I wonder now: Were my sisters and I ever unself-conscious or oblivious of our parents? Did we think in terms of ”candor”? I ’m sure that, except for the traditional infant pose on a white fur rug, we would not have dreamed of allowing ourselves to be photographed without clothes. We felt that it was bad enough to have
to show our naked faces. Like primitives, we were afraid of having our personalities sucked up into the camera.
We would not have been able to understand why anyone would want to photograph us playing, for playing was not yet seen as a socially significant activity. For us, a photograph was more like a visit to the doctor, or a preview of Judgment Day. We got all dressed
up, scrubbed our hands and faces, tried to look as neutral as possible in order to deny what we could not anticipate. Our chins were generally lifted, as if we were trying to keep our heads above water.
And, of course, we were photographed in black and white. I don’t know whether there was color film in those days, but we didn’t think of life as colorful; it would not have occurred to us. Nor did we find it necessary to smile, we smiled only when something
was funny. Under the searching eye of the camera, we stood up straight, our hands at our sides, our feet together like little soldiers, as in "Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
We gazed out of our faces like people who had never seen themselves m a mirror. We did not think of ourselves as having "identities." These photographs were simply ”stages on Me's way," as Kierkegaard called one of his books. We obeyed the camera as if it were
a gun and bore witness to the stealthy passage of time. We had no idea of embellishing the outward appearance of our lives; I believe we felt that you could not lie to a camera, that it would inevitably show you up.
The circumstances of the pictures were determined more by the available light than by any consideration of the environment. We relied on the sun to supply that light, to be the agent of our reproduction. In the earlier pictures, which were taken in New Orleans,
the sun was ferocious. In fact, it rather bleached us out, left us looking pale and insubstantial, like dried flowers.
After we moved to New York, when I was six years old, we were always photographed on the roof of the brownstone in which we lived. My father believed that the roof was the only place where there was sufficient light. While he never found it, he never stopped
pursuing brightness. He seemed to doubt the potency of the sun in New York and insisted on facing us directly into it. And of course, we frowned and squinted, and as a result our life looked sadder or angrier than it may have been.
My mother never took our pictures, always my father. She disdained mere images, she had produced the originals. Nor, in most instances, would either of my parents enter the photographs themselves, except for my father’s shadow at our feet. It was as if they
felt that with adulthood their lives were completed and needed no further documentation.
Moving back and forth, side to side, shouting contradictory instructions, my father fiddled with the lens and peered through the viewfinder. And though we struggled to maintain our neutral expressions, he sometimes took so long that we betrayed ourselves. Every now and then, there is a picture With a personality peering
out, like a deer trapped at night in the headlights of a car.
Once we moved to New York, we inhabited, in the family album, a bleak landscape of tarred surfaces, chimneys, tin cornices and clotheslines. People who did not have backyards hung clothes on the roof in those days, and we were posed against sheets, towels, tablecloths,
shirts, dresses, nightgowns, pajamas and underwear. My sisters and I were aware of these intimate articles fluttering behind us and this awareness filtered in some subtle way into our attitudes.
Some time ago, Mary McCarthy wrote that the American personality always looked as if it had just had a bad haircut. That was us. We certainly had bad haircuts. After leafing through the old and new albums, I realize how far Americans have come in making themselves
look better. Almost every child today seems attractive, or at least passable looking, in his long hair.
1 think they have lost something, though, in this cosmetic evolution. With our ears sticking out, our unframed faces, our secretive mouths and wary eyes, we looked as if we realized what we were in for, as if we knew that something difficult was expected of
us and that we would probably have to try to do it.
I’ve been thinking about the family albums of my children’s children. I suppose that by their time, there will be nothing but movie cameras, that stillness, especially the monumental stillness of my childhood pictures, will be thought unnatural, a morbid shirking
of a child’s duty to enjoy himself while he can. Probably there will be television cassettes and the children’s first faltering steps-their first everythings- will be repeated in instant replay.
Then, as American life continues its liberating advance, these tapes will be erased and my grandchildren will step out boldly into the future without the embarrassment of a past.
And
attempt.
There was the time, for example, when the family drove down from Martha’s Vineyard one wet night to find that we were locked out. Idon’t carry a house key, for the same reason that I never carry coins: I can’t fit them into my jeans. My wife didn’t have her key, either. She is a dancer and likes to call attention to her creativity by disarming little bouts of absent-mindedness.
My children, whom we had already awakened, were waiting for me to rise to the occasion, to solve the problem in a manner that would provide a model for them all through their lives. My wife stood apart, as if to say, ‘This is where we separate the men from the boys.” In the back of the station wagon, both of our dogs began to bark.
And
I dreaded these excursions, these escapades. To me, they were like a suicide pact. Didn’t my parents know that the world was just waiting for a chance to come between us?
Inside, we were a family, but outside we were immigrants, bizarre in our differences. I thought that people stared at us, and my face grew hot. At any moment, I expected my father and mother to expose their tribal rites, their eccentric anthropology, to the gape of strangers.
Anyone who saw me with my family knew too much about me. Nobody is so secret about his loves as a boy of six or seven. Why, I wouldn’t even confess my infatuation for a girl on the block, and here I was, exhibiting in public the most intimate relationship I was ever to know.
To go out with my parents was to suffer for the second time the trauma of birth. My mother, who was mildly stout, might as well have been the Venus of Willendorf, a primitive fertility figure. My father was a rogue male, a creature of such reckless masculinity that I always thought of him as breaking the law.
While I loved them, I was uneasy about our relationship. It struck me as a terrible incongruity, especially for a boy, to have originated in my mother’s belly. It was such a derivative way for me to have arrived in the world. I would rather have been store-bought, instead of homemade.
My father flustered me more than my mother, for on him fell the full weight of patriarchy, and he was not a man to shirk it. I remember in particular a boat ride to Bear Mountain. This being a sporting occasion, my father elected to wear a pair of plus fours, or knickers. He even went so far as to pull a beret, another installment in his unpredictability, over his unruly hair. Walking beside him, I shut my eyes,
guiding myself by the brown. ne lohaen the metal taps on the toes ang &-tip shoes.
We had come up from New Orleans, where I was born in the French Quarter. For a bel homme, a galant, like my father, it was no simple matter to walk along the street. He had to strut, stretching and swiveling his head on his neck, arching his back and undulating his shoulders, flourishing his arms in counterpoint to his legs. I would watch him out of the comer of my eye and despair. I half-expected him to break into the Camel Walk, the Shimmy Shewobble, the Black Bottom or the Mess Around.
I wanted desperately to run away from home. My mother and father were too folksy for me, too colorful. Conformity is the first passion of small boys. Originality, if it comes at all, arrives much later. My love for these two misfits, these character actors, was too heavy to bear.
Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no one had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel. We buried our families in the common grave of the generation gap, silenced them with the so-called failure of communication. Parents became our shtick, a whetstone for our wit. Orphans of the avant-garde, we outdistanced our history and our humanity.
I became an amnesiac, a flimsy Frankenstein monster of pop sociology. Isaw myself as spawned by time, as flies were once thought to be spontaneously generated in offal. I deracinated and rationalized my image. For my new friends and me, parents had become synonymous with the establishment, an outmoded, authoritarian and absurd institution.
Like every great tradition, my family had to die before I could understand how much I missed them and what they meant to me. When they went into the flames at the crematorium, all my letters of introduction went with them. Now, in my middle age, I understand at last that personality is a conspiracy. I’m grateful to my mother and father for their quirkiness, for this gave me a glimpse of the range of styles, the richness of being. I thank them for their irrationality, which was a grand tour of unmapped territories. Especially, Ilove them for not being modern, not dumping me into the polluted river of progress before I was ready to protect myself.
Now that I have a wife and family of my own, I’ve begun to feel what it is. When we go out together, I do my own share of strutting, and I wonder how my children feel about it. Am] an embarrassment to them, or an accepted part of the human comedy? Have they joined my conspiracy, or are they just pretending? Do they understand that, after all those years of running away from home, I am still trying to get back?
