Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“He couldn’t see why he should get a bank loan instead of a gift from a fame-sucker on Park Avenue — I guess he figured the bank might foreclose and repossess his genius. ‘It’s my mind,’ he said. ‘I need spiritual freedom to do anything I want’—and these are his exact words—‘from a cloud to an old shoe.’

“‘To me, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a cloud and an old shoe. The sky’s full of old shoes,’ I says to him.

“We were getting nowhere. He said that he was going to apply for a Guggenheim just the same. And he did. And I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t get one. In 1937, he was the first photographer ever to get a Guggenheim, but as I said to him, ‘Your camera still weighs forty pounds and if you shoot any nice pictures you’ll have to go around afterward and say thank you to all the Guggenheims.’ Imagine, an artist saying thank you! I didn’t see much of him after that.”

Frank said, “You peed on Weston, so you’re peeing on me.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “The next thing I know I get a letter from the foundation. Do I wish to apply for a Guggenheim grant? Well, I made a big mistake. I was young, I wasn’t as smart as I am now. It wasn’t the money, but somehow if they gave me the money they were testifying to my art. You’re an artist, here’s ten bucks to prove it — that kind of thing. Was I worth it? There was a crisis in my life. I needed encouragement. That’s the worst of patronage, you know, the belief that having a patron means having talent. But the answer to ‘Am I an artist?’ must always be no, because no artist would ask that dumb question. Right?”

“Interesting,” said Frank.

“I filled out the application, in triplicate. My name, outline of project, previous shows, sponsors. It was like a Means Test — no, it was like a Pauper’s Oath. Then I waited.”

“I never knew you had a Guggenheim,” said Frank.

“That’s the point of the story, you peckerhead. I didn’t get the fucking thing!”

“I see.”

“No moolah for Maude.”

I fell silent. I had applied in October, this receding time of year. The leaves, the grass, the withered flowers, just like this. And the air rounded with a chill amplifying the rasps of autumn, everything that had been alive in the summer turning to confetti, smoke, dust, and haze. Even the fires dying into yellow vapor, the sunlight weakening on the Sound, somewhere a buzz saw, and hammerings from the Hyannis shore. I was parched with incomprehension; I could taste the driest disappointment, and it stifled me like defeat.

“Afterward I hated them — for making me want it, for making me need proof, and for thinking, when I didn’t get it, that I wasn’t worth it. But I got over it. Everyone who gets one of those things deserves it. The best never ask.”

“What was your, um, project?”

“Something to do with Florida.”

“But you did Florida!” said Frank. “It was your first big success!”

“So it was. If you have something to do you do it. You don’t sit around on your fanny waiting for someone to put you on the payroll.” But I could not remember how I had done Florida, or why I had gone.

“Some payroll,” said Frank. “Subsistence — that’s all I get.”

“You let them buy you Tootsie Rolls, is that it? Ain’t it a riot? They’re paying you to study my work, but they refused to pay me to produce it. What’s wrong with a Guggenheim? That’s what’s wrong. They don’t care about the ship — all they’re interested in is the goddamned barnacles.”

In my anger over lunch I almost blurted out to Frank that I had seen his raunchy pictures. But I resisted: his back was to the wall — I couldn’t throw that at him. And furthermore, I had not worked out in my own mind how they mattered: the mind is more fastidious than the eye. I didn’t know whether to witness or judge, and had not decided if such stuff should be suppressed. The soul of art is human emotion. Although pornography depicted anonymous emotion and was crude as a cactus, the people who needed it brought imagination to it and pulped the lumps and spines into art. and let this simmer in their brains. It was like making your own amorous masterpiece, the pure glory of love’s double image — the classically serene embrace — out of the furious meat of Kenny and Doris. Perhaps in Doris’s bivalve and Kenny’s knobby anemone Frank saw a whole sea-floor of possibility, or were these fuck shots merely a sleazy detonator for his libido? “Rhetorical,” he might say; but how did they refer, and to whom, and why?

It baffled me. I resolved to wait.

Quite late — I was in my room, something on my mind, an unformed consequence — Frank knocked on my door. He rapped impatiently, loudly hectoring to alert me to his anger. He burst in, heaved himself at me, then drew back.

He shook his bony fingers and glared.

“You’ve been in my things!”

Enraged, he had a look of starvation. I had never seen him so skinny or so pale; his eyes bulged, there was a beggar’s cringe in his shoulders. But I had seen this sort of thing once before. I knew this intrusion, a particular one — which?

“You know what I’m talking about.”

I smiled at him: I had heard that once, in precisely those words. “Haven’t the faintest.”

He said, “My personal property. Pictures.”

“Describe them.”

“Don’t be funny — you know the ones I mean.” His voice cracked and I thought he was going to burst into tears. Single people are fairly unembarrassed about crying: they practice it alone in their rooms. He sat down and took a deep breath and after exhaling it seemed much calmer. He recovered his aggrieved tone. “If there’s one thing I hate it’s people who don’t respect private property.”

“Then get your skinny ass off my chair and clear out. This is my private property, buddy.”

“I want an explanation. I’m not leaving until I get it.”

“I went into a room in my house, opened the drawer of a table I happen to own and found some of your pictures. I wasn’t going to mention it, but since you raised the matter I can tell you I think you have rather a grim taste in anatomy. That’s all there is to it.”

But I didn’t want him to go. I needed him to help me remember that other intrusion. His eyes were damp with anger. He had gotten even skinnier since entering my room and looked as if he might let out one maniacal honk of wind and shrivel like a bag before my very eyes.

I said, “Also, I thought I recognized the people in them.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Turns out it’s the same couple I’ve been seeing for years. Kenny and Doris. They could use a vacation. I wonder what folks like that do on vacation. Probably tear open a six-pack and shoot the bull. Watch television. Stuff themselves with Twinkies.”

“You’re not even sorry.”

“Sorry?” I said. “I’m appalled!”

“I want an apology.”

“You came to the wrong place, buster.”

He shook his head vengefully. “Know something? You’re really incredible.”

“Just as a point of interest,” I said brightly, “how did you know I’d seen them?”

“That’s my business.”

“Very clever of you, I’ll grant you that. Seriously, how’d you know I’d been nosing around?”

“So you admit you were nosing around!”

“Of course. I’ve got a right to in my own house, haven’t I?”

“Not with my stuff you haven’t. No one touches my stuff.”

“Your ‘stuff’? If us photographers said that, where would you museum people be?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Listen, you peckerhead, for the past three months you’ve been pawing over my pictures and drooling. Have I complained? I jolly well haven’t. And remember,” I said, flinging a finger at him, “when they were handing out Guggenheims no one gave me one. As far as I’m concerned you’re just another burglar using his Guggenheim as a license to pry, so shut up and be glad I don’t report you to the police.”