On August 15, 1965, Smith was up late, as usual, in his dingy loft space, working on the first issue of Sensorium, his new “magazine of photography and other arts of communication,” a hopeful platform free of commercial expectations and pressures. He was editing a submission by the writer E. G. “Red” Valens, whom he had met in 1945 when both were war correspondents in the Pacific. Despite the late hour, Smith decided to give his old friend a call.
Valens’s wife answered the phone just before the fifth ring. She’d been asleep. She gave the phone to her husband. He’d been asleep, too.
Good morning, said a groggy Valens.
You don’t stay up as late as you used to, joked Smith.
He then apologized for calling so late. Valens wasn’t irritated. He even resisted Smith’s offer to call back at a more reasonable hour. Thirty-six minutes and nineteen seconds later, the pair said goodbye and hung up. Smith recorded the call.
After the discussion of Valens’s article concluded, the conversation turned to the habit of taking notes while reading. Smith said he couldn’t read one page of Henry Miller without taking three pages of dissenting notes. Valens said he could rank his library based on the number of notes he’d jotted in the margins of each book—the more notes, the more favor. Smith responded by expressing adulation for an Irish writer who had passed away the previous year:
That seeing, thoughtful soul Sean O’Casey causes me to be … when I run out of imagination or I’m just dead against a wall—I can’t function, I can’t think right, I have no probe, if I read O’Casey for a little while … I’m usually back to seeing and searching, and things start pouring out. Very few writers can do that to me. Faulkner can do it to some extent. O’Casey is my old standby. I always include a copy of O’Casey when I go somewhere on a story.
Valens then said, That’s worth a short article next time you run out of ideas for an issue [of Sensorium]—“O’Casey: The Traveling Man’s Boon.”
Smith chuckled.
Valens then said, No, I’m serious.
Three weeks later, Smith’s financing for Sensorium fell through and another grand ambition was left unfinished. An essay treatment of O’Casey’s impact on Smith’s photography never emerged, either.
This twenty-second comment by Smith about Sean O’Casey, in a dubiously recorded, nocturnal phone call in August 1965, led me down a rabbit hole. There are other references to O’Casey in the Smith annals, but none this intriguing to me.
* * *
In a letter to two editors at Holiday magazine in 1957, while pitching a layout of his extended work-in-progress on Pittsburgh, Smith described the intended opus as “Tennessee O’Neill or Wolfe O’Casey.” The four names refer to three playwrights and a novelist, Thomas Wolfe, who also wrote several one-act plays. Throughout his life, Smith referred to literature and theater (and to music) as the most important influences on his photography, but he rarely provided references to specific works.
Smith’s obsession with theater registered in other ways, too. Of course, his first daughter, Marissa, was named for a dancer he met while photographing Mexicana in 1939. In much of his classic Life work, especially 1948’s “Country Doctor,” his pictures resemble theater stills. He photographed the preparations and openings for original productions, such as Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, and he produced two major photo spreads on obscure theater subjects for Life. When he began making voluminous photographs out his fourth-floor window in the late ’50s, he called the frame his “proscenium arch.”
Smith spoke of his photography assignments as “stories,” as he did in the phone call with Valens. He would have been closer to the truth if he’d said, I always include a copy of O’Casey when I go somewhere on a poem. He never recognized or reconciled the difference between story and poem, or journalism and art, and the tension troubled him.
* * *
When Smith’s archive was bequeathed to the University of Arizona, among his library of 3,750 books were two collections of Sean O’Casey’s plays, five of the six volumes of his autobiography, one essay collection, and two individual plays, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and Red Roses for Me. Who knows how many O’Casey volumes Smith lost or gave away or were stolen from the Sixth Avenue loft?
Also, among Smith’s 25,000 vinyl records was much of the spoken-word catalog of Caedmon Records, which means that it can reasonably be assumed that he owned that label’s 1952 recording of O’Casey reading selections from Juno and the Paycock and from two of the autobiographies.
According to Smith’s first biographer, Jim Hughes, Smith had an affair with a young actress who read O’Casey aloud to him in 1949. Six of the books by O’Casey that Smith owned were published between 1944 and 1949, and thus would have been available during the affair. O’Casey had died less than a year before Smith’s 1965 taped phone call with Valens, and The New York Times ran a two-thousand-word obituary. There was even a Hollywood movie—Young Cassidy, from MGM—based on O’Casey’s autobiography that had been released earlier in 1965. The playwright reverberated in the culture far more than he does today.
But what if Smith was more or less bullshitting about O’Casey, slightly eager to impress in that lonely, sad-hour phone call? What if, knowing his tape was rolling, Smith had enough ego to imagine a researcher would one day be listening?