The photographs of war put McCullin’s work in its proper perspective. McCullin might be trying to awaken our dormant psyches but for the Japanese the gap between everyday tranquillity and stark horror seems always to have been only a step wide. And just as readily as they photographed the violence they inflicted, they photographed the violence inflicted on them. Elegantly judged, Pompeii-like photographs of the charred bodies after the Tokyo fire raids may be edifyingly compared with similar studies obtained in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Proudly saluting from the cockpit, a kamikaze pilot taxis past a class of schoolgirls waving cherry branches in farewell. Words are needed to tell us where he is flying to, but once we know that, the picture tells us that he was there. Probably some of the schoolgirls are still alive and can pick themselves out in the picture. They were there too. Reality is the donnée of photography and sets the limit for how much the photographer can transform what he sees into a personal creation. For the artist photographer the limit is high but it still exists. To think it can be transcended is to be like Kant’s dove, which, upon being told about air resistance, thought it could fly faster by abolishing the air.
New York Review of Books, December 17, 1981;
later included in Snakecharmers in Texas, 1988
POSTSCRIPT
Like writing about television, writing about photography was a chance to talk about everything. If someone had taken a photograph in China, I could talk about China. Doing a round-up of all the world’s books about photography in the past and present, I could go on for pages about time, space and the history of the world. But I couldn’t go on for long about photography itself, because apart from the technicalities there isn’t much to discuss, and criticism based solely on technicalities is doomed to famine. It can sound impressive, but so can an actor pretending to be a doctor. The specialist photography magazines are full of articles specifying shutter speed, focal length and what have you. No doubt it all means a lot to the adept, but it leaves the layman facing the same void as he always does when an aesthetic event is discussed in mechanical terms. A solo by Darcey Bussell, for example, can be registered on the page as a set of steps and poses with French names. Unfortunately every member of the corps de ballet can do them too. So the writer has evoked precisely nothing. In the case of photography the problem is exacerbated by the remorseless industrial effort to get all the relevant expertise into the camera itself, and out of the fallible hands of the goof holding it. There is indeed a miracle of creativity involved, but it is all inside the mechanism: more than a hundred and fifty years of intense technical development, none of which, if it were all forgotten tomorrow, even the most gifted photographer could begin to recapitulate.
Making a television programme about a safari in Kenya, I was supplied by my producers with the very latest Nikon. All I had to do was point it and twist the bit that stuck out until something I could see through the little window was in focus—anything. I can’t even remember if I had to press a button. Perhaps it pressed its own button and told me afterwards. Anyway, I got a close-up of an angry lion’s face. The lion was angry because the car I was in woke it up, and some idiot human sticking out of the top of the car was pointing a sinister-looking box of tricks at it. When the photograph came back from the chemist’s, I was as open-mouthed as the lion. Cartier-Bresson would have swallowed his hyphen with envy. The photograph was as sharp as a tack, impressive as the crack of doom, frightening to chill the mind. It could have gone straight into a glossy magazine, full page, bled to the edges. There is a lot I could say concerning that photograph. I could talk about my fear and the lion’s nobility, Africa’s tragedy and the pathos of civilization. But there is almost nothing illuminating to say about the technique with which I secured it. With a camera like that, the lion could have taken a photograph of me.
Art is safe from such developments. We aren’t, but it is. At once primitive and infinitely protean, art wasn’t born of consciousness: consciousness was born of it. As long as human life lasts, art will go on being the one activity for which no amount of calculation can provide a substitute, and the job of the critic will be to explain why this is so. The ability to realize that he can never attain to an exhaustive analysis of the thing he loves best is the indispensable qualification for signing on. What he has to offer is his life, of which his learning can only be a part: the more he knows the better, but if he thinks that nothing else counts then he will count for nothing. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari is a rap that nobody can beat.
Reliable Essays, 2001
INDEX
Abbott, Berenice, 589
Abbott, Jack, 408
About the House (Auden), 15
Abrams, M. H., 445, 447, 450
Accattone, 533
Acheson, Dean, 300
Across the Rhine, 580–81
Across the River and into the Trees (Hemingway), 208
Across the Street and into the Grill (White), 390
Adams, Ansel, 571, 572, 582, 592–93
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The (Doyle), 191
Against Oblivion (Hamilton), 88–89
Against the American Grain (Macdonald), 182
Agee, James, 179–89, 573
Age of Anxiety, The (Auden), 18
Aimée, Anouk, 533, 540, 546, 550–51, 552
Alberti, Guido, 545–46
Alex in Wonderland, 555
Allen, Woody, 541, 562
Allende, Salvador, 415
All What Jazz (Larkin), 48–51, 71, 79
Altered Landscapes (Pfahl), 599
Alvarez, A., 440–41
Amarcord, 554–55
Ambler, Eric, 191, 193
American Dream, An (Mailer), 405
American Earthquake, The (Wilson), 371–72, 374, 382
American in Paris, An, 523
American Photographers and the National Parks (Cahn and Ketchum, eds.), 592–93
Amis, Kingsley, 23, 45, 68, 69, 122, 191, 193, 453
Amis, Martin, xiii, xiv, 122, 466–69
Ammons, A. R., 573
Amory, Mark, 432
Anchors Aweigh, 523
Andropov, Yuri, 299
And the Ship Sails On, 556
Angier, Carole, 276, 279, 281–82
Animal Farm (Orwell), 285, 289, 296, 297
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 215
Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The (Baring-Gould), 196
Another Time (Auden), 13
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 533–34, 543
Apologies to the Iroquois (Wilson), 373
Arbus, Diane, 570
Arendt, Hannah, 479, 489–90
Arnold, Eve, 580
Arnold, Matthew, 316, 317
Aron, Raymond, 300
Art of Australia, The (Hughes), 250
Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, The (Kobal), 577, 601
Ascension (Coltrane), 50
Ashes of Gramsci, The (Pasolini), 531
Astaire, Fred, 278, 521–22, 523
Atget, Eugene, 589–90, 593
Atherton, Gertrude, 241
At Long Last Love, 562
Attachment and Loss (Bowlby), 505
Auden, W. H., 3–18, 58, 80, 95–96, 97, 108, 113, 201, 447, 448–49
Auerbach, Erich, 452–53
August 1914 (Solzhenitsyn), 214, 215–19
Au Pays du Grande Mensonge (Ciliga), 288
Auroras of Autumn, The (Stevens), 86
Autobiography (Russell), 507
Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue, The (Lartigue), 590
Auto da Fé (Montale), 53–54, 457
Autumn Journal, 108
Avedon, Richard, 569
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, The (Kinnell), 129–35
Axel’s Castle (Wilson), 379–80
Baby Face Nelson, 564
Backless Betty from Bondi (Slessor), 142
Bailey, David, 578
Baker, Nicholson, xv, 188
Baker Street Studies (Bell), 196
Balchin, Nigel, 233
Balzac, Honoré de, 120
Bancroft, Anne, 400–401
Band Wagon, The, 521, 522
Barbera, Jack, 123–28
Baring-Gould, W. S., 196, 198
Barkleys of Broadway, The, 523
“Baron de Meyer/The New Hat Called Violette Worn by the Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes—Alex, (1924)” (Beaton), 576
Baronio, Joyce, 579
Barthes, Roland, 532, 585–604, 595
Battle of Algiers, The, 534, 544
Baudelaire, Charles, 30–31
Bausch, Pina, 556
Bay City Blues (Chandler), 210–11
Bayley, John, 37, 112
Beaton (Danziger, ed.), 575
Beaton, Cecil, 575–76, 583
Beatty, Warren, 564
Beautiful Changes, The (Wilbur), 437, 441
Beautiful Stars of the Bear, 548
Bechet, Sidney, 39, 52, 82
Beiderbecke, Bix, 52, 72
Bell, H. W., 196
Beloved (Morrison), 310, 311
Benjamin, Walter, 572, 584, 585, 586
Beresford, Bruce, 535
Bergman, Ingmar, 555, 557
Berkeley, Busby, 523–24
Berlin, Isaiah, 446–47
Berryman, John, 26, 36, 84, 114, 437
Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1872–1921) (Monk), 502
Best Man, The (Vidal), 422
Best of Photojournalism 5, The, 580
Betjeman, John, 81, 286, 432
Big Sleep, The (Chandler), 186, 201, 203, 209
Bill Brandt: Nudes, 1945–1980, 600
Bishop, Elizabeth, 132
Bit Between My Teeth, The (Wilson), 373, 379
Black, Dora, 511
Black Orpheus, 530
Blainey, Geoffrey, 255–56
Blow-Up, 543
Blue Dahlia, The (Chandler), 209
Bogan, Louise, 97
Bogdanovich, Peter, 553, 557–58, 561–67
Booth, Wayne C., 443–55
Boratto, Caterina, 549
Bourke-White, Margaret, 581
Bowlby, John, 505
Boyer, Deena, 541–42, 545, 550
Brady, Veronica, 154
Brandt, Bill, 582, 600
Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 14, 500
Brennan, Christopher, 149–50, 156, 157–58
Brett Weston: Photographs from Five Decades (Weston), 573
Brezhnev, Leonid, 410
Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 431, 497–98
Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 38
Broad Stream, The (Stewart), 157
Brodsky, Joseph, 56–57
Bronze Horseman, The (Pushkin), 113
Brooks, Van Wyck, 374, 376
Brown, Tina, 491
Buckland, Gail, 583
Bull, Clarence Sinclair, 577
Buñuel, Luis, 11
Burgess, Anthony, xvii, 298, 442, 581–82
Burke, Kenneth, 15, 445, 447, 450, 451
Burmese Days (Orwell), 287
Byron, Lord, 105, 449
Cahn, Robert, 592
Callahan, Harry, 572–73
Callas, Maria, 463, 534
Call for the Dead (le Carré), 227, 231–32
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Barthes), 585–604
Campbell, David, 144, 149
Camus, Albert, 220
Camus, Marcel, 530
Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn), 215, 223
Canetti, Elias, 457
Cantos (Pound), 129, 130, 134, 139
Capote, Truman, 424
Captain Quiros (Fitzgerald), 150
Captains Courageous (Kipling), 311
Cardinale, Claudia, 548
Carné, Marcel, 559
Carroll, Lewis, 586
Carteggio Svevo/Montale (Montale), 457
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 582, 590, 595
Carver, Raymond, 188
Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo, 328–39
Casanova’s Homecoming (Schnitzler), 335–37
Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, The (Snow), 191
Castro, Fidel, 416
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, The (Twain), 307, 313
Century of Japanese Photography, A (Dower, ed.), 601
Ceremony (Wilbur), 437
Chamberlain, Neville, 290
Chandler, Raymond, 186, 201–13
Charisse, Cyd, 522
Chaudhuri, Nirad, xiii
Christina, Queen, 368
Churchill, Winston, 220, 290, 292, 315, 483
Ciliga, Anton, 288
City Hall, 565
City of Women, The, 555
City Without Walls (Auden), 15
Classics and Commercials (Wilson), 373, 379
Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill), 325–27
Coburn, Bob, 601
Cocktail Party, The (Eliot), 354
Cocteau, Jean, 256, 549
Cold War and the Income Tax, The (Wilson), 371, 373
Coleman, Ornette, 53
Coleridge, Samuel, 220
Cole Weston: Eighteen Photographs (Weston), 592
Collected Essays (Orwell), 300
Collected Essays 1952–72 (Vidal), 421
Collected Poems (Larkin), 38–48
Collected Poems (Roethke), 95
Collected Poems (Smith), 126
Collected Poems of James Agee, The (Agee), 179
Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957 (Auden), 12
Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944 (Auden), 10, 12
Collected Short Prose of James Agee (Agee), 179, 182, 184
Coltrane, John, 49–51
Comden, Betty, 522, 523
Common Pursuit, The (F. R. Leavis), 349–50
Complete Poems (Jarrell), 84
Complete Professor Challenger Stories, The, 200
Connolly, Cyril, xiv, 286
Conquest, Robert, 219, 221, 224, 225, 298–99
Conrad, Peter, 255
Contemporaries (Kazin), 374
Contini, Gianfranco, 4, 531
Cooper, James Fenimore, 21, 316–17, 322
Cooper, Thomas, 582
Cooper-Willis, Irene, 509
Crane, Hart, 133
Crane, Ronald S., 445, 447, 450, 451
Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Booth), 443–55
Croce, Benedetto, 450, 462
Cukor, George, 577
Curtains (Tynan), 500
Curtis, Tony, 398, 399–400
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 453
Dalí, Salvador, 11
Dante Alighieri, 4, 13–14, 33, 40, 266, 308, 354–55, 380, 456
Danziger, James, 575
Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 334
Dario, Ruben, 136
Darkness at Noon (Agee), 181
Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 222
Darkness Falls from the Air (Balchin), 233
Darlinghurst Nights (Slessor), 142
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (Benjamin), 585
Davie, Donald, 71
Davis, Franklin M., Jr., 580–81
Davison, Peter, 285, 291, 300
Dawe, Bruce, 159
Death in the Family, A (Agee), 181–82, 186
Decline and Fall (Waugh), 433, 434
Deer Park, The (Mailer), 395, 396, 405, 406–7
Dehumanisation of Art, The (Ortega), 588–89
Deighton, Len, 191, 192
de Laurentiis, Dino, 553
Delon, Alain, 548
Demon, The (Lermontov), 113
Der Doppelte Boden (Reich-Ranicki), 492
Der Weg ins Freie (Schnitzler), 492–93
Der Widerstand Gegen den Nationalsozialismus, 482
de Santis, Pasquale, 545
de Stael, Madame, 120
Destruction of the European Jews, The, 475
Devil and James McAuley, The (Pybus), 152�
�53
Devil’s Eye, The, 555
Dialogue with Photography (Hill and Cooper, eds.), 582
Diana and Nikon (Malcolm), 569
Diaries (Waugh), 427
Diary of a Century (Lartigue), 590–91
Dickens, Charles, 308–9, 454
Dickinson, Emily, 439
Die Blendung, 457
Die Grenzen der Macht (Stürmer), 489
Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Brecht), 14
Dienes, André de, 396
Die Seeräuber-Jenny (Brecht), 14
Die 200 Tage von 8?, 541
Dirty Dancing, 524
Di Venanzo, Gianni, 542, 544, 545, 553
Divine Comedy, The (Dante), 14
Dobson, Rosemary, 159
Dodge, Mabel, 173, 174–75
Dolphin, The (Lowell), 25, 28, 36
Donen, Stanley, 522
Donovan, Terence, 578
Door into the Dark (Heaney), 19
Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Ohrn), 582
Dos Passos, John, 217
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 120
Double Bond, The (Angier), 276, 279, 281–82
Double Fold, xv
Double Indemnity (Chandler), 209
Dower, John W., 601
Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell), 287
Doyle, Arthur Conan, 190–200, 231–32
Dream Songs (Berryman), 26, 36, 114
Drouet, Minou, 256
Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi), 259–73, 280, 282, 283
Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak), 218, 220
Dubus, Andre, 188
Dudley, Helen, 508–9
Duffey, Brian, 578
Dutton, Geoffrey, 140
Dwan, Allan, 563
Eclipse, The, 543
Edgar, Stephen, 441–42
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 489–90
81⁄2, 539–60
Einstein, Albert, 445–46, 514, 516
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 412–13, 416
E la Nave Va, 556
Eliot, T. S., 93, 95–96, 99, 353–55, 357, 374, 376, 380, 381, 460, 510, 540
Eliot, Viven, 510
Eloquent Light, The, 571
Enemies of Promise (Connolly), 286
Epistle to a Godson (Auden), 15
Ervin, Sam, 412
Estuary in Scotland (Johnston), 204
Etruscan Places (Lawrence), 176–77
Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 102–16, 117–21, 122
Europe Without Baedeker (Wilson), 383
Evans, Walker, 573, 582
Everyman History of English Literature (Conrad), 255
Everyone Says I Love You, 562