Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

‘You’ve done other blind people,” said Greene. “I’ve seen them exhibited.”

‘When I was very young,” I said slowly, trying to evade what was a fact. “I’m ashamed of it now. But the faces of the blind are never false — they are utterly naked. It was the only way I could practice my close-ups. They had no idea of what I was doing — that was the worst of it. But they had this amazing light, the whole face illuminated in beautiful repose. They’re such strange pictures. I can’t bear to look at them these days. I was blind myself. However, let’s not go into that.”

But as I described the pictures to Greene I saw that he had this same look on his own face, a blind man’s luminous stare and that scarifying scrutiny in his features, his head cocked slightly to one side like a sightless witness listening for mistakes.

“I understand,” he said.

“I’ll be glad to show you the others,” I said. “The pretty faces. You’ll cry your eyes out.”

“There were some lovely girls in Haiti,” he said. “Many were prostitutes. Oh, I remember one night. I was with that couple I called the Smiths in my book. I said they were vegetarians. They weren’t, but they were Americans. He was a fairly good artist. He could sketch pictures on the spot. We were at that bar I described in my book — the brothel. He picked one out and drew her picture, a terribly good likeness. All the girls came over to admire it.” Greene paused to sip at his sherry, then he said, “She was a very attractive girl. If the Smiths hadn’t been there I would have dated her myself.”

It seemed a rather old-fashioned way of putting it—“dating” a hooker; but there was a lot of respectful admiration in his tone, none of the contempt one usually associates with the whore-hopper.

“Dated her,” I said. “You mean a little boom-boom?”

“Jig-jig,” he said. “But it comes to the same thing.”

I laughed and said, “I really must be going.”

“Have another drink,” said Greene.

“Next time,” I said. I had lost count of my gins, but I knew that as soon as I remembered how many I’d had I’d be drunk.

“Will you join me for dinner? I thought I might go across the street to Bentley’s. That is, if you like fish.”

I was tired, my bones ached, I felt woozy and I knew I was half pickled. I attributed all of this to my sudden transfer from Grand Island to London. But I also had a creeping sense of inertia, the slow alarm of sickness turning me into a piece of meat. I knew I should go to bed, but I wanted to have dinner with Greene for my picture’s sake. I recognized his invitation as sincere. It was an English sequence: they invite you for a drink; if you’re a dead loss they have a previous engagement; if not, you’re invited to dinner. I was pleased that he hadn’t flunked me.

I said, “Lead the way.”

Greene went to settle the bill and ring the restaurant while I tapped a kidney in the ladies room. I met him outside the bar and said, “Bentley’s — isn’t that where your short story takes place?”

“Which one is that?”

“‘The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen.’”

He looked at bit blank, as if he’d forgotten the story, then put on a remembering squint and said, “Oh, yes.”

“One of my favorites,” I said. We left the Ritz and crossed Piccadilly in the dusty mellow light that hung like lace curtains in the evening sky. Greene towered over me and I had that secure sense of protection that short people feel in the presence of much taller ones. He held my arm and steered me gallantly to Swallow Street. I knew the story well. The couple dining at Bentley’s are discussing their plans: their marriage, her book. She’s a bright young thing and believes her publisher’s flattery — believes that she has remarkable powers of observation. Her fiance is hopelessly in love with her, but after the meal, when he comments on the eight Japanese that have just left the restaurant, she says, “What Japanese?” and claims he doesn’t love her.

I heard the waitresses muttering “Mister Greene” as we were shown to our table. Greene said, “I know what I’m having.” He passed me the menu.

He began talking about trips he intended to take: Portugal, Hungary, Panama; and I wondered whether he had people joshing him and trying to persuade him to stay home. Did he have to listen to the sort of guff I had to endure? I guessed he did, even if he didn’t have a Frank. I had the feeling of being with a kindred spirit, a fellow sufferer, who was completely alone, who had only his work and who, after seventy years, woke up each morning to start afresh, regarding everything he had done as more or less a failure, an inaccurate rendering of his vision, a betrayal. But I also saw how different we were: he was in his work — I wasn’t in mine. And perhaps he was thinking, “This boring little old lady only believes in right and wrong — I believe in good and evil.” We were of different countries, and so our ages could never be the same. In the two hours that had passed since I had first seen Orlando in him, Greene had become more and more himself, more the complicated stranger in the fourth dimension that confounds the photograph.

“London’s not what it was,” he was saying. “Just around the corner one used to see tarts walking up an down. It was better then — they were all over Bayswater.”

“I did some of them.”

“So did I,” said Greene, and passed his hand across his face as if stopping a blush. “When I was at university I used to go down to Soho, have a meal in a nice little French restaurant, a half-bottle of wine, then get myself a tart. That was very pleasant.”

I didn’t feel I could add anything to this.

He said, “Soho’s all porno shops now. It’s not erotic art. I find it brutal — there’s no tenderness in it.”

“It’s garbage,” I said. “But there’s an argument in its favor.”

“What’s that?”

“It works,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Greene. “I haven’t seen any pornography since they legalized it.”

I laughed: it was so like him. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t catch that contradiction on his face. He was surprising, funny, alert, alive, a real comedian, wise and droll. Knowing that I was going to meet him for a portrait I had been faced with the dilemma that plagued me every time I set out to do someone. Against my will, I created a picture in my head beforehand and tried to imagine the shot I wanted. I had seen Greene in a bar, seedier than the one in the Ritz, a slightly angled shot with only his face in focus, and the rest — his long body, his reflective posture — dim and slightly blurred: the novelist more real than his surroundings, special and yet part of that world.

Then I saw him in the flesh, his sad heavy face, his severe mouth, his blind man’s eyes, and I thought: No, a close-up with a hand on his chin — he had a watchmaker’s fine hands. But his laugh changed my mind, and it struck me that it was impossible. I couldn’t do him. Any portrait would freeze him, fix him, give him an eternal image, like Che looking skyward or that tubby talk-show bore everyone forgives because he was once Truman Capote, brooding under a shock of scraped-down hair.

Once, I might have taken my picture and gone, and in the printing seen his whole history in his face, past and future. Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft. I had seen too much in Greene for me to be satisfied with a picture.

I said, “I think I ought to tell you that this is my last picture. I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”

“Whatever for?”

“I’m too old to travel, for one thing.”