20220203130833 from Janet Malcolm, Diana and Nikon (1980)

Original post on Tumblr from my commonplace book in 2022. Fair use.

”Assorted Characters of Death and Blight” (an essay about Edward Weston)

As one rereads the *Daybooks* and the biography under the weight of these impressions, one’s sense of Weston darkens; one gets the feeling that he didn’t enjoy himself very much. (What artist does?) He was happy at the start of a love affair (“The idea means more to me than the actuality,” he confessed, and pondered, “Is love like art—something always ahead, never quite attained?”); when intoxicated (or *borrachito,* as he liked to call it); when in the presence of beauty (“I received by mail from Cristel a box of lilacs, white and lavender, so exquisite that my eyes filled with tears”); when doing “my work,” in contradistinction to the portrait photography he did to earn his living. (It would be interesting to see examples of the commercial work and compare it to the portraits, done for art’s sake, of his friends and family.) But far more frequently than happiness, the *Daybooks* express the anxiety and loneliness and eccentricity that underlay and undermined the surface exuberance and gregariousness and conventional bohemianism. The entries written during the romantic trip to Mexico are pervaded by with worry about money, housing, equipment; with sorrow about the deadness of his feeling for Tina (which Weston was to feel toward all the women he loved); and with guilt about the three children he had left behind. (In a film based on the *Daybooks* that Robert Katz made for public television in 1965, there is a painfully moving scene in which Neil, the second-youngest son, talks of how he felt during his father’s desertion; the camera, focused on his face, reveals how much it still hurts.)

The *Daybooks* written on Weston’s return from Mexico continue to reflect the alienation from family, friends, and lovers, and from the cultural and political life of the time, that Weston felt—an alienation that seems to be one of the preconditions of producing art in this country. A small, but telling, detail is the repeated reference in the daybooks to the vegetarian meals Weston enjoyed (“supper: *aguacates,* almonds, persimmons, dates, and crisp fresh greens”)—always accompanied by references to the gross steaks or greasy pork chops that other people eat and that he had narrowly escaped from, as if his enjoyment of one depended on the repudiation of the other. A similar though less explicit polarity is set up between the lithe, ever-younger girl Weston fell in love with and the threatening “hog-fat” bourgeoise American woman, into which category his abandoned wife, Flora, apparently fell. (One is reminded of Humbert Humbert’s distaste for grown-up women, like Lolita’s mother, in comparison to nymphets.)

—Janet Malcolm, *Diana and Nikon,* (1980, original essay © 1975), pp. 25-26