I’m the Screen: The Lives of Lee Miller

In May 1945, Lee Miller heard the news that Hitler was dead. She heard it from Hitler’s apartment in Munich. Miller and her colleague Dave Scherman had found the place with some US troops, undamaged enough to ride out the remainder of the war. Since 1942 Miller had been the war correspondent for Vogue. Her passion was photography. She took a whole series of shots in Hitler’s flat, but her most famous from that time is the one where she was the model – enjoying a long soak in the Führer’s bathtub. (The Guardian has a good gallery of Miller’s war shots, here.)

Miller hadn’t posed for a long time. She had been one of the most adored models in New York of the late 1920s. After two years, she tired of it and moved to Paris where she reinvented herself as a photographer. This is where Whitney Scharer’s novel of Miller comes in – when she is just another face in the city: ‘When she walks through Montparnasse, her new neighborhood, no one catches her eye, no one turns around to watch her pass. Instead, Lee seems to be just another pretty detail in a city where almost everything is artfully arranged.’

Miller meets the artist Man Ray when she is running out of money and half-crazy from loneliness in Paris. He offers her a job as his assistant. The two have passions in common and inevitably they fall in love, and The Age of Light charts their stormy relationship. There is a new trend in fiction for novels about real people – see Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott‘s stunning Swan Song, which tells the life of Truman Capote through his relationships with his woman friends.

The Age of Light did not work as well for me because Scharer shrinks the viewfinder of Miller’s life into the short years she spent with Man Ray. The problem with writing about relationships is that there’s only a certain number of scenarios that can play out (boy meets girl…) and you don’t have to know anything about Miller or Man Ray to see how the story will go. You know that Miller will begin to outdo Ray as an artist and that Ray won’t like it. You know this’ll end in tears.

Miller lived a long accomplished life after Man Ray. She ran a studio in New York. She saw Dachau. Her wartime experiences led to difficulties in later life with depression and (likely undiagnosed) PTSD. In The Bitter Taste of Victory, Lara Feigel’s history of the immediate aftermath of World War 2 in Europe, Feigel discusses Miller’s bathroom shot at 16 Prinzregentenplatz:

There is no simple message in Miller’s picture but by juxtaposing the clumsy brutality of her muddy boots with the pomp of the military leadership and the classical beauty both of the sculpture and of her own huddled and fragile naked figure, she was asking how these incongruous elements could have come together. The Nazi leadership had been famous for finding a place for art within the torture chamber and the battlefield. Already, there were frequent tales of the concentration camp commandants who went home from a day of gassing Jews to listen to Beethoven… By bringing the statue into the frame with Hitler, Miller was undermining the notion that art could be redemptive simply through its purity or detachment.

Scharer touches on this in her prologue, when Miller is living in the countryside in the 1960s. She loves cooking and hosts frequent dinner parties, but drinks so much in the kitchen that her banquets are often delayed until almost midnight. ‘She cannot stop the thoughts from coming,’ Scharer writes. ‘They lodge like bits of shrapnel in her brain and she never knows when something will bring one to the surface.’ It is a sympathetic portrait of a woman self medicating against mental distress. But this plus snatches of wartime memory is pretty much all we get of Miller after Ray: and I think that’s a shame.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh though. If you want a love story I’d totally recommend The Age of Light, and the scenery and people of Paris are beautifully rendered. There is also an increase in tempo towards the end of the book, and a growing sense of liberty. After completing an artwork, ‘Lee opens another bottle of wine and watches all four films, projected on the back wall of the studio, as she drinks straight from the bottle, the wine going down her throat in what feels like one uninterrupted swallow. When the last film slips loose of the reel at the end, Lee sits in the sudden hot bright light of the projector, listening to the tock tock tock tock as the film goes around the reel, and she feels overwhelmingly, drunkenly proud.’ Scharer’s novel is about sharing a life, but the lesson from it is what the poet Claude tells Miller, very early on: travel only at the prow of yourself.

2016 And All That

A curiosity of political writing is the panoply of small sites that have sprung up outside traditional UK media, offering regular blogs with a particular political slant and names you half recognise. This week we’re looking at ‘Unherd’ which examines current events from an angle of the communitarian left and right.

You might have heard on the grown up news that the Labour Party has (provisionally and reluctantly and at this very late stage) backed a second referendum on Brexit – and that has not gone down very well with the fellows at Unherd. Their always entertaining contributor Paul Embery has written a polemic against any such new referendum. Even among a political movement known for zealotry, Embery’s partisanship stands out.

Embery laments that ‘the post-referendum debate among Westminster politicians and the commentariat has missed the mark spectacularly by focusing almost exclusively on the dry, technical issues of Brexit: the Single Market and Customs Union, the Irish border backstop, and so on’ – you know, the boring, technocratic shit that keeps food on the supermarket shelves, and gunsmoke off the breeze. Embery is more of a Brexit purist, perhaps Brexit aesthete.

In 2015, five in six MPs voted to hold a referendum on membership of the EU. Then, a year later, in the biggest democratic exercise ever witnessed in our nation’s history, more than 33 million people went to the polls and a majority voted for secession. They didn’t vote to leave only with a divorce agreement that the EU was willing to approve. No, the question on the ballot paper was simple: remain or leave.

For Embery, democracy began in 2016. And that’s where it ends, apparently. For the second referendum in Brexit mythos is an establishment ruse to subvert popular sovereignty. Embery warns: ‘For as the gilet jaunes have shown across the Channel, if you chip away enough at people’s faith in the democratic process and their ability to hold their political leaders to account, then from behind that silence a mighty roar will eventually emerge.’ (The stirring Shelleyan rhetoric clashes badly with the example of the gilet jaunes: a couple of weeks ago the brave boys of Paris had to be restrained by police after bullying an elderly Jewish philosopher on one of their demos.)

Here is the problem. It has now been more than three years since the referendum. If Brexit were a government it’d be past the mid terms. It would have faced local and by elections. The action has become boring. (It is an irony of the Brexit vote that what was supposed to lead to one big decisive outcome instead gives us endless process.) Most people don’t have fixed and unchangeable views. Most people have moved on. And was 2016 such a huge moment? I don’t recall the street parties.

And think on the fundamental things that will not change. We are next to Europe. We had a relationship with Europe before the EU, we will always have that even if the EU falls over completely as it periodically threatens to do. If we are going to leave it is best to sort out some kind of trading relationship rather than go out on WTO rules. WTO rules may be survivable. Sure, we might run out of produce, and medical supplies, and god knows what else.

Let’s say no deal is survivable. It may not create the communitarian paradise that Unherd writers dream of. Polly Toynbee, speaking with postwar austerity historian David Kynaston, said that: ‘Even in a supposedly collectivist decade, people were strongly individualist… They welcomed the NHS as ‘good for me’, but reading mass observation archives, [Kynaston] detected no widespread New Jerusalem sentiment.’ Quite so. In times of privation people think to me and mine. As so often, the collective revolution leads to grasping selfish survivalism.

‘These things are important of course,’ Embery says, ‘but no-one in power has yet bothered to initiate a serious discussion about what drove so many of their fellow citizens to vote Leave in the first place – defining issues such as community, identity, democracy and belonging.’ The question here really is, what stopped you? Brexit for good or ill was an opportunity to find out what kind of country we wanted to be. We could have had a written constitution, a First Amendment, an elected senate by the year 2017. Instead it has been a comedy of lowered expectations and an epic of wasted time. And still, Embery and his Brexit purists stay in referendum day, fixed in amber, trapped in the golden moment and lost content.

The People’s Vote is still more of an idea than a reality. Embery is the latest of numerous commentators in political and journalist circles to warn against it. I’m not convinced about a second referendum but this to me seems a reasonable argument for having one.

Gonzo or Go Home

Standpoint magazine has an interesting little feature where the writers take political or cultural figures of great reputations and then knock them down. It’s fun to read although the cynical part of me says that the feature’s really there to generate clicks from outraged fanboys. This week Oliver Wiseman has taken on Hunter S Thompson, and as I’m very much an ageing HST fanboy, I will bite.

Wiseman’s critique gets a lot of things right. Thompson was a degenerate, a fabulist who often missed the story or plainly made stuff up, a talented man who was swallowed into his own narcissistic mythos. There were plenty better journalists of the day who were ignored. Joan Didion and Michael Kerr could probably tell you more about the crazy times of the American midcentury than HST.

But fanboys love the person, not the prose. As Wiseman writes:

‘Four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of keylime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert.’

All of which should be enjoyed alone, ‘outside in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked’.

To a certain man of a certain age — me in my late teens, to be specific — there was something heroic about the way Hunter S. Thompson liked to start the day.

Be careful who you pretend to be, said wise Kurt Vonnegut, and perhaps HST should have taken this advice to heart. Reading the correspondence I was surprised by how much time Thompson spent at home in Owl Farm. Alcoholic artists like to get hammered alone. Other people tend to get in the way of the visions. Perhaps HST shot himself because he knew he’d come to the end of his visions. No more fun, indeed.

And yet, and yet, the fanboy part of me keeps bobbing up and shouting…

Have a look at a broadsheet feature or op-ed. Notice how overmannered and overwritten and partisan and twee and insufferable the writing is. How obsessed the writers are with clicks and culture wars. It is near a trial to read. For all the respect I have for the British press, I know there are great British journalists out there, there are probably more than they have ever been but they are still in the minority.

Go from there to the Daily Beast, Longreads, or Deadspin, and you will find the experience like a warm bath and brandy after cutting your way through miles of brambles. It is just so refreshing to read journalists who write clearly and without fear. St Louis writer Sarah Kendzior, whose View From Flyover Country I’m currently enjoying, has the same quality.

I’m not saying that American journalism is better than British journalism. But, well, there’s a reason there’s a Mueller investigation in the States and no equivalent over here. There’s a reason Donald Trump hates and fears the press, while British politicians fear only their political rivals. The contrast holds even in my own interest of fiction and criticism. The biggest story in Anglo-American publishing this year, the Dan Mallory scandal, was broken by the New Yorker. It could not and would not have been published in a UK publication.

Americans don’t necessarily have a stronger tradition of newspapership than we do but they know how better to draw on it.

And part of that tradition includes degenerate assholes like HST.

On the ten year anniversary of the Beast, editor Noah Shachtman wrote:

The world is so dark so often that a staid recitation of the day’s horrors will cause audiences to turn the news off altogether. Journalism today has to paint in bright colors, have a sense of wit, and give up any attachments to the powerful. It’s gonzo or go home.

Go gonzo or go home. What an editor. What a sensibility.

The Beast has also drawn from English traditions as well, the name is of course from Waugh’s Scoop, a satire of the days when it was easier to make living as a newspaperman. These days it is not so easy. I agree with the plaintive appeals to support British journalism, I agree with paywalls, I want journalists to have good incomes and job security and I understand that all this costs.

But readers can’t do everything. Writers have to write better.

And writing better requires you to read, to enjoy, and to draw on tradition. Fanboyism rarely makes for great writing. But it can provide the spark that leads eventually to great writing. We get older, we put away childish things: we do not burn them.

And wouldn’t it be fun to see Hunter Thompson back from the dead and covering the Trump administration?

Now that would bring in subscriptions.