There I Was

Mark Dorset

Late in 2007, as his work on Flying Home, the final volume in the Flying trilogy, began drawing to a close, Kraft began to feel the familiar uncertainties that bedevil an artist’s mind when a work begins to seem complete: Is it any good? Why isn’t it as good as I hoped it would be? Why has it become something different from what I meant it to be, what I expected it to become, what I worked to make it? What the hell am I going to do next?

It was that last question that made Kraft feel that he had come to a turning point. He may have felt that he was going to have to take a turn, that he was going to face a bifurcation and have to choose a way, as a traveler does at a fork in a road, or he may have felt that his life was about to take a turn whether he chose to have it do so or not.

His reluctance to let Flying Home go, combined with the need to do enough hackwork to keep the Kraft ménage afloat, made work on the book progress slowly. When he felt that he needed or deserved a break from the hackwork or from work on the book, he would refresh himself by working on his photographs, and he found himself turning in particular to the many images he had made of signs of the “you are here” type.

Perhaps it was the obvious connection between a sign that reassured a traveler who might be feeling a bit lost and the situation of the novelist who was feeling that coming to the end of a book was akin to approaching a fork in the road that made Kraft begin playing with those images. He cropped them, adjusted the color saturation and contrast, and straightened them a bit. He understood what he was doing and what was happening as he did it: he was fictionalizing the images, sending them into that other realm, the fictive, where things have undergone a transformation, where they have been worked, and in the working have been removed a certain a distance from the realm of the real. At some point in the work of transformation, Kraft asked himself how the images would look in black and white. To find out, he made a duplicate of each image and removed the color. This change, he found, had a remarkable effect on him, as the viewer, and the effect on him made him think, or at least feel, that the change had had a remarkable effect on the images themselves. It was an effect not only on the way he responded to each new black-and-white image, but also on the way he responded to the image in its original state, the color image. With the recognition of those twinned effects came the decision to attribute the images in their first altered state—not the images as they came from his camera, but the images that resulted from his cropping them, adjusting their color saturation and contrast, and straightening them—to Bertram W. Beath, the alter ego of Matthew Barber, a longtime friend of Peter Leroy. Beath, known as “BW,” made his first appearance in the Personal History in Reservations Recommended and reappeared in Passionate Spectator; at the end of that book Kraft sent him wandering the world in search of beauty and pleasure.

Each of the color images that had now become BW’s seemed to Kraft to be something close to the experience that had prompted BW to take the photograph, while each of the corresponding black-and-white images seemed to be the documentation of the act of recording the experience, as if it were an official record of the making of its color precursor. He had the feeling that he was dealing with stages in the mediation of an experience, beginning with a color image very near the experience itself and progressing to a black-and-white image that was the result of several stages of consideration of the experience. As he compared the two versions of each image, and as he pondered the different effects that they had on him, he decided that he might publish them in a small book, and that if he did publish them he would combine the two versions in some way that would allow them to have the same effect on other viewers as they had had on him.
He continued this reflective play, and as he did so he developed a plan, and from that plan he began to develop a design, and then, because he liked what he had produced, he began to worry that he might be deceiving himself. What if the pleasure that he took from these images was not a pleasure that anyone else would take from them? What if the significance that he seemed to see in them would not be seen by anyone else?

His next step must have been immediately obvious to him, I think. He would have known that he had to find out what Madeline thought. She had been the first audience for every one of his earlier books, which he read to her, chapter by chapter. So, in this case, when the images in the book were as important as the words, she would have to be its first viewer. He printed the images, in pairs, and brought them into the kitchen of their apartment at the end of the day.

I can imagine the scene.

He makes a martini for each of them, as he usually does at the end of the day, and then he lays the images on the dining room table, in pairs, and introduces the subject of the project that will eventually result in There I Was:

Eric: I’d like your opinion of these photographs. I’m thinking of publishing them.
Madeline: Publishing?
Eric: Yes. I’m thinking of disinterring the Babbington Press.
Madeline: So you’re plying me with drink in an effort to keep me from saying, “I guess we can kiss the retirement fund goodbye”?
Eric: I always ply you with drink at the end of the day.
Madeline: True.
Eric: And it never prevents you from saying, “I guess we can kiss the retirement fund goodbye.”
Madeline: True.
Eric: Take a look.
[Obligingly, she does.]
Eric: Isn’t it remarkable the way the two versions of each image differ, the way the black-and-white seems to document the moment when the color image was created, to historicize it, to preserve it?
Madeline: Hmmm.
Eric: I think they’d make an interesting little book. What do you think?
Madeline: I think we can kiss the retirement fund goodbye.

Because I know how much I am encouraged by Margot and Martha’s willingness to “go along with the gag,” whenever I am about to commence an undertaking that I know they must consider slightly Quixotic, I can fully understand that Madeline’s neutral response must have been endorsement enough for Kraft.

Early the next morning, stealing time from hackwork and Flying, he was hard at work, laying the images side-by-side on facing pages of a small book.

At first, Kraft hadn’t intended to include any text with the images other than the identifying data giving the time and place where image had been made. He began working on the text by looking at the images that the text would complement, accompany, augment, or explain. As he spent time with the images, he realized that the images might, when he was done, seem to augment or explain the text. As he regarded each image, he tried to put himself—as BW—in the place where it was made at the time when it was made, looking at the original sign, map, placard, or drawing rather than at an image of it. He asked himself, “What is this sign saying to me?” I don’t think that he was asking himself that question merely in the obvious locational sense; I think he was asking it in the deepest sense, that he meant something like this: “What is the sign saying to me essentially, fundamentally, at its most basic?” That question led him, eventually, to an understanding of what the sign was saying about the relationship between itself and him (with him now standing in BW’s place), and that led him to the discovery of the question that he most wanted to ask each of these signs, maps, placards, or drawings: “What message do you have for me, what personal message apart from the message that you offer to everyone who passes by, who happens upon you?” With that, the text, the raw text, began to come.

When he had laid out the entire book, with the manipulated images and a much-manipulated version of the text, he stepped back from it, asking himself whether it had been worth doing and whether it was now worth publishing. Looking at it on his computer screen, he was pleased with what he saw. He could imagine holding it in his hands, and he could imagine flipping through it. He found himself enjoying it. So, he took another step toward reviving the Babbington Press: he ordered a single proof copy.

When the proof copy arrived, the book pleased him, but the cover did not, not quite. He and Madeline admired its simplicity and I feel certain that they responded warmly to its Modernist style and what I perceive as a tip of the hat to Kazimir Malevich and Suprematism. However, it must have seemed to him a bit too cool, a bit too spare, because he set it aside and began experimenting with other approaches.

The first of these wrapped a single black-and-white photograph around the entire book, with a locational arrow and circle on the part of the image that would appear on the front. (The image was an aerial photograph, taken by Kraft on a return flight from San Francisco, of a stretch of the North Shore of Long Island, flipped horizontally to place the shoreline and the Long Island Sound on the front cover.) The result had a certain appeal, despite the fact that the full impact of the design would be achieved only when the book was lying open and upside down, an awkward and damaging position for a book, especially a perfect-bound paperback.

Substituting a color version of the image for the black-and-white one showed Kraft where the real problem lay: the image dominated the cover and, because books are so often judged by their covers, was likely to dominate the viewer’s expectation of what the book inside the cover would be. It seemed to promise an adventure that would open with its protagonist in a precarious spot (“There I was . . .”) and then would narrate the journey and events that had led to that precarious position. There is a metaphorical sense in which There I Was can be interpreted as that adventure, but that, I think, was never Kraft’s intent.

Reducing the photograph reduced its domination of the cover, but the white background now seemed pale, and the overall effect a little limp.
Enter the New Yorker’s favorite color: black. With the photograph reduced still further, and the background in glossy black, Kraft felt that the cover achieved the effect that he had been after, but hadn’t recognized until he was holding another proof copy in his hands.

The Babbington Press published There I Was on March 27, 2008, the twelfth anniversary of the launch of erickraft.com on the World Wide Web.

Risking the Ridiculous