Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

My luck was an ocean mirroring the sky and stretching to that threshold on the horizon beyond which, so the lover believes, there is more ocean. I was buoyant enough and, at forty, was shot of all desires and entanglements. Once, in blind seclusion, I had been older than this and had enjoyed it. I looked forward to the day when I would be leathery and have a mustache and could fart and burp and say any fool thing that came into my head; I would have the authority that went with white hair and deafness.

I indulged myself in the Star and Garter Mansion in the Mitty-dream I had seen in so many people of accomplishment — that feeling that underneath the glamor and achievement one was a very simple soul, saying “Golly” and “Darn it” and dotting on cheese and biscuits. I didn’t create pictures — I found them. What luck! But anyone with a good camera and a free afternoon could have done the same or better. I called them “Pratts” because the critics did, but “Pratts” were only the world in focus, the few feet of it I could manage with my peepstones. I could go to India or wherever and do the same.

I was setting out to do that very thing when the cable came.

I almost chucked it away without reading it. I’d had enough cables to last me a lifetime and I assumed it was just another one promising me the moon or saying I was swell. But thinking it might be an update on the India jaunt I ripped it open.

The message, in strips of tape, was brief and brutally glued to the flimsy paper. I did not understand it until I had read it three times and could separate the words and give them the right emphasis. Even then, I could barely translate the words: there had been a boating accident, Orlando and Phoebe had drowned, I was to go home immediately— boating accident? drowned? I had questions, but a cable has no nuances; it is a foreign language, cryptic at its baldest.

The paper I held in my hand was stupid, innocent, not comprehending its terrible news. Already I was looking around the room for support and in my hysteria saw the tiny curled squares of newly printed pictures — so trivial and mocking I screamed at them. My voice terrified me. It seemed to come from outside my room, where I had left my life, and its echo was a succession of other sounds, like the harsh gasp of a cat when it sneezes.

“ALL MANIACS have a spitting image,” I was saying to Frank. “And listen — not only maniacs!”

Our Guggenheim Fellow was still rifling the windmill. Though I had kept pace with him in recalling the circumstances of the pictures he had progressively unearthed, I had paused so often to frame these strange events in my mind that my own retrospective lagged behind the pictorial one he was assembling. I was like a child being led away, but delayed on her journey because she keeps glancing back to remember. Mentally, I was in London, reading the terrible telegram: I had no picture of that. What happened next? I was stuck in grief, and Frank had skipped ahead ten years or more, sorting pictures of yet another European visit. In his hand was the portrait of Ezra Pound which, a moment before, occasioned my remark about maniacs.

It was the crazy-haired old man portrait showing Ezra the ham-bone singing loony tunes with his eyes shut. Ro-hoses are bloo-hooming, Te-hell me troo-hoo .

“What I don’t get,” said Frank, rattling the picture — he had more under his arm, the morning’s harvest—“is why didn’t you have a retrospective ten years ago?”

“Because it would have meant,” I said, and I stopped. I looked at his silly searching face: if I told him some I’d have to tell him all. I said, “I didn’t go into the windmill ten years ago.”

“You don’t go in there now.”

“Troo-hoo,” I said, glancing at Ezra. Or twenty, when I did this European batch; or thirty, when I arrived after the long flight from London — too late to go to Orlando and Phoebe’s funeral. What was the point in my delving? The windmill, however palatial a structure — raised up on our Cape Cod lawn like a Dutch forgery — had become an anteroom of my memory, a catchbasin for my pictures, an attic, a shrine. It was to my work what a corresponding piece of my bunched-up brain was to my life, another set of crenelations and ramparts, containing the past. As a picture-taker I had ruled like a queen, but in this retrospective I wished to be a subject.

I had always been orderly: I threw nothing away. The windmill held my photos and the picture palace of my imagination another set, a different version of the past. I had thought that someday I would chance the windmill — I’d go in and have a good look. But I had not dared: ghosts thrashed on the floor, the double image of lovers who had not known what I had seen in those blinding seconds before the war. It had never been mine, not any more than Orlando had been mine. I could use it like an attic, but like an attic it was not a place I could live in. I would not deceive myself further or disturb those ghosts.

All Papa had said was, They went out too far . Of course: it was why they had been so happy and why they died. I accepted the explanation, and I wasn’t desolated, because a person’s death is easier to take if he had known a great passion. Only the death of children, of the ignorant and inexperienced, is truly tragic, the loss of people who die never having lived. I could not but feel that, out too far and knowing the risks, Orlando and Phoebe had capsized and danced on the waves for a while in each other’s arms. Celebrating their secret, they had known ecstasy.

It had nothing to do with me. They had lived without me and loved and died; and neither had seen me. It had made me solitary, which is the first condition of a photographer. I was, as I had always been, alone, just a peeping picture-taker. Don’t mind me — pretend I’m not here. And the windmill with its stilled sails, once alight with their love, was all that remained. I might stick my head in and leave my pictures behind, but I had no right to linger there. They had consecrated every corner. It was a shrine: I left my pictures as offerings.

Knowing what I knew, it was almost amusing to hear Frank ask me why I had never rifled the windmill myself and assembled a retrospective. Ignoramuses pose the hardest questions!

But I could not be angry with Frank. He was doing the spadework. Interested in my pictures he had interested me in my life, and his sifting and sorting had made it possible for me to re-enter the past without going into the windmill. He preceded me, cued me, triggered my memory; he was the mechanical medium by which I could examine my picture palace. But my work — as I had told him — was the least important thing about my life; and the rest, which had always been separate and impermanent, a source of ceaseless wonder.

The fellow knew nothing. He did not even know Orlando’s name. For Frank, I was my work, and short of autobiography there seemed no way of proving to him that my story was not in my pictures. It was all off-camera, in the pitch of my blind body’s witness. And yet I needed Frank to remind me of that contradiction.

“I’ve always liked this one,” he said, still looking admiringly upon the squinched face of Ezra Pound, that crumpled rubber road map.

“That’s just what I mean,” I said, following my own train of thought. I wondered if I should let him in on the secret. “There’s quite a story behind that picture.”

He became attentive in the cringing way that is characteristic of fellowshippers who are fearful, hearing a secret revealed, that their reaction might be wrong: they might laugh too hard or too soon or not at all, the cash a dead weight on their sense of spontaneity. “I’ve got work to do,” Frank was always saying — but if I found it hard to take my own work seriously, how could I keep a straight face about his?