Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Alfred told Georgia that Paul looked weary when he came to the Hill for the weekend: “I fear Beck worries him a great deal even more than he worries her.” But he was also annoyed with Paul, who had again tried to capture his likeness: “If Strand doesn’t understand what a portrait is—he is deficient in all his work, deficient of the creative quality which gives life.” Equally critical of Beck, he wrote, “It’s amazing how sensitive she is at moments & how something gets in the way then & turns a fine material into something much less fine.” Alfred complained that when he needed her, she seemed “a million miles” away. He added, “She’s all right—but there is a messiness somewhere which will ever remain messy.”

  Complaints about “messiness” in others were often projections of his own distress. For some time, the Stieglitzes had been thinking about selling the Hill. Alfred lived there with Georgia for long periods each year but contributed little toward the cost of upkeep (he claimed that their improvements to the outbuildings increased the property’s value). Already concerned that this might be their last stay, he became apprehensive when his brother Leopold told him that he did plan to sell the house on East Sixty-fifth Street, where Alfred and Georgia had lived for the last three years. The thought of approaching homelessness sent him into a panic. He ranted at Beck and Rosenfeld, telling them that he felt guilty about Kitty’s illness, that no one understood him, that his life was a disaster. Worse, he feared that Georgia was leaving him.

  Beck sympathized with Alfred’s determination to keep the farmhouse, but being with him through this prolonged crisis took its toll, she told Paul. “Stieglitz wants his own way of living and his passion for trying to make other people see it in the face of their own inherent qualities really gets things into such a state of pressure that you…feel as though you were suffocating.” Rosenfeld, finding it impossible to work, “said he had never been in such hell.” Now, despite her love for Alfred, Beck looked forward to leaving soon after Georgia’s return. “I shall be glad…to come to you again for our own kind of living.”

  Concerned about Alfred’s state of mind, Georgia telegraphed that she would return home sooner than planned, even though he protested that she must stay in Maine to paint. He would need to be careful, Beck told Paul, in order not to overwhelm her: “This house is queer—so many ghosts of old experiences drifting around and so much suffering.” When Georgia returned in good form, Alfred calmed down, and Beck told Paul that she would stay a few more days, until she could face Manhattan.

  Alfred decided that in the future he would do less on behalf of all those who relied upon his support. “I feel the more the people he has fought for begin to be responsible for themselves the better he will like it,” Beck explained. Rosenfeld agreed: He was “ready to fly with his own wings.” But she could not see that such a change would also touch her and Paul, that their relations with Alfred and Georgia would change. Beck was proud of having stood her ground when Georgia criticized her for wearing trousers (they had not yet been adopted in progressive circles). Describing their “row” to Paul, she declared, “No harm done. She capitulated.”

  Some years later, Alfred was still smarting about this quarrel. He recalled Georgia’s resentment of Beck for taking her place that summer, Beck’s attempts at intimacy with both of them, and her self-importance—all symbolized by her riding pants. Yet Beck had come to see that making Georgia capitulate was not good for their friendship, nor was the continuation of their threesome conducive to good relations between the couples. She caught the train to New York soon after Georgia’s return, leaving her and Alfred to themselves.

  * * *

  . . .

  Beck had no trouble finding another job. Ten days after her return, she was hired by the Neurological Institute of New York, on East Sixty-seventh Street. The institute, the first in the country, was a palace, she told Alfred, and her work with the directors, Drs. Frederick Tilney and Henry Riley, more challenging than at her previous post. She was learning to use up-to-date devices, a silent typewriter that was a pleasure to operate and a dictaphone with amplifiers. She would stick with this job “until I can’t anymore—spiritually,” she continued. At the same time, she was retyping parts of Rosenfeld’s manuscript, including the chapter on Georgia. Paul was again traveling to film horse races: “I don’t care about the money he makes as money—but I do know he is released from a tremendous burden of a fixed idea.”

  Unexpectedly, Alfred’s woes resurfaced in Beck’s New York life. Soon after her return, she noticed a young couple at the institute, bound to each other by some deep sorrow. Seeing this woman and her husband brought to mind her last days at the Hill, where the shared suffering, she wrote, “seemed to envelope me like a clinging, heavy vapor. I tried to struggle free of it and found myself weighted down by a sense of double suffering.” The woman, she learned, was Kitty, who was a patient there. “Your family does run into my life,” she wrote in November, when Leopold Stieglitz came to consult with the doctors. After checking Kitty’s records, Beck told Alfred that they were optimistic about her, provided there was no interference from Emmy—an interpretation that endorsed his view of the matter.

  Beck had witnessed what no one else had seen, Alfred told her after she left Lake George. She was very much part of the Hill—the distress of those days had deepened their intimacy. Beck agreed: “There was infinite pleasure and real suffering.” As she sat at her typewriter, memories of their time together overwhelmed her: “I can see you, Stieglitz, Davidson & Elizabeth at the side of your shack, the day after Englehard spoke of selling the farm—and the hurt I felt & the rage.” She agreed that he must let his “children” go it alone. “Your light is too intense for most & burns with an almost unbelievable purity!”

  Judging by the Strands’ correspondence with Stieglitz for the rest of the year, neither felt that they had been burned. Alfred made a point of encouraging Paul by introducing him to acquaintances in the racing world. “You will come into your own,” he told him, after inquiring about Paul’s photographs at the lake, including his portraits of Alfred. “My whole being is far beyond portraiture,” he added. In Alfred’s mind, the Hill had replaced 291: He and Georgia were so productive there that he was toying with the idea of it as a permanent home. Just the same, they would return to New York for the winter and looked forward to seeing the Strands. Beck replied, “You two are still the finest thing we have besides our being together, and our deepest satisfaction, when regarding the rest of the world, is in the thought that you just are.”

  Alfred and Georgia enjoyed their last weeks at the lake, when, despite the intense cold, her sister Ida came to stay. He took snapshots of Ida (she declined to pose in the nude) but was reserving his energy for his cloud pictures. Photographing clouds, he explained, let him evoke thoughts and feelings different from those he captured in portraits, including the images of Georgia and other women that had often expressed his vision of life. Alfred would later name this series Equivalents, a title suggesting its origins in the Symbolist theories of his youth. In 1923, he called his cloud pictures Songs of the Sky, visual harmonies that conveyed psychic states in the manner of music.

  By then, Georgia was painting full-time. While Alfred devoted himself to the skies, she turned to the fruits of the earth, although apples no longer claimed her attention. That fall, she painted magnified close-ups of oak leaves in clusters of red or green, filling the compositions with pulsing energy. On the same compressed scale, she did paintings of fruit that accentuate their fullness of form and may also stand in for relationships. In Red Pear with Fig, for example, a purple fig reclines in front of its shapely red companion. Similarly, in the series Alligator Pears (a term for avocados), the fruit is arranged alone or in twos on cloths to set off these rounded shapes and brilliant surfaces (their greens, browns, and blacks suggest that she painted them until they were ripe for consumption).

  While Alfred imagined the Hill as their home, Georgia was more
ambivalent. “There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees—Sometimes I just want to tear it all to pieces,” she told Sherwood Anderson. Yet it was also true that when the household ran smoothly, she could paint. After hiring a housekeeper, the couple worked all day: “We all spend most of our time alone—each tending to his own particular job—and get on wonderfully.” They returned to New York in November after a blizzard that delighted Georgia, who dragged Alfred outside to take pictures. Looking back at their time at the lake, he told Beck, “I know all your Life you’ll remember it—Heartaches & all.”

  In the meantime, Beck had been helping Rosenfeld revise his manuscript while he rewrote the penultimate chapter—about Stieglitz as one of “the great affirmers of life.” Alfred proposed revisions to an earlier draft, which called him America’s greatest artist: “I know my own worth. But I’m not sure about being as much an artist as one of the leading spiritual forces in this country.” Both were satisfied when Rosenfeld submitted the manuscript but disappointed to learn that the publisher would limit the number of illustrations to reduce costs. Of the nine included, five were Stieglitz portraits, of Marin, Hartley, Dove, Anderson, and O’Keeffe (a severe 1922 shot chosen with her approval, in contrast to earlier ones). Stieglitz selected a Strand portrait of himself taken that fall as the book’s final image: Staring at the camera, he seems to challenge his disciple to take a picture as expressive as his own. The result, prominently placed in the volume, made both Strands feel that Paul had taken a step forward.

  Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe kissing, Lake George

  In advance of publication, Stieglitz told Rosenfeld that his collection of essays was “a hummer.” He continued: “My name can be used to advertise the book & help sell it. —But perhaps my name has very little selling value.” Surprised to learn that it mattered in some quarters, he informed Paul that a journalist from The American Hebrew was writing about him as “a Jew who has arrived.” He added ironically, “I arrived. At Nowhere—a marvellous place so much finer than Somewhere.” He and Georgia had to leave their apartment by the following June. What was more, he would turn sixty on January 1, a date that always caused him to reflect. If he was, as the journalist claimed, a genius of the camera, he was far from a success in worldly terms.

  “I have learnt an awful lot this summer & this autumn—about myself & my dreams,” Alfred told Paul, “the dream that under ‘free’ conditions people will cooperate because of common sense if for no other reason.” Now, in his disillusionment, he could see that in groups like the Camera Club, the Photo-Secession, and 291, it had been his guiding hand that held things together. Rosenfeld gave these sentiments another twist: “At the root of the man’s dream of a group of people, working together, each one preserving his own identity, there must lie some strong unconscious family feeling; perhaps the strong Jewish family feeling; extended in this case not to individuals related in blood, but related in work and spirit. All his life [Stieglitz] has been hoping for the realization of this dream.”

  Rosenfeld’s book, which would be published in 1924 as Port of New York, was like a birthday present—one that gave Stieglitz satisfaction in its praise of the individual artists and the group spirit that he had struggled to create. The book concludes with a paean to his Songs of the Sky as the artistic expression of this dream, an affirmation of the soul as “something thrust fuller than the skyscrapers.” Ironically, Rosenfeld may not yet have seen the sardonic photograph from that series called Spiritual America—a gelded, harnessed stallion meant as a comment on the state of contemporary American culture.

  CHAPTER 10

  Sensitive Plants

  1924

  “I don’t worry but I am not growing younger,” Stieglitz told a friend toward the end of the year. Brooding about his age and impending homelessness, he felt like a cross between “the Flying Dutchman & Wandering Jew.”

  Still, at sixty his artistic stature was undiminished. In January, the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain conferred its Progress Medal on him for “services rendered in founding and fostering Pictorial Photography in America” and for Camera Work, “the most artistic record of Photography ever attempted.” But this accolade, linking his name to pictorialism despite his objections to the contrary, failed to assuage him. And when he forwarded Strand’s and Rosenfeld’s essays on his new work to the society, its director called Strand a “pretentious duffer” and said that Rosenfeld’s prose gave him a headache.

  Stieglitz took comfort in his budding friendship with a newcomer to the New York art scene, the racially mixed writer Jean Toomer. Since the publication of Cane, Toomer’s novel about American blacks in Georgia, writers close to Stieglitz praised the author’s take on the subject. Rosenfeld called the book something new in American letters. Waldo Frank, Toomer’s friend and literary sponsor, claimed that Toomer wrote “not as a Southerner, not as a rebel against Southerners, not as a Negro, not as an apologist or priest or critic but as a poet.”

  Overnight, it seemed, Toomer had arrived. Looking back at this time, he mused, “If you were doing anything worthwhile in any of the arts, and in the modern idiom, to arrive meant that you were welcomed…into the most remarkable up-swing yet to occur in our national culture.” That Toomer was strikingly handsome, with copper-colored skin and silky black hair, only enhanced his appeal. His background (he claimed French, Dutch, Welsh, Cherokee, African-American, and Jewish forebears) made him exotic; his bearing gave him the air of a well-educated Indian. While many looked to Toomer as a type of the “New Negro,” he saw himself as someone who transcended racial categories.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, 1925

  Toomer called on Stieglitz and O’Keeffe a few days after Alfred’s sixtieth birthday. Following a rapt contemplation of his cloud photographs, the young man sought Alfred’s advice about the unease that he was experiencing since his bewildering success. Toomer’s Whitmanian notion of the self had helped him formulate the idea of a new American race that would reconcile differences. Crucial to this process was the need to “see” into the essence of things, a term that few others than Stieglitz understood.

  After their evening together, Toomer thought that he had been recognized by a visionary. He awoke with “a vivid sense of your pure black,” he told Alfred, “a beauty as intense and clear as I’ve ever known.” He was equally effusive in his thanks to Georgia. The couple had grasped Cane’s spirituality, though most did not. “When I say ‘white,’ they see a certain white man, when I say ‘black,’ they see a certain Negro. Just as they miss Stieglitz’s intentions…because they see ‘clouds,’ ” Toomer wrote. He looked forward to the next opportunity to discuss with Alfred the unity of seer, camera, and subject matter as revealed in his skyward-gazing photographs.

  What was more, meeting Alfred had stirred up questions for him about the relations of art and life. Chief among them was the triangle formed by Toomer, Naumberg, and Frank, who had used his influence to launch Cane. Despite the Franks’ open marriage, their union began to unravel when Naumberg and Toomer fell in love. Frank may not have suspected the affair at this stage, but his relations with his friend had deteriorated. Jean told Alfred that since their evening together, he had been seeking a way to attune body, mind, and spirit.

  The young writer thought that he had found his way when he and Naumberg attended “demonstrations” by the Greek-Armenian guru George Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff’s vision of wholeness, Toomer wrote, offered “a life and a way to which I felt I could dedicate my whole mind and heart and body and strength.” That evening, the harmony of self and world glimpsed in Alfred’s images came to life in Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way,” especially in the sacred dances intended to awaken disciples—the next “up-swing” to which Toomer would devote himself.

  Gurdjieff returned to his headquarters in France about the time that Naumberg went to Reno to seek a divorce; Toomer’s plan to join h
er had to be kept secret so that Frank would not hold up the proceedings. In February, Toomer wrote to Stieglitz of the “inward re-buildings” taking place: “I am broken glass, shifting, now here, now there to a new design.” He came to see Alfred when he was immersed in preparations for a show of Marin’s watercolors and told him of his hope that like-minded souls would “directly see you and O’Keeffe” in the joint exhibitions of their work scheduled for March at the Anderson Galleries.

  One would like to know what others in the group thought of Alfred’s new protégé and of the awkward triangle he formed with Frank and Naumberg. Given Alfred’s estrangement from Waldo and the circle’s tendency to adopt his views, some of its members would have sympathized with Toomer. Rosenfeld, with whom Frank had been feuding, said that if Toomer’s prose was rather exalted, this was because he was experimenting. He concluded sympathetically, “Toomer comes to unlimber a soul.”

  During this period, Beck was putting the turmoil of her stay at Lake George behind her. She hoped to help Alfred finish the book they had begun there and told him that if support was needed (there was talk of a fund to buy his prints for the Metropolitan Museum), she could contribute a thousand dollars. But after falling ill in February, she went to recuperate at the Briarcliff Manor Lodge, a Westchester resort known for famous guests like Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan. Soon she felt well enough to try sledding—a pastime, she teased in a note to Georgia, that had already resulted in her ripping the breeches that nearly caused a rift between them. Georgia, ill with a preexhibition cold, did not reply.

  Gossip about their friends’ affairs abated when Naumberg took up residence in Reno and Toomer, who was already living with her in secret, wrote to Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, giving as his address the Toomer home in Washington. Alfred and Georgia busied themselves with arrangements for their exhibitions, in particular their effort to shape critical reception with carefully worded personal statements.