Lee Miller, the tough, ambitious, hard-drinking war photographer, was also beautiful enough to appear on the cover of 'Vogue' and surreal enough to count Picasso among her friends. If she hadn't existed, Hemingway would have invented her, writes John Banville
The war photographer David E. Scherman tells a nice Lee Miller story. One morning early in 1945, in western Germany, Miller pulled up in a jeep at a crossroads where a US military policeman was directing traffic. Miller was dressed in a field jacket and an army helmet, and when she called out to the MP for directions to army headquarters he barely glanced at this figure in combat gear before answering impatiently: "Beats the s**t out of me, Mac." Then he took a closer look and, seeing who this "soldier" really was, said apologetically: "Scuse me. I mean, beats the s**t out of me, Ma'am."
It hardly matters if the story is true or apocryphal, so characteristic is it of the time, the place and the person. If Lee Miller had not existed, Hemingway would have had to invent her. Tough, ambitious, hard-drinking and hard-swearing, and good-looking enough to have been a Vogue cover girl, Miller not only captured in her photographs the horror and euphoria of D-Day and its aftermath but was also a part of the action, sharing in the terrors, the excitement and the "delirium of the brave" as the Allied armies swept eastwards, into the heart of what for Hitler and his forces had been Fortress Europe.
When war broke out Miller was living in London with her husband, the painter Roland Penrose, a friend and later a biographer of Picasso. Their Hampstead home was a treasure house of works by contemporary masters - Picasso, of course, and Braque, and Max Ernst and René Magritte, and Miro and Chirico and Brancusi. Their guest lists, as Scherman writes in his introduction to Lee Miller's War "read like a who's who of modern art, journalism, British politics, music and even espionage".
It was all a long way from Poughkeepsie, in New York state, where Elizabeth, Liz, then Li-Li and, finally, just Lee Miller was born in 1907. In later years she liked to claim that she had been thrown out of every fancy school in the state. While still a teenager she went to Paris and fell in with the so-called Lost Generation chronicled by Hemingway and Scott FitzGerald. Back in New York, and still on fire after her European experiences, she studied art and modelled Vogue covers by the likes of Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene. In 1929 she returned to Paris, where she lived and worked with the surrealist photographer Man Ray and, among other adventures, appeared in Jean Cocteau's film The Blood of a Poet.
By 1932 she was in New York again, where she met and married a rich Arab businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved with him to Egypt. After three years of boredom in Cairo and Alexandria, Miller took off for Paris again, where through Ernst she met Penrose, and sailed with him for England on September 1st, 1939, the day Hitler's armies invaded Poland.
In London Miller combined work as a Vogue photographer with the compilation for that magazine of a photographic history of the Blitz. When D-Day came, on June 6th, 1944, she wangled an accreditation as a war correspondent - again for Vogue - with the invading US forces and set off to cover the workings of an army hospital behind Omaha Beach, in Normandy. Her report, Unarmed Warriors, ran in the August 1944 issue of Vogue. The piece showed her to be not only a fine war photographer but also a natural writer; her Vogue article is as straightforward and vividly immediate as her accompanying photographs.
In subsequent months she followed the invading armies across Europe, from the frenzied joy of a newly liberated Paris, through the horrors of the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, to Munich, where Scherman famously photographed her bathing in Hitler's bath, and on to the führer's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, which had been set alight by retreating SS troops.
It is hard not to think that those months after D-Day must have been the high point of Miller's life. Many of the people who took part in that exhilarating venture found it difficult to return to the relative drabness of civilian life in a Europe exhausted by war, its cruelties and privations. She continued her work in photography, particularly as a portraitist; leafing through another collection, Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life, one might again echo Yeats and say of Miller that her glory was she had such friends.
After the war the Penroses bought a farm in Sussex, and Miller settled down as best she could to being the wife of a country squire; she became - "momentarily at least", as Scherman puts it - a gardener and amateur botanist. On occasion, however, Lady Penrose was heard to mutter: "F**k weekends in the country!"
Although she produced some haunting and unforgettable images, for instance the portrait of a beaten-up SS guard at Buchenwald or of the elderly Picasso studying his pictures from an armchair in his chateau at Vauvenargues in 1960, as a photographer Miller was not up there with the great ones such as Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa. She was a chronicler before she was an artist, and her first interest was the human spectacle, in all its beauty and ghastliness, it glamour and its tawdriness. She got the best out of her time, and she recorded much of it for our aftertime. As Hemingway would have said, she was some woman.
Lee Miller's War, edited by Antony Penrose, and Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life, by Richard Calvocoressi, are published by Thames & Hudson, £17.95 and £18.95