Foursome
Page 16
Although Tyrrell reproduced Strand’s letter in his column, this attempt to displace the trope of O’Keeffe as a sexual being came too late to influence other critics, some of whom also quoted Rosenfeld to claim that she painted from, or with, her body. Disappointingly, Helen Appleton Reed cited Hartley’s account of O’Keeffe’s oils as “shameless private documents,” then opined, “To me they seem a clear case of Freudian suppressed desires.”
The commonly held view that O’Keeffe’s work should be seen in psychoanalytic terms also appeared in McBride’s review, which played with the idea: “In definitely unbosoming her soul she not only finds her own release but advances the cause of art in her country.” He continued: “She will be besieged by all her sisters for advice—which will be a supreme danger for her. She is, after all, an artist, and owes more to art than morality.” Georgia wrote to thank him. His tongue-in-cheek advice, that she get herself to a nunnery, had made her smile.
Despite McBride’s wry remarks and the Strands’ supportive gestures, Georgia succumbed to the depression that often accompanied showings of her work; she took to her bed with a cold. Meanwhile, Alfred went to the gallery every day to lecture visitors about her Americanness. Those who picked up the brochure he had prepared found contradictory views expressed, in the Hartley piece and in her personal statement—which presented her as someone with a mind of her own: “I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way….Some of the wise men say it is not painting, some of them say it is. Art or not Art—they disagree. Some do not care.”
“You have had reports about the excitements at the Anderson! More are to come I’m sure,” Alfred crowed to Beck: “The Old Man & Little Fellow are on the job, a tough combination to beat.” When the show closed, his efforts on Georgia’s behalf had earned her about three thousand dollars ($41,000 today), which made her think that she could earn her living as an artist. “One must sell to live—so one must be written about and talked about whether one likes it or not,” she told a friend. She had to accept her reliance on Stieglitz and his spokesmen in a world where artists’ reputations were constructed and maintained by men.
In February, Alfred turned to his next task, an exhibition of his recent work to open at the Anderson in April. Meanwhile, he had to vacate the gallery’s spare room, where he had been storing his archive and the complete inventory of Camera Work. In despair, he tore up hundreds of prints and copies of the magazine—at a time when Beck had begun collecting the full run of Camera Work as an act of homage. When Paul told Alfred that he had forbidden her to read copies in the bathtub, Alfred replied that he would give her waterproof ones: “Beck has her own kind of pleasures & delights. —I think I know some of them.”
Alfred’s new show consisted mainly of portraits, the majority of them women. He selected twenty-two of Georgia, though not the more daring nudes: “New York is still not ready for some of the most significant portraits I have made,” he wrote in the catalog. From his portraits of Beck, he chose four of the most striking and the one of her hands. We can imagine her delight on learning that The New York Times had singled them out: “In a portrait of Rebecca Salsbury Strand the head is against straw in such a way as to emphasize texture. The firm round flesh against the prickly straw. Especially in the photographs of hands, texture is strikingly managed.” Yet one wonders if she enjoyed being seen as texture and whether the reference to her “firm round flesh” caused concern, in that her mother was sure to object to such terms.
Both Strands would have noted the omission of Paul’s likeness in the section devoted to men, which featured some of Stieglitz’s favorites. The presence of Marin, Duchamp, Seligmann, Rosenfeld, and Anderson on the walls would have underscored his disciple’s absence. Nonetheless, Paul showed unwavering support for Alfred in a talk he gave about this time at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. (In 1916, after falling out with Stieglitz, White had formed the Pictorial Photographers of America, where he taught pictorialist technique to photographers hoping to work as illustrators.)
Photographers needed to show respect for their craft, Strand argued, looking not to the history of painting but to their tradition, to the work of David Octavius Hill and Alfred Stieglitz: “From the beginning Stieglitz has accepted the camera machine, instinctively found in it something which was part of himself and loved it. And that is the pre-requisite for any living photographic expression.” Alfred thought so highly of the talk that he told Paul to send it to the British Journal of Photography. He added, “White is really too unspeakably stupid not to have the paper printed.”
Still, it had been galling to read Sheeler’s critique of Stieglitz in The Arts, which charged him with “preciousness”—the use of palladium prints rather than those made with “a less aristocratic element, such as silver.” Strand dashed off a rejoinder: Photographers used palladium not because it was precious but because it gave the most permanent results. Sheeler retorted, “Any exception that Stieglitz may have taken, through you…is quite alright”; Strand replied that he wrote not as Alfred’s mouthpiece but from a “love of truth.” This tart exchange ended relations between Sheeler and his former friends.
By contrast, Rosenfeld’s wholehearted embrace of the Stieglitz line was evident in his plans for a book on American artists whose work kept the spirit of 291 alive. Having recently written a book about modern composers, he told Stieglitz that the new one might include figures like Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore but would feature Marin, Hartley, Dove, Anderson, O’Keeffe, and himself—as the one who created the family feeling in the arts that Rosenfeld meant to celebrate. He would send him drafts of each chapter and take advice on the illustrations. Rosenfeld’s homage to their mentor became a project in which both Strands played their part over the next few months.
In June, Alfred and Georgia asked Beck to accompany them to Lake George. She accepted with glee, as Paul was again traveling in his efforts to succeed in cinematography. She told him not to fret about finances: “I know things are hard for you—this struggle to get some sort of a foothold….We’ll pull along for a while & see what happens. Remember that I do not expect anything—only want you to be a little freer in your mind.” From the lake, she wrote that she missed him: “You are a lovely lover and my happiness lies deeply in you.”
Beck was delighted to be with Alfred and Georgia again, and by their compatibility as a threesome. The women did domestic chores while Alfred rested. Wearing their bathing suits because of the heat, they made ice cream with wild strawberries from the woods; they painted the kitchen floor “a sweet and girlish grey.” Alfred urged Beck to stay longer; he was too tired to pick up his camera but hoped she would return to pose for him and resume her role as scribe, to transcribe more of his stories. “It is heavenly quiet with just the three of us,” she told Paul. Still, she warned him to inform her mother that she was staying at the guesthouse rather than with the unmarried couple: “I’m not going to give this up just for a question of propriety.”
Beck went back to New York, with an invitation to return to the Hill in September. She and Paul were apart much of the summer, when he traveled in search of employment. “I want you so to be free and yet we are caught in the net of necessity,” she wrote during one of their separations. About this time, she told Alfred, with whom she could speak freely, “I must earn my daily roast beef and potatoes here (and, incidentally, the good Paul’s).” She was glad when he went to Saratoga to film the races. The town’s proximity to Lake George meant that he could spend time at the Hill: “You deserve a little holiday & I know what being with Stieglitz means.”
At this point, Stieglitz, too, was in low spirits. In recent months, there had been a rapprochement between him and Kitty after she became pregnant. When Alfred visited her after the birth of her son, he learned that she had succumbed to depression, which then developed into postpartum psychosis. He blamed himself for having neglected her: “I
certainly failed in so many ways in spite of all my endeavour to protect and help her prepare herself for life. I realize with every new day what a child I have been & still am.” Worse, when his visits provoked Kitty to rage, the doctors told him not to return.
He and Georgia had often discussed her wish to have a child. At thirty-five, she felt some urgency but deferred to Alfred when he argued that she could not paint and look after a baby; moreover, at fifty-nine he was too old to be a father. Given Kitty’s condition, he insisted that Georgia must not risk pregnancy—even though his niece Elizabeth, who had two little girls, promised to help if they were to have a child. At the same time, Georgia had to tolerate the presence on the Hill of Alfred’s secretary, Marie Boursault, who was pregnant, and her two-year-old daughter.
Alfred described the situation to Beck, who had let him know that she, too, was ambivalent about children. “Marie’s kid is cute but she cries much more than the contract calls for….A baby does make a huge difference.” Beck’s reply made her position clear: “I think the business of raising a kid is horrible. They all smell, spit, sleep, slobber, snort. Then when you have lived thru this S period you go into F period—Fight, fuss, fall, feed, fresh and so on.” To end any doubts, Beck told Paul that during a friend’s visit with his children, their unruliness had spoiled the day. She added, “I know I would be evil to my kids!”
Paul’s freelance work allowed him little time for still photography, and he was dissatisfied with the few images he printed that summer, except for those of the Akeley. Alfred said that he understood Paul’s frustration about not being able to earn a living and Beck’s feelings on the subject. Yet, he reflected, Paul had “my kind of ‘touch’ in some things. A genius.” If necessary, he joked, the two couples could “build a straw bed big enough for all of us & go asleep & dream that Life is full of Beauty & Art & Kind People.” When Paul returned to the lake for a few days, the men photographed each other and Paul amused Georgia by helping in the kitchen. Their meals, Alfred told Beck, resembled a dance with Paul and Georgia “in a pas de deux.”
Marooned in the city for August, Beck decided to redecorate the Strands’ kitchen. She painted the walls gray, black, and brown, put down a complementary rug, shellacked the floor, and painted the fireplace. When the cook hooted at the moderne color scheme, Beck ranted, “She’ll keep that kitchen clean while I’m in it or there’ll be a Yankee-Jewish War.” (In her view, her “Yankee” persona—Nate’s legacy—distinguished her from most Jewish New Yorkers.) After this altercation, Beck withdrew to their room, which soothed her, “as though only loveliness could find its way in to share the loveliness we have had together in it.”
Over the summer, Alfred’s letters to Beck became more flirtatious, his joie de vivre having revived as he printed some images of her from the year before. “Beckalina Mina Carissima,” one began. “For an hour or more I have been tickling up your rear into most perfect condition of delight.” Moreover, her “most strongly alive…emerging from water in the sunglare rear” had delighted those guests who had seen it (one wonders if Paul was among them). When Paul allowed that he missed Beck, Georgia quipped that she was probably glad to have him out of the house. Alfred wished that Beck were with them: “You are liked by us up here on the Hill & not the least of all by the T.L.F.”
To prove the point, Alfred invited Beck to occupy “her” attic room on her return. Anticipating the renewal of closeness, Beck wrote that when Paul told her about Alfred’s insomnia, she wanted “to take you in my arms against my broad bosom…make you rest against—well, what is it—all that is gentle and tender in Woman.” The thought of her bosom helped, Alfred replied, but he also valued her as a muse. After two months at the lake, he was “fit for the gods—& several goddesses.” In the meantime, Beck told Paul how much she longed for him: “I’m like a ship without a rudder.”
Beck arrived at Lake George, to find the Hill full of people. In addition to Marie and Yvonne Boursault, the guests included Katharine Rhoades, Anita Pollitzer, the Seligmanns, and Elizabeth and Donald Davidson; more family members were expected. Katherine Herzig, Hedwig’s nurse, was running the household with Georgia. After Paul’s departure, Beck helped Alfred paint the kitchen floor pistachio green before resuming her duties as his typist. “Will I never stop?” she asked Paul in a letter detailing the Hill’s division into two camps—“the racketing in the kitchen and then somewhere else in the house Stieglitz or Georgia quietly doing something.”
Beck’s dream of a perfect union with Paul took a jolt one afternoon when she and Georgia went rowing. “She told me the story of the time you were in Texas,” Beck informed him. “She has forgotten much that happened—but was amused by recalling it.” Making light of what transpired between herself and Paul allowed Georgia to downplay the meaning of this revelation, just as Beck’s reference to her in her letter to Paul emphasized the women’s closeness rather than the history of his relations with Georgia. On hearing Beck’s professions of love for Paul, Georgia gave her a poem cut from a newspaper, which, she said wryly, voiced her wish to hear him respond in kind.
It came as a surprise when Georgia announced that she would soon go to Maine for a month with the friends who had invited her the year before, knowing that she could entrust the household to Beck. From then on, Beck sent bulletins assuring her that Alfred was in good form and life on the Hill was going smoothly. His letters to Georgia told a different story. Tensions developed between Beck, who was sometimes willful, and Katherine Herzig, who let Beck know that she preferred working with Georgia. After soothing Beck’s feelings, Alfred joked, “There is peace amongst the women folks.” A few days later, he wrote, “Beck as nice as she is—& certainly developing—does lack creative seeing—It’s a pity. But I suppose that can’t be ‘given’ one.” Meanwhile, he relied on her as typist and model—activities that, in his view, did not require creative seeing.
Beck was also enlisted in the effort to get Rosenfeld’s work in progress into shape. Its importance to the group was obvious. Stieglitz promised Rosenfeld that he would do all he could to help him meet his deadline, since the book would give an account of “America without that damned French flavor!” In recent years, he continued, he had been involved in fighting to have Georgia’s work recognized as American in his sense of the term: “Of course by American I mean something much more comprehensive than is usually understood.” At this stage in the country’s cultural life, it was imperative to challenge the idea that America was “only a marked down bargain day remnant of Europe.”
Rosenfeld was pleased that “Rebecca Countess of Salisbury” would insert Alfred’s comments in his chapter on Georgia: He admired her secretarial skills and high spirits. Beck no doubt kept her thoughts to herself as she retyped his effusions, including these remarks on Georgia’s art: “It leads us, this painting, further and ever further into the verity of woman’s life….She gives the world as it is known to woman.” Beck enjoyed the work because it brought her deeper into Alfred’s charmed circle, but at the same time, she told Paul, she thought that Rosenfeld’s understanding of Georgia “derives from [Alfred’s] photographs rather than directly from her paintings.”
Rosenfeld admired Beck and Georgia as women who knew their own minds. (Georgia reminded him of Wagner’s Brünnhilde.) In September, he went to Lake George to work on his manuscript with Beck. They took breaks to go rowing and discussed the idea of a fund to help support Alfred, an easygoing entente developing between them. Still, one wonders what Beck thought when he read the end of his O’Keeffe chapter to Alfred. “The American failure has been primarily a failure between men and women,” it began. In his view, the American female was like “a dwelling uninhabited, grey and chill like the houses where the furniture stands year-long in twilight.” O’Keeffe was an exception: “A woman…going toward the fulfillment of a destiny.” (Rosenfeld devoted a chapter to Margaret Naumberg but omitted Waldo Frank, with whom he and Stieglitz had been
feuding.)
These stirring words may have prompted Beck to ask whether less exceptional women could follow in Georgia’s footsteps. She sympathized with her friend’s need to work in peace but feared that her own talents might not extend beyond painting the kitchen floor. And her position at the Hill enhanced her self-doubt. “I am the only one who seems to create nothing,” she wrote to Paul. “I am always conscious of it & regret it. The only real thing I can do is in my relationship with you.”
At that time, Alfred, still suffering from insomnia, turned increasingly to Beck. He came into her room at night, she told Paul, “like a haunted man pursued by his daemon.” While there is no question that Beck was devoted to him, it is unlikely that she took him into her bed—as some have assumed—given her devotion to Georgia and the value she gave the sexual aspect of her relations with Paul. Even so, somewhat ingenuously Beck repeated her wish to “take [Alfred] to my broad bosom and comfort him,” assuming that Paul would understand.
While Alfred continued to rely on Beck, she was unaware that he was also complaining to Georgia about her. Annoyed when Beck continually found fault with the old Corona she was using, he compared her to a piano with some stuck notes. Her obstinacy was harming both her attempts at art and her marriage, he thought, and she was inclined to behavior unsuited to her sex. (In a feisty moment, she challenged Davidson to wrestle, then ended the fight by biting him, to show Alfred that she could.)