Books: American Gothic

NOTHING PERSONAL by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Atheneum. $12.95.

For over a decade, Photographer Richard Avedon’s elegant, epicene high-fashion pictures have set the slick tone for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Now it turns out that all along Avedon has been disgusted by the affluent America he celebrates. To register his revulsion, he got together with James Baldwin (who was his old classmate in The Bronx’s prestigious De Witt Clinton High School) to plan a work that would “expose the corruption in American life. I am fascinated by decadent faces.” Baldwin’s brief text is oddly irrelevant, obviously hasty, too often drawn on by his sheer flow of language into shrill overstatement: “No one is happy here.” The 54 Avedon photographs are something else again: a chilling, engrossing display of ferocity.

Avedon is possessed of a lens that is a subtler, cruder instrument of distortion than any caricaturist’s pencil. Washington Hostess Perle Mesta appears whiskered and wattle-throated; Dwight Eisenhower looks like his own corpse simple people getting married at City Hall look bloated, ugly, foolish; Adlai Stevenson looks tired, disillusioned, a little sly; Playwright Arthur Miller looks scrufty, torn by anxiety.

When Avedon lets up on the extreme of technique, he can catch a masterpiece of self-satire such as a group photo of eleven plump, prim, grim general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. His unaffected snap of a drooping, slightly disheveled Marilyn Monroe may be the most psychologically inward picture ever taken of her. But the slippery bias of the book is best shown by the inclusion of one picture: a so-so photo of Major Claude Eatherly, slyly captioned to perpetuate the oft-disproved legend that this disturbed man was the pilot who dropped the firs atomic bomb.