EUPHORIA INAMORATA

PROLOGUE

A Letter to Rachel

I found Lovers again the other day. 'Found' might sound a little odd coming from the co-creator of the book that made his name. After all, Paul Hanna- 'the greatest photographer who never worked for Life (I ought to pay a royalty to the reviewer who said that - it's brought me more commissions than I can shake a tripod at!) might be expected to have his walls lined with his own photographic works. And there are plenty there, my artistic ego is as big and frail as ever it was when you knew me. But Lovers has never been among them.

The reason is two-fold: those photographs were never intended for public view were made out of the love and joy and lovemaking of the two couple in them; they were meant to refer to no one and to nothing beyond. Their public appearance was made without my knowledge or consent, and by the time i knew of it already taken both of us down a path feat which was to return. I realize that now, after ten years of wrestling with guilt, of trying to expiate a sense of betrayal in a flood of work that would prove I would have made it anyway-without using us, without exploiting our bodies and our emotions so much more ruthlessly than you or I had ever been exploited before.

But, more importantly, I am the co-creator, not the sole creator. We were responsible for that volume, as a man and a woman unite to create a child. Lovers is our child, the fruit of our love, and our loving. It should rest on our shelves, or now here, and since we are apart it must be nowhere.

O brave words..!

You always accused me of over-seriousness about my work. Humour in all things but that. My ultimate truth or at least my own way of searching for it. Truth above all! Art above all! Only the truth is not always so easily found, or, if found, not so easily recognized for what it is.

I tell you this so let you know my thoughts before I chanced on that new-minted publisher's copy in a far corner of my attic its discreet, black gloss, grey-lettered cover still wrapped in cellophane.

For a moment I was tempted to return it to its hiding place at the bottom of a forgotten chest. I regarded it as a man might regard the letters from a deeply felt and sadly ended affair. The sudden shock of recognition. A stomach- deep churning of ancient agonies that only masochism would wish to revive.
But, masochism or not, I tore open the dusty cellophane anyway. And then there was another, more selfish fear reputations are made as much by luck or fashion as talent. How gauche would that first effort appear now? How embarrassingly naive like re-reading a prize essay from the twelfth grade?
I began to turn the pages and the attic, and all the complicated present disappeared.

I was shocked.
Not shocked, as those first readers and reviewers were shocked, by the subject itself. Pornography masquerading as art' declared one newspaper, British I think. Do you remember that one? Or Mr Hanna and his wisely anonymous companion undoubtedly enjoyed themselves taking these photographs but only Masters and Johnson or the dirty-mackintosh brigade are likely to share their enthusiasm. (Definitely British, that!) Or, best of all, the commentator who almost beat the bleeper on networked television: 'Who wants to spend money to watch two young people fucking? Drill yourself a hole in your neighbour's bedroom wall and save yourself twenty-five dollars!' Yes, those photographs showed fucking not love making' or 'erotic dalliance' or any of the other flowery euphemisms that pepper the introductory blurb. They were as explicit as anything you would pay twice the price for in Times Square or Soho or along the Reeperbahn.

Which explains, of course why they sold so well. But where those photographs celebrate nothing but the possibilities of flesh, or the participants' disregard for it, ours were touched with an extraordinary rawness of emotion. They weren't- they aren't- porno or deliberate 'art', either; they are documentaries. Documentaries of love. They have a quality you see in Robert Capa or Donald McCullin, and that's not a boast I mean a quality of present truth that's so nail-bitingly real you want to look away out of embarrassment but you don't because it has a crude, wonderful kind of beauty too.

Now that does sound like a boast or one of those arty- farty Village Voice-style critics I'm supposed to despise The point I'm trying to make in my usual cack-handed way (see, I still haven't forgotten my British English!) is that the two young people in those pictures show a commitment a self-respect, a wholeness I would never have believed either of us were capable of at the time.

The proof is in Lovers. Those photographs are a kind of prefigurement of the future, a turning point, a moment of healing for two young lives blighted by circumstance, by distorted views of what should happen between men and women. In some weird way-and the pun is fully intended I came right in those pictures. And if I know you and I still believe I am closer to you than any other person I've ever known then you did too. I just wish I'd seen it at the time! When the obviousness of it first stared me in the face I went through a good hour of anguish thinking of what might so easily have been. But this letter isn't meant to be a fruitless yearning after lost opportunities or any kind of glum remembrance of things past. Think the right term is an apology, or is it apologia?

I'm trying to say the publication of Lovers deserves an apology, even ten years too late. But Lovers itself does not, nor will it ever. It's private and beautiful and true in ways I've never managed to repeat because you created it just as much as I did. It cleansed us, it normalized us, it brought sex into a loving part of our lives where it had never been before-in a bizarre kind of way, it created us.

And that's why it will go back on my shelves tonight. That's why I've spent so long composing a letter 1 may never have the courage to send, even if I did know where you were or, perhaps just as important, who you were with. Old flames, I know, can be even newer embarrassments. Perhaps, then, this is really just a letter to myself, a memo from my conscience to the fondest and most cherished of memories. If it is then it still has its purpose. Didn't we tell each other: you are more myself than I am? Oh the embarrassments of youthful passion! Doubly embarrassing, of course, because it's still quite true.

With much love,

PAUL

Truro
Cape Cod Massachusetts
USA
28 May 1986