Filling the Grey Spaces

The Grey Space: Notions of Loss in Writing Real Lives Critical thesis & The Sculptress A work of creative non-fiction Lucie Alexandra Brownlee Doctor of Philosophy Supervisors: William Fiennes, Professor Linda Anderson School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Faculty of Arts and Humanities Newcastle University, May 2018 1 Abstract This thesis in Creative and Critical Writing comprises two parts. The book, The Sculptress, is fictional interpretation of the life and work of the American artist and collector Mary Callery and her daughter, Caroline. It pivots around Callery’s fractured relationship with Caroline, suggesting the trajectory which led to the suicide of Caroline at the age of forty. It aims to throw new light on Callery’s considerable body of work, which has been overlooked by art history despite receiving critical acclaim. Set against fast-changing backdrop of European and American Modernism, it spans Callery’s lifetime, from her birth in 1903 to her death in Paris in 1977. The critical part of this thesis proposes that ‘loss’ is a central feature of writing creative non-fiction, and explores this with reference to the work of Naomi Wood and Julia Blackburn along with my own. Notions of loss emerged as the driving force behind my entire project: my own personal loss, loss of direction, loss of emotional, historical and factual truths. The ways in which Callery dealt with the ‘grey spaces’ in her own existence – that is to say, the distance between the two social poles she inhabited (avant- garde bohemia and old money, society New York), plus the grief she was unable to express about her daughter’s death – became the governing theme of the book. 2 Acknowledgements My thanks go to my two supervisors, William Fiennes and Professor Linda Anderson, for their expertise, enthusiasm and wise counsel throughout the course of my research. Thanks also to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Newcastle University for their generous financial contribution to my research trip to New York. Thanks to Mary Callery’s family, most notably Susan and George Mittendorf who so generously opened their hearts, home and Mary’s archive to me, and to Susan for accompanying me on the trip to Cadaques. The project quite simply wouldn’t have been possible without them. To my guide at The Colony Club, New York, for her time and insights into New York society life, and to everyone I met in Paris, Cadaques and New York for sharing their tantalizing titbits about Mary. Thanks to Philippa Campsie for sharing her initial research and for setting me on the path to finding Mary and Caroline. Thanks to the Centre de Documentation du Musee de Picasso de Paris for allowing me access to correspondence between Mary and Picasso. Heartfelt thanks to my wonderful mother Jane Brownlee, who found Mary first and willed me on every step of the way to completing this doctorate. Thanks to little Beatrice for making me laugh every single day and reminding me that there is life outside of a thesis. And finally, to Mark. He always wanted to do a PhD, so this is for him. 3 Table of Contents Title page………………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………….2 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………...3 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………4 Part 1: Critical Study The Grey Space: Notions of Loss in Writing Real Lives 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..5 2. Naomi Wood: Retrieving what is lost…………………………………………..10 3. Julia Blackburn: Thread-bare: The Life of John Craske………………….17 4. The Sculptress: Paris, New York, Cadaques………………………………….27 5. The Grey Space: Creativity, Loss and Truth………………………………….55 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………72 Part 2: The Sculptress …………………………………………………………………………..77 4 Introduction High up in the scrubland, there is a cemetery. You happen upon it at the exact midpoint on the road between Cadaques and Port Lligat, on the craggy peninsula of Cap de Creus in north east Spain. Bordered on all sides by curved white stuccoed walls, stark against the cloudless blue sky, it looks for all the world like the lacy tip of a giant, cresting wave. Tucked away in the corner of the cemetery is a wooden cross. It is propped up behind a cube of white marble, which teeters awkwardly atop the knotted roots of a genuflecting weeping bottlebrush. The marble cube bears a name and two dates: Mary Callery (1903 – 1977.) What led us to it I’ll never know, but I want to imagine it was one of those synchronistic moments that biographers talk about, where their subject somehow finds them and demands to be written about. The wooden cross and its cumbrous cube of marble are where this story begins and ends. * I had never attempted to write a life. My compulsion to do so – my compulsion to exhume Mary Callery (1903 – 1977), from her final scrubland resting place – was rooted, much like that weeping bottlebrush, in isolated, rubbly terrain. My husband, Mark, had dropped dead suddenly just over a year before. He suffered a catastrophic heart arrhythmia one idle Saturday evening in February 2012 at the age of thirty-seven. Mark died; I was left to live, which at the time, felt like the hardest part. A raw, angry grey space opened up in my life and I needed desperately to fill it in order not to self-destruct. James W. Pennebaker and John F. Evans in their book Expressive Writing: Words that Heal suggest: “Immediately after a trauma, things often seem out of control and disconnected. One goal of expressive writing is to begin to put things together again.”1 Words were, just as they always had been, the only escape I knew from pain and trauma, and the discipline required in researching and writing a life felt like my best shot at ‘putting things together again’. Endings and beginnings. Whether the line between them is blurred or cleanly defined, the two exist in a state of codependency. The ending of two lives – those of Mark and 1 James W Pennebaker and John Evans, Expressive Writing Words that Heal, (Idyll Arbor, Inc 2014) p17 5 Mary – precipitated the beginning of a fertile period of writing and research for me, but the line between them was indistinct. How did those endings inform this particular beginning? Where would I start in my quest to tell the story of a life? Was my motivation for wanting to do so important, or was the end result - my novel, The Sculptress – ultimately the only significant aim? As I interrogated my project and its motivations, a unifying motif emerged: loss. By loss, I don’t just mean personal loss as a motivating factor in embarking on a biographical project - that is to say, the need to entrench oneself in the life of another as an antidote to grief. I encompass within ‘loss’ that very writerly preoccupation of losing direction, and of subsequently finding it again through the eyes of a new subject. Then there’s the inevitable and disconcerting loss of emotional and factual truths when researching and writing a real life, those ‘grey spaces’ that emerge simultaneously along with discovery, which can derail or liberate the project depending on the artistry of the author. And finally, the notion of disinterring a subject or story which has previously been ‘lost’ or ignored. How does loss, then, in its broadest sense, impact on choice of subject and methods of research when writing biographically? How does it shape the finished narrative? What does it mean for the subject, and indeed the reader– is verisimilitude compromised? Does it matter? In the following sections, I will respond to these questions by exploring my own work along with that of two other biographical writers – Naomi Wood and Julia Blackburn. Wood’s book, Mrs Hemingway, is a creative reimagining of the lives of the four wives of Ernest Hemingway, where Blackburn’s Threads: The Life of John Craske is a biographical mille feuille, layering story upon story to build a previously untold life. Why and how did we each choose our subjects? How did we go about fashioning these individuals into convincing and authentic protagonists, how did we manage to revivify their physical environments when information about them was sparse (in the case of Threads, and my own book, The Sculptress) or their lives were overshadowed by the life of another, more prominent, figure (notably Ernest Hemingway in the case of his four wives in Mrs Hemingway). I will look at the ways in which each writer responded to notions of loss in life-writing differently, and how each used, to a greater or lesser extent, a hybridisation of fact and fiction as a counterforce to it. Increasingly referred to as ‘creative non-fiction’, this hybridisation has gained traction as a discreet genre, distinct from biography in that its primary concern is not the 6 conveyance of fact but the dramatization of factual substance. It is distinct from fiction in that the reader understands that what they are experiencing is not a biography masquerading as a novel, but a dramatized biographical interpretation which interweaves fictional characters and events in order to advance the narrative. There is inevitably a mutuality of stylistic techniques between the three genres - in his book Fictional Techniques and Factual Works, William Siebenschuh writes: “As in a traditional novel, we are given a group of characters about whose fates we are made to care…and success depends on the effectiveness and credibility of (the author’s) portraits of the central characters and the minor characters who people their lives.” He goes on to say: ‘(The reader’s) relation to the subject is, naturally, different from that in an ordinary biography because we are responding to dramatic art, not analysis or exposition.’2 This is not to say that creative non-fiction relies on dramatization as a substitute for exposition and analysis –rather, it adds an additional ‘pillar’ to what Jeffrey Meyers calls “the three pillars of the biography - research, correspondence, and interviews”3 - that of original creative invention.

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