The Girl From Carmel

The Others, both Significant and Insignificant, sure grow restless in their retirements as muses, companions, colleagues, bedmates and wives. In the last few years, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth have suffered at vengeful keyboards and, most recently, the memory of the New Yorker’s Mr. Shawn is suffering at the smarmy hands of Lillian Ross. Francoise Gilot’s 1981 book-length complaint that Picasso inhibited her own talent as a painter may be a model of the genre; at least she allowed him to be both genius and bad boy (nice of her), and she eventually got a movie deal out of it.

Amid these embarrassments to the hobby of voyeurism comes an unexpected delight, “Through Another Lens” by Charis Wilson, who in her mid-80s has completed a touching and evocative memoir of her time as Edward Weston’s most famous model, one of his wives and muses and the bearer of recollection without grudge. How refreshing, how beguiling. She tells about more than the great photographer and herself; she has achieved a cool-eyed and richly suggestive portrait of many free spirits enslaved by the ambitions of genius in a certain time and place--the West Coast from the Depression to the war years.

In late life, Alexander Dumas pere needed many models, many muses, who treated him with more concentrated deference than Wilson does Weston. The children of Dumas would gather at the door of his study when this monument of French culture descended from his pedestal for a little restorative lovemaking (their attention at the keyholes was not prurience, of course; they were concerned for daddy’s health). Once, a young muse was heard to cry out at the crucial moment: “Maintenant, maintenant, Monsieur le Dramatiste!”

Wilson treats Weston with discretion but hints that he, too, was, oh, perhaps a trifle self-centered. She never nominates herself for victim status. She was a lovely and intelligent 18-year-old when the middle-aged Weston found her. She also found him. When his self-concern proved greater than his need for her, she took her own lovers. She had her own creative life. And now, as a spirited, elderly party, she has told her important story. Although she had essential help in the composition from Wendy Madar, a friend who spurred her along to organize and order the riches of memory, the voice of the teller is authentic.

But was it necessary for Wilson to have written her story? Did she need to defend herself against an impression that she was merely being used? Was she bullied and exploited by the photographer who created chilly erotic images of her body as a sort of eternal feminine, in the way his friend Ansel Adams photographed the Platonic ideal of eternal mountains and moons? She doesn’t think so; the mountains and moons will have to write their own stories. For some tastes (oh, let’s say it: mine), the temperament of Wilson is more congenial than Weston’s, and it’s suggestive to compare her acute, nuanced portraits of him with his sculptural images of her--face averted, body blankly offered in the way a mountain offers itself to the climber. Certainly, she learned from him about crispness and shadow and line. Too bad he couldn’t learn from her about wit and empathy. Dryly, she noted his need for a new and younger muse; compassionately, she returned to help him as old-age frailties wore him down.

The book, as such a book should, provides a rich store of answers and further questions about the nature of love, art, fidelity, persistence; it is also a tribute to a grand survival. Wilson is likable, and she loved Weston. He was not lovable--usually as chilly and complete unto himself as his images--but had the gift of causing others to adore him anyway. For his art, he needed her lean curves and proud pliancy. Perhaps her lively spirit tuckered him out, as any rival spirit would have. She doesn’t take revenge here; the story does it for her.

The love affair of Wilson and Weston might make a contemporary woman groan, while a contemporary man politely pretends to be shocked--shocked that this marvelous creature, 30 years Weston’s junior, was so used. Ultimately, of course, victory should be declared on both sides. The used woman turns out to be a winner, a writer, an artist of note, with a long, rich life to look back upon; their love turns out to have been a zero-sum competition. Even Weston wins: He got the photographs and her attention.

“Through Another Lens” offers the pleasures of nostalgia for the California bohemia of the time, including photographs such as the one of “Sen~orita Edwardita” in a dress, dancing; there is no reference to “drag” in the index, but Wilson describes “many an eye flutter and fanny wiggle. . . . Edward thought it was great to gain some fame in a brand new field.” Weston confided news of one homosexual experience but described it as a compassionate experiment that failed. Alas, she says, it was their loss that neither she nor Weston could honestly lay claim to gay pleasures. Now in her mid-80s, she still has the light touch, the amplitude of the soul that made her much more than a pretty face and a delicious body.

Her discreet collaborator, Madar, did nothing to homogenize the fresh voice. Allen Ginsberg, muse to William S. Burroughs, served in similar fashion in the assembly of Burroughs’ signature book, “Naked Lunch.” The role of muse-collaborator-spouse equivalent crosses sexual boundaries.

In the long, distinguished and now politically incorrect tradition of the profession of wife-of-artist, the purest 20th century manifestation must be Vera Nabokov, wife of the author of “Lolita.” She drove his car, answered his mail, typed his manuscripts, bargained with his editors and dusted the crumbs off his vest. When he taught at Cornell, she sat in class to do the writing on blackboards and the collecting of papers. It was said that she carried a pistol in her purse for the shooting of his enemies.

But in this listing of duties, one is left out--the role of inspiration. Although all Nabokov’s late books are dedicated to Vera, visual artists with their models provide better proof of musedom. Here comes one of the best, a superb memoirist of her time with Edward Weston. Untrue to the tradition, Charis Wilson remains loyal to the memory of the artist who ultimately left her for a younger woman--one who was more steadfast in the unblushing worship which the godlike philosopher shutterbug required in his old age.