Popup Imagery
Louise Brooks possesses a peculiarly idiosyncratic talent when it comes to the use of imagery: she pops a resonant sensory appeal into a sentence without lead-up, context or explication. The outcome is surprisingly effective. With just the insertion of a single sensory word she is capable of conveying an image well beyond its expected limitations:
“During that fragrant month of October, 1927, spent with George in New York, I was aware of a security I had never known before.”
The word fragrant has no follow-up to make it clear; it is as she is simply counting on her reader to fill in all the gaps.
Punishment by Decor
Brooks uses imagery effective in a little rabbit hole of a story about a friend named Pepi whom she surprisingly found living away from the expected glamour of the Warwick and instead calling a “hideous red-wallpapered” apartment home. Pepi, it seems, was purposely punishing herself for a supposed offense against William Randolph Hearst and his paramour, Marion Davies by living beneath her usual station. A few paragraphs later, Brooks intensifies the connection between “penance” and décor by suggesting that she was “mortifying herself with the red wallpaper.” No photos of the wallpaper are included in the book, unfortunately. A situation one can only term a gross oversight.
Studio Overhead
Quite possibly the single most sublime piece of imagery found anywhere in the text is the definition that Brooks applies with specificity, but could almost certainly be adjusted to apply to “overhead” in any industry:
“a sum of money executives added to a film budget to later split among themselves”
Pandora’s Box
In her inimitable style, Brooks distills everything about her most famous movie—a movie that is as inextricably linked to Brooks as Brooks is to the movie—into one beautifully wrought work of imagery:
“nobody who was connected with the film dreamed that Pabst [the director] was risking commercial failure with the story of an `immoral’ prostitute who wasn’t crazy about her work and was surrounded by the `inartistic’ ugliness of raw bestiality.”
