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Authors: Paul Theroux

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BOOK: Picture Palace
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These believers in the immortality of the photograph wanted to deal with my life in a single afternoon. They could not even pronounce Niépce. They were eaten up with haste. It was their conceit: their speed, the speed of light.

They had all the equipment—what was the problem? These faddists of high contrast and golf-ball grain could shoot fly spit, the smell of an onion, sunspots, a virus picking its nose, bazooka shells bursting out of gun muzzles, indigestion, a fart in a mitten. With their motor-driven cameras—a lens for every occasion—they could do it underwater, with mirrors, twenty thousand feet over Rangoon. That shotgun was no shotgun; it was a Hasselblad with a telescopic lens on a shoulder rest, “for combat situations,” as the kid said, and it really did look lethal. And what of that Japanese capsule, the size of a tranquilizer, with a tiny pinhole eye? It was a camera so small you could swallow it at noon and photograph your breakfast.

I brushed these trinkets aside. I didn't tell them I used a box camera until 1923, a folding camera until 1938 and only then broke down and bought a Speed Graphic for Florida. Instead, I said a few words on man the picture-maker—erect, sketching his fears on a cave wall—which left man the tool-maker on all fours, hunched over a nut he was bludgeoning with a rock some fool scientist would enshrine. The mind is made of pictures, I said, not words; thought is pictorial, the eye is all art, get the picture? And, sure, sure, they said—saying no meant saying why. They were in a big hurry to see
Twenty-two White Horses
and my contacts of
Ché
Guevara and my blacks. Never mind Orlando and Phoebe or myself when young. They didn't have time for that. They took pictures hanging by their ankles, their light meters could detect glowworms in the next county. And at this point they were haywire with curiosity.

“Mind if we turn the page, Mi$s Pratt?”

I jolly well did mind. My hand held it down. There was that windmill with its narrow window. They wouldn't understand me unless they looked in and saw what I saw.

Impudently, they reached. I didn't say
Patience, children
or
Oh, no, you don't
. I didn't slap them—they would probably have hit me back. The old person who blows her top all of a sudden has been furious for years—I said what I had to and hoped they would see: “Shit and derision!”

8

Orlando

B
UT
even if they had slobbered over every blessed picture in the place they would not have understood, for Frank was in the windmill doing that very thing, and not a day passed without his dragging some forgotten shot to the room that had become my camera obscura and screwing up his face and saying, “What's this one all about?” It helped me remember the pictures I never took, or if I did, the ones I never showed anyone.

I feared that the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective, scheduled to open in New York in November, would give little idea of the woman I was or the times I had. I was behind the camera, cheating, not in front of it. I hinted to Frank that I wanted to write something and he humored me with “Might be just the ticket—something short and personal for the catalogue—paragraph or so about your life.”

Fuck your catalogue, I thought. A life is too messy and random to be summarized so neatly. It gets out of hand, it haunts, it sprawls beyond the periphery of a single picture, casting shadows every which way. I needed a little latitude if I was going to do complete justice to my life, which I felt had been happy on the whole and fairly interesting if not remarkable. The picture palace on the lawn held half the story, but the mind had its own picture palace, much grander, like a mad queen's extravagance—not the museum show of pictorial fossils—room after room of memory's live ghosts and events only now detectable and surprising revelations behind each creaking door. It was necessary to pass through these chilly bedchambers and along the corridors and climb blindly to the tower of imagination above its ramparts to look down and comprehend the spin of its whole design. My life mattered more than my work, but my work gave no hint of this.

The trouble with cameras is that people see them a mile away and they get self-conscious and sneeze out their souls and put on that numbed guilty expression and act as if you are going to shoot them dead. Or worse, they pose like dummies and show their teeth: even your bare-assed savage knows how to say cheese. As a photographer I was embarrassed to be caught with that contraption in my mitts, like an elderly pervert, a distinguished old lady with my skirt around my neck frightening children at play. Later, I was proud of the way I could conceal my intention and, long before the Japanese produced their tiny instruments, I could disguise my camera—as a shoe box or a handbag or as a ridiculous hat that people gaped at, not knowing that I was recording their curious squints.
Orthodox Jewish Boys
, a small group of dark-eyed youngsters with beanies and side-curls—some critics found them a bizarre evocation of alienated Americans ignoring the squalor of downtown Brooklyn and looking skyward toward Jehovah—are just some curious kids looking at my hat.

I was anonymous, I made no sound, I never got in the way of my pictures. I wanted the viewer to drown among the images without thinking of me. The whole of my craft went into making it easy for the blinking public; I then withdrew and removed all traces of myself, so that the viewer could believe the discovery to be his. Only after studying it for a long time should the viewer realize that in my early picture,
Negro Swimming to a Raft
, the man is handcuffed and the raft too small and frail to bear his weight; then the rainclouds become apparent, the futility of the swim, the desperate motion in the swift current of the Mystic River—there is the municipal signboard lettered small on the far bank (I took this picture in West Medford in 1927; the convict, one Cecil Jerome, was quickly recaptured). People have seen this photograph and thought they invented its importance; it was a personal victory for them, they felt responsible for it, the details were theirs, and I didn't blame them. Thereafter, everything they saw was new: I had given them my eyes.

It worked—no one knew me. My exhibitions were occasions for people to think about themselves as they might, during a concert of classical music, remember a compliment or rehearse their marriage, think of everything but the piece being played. And, as I say, people liked themselves a bit better after seeing my photographs. They saw their lives flash before them: for minutes they drowned in my pictures.

I knew this queer experience. It used to interest me, looking at a picture or a sheet of contact prints, to lose the image and see my own reflection staring back. In something beautiful I saw this pining double exposure. The light would glance on my loaf-like face and print it on the glossy paper, and no matter how hard I tried I could not regain the original image that lay beneath it. The pliable paper was a funhouse mirror of stammering light in which I shimmered and drooped, now softening sadly, now jumping into splinters to be gathered a moment later into a sheaf of features. I lost my nose, I watched my cheeks explode, I was lobotomized by a chance blade of light that flicked away the front of my head. It was not the ordinary frenzy for reassurance that people usually seek in mirrors—indeed, I didn't want to see my face. But there it was, as ineradicable as the reflected image one gets on the window of a train late at night when, hoping for a clue to how far one has traveled, one looks out and sees one's own kisser staring inquisitively in. That rather haunted face peered from many of the pictures I developed; it wouldn't slide off, I could not shake it loose, and it was, maddeningly, not a pretty face.

My face, more than anything else, made me career-minded. In those days, attractive girls waited for Mr. Right, and ugly ones, if they had any sense, looked for a job. I was stamped with imperfection. My face was lopsided and when I was tired it looked even worse. I wished I could detach it like a mask; I scrutinized it in the mornings for changes and tried out expressions that made me look less hideous. But I knew with a woe that showed in every feature that this was the face I had to push through the world.

I was a fastidious slob, attentive and yet with such a profound dread of failure that my efforts to be neat produced only disorder and private pain. I was not horrible enough to be frightening, nor plain enough to be invisible, but homely and obvious, the sort of child visitors attempt to compliment by saying, “I'll bet she's good with her hands.” It was one of these patronizing people who gave me my first camera: “You'll have hours of fun with that!” If you didn't have looks you had to have a knack, and somehow I earned the reputation—so many physically unattractive people do—of having a good heart. It was conventional flattery; no one ever accused me of being vain and none of my parents' friends treated me like a child. Ugliness itself was like maturity: I looked like an adult at eleven, one of those big serious things whose plainness is taken for intelligence; the ugly child so often looks forty. I was marked.

The upshot of this was a very strange little girl. It made me secretive and pious, and kind of holy cow, and—it is not unusual—it gave me a taste for perfection. I had a precocious grasp of bright symmetries. I loved what was beautiful; I knew I was not. The artist is a packhorse and frequently looks like one, but his eye is responsive and accurate. It was not that I knew what I was; more important, I knew what I was not. I understood fairly early the depressions of our cook, Frenise, and how they must have been caused by a knowledge not that she was black but that she wasn't white.

Frenise returned that understanding. “Just like us,” she would say, and at first I wondered who she meant by
us:
blacks? cooks? women? Frenise did the chickens. Near the chicken coop there was a shed where the grain was kept in a barrel. It had a lid, but the lid was usually ajar so the grain would not go moldy. Rats could climb into this barrel, but we didn't discover this until one day a rat had eaten so much it was too fat to climb out. That day Frenise screeched when she leaned over to take a scoop of it. I heard her and ran to the shed.

“Shet,” she said, “there's a fat black old rat in there. Bidge can't do nothing—too swole up.” She made a kissing sound and I heard the purr of Phoebe's Angora cat, a fluffy white creature with a bell on its collar so he wouldn't eat the robins.

“Just like us,” said Frenise. “Faa.” She gathered the cat in her arms and stroking it to settle it she turned and poured this length of white fur into the grain barrel. She clapped the lid on and shook her head. There was a thump, the tinkle of a bell, a skidding like grain being sluiced in a bucket, and then only the bell.

Then, Frenise (who played a dime lottery every week she called “The Bug” and said “shet” more times than anyone I have ever known) lifted the lid off the barrel and took out the gasping cat. Its white fur was splashed with blood and one ear was slightly torn. She dropped it and stamped her slippered foot and then reached in again; and when I saw what was attached to that undamaged tail—all those bites on rag and bone, making it look like a chewed radish—I heard Frenise say, “Just like us” and knew she was including me. She saw in me the spitting image of her black self. It is an early picture: me and Frenise and the bitten rat. We carried it to a flowerbed and buried it together.

That night I was chased in a dream. I escaped, I lost my tail, and a bigger blacker Frenise hovered over me and yapped, “You look better that way, Maudie.”

People often asked me why it was that my first exhibition of photographs was composed mainly of black portraits, Negroes (as they used to be known) in every human attitude. I used to say, “Because they're so pretty” (this was reported in hayseed language, “Because they're a whole lot purtier than white folks”). It was partly true.

 

My family was kind. Frenise toughened me with her profanity (“shet,” “bidge,” and “faa”), they courted me with their sorrow; so they competed with her and made me their madonna. I was not suited to the role, but the weak never choose, and the madonna is made in childhood. They were generous and uncritical, protective, anxious to please me and prompt with their attention. I understood their adoring eyes to mean that I was blessed in some extraordinary way, singled out for their encouragement and praise, and did not guess, not for the longest time, that they did this purely because they thought I was ugly as a monkey.

They magnified my homeliness, so they exaggerated their pity. Children adore being pitied; I mistook it for love, I snuggled up to it and purred and thought they were kissing me when in fact they were trying to lick my wounds. “Her real love,” Mama said, “is her camera.” Their protective attitude isolated me, and this state of affairs made me look upon my brother and sister as my only friends. I came to depend on them in a way that is known best to people passionately in love. They aroused in me all the instincts of a mistress—jealousy, possessiveness, spite, greed. Pity is uncertain; it has none of love's terrible demand, it asks nothing, it gives nothing, it casts a feeble light on one's defects. I suppose I recognized that uncertainty; it wore me down, it didn't feed me, it made me tricky, a plotting adult at the age of eleven. I came to fear the thought of separation our growing-up would bring—we'd be forced apart, I'd be alone. My father was kindest. I had his face: he took the blame.

Papa loved music—he said it oiled the springs in his mind (which was why he had a season ticket to the opera, though he called it “the uproar”). One April—a Boston April: sunflecks on wet streets—he took Orlando and me to a children's concert at Symphony Hall, and he left us there in the balcony while he ducked out to do some shopping. Out of pure high spirits we ran to the exit when he was gone and after a few heavy doors which I held open for little Orlando we found ourselves on a fire escape, clinging to the rail and looking down—not far, two or three floors. I was in a long dress and Orlando in his sailor suit. We laughed and listened to the rumble of street noise booming in the alley. I cannot remember why we did it, or what we expected to see. Large drops of rain tumbled through sunlight and glittered whole on Orlando's hair.

BOOK: Picture Palace
10.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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