Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  “World traveler—interesting gent.”

  20

  World Traveler, Interesting Gent

  Over the years, Larry and I have been asked how it is we have such a strong bond, and we respond that it was formed in the annealing crucible of impoverished travel. As newlyweds, he and I set out in 1971 to spend my junior year traveling from northern Denmark to Greece. We had earned enough in our first year of marriage for the plane tickets, but Gee-Gee, in a gesture reminiscent of Hattie’s bequest to my father, slipped us fifty dollars for the road and my parents promised to send a hundred dollars each month to American Express as we went along. We carried two backpacks heavy with books and a 1950s white Samsonite overnight case lined in scarlet taffeta, which held my 5 × 7 inch view camera, the tripod for which was strapped beneath the lighter of the two backpacks.

  If any backwater of disconsolateness exists that is blacker and lonelier than the one our travels sped us to, I do not want to see it. We knew no one, and were so broke by the end of each month that I remember eating cold petit pois out of a can in the Dickensian gloom of our clammy Paris hostel—imagine, in Paris, gastronomic capital of the world. We embraced on any number of sagging mattresses, always too short for his six-foot-four frame, and on third-class train and ferry rides. Taking turns carrying the white suitcase, we walked lonely northern European streets in the perpetual wintry twilight, while strangers brushed by us and entered their warmly lit homes. We made love frequently, if my journals are to be believed, and visited every museum and gallery within our reach, fervently looking at art as if it were the lodestone, the vinculum that would hold us together. In the end, I think it might have been.

  My father had set off on a similar, though better-funded and more ambitious, year of travel in July 1938, when he was twenty-six. Just out of Tulane Medical School, the boatman rested on his oars and let himself drift, for the last time, dreamily toward Art and Culture.

  He had traveled to Europe three times before, and each trip had been dedicated, or so his journals suggest, to Art (in his mind, yes, with a capital A, and Culture with a capital C). It is clear that art was his lodestone, his vinculum, too. I expect that on his earlier trips his traveling companions, and especially his mother, Pan, were busy shopping while he methodically went from museum to cathedral to library, noting in detail his impressions, his art passion spilling over in fevered journal jottings. I’ve deciphered the secret language in bowls of spaghetti more easily than the writing in these notebook pages.

  His journal presentation improves for the 1938 expedition, as if he understood the significance of this epic trip. In the saddlebag grip swung over his shoulder that was his only luggage, he carried a zippered calfskin notebook that he maintained, with reasonable legibility for a doctor, throughout the nine months and one day of his journey. I have it before me now, as vibrant as any new hour.

  Companion reading to this journal is a collection of highly entertaining letters that he sent to Pan in her Melrose Hotel suite in Dallas. As they arrived, a secretary at the Magnolia Petroleum Company named Kate Frierson was pressed into service deciphering and typing the letters for Pan. When she was done, Miss Frierson wrote Pan that the letters were

  most interesting.… He shows splendid talent as a writer aside from his chosen profession. These compare very favorably with some diaries of very reputable travelers/writers… they are original, terse, with just enough humor.

  One of the “reputable travelers/writers” whose epistolary style my father clearly favored was Flaubert, who wrote just as faithfully, and in as much detail, to his own adored mother while traveling through Egypt almost a century earlier. And Miss Frierson is right about his talent: Daddy’s letters to Pan are witty and original, high-flown at moments, didactic at others, rife with assurances of thrift, rich in descriptive detail, and occasionally even emotional and excited, in a multi-exclamation-mark kind of way. Strange for my generally reserved father, I have to say.

  The range of his observations is far-reaching: he describes the flora and fauna as well as the manners and customs in the localities visited; also architecture, costume, dialect, music, modes of transport, cuisine, drink, methods of summoning a waiter, how coffee is prepared and consumed, means of carrying babies, the behavior of beggars and prostitutes, the design of oars (interesting in light of his own oarsman metaphor) and techniques of rowing, the prevailing medical problems, and the available means of responding to them—this inquisitive onlooker visited every kind of hospital, clinic, medical school, and medicinal spa.

  Throughout, his fascination with death is conspicuous, as when in Grindelwald, Switzerland, famed for its view of the north face of the Eiger, he notes the telescopes installed at all the hotels and cafes “thru which one can see the climbers fall, sometimes hanging for days before death, being watched by people below all the while.”

  He set out to go around the world, and he did it. His financial accounts are meticulous, and they report that when he boarded the ship Manhattan (from Manhattan, in fact), he had a budget of $1,460. (That was, incidentally, $335 more than Larry and I had for our own nine months of travel three decades later.)

  When the Manhattan landed he immediately bought a black 350 cc BSA motorcycle in London, whose license, and affectionate nickname, was EYU97. Then, having never ridden a motorcycle in his life, he put the saddlebags on a rack above the back wheel and headed down Oxford Street during rush hour and straight on to Paris, where he began in earnest his Art Wanderjahr.

  It is family legend that all he took with him in the saddlebags were the complete works of Plato, one change of underclothes, and his white tuxedo, but his journals reveal the predictable fallacy of familiar lore: in fact, my sartorially impeccable father crossed most of the globe indeed with Plato’s complete works, but in a three-piece gray wool suit under a waterproof, Bogartian trenchcoat.

  However, there is a grain of truth in the white-tuxedo legend: the one item this well-reared wayfarer considered absolutely necessary within his tight packing scheme was a pair of white kid gloves. And they got a real workout: his journals reveal that he attended any opera, play, orchestral performance, lecture, poetry reading, recital, or ballet on offer wherever he dismounted for the night.

  He traveled in that three-piece suit the entire trip: through England, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece (the entire country, including Crete, several other islands, and the Peloponnese), Bulgaria, Turkey, Egypt, and thence (though at this point neatly stowing the suit in favor of khaki shorts and sandals) all the way to the Pacific, passing through Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, India, Burma, Siam, Cambodia, and French Indo-China on his way to the port at Yokohama, Japan, from whence he sailed home.

  Can you imagine wearing that three-piece wool suit to climb to the top of the pyramids?

  That’s what he did, obviously.

  (A quick peek ahead in our narrative shows him still wearing it four months to the day after the pyramid climb, with the long trek across the Middle East and Asia behind him,

  having just disembarked the Heian Maru in Vancouver.)

  It must have been a pretty well made suit to look so good after the rocky territory he and EYU97 traversed. These appropriately dressed Greeks who helped him through a particularly difficult passage in the Peloponnesus surely wondered at his cufflinks and Windsor knot.

  On the tonsorial front, however, he had slipped a little, as this picture taken in Athens the day before indicates, and was now somewhat scruffily bearded. There’s something else, too… do you see it?

  I do: there’s a hint of distress in those very blue eyes.

  It seems reasonable to suppose that the source of that distress would have been the fact that all of the countries he had just traversed were on the brink of war. On August 20, 1938, as Hitler was mobilizing his troops to invade Czechoslovakia, Daddy was blithely pointing his motorcycle into Nazi Germany from Antwerp (where, with a two-exclamation-point ex
ultation, he made note in his journal of a genuine human skull in the Rubens’ tomb that had been painted to resemble marble).

  While in Germany, he laid up in ten cities, writing lyrical descriptions of cathedrals, of Bruno Walter’s elegantly restrained orchestral direction, of the sublimity of Beethoven’s original manuscript for his “Moonlight” Sonata, of the baths at Baden-Baden, the excellent performance of The Barber of Seville, and the pleasures of the autobahn. He composed eight pages of detailed, regressively spaghetti-ish notes on his opinions of the art at the various museums he visited.

  But about what was really going on in Nazi Germany? Barely a word, save a remark on the good manners of the smartly dressed soldiers, and his aesthetic irritation at the ubiquitous posters of Hitler’s “rather expressionless and certainly plain features.” That’s IT.

  In a letter to Pan he wrote, a bit jokingly (I hope): “I did not even know there WAS a war scare until you mentioned it in your letter!” and goes on in the next sentence to quote something his Dallas friend Horace had written him:

  In a letter from him which I got yesterday Horace says “But, I know you, Bob, you’d choose to go in a museum and look at Egyptian mummies rather than look at a man who had just been shot to death by the Nazis.”

  His dedication to art and his fascination with images of death seem to have obscured with an almost willful blindness the real murders that were occurring around him.

  But he was not blind to the beauty of the landscape through which he traveled. The Leica III that he used to photograph his old bulldog Ace back in Dallas had been stowed in the saddlebags and was well used on this trip. First and foremost he photographed death imagery,

  but he also made some better-than-average travel pictures. In fact, I think they’re ravishing:

  While most of his travel pictures were High Art only to the extent that his early artistic attempt with the gun and holster was High Art, all the same, they give some idea as to the force of that strongly flowing current of artistic sensibility against which he knew he was soon to be rowing.

  As far as I can tell, his travels were entirely solitary until he reached Rangoon and teamed up with two other Americans for a viperous, tigery, machete-whacking hike from Burma into Siam. Apparently, he had been perfectly happy by himself, given over to his art and death passion, probably going through his travels in the same solitary way he went through the rest of his life, despite later having a wife and family with whom he could have shared his thoughts and never much did.

  Not until Cairo did he finally part with his faithful companion, EYU97, after ferrying her around the Greek Isles, negotiating the rocky terrain of road-challenged Bulgaria and Turkey, and touring Egypt and Libya for nearly three weeks, his head protected from the wind and sun by native garb (over, of course, the three-piece suit).

  Though he never seemed to miss the company of other humans, he took this parting hard. Just before he sold EYU97, he took her on one last midnight spin out of Cairo to the pyramids:

  The pyramids in the moonlight were cast in black relief, ponderous, mighty and mysterious as I drove back over the wide, totally deserted avenue, no construction or housing anywhere, into Cairo, trench-coat flapping, the streetlights throwing my racing shadow eerily on the sands to the side of the road.

  He memorialized their separation with a portrait the next day and laments in his journal (N.B. double exclamation marks): “Goodbye, EYU97!!”

  Though he missed his two-wheeled companion, he described himself as “light as Shelley’s skylark” as he resumed his travels with only his saddlebags, each half of which he reported to be the size of a woman’s handbag, slung over his shoulder. He passed through Palestine, spent four days bogged down in the Syrian desert on his way to Baghdad,

  and headed down the Euphrates to Basra, where he caught a boat for Bombay.

  Once he reached the Far East, the culture, people, and art of these countries, especially Burma, are described in a rapture of aesthetic homecoming. Here he is—formerly a crass, car-racing, snake-killing, pistol-popping, booze-chugging Dallas kid now with a fevered desire for art, beauty, and the life of the mind—finally at peace and at home: at Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

  He wrote in his journal, his handwriting looping extravagantly, about his solitary time among the ruins, his only human companion an occasional Buddhist priest in a saffron-hued gown:

  In my first view in the moonlight, it had been the immensity of the great temple that had taken my breath away. But in the daylight, it was the exquisite detail and carefully planned architecture—and the Apsarases! The demimondaines, those scantily clad, marvelous dancing girls with bulging breasts, narrow waists and sensuous hips—perfect in beauty and potent in love—sent to earth to tempt the ascetic.

  The spectacle was so amazing I could scarcely credit my eyesight, for here was a structure built a thousand years ago, so stupendous in its dimensions, in artistry, in purity, in magnificence, that surpasses anything you’ll ever see in Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mexico or Central America.

  And his is the voice of experience—he’s been to all of them. He continues:

  After many days of solitary exploration, on the last evening there I climbed slowly and wonderingly among the now familiar ruins. How was it possible for such a race as the Khmers to disappear so absolutely? How long did it take? Was there no soul left to see the ruthless jungle creep in and devour these magnificent structures?

  Musing this, before I realized it, day had gone and twilight enveloped me. For some moments a hush fell over the land; there was not the faintest breeze to stir the jungle-tops. Sensuous roots of the banyan tree—like exploring fingers—found their way into every stone crevice—I could see, feel them…

  From the shadows of the ruins arose an indescribable melancholy.

  Loneliness, loneliness—in all this stupendous graveyard of man and monument, I stood—the only living human being!

  Reading those journals and letters, matching up the travel accounts with the yellowed photographs, I find my father, filled with joie de vivre and spirit and desire, on a dedicated quest to find the place of art in his life… and the place of death in that art. The evidence, his joyous, art-inflected accounts, indicate that, just as it would for Larry and me thirty years later, art had firmly planted itself in his soul, with roots as deep and broad as those of the banyan trees at Angkor Wat.

  But he dutifully came back to America, picked up his oars, and resumed rowing, against the current of desire, back toward science. Within a month of his return, he reentered the practice of medicine, married my mother six months later, and, his boat into the current, pressed forward.

  For the next four decades he labored over his great masterwork, cajoling my mother from cave to cathedral, exploring the iconography of death in art. Lavishing his distinctive longhand on reams of yellow paper, he tried out various titles:

  Keener it Cuts the Hay

  The (graphic) pictorial representation of (personified) Death

  The Personification of Death in Art

  With a Crawl or a Pounce

  With his Sickle Keen

  The Personalization and Personification of Death in Art

  Ten Thousand Doors

  In his files are communications with nearly one hundred museums, galleries, and libraries, from Uganda to the Vatican, and more than 450 pictorial representations of death, in folders labeled:

  Pagan

  Norse

  Peruvian and Indian

  Middle Ages/Byzantine

  Primitive and African

  Greek

  Etruscan and Roman

  Medieval French

  Jewish

  Misc’l

  Renaissance

  Middle America/skeletons

  Modern

  Mexico/Middle America

  Danse Macabre

  Caricaturists and Realists

  Indian

  Trees

  Physical death

  Pagan, Slavic

&nb
sp; Masks/Mexico

  Babylon/Assyria

  Oriental/Indian

  Gravestone carvings

  Attributes and symbols (sickles/scythes)

  Abyssinian

  Political cartoons

  Egyptian

  After his death, my exasperated and exhausted mother gathered it all up and stuffed it into two large boxes, which I have, page by crumbling page, finally sorted out. (Yes, that’s Max under the table.)

  Most of the writing is illegible, and the organization barely comprehensible. But the scholarship and dedication are crackerjack (one of his favorite words of approbation), although he might have paid more heed to his self-admonition, opposite, that he “steam up the lingo.”

  It saddens me that only occasionally do lines within the flaking pages remind me of the author of the charming journal entries of 1938–39, but this is one that does:

  By comparison, a skeleton is, by nature, chaste and uncorrupt, a batch of dry, rattly bones—quite incapable of the delicious merriment and the gamut of histrionics proffered by a cavorting, putrescent, flesh-flapping, hammy old corpse.…

  Indeed, what is striking about this magnum opus is the lack of joy and wonder so evident in the journals and letters home from his Art Wanderjahr. He has made the trade-off, struck the deal that almost all of us sooner or later must strike between the thing we love and the thing we must do. Somewhere in the process, he lost the two-exclamation-mark art moment.