Phoebe said, “We couldn’t find you anywhere, Maude.”
I smelled a rich odor of apples and summer, bees and blossoms and tomato vines and the fish and salt of the sea, maddening and hurtful.
At dinner that night Orlando said, “If I were you, know what I’d do? I’d take my camera to New York City.” He touched my hand and set a growl going in me. “Yes, I would.”
The next day I went and stayed with those people, the Seltzers.
New York then was stink and noise, the dung of dray horses steaming in the sunlight and dogcarts jumping on the cobbles, Irish families, all woolens and shoes, toting patched bundles and pausing in the reek of beer to turn their white faces toward the fumes of the harshly honking cars. Half the city seemed to live in the street, jostling among the fruit and cats for room. Orlando had ordered me here: I wondered if this descent was a retreat. I had never been so close to such loud strangers — screwballs, swill-pails, fancy signs — and it amazed me to think that I had the same right they did to stare.
I took pictures — bad blundering work that I recall with great tenderness, because I was overwhelmed by the crowds and wanted to photograph those trembling smells, that rapid movement, the laughter of picnickers in Battery Park, the early-morning stables. I tried and turned it into blurs, the kind of crudity that saddened me at the time but later, as memorable imprecision, fed me keenly each vivid line: the ice man in the rubber cape kneeling over a tombstone of frost and dividing it into bricks with the needle-point of his stiletto — the chips flying into his face; the men in aprons mounding sawdust with pushbrooms and the woman screaming “Waldo!” at a weeping child. The sun struck the signs Saloon and WOLFPITS FURRIERS and filled the street with smoldering paint; the trolley cars rattled and sounded their gongs at corners; and I fought to photograph the oddness of it — the mucky gutters, the woman smoking a cigarette, an urchin whacking a ball with a stave, the Chinese grocery, the horses munching out of the trim canvas buckets that fitted their faces like masks. I did not feel I was alone; I believed that the whole world squinted with me through my camera’s lens and that I could call up a stallion from a clumsy hoofprint.
And yet I was alone. I got unexpected strength from this — being able to cover huge distances because there was no one with me. If I went far enough I would get the picture I wanted. Even then I didn’t take the view that one opened one’s eyes and there was one’s masterpiece: that goddamned tree. That was the consolation of laziness (Just look out your own window, the photography handbooks said). It had to be more than that, a quest which after great exertion and occasional luck brought me without sight of my shot; the next few steps composed the picture. My photographs were miles away. I stalked them and saw at the moment of discovery how temporary they were, and how the instant I snapped them they changed and vanished like smoke, or ceased to sing, like a lark in a snare. The life of a picture was that stinging second: there was nothing more.
I was sad over Orlando and had the sad person’s dull stamina, a cranky concentration, as I went about harvesting these split-seconds. One picture showed a huddled family on Mott Street, horses and clutter, Chinese characters splashed down a wall and a window of skinny stretched chickens; but what I remembered best was a song and the smell of frying and the ache of my swollen feet and how Orlando had said, “Don’t forget to come back.” These failures, so irksome then, gave me back the past. I could enter these pictures and start drowning and relive my life.
The back of that head Frank had showed me; it had a face.
It was after I returned from one of these exhausting outings that Mrs. Seltzer opened the front door and said in a hostess’s obliquely warning way — as much for the people inside as for me—“We’ve got company, Maude.”
I looked beyond her and saw six or seven people arguing furiously. They’re just prostitutes,” one man was saying at the top of his voice.
Mrs. Seltzer said, “Watch your language.”
She steered me inside and she introduced me to everyone so fast I just heard my own name six times and didn’t catch anyone else’s. I was glad to sit down in a corner — I didn’t want to stick out and be noticed. Besides the Seltzers there were four men and one plump woman who kept her feet flat on the floor and didn’t say a word or even smile. She reminded me of a throbbing potato. And the small dark whiskery man who had been practically screaming turned to me and said in an accent I could not quite place, “What do you do, lass?”
They had been having tea. This activity stopped with a sudden swelling pause and the room became big and still. Everyone looked at me. I looked at my knotted fingers. I didn’t know what to say.
Mr. Seltzer said, “Maude’s a photographer.”
And saved me.
“Are thee?” said the weasel-faced man, passing his hand across his beard.
“Yes. I’m a photographer.”
You become what others call you, and this was my baptism. Magic: everyone relaxed. From that moment I understood the access a photographer has, the kind of gate-crashing courage the instrument granted. It was like having a title — make way for the queen; and I didn’t even have to show them my pictures. Here I was, seventeen, ignorant, a virgin, not pretty, “a cheap date.” But the statement worked a miracle and changed me, because I am a photographer implied You are my subject. It was much more a novelty then than now. Although photography had been rattling along for a century, cameras were still considered mysterious contraptions and photographers a little suspect in their poaching on the Cubists. Indeed, there was a whole raft of photographers in New York at the time — Stieglitz was only one of them — who were madly signaling their belief that they had killed painting dead with their arsenal of cameras. Photography was new; it was like comedy, it hadn’t been tainted by criticism, it was naive chemistry — leather bellows, smelly bottles, wobbly tripods — done in the dark. It was trying to replace painting by imitating it, so photographs looked freckled and corpselike, soft-focus poses that might have been painters’ instant fossils. The New York notion (which I did not share) was that pictures were made, not found. I had Orlando to thank for my philosophy of the direct approach: I never created pictures — I took them. But, for my supposedly chemical creativity, the people in the room looked at me with curiosity and affection, a kind of friendly trust that made me feel I belonged. It was so simple! Mr. Seltzer had said it, but I believed it, and so in myself, and stopped doubting. Orlando had been right to send me here.
But the dark man said in his high-pitched voice, “Then where’s your bloody camera?”
There was laughter. I said, “It’s right out front in the hall, where I left it.”
“Take my picture,” said the man and showed me his yellow teeth.
“No,” said the plump woman, throbbing at him. “Leave the child alone.”
“What am I doing here?” said the man. His voice was shrill and complaining. “I don’t like it! I don’t want to be here!”
I knew he must be someone famous because no one contradicted him or told him to shut his trap. He was being rude, but the silence seemed to say, “It’s just his way — he’s always like that.” The rest of the people resumed chatting about books, while the little man looked at me hard. His ears were purple, his beard ragged and he looked so sick I felt sorry for him.
I said, “I would very much like to take your picture, but I can’t. It’s just a cheap folding camera and there’s not enough light in this room, as I’m sure you appreciate.”
“Lights!” he cried in that odd accent. “That’s it! You need the sun blazing. You can’t take pictures in the dark.” He leaned over to me. “I can see in the dark — it’s all darkness where I come from. I hate the dark, I’ve had the dark — I crawled out of it and I’ll never go back. The things I’ve seen would scare the likes of you.”