Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Beck continued to do whatever she could to maintain close relations with Alfred. After Georgia’s show closed, she organized all the documents at the gallery—correspondence, reviews, sales records—that had not yet been filed. Alfred appreciated her “neatifying.” In addition to Beck’s organizational skills, he told her, she had talent: “All it needs is a chance to develop.”

  By then, Beck’s pastels were on display in the Opportunity Gallery’s April show, curated by Georgia. It is of interest that Beck exhibited under her maiden name, avoiding any association with Paul and asserting her status as a Salsbury. The New York Tribune singled out her “rather individual fruit decorations done in pastels”; when the best work of the year was shown at the gallery in December, a critic was glad to rediscover Beck’s Autumn, “a flower painting of bold and decorative rhythms.”

  Having her work shown for the first time would have been rewarding, and that it appeared under the auspices of O’Keeffe made it even more so. Georgia’s decision to give Beck the chance was a way of making amends; she may have sympathized with her decision not to have children. From then on, the two were on warmer terms. Georgia introduced Beck to Madame Geo, her French dressmaker, whose designs suited Georgia’s preference for understatement. Madame Geo had recently given a series of radio talks about style, and a journalist observed, “This designer, who has counted among her patrons Queen Marie [of Romania] and much more significantly for this discussion Georgia O’Keeffe, makes dresses which are interesting to architects, sculptors, and engineers for their clean structural lines.” Both Beck and Georgia appreciated their exceptional workmanship.

  In the meantime, a minor sensation erupted in the press about the prices Stieglitz had obtained for O’Keeffe’s recent work. After negotiating the sum of $25,000 for six calla lily paintings, he made much of the secrecy surrounding the sale to an anonymous buyer (Mitchell Kennerley and his fiancée). “Artist Who Paints for Love Gets $25,000 for 6 Panels,” The New York Times announced. “Not a rouged, cigarette smoking, bob-haired, orange-smocked Bohemian, but a prim ex-country schoolmistress who actually does her hair up in a knot is the art sensation of 1928!” declared the Evening Graphic. Once again Georgia was in the news. Although the deal fell through that spring, along with the prospective buyers’ engagement, she was still smarting from the unwanted attention.

  Covarrubias, Our Lady of the Lily (The New Yorker, July 6, 1929)

  During the last exhibition of the season, of the notorious calla lilies, Stieglitz made up his mind to offer Strand a show. Beck was overjoyed. It was what she had been working for, relying on her closeness to Alfred while pointing out the merits of Paul’s work. “You must know how much this means to both of us,” she wrote. “It is an affirmation of him as a worker—and for me the affirmation of what I believed him to be the first time I saw his photographs. That has been my greatest happiness—that—and sharing you and Georgia—as friends.”

  In May, Georgia again took refuge at York Beach. “I am quite a normal being here,” she told her sister: “wonderful food—busy people who leave me alone—and the ocean.” Alfred was making do with her likeness, Lachaise’s alabaster bust, which sat in front of him as he wrote to tell her that the next season at the Room might be his last: “I don’t want to waste any time over anything not essential. You understand.”

  She did. What was more, she shared with him a vision that came to her as she watched the ocean: “It is as terrifically male and female as ever—the same terrific male power in the overpowering breakers as they move toward you—slowly—but surely coming—and the same marvelous loveliness that seems female when they break—I love it—I wish you were watching it with me.” (Perhaps her solitary enjoyment of these tremors heightened the idea of their complementarity.)

  * * *

  . . .

  Georgia returned to New York at the end of the month in time to accompany Alfred to Lake George. After a few days there, when he wrenched his back and then tore a ligament in his finger, she was in a daze, telling McBride, “I look around and wonder what one might paint—Nothing but green—mountains—lake—green….And Stieglitz sick.” In July, with his blessing, she hired a housekeeper and set off on a monthlong journey through the Midwest to see her family and “her America.” Alfred hoped that she would regain her lightheartedness. “I have robbed you of much of it without acquiring any,” he wrote. Yet it was their closeness that made him “a bit worth-while….Heavens knows I have been taught much by you.”

  During Georgia’s absence he mused on the impediments to their relations, starting with the age difference. At forty, she could not grasp how he felt at sixty-two. “The beginning of our togetherness was much simpler….But the question of practical daily living is not as simple as it was—or as we thought it was.” Even so, they had both “grown greatly—one thro’ the other.” And their sexual rapport was still strong.

  Alfred found his thoughts on intimacy confirmed in the book he was reading that summer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he saw as “a sort of Bible.” Lawrence, who had been corresponding with Stieglitz for some time, sent him one of the thousand copies privately printed in Florence (the book would be banned in the United States and the United Kingdom). Alfred could not put it down. “It’s a powerful book,” he told Georgia. “There is a deep relationship between his writing & my photographs & feeling about life. —And between your work & his too….He understands the forces.”

  At the same time, Alfred was also writing daily to Dorothy, who was vacationing on Cape Cod. Unaware of their correspondence, Georgia returned from the Midwest feeling refreshed. She enjoyed August at the lake until Alfred suffered an attack of angina and was ordered to bed, where he remained for most of September; she looked after him with the aid of a nurse and her sister Ida. Writing to Florine Stettheimer, she said that she had “not a thought in my head—unless strained spinach, peas, beans, squash—ground lamb and beef—strained this—five drops of that—a teaspoon in a third of a glass of water—or is it a half—pulse this—heart of that.” There was little relief, except when the women “got hysterical laughing” as they rubbed meat through a sieve for the fourth time.

  Stieglitz’s letters to Strand from this time barely allude to his condition. Earlier in the summer, he had thanked Paul for sending him supplies and asked what he thought of the dip in stock prices after the boom in the first half of the year (five million shares were traded on June 12 in what looked like a random drop in value). Paul had passed on his broker’s appraisal of the market, along with his sense that although it was ailing, there was no reason to worry.

  Relations between them warmed still further with Strand’s defense of the group credo. That year, The New Republic’s serialization of Waldo Frank’s Re-Discovery of America stirred up controversy about Frank’s critique of Marin, whose art he called a retreat from modernity into a romanticized Maine landscape. Having found his own sources of inspiration in Maine, Strand leaped to the defense in a letter to the magazine: Far from being an escapist, Marin was a patriot. He went on to say, “Perhaps more than anyone in painting, Marin is related to the American pioneer.” A native consciousness infused his work, moving toward “an apocalyptic penetration of the spirit of place.” Alfred congratulated Paul on his letter’s publication: “Am glad it’s in print. Important.”

  Strand carried forward his defense of the group’s Americanism in an essay on Lachaise in the 1928 American Caravan. (Rosenfeld and Kreymborg had founded the annual to showcase work by writers of whom they approved: It would publish Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marsden Hartley, and Jean Toomer.) Lachaise’s statues were “projections of an elemental vision,” Strand wrote. The Frenchman had abandoned Europe to channel the energy of the New World into shapes “in which human growth approximates the rich variety and growth of nature”—especially the female form, his “epic symbol.” Paul’s essay, Alfred told him, “reads
splendidly. —As for your Show in the Room it will come off.”

  The Strands took up residence at their Georgetown hotel in July. Paul needed time off from freelancing to produce a body of work for his upcoming exhibition, which would, in its own way, emphasize the “rich variety and growth of nature” that he admired in Lachaise. He and Beck spent three months in Maine, photographing, painting, antiquing, and seeing friends. Visits with members of the circle absorbed much of their time. They inspected Marin’s island, which was splendid but useless as a place to live, and drove to York Beach to see Rosenfeld and Toomer, who returned their visit in August. Hartley was expected around then to stay with the Lachaises. When their friends converged on Georgetown, Beck wrote to Alfred, “I felt you must walk in at any moment.”

  Hartley, who was often ill at ease with the more prosperous members of the group, felt at home with the Lachaises and, soon, with Beck, whose fondness for their hosts and for Georgetown was infectious. They began to correspond after Hartley’s return to Paris—an exchange that comforted him: “It is just that nice to be hearing so directly and so intimately from you and the special circle. I am so thoroughly pleased that you are one of those Americans who can write.” Beck sent him things he needed from New York and carefully chosen presents—an antique vase, a handmade valentine, a quilt—along with occasional checks for small amounts of money. Hartley called her his “good angel.” She typed the manuscript of his poems and sought his advice about painting on glass, which he considered an “almost selfless” practice—an ideal that ran counter to the self-aggrandizing art of most modernists.

  At about this time, Paul confessed to Alfred that he was having trouble getting started: “Something in me I suppose plus a more critical attitude,” along with faulty equipment—a tripod that quivered in the breeze and a camera that demonstrated “its essential junkiness.” Still, in August he judged some prints to be satisfactory. Following Rosenfeld’s inspection, Paul relayed his comments to Alfred: “He felt for the first time no ‘sense of unrelieved strain,’ that they had a ‘vigorous life of their own.’ ”

  While it is hard to give exact dates to Strand’s nature studies, several images from that summer bear witness to the change he sensed in himself. The tracery of a spider’s web shimmers with drops caught in the mesh of Cobweb in Rain; the shoreline’s textures are felt in the accidents of line and pattern in Rock by the Sea; ferns peering through swordlike leaves in Wild Iris form part of a larger whole. With these close-ups of plants, rocks, and driftwood, the natural world approaches the human. A critic would write of them, “The artist, by a sort of sensuous sympathy with the body of his material has somehow become one with it.”

  Beck found it hard to bear Paul’s exclusive focus on his work. One day when he went to the beach to photograph, she sat down for “a little talk” with Alfred. She had to let Paul go “his solitary way,” she wrote, and wondered whether Alfred was content “tinkering” by himself. Because he had asked about her painting, she said that some of her pastels showed promise, then admitted, “It is slow, this learning by oneself.” But it was comforting to know that she was in his thoughts. Nostalgic about summers at Lake George, she thought of “the little room you came into, the photographs at the lake, in the hay,” then said wistfully, “Perhaps it will happen again sometime, some different way.”

  Beck was hoping that she could limit her work hours that winter in order to take art classes. “I really feel I could develop something of my own with a little instruction. I sometimes feel I have very little of that [my own] what with the demands of my family, Paul’s problem, his family, my own physical limitations—life is horribly short—and if there is to be no ‘home’—no child, I want something that is truly mine.” Her recognition of how things stood ends poignantly: “Take care of your rare little self—and again, love me always as I love you.”

  It is intriguing to learn that Beck and Alfred shared a sense of Paul’s “problem” (his cautious temperament? his self-absorption?). In his comments to Alfred about Beck’s pastels, Paul remained his analytical self: “The average I think shows a great development over the past—even those she did this Spring—She certainly has ability—and something her own which is trying to break through.” Given the disappearance of his letters to her, we cannot know to what extent he nourished her creativity or hindered it by being overly critical.

  Still, a trace of reserve is implied in Paul’s response to Alfred’s admiration of D. H. Lawrence. Quoting Rosenberg, Paul wrote that their friend “felt Lawrence had become fixed on sex and was trying to make that all of life.” For Strand, as for some other highly focused people, sex was not at the heart of life, perhaps not even an important part of it. And because his “sensuous sympathy” informed his rapport with photography, it was less likely to be shared with his wife when nature took her place as an (undemanding, unwavering) source of inspiration.

  * * *

  . . .

  Following Alfred’s recovery, he and Georgia returned to the Shelton. Paul was taking time between jobs to prepare prints for his show at the Room; Beck was pleased by the publication of Walsh’s book, The Making of Buffalo Bill, with its tribute to Milton and thanks to her as adviser. Pirated copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover were already for sale in New York. Paul informed Alfred that he had bought one and sent a check to Lawrence in the hope that the writer would one day see the best of America—the work of O’Keeffe, Marin, and Stieglitz—to compensate for “the America that was pirating his book.”

  In the next few months, the two couples heard another Lawrence enthusiast, Mabel Luhan, extoll the merits of the novel and of its author. Six years earlier, she had lured Lawrence to Taos with the promise of an utopian community, or at least a home, for himself and his wife, Frieda. The only person capable of interpreting native culture, she believed, Lawrence would promote a way of life uniting body and soul attuned to the spirit of the place. Although he found much to admire in Pueblo life, he came to see Mabel as someone who not only appropriated Indian culture but was power-mad in ways that undermined her professed spirituality.

  During the winter of 1928 Mabel was in residence in New York with the English artist Dorothy Brett, who had gone to Taos with the Lawrences but had stayed on after they’d returned to Europe. For some time, Stieglitz had hoped to exhibit Lawrence’s paintings—“to challenge the entire country on the book and what is being done to it.” But that fall, when Lady Chatterley was condemned as obscene, Lawrence had abandoned the idea. At Mabel’s urging, Brett took her paintings of Pueblo ceremonial dances for a possible exhibition at the Room, but after seeing them, Stieglitz declined. Following one of their frequent quarrels, Mabel told Brett that she was no longer welcome at her apartment. Brett moved to the Shelton, where a friendship with Alfred and Georgia began over the breakfast table.

  Just the same, both remained on good terms with Mabel. Their cordial relations suggest that neither had read Mabel’s response to Georgia’s request to write about her art from a woman’s perspective. Mabel rose to the occasion, but what she wrote seemed envious and cold. She had felt “indelicate” when gazing at O’Keeffe’s flowers. The artist, she continued, had externalized “her true being out onto canvases which, receiving her outpouring of sexual juices…permit her to walk this earth with the cleansed, purgated look of fulfilled life.” Stieglitz did not fare any better: She called him a showman whose only motive was to sell his wife’s work. Mabel’s essay remained unpublished.

  What disturbed Georgia that winter was Dorothy’s presence at the Room and Alfred’s attachment to her. One day when they were alone, Dorothy said that she loved him. Alfred kissed her, she recalled, “as I have never dreamed a kiss could be.” From then on, they were obsessed with each other: “We must be in touch in person, by letter, by phone at every possible moment.” Alfred’s declaration of his feelings reads in kind. “We are one. —Every day proves it more and more to be true.” In time, conv
inced that their relationship concerned only themselves, they became as intimate as circumstances allowed.

  Others in their circle saw Dorothy as a socialite who was devoted to modern art, or so she thought. The more observant, watching her with Alfred, sensed their closeness. Georgia could not help letting her know how she felt. “She always looks at me as if I were some queer species of animal who had strayed in,” Dorothy told Alfred, “and wouldn’t I please remove my superfluous presence far enough away so as to be out of her sight.”

  CHAPTER 14

  How Closely We 4 Have Grown Together

  1929

  While insinuating herself into activities at the Room, Dorothy did little to assuage Georgia’s resentment, and Georgia preferred not to look too closely: “That I haven’t thought much of how I feel is the way I like it. I am not talking much to Stieglitz,” she told a friend.

  Georgia was talking to Beck that winter, as their friendship strengthened. It is pleasant to picture them at Madame Geo’s boutique on East Fifty-seventh Street. One wonders which designs Beck would have chosen. Both admired the way the designer’s silhouettes followed the lines of the body while allowing for freedom of movement. Georgia ordered a pin-tucked tunic and underdress in white silk georgette, a pleated tunic of black silk to wear over the white one, and a matching black wool coat and skirt. To the art world’s surprise, she turned up at exhibitions that winter in a scarlet cape.