Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

There was enough of America in London for me to be happy there (“I don’t mind Americans,” one of the British jokes went, “but it’s those white chaps they brought with them”). I stayed on long after the Anglophiles had left in disenchantment; I saw no point in leaving. Work had displaced my life, and I was well known to the wire services and the picture agencies. I continued to accept assignments which didn’t compromise my idea of pictures needing a “drowning quotient.” There were some jobs which anyone could have done, and there were others I could make into “Pratts”: a Pratt was indistinguishable from the truth and contained both time past and time future. I had my room in Putney, my career, and my contacts. My work gave me access and so I lived what must have looked from the outside like a life. But it was nothing of the kind.

For my Whose Room? series I decided to do T. S. Eliot. I wrote a letter to him at Faber’s explaining my plan and introducing myself. His reply was formal but hospitable: I am charmed by your idea, but I cannot conceal my keen disappointment that you intend to exclude me from your portrait of my room .

When I got to his house (it was a drizzly Sunday afternoon) he said, “Shall I leave now? I feel I am quite superfluous to your intention.”

“I’ll deal with you later,” I said.

But he was showing me into his study and saying, “It’s quite a proper little room — too proper do you think? It would be vastly enhanced by a provocative mess in that corner, or a book out of place, or perhaps a constellation of bloodstains on the wall. But I’m in the way. Please go on. Do your stuff and then we’ll have tea.”

This mock-serious patter surprised me. He produced it the way a whimsical uncle takes out a water pistol, and wonders at it, and then squirts you in the eye. And the fact that he pretended to be a stuffed shirt only made him funnier.

The desk held writing tools and a blank blue pad and a book in a foreign language that might have been Latin or Greek. On the mantelpiece was a chunk of marble, a photograph of Yeats, and on the wall a small aqueous Turner and a junky impressionist painting of some solidified beef stroganoff. The room was like him and yet had none of his humor.

“I greatly fear I am casting a shadow over your picture.”

“Don’t move,” I said. It was true: his shadow in the gray autumn light rose from the foreground and leaned across the room and broke sadly on the bookshelves. A perfect picture of a writer’s room and deepened by telling details — the paper-knife, the mirror reflecting the coatrack in the hall with its bowler hat and the urn full of walking sticks, the impatient clock and the vase of white roses. I made one alteration. I went over and thumped the stand that held the vase and knocked a shower of rose petals to the carpet.

“Yes,” he said. “It needed that touch.”

I shot until I was satisfied that I had the picture I wanted, one a person could browse upon for an hour or so, and then I said, “If you stand by the fireplace I’ll do one for your scrapbook.”

Standing, not sitting — I wanted his hunch in the picture, the bent back of responsibility. At first he refused, but he allowed himself to be bullied. He gave me his hunch in profile; his face froze in stern reflection at the fallen rose petals. It was a pinched beaky face fitted into a solemn sloping head, with thin slicked-down hair and a tight starched collar and a grim one-syllable mouth, very statesmanly and imperious, but at the same time like a man trying to determine the price of a coffin. He breathed shallowly so as not to disturb his expression, and without batting an eyelash he said, “How do I look?”

“Like a cheese-parer.”

He almost smiled, but he kept it down until his eyes grew damp with concentration. Still staring gloomily at the rose petals, he said, “Mrs. Quormby — she does for me — was scouting for cheeses yesterday at the market. I like a ripe Stilton and I don’t think I would live in a country where I couldn’t get Double Gloucester. The mature Cheddars are lovely at their yellowest, but the young ones are so insipid. Cheshire when it’s crumbly, Caerphilly when it’s wet, or any old Wensleydale. I don’t like a soft cheese unless it’s a Brie or a Camembert — we’ll be seeing a lot more of them now that the war’s over. The Leicesters are best when they’re ruddy. One used to buy them by the wheel — do you know that locution? One has been eating the mousetrap variety for so long one has begun to feel rather like a mouse. I say, am I putting you off?”

He pondered with his pale clerical face, seeming to look into infinity, but he continued chirping about cheeses until I ran out of film.

Over tea, I felt enough at ease with him to say, “By the way, I like The Waste Land .”

“No one,” he said, “has put it to me quite like that before. I am very flattered.”

That was how it went my whole time in London. I took pictures and if no one had a prior claim on them I hoarded them. In the winter of 1946 I held a hugely successful exhibition in a Mayfair gallery. I was well established in Putney and full of plans. Papa wrote and said that Orlando, who had been home for a year, had passed the Massachusetts Bar and was practicing law in Hyannis. I replied that I was about to set off on a trip: India was about to become independent and I longed to do a series of updated Bourne and Shepherd shots of the empire that was about to close up shop. Life had promised me first refusal but said that Margaret Bourke-White was next in line. I would not stop in India, I thought; I’d go on and do a Whose Room? at Mrs. Cameron’s in Ceylon, and Burma, and the aftermath in Japan. And I could travel forever, for I had found that any room was home if it was quiet enough and had the consolation of shadows.

I had rid myself of my life; I had only my work. I did not dine out on my pictures, nor did I seek to be entertained. I made a practice of avoiding friendship with anyone whose picture I had taken: regrets to Eliot, apologies to Forster, so sorry to Bill Astor. Planning the trip, buying an outfit for the tropics, getting a mildew-proof case made for my Speed Graphic — all this kept me occupied in London. When I was lonely I sat down and thought of a likely subject and went out and did him. I could cheer myself up with a general, a great poet, a surgeon, or simply a fellow sufferer — I did my Edward Steichen, my Angus McBean, and my Cecil Beaton at this time.

It was my way of getting grace — by dispensing it; for though I always did the picture I wanted I often consented to do the picture the subject wanted, and I was deft enough to make fools look wise or the plainest meatball endlessly interesting. At the end of a session with an actor, I usually said, “Now let’s have some tears.”

After a tour of the East I would find an obscure room in Mexico or California, or elsewhere. Orlando and Phoebe were no longer part of my life, though they often swam into my thoughts like sudden frogs one mounted on the other’s back, with their legs out, and I looked closer and saw them fucking. The years would roll on and erode my life, but my work if it was any good would exist outside time. I lived timelessly in my work, where disappointments could be reshot, mistakes rectified, errors cropped. It was a world of my own making — a wonderful place. I could not praise too highly the satisfactions of the craft I had compared to raking leaves. It was noiseless, it was not difficult, I could do it drunk or dead tired and it never showed. Within the limits I had set for myself I could do whatever I wished.

I had not earned any of it. I dreaded, as all lucky people do, that 1 would be handed a bill and have to pay up.