Picture Palace (36 page)

Faulkner, I learned, was staying at the Highland Hotel in Hollywood, a semirespectable residential hotel done up in a kind of ulcerated stucco. There was no one at the front desk the day I visited, so—seeing his name and room number on the key board—I went directly to his room. I knocked and waited, and getting no response I tried the door.

It was unlocked: I stole in. The curtain was half open and through the French windows I could see a bright balcony and an armchair. On a table near me were crumpled pages of typescript, an old newspaper, and two copies of
God Is My Co-Pilot
. In the air was a sweet rotten-walnut stink of bourbon whisky, but apart from the sound of traffic and the sizzle of California sunlight the room was quiet. I peeked into the next room—an empty unmade bed—and I was about to leave when I saw a half-filled glass next to the telephone and a bottle and ice bucket. It looked like an interrupted boozing session, as if he had just stepped out. The room had the lived-in appearance of a warm mangled nest, the disorder of anticipation, a certain nervous premonition.

I considered photographing the room—
Whose Room?
, another series: identify the inhabitant from the dents in the chairs and the dirty glasses and ashtrays and books. I had taken off my dust-cap to act on this impulse, and then I saw him.

He was lying face up on the floor, one hand across his chest, the other pillowing his head; and his legs were poised in a twinkle-toes angle, as if he had died in a dance-step. My first thought was that he was dead—he had busted a gut or had been robbed and killed. But there was no blood anywhere. I went closer and heard him breathe. A moment ago I hadn't heard it; now his snores filled the room with the ripsawing of his drunken doze. As he lay there on the cool floor I could see how small he was—tiny feet, tiny mustache, pretty hands, and in his shorts his hairy little legs. He had a typist's powerful shoulders and though he was flat on his back and unconscious he had a victim's innocent dignity.

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 you 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.”