`Bites Out of American History'

As always when I return to Cleveland my brother and I sifted through boxes of family photographs mixed with old newspapers and greeting cards, all stored in cardboard boxes. That they survive at all is miraculous, given three or four generations of incompetence and sloth. What is more frustrating than photographs of intriguing faces, elegantly framed but unidentified and undated, and thus anonymous? We may be looking at a lineal forebear but probably we’ll never know. My brother plans to meet with a cousin and our surviving aunt – the last person, at age 78, with any hope of giving names to some of the ghosts – to work out a Kurp/Hayes/McBride/Kelly archive. The inevitable has happened: What once seemed tiresome (pictures of dead people) has become precious, some of it even salacious.

Speaking of photograph, I recommended to my brother the work of Michael Lesy, still best known for his first book, Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). I don’t know if he pursued the suggestion but I’ve returned to Lesy’s work, in particular Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. For me, his books move in and out of focus. Just when I think I understand what he’s getting at with his vast collections of vintage photographs, I lose that understanding and another takes its place. He’s not a merchant of nostalgia, though he could be if he chose to market himself differently. Rather, he’s a scholar of images without the footnotes, and his subject is the United States in the age of photography. In a 2003 interview Lesy says:

“I had an agenda. I wanted to take bites out of American history in a steady way. I wanted to talk about the United States, decade by decade by decade.”

This is an admirable goal but Lesy surpasses it. The pictures in Dreamland are drawn from the work of photographer William Henry Jackson who, in 1898, with a wealthy man from Detroit, William Livingstone, formed the Detroit Publishing Company. After acquiring the rights to a Swiss color photolithographic process, they produced more than 7 million images a year – especially color postcards but also panoramas and slides. Jackson and his stable of photographers seem to have visited every state and photographed every social class, from high society to former slaves.

On the cover of Dreamland is “Cliff House, San Francisco,” a splendid photograph of a mansion built by a millionaire and one-time San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro. Cliff House has had five lives. The eight-story dwelling in the picture went up in 1896, survived the earthquake a decade later and burned down in 1907. In the foreground, 13 overdressed children and a woman run in the waves and along the beach. Offshore, craggy rocks, the sort that remind us of human or canine profiles, obscure a portion of the horizon. Waves crash against other rocks below the house and foam splashes almost to Cliff House’s third floor. Like a proud, soon-to-be-humbled emblem of Manifest Destiny, the beautiful house withstands the pounding of the western ocean.

All photographs are personal. They capture evanescence as it disappears, and that’s the secret of their mournful charm. With the photographer at Cliff House we face north. To the west, our left, is the Pacific. To the east, our right, the gravity of the American continent outweighs it. For a few nights during the 11-year incarnation of Cliff House, an American guest from England visited behind us, some 500 miles to the south, in San Diego. Henry James was nearing the end of his year-long tour of his homeland after 20 years in Europe. When I see the Cliff House photo, I think of James, a 19th-century man who wrote his finest books in the 20th century, including The American Scene (1906).

The late Donald Justice loved James and was attuned to the sad fragility of the past. He wrote “American Scenes (1904-1905)” about James’ late return to the United States from Lamb House, his home in Rye, East Sussex. In the last of its four sections, James is staying in the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego. Here is “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California”:

“In a hotel by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost –
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done,
But not, not – sadly enough – by him. His talents,
Such as they may be, want an older theme,
One rather more civilized than this, on balance,
For him now always the consoling dream
Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.”