Paul Theroux: Picture Palace

“The feeling’s mutual.”

“I particularly like your portrait of Evelyn Waugh.”

“That’s a story,” I said. “I was in London. Joe Ackerley said Waugh was at the Dorchester, so I wrote him a note saying how much I enjoyed his books and that I wanted to do him. A reply comes, but it’s not addressed to me. It’s to Mister Pratt and it says something like, ‘We have laws in this country restraining women from writing importuning letters to strange men. You should have a word with your wife’—that kind of thing. Pretty funny all the same.”

Greene nodded. “I imagine your husband was rather annoyed.”

“There was no Mister Pratt,” I said. “There still isn’t.”

Greene looked at me closely, perhaps wondering if I was going to bare my soul.

I said, “But I kept after Waugh and later on he agreed. He liked the picture, too, asked for more prints. It made him look baronial, lord of the manor — it’s full of sunshine and cigar smoke. And, God, that suit! I think it was made out of a horse blanket.”

“One of the best writers we’ve ever had,” said Greene. “I saw him from time to time, mostly in the Fifties.” He thought a moment, and moved his glass of sherry to his lips but didn’t drink. “I was in and out of Vietnam then. You’ve been there, of course. I found your pictures of those refugees very moving.”

“The refugees were me,” I said. “Just more raggedy, that’s all. I couldn’t find the pictures I wanted, so I went up to Hue, but they gave me a lot of flak and wouldn’t let me leave town. The military started leaning on me. They didn’t care about winning the war — they wanted to keep it going. I felt like a refugee myself, with my bum hanging out and getting kicked around. That’s why the pictures were good. I could identify with those people. Oh, I know what they say—‘How can she do it to those poor so-and-so’s!’ But, really, they were all versions of me. Unfortunately.”

“Did you have a pipe?”

“Pardon?”

“Opium,” said Greene.

“Lord no.”

“They ought to legalize it for people our age,” he said. “Once, in Hanoi, I was in an opium place. They didn’t know me. They put me in a corner and made a few pipes for me, and just as I was dropping off to sleep I looked up and saw a shelf with several of my books on it. French translations. When I woke up I was alone. I took them down and signed them.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I put them back on the shelf and went away. No one saw me, and I never went back. It’s a very pleasant memory.”

“A photographer doesn’t have those satisfactions.”

“What about your picture of Ché Guevara?”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen it so many times I’ve forgotten I took it. I never get a by-line on it. It’s become part of the folklore.”

“Some of us remember.”

It is this photograph of Ché that was on the posters, with the Prince Valiant hair and the beret, his face upturned like a saint on an ikon. I regretted it almost as soon as I saw it swimming into focus under the enlarger. It flattered him and simplified his face into an expression of suffering idealism. I had made him seem better than he was. It was the beginning of his myth, a deception people took for truth because it was a photograph. But I knew how photography lied and mistook light for fact. I got Ché on a good day. Luck, nothing more.

“Pagan saints,” I said. “That’s what I used to specialize in. They seemed right for the age, the best kind of hero, the embattled loser. The angel with the human smell, the innocent, the do-gooder, the outsider, the perfect stranger. I was a great underdogger. They saw things no one else did, or at least I thought so then.”

Greene said, “Only the outsider sees. You have to be a stranger to write about any situation.”

“Debs,” I said.

“Debs?” He frowned. “I didn’t think that was your line at all.”

“Eugene V. Debs, the reformer,” I said. “I did him.”

“That’s right,” said Greene, but he had begun to smile. “Ernesto wasn’t a grumbler,” I said. “That’s what I liked about him. Raúl was something else.”

“When were you in Cuba?”

“Was it ’fifty-nine? I forget. I know it was August. I had wanted to go ever since Walker Evans took his sleazy pictures of those rotting houses. I mentioned this in an interview and the next thing I know I’m awarded the José Marti Scholarship to study God-knows-what at Havana U. Naturally I turned it down.”

“But you went.”

“With bells on. I had a grand time. I did Ernesto and I don’t know how many tractors, and the Joe Palooka of American literature, Mister Hemingway.”

“I met Fidel,” said Greene. There was just a hint of boasting in it.

I said, “I owe him a letter.”

“Interesting chap.”

“I did him, too, but he wasn’t terribly pleased with it. He wanted me to do him with his arms Outstretched, like Christ of the Andes, puffing a two-dollar cigar. No thank you. The one I did of him at Harvard is the best of the bunch — the hairy messiah bellowing at all those fresh-faced kids. Available light, lots of Old Testament drama.”

Greene started to laugh. He had a splendid shoulder-shaking laugh, very infectious. It made his face redder, and he touched the back of his hand to his lips when he did it, like a small boy sneaking a giggle. Then he signaled to the waiter and said, “The same again.”

“Isn’t that Cuban jungle something?” I said.

“Yes, I liked traveling in Cuba,” he said. “It could be rough, but not as rough as Africa.” He put his hand to his lips again and laughed. “Do you know Jacqueline Bisset?”

“I don’t think I’ve done her, no.”

“An actress, very pretty. François Truffaut brought her down to Antibes last year. I gave them dinner and afterwards I began talking about Africa. She was interested that I’d been all over Liberia. ‘But you stayed in good hotels?’ she said. I explained that there weren’t any hotels in the Liberian jungle. ‘But you found restaurants?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no restaurants at all.’ This threw her a bit, but then she pressed me quite hard on everything else — the drinking water, the people, the weather, the wild animals and whatnot. Finally, she asked me about my car. I told her I didn’t have a car. A bus, maybe? No, I said, no bus. She looked at me, then said, “Ah, I see how you are traveling — auto-stop!’”

“Pardon?”

“Hitchhiking.”

“Bumming rides?”

“That’s it — she thought I was hitchhiking through the Liberian jungle in 1935!” He laughed again. “I had to tell her there weren’t any roads. She was astonished.”

“Say no more. I know the type.”

“But very pretty. You ought really to do her sometime.”

“I did a series of pretty faces,” I said. “My idea was to go to out of the way places and get shots of raving beauties, who didn’t know they were pretty. I did hundreds — farm girls, cashiers, housewives, girls lugging firewood, scullions, schoolgirls. A girl at a gas station, another one at a cosmetics counter in Filene’s Basement.”

“One sees them in the most unlikely places.”

“These were heartbreaking. Afterwards, everyone said I’d posed them. But that was just it — the girls didn’t have the slightest idea of why I was taking their pictures. Most of them were too poor to own mirrors. One was a knockout — a Spanish girl squatting with her skirt hiked up to her waist, sort of pouting, her bare bottom near her ankles. What a peach — there was a beautiful line cupping her bum and curving up her thigh to her knee. She didn’t see me. And another one, a Chinese girl in Hong Kong I did after that Vietnam jaunt — long black hair, skin like porcelain, one of these willowy oriental bodies. She was plucking a chicken in a back alley in Kowloon, a tragic beauty with that halfstarved holiness that fashion models make a mockery of. I weep when I think of it. That’s partly because”—I leaned forward and whispered—“I’ve never told anyone this before — she was blind.”