On Tuesday, February 1, 1955—less than a month after his resignation from Life, after a successful and conflicted career—Smith wrote a letter to his mother that began like this:
Dearest Mother:
I am as calm as a sleepy lagoon, although that, and I, may conceal a volcano on the verge of eruption. Who said to you, of the possibilities of my being fired, or of firing. After all it is my eight bucks [owed] against their eight billion [a figurative figure], and what could be more even than a grain of wheat against the miller’s stone—I speak not of mill stones dangling from a chain around my neck. Shed no tears of compassion for only tragedy awaits—but as yet it awaits not for me. It may be that we are walking hand in hand, tragedy and I, and desperation makes three. Though my stomach quivers like a professional belly dancer, the dancer is paid and mine is caustic[ing]. All is not lost, instead, I have thrown it away, lightly, dancingly, trippingly away—though I calculate it may return as would a friendly boom-a-rang, and if it doesn’t, let me rest six months to lift the rubble of collapse from about my head.
In other words, don’t get perturbed—difficulty, but not destruction is at hand. And everyone shall get their money as well.
It’s unclear if Nettie Smith ever saw this letter. On Sunday, February 6, she collapsed and died in Wichita, after attending morning mass at her beloved St. Mary’s Cathedral. She was sixty-five and had been sick, in and out of the hospital. Her son’s letter might have reached her mailbox before she died, or a day or two later.
On Tuesday, February 8, Smith flew from New York to Wichita for the funeral arrangements. He returned to New York a few days later, leaving the house cleanup and estate work to his brother, Paul, and his uncle Jesse Caplinger, his mother’s brother.
* * *
Smith was thirty-six years old and in his prime. He joined the prestigious photographers’ cooperative Magnum, through which he would seek freelance assignments. Freed from a dozen years of pent-up frustrations at Life, a photographic eruption was inevitable.
On March 25, 1955, he wrote Magnum’s executive editor, John G. Morris, an eight-page single-spaced letter in which he listed seventy-three prospective topics for photo-essays. He made no mention of his mother’s recent passing. Smith wrote (syntax and spelling are his):
Dear John: From the top of me hat, and the bottom of me bottles bottom, are some of the ideas—edited and unedited, that have tripped upon my loggy brain, and have had at least a bit of squintin at for size, creativeness, and taste. But as I say, this list as presented here is not necessarily a sure thing of my acceptance, for several of them would certainly have to be examined far more carefully for potential, and compatibility. I send this list to you far more for the purpose of letting you know how my mind sometimes wanders—and though it contains many of the stories I have suggested to Life (and I will indicate most of these), it is not a list that I would present in this fashion to any editor. I am, as well, too damn tired tonight to try a spruce-up job on it—or you would receive it in a more precise, and careful style.
Smith’s list contains subjects and themes reverberating backward and forward throughout his life and career, offering glimpses of his feverish artistic desires at a pivotal time. No other document or oral history provides access to Smith’s ambitions and state of mind in a form as raw and unmitigated as this list.
The first thirteen entries on Smith’s list are indicative of the whole:
1. Preservation of camps to contain those judged as subversive when it is decisioned that dire emergency exists … I thought this aspect of the Justice Department’s program worth investigating.
2. The Hutterites: The 8500 Hutterites of this hemisphere live in ninety-one colonies in the Northwestern United States and Canada. They live their own way of life, apparently without need, or acceptance of the incentives motivating much of the world, and motivating even their immediate neighbors, yet they are close to the mainstream of America, and have daily business and social contact with the “world.” The Hutterites insistence upon simplicity of living conditions is based upon the belief that wealth, personal power, and artistic adornments are sinful objectives.
3. Basic research:… this would be a long one and a tough one because it takes understanding of a very complicated branch of science. It is (on the surface) unphotographic as nearly a blank wall—and it is a story and a problem of extreme importance.
4. A man and a castle: being built by the one man, somewhere in California, he has been working on it six years at least.
5. Man who has chosen a life of contemplation:… It is photographically difficult, almost impossible, yet with time, and care, and understanding—and a profound marriage of words to photographs, this could be magnificent. Again, it is vaguely of the idea stage.
6. An orphanage: lonely men, and castle builders, brought me to thinking there would be potential in this.
7. Commuter’s route:… The route I chose would be New York to Poughkeepsie, although it could have a wonderful variety from Croton on in. The only restriction (after eliminating the doing it from the train) would be that the subject could be seen from the tracks.
8. Broadway, from the beginning to its Albany end.
9. R.R. Station: a portfolio, or essay:… to hang around a small station for a couple of weeks, letting it be the hub, with all of the activity of the story coming to it—preferably a station, perhaps southwest, where cattlemen, military school, Indians, dudes, traveling salesmen, etc., although it need not be as garish as that listing might sound.
10. Satirical story of children and toys—the weapons and passions we give our children, utilizing the toys that are the weapons of hate and murder.
11. Men of 80, a Portfolio.… People that were still functioning, with importance.
12. The Japanese movie industry, an essay.
13. Back lots of Hollywood, a portfolio, the surrealism, photographically speaking, of the back lot storage spaces.
In these entries we can see Smith focusing on the human landscape and the tension he felt between isolation and the teeming churn of collectives, a tension he never reconciled, and many themes of home—creating or finding a home, leaving and returning home. There is also cinema, an effort to make and present a world, a craft perhaps more flexible than his chosen one though also more collaborative, which would have thwarted him.
After the thirteenth entry, Smith inserted the following note to Morris:
By now one thing may be slightly evident; to a certain degree I am veering from stories that present the nerve draining, emotionally twisting stories that are of intense involvement on every level of approach. I am trying to spare myself enough in the face of other problems, to let my nerves settle, my depression lift, and a little resiliency is once more evident in this dragging hulk. HOWEVER, let the project really present itself that can really intrigue and seduce my mind and soul, and I’ll throw the body into the deal—and it will respond, perhaps aided by a little Benzedrine. Remember, don’t hesitate in thinking I would accept such a project …
In his final letter to his mother, Smith recognized he was boiling over. Whether it would be one of these seventy-three subjects or something else, he was about to “throw” himself into a project on a scale bigger than anything he had ever done. He only needed a starting point.