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At the end of her fine biography of the enigmatic Walker Evans--the first one yet published--Belinda Rathbone describes a certain dismay among the friends and colleagues attending the seventy-one-year-old photographer's memorial service. Given the splits and far-flung qualities of Evans's busy personal life, she writes, even those who were most intimate with him realized "there were rooms upon rooms" of Evans's life they would never know. Such a metaphor seems applicable to the public's understanding of Evans's professional life and the body of his work as well, where there are also "rooms upon rooms" not commonly appreciated.
Born into sturdy midwestern prosperity in 1903, Evans grew up in St. Louis and suburban Chicago. His father was an advertising man who later left the family for another woman. This experience, asserts Rathbone, encouraged an introspective turn in the young boy, who sought refuge in his diary and his Brownie camera. Known as a bright but inattentive student at his first East Coast prep school, Evans would eventually graduate from Phillips Andover. But he flunked out of Williams College after his first year, having spent far more time daydreaming about becoming a writer while reading in the library than putting in the hours needed to pass the required course in Latin.
WALKER EVANS: A BIOGRAPHY
BY BELINDA RATHBONE
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
358 PP. $27.50.
After a short stop in New York as a clerk at the Public Library, Evans went on to Paris on his father's tab, finding it, as fellow expatriate Malcolm Cowley put it, "a great machine for stimulating the nerves and sharpening the senses."
"Evans had been raised to think of artists as forbidden fruit, and the life they led abroad as charged and erotic," writes Rathbone. But in Paris, he was just "a nobody" hovering on the edges of the literary and artistic ferment of the day, so insecure in fact that he turned down an offer to meet James Joyce at Sylvia Beach's famous bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. It was not time wasted, though. In Paris he first developed his powers of observation. "'Stare,' he advised his admirers years later," writes Rathbone, describing the legacy of his days sitting and watching in Paris cafes. "It is the only way to educate your...





