Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

The camera lied. And had I been foxed by my memory too? The past, drowned and buried by time, was unverifiable. But I had been fooled all right.

I needed a drink. I made a jug of martinis and sluiced the morning away.

At lunch, I gave the pictures to Frank and said, “These are for the shredder.”

He had a sandwich in one hand. He raised the pictures, raised the sandwich, took a bite of the sandwich, and holding the pictures, chewed. Then he tucked the bite into his cheek and said, “Who’s the guy?”

“Fellow I used to know.”

“If they’re personal we should include them. Otherwise forget it — they won’t reproduce.”

“Like I say, shred them.” I snatched them from him and started to tear them. “Pack of lies.”

“Don’t do that!” he squawked, spattering me with mayonnaise. “They’re primary sources. They’ve got to be catalogued. Nothing gets thrown away.”

But I went on tearing them. “I am executing these pictures.”

“Stop it!”

“Finish your lunch,” I said, and dropped the pieces next to his plate.

“Look what you did,” he said. But his tone was softened by gratitude. He began arranging the photograph pieces like a jigsaw, fitting them and puzzling. He smiled as he chewed. He looked eager; this was like making his own pictures — creation.

“I’ll need information on these for the catalogue.”

“You tell me. They’re no damn good, but that’s your problem. It’s your retrospective, ain’t it?”

He put down his bite-scalloped sandwich. He said, “I know you think I’m a fool. That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“Your pictures, your everything. Who cares what I think?”

“I care,” he said. “I care very, very much what you think, Maude.”

“All right,” I snapped. “I think you’re a fool. So there.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “And this morning you called me a shit-kicker. That’s the thanks I get.”

“What’s in it for me?” I said.

“This retrospective’s going to be the biggest thing—”

“You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “Listen, I’m seventy-one years old. I’ve got more money than I will ever spend and there’s nothing I want in the world that I can’t buy in Hyannis. I’ve had critics eating out of my hand for fifty years, but don’t judge me by my pictures — I don’t give a rat’s ass for them, anyway, burn the lot of them for all I care. I don’t need a retrospective — I didn’t take pictures for people like you. I took them for myself, understand? I’ve had a long fascinating life, and I’m happy, Frank!”

“Then why do you sound so mad?”

“Because you’re pissing me off something wicked, that’s why.”

He swallowed guiltily and looked down at his bitten sandwich.

“You,” I said, wagging my finger in his face, “You say you’re going to make me famous. Well, thanks very much, Frank, but I’ve got news for you—”

“I never said famous. I’m just trying to broaden your appeal.”

“Who the fuck are you trying to impress? I know what you want to do — you want to put your own name in lights. Just like these squirts who make the celebrity scene — they get a hammerlock on the luminaries. Why? Because they want to be famous themselves, and the by-line ends up bigger than the picture. That’s how it happens, you know — any jackass with a two-dollar Instamatic can get billboarded all over Vogue if she does the right people. And you’re doing me the very same way. You’re piggybacking. Deny it.”

“I deny it.” He shuddered and added, “Strenuously.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“What’s got into you?” he said pityingly. “You’re really bitter. You’ve said some terrible things to me.”

“Get off the bucket. If you’re not interested in fame, what is it?”

“I am sincerely interested in your work. I think it represents the America of this century.”

“Hogwash,” I said. “It doesn’t even represent my life.”

“An artist’s life is his work.”

“I don’t buy that,” I said. My life wasn’t in my work: perhaps that meant I wasn’t an artist? But Frank was convinced I was, and unshakable in his conviction. I said, “I can’t help thinking there must be a pile of dough in this for you.”

“Money is not one of my considerations. Fortunately.”

“Really? You’re loaded, right?”

“I have sufficient funds,” he said: the prissy verbosity of the self-righteous.

“Come off it. You think you can make a bundle. The museum pays you for all of this.”

“As a matter of fact, they don’t. I’m on a year’s sabbatical.”

“You’re doing it free?” For a moment I was ashamed.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’ve got a Guggenheim.”

My mouth went dry. “Repeat that.”

“And it’s renewable.”

“You’ve got a what? ”

“Don’t tell me you never heard of the Guggenheim Foundation.”

“Jumping Jesus, doesn’t that take the cake!”

“What’s wrong with a Guggenheim?”

“Everything,” I said, and decided to let him have it. “Ever heard of Edward Weston?”

“The photographer?”

“No, Edward Weston the dogcatcher,” I said. “Of course the photographer!”

“We had a really big Weston retrospective years ago,” he said, sounding a little tired and knowing, the way the French do when you mention wine, as if nothing I said could be news to him.

But I pressed on. “Long before you were born, I met Weston in New York. He said he liked my pictures, but he was a horny devil, so when he said, ‘I’d like to see a lot more of you’ I figured him for a bum-pincher. We had a set-to — he gave me his usual baloney about farmers with furrows on their faces and Kentuckians with bluegrass growing out of their eyebrows. I took exception to it — I mean, what if your farmer happens to be a little shrimp with eyeglasses and beautiful hands? Eugene O’Neill looked like a wino, I told him, and Lawrence had a case of halitosis that made the shit-plant on Moon Island seem like a rose arbor. And let’s face it, most of those black pimps and numbers runners I did in New York looked like kings and princes of Bongo-land. But Weston disagreed, and he wanted to prove his point.”

“Artistically, Weston’s Mexican—”

“Keep your shirt on, Frank. At the time — this was ’thirty-six — he got it into his head to apply for a Guggenheim. They were giving them to painters, English teachers, playwrights — in fact, every filling station attendant in the country believed that as soon as he got a Guggenheim he’d write Leaves of Grass . Weston said if those fakers got them, why not him?

“‘I’m an artist,’ says Weston, and smacks his lips.

“‘Well, I’m a photographer,’ I says, ‘and I wouldn’t touch one of them Guggenheims with a ten-foot pole.’

“He said he needed the freedom. The money would free him. ‘How very American,’ I says. Give this boy a few bucks and suddenly he’s free. I couldn’t see the point of it — still can’t. How much money makes you free? I told him he’d be de-balled by patronage and end up being just another castrated wage slave. The only virtue in being an artist — that was his word — is being your own man. No masters, no enemies, no rivals, no patrons! I said he was talking a lot of garbage — you were free until you took the money, then you weren’t free anymore, you were in the pay of Jack Guggenheim or whoever.

“This really annoyed him. ‘My equipment costs money,’ he says, ‘and I want to do an epic series of photographs of the West.’ ‘Get a loan,’ I says, ‘mortgage that tripod — you can repay the bank when you’re rich, but with a patron, no matter how rich you get, you’ll be in debt for the rest of your natural life.’ I told him I was from a banking family and I knew what I was talking about. I said, ‘You’re a good risk for a loan — big on talent and low on overheads. After all, you can take all the pictures you want of the Grand Canyon and no one’ll send you a bill.’