A Hotel for Poets

“It was mortifying not to be married, so I had to have a thing,” Elsa Dorfman told the talk show host Sandra Elkin on an episode of Woman, a PBS program broadcast from upstate New York. “What could be better? My camera! I’m a photographer! People stop short. It was like saying you were a poet . . . And I was lucky because I grabbed it, and it worked.”

It was 1975, and the 38-year-old Dorfman had been taking pictures of her milieu in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a decade. Her first book, Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal, had recently appeared from publisher David R. Godine. In this unorthodox catalog of musings and pictures with handwritten captions, Dorfman narrates her photographic trajectory by way of introducing readers to her community of poets and other colorful characters. Her black-and-white portraits document such lions as Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Gail Mazur, Joanne Kyger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fanny Howe, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Anne Waldman, many of whom we catch snacking at Dorfman’s kitchen table or lazing atop her heavenly Empire sofa. Dorfman’s pictures, like her writings, have an unpretentious, friendly quality that brings the reader into the conversation. While some of her subjects were indeed locals, most were passing through town or specifically making the pilgrimage to Dorfman’s mansard-roofed duplex on Flagg Street near Harvard Square. (As Harvey Silverglate, an attorney and writer who married Dorfman in 1976, put it earlier this year, “We ran a hotel for poets.”)

More than capturing a now-legendary scene, the Housebook played an essential role in creating it. And the book offers an excellent case study of how the avant-garde literary and photography worlds of New England, New York City, and the Bay Area constructed and strengthened each other during a transformative period in American culture. Yet the quietly feminist Housebook is also about redefining domesticity as a then-unmarried, childless, and sometimes-dieting thirty-something Jewish woman in the age of women's liberation. In recent years, the 35mm Housebook pictures have figured in Errol Morris’s endearing documentary The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (2016), as well as the exhibitions Elsa Dorfman: Me and My Camera at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2020) and Elsa Dorfman & the Widening Lens at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room (2024). Since its original publication, however, the Housebook has received little attention from critics and historians as a pivotal cultural text in its own right. A revisitation of the Housebook on its fiftieth anniversary brings into focus the quirky brilliance of Dorfman’s open-hearted, ever-evolving project.

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Dorfman’s ties to the pantheon of Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School poets were strong from the start. After graduating from Tufts University in 1959, she moved to New York City, fortuitously landing a job as a secretary to the editors at Grove Press and The Evergreen Review. One of her duties was organizing the first poetry readings for Grove authors such as Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. Returning to Massachusetts after an invigorating year, she continued to cultivate friendships with leading poets by forming the Paterson Society (named in honor of William Carlos Williams’s work, as well as Ginsberg’s hometown), whereby she singlehandedly arranged “monster poetry reading tours” at numerous colleges across the country and used the proceeds to fund the publication of books such as Edward Dorn’s The Newly Fallen (1961). Intending to teach elementary school, she pursued a master’s in education at Boston College, where she produced an anthology of poetry for children as her thesis.

But Dorfman felt that she was floundering. As she recounts in one of the Housebook’s most penetrating passages:

I was a constant monologue of confusion and fantasy, and I couldn't keep things together, like arrive places when I said I would, balance my checkbook, get the laundry done before I totally ran out of underpants. I had the notion that it was attractive to be suffering, it was what you were supposed to do if you were at all sensitive. People didn't just tolerate you when you were down, they loved you for it.

In 1965, while building elementary school science curricula at the Educational Development Corporation, she was introduced to and then tutored in photography by a fellow employee, George Cope. Because the most important artists in her life were poets, she looked to them for guidance and validation despite working in a different medium. “I had the notion that they expected something from me,” she writes in the Housebook. “My fantasy about them helped me approach the camera with a sense of purpose, seize it and make it an experiment that worked.” By 1967, Dorfman had saved up enough money for a camera of her own and enlisted Whalen and Snyder to purchase a Mamiya on her behalf while they were in Kyoto.

Poets were also, predictably, among her first subjects, and soon she was using her photographic skills to bolster the profile of the community that congregated at the Grolier Bookshop in Harvard Square. She published a lengthy essay about the Grolier and its grumpy proprietor Gordon Cairnie in The Boston Sunday Globe in 1968, accompanied by her own photos of male poets shooting the breeze in the shop, and contributed individual author portraits to the “36 Birthday Poems for Gordon Cairnie” special issue of The Antioch Review in 1970. But it wasn’t until the holiday season of 1972 that she performed her most iconic act of all: loading up a shopping cart on loan from Stop & Shop, wheeling it over to Holyoke Center in Harvard Square, and hawking her archival-quality prints (some of which would later appear in the Housebook) for $2.50 apiece to captivated or bewildered passersby. Some of them are valued at $3,000 today.

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The idea for the Housebook began to germinate in the spring of 1972 during a conversation between Dorfman and her old friend Mark Mirsky, a Boston-born novelist then living in New York. “Mark encouraged me to put all the pictures I was snapping into a housebook, telling me in his grand historical way that in the nineteenth century everyone kept a housebook.” While Dorfman runs with the suggestion, even using the term as an all-encompassing descriptor (“the Housebook style of my life”), she does little to define her improvised visual-literary form or situate it within bygone cultural practices.

In the history of art, the term recalls the Medieval Housebook, an extraordinary compilation of sometimes-unrelated secular texts and images produced in a late-fifteenth-century German court. Though primarily focused on warfare mechanics, the decadent manuscript scuttles across a medley of topics, including animal husbandry, mining, medicine, pyrotechnics, and planet personification. If the Medieval Housebook constructed princely masculinity in an unsystematic way, the nineteenth century witnessed the proliferation of journals in which women jotted down their everyday household affairs, financial matters, shopping lists, recipes, and gardening notes, as well as scrapbooks of juxtaposed texts and images that marked the visits and activities of friends.

Even with these historical associations, however, “housebook” isn’t a straightforward reference. “She really invented the idea of the housebook,” Mazur told me in a recent interview. “You would think that maybe people had housebooks after she invented it.” Mazur was one of Dorfman’s closest friends; they talked on the phone for at least thirty minutes every day for more than 50 years. For her, the book’s boundary-breaking form emanated from Dorfman’s uninhibited disposition, as well as the urgency many women artists felt to make a name for themselves in the 1970s. “She was free of any sense of limitations, and not in any way that was offensive or stepped on anybody's toes,” Mazur says. “If she had an idea of something she wanted to make or do, there was nothing that said to her, oh, that wouldn't work, or that would be too hard, or who would want that.”

The Housebook is an imaginative reinterpretation of these piecemeal vernacular cultural forms of recording and memory-making, historically inseparable from the gendered labor of housework. “By taking pictures in my house,” Dorfman writes, “I get a sense of how things change every day. How my relationships change, the rhythms, who comes in, who hasn't come, who's busy, how busy I am, what I feel like tacking on the wall, what I feel like throwing away.” Just as nineteenth-century housebooks had the potential to be sites of women’s agency in a patriarchal world, Dorfman viewed her photography as a self-making, even therapeutic practice. “If I feel depressed in my mind, then I can go out with my camera and create an event and take pictures and meet people that draw me out of being angry and lonely and whatever that I feel,” Dorfman says in her friend Irene H. Lang’s short film At Home: Elsa Dorfman (1973), a student project that spectacularly concludes with houseguests Ginsberg and Orlovsky singing an early version of “Broken Bone Blues” (the former had recently broken his leg). “Taking pictures,” Dorfman continues in the film, “is the short route to mood elevation, to making me feel more in touch with life.”

It was Dorfman’s documentation of ordinary, everyday happenings that gave the Housebook political acuity. Feminist literary critic Annette Kolodny made this argument in her enthusiastic review of the book in the journal Women’s Studies in 1976:

. . . as women living in a society that projects upon us images we do not recognize as our authentic selves, but into which many of us have tried to fit for so long, we are in urgent need of discovering as many ways as possible into our own complex and daily realities. We need to learn how to see those realities and, having seen them, how to make images of them for use and sharing.

Unlike Kolodny, Dorfman does not plainly situate her “woman’s photojournal” as a feminist project—a stark difference from photographer Abigail Heyman’s Growing Up Female: A Personal Photojournal, published the same year. Heyman commences her landmark book, in which meagerly contextualized photos of many unrelated women have pride of place, as in most photobooks, with a declaration that “This book is about women, and their lives as women, from one feminist’s point of view.” By contrast, Dorfman’s photojournal sidestepped dogmatic language at a moment when feminist debates over representation and self-representation were taking off in literature and photography (interestingly, the radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin was Dorfman’s close friend, and her radiant portrait from 1974 appears in the Housebook).

Dorfman’s feminism articulates itself more subtly. The Housebook’s several self-portraits emphasize her identity as photographer and play with the conventional gendered politics of the camera. In two casual mirror selfies that bookend the work, for instance, her head is entirely overtaken by the instrument, denying the reader’s gaze and almost suggesting that they are being photographed. In a similar vein, when describing a shirtless photo of Silverglate twinkling at her from the breakfast table, distracted from a work phone call for an instant, she notes, “I love taking pictures of Harvey, partly because it's a switch on the usual combination—male photographer, female lover.” (Indeed, as feminist writer Fran Taylor admitted in her contemporaneous review of the Housebook in The Second Wave, “My trepidation upon glancing through a book that seemed filled mostly with pictures of men melted upon reading the text.”) 

In fact, Dorfman expresses her gratitude to the women’s movement, which, she writes, “has been an enormous help in making me more comfortable. It's made being unmarried less freakish; it's challenged the notion that only life with children is complete.” On top of this, if nineteenth-century housebooks were once populated with recipes and storeroom stocks, Dorfman’s revival, in a feminist gesture, outsources traditional housework activities of cooking and cleaning. Her interest in the former, she says, could not compete with her pursuit of photography. Cooking, she hilariously insists,

is too much like developing film and making prints. In front of a sink. Following directions. Measuring. Waiting. Stirring. Using a million utensils. Now when I have friends over, I buy food that takes very little preparation. All I have to do is unwrap it, or at most, put it under the broiler with a little paprika. I order it by phone and have it delivered.

These lines are particularly forceful when one remembers that Julia Child (whom Dorfman would later photograph at least twice with her 20x24 Polaroid camera) was concurrently instructing housewives how to make terrines and pâtés down the road at WGBH studio. In the same spirit, Dorfman writes about how she hired her mother’s former housecleaner, Willy Williams—one of the book’s more eye-opening moments, because he seems to be the only Black person represented in the Housebook. Her circles in those years can only be described as exceedingly white.

Even within Cambridge, Dorfman was not the only woman photographer whose work cast a critical eye on normative forms of domesticity and community in the early 1970s. As a master’s student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, Susan Meiselas made her first photo series, 44 Irving Street (1971), a collaborative project that involved photographing the twenty, mostly single and childless inhabitants of her boardinghouse. Or, by 1972, Nan Goldin had started photographing her queer and trans roommates at home. In the summer of 1973, Project, Inc., a small Cambridge gallery, hosted Goldin’s first solo show, followed by Dorfman’s exhibition Elsa’s Housebook, comprised of photos that would soon appear in the book. Dreaming up an alternative mode of domestic life as an unmarried woman, Dorfman, like Goldin, conceptualized her friends as family and photographed them accordingly. As she explains the significance of regular visits from Creeley, Ginsberg, and others,

It's clear that I need to/like to [almost compulsively] recreate the idea/feeling/warmth of a family—all those cousins I knew when I was growing up. At 19 Flagg Street, I've made a family of people I can talk to. Understand. I have a certain ritual when these friends from out of town arrive. I buy strawberries and shrimp, cheeses. Wine. Cider. They're the most celebratory.

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The beauty of the housebook form is its capacity to shapeshift and expand. First published as a trade paperback, the Housebook was out of print by 1976. In 2004, Dorfman collaborated with her webmaster Kyle Nicholls to create an open-access digital version, cleverly visualized along a navigational axis inspired by Boston’s Orange Line. In print reissues from the Harvard Book Store in the 2010s, Dorfman solicited new texts, initially from those involved in its printing, and then nostalgic contributions and updates from those she had written about and photographed as well as their family members. The fourth and final edition, from 2017, is a wide-ranging accumulation of rediscovered archival ephemera and recent correspondence, pictures, and writings. There’s a postcard from Robert Creeley, a new handwritten poem from Joanne Kyger, charcoal sketches by writer Lazarre Seymour Simckes, emails with the grandson of Willy Williams, a photo of Dorfman’s younger sister Sandy practicing Iyengar yoga at age 70, movie posters for The B-Side. “The Housebook,” Mirsky observes in his contribution, “could have been titled Elsa’s Houseparty,” and reading this fourth edition indeed feels like crashing a reunion for the history books. What originated as a tight personal work morphed into a chaotic and polyvocal community chronicle.

Covering the Housebook for The National Review in 1975, historian Francis Russell asserted, “in its Dorfmanesque way and at the Cambridge level, it has captured a glimpse of our times. Something permanent. I recommend that it be sealed in the cornerstone of every Cambridge and Boston building built in the next five years.” Well, those times are not our times, something made even more irrefutable by Dorfman’s death in 2020. But the Housebook has long been a site of nostalgia. “When I look at these pictures of the Housebook,” Dorfman tells Morris in his 2016 film, which resembles an oral history interview-cum-studio visit, “I’m amazed how young we were, how many of us aren’t still here.” These portraits of her dazzling friends formerly adorned dust jackets but now find themselves in obituaries and posthumous tributes. Harvard Square, meanwhile, once had a beaming countercultural profile; today it’s a gentrified wasteland. Yet somehow the Grolier, one of the last strongholds, intellectual or otherwise, independent of that neighboring behemoth, is still there, and on its walls hang Dorfman’s lovely pictures of Ferlinghetti perched on Cairnie’s storied couch, of Ginsberg and Orlovsky performing “Broken Bone Blues” in her living room. They call to mind one of the Housebook’s enduring insights: “We are given this evidence of an instant when we all know time is a continuum. The photograph is an exquisite metaphor, a delicate haiku of memory.”