Tag: Historical Fiction

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 44: Anamaría Crowe Serrano on “In The Dark” (Turas Press: Dublin, 2021)

You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your debut novel In The Dark (Turas Press: Dublin, 2021), which, from its captivating opening brings you right into the world – the house – of sisters María and Julita in north-east Spain, 1937.

Cover of “In The Dark”

Buy In The Dark from Turas Press

Disclosure here: I’m working on a trilogy set in the Spanish Civil War in the north west region of Asturias (prompted by my father-in-law, an extract of which was published in Reading The Future (Arlen House: Dublin, 2017)) so I was particularly interested to read about your personal connection to this period in Spanish history. I’d love to talk about personal connections, the difficulties in writing from personal history and on the ground research but that would take us too far away from your wonderful novel that we’re here to discuss!

SG: I read In the Dark in two sittings – I couldn’t put it down! So let’s start with the writing. From the brilliant opening and daring style, you exhibit real control over the language, moving the narrative along and introducing us to the characters in ways that keep us engaged and make us care.

Bar Joselito. The bustle and Joselito’s widow, Encarna, are one and the same thing. Encarna is tables and chairs. She is indoors, outdoors, shutters open, sawdust, chalkboard. She is tinkling glasses, barrels and rolling laughter…..

I don’t think I’ve ever read an opening in this style that brings character, setting and movement into such sharp and wonderful focus! Can you talk to us about the style of this novel and how it was for you to write in this form? Did your vast experience of poetry and translation influence this style?

ACS: Thank you, Shauna, for taking the time to read my novel so carefully and do this interview. Your own trilogy sounds fascinating. I really look forward to reading it. It seems that there’s a lot of interest in the Spanish Civil War at the moment, especially in Spain, of course, now that this generation have the benefit of hindsight from a remove of several decades.

Coming back to your question, I’m delighted the style grabbed your attention because style is the most important thing for me. I’ll put up with a less than satisfactory plot in a book I’m reading if the style is beautiful. Finding the right mode of expression took a while, but rather than force anything, I put the writing to one side for a year or two and did a lot of reading instead. It was a bit scary not having a clue how to go about writing, but I had to trust that the ideas and inspiration would eventually come. And they did, thanks to three books in particular whose styles jumped out at me and made me realise that what I was after was something very spare and evocative with a strong visual dimension. It’s no coincidence, I suppose, that the three writers of those novels are also poets. They were Han Kang’s The White Book, translated by Deborah Smith, Maryse Meijer’s Northwood, and Robin Robertson’s The Long Take. I loved the fragmented structure of their work, the silence of their blank spaces.

As you point out, my own background in poetry definitely influenced what I liked and how I wrote. I’m used to brevity and enjoy playing around with mood, distilling it to create more impact. When it came to writing from the point of view of the man hiding under the stairs, his thoughts fell naturally into an even briefer style that reflects the cramped dimensions of the space he is in, the lack of air, the disintegration of his state of mind.

SG: Thank you for such an expansive answer. I’m not familiar the writers or the three books you mention but I really must seek them out – the idea of the silence of blank spaces is fascinating.

The main story of In the Dark – and there are many stories within this novel – is narrated by the sisters, María and Julita, and through the secret the house holds – the man locked in the dark room under the stairs. I enjoyed the alternating viewpoints and how, as the plot was revealed to us, you brought in more narrators, including, the interesting (and brief) one of Julita’s son Fernando. Can you talk a little about how this device of multiple narrators served to unfurl the plot while keeping a steady pace?

ACS: The characters that take refuge in the house were good fun to write, I must say. In the beginning, I brought them in partly because I wanted to build tension – with all these people around it becomes more difficult to take care of the deserter under the stairs. But somehow their lighter side emerged and it was interesting to examine the way they could change the dynamic between the sisters. You are right that they also serve to provide their own stories. In some ways they highlight the horror of being stuck in the middle of the war with no homes of their own, unsure of what will happen to them even when the war ends. Through their political comments I also wanted to convey the complexity of the political situation, how ordinary people could only have a partial understanding of what was happening in Spain because the information they got in the media was censored or very biased. In that regard, Fernando, who is home on leave after almost a year, brings hope to the house, but knows he can’t really tell the family the truth about the disorder at the front because the family wouldn’t believe it. He, too, unwittingly becomes part of the censorship machine.

Something else that I was keen to get across was the power that creativity and the imagination have in helping us endure difficult circumstances. That’s where Fina’s character came in. She’s the dancer, the antidote to war, completely misunderstood and even ridiculed by characters who hold extreme views that lack flexibility or imagination. But her presence in the house is transformative for more open-minded characters.

To keep the plot moving forward with all these different voices vying for attention, I had to pace it carefully, making sure I interspersed the voices sufficiently, giving them turns to speak. At the editing stage, I had to juggle them a bit to make sure it worked and that no particular voice dominated.

SG: What a wonderful insight into your writing and editing process, Anamaría! In the Dark is set in Teruel, north-east Spain in the winter of 1937. We get a very convincing picture of the city yet it felt like a character, even an everycity – almost universal. Part of this is because of the descriptive and sensory language you use throughout the book to place us with and in character and show us the narrative drive.

“It’s easier for a village to swallow the darkness when there’s a rumour of light”

“Every cell in María’s body is bursting for fruit. A town is a living thing, she thinks, her progress almost static through the rubble. But shops and houses here are no more than skeletons of buildings. A town is its people. Dies with its people. Wheezing, spluttering, crumbling to demise.”

“Time expands and the world shrinks to the size of the house.”

Can you talk a little about the importance of place in In the Dark?

ACS: That’s a great question. For me, there are always two aspects to a place: the physical aspect – which has to do with its architecture, layout, geographical location – and the emotional aspect – which is its people and everything that goes with that. The two are usually interlinked, but people are ultimately more important than buildings, so in some way, there is this very human element to places that makes them what they are. I’m always struck by devastated cities in war zones. They hardly can be called cities anymore because so much of them is demolished, but as long as there are still people living there, trying to survive, we refer to cities as though they still exist – “this is such-and-such a place”. Once the people are gone, though, the place ceases to exist and is written into history: we say “that was such-and-such a place”.

The relationship between people and place gives the city its personality. There are places like public parks, libraries, that to me are a bit like friends. You go there to connect with the place because you want the feelings that it produces in you, you feel comfortable there in a similar way to when you pick up the phone to a friend because you want that particular connection. I think it’s why it seemed quite natural in the novel to personify the city sometimes. Like a character, as you say.

When the city changes dramatically because of a war – or a devastating flood like the one I witnessed in my teenage years in Bilbao – it’s as if some part of you dies with it. There’s a huge sense of loss. It takes years to rebuild a city and, even then, it’s never the same again. This, too, was something I wanted to capture.

SG: I love the idea of the public places/amenities being friends. You paint a convincing picture of sibling relationship – and all its nuances – in the characters of María and Julita and is, at times, most interesting seen through the eyes of the man in hiding who says they are “so unalike as sisters”. They represent different factions in the war – Nationalist/Fascist and Republican/Democracy – as well as different types of femininity and in their relationship to motherhood. Can you talk about the characterisation of the sisters?

ACS: With María and Julita I wanted to create characters that were complex and that, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, contain multitudes. I wanted characters that revealed one face to the world but who had another side to them that was less obvious, less understood. Julita, who supports the Communist party on the Republican side, comes across as bossy and insensitive, belittling others as a way to purge her inner pain – her husband was drowned in the war, after all, and her two older sons are fighting at the front – but in her own way she is selfless, staying in the besieged town to help María, and always doing whatever she can to help the war effort. María, on the other hand, appears to be generous in offering her home – albeit reluctantly – to the refugees, but she is grieving for her infant daughter, and finding it hard to cope with the tension that is building with the arrival of the refugees. She also dithers in her political position. She’s not fascist, but she questions what is happening in the Republic, the methods that are being used to bring about social reform.

I wanted their relationships with the important men in their lives to be less than straightforward too, in some ways because that’s often how life is, but also to hold another mirror up to the many ways that life and human relations disintegrate during war.

One key thing about the sisters that I wanted to convey was their resilience and their ability to adapt to the horrors of war. Women everywhere form the fabric of society, which is especially important when times are tough. It is a role that has long been undervalued across the world, but the quiet domestic role women play is like the soul of society – the unseen pulse that is vital for everyone’s wellbeing. Both María and Julita fulfil this role in their very different ways. 

 

SG: For me, one of the strongest voices was that of the man in hiding. You capture the physicality of his space – both physical and head – through your use of space and the page. One particular scene that struck me was one in which he experiences PTSD when he is trying to think of María:

…still pain persists–if only I had a cigarette [….] my whole body flinches–if only I could deny this body–disown it–be someone else…think–think her dark–her fingers slim around me–think the soft–her mouth–her tongue–the bullet–no–think–think […] think her soft–his guts–his–fuck–NO–María think–please–María please–his hole–his head….

Can you talk about the role of this narrator and how he holds the book together – being the voice of the war and of the house?

AMC: During the Spanish Civil War, like in many other wars, there were men who spent long periods of time, sometimes decades, in hiding so as not to have to fight. They lived in tiny spaces, the size of a coffin in some cases, or in attics, or under a stairs, with just one person, usually their wife, helping them. It was a horrific existence. In Spain they’re called “topos” (moles) because they often went blind from living in the dark. That’s what gave me the idea for this character.

He deserted from the war because of the atrocities he saw at the front and because his political allegiance shifted as the war progressed; he doesn’t want to fight for a cause he no longer believes in. I think many people in Spain at the time didn’t quite understand the full implications of the political situation and were misled by their leaders. George Orwell, famously, understood it but even though he wrote Animal Farm from his experience of the Spanish Civil War, that aspect of the Republican government’s vision for Spain doesn’t seem to have filtered much into the public consciousness. I wanted the man under the stairs to have the kind of clarity that other characters lack. It is ironic that his voice, the only one that seems to understand what’s happening politically, is silenced. He is physically in darkness but he has insight into the government’s mismanagement of the country, whereas the other characters are getting plenty of information from the media but, because of the censorship and propaganda, they are the ones in the dark as to what is really happening.

His desertion also represents a moral dilemma that runs throughout the novel. He is doomed to think about his position, which in many ways is an act of cowardice, while he watches everyone in the house through a crack in the wall. Even though he has no contact with anyone except María, he has his own kind of relationship with everyone in the house from his observations of what’s happening. He’s like a common denominator no one knows about. I hope readers might be conflicted about him – and other characters – even though there’s good reason to be sympathetic towards him. The more I researched this novel, in fact, the more I realised that people fell victim to circumstance in the lead-up to the war. It would seem wrong to judge from our privileged remove. Yet the moral questions remain for us to mull over.

SG: Although In the Dark is about war and how it destroys countries, villages, communities and families, it is also very much about the domestic and how women (María, Julita, Encarna, Fina, Senora Rojas) and children try to uphold a sense of normality and keep both families and communities surviving. I particularly enjoyed the struggles and triumphs of birthdays and Christmas and the joy – the times when “for a whole evening no one has thought of the war” – when in reality, “Moral is a fragile thing. Like happiness.”

How important was it for you to convey the domestic alongside the war?

ACS: This was one of the most important things I wanted to convey, apart from the political conundrums. Books about war, whether fictional or factual, seems to focus mostly on the fighting, on strategies, supplies for troops, but there is less mention of the women and children and older or infirm people who are living in the middle of a war zone, struggling desperately to stay alive in their own homes. I was very curious about this and wanted the novel to portray the resourcefulness of women. They had to adapt constantly to all kinds of deprivations – freezing temperatures, electrical outages, no running water, little fuel or food, poor access to medical services, blocked and/or dangerous streets, children at home because schools are closed, homes damaged by shelling… The list is endless.

The amazing thing is that humans somehow manage to rise above extreme hardship and find ways of bringing moments of joy, like the festivities you mention, into the day. It’s important to do that in order to counterbalance the grief and uncertainty. In the novel those celebrations tend to revolve around the children, but it’s clear that they are as important for the adults. So is the semblance of normality that you mention. The family play cards in the evening as they always have done. When the women go out, they make some effort to look well even though they have very little. They wear lipstick or use a good hat pin. It’s important to cling to some element of dignity, of one’s former self. It’s what keeps people sane.

SG: It’s so true what you say about how we “manage to rise above extreme hardship and find ways of bringing moments of joy into the day” – and that’s something that you capture so well in this novel, In The Dark.

So we’ll end this Writers Chat, Anamaría, with some short questions:

  • Beef or rabbit stew? Lentil stew. I’m vegetarian.
  • Mountains or beach? Mountains.
  • Red or white wine? White.
  • Music or silence when writing? SILENCE!
  • What are you writing now? I haven’t started writing yet, but I have an idea for another historical novel about an Irish man most people never heard of, but who was influential in changing the course of Western literature.

Thank you so much, Anamaría, for such a open and informative answers about your process and characters.

Readers who want to know more – here is a selection of articles by / interviews with Anamaría Crowe Serrano:

Connect with Anamaría Crowe Serrano via her website

Buy In The Dark from Turas Press

Thank you to Turas Press and Peter O’Connell Media for the advance copy of In The Dark  

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 40: Linda Lappin on “Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jean Hébuterne” (Serving House Books: 2020)

Linda, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat Series where we’re here to talk about your latest novel, Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jean Hébuterne which has recently won the women’s fiction category in the IRDA (Indie Reader Discovery Awards) for 2021. Congratulations!

Cover of Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jeanne Hébuterne

I thoroughly enjoyed the whirlwind journey you brought me on, Linda. From the atmospheric opening where we meet Jeanne Hébuterne, Amedeo Modigliani’s pregnant widow just after she’s died from jumping out a window to her search for Modi in the afterlife in the other Paris where “Sooty mist enveloped all, muting most colors but gray, purple, and black and draining the luster from things” to art students and curators in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Congratulations on an inventive and innovative novel that has been described as “Part ghost story, part murder mystery, and part treasure hunt…a haunting, genre-bending novel” (Gigi Pandian). Let’s start by listening to you read some of the opening of this novel.

Linda Lappin Reading from the opening of Loving Modigliani [4.04 Minute reading]

SG: Thank you for that beautiful reading.

Tell us, what inspired you to write this wonderful story and in the structure in which you place it – six parts (Gothic Fairy Tale, Ghosts of Montparnasse, The Notebooks of Jeanne Hébuterne, The Missing Madonna, Afterlife and The Holy Family of the Circus). I know that you came upon the name Beatrice Hastings pasted on a wall when you were researching Katherine Mansfield (she was Mansfield’s lover and muse/lover of Modigliani). But from there…?

LL: Thank you so much for this invitation, and this opportunity to talk about Loving Modigliani. I am delighted by your response to the novel. And your questions are very stimulating. I became interested in Jeanne Hébuterne because quite by chance I saw an exhibition in Venice in 2000 where her artworks were being displayed for the first time in eighty years – perhaps the first time ever. Up until then, I had known Jeanne only as Modigliani’s common-law wife and favorite model. I did not know she had been an artist.

The drawings and paintings on display were eye-popping, and revealed Jeanne’s complex personality and considerable talent. I was instantly captivated and began researching her life—although at that time not much was available. This was partly because the Hébuterne family did not collaborate with biographers or writers in the decades immediately following her death; they were closed in the silence of grief. After Jeanne died, her artworks were taken by her brother, Andre, and basically shut away for eighty years, until he died, after which his heirs allowed them to be publicly exhibited (and more recently, auctioned).  

I wrote an essay about this exhibition entitled Missing Person in Montparnasse: The Case of Jeanne Hébuterne, published in The Literary Review, in 2002, which was very well received and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. But I wasn’t ready to let Jeanne go! I began to mull over the idea of writing a novel about her life, using a narrative technique similar to the one I used in writing Katherine’s Wish, which is about Katherine Mansfield, but there were very few resources to draw on. Most biographers dismissed Jeanne’s artistic ambitions, if they mentioned them at all. The only traces I could find of her were in period memoirs and in a few biographies of Modigliani, especially in the books written by Jeanne Modigliani  (the daughter of Jeanne and Modi, whom Modi called by her Italian name, “Giovanna”); and of course Modigliani’s portraits of her and her own artworks.

I also contacted the curator of the Venice show, Christian Parisot, author of many studies on Modigliani and interviewed him several times, in person and by email.

 I did come across a lovely book by Patrice Chaplin which is very intriguing because she mentions being shown letters written by Jeanne to a friend, which do not seem to have been shared with other Modigliani-Hébuterne biographers. These letters supposedly came to light after the death of Jeanne Modigliani, who had collected documents pertaining to her parents in an archive.  It may be that they have passed into other private hands, or have gone missing. Chaplin also mentions briefly a diary kept by Jeanne which  so far has not surfaced publicly. These missing pieces of the puzzle obsessed me. Where were they? Were they being kept secret?  Did they really exist?

I began writing Loving Modigliani as a diary kept by Jeanne from her sixteenth birthday onwards. However, I ran into a snag because the diary format would not allow me to write about her death.  You can’t commit suicide and live to report it. Moreover, the relationship between Jeanne and Modigliani suffered a severe crisis near the end, mainly because of his illness- and I didn’t want to write a book with a gloomy atmosphere. I was also increasingly interested in Jeanne’s transformation through time: her afterlife, and the way she sprang out of a black hole, with her works resurfacing from a vacuum, and the changing perception of her work and of her role in Montparnasse.

So I put the diary aside for awhile and began writing the middle part, set in 1981, in which the unnamed narrator, a graduate student in art history, brushes elbows with Jeanne’s ghost. In this section, the narrator meets Madame Rosier, now an elderly lady who knew Jeanne and Modigliani in her youth and involves the narrator in a search for Jeanne’s legacy – the missing portrait, “The Holy Family of the Circus.”  I didn’t realize at first that this narrative was part of the same project as the diary – but then it gradually dawned on me that I was writing a frame for the discovery of the diary.

The first section, the gothic fairy tale,  was a surprise even to me. I saw a photo of Jeanne looking a bit vampirish – very pale with dark lips, a haunted, magnetic  gaze – but also provocative. And I thought – well suppose I tell this story through the perspective of her ghost?  And something clicked. I intended to write just a short  prologue, but it kept getting longer and longer, and acquired a mythic dimension, with the Other Paris and Theo. Once Jeanne had become a spirit, it seemed natural that she should want to be reunited with Modigliani’s spirit – and so her journey became a quest,  as in fairy tales, when the heroine must undertake a dangerous journey in order to be reunited with her beloved.

I have gotten a lot of comments about the creepy ambience of the Other Paris, “where dead people live,” as one reviewer said.  My depiction of it had many sources of inspiration—the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice – including the film  Black Orpheus, and Gilgamesh’s journey through the dusty underworld. The keeper of the Dome of Undoing has Tibetan associations. I also made a mental map by imagining Paris without color, and without markets, cafes, restaurants, food shops – what would be left?

My mother had just died when I started writing this part, and my father died two years later as I was finishing the novel. I don’t think I could have written about death in the same way – had they still been alive.  I had a new familiarity with the subject. Also, this was my first real foray into magical realism. In my mind’s eye, I had a  vision of Jeanne, accompanied by the little dead boy Pierre, and Theo the cat,  walking through a cemetery at night, and it wouldn’t leave me. It was a sort of cartoon image firmly fixed in my imagination.

With regards to Theo:  Among the apocryphal stories of Jeanne and Modi’s life in Paris is the mention of a cat Modigliani kept that ran away from the studio after they died. The cat in my novel was originally black, like the cat in one of Jeanne’s paintings.  But then one day in Paris, I ran into an extraordinary gray cat who literally stared me down for over five minutes. Theo would have had eyes like that! So Theo became gray in the novel.

There is one odd thing, though: I wrote the description of Notre Dame destroyed by fire with truncated spires about two years before the fire actually occurred.

SG: Thank you, Linda, for such an honest and personal insight into your process. My deepest sympathies on the deaths of your mother and father. In the first part, Out the Window, which takes place in 1920, you bring us right into a fairy-tale of Jeanne who is in-between worlds, tethered by a string attached to her middle which is “clear and stretchy as a jellyfish tentacle, and a bit sticky, like old egg whites. It shimmered like mother of pearl.” You create an unsettled atmosphere yet also set up ghost-Jeanne’s narrative as a way to bring us on her adventure through time to find Modi (who died just two days before her). Later in the Notebooks section, Jeanne recalls seeing Modi across the room full of artists and realises that

There was a thin golden thread strung across the room from his body to mine, like honey dripping from a spoon.

Can you talk about writing this narrative with the thread of time and connection?

LL: Loving Modigliani is a cross genre, because it blends well-researched historical events and people in the real world, with fantastic events and elements – ghosts, the afterlife, etc.  The two realms only come together in momentary flashes, or “spots of time,” when the mythic undercurrent intrudes upon the so-called real in the characters’ consciousness.

For example,  in the prologue there is a blue door painted with symbols and Hebrew letters connecting  the worlds of the dead and the living. In the real world of the diary, Jeanne glimpses that door in the mirror of her parents’ dining room. Rats stitch the worlds together in the novel, but so do crows and roses. There are several examples of these “spots of time”  scattered through the book, particularly in the ending.

I think the mythic dimension – or call it the subconscious, or whatever, is always with us, guiding us towards certain choices, and allowing us to experience occasionally aspects of the greater reality in which we move unawares.

By the way that “blue door” actually exists, but in another part of Paris, not far from where I place it.

This trailer (below) of Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jean Hébuterne captures the mood of the book, especially the prologue.

Loving Modigliani Trailer on YouTube

SG: Yes, I loved how you handled the subconscious and the various worlds throughout. Much of the novel revolves around desire – who desires whom, who is allowed to desire and how that desire is expressed. We know Jeanne’s family objected to her moving in with Modi and Jeanne rather than Modi was judged for being unmarried, giving birth to a girl and then leaving her with the nuns because she felt unable to give her the care she needed. Death seems to continue the barriers that life put in place for her as, just after she’s had to witness her own funeral – the talking cat Theo who brings her between the world, tells her that to find Modi, “there is one condition. The other person must desire equally ardently to be found by you. And also the circumstances must be right.” After she and Modi are lovers she recounts in her notebook:

I stand naked before the cheval mirror. My hair cascades to my knees—so dark on my pale skin, and my orange nipples showing between the glossy strands. This is the body of Eve, of a Pre-Raphaelite maiden. The body I have given to Modi. The body I refuse to let my mother control.

In Part 2, Ghosts of Montparnasse, recounting the fact that Jeanne was a talented artist in her own right, Madame Rosier says “Today a woman may be whatever she desires, except perhaps… a woman.”

Can you talk about desire, beauty, censorship, ownership and the body as themes?

LL: I will take you up on the body theme because it is vital to how I see Jeanne. When I first saw photos of Jeanne Hébuterne, aside from her extraordinary beauty, what struck me was how 1970’s she was –her long hair in braids, her ankle-length Pre-Raphaelite style dresses, which she designed and sewed herself,  her beaded headbands and hand-crafted necklaces  – she might have stepped off the stage at Woodstock or the Filmore West, or  off a Pentangle album cover. If you had glimpsed her on a college campus, or on a street in San Francisco or London in 1972,  you wouldn’t have thought she was someone from a different era. 

And so many elements of her story coincide with family dramas of the 1970s: a young girl moving in with her boyfriend who is quite a bit older and also a drug user, an artist who rejects bourgeois values of marriage and monogamy, with no real income or home. An advocate of free love.  And the young girl, fairly innocent, raised in a comfortable, protective, middle-class environment, is very attached to her family who has sheltered and pampered her –  and yet rejects the stability and affection they offer in order to pursue her own passions. She willingly chooses poverty and precariousness  as  the rebel’s partner. It’s like a story out of the 60s and 70s, of the culture of fulfilled personhood we inherited from that era  which prized freedom, creativity,  nonconformity,  self-realization and self-expression above all things.  And the latter: self- realization and self-expression included sexual freedom and fulfilment: Jeanne wanted to be free and fulfilled as an artist, an individual, and a woman and we respond strongly to that today. We feel we have a right to freedom and fulfilment on whatever level we seek it. That conviction may be a legacy of feminism, or romanticism, –but it isn’t how  19th century society -or early 20th century- thought women should think, much less act.

Among Jeanne’s drawings are some nude sketches, believed to be self-portraits, which reveal that part of the female body  which until recent times could not be portrayed, but had to be hidden by drapery or a fig leaf. Courbet’s famous painting of female genitalia, l’ Origine, was a great scandal and was not viewed publicly until our own era. Ten years prior to Jeanne’s enrolment in art school, women were excluded from drawing classes with nude models of either sex.  So here is Jeanne  at 18 or 19 – breaking all the taboos, drawing parts of herself which proper ladies should never even name, suggesting an ownership of her body and her celebration of it, quite remarkable for a young woman of her age and of her era. Certainly there were women like Kiki or Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent, who boldly displayed their bodies to the male gaze, and later became accomplished artists. Kiki had begun modelling nude at the age of 14. But being working class girls, they were much more streetwise than Jeanne and less dependent on their families.  For Jeanne, those drawings are an extremely bold statement and a challenge. They aren’t the product of the male gaze or even intended for it. She is saying quite simply: This body is me and I have the right to draw it as I wish.

Yet there is a big difference between us and Jeanne:  a difference that has evolved through women learning to own their own bodies and  exercising control over them. Unlike women today in North America and Europe, Jeanne did not have access to birth control.

Rudimentary methods of contraception did exist in Jeanne’s times – but it is doubtful that a girl of Jeanne’s background would have known about them.  Such things could not be talked about openly by people of a certain class.  Jeanne’s first child was born in November 1918. She was nearly nine months pregnant with her second child when she died in January 1920 – so that, say from March 1918 – not quite 20 years old, until her death — she was either pregnant or nursing a baby. Motherhood was an enormous responsibility for Jeanne. It came too soon, and there is some suggestion that she suffered from postpartum depression. Her first meeting with Modigliani has been dated to somewhere between 1916 and 1917 – so their life together was quickly burdened with the responsibilities of parenthood.

Modigliani never painted Jeanne in the nude – but he did use a nude sketch of Jeanne on a program for an exhibition.  In his portraits, she is always dressed, sitting or standing —  it’s believed that was because he saw her as a proper young girl – a wife. But Jeanne had a different idea of herself.

Madame Rosier’s comment echoes a comment by Anais Nin, who held to a rather conservative standard of femininity and believed that although women should seek freedom of expression also sexually, they should not sacrifice their femininity by imitating males. She didn’t like women wearing jeans, for example, because  she felt they were unfeminine.

I find it revealing to compare Jeanne’s fate with that of two other artists, her contemporaries. Georgio O’ Keeffe, ten years older than Jeanne, and Anais Nin, five years younger. Both lived long, full productive lives and championed the role of women in the arts and were our heroines and role models in the 1970s.  Anais Nin writer, artist, dancer – in temperament is perhaps more similar to Jeanne, than O’ Keeffe, and a believer in women’s sexual and creative freedom. Yet both O’ Keeffe and Nin had what Hébuterne did not have: the moral, emotional, and economic assistance of a successful man who supported and advanced their careers. Nin had the support of several men – her husband, her psychoanalyst, and Henry Miller, who encouraged her work—along with several male editors. Jeanne had nobody supporting her art – and had to give her support to Modigliani.

SG: How interesting to compare her plight to that of Nin and O’Keefe – it comes back to agency and power again, of which Jeanne had neither in those year. Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jean Hébuterne is also about family – the one that Jeanne left behind so that she could devote herself to Modi, the one she creates with Modi – almost unintentionally – and the one which the characters in the novel search for -the “Holy Family of The Circus”. Jeanne’s epitaph reads “Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice.” Do you think family and the bounds of family in the story of Modi and Jeanne required such sacrifice?

LL: I think Jeanne did not have an adequate system of support – either among friends or family after she took up with Modigliani. Some of Modigliani’s friends looked askance at her because she was “bourgeois” and because she seemed timid and reserved in their company. She wasn’t “one of them.” Yet she lived and died at the heart of an unrepeatable moment in the history of art.  Satie, Kiki, Foujita, Marevna, Picasso, Kisling, Cocteau – stars pulsing at the center, with dozens of parallel universes: Hemingway, Joyce,  Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, and their scintillating satellites. She was part of a creative explosion taking place in Paris, which corroborated her existence and validated her aspirations, although it could not give her emotional support, when times grew rough with Modigliani, or with adapting to motherhood while so young.   And though their friends Kisling, Soutine, Zborowski, Ortiz de Zarate were like a family in some ways to them –some important levels of support were missing.

Her own family rejected Modigliani because they did not feel he was a suitable partner for Jeanne – for various reasons. Who wants their daughter to run off and get pregnant by an older man with a bad reputation?  Possibly they also objected to the fact that he was Jewish, and her father would not allow her to be buried alongside  Modi in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise cemetery. She was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Montparnasse, and it was only after her father’s death that her mother allowed her remains to be moved and placed in Modigliani’s grave.  And yet, three years after her death, her parents issued a notarized statement, not exactly of forgiveness, but conceding that it was mutual love that bound Jeanne to Modigliani.

The Hébuternes did not welcome little Jeanne Modigliani into the world, and they did not adopt her when she was left an orphan. She went to live in Italy with her aunt, Modigliani’s sister, who kept her in the dark about Modigliani’s life. I believe as an adult she suffered greatly from the Hebuternes’ rejection of her.  Jeanne Modigliani dedicated her life to trying to find out who she really was and what her parents were really like.

The Hebuternes had hoped that Jeanne would give up her baby for adoption, but Jeanne would not, and Modigliani doted on his daughter.  There exists a letter written by Modigliani to his mother, expressing the love and joy he felt as the baby began to grow. However, when the child was boarded at a convent, Jeanne went every week to see her – Modigliani, it seems, never went. It is also unclear who paid for this arrangement. Possibly her parents. Or perhaps Zborowski, Modigliani’s agent, who feared the child’s presence in the studio might interfere with his work.

Jeanne’s relationship with  her brother André was the most strained and stressful of her family ties. They were very attached to each other – and before going off to war, André was teaching her how to paint. Her relationship with Modi began after André was mobilized. His absence left a vacuum which Modigliani filled. Understandably, knowing of Modigliani’s reputation, her brother could not condone their relationship, and doubtless blamed himself for failing to dissuade Jeanne from the path she had taken – and also for her suicide, as she fell from the window while he was nearby, asleep. The rift between them was probably lacerating to both, but neither one would concede an inch. I try to catch this feeling in the notebooks in my novel: Her very strong affection for her brother, her worship of Modigliani, and the impossibility of reconciling the two. André’s pain at her death was infinite. He would not talk about her after her death.

Still it is worthwhile  noting that by sequestering her artworks for decades in his studio, André Hébuterne also preserved them from the destruction of time and negligence.  Since Jeanne’s status an artist was not recognized until our own times, it is unlikely that her works would have been carefully preserved.

SG: Yes, I felt that their relationship and I include post-death in this was so complicated but that the portrait you paint of him is that his actions were for the greater good. I felt like the novel was an education in art and artists; a joyful one. Through Jeanne’s notebooks we meet artists such as Foujita, get to roam around his studio which is “is crawling with plump, well-kept, mischievous cats and dozens of drawings and pictures of the same”, we get to know Soutine through Rosier and Mathilde and most of all we get to know Modi and Jeanne. Tell me about your research into the world of art and art critics, particularly in relation to the Venice exhibition and the ‘lost’ painting, The Holy Family of The Circus which symbolises the unity and passion that Modi, Jeanne and Giovanna shared.

LL: The Venice show in my novel draws inspiration from the first show of her work, which I saw in 2000, along with more recent events, including a major exhibition in Tokyo.  During my research, I had opportunities to discuss Jeanne and Modigliani with other writers and researchers, and with Christian Parisot, who first “launched” Jeanne as an avatar of Montparnasse, and had worked closely with Modigliani’s daughter, in collecting documentation about Jeanne’s life. I also met someone who claimed to be descended from one of Modigliani’s illegitimate children.

But I also was drawn into the shadowy labyrinth of forgeries, falsified certificates of authentication, and other scandals–which have sullied the careers  several people connected to Modigliani’s legacy.  This is in itself a tantalizing story that cannot be told in our own times!  The whole question of forgery is quite fascinating. In past eras, paintings were often attributed to  the “school” of an artist – painted by a pupil trained to replicate the master’s style, which was perfectly acceptable. Today it would not be.  Twenty percent of artworks currently in museums are thought to be forgeries. Some famous painters began by forging artworks by others. Michelangelo began by making Roman and Greek fakes.  Other artists forge their own works – which is a bizarre concept. Artworks are sometimes misattributed, and some artists enjoy imitating someone else’s style as a joke or a challenge to their skill. Sometimes artists collaborate with each other on works which they then attribute to a fictional artist. I know of well-established artists who buy anonymous  paintings in junk shops and then “improve them” for re-sale, or just for fun. We know that Jeanne and Modigliani occasionally painted the same models, in similar poses. Did they ever collaborate on the same painting, or add touches to each other’s works?– it’s possible.

There exists a canvas with a painting by Modigliani on the front and a sketch by Jeanne on the back. There exists a drawing of a man with a hat which has been identified as a portrait of André Salmon by Modigliani, but has also been identified  as a portrait  of Modigliani by Jeanne… So the whole question of authenticity is tenuous. Why is a scribble by Picasso worth millions, while one by a lesser known artist worth so little? How is it possible that Jeanne’s sketches were considered of little value and now sell for formidable sums? It is the myth surrounding the artist that gives a work its value. Successful artists nowadays spin myths around themselves while they are still alive; others accumulate new layers after their deaths. Reputations can be invented and manipulated at any point in the process.  This has happened to Jeanne Hébuterne.

The missing portrait in my novel:  The Holy Family of the Circus – doesn’t really exist. It is an object which changes over the course of a century, adding new elements and gathering new meanings  as it travels through time, enduring war, occupation, censorship, greed, oblivion. Yet it remains faithful to the impulses which engendered it: tenderness, playfulness, love, the need to leave a mark, and the joy of making art.  But is it genuine, a copy, or a fake? The reader must decide.

SG: I love that – I did that twist-and-turn thing of believing/not believing as I read it! In “In the Other Paris” and “The Harrowing,” the novel has a Kafaesque feel to it – where the rats are what stitch the two worlds together and Theo tells Jeanne that “there are other forms of disintegration which are even worse than physical death.” I love how you evoke place in the notebooks. Take this opening of the first one:

Saint-Michel-en-Grève, July 19, 1914: I like to sit here on this rock and look out over the ocean as I scribble in my notebook. I could spend hours gazing at those inky clouds, drinking in the colors with my eyes and my skin. I love the ocean in all weathers, even like today when the wind is raw and the salt stings in my throat and the mud from the field clings in globs to my shoes and dirties the hem of my cape.

Later in the narrative talking about Jeanne and Paris, Madame Rosier says “She wanted her life to be art, and art, her life” and the narrator thinks “Who doesn’t? I thought—isn’t that what we were all doing in Paris? Isn’t that what the city promises us?” In this novel you also take us to Nice and Rome as well as Gauguin’s Island (a fantasy). How important was place to you in the research and writing of this novel?

LL: There’s a lot to say on this: I have dedicated years of research, as you know, to the power of place, and the way places fashion our identity. Places inhabit us as we inhabit them, and sometimes let us glimpse those  “mythic flashes” or “spots of time” or “shoots of everlastingness” connecting us to another current of experience.  I am fascinated by the concept of the Deep Map – which I discuss in my book The Soul of Place, as a resource writers can use to conjure up stories and imagery.    On the subject of maps, Mary Butts has written

As happens to people who become imaginatively conscious of a great city, he came to have a private map of it in his head. A map in which streets and groups of buildings and even the houses of friends were not finally relevant, or only for pointers towards another thing, the atmosphere or quality of certain spots…  These maps are individual to each lover of a city, charts of his translation of its final significance, of the secret working of men’s spirits which through the centuries have saturated certain quarters, giving them not only character and physical exterior, but quality, like a thing breathed. Paris is propitious for the making of such magic maps.

For me, this is a partial description of the deep mapping process and of the genius loci.  Elsewhere, Butts has described Paris as a person – or if you will – a sentient being – whose passions and stories its inhabitants enact unawares. A similar concept has been expressed by Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet. The idea of place – and the specific place of Paris, as not just a setting, but a character, resonated in the back of my mind while writing  Loving Modigliani. Much of my research  for this book took the form of “deep map making,” over a period of years, with trips to Paris, a lot of walking and prowling about, also visiting museums, galleries, libraries, and bookstores,  sifting through all kinds of resource materials, especially old photographs, and scribbling maps and time lines. But it also entailed meeting a few ghosts.

SG: Thank you, Linda for such full and generous answers. We may return to this theme when we revisit our 2015 The Soul of Place, Writers Chat. To finish up, some fun questions:

  • Paris or Rome? Paris
  • Modi or Jeanne?  Jeanne
  • Red or White Wine? White
  • What are you reading now?  “The Offing” by Benjamin Myers. A beautiful book!
  • What are you writing now?  I am rewriting my first unpublished novel about a castaway girl, a female Caliban, in 18th century Italy on an island where a penitentiary is about to be built. The title is Prisoner of Palmary. Another project is recording audio books of short stories and parts of my novels –with sound effects. I will be adding those to my website 

Connect with Linda via her website and watch out for our next Writers Chat which will focus on creative writing and place. I wish Linda much continued success with this novel, Loving Modigliani: The Afterlife of Jean Hébuterne.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 29:Karen Lee Street on Edgar Allan Poe and The Empire of the Dead (Oneworld: London, 2019)

Writers Chat – Edgar Allan Poe and The Empire of the Dead

Karen, you’re very welcome to my Writers Chat. We last chatted about Edgar Allan Poe and The Jewel of Peru and today we’ll discuss  Edgar Allan Poe and The Empire of the Dead which was described as “a gripping read, and a worthy homage to Poe’s genius” (Historical Novel Society). In this novel you evoke “Poe’s unique sensibility through passages of inspired prose, in a narrative that preserves the spooky penumbra surrounding Poe’s enduring legend” (Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal) it is, as described by Mystery Scene Magazine “a brilliant historical whodunit.” In the words of yet another starred review (Booklist), it is a “superlative historical mystery, capturing the tone of the time and Poe’s lasting literary legacy” and for this Writers Chat rather than focus on the narrative and the mystery, to save ourselves from spoilers, we are going to look at themes, motifs, setting and atmosphere.

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Raven sculpture from Poe Museum in Philadelphia; photo by Karen Lee Street

SG: The novel opens with one of my favourite first lines: “It began with a cat”. A simple first sentence, yet intriguing and so very gothic. I am delighted to present a short clip to our readers/viewers of you reading it. Was this the line that set you off on telling this tale or did it come later?

KLS: Thank-you, Shauna, for inviting me to talk with you again. You always ask questions that make me think about the novels in new ways. I’m pleased you like the opening line, which was in the very first draft. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe and the Empire of the Dead as a ‘gothic noir’ when outlining it and my intent was always to use a flashback structure, an homage to film noirs like Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard. As for the cat, Poe was very fond of his calico who was named “Catterina” and apparently used to write with her wrapped around his shoulders. It’s said that when Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, learned that Poe had died in Baltimore, she discovered that Catterina, who was with her in New York, had also died. Given its very gothic flavour, that little tale inspired me to include Catterina in the opening and resolution.

Press Play to hear Karen Lee Street read from Edgar Allan Poe and The Empire of the Dead [duration of 6 minutes, 1 second]

SG: So, after hearing your wonderful reading – there’s always something special about hearing the author read – can you tell us a little about what helped you capture – what seems like – the narrative voice of Poe that runs throughout? We’ve talked about this before but it’s important, I think, as you capture, as the History Revealed review says “a heady mix of the macabre and enigmatic.”

KLS: To try to capture the flavour of Poe’s narrative voice, I re-read Poe’s Dupin stories, but relied more on his letters, which can be found at EAPoe-dot-org.  I was pleased when a reviewer for the British Fantasy Society noted that he really enjoyed Empire of the Dead and “found it very easy to get into (I do sometimes find period-style writing to be difficult to warm to.) ” That’s always a concern when trying to capture period voice. Accuracy does not always mean accessibility for a modern reader. Some authors choose to write period novels in a modern voice, with plenty of anachronisms, but I’m personally not as fond of that approach unless it’s comedy or YA literature.

SG: Magic and mystery- in the writing, the reading, and the plot – abound through the novel. We have Dupin’s servant Madame Morel appearing “as if by magic”, we have Virginia, Poe’s decesased weife standing or sitting before him at key points in the narrative, and indeed, advising him at times:

“Moonlight trickled into the air and coalesced into her form – she was sitting in the chair near the fireplace, glimmering and pale… stay safe.”

Can you tell us about your interest in magic and how you’ve used it both to create atmosphere but also as a plot device (the scenes with The Great Berith, for example)? 

KLS: When I came up with the idea for the trilogy, I knew what would happen to Valdemar (Dupin’s nemesis) as his name is from one of Poe’s short stories: “The Facts in the Case of M. Ernest Valdemar.” It’s a story about mesmerism, which fascinated people in Poe’s day, and when the story was published, Poe insinuated that it was a factual account of a real experiment. He also mentions esoteric literature and the supernatural in some of his tales, so I wanted to play with those elements and how our ideas of what is science and what might be considered occult practices have changed. For example, things we take for granted today such as electricity, telephone communication, the internet (to name but a few), would have seemed like impossible magic in the early 1800s. On the other hand, many nineteenth century intellectuals believed in phrenology, autography, the power of mesmerism, all of which are typically dismissed by today’s scientific community. In my trilogy, the highly intellectual Dupin has a keen interest in esoteric studies such as alchemy and has a firm belief in his superior intelligence. He delights in exposing charlatans who dupe people with seances or magic shows. When Dupin encounters the Great Berith, a charismatic magician in the tradition of Victorian conjurers, he is instantly suspicious of him, particularly when Berith uses popular magic tricks of the day to impress the mob of the Île de la Cité. The analytical Dupin knows how each trick is done… until he doesn’t. That wrong-foots him and forces him to be more open-minded. Or perhaps his desperation and desire make him gullible. A mystery that deals with the magical (in the widest sense) is more than just a who-dunnit; it often forces the investigator to investigate him or herself.

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Mesmerist (Thanks to Karen Lee Street for providing the image which is in the Public Domain)

SG: Yes, and I think that double layer you have running through all three books is what gives them that extra edge. I love how animals serve as portals into other worlds – physical and psychological – but also as warnings. I’m thinking of Catterina the cat, the gulls “like demons” on The Independence ship that brings to Poe to France , the cobra head on Dupin’s walking stick (weapon!) and, most importantly, the carvings of owls that lead Poe and Dupin to the “mysterious world that existed beneath their very feet.” Owls, are “associated with Athena, goddess of wisdom – but the screech owl is sacred to Hades, god of the underworld.” Can you talk about the role animals play in this novel?

KLS: Certainly, as you point out, animals provide messages or act as harbingers in the book. I suppose fairy tales initially provoked my interest in animals as guides to other worlds or as messengers. Of course Poe’s poem “The Raven” uses that bird as a messenger and ornithomancy—messages from birds—is an important element in Edgar Allan Poe and the Jewel of Peru, so I felt a thread connecting the trilogy would be useful:  Charles Dickens’s pet Grip the raven in book I; all the birds in book II; and the owls in book III. Following the owls into the dark world beneath (or within) can lead to wisdom and transformation… or perhaps death.  Owls being associated with Athena and wisdom is also important as many of the owl figures in the book are associated with spaces that are or were libraries in Paris, a little puzzle in the book linked to the epigraph.

SG: One of my favourite scenes is Madame Legrand’s literary salon. Poe, Dupin, and the Prefect of Police attend the salon where Poe is accused – by the Madame also known as Undine (“who kills with a kiss”) of telling only “tales of the macabre…poetry…and ghoulish affairs of the heart”. Poe brings us right into the room with him:

“A thin male servant wearing alarming orange livery and a sour expression guided us into the salon. Crossing the threshold into the room was like stepping into a confectionery shop filled with glazed cakes, sugared candies and marzipan sweetmeats, all glistening with a surfeit of sugar.”

Here we encounter historical literary figures such as George Sand, Eugene Sue, Charles Baudelaire. How much fun was that to research and write?

KLS: It was great fun to write, particularly Undine who is all about shiny surface but has little depth as exhibited by her decorating sense, fashion, and the vapid poetry she writes. She is very loosely modelled on the Marquise de Merteuil in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses— a very beautiful, but narcissistic person who uses her wit to undermine others. I enjoyed bringing together some of France’s nineteenth century literary greats for a “poetry slam” as one reviewer put it and to give Baudelaire, who greatly admired Poe’s work, the chance to defend him in the flesh. During my research trip to Paris, I visited Baudelaire’s grave in Cimetière du Montparnasse, and the cemetery plays a part in the novel.  I also went to George Sand’s house; I hadn’t known until I started researching that her birth name was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, which was a fun coincidence. I had to wonder if Poe borrowed her name.  Probably unlikely, but not impossible as Poe knew her work.

 

 

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Victorian magic poster: Carter the Great – Thanks to Karen Lee Street for the image.

SG: In all your Poe and Dupin mysteries, place and setting are characters in themselves and no less so here. The Paris that you bring us to is full of illusionists, magicians, tricksters, ruffians, even an ogress (Mother Ponisse). It’s also full of rich food and wine – hare stew, heavy red wines – as well as “ravening darkness”, elixers, poisons and, who could forget, the subterranean world of the underground tombs and tunnels. We are presented with contradictions and mysteries in just a few examples which illustrate your beautiful sensual writing:

“Golden light shimmered along the bleak walls, but our four lanterns did little to dispel the malevolent atmosphere. Sounds were amplified: pattering feet, the flutter of wings, chatters and squeaks – sounds that might fill one with the joy of nature in a woodland or some attractive city park, but evoked nothing but dread in this tomb-like space.”

“Perfume snaked through the night air, intoxicating and cloying as the scent of death, accompanied by a haunting voice raised in a song without words.”

Can you tell us about how you used 21st Century Paris to re-create 19th Century Paris?

KLS: My main inspiration in trying to give a convincing flavour of 19th century Paris to Empire of the Dead was to read some books written and set during that time, most particularly Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris and Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot as well as Poe’s Dupin stories. The descriptions of clothing and furniture and food were inspired by these works and those familiar with The Mysteries of Paris will recognise some characters and some places from the Île de la Cité, which are part of a little subplot linked to one of the book’s themes.  Prints, illustrations, and maps of Paris from the time were also incredibly useful in trying to create a convincing picture of 19th century Paris —trying to work out which streets, bridges, cemeteries, libraries, and other buildings were in existence in 1849 was not an easy task. And then there were the tunnels beneath Paris and their history. When I had most of a very rough draft in place, I did a research trip to Paris and visited key locations and areas, especially the catacombs, which I hadn’t been to previously, and took a lot of photographs.  I also visited Paris at the same time as the book is set (in July), which was useful in terms of weather, light, general atmosphere – and below you can see some of my photographs!

Catacombs, Paris – Photo by Karen Lee Street
Catacombs, Paris – Photo by Karen Lee Street

And now for some fun questions:

  • One cat or many cats? Two, currently. Given they are indoor cats, that’s probably enough. Probably.
  • Best book you’ve read in the last six months? The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which I just finished. It was interesting to find a magic show in it, and some other familiar elements.
  • Best film you’ve seen in 2020? Probably Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, but I also enjoyed  Lulu Wang’s The Farewell —definitely the best debut film for me.
  • What do you miss the most during this Pandemic ‘lockdown’? The trip I’d planned to make back to Europe and a research trip to New York City.  As I work from home, day to day life hasn’t changed radically during lockdown.
  • What’s next up for you in terms of novel writing? I’m working on a contemporary crime story set in New York City which deals with photography, but all the events of 2020 (so far!) are making it difficult as current events would have an effect on what happens in the novel.

Buy Edgar Allan Poe and The Empire of The Dead

Keep up to date with Karen on her website

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Karen Lee Street