Mummy!

How could you?

Patrick Skene Catling

THE LIVES OF LEE MILLER by Antony Penrose

Thames & Hudson, £16

It was kind of Antony Penrose, Sir Roland Penrose's son, not to write this biography of his mother before she died. It would have been kinder if he had never written it. As many of the 171 'duotone' (black and white) illustrations show, most- ly photographs by her, some of her, she was a very pretty girl and a beautiful young woman of exceptional talent; she remained attractive until middle age; but then, at the age of 40, she gave birth to her biographer and went into a grievous decline. In an understandable, unsuccessful attempt to maintain a decent distance, Mr Penrose writes of himself in the third Person: Following the birth of Tony, she had sudden- ly found herself unable to get any pleasure from sex. She was also rapidly losing her looks. Her face no longer had its fineness wrinkles and folds were proliferating and her eyes were becoming puffy. Her hair was getting thinner and lifeless. The fat was piling on, making her body look coarse and bulky. To make matters worse, the woman who had once been described as a 'snappy dresser' was fast becoming a slob. She would turn up at smart dinner parties in scruffy or unsuitable clothes — calf-high stockings under a knee-length skirt, or an ill-fitting suit jacket worn over slacks. [Really, Mummy! How could you?] But of all the vicissitudes of age, it was the deterioration of her face that wounded Lee the most, and drove her to a painful face-lift and ill-fitting wigs. [Oh, Mummy! Can't you get anything that fits? Now you look even worse!]

Uninhibited by filial piety, he reveals experiences of her childhood in Pough- keepsie, New York, which made her pa- rents leniently indulgent and made her irresponsible and manipulative for ever after. The son of 'some friends of the family', a sailor home on leave, sexually molested her when she was only seven, 'with savage consequences'. It was soon found that she had contracted a venereal disease. 'These were the days before peni- cillin was discovered,' Mr Penrose points out, 'and the only cure was douching with dichloride of mercury. It fell to Florence [her mother], with her nurse's training, to administer the treatment. It was agony for them both.' Then, in her teens, Lee was in love for the first time, but the boy fell in a lake, when they were boating together, suffered a heart attack and immediately died. 'Lee carried the combined scar from both events to her grave.'

Theodore, her father, was a factory manager on weekdays. 'During weekends. . . Lee would help Theodore indulge his passion for photography.. . Bridges and other engineering marvels were obvious subjects, but his secret pas- sion was nudes. Lee posed for him count- less times, indoors and out; cool, poised and at times a little solemn. Her self- consciousness only creeps into the shots where she is posing together with nude girlfriends.'

Her mother's use of dichloride of mer- cury and her father's hobby had an Elec- trafying effect. Theodore, in Mr Penrose's judgment, 'of all the men in her life.. . was undoubtedly the one she loved the most. . Throughout her life there re- mained a fundamental inability to form stable relationships with her lovers.' Lee was conditioned incorrigibly for the fitfully obsessional years that followed, when she became an international photographic model, a darling of the surrealists, a photographer and writer for Vogue, and a fickle mistress and wife.

Man Ray, the French photographer, made Lee's body famous in Paris and beyond. According to an article in Time, she was 'widely celebrated for having the most beautiful navel in Paris'. Something in his darkroom, perhaps a mouse, once startled her, and caused her accidentally to diScover the solarisation technique which• he perfected.' By means of the controlled, selective 'over-exposure of negatives, he was able to print photographs that look like ectoplasm outlined in India ink. Mr Penrose, with his magpie eye for a glitter- ing triviality, records that 'a glass manufac- turer designed a champagne glass inspired by the shape of her breast'. No vulviform ashtray? Jean Cocteau soon afterwards, in 1930, cast- Lee as the armless statue in Blood of a Poet.

Her love affair with Man Ray ended in tears — his tears. After her many infideli- ties, which he found very painful, she deserted him for a quiet, generous, father- ly Egyptian. Aziz Eloui Bey, infatuated, promptly divorced his wife by invoking the convenient Moslem formula. 'Distraught, she took a room in the Hotel Bourgogne et Montana where, with liquor supplied by a Russian -friend, she drank herself to death in the space of a few weeks.'

After working hard and successfully as a freelance photographer in New York, tak- ing some elegant portraits, including most notably one of Gertrude Lawrence of metallic brilliance, Lee eventually married Aziz, twice, in accordance with New York and Egyptian conventions. The account of her life in Egypt is mainly about her photography and adultery on expeditions into the desert.

One of her more persistent lovers during her Egyptian marriage was Roland Pen- rose, their son writes. In London at the outbreak of the second world war, she elected to stay rather than to return to the United States, as her embassy recom- mended.

Some of the best photographs she shot during the Blitz were published in Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain under Fire, which was edited by Ernestine Carter, with a preface by Ed Murrow, intending to gain American sympathy. Several of these ex- cellent photographs are republished here. 'Revenge on Culture', depicting a classical statue of a woman supine under the debris of an air raid, and 'Remington Silent', a close-up of a mangled typewriter, for example, make their points with surrealis- tic artistry.

Accredited as a US war correspondent, Lee spent the later war years with the US Army on the Continent — still working for Vogue. Travelling with Dave Scherman, of Life, she shot so many photographs and wrote so many articles so fast that Mar- guerite Higgins, of the New York Herald Tribune, who was quite an operator herself on a good day, complained to Scherman: 'How is it that every time I arrive some- 'where to cover a story, you and Lee Miller are just leaving?'

Lee was one of the first photographers to get into Dachau at the end of the war. The pictures she took there made a terrible impact on everyone who saw them, not least upon herself. Photographing Hitler's Berchtesgaden, house in flames and posing in his bathtub were insufficient compensa- tions. Mr Penrose's account of his mother's marriage with Roland, in Hampstead and Sussex, suggests that his successful work, especially through the ICA, 'for the furth- erance of contemporary art', for which he was knighted, made Lee acutely aware of her failure to continue her achievement as a photographer. She found gratification in the kitchen and at the table in the company of old friends, such as Man Ray and Picasso. But the last years seem predomi- nantly melancholy.

'As is customary in fate's control of these matters,' the author says, 'the final burying of the hatchet with Tony came far too late.' In this interesting book, whose photo- graphs I recommend, he keeps burying the hatchet again and again, in her.