A New England lament: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand in the 1940s

[FIGURE 18 OMITTED]

As readers of the twenty-first century perusing a book published in 1950, we uncover in the closing words and images a presentiment of a future--our present, in fact--in which the New England spirit will no longer exist, will no longer characterize the nation. Bereft of a future of progress and renewal, the book mourns the passing of New England, including its purportedly essential and timeless spiritual core devoted to the principles of freedom. Time in New England comes to terms with loss not just by locating the region in the past but also by accepting the inevitability of the disappearance of its own position of mourning from within the spirit of New England sometime in the impending future. If we are to believe reviewers of Time in New England, some felt that the New England spirit already no longer prevailed at the time of the book's publication. Milton Brown commented that "the book peters out at the end, for the truth is that his great reservoir of American culture has long since run dry." (48) Time in New England remembers a past not to reanimate it in the present nor to imagine a future based on the past but to chronicle what will have passed--what may have already passed in 1950.

In a decade marked by the enormous and tragic loss of lives in World War II, both Strand and Sheeler obsessed about death, not abroad but locally, within the New England region. Neither artist imagined the New England landscape, its buildings and inhabitants, as destined for a future progressing forward, increasingly distanced from the Depression and the war, uncovering new means of industrial strength and preserving an enduring spirit committed to democracy. Rather, each artist pictured textile mills and, in Strand's case, other artifacts as well, whose abandonment and ruin in the twentieth century indicated the economic downturn of the region, the loss of jobs, and the end of a way of life.

Sheeler, who returned over and again to the motif of the textile mill in his paintings of the 1940s and early 1950s, refused to accept loss, whether of industry, his artistic star, or his own life. It may even be that, ultimately, Strand, Sheeler's junior by thirteen years, similarly never came to terms with loss. Certainly, by locating the loss of lives, buildings, and artifacts in time, he and Newhall affirmed and accepted death's toll in the past. But did not their desire to proclaim death's triumph in the future also manifest an anxiety about loss, a lack of resolution about loss in the present? To anticipate a future when the spirit, which is supposed to be eternal, will join the departed body is to suggest that the dead have not yet been put to rest. Indeed, the voice of Time in New England would itself seem to be that of a spirit that troublingly lingers on beyond the time of its own demise, an uncanny double of Sheeler's textile mills that have taken on the zombielike character of the living dead. Strand left the United States the year before Time in New England was published. While the ostensible reason for his departure was to attend the screening of his film Native Land at the Fourth International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia, Strand decided to remain abroad, living in France until he died in 1976. Whether motivated by naive idealism or political utopianism, Strand's subsequent five publications indicate that he did not abandon his attempt to uncover and to photograph an enduring spirit manifested on the faces of people living in a present seemingly untouched by the forces of modernization--he just sought that living spirit elsewhere. He took up the project many times over with people who resided increasingly further afield from New England, as indicated by the titles of the books: La France de profil (1952), Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village (1954), Tir a 'Mhurain: Outer Hebrides (1968), Living Egypt (1969), and Ghana: An African Portrait (1976). Strand's compulsion to mourn what may be lost in the future in Time in New England combined with his fidelity in the next five projects to that lost object admits an aura of melancholy that haunts his late work, much as it had Sheeler's. Holding on even as he avowed to be letting go, Strand, like Sheeler, repeatedly affirmed loss by forever seeking to rediscover its object and, like the devoted lover, to embrace it one more time.