“No, I sincerely would. It’s something for the museum. I’ve got the ear of the guy in Acquisitions.”
“Don’t bend it on my account. Like I said, this picture’s got fur on it.”
“We’d still pay.”
“For this?”.
“Sure. Give us world reproduction rights and your worries are over.”
“Frank, do I have worries?”
He winced. “We paid a lot for those Diane Arbus pictures.”
“That freak show,” I said. “Poor gal needed her engine tuned.”
The smaller of the Beeny sisters said, “Her pictures were really strange. I mean, tragic.”
“Quite the reverse,” I said. “Arbus is all comedy, or at least farce. She was like Weegee. She thought those people looked funny. Now get off the pot.”
“I didn’t want to start a discussion about Diane Arbus,” said Frank. “I was just trying to give you an example of what we pay.”
“You haven’t mentioned a price,” I said.
Frank said, “In the neighborhood of a grand.”
“Two is a figure I could live with.”
“We’d have to see the picture first.”
“I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “I told you I ain’t a photographer no more. If you promise not to ask me why, you can have this picture free.”
Frank said, “Let’s have a look at it.”
“That’s against the rules. But I’ll describe it to you.”
“Shoot.”
“It’s got a lot going for it,” I said, “Depth of field, symmetry, a kind of brooding cosmic quality. Texture-wise, it’s grainy understatement, with ominous shadows, like an untitled by Ralph Eugene Meatyard or one of your Wynn Bullock fern studies with a pair of knockers. My heart’s in this, sort of caged in and qualified somewhat by your absence of natural light. It works as an architectonic model—”
I went on in this vein, generally giving him back the critical bull-sugar his sort have been haunting me with for fifty years, the jabber about conceptualizing the vagrant image, redefining the semiology of the foreground and cannibalizing the eye. Quack, quack: I was enjoying myself and he was absolutely lapping it up.
He said, “Okay, say no more — it’s a deal.”
“You lucky stiff,” I said, handing him the envelope.
He was trembling as he tore open the flap, and he looked for a moment as if he was preparing to eat it. Then he pulled it out: my chest x-ray.
He went very quiet. The others leaned over to see what it was. A couple of them were on the point of guffawing. I heard a snort.
Frank said, “That’s not funny.”
“Then why am I laughing?” I said.
Bushrag said, “That’s outasight — it really is an x-ray!”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Frame it, call it Fragments—no one’ll know the difference.” Bushrag was laughing; the rest of them were looking at me as if I had gone off my head, that mourner’s expression of mingled grief and joy. I said, “It’ll win a prize.”
Frank said, “You’re pulling my leg. You haven’t given up photography. You’re not feeling too hot — am I right?’
“Listen, doctor,” I said. “Have you heard the one about the scientist and the frog? No? Well, there was this scientist. He wanted to find out what happened when you cut a frog’s legs off, right? He cuts off the hind legs and says, ‘Jump!’ Frog sort of lurches forward. He cuts off one of the front legs and says ‘Jump!’ Frog drags himself an inch or so. Then the scientist cuts off the remaining front leg and says ‘Jump!’ Nothing happens. He shouts it again. The frog just blinks and sits there.”
“Of course—”
“Wait a sec,” I said. “So what does the scientist do? He’s working for a big foundation — he’s got to produce a report or his Guggenheim won’t be renewed. He’s a researcher, isn’t he? The National Endowment for the Arts just bought him a Cadillac so he won’t defect to the Russians. He takes out his notebook and writes, ‘If you cut the limbs off a frog you make him deaf.’ Get it? Okay, the joke’s over. Now take me home. I’ve had a long day.”
PART TWO
7. My First Picture
SO, now that I had renounced photography for good, the first thing I wanted to get off my chest was my camera. As any damned fool can see, a photographer does not appear in her own pictures except as a dim and occasional reflection — even the greatest one is no more than a gleam in her subject’s eye. It is common enough among painters to do self-portraits, and there is certainly no shortage of writers who put themselves into their books — the most notorious example being your modern writer who can’t describe anyone else, which makes it pretty easy for biographers but holy hell for the rest of us.
It is not the cinch it seems for a photographer to take her own picture, and though it is technically feasible in an age when the amateur shutterbug can shoot halitosis in pitch dark, it is seldom done because — unless you have arms like an ape — it entails rigging the camera and then panting into position, a hectic business like a rather exhausting form of suicide. The results usually bear this out in panicky grins and mad staring eyes. Karsh of Ottawa has been content to remain a fancy signature on his clients’ lapels, and until I met Mr. Greene, so was I. But I didn’t have that thing around my neck anymore, and it seemed high time I considered a memoir. At my age I suspected that it would have the apologetic self-regard of an obituary, but still, wasn’t writing the best form of ventilation? The last picture in this retrospective had to be my own.
Picasso (who loved being photographed stark naked) told me that the surest sign of an artist’s poverty was his selfportrait, and I think he meant the spiritual kind — blubbing into a mirror and not knowing which side you’re on. But looking back over seventy years I saw nothing but wealth and luck and fame. I was not alone in thinking that, though my heart was not always in it, my career had been absolutely triumphant.
My heart was another story. The truth was that of all the people I had ever done, and that includes all your heavies, your Picassos, your Hemingways, your Phil Rizuttos, your T. S. Eliots and E. V. Debses — of all these people, I liked my brother Orlando best. Take D. H. Lawrence. He hated having his picture done, and no wonder. He had a tiny head, a high voice, and reddish whiskers of the sort that crackers call “jeezly.” I found him a most unattractive man who, because he thought he was dynamite sexually, taught me something about the artist’s imagination. The rest of us are healthy; it’s the wounded who take to art: no one wins more races than the cripple in his sleep.
And — to move on — of all the places I had ever seen, this part of the Cape was my favorite, where the pizza joints, pancake parlors, the nautical saloons — all plastic and leatherette — and the drive-in hamburger stands, flanked by salt marsh and pine woods, face the brimming ocean. Orlando was dead, rest his soul, but I often thought of him as I sped along Route 28 in my new Chevy, with the radio going, marveling at how downright frytastic everything looked, this blend of honky-tonk and brooding, swallowing sea — it was pure Pratt, a vindication of vulgarity. I saw the sunset on the Sound through the hole in a giant Styrofoam donut (“Ho-Made Koffee ’n’ Krullers”) and I wanted to holler, “What’s wrong with that!” and to Orlando in Valhalla, “How am I doing!” These were not questions. In the car, tailgating some retired gent who’d come down here in his orange pants and polka-dot shirt and straw fedora to Wrinkle City to check into some beaverboard condominium until there was room in one of our “colonial-style” funeral parlors — tailgating that liniment freak, I had a kind of bottomless reverie about having had the best life anyone could want and how little it showed in the pictures I started to take when, according to Frank, I was eleven.