How Georgia Became O'Keeffe (8 page)

BOOK: How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
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Georgia received word of her mother's death by telegram in Manhattan. She was surprised by the depth of her grief. Frank Jr. had been her mother's favorite. Anita was the prettiest, and Ida, the most artistically gifted. Georgia was quirky and willful. In a letter to Stieglitz, she said she and her mother were so different; she had essentially raised herself, “wriggling up alone—bumping my head and thinking it was worth it.” It never matters, does it, that we were not our mother's favorite? Georgia was not the kind of woman to eat her way through a chocolate cake to make herself feel better. Even in the face of grief, something most of us spend a lifetime trying to dodge, she was in thrall to her emotions. She submitted to her sadness with Midwestern stoicism. She dreamt about touching her mother's face, massaging her temples with her thumbs. She sometimes wept in private, but mostly she trudged through her days at the University of Virginia, where she was once again teaching summer school. It was a measure of her despondency that nature—in this case, the spunky bright green of early summer, the rolling wooded hills—left her cold.

Work had become both a habit and a source of solace (sublimate!), and when she returned to it, she also returned to working with color. Her charcoal-only days died with Ida. She began a calligraphic series of lines, rendered first in charcoal, then black watercolor, and finally, her spirits lifting, blue. Two deep blue lines travel up the page from a horizontal pond of blue; two-thirds of the way up one line zigs down, zags back up, then continues along its way, once again parallel to its mate. She sent it to Stieglitz, who was so smitten by its self-assurance and austerity that he hung it on a wall where he could gaze upon it from his office, so that he could look at it whenever he pleased.

A Few Modest Lessons on Falling in Love

You must write to one another.

After Georgia left for Canyon, Texas, and West Texas State Normal College in late August 1916, she and Stieglitz struck up a correspondence that was so lively, consistent, and increasingly intimate
‡‡
that it could have only ended in bed. Every thought that entered their heads was fit to be part of their communication. From a letter dated September 3, 1916, in which Georgia complained that the narrow-minded citizens of Canyon were like “petty little sores” on the plains, described the locust-sound of the prairie wind, expressed fear and loathing of the pink roses on the wallpaper of her rented room (“Give me flies and mosquitoes and ticks—even fleas”), and made coy, passing reference to being naked, she writes:

You know—I—

I waited till later to finish the above sentence—thinking that maybe I must stop somewhere with the things I want to say—but I want to say it and I'll trust to luck that you'll understand—

She reports that she prefers to wear her coat buttoned, and how the sound of her pen scritching along as she writes drives her mad.

He details every cloud that drifts overhead, the feeling of ice on the tips of his mustache, his thoughts about the drawings and paintings she sends to him on a regular basis (“Gripping”), his conversations with other artists, advice on how to cure a sore throat. The more they wrote to one another—sometimes two or three letters a day—both adopting her manic use of dashes in place of standard punctuation—intoxicated by the romance they were creating and the depth of their communication—by the connection they were developing—the more their letters became a richly textured work of art that belonged to no one but them.

Now that letter-writing is dead and e-mails are on life support, how do we develop this kind of rich, multifaceted attachment to someone we're interested in? I'm probably being unrealistic in assuming that most people still think this is an effort worth making. After all, when Georgia and Stieglitz began their passionate correspondence, people didn't even have radio, much less six seasons of
Lost
to catch up on (available on DVD and for instant streaming on Netflix). A lot of this mad letter-writing was also something that passed the time. It was fun, 1916-style. It was Angry Birds and
I Can Has Cheezburger
and
American Idol
and retail therapy, and everything else we moderns like to do. Also, when Georgia and Stieglitz began, they weren't looking to fall in love. Stieglitz was older and long-married, and Georgia was still technically seeing Arthur Macmahon. They were merely messing around.

Nowadays, we simply don't have the time to mess around, to bounce ideas off each other, chase each other's thoughts, and in the process create a private world built of ideas, feelings, and language. One day we're single, the next we're on Match.com. In a perfect world, we would be able to go straight from being “winked at” to a meeting with the wedding planner. We don't want to futz around e-mailing someone about the sound of the rain on the roof, or how we took the dog for a walk around the block and admired the plum trees in bloom, or how our sister came to visit and made her special lasagna. A friend of mine
§§
who's an avid online dater said that she'd made a policy to write off any potential suitor who e-mailed her for more than two weeks without making a coffee date. Such foot-dragging was a sure sign that either he wasn't interested, or he had intimacy issues. The idea that maybe her online crush wanted to flirt a little, throw out a few jokes to see if she got them, reference a book he'd read or a movie he'd seen, or test the political waters to see if they both avidly supported/mutually loathed the president had never occurred to her. She was busy and wanted to get busy. She wanted to dispense with the niceties of getting to know what goes on inside her potential beloved's head and get straight to the cha cha cha and ooh la la.

The only people left in the world who build and nurture the sort of deep, complex connection that is created via correspondence do so because they have no other choice: They're either in love with a soldier serving a tour of duty in a developing country with unreliable Internet, a Peace Corps volunteer, or someone serving a long prison term.

And lucky them. Because they're forced to communicate via writing they're able to ascertain, over time, their beloved's true character. I'm not talking about discovering his likes and dislikes or most embarrassing moment in middle school. I mean learning whether he possesses the ability to see and love them for who they are, support them in their goals to do whatever, and make them laugh.
¶¶

It's essential to know this about anyone you think you might be serious about, and really, the best way to gauge this is over time, without the interference of pesky hormones. This shouldn't need to be said, but there is no correlation between a guy's washboard abs and his ability to champion your fondest hopes and dreams. I wish I could find a more elegant way of saying this: People in passionate long-term relationships put up with a lot of shit from one another. That's just the way of it. You can learn how to communicate better, or add spice to the bedroom, or make time for weekend getaways that feature a hotel with en suite hot tub, but people can't escape their essential personalities. And neither can their significant others.

I'm belaboring this point so you can see why O'Keeffe loved Stieglitz, and continued to love him once he started behaving badly. For all of his off-putting qualities, no one on earth believed in her vision and her genius more profoundly than did Stieglitz, and because of that he was irreplaceable.

But how, you may ask, with letters long dead and e-mails about to exhale their death rattle at any moment, can you begin a meaningful correspondence with someone? What is the would-be writer of love letters to do? There is an answer, but I suspect you won't like it: video games.

I met Jerrod, my own Glorious Bit of All that's Human, playing EverQuest.
**
I played a high elf magician and he played a wood elf bard, and one day our avatars “met” in a zone called The Estate of Unrest, where we were each killing ghouls, zombies, and reanimated scarecrows. There's a heavy chat component to these games. In between slaying two-headed ogres and raising your sewing skill by “making” the same cloth hat four hundred times in a row, there are hours of typing back and forth. Not letter-writing, but just as time-consuming. “Mozi” and I quested together and chatted every night for months. The courtship was Victorian even by Stieglitzian standards. In the event he was an unemployed pothead in a stained T-shirt living in his mother's basement, I was reluctant to give him my real name. I was smitten by his sense of humor (on many occasions I really did LOL), his California roots (like me, he grew up in a tragically dull suburb), and the clincher, the fact he knew that “a lot” was two words.
††
Finally, I told him my name. That was ten years ago.

The greatest aphrodisiac is vitality.

By the time she'd settled in Canyon, Georgia was a full-blown eccentric. You'd be hard-pressed to find a woman so astoundingly herself, not just of that time, but of any time. In a bit of fashion synergy that echoed what was going on in the same decade in the atelier of Coco Chanel, half a continent and an ocean away in Paris, Georgia wore only straight, sheath-like black dresses. She tromped around wherever she pleased in flat, mannish shoes. The only time she changed her footwear into something more dainty and acceptable was when she wanted to resist the urge to hike for miles out into the prairie, or scramble up and down the rocks at nearby Palo Duro Canyon; high heels were for self-hobbling only. She was known for the spot-on impersonations she did of other teachers, her biting wit, and her knowledge of something called cubism.

She was as on the fringe as they came, and yet, she attracted a variety of men. They weren't afraid of her oddness, her competence, her lack of bows and small talk. George Dannenberg, The Man from the Far West, was still writing to her, as was Arthur, her first lover. For a time Arthur wanted to marry her, but she wasn't interested enough to encourage him to press his hand. There was also her student, Ted Reid, and of course, Stieglitz.

She was not yet the famous O'Keeffe. She was merely the local bohemian. And yet, all these men, all of a different stripe (the arty San Franciscan who loved to dance; the handsome, straitlaced political science teacher; the local football hero; the equally eccentric Father of Photography), couldn't stay away.

Her secret? Loving her own life. Finding the things that came her way of immense interest and animating them. No matter what was going on, it was great to be her, starring in her own true-life adventure. My mother, who knew about these things, advised me when I was thirteen and boy-crazy to ignore the boys and focus on my schoolwork, swim team, horseback riding (which I could never get enough of), making macramé plant hangers, and keeping up with
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
She said that loving things in life makes people love you. She said, it's like how we trained the dog Smitty to come. We didn't stand there and holler
Come!
We didn't entice him with a dog treat. Instead, we would ignore him, then rush over to the other side of the room and pretend we'd found something exciting. Then he would rush over to see what the fuss was about. It didn't take long for Smitty to rush over to me every time I entered the room, so sure was he that I was up to something interesting.

Resistance is futile.

After the end of spring term, 1917, O'Keeffe hopped on a train and went to New York. To buy the ticket, she convinced the banker to open the bank on Sunday so she could withdraw her savings. This was not something people routinely did, hopping on a train at the spur of the moment. When she showed up at 291, Stieglitz was both impressed and titillated by what he thought of as her girlish “American” spontaneity. On April 3, 1917, he had opened her first solo show, including some of the charcoal
Specials
, some watercolors from Canyon, and the esoteric and elegant
Blue Lines
(1916)
,
but by the time she arrived it had been dismantled; he insisted on rehanging it for her private pleasure.

During her ten-day stay she met Paul Strand, a young photographer and one of Stieglitz's recently acquired disciples. Stieglitz loved nothing more than having a new disciple. A decade earlier the Belgian-born photographer Edward Steichen had sought him out during a trip to New York in 1900. Stieglitz immediately pegged Steichen as a fellow photographic visionary. Steichen designed the logo of
Camera Work
, and Stieglitz dedicated several issues to Steichen's photographs. Even though Stieglitz had been born in Hoboken, the two men shared a European sensibility. It was Steichen who had turned Stieglitz on to Rodin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Brancusi.

But inevitably, Steichen betrayed his mentor by committing the unpardonable sin of inventing fashion photography,
‡‡‡
then further rubbed salt into the wound by proving his youth and manliness by joining the army after the United States entered World War I, where he commanded a photographic division of American Expeditionary Forces. Stieglitz was both too old and too conflicted about the war to join in.

Acolytes came, then disappointed and left, so there was always an opening for a new one. Paul Strand was the latest and brightest. He discovered photography in high school, when his class at The Ethical Culture School took a field trip to 291 in 1907. Like Steichen before him, when Strand met Stieglitz
§§§
he was dazzled by possibilities and dared believe that he could make a career of photography. Strand was handsome in the way of the cutest male high school teacher, and the moment Georgia met him she fell for him, and he for her.

On Memorial Day, Stieglitz, Strand, and some other photographer who isn't important to the story took a trolley to Coney Island. Georgia was in a swoon. At twenty-nine, the Patsy O'Keeffe part of Georgia's personality, the fun-loving Irish girl who liked to dance and pull pranks, had been allowed to atrophy. Years earlier Georgia had realized that there were only so many hours in the day, and that if she stayed out late dancing, she wouldn't be able to paint the next day. She'd begun to understand both time and emotional energy were art supplies, every bit as important as fine brushes and high-quality paint. She simply never allowed herself to have fun like this. On the trolley ride home, Stieglitz wrapped O'Keeffe in his heavy loden cape to keep her warm. Georgia couldn't help but view Stieglitz as avuncular. He was old enough to be her father, with iron-gray hair and a well-upholstered marriage made in the last century.

BOOK: How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
11.04Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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