'Master Writers Often Teach How to See'

The unexpected intersection of two writers, particularly when at least one of them expresses admiration for the other, is always a pleasure, rather like learning that one friend has befriended another. I was browsing in Walker Evans, a catalogue published in 2017 in conjunction with exhibitions of the photographer’s work at the Centre National d’Art et de Culture George Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The editor is Clément Chéroux, the senior curator of photography at the latter museum. Evans (1903-1975) is a great American artist, far greater than the better-known James Agee, the writer with whom he collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Among the essays included in the catalog is “‘I’m a Writer Too,’ The Texts of Walker Evans” by Anne Bertrand. In it, without elaborating, Bertrand mentions Walker’s “joy” in reading Proust, Joyce, Henry James and Nabokov. She gives no source, but adds: “[A]nd while we know that he read Céline, writing, perhaps even more than literature, was his second passion, his violon d’Ingres . . . and his secret garden, so little did he speak about this subject (about which no one asked him). Perhaps it was one of those intimate things that this complex man never wanted to talk about.”

A brief search disclosed a posthumously published essay by Evans, “Photography,” in the Winter 1978 issue of The Massachusetts Review.  Evans notes that “photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts. It will have--on occasion, and in effect--qualities of eloquence, wit, grace, and economy; style, of course; structure and coherence; paradox and play and oxymoron.” Like any good sample of poetry or prose, including work by the four fiction writers cited above by Bertrand.

“If photography tends to the literary, conversely certain writers are noticeably photographic from time to time--for instance James, and Joyce, and particularly Nabokov. Here is Nabokov: ‘. . . Vasili Ivanovich would look at the configurations of some entirely insignificant objects--a smear on the platform, a cherry stone, a cigarette butt--and would say to himself that never, never would he remember these three little things here in that particular interrelation, this pattern, which he could now see with such deathless precision . . .’ Nabokov might be describing a photograph in a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Master writers often teach how to see; master painters sometimes teach us what to see.”

The quoted passage is from “Cloud, Castle, Lake”, translated from the Russian by Nabokov and published in The Atlantic in 1941.