Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

I tapped a cigarette and lit up, puffing it reflectively to demonstrate that I was taking his suggestion seriously and to keep me from laughing in his face.

“It’s all here,” he said, breathing hard. He dealt the photographs importantly onto the table and paced the floor. I had never seen him so excited. His Adam’s apple was plunging with certitude. “Look at these people!”

I obliged him and looked.

“You can see a terrific artistic ego in that one — typical overdressed Twenties writer,” he said, pointing to one of a flounder fisherman who had insisted on wearing his Sunday best. “And this derelict,” he went on, drumming his fingers on a morning-after shot of Eugene O’Neill, “you’ve captured all his hopelessness — the guy’s a mess, he’s dead, skid-row by the sea.”

I didn’t correct him. He believed; perhaps I should have been grateful for that, but he was believing for the wrong reasons. To me the pictures were obvious, and some were grotesque (how could I have had the nerve to do Eel in a Toilet ?). And the surprises: I had forgotten that boogie-man on the beach, walking away from the camera, his high buttocks and bowed head and the tide wrack of straw and broken boards: all the grays; Orlando and Phoebe solarized in a sailboat, conferring silhouettes; a Cummings I thought I had jettisoned, grinning with heavy sea-slug lips — what a happy man!

Some needed cropping or touching up, I was reminded of my boast. I used to think: No one will make me change a thing; every detail is mine. “Airbrush flies, remove genitals,” someone at the National Geographic had scribbled in green ink on my Caged Baboon— I had told the editor to take a flying leap. Now the imperfections, the surprises, the successes and embarrassments seemed of no importance whatever.

Still Frank raved. “You were roughing it out, setting yourself on course, looking ahead to refining the shots.”

It is hard to know where true praise ends and the critical leg-pull begins. I felt we were pretty close to the seam. But Frank yammered on without hesitating.

“It’s about people — they’re all foreground. That’s what really knocks me over.”

“I was never big on landscapes.”

“And there’s this insistence that’s never actually stated, on the outdoors. You’ve exteriorized your—”

“Frank, this was well before the flash cube.”

“—nature at the edges, the suggestion of surf here, the broken sapling as a frame for that, um, colored guy’s despair.

Despair? It was Pigga, who ran a numbers game, doing a soft-shoe on a curb near Prospect Park after a rainstorm. The important feature of it was that he was wet — or rather that his skin was wet but that he was bone-dry. I had been fascinated by how water affected black skin. It wasn’t absorbed; it stood in droplets on the oily surface, defying the porousness like a coating of pearls. Pigga’s skin was jeweled with rainwater and his hair was full of whole pearls, too.

Frank had taken Prospect Park for a precinct of Provincetown. He said, “You can put the town together from all the backdrops. The lighthouse, the main street, those cars and dunes. You haven’t missed anything. It’s a whole world — an age! Here, this is one of the best things you’ve ever done.”

I might have known he’d pick a fraud: Slaughter, the blind piano tuner, struggling to find a chord; his fingers spread, his bulging eyes marbled with glaucoma.

Frank was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But the thing is, they’re all so sad, even the ones in fancy clothes — they look like they’re pretending to be happy, putting on faces. Nobody’s doing anything.” He chewed, pursed his lips, and farted. “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction.”

It was how I had felt, kind of blue. I was so young. I knew nothing of passion or deceit. I was simple, blundering, impatient. Perhaps Frank saw this strange girl’s reflection in the pictures and could not convey it in his jargon. But he didn’t know what I knew, how — far from mirroring my emotions in my pictures — I had always chosen op posites: the old when I was young, the blind when I’d valued my eyes, the black and the bizarre when I’d felt white and ordinary, and in my severest depressions the very glad. It was only confidence and a feeling of well-being that enabled me to do down-and-outs, and my comic shots were done in a mood of near-hysteria.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, trying to surrender. I was touched by his piety: his version of me sounded true. He had faith in my pictures — he was wrong, but his faith would save him. I only hoped I had not misled him. Yet his belief in what I had abandoned called me back. The hesitation I felt was that of the woman who drives her lover away and sees him by chance years later with a new woman and endures the slow panic of regret. What if Frank was right? I had known before that I’d only half understood my best pictures and was humbled when, by degrees, their truth was revealed; and that other fear — how, knowing so little (no one has more immediate ignorance than the picture-taker), I might never be able to repeat my luck.

I had sworn after meeting Greene that I would never take another picture, but here was Frank saying without a stammer, “A kind of deep-structure of rhetorical inaction” and using words like integrity to discuss Pigga. He insisted I had captured an age in a manner I was well aware I had renounced.

Frank, full of his discovery, somehow loomed like the scholar-flunky he was, thinking he was making himself small and useful. He said, “You’ve concretized not only your own vision, but also the elusiveness of the subjects. It’s a triumph over technique. You built the kind of relationship between artist and subject that one only sees in the greatest pictures. Your Camerons, your Bournes.”

Eyewash, I thought; and if he mentions Arbus I’ll kick him in the teeth. But I lit another cigarette to show I was listening.

“Just this picture alone”—he was holding one of Orlando and Phoebe, picnicking with their backs to me—“is enough. It says everything. That sky, those lonely figures, the sea — that’s the human condition.”

Typical browser’s praise, the skinflint critic mooching among the masterpieces: Ah, what have we got here? Nothing less than the human condition! Very nice, he says, jingling his bus fare in his pocket and thinking: It ought to cost an arm and a leg. Out the door: he’s not buying today.

I was tactful: “It leaves a lot unsaid.”

“No,” he said. “This is it. It’s got allegorical thrust, but it can be read as straight naturalism.”

Orlando and Phoebe? Allegorical thrust? But Frank was happy. I wondered if he believed as I had believed once, and that he would have to wait as long as I had to see the trickery. In praising me he was complimenting the craft and making me doubt my decision to mistrust my life as a sequence of photographs. I thought: What a thing to say to an old lady who’s made up her mind!

He was saying, Wait! Look! Hold on there!

It was unnerving to hear someone speaking with such assurance about Orlando’s picture. Though I suspected Frank of having the faith of the believer, an ignorance more unshakable than the priest’s or prophet’s; and saw myself something deeply untruthful in the pictures — overcertain and prying and misleading; though I doubted his barnacle’s grip on my work, I couldn’t let him down. The guy sounded sincere. My pictures mattered to him.

All this happened the day after the Provincetown visit.

I had three days of alarm. I drank to relieve myself of doubt, and between gulps I heard him on the phone. At one point, pompously argufying with a caller, he used the phrase, My retrospective . For a moment, I felt like an intruder on this busy genius’s routine and then I remembered that I had allowed him to poke in my picture palace.