* * *
. . .
Alfred and Paul weathered their wives’ absences well enough at first. Closing the Room once he knew that the lease would not be renewed and arranging to store hundreds of works kept Alfred busy through June. Paul helped when he could, but it was disconcerting to watch Alfred’s orgy of destruction when he began destroying negatives and copies of Camera Work. Alfred told Georgia about an evening at the Normans’: He enjoyed their hospitality and was pleased to see paintings there by members of his circle, but afterward he felt “a million years old.” Still, he assured her, he would not be too sad at the lake because he had already imagined how it would be without her.
But that would not happen. Once settled at the Hill, Alfred began burning still more books and papers, as well as many of the prints and negatives he had sent there only weeks before. A few days later, he outlined his last wishes: to settle a small income on Georgia, donate his best work to the Metropolitan Museum, and return many of his paintings to their makers. He asked only one thing of her—to bury him with her 1916 Blue Lines.
The apocalyptic clouds in his Equivalents taken that summer suggest Alfred’s anguished state of mind. Of such images, he told Dorothy, “My photographs are a picture of the chaos in the world, and of my relationship to that chaos. My prints show the world’s constant upsetting of man’s equilibrium, and his eternal battle to reestablish it.” Georgia’s absence had disturbed his sense of balance; he would become frantic in his efforts to reestablish it.
But Georgia was unaware of this turn in Alfred’s thinking. She, Beck, and Tony had set out on a trip to see the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, and from there traveled to Gallup, Albuquerque, and back to Taos. The trio were delighted with their adventures and with one another. Georgia and Beck loved sleeping under the stars, with nothing to eat but oranges and whiskey. The trip was cleansing, Georgia told Alfred: “The best thing all this is doing for me is that many of those old things are sliding away….Put all that heartache in your pocket—and just let down—these things aren’t so bad.” She could now look to the future—her paintings, a new exhibition space, and their reunion.
During this time, a storm blew up when Mabel, still awaiting her hysterectomy, wrote to Georgia of her fear that Tony no longer loved her. Georgia replied that in her view Mabel and Tony were “welded together,” and that his relations with his Indian wife did not threaten their union. Mabel, however, misreading between the lines, fixed on Georgia’s call for acceptance: “Next to my Stieglitz I have found nothing finer than your Tony—but I feel you have got to let him live and be his way however much it might hurt you.” Georgia added, “If he does go out and sleeps with someone else it is a little thing.” She ended with a declaration: “I’m having a grand time just being ME—I think I would never have minded Stieglitz being anything he happened to be if he hadn’t kept me so persistently off my track.”
This did not sit well with Mabel. She chided Georgia for not caring whom Tony slept with, and made matters worse by informing Alfred of her fear that Georgia and Tony were having an affair. Mabel’s alarm threw Alfred into an agitated state: He lay awake at night, imagining the worst.
He remained in limbo while Georgia and Beck took a second trip with Tony and four Indians to Santa Fe and Las Vegas, where they drank too much whiskey. Georgia told Mabel that she came through this time “much more clear than usual—with a fine neutral feeling.” She could now tell Alfred that she and Beck had bought a car, which she was learning to drive. “I made up my mind to it last year and now I have done it….I have told you about the worst thing I have done since I was away.” She ended on a conciliatory note: “I wouldn’t mind being fluffed—I wonder if it is the altitude or not being fluffed—We are both certainly keyed up to a pitch to tear the roof off.”
These sentiments excited Alfred but failed to console him. He wrote her a twenty-five-page letter that begins with his dream of their lovemaking. “I had a terrific erection—Fluffy looked like the big Black Iris which next to the Blue Lines is closest to my heart—& as I took hold of you—& rammed my Little Man into you, you said with sighs—sighs so deep so heartbreaking—you must leave him no matter what happens.” The dream mounts in intensity until he withdraws the Little Man and moans, “I & mine are accursed.” (Alfred feared that he had a genetic defect that had caused Kitty’s schizophrenia.) He went on to rehearse self-serving explanations of recent squabbles (including Georgia’s distrust of Dorothy), old grievances, and new complaints, chief of which was his realization that Georgia no longer needed him.
It was in this condition that Paul and his friend Harold Clurman found Stieglitz when they stopped to visit on their way to New England. Alfred treated them to “a long discourse on life, part lament, part harangue” that lasted for eighteen hours, stopping only to read aloud his letters to O’Keeffe. “As we retired for the night—Strand said that in view of Stieglitz’s excited state we ought not to leave—Stieglitz came to our room with us and stood over our beds, continuing his monologue.” The cause of his distress, Clurman thought, was jealousy. Alfred claimed that Georgia had taken up with “an Indian” because of “the physical thrill she felt in the Indian’s presence.”
Letters and telegrams flew back and forth between Lake George and Taos over the next few days. Paul wired Georgia, “Never have I seen such suffering. Your letter this morning telling him you loved him actually saved him.” He added, “The future is still a blank for him and so far for all of us.” Paul felt especially close to Alfred because of his shaky rapport with Beck, who wired him not to come to Taos, since she would go east at the end of July to take her mother to New Jersey.
A few days later, Paul told Georgia that he thought Beck was wasting her time in Taos—“letting it become just a plain drinking bout of excitements.” He hoped that Georgia could help Beck get over her resentment about leaving, but he did not see that this resentment resulted from her having to abandon her new life just as it was getting started. What Beck wanted was a relationship that supported her yearning for a creative outlet. She admitted to Alfred some time later, “For seven years I’ve shut out things believing that they would stand in the way of what Paul was trying to do.”
The two couples became more entangled in their efforts to cope with Alfred’s mania. By mid-July, he felt so weak that he dictated two letters to Paul in which he proposed taking the train to Albuquerque to meet Georgia. One can imagine Paul’s feelings as he took down Alfred’s words: “I must see you & hear you—what you have to say about your decisions—new attitude—new feelings.” The next day, Alfred decided instead to go to Chicago, then to forgo the trip altogether. He wired Beck, who was fielding his telegrams while Georgia was traveling: “I have been thinking entirely in terms of Georgia and have decided it would be criminal on my part to disturb in any way her original plans.”
The friendship between the women seems to have exacerbated the tensions among the foursome. They were protective of each other and determined to ignore other people’s expectations; at the same time, they were behaving like the free spirits they intended to be—enjoying the kind of closeness that can thrive between women and indulging in a certain giddiness for the fun of it. But to Paul, such playfulness was unrelated to the creative imagination as he conceived of it.
Beck and Georgia celebrated their friendship with glee—driving into the desert at night, washing “Hello,” then turning the hose on each other, wearing fancy clothes to dinner, dancing with their male companions. One night, Georgia went up on the roof to watch the sunrise: “We do such things here without being thought crazy,” she told a friend. For Beck, Georgia was the high-spirited sister she had always wanted.
By July, however, Beck was distressed about returning to a life where the things they did would be thought crazy. She could not check her sense of loss on leaving Georgia:
We have had a beautiful relationship together and feel the need of nob
ody else….I think she is fond of me and I know I am of her. Nobody can ever take this experience and mutual sharing away from us, no matter what happens—even if the relationship itself changes. I think she is perfectly happy with me for she speaks all the time of getting a large car next Spring and our going off together again in it. We also have in mind trying to find a little house somewhere near New York that we can retire to when we feel like it.
Beck’s sense that Paul understood how much this meant is implied in the next sentence: “I am entirely myself in her company.”
On the basis of such passages, some have argued that their happiness developed into an affair. If one takes into account their passionate ties to their husbands, however unsteady on occasion, this interpretation seems tendentious, relying as it does on excerpts taken out of context from letters like the one quoted above. Other than these documents, evidence is lacking to support such a reading, which contradicts the strong heterosexual attractions expressed by both women. If anything, Beck may have hoped that accounts of her “beautiful relationship” with Georgia would bring her renewed respect from both Paul and Alfred.
“How closely we 4 have grown together,” Beck wrote to Alfred in a moment of wishful thinking. She could not have suspected that in her role as go-between she would unleash another round of manic behavior, this time directed at her. After she wired to say that Georgia was still incommunicado, Lee Stieglitz (who had gone to the lake) wrote that Alfred was “going to pieces.”
Rather than blame Georgia, Alfred excoriated Beck: “You are absolutely unseeing,” he wrote on July 21. Her well-meaning accounts of Georgia’s emancipation had enraged him. It was “diabolically unfair” of Beck to imply that he had kept Georgia from doing such things (she hadn’t). In his anguish, he harked back to times when Georgia resented Beck’s presence at the lake. “I have learned one great thing,” he continued, “not to waste my time on people who have no vision….You don’t know what friendship is any more than you see Love when it is before you.” Worse still, he wrote, Beck had made “tremendous mischief without wishing to not because of your feeling for Georgia but because of your feeling for self.”
This attack was his way of blaming the messenger. “You have lived very close to Georgia for 3 months,” he scolded; “how about my 11 years & 3 years correspondence before.” Again, one wonders what Paul made of Alfred’s rants and how he coped with his divided loyalties once his mentor began to castigate his spouse. In these weeks, during which Paul acted as Alfred’s minder, the men learned to lean on each other. “I don’t know what would have happened hadn’t Strand been here,” Alfred told Georgia. He added, “He has his own problem.”
By then, Beck was on her way east. She wrote to Georgia from the Limited’s observation car: “One night gone—and with it the mountains and clear air—You—Tony—all of Los Gallos.” It was a shock to find herself there: “I’m still in the Casita Rosa with you.” She hoped to return in the fall and asked Georgia to wait for her. Of their times together, she wrote, “How right they were—how necessary.” Paul would meet her at Albany to take her to Alfred. She could not believe that he had meant the things he had said. She added, “I will be glad to see Paul & know his tenderness once more—I need it—badly.”
During their time at the lake, Beck told Alfred how much he had hurt her. While he continued to cast doubt on her ability to “see,” they tried to settle their differences. “I took a lot of pretty awful punishment, but in the end it was all for the best.” Beck reassured Georgia that Alfred’s love for her burned “with an incredible flame,” and that her own feelings for Paul had reignited: “He certainly missed me,” she wrote discreetly. Yet Beck found herself in “a trance of readjustment.”
Paul’s attitude may not have helped. After leaving the lake, he voiced his relief that Alfred was at peace with Georgia: “The suffering not in vain—but bringing what must be a greater oneness.” Yet he fretted about Beck’s role: “As I see all that has happened—nothing is changed—yet I feel to a certain extent Beck’s weakness was lost sight of by me—And that did something perhaps to you—and that in turn again to me—She really [is] the weakest of us all—without direction—at the root no faith in herself.”
Unaware that they were discussing her, Beck wrote to Alfred about the need for change: “Now that some other ‘action’ seems necessary, it will be hard to act—Paul’s leaving me for spending all his money, or having a child in a home won’t do it…it is going to be slow & painful.”
By August, Beck was considering various plans for the future. Hoping that Georgia would drive “Hello” cross-country, Beck again asked her to await her return so they could travel together. When Georgia wired that she would take the train to Albany, then go to the lake, Beck decided to spend September with Paul, in hopes of patching things up. Paul, his mind on Alfred’s woes, rejoiced at the news of Georgia’s return: “The cataclysm comes—innocent things are beaten down—the mountain remains.” He added, “Beauty must come out of all this pain—that I feel deeply—for all of us.” Thanking Alfred for his advice about Beck (this letter is lost), Paul mused, “It will be slow but we will work it out together—the oneness—I know how deep she is in me.”
* * *
. . .
Georgia was delighted to find Alfred in good spirits. Their reunion, she told Mabel (they had made peace on Mabel’s return to Taos) was “the most perfect thing that has ever happened to me.” The weather was balmy, their surroundings an incitement to work. She was painting trees, leaves, and abstractions based on natural forms—her “equivalents” for states of feeling. Some canvases begun in Taos now seemed odd; she was working on them slowly. (One wonders if Pine Tree with Stars at Brett’s was among them. Its perspective, gazing up through the tree into the night sky, linked the artist’s location to the cosmos through its radical changes of scale.) Georgia’s sense that it would take time to absorb the influence of New Mexico is also felt in Farmhouse Window and Door, which treats the entrance to their Lake George home as a threshold that blocks the view—an inward-turned look at the place she came back to in full knowledge of its constraints.
At this point, Georgia was still unaware of Alfred’s intimacy with Dorothy, with whom he had been corresponding all summer. Referring to each in code—Georgia was “S.W.,” or Southwest, and Dorothy, “Y.L.,” or Young Lady—he told Dorothy that it was thanks to her that he had survived Georgia’s neglect. He accepted her criticisms of “S.W.” and their entourage. Since the spring, Paul and Dorothy had been discussing the idea of a new gallery to continue the work of the Room. Dorothy would be an essential part of it, Alfred insisted, with the Strands—on whom he relied despite his reservations. When he expressed doubt about the idea, Dorothy told him not to abandon his dream: “The Room is an admission not of failure but of truth….I really do love you—like nothing on earth. It is bigger than you can ever know.”
Unaware how things stood, Paul spoke to Alfred of his high regard for “Mrs. Norman,” to whom he had sent a portrait of Alfred taken at the height of his misery: “In spite of its pathos she felt it the finest thing of you she had seen.” Paul may not have understood that Dorothy’s support for the new gallery had a great deal to do with her wish to replace Georgia as its presiding spirit. In his mind, Dorothy was “a rare and beautiful person all alive and really articulate as few I know are.”
By then, Paul was again photographing Beck. While both of them thought well of these portraits, this opportunity for rapprochement was abandoned when they went to Canada so that Paul could photograph in the Gaspé Peninsula, a region of rugged sea cliffs and mountains along the Saint Lawrence River. It was as if they had gone to another world.
For the next six weeks, Paul worked to capture what he called the place’s essential character by relating the elements of each composition—houses, headlands, fishing boats, clouds—in a unified perspective. Concentrating on this approach, he chose not to p
hotograph the region’s residents. Strand’s engagement with the Gaspé would lead to his idea of creating a sense of place wherever he went—a turning point made possible in a setting without prior associations and far from the influence of Stieglitz. But despite Beck’s hopes for change, she slid back into the role of helpmeet. She missed Taos, she told Tony Luhan; meaning to speak French, she found herself speaking Spanish instead. With this letter, she sent a snapshot of herself, as if trying to post herself back to New Mexico.
The Strands returned to New York in October to devote their efforts to Alfred’s next gallery. Now that an upstart venue, the Museum of Modern Art, was to open on Fifth Avenue, it became urgent to identify donors who could help Alfred continue in his role as reigning impresario and accept his terms. Paul, Beck, and Dorothy were to sign the lease, but only Alfred would decide what was to be shown; investors must not expect to make a profit. The Strands drafted a letter to prospective backers, and Dorothy lobbied her husband, who promised three thousand dollars in support of the venture. Over the course of the fall, the donor list came to include Jacob Dewald, Paul Rosenfeld, Lee Stieglitz and family, Beck and Paul, and Paul’s father, who had done well on Wall Street. A total of more than sixteen thousand dollars in pledges accrued over the next three years.
Alfred told Beck that he appreciated the Strands’ efforts. He did not apologize for the way he had treated her, but he hoped that she had forgiven him. When stock prices plummeted on Black Thursday, October 24, he wrote, “To start anything pertaining to Art in days like these seems like challenging the Devil himself.” Beck’s letter posted that day reassured him that there was nothing to forgive. She was again working as a typist and again wondering if she should take drawing lessons—perhaps with Alfred’s former friend Thomas Hart Benton, who was teaching at the Art Students League. Paul had found gallery space on the seventeenth floor of a new building at 509 Madison Avenue and was negotiating the lease, pending Alfred’s approval.
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