Geniuses & Other Eccentrics: Photographing My Friends

Letter to the publisher introducing Geniuses...

Dear Tom,

In the long, happy years of our friendship before you became a publisher and (almost) before I became a writer, we shared many preoccupations. First there was Peru, where we met, and then came the Dominican Republic, and finally Haiti. But the places we actually lived in, California and New Jersey--were afterthoughts to our passions for distant places--Prague, Barbados and Venice in your case--Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Rio in mine.

In the beginning we wandered, but how can a born traveler be said to wander? The place changed. Our pre-occupations remained the same. Not least among them was--tennis.

Tennis started for us in Lima, gathered momentum in Santo Domingo, shuttled back and forth between our respective homes; and then achieved unusual definition in Haiti, a country you and I came to love. You'll recall the time we arrived in Jacmel after dark at the court, which at times was used to dry coffee beans. We played by placing cars with headlights ablaze at the corners of the court.

The time has come to say a few words about how this book evolved. Like Topsy, it just grew. Vanity, for certain had something to do with it. Very early I fancied myself a photographer, but Ben Shahn, whose biography I was writing, put an end to that when he introduced me to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Photography thence-forth would be only an ally in my struggle with words, never an end in itself.

It must have been during my first trip to Haiti in the late 1930s that I became conscious of the reservoir of talent in that country. Moving in with Bill and Peggy Kraus, already in love with most aspects of Haiti after several years in Bizoton, I was taken on a whirlwind tour to the North--especially

the ruins of the palace and citadel Henry Christophe had planted there after crowning himself King. Years later when I came back to Haiti, after putting together the first of my three anthologies of poetry, which introduced Auden and Spender and Robert Lowell to the American public, I became involved in the newly emerging Haitian art movement. As co-director of the Centre d'Art I initiated the mural painting in the Cathedral Ste. Trinit?

Returning to New York, I met Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem De Kooning, artists who hung out in a loft directly across the street from my sister's apartment on East 10th Street. Their styles, dispensing with subject matter absolutely, were bold and brash. One night walking west on 10th with Jackson, I broached the subject of doing an interview with him and writing a book about the new artists' ideas. He and his friends promised to cooperate.

They did. Conversations with Artists was published and later, Tongues of Fallen Angels and Artists in Tune with Their World were published, receiving final definition in these pages of ours--I hope.

Selden