`A Report of the Matter'

I was born in Cleveland and lived there until I was 17 and for brief spells over the next few years, so I was pleased when I discovered Wright Morris had taken a typically elegant and mysterious photograph in my hometown. It’s titled “Starfish and Portrait, Cleveland, Ohio,” and is dated to the 1940s, the decade before I was born. I’m unable to find the image online but I will describe it: We see a table, perhaps a sideboard or dresser, covered with a white cloth heavily creased from ironing, probably in the parlor or front hallway. At the lower left are three postmarked letters, the one on top addressed to “Mary A. Finfrock, 3186 Oak Road, Cleveland Heights, Cleveland, Ohio” – no zone and no ZIP code, of course. The return address is in Covington, Ohio. Behind the letters are a small, framed photograph of a grim-looking elderly woman and a glass vase painted with violets. To the right is a glass goblet holding four pens or pencils. At the center of the photo is a large starfish leaning against the wall, a souvenir of the distant beach. The wall is covered with floral-print paper.

Often, especially in the homes and workplaces of other people, we observe spontaneous, unposed still-lifes, but unlike Morris most of us don’t take the trouble to photograph them. We don’t know if Wright staged this arrangement of objects or shot what he found. If random, the set-up was fortuitous, for we can read the picture as an exercise in fanciful autobiography. Morris was both a writer and a photographer. Two of his books from the 1940s – The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948) – were in a hybrid form he pioneered, the “photo-text.” One leg of the starfish rests near the photograph of the old lady, the other near the goblet holding the writing implements. Morris – the “star” – is straddling two artistic worlds. Farfetched? Probably, but Morris’s eye was too acute not to have noticed.

As the epigraph to The Home Place, Morris chose a passage from Henry James’ The American Scene, a book he rhapsodizes in his wonderful study of American literature, The Territory Ahead. The James volume is notably dense, written in his elaborate late manner – Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” – and it is probably the best book ever written about the United States, the one I would give curious strangers. Here’s the passage Morris selected:

“To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytical, minded – over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things – is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of there own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.”

I take that as license to read meaning into Morris’ picture of the starfish. As a native Clevelander, someone born there not long after he took the picture, I am, as James says, “at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.” The scene is quintessentially American and, I’m guessing, already a little old-fashioned in a shabby-genteel way by the 1940s. The old woman was born no later than the Civil War. The setting is working-class or lower-middle-class – the cloth is clean and ironed, the wallpaper pattern is tacky – and it all seems perfectly familiar from my childhood. More than any medium, photos are suffused with pathos. This well-lit, tightly focused photograph renders a world long gone, and like much of the best art it does so without tricks, with a peculiarly resonant directness.