Catching Edward Curtis’s Shadow

At the Trysting Place by Edward Curtis, a copper photogravure plate in the The North American Indian, and my personal favorite

The photographer, Edward Curtis, is a primary character in Marianne Wiggins’ novel, The Shadow Catcher; note the word novel.  At a time when the lines between memoir and novel are blurry, Ms. Wiggins throws in a new variation, a book with the feel of a historical novel told by a fictional narrator named Marianne Wiggins, that’s right the name of the author.  So what’s fiction and what’s real and why is the reader curious?  I recently attended an event with Marianne Wiggins at the home of the premier dealer in Curtis works, Bruce Kapson, and prefaced a question with ‘readers are often curious how much of a novel reflects the author’s life.’ Ms. Wiggins disputed that readers are looking for the author in a book.  This surprised me because I talk to people all the time about books and art and find they frequently are looking for the author or the artist in the creation.  While I understand this is frustrating for the creator, I found it curious that Ms. Wiggins found it unusual. 

When I read the book, it was clear to me that much of it was fiction, but that a passage about the narrator’s feeling of smallness driving through the expanse of the West rang true.  It was so beautifully written that I actually stopped and read it out loud to my dog, the only one home at the time.  I think that in any fiction novel, even one where the narrator didn’t have the same name as the author, I would have heard that as the voice and heart of the author.  Ms. Wiggins confirmed that it was her own personal experience.

The Shadow Catcher  traces the life of Edward Curtis partly through the point of view of his wife, Clara, and partly through the research of the fictional narrator who authored a fictional Curtis book.  The reader sees a self-absorbed, immensely selfish man with incredible talent.  Curtis is famous for his pictures of Indians.  Controversy surrounds this work because for some reason the viewer expects a photograph of portrait quality to be historically accurate.  But these are works of art, they are not anthropological pieces.  Curtis set his photographs to portray an era gone or leaving.  He dressed the subjects in Indian clothing, but not necessarily the tribe of the model.  (Historically, painted portraits frequently portrayed the sitter in unrealistic clothing and settings, maybe because it’s a photograph people are critical of Curtis.) For years Curtis traveled the plains of America, photographing Indians all across the nation.  The images are stunning.  At the Wiggins/Kapson event we were able to see original copper photogravure plates from Curtis’ work The North American Indian.  Curtis spent more time perfecting the imagery of each plate in this collection than anything else he ever printed and it shows.

SPOILER ALERT:  The depiction of Curtis in The Shadow Catcher upset many of his fans.  He doesn’t come off as a person you’d want to have a relationship with.  At one point, the narrator ‘discovers’ that Curtis was gay.  For me, this felt like fiction, as was intended.  Ms. Wiggins answers the criticism that the book clearly says it is a novel, readers will know not to believe that she is making factual claims about Curtis’s life.  Personally, I felt like the author gave Curtis an excuse for his behavior, the standard ‘he was so distant because he was a gay man who couldn’t live the life he wanted in his time.’  I asked her, why let him off the hook, why couldn’t he just be a self-absorbed jerk?  She felt that were homophobic traits in his life, such as he was the first white man to participate in the Snake Dance ceremony, a homoerotic dance, and she elaborated on those activities.  Curtis experts will answer that he was the first white man to be a Hopi Snake Priest and he participated in the dance in that capacity.  I say quit making excuses, let a jerk be a jerk.

I found the insertion of Curtis photographs in the book a relief.  Having read thousands of pages of description of music while trying to imagine the sound in my mind’s ear, it was a joy to read about a photograph and see it.   Here again, Ms. Wiggins plays with truth and fiction.  Not all of the photos are authentic.  Some Curtis family photos are under the management of a Curtis descendant who isn’t fond of fiction and refused to authorize their use in the novel.  Ms. Wiggins replaced them with photos from her daughter’s collection of found photographs.  The list of photo credits clearly attributes the photographer where known, so no trick is being played on the reader except the underlying question, does it really matter if it’s the same family photo or one that gives you the same sense of the family photo?

There are passages in that book that I loved.  As an Angeleno, the description of traffic flow around the Santa Monica mountains and how we all believe we have secrets for defeating the log jam; secrets everyone else knows.  When I was reading it, I thought “why did you tell them about Fountain, that’s my sure fire path to getting to the Bowl!”  The narrator’s meeting with Hollywood producers is hilarious, the fact that the producers haven’t read the material they’re talking about making a movie of and then jump to casting the film about the book they haven’t read, including casting Theodore Roosevelt with a ‘white James Earl Jones.’  It’s an exaggeration of these ridiculous conversations, but not by much. 

The image that stays with me and replays in my mind over and over is of Clara rowing in a foggy Puget Sound recognizing the natural acoustic quality of that closed in and softened space.  Even in memory I feel her love for music and her unfulfilled life living in the shadow of Curtis.  Ms. Wiggins was married to  Salmun Rushdie when he was in hiding, maybe one of the reasons she describes Clara with such poignency is that she too spent time living in the shadow of another.  Having read both authors, I’ll take Ms. Wiggins every time.