Out of Frame

Before George Platt Lynes became a celebrated photographer of famous faces, all signs pointed to him pursuing a life in letters. In his teens at Berkshire School in Sheffield, Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1925, Lynes was a precocious reader of modern poets, such as T.S. Eliot, and “difficult” fiction; his mother feared a steady diet of Russian and French novels might pollute his mind. He distinguished himself among his more robust male peers by a pompous self-presentation. A fellow student, the future writer and cultural impresario Lincoln Kirstein, saw the aloof and somewhat effeminate Lynes as a poseur who “fancies he is pretty to look at and saunters through the post office, into the reading room to the library and back.” In young Kirstein’s estimation, Lynes was a “sneering little bitch.” 

As a student, Lynes worked diligently only at what interested him: reading, writing, and books not on the school curriculum. He published poetry—influenced by Imagists such as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)—in The Dome, the student newspaper. “Sunset” is an example:

Daintily upon a sea
Of mauve
Deepening to lavender
Boats,
Pure gold
With fleecy sails
And joyous colored ensigns,
Ply between sky-ports
’Twixt saffron isles
And silver cities,
Bearing on a happy commerce

Before leaving Berkshire School, he also self-published an essay, “Genesis of Peace,” by a schoolmate whose subject matter sufficiently irked the headmaster, Seaver Buck, that all available copies were seized. So deficient was Lynes in several other subjects that he left Berkshire School early still needing to play “catch up.”

Lynes came from a middle-class background. His father, the Reverend Joseph Russell Lynes, and his mother, Adelaide Sparkman Lynes, skirted economic hardship through the help of Wall-Street-savvy parishioners and the Reverend’s golfing buddy, Headmaster Buck, who had arranged for Lynes to attend the Berkshire preparatory school on reduced tuition. It also helped young Lynes complete his studies that Adelaide Lynes’s cousin, who lived in Paris, acted in loco parentis when Lynes was sent abroad to the Auteuil Day School and Institut du Panthéon to fulfill coursework before entering Yale in the fall of 1926. Paris was then the hive of the so-called Lost Generation, those anglophone writers, such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Ford Madox Ford, et al., who found the City of Light a congenial setting in which to set up shop, conduct love affairs, write for modernist journals, including transition and The Dial, and compete in games of professional one-upmanship with their peers.

Lynes’s Parisian cousins—and de facto guardians—were friends with Gertrude Stein, the American doyenne of modernism. Along with her brother Leo, Stein amassed a significant collection of paintings by Juan Gris, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and others. After World War I, Stein and her life companion Alice B. Toklas hosted a salon of young acolytes, including Russian painter and theatrical designer Pavel Tchelitchew, American writer Bravig Imbs, and French Surrealist poet and novelist, René Crevel. 

At age 18, Lynes’s good looks and knowledge of modern writing impressed members of the Stein circle, particularly Crevel, with whom he had an affair. More important, Stein and Toklas found Lynes appealing; Stein christened him her “Baby George.” Lynes also gained points for being a devoted disciple whose publishing ambitions meshed with Stein’s desire to extend her reputation to a wider American public. By the time Lynes was back home in New Jersey, he had her permission to publish Descriptions of Literature (1926), the inaugural offering of his privately printed, subscription-based As Stable Publications, an imprint he ran out of his father’s rectory in Englewood, the suburban New Jersey town where Lynes lived with his parents and his brother Russell. Lynes turned to mailings and ads in literary journals to market Stein’s gnomic dicta:

A book which makes no mistake in describing the life of those who can be happy.
 
The next book to appear is the one in which more influences will be given to numbers of them.
 
A book which when you open it attracts attention by the undoubted denial of photography as an art.

It was perhaps disingenuous for Stein to put down photography in this way. When Lynes returned to Europe a few years later, he had already acquired a camera from his beloved Monroe Wheeler, who was then the independent designer/publisher of a series of literary chapbooks under the banner “Manikin.” Stein was among Lynes’s earliest portrait subjects. He captured her outdoors, her smiling face lit by sunshine. Thus, before approaching photography as a career, Lynes already began collecting notable faces.

Wheeler had been introduced to Lynes in New York in early 1927. The darkly handsome Wheeler was 28 at the time and from a comfortable background in Evanston, Illinois. He was already in a relationship with the poet and novelist Glenway Wescott, whom he had met at the University of Chicago about 1919. Wescott, a poor boy raised on a Wisconsin pig farm, had been a bright star in the university’s Poetry Club. Poetry magazine editor Harriet Monroe helped advance nascent talents like Westcott and Yvor Winters, who were the club’s leaders. Despite his burgeoning success and proximity to literary tastemakers, Wescott left the university after his third semester and eventually moved with Wheeler to New York.

In the 1920s, Wheeler and Wescott deepened a bond that lasted for the next six decades. Wheeler published an early Wescott poetry collection, The Bitterns (1920), as well as a chapbook of poems by Winters, The Immobile Wind (1921). The couple lived in New York’s Greenwich Village, where Marianne Moore and her mother became admiring friends, sometimes delivering soup when the men were living close to the bone. Moore’s mother thought the male couple worthy of high praise: “They are a safe and giving pair; the most poisonous could not hate them or question their nobility, yet they have so much poise and dignity that no one would presume to brush them off.” Moore eventually entrusted one of her most famous poems, “Marriage,” the shrewdly ironic and sometimes damning account of conjugal love, to Wheeler’s Manikin series.

 

Wheeler and Wescott traveled to Europe and by the mid-1920s became acquainted with expatriate American and British writers settled in Paris and the Riviera. Soon enough, Wescott’s sun rose with the publication of two works of autobiographical fiction, The Apple of the Eye (1924) and The Grandmothers (1927). The couple traveled on publishing business to New York in late 1926/early 1927. There, they followed up a recommendation by the journalist Bernardine Szold Fritz, another Stein friend, to meet young Lynes, who quickly decided that Wheeler was the man for him. Wescott, attracted to Lynes, hoped that the three men might have an equitable relationship, although he often felt second-best. Still, over the next half-dozen years, their tripartite relations continued as an epistolary romance abetted by visits back and forth to New York, Englewood, Paris, and Villefranche-sur-Mer, with side trips to Austria and Germany.   

In 1926 Lynes had dipped his toe into the waters of Yale and decided the temperature was too chilly: male campus culture was impossibly hidebound and conventional. Instead, the still “literary” Lynes returned to his father’s rectory, took a course in book publishing, and eventually opened a bookstore in Englewood, modeled after Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company on Paris’s Rue de l’Odéon. He asked Stein to send him a suitable portrait of herself (by Man Ray) to hang in a place of honor in the bookshop. 

The association between the world of letters and photographic portraiture was early established by the great French photographer and illustrator Nadar (Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910) who immortalized Gérard de Nerval, Champfleury, Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, and other cultural luminaries of the Second Empire. For a writer to be formally photographed became akin to membership in a given period’s literary canon. Sylvia Beach lined the Left Bank Shakespeare and Company’s walls with framed photos of notable Anglophone writers, whether resident or not in Paris. This was a way of granting her customers—many of them writers themselves—an amusing, even seductive, view of a contemporary pantheon.

It’s doubtful that Lynes knew of this history before seriously taking up photography, though he came to regard Nadar as the great master of the portrait. Instead, it was through Wheeler and Wescott, and their literary circle in Villefranche on the Riviera, at the Hotel Welcome, where poet, novelist, and playwright Jean Cocteau held court, then at the couple’s quiet villa, La Cabane, where they received writer friends and their friends, that Lynes increasingly felt he, too, must become a writer. Wheeler kept introducing him as such, and Lynes felt that Wheeler was “sticking me into a myth, for I can see that I am going to have a hard enough time to keep from becoming one. … I suppose it would be very well if I attempted to become a ‘man of letters’; I think I should like it. One cannot always be a plaything for the gods.” But it is possible Lynes held himself to too high a standard. Despite his youthful penchant for so-called “modern” literature, his taste for classic French and English literature was deep. While in Paris in 1929, Lynes wrote his brother Russell, who followed him to Berkshire School, “I have just squandered 170 frs. ($7) on a five volume set of Jane Austen of which I have already read three. Why don’t you try her [?]. Her characters are marvelous, her writing charming; and what she doesn’t know about the novel is just not worth knowing.” 

Despite Wescott’s professional guidance and encouragement, Lynes was never satisfied, neither with the novel he abandoned, nor with the short stories he aborted. Months after a serious illness back in Englewood, he was visited by his expatriate angels. One evening, he shared with Wheeler and Westcott a cache of pictures he had collected, including images of popular physique model Tony Sansone, from whom he bought them directly, but also informal snapshots he had taken on his earlier stay abroad: pictures of the bronzed youth of the French Riviera, and of Stein on Paris’s sunny Left Bank, and of the eminently Gallic Cocteau parading on a terrace of the Hotel Welcome. Wheeler and Westcott were enthusiastic; what Lynes had was a good eye. They arranged for him to borrow professional equipment and get sound counsel from a friend, a woman of means who was happy to lend her photographic equipment and to advise Lynes.

Lynes quickly evolved from an amateur into a professional, often photographing close friends, Wescott and Wheeler among them, but also keeping an eye out for transatlantic artists, writers, and theatrical performers of note. With Wheeler’s shrewd mentoring, Lynes realized early that his efforts would draw the most attention if he took portraits of celebrities, both high- and low-brow. In New York, he had become part of the Upper Bohemian crowd attending the weekly “teas” at Muriel Draper’s and Kirk and Constance Askew’s salons, gaining entrée into a sophisticated cosmopolitan milieu. Abroad, he was equally well positioned to build an elite clientele given his connections via Stein-Toklas and the writers of Wheeler-Wescott’s acquaintance. In spring of 1931, he visited Stein and Toklas at their country home in the Haute Savoie. He informally documented the three of them having tea in the garden, with the women’s poodle, Basket, showing his curly white rump to the camera. But Lynes’s singular portrait of Stein sitting near her garden parapet overlooking the valley below was especially admired by Stein and her friends. Lynes captured her in profile—a handsome head with a helmet of short hair. She looked for all the world like the bust of a Roman Caesar as she contemplated her vast neighboring bucolic empire. In 1934, Stein toured the States with Toklas to solidify her newfound popularity; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published the year before, both in an abridged version in the Atlantic Monthly and as a Harcourt Brace book whose first printing of 5,400 copies sold out nine days before official publication. Time magazine’s Stein cover of September 11, 1933, affirming her stature, used the Lynes photo but cropped out the vista and zeroed in on the indelible contour of Stein’s silhouette.

Lynes soon established himself as a celebrity photographer whose bread and butter was fashion photography for such magazines as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Kirstein, his old nemesis, also invited him to document the ballets of George Balanchine, whom Kirstein had inveigled to come to America. By the time Wheeler and Wescott resettled permanently in New York in 1934, Lynes joined them in a ménage-à-trois that lasted a decade. Their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side hosted many dinner parties, and guests of stature in the arts might also have their reputations confirmed and enhanced by a portrait sitting with Lynes. Starting in the mid-1930s, Marianne Moore sat several times for Lynes at one of his studios. Using his signature style of high-keyed theatrical backlighting combined with velvety shadows, he portrayed her in all her beatific simplicity as a secular saint with a round-brimmed hat resembling a kind of halo. In 1953, he had her pose in her tricorn hat and cape. Elizabeth Bishop wrote that it made Moore look “like a feminine, luminescent, delicate re-incarnation of Paul Revere.” The tricorn and cape helped iconize her, making Moore a recognizable public figure.

 

Lynes often attached himself to new literary figures, particularly those whose work implied a more or less clear affiliation to same-sex love. When novelist Christopher Isherwood came to America with W.H. Auden just as Britain was facing the Nazi menace—hardly endearing the two Englishmen to their compatriots—Lynes posed the handsome but smaller statured Isherwood in studio shots that gave him an air of mystery as he hugged in and around prop walls. These may have been publicity images, but Lynes also implicated the gay author of the autobiographical Berlin Stories (1945), whose homoeroticism lay just below the surface, in a more private and more candidly queer reverie. In one of Lynes’s typically staged setups, the Englishman stares back at the camera, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his suit jacket raked casually over his shoulders. Behind him, on a steeply inclined prop, a young male model lies prone and naked, his eyes closed as if in a state of dream-sleep. But who is dreaming of whom? This would not have been a publicity shot but a private image that fused the portrait genre with the unpublishable male nudes that were Lynes’s obsession.

With the male nudes, produced after his formal work hours, Lynes called upon young male dancers, physique models like Tony Sansone and the Ritter Brothers, and a host of demimonde characters who bared their tattoos and their genitals in poses that were often highly aestheticized but would never have passed muster with the postal or customs censors. Lynes’s massive corpus of male nudes, including clearly identifiable portraits, was known mostly throughout his intimate circle. In 1937–40, in league with Wescott, Lynes produced a series of images based on Greek myths. Male nudity was discreetly featured. Wescott was to supply retellings from the ancients in the hope of producing a book, which never came off; still, the male nudes awaited an even more prestigious, if rather cloistered, safe haven. In the late 1940s, Wheeler and Wescott became helpful partners to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the sexologist made famous by the 1948 publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by introducing him to the mysteries of the homosexual “scene” and arranging interviews with gay writers and artists. Kinsey became a devotee of Lynes’s male nudes, some of which presented ambiguously erotic narratives of young men in relation to each other. Little by little, Lynes sold or gifted large quantities of these otherwise sub rosa images (today, the Kinsey Institute is the largest repository of the Lynes male nudes). Although the nudes brought little financial gain, Lynes was no doubt happy in the knowledge that his private obsession, which he considered his best work, would remain intact in a scientific institution for the benefit and delight of later generations.

After that first provocative Isherwood portrait, there began an affiliation between the British writer and the American photographer that continued nearly till the end of Lynes’s life. When Lynes lived in Los Angeles for two years after the war, heading up Vogue’s West Coast studio, he frequently shot with natural light, yet still found drama in the shadows; he posed Isherwood seated inside a window frame whose large panes allowed a hint of muted daylight. Meanwhile, a spotlight from the floor played upon the planes and hollows of the writer’s face, arms, and hands, while sculpting the folds of the window’s drapes. This was a reflective Isherwood waiting in the gloomy wings. Lynes and Isherwood had a wary friendship, never close, and this may have allowed Lynes the temerity to run after Isherwood’s teenage but legal inamorato, the painter Don Bachardy, in the early 1950s. After he took nude shots of Bachardy in New York, Lynes carried on a year-long epistolary seduction-in-secret with the boy but could not woo him to leave Isherwood’s sunny Santa Monica for the uncertain promises of living in New York with Lynes, whose finances were then in a near ruinous state.

Lynes was not always free to choose his subjects but instead answered to the Condé Nast editors while heading up the Vogue studio. In 1946–48, he produced for publication a number of portraits of the new postwar Hollywood heartthrobs, including Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Louis Jourdan. This satisfied his quest for capturing the up-and-coming male cinema icons, but he was also called on to document elite members of the European émigré community; in particular, writers and composers who had fled the Nazis and resettled near Hollywood. Among the most notable of his émigré portraits was that of Thomas Mann, critically hailed on his arrival in America as “the world’s greatest novelist.” However, among German exiles, Mann was alternately revered as the personification of German high culture and dismissed for being late to lend full-throated voice to the antifascist cause.

Mann as a writer was certainly known to Lynes. In 1930, when Wheeler was launching a series of deluxe illustrated editions under the imprint Harrison of Paris—his business partner being the culturally astute heiress, Barbara Harrison—the publishing duo were determined to have Mann, a recent Nobel laureate, as one of  their authors. Wheeler wrote Mann to invite him to contribute a translation of his memoir Lebensabriss (A Sketch of My Life). When boxes of Sketch were finally shipped, Lynes received them at the Englewood rectory, where they were initially stored. The Lynes-Wheeler-Wescott trio would undoubtedly have been intrigued to have a memoir by the German author of Death in Venice, whose homoeroticism was thinly veiled. But as literary critic Anthony Heilbut commented of Mann’s A Sketch of My Life, “Much was hinted, little revealed, as if telling just this amount obviated further disclosure.”

By the postwar period, with Mann ensconced in a home in Pacific Palisades, Lynes probably knew the man no better than through his writing, but at least two of the Mann children had become personally known to Lynes and his circle. Klaus and Erika Mann were ardently antifascist sooner than their father. In 1935, Erika, touring in her own pointedly political cabaret, had good reason to suspect she was being tracked by the Nazis. In Amsterdam, her brother Klaus introduced her to Isherwood after a performance; with an embarrassed laugh, she asked Isherwood if he might marry her to secure her British citizenship. Isherwood, already burdened by his own German boyfriend’s evasion of military service, declined. But he passed the request on to his friend, Auden, who was “delighted” to be of service. Auden and Erika met in England on the day of their marriage. When Thomas Mann was first living as a distinguished émigré professor at Princeton University after arriving in America in 1938, a member of the American press visited to discover Dr. Mann and his wife entertaining Erika, son-in-law Auden, and Isherwood. The journalist understood Auden’s marital connection to the family, but perhaps cheekily inquired as to Isherwood’s connection to the Manns. A pregnant pause followed, which Mann filled with two words: “Family pimp.”

When 10 years later Lynes photographed Mann in the garden of Lynes’s Hollywood home, the much-lauded author arrived with his beloved black poodle Nico. The aging but still distinguished author presented as a natty scholar-dandy in wire-framed glasses and a pale double-breasted suit with bowtie, shod in warm-weather white shoes, his straw panama hat beside him on a wicker settee, surrounded by an expanse of manicured lawn. In several photos, loyal Nico stands sentinel beside his Master; in one shot, Mann tenderly addresses himself to Nico’s inquiring gaze. Lynes believed he was revealing the prim and fussy Teutonic side to the “great man” (or the Great Mann), yet there is nevertheless a sense of the writer’s dislocation as he looks into some abstract distance, isolated in a seat designed for two, as if his 19th century rectitude had been cast adrift in a neatly landscaped suburb of Tinseltown.

Even after the dissolution of the Lynes-Wheeler-Wescott ménage in 1943, the three men maintained friendly relations. It was not easy at first. Lynes had fallen in love with his young studio assistant who was about to enter the armed service. Meanwhile, the trio’s unconventional living arrangement did not accord with Wheeler’s career in the upper echelons of the art world, which were moneyed and conservative. By this time, Wheeler had extended his earlier influence as the director of publications for the Museum of Modern Art into allied status as its director of exhibitions, positions that earned him more respect than recompense. Nevertheless, he and Wescott also maintained a deep cultural reach through their many friendships and connections in the transatlantic literary and art worlds. In 1949, at cocktails before a dinner party at Wheeler’s home, present were Dr. Kinsey, and Lynes and his mother, the estimable Adelaide Lynes. There they all met British author E.M. Forster, whose novels earlier in the century (A Room with a View, Howard’s End, A Passage to India) pictured the subtle class distinctions, social mores, and psychology of the English both at home and abroad. This gave Lynes the chance to invite “Morgan,” as Forster was familiarly known, to sit for his portrait at his studio, alongside his younger companion Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Lynes’s double portrait of the male pair documented what was already a long-standing and committed relationship; the pictures were somewhat conventional in pose and lighting, but the delicately implied intimacy between the younger and older man lend them a frisson of the taboo, especially for the period.   

Lynes achieved deeper psychological resonance in the portraits of Forster by himself, posed against an expanse of blank wall. Its wash of tonal greys match those of Forster’s own rumpled suit. The composition takes in Forster’s full figure, the studio floor paint-speckled, the empty studio wall extending on either side away from Forster’s lone figure, as if it might go on forever in either direction. The drab anonymity of the space forces the viewer to assess this modest balding man who looks warily toward the photographer, a vague questioning appeal on his face. Though he stands erect, Forster’s stout belly pulls the fabric at his single closed buttonhole. He holds some folded paper in one hand, like a symbol of the writer’s trade or the reader’s task. What note or message, what “text” we might ask, fills that page? But let’s not make too much of that, as if it is the point of the portrait. Rather, the image insists that it is the whole Forster who must be reckoned with: a man alone in an indifferent universe, a man past his physical prime who stands four-square on the side of ethical rectitude—not the threadbare rectitude of the pious hypocrite quoting well-worn homilies and passages from Testaments Old and New, but the rectitude of a man whose life was lived against the grain, yet who in his writing held that honor in personal relationships was a worthy basis for a whole life, indeed, for a whole civilization.

 

Lynes gave Forster his full due in a most unassuming image. It was what he tried to achieve with all of his subjects. T.S. Eliot was so pleased with his 1947 portrait sitting for Lynes, commissioned by the fashion publisher Condé Nast, that Eliot wrote the photographer:

People often take photographs of one but usually nothing more is heard of them, and therefore I appreciate all the more your thoughtfulness in sending me such a number and variety … I must tell you that I … think they are very good indeed—among the best I have had for many years. The total effect gives me an impression that I look like a moderately good film actor in a variety of parts. I prefer myself in the apparent role of big executive to my part as a kind of plain clothes man in a William Powell film.

Lynes tried to see and present past the surface. With writers in particular, Lynes’s portraits paid homage to a field of endeavor in which he himself had tried but failed. He read seriously all his life and admired writers immeasurably. Alas, his hundreds, if not thousands, of intimate and gossipy and self-questioning letters are Lynes’s literary legacy; that, and his portraits of Stein, Cocteau, Colette, Gide, Eliot, Moore, Isherwood, Wescott, Mann, Katherine Anne Porter, and on and on.