They wanted a portrait for the newspaper. Dignified. Brooding. The face of American letters.
He'd been up since Tuesday, he was three drinks past caring, and the man with the camera had been fussing with the plate for forty minutes telling him to hold very still.
So on the final exposure, with the whole grim apparatus finally ready and the assistant counting down, the greatest gothic mind of the century looked directly into the lens and stuck his tongue out.
"That one," he said. "Print that one."
They did not print that one.
The plate sat in a drawer in Baltimore for a hundred and forty years, and when it finally turned up, every scholar who had ever written about his tortured soul had to go and lie down.
