'American Grotesque' resurrects William Mortensen's photos

It's hard to imagine two 20th century American photographers more diametrically opposed than the macabre visionary William Mortensen and Ansel Adams, poster boy for so-called straight photography. Google Ansel Adams and you get a Sierra Club Calendar-ready black-and-white photo of the Grand Tetons. Do the same for William Mortensen and you get what appears to be an etching of a naked nubile witch perched provocatively on a broomstick.

Odds are that Adams rings a bell but that you've never heard of Mortensen, subject of a splendid new book, "American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen," the most extensive work on one of the strangest and most compelling artists of the 20th century.

Yet at the height of his fame in the 1930s, Mortensen was perhaps the best-known practitioner of his craft: the first photographer-as-celebrity. Born in Utah in 1897, he studied at the Art Students League in New York, traveled briefly to Greece before returning to Park City, where he dated a young woman named Willow Fay. In 1921, he loaded his motorcycle's sidecar with photographic equipment and drove to Hollywood, where he acted as chaperone to Willow Fay's 14-year-old sister, Vina, one of his first photographic models.

Determined to find work as an actress, Vina soon changed her name to Fay Wray. She sent her mother copies of the photos Mortensen had taken of her, artfully draped in crepe de chine. Wray mére subsequently hot-tailed it to Hollywood. There she confronted Mortensen and, in an eerie foreshadowing of his work's later disappearance from the public eye, destroyed the glass negatives he'd taken of her daughter.

In Hollywood, Mortensen worked with Cecil B. DeMille — he was the first photographer to shoot still photos on set rather than posed in a studio. He went on to photograph Jean Harlow, Lon Chaney Sr., John Barrymore, Rudolf Valentino and Norma Shearer, and he created a series of disturbing masks for Chaney's star turn as a wheelchair-bound stage magician in "West of Zanzibar," a lurid film directed by Tod Browning, later notorious for "Freaks."

From the outset, Mortensen's subject matter was unabashedly theatrical, bizarre and often louche. He was an ardent admirer of Goya and Daumier, and with his Hollywood access to costumes, sets, makeup and masks, would create elaborate tableaux vivants in his studio. He mastered the bromoil process early on and later developed and refined his own techniques for lighting, multiple exposures and the like. He was most famous (and later infamous) for retouching prints (though seldom negatives) with the abrasion control process, which used razor blades, carbon pencil, ink, powder tone, sable brush, eraser, pumice. The resulting images are almost indistinguishable from etchings or paintings.

As the years passed, his work increasingly tended toward the gothic, a trend enhanced after he met occultist Manly P. Hall in 1926. This is when Mortensen began to produce his best and strangest work, the "Pictorial History of Witchcraft and Demonology." Many of these photos are gorgeously reproduced in "American Grotesque" for the first time, along with equally strange and compelling images that first appeared in Mortensen's two masterworks, "Monsters and Madonnas: A Book of Methods" and "The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze."

"The Command to Look" developed a (literal) cult following after Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, name-checked Mortensen's work as influential in "The Satanic Bible" [1969]. Feral House has reprinted Mortensen's long out-of-print book in a handsome new edition with an excellent intro by Larry Lytle and an amusing afterword by Michael Moynihan on Mortensen's influence on modern Satanism.

In the 1930s, Mortensen left Hollywood and founded his own school of photography in Laguna Beach, where his students included Hollywood cinematographers and silent film stars. His photos appeared in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and Theater Magazine, among many others. His how-to books, written with his friend George Dunham, went into multiple printings, and his name was used to sell photographic equipment: "Made for Mortensen — Available To You!"

He was the first photographer to become a name brand, as Lytle writes in "American Grotesque": a precursor to Warhol, Mortensen's influence can be seen today in the work of Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin and fashion photographer Steven Klein, to name only a few.

So if Mortensen's name and work still don't ring a bell, you might blame Ansel Adams.

The photographers sparred publicly in serialized essays that ran in the pages of Camera Craft magazine in 1934. Adams' contribution was "An Exposition of My Photographic Technique," in which the relatively unknown photographer laid out the tenets of the San Francisco-based f/64 Group he'd organized two years earlier with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, among others.

In his essay, Adams stated: "Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality." Mortensen's essay, "Venus and Vulcan: An Essay on Creative Pictorialism," countered that "the ideal they [Group f/64] have set up of complete literal recording is a very primitive one — a good beginning but not an end in itself."

Tragically, Mortensen was on the losing side of this particular artistic skirmish. According to critic A.D. Coleman, the artists and critics associated with Group f/64, especially Adams and his friends Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, "loathed Mortensen with a passion bordering on religious crusading. By the time Mortensen died [in 1965], they'd seemingly won the war between their camp and his, and had long since adopted a scorched-earth policy."

Mortensen's work soon disappeared from critical discourse, and even his photographic archive (somewhat mysteriously) all but vanished. In a letter published in the World Journal of Post-Factory Photography [August 2000], Coleman "lays the blame for that squarely on the doorstep of Newhall, Adams, and the others whose active hostility to Mortensen's work virtually ensured that, at his death in 1965, no respectable repository would have considered acquiring and preserving his materials."

"American Grotesque" recounts this conflict, and much more, in a long-overdue assessment of Mortensen's work and aesthetic philosophy. The book includes a thoughtful biography by Lytle; the complete text of "Venus and Vulcan"; and A.D. Coleman's influential, caustic essay "Conspicuous by His Absence: Concerning the Mysterious Disappearance of William Mortensen," along with a stunningly reproduced gallery of Mortensen's images, many of them published here for the first time.

Group f/64 abhorred Mortensen's manipulation of "reality," his unabashedly Romantic stance. The Newhalls found his photos and philosophy "perverse" and in bad taste.

This is often true. Mortensen's work embraced the gothic, the occult and the trappings of sexual fetishism (especially bondage). Some of the photos reproduced in "American Grotesque," like "Untitled (abduction by monks)," are unintentionally hilarious. Others are merely camp. He had a legendary predilection for shooting female nudes and as his career declined produced way too many of the cheesecake photos he himself had once deplored.

Yet much of Mortensen's work retains its power to haunt, if not shock, viewers whose sensibilities have been numbed by a 24/7 news cycle reliant on disturbing imagery. He believed that "the Grotesque becomes important. … It is recognizably our world that Romance deals with, but somehow transfigured by mystery and surprise, and illuminated with strange lights."

And his writings, especially on the uses of propagandist images and the limits of straight photography — "a good beginning but not an end in itself" — have proved to be amazingly prescient in our post-Photoshop, Instagram world. He recognized early on that visionary photographers could "push their optical equipment to strange extremes, not to reveal unimportant detail, nor as a mere technical stunt, but because the result is beautiful. … [They] represent a phase of pictorial photography whose very existence is barely glimpsed, and whose potentialities are at this time unpredictable."

Adams and Group f/64 may have won a battle over photography's future, but nearly 50 years after his death and decades of obscurity, Mortensen appears to have won the war. His archive now resides in the collection of the Center for Creative Photography, along with those of Adams (one of CCP's founders), Weston, Cunningham and Van Dyke.

Hand's forthcoming novels are "Hard Light" and "Wylding Hall."

American Grotesque: The Life and Art of William Mortensen
Edited by Larry Lytle and Michael Moynihan
Feral House, 287 pp, $45

The Command to Look: A Master Photographer's Method for Controlling the Human Gaze
By William Mortensen & George Dunham
Feral House, 232 pp, $20 paper

Originally posted on LATimes.com.

Book review: ‘Revival,’ by Stephen King

"Revival" is Stephen King’s latest novel. (Scribner)

"Revival" is Stephen King’s latest novel. (Scribner)

Stephen King’s splendid new novel, “Revival,” offers the atavistic pleasure of drawing closer to a campfire in the dark to hear a tale recounted by someone who knows exactly how to make every listener’s flesh crawl when he whispers, “Don’t look behind you.” King has always been generous in acknowledging the inspiration for his fiction. With “Revival,” he names Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), one of the greatest supernatural tales ever written.

King updates Machen’s fin-de-siècle setting and erotic subtext, in which a 17-year-old girl is subjected to a primitive lobotomy that allows her to glimpse the terrifying abyss that underlies our world. “Revival” opens in a place nearly as remote from our modern world as Machen’s gaslit London: rural Harlow, Maine, in the early 1960s. Jamie Morton, the novel’s narrator, recalls an incident from when he was 6 years old, the youngest of five children in a boisterous, big-hearted clan. He’s outside playing with his toy soldiers when a stranger appears:

“On top he was wearing a black-for-church jacket and a black shirt with a notched collar; on the bottom blue jeans and scuffed loafers. It was like he wanted to be two different people at the same time.”

The stranger is Charles Jacobs, Harlow’s new Methodist minister, happily married, with a beautiful young wife and toddler. Jacobs quickly befriends Jamie (and King immediately deflects any intimations of child abuse — this is not that story). He brings the boy to his garage to show him a wonder: a realistic tabletop model of the countryside, complete with what appears to be a real lake and miniature power pylons. With a wave of his hand, Jacobs illuminates the vista. Streetlights glow, and a figure of Jesus walks across the surface of the lake.

Jamie is amazed, even when Jacobs shares the secret of the apparent miracle: electricity, which the minister later says is “one of God’s doorways to the infinite.” Fascinated, the boy becomes a surrogate son to Jacobs, a role Jamie will continue to play long after tragedy strikes and Jacobs disappears.

All of the novel’s themes are contained in that early scene: the tug of war between science and belief; the ability of a good huckster, whether preacher or carny, to hold a crowd rapt with the promise of healing. Most of all, the novel explores the nature and abuse of power, whether it’s love, religious faith or Jacobs’s lifelong obsession, electricity.

King spins this story slowly and with great compassion for his characters, damaged as many of them are by grief and loss, addiction and disappointment; the teeth marks left by time gnawing away at youthful love and ambition. The dead-on details of Jamie’s 1960s childhood — van-choc-straw ice cream, the smell of Vitalis, a half-smoked joint hidden in a Sucrets box — give way to the joys of learning to play an electric Yamaha as Jamie embarks upon his eventual career as a session guitarist.

Happiness is notoriously difficult to make interesting in fiction. Idylls are created only to be destroyed. But King’s narrative never surrenders to mere nostalgia or contempt for the broken world that Jamie, like the rest of us, must live in as he ages.

Decades after Jacobs leaves Maine, he and Jamie meet again at a carnival. Here the former preacher, now calling himself Dan the Lightning Portraits Man, astonishes onlookers by using “secret electricity” to perform impossible feats on audience volunteers. Afterward in his workshop, Jacobs uses his secret electricity to pull off another miracle: a bit of electroconvulsive therapy that cures Jamie of his heroin addiction.

But the two part when Jamie questions Jacobs’s act and his old friend’s real intentions. “All your customers are actually guinea pigs,” Jamie notes. “They just don’t know it. I was a guinea pig.”

Years later, Jamie sees a Web site for evangelist C. Danny Jacobs, whose old-fashioned tent revival show advertises that “God heals like lightning.” Jamie finds himself drawn back into Jacobs’s malign orbit, even as he begins to track down those people who have been “healed” by the evangelist’s secret electricity but display disturbing side effects.

And here the narrative starts to dovetail with Machen’s masterpiece. King’s restrained prose explodes in an ending that combines contemporary realism with cosmic horror reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction and the classic film “Quatermass and the Pit.” The tormented relationship between Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs takes on the funereal shading of an Arthur Miller tragedy — albeit one electrified by the power to bring the dead to life.

Hand’s short novel “Wylding Hall” will be out next year.

Revival
Stephen King
Scribner. 403 pp. $30

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

Book review: ‘Belzhar’ by Meg Wolitzer

”Belzhar,” by Meg Wolitzer (Dutton Juvenile)

Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 bestseller, “The Interestings,” featured a group of precocious teenagers who met at summer camp in 1974. Wolitzer’s gift for capturing youthful exuberance and insecurity in that book suggested that she’d also be a natural at writing a young-adult novel.

“Belzhar,” her first work aimed at a younger audience, is narrated by 15-year-old Jam Gallahue. For almost a year, she has been inconsolable over the death of her boyfriend, Reeve, an English exchange student. When the story opens, Jam has just arrived the Wooden Barn, a boarding school in rural Vermont that’s “sort of a halfway house between a hospital and a regular school. It’s like a big lily pad where you can linger before you have to make the frog-leap back to ordinary life.”

The school eschews drugs for treating depression or other mental illnesses. Internet and cellphones are banned. Instead, Jam and four other students are subjected to what might be called the Plath Method. They’re chosen for a class called Special Topics in English, whose elderly teacher assigns just one book a semester. This time, it’s Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar.” She also gives each student a red leather journal. Their homework: Read Plath’s novel and write in the journal twice a week.

Sound like an easy A? It turns out to be a wrenching, complicated experience. As the weeks pass, Jam and her friends discover something unnerving. The process of reading Plath and reliving their own traumas by writing them down transports them to an eerie, magical way station, a place they call Belzhar (pronounced “bell jar”). In Belzhar, Jam and her classmates find that their lives are frozen in eternal replay mode: Each relives the moments leading up to his or her trauma, but it’s an unending “before” with no “after.”

This metaphor for the grieving process makes for an uneasy amalgam of teen angst and the supernatural. Wolitzer’s first novel, “Sleepwalking,” written more than 30 years ago when Wolitzer was a college student, also deals with young people obsessed with Sylvia Plath. The teenagers in “Belzhar” seem to have been magically transported from that period to 2014. They don’t speak or interact much like contemporary adolescents. Reeve is the most egregious example, spouting lines from ancient Monty Python routines. And the perfunctory references to “The Bell Jar” seem more like canned fodder for a book group Reader’s Guide than an attempt to illuminate Plath’s life and work.

Still, Wolitzer works her own dark magic toward the end of her tale, when, as the semester draws to a close, the five friends are forced to choose between remaining in Belzhar or resuming their lives. As Jam confronts the truth about Reeve’s death, these last few chapters rewrite everything the reader knows about her — and what Jam knows about herself. And, despite its flaws, “Belzhar” finally demonstrates the power of words to heal.

Hand’s most recent novels are “Radiant Days” and “Available Dark.”

Belzhar
Meg Wolitzer
Dutton. 266 pp. $17.99. Ages 14 and up

Originally published on WashingtonPost.com.

Sarah Waters mixes crime and romantic strangers in 'Paying Guests'

"The Paying Guests," by Sarah Waters, is among the finalists for the Kirkus Prize for fiction. (Charlie Hopkinson / Riverhead)

Sarah Waters seems to revel in 19th and 20th century British history as a dolphin does in water: Her literary depictions of domestic life, manners, architecture, class structure, the weight of war and the volatility of love all appear as effortless as they are beautifully executed.

Her novels "Tipping the Velvet," "Affinity" and "Fingersmith" featured Victorian London as backdrop; "The Night Watch" leaped forward to England during the Blitz of World War II. All delved into lesbian relationships and female friendships, with complex yet sympathetic characters as memorable as any in recent fiction. Her previous book, "The Little Stranger," was the first to feature a male protagonist, in a dazzling, Jamesian ghost story set in a decaying country house in the years after WWII, when England's class structure was being demolished along with the vast estates its upper caste could no longer afford to maintain.

Waters' newest work moves back in time to the years after the first world war, where she masterfully weaves true crime, domestic life and romantic passion into one of the best novels of suspense since Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca."

"The Paying Guests" opens one Sunday afternoon in 1922, with a melancholy if mundane event: 27-year-old Frances Wray and her mother awaiting the eponymous paying guests, Lilian and Leonard Barber, who two weeks earlier answered the Wrays' advertisement in the South London Press for rooms to let.

Brash twentysomethings from Peckham Rye, the Barbers arrive bearing two weeks' rent — 28 shillings — along with less welcome reminders of the Wrays' unhappily straitened circumstances. Frances' two brothers were killed in the war. Two years after their deaths, her father died, and the posthumous revelation of his bad investments reduced the Wrays' upper-middle-class lifestyle to penury. Gone are the live-in servants, whose room has become the kitchen; Frances now sleeps in the former dining room (along with some of the dining room furniture), with her mother across the hall.

Gone too is any semblance of privacy. The WC is in the backyard, accessed only through the Wrays' kitchen. The faded elegance of Mrs. Wray's bedroom disappears beneath cheap mass-produced rugs and shawls and pre-Raphaelite prints, a wicker bird cage that contains a fake parrot on a papier-mâché perch. Mr. Barber picks his teeth with a matchstick. Pretty Mrs. Barber favors makeup, shingled hair and scandalously short skirts that expose fancy silk stockings. Frances finds herself "as conscious of their foreign presence as she might have been of a speck in the corner of her eye."

Yet the dramatic changes in her fortune allow unexpected pleasures to enter Frances' life. To her mother's dismay, Frances finds that she enjoys "landladying," and she takes pride in the physical labor — varnishing wallpaper, staining floors — involved in readying the house for tenants. Even more, she delights in the Barbers' rent money: "She parted the gum of the envelope and — oh, there it all was, so real, so present, so hers, she felt she could dip her mouth to it and kiss it."

The sly eroticism of Frances' reaction is a neat foreshadowing. Because, as the weeks pass, she and Mrs. Barber — Lilian — gradually become friends, and then after a sexually charged evening at a party with Lilian's friends, lovers. In one of the many clever twists in Waters' diabolically clever tale, we learn that the demure, seemingly diffident Frances has had other female lovers — lots of them. Her matter-of-fact acknowledgment is another of the book's delights, along with one of the hottest sex scenes ever to be set in a scullery.

"The Paying Guests" unfolds in a deceptively languid fashion, but its meticulous descriptions and period details are neither arbitrary nor superfluous. Instead, they subtly illustrate how horribly constrained women's lives could be, in an era many associate with flappers and Bright Young Things whizzing from one country house weekend to the next.

World War I inescapably overshadows this world, from the Wrays' genteel poverty, to the bigotry and suspicion that accompany the economic rise of formerly working-class people like the Barbers, with "their 'refined,' elocution-class accents," to the resentment of veterans who return home to find their jobs gone or, worse, occupied by women.

Waters sets her narrative trap carefully, and when she springs it, more than 300 pages in, "The Paying Guests" shifts into high gear as smoothly and relentlessly as a Vauxhall touring car overtaking a horse and carriage. As in "Rebecca," there's a crime of passion, but instead of a low-key inquest conducted by a sympathetic magistrate, there's a court case with all the tabloid furor of the Amanda Knox trial — Waters' novel was inspired in part by several real life crimes of the period. The novel's last few hundred pages race past to reach a climax of nail-biting suspense, followed by a moving and delicately wrought denouement.

"I pay attention to women's history," Waters said in a recent interview. "To their secret history and lives." "The Paying Guests" illuminates these lives brilliantly and unforgettably.

Hand's most recent book is the collection "Errantry: Strange Stories."

The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters
Riverhead: 566 pp., $28.95

Originally published on LATimes.com.