Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

“Delighted,” he said. He shook my hand, then looked at his pocked watch.

“Let me do you holding that pen.”

He showed me the object between his fingers and transformed it into an unlit cigar: magic. He smiled and lit it lovingly. Coffee and chocolate cakes were brought and we were joined, one by one, by people: wife, children, young men and women who weren’t introduced. They watched him attentively and leaned forward when he spoke.

I said, “You must be happy here. Huxley says it’s like Vienna.”

“I wonder if he knows Vienna,” said Mann. “It is various in this city. Plastic. But I make no such comparisons.”

“I’m going to Europe pretty soon.”

His gaze deepened with thought. He said, “The cockpit.” Then, “What of your family?”

Before I knew it (perhaps because he was so correct and cultured and I was, in my own defense, trying hard to please) I was telling him how my parents had taken me to the opera and encouraged us to be music lovers. I ransacked my memory for episodes and, relating them, saw that he was particularly struck by the one in which Orlando and I had gone out to the fire escape during the concert at Symphony Hall; and how the man passing below had looked up at us and joined us in some mystical way, not as brother and sister, but more profoundly marrying our souls.

“I suppose you could say it was a blessing”—what was I saying? I thought I had been talking about music! — “the way this stranger looked up and smiled at the two of us.”

“I know that young man,” he said. “I could tell you his name.”

More magic. Did he wink? It certainly looked that way.

Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was reassured, for just as Huxley had been charmed by my memory of Lawrence, Mann responded to this childhood incident. I was glad that I remembered enough of my past to interest my subjects.

“If you just stay put,” I said, “the others can sort of group around you.”

I saw a nice courtly picture, with the friends and relations standing around the great man. But he wouldn’t have it. He insisted on standing, half turned, with one hand in his jacket pocket and the cigar in his other hand and the folks extended between two fringed floor lamps against the drapes — a very corny arrangement, as if they were all waiting for a bus.

“Erika is in London,” he said, when I was done. “You will send some reproductions for her?”

I promised I would and he took out his pocket watch: time to go.

There was only one more picture to do. I had been asked by Life to update their files. Their picture of William Faulkner was a studio shot that had obviously been retouched to make him look like a confederate colonel. “Get him looking human,” the picture editor said. I remembered that Orlando had mentioned him and admired several of his books, one apparently dealing with Harvard, which he had started to read to me during my early blind period and then stopped, saying, “This wouldn’t make any sense to you”—I suspected that he gave it to Phoebe to read, because for the next few days, engrossed in the book, she flicked pages and her body purred.

Faulkner, I learned, was staying at the Highland Hotel in Hollywood, a semirespectable residential hotel done up in a kind of ulcerated stucco. There was no one at the front desk the day I visited, so — seeing his name and room number on the key board — I went directly to his room. I knocked and waited, and getting no response I tried the door.

It was unlocked: I stole in. The curtain was half open and through the French windows I could see a bright balcony and an armchair. On a table near me were crumpled pages of typescript, an old newspaper, and two copies of God Is My Co-Pilot . In the air was a sweet rotten-walnut stink of bourbon whisky, but apart from the sound of traffic and the sizzle of California sunlight the room was quiet. I peeked into the next room — an empty unmade bed — and I was about to leave when I saw a half-filled glass next to the telephone and a bottle and ice bucket. It looked like an interrupted boozing session, as if he had just stepped out. The room had the lived-in appearance of a warm mangled nest, the disorder of anticipation, a certain nervous premonition.

I considered photographing the room— Whose Room? , another series: identify the inhabitant from the dents in the chairs and the dirty glasses and ashtrays and books. I had taken off my dust-cap to act on this impulse, and then I saw him.

He was lying face up on the floor, one hand across his chest, the other pillowing his head; and his legs were poised in a twinkle-toes angle, as if he had died in a dance-step. My first thought was that he was dead — he had busted a gut or had been robbed and killed. But there was no blood anywhere. I went closer and heard him breathe. A moment ago I hadn’t heard it; now his snores filled the room with the ripsawing of his drunken doze. As he lay there on the cool floor I could see how small he was — tiny feet, tiny mustache, pretty hands, and in his shorts his hairy little legs. He had a typist’s powerful shoulders and though he was flat on his back and unconscious he had a victim’s innocent dignity.

This supine man in a bleak Hollywood hotel room would, I knew, be fixed in my mind as emblematic of art. I could not hear the word “literature” without thinking of Lawrence’s halitosis or O’Neill’s dandruff, or the word “photography” without remembering pictures I had never taken, such as our windmill in the rain. People pretended that art was complete, but it had another side that was hidden and human and wept and stank and snored and died; and I wondered whether it was not perhaps truer than creation.

If Faulkner had been dead I would have done him. But he was only drunk, poor man, and I guessed why. I went away and locked the door and never regretted not taking that picture. Indeed, I was glad it was I who found Faulkner that day, and not another photographer out to make a name for herself.

Before I sailed for Europe I stopped at Grand Island, but I warned them that I wasn’t going to stay for long. I had one detail to attend to. My darkroom had to be emptied and all the paraphernalia of my peepshow secured.

“What’s that?” asked Phoebe, who looked more than ever the war-bride.

“Guard this with your life,” I said. It was the trunk, a so-called steamer trunk, with brass fittings and decayed labels. There was a padlock on the outside and the shots I wanted suppressed — bad ones, amateur ones, the pictures I had found in my camera and processed blind — on the inside. I had not had eyes to see many of these pictures, and now that I had eyes I didn’t have the heart. They were blind pictures, they belonged in darkness, and because I had no intention of ever looking at them I put this trunk in the windmill, a memory I vowed never to re-enter. I left my own room empty. It was my way of telling everyone that I was out for good, but all I said was, “I might be away for some time.”

I meant it ominously: I had no plans to come back. I had my photography and I was free of all desires. It was a useful rootless trade, and if one took the Eisenstadt view one could roam the world like a gypsy, tinkering and pushing on. I had my skill, I had proven my ability to come up with the goods, and I was at last the equal in reputation, if not in accomplishment, of the people I photographed — perhaps the most crucial factor in photography, since subject is everything and technique only something to conceal.

Papa said, “Say, that reminds me. Our friend Woody is dead. He was killed in Leyte in October.”

No one understood why at that moment I burst into tears.

“But Ollie’s fine,” Mama said. “They put him in charge of all the combat photographers. He’s going to be all right. Tell us about California.”