Ansel Adams Read online

  From October 27 to November 25, 1936, Ansel’s photographs hung at An American Place, in the first exhibition by a photographer other than Stieglitz himself since Paul and his wife Rebecca Strand’s two-person 1932 show.51 Ansel was now a leading artist in the United States, and he took his new position seriously. His statement for the show explained that these images had been created from the meeting of the world’s outer reality with the unique personal reality of the artist. Ansel termed the result to be photographs that achieved a “super-reality.”52

  His exhibition earned a substantial notice in the New York Times, in which the reviewer remarked that “a skier spotted with snow, a rocky butte against a cloudy sky with great clarity of foreground foliage, the pattern of a pine cone or bark on a tree, a leathery face: these and kindred subjects reveal his personal use of the camera and clarifying ability. Some unusually interesting work.”53

  Financially, too, the show was a big success, with at least nine prints sold.54 Stieglitz disliked even giving the appearance of being a salesman, preferring to “place” prints with duly appreciative buyers. Customers first had to prove to him that they were worthy; they then had to pay whatever price he demanded (which depended on who was buying; Stieglitz believed that the rich should pay a premium). He usually insisted on a thousand dollars each for his own photographs or Paul Strand’s, an outrageous price during the 1930s and 1940s. But whereas Stieglitz and Strand often made only one print from a negative, Ansel held to no such rule, assuming the contrarian position that one of photography’s greatest strengths was reproducibility, the ability to make many prints from one negative. Stieglitz priced most of Ansel’s photographs at thirty dollars, although he sold The White Tombstone to the wealthy David McAlpin for a hundred dollars, Ansel’s highest selling price for a single print for many years to come. The same photograph carried a price tag of twenty-five dollars at the Kuh Gallery.

  But Stieglitz was not yet finished with the prospective buyer. After a check for the full amount was made out directly to the artist, Stieglitz required that a second check be contributed to the “Rent Fund” of An American Place, which in the case of McAlpin and The White Tombstone meant an additional forty-nine dollars.55

  The White Tombstone is a haunting image of a carved and Tudor-arched headstone bearing a profiled figure of a young woman, her head bent in sorrow. Sculpted as a grieving memorial to Lucy Ellen Darcy, who died in 1860 at the age of twenty-six, the stone had subsequently been etched by age and nature.56 The camera’s tilted viewpoint in Ansel’s photograph seems to suggest that the world has been permanently pushed askew by the tragedy of Lucy’s death.

  With confirmed paying jobs awaiting him in Chicago courtesy of Katharine Kuh, Ansel boarded the train from San Francisco on Saturday, November 7. He spent nearly a week in the city, basking in the accolades of the critics and making some money as well. Kuh arranged seven sittings for portraits and a couple of days’ work photographing corsets and brassieres for Paris Garters. Ansel happily tackled this bizarre range of assignments, grateful for the income.57

  On Saturday, November 14, he lectured to the Chicago Camera Club. A newspaper notice of the event described him as the “noted California photographer,” and an accompanying photograph depicted the thirty-four-year-old Ansel, now balding, with broad brow, hooded eyes, prominent nose underlined by a dark mustache, and a tiny apostrophe of a beard beneath his lower lip, looking a bit like a soul patch. Staring off into space, he confidently posed with his new 35mm Zeiss Contax camera held in his smooth, handsome hands.

  The proudly displayed Contax was his latest toy. Ansel was amazed by the ease and portability of the little camera, such a change from his cumbersome eight-by-ten. Shortly after receiving it, he took the Contax into the High Sierra for a month and managed to shoot two dozen rolls of film, about 864 exposures, a revolution for a photographer used to the time-consuming project of making a negative with a view camera. In an article for Camera Craft, Ansel touted the Contax as the single piece of equipment most responsive to the hurly-burly of real life.58

  Ansel arrived in New York too late in the evening to visit An American Place, but the next day he crossed the gallery’s threshold and became transfixed by Stieglitz’s presentation, from the soft gray walls (a color selected by O’Keeffe) to the thoughtful sequencing of image next to image. Most were hung in a line, but a few were grouped in twos or threes, and a few were double-hung, one above another.

  Proper lighting is imperative for photographs if the subtle nuances of tone and detail are to be revealed. The six-foot-tall windows at The Place were sheathed in white shades made softly luminous by the sunshine that moved through the surrounding skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. The shades unrolled from the bottom up to allow regulation of the natural light, which was supplemented by rows of floodlights, their intensity controlled by reflectors; the effect produced recalled the “quality of light of a cathedral.”59 Anointed by Stieglitz, whose praise provided the deepest affirmation and whose intellectual reinforcement had been critical for him, Ansel had achieved the pinnacle of success in the established art world.

  After just four days in New York, Ansel had to return to Chicago for a few days for another round of portrait making and a commercial assignment for a paper factory, and then it was on to Carlsbad, New Mexico. This promised to be another lucrative stop for Ansel, with paying jobs for the Southern Pacific Railroad and the possibility that if he made good photographs in Carlsbad Caverns, the U.S. Department of the Interior would buy them.

  Ansel spent the better part of a week entombed in the caverns, and emerging each evening only made him feel more like a bat. Photographing there proved a frustrating experience: he was repelled by the Park Service’s theatrical lighting, which laid bare what should not have been seen and kept in shadow aspects that deserved revelation. Ansel also found offensive the repetitive boom of the ranger’s voice as he momentously expressed important thoughts about the meaning of life for each new band of tourists. Doubtful that he could capture the quintessence of the natural splendor of the caverns, Ansel wrote to beseech Stieglitz to pray for him.60 He also sent his deepest thanks for the exhibition that had reinvigorated him and trumpeted that he was heading in an exciting and new direction; he chose the word joy to describe his state of mind (despite the cavern experience).

  Finished with Carlsbad, Ansel finally traveled home, arriving in San Francisco on Thursday, December 10, 1936, to a mountain of personal troubles.

  Chapter 9: Losing Heart

  Ansel’s future seemed golden, but what looked like the best of times was actually the worst, and it was all because of love. In early 1936, now an established commercial photographer, he had been hired by the Southern Pacific Railroad to shoot promotional pictures of their posh new passenger cars. Extras were needed, and on a whim, Patsy English, a friend of someone at the modeling agency, joined in the crowd.

  Patsy stood out, at least to Ansel, who asked her to work as a model for him on an advertising campaign for his major client: Yosemite Park and Curry Company (YP&CC) was clamoring for new pictures depicting pretty tourists making the most of their Yosemite experience. Although she had no professional training, Patsy agreed, and she proved so adept that Ansel asked her back for a number of shooting sessions. She bunked at the Best home in the valley along with Ansel and Virginia. Ansel was thirty-four, Virginia thirty-two, and Patsy twenty-two years old.

  Swamped with orders for stock prints from YP&CC, Ansel decided it was time to hire a darkroom assistant: Patsy. Patsy was inexperienced in photography, but she possessed a full measure of energy and was ready and willing to learn. She later remembered that Ansel “needed to make two dozen of this and two dozen of that. He taught me to do the fixing and washing while he printed. This is when I learned about quality. I watched while he exposed and printed and I came to understand. I was very receptive and had the same kind of taste as he did.”1

  Patsy stayed on as Ansel’s assistant as he made the prints for the A
n American Place and Katharine Kuh Gallery shows. She was struck by the severity of his self-criticism, as he often reacted to a freshly made print by saying, “I can do better than that,” whereupon he would return to the darkroom to try it again.

  Throughout the year, as she modeled and assisted in the darkroom and on the road as he went off to make new photographs for the upcoming shows, Patsy was paid, though not royally, and received an occasional print.2 Her favorite from the Stieglitz show was The White Tombstone; when Ansel discovered that this was Stieglitz’s preference as well, it only increased his estimation of Patsy.

  Patsy was excited about life. She was young, smart, and lovely, and she looked great in jeans. Unlike Virginia, she took Ansel’s guidance as a gift rather than a wearisome improvement lecture. Although she found his face and body more than a bit reminiscent of Ichabod Crane’s, she grew enamored of Ansel—his vibrant personality, his great artistry, his patient teaching. (His most attractive physical feature, she thought, was his beautiful hands.) Possessed of sympathetic personalities, they agreed on most matters, including the importance of her establishing her own career.3

  Ansel, for his part, fell head over heels in love. He believed it was Patsy’s presence that inspired him to make the prints for Stieglitz, prints that at last conveyed the intensity he had been seeking. With her spirit beside him, he could conquer the world. Forget Virginia, with her pedestrian, wifely demands, forget the children, whom he didn’t really relate to, forget the old folks in San Francisco, forget the trap he found himself in: Ansel decided that he must leave Virginia for Patsy.

  On the evening of October 14, 1936, just three days after Ansel shipped his prints to Stieglitz for the show, Patsy attended a dinner party at Ansel and Virginia’s San Francisco home. Harry Cassie Best carried his seventeen-month-old granddaughter, Anne, upstairs, placed her in her crib, and then keeled over, dead of a heart attack. While Ansel saw to the children, Virginia called an ambulance and ordered Patsy to stand at the curb, wave it down when it arrived, and try to keep the emergency crew quiet to avoid waking Ansel’s parents, asleep next door. Virginia knew she had to remain strong, and the elder Adamses’ grief and shock would be unbearable.

  An emotional wreck, Patsy stood sobbing by the side of the street. The ambulance crew came and made their way upstairs, out of sight of the guests in the living room, who had no idea what was going on and continued chatting. Patsy recalled that Virginia remained eerily calm throughout, almost stonily cold, though her neck was streaked bright red from the effort of containing her feelings.4

  With her father’s death, Virginia inherited Best’s Studio. If he remained with Virginia, Ansel would now have his own photography gallery and house smack-dab in the middle of his treasured Yosemite. He loved and respected Virginia as the mother of his children, but his passion for Patsy was immense. This situation posed an impossible conundrum for Ansel.

  To compound the problems, Virginia discovered that she was pregnant again. After much debate and open discussion at their home, she checked into the University of California Hospital in San Francisco for a quiet curettage (abortion), having concluded that it was difficult enough raising two children almost single-handedly;5 a third was out of the question.

  Three weeks after Harry’s death, with the two women demanding that he choose between them, Ansel literally skipped town, determined to visit his Chicago and New York exhibitions. Letters poured from his trusty portable typewriter to the two women, neither of whom realized, until years later, that he was sending near duplicates to them both.6

  Ansel returned to San Francisco on December 10 and immediately crash-landed in bed, under the spell of his catchall affliction, the flu.7 Rather than feeling ebullient about his successes in the East, he felt defeated by his personal life. Both Patsy and Virginia told him that his time was up. He and Virginia became embroiled in such a vehement argument that both collapsed and had to be hospitalized in separate rooms in Dante Hospital.8 Emotionally drained and no longer able to run on empty, Ansel lay despondent in his hospital bed, unable to make a decision and unwilling to face either woman.9 He knew what his choices were—either start a new life with Patsy or hoist the burdens of family—but he was tempted just to light out in a simple escape. There was everything to lose either way: his soul or his honor. In the end, he did not have the strength for the struggle.10

  For Christmas, Ansel gave Patsy The White Tombstone. He inscribed the verso of the print with the title “Early California Gravestone, For Patsy, December 1936.” He also added a few poignant lines by Robinson Jeffers.11

  Here is a symbol in which

  Many high tragic thoughts

  Watch their own eyes.

  Since Albert Bender had introduced Ansel to Jeffers in 1926, Ansel had grown to love Jeffers’s work, and it is likely that he had shared this poem with Patsy. To better understand Ansel’s profound sadness, it is helpful to read the entire poem because that was the communication he was sending to his impossible love. One should also look at Ansel’s photograph when reading this, a white marble headstone incised with the image of a disconsolate figure, mourning the too-early death of twenty-six-year-old Lucy Ellen Darcy in 1860.

  “Rock and Hawk”

  Here is a symbol in which

  Many high tragic thoughts

  Watch their own eyes.

  This gray rock, standing tall

  On the headland, where the seawind

  Lets no tree grow,

  Earthquake-proved, and signatured

  By ages of storms: on its peak

  A falcon has perched.

  I think, here is your emblem

  To hang in the future sky;

  Not the cross, not the hive,

  But his; bright power, dark peace;

  Fierce consciousness joined with final

  Disinterestedness;

  Life with calm death; the falcon’s

  Realist eyes and act

  Married to the massive

  Mysticism of stone,

  Which failure cannot cast down

  Nor success make proud.12

  For Ansel, The White Tombstone was no longer the emblem of his great New York success, but represented his unspeakable anguish at the loss of Patsy.

  Patsy came to visit Ansel in the hospital, but as she climbed the stairs to his floor, she was met by his friend Ted Spencer, who delivered a verbal “Dear John” to her, explaining that Ansel had decided not to leave Virginia. Patsy continued on to Ansel’s room, where she found him subdued and a bit stuttery as he briefly informed her that he was staying with his wife, adding that he hoped they could still be friends.13 Remembered Patsy, “And that was that.”14

  Released from the hospital just before Christmas, Ansel only grew more depressed over the holidays. In despair, he wrote to Cedric that he wished he could somehow reclaim his lost happiness.15 In the middle of January 1937, Virginia entered San Francisco’s Saint Francis Hospital to have her tonsils removed;16 shortly before her release, Ansel was admitted to the same hospital complaining of abdominal pains, thus deftly missing her return home.17 He was diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis, a potent virus that plays havoc with the body’s immune system and left him even more exhausted physically and mentally than he had been in December.18 The only treatment was then, as it is now, rest, with recovery in two to three months.

  When he was discharged, two weeks later, he had run out of time and excuses and had to act to save his marriage. Leaving the children with Charlie, Ollie, and Aunt Mary, Ansel and Virginia drove to Palm Springs for a week of sun and rest, in hopes of the honeymoon they had never had.19

  Upon their return, convinced that the damp and foggy San Francisco climate was not helping—not to mention the lack of privacy, with his parents and aunt next door—Ansel and Virginia moved their young family of four to the sunnier clime of Berkeley.20 Unfortunately, their rental house sat directly on the Hayward Fault; within days a tremor rumbled convincingly beneath them, shaking both the ho
use and its occupants to their foundations.21 In no time they were restored to the mixed comforts of 131 Twenty-fourth Avenue.

  The doctor had ordered Ansel not to return to work yet, but the medical bills began arriving,22 and his immediate plunge back into the rat race of making a living in photography seemed their only financial hope. Life resumed as miserably as before.

  Virginia, as was her wont, simmered and stewed for the next few years. She might not have turned out to be Ansel’s dream girl, but then, he was no longer the romantic poet and musician with whom she had fallen in love. Photography did not impress her; photographers had been employed by her father her whole life, and she had never seen much merit in what they did.23 In snapshots taken during these years, her mouth, so soft and shy in earlier photographs, has begun its downward journey, its corners set low in resignation. Virginia, who for years had patiently listened to Ansel’s admonishments, now could not stand to hear them.24

  The rumor mill busily continued to churn out stories of Ansel’s transgressions, not just with Patsy, but Virginia never took any of it seriously because in her experience he was not very good in bed and did not have much of a sexual appetite. She was quite certain that he had not consummated his relationship with Patsy. There was a part of Virginia that always loved Ansel, primarily for his mind, which she considered his best feature.25

  Patsy could not help but overhear various women at different social occasions discussing Ansel, whom they all agreed was notorious for his many liaisons; their gossip chilled her. It was her belief that Virginia condoned his wandering eye because he would stay in their marriage only if she allowed him this freedom.26