The writer’s elusive soul

Here I am, on a rainy May afternoon in 1996, struggling out of a taxi on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I’m carrying an umbrella, a briefcase and a couple of changes of coat and tie. Needless to say, I don’t have anything close to the correct change for the cabby; it takes a drenching while to complete our transaction. But eventually I find myself in one of those vast loft building elevators, creaking my way, damp and edgy, to the studio of Marion Ettlinger, to have a jacket photo taken for my forthcoming flop book.

She seems a nice woman, soft-voiced and welcoming. Tea is served. Conversation ensues. She is searching for the real me to capture in her photograph. Or so I was encouraged to think. What she was actually after, I now realize, is a dream me, some secretly harbored authorial fantasy of myself. She does not have much luck. I write nonfiction and I am a nonfictional sort of person, a workman who often feels put upon and cranky as deadlines follow one upon the other, world without end. If you really wanted to capture my writerly essence, you’d have to come in the morning to my house, where I generally write, uncombed and unshaven, in bathrobe and pajamas, until noon at least, fearing the contempt of the up-and-doing FedEx guy when he rings the bell.

What Ettlinger ends up taking is a picture of me not unlike all the other jacket photos that have been made of me over the years -- a decent likeness of someone not giving too much of himself away to the camera. It is not as grim as some earlier snaps of me; I am not exactly smiling, but you can imagine that I might possibly do so in a few seconds. To be honest, the photo is neither better nor worse than many taken in the past, on the cheap, by various shutterbug friends and relatives.

This is not Ettlinger’s fault. She was trying and, to the best of my ability, so was I. According to Richard Ford’s admiring foreword to “Author Photo,” her collection of literary portraits, what she’s always looking for is “permission,” by which she means, I guess, permission to enter into the writer’s secret life. Ford says that encompasses a lot of contradictory things: surrender, defiance, acceptance, nostalgia, vain hope and, above all, intimacy and sympathy.

It seems to me he is dancing gracefully around the point instead of getting to it. In the Age of Annie Leibovitz, what public figures and photographers like Ettlinger seek is the defining, simplifying, not necessarily truthful “image.” Whether writers, for the most part, are celebrities in the full sense of the word, meaning that they are permanently part of millions of people’s dream lives -- is a question I’m not going to address. But I do think -- such is the breed’s sly, inherent egotism -- that they need to think that’s at least a possibility. Else why endure the lonely misery of the work? In this collection, what seems to me a disproportionate number of women strike glamour poses. They recline on chairs and sofas, often with their hands clasped gracefully behind their heads. They are pretty and easeful, though not overtly flirtatious. They, more than their male counterparts, suggest that word processing is by no means a 24/7 proposition. They imply that there is time in the day to run a comb through their hair, put on some makeup and just, you know, look nice for the camera. One of them, Melissa Bank, has her feet propped on the back of a chair, while the rest of her flows on down through it. She supports her upper body with outstretched hand on the floor and smiles modestly at her funny little subversion of the “sitting.”

A few of the men affect the supine, perhaps most notably David Guterson, sprawled on his couch, looking moodily away from the camera. It doesn’t quite parody that most famous of all jacket photos, Truman Capote tilted back on a more elegant divan, which once seemed such a scandalous send-up of the genre’s then ruling sobriety. Maybe Ettlinger’s is more of a rough-hewn homage. More common among the men are baleful glares, including, rather surprisingly, the late, clubbable George Plimpton looking very warily into the lens. The implication of these photos is that Ettlinger and her camera constitute a barely tolerable interruption of busy days normally given over to the ineffable. Not a few of them have their overcoats (or hats) on or handy, as if eager to make an escape from the prying eye.

A number of Ettlinger’s pictures are rather mysteriously propped. Two writers, Ken Kesey and Robert Hughes, pose with parrots. Jonathan Ames lunges toward the camera with a fencing blade. Tom Drury for some reason wears Wellingtons. Jonathan Franzen sits at a table with a phone to his right, a bare-bulbed goose-necked lamp to his left and an umbrella hanging behind him. I do not know what, if anything, this means, although puzzlement does stay the scanning eye. On the other hand, Andre Dubus gives us pause more simply by posing shirtless with a crucifix nestling in his copious chest hair. Will his friends soon be obliged to address him as “Papa”?

There is something more than a little desperate about these pictures, a scramble for something -- anything -- “interesting” to arrest our attention. Some things also are missing -- a book or books, a typewriter or computer. The effort is to detach the writers from the boring old products and tools of their trade, to give them a sort of free-floating glamour, like the movie stars goofing for Leibovitz.

Mostly, that doesn’t quite work. The writers submit to the process, but you can see that most of them don’t love it. Their eyes retreat from the camera, their souls don’t emerge to meet it. Their essences are elsewhere -- possibly thinking about the paragraph Ettlinger interrupted. Or, for all we know, their impending property tax bill.

The exceptions to this rule are the older writers -- Reynolds Price, Richard Rhodes, Horton Foote, all of whom manage inviting, ironic twinkles that say they’ve been around awhile, paid their dues (which doubtless include previous photo shoots) and are fine with this interruption, possibly even welcome it as a nice little change from the slogging routine of composition. They’re too wry, wise and experienced to collaborate in hustling up a spurious “image” for themselves. They look out from these pages at their imagistically striving fellow scriveners with amused, even perky detachment and seem to say, “What you see is what you get -- and while we’re at it, let’s lose the parrot.” *