Iam not the kind of reader who naturally gravitates toward slice-of-life Americana. I’m an enthusiast for the sort of American fiction where cowboys make dolent pronouncements while staring into fires, sure – but less the kind where people are generally nice, and go to places called things like “Fink’s Drugstore” to drink “root beer floats”.
| Picasso and Françoise Gilot |
Françoise Gilot is the most compelling figure in this biography of the painter’s lovers – but you get the feeling she would have loathed this book
“No woman leaves a man like me,” Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he’d become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he’d go on to spend the final years of his life.
What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. “I am very secretive,” she said in an interview in 2016. “I smile and I’m polite, but that doesn’t mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.” The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon.
Gilot, clever and hard working, was an artist in her own right whose relationship to Picasso even in later life was vexed. In 1964, she published a brilliant, bestselling memoir of her time with him (he was enraged, and so was the French establishment on his behalf), but thereafter, she often disdained to talk of him. She preferred to discuss her work, which is held by, among other institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If Picasso’s influence on her art was clear, she was adamant that it had made its mark before she met him (she had studied his pictures). Leaving him hadn’t been liberating, she insisted, for the simple reason that she hadn’t been a prisoner in the first place.
Gilot appears on the cover of Sue Roe’s new book, Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso, in a famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, and from the moment you look at it – her famous lover reclines on a divan in the background, wearing a Breton shirt – the feeling grows that there’s something wrong here. She would surely have loathed this book, and not only because it defines all its subjects only in relation to Picasso; try as Roe might to insist that each of her women is equally worthy of attention, there’s no getting away from the fact that this is not the case. Several books have been written about Gilot, and I’d be happy to read any of them (I recommend About Women, a collection of conversations between her and the American writer Lisa Alther). But about other of Picasso’s lovers there is, I’m afraid, somewhat less to be said.
The book comprises six biographical essays, though self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last (the book’s structure isn’t always fit for the time frames involved). It begins with Fernande Olivier, the artist’s model who lived with him in Montmartre between 1905 and 1912, and who appears, in various guises, in many of the Rose Period portraits. She is succeeded by the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and she, in turn, by the model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Next comes Dora Maar, the photographer and painter, to be followed by Gilot and Roque, a saleswoman in a pottery shop. After Gilot, Maar is the most interesting, not least for her influence on Picasso’s Guernica (she first caught Picasso’s attention in a cafe by peeling off her gloves and stabbing between her fingers with a penknife).
Sometimes, there’s light relief. The scene – possibly unreliable, since several different accounts of it exist – in which Walter and Maar physically fight as Picasso looks on is straight out of a film by François Ozon. But mostly – Gilot being the exception – Picasso leaves these women devastated. It’s not only his restlessness and unthinking cruelty; while once they were living in Technicolor, now they’re back in black and white. Roe tells her stories straightforwardly, though she can be both repetitive and a touch Mills & Boon (“We can only imagine the chemistry between the charismatic, seductive, black-eyed painter, who by all accounts exuded charisma even when standing still; and the poised, serious dancer…”). If this territory is new to you, the book won’t be without interest. But as a feminist project, however well-intentioned, it misfires badly.
| Alice Munro |
To consider “Home,” I return to Munro’s “Foreword.”
I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.
Although this story is about her father, it is also, or really, about a daughter’s acceptance of a new reality regarding her father and regarding herself.
The daughter is living in the east now, about a hundred miles from her father. Unlike the past, when years could pass before she returned home, she now visits every few months or so. She takes a series of busses. The time it takes to get “home” is emblematic of reality. Things have changed so much that it takes real time to catch up to all the changes that make up her father’s home now. So, the beginning of the story sets us up for that – for the time it takes for a person to reach a destination, especially if the person is looking for the truth or looking to go “home.”
The scenes that begin and end the story both address the issue of time. But it is the story’s the ending that tells us we have finally arrived at the story’s original destination.
The last scene is a memory, one that she says is her first memory. She’s three or four and she’s out in the barn with her father, who is milking a cow. It’s dark. It’s cold. The milk hitting the pail sounds like “tiny hailstones.” This is the cow that will die of pneumonia the following year.
Christopher Isherwood’s mellifluous name is not heard often these days. Until a film adaptation by a fashion designer turned perfumer brought this title back into print, all we had readily available were his Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, so this overdue reissue seemed an ideal time to revisit.
The Sign of Four
by Arthur
Conan Doyle
1890
The 100 best novels written in English / The full list
The 100 best novels / No 26 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
Halfway through The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle steals the literary critic’s thunder by aptly “theorizing,” as we used to say in grad school, the novel’s own genre through two minor characters:
“It is a romance!” cried Mrs. Forrester. “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl.”
The late Victorian period saw a general revival of romance in Britain, for a variety of reasons: the ideological and commercial collapse of the three-volume realist novel; the increasingly martial cultural tone of an expanding empire; the reaction against the previous dominance of female authors and female modes (domestic realism, sentimentalism) in fiction; and the rise of a newly literate, non-classically educated audience seeking more adventurous fare. (I derive my information from such useful literary histories as Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy and Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island.)
Doyle’s myth-making imagination scored an undeniable triumph with the invention of the maven of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, and his more practical partner, Watson. But aside from this, he lacked the virtues of his fellow romancers. He could not write the perfect prose of Stevenson or Kipling, nor philosophize over his own phantasmagoria as Wilde could, nor embody in vividly imagined tales whole new concepts of time and nature like Wells; even Stoker’s Dracula, while a bit schlocky, is prodigiously imagined and intricately composed. I find Doyle’s narrative gifts and his style weaker—at least in the first two Holmes novels—and cannot bring myself to care much about the story or characters.
The Sign of Four, a complicated mystery involving the schemes of various parties to acquire treasure that a British army officer mysteriously won in India, is mainly interesting today for what I might call “cultural studies” reasons. That is, it fascinates readers for what it suggests about late-19th-century British attitudes toward drugs, race, empire, law enforcement, homosocial relations between men, statistics, etc. I imagine the scene where Holmes deduces a killer’s identity from his footprint, complete with a lengthy pseudo-scientific racialist disquisition on the characteristics of various non-Western people’s feet (“The Hindoo proper has long and thin feet”—who knew?) has launched a dissertation or two.
But even I am not immune: as a student of aestheticism, I was interested in Doyle’s portrayal of Thaddeus Sholto, son of the major who brought the jewels back from India. In Sholto, Doyle provides an amusing caricature of the aesthete, an ineffectual and hypochondriacal lovers of the beautiful; and Doyle, in his bluff way, communicates directly what Pater and Wilde never quite get around to telling us, namely, that the aesthete is able to enjoy his refined pleasures only because he sits at the pinnacle of an imperial hierarchy (I think I learned somewhere or other that Edward Said, whom I have had cause to mention here before, re-read the Holmes stories on his deathbed).
But Holmes’s disinterested gaze knits the seeming chaos of crime into patterns that are pleasurable for the reader to behold: he is only another kind of aesthete (he is called in this novel a “connoisseur of crime”), which is no doubt why we find him, on this novel’s famous first page, in the languid Huysmans-esque pursuit of intoxication:
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.
And there is also some fine atmospheric writing about London here; not as good as Dickens, but moody and dream-like:
It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.
| Arthur Conan Doyle |
The novel ends with a long narrative from the main villain explaining the background to the crime. His narrative is an imperial romance within the detective romance, a tale of desperation, greed, and betrayal amid the upheavals of the Sepoy rebellion. The villain’s strong will and loyalty—he is the only non-racist character in the novel, being bound in solidarity with his Sikh collaborators in crime and his Andaman islander confederate—make him a good foil for Holmes, a man of equally strong drive but also of total abstraction and misanthropy. Here is Holmes watching a shipyard empty at quitting-time:
“Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!”
“Some one calls him a soul concealed in an animal,” I suggested.
“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”
Holmes’s utterly detached aestheticism is necessarily his readers’, since we too are reading rather than acting (on the other hand, the active villain says, “reading is not in my line”); we contemplate the abstract that is literature rather than the individuality of life. But the passion of those who have to fight or work for their lives, even at the price of their souls, is the material from which Holmes shapes his narrative designs—communicated to us by Watson, who is the author of all Holmes’s adventures. Like those heralds of modernity, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson have already read of their earlier exploits by the time this book opens. We readers and writers are detectives all in the ghostly city, looking with mastery but also longing (“imperial nostalgia,” it has been called) on those—poor Englishman and colonized Indian alike—whom we leave no choice but to live.