Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“You took pictures of me at Carney’s Pig Dinner, when I was watching those people disport themselves. Hadn’t you ought to show the sequel to that innocent stag party — what you just found, a broken-up old man with his fire all burned down and no whisky and no cigars and no life? Now you go on and get your camera and snap my picture. I want the world to know what you did to me.”

Phoebe said, “Don’t, Papa.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, his voice shrill with sarcasm. “No more film? All used up in Florida? Not enough money in it for you? Ain’t I horrible enough?”

“Maude doesn’t take pictures anymore,” said Phoebe. “That’s real shame,” he said. “But she’s going to take this one.”

Mama said, “That’s what he was saying on the train, over and over.”

“I’ll do it,” I said, and went upstairs to get my camera. I could do him — I’d done Firebug blind: I had my own way of seeing. I loaded the camera and thought: I owe him this much at least. And I kept thinking what a fine picture it would be, found in the last of the firelight, the craggy old man casting a broken shadow, doom in a dinner jacket, the melodrama of near-extinction. His face, and the room, had the funereal dignity of light and shadow that I had only seen before in a Cameron.

But when I got back to the parlor the mood had changed. Mama was crying, Phoebe was sniffling, and Papa, though abject, was himself again. He rounded on me.

“You let me go on,” he said. “You should have stopped me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

It was a picture I did not take. If I had I would have called it Buffaloed , though it was not half as good as the one I had prepared myself for, Doom in a Dinner Jacket .

Orlando came home on Christmas Eve and got the story from Phoebe. It was a sad holiday, a few presents — very expensive ("Cause there aren’t going to be no more parties!”) and the last of Papa’s good wine was drunk. Mama cried a lot, but Papa was spent. I was given the invalid routine: I was blind, I was incapable, they confined me to a chair. Phoebe and Orlando took long walks together. It was very much a family affair.

WITH THOSE NOISY EXCHANGES, that skirmishing — my father finding an enemy in his own camp — the year closed, and there was no more talk. The new year moved swiftly toward Orlando’s graduation from law school. Then the decade ended, the half-baked monochrome of the Thirties which left everyone with a grudge. Time sprinted, but without an event to give it shape the days were interminable. It is time’s confounding perversity. I lived in a torpor of suspense in which I heard every tick of the clock. But suspense is empty: because nothing happened, the months seemed in retrospect little more than one dull afternoon.

The eventful life has dates; it swells and pauses like a plot. But this was an unbroken length of time, like an endless and perfectly plaited rope. I knew each fiber of it, but it passed without a knot, and I was tempted out of boredom to make it into a noose. I had shot to fame in a matter of weeks: from my portrait of Stieglitz to my showdown with Papa took just two months.

Then there was nothing, I entered a void, the void was in me. My work was done, my life was over. Yet I think I can rightly say that the following four years or so — the war — during which I took no pictures whatever and only moped and listened to the radio and endorsed checks and darned socks and lost all track of what was going on in the world of photography — pretending to be older than I was and doing absolutely nothing of value — that barren inactive period was the high point of my career as a photographer.

My pictures, the same pictures, appeared everywhere. The show traveled, the photographs were reproduced in magazines, my early work was rediscovered and promoted. I was seen to have been an important Twenties pathfinder, one of the few American photographers who had not gone to Europe. (I hadn’t thought to do so, but I would not have gone for anything, since Europe — the cheap franc, the cliquey artists, the crowd-pleasers and posturers — represented to me the most hideous kind of patronage.) Blacks were in fashion and of course I’d done them by the bushel basket. At the dreariest time of my life I’d done my funniest and most hopeful pictures; at my most hopeful I had done desperately tormented shots. When I had sought work I had been ignored, and when I was no longer looking for it I was courted. Now my fame was consolidated. I must have seemed to many people incredibly busy with all this exposure. I wasn’t. Papa did all the paperwork. I didn’t lift a finger.

And, as often happens, my fame became an aspect of others’—the general public confused me with other woman photographers of my own vintage: Margaret Bourke-White, Imogen Cunningham, Ann Brigman, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, and even older ones like Gertrude Käsebier.

I was too detached to be offended. I regarded this woman, Maude Coffin Pratt, with a mixture of awe, scepticism and amusement. What an engine of creation she was! What depth of field! What a glad eye! I could never live up to her achievement (her pictures were rather good), so I didn’t try. I still got many requests to do pictures — it was an effect of the war in Europe, the urgency that the present must be caught on film, a kind of souvenir-hunting, since the world would change out of recognition. It was the superstitious deception of the photograph as a historical record, the snapshot for posterity, as a photograph of the Chinese wedding is as much a part of the ceremony as the tea-drinking. Or the other sort of picture, the view-camera taxidermy of buildings soon to be bombed, the portraits of crooked political bosses who expect to be voted out of office or jailed for fraud. But I did none of these pictures, and gradually the message got across: I wasn’t faking, I was truly blind; and though I was still a young woman people began to think of me as very old and venerable, a kind of sage, reclusive and cantankerous. Soon they would be saying, “Maude Pratt? Gosh, I thought she died years ago!”

Perhaps I had. I certainly didn’t see as well as I used to. Papa, who was home all the time now, took charge of me, treated me as an invalid, and insisted I never be left alone.

“Move over,” he said. He was my seeing-eye dog; he held my hand and jerked me this way and that, warning me of obstacles, and sometimes woofed about the weather to cheer me up. “Another glorious day — I wish you could see the crocuses.” Once, years before, he had been funny, speaking of going to the “orifice” or the “uproar,” saying “Pass the mouseturd” or “Abyssinia.” Now he had no jokes. He often mentioned dying: “Yep,” he said, “I’m going to be leaving the building pretty soon.”

“Will you look at that!” he wheezed and dragged me to a halt. I saw nothing. His company was oppressive and his constant fussings of attention, instead of helping me, only reduced my vision. He contradicted me, he slowed me up, he got in the way and made me stumble. It was only when I was alone, in concentrated solitude, that I could see clearly; but I was so seldom alone I began to lose my ability to sniff out images. The dazzle I had known was reduced to a wan play of shadows. My uncertainty made me falter and I grew to depend on Papa the more for guidance while at the same time realizing that his intimidating concern was weakening me. He demoralized me with charity.

“Let me do that,” he said. And I did. It was easier for me to be supported by him, less trouble for me to turn over the remainder of my life to him than to live it myself. The patron of the arts! It was a repetition of what I knew to be the oldest folly of dependency. I was in chains, a child again. He was almighty in his paternal role and he was vindicated. Each time I accepted the favor of his help, his warm hairy hand tugging mine, I lost another battle in my war on patronage. He had enfeebled my attacks, advanced on me, cut off my retreat, invaded and taken over and occupied me. He was my mad dictator, with designs on the world, and it got so that I could not do without him. He had proved me wrong. I stopped fighting; I regarded his damaging incursions on my freedom as protection, and at last it was as if he had plucked out my eyes, for it was much worse than being returned to the early days of my blindness: I was nothing, no one, I had no name.