“I deny it.” He shuddered and added, “Strenuously.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“What’s got into you?” he said pityingly. “You’re really bitter. You’ve said some terrible things to me.”
“Get off the bucket. If you’re not interested in fame, what is it?”
“I am sincerely interested in your work. I think it represents the America of this century.”
“Hogwash,” I said. “It doesn’t even represent my life.”
“An artist’s life is his work.”
“I don’t buy that,” I said. My life wasn’t in my work: perhaps that meant I wasn’t an artist? But Frank was convinced I was, and unshakable in his conviction. I said, “I can’t help thinking there must be a pile of dough in this for you.”
“Money is not one of my considerations. Fortunately.”
“Really? You’re loaded, right?”
“I have sufficient funds,” he said: the prissy verbosity of the self-righteous.
“Come off it. You think you can make a bundle. The museum pays you for all of this.”
“As a matter of fact, they don’t. I’m on a year’s sabbatical.”
“You’re doing it free?” For a moment I was ashamed.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I’ve got a Guggenheim.”
My mouth went dry. “Repeat that.”
“And it’s renewable.”
“You’ve got a what?”
“Don’t tell me you never heard of the Guggenheim Foundation.”
“Jumping Jesus, doesn’t that take the cake!”
“What’s wrong with a Guggenheim?”
“Everything,” I said, and decided to let him have it. “Ever heard of Edward Weston?”
“The photographer?”
“No, Edward Weston the dogcatcher,” I said. “Of course the photographer!”
“We had a really big Weston retrospective years ago,” he said, sounding a little tired and knowing, the way the French do when you mention wine, as if nothing I said could be news to him.
But I pressed on. “Long before you were born, I met Weston in New York. He said he liked my pictures, but he was a horny devil, so when he said, ‘I’d like to see a lot more of you’ I figured him for a bum-pincher. We had a set-to — he gave me his usual baloney about farmers with furrows on their faces and Kentuckians with bluegrass growing out of their eyebrows. I took exception to it — I mean, what if your farmer happens to be a little shrimp with eyeglasses and beautiful hands? Eugene O’Neill looked like a wino, I told him, and Lawrence had a case of halitosis that made the shit-plant on Moon Island seem like a rose arbor. And let’s face it, most of those black pimps and numbers runners I did in New York looked like kings and princes of Bongo-land. But Weston disagreed, and he wanted to prove his point.”
“Artistically, Weston’s Mexican—”
“Keep your shirt on, Frank. At the time — this was ’thirty-six — he got it into his head to apply for a Guggenheim. They were giving them to painters, English teachers, playwrights — in fact, every filling station attendant in the country believed that as soon as he got a Guggenheim he’d write Leaves of Grass. Weston said if those fakers got them, why not him?
“‘I’m an artist,’ says Weston, and smacks his lips.
“‘Well, I’m a photographer,’ I says, ‘and I wouldn’t touch one of them Guggenheims with a ten-foot pole.’
“He said he needed the freedom. The money would free him. ‘How very American,’ I says. Give this boy a few bucks and suddenly he’s free. I couldn’t see the point of it — still can’t. How much money makes you free? I told him he’d be de-balled by patronage and end up being just another castrated wage slave. The only virtue in being an artist — that was his word — is being your own man. No masters, no enemies, no rivals, no patrons! I said he was talking a lot of garbage — you were free until you took the money, then you weren’t free anymore, you were in the pay of Jack Guggenheim or whoever.
“This really annoyed him. ‘My equipment costs money,’ he says, ‘and I want to do an epic series of photographs of the West.’ ‘Get a loan,’ I says, ‘mortgage that tripod — you can repay the bank when you’re rich, but with a patron, no matter how rich you get, you’ll be in debt for the rest of your natural life.’ I told him I was from a banking family and I knew what I was talking about. I said, ‘You’re a good risk for a loan — big on talent and low on overheads. After all, you can take all the pictures you want of the Grand Canyon and no one’ll send you a bill.’
“He couldn’t see why he should get a bank loan instead of a gift from a fame-sucker on Park Avenue — I guess he figured the bank might foreclose and repossess his genius. ‘It’s my mind,’ he said. ‘I need spiritual freedom to do anything I want’—and these are his exact words—‘from a cloud to an old shoe.’
“‘To me, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between a cloud and an old shoe. The sky’s full of old shoes,’ I says to him.
“We were getting nowhere. He said that he was going to apply for a Guggenheim just the same. And he did. And I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t get one. In 1937, he was the first photographer ever to get a Guggenheim, but as I said to him, ‘Your camera still weighs forty pounds and if you shoot any nice pictures you’ll have to go around afterward and say thank you to all the Guggenheims.’ Imagine, an artist saying thank you! I didn’t see much of him after that.”
Frank said, “You peed on Weston, so you’re peeing on me.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “The next thing I know I get a letter from the foundation. Do I wish to apply for a Guggenheim grant? Well, I made a big mistake. I was young, I wasn’t as smart as I am now. It wasn’t the money, but somehow if they gave me the money they were testifying to my art. You’re an artist, here’s ten bucks to prove it — that kind of thing. Was I worth it? There was a crisis in my life. I needed encouragement. That’s the worst of patronage, you know, the belief that having a patron means having talent. But the answer to ‘Am I an artist?’ must always be no, because no artist would ask that dumb question. Right?”
“Interesting,” said Frank.
“I filled out the application, in triplicate. My name, outline of project, previous shows, sponsors. It was like a Means Test — no, it was like a Pauper’s Oath. Then I waited.”
“I never knew you had a Guggenheim,” said Frank.
“That’s the point of the story, you peckerhead. I didn’t get the fucking thing!”
“I see.”
“No moolah for Maude.”
I fell silent. I had applied in October, this receding time of year. The leaves, the grass, the withered flowers, just like this. And the air rounded with a chill amplifying the rasps of autumn, everything that had been alive in the summer turning to confetti, smoke, dust, and haze. Even the fires dying into yellow vapor, the sunlight weakening on the Sound, somewhere a buzz saw, and hammerings from the Hyannis shore. I was parched with incomprehension; I could taste the driest disappointment, and it stifled me like defeat.
“Afterward I hated them — for making me want it, for making me need proof, and for thinking, when I didn’t get it, that I wasn’t worth it. But I got over it. Everyone who gets one of those things deserves it. The best never ask.”
“What was your, um, project?”
“Something to do with Florida.”
“But you did Florida!” said Frank. “It was your first big success!”
“So it was. If you have something to do you do it. You don’t sit around on your fanny waiting for someone to put you on the payroll.” But I could not remember how I had done Florida, or why I had gone.