YOU COULD USUALLY FIND Tom Victor, camera in hand or slung on his shoulder, darting about at a literary event, a reading or awards ceremony or publishing milestone. He would pause midnight to say an exuberant hello in his swift, smiling fashion, and then, as he slipped away—“Talk to you later!”—his face would change, and the sober, hermetic face of the man at work would show.
The secretive face intrigues me, the face of the man taking the measure of things. To see it again, I sometimes look at my pictures, the dozens of photographs he took, for they invoke him as much as they represent me. In every good artist’s work the sensibility is immanent; in Tom’s it is practically tangible, in the way the light sculpts the face.
I don’t like having my picture taken. I am not one of those people who is “photogenic”; I don’t even come out looking like anyone I care to acknowledge as myself. So I did not go to Tom Victor with enthusiasm. I was sent, for a book jacket, and apparently it was something of an honor, for he was one of the semi-official chroniclers of the brazen yet soulful world of books. Consciously or not, American readers know his work well; it is through his eyes that they see many of their writers.
You’ll like him, I was told, everyone likes him—which made me immediately suspicious. (I didn’t dare admit I was a trifle excited. And curious: I might even get a good picture out of the ordeal.) I called him first and suggested he come to my apartment—to get it over with quickly, for I imagined it would take fifteen or twenty minutes: set the stuff up, size me up, press the buttons. But I lived pretty far uptown, and Tom didn’t want to haul his expensive equipment around the city. He urged me to come to his studio, which at that time was just south of Lincoln Center.
Very well, but how long would the session take? I had somewhere to go afterward. That was hard to say, he replied, a couple of hours, maybe. The idea of being scrutinized so closely for so long filled me with dread, yet goaded that keen, obscure, semi-erotic anticipation. Since he sounded friendly and forthcoming, I risked a nervous question: What should I wear? Anything, he said, anything you like. Getting bolder and sillier, I said I had several possible getups, each showing me in a different way. Bring your costumes along, said Tom. Bring whatever you like, jewelry, things to fix your hair. ... Here was a man who knew about women, I thought, and who knew about vanity and anxiety, and accepted them with good cheer.
I went with my little bag of props, all set to impersonate my various selves. I found him to be small and dark and full of motion. He had a quick smile, an ingratiating voice, and a mid-western accent, and I liked the way he lingered on the liquid consonants of my name. He moved like those great blue translucent flies we used to call darning needles, which skim along the water’s surface speedily and unobtrusively. Tom was a slender shape skimming in total ease amidst large black mystifying paraphernalia with which he would do something to me. My part was to yield. I felt as you do when abandoning yourself to a dentist or hair stylist or makeup artist or psychiatrist, someone for whom you are raw material, who readies you for presentation to the world—a genre of experience I avoided as far as possible. But I was here for my work. I had to do it.
I barely remember the studio—my memories of it have been erased by or merged with memories of his later, better studio, farther downtown—but I know it was spacious and white and fairly empty except for the lights and cameras and photos of familiar faces on the walls. It seemed to take him forever to set things up, and as he did, he talked. Talked and talked. Funny, I thought, that he wasn’t trying to “draw me out,” which I’d expected. On a desk piled with books sat a telephone, which intruded frequently. Tom would dash over and, pacing about in small arcs, hastily say a few friendly, firm words of the No, I can’t or Yes, I will variety, then resume where he had left off.
He talked about his family and his childhood in a small town in Michigan. No matter how many celebrated people he met, he said, or how often he saw his work in newspapers and magazines, he still felt like a small-town kid making his way in the big city. (Yet his telephone manner was distinctly urbane.) He mentioned a number of writers and poets he had photographed and told what they had been like; so many seemed to have become his friends that I was skeptical, for name-droppers can use the word “friend” rather loosely. But they had indeed become his friends, I found out later. And I found out why, when I saw how he had rendered their faces in the extraordinary collection, Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems from Their Own Work and from the Past, on which he collaborated with the poet and critic Richard Howard.
He talked about his various apprenticeships: years spent writing poetry, editing a literary magazine, and training as an actor at the Yale. Drama School—though he later found acting too confining a discipline for his temperament. He also studied stage movement with the dancer and choreographer Pearl Lang, which led him to photograph dancers, a subtle task. A dance critic friend of mine saw in Tom’s dance photos a curious quality of stillness.
I imagine he came to prize that stillness. It was perfect, in any event, for showing writers, maybe an even more subtle task. Unlike dancing, their act is undramatic, impossible to locate visually; the drama is within, a dilemma which suited Tom’s gifts beautifully. He cared less for the outward act than the sensibility behind it, and its transformations: he knew all about that, about the way art happens, since it was his way too.
Meanwhile he kept on talking: about his work and the photographers he had learned from. August Sander, who had undertaken to document the faces of twentieth-century Germans, was one he revered; he showed me some of his photos. About books—poetry and fiction, particularly Katherine Anne Porter, the work and the woman herself, whom he had known and loved. He was a reader, which was rare in itself, many artists having little time for arts other than their own, and he made it a point to read the books of the writers he photographed. To my surprise, he had read mine, and since it was my first I was especially delighted.
By this time he had gotten to work—clicking, that is—though I know now he had been at work from the instant he opened the door. Soon I was talking quite a bit too, and more intimately than I generally do with strangers. How was he getting these anecdotes and memories out of me, these very private observations, attitudes, tastes? But I was having such a good time, moving about in the large space as he casually suggested, that I didn’t draw back. Now and then I would change clothes or play with my hair, put it up, put it down, make it wild or austere. Very silly, no doubt, but he didn’t seem to think so, which made it just fine. He understood the nature of every small change; he took me in all my guises.
And kept talking. His travels: Paris, where he had lived for a few years, and Greece, and Italy, where I had lived too. Health foods: he joked that if we ever had lunch he’d drag me to his favorite health food restaurant (which later on he did, full of half-serious apologies, recommending the soba noodles, “not so bad”).
We must have talked for several hours, that first meeting, just as if he weren’t clicking away all the while, a steady background of clicks, just as if we were making friends and finding all sorts of affinities, saying, Yes, yes, and Me too, every few moments. At some point he told me about an old friend and showed me pictures he’d taken of her. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Women never think they’re beautiful. They don’t know how beautiful they are.” Typical seducer’s lines. Couldn’t be more calculated if they were a parody. Indeed, thinking it over later I grasped, as you always do later, that he must talk this way to everyone, fickle fellow.
Well, he had to. How else could he get it all out of us, men and women both, it didn’t matter, sex, age, nothing mattered but the face and its play of spirit. Somehow, he had to find the means to induce the recalcitrant, impalpable thing out of hiding and at play in the lineaments of the face, to coax forth the mysteries of flesh and spirit and make them visible, incarnate. He was very good at it, a genius. He knew what the best seducers know: the trick is to talk. The trick is to give something. Not to coax or to wheedle, but to extend.
To link art and the erotic, in thinking of Tom’s work, is inevitable. The process was, for him, a kind of love, both spiritual and exploitive in the highest sense: he could turn the love on, for his work. He didn’t love his subjects, he loved the process, or rather, each subject as it took part in the process, which couldn’t exist on its own. Of course he had to seduce, to fit himself so cleverly and naturally to our contours that we would stop guarding the borders. What he was asking of us was everything, yet in a sense nothing: none of the trappings of self, only what Borges has called “that kernel—... the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”
Like so many other writers, I came away from an anticipated chore having had a lark instead, a kind of fantastic voyage behind the surface face. He led people to become, in his presence, the people they are in their best solitudes. No wonder everyone liked him. It happens he was indeed both good and charming, but that is not the point. If he hadn’t been amiable by nature he would have learned to be, I am quite sure, as an obligation of his craft.
In the end, you didn’t know how far you had gone till it was too late and you had shown him everything, given him exactly what he needed, the kernel. The pictures tell: I look at them and realize, My God, anyone would think we had spent the day in bed or something, they are that naked, I am that free, that present.
He died of AIDS on February 7, 1989, still young, long before his work was completed. When he got sick he left New York to stay with a sister and went into seclusion, toward the end not even communicating with close friends. He never acknowledged his illness; it was a different era then, as far as AIDS was concerned, though not very long ago. Perhaps he wouldn’t have in any case. For all his surface verve, he was profoundly private. Like other casual acquaintances, I never figured out his mysterious illness and disappearance until after his death. At the memorial service, many who got up to speak recalled his eyes. It is difficult, when describing eyes, not to fall into clichés—only a limited number of adjectives apply. His eyes were unusually black and velvety, as everyone said; glittering and warm and animated and intense were other words his friends used. But they were hard, too, almost metallic. The best thing about them was not what they gave but what they withheld. What was behind the velvet: a quality of vision that had nothing to do with amiability.
His eyes held his craft, and they were crafty eyes. When I caught him off guard (seldom), when the concentration outwitted the charm, I glimpsed their hardness—a cold formidable focusing, as if he were peering through me, which was unsettling. But I think he wasn’t peering through me or any of us; he was not a portrait painter who spends hours, days, probing. He made his search quickly, like a raid, looking for the pictures we could become, imagining us as photographs—eventually, as part of his gallery, his life’s work.
The hard thing screened by the eyes, the thing withheld, was the art. The scrutiny, the penetration, the sizing up, the shaping. The skill of the Zen archer so thoroughly at one with his craft that he can hit the target with eyes closed, taking inward aim, and at the spiritual peak of his skill hits not only the target but himself.
All of this, the unique part, he had to keep back. He was a truth seeker, a truth giver: the art was not warm or friendly but had truth’s utter indifference. Even, in a way, love’s utter indifference—he was indiscriminately loving to dozens of captured faces. But in the end, unlike habitual seducers, he kept nothing for himself except what was rightfully his, the work. He gave, in the end, the greatest gift, and the rarest. I look at his pictures—at my own faces—and find there what I know best in the world but never imagined I could see or hold in my hand.