by Paul Theroux
This supine man in a bleak Hollywood hotel room would, I knew, be fixed in my mind as emblematic of art. I could not hear the word “literature” without thinking of Lawrence’s halitosis or O’Neill’s dandruff, or the word “photography” without remembering pictures I had never taken, such as our windmill in the rain. People pretended that art was complete, but it had another side that was hidden and human and wept and stank and snored and died; and I wondered whether it was not perhaps truer than creation.
If Faulkner had been dead I would have done him. But he was only drunk, poor man, and I guessed why. I went away and locked the door and never regretted not taking that picture. Indeed, I was glad it was I who found Faulkner that day, and not another photographer out to make a name for herself.
Before I sailed for Europe I stopped at Grand Island, but I warned them that I wasn’t going to stay for long. I had one detail to attend to. My darkroom had to be emptied and all the paraphernalia of my peepshow secured.
“What’s that?” asked Phoebe, who looked more than ever the war-bride.
“Guard this with your life,” I said. It was the trunk, a so-called steamer trunk, with brass fittings and decayed labels. There was a padlock on the outside and the shots I wanted suppressed—bad ones, amateur ones, the pictures I had found in my camera and processed blind—on the inside. I had not had eyes to see many of these pictures, and now that I had eyes I didn’t have the heart. They were blind pictures, they belonged in darkness, and because I had no intention of ever looking at them I put this trunk in the windmill, a memory I vowed never to re-enter. I left my own room empty. It was my way of telling everyone that I was out for good, but all I said was, “I might be away for some time.”
I meant it ominously: I had no plans to come back. I had my photography and I was free of all desires. It was a useful rootless trade, and if one took the Eisenstadt view one could roam the world like a gypsy, tinkering and pushing on. I had my skill, I had proven my ability to come up with the goods, and I was at last the equal in reputation, if not in accomplishment, of the people I photographed—perhaps the most crucial factor in photography, since subject is everything and technique only something to conceal.
Papa said, “Say, that reminds me. Our friend Woody is dead. He was killed in Leyte in October.”
No one understood why at that moment I burst into tears.
“But Ollie’s fine,” Mama said. “They put him in charge of all the combat photographers. He’s going to be all right. Tell us about California.”
“Ollie raved about it,” said Phoebe.
Papa nudged me and said, “She misses her brother.”
“And how,” said Mama.
Phoebe shook her head and sighed; but there was a storm in that sigh.
A week later, Papa and Mama saw me aboard the Georges Clemenceau, looking tiny and old as people do in their helpless farewells, already receding even as they waved. The Clemenceau was a French ship which had come in convoy across the Atlantic and now in safer seas was making a solitary voyage back with a cargo of wheat and about a hundred passengers, nearly all accredited journalists and photographers hoping to report the last act. I kept to myself, avoided their parties, and developed a fear of drowning. I could not sleep in my stifling cabin, so I snoozed in a deck chair during the day and stayed awake at night, roaming the ship. It was on that voyage, on moony nights, that I did my Ghost Ship sequence, the empty vessel awash on rough seas. Was it a fear of drowning or a desire for it? All my life I had lived next to the ocean, and it seemed always to be impatiently smacking the shore to remind me how easily I might enter and disappear. Death by drowning was not death at all, but a surrender to the immortality of a watery afterlife in the chambers of the sea.
We docked at Southampton in late March 1945. I went straight to London, where morale was high. It was my first glimpse of the disaster-prone British, obsessed with their own fortitude, making a virtue of the national vice—their love of a plucky defeat. London looked raped, as if the enemy had plundered it and gone, and yet even in bombed disrepair it wasn’t beaten. I tried to show this in my pictures—not the city but the weary whistling-in-the-dark triumph in people’s faces, the strain of war, the threadbare frugality. To do them complete justice and make the pictures timeless I cropped them closely from chin to forehead. There are no hats or hairstyles or neckties or ears in my English Faces—they are people peering through the wrong side of a picket fence—and though there is a bishop, a lord, at least one millionaire, as well as a Bayswater prostitute, a flower-seller, and any number of tramps and tea-ladies, I believed they were impossible to tell apart.
Through Miss Dromgoole, whom I visited and photographed (how strange it seemed that this dull old lady had educated Phoebe and me), I got a bedsitter in the Star and Garter Mansion in Putney, right on the river. It was, with the assignments I was offered, all I needed: darkroom, bedroom, parlor, and at twilight the complete camera obscura, with the rowers shimmering on the wall. I lived there happily, room within room, in the Chinese box of my body, feeding shillings into the meter and toasting crumpets on the gas-fire. London made me feel elderly and genteel, like some brave old dear in bombazine, secure in what seemed an eternal old age. That was how I lived, alone and unpestered, among dog-lovers.
My work was something else. Just after V-E Day, I took the train to Paris and did Georgie Patton. I think one can see the regret on his face, deflated aggression wrinkled up; his war was over, and he died that same year, not performing one of the daredevil stunts everyone associated with him, but in a fairly unspectacular car crash. He was, like many fanatics I have known, rather shy in close-up, and he talked nervously throughout the session, swearing and excusing himself, telling me the Fokker-Messerschmitt joke, and finally saying, “You get the pistols? People say they’re pearl-handled—well, that’s a goddamned lie. They’re ivory. From an elephant. You can tell them that. From an elephant.”
My portrait of Gertrude Stein looking like a saloonkeeper (“I won’t let you do Pussy,” she said, wagging her crewcut at the wretched Miss Toklas) was also done on this visit, but I left Paris soon after. I did not want to be tempted into any damp Cartier-Bresson shots of lovers and bores in berets and courageous floozies in teddy-back chemises.
On my return to London I toyed with the idea of writing a biography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the first female of my species. I thought that by writing about her I could divest myself of my own experience and my general feelings about photography. In some ways our lives were similar and we were both makers of icons—in her case “the Dirty Monk,” in mine “the Amherst Grump.” I could be oblique and remain truthful, even anonymous, by attributing my feelings to Mrs. Cameron, identifying myself with her in the way chicken-hearted biographers did with their subjects. I wanted to get it off my chest and leave myself with the imaginative novel-writer’s satisfaction of having done us both by swapping my life for hers. But though I spent some days in the British Museum and even wrote a few opening pages about her originality, I abandoned the project. Morgan Forster, whom I did in Cambridge (I had met him through the dog-lover Joe Ackerley, a fellow Star and Garter resident) encouraged me to continue. I told him I’d given up writing. Forster said, “That makes two of us. Isn’t it a muddle?”
It was Ackerley who fixed up my meeting with Evelyn Waugh at the Dorchester. I wrote Waugh a letter; he wrote back to “Mr. Pratt” and then I descended on him. He had just come back from Yugoslavia, rosy-cheeked and full of cherubic colic. I got off to a bad start by mentioning Bunny Wilson, whom he apparently loathed—though Bunny had always spoken highly of him—and then by telling him I lived close by, in Putney.
“Putney is not anywhere near Park Lane,” he said.
“Not far, by American standards.”
“You Americans and your standards,” he said. “Besides, no one lives in Putney.”
He was wearing a checkered suit and smoking a big cigar. As I set up my equipment he said, “Is your husband aware that yo
u importune strange men in hotel rooms?”
“I told you I don’t have a husband,” I said. I did about eight seated pictures and then saw a good angle at the window, Hyde Park in the afternoon sun. “Could we have a few by the window, Mister Waugh?”
“My name is not Wuff,” he said.
“I’m sorry, but I said Waugh.”
“I distinctly heard you say Wuff.”
“Hey—”
“Please leave this instant or I shall ring for the hall porter. You might have some explaining to do. In any event, I think he’ll want a substantial tip for showing you in. Isn’t that customary for a woman in your position?”
Ackerley told me not to take this personally—it was Mr. Waugh’s usual brush-off. And I still had a good set of pictures.
Remembering the Faulkner picture I had been too tactful to take, and the idea for the series Whose Room?, I set off and did a number of authors’ rooms. I did the parlor at 23 Tedworth Square where Sam Clemens had written one of his travel books, James’s study at Lamb House, Stephen Crane’s hospital room, and Hemingway’s expensive hotel room. I didn’t dare to do Hemingway in the flesh, though I had a good look at him. He was accredited to Collier’s and for some reason wore a Royal Air Force uniform: he had a broad rich-kid’s face and a big mustache and square teeth. There was flint and hurt in his eyes. I was terrified of him. A noisy family lived in the room Ezra Pound had occupied, but it retained a great deal of Ezra’s residue. And I did, without divulging it in the caption, my own room at the Star and Garter Mansion—the closest I had ever come to doing a self-portrait. The titles of these pictures were no more than street addresses; some critics called them my most haunting pictures. A room is like a cast-off shoe, which holds the shape of its owner’s unique foot. The rooms of these expatriates, with their poignantly printed shadows framed by foreign carpentry, were even more telling than shoes. In Pound’s, rectangles on the wall spoke of paintings that had been removed. I believed that it would be possible for a photograph of, say, an uncleared breakfast table or an unmade bed to tell a whole plotty story of a marriage.
There was enough of America in London for me to be happy there (“I don’t mind Americans,” one of the British jokes went, “but it’s those white chaps they brought with them”). I stayed on long after the Anglophiles had left in disenchantment; I saw no point in leaving. Work had displaced my life, and I was well known to the wire services and the picture agencies. I continued to accept assignments which didn’t compromise my idea of pictures needing a “drowning quotient.” There were some jobs which anyone could have done, and there were others I could make into “Pratts”: a Pratt was indistinguishable from the truth and contained both time past and time future. I had my room in Putney, my career, and my contacts. My work gave me access and so I lived what must have looked from the outside like a life. But it was nothing of the kind.
For my Whose Room? series I decided to do T. S. Eliot. I wrote a letter to him at Faber’s explaining my plan and introducing myself. His reply was formal but hospitable: I am charmed by your idea, but I cannot conceal my keen disappointment that you intend to exclude me from your portrait of my room.
When I got to his house (it was a drizzly Sunday afternoon) he said, “Shall I leave now? I feel I am quite superfluous to your intention.”
“I’ll deal with you later,” I said.
But he was showing me into his study and saying, “It’s quite a proper little room—too proper do you think? It would be vastly enhanced by a provocative mess in that corner, or a book out of place, or perhaps a constellation of bloodstains on the wall. But I’m in the way. Please go on. Do your stuff and then we’ll have tea.”
This mock-serious patter surprised me. He produced it the way a whimsical uncle takes out a water pistol, and wonders at it, and then squirts you in the eye. And the fact that he pretended to be a stuffed shirt only made him funnier.
The desk held writing tools and a blank blue pad and a book in a foreign language that might have been Latin or Greek. On the mantelpiece was a chunk of marble, a photograph of Yeats, and on the wall a small aqueous Turner and a junky impressionist painting of some solidified beef stroganoff. The room was like him and yet had none of his humor.
“I greatly fear I am casting a shadow over your picture.”
“Don’t move,” I said. It was true: his shadow in the gray autumn light rose from the foreground and leaned across the room and broke sadly on the bookshelves. A perfect picture of a writer’s room and deepened by telling details—the paper-knife, the mirror reflecting the coatrack in the hall with its bowler hat and the urn full of walking sticks, the impatient clock and the vase of white roses. I made one alteration. I went over and thumped the stand that held the vase and knocked a shower of rose petals to the carpet.
“Yes,” he said. “It needed that touch.”
I shot until I was satisfied that I had the picture I wanted, one a person could browse upon for an hour or so, and then I said, “If you stand by the fireplace I’ll do one for your scrapbook.”
Standing, not sitting—I wanted his hunch in the picture, the bent back of responsibility. At first he refused, but he allowed himself to be bullied. He gave me his hunch in profile; his face froze in stern reflection at the fallen rose petals. It was a pinched beaky face fitted into a solemn sloping head, with thin slicked-down hair and a tight starched collar and a grim one-syllable mouth, very statesmanly and imperious, but at the same time like a man trying to determine the price of a coffin. He breathed shallowly so as not to disturb his expression, and without batting an eyelash he said, “How do I look?”
“Like a cheese-parer.”
He almost smiled, but he kept it down until his eyes grew damp with concentration. Still staring gloomily at the rose petals, he said, “Mrs. Quormby—she does for me—was scouting for cheeses yesterday at the market. I like a ripe Stilton and I don’t think I would live in a country where I couldn’t get Double Gloucester. The mature Cheddars are lovely at their yellowest, but the young ones are so insipid. Cheshire when it’s crumbly, Caerphilly when it’s wet, or any old Wensleydale. I don’t like a soft cheese unless it’s a Brie or a Camembert—we’ll be seeing a lot more of them now that the war’s over. The Leicesters are best when they’re ruddy. One used to buy them by the wheel—do you know that locution? One has been eating the mousetrap variety for so long one has begun to feel rather like a mouse. I say, am I putting you off?”
He pondered with his pale clerical face, seeming to look into infinity, but he continued chirping about cheeses until I ran out of film.
Over tea, I felt enough at ease with him to say, “By the way, I like The Waste Land.”
“No one,” he said, “has put it to me quite like that before. I am very flattered.”
That was how it went my whole time in London. I took pictures and if no one had a prior claim on them I hoarded them. In the winter of 1946 I held a hugely successful exhibition in a Mayfair gallery. I was well established in Putney and full of plans. Papa wrote and said that Orlando, who had been home for a year, had passed the Massachusetts Bar and was practicing law in Hyannis. I replied that I was about to set off on a trip: India was about to become independent and I longed to do a series of updated Bourne and Shepherd shots of the empire that was about to close up shop. Life had promised me first refusal but said that Margaret Bourke-White was next in line. I would not stop in India, I thought; I’d go on and do a Whose Room? at Mrs. Cameron’s in Ceylon, and Burma, and the aftermath in Japan. And I could travel forever, for I had found that any room was home if it was quiet enough and had the consolation of shadows.
I had rid myself of my life; I had only my work. I did not dine out on my pictures, nor did I seek to be entertained. I made a practice of avoiding friendship with anyone whose picture I had taken: regrets to Eliot, apologies to Forster, so sorry to Bill Astor. Planning the trip, buying an outfit for the tropics, getting a mildew-proof case made for my Speed Graphic—all this kept me o
ccupied in London. When I was lonely I sat down and thought of a likely subject and went out and did him. I could cheer myself up with a general, a great poet, a surgeon, or simply a fellow sufferer—I did my Edward Steichen, my Angus McBean, and my Cecil Beaton at this time.
It was my way of getting grace—by dispensing it; for though I always did the picture I wanted I often consented to do the picture the subject wanted, and I was deft enough to make fools look wise or the plainest meatball endlessly interesting. At the end of a session with an actor, I usually said, “Now let’s have some tears.”
After a tour of the East I would find an obscure room in Mexico or California, or elsewhere. Orlando and Phoebe were no longer part of my life, though they often swam into my thoughts like sudden frogs one mounted on the other’s back, with their legs out, and I looked closer and saw them fucking. The years would roll on and erode my life, but my work if it was any good would exist outside time. I lived timelessly in my work, where disappointments could be reshot, mistakes rectified, errors cropped. It was a world of my own making—a wonderful place. I could not praise too highly the satisfactions of the craft I had compared to raking leaves. It was noiseless, it was not difficult, I could do it drunk or dead tired and it never showed. Within the limits I had set for myself I could do whatever I wished.
I had not earned any of it. I dreaded, as all lucky people do, that 1 would be handed a bill and have to pay up.
My luck was an ocean mirroring the sky and stretching to that threshold on the horizon beyond which, so the lover believes, there is more ocean. I was buoyant enough and, at forty, was shot of all desires and entanglements. Once, in blind seclusion, I had been older than this and had enjoyed it. I looked forward to the day when I would be leathery and have a mustache and could fart and burp and say any fool thing that came into my head; I would have the authority that went with white hair and deafness.