The Trauma of Harold Baker
In The Guardian article Lee Miller is described as having her world view and work shaped by trauma. Reference is made to her being raped at the age of seven (this issue will be opened for discussion in a subsequent post), and that the other contributing trauma was her being an eyewitness to a boyfriend dying in an accident.
Since much weight is given to the effect of trauma on Lee’s life, the veracity of The Guardian report is worth examination.
The original footprint of the death of the boy is found in the 1985 biography Lives and it has been followed by many authors since then. Lives represents that Lee and her boyfriend had been rowing on a lake on a hot afternoon and that the young man either fell from the boat or jumped into the water which caused heart failure and instant death in front of Lee. Antony Penrose claims that Lee carried the scar of this trauma to her grave emphasizing the depth of the trauma of Lee’s witnessing the death.
Carolyn Burke, in her biography Lee Miller, A Life identifies the man as Harold and the lake as Upton Lake, New York (1). Additional independent research undertaken for this forum further establishes that the boy was Harold Baker of 117 South Hamilton Street, Poughkeepsie, New York. However, it also reveals that Harold did not fall or jump out of a boat, but rather that he drowned swimming after a canoe that had broken from its mooring. More importantly, the press reported at the time that the drowning did not result in an immediate death at the lake, but rather that Harold was taken into medical care and his death resulted after thirty hours of unsuccessful attempted medical intervention. Harold did not die in front of Lee on Lake Upton nor do the reports at the time indicate that she was there. In drowning victims, the lack of oxygen to the brain and heart frequently results in brain death or coma until the organs eventually fail.
The manner of Harold’s death or Lee’s presence are not particularly significant, but the reliability of the research and the conclusions advanced as to the effect on Lee’s life are significant. At the end of the day, the purpose of this forum is to measure the story against reality. In addition to the contemporaneous newspaper reports, there is no evidence between July of 1926 and 1985 that Lee, or anyone else for that matter, mentioned Harold’s death and it is difficult to concede that it had a part in shaping Lee’s world view or work or had any long-term impact on her at all.
Harold’s story appears to be the application of the gild to the lily. This analogy is apt for purposes of this forum as this pattern will appear throughout. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to gild the lily is “to add unnecessary ornamentation to something beautiful in its own right.”
The hope and expectation is that through research and discussion, the gild is stripped from the lily, without damage to the lily, revealing the tragic beauty of the lily in its own right.
Footnotes:
(1) Burke, Carolyn (2005) Lee Miller: A Life. Knopf, New York (page 51)