Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

I could not help wondering last evening whether my attempt to describe the woman in the red armchair had given you any clear idea of it.

– Rilke in a letter of October 23, 1907

Of the risks that paid off during the research and development era for English-language fiction (i.e. the second half of the 20th century) some of the boldest were confident moves by novelists entangled with large-scale historical narratives. It was not new to place famous figures in a novel. That goes back to early days of the form, but instead of merely using the famous as stage props, writers like Thomas Pynchon, Hilary Mantel, and EL Doctorow ventriloquized through them to create startling works in prose. This is not biography in any ordinary sense of the word. While fiction like this can do the work of uncovering lives and voices, it is speculative rather than epistemological. The device serves the aims of the work of art. Robert Coover’s Richard Nixon or Don DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald are just two well-known examples from dozens in English. Earlier novels outside English include the beautiful Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar or The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch.

There’s always the risk of catching flak from outraged corners of the culture. The conservative columnist George Will launched attacks on both Coover’s The Public Burning and DeLillo’s Libra. Coover tells a retrospectively amusing story of this in a piece in Flashpoint that you can find here: https://www.flashpointmag.com/cooverpubburn.htm

 At church one Sunday in Nebraska, my parents had to face friends and fellow citizens who had seen that morning in the Omaha World-Herald a headline over George Will’s syndicated column: “A Sick Fantasy—Robert Coover’s Novel Violates the Ethics of Literature.” I was never quite forgiven for that.

Will later called Libra “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship” in a 1988 column in the Washington Post. Link here: https://tinyurl.com/yjpabvec These are probably literary badges of honor for the artists, but, as Coover relates, they are not the type of attention a writer dreams about for their book.

Since the marketplace has now embraced fictions like these, a deeper risk for the artist is the commonplace. Writers struck by inspiration during their own reading or research see it as one of the many possible moves for getting a foothold in a work of fiction. It is rare to find one that stands out from the rest. Australian writer Angela O’Keeffe’s captivating second novel The Sitter (UQP, 2023) is one of these gems. In fact, The Sitter turns this convention on its head, as Marie-Hortense Fiquet, the wife of the painter Paul Cézanne and the subject of so many gazes (the gaze of her husband as she sat for twenty-nine portraits by him, the stares of a century of viewers of those paintings), exchanges roles and looks with sympathy at the woman destiny pairs with her.

The situation of this novel is simple. It might seem metaphysically complex under analysis, but it is a simple story. It opens with two women in a hotel room. One is a writer. The other is Hortense (the name the book uses for her) who was married to Paul Cézanne, bore his child and has been dead since 1922. The setting is our present day. How the two women came to be together in the hotel room is underdetermined, a fact that Hortense acknowledges.

I met her at the beginning of that summer, in the beachside suburb of Bondi, around the time she began writing the novel about me. I don’t know exactly how I made my way to that room in her house near the roaring Pacific. There was an event that preceded my arrival, but for all that I was simply there one morning, standing in the doorway watching as she sat at her desk, her back to me, the sun shining through the window onto her head. A harsh sun. Sydney is a crushed and glittering prism of light.

O’Keeffe lets it go there. Hortense knows she’s dead. My grave is here, she says, in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where in summer the trees are weighted with brightness and children play hide and seek among the headstones. You get a sense already in these two passages of O’Keeffe’s lovely, light, descriptive style. It carries the story along.

How to define Hortense’s being (ghost, muse, emanation of the writer’s imaginative immersion, or something else) is inessential. The reader can settle on something useful there. It is the relation of the two women in the present of the book’s narrative that should concern us. They weave together. Not the stories, but the women. They weave. Hortense tells her story, but we’re getting it from the writer’s deep dive into her life. The writer rapidly drafts a story from her own past (for her adult daughter who is thousands of miles away, suddenly separated by the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19), but we get it when Hortense reads it. The writer finds a new perspective or way of telling this story from her past, a story she could not tell until now, from her sympathetic exchanges with Hortense. Likewise Hortense comes to life for us as something more than a note from an exhibit label at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

From the very start of the novel, Hortense shows herself a keen observer. She watches the writer closely. Her observations often contain bits from her own experience.

She was in the habit of drifting through the rooms with a demeanor that reminded me of my son when he’d walked in his sleep as a child, and in that state she would put things down in any old place. She is not forgetful—at least not in the ordinary sense. She can, for instance, remember with remarkable precision the dates and events that punctuate my life. She has no affliction, as far as I can tell, except for a one-pointed attention to her own inner world to the exclusion of all else; once, she came across her hairbrush in the fridge.

O’Keeffe’s use of “punctuate” here reminds us of the written nature of the relation of these two women and tells me we’re in the good hands of a capable author. She also gives us vivid fragments of Hortense and her husband together, as he worked, and she sat for him.

For one hundred years, I was dead—or asleep. Call it what you wish. I lay in the arms of the dear, dark earth in Père Lachaise Cemetery, where I dreamt of my own fingers sewing together the pages of a book; where I dreamt of dresses and brushstrokes; where I dreamt of turning towards a window and murmuring, ‘Dear little birds,’ and my husband’s voice upon me like a landslide—‘No bouge pas! Ne parle pas!’ Don’t move! Don’t speak!

So much is conveyed in that landslide. We see Hortense in her social position, and we see how fraught her marriage was. The first half of the novel contains many passages like this, speculative of Hortense’s thoughts on her life and on Cézanne’s work, too. I think back to my epigraph above from Rilke’s letter to his wife in October of 1907. He’d become obsessed with the Cézanne paintings he saw at the Salon d’Automne that season, the year after the painter’s death. He wrote in particular about the painting that is on the cover of O’Keeffe’s novel. “I could not help wondering last evening whether my attempt to describe the woman in the red armchair had given you any clear idea of it.” He was experiencing an artistic awakening. The strangeness of Cézanne’s works had disconcerted him. He kept going back to them, day after day. He wrote in another letter that month: … and suddenly one has the right eyes. Something similar is happening in the novel. O’Keeffe’s writer is working and working on the story of Hortense, and finally something inside herself is unlocked.

In the first quarter of the book, access to the writer’s inner life is blocked. Hortense says:

It is because I do not know her name. I have heard it, of course; others call her by her name; she calls herself by her name, when answering the phone or checking into the hotel, for instance. But when I hear her name it enters me in camouflage. It’s like white ink on a white page; it’s like tears cried into the sea. She is less a person to me than she is a function: she writes.

A little later, Hortense on the life of the writer:

Her life with her husband, her life with her daughter, her life with her grandchild, her life with her other books: all these I have wondered about. But when she speaks of this life, I don’t always listen. I’m not sure why. It’s not that I feel bored or distracted, but rather that I feel nothing.

There are plot points in this novel that ought not be spoiled even by this enthusiastic reviewer. I can say that there is a shift. Hortense feels it, and she notices the writer’s attention moves away from herself. It’s a threat to the very ground of her being, but she rolls with it. She says: She has lost interest in me. But I grow more interested in her. Is she my subject?

The book is split into three parts, and a page after Hortense asks her question (Is she my subject?), Part II begins. The style changes, and we follow an entirely new story, the writer’s own addressed to her daughter Rebecca. Although the setting is contemporary, this part is stranger and more inhabited (in the haunted sense) than Part I, as the writer’s stand-in character named Georgia moves through it like a presence who does not quite belong there. It is about her family, her parents, an event from her teenage years. Hortense reads it along with us. She notes: And it occurs to me that although she wrote the story for Rebecca it is also for me, for there are certain details in common between her story and mine. It seems that she has left me clues. The clues inspire Hortense to go deeper into some of her own stories. The ones that hurt the most. We find: The mind is a map of compartments: some locked, others open a mere crack. It is a great privilege when we’re given the chance to look over the shoulder of a storyteller like Angela O’Keeffe, as she begins to nudge those chambers open.