But I really aced the night pictures, I really showed him, except of course he didn’t realize it, but I showed this world he finds so glamorous, I showed the pimps and the druggies and the prostitutes and the drunks, and they aren’t glamorous or gorgeous or dangerous or even interesting-looking, they are miserable and empty. If you look at my photographs you might pity them but you certainly wouldn’t want to emulate them, they have bad skin and bad color and tense expressions, except for the occasional Negro male who manages to convey a look of triumph—and who knows, maybe life on the street is better than ordinary life for him. I used to think that if I’d been born a poor girl in the nineteenth century I’d have become a prostitute rather than a mill girl.
Anyway, most of the people I photographed look as if they will be able to stand up only as long as a strong wind doesn’t come through. Oh, they’re tough, I guess, they don’t let on that anything touches them, but in that they’re no different from Brad’s businessman and lawyer friends. All they have is faddish clothes, but I photographed through the clothes, I showed the bone. Well, that’s what I tried to do, that’s what I thought I did. No one else mentioned it.
Farrell called me to tell me the pictures were great but that we wouldn’t plan a mock-up until Sonders’s manuscript was in, and when Sonders delivered it they had drinks together and Farrell praised the pictures, saying the choice of sites was brilliant, and that fucking lousy stinking bastard said he’d chosen the sites because I was young and inexperienced, a little girl, and he was glad he could be of help. Well, Farrell didn’t use Sonders’s words, I had to translate what he told me into Sonders’s language. I was so outraged I couldn’t speak.
And I didn’t speak. I didn’t tell him that bastard was a liar, that that work represented hours of my time each night while Sonders was out drinking or out cold, that Sonders never even went to some of the places I’d shot, and certainly never saw them before the shadows in the place got too heavy, before human footprints defiled the new-fallen snow. Oh, AGGGGGH!
Oh, he adored Sonders’s prose, so lyrical, so evocative, so subtle! (So drunk!) “Sonders never imposes himself or his values; he draws out the spirit of a place, soaking it up to reproduce the poignant life of the underside of great cities.” (What values? Soaking it up is right!) “Like Ernest Hemingway, he is a sophisticate of unspoken feeling, barely gestured action; but his style could not be more different. Sonders is a literary impressionist, using vivid dabs of color with a profound understanding of light to create his sensitive evocative portrayals. Yet despite his many journeys into lost worlds, he has not lost a feeling for the healthy, fundamental part of life. Sonders managed to find, in a great metropolis, little-known corners showing the peaceful, contented world of ordinary people who make up the majority of those who live and thrive in quiet corners of The Real Naked City: New York.”
This is what appeared in the editor’s column, but I could tell that the paragraph came from Farrell, because he was already practicing phrases to send up to William Carney, the editor, when he spoke to me. The drivel about Sonders was followed by a sentence on the photographer: “The photographs were taken by one of World’s most brilliant young beginners, lovely Stacey Stevens.” A stamp-sized picture of me was inserted in the column.
It is not surprising that no one commented on what I thought I had expressed in my pictures, because the text accompanying them, Sonders’s “masterpiece,” as the guys around World referred to it even years later, sentimentalized and idealized the street people, making them sound like the poets of a fallen world, and made the people who lived in the “quiet corners” sound like slightly better-off versions of the same thing. I have to admit it is well-written in a sentimental kind of way, but I hate it because it is dishonest.
It isn’t that I don’t think that we are all in some way alienated—a word Sonders is fond of—from our world. Lots of us feel disconnected. But Sonders romanticizes that disconnection, rhapsodizes about it, instead of showing it for the wretched jarring feeling it is. Like everybody is “half in love with easeful death,” as if that is admirable somehow. He turns the misery of aloneness, disconnection, a sense of not mattering, into heroism.
He idealizes sensitive young men (they are always men, he isn’t interested in women) who cannot find a way to live inside the narrow precincts of middle-class life. My whole life has been a struggle to find a way to live outside those confines, but I just struggle, I don’t dramatize myself. His writing is basically self-aggrandizement. Like the Beats—good name: I’m beat, I was beat, I’ve got the beat. Male self-aggrandizement and self-pity. On the other hand, it’s an alternative image to the usual one of men as conquerors of the wilderness, of the machine, the kind of thing that was my stock-in-trade. I cannot condemn them I guess, without condemning myself.
But why is it they have to counter one false image with another?
2
READING THIS JOURNAL NOW, more than twenty years after I wrote it, I begin to understand something of how I got the way I am, how I got sick, essentially. Oh, I suppose I was always a little—what shall I call it? Neurotic, my mother would say. I think she thinks that means nervous, in the way the old ones used that term—sensitive, delicate, in need of special care. But she doesn’t think I’m neurotic, she thinks she is, and that I am the epitome of health and sturdiness, self-sufficient hardiness. I guess I would say just that I was always unhappy, seriously unhappy, no matter how cheerful I acted. But I got worse as I got older.
The Sonders incident brutalized me in exactly the same way women these days are brutalized by their jobs, making them want to quit and move to Vermont and grow herbs. There were many such incidents over the next years, and with each one I grew another layer of callus—not insensitivity to others, but to my self. Until I reached the point where I couldn’t hear my own heart crying, where my body had to falter and fail before I noticed….
Oh, enough of that.
In March and April of 1960, I had short assignments, one in Detroit, a photoessay on high-school dropouts which I probably drew because of the photographic attitude—which they must have perceived, although they didn’t mention it—of my pictures of street people in New York. This time they wanted a pathetic message. I was gone four days. In April World sent me to the end of Long Island to shoot an idyllic set of pictures about Montauk Point. And it was probably these that gave them the idea to give me a major assignment—a month in Scandinavia, for a long photoessay, in June.
The kids were good kids. Pani spoiled them a little, she let them have their own way about most things, despite my injunctions about homework and bedtime. I couldn’t blame her, she was a babushka, and grandmas aren’t supposed to have to provide discipline. When I returned from Detroit, I had to settle them down a bit, let them yell at me a bit, get rid of their anger with me for leaving them. That was okay. And I took them with me to Montauk. We went over the Easter vacation and stayed in a motel for the four days I shot. That wasn’t easy, I had to keep an eye on them and photograph at the same time. I was harried by the end, and decided not to repeat the experience. The time was gone when I could mix motherhood and photography.
But the trip to Scandinavia was another thing, and it made me cranky. First of all, I couldn’t enjoy my success. I know it seems self-indulgent to complain, but it does seem a shame that I couldn’t exult, couldn’t dance around maypoles and put up flags of self-congratulation in this period when things were going so well for me. If I acted pleased the kids would interpret it as delight at being away from them. They’d gotten used to my being away for four or five days at a time, but a month seemed a huge gap to them. And to tell the truth, to me too. So I felt resentful that I couldn’t take a perfectly normal pleasure in what was happening, and guilty because I felt a month away from them was too long, and I shouldn’t go, but I wanted to.
So there it was, staring me in the face: which came first? I did then what I’ve done many times since, what, I expect, men do all the time. I didn’t pu
t it into words, I just felt it: that the kids would always be there, but the job wouldn’t. This way of thinking was worse than taking things for granted—a euphemistic way of describing things anyway. I was assuming that having kids was simply a biological act, something that didn’t require intelligent and feeling attention. Like having plants and paying somebody to water them once a week. Even plants don’t do well under those conditions. But on the other hand, if I’d turned down the assignment, I’d have resented the kids horribly. There was no solution, except to take them with me, which I couldn’t do. In June they had their final exams; with our new prosperity, Arden had begun ballet lessons, and her class was giving a recital; Billy was to play a bicuspid in his class play; and the school was showing exhibits of social studies projects in the lobby on a special parents’ night. And in any case, World wouldn’t pay their way, they didn’t even know I had kids.
But worst of all was the fact that Brad’s new wife was pregnant, and due to deliver in June.
It’s funny, I’d completely forgotten this whole period until I reread the entries in my journal. It’s clear from what I wrote that by late April of 1960 I knew I was going to Scandinavia, but hadn’t yet found the courage to tell the kids. Brad never found the courage—or never bothered—to tell the kids about the pregnancy. They had learned it by the evidence of their eyes, and had asked Fern when the baby was to be born. Since Brad hadn’t mentioned it, they couldn’t bring it up with him, and they didn’t feel comfortable talking about it with Fern. I imagine they were sullen and withdrawn when they saw Brad, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. At least I hope they were sullen and withdrawn around Brad, because they certainly were around me.
I tried talking to them the way the advice columns in newspapers and magazines suggest—reasonably, kindly. From my journal, April 18:
Over ice cream in the kitchen I offered them pious verities like “When Billy was born, I didn’t love Arden less, I just added Billy to the people I loved. Nor,” I drew it out painfully, “do I love Billy less because I have Arden. I just have two people to love.” They watched me over their spoons. “And it will be the same with Daddy. When the new baby arrives, he’ll care about you just as he does now, he’ll just have an extra person to love.”
Oh, those eyes of theirs! I felt such anguish as I looked at them, as if my heart were being crushed between rocks. Because you never know what’s going on in a child’s mind, even when they are as nearly grown as these two, and looking into their eyes reminded me of how I had tried to interpret their feelings when they were babies, gazing at their eyes, trying to read them. They’d said nothing then, and they said nothing now.
I tried again. “Daddy was probably too embarrassed to tell you about the baby….”
“Yeah, he was probably afraid we’d ask him where babies came from,” Arden interrupted in a cynical drawl shocking in an eleven-year-old. I almost expected her to cross her legs and light up a cigarette. After I blinked, I pulled my face back into shape and continued.
“Maybe. He’s probably embarrassed altogether, you know? He left us, he got another wife, and he probably feels guilty about that….”
The spoons were set down in their bowls. They both peered at me with intense interest.
“But in a way, he isn’t responsible, I mean, we left each other, Daddy and I, we stopped loving each other long before he started to see Fern….”
“So, you can stop loving somebody you used to love,” Arden concluded, a child again, with a child’s hurt firmness.
“Yes, adults. But not your children. You never stop loving your children. Any more than you ever stop loving your parents.”
“No matter how bad they are? No matter how they treat you?”
Dread made my stomach hollow. Were they going to attack me now for leaving them?
“Well, you know, some parents are really terrible to their children—they hit them and punish them for small things, sometimes they’re very stern…”
“Like you when you make us go to bed at nine o’clock,” Billy shot in.
“No, not like that. You don’t know what stern is!” Why was it I could never stay on track when I was talking to these kids?
“Yeah,” Billy agreed, stirring his melting ice cream, “like Mr. McFee, he hits all of them with his belt. Even the baby.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “Everybody knows it. He just whips them all, they’re really scared of him.”
Arden urged her face at mine. “It’s true, Mom. All the kids know. You can hear them yelling sometimes.”
They were looking at me in a fixed intense way. I could see this was a moral quandary for them. And, without thinking, I just burst out, “How horrible!” They glanced hard at each other; something had been resolved.
As I read this over, I search inside the words to see where, how I went wrong, how things came to be the way they are. Did I tell my children that they didn’t have to obey their parents? Because it is clear that Arden at some point felt it unnecessary to obey me. Did I undermine my own authority? But what was I supposed to say? Mincing lies about some parents being stricter than others? Shit!
The other thing that comes through as I read what I wrote about the business with Sonders, arguments and discussions with the kids, is how I gradually trained myself not to show my feelings, and because feelings kept in are terribly painful, how I also trained myself not to feel them….
Because I know, yes I do know, that the worst thing about my present life is not the way my kids are, not even my loneliness (oh, are you admitting you are lonely, Anastasia?), or maybe those things are simply reflections of the worst thing about my life—which is the heavy heart I carry through it.
“Anyway,” I continued, “I’ve known people whose parents did terrible things to them, and who didn’t like them or want to see them when they were grown up, but they still love them, it’s almost tragic, it can’t be helped, the love is there….” I stopped myself, I didn’t like the morass I was getting into. I tried to get things back on track. “And I don’t know any parent who ever stopped loving their child….”
“What if they didn’t love their child to begin with?” Billy asked in a faint voice. Arden looked at him tenderly, then turned a furious glare at me.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore! And I don’t know why you do! Does it make you feel good to upset him?” She left the table, forgetting the ice cream, mostly melted by now anyway, and went into her room and slammed the door.
“Do you think Daddy doesn’t love you?”
Billy moved his head: I couldn’t tell whether he was nodding yes, no, or maybe.
I took his hand. It was sticky and small and soft. “Daddy loves you,” I whispered. “I know he does. He doesn’t know how to show it is all.”
“He kisses Arden.”
“That’s ’cause she’s a girl. He doesn’t kiss you ’cause you’re a boy and…” I caught myself. I couldn’t go into that now. But I had to finish the sentence. “A lot of men think you shouldn’t hug boys. It’s silly, but…”
He looked up at me with those eyes which are so much like mine but bluer, greenish blue instead of greenish brown. “Why, Mommy?”
Oh god, then I did it. I launched into a lecture about the way things are; I told him a little about the way Orson Sonders had treated me because he thinks women should wear high heels and makeup, and how Daddy’s parents didn’t want him to be a musician because they think men should make a lot of money and live in a particular way, the way people have fixed ideas about what girls and boys should be like, I went on and on, stumbling deeper into territory I should have avoided. But if I didn’t know when to stop, he did. He took what he could handle, then began to let his eyes close in tiredness and asked if we could go to the carousel in Baldwin. I agreed with relief.
I went to Scandinavia. I was a little disappointed that my first European trip wasn’t to Paris, Rome, London, or Florence, but Scandinavia was a go
od introduction to travel on your own—even then, many people spoke English, and since it was summer, daylight lasting until midnight, everyone was joyous too. I spent time in the capitals, but also went to the countryside, up the fjords in Norway and all the way to Tromsø at its northern tip, into Jutland in Denmark, and around the southern part of Sweden—landing at Malmö after a swift boat trip from Denmark, and driving to Göteborg, a college town. I made friends everywhere; one guy took me flying at night toward the North Pole, so I could see the northern lights; a group of journalists took me bathing on little islands that dot the coasts of those countries. I’d take a quick swim, then lie out on a rock under the sun. I went walking through the old castle at Elsinore, wondering if in fact Shakespeare had seen it. People took me to the opera, the theater, the ballet, to dinners; I even ate once at the Operakallern, one of the world’s great restaurants, on some man’s expense account. I traveled by train, plane, and boat, and even by cart.
I took wonderful pictures. From the deck of a ship cruising the fjords, I took panoramas with my new telephoto lens. The water—opaque, silvery, calm—blended with the sky, which was the same color and just as opaque. Huge bare stone mountains rose up all around, one silence speaking to another. I had fun, I played with my camera—shooting the mountains reflected in the water instead of the actual mountains. Occasionally we’d pass a village curled in the crook of a mountain arm, houses made of what looked like yellowed old stucco, all orange-roofed; stone streets, and the masts of sailboats swaying gently at the pier that was lapped quietly by the still fjord water. The masts moved me, they were beautiful but they were also necessary, people could always look out from their windows to make sure their lifeline was still there.