Double Exposures

By R.Z. Sheppard

PICTURE PALACE

by Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin; 359 pages; $9.95

After Susan Sontag's intricate cerebrations on photography, Maude Pratt's observations seem like flash cubes going off at Disney World. "Photography lied and mistook light for fact." "Ubiquity --that's what photography's all about. Locomotion. Not thought--action." And, "I began to doubt that photography was an art. It was a way of life, the best vocation for a single gal to get out and meet people, find a husband, make a few bucks. 'I want to be a photographer' was a plea for love."

Maude Coffin Pratt, focal point of Paul Theroux's latest novel, is a septuagenarian who has taken pictures ever since "a friend of Mama's bought me a camera because she thought I wasn't getting enough fresh air." Maude's picture taking became a career; she herself eventually became a legend to the millions who work and play in the form that is a billion-dollar synapse between technology and art.

She did not make it by being shy. As a young freelance, Maude and her Speed

Graphic sneaked into a lavish stag party to secretly record unspeakable acts performed by a naked circus troupe. That her camera caught her own father in midslather and led to his financial ruin was of little concern. Her ambition had already driven her to beard a haughty Alfred Stieglitz in his own studio--with his own camera. Other victims of Maude's lens included D.H. Lawrence, Eugene O'Neill, Ezra Pound, Raymond Chandler and Robert Frost, "the biggest son of a bitch I was ever to photograph." E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot and Thomas Mann get flattering portraits; and a dinner with Graham Greene is recalled in vivid detail and charming conversation.

Maude Pratt is keenly aware of her role as an American original who, as Sinatra says, "did it my way." This sense of independence is focused during the months before a retrospective of her work is to open in New York. It is being hung by a twerpy careerist named Frank Fusco, who moves into Maude's Cape Cod house to rummage through thousands of forgotten prints.

Pratt meanwhile riffles through the "picture palace" of her memory, superimposing an exotic, lapidary interior life on the grainy black and white surface of a public image. Dominant tenant in the palace is Maude's brother Qrlando, the grand, unconsummated passion of her life. Maude, in fact, has only consummated once, in an unbelievable case of mistaken identity. Thereafter, she is the professional virgin, indistinguishable from her Speed Graphic with its ever renewable unexposed plates.

One of the main difficulties with Maude Pratt is that she is more convincing as a metaphor than as a character. She is full of biting, often cranky opinions about fame and the effects of patronage on artists. This contrasts with her humid, romantic maunderings on art and incest. It is almost as if Author Theroux were suggesting that Maude's lust for her brother was indistinguishable from her aloof and aristocratic aesthetic.

Vladimir Nabokov embraced a similar theme to some wondrous effects in his novel Ada. But the author is no Nabokov, though he shares the master's taste for drollery and erudition. Like Nabokov, he is also something of an outsider. Born in Massachusetts, Theroux has lived abroad most of his adult life. His present home is London. Picture Palace is his tenth novel; The Great Railway Bazaar, an account of the author's international train travels, was a bestseller in 1975, and his reviews and critieism appear with regularity in the U.S. and England.

Theroux clearly has old-fashioned literary aspirations. Picture Palace may be one of his weakest novels, but it is not likely to keep him from moving up steadily on the outside. If writers often seem to be in a cultural horse race, Theroux gives every indication of being its Man O'Letters.

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