Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate

Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate

by Judith Kitchen
Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate

Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate

by Judith Kitchen

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Overview

“Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at the same time insistently complex. Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of seeing, and finally for me, a beautifully sustained meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book’s potent, unsentimental emotive power gathers.” —Stuart Dybek

When Judith Kitchen discovered boxes of family photos in her mother's closet, it sparked curiosity and speculation. Piecing together her memories with the physical evidence in the photos, Kitchen explores the gray areas between the present and the past, family and self, certainty and uncertainty. The result is a lyrical, ennobling anatomy of a heritage, family, mother-daughter relationships, and the recovery from an illness that captures with precision the forces of the heart and mind when "none of us knows what lies beyond the moment, outside the frame."

Judith Kitchen is the award-winning author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has won the Lillian Fairchild Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the S. Mariella Gable Fiction Prize. She has served as judge for the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Oregon Book Award, and the Bush Foundation fellowships, among others. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Kitchen lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and serves on the faculty and as codirector of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.



Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781566892964
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication date: 04/03/2012
Pages: 214
Sales rank: 926,306
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Judith Kitchen is the author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has won the Lillian Fairchild Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the S. Mariella Gable Award. She has served as judge for the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Pushcart Prize in poetry, the Oregon Book Award, and the Bush Foundation fellowships, among others. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Kitchen lives in Port Townsend, Washington, and serves on the faculty and as codirector of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

— JULIAN BARNES, Flaubert's Parrot

The Speed of Light

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm, and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design.

— EDWARD HOPPER

I seem to be stuck in their wake, halting behind each of them as they stop, pose, smile, then move apart, while I wait patiently, then not so patiently, for them to finish. In twenty-seven languages they speak the universal tongue — the telltale click that says you're trapped in someone else's frame. The place does not matter, though this time it is the Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria, British Columbia. It's crowded, and I can barely see the flowers for the people who stream past them. In the distance, wild geese lift from the field where they have been feeding, circle once, then settle in the farther distance on a pond. The tractor that disturbed them drones on, turning the earth for what looks to be yet another bed.

These are no ordinary flowers — or rather, they are ordinary flowers set in extraordinary circumstance. Each individual garden tucks itself into the hillside, or wanders down to the water — all but the regimental Italian garden that now occupies what was once the tennis courts. The gardens swell with color: one all white, from the tiniest rock creepers to the tallest hollyhocks; another yellow and muted orange; and, of course, the subdued greenery of the Japanese garden with its stylized miniature trees and drab stone Buddhas, punctuated by one bright red bridge over a studiously placid stream. By now the flowering trees have gone to green, and the rhododendrons are clearly past their prime. Today there's a riot of roses — those most boring of blooms, stiff on their thorny stems.

Stop. Position your subject. Raise the camera. Stop. Motion your subject to move a little to the left. There. Now you can see the roses too. Click. Flash. A document of your day. And there I am, pausing while you chatter away, oblivious, it seems, to anyone or anything else. Oblivious to the fine rain that falls, even as the sun insists itself, the day softened into the spectrum, all indigo and mauve. Or iris. Lilac. Lavender.

Rose.

My quick count tells me that two of every three people here are carrying a camera. Some carry two — one for the hand, another slung around the neck, zoom lens glaring like a ferret's eye. And there are camcorders as well, though roses do not dip and sway the way a field of tulips might, do not turn their heads or whisper or bow. So it must be all these milling, smiling people these cameras intend to seize — here on a Monday morning in mid-June, sometime in my past.

Among married couples, 92 percent of the time the man is in charge of the camera, but fairly often his wife wields a smaller version as well. Two women together either carry one each, or else none. In the amorphous groups of young people, everyone sports a leather case. Only children are free of the duty to record: they coil around lampposts, lean over the sides of fountains, poke or prod, race ahead or drag their heels — anything to disrupt the static posture of these planted beds, their planned finery.

What will the children remember of this day? The boredom. The see-through umbrella. The migrant feather found at the edge of the walk. The way Grandma kept stopping to sit on every bench. The way Uncle Martin made them stop so he could enforce his idea of family: Say cheese, fromage, formaggio, queso, queijo, käse, kaas, chi-zu, jibini, tupi, serowy, ost. In twenty-seven languages, smile.

I prefer their young memories — the inexplicable ennui — to the albums that will eventually shape this day in recollection, the fabricated family lined up against a background of fuchsias and pinks, backdrops to the drama of forced smiles and obligatory arms around shoulders.

In the photograph, we look at; the self becomes someone we watch with mild curiosity as the day spools out in three-by-five increments. The shutter click ed, and caught me thus, therefore I am.

In memory, we walk through. We reenact. We call up the slight shiver as the sun disappeared behind a cloud. We hear again the chatter, the mishmash of sounds as people call to each other, point and click. We conjure the moment when the wings all beat the air as if they were one large wing and the tractor made a syntax of sound. We stop to let the man ahead of us focus his third eye, as though he, too, would remember himself poised at the frozen edge of the moment before the moment before.

So, I hesitate just beyond the range of their future, a woman they did not notice or, when they did, they thanked politely as she halted her own passage through the day to make room for their documentation. What will they do with the stacks of prints tucked into their envelopes as though to preserve the limits of perception? The bottom drawers of twenty-seven countries grow steadily heavier, weighted with these self-defined memento vivere.

Photographers Anonymous. There must be a club for those who have sworn off this addiction, who resist the urge to snap and snag, whose memories provide the pigment, the sensation of the hand on the lizard-skin rail of the bridge, the goldfish wavering like coins in the water below. They meet in secret, in the pages of books, their ears attuned to what will make the eye respond, the inner eye, the one without the necessary attachments, where zooming in means going deep. They meet in secret, and they share their fear that we have lost the art of seeing to the technologies of looking. Look, they say, at what we've become. So many identical photographs — just lift out John and brush in Jacques. Same time, same place, same faces filled with stilted smiles. Same thoughts, same — oh, shame — desires.

"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver," and I'm a child, sitting in front of the old Philco waiting for The Lone Ranger, 7:30 p.m., every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the voice on the radio conjuring the masked rider and his quiet companion, Tonto. I'm seeing it all unfold — the plains unrolling under Silver's hooves, giddy with sagebrush and tumbleweed, the mountains an austere blue in the distance. Where did I get that image — I, a child whose horizon was low-slung hills, a child who had yet to see a movie? Yet it was so clear, so perfectly mine.

And now I'm alive again in that time — maples shading the street like a dusk before dusk; the street itself cooling in that after-dinner hour when children can circle and circle on bikes, or prick their ears to the clanking refrain of kick-the-can; time held at bay until my mother's clear voice orbits the yards, calling us in to thrill to history.

Never mind that the speed-of-light hoofbeats were bathroom plungers pumped up and down in sand or gravel. Never mind that the gunshots were a cane slapping a leather cushion. Never mind that the rushing river was really crumpled paper. In my mind it was real, made all the more real because it happened only in my mind.

Imagination, then, must be the flip side of memory, not so much a calling up as a calling forth. Yet imagination also relies on knowledge: on knowing what is — and is not — possible in this world of fact. Imagination plants the seed or buries the bulb knowing the seasons will shift, seeing, in the mind's eye, April give way to August, the azalea to the rose, knowing that the red leaves of the maple will burnish in autumn, knowing that from this exact window, one can look down to the inlet where the moon's reflection will be just another shimmering white blossom.

And the photo? It catches the moon's reflection — here — held forever in this one impressionistic night, while the moon moves on, dropping below the horizon, giving way to the pastel dawn. While we move on to other gardens, other moments to record. The snapshot holds us still in our twenties, our thirties, our sixties. Past tense. Imagination fills the aperture, finds the griefs that caused the lines at the corners of the eyes. And memory reconstructs those griefs, faded now to bearable, but alive and squirming beneath the glossy surface, demanding their day in the brash, unflinching glare of the sun — the hidden ultraviolet damage of it — until grief cannot be glossed over, but finds us out again, and again.

This is not art. This is life, where grief accompanies our every loss, and every photo is a loss recorded. We sift through the album, grieving, even as we smile in recollection. In every language, it's a mixed blessing I stop for, waiting for strangers to complete the process so we can all walk on, in present tense.

Paris: 1938

September eighth, I know she was there. The evidence is inescapable. Someone named Rosa sketched her — one of those quick sketches by a sidewalk artist that almost, but not quite, catch your character. So in the drawing my aunt Margaret remains simply another young woman with short, bobbed hair, lips slightly too pronounced (more pronounced than in real life), eye with only the hint of eyebrow, oval of earring, characterless.

I don't blame the artist. Probably my aunt Margaret turned to her the one clear cheek, withholding everything that made her who she was. On the other, she had a scar, burned into soft flesh when as an infant she fell on the hot-air vent. A crosshatch scar that moved when she smiled. A beauty mark, though she probably didn't see it that way. What else didn't she see?

It was Paris, 1938. Innocence about to be assailed. Time magazine, September 19, 1938, along with ads for Robert Burns ten-cent cigars and Grace Line Caribbean Cruises, and following the "national" news that Roosevelt had pulled back slightly from a full alignment with Britain, gave an account of "foreign" news:

Frenchmen were grimly convinced last week that Germany was in the very last stages of preparation for a war which Adolf Hitler would decide to fight now or later . ... Heavy trucks rumbled into Paris and dumped sand at points where it would be handy to shovel into bags for bomb shelters . ... With wealthy families of Strasbourg already evacuating that border city, France, too, began to gird Internally . ... The Marseille stevedores, basing their stand on the French 40-Hour Week Law which the Cabinet took power to modify in special cases a fortnight ago, "Struck" by refusing to work over the weekends . ... The nation sat tight to see if, after 19 years and ten months, the Armistice was about to end.

Heavy trucks were rumbling into Paris and my aunt Margaret was sitting on the small folding stool, her best profile turned toward a middle-aged woman — Rosa, her sign said — wearing black pants and a plain white shirt. This is the day she would keep. This day, like no other. The smell of the river, a mix of yeast and oil, and the first yellow leaves dropping to the pavement. The sun, absent behind skimming clouds, pale vestige of what it had been only a week or two before. The turn of the season, hint of what was coming. When this sketch was finished, she'd wander past the bookstalls, the peculiar smell of French books, like vinegar, and the sound of the language filling her with its liqueurs.

Families were leaving their homes in Strasbourg and my aunt Margaret was twenty-three years old, in Europe alone, drinking in everything she was about to lose. She'd given up her master's thesis on Bergson and Proust — the one her father had spent more time thinking about than she had. She'd given it over to her father's dream of what it might have become. Now she was searching for something new. She was on her own. There was more to this city than fusty philosophers and nostalgic old writers, an old man propped up in bed, longing for the past. There was energy in the air, movement, expectancy. Every word seemed to come to her with the clarity of fine wine, or woodsmoke. Rosa's hands moving so quickly, as though they had done this same sketch a thousand times, as though they would be there twenty years from this day. In the sketch, she would be beautiful, she just knew it.

Stevedores were striking in Marseille until their country called them to colors, and my aunt Margaret was trying to plan a future. There were no husbands waiting for a woman who seemed never to have heard of make-up, though the earrings suggest an attempt at dressing up. Or did Rosa simply add the earring, something to fill the negative space, something to draw the eye as it might in reality? The odds are fifty-fifty.

There are no odds on whether Margaret will stop at a café for coffee. Or whether she will buy a small book with a pale blue cover. Or whether she will keep the sounds of the language flowing through her, like a remembered river. Twenty-three, and alone. Paris, 1938.

Rosa stands back for a moment, then adds a straight diagonal line across the neck, as though to dress her subject in something simple, but elegant. With a flourish, she writes her name, and adds the date, the place: Boule Blanche, Montparnasse. The young woman smiles, and pulls out some notes. It's then that Rosa sees the other cheek. If only she'd known. She might have made art.

It's Paris, and the world should be opening to this young American. The world should be hers for the asking. In August, 1939, between ads for The Saturday Evening Post, air-conditioning, Florsheim shoes, the brand new Ford v-8, Goodyear's Double Eagle Airwheel tires that stop "4 to 223 feet quicker," Lucky Strike cigarettes, and portable victrolas, Time will publish a photo above the caption gasmask containers must not contain fishing tackle, the accompanying text ominously flippant:

The face of lovely Paris is pocked with gun emplacements, searchlight batteries, and trenches. Recently a demonstration of air defenses was held in the ditched and tunneled Esplanade des Invalides outside Napoleon's tomb .... There are concrete gun platforms on the wooded Meudon and St. Cloud hills where Americans have their villas and restaurants serve cool drinks to heat-weary Parisians .... Large railroad station signs, a giveaway to low-flying raiders, have been removed. Seven of the main bridges leading across the Seine are being doubled and tripled in width to facilitate rapid evacuation. All Parisians whose work does not compel them to stay must leave the city for assigned villages when war breaks out. To avoid being billeted in barns the wise and wealthy have leased comfortable rustic retreats stocked with preserved food. If there is no war some families are going to become mighty tired of canned peaches.

Gas-mask containers must not contain fishing tackle? One sentence of semiexplanation: "Every Frenchman in Paris has his gas mask, and he is subject to fine if he uses its metal container to carry his fishing tackle." So they have imagined what ordinary men might do. But, despite Guernica, they have failed to imagine the future — Esplanade des Invalides, with its sandbag trenches, seems almost innocently ready for the last war, not the one to come.

What's the use of looking back? Trying to penetrate the sketch's static past? There is no one we can save. Rosa, given the nature of her work, will most likely become a collaborator. Or — and this we like to imagine — she will join the underground. One dark night, she will simply disappear. The bookstalls will close. Margaret will go home to America, although soon we could pick up her saga as a volunteer with the American Friends Service Committee in Ecuador and Guatemala. The scarred face of Esplanade des Invalides will be crosshatched with tunnels.

Ah, here's another photo: Margaret, 1948, sun in her hair, simple white blouse. Here she is, as I remember her. And then I see what I've been looking for: her left cheek — the one she deliberately turned to Rosa — with its distinctive flaw. So it was Rosa, then, glancing up, eyes back to the sketchbook then up again, who carefully disregarded what she saw, Rosa for whom fact was fiction. Margaret knew who she was all along.

Stop time, then, for the sake of imagination. Let Roosevelt stand behind Hull's statement that we are with France "in war as in peace." 1938. One day, like no other. Let the coffee be strong and uncommonly sweet. Let the sun record a sheen of rain on the rooftops, the afternoon winding down like a wind-up toy, the pigeons preening on the peaks, their three-note call — je m'appelle, je m'appelle — naming the present as though they had all the time in the world.

"With Cloud Chamber"

This is what a scientist should look like. The gooseneck lamp that twists in the direction of the glass rods that are somehow connected to the rubber tubes that are somehow connected to the drum into which my serious young father is peering casts long shadows in stripes over the ceiling and down the far wall. University of Michigan, 1939. His mind is ahead of his body, which waits and watches. This is a far cry from the computer screen, the digital world that turns fact into fiction, graphs and charts played out on the screen in multicolored projections. This is the upshot of haphazard inquiry. Here things will whirl and whir and fill the space with sound — or else silence will tick away until, like magic, dials will pulse. He invents himself from shadow. His wrists reveal the short-sleeved shirt beneath his good black suit. The wires curl behind his ear, buzz with meaning. Surfaces glitter, see themselves in the glass, measure themselves against the rough wood of the frame. Jury-rigged — or jerry-built — that's what we'd say, but that would be later, after we knew his propensity for cobbling things together. After we sensed his love of the outmoded, the hopscotch world of tinkering. Careful. The arrow points to zero. Everything is about to begin.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Half in Shade"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Judith Kitchen.
Excerpted by permission of COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

1,
The Speed of Light,
Paris: 1938,
"With Cloud Chamber",
"Robert, At About 3 Years Of Age",
Circa 1873,
Great-Uncle Carl,
Double Exposure,
Where They Came From, Where They Went,
Bits and Pieces: 1,
Plaid,
Notebook,
Bits and Pieces: 2,
Classroom with Landscape,
Time and Tide: Five Letters,
"Rain Coming from a Bright Sky",
Bits and Pieces: 3,
Standard Time,
In Half,
And Endings?,
2,
Uncertainty,
3,
Absolute Grey,
Young Woman on Fence,
Girls in White Dresses,
"Some of Lillian's Friends from North Adams — Note Car",
Parentheses,
Recess,
Trueheart,
The Same as Usual,
A Study in Sunlight: Three Snapshots,
Sense of Play,
4,
Certainty,
5,
On Snapshots: A Sonnet,
Who,
Punctum,
Downriver Construction Company,
Where,
Unknown,
Mayme,
What/Not,
Portrait,
"Main Street, North Adams",
"The Triplets That Were Born to Mr. and Mrs. Warren Snyder",
When,
Overlay,
Perpendicular,
Thingamajig,
Why,
Haworth,
Half in Shade,
F-Stop,
6,
Night Piece,
Photographs Identified,
Credits/Notes/Serendipities,
Acknowledgments,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

[Half in Shade] rewards a leisurely reading, with not only, as Kitchen promises, “patterns of American immigration and opportunities,” but an experience that may open the eyes to the treasure chest of American experience found among those stepchildren of the arts—the snapshots. Kitchen’s book lets you know what a keen eye coupled with an alert and sensitive intelligence can see.” —Publishers Weekly

“Intriguing . . . . Elegantly written.”—Kirkus Reviews

"Half in Shade is illustrated with dozens of the family photographs Kitchen found in that 'haphazard collection of boxes and albums.' Each photo prompts a lyrical reflection on its place in her family history and how she herself fits into the picture, so to speak."—David Abrams, The Quivering Pen

"[E]ach of the lyric tidbits develops before the reader as if with toners and fixers and gelatin—silver in a darkroom, the process yielding startling and wondrous results."NewPages

"Judith Kitchen is a gifted writer of immense humanity, grace, and depth. Travel with her, trusting where she takes you." —Naomi Shihab Nye

"Half in Shade is mysterious and brave, written with wit, humor, stabbing insight, and in prose that reverberates long after you turn the last page." —Dinah Lenney

"Half in Shade is one of those rare, hypnotically enjoyable books that can be stretched out over many long, lazy afternoons or read in one sitting. Kitchen writes of photographs that 'there is a mystery in the still moment. The very black-and-white of it. It serves as entry into another time, another place.' The same could be said of her words." ForeWard

"Half in Shade is the work—diligent and curious—of an innocent of sorts, a daughter, mother, and grandmother mapping family stories and myths using grainy images as her guide."No Such Thing As Was

"Behind the beautiful language Kitchen employs and the poignant moments she unearths, it's the theme of life's instability that resonates most. . . . Using her imagination—and ours—Kitchen creates a testament to the veracity of art: sometimes the fiction is more real than the facts. More importantly, sometimes all the spectator needs to connect the dots is that uncanny sense of familiarity."The Brooklyn Rail

"Kitchen's ruminations linger long after Half in Shade is finished, leaving readers to question how much we really know about the people who become our parents." Shelf Awareness

"Half in Shade [is] well worth the read. Together with the photographs, it offers an entertaining, quirky, and sometimes profound trip down memory lane—even if the lane is not your own." TriQuarterly Review

"[Kitchen's] memoir moves according to an associative logic, like a detective story told by a wild and poetical Watson."—KAXE Grand Rapids Radio

"Over a ten year period, Kitchen worked on Half in the Shade, trying to come to terms with an inherited collection of family memorabilia that enlightened as much as it confused. . . . Most compelling is her attempt to find out the things she does not know but suspects about her mother, including an unexpected romance."—Bookslut

"Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate, takes an intensive look at the intent behind 20th-century photography in general, with specific reflections on what any photo can tell us. . . . [I]t can leave the least nostalgic of readers wishing they had paid more attention."—The Quivering Pen

"Kitchen's collaboration with the past serves as a reminder that we of the twenty-first century are neither the first nor the last to know heartbreak. Rather, we are simply one more snapshot in the collage of humanity—half-blurry proof that none of us are ever truly forgotten."—LAReview

"Kitchen's invitation to look with her at the images she has gathered— a journey of seeking and finding or failing to find— is irresistible, and the company of her assuredly meditative voice makes a reader want to respond in kind. . . . Half in Shade glows with a kind of inspirational energy that will make this book eminently teachable."—Water Stone Review

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