Picture Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

Against my will, I created a picture in my head beforehand and tried to imagine the shot I wanted. I had seen Greene in a bar, seedier than the one in the Ritz, a slightly angled shot with only his face in focus, and the rest—his long body, his reflective posture—dim and slightly blurred: the novelist more real than his surroundings, special and yet part of that world.
    Then I saw him in the flesh, his sad heavy face, his severe mouth, his blind man’s eyes, and I thought: No, a close-up with a hand on his chin—he had a watchmaker’s fine hands. But his laugh changed my mind, and it struck me that it was impossible. I couldn’t do him. Any portrait would freeze him, fix him, give him an eternal image, like Che looking skyward or that tubby talk-show bore everyone forgives because he was once Truman Capote, brooding under a shock of scraped-down hair.
    Once, I might have taken my picture and gone, and in the printing seen his whole history in his face, past and future. Tonight, I knew despair. Photography wasn’t an art, it was a craft, like making baskets. Error, the essential wrinkle in the fiber of art, was inexcusable in a craft. I had seen too much in Greene for me to be satisfied with a picture.
    I said, “I think I ought to tell you that this is my last picture. I’m going to wind it up. Call it a day.”
    â€œWhatever for?”
    â€œI’m too old to travel, for one thing.”
    â€œWhich Frenchman said, ‘Travel is the saddest of the pleasures’?”
    â€œIt gave me eyes.”
    â€œI understand that well enough,” said Greene. “Not long ago I saw an item in a newspaper about Kim Philby.”
    â€œAlways wanted to do him,” I said.
    â€œI worked for him during the war in British Intelligence. Anyway, in this item Kim said what he wanted to do more than anything else was split a bottle of wine with Graham Greene and talk over old times. I fired off a cable saying that I would meet him anywhere he named if he supplied the wine. I felt like traveling—it’s as you say, an awakening. Kim cabled back, very nicely, he was busy. Some other time. I was sorry. I was quite looking forward to the trip.”
    â€œAs soon as I leave home my eyes start working. I can see! It’s like music—I don’t really listen to it, but I can think straight while it’s playing. It starts things going in my head.”
    Greene was listening carefully, with his fingers poised like a pianist’s on the edge of the table.
    â€œBut there’s something else,” I said. “They’re thinking of getting up a retrospective—fifty years’ accumulation of pictures! I have a fella digging them out. It was his idea. I don’t dare look at them—I know what they’ll add up to.”
    â€œOh?” he said, and started to smile, as if he knew what I was going to say next.
    â€œNothing,” I said in a whisper, “nothing. They’re failures, every last one of them.”
    â€œThe long defeat of doing nothing well,” he said, and sounded as if he was quoting. But he was still smiling. “Does that surprise you?”
    â€œGoddamit, yes!” I said. “I don’t want to be famous for something I’ve failed at.”
    â€œIt’s all failure,” he said, speaking a bit too easily for my liking, as if he’d said it before and was getting so bored with it he suspected it of being untrue. Perhaps he saw my scepticism. He added, “Why else would you have started again so many times?”
    I said I saw his point, but that I expected more than that from all those years of work. It was a bit late in the day to talk so easily about failure, I said, and it was obnoxious to me to realize that while I thought I had been truthful I had only been deceiving myself. I said I felt like an old fool and the worst of it was that no one else knew, and that was a sadness.
    While I had been