By the time Arzner began her career, in the late 1920s, women directors were no more. Arzner started as a writer, quickly became an innovative and sought-after editor, and then became one of the top ten directors in the studio system. She directed sixteen feature films in her career, more than any other woman has to this day.
How much does perspective matter? How much does it shape the fiction we think of as reality? It wasn’t until the first time I went to Craig’s apartment that I realized I’d been looking at portraits of him for about five years before we met. And not just any pictures, but portraits by one of my favorite contemporary artists. The first time I ever saw a painting by the artist Elizabeth Peyton, it was 1997, and I had just turned twenty-nine. I’d been living in San Francisco for almost seven years before I came across it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The portrait looked like something a twelve-year-old would draw on the back of her notebook, only incredibly luminous and jewel-like. The portrait reflected my perspective, which I’d never seen legitimized in quite that way before. It was fan-girlish and besotted. It was the most radical thing I’d ever seen. My first thought was that it had to be a joke. Then I got angry. Was this allowed now? Since when? And why had I not been informed? There was no way that this small, precious, unabashedly romantic likeness of Kurt Cobain could be for real. It couldn’t be sincere, and yet it appeared to be. Validated. Legitimized. Institutionalized.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that my fascination with Peyton’s work began not very long after Craig had become one of her regular subjects. By the time I met him, I’d seen her idealized version of him many times. Craig and I met in Los Angeles, at a party at the house of some mutual friends. A couple of weeks later, I was shocked to discover one of Peyton’s paintings hanging on the wall of his shabby Hollywood studio. He was shocked that I was shocked. Nobody he knew in Los Angeles had ever recognized it before.
Peyton once replied to the observation that there seemed to be a lot of melancholy in her work by saying, “It’s not so much sentimental, it’s just really overwhelming to me that time passes. I’m constantly thinking about it and kind of obsessing about it. How things change, how I change, how there’s no stopping it.” If this chapter has a theme, it would have to do with this comment. Ever since Craig and I met, I’ve wished we could have met when we were younger. It’s not that, in our thirties, we were so old. It’s that as we got to know each other and told each other stories about ourselves before we met, the same things got to me that had gotten to me when I first discovered her work: emotion as aesthetic experience; romanticism; imagination; bohemia; nostalgia; the fleeting nature of beauty, youth, fame, time, life; the ardent revolt I felt against the pragmatism and triumphal materialism that eventually ate us all.
It also had something to do with this: Peyton, whose 2008 retrospective was called Live Forever, has said that her career began to take off when she began to meet people who could see what she was doing. In an interview with her, Steve Lafreniere remarked, “You once told me that you’re fascinated by that moment when a person’s worth and destiny are revealed.” When I met Craig, I had the feeling he could see what I was doing. I wish we could have known each other when we were very young, that we could somehow go back to the moment of pure potential and do it all over again, together; it’s predicated on the fantasy that we could have guided each other through the perils of growing up. Somehow, when I imagine us having met when we were very young, I can believe in the idea that we might have lived forever.
We sold the painting that I had recognized as Peyton’s shortly after our wedding, about a year before Kira was born. It was a completely pragmatic, totally heartbreaking decision that I often still regret. Maybe the romantic decision should have won out in the end. Maybe, in some way, in some parallel reality, it still will.
5
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The Eternal Allure of the Basket Case
I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I’ve wanted to do for years.
—Mrs. Copperfield, from Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles
I loved stories about female artists who went off the deep end when I was young—tragic tales of beautiful, passionate girls who escaped the plot by losing the plot. Madness was refusal and rebellion. It was punk. It was a tale I loved in fiction, in nonfiction, and at the movies, where the crazy artist was likely to be played emblematically by the hauntingly beautiful, prodigiously emotive French actress Isabelle Adjani. Nobody made a nervous breakdown in pre-Prozac times look so sexy. François Truffaut, who directed Adjani in The Story of Adele H. when she was nineteen, called her a genius—though there are those who impute his effusion to his shock at her refusal to sleep with him. We’ll never know.
When Camille Claudel came out, in 1988, I was a student in Paris trying to imagine how a girl became an artist when the world insisted on defining artists as the opposite of a girl. I lived a few blocks away from an Italian restaurant called Villa Borghese, just like the place where Henry Miller rented rooms in Tropic of Cancer. I’d borrowed the novel from a friend who’d found it in her room, left there by some other American student on a year abroad program. I’d started reading it on the Metro on the way home and didn’t put it down until I’d devoured it whole, like a python swallowing a rat. It was ingested in a moment. It took longer to digest. I’d never loved and hated a book so much in equal proportion. Every time I walked by the Villa Borghese sign, the first lines of the book popped into my head: “I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.” I wondered if it was the same place, if there were rooms above the restaurant, if the lice still lived there. I was a junior-year-abroad girl in Paris. I was a sucker for modernism, despite its glaring woman problem, which I did my very best to overlook. In my class on postwar European cinema, my professor refused to learn the names of all but two or three of his female students, even though (or maybe because) there were only three boys in the class. He renamed the rest of us mnemonically, or perhaps onanistically. My friend Heather with the long, curly, side-parted auburn hair was “Vous, Rita Hayworth-là.” You-Rita-Hayworth-there. You-Rita-Hayworth-there, say something about L’Eclisse.
Camille Claudel was the true story of a nineteenth-century bourgeois girl who became an artist and then went gorgeously, flamboyantly, furiously off her rocker. I knew about Camille because she was one of the flags you could wave when someone said there were no famous women artists. You could point the big side-of-the-road arrow sign at her: Camille Claudel—five miles! I collected them like action figures, the famous female artists, long before I knew it wasn’t their existence that was rare but their inclusion in history. I also knew her by association with Rodin, which is the real reason anyone knew her. She is a footnote in art history, a note under his foot. Claudel was Rodin’s student, apprentice, assistant, muse, and mistress for more than a decade. Twenty-four years younger than him, she was born the same year he met his lifelong companion and the mother of his child, Rose Beuret. Rodin and Claudel were madly in love, but Rodin refused to leave Rose and marry Camille, which made Camille crazy. She and Rodin were intellectual equals and partners. They had an artistic, spiritual, and sexual connection. Rose, in her view, was a glorified housekeeper and nursemaid. Camille made Rodin sign a contract saying he would stop sleeping with other students, take her on a trip to Italy, and then marry her. He signed it but didn’t honor it. Eventually, Camille left him to devote herself entirely to her career and to develop her own separate artistic identity. She developed a new style of “narrative sculpture” around small moments of everyday life. Rodin continued to publicly support her work, but she was socially ostracized and neglected by the art world. She was broke and paranoid, convinced that Rodin was trying to sabotage her career and poison her. A week after her father died, her brother had her committed to an asylum. She stopped sculpting and became a mental patient until she died, thirty years later. “The events of my li
fe would fill more than a novel,” she wrote to Eugène Blot from the Montdevergues Asylum. “It would take an epic, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and a Homer to tell my story. I won’t recount it today. I don’t want to sadden you. I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is the nightmare.”
Camille Claudel was my first Isabelle Adjani movie about an artist tipped into madness by a bad boyfriend, but it wasn’t her first. In cinema class, we watched François Truffaut’s The Story of Adèle H. Adèle was the daughter of Victor Hugo, and herself a writer and a composer. The screenplay was adapted from Adèle’s journals and focused on the story of her demented pursuit of a British army lieutenant named Albert Pinson. Pinson had proposed to Adèle, but she turned him down. Later, she changed her mind, but by then he had moved on, literally, with his regiment to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Adèle told her parents she was going to London, and set off to Canada to win him back.
Adèle is widely understood to have suffered from erotomania, also known as de Clérambault’s syndrome, and schizophrenia. After spending several years in Canada stalking Pinson, she followed his regiment to Barbados. A Barbadian woman found her wandering the streets talking to herself, wrote to her family, then accompanied her back to France. Victor Hugo then had his daughter committed to an asylum for the rest of her life. We know better now than to romanticize mental illness, but Adèle’s insanity has a way of exposing the double standards and hypocrisy of the era—those of her father, the Great Man, especially.
Whatever her actual diagnosis, in her mind (Adjani/Truffaut’s) Adèle was a Byronic hero who needed her life to be a story with meaning; a passionate adventure. She set out, quite literally, on a voyage of discovery, or recovery, to get the boy back. The boy was platonically beautiful, distant, remote, indifferent. The boy was a symbol just out of reach. The boy was perfect, ideal. Her decision to follow Pinson and to persevere in her devotion to him was doubtless a crazy decision, but—at least as portrayed by Truffaut—it was also an aesthetic decision, an ethical decision, in keeping with the romantic spirit of the age. She was in it for the feels, for the “unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals,” to quote the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Which totally spoke to me, because I was in it for the feels, too. I was in everything for the feels—for the sublimity, the transcendence, for the aesthetic transport, for the truth and beauty that drove my every fleetingly sublime, absurd, doomed decision. Adèle, c’était moi. Obsessive, hysteric, seeker-of-the-sublime type, weirdo. My very favorite scene in the movie, the part that spoke to me the most, was near the very end, in Barbados, when Pinson decides to finally deal with Adèle. She is walking down a dusty street in a black cape, her eyes staring blankly ahead and hair wildly disheveled. He walks up to her and does what she’s been longing for him to do for years—he says her name. She walks right past him, unseeing. She doesn’t even recognize him. He’s completely blotted out by the image in her head.
In the movies, as in the popular narrative in general, a boy who does this is a hero and a girl who does this is a stalker. She is a bunny boiler. Standing on the edge of a windy bluff in Guernsey overlooking the turbulent ocean, clutching her journal, Adèle immortalizes herself in her own mind, as literary heroes have always done; she declares to herself and the camera, “This incredible thing, that a young girl should step over the ocean, leave the old world for the new world to rejoin her lover; this thing will I accomplish.”
It’s a remarkable statement and sentiment, even if she ultimately doesn’t accomplish it—though not for lack of trying. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar make the case for madness as feminist protest, subversion, and resistance. The madwoman, they say, serves as “the author’s double, and image of her own anxiety and rage” toward a culture that oppresses her. But Adèle is the nineteen-year-old daughter of the greatest of Great Men in the nineteenth century. The fact that she believes that she can accomplish this incredible thing, that she thinks this narrative is available to her at all, is how you know she is crazy.
Camille and Adèle were artists in an era of high gender anxiety. The fear of “unnatural” women was high, as it was in the 1980s, as it is as I write this, in 2016. Women’s behavior was strictly delimited and policed. To react to the limits in frustration or anger was to get labeled hysterical—female madness comes from the womb. It was believed to be a reproductive ailment. Adèle was thirty-four years older than Camille, but they were contemporaries and could conceivably have met. Bruno Nuytten, who directed Camille Claudel, once told the New York Times, “At one point, we considered having a scene where Camille would meet Adèle H. at a party, and say, ‘I think she’s going crazy.’ Luckily, we came to our senses.” I think it would have been glorious, actually. They could have both used a friend who understood them, who could relate. Adèle could have mentored Camille. Camille could have used a mentor who wasn’t also her lover and a national symbol and the most famous sculptor in France.
There’s a decadent glamour to falling apart, but not everyone can afford it. At the time of Camille Claudel, McLean Hospital was already known as the most aristocratic of all the psychiatric hospitals, and it was beginning to acquire a reputation as the most literary as well. It was the nuthouse to the poetry stars. The poet Robert Lowell, with whom Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton both studied, had done several stints there, and Sexton was jealous of Plath’s stay. “If only I could get a scholarship to McLean,” she confessed to a friend. Plath was well aware of the appeal. “I must write [something] about a college girl suicide,” she wrote in her journal after reading some mental-health articles in Cosmopolitan magazine. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff,” she wrote. “I’m a fool if I don’t relive, recreate it.”1
That line of Plath’s makes me cringe, probably because I recognize it as the kind of thing I might have written in a journal, or a variation on the kind of thing I did write. The girl writer and her relationship to the marketplace are complex. What identity is hot now, which hallway should you choose? The fixation on crazy-girl artists makes me uncomfortable, too. It is such a cliché, after all, so mopey and indulgent, so irritatingly girly. When have feminine genius and madness not been linked?
This may explain why, near the beginning of Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the two years she spent as a teenage mental patient, she describes her compliance with the doctor’s decision that she should be institutionalized as though it were nothing at all. She’d recently tried to kill herself with aspirin but changed her mind. She’d been picking at a pimple on her chin. The doctor, whom she’d never met before, said she looked like she needed a rest. Within fifteen minutes she was in a cab on her way to McLean. “What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me off to the nuthouse?” Kaysen asks, and you wonder. Such is her detachment that she muses on possible justifications: It was 1967. Kids were acting crazy. Maybe the doctor was trying to protect her, or to spare her parents some tragic outcome. Still. “I wasn’t a danger to society. Was I a danger to myself?” Maybe she was just a victim of society’s low tolerance for deviant behavior, she thinks. Maybe she was sane in an insane world. Maybe it felt in some way like an honor, or an opportunity. What’s striking is the sense of inevitability. She moves through the scene as if in a trance, a hypnotized heroine sleepwalking toward her doom, a spindle-sedated Sleeping Beauty, a vacant-eyed anorexic model on a catwalk. In 1967, a girl who was made miserable by the gender role she was expected to play was a girl who was crazy, sick, glamorous, cool.
On the other hand, maybe what attracts us aren’t the stories of falling apart so much as the stories of self-creation. The falling apart stuff is just a byproduct, a hazard of the trade. Maybe what I loved about Camille Claudel was what she created out of what she smashed to bits. How did a bourgeois girl become an artist and a woman? What was the female equivalent of the Great Man? If it didn’t exist, why not? Who said it didn’t? Who sa
id it couldn’t? What were the conditions that made it so hard? Rodin was the image Claudel identified with and against which she defined herself. Scott was this image for Zelda. A woman could not be a great artist and have a traditional marriage—not unless her husband was a Leonard Woolf. One boyfriend I had in college used to joke, “Only one artist in the family,” meaning not me. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now. There was always something self-annihilating in the act of loving, for a girl with creative aspirations—always—but far more then than now. The message, invariably, was that youthful passions lead to middle-age breakdowns, so choose your institution wisely. Marriage or the nuthouse. One or the other. It started to dawn on me that it wasn’t that I was attracted to stories about girls who went mad, I was attracted to stories about girls with ambitions who wound up institutionalized. Getting locked up was not the result of adventure, it was the price you paid for adventure, it was your punishment. I had mistaken correlation for causation. Rookie mistake.
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