Evans’ lists
I feel a lot better about dawdling regarding Walker Evans after receiving James R. Mellow’s biography. It’s over five hundred pages, and only goes to 1957. Mellow died before it was completed. There’s a lot of material out there on Evans. The sources for all my ruminations fill a good-sized banker’s box. I’ve been collecting them for years, because while I know a lot about Evans’ approach, I’m still grappling with him as a man. Conflicting things are written all the time, and Evans encouraged that. He wanted to be a mystery.
I remain stuck in the 1928-31 phase because there is relatively little there, image-wise, though there is a lot of textual stuff. In 1929 Evans changed roommates, from Hans Skolle to Paul Grotz. Skolle was a painter, and Grotz an architect and amateur photographer. Skolle moved out, and Hart Crane left town. Though Evans enjoyed Crane when he was sober, like most people, he couldn’t deal with him drunk.
Part of the reason for the limited number of photographs available, I suspect, is because Evans wanted to destroy any evidence that he was aligned with the “high aesthetic tradition” that he dabbled in, via his cityscapes. In the years from 1929-34, Evans forged a new aesthetic. The romantic or at the very least, dramatic, approach to photography was quickly moved to the itemized list of things he loathed.
Evans made a list of the things Skolle left behind when he moved out, sorting them in a rather familiar pattern.
| Thanks for: | No thanks for: | |
| ruler | LePage’s Big Boy Paste | |
| Rosmersholm [by Ibsen] | The Miraculous Revenge | |
| Superior clips | by Bernard Shaw | |
| Vick’s Vaporub | Rock Island time table | |
| twine | garbage | |
| India ink | Burton’s trade purity strength | |
| Asia [a magazine] | delicacy of flavor mark | |
| Monocle | extract of vanilla | |
| The Missing Link | souvenirs of amorous adventures | |
| hatchet | whiskey | |
| Dos En Uno Pasta Superior | oil can | |
One of the interesting things about the change from Skolle to Grotz as companions, was the fulfillment of some of Evan’s wanderlust. The pair made extensive trips, including one to Canada which has some surviving photographic evidence.
Rosenheim and Eklund paired the grain elevator photograph with a set of prose poems composed around the same time, thinking that the poems might be written in reflection of the Canadian trip; however, they could just as easily be a reflection on New York. Influence is a curious thing.
An interesting attribute also noted by these editors is that the manuscript containing the poems is set apart by short lines, like the lines of a contact sheet of photographs. I think that’s a bit of a reach. That’s also a contextual apparatus also used in books of poetry.
The great thing about Mellow’s biography is that it’s written by a man used to writing biographies of modern writers; he examines the lies, and the reaching involved of trying to make sense of history.
In the introduction, Hilton Kramer notes Walker Evan’s reaction to biography: “They’re all lies! They’re nothing but lies!” Reacting to the suggestion that he write his own memoir, Evans said: “No, no, you don’t understand. I would write lies too. You can’t write anything but lies about the past.”
One thing is certain about this group of poems by Evans: they are hardly the celebration of modernist vision of the city
cross
check
cube yourselves
black and white in the sun
it is nothing to me that you are a grain elevator
your words carry another word to my eye
shadowshade of a city
falling across the face of a one eyed monster
built byhiding
for
awaitingwaiting
standing day after day
none sees this
threat
cascadesdry
your water is the caress of my eye
one part of a cityimpaled
punctured cubes
full of stenographers desires banalities
not good enough for their shell
Text on verso:
To hell with the filthy punctured cubes of the city — architecturally speaking. Fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy three tragedies, 67284 mysteries, several obscure dramas with or without poetry there in the night.
Besides the trip to Canada, there were also several subsequent trips to Truro in Cape Cod. Grotz had a place there, and when I get to that section, where this is all going will be much clearer. In his words, Evans reacts against the aestheticism of his day. However, the visual solution to the problem is just around the bend.
