Just Now, at Present

Mark Dorset

Because Kraft had been photographing cocktails for some time, he had in his files many close-ups of martinis, gibsons, and gimlets. Before he had even finished work on There I Was, he had decided to give those images to BW, and to add a text to them. He didn’t know what that text would be, nor did he yet realize that it ought to follow the text of There I Was, that it would continue that text in some way.

He began working on BW’s cocktail images, and again—as in the making of There I Was—he tried the effect of pairing a color image with a black-and-white image that was identical to it in every respect except for the absence of color. Then he began laying them out in spreads, placing the two versions of each image on facing pages, side-by-side. When he looked at the first spread, he was struck by the idea that there was a tension between the facing images. He saw the tension; he felt the tension; he expected that most other viewers would see and feel it, too. The images seemed to be competing for his attention, competing for first place in his affection. He didn’t want that tension, that feeling of competition, so he manipulated the images in a way that relieved or removed the tension. He did a simple thing: he flipped the black-and-white image horizontally, so that it became a monochrome mirror-image of the color picture. At once, the two became collaborative, cooperative, and complementary rather than contentious and competitive. I find as I contemplate them now, in their published form, that the images seem to reach toward each other. They seem to yearn for each other. (Is there even a hint of the conspiratorial, the collusive?)

I doubt that Kraft understood, before he actually effected the manipulation, that the flip would change the relationship between the images in that way. I think he was just experimenting. He may even have been “only” playing. If so, he must have surprised himself. That is a rare experience in the making of art, rare and delightful.

When I view the images as Kraft placed them, I find myself asking, “Is it my Western way of reading a book, from front to back and from left to right, that makes me ‘see’ the left-hand image, the black-and-white flipped one, as chronologically precedent to the color image?” Yes, it is, and as a result of that way of reading and seeing, I am inclined to interpret the black-and-white image as the earlier one, even though my experience with photographs tells me how unlikely it is that a black-and-white original could have been so thoroughly and realistically “colorized” as to produce a later image like that on the right-hand page. So, for this viewer (and in this respect I am, I think, a typical viewer), the two ways of seeing the spread, of reading the spread, fight each other, and there remains a tension on the page, a tension built into the spread, despite the amiable cooperation of the two images themselves.

As he created the first three spreads, Kraft began with the color image, made the black-and-white image from it, and then flipped the black-and-white image; that sequence made the flipped black-and-white image the youngest of three images (one of which, the unflipped black-and-white image, was nowhere to be seen, having had an evanescent existence briefer than a mayfly’s). Enter an additional complication, bringing with it an additional confusion of the chronology. After he had completed those first three spreads, the thought occurred to him that on the fourth spread he might flip the color image instead of the black-and-white one. In the historic development of the images as they would appear on the printed page, then, the color image would be the youngest; the black-and-white one, on this spread, would be chronologically closer to the original than the color one. What would that do to the tension? (Is it important to say that much of this thinking was done while Kraft was in San Francisco rather than in New York?)

On the next spread, he placed the color image first. He had been placing the black-and-white image on the left-hand page and then placing the color image on the right-hand page (that old Western left-to-right progression at work again). Then he placed the black-and-white image, and he spent some time contemplating them before deciding which one to flip. From then on, the question of which image to flip was decided on an aesthetic basis, spread by spread.

Then came what might be called a crisis of intent. Kraft began to wonder about his motivation. In the course of his work on Just Now, at Present (which at the time he was thinking of calling Ten Martinis, Ten Gibsons, and One Gimlet), he began to ask himself how much of his enthusiasm for working on BW’s images, working on BW’s books, and reviving the Babbington Press was actually a mask for his reluctance to work on Flying Home, to finish Flying Home.

I intend to discuss that reluctance at some length when I explore the making of the Flying trilogy. For now, it is probably sufficient to say that Kraft’s reluctance paralleled and reflected the reluctance of his alter ego, Peter Leroy, the protagonist of Flying Home, to complete the confession that he intended to make when he and Albertine returned to Babbington. The essential nature of the reluctance was the same: each was reluctant to make his work public. (Need I point out the parallel to the reflected images of cocktails?)

Permit me a personal observation, the result of self-examination during the preparation of my own work. I am also reluctant, as the end comes into sight, simply to finish a book. I have been reluctant to finish every one of the many books and articles that I have written. Do you suppose that this is an example of the writer’s reluctance to “let go”? I think not. I know that other people who write books often claim that they are as reluctant to let a book go as they would be to let a child go, reluctant to release it from the safety of home and family into the wide and dangerous world. I suspect that, generally, that claim is — ahem — bullshit. The real reluctance to let go of a book comes from the feeling that it will be wrong, that it will not be what the writer had hoped it would be, and that once it is gone there will be no way to summon it back and repair it.

At some point in his work, Kraft began to think that the text accompanying the cocktail pictures ought to consist of bits of dialogue that might have accompanied the drinking of these cocktails or might have been fueled by them. His first thought was that he might lay the type over the images — but that thought brought an immediate objection from BW.

BW: If you did that, the words would stand in the way of the images. They would deface the images.
Kraft: The words will work with the images. The dialogue will be essential to a full appreciation of the images.
BW: You put too much faith in words. You value them too highly.
Kraft: You may be right, but I tell you there will be words, and I will put them where I want them.
BW: Very assertive.
Kraft: Well, I’m in charge.
BW: All right, then, if you must have words, why don’t you add a few pages to the book, run miniatures of the pictures, and add the dialogue there?
Kraft: Hmmm. I see what you mean. The dialogue would become something like the speech balloons in a comic strip. Yes. I’ll do that.

Although Kraft had been thinking that the words he would add to the images should be about their relative levels of reality or fictionality, the idea of a dialogue or conversation sent him in another direction. Almost at once he knew that one of the speakers would be the speaker in There I Was, that unidentified someone who seemed uncertain about where he had come from and where he ought to go. The conversation would be about the past (where he had come from) and the future (where he ought to go). It would be about feeling a responsibility to the past and a different kind of responsibility to the future.

I must point out that while Kraft was working on this little book and struggling to finish Flying Home he was toting the usual load of hackwork. He found himself wishing that he could say something about all the things that were crowding his life, but there is not enough time in life, in a life, both to live it and to write about it. One must find a balance. The balance may be tilted more one way than another, but Kraft has found that, for him, it can’t be tilted all one way. He can’t seem to give up living in favor of writing, and he can’t seem to give up writing in favor of living.

One night in particular during the making of Just Now, at Present brought great turbulence. In the interval between the first and second sleep, Kraft couldn’t stop thinking about the book (still untitled then) and the text that would accompany its images. For a while, he could see the book as it might be, and it pleased him very much. That feeling of satisfaction lasted long enough to make him think that he would soon fall asleep in a good frame of mind, with a head full of happy thoughts about that new book, whatever it might be called.

However, doubts began to slip in. They always do. They are the cockroaches of thought. Like cockroaches, they like the night. Among his doubts was a doubt about himself as the author of the book; in fact, it was a bigger doubt than that: it was a doubt about himself as the author of the entire Personal History.

Kraft began asking himself why he was going to hide behind BW in this book. Why was he going to attribute the images to BW when he had taken them himself? He had thought that this question had been settled long ago. Indeed, I had thought that it had been settled long ago. I shudder to think what might have happened if he had decided to try abandoning his characters and writing solely as himself. Fortunately, he decided to turn to Madeline for advice. With that decision made, he was able to sleep. The following evening he told Madeline about the turbulent night. She turned salty.

Mad: This isn’t the first bit of rough weather you’ve had to get through. Reef your sails and ride it out.
Eric: Reef my sails.
Mad: In landlubber’s terms, chip away at it.
Eric: Ah. My own advice to myself.
Mad: Any headway is some headway.
Eric: Yes, but—
Mad: And rely on your crew, trust your crew, use your crew.
Eric: My crew?
Mad: Your characters. I think you should have one of them tell the story behind the story of Flying.
Eric: That would mean—
Mad: Putting Mark Dorset to work. Taking another tack. More grog, please.

So I was summoned. I was put to work on “There I Was, the Making of It,” and here I am now, working on “Just Now, at Present, the Story Behind It.” Why? Why am I here? Why am I doing this work instead of Kraft himself? Why is Kraft using me this way? Why does he use all of us, all of his characters, as he does?

For one thing, we are aids—I could say aides—to discovering what is in his experiences: the details, the essentials, the significance. Because he has to fictionalize his experiences in order to give them to us, he has to examine them more closely than he would ever have to examine them if he were writing, say, his memoirs. The effort of examination and the transformative effect of fictionalization makes those experiences new. His characters’ experiences become something like manipulated photographs of his own experiences. Through the manipulation, the requisite close study of the original, and the various fictionalizing manipulations, he discovers things in the originals that he might otherwise never have noticed.

For another thing, as he knows very well, his characters liberate him. We allow him to get outside himself. We allow him to escape his worries and woes, even the lets and hindrances that stand in the way of his doing the work that he knows he should be doing, not the hackwork that he must do, but his own work, the work that ought to fill his working day. We allow him to look at life from a certain distance; we allow him to look at his own life from a certain distance; we allow him to look at himself from a certain distance.

For yet another thing, we allow him to stay out of the spotlight. Why does he give BW so loose a rein, endowing him with the ability to roam the world, apparently without having to give a thought to lets, hindrances, or lost luggage, while requiring me to portray Kraft himself as living within the narrow compass of New York? (Perhaps the question is beside the point, but I do wonder, in addition, why he confines me to a number of vaguely sketched libraries and a very fuzzy dwelling “somewhere.”) Is it that he wants to portray himself as the cloistered artist who sits in a cramped workroom and imagines or conjures a larger world without? Yes, that’s part of it, I think. It’s a consequence of a personality trait. I would call it reservedness. When he makes an excursion into a world larger than his workroom, he does it in disguise. I am one of those disguises, the one he wears for lectures. Peter Leroy is another, the one he wears to tell the story of his life.

At this point, I ought to insert Henry James’s “The Private Life” and Kraft’s own “I Am (He Is),” but I have already delayed the publication of Just Now, at Present for far too long.

As his work on the book began to draw to a close, Kraft began to see that it and its predecessor, There I Was, were going to be the first of six collections of BW’s photographs. He would publish each of them first individually, in a limited edition, and then collect them into a single volume. Taken together, these six parts of the larger book would tell the story of an unnamed someone who would progress from a moment of indecision, of hesitation, perhaps even fear, to a feeling of certainty, a sense of direction, a feeling of being on the way, on the wing. I can picture him smiling at himself when he realized that he was going to do this, because I am certain that he knew what he was hoping the book would do for him. He was hoping for a bit of magic. He was hoping that the transformative power of art would transform him. By making a narrative of success out of these little books, he hoped to redirect himself, to take another tack, catch the wind and steer a course that would get him where he had always wanted to go, where he had always intended to go.

The way the dialogue evolved, the path it took, surprised him, but to me it seems inevitable because it is so honest. The dialogue turned out to be about his own circumstances, caught between a rock—the demanding, constantly demanding, hackwork—and a soft place—the paradise of Art, where he could play all day with the likes of me.

Let’s look at the details of those circumstances. During the making of Just Now, at Present, Kraft was also working on Flying Home, new designs for the covers of his published books, a redesign of his website, and hackwork. He had begun planning the next episode in Peter Leroy’s memoirs, tentatively titled Albertine Appears, and the next episode in Peter’s account of his life with Albertine in the present, also a part of his memoirs, of course, tentatively titled Echo TV. He had also begun thinking about a book that he had begun to call Risking the Ridiculous. That book would appear under my name. But there was the hackwork to be done, the hackwork, the hackwork, always the hackwork.
So, to a greater degree than any of his other characters, the unnamed speaker represented by the black-and-white images turned out to be Kraft himself, seeking advice and consolation from . . . whom? Someone represented by the color images. An alter ego? A mentor or counselor? Albertine? Madeline? Himself? I cannot say with certainty, and I doubt that Kraft can either. Why not ask?

Dorset: I’m sure that the situation you were in is reflected—note the word—in the dialogue, which seems to me to allude to the many things that you wanted to do in that future that looked so bright, lit by the light of promising projects, but that seemed so far away because in order to inhabit it you had to get free of the past, of so many obligations, before you could even begin to move toward it. Am I right?
Kraft: You are.
Dorset: Getting there would require some canny tacking.
Kraft: [Chuckles.] Perhaps Canny Tacking should be the title for the collected book.
Dorset: It might be too obscure.
Kraft: Maybe. We’ll see.
Dorset: I can imagine that, at some point, you must have felt that the dialogue had taken a tack that took it so far away from B. W. Beath that it would have to become a conversation overheard. Right again?
Kraft: Right again, and it was at that point that I decided to have him make some remark about the pleasures of eavesdropping.
Dorset: He mentions a woman who shouts into a cell phone . . .
Kraft: She’s drawn from life. The original lives across the street from Maddy and me. We call her The Screamer.
Dorset: And the setting where the eavesdropping supposedly takes place? That beautiful lounge?
Kraft: Let’s just say that it is “somewhere in Barcelona.”

By including the photograph of that lounge and implying that it was the setting for the overheard conversation, Kraft has done something that he rarely does: he has placed a fictional scene in an actual place. I cannot resist pointing out that although the picture was taken in Barcelona, where he and Madeline were visiting friends, the Krafts were en route to Zaragoza, where he spoke at the University of Zaragoza. His talk, “Realism in the Service of Romance,” included a discussion of Henry James’s decision to add photographs to the “New York Edition” of his novels, and James’s concern that the photographs enhance the verisimilitude of the novels without suggesting that they were merely slight transformations of reality, too solidly anchored in reality to achieve the buoyancy of romance.

All that remains for me now is to consider the evolution of the cover. It followed a course of development nearly identical to that of the cover for There I Was, and for nearly identical reasons. There. That’s that.

The Babbington Press published Just Now, at Present in an edition limited to fewer than one hundred copies on April 22, 2008.