Mug Shots

The December 2006 issue of Poetry features 12 portraits of poets by David Schorr. The artist explains how a chance meeting 30 years ago in Rome turned an obsession with a few faces into a lifelong affair with literary portraits.

John Ashbery

I used to scribble portraits—always with a fine-point marker—of strangers in railroad stations and cafes, my teachers and fellow students in my college classes, and, later, people at meetings. When I was in Italy on a Fulbright in 1974–75, working at the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome, I learned to really engrave, to make the burin (an extremely sharp rhombus-pointed tool) move through the metal with a meandering, reactive line, not unlike the line of my fine-point markers. But I didn’t engrave portraits.

On my return, I was living in Connecticut and one day happened to attend a meeting at the offices of the designer Malcolm Gear in Providence, Rhode Island, with a friend who worked for him. As the meeting turned to business matters, I began scribbling portraits of everyone at the table on a scratch pad, which I left behind. On my next visit to the office, I walked in to find that Malcolm had made blowups of the portraits and hung them over the desks of the subjects. I was thrilled, and felt a bit startled when he took me aside and said, “Those portraits are good—do more of ’em.” Malcolm was one of the people in the design world whom I most respected.

About that time my sister-in-law Natalie gave me a book, The Literary Life. It was a collection of photographs of writers, none of which were the usual images. I had never really thought about what F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edna St. Vincent Millay looked like beyond the iconic photographs on the backs of the paperback editions of their books, but the “different” views of their faces on display in the book made me look more closely. I went to the machine shop at Wesleyan, where I often worked, and cut a few plates into circles. I began scribbling portraits directly on the plates with my trusted fine-point marker, and then engraving them. But the rub of my hand would erase the line. So I sprayed the plate with fixative and found that the plastic coating actually made engraving easier, catching the burin and keeping it from slipping when rounding sharp curves.

H.D.

One night, late, I was doing Rudyard Kipling and was so taken by the way the metal burr had risen, like an unbroken apple peel, from the plate and was catching the light that I made an engraver’s most dangerous mistake: while turning a sharp corner, I turned my hand instead of the plate, and the burin pierced right through my thumb. I had to go to the emergency room to have it pulled out.

When I was in Rome I had met Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, at a party. He asked if I would be interested in doing portraits for the magazine. Though I wasn’t yet doing literary portraits, I said yes and promptly forgot about it. Then, right after I began engraving these literary portraits, I got a call from the magazine: would I do a portrait of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy for next week? No problem, I had just done Cavafy. I sent it in. They called. They loved the portrait but had decided to kill the review. Would I do a Camus? My Camus portrait appeared in the magazine the following week, and a check arrived in the mail a week later. I was cooking.

And so it began, and so it continued. The challenge of using these writers’ faces to constantly recompose these six-inch circles became a game of variation. Other magazine art directors were interested. Dan Harvey, then at Harper & Row, had me do five portraits each month for The New Yorker, New York magazine, and others. Phyllis Rose asked me to do portraits of the late-Victorian couples Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, among others, for Parallel Lives, her now classic study; and Paul Monette asked for portraits of the speakers of his dramatic monologues, including Isadora Duncan, Edgar Degas, and Greta Garbo.

When I had finished 60 portraits, I paused, printed editions, and looked for a show.

Hart Crane

David Kermani, who managed Tibor de Nagy Gallery, arranged for an exhibition at the Gotham Book Mart Gallery. On the nervous day when I went in to meet the director, Andrus Brown, and show the work, the gallery’s most famous regular artist was there—Edward Gorey (in one of his splendid fur coats). He was a hero of mine. He said nothing even when introduced, but hovered, and when the linen-covered box with the untitled prints was opened, he glanced at the countenance of the bright-eyed, bobbed-hair poetess and, as though seeing an old friend, exclaimed “Oh! Edna!”

The opening was a great bash: Patti Smith was there (somehow!) as well as David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj. Lillian Hellman sent me a note saying how much she liked her portrait.

Over time, interested in moving on from literary portraits, I began to say “no thank you” to all of the magazine art directors, except the one at the New Republic, who had trusted my faces from the very beginning. Thirty years later, I have done more than 300 portraits for their literary section. And many other kinds of pictures as well.

But for a time, I couldn’t stop. What faces they had! And I realized that while we knew a photographic portrait was but one moment in the life of its sitter, the expectations were much greater for a drawn or engraved portrait to be more comprehensive.

Whether or not a magazine called in an assignment, I continued to survey in line, on zinc—and later, when I could afford it, on copper—the faces of writers I loved: Auden, Proust, Housman, Lawrence, Woolf.