July 22, 2013 Issue

Saul Bellow forged a brilliant style. But in the process, according to Greg Bellow’s Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir, he sacrificed a son. Was it worth it? James Wood’s absorbing “Sins of the Father,” in this week’s issue, says yes. Wood writes, “In two or three generations, that story will have faded from memory, outlived by what it enabled.” Wood’s verdict is too harsh. It’s true that most future readers of such masterpieces as The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet will not likely bother to go behind the books to Bellow’s personal history. But those few who do will find the son’s memoir. It’s now part of the record. As Janet Malcolm said in respect of Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, “But Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty” (“A House of One’s Own,” in Malcolm’s great Forty-one False Starts).

Postscript: My two favorite sentences in this week’s issue: (1) “Overhead, banner planes towed news of extraordinary holiday mattress deals, while bored-looking lifeguards, with no one to save, lounged in their chairs” (John Seabrook, “The Beach Builders”); (2) “But the literary assessments are so wrongheaded as to give the book a migraine of unreliability” (James Wood, “Sins of the Father”).  

Second Postscript: I was pleased to find a piece by Christine Smallwood in this week’s issue. Her “The In-Between World,” a review of the Dardennes’ great The Kid with a Bike (The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2012), was one of last year’s highlights. I look forward to seeing more of her work in the magazine. 

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part IV

There’s a basic paradox at the core of Janet Malcolm’s brilliant deconstructive style: despite her express distrust of narrative as a means of representing reality, she uses the novels of, among others, Henry James, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy as sources of meaning-making. For example, in her superb “A House of One’s Own” (The New Yorker, June 5, 1995; included in her new collection Forty-one False Starts), Malcolm says, “Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel.” But, earlier in the same essay, she writes, “The legend of Bloomsbury has taken on the dense complexity of a sprawling nineteenth-century novel, and its characters have become as real to us as the characters in Emma and Daniel Deronda and The Eustace Diamonds.” How real is that? It’s not real at all if you accept, as I do, Malcolm’s central tenet that “our lives are not like novels,” that we should accept life’s inherent messiness and “live without a story” (“Six Roses ou Cirrhose?,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic).

Zoë Heller, in her engrossing review of Forty-one False Starts, says, “The tension between the messiness of truth and the false tidiness of art is Malcolm’s great subject” (“Cool, Yet Warm,” The New York Review of Books, June 20, 2013). This is well said. Malcolm is skeptical of narrative art’s ability to represent life’s disorderliness. But it appears her skepticism admits at least two exceptions: (1) certain nineteenth century novels; (2) certain journals, memoirs, and letters. Regarding this second exception, she says of Vanessa Bell’s letters: “Vanessa’s letters make us care about these long-dead real people in the way novelists make us care about their newly minted imaginary characters.” Here, once again, Malcolm’s “novelists” analogy seems at odds with her “life is not a novel” theory.

Malcolm’s “A House of One’s Own” is curious in another way, as well. It departs from the usual journalistic mission of finding the real story behind the legend. Instead, it defends the legend (“the legend of Bloomsbury”) against a perceived threat – Angelica Garnett’s memoir, Deceived with Kindness (1987). Malcolm says,

Angelica denies that Vanessa was a splendid mother and believes Vanessa’s life was a shambles. Her book introduces into the Bloomsbury legend the most jarring shift in perspective. Until the publication of Deceived with Kindness the legend had a smooth, unbroken surface.

Malcolm calls Angelica’s book an “attack from within.” But she also considers it “a primary document,” one that “cannot be pushed aside, unpleasant and distasteful though it is to see a minor character arise from her corner and proceed to put herself in the center of a rather marvelous story that now threatens to become ugly.”

Angelica’s memoir seriously provokes Malcolm. She’s written about it before. In “What Maisie Didn’t Know” (The New York Review of Books, October 24, 1985; included in The Purloined Clinic), she says,

Angelica’s psychological insights seem half-baked (significantly, they are almost always insights into the motives of others), and the discussion of her complicated relationship with her mother – though it forms the matrix of the book – remains on a vague, platitudinous level.

In “A House of One’s Own,” Malcolm returns to this point, saying,

We withhold our sympathy [from Angelica] not because her grievance is without merit, but because her language is without force…. Angelica cloaks and muffles the complexity and legitimacy of her fury at her mother in the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.

In “Cool, Yet Warm,” Zoe Heller says she finds this passage “shocking” (“In the absence of moral certainty, Malcolm suggests our sympathies are assigned on what are essentially aesthetic grounds – on the basis of who has the more attractive language, or the more engaging style. This is a rather shocking proposition and it is meant to be”). Is that what Malcolm is saying? I’m not so sure. Language that is “vague” and “platitudinous” is “without force.” It’s unpersuasive. This, I think, is Malcolm’s point.

Interestingly, “A House of One’s Own” appears to temper “What Maisie Didn’t Know” ’s harshness, concluding that “Angelica’s cry, her hurt child’s protest, her disappointed woman’s bitterness will leave their trace, like a stain that won’t come out of a treasured Persian carpet and eventually becomes part of its beauty.”

My favorite part of “A House of One’s Own” is Malcolm’s description of her visit to Vanessa Bell’s Charleston Farmhouse, “now a museum, complete with a gift shop, teas, lectures, a twice-yearly magazine, and a summer-study program.” Reading it, I recalled April Bernard’s “What I Hate About Writer’s Houses” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2011, in which she says,

Here’s what I hate about writers’ houses: the basic mistakes. The idea that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

Malcolm’s inspired description of her Charleston visit counterpoises Bernard’s dour view. She writes,

The ubiquitous decorations only extend our sense of Charleston as a place of incessant, calm productivity. They give the house its unique appearance, but they do not impose upon it. They belong to the world of high art and design, the world of postimpressionist painting and early-modernist design, and yet, quite mysteriously, they are of a piece with the English farmhouse that contains them and with the English countryside that enters each room through large, old-fashioned windows. During my tour of the house, I was drawn to the windows as if by a tropism. Today, we come to the house to see the decorations and the painting that Clive and Vanessa and Duncan collected as well as the ones that Vanessa and Duncan produced; but what Clive and Vanessa and Duncan looked at when they entered a room was the walled garden and a willow and the pond and the fields beyond, and as I looked out the window they had looked out of, I felt their presence even more strongly than I had when examining their handiwork and their possessions.

Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts is an endless source of literary stimulation. It branches in so many interesting, intricate directions – towards transfixing art (Arbus’s, Weston’s, and Struth’s photographs, Salle’s canvases), intriguing visits (to Salle’s studio, a Struth photo session, Vanessa Bell’s Charleston, Rosalind Krauss’s loft), brilliant writing (Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf, Carol Armstrong’s “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” The Daybooks of Edward Weston), and Malcolm’s own extraordinary oeuvre (e.g., her wonderful 1980 Diana & Nikon). It’s a great collection. I’m enjoying it immensely.

(This is the fourth part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts.)

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part III

Is Janet Malcolm’s view of Irving Penn’s photography a case of pay attention to what I do, not what I say? I think so. In her early essay on Penn, “Certainties and Possibilities” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1975; included in her 1980 collection Diana and Nikon), a review of a MoMA exhibition of Penn’s photographs of cigarette butts, she says, “Penn’s butts efface reality.” It’s one of the most devastating (and memorable) art criticisms I’ve ever read. What I treasure in art is its realism – depiction of, in Edward Weston’s famous words, “the thing itself.” Here’s a photographer, Malcolm says, pointing at Penn, who uses his camera – that most accurate of devices - not to capture reality, but to erase it. It’s an audacious claim, yet Malcolm’s piece persuasively makes the case:

Penn’s pictures of butts exhibit all the rough oddity of the found art object that emerges from the enlargement of a murky detail in a torn, unregarded snapshot or of a quaintly drab illustration in an old textbook; they partake of the transformation that quilts and ship propellers and industrial tools undergo when they are wrested from their functional context and put on show for their aesthetic qualities. And they suffer from the same paradoxical devitalization that comes over useful objects when they are no longer in use. The tacky machine-made synthetic comforter on the bed has more connection with life – is more genuine, in its way – than the handsome antique quilt that hangs on the wall as if it were a painting, and in this respect Penn’s sleek pictures of clothes and caviar in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, far from paling before the rough vigor of his pictures in the museum show, present a kind of rebuke to the latter’s false vernacularism.

Irving Penn, "Cigarette No. 86," 1972

Malcolm, in her “Certainties and Possibilities,” also looks at Penn’s portraits. She says that they are “first of all Penns and only incidentally pictures of individuals.” She says, in what is, for me, her clinching argument,

Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens. He lures them into his studio, sits them on cloth-draped structures, subjects them to a north light that shadows half of each face, and sometimes literally pushes them into a corner that his brutal direction has put them emotionally.

Malcolm quotes from Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room (1974), in which he says, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” Yes, Penn’s method is transformative, but not in a good way, Malcolm seems to say, in “Certainties and Possibilities.” Looking at Worlds in a Small Room’s pictures of artificially posed Peruvian Indians, Spanish gypsies, San Francisco Hell’s Angels, etc., I agree. They are, to use Malcolm’s excellent word, devitalized.

In her “Nudes Without Desire” (The New York Review of Books, April 11, 2002; included in her splendid new collection Forty-one False Starts), Malcolm continues her critique of Penn’s transformative approach. This time her subjects are two shows of Penn’s photograph’s of female nudes – the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949-50 and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Dancer: 1999 Nudes by Irving Penn. Regarding Earthly Bodies, Malcolm says, “The photographs immediately raise questions about their making.” She describes Penn’s “darkroom hocus-pocus” as follows:

Step one was to obliterate the image by overexposing the printing paper to such a degree that it turned completely black in the developer. Step two was to put the black paper into a bleach solution that turned it white. Step Three was to put the white paper into a solution that coaxed back the image, but only up to a point – the point where the earthly bodies exhibit an unearthly pallor and, in certain cases (such as the catalog cover picture), a flat abstractness that human bodies assume only in primitive and modernist art.

Once again, according to Malcolm, Penn has produced a series of devitalized (“flat,” “unearthly”) images. This isn’t the only similarity with his butt pictures. The type of body he’s chosen to photograph is ugly. Malcolm says, “The idea seems to be to make beautiful pictures of ugly bodies.”

Looking at the Dancer nudes, Malcolm says she “has trouble keeping a straight face.” She writes, “As Beller [Alexandra Beller, Penn’s model], with lowered eyes or averted gaze, strikes one absurdly theatrical attitude after another, Penn photographs her with an almost religious solemnity.” Comparing the Dancer nudes with E. J. Bellocq’s nudes, she says, “Penn’s dancer has nothing in common with Bellocq’s larkily relaxed whores.” She refers to the “wonderful warmth and life” of Bellocq’s photographs.

Malcolm makes an exception for the last eight photographs taken at the final Dancer session. She says, “They show the dancer in motion and have a “mysterious blurred painterliness.” “But,” she says, “they cannot change the show’s overall daunting impression.” She concludes “Nudes Without Desire” with the observation that “Not all experimental work works,” and that Penn erred in his decision to show the Earthly Bodies series and Dancer’s first nineteen images.

Janet Malcolm, "Burdock No. 1," 2005-07

But what Malcolm rejects in “Certainties and Possibilities” and “Nudes Without Desire,” she appears to embrace in her own photography and in her essay “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). In “Burdock,” she says, echoing Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room, “Taking a picture is a transformative act.” And the method she uses to photograph her burdock leaves is the same artificial one that Penn used to photograph his butts. She describes it as follows:

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontist’s waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables – these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

Decontextualization is exactly the process Penn used to photograph his cigarette butts, his ugly nudes, and the various “simple people” (Penn’s condescending words) depicted in his Worlds in a Small Room. It’s the very process that Malcolm previously criticized (rightly, in my opinion) as “devitalizing” and “effacing reality.” Now, in an interesting volte-face, she says it’s “beautiful in a particular way … the way of modernist art and architecture and design.” Obviously, Penn has influenced her more than she admits. In “Certainties and Possibilities,” she says, “Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens.” That’s exactly the treatment she accords her burdock leaves. In “Burdock,” she says,

But I also see images that pre-date modernism: namely, the illustrations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century herbals and works of botanical science, whose subjects have been similarly plucked from nature and rendered in splendid unnatural isolation. Although these decontextualizations are in aid of identification and classification, the old botanical artists were hardly immune to the beauty of the forms they scrutinized with such care. Looking at natural forms close up is an exercise in awe. The botanical illustrators never failed to convey their sense of the mystery that adheres to the gorgeousness of the particulars of the things that are alive in the world. These photographs were made under their inspiration.

Like “the old botanical artists,” and like Irving Penn, whose method, she said, treated people “like botanical specimens,” Malcolm has chosen to render her subjects in “splendid unnatural isolation.” Are her denatured burdock leaves beautiful? No and yes. No, they’re not beautiful; they’re dry, devitalized, lifeless. They lack the “wonderful warmth and life” that Malcolm says she finds in Bellocq’s photographs. They efface burdock reality. But wait a minute. My tactile imagination is now in play. There’s another way of looking at them; my fingers accompany my eyes. Yes, they are beautiful – for their crumbly, wrinkly, time-eaten texture. Texture is, as Bernard Berenson pointed out in Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1952), an important aesthetic element. Malcolm’s burdock leaves have it; so do Penn’s butts. 

(This is the third part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm's Forty-one False Starts.)

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part II

In late 2003, two remarkable Diane Arbus exhibitions (and accompanying catalogs) – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Diane Arbus Revelations and Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art’s Diane Arbus: Family Albums - attracted the attention of two of America’s greatest critical writers – Janet Malcolm and Judith Thurman. Thurman’s review, "Exposure Time," appeared in the October 13, 2003, New Yorker, and was later included in her superb Cleopatra’s Nose (2007). Malcolm’s piece, "Good Pictures," was originally published in the January 15, 2004, New York Review of Books, and now, nine years later, wonderfully reappears in her excellent new collection Forty-one False Starts. Both pieces are brilliant. It’s interesting to compare them, as much for what they may tell about Malcolm’s and Thurman’s style, as for what they reveal about Arbus’s work. (I’m as interested in the way Malcolm and Thurman write as I am in the way Arbus took pictures.)

The first thing to note is that Thurman’s piece is a book review; it considers only the exhibition catalogs. In contrast, Malcolm’s review covers both the exhibitions and the catalogs. This is a significant difference that accrues to Malcolm’s benefit. Her critical approach thrives on comparative analysis. In her “Good Pictures,” she pounces on a fascinating discrepancy between the Family Albums exhibition and the Family Albums catalogue and uses it to illustrate what constitutes, in her words, “true Arbus photographs.” I’m referring to the point late in Malcolm’s narrative in which she reports that the younger Matthaei daughter, Leslie, “suddenly decided she didn’t want any pictures of herself published.” As Malcolm explains, this meant that Arbus’s Leslie portraits were viewable only at the show, not in the catalog. This fact generates a quintessentially Malcolmian line: “When I went to see the Mount Holyoke show, I naturally sought out the missing pictures of Leslie and immediately understood why she had not wanted them preserved in a book.” I find that sentence thrilling for at least three reasons: (1) it shows Malcolm entering her narrative, making a story of her pursuit of a story; (2) it turns a trip to the gallery into a form of psychoanalytic inquiry (what is it about the portraits that Leslie is repressing?); (3) it creates a delicious anticipation of Malcolm’s description of what the Leslie portraits look like. With respect to this last point, Malcolm doesn’t disappoint. Immediately following the above-quoted sentence, she writes: “Leslie, an attractive girl, is the disobliging daughter, the Cordelia of the shoot. In almost every photograph, she sulks, glares, frowns, looks tense and grim and sometimes even outright malevolent.”

Malcolm then makes another brilliant analytic move – a comparison of the Leslie portraits with those of her older sister, Marcella. In what is perhaps the piece’s most memorable line, she writes, “Marcella gave Arbus what Leslie refused.” It’s like a line from a novel. Malcolm reads the pictures as a story about how Arbus made art from what appeared to be a hopelessly banal family photo shoot. In fact, earlier in “Good Pictures,” she says, “The uncut Matthaei contact sheets straightforwardly tell the story of Arbus’s two-day struggle with her commissions.” The art that emerged from this struggle are the two Marcella portraits. Malcolm describes them unforgettably:

The two portraits of Marcella that Lee and Pultz reproduce in the book are true Arbus photographs. They have the strangeness and uncanniness with which Arbus’s best work is tinged. They belong among the pictures of the man wearing a bra and stockings and the twins in corduroy dresses and the albino sword swallower and the nudist couple. Like these subjects, Marcella unwittingly collaborated with Arbus on her project of defamiliarization. The portraits of Marcella – one full-figure to the knees, and the other of head and torso – show a girl with long hair and bangs that come down over her eyes who is standing so erect and looking so straight ahead of her that she might be a caryatid. The fierce gravity of her strong features further enhances the sense of stone. Her short, sleeveless white dress of crocheted material, which might look tacky on another girl, looks like a costume from myth on this girl. To contrast the pictures of balky little Leslie with those of monumental Marcella is to understand something about the fictive nature of Arbus’s work. The pictures of Leslie are pictures that illustrate photography’s ready realism, its appetite for fact. They record the literal truth of Leslie’s fury and misery. The pictures of Marcella show the defeat of photography’s literalism. They take us far from the family gathering – indeed from any occasion but that of of the encounter between Arbus and Marcella in which the fiction of the photograph is forged.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (Marcella Matthaei)," 1969

I confess, as much as I admire this passage for its extraordinary interpretative beauty and originality, I find it disorienting. Nothing that’s gone before it, in “Good Pictures,” prepares the reader for critical phrases such as “project of defamiliarization,” “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work,” and “the fiction of the photograph.” In fact, if you are reading the essays in Forty-one False Starts serially from the beginning, you will have already encountered Malcolm’s observation, in  “Depth of Field,” that “Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness.” I don’t know if it’s possible to reconcile these two views. “Inescapable truthfulness” would seem to preclude fictionalization, unless Malcolm is reading the Marcella portraits as a type of narrative truth. Perhaps she is. Recall that in her great essay, “Six Roses ou Cirrhose” (The New Yorker, January 24, 1983; included in her 1992 collection, The Purloined Clinic), she defines narrative truth as “the truth of literary art.” Perhaps “the fictive nature of Arbus’s work” and “the fiction of the photograph,” in the sense that Malcolm uses them in “Good Pictures,” means “the truth of photographic art.”

If you read Judith Thurman’s “Exposure Time” after you read Malcolm’s “Good Pictures,” you might think that Thurman missed the story. In a way, she did. Not only does she not mention the Leslie and Marcella portraits, she devotes only three lines to Diane Arbus: Family Albums (“The pictures she took for the album, which was never published, were commissioned by magazines or by private clients, and some were made for art’s sake. Like all her work, they explored the nature of closeness and disaffection, sameness and anomaly, belonging and exclusion: the tension between our sentimental expectations of what is supposed to be and the debacle of what is. Arbus put it more simply to Crookston: ‘I think all families are creepy in a way’”). Instead, Thurman focuses on Diane Arbus: Revelations, which she calls the “much more ambitious Arbus show.”

But Thurman has her own Arbus story to tell or, rather, more accurately, her own Arbus brief to argue. “Exposure Time” is a tour de force of descriptive analysis that powerfully defends Arbus against, in Thurman’s words, “the hostility to her transgressions.” Thurman quotes Susan Sontag’s accusation that Arbus explored “an appalling underworld” of the “deformed and mutilated.” In rebuttal, Thurman says, “The respect and sympathy for her freaks that Arbus expresses in her letters – particularly those to her children – and her apparently solicitous, ongoing engagement with them, is at odds with the view that she was exploiting their credulity.” Conceding that Arbus was “cunning and aggressive,” she adds, “but so are many photographers.” She says,

Photography was then, and still is, a macho profession, and if she took its machismo to greater extremes than her peers of either sex, it was in part to scourge her native timidity and to prove that she had the balls to join her subjects’ orgies, share their nudity, endure their stench, revel in their squalor, and break down their resistance with a seductively disarming or fierce and often sexualized persistence until she “got” a certain expression: defeat, fatigue, slackness, anomie, or demented joy.

Diane Arbus, "Untitled (7)," 1970-71

Rereading “Exposure Time,” I’m struck by the naturalness of Thurman’s style. She is much more natural than Malcolm. Her lines are longer, richer, more sensuous and vivid. For example, here from “Exposure Time,” is her wonderful description of Arbus’s great Untitled (7):

In one of her masterpieces, “Untitled (7),” the rural landscape seems bathed in the lowering and eerie radiance of an eclipse, and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects—descendants of Goya’s gargoyles—march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear. A grave child of indeterminate sex with a painted mustache and averted gaze holds hands with a masked old woman in a white shift. They are oblivious of—and in a way liberated from—Arbus’s gaze. After years of posing her subjects frontally, she had begun to prefer that they did not look at her. “I think I will see them more clearly,” she wrote to Amy, “if they are not watching me watching them.”

That “and the misshapen figures of her brain-damaged subjects – descendants of Goya’s gargoyles – march across the frame with unsteady steps as if to the music of a piper one can’t hear” is very fine.

“Exposure Time” is more descriptive; “Good Pictures” is more analytical. Both are terrific - two of my all-time favorite critical pieces. It’s good to see them preserved between hard covers.

(This the second part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm's Forty-one False Starts.) 

Janet Malcolm's "Forty-one False Starts" - Part I

The best pieces in Janet Malcolm’s recently published Forty-one False Starts are, for me, the four photography reviews – “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward Weston’s Women,” and “Nudes Without Desire.” Interestingly, two of them, “Edward Weston’s Women” and “Nudes Without Desire,” begin with a discussion of pubic hair. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” Malcolm artfully links the visibility of “a few wisps of pubic hair” in a Weston nude with Weston’s audacious statement (in a letter to the Museum of Modern Art) that pubic hair “has been definitely a part of my development as an artist … that it has been the most important part, that I like it brown, black, red or golden, curly or straight, all sizes and shapes,” to launch one of her favorite subjects – Weston’s love affairs and their impact on his work. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she writes,

Weston’s erotic and artistic activities are so tightly interwoven that it is impossible to write of one without the other. It is known (from Weston’s journals) that most of the women who posed for his nudes and portraits – arguably his best work – slept with him (usually after the sitting) and were sources for him of enormous creative energy.

Weston’s women fascinate Malcolm. In one of her first New Yorker photography pieces, “Two Photographers” (The New Yorker, November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West,” and included in her superb 1980 collection, Diana & Nikon), she vividly describes Weston’s Charis (1925):

A photograph of Charis shows a girl in a black beret and a sweater straddling a ladder-back chair, her elbows outthrust and her chin resting on the junction between her wrists; her brow is furrowed, she is staring into the middle distance, and her slip is showing. The composition is striking in its symmetries of legs, arms, and chair posts and ladders, and in the deployment of blacks, grays, and whites. Equally striking is, “the thing itself,” as Weston called the object of his quest for realism – in this case, the relationship between the model and himself.

Edward Weston, "Charis" (1925)

Malcolm further says, in “Two Photographers,” that Weston’s portrait of Charis, “with its comical pose and the girl’s mock-serious gaze, expresses the playfulness and courtliness of the relationship between the young woman and the older man.”

But, interestingly, in another essay, written shortly after “Two Photographers,” Malcolm’s appreciation of Weston’s work appears to sour. The piece, called “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” (included in Diana & Nikon), is a review of a Weston retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She writes,

Weston’s major works (most done in the 1920’s and 1930’s) are the nudes, vegetables, shells, clouds, and landscapes that have been transformed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – into pure, cold, perverse, unmistakable Weston abstractions.

Note Charis’s absence from the list of “Weston’s major works.” Had she forgotten about it? She does refer to a nude portrait of Charis (Nude, Oceano, California, 1936):

A well-known photograph of Charis stretched out face-down on the sand – one of Weston’s most apparently straight-forward nudes – has an attenuation, a starfish-like quality of inanition that is evocative of death and sleep rather than of lovemaking.

Malcolm saw the MoMA retrospective as a “corrective” to the thinking that Weston’s art was sourced in his erotic interaction with his models. In “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight,” she says:

The picture of Weston that emerges from these sources [Weston’s Daybooks and Ben Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years] – of a vital and virile romantic who lived a life of physical simplicity and emotional richness in warm climates with one beautiful woman after another; who had the courage to leave his wife and children and go to Mexico with his mistress, Tina Modetti; who finally found the love of his life in his second wife, Charis; who enjoyed the friendship of such artists and intellectuals as Diego Rivera, José Orozco, Robinson Jeffers, and Ramiel McGehee – is at curious odds with the static, indrawn, remote, and sometimes even morbid character of the photographs.

Yes, but it’s not at odds with the portrait of Charis that Malcolm so glowingly described in “Two Photographs.” Curiously, she fails to point this out. Her view of his achievement has turned inexplicably icy. In one of the essay’s most pointed lines, she says, “Stieglitz’s blurry view of the Flatiron Building on a snowy day is surely a more literal rendering of ‘the thing itself’ than Weston’s razor-sharp close-up of a halved artichoke.”

Edward Weston, "Charis, Lake Ediza" (1937)

Malcolm must’ve been sitting on a sharp tack when she wrote that piece. Obviously, it isn’t her view today. In “Edward Weston’s Women,” she reverts to her initial position. She writes, “His nudes can indeed be characterized as ‘passionate collaborations,’ in which Weston’s passion for a certain kind of beauty and a woman embodying that beauty come together with an almost audible bang.” And she says, “Charis Wilson is the foremost of these collaborators.” She describes another “Charis” picture, Charis, Lake Ediza (1937):

This photograph, however Wilson remembers the circumstances of its making, is indeed sensual, probably the sexiest of all of Weston’s pictures of her. She sits with her legs spread and her hands crossed over the inner thighs. That she is wearing trousers and high lace-up boots only adds to the sexiness, you could even say dirtiness, of the picture. The face, wrapped in a scarf as a Bedouin might wrap it, stares at the viewer and beyond him. It is a very young face, perhaps a little sullen, certainly not unaware of the provocativeness of the pose, but refusing to register it. One’s eye goes back and forth between the hands and the face, alternating between the hands’ downward direction and the face’s straight-ahead one. I don’t know of another photograph that puts the eye through such paces.

Malcolm calls Charis, Lake Ediza “extraordinary.” In “Nudes Without Desire,” another of the excellent photography essays in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm says, “Edward Weston pursued the nude genre more assiduously – and, I think, more brilliantly – than any other practitioner.” And with that, Malcolm’s revision of her acrid opinion in “Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” is complete.

(This is the first part of a four-part review of Janet Malcolm’s Forty-one False Starts.)