Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsNash’s Magazine, September 1929
ONE of the things which most acutely exasperate lovers of justice in this world is the difficulty of fixing responsibility. Too often it happens that, wishing to execrate the originator of some particularly noxious evil, we are baffled for want of evidence. Nobody, for instance, knows who introduced the rabbit into Australia, jazz-music into London, or the expression “Sorry you were tr-r-r-r-oubled” into our telephone exchanges. And, similarly, it is impossible to say with any real certainty who it was who discovered photography.
The Encyclopaedia is guarded on the subject—cautious, evasive. It obviously has a wary eye open for libel actions. “K. W. Sheele,” it says, “was the first to investigate the darkening action of sunlight on silver chloride.” As if we didn’t know that! Why, we can remember as if it were yesterday sitting on our nurse’s knee and listening with delicious shivers of excitement (and a bit scared, too, if we must confess it) to the story of how K. W. Sheele—Bill, his friends called him—found that when silver chloride was exposed to the action of light beneath water there was dissolved in the fluid a substance which, on the addition of lunar caustic, caused the precipitation of the silver chloride.
“And on applying a solution of ammonia to the blackened chloride, Master George, what do you think was left behind? An insoluble residue of metallic silver!”
“Oo, Nanny!” we used to pipe in our shrill, childish treble. “Now tell us about Jack and the Beanstalk.”
All very good as far as it goes. But you cannot possibly start burning a man in effigy on rambling evidence like that. Granted that K. W. Sheele did fool about with blackened chloride. Admitted that his experiments with the residue of metallic silver won for him the affectionate nickname of The Pest of Ponder’s End. How can we say, even then, that it was due to him that a train of events started which culminated last week in our facing a forty-two centimetre camera with a frozen smile on our lips and rendering ourselves liable to a bill from Captain Kidd’s grandson for ten pounds eleven and sixpence?
No. We must be fair. We shall investigate K. W. Sheele’s movements and antecedents, but until the report is in we must suspend judgment. All we will say at this point is that, if K. W. Sheele does prove guilty, he will be the object of the concentrated dislike of virtually every civilized man.
Man, we say. Not woman. It is not women on whom the hardships of photography weigh. Women as a sex enjoy being photographed. It is second nature for them, on catching sight of a long-haired man in spectacles diving into a velvet nose-bag, to assume without an instant’s hesitation an expression in which sweetness, dignity, kittenishness, soulfulness and spontaneity are so nicely blended that broken sentences of admiration and esteem filter through the velvet in an excited torrent.
Débutantes who have not undergone the ordeal since they were taken in the nude sitting on a cushion at the age of two, need as little encouragement as actresses who have played in every failure in the last sixteen seasons. And these devoted women, as everybody knows, will rise at six a.m. and reduce their mid-day meal to a mere snack in order to crowd their daily dealing with the camera into the twenty-four hours. One eminent member of the profession, indeed, on learning that there was some danger of a shortage of her photographs owing to the growing demand, is said to have sat before the lens without a pause for a period of two days and a night, sustained only by indomitable courage and hourly injections of clear soup from a hypodermic syringe.
How different with Man! For some reason, due probably to his nobler and more spiritual nature, the average man is overcome in the presence of a camera with an embarrassment which would be excessive if he were being arrested for forgery while eloping with somebody else’s wife. He tries to cover this with a look of brooding gloom, which the photographer (who, owing to the fact that he makes a lot of money without doing any work for it, is an optimist) will not permit for an instant. The photographer is all for more sweetness and light, and, as a means towards obtaining these, suggests the moistening of the lips with the tip of the tongue.
To a thoughtful man like myself, it is one of the most inexplicable things in our daily life, this pathetic faith which all photographers have in this curious operation. They seem to regard the moistening of the lips with the tip of the tongue as a panacea for all human ills. No mundane sorrow, they appear to think, can stand up against it. I often wonder if they carry the hallucination into their private lives.
It would make a good curtain for an instalment in a romantic serial. The hero is sitting alone in his deserted flat, his head buried in his hands. Life seems ended for him. The future—if there is a future—is black. But, unseen by him, the door has opened, and there has stolen softly in a kind-faced man with a velvet nose-bag tucked under his arm. It is his old school chum, Tom, who runs the fashionable photograph-studio in Bond Street.
Tom places a hand gently on the stricken man’s shoulder.
“Cheer up, Ralph,” he whispers. “You have had a hard knock, lad, I know. Your wife has run away from you and, what is worse, has done it in the car on which you are still paying monthly instalments. But what of it? The sun is still shining. There are still blue-birds in the world. Moisten the lips with the tip of the tongue, boy, and be your old merry self once more.”
No photographer will ever admit that Hamlet and King Lear are to be pitied for their misfortunes. They wilfully omitted to moisten the lips with the tip of the tongue.
I say that it would make a great situation in a story, but it will never be written. Authors will not write about photographers. Search through literature, and where will you find a photographer hero? Butchers have been heroes of novels. So have drapers. So have policemen, prize-fighters, footballers, engineers, cowboys, bespoke tailors and Italian oil-and-colour men, but never a photographer. There is a reason for this.
I look in my glass, dear reader, and what do I see? Nothing so frightfully hot, believe me. The face is slablike, the ears are large and fastened on at right angles. Above the eyebrows comes a stagnant sea of bald forehead, stretching away into the distance with nothing to relieve it but a few wisps of lonely hair. The nose is blobby, the eyes dull, like those of a fish not in the best of health. A face, in short, taking it for all in all, which should be reserved for the gaze of my nearest and dearest who, through long habit, have got used to it and can see through to the pure white soul beneath. At any rate, a face not to be scattered about at random and come upon suddenly by nervous people and invalids.
And yet, just because I am an author, I have to keep on being photographed. It is the fault of publishers and editors, of course, really, but it is the photographer who comes in for the author’s hate.
Something has got to be done about this practice of publishing authors’ photographs. We have to submit to it, because editors and publishers insist. They have an extraordinary superstition that it helps an author’s sales. The idea is that the public sees the photograph, pauses spellbound for an instant, and then with a cry of ecstasy rushes off to the book-shop and buys copy after copy of the gargoyle’s latest novel.
Of course, in practice, it works out just the other way. People read a review of an author’s book and are told that it throbs with a passion so intense as almost to be painful, and are on the point of digging seven-and-sixpence out of their child’s money-box to secure a copy, when their eyes fall on the man’s photograph at the side of the review, and they find that he has a face like a rabbit and wears spectacles and a low collar. And this is the man who is said to have laid bare the soul of a woman as with a scalpel.
Naturally their faith is shaken. They feel that a man like that cannot possibly know anything about Woman or any other subject except where to go for a vegetarian lunch, and the next moment they have put down the hairpin and the child is seven-and-six in hand and the author his ten per cent. or whatever it is to the bad. And all because of a photograph. In virtually every case where a photographer is found mysteriously murdered, the first thing the Big Four at Scotland Yard do is to hold a round-up of the novelists and short-story writers in the neighbourhood.
For the ordinary man, the recent introduction of high art methods into photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stile and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight into the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky thing was shoved firmly into the back of his head leaving him with the choice of being taken as he stood or having an inch of steel jabbed into his skull. Modern methods have changed all that.
There are no photographs nowadays. Only “camera portraits” and “lens impressions.” The full face has been abolished. The ideal of the present-day photographer is to eliminate the sitter as far as possible and concentrate on a general cloudy effect. I have in my possession two studies of my uncle Theodore—one taken in the early nineties, the other in the present year. The first shows him, evidently in pain, staring before him with a fixed expression. In his right hand he grasps a scroll. His left rests on a moss-covered wall. Two sea-gulls are flying against a stormy sky.
As a likeness, it is almost brutally exact. My uncle stands for ever condemned as the wearer of a made-up tie.
The second is different in every respect. Not only has the sitter been taken in the popular modern “one-twentieth face,” showing only the back of the head, the left ear and what is either a pimple or a flaw in the print, but the whole thing is plunged in the deepest shadow. It is as if my uncle had been surprised by the camera while chasing a black cat in his coal-cellar on a moonless night. There is no question as to which of the two makes the more attractive picture. My family resemble me in that respect. The less you see of us, the better we look.
Little more remains to be said on this absorbing subject. If I have seemed to write in a jaundiced and condemnatory spirit of photographers, let me end on a note of kindly approval. Say what we may against photographs, they remain—I speak now of the stiff, cabinet size—the best paper-cutters in existence. The big, limp, artistic ones, if torn and properly doubled up, make admirable wedges for stopping windows from rattling. And let us never forget that if there were no photographs there would be no photograph-frames: and where would we turn then for an adequate yet inexpensive birthday, wedding, or Yule-tide gift for our wide circle of friends?
Notes:
Much of this article had appeared in “On Being Photographed” in Vanity Fair, August 1916; in that version the name of chemist K. W. Scheele was spelled correctly.
This version was collected in Louder and Funnier (1932).