On not Writing about Lo'
A reading I read at Dunkunsthalle, New York
I did not like New York. Or, I did not like Manhattan. Occasionally I would walk the hot, loud streets and cry “I LOVE THIS CITY” before coming to my senses - reminded by something ugly, heart-wrenching, expensive. I have more to say, but I am sorting through my thoughts (in Australia).
In the meantime here is a reading I did for Nadja, a collaboration between Espace Maurice and SARA’s at Dunkunstalle in the Financial District. The exhibition was a response to Andre Breton’s Nadja and so I responded too.
I have not read the book and don’t plan to.
On not Writing about Lo’
I haven’t read Breton’s Nadja – I never cared much for the male surrealists, and most of what I know about surrealism is through the eyes of Lo’, who I have loved since I was thirteen. She says she knows nothing about the Surrealists either, but has a feeling for them. She’s an artist in the most complete sense of the word – a world builder, from necessity not indulgence. In the Wikipedia entry for Nadja we are told that Andre’s obsession with her is due to her vision of the world and that he ceases to enjoy spending time with her once he realises she’s in a state of emotional turmoil.
There’s an early Lucien Freud painting called Hotel Bedroom, which pictures Freud’s first wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, lying in bed in a state of depression while on their honeymoon in Paris. Freud stands in the background, hands in pockets, bored, wanting to get out into the city, not feeling particularly empathetic toward his new wife. Lockwood had paid for the trip – she was very rich – and was upset by her depiction in the painting, though her main gripe was about looking so old rather than so sad. The marriage did not last.
Robert Lowell - the poet of all sad men – died from a heart attack in a taxi close to here. He had just told Caroline Blackwood – yes, the same – he was leaving her, and was on his way to meet another woman - the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, to whom he had previously been married and from whom he had very messily split. To add a level of silliness worthy of his poems (some of which I do love) Lowell was holding a portrait of Blackwood by Lucien Freud when he expired. In The Dolphin, his last book of poetry, he used passages of Hardwick’s letters to him, incredibly personal letters written during great emotional turmoil, pasting them into the poems, efficiently turning the collapse of his marriage into art.
The Wikipedia entry on Nadja, upon which I have based my whole idea of the book, becomes angry as it describes the book’s end – “Ironically, while the real life Nadja is in the same city as him, not once does he think to check on her, see how she is doing, or care about her beyond his own ability to exploit her for his own artistic ends.” No kidding. When Breton revised the novel in the 1960s he removed any physical contact between his Andre and his Nadja, finally completing the disappearing muse act.
Sensibly, Lo’ has told me I’m never to write about her, nor about her childhood or her family. She does not wish to become a woman written into a man’s oeuvre. When I have written about her, her response has come in two forms: if the writing is kind but, more importantly, true to her memory, she doesn’t really mind. She doesn’ really like it either. But if the writing is unkind or wrong, if it indulges in her pain or suffering for the sake of my art, she hates it. And so she might: it is deeply uncomfortable to be conjured up and used as the meat of a story, or an essay. Or a reading.
But this represents a problem, for as a writer I am obsessed with my own life, and it is this life that I mine for inspiration, stories, observations. It is in my life that I find the meat. But my life has been intertwined with Lo’s since we were thirteen. That’s seventeen years now, now more than half. Moreover, the things I’ve done without her have been less interesting and also less emotionally fraught – so have lacked that meat. One consequence of this is that I write a great deal about my mother and early childhood, which comes with its own discomfort and makes me look like a creep. Another is my continued focus on food and eating – a topic which lends itself to the general rather than the hyper personal and edges on society and culture and politics.
Maybe it’s because we’re in a gallery, but I’ll reach again for a painting, perhaps my favourite painting - certainly my favourite Renaissance painting - Michelangelo’s Manchester Madonna. I have been thinking about this painting for a decade or so – since I came across it in London’s National Gallery – and when I search its name on my computer I find many references in many half-finished pieces. Apt since it, too, is unfinished – in the centre sit the Madonna and child, resplendent and coloured in. To the left stand two angels, mere outlines – almost like Matisse cut-outs – absences of painterly space. Inside the outlines, the features, skin colour, clothes and so on, are suggested by the painting’s finished figures.
Sometimes I think this is what writing about life without Lo would look like – an unfinished painting, with silhouettes, a gap to be filled in. Would this experiment lead to beauty? I don’t know. My love for the Manchester Madonna is not because of a decision of Michelangelo’s, but because his impulses in the painting were thwarted before they could be acted on. I like the accident. I like the enforced restraint. And as for my own project, my writing of a life in which I can’t lean on the crutch of another’s, the crutch of a woman’s ‘vision of the world’, perhaps this paucity of material might lead to its own happy accidents, its own novel directions. The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett wrote in French, not because it was the language he was most comfortable with, but because of the discomfort he felt using it, and the directness and simplicity this forced upon him. I hope Lo’s command that I do not write about her will lead to somewhere similar, away from what is easy – recording her gigantic and sumptuous presence, her life, her art, her ideas – to something hard and new, to something not quite stolen.