Reviewed by Horam Kim
10.29.07

Some good things about photographs: they can’t yell at you, throw fine china at your head, or accuse you of having an affair with their best friend. On top of that, they’re usually pretty good looking. It’s no wonder the celebrated photographer Edward Steichen in Emily Mitchell’s incisive debut novel The Last Summer of the World would rather have his photos for company than his first wife Clara.

For those unfamiliar with the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, he is best known for “The Family of Man” exhibition made up of some 500 photos that captured love, life, and death in 68 countries. He founded the photo-secessionist movement with Alfred Stieglitz and later became the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. A close friend of Auguste Rodin, he also ran in the social circles of Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse. While he found great success in his art, he was thought to be an absent father and husband.

Mitchell concentrates much of her story during the tail end of World War I in 1918, when Steichen, commander of the American Expeditionary Force photographic division, arrived in France to take aerial photographs of the war. He is in unfamiliar territory in more ways than one. Unlike his previous work, these photographs “were not made to be beautiful, but to be clear.” His photographs of enemy terrain were strictly utilitarian, which is just as well, because he can no longer bear to capture the beauty in the world.

The chaos of war seemed the perfect escape for Steichen from the irreparable discord of his personal life at home. His wife, Clara, has left him, taken their daughter away, and sued him for “alienation of affection,” because she thinks he’s having an affair with her best friend Marion Beckett. But eventually he realizes even the war cannot hide him from his troubles when he awakens to see Marion, his alleged mistress, working as a nurse and caring for his wounds.

But amidst the devastating accounts of death, pain, and suffering, Mitchell still manages to interject the random moments of unexpected beauty that inhabits the bleakest places. A shell striking the storeroom of a hospital is described as having caused the nearby trees to fill with what looked like festive white streamers but were really just bandages.

Mitchell bounces back-and-forth from the present war to the summer of 1914 and earlier. She introduces the flashbacks with titles of Steichen’s photographs, which are then brought to life with Mitchell’s elegant narrative. Although the scenes of the past build up to the unraveling of his marriage, they are overall images of happier times detailing Edward’s courtship with Clara, his blossoming artistic promise, and his supportive circle of friends: “he could hardly believe that he used to have a life consisting of such wonderful, ordinary things.” The frozen past is everything that the present is not: blissful, beautiful, and idyllic. It serves as a stark contrast to what confronts him now: a bloody world war, a marriage in shambles, and a family broken apart.

While Steichen wants to hold on to these photos and all they represent, Clara wants to finally be free of them and their unfulfilled promise of a loving husband. She has put up with his affairs, mothered his children, and sacrificed her own musical talents for him, and “he does not even seem to notice.” The final insult of having her husband love her best friend proves too much for her to bear. She wants desperately to “walk into a new life without the weight of the past, clean.” To Clara, the photographs are records of Steichen’s perspective of the past that accepts adultery as “a natural right as a man,” disregards her feelings, and holds her back from living her own life. She, like Steichen, is only able to face the present and beyond after the delicate past, “susceptible to sun and to damp,” has been finally relinquished.

In Mitchell’s poignant search for the man behind the photographs, she gracefully uncovers a complicated life haunted by love and regret.