A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

INTRODUCTION: COLLECTING ONESELF

I write with my left hand. Left-handedness used to be considered a malign aberration (sinister is Latin for left), and in the generations before mine, left-handed schoolchildren were routinely switched. Enforced conformity, especially, perhaps, when it selects an inborn trait to repress or persecute, breeds intolerance for difference of all kinds. Singled out for bullying or conversion, a child internalizes the message that she isn’t right.

I have a bittersweet memory in this regard. My father had been switched by an implacable Hebrew schoolteacher who’d made him sit on his left hand for six years. Even in old age, he still flexed it compulsively, though I reckoned that other childhood humiliations had also numbed him. Our relations were mostly silent, and I pined for his attention. But when I was learning to write, he sat patiently by my side, holding my wrist so it wouldn’t hunch over like a cripple’s back. He wanted to endow me with a beautiful hand—the signature of a lady. I don’t think he realized how illegible his love was.

In the contemporary world, belonging to the left-handed minority (about ten percent of the population) is a minor inconvenience. But when I started kindergarten, at the height of the McCarthy hearings, my mother, Alice, warned me not to describe myself as a leftie. Why, I asked her? It could get us into trouble, she said darkly. I had no idea what she meant, and her anxiety was cockeyed, since my parents’ only cell was our four-room apartment. Yet the tone of that caution sobered me to the core. It hinted at a guilty secret that a careless word could betray.

My mother’s demons—her abiding terror of some imminent catastrophe—still haunt me. By the time I could see her with detachment, she was a sedated recluse who had designated the task of living to her only child. In that sense, our roles were reversed; I attuned my behavior to her fragility. I don’t know what her own aspirations might have been, except that she revered language, and her gift to me was insisting that I should. During the Depression, she’d taught Latin and English in a Boston high school, but on her wedding day, she forfeited the job. It went to a man, she was told by the principal, who had a family to support.

Alice accepted her dismissal timidly, without questioning its injustice. Perhaps her ambitions for me were a deflected protest. I was lucky, however, to have two maiden aunts. The feisty old maid in an uptight family is often an ally to her wayward niece. Eva, my father’s sister, managed a used bookstore near Harvard Square. She was wraithlike and tweedy, with a smoker’s deep voice and wrinkles. Eva’s a character, the family liked to say. Whatever small luxury they sent her—a toaster, a winter coat, a banknote tucked into a birthday card—she gave it away. It went to a poet on scholarship, or to the unwed mother who lived upstairs. I first heard the expression free love from Eva, uttered with reverence. She meant something heretical, I think; she meant to let me know that virginity is a false idol. Even as a child, I marveled at her ardor.

Unlike Eva, my maternal aunt Charlotte wasn’t a romantic, though unlike her sister, she inhabited a body that gave her pleasure. Arkie, as I called her, was built like an otter and could swim two miles in the ocean. She taught me to ride a bike and to build a campfire. She had spent her youth as an activist in the settlement house movement. Later, she ran a state unemployment bureau staffed mostly by closeted socialists like herself. Arkie took a dim view of patriarchal institutions—religion, capitalism, marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a woman’s college: He has to be a very good husband to be better than no husband at all.

Both my aunts got stuck caring for their elderly parents well into middle age. But then they moved into their own bachelor digs not far apart in Cambridge. They often traveled together, adventurously. Had they been born in a later era, they might have been lesbians, and perhaps they were, covertly—I hoped so—though we never spoke of intimate things. Of course she was a lesbian! Alison Bechdel said to me of Arkie. (I was visiting her in Vermont, reporting the profile in this volume.) Straight women didn’t dress up as Gene Autry (a singing cowboy of the 1950s). When I stayed with my grandparents, as I did every summer, Arkie sang me to sleep in a Stetson, chaps, and a six-shooter.

At the age of eighty, Arkie came to live with me, and helped me to raise my son. (I, too, was an unwed mother.) I once asked her if she was happy. We were living in Paris for a year, while I did research on Colette. She kept house for us without a word of French, and her only company, for most of the day, was a rambunctious two-year-old. You’re too sentimental about happiness, she said. No critique has served my craft better.

The writers I most admire never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable. Style is character, Joan Didion asserted, in an essay on Georgia O’Keeffe whose surface is as taut as a drum skin. Didion’s character was elusive, above all to herself, unlike O’Keeffe’s—an artist, she wrote, with palpable envy, who seems to have been equipped with an immutable sense of who she was. A style like Didion’s is often the result of arrogance, painfully unlearned.

All men are deceived by the appearances of things, Heraclitus wrote, 2,500 years ago, even Homer himself, the wisest man in Greece. The poet was alerted to his self-deception by boys catching lice: ‘What we catch and kill we leave behind,’ they told him, ‘but what escapes us we bring with us.’ What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.

That mystery has been my subject from the beginning; with every new piece of work, I grope my way into it. First Impressions, a reportage on Paleolithic art, suggests my point of departure. It recounts the accident by which three spelunkers found an entrance to the Chauvet Cave, which had been sealed for millennia. They were attracted by an updraft of cool air coming from a recess near the cliff’s ledge—the potential sign of a cavity. There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.

I write about the lives and work of other people in part to understand my own, while avoiding what I feel obliged to do here: talk about myself. In most of my essays, a passage or even just a sentence surprises me with a private truth I couldn’t otherwise have expressed freely. In my study of Emily Dickinson, it’s a reflection on depressive mothers. Their daughters, I write, often feel a propitiary impulse to make some sacrifice of their aggression and desire, perhaps because … they feel guilty about their own vitality. In my reading of Elena Ferrante, it’s a riff on primal attachments, for which hostile love is an antidote. Ambivalence, I suggest, is Alison Bechdel’s default mode: the voice that narrates her graphic memoirs both yearns for and mistrusts closeness. In taking the measure of Rachel Cusk, I begin with a description of her narrator—a Cusk-like British writer named Faye. Friends and strangers tell her their stories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. While sharing their dilemma covertly, Faye lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows … she extracts something clear—a sense of both her own outline and theirs.

After fifty years of dissembled groping, I thought of calling this collection Wear and Tear. You’ll frighten off young readers, a friend warned me. Indefinite Article was another wry title that appealed to me. But it alluded too obliquely to The Left-Handed Woman, a novella by Peter Handke. The connection merits an aside.

Handke found the title I have reborrowed from him one evening in Paris, where we’d met in the early seventies. I’d moved abroad after college, and those years in Europe were my graduate school. Every aspect of its culture—class, speech, dress, food, décor, politics, and sex (especially sex)—was coded in a manner both fascinating and arcane to the provincial American I was. Decrypting the codes was good training for my future vocation. I had one mentor in particular, an elegant Frenchwoman with whom I used to stay. She balanced a prestigious career with her duties as the wife of an important man, and her life seemed glamorous, though I aspired to a different one. Madame G. worried it wouldn’t be secure, or not, as she liked to say, when you’re alone at my age.

Perhaps I’d related our conversations to Peter—I don’t remember—but when he read the note my hostess had left on the kitchen table, it made him laugh: Ce soir, à 9 heures, réunion des féministes gauchères américaines. (She’d invited another friend to dinner, also a left-handed expatriate, who shared my outspoken allegiance to women’s liberation.) I suspect her teasing tone appealed to him as much as its suggestion of a naïvely militant New World sisterhood. He took out a notebook and wrote something down.

Men are a minority in this volume (if not in this Introduction) and four of the seven were couturiers who spent their careers styling—and eroticizing—the feminine figure, at times perversely. The true function of fashion, Charles James believed, is to arouse the mating instinct. Yet unlikely affinities are sometimes the most revealing ones. Alexander McQueen, for example, was often accused of misogyny; he was pugnaciously gay and working-class; he brutalized his clothes, and sometimes his models, and he killed himself at forty. But on his right arm, he’d tattooed a line of poetry spoken by Helena, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. That anguished outcry, by a lost woman, whose desire is mocked and rejected, alludes to a wound that McQueen’s work and mine both seek to dress.

The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive. Seventy-five years ago, in the lower-middle-class milieu where I grew up, the career prospects for a girl who couldn’t tap dance were depressingly limited. I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message that they weren’t right.

The price of self-possession used to be spinsterhood, if not the convent. (I’m always happiest when dressed almost like a nun, Miuccia Prada once remarked. It makes you feel so relaxed.) A few brazen rebels braved ostracism. (The two Georges, Sand and Eliot, welcomed their exemption from polite society; it gave them more time for their spinning.) A few women writers found exemplary spouses—wives, in essence—of whom Leonard Woolf and Alice B. Toklas are the epitomes. But many of those unions were childless, and it’s still a daunting feat to juggle art and maternity. Even Colette, that great poet of female carnality, felt unsexed by the exercise of her powers. She’d understood before almost anyone that gender is a bell curve, yet she despaired of being what she enviously called a real woman. (The real women were her husbands’ mistresses.) It wasn’t obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself, an individual, without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a female-female impersonation.

In resisting a generic definition, many of my subjects have fetishized uniqueness. The witch, the sibyl, the priestess, the martyr, the diva, the vestal, the femme fatale—these are some of their guises. A stylist aims for unsparing specificity, but a stylized persona risks becoming a caricature. Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, is a poignant example. She was the first American foreign correspondent of her sex and the author of a foundational work of feminist history. I shall always reign through the intellect, she boasted. But her dazzling mind was housed in an unlovely carapace, and she resigned herself to being bright and ugly.

I recognized my own grandiosity in Fuller’s. Until puberty, I, too, was outsized and ungainly. I compensated, as she did, by showing off as a know-it-all. One of my teachers mocked me with the epithet Miss Importance, and she cast me in our school play, The Mikado, as Katisha—a deluded old woman who is spurned by a prince. Since I couldn’t carry a tune, I had to deliver her solos in singsong: "My soul is still my body’s prisoner!" I later destroyed all my class pictures.

In rereading these essays and profiles, all but two of which were published in The New Yorker between 2006 and 2021, I was proud to realize how much I managed to write; it was a bleak era in my own history and America’s; we were both coming apart. But I also felt a pang of obsolescence—an awareness of the extent, as Didion puts it, to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies. She believed that loss was peculiar to her generation, though I suspect each aging one is similarly humbled. Whatever I have made for myself is personal, she concluded, ruefully. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade … but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

There are, however, some endings which give you a taste of happiness. Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.

UNSTILL LIVES

ROVING EYE

The American model and photographer Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, a century ago, but spent most of her life seeking adventure in Europe and the Middle East. Last September, a retrospective of her work in front of and behind a camera, The Art of Lee Miller, curated by Mark Haworth-Booth, opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In his introduction to the show’s companion volume, Haworth-Booth describes Miller as an artist of the first electric century, and he invokes the metaphor of electricity—its power to attract, repel, shock, and illuminate—in making a case for her significance.

Miller’s power, however, generated an uneven legacy notably indebted to her lover Man Ray, to her mentor Edward Steichen, and to Eugène Atget, Edward Weston, Brassaï, and Paul Strand. Her audacious sexual history has colored perceptions of her art, as has her enshrinement by the fashion world. She traded on her exceptional beauty while it lasted, but she also struggled for respect, and for something more elusive: self-respect. The formal tension in her work is a play between veiling and exposure, glamour and brutality. It carries an erotic charge even when the subject isn’t erotic.

On my way to the London preview, I stopped to ponder a startling image of Miller in a show of military and couture camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. The French were the first, in 1915, to experiment with disruptive patterns of light, shade, and color hand-painted on uniforms and artillery—a technique indebted to Cubism. In 1940, the rich and eccentric British Surrealist Roland Penrose decided that he could best contribute to his country’s defense by recruiting artists for a camouflage unit and lecturing on their research to the Home Guard. The unit had been testing an ointment developed to hide skin from a rifle scope, or at least to disguise it, and on a summer day, in a friend’s garden, Penrose asked Miller, his mistress (they married a few years later, to legitimatize their only child, Antony), to play the guinea pig.

Miller was in her mid-thirties. She had been covering the blitz for British Vogue, and, after the Normandy invasion, she would help to document the liberation of Europe as one of an elite company of women (Margaret Bourke-White, Marguerite Higgins, Mary Welsh, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Martha Gelhorn, among others) accredited as war correspondents. That afternoon, she gamely stripped for the assembled house party, smeared the dull, greenish paste over her body, and stretched out on the lawn under a caul of camouflage netting. In the course of the demonstration, her groin was covered by a clump of sod bristling with matted weeds—a trompe-l’oeil pubis—and one of her nipples snagged in the net. As a finishing touch, the severed heads of two blood-red lilies were placed between her breasts like a funerary offering. The couple’s friend (and partner in a ménage à trois) the American photojournalist Dave Scherman captured the scene, and Penrose used the image in slide shows—no doubt to great effect with the guardsmen.

The earliest known nude study of Lee Miller, who was christened Elizabeth, was made by her father, Theodore, an engineer whose hobby was photography. He titled the picture December Morn, even though it was taken in April 1915, two weeks before Elizabeth’s eighth birthday. Poughkeepsie had been blanketed by a spring snowfall, and the shivering little girl is posed outside the family house wearing nothing but bedroom slippers. A year before, as Carolyn Burke observes in a fine biography, Lee Miller: A Life, the likeness of a fleshier maiden—September Morn, by the French painter Paul Chabas—had provoked a storm of outrage and titillation when it was displayed in the window of a Manhattan gallery. The public rallied to one side or the other, and Theodore, a health faddist, evidently took the liberal view. He had persuaded Lee’s mother, Florence MacDonald, a Canadian nurse from a respectable family, to pose nude for him before they were married, and if he later philandered with impunity, she considered divorcing him to marry a lover. They kept up appearances, but something in the household was seriously peculiar. Lee became a promiscuous hellion; her older brother, John, was a cross-dresser; Florence attempted suicide; Theodore continued taking nude pictures of his daughter, often with a stereoscopic camera, well into her twenties. He also talked her girlfriends out of their clothes and into posing for group portraits, though when other people’s naked children were involved, Florence chaperoned the sittings.

None of those art studies, or none that survive, cross the line into obscenity, and the family seems to have been unperturbed by them. They did, however, bury a painful secret that Antony Penrose revealed in The Lives of Lee Miller, an illustrated biography of his mother. At the age of seven, Elizabeth had been raped, ostensibly by a family friend (all attempts to verify his identity, Penrose told me, have drawn a blank), and infected with gonorrhea. Venereal diseases were still incurable, so she was treated at a hospital and by her mother with disinfectant irrigations. The Millers also consulted a psychiatrist, Penrose said, who counseled them to tell Elizabeth that sex was merely a mechanical act, and not the same thing as love, so the damage wasn’t permanent. But the damage to a violated child, even one as resilient as Miller, is permanent in incalculable ways.

Given the timing, the kindest interpretation of December Morn is that it represents a form of shock therapy—physical immodesty as a cure for shame. Whatever it was, Miller’s story suggests that beauty can also be a form of camouflage, one that successfully deceives the beholder without offering much protection to the wearer. Her art was always improvised on the run, escaping from or to a man or a place, and she described her life as a water-soaked jig-saw puzzle, drunken bits that don’t match in shape or design. The memory of a trauma is often fractured in the same fashion by that most devious of camouflagers, the unconscious. Few artists achieve lasting renown without a body of work that is cumulative in its power, and Miller wasn’t capable of sustained ambition. But her finest pictures—the semi-abstract desert landscapes; the poetic rubble of wartime London; the graphs of desolation from the battlefront; the sculptural female torsos, which were considered shockingly phallic—tantalize you, as they tantalized those who championed her career, with the promise of what she might have achieved.

Although Miller was expelled from nearly every school she attended, she was capable of focus when a subject or a teacher, more often the latter, excited her. She and her best friend collaborated on screenplays, inspired by Anita Loos. At eighteen, having badgered her parents for a trip to Paris, she dumped her chaperone and enrolled in a course on stage design taught by the Hungarian artist Ladislas Medgyès, who introduced her to experimental theater, and to her destiny as a bohemian. Back in Poughkeepsie eight months later and pining for the Left Bank, she continued her training in stagecraft at Vassar, did some acting with a local company, and studied dance, which led to a part in the chorus line of a risqué Broadway revue. Success in the performing arts came easily to a quicksilver girl who was usually the most striking hopeful at a casting call. (A few years later, Jean Cocteau, looking for an actress with the features and aplomb of a Greek statue, chose Miller, who had no experience onscreen, for the lead role in his didactically outré first film, The Blood of a Poet.)

None of these promising forays, however, held Miller’s fugitive attention. By the autumn of 1926, she had moved to Manhattan to take classes at the Art Students League and was earning her pocket money as a lingerie model. If one is to believe the story, Condé Nast noticed her crossing the street just in time to pull her from the path of an oncoming vehicle, and this fortuitous collision led to an interview with Edna Chase, Vogue’s editor-in-chief. With a boyish haircut and a new moniker, Lee (a contraction of Li-Li, her family nickname, but also, perhaps, a little bow to that most enterprising flapper, Lorelei Lee), Miller made her debut in Vogue—on the March 1927 cover, in a drawing by the French fashion illustrator Georges Lepape—and at the famous parties that Condé Nast hosted in his penthouse. She was soon posing for Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Muray, the leading photographers of the day. But the fact that she modeled for them is more interesting in retrospect than the decorous pictures they took of her. None capture her subversive modernity the way Lepape did: confronting the beholder from under a purple cloche with swollen lips and a sullen gaze that manages to project both wantonness and reserve.

In 1929, with several lovers fighting for the honor of seeing her off, and café society sad to lose its star playgirl, Miller sailed for Europe with the ambition to enter photography by the back end. It was Steichen, she said, who put the idea into my head. She planned to do some modeling for George Hoyningen-Huene at Paris Vogue while she apprenticed with Man Ray, a leader of the avant-garde and a master of many genres—painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic art. After co-founding the Dada movement in New York with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray had immigrated to France, where society portraiture and fashion photography helped to support his experiments. To be done by this edgy dynamo was as chic in the Jazz Age as to be done by Warhol was forty years later. Despite a bantam physique and a receding chin, Man Ray attracted singular women. Miller succeeded an adorably lewd and fleshy cabaret singer who was a legend of the Latin Quarter: Kiki de Montparnasse.

Man Ray was thirty-nine and Miller was twenty-two when they met. He marginalized their relationship in his autobiography, Self Portrait, perhaps in revenge for her infidelities, but she described their chance (or contrived) encounter at an artists’ hangout, Le Bateau Ivre, as the turning point of her youth. With few preliminaries—she introduced herself as his new student, he told her that he didn’t accept students, they left the next morning on a road trip—the affair began. After a summer in the South of France, Miller rented lodgings near Man Ray’s studio on the Rue Campagne-Première, and paid tuition for a priceless education in art and worldliness by working as his dogsbody. One of her early tests was to help him photograph the Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt’s White Ball of 1930, and, typically, she abandoned her post to dance with other men.

Under Man Ray’s tutelage, Miller mastered the use of a Graflex camera, with glass plates, and then a Rolleiflex; studio lighting setups; cropping and retouching; improvisation with a viewfinder; and his techniques for developing. A darkroom accident (Miller turned the lights on before she realized that a batch of negatives was in the open tank) led, by her account, to the discovery of solarization, a process in which the background of a portrait is overexposed to outline the head with a black penumbra.¹ Many years later, claiming partial credit for one of Man Ray’s most famous solarized images, Miller pretended that it didn’t really matter which of them had made it, because we were almost the same person when we were working.

Man Ray was a generous mentor, but his generosity didn’t extend to sharing his protégée with rivals in the arts. He was furious with Miller for lending herself to Cocteau, and resentful of the time that she spent working in London as the still photographer on a feature. You are so young and beautiful and free, he wrote to her, and I hate myself for trying to cramp that in you which I admire most. The definitive image of his obsession is a 1930 nude study of Miller, her gaze enigmatic, her head caged by a wire fencing guard. He titled it La Révolution Surréaliste, and it expresses an attitude rife in the movement, but also in Miller’s life: a contradictory impulse to worship and defile the female body. But Miller’s submissiveness in games of bondage was, if not illusory, paradoxical. She claimed the privilege of a man’s sexual freedom (while depending, like most women of her class, on subsidies from her men), and Man Ray’s jealousy—indeed, any man’s jealousy—made her claustrophobic. Man Ray may not initially have known that Julian Levy, his New York art dealer, who included Miller in an important, early group show of European photography, was among her paramours, but in 1931 the couple’s fragile illusion of oneness was tested by the arrival in Paris of Theodore Miller, toting his cameras. He photographed his daughter and her roommate, Tanja Ramm, an American model, cavorting in bed, and Lee obliged him, Burke writes, by striking contorted poses … pubic region exposed. She insists that Lee’s composure in the pictures is evidence of her implicit trust in the photographer, though one wonders, she adds, what went through Man’s head as he watched them.

Perhaps it was trust, or perhaps, as Miller’s own work suggests, it was dissociation. She had the gift of finding beauty in a wasteland, and her eye tends to petrify what it looks at. Organic forms and living creatures become abstract in her pictures, but movingly so—the way a nymph fleeing an aggressor is transformed into a star. Where human figures appear in a frame, they are often faceless or disembodied. Her best photographs from the war are of corpses, landscapes, statuary, or distant violence. Once she was proficient with a camera, Man Ray promoted her for commissions that he couldn’t fulfill or didn’t want, one of which was to document operations at the Sorbonne medical school. Having watched a mastectomy, she asked the surgeon if she could keep the amputated breast. She arrived for a fashion shoot at the studio of French Vogue in a buoyant mood, carrying this grisly trophy on a dinner plate, then photographed it at a place setting, next to a knife and fork. She tends to isolate the mechanical act of taking a picture from the visceral connection with a subject, as she was taught to compartmentalize sex and love. Most of her portraits, including her self-portraits, seem wary or disdainful of any true engagement with a sitter except, perhaps, where she was engaged by the drama of seduction. That was the case with two great satyrs who yielded both to her and to her camera: Chaplin, whom she knew from her modeling days in New York, and Picasso.

Miller and Man Ray spent three stormy years together, then, almost as suddenly as she had decamped for Paris, she returned to New York. On the strength of her growing reputation, but also of her errant glamour, she found rich backers for a studio in Manhattan. Theodore had the nerve to sue Time for describing his daughter as the possessor of the most beautiful navel in Paris, and she spent part of the libel settlement to hire a staff, including a young maid who cooked homey lunches for the artist and her clients. The press was fascinated by Miller’s new incarnation—paparazzi had been waiting on the pier when her ship docked—and Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair welcomed her to their pages. When she chose to model for one of the pictures Vogue had commissioned—a story on headbands—her younger brother, Erik, operated the camera, and their feature is, in its way, a perfect artifact of high fashion in the Depression. Miller sits at an angle in a plush wing chair, against a black backdrop. The light in this hermetic frame glosses the fine planes of her face and neck, the frill of her hair, and the ruching of a velvet gown. Her beauty and expression are as inanimate as those of the figures that were, at the same moment, being carved into the granite of Mount Rushmore. The bell jar that she had sometimes used as a prop in her Surrealist art photographs is here invisible, yet implied. She embodies elegance as refusal—the refusal to inhabit a flawed world of human inferiors.

While the Lee Miller Studio was ultimately an abortive venture (Man Ray was outraged to learn that his ex-apprentice was touting his name and his signature techniques to promote it), for two years, from 1932 to 1934, it made her one of the most sought-after commercial photographers in New York. In addition to her advertising and fashion work, she specialized in celebrity portraits. Julian Levy gave The Blood of a Poet its debut at the New York Film Society, enhancing Miller’s prestige as a muse to genius. He also gave her art photography a well-received solo exhibition at his gallery. (We don’t think her photos are very good, Levy’s wife, Joella, admitted in private, but they make a surprisingly good show.) Erik Miller, who ran the darkroom, admired Lee’s perfectionism as a printer, but noted that his sister could also be intolerably lazy. She never scheduled more than one sitting a day, and, after work, Penrose writes, she would resume her social life: the demonic games of poker … or wild parties with friends from the theater world.

In 1933, the director John Houseman engaged Miller to photograph the all-Negro cast of Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Those portraits, taken in Harlem, have a dignity and a depth of tenderness otherwise missing from her airless portfolio of movie stars, perfume bottles, socialites, and couture. That May, Miller was named by Vanity Fair as one of the seven most distinguished living photographers. Rather than capitalize on her growing renown, she abruptly closed her studio and holed up at a fat farm in the Poconos, to lose fifteen pounds. The motive for her apparent self-sabotage was revealed two months later, when she stunned her family and friends by announcing her marriage to a man they had scarcely met, Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian railroad magnate in his forties. Their romance, a well-kept secret, had begun in St. Moritz, in 1931, when Miller was vacationing with Chaplin. Among the pictures she took for Vogue that year is one of Eloui’s wife, Nimet—La Belle Circassienne—in a turban and pearls, and perhaps there was a thrill to stealing the husband of such a formidable rival.

Leaving her brother, a newlywed, unemployed, and her angels incensed, Lee embarked on marriage as if it were a holiday, Burke writes. Eloui owned a beach house in Alexandria and a mansion in Cairo. He added a European ladies’ maid to their staff of fifteen and endowed his bride with a stock portfolio. She had nothing more strenuous to do than enjoy the high life. Eloui believed that this serene existence would, as he assured the Millers, cure their daughter’s ennui, and a series of exotic pastimes—snake charming, camel racing, desert safaris—did briefly distract her. She also recovered from an ephemeral loathing for photography, or for the discipline a career required, to do some of her purest work as a modernist. (Her 1937 Portrait of Space, a barren landscape seen through the gash in a patched window screen, was included in the definitive retrospective of Dada and Surrealism at the Arts Council of Great Britain, forty years later.) But life in Egypt was also much like her childhood: charmed on the surface, roiling beneath it, with a doting male footing the bills for her mischief, and a provincial society that was fun to shock. If I need to pee, I pee in the road; if I have a letch for someone, I hop into bed with him, she boasted to a friend.

One loses sight of how young Miller still was. In June 1937, just thirty, escaping her husband and the heat, she returned to Paris. There she met Roland Penrose, who was married to a lesbian poet and was, or had been, homosexual himself but in any event wasn’t the next morning. Later that summer, they vacationed in Mougins with a party of friends who, like Penrose, worshipped Picasso. The acolytes paid tribute to their idol by offering their women to him (although they also shared them fraternally with one another). Miller posed for Picasso, who posed for her, and they recognized in each other a vulnerable quality—the expectation of being looked at without being seen—that others had missed. Those arty revels, staged, in part, for posterity, also produced her homage to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. In a dappled grove, three eminent Surrealists (Penrose, Paul Éluard, and Man Ray) and their bare-breasted muses share an amorous picnic. The size of the picture—a one-and-a-half-by-two-inch Rolleiflex contact print that Miller never bothered to enlarge—enhances its peepshow coyness.

When Miller went back to Eloui, she and Penrose exchanged fervid letters, hers astute about her own character. Her betrayal of a man whom she had married for love in the sincere belief that their union was forever makes me cynically suspicious of any attachment I might make, she told Penrose—my ‘always’ don’t seem to mean much, do they. But on September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler invaded Poland, the two adulterers, reunited in France after fugues and dramas, caught the last boat for England from Saint-Malo. The stoical Eloui forgave her, and facilitated a last-minute divorce, in 1947, shortly before her child was born, so that she and Penrose could marry. When she returned to Egypt, in the sixties—by which time Eloui had lost his fortune and married the ladies’ maid—he was grateful for the visit.

Idleness only ever aggravated Miller’s demons: she needed purpose to still them. With Britain girding for the siege, she volunteered at an unlikely venue for patriotic service, but the only one likely to accept her: British Vogue. Her cavalier defection from the fashion business had devalued her credit as a professional, and Condé Nast was skeptical of his prodigal’s return, so she was hired, on a trial basis, at eight pounds a week, to celebrate handbags and famous faces. But when the Vogue pattern house was destroyed by a bomb, Miller was eager to photograph the ruins. The magazine, impressed with the laconic eloquence of her reportage (perhaps one could also describe it as stagecraft—she created, literally, a theater of war, a puppet theater, for the most part, in which objects dramatize human suffering), began to feature it prominently. With an eye for the macabre visual ironies scattered by the bombs like promotional flyers for Surrealism, she photographed a ruined chapel, bricks cascading from its portico like worshippers after the service; a smashed typewriter (Remington Silent) lying in the gutter; an egg-shaped barrage balloon nesting in a London park behind a pair of geese that are strutting as if they had just laid it; and two air-raid wardens—nubile vestals—masked totemically by their eye shields.

Early in 1942, when American troops and journalists arrived in London, including Dave Scherman, who worked for Life, Miller was accredited as a war correspondent with the U.S. forces, a promotion that gave her access to restricted zones. In 1944, six weeks after D-Day, she sailed for Normandy to cover the work of nurses in a field hospital. She also began filing text to accompany her pictures, and, for the next eighteen months, her writing and photojournalism changed the perception of Vogue, even among its staff, as an atoll of frivolity in a vast ocean of heroic conflict. Something had unfettered Lee’s talent, her son writes. The model in the ruched gown lived in fatigues and channeled her insatiable desire for excitement into a noble endeavor. On her next trip to France, in a tank-landing ship, her convoy ran aground on Omaha Beach, where she was carried ashore by a sailor. Hitching a ride into Saint-Malo, she discovered that, contrary to reports, the siege of the town was still under way, and the Allies were using napalm for the first time in Europe, to dislodge a German unit holding out in the fortress. Tall chimneys standing alone gave off smoke from the burning remnants of their buildings at their feet, she wrote. Stricken lonely cats prowled. A swollen horse had not provided adequate shelter for the dead American behind it … I sheltered in a kraut dugout, squatting under the ramparts. My heel ground into a dead detached hand. She picked up the hand, and, in a spasm of fury at the enemy, hurled it across the street, and ran back the way I’d come bruising my feet and crashing in the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in blood. Like one of those feline survivors, Miller was probably too unnerved to have been conscious of how much of herself—of her previous life and imagery—that passage, an inventory of disintegration, contains.

Miller was rewarded for her virtuosity under fire with a working vacation in Paris, and the chance to celebrate its liberation among old friends. She photographed Colette, another feline survivor, at the Palais Royal, and covered the first postwar couture collections. They were enlivened, she wrote, apparently without irony, by folderols, a splurge of red and a desire for oversized muffs. Scherman turned up at her hotel, the Scribe, and together with him or singly, traveling with infantry divisions, she covered the Allied push to the Rhine on icy roads clogged with refugees, and the reconquest of Alsace, Luxembourg, and Cologne. It is worth remembering, Penrose writes, that Lee’s Rolleiflex did not have a telephoto lens, and that the only way she could get her pictures "was to go and find the