my buttons,’ and shows me his fangy teeth. We start talking about poetry—Eliot, Cummings, Frost, whoever. He names someone and I say, ‘I’ve done him.’ ‘How about a cup of tea at my place?’ he says, and I can’t believe my luck. My picture’s as good as in the bag.
“Up the road we enter the courtyard of a run-down palazzo. He takes me into the study, a funny little room—there’s a small bookshelf with only three books on it. ‘The greatest books ever written,’ he says. Gone With The Wind, The Pisan Cantos, and Picture Palace, by a man called R. G. Perdew. ‘I’ve heard of the first two, and I love the title of the third one,’ I said, ‘but who’s this R. G. Perdew?’ He said, ‘Why, that’s me!’ ‘You’re not Ezra Pound?’ I asked. ‘Occasionally,’ he said.
“Occasionally? It turns out that this guy’s pretending to be Pound—wants people to take him for the poet, even writes letters to him. ‘Do me a favor,’ I says. ‘Ask your friend Pound if he’ll let me do him. I can’t go home until I get a picture of that man.’ Perdew gave me a very Pound-like whinny and leered crazily at me. ‘Looks like you ain’t going home, dearie,’ he says. ‘Ezra don’t pose for pictures.’ ‘Crap,’ I said. ‘Picasso jumped at the chance up in Cap Ferrat.’ ‘Ezra don’t jump no more. And the fact is,’ said this Mister Perdow, ‘even if you did do him, no one would recognize him. They wouldn’t believe you. He don’t look like Ezra Pound. He’s all scrawny and shriveled up with bug juice. Looks like some derelict. I know cause I’ve seen him. He used to look like me, this little bushy beard and sombrero. But now he don’t.’ So I said, ‘All righty then, I’ll do you.’ And I did. He was so pleased he started singing a song. Later on he showed me his pictures. They were a damn sight better than Ezra’s poems and so was my portrait.”
Frank said, “You mean it’s not Pound?”
“No, but it’s a dead-ringer. Now do you still think you’re throwing me a rope?” I let this sink in, then said, “My pictures are worthless, Frank. But there’s a moral. Every maniac has a spitting image. Whose double-ganger are you?”
“Maybe yours.”
“Don’t make me laugh. I’m an original.” Or was he? Was this barnacle my Third Eye, the camera I had renounced? Perhaps even in his necklace and funny shoes he was necessary to me.
“Your Picasso—is it faked?”
One might have thought it was a bit of trick photography, the famous googly-eyed head printed on a naked body. But, “Nope. That’s the real McCoy. He loved posing bare-ass.”
“This one of Somerset Maugham is terrific.”
“The Empress Dowager—he had more wrinkles than Auden, that other amazing raisin. Poor old Willie. He was on the Riviera then, too. The English are so portable. I caught him on a bad day. He was brooding over a case of constipation, but as soon as I did him I knew people would look at him and think he was speculating on the future of mankind. Ain’t it always the way?”
“And that’s when you did your Cocteau?”
“Correct. Looks like a sardine, don’t he? He says to me, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.’ I says, ‘May oon poet—say la shows important.’ ‘Incanoe,’ he says, full of that weepy French dignity. ‘May commie foe,’ I says, and when he starts in again I says. ‘Murd de shovel,’ and keeps on clicking.”
“I love these Fifties shots,” said Frank. “All those faces.”
“I couldn’t stand the landscapes. Venice was waterlogged, the canals full of minestrone. And the south of France, which is supposed to be Shangri-La, just looked like one of the crummier Miami suburbs, except that there was no place to park. You can have all that vulgarity at a third of the price anywhere on Cape Cod. I hated it. What is Europe, anyway? Museums, greasers, winos, toy cars, churches, bum-pinchers, ruins, worthless money—no wonder they’re uncreative. History and religion. Boring? You have no idea. I used to look at Europe and think, Do me a favor!”
“Now I understand why you liked Cuba.”
“Loved it, loved the revolution—that was a real kick in the slats,” I said. “I turned down the José Marti scholarship, but went anyhow, and appeared on TV with Ché Guevara and some American college kids. All those beards! A week or so later I did Hemingway. During the war I had been scared of him—wouldn’t go near him. In Cuba he was just another fisherman, but a damned spooky one. He wanted me to make him look athletic. I made him look like Joe Palooka. He lapped it up. Between him and the Guevara boom in the Sixties I think you could say I got a lot of mileage out of that trip.”
“I’d better get back to work,” said Frank.
“You don’t have far to go,” I said. “I didn’t do much in the Sixties. A couple of weeks in Vietnam doing refugees, a stopover in Hong Kong. Some group shots. Keep an eye out for them—they’re to go with my Woonsocket graduation. The whole John Hancock insurance company, every single employee standing in Copley Plaza—I shot it from the roof of the Boston Public Library. I did a lot of other crowds, too—there’s one of Red Sox fans on the bleachers of Fenway Park. They’re beautiful, three thousand faces—you could spend a week with that picture and not get bored.”
“I’ll put them aside.”
“I can’t believe you’re nearly done.”
“It’s shaping up. The show has to open in a month, Maude.”
“But there must be lots more that you haven’t shown me.” And I tried to think what I had not seen—the ones I had done for the National Geographic, the nudes in which I had slipped the back view of a buttocky boy, some of the steamier Pig Dinner ones.
Frank said, “I haven’t hidden anything.”
“I didn’t say you had.”
He looked offended—more than offended: wounded b
“Everything’s in order,” he said, jerking his head at the windmill. “Go see for yourself.”
“Not on your tintype.”
He said—and I couldn’t help but feel he was deliberately changing the subject—“Are you going to write something personal for the catalogue?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Only a paragraph or so.”
“Who do you take me for—Ralph Eugene Meatyard? The unspeakable Stieglitz? Cecil Beaton? I’m no writer.”
“It would interest people.”
“There’s only one way to interest people. Something really sensational. Do an Arbus. Take a lot of mad crazy Weegee pictures of people you hate, and then swallow rat poison. Then they’d come flocking. Suicide explains everything.”
“Poor Diane,” he said (I loved his use of first names: Alfred, Yousuf, Maggie, Jill, Nancy—I could hear him in New York saying, “Maude—”), but he looked like a clown grieving in those bizarre clothes, like my picture of Emmett Kelly, the sad face beneath the greasepaint. Frank twirled one of his string of beads. “If you’re having trouble writing you could do what I do when I get stuck. I tack sheets of paper on the walls around my room, then whenever I get an idea I just scribble it down—a word, a phrase, anything. I get a body of thought here, a body of thought there. I put them all together and hammer out my piece.”
“It sounds a bit”—I wanted to say “stupid.”
“Sure, it’s complicated. But it loosens the thought processes.”
“I think I’ll wing it,” I said. “In the meantime, keep digging, Frank, and if you come up with anything unusual, let me know.”