Picture Palace (38 page)

“Wasn't it the first picture of Pound to appear after he was let out of the funny farm?”

I said, “One day I was in a magazine office in New York and the editor says, ‘Have a look at this—ever see anything like it?' It was a picture of a turkey buzzard pouncing on a snake—three pictures, actually, the approach, the snatch, and the getaway. ‘Amazing, isn't it?' he says. I agreed. But it was too amazing—so perfect I didn't believe it. Anyway, wildlife photography seems as silly to me as talking animals. I says, ‘There's something about that snake. Doesn't it seem rather limp to you?' He was annoyed. ‘You think it's a fake?' ‘Just dead,' I says. He tried to defend the picture. ‘But it's a fine turkey buzzard!' he says. ‘What turkey buzzard,' I says, ‘would want to eat a dead snake?' We looked at the turkey buzzard, a rigged-up bird with crooked wings. I says, ‘Stuffed. And the mountain looks pretty suspicious, too.' I thought that man was going to cry.”

“Wait a minute,” said Frank. “Does that have anything to do with this picture of Pound?”

“Everything,” I said. “It's a turkey, isn't it?”

Frank said, “You're always so critical of your work.”

“You'd be critical too, if you were in my shoes.”

“They're great pictures.”

“They're stiffs,” I said. “They don't matter. If you had any sense you'd see that.”

“You know,” he said, fingering the beads around his neck, “I'm glad I'm doing this retrospective. The way I see it, I'm kind of saving you from yourself.”

“Listen, buster. I took that picture in Italy around 'fifty-nine or so. I'd been sent to do a photographic essay on Cocteau and Picasso, but Venice wasn't far from Cannes and my editor was screaming for a glimpse of Pound, who'd just been let out of his rubber room. The only thing was, he refused to see me. His wop servant slammed the door in my face. ‘We don't want any!' T. S. Eliot gives me a pep talk and two cups of tea, and Pound won't even give me the right time. Anyway, a few days later, I'm on the coast in Rimini having some spaghetti and I look up and who do I see walking by the restaurant? Ezra! I whistled down my noodles and rushed off in hot pursuit. Ezra's just strolling along, tapping his walking stick and singing. It was unmistakably him, whiskery and old, in a floppy hat and jacket. ‘Wait a sec,' I said, ‘aren't you Ezra Pound?' He sort of grins and says, ‘Waal, bless my buttons,' and shows me his fangy teeth. We start talking about poetry—Eliot, Cummings, Frost, whoever. He names someone and I say, ‘I've done him.' ‘How about a cup of tea at my place?' he says, and I can't believe my luck. My picture's as good as in the bag.

“Up the road we enter the courtyard of a run-down palazzo. He takes me into the study, a funny little room—there's a small bookshelf with only three books on it. ‘The greatest books ever written,' he says.
Gone With The Wind, The Pisan Cantos
, and
Picture Palace
, by a man called R. G. Perdew. ‘I've heard of the first two, and I love the title of the third one,' I said, ‘but who's this R. G. Perdew?' He said, ‘Why, that's me!' ‘You're not Ezra Pound?' I asked. ‘Occasionally,' he said.

“Occasionally? It turns out that this guy's pretending to be Pound—wants people to take him for the poet, even writes letters to him. ‘Do me a favor,' I says. ‘Ask your friend Pound if he'll let me do him. I can't go home until I get a picture of that man.' Perdew gave me a very Pound-like whinny and leered crazily at me. ‘Looks like you ain't going home, dearie,' he says. ‘Ezra don't pose for pictures.' ‘Crap,' I said. ‘Picasso jumped at the chance up in Cap Ferrat.' ‘Ezra don't jump no more. And the fact is,' said this Mister Perdow, ‘even if you did do him, no one would recognize him. They wouldn't believe you. He don't look like Ezra Pound. He's all scrawny and shriveled up with bug juice. Looks like some derelict. I know cause I've seen him. He used to look like me, this little bushy beard and sombrero. But now he don't.' So I said, ‘All righty then, I'll do you.' And I did. He was so pleased he started singing a song. Later on he showed me his pictures. They were a damn sight better than Ezra's poems and so was my portrait.”

Frank said, “You mean it's not Pound?”

“No, but it's a dead-ringer. Now do you still think you're throwing me a rope?” I let this sink in, then said, “My pictures are worthless, Frank. But there's a moral. Every maniac has a spitting image. Whose double-ganger are you?”

“Maybe yours.”

“Don't make me laugh. I'm an original.” Or was he? Was this barnacle my Third Eye, the camera I had renounced? Perhaps even in his necklace and funny shoes he was necessary to me.

“Your Picasso—is it faked?”

One might have thought it was a bit of trick photography, the famous googly-eyed head printed on a naked body. But, “Nope. That's the real McCoy. He loved posing bare-ass.”

“This one of Somerset Maugham is terrific.”

“The Empress Dowager—he had more wrinkles than Auden, that other amazing raisin. Poor old Willie. He was on the Riviera then, too. The English are so portable. I caught him on a bad day. He was brooding over a case of constipation, but as soon as I did him I knew people would look at him and think he was speculating on the future of mankind. Ain't it always the way?”

“And that's when you did your Cocteau?”

“Correct. Looks like a sardine, don't he? He says to me, ‘Ja swee san doot le poet le plew incanoe et le plew celebra.' I says, ‘May oon poet—say la shows important.' ‘Incanoe,' he says, full of that weepy French dignity. ‘May commie foe,' I says, and when he starts in again I says. ‘Murd de shovel,' and keeps on clicking.”

“I love these Fifties shots,” said Frank. “All those faces.”

“I couldn't stand the landscapes. Venice was waterlogged, the canals full of minestrone. And the south of France, which is supposed to be Shangri-La, just looked like one of the crummier Miami suburbs, except that there was no place to park. You can have all that vulgarity at a third of the price anywhere on Cape Cod. I hated it. What is Europe, anyway? Museums, greasers, winos, toy cars, churches, bum-pinchers, ruins, worthless money—no wonder they're uncreative. History and religion. Boring? You have no idea. I used to look at Europe and think,
Do me a favor!
”

“Now I understand why you liked Cuba.”

“Loved it, loved the revolution—that was a real kick in the slats,” I said. “I turned down the José Marti scholarship, but went anyhow, and appeared on TV with Ché Guevara and some American college kids. All those beards! A week or so later I did Hemingway. During the war I had been scared of him—wouldn't go near him. In Cuba he was just another fisherman, but a damned spooky one. He wanted me to make him look athletic. I made him look like Joe Palooka. He lapped it up. Between him and the Guevara boom in the Sixties I think you could say I got a lot of mileage out of that trip.”

“I'd better get back to work,” said Frank.

“You don't have far to go,” I said. “I didn't do much in the Sixties. A couple of weeks in Vietnam doing refugees, a stopover in Hong Kong. Some group shots. Keep an eye out for them—they're to go with my Woonsocket graduation. The whole John Hancock insurance company, every single employee standing in Copley Plaza—I shot it from the roof of the Boston Public Library. I did a lot of other crowds, too—there's one of Red Sox fans on the bleachers of Fenway Park. They're beautiful, three thousand faces—you could spend a week with that picture and not get bored.”

“I'll put them aside.”

“I can't believe you're nearly done.”

“It's shaping up. The show has to open in a month, Maude.”

“But there must be lots more that you haven't shown me.” And I tried to think what I had not seen—the ones I had done for the
National Geographic
, the nudes in which I had slipped the back view of a buttocky boy, some of the steamier Pig Dinner ones.

Frank said, “I haven't hidden anything.”

“I didn't say you had.”

He looked offended—more than offended: wounded by my simple statement, and desperate, as if I had found him finagling.

“Everything's in order,” he said, jerking his head at the windmill. “Go see for yourself.”

“Not on your tintype.”

He said—and I couldn't help but feel he was deliberately changing the subject—“Are you going to write something personal for the catalogue?”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“Only a paragraph or so.”

“Who do you take me for—Ralph Eugene Meatyard? The unspeakable Stieglitz? Cecil Beaton? I'm no writer.”

“It would interest people.”

“There's only one way to interest people. Something really sensational. Do an Arbus. Take a lot of mad crazy Weegee pictures of people you hate, and then swallow rat poison. Then they'd come flocking. Suicide explains everything.”

“Poor Diane,” he said (I loved his use of first names: Alfred, Yousuf, Maggie, Jill, Nancy—I could hear him in New York saying, “Maude—”), but he looked like a clown grieving in those bizarre clothes, like my picture of Emmett Kelly, the sad face beneath the greasepaint. Frank twirled one of his string of beads. “If you're having trouble writing you could do what I do when I get stuck. I tack sheets of paper on the walls around my room, then whenever I get an idea I just scribble it down—a word, a phrase, anything. I get a body of thought here, a body of thought there. I put them all together and hammer out my piece.”

“It sounds a bit”—I wanted to say “stupid.”

“Sure, it's complicated. But it loosens the thought processes.”

“I think I'll wing it,” I said. “In the meantime, keep digging, Frank, and if you come up with anything unusual, let me know.”

In the succeeding days the pictures he brought me reminded me of the many magazines that had paid my way and finally crashed—dear old
Collier's
, the winning
Saturday Evening Post
, the all-purpose
Look
, and vividly illiterate
Life
. I had always liked the big-format family magazine in which a two-page picture could be bled at the margins, and the photograph itself wrapped around your face, your nose in the staple where it belonged. When television sent those magazines into liquidation, photographs were reduced in size. They either had news value or they didn't count, and ambitious pictures like my group portraits
John Hancock
and
Red Sox Fans
became unthinkable.

It was about then, with the folding of
Life
, that I abandoned my idea for the panning shot with which I had hoped to fill an entire issue: a sequence of pictures taken from South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, to San Diego, California.
Cross Country
I had planned to call it, every inch of it in tiny pictures. And if that worked I'd do the ultimate panning shot, around the world in a zillion frames.

I stopped working for magazines. I could not bring myself to do the ghoulish photojournalism that was so much in demand—two children failing ten storys from a burning balcony, the seconds-before-death pictures of executions and ambushes and train wrecks: snuff shots, as they were called. Several publishers offered me contracts to collaborate on picture books, with texts by famous writers, as Agee and Evans had done on the peckerwoods. I probably would have done it if it had meant only pictures, but I could not see how forty pages of tortured prose like Jim Agee's would have helped my pictures. He wanted to make the reader see the pictures, so he described them, every blessed detail, but before I knew it I was in the dark, stumbling among the subordinate clauses and tripping over semicolons, each word calling to mind a thousand pictures, as I was fond of saying.

The beauty of photographs, I told those publishers, was that they required no imagination. They took your breath away, dragged you under and kept you there. The written word was a distraction, and anyone who wrote about pictures was just showing off. No one got fat reading about food—he just got hungry. On the other hand, my
Cheeseburger
was as good as a meal. Many people burped after they looked at it.

“Nearly done,” said Frank some days after the Pound business. He showed me an interior shot of my own house.

“
Whose Room?
” I said.

“That's what I was going to say.”

“It's a sequence,” I said. “Objects have memories. Rooms are psychic.”

“I'd love to hear all about it,” he said. “But I have to go down to New York to check the audio for the show.”

“Audio? I thought this was a picture show?”

“The tapes I was telling you about. Sea gulls and waves. Traffic. It's a new concept I'm working on—atmosphere.”

“If you're catching the bus to New York, Fusco,” I said, and looked at his beads and those high-heeled shoes, “you'd better go fluff up.”

He left me with the picture. A parlor; but come a bit closer. Look at the cigar butt in the ashtray, the knitting on the stool, the dents and worn places in the chairs, Papa's reading glasses, Mama's handbag—she never went anywhere without it. And more: two flower stalks in a vase, with their petals missing, and out the window a fisherman, obviously a trespasser, making his way to the beach: low tide. It is a poem. Two people have just left that picture.

He died first, of a coronary that killed him by pinching one pipe, then another, until finally all his systems failed. It was not the departure he had wished, “leaving the building” on a moment's notice. He was kept waiting, and he hated that. When we were together, Mama and I were strangers to each other; and she knew it was her turn. She broke her hip, caught pneumonia and finally let go. Her last words: “Pull up the shades.”