The Blazing World: A Novel Read online

  He asks about Anton, too.

  But Big Venus belongs to Anton Tish, I said. Dear Dr. Fertig, without Anton she would not exist. It is a work that came into being between him and me because it was made by a boy, an enfant terrible, not by me, old lady artist Harry Burden with two adult children and a grandchild and a bank account.

  Dr. Fertig pointed out that the money is rarely simple.

  Anton gets the money from sales. That is the deal.

  I close my eyes. I close my eyes. It is my time now. It is my time, and I will not let them take it away from me. The Greeks knew that the mask in the theater was not a disguise but a means of revelation. And now that I have started I can feel the winds behind me, not because Big Venus is so much—cynical fun—but because I see what they gobble down and with the right face I can do more. Nota bene.

  And yet, Anton says she is beautiful in the gallery space asleep, that she is better than I imagine because we couldn’t see her so well when we assembled her. I have not dared to go yet, but maybe I will peek in from outside and look through the window at my big doll, my first success.

  Nobody knows but me and Anton and Dr. Fertig. Edgar is suspicious. The other little assistants know that I paid for her, but they believe the lady is blown straight from Anton’s imagination. One of them, with a preposterous name, Falling Leaves or Autumn Sunshine, no doubt the offspring of New Age fruitcakes, seems to have glued herself to Anton—an unheimlich little creature, very pretty with blond curls and poppy-colored lips, and strange, large, knowing blue eyes.

  Speaking of winds, where is the Barometer? I looked in his room. He is usually curled up in his sleeping bag by now with his eye mask and earphones on to keep out the pressure so he can rest from his labors of feeling the weather. I hope the poor man hasn’t burst and been taken to a hospital. Although Rachel insists medicine can help him, I know that he doesn’t want the poison pellets the doctors give him, which mute his gift, and it is a gift, strange to say. Sometimes when I listen to him talk, I begin to feel the barometric variations myself—the ups and downs in my own bodily register—a hum in the system.

  I have another guest: Phineas Q. Eldridge, not his real name. He was born John Whittier; he disavowed the name when he emerged from the closet. The new man disconcerted his sister and homophobic brother-in-law, but his mother, whom he e-mails often and visits once a year in North Carolina, has stayed true. Mother and sister come on the sly to see him at a hotel. Phineas is a performance artist; he performs in “half drag,” half man, half woman, half white, half black, cut straight down the middle, and the two parts of him have conversations onstage. His father was white; his mother is black, so he knows something about halves. The couple is mostly in conflict, apparently; it would not be entertaining otherwise, but they also blend at times, mingle and mix, which I find compelling. He has invited me to watch him next week, and I am excited about it and just a bit anxious as well because I hope he is good. Phineas Q. (the Q, he says, can stand for anything one desires—Quentin or Query or Querulous or Question or just Q) is highly articulate and, although I haven’t seen him much because he works at night, I have come to hope he will saunter in and offer one of his tart comments about my work. He called my Felix dolls “ambrosial runts.” He also said my Empathy Box could do with some empathy. That hurt me, but he was right. I have begun over with mirrors. He also made reference to the building as a “flophouse” and advocates rules, organization, someone to run it. I can’t just take in any drug addict or sleazeball that knocks on my door. He is right about this. Last week I housed a girl in pigtails whose bum had been squeezed so tightly into a pair of red leather shorts, I thought of sausages in casing. It’s possible she turned a couple tricks before I asked her to leave. There were two grim-faced men who came and went in a single night. If they had sex with Red Shorts, it wasn’t happy sex.

  There is sadness in Phineas, a wound that lies beneath the brisk, bright persona. I don’t know how old he is, mid-thirties maybe, but I am drawn to that doleful piece of him. In unguarded moments, a pensive expression changes his features. It never happens when he is looking at me, but when he pauses, when he turns away. Once I asked him, Are you okay?

  And he said, No.

  The no made me glad. Aren’t we always saying, Yes, I’m fine?

  Yes, and you?

  Fine, fine.

  We’re all fine.

  I wish I hadn’t been so fine, so goddamned fine for so many years . . .

  I waited politely for Phineas Q. to tell me why he wasn’t fine, but he didn’t, and I let it go because there is fear in me, a sickening reticence. For as long as I can remember it has been there, lying in wait—a fat, leaden, hideous thing. I don’t want to wake it. If I wake it, the earth will rumble and the walls will crack and fall. Put your finger to your lips, Harry, put your finger to your lips and tiptoe around the thing. Make nice and fine, Harry, as nice and fine as you know how.

  It was there with Felix, too, the thing, but it wasn’t his fault. I understand that now. It was there long before Felix. Let him sleep. Walk softly. Defer. Don’t upset him. He is fragile, fragile and somehow dangerous. Felix always deserves what you don’t. Why? Mysterious feelings: ingrown, automatic, thoughtless. Before words. Under words.

  What is early memory, I ask you?

  It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct.I

  Mine, too.

  The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.II

  Can I rely upon the pictures I see or are they reconfigured to a degree that obscures all sense?

  My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun.III

  I am wild on paper. I am bestial. And then I must hide and, with the thick black crayon, I rub out every line. I blacken the page so they will never see what I have drawn, what I have done.

  Why do I feel there is a secret I carry in my body like an embryo, speechless and unformed, beyond knowing? And why do I feel it might erupt in a great blast if not checked? It must be easy, so easy to fill in that damp, throttling unease with words, to write the disturbance, to write a story to explain the why of it.

  I was in my crib.

  I was standing on the floor.

  The curtains were drawn, and I had to climb onto a chair to pull aside the fabric and look outside into the street.

  I saw his feet in front of the door.

  The memory begins to form itself from the cloud of unknowing. The shapeless takes shape and soon there is a smothered articulation—ominous and meaningful.

  Shame arrives before guilt.

  But there is no going back, Harry. The mind is its own place, and it bears us backward and forward. It has its own architecture of the past that comes from real rooms and real streets, but they are made over and over again in time and now reside within, not without. Once those places were filled with the noise of garbage trucks and sirens and the sentence fragments of chattering pedestrians and the odors of the moving seasons, but the dense visions and clamor and smells have been simplified into interior mental codes grown stiff with words. The future is made of that same stuff—elemental spaces we inhabit with wishes or fears. Why so many fears? There is no single story in that foggy region of childhood to explain you, Harry.

  I think of Bertha, Bertha Pappenheim, alias Anna O.

  It is frightening what we imagine and what we make by imagination.

  She, Anna O., receives Dr. Breuer, the physician who has supposedly cured her, who has used the cathartic method, the first talking cure, but she, Bertha, named it, not he. She named it. In a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1932, Freud provided a coda. And when Breuer comes into the room, Bertha is clasping her belly and writhing in pain. What is the matter? he asks. What has happened? And she says, Now comes Dr. B.’s child.

  It is the thing they have made together. Look at it.

  The good doctor runs in terror.

  The good doc
tor does not run in terror. It is a myth.

  They rewrote her.

  She would rewrite them. In courage.IV

  I dream of Dr. F.

  The suppressed thing. The thing that comes up. She has named it: Dr. B.’s child. It will out.

  Where is the borderland between memory and hallucination?

  We make images spontaneously. They will out.

  For as long as I can remember they have come to me at night before I sleep. They used to frighten me, the horrors of that self-generated cinema, like dreams but not dreams, a threshold reality between waking and sleeping; a limen that should be named, but isn’t. I am not inside the screen but outside, watching their exploits, and I have come to love them. Every night I wait for them. The brutes rise up, fierce and menacing, their teeth bared and their noses leaking pink snot as they lumber over brimming blue hills. They are never still but in constant metamorphosis, mouths become chins, eyes turn into welts, boobs and cocks drop to the ground and molt into new devils or vanish in festering heaps of color. Hair floats behind a disfigured head in curling knots or garlands, but I also see the innocent and the lackadaisical, sweet children and well-formed adults; two dancers fornicate while airborne, and I smile at their rhythmical hips. A tiny man leaps from a cliff, and pure geometries of hard green and red and yellow melt into a riot of running lava. I have seen us all, Maisie and Ethan and Felix and me and my parents and Rachel fleeing past my closed eyelids on the screen, barely recognized but there nevertheless among the parade, as if my mind had retained the reels of an old movie. If only I could transfer those hypnagogic muses into paint or film or little kinetic sculptures. Where do they come from? Why one image and not another? Is it memory transmuted? Where do hallucinations come from in the brain? No one can say.

  I hear the Barometer wheezing in the hall. I’m glad he’s back. I’m not sure where he goes for hours at a time. Proselytizing or schmoozing or just wandering? But I can hear his whistling tubes. Felix wheezed, too. And he coughed. My father coughed. Smokers all. Each man’s cough had/has its own moist rumble or dry rattle. Isn’t it odd that we can recognize a person’s cough, that phlegm loosened in bronchia has an idiosyncratic sound? My madman wheezes and coughs and has begun to scratch imaginary sores, which, with scratching, become real. I offered him a salve. In his notebooks he draws cities on fire and dragons and dervishes and circle upon circle and cryptic symbols and clouds, of course, and rain and snow and hail of various sizes. He has little interest in fair weather; he is my foul-weather friend.

  * * *

  I. The opening sentence of Chapter 11 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  II. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1 (554–55). The words are Satan’s. In Notebook G, Burden notes, “Satan removes his mind from God. Heresy, of course. Hubris, of course. Modern, of course.”

  III. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Little Brown and Co., 1960), no. 754, p. 369.

  IV. Bertha Pappenheim was the real name of Josef Breuer’s patient Anna O., whose case figures in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895). Her symptoms included tics, intense facial pain, loss of vision, memory lapses, and even a temporary inability to speak her mother tongue, German. Breuer’s treatment, along with other methods, included letting his patient talk and tell him stories. Pappenheim coined the name the talking cure in English. In the case study, Anna O.’s story ends with her cure, but the truth is far more complicated. Breuer handed his patient over to a Swiss sanitarium. Pappenheim still suffered from hysterical symptoms, although they were less dramatic than before her treatment with Breuer, and she was addicted to both morphine and chloral hydrate. See A. Hirschmuller, The Life and Work of Josef Breuer: Physiology and Psychoanalysis (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 301–2, and D. Gilhooley, “Misrepresentation and Misreading in the Case of Anna O.,” Modern Psychoanalysis 27, no. 1. After her release from the sanitarium, she was hospitalized three times over the course of the next five years.

  In his letter to Zweig, Freud writes, “What really happened with Breuer’s patient I was able to guess later on, long after a break in our relations, when I suddenly remembered something Breuer had once told me . . . On the evening of the day all her symptoms had been disposed of, he was summoned to the patient again, found her confused and writhing with abdominal cramps. Asked what was wrong with her, she replied, ‘Now Dr. B.’s child is coming!’ ” E. Freud, ed., The Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 67, my italics. From this memory Freud conjectures that Anna O. suffered from a hysterical pregnancy and that the sexual character of those symptoms caused Breuer to flee in fear. Ernest Jones later corroborates this version of events in his biography of Freud, as does Peter Gay in his. These interpretations of the evidence are disputed, however, and Burden appears to be well acquainted with the controversy. “They rewrote her. She would rewrite them. In courage” refers to Pappenheim’s later life as a feminist activist. In 1888, Pappenheim left the haute bourgeois life she had led as an Orthodox Jew in Vienna and traveled throughout Eastern Europe, fighting for and publishing works about the rights of Jewish women. In 1904, she co-founded the League of Jewish Women, which organized health-care facilities, vacation retreats, and youth homes, and offered career training for women. The League was dissolved on November 9, 1938. Many of its leaders were murdered in the camps. Burden may be referring to Pappenheim’s Last Will and Testament, in which she wrote: “If you remember me, bring a little stone, as the silent promise and symbol of the establishment of the idea and mission of women’s duty and women’s joy in serving unceasingly and courageously in life.” E. Loentz, Let Me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2007).

  Rosemary Lerner

  (written statement)

  There is a pronounced tendency in all the arts to mythologize the dead, by which I mean the creation of reductive narratives to explain artists’ lives and works. I have been an art writer for more than forty years and have witnessed this time and time again. The reasons for simplification are often ideological, but sensational biographies can also erase all nuance when they appear to fit a prefigured character and script—tragic hero or heroine, victim, genius. It is helpful to undermine these wooden scenarios. Harriet Burden was not nearly as obscure or unnoticed as she has been made out to be in the stories that are now circulating about her career. Her work was represented in no less than five group shows in the seventies and I, for one, singled her out in a review I wrote for Art in New York in 1976:

  Harriet Burden’s uncanny architectural piece with its slightly askew walls and floors, its emotionally charged figures, pastel palette, and dense use of text lingers in this reviewer’s mind as the work of a brilliant and strikingly independent artist.

  Albeit a minority view, I was not alone. Archie Frame, Beatrice Brownhurst, and Peter Grosswetter all commented favorably on her two one-woman shows, both at major New York galleries. Yes, both dealers let her go, but this is hardly a unique fate. It merely places Harriet Burden among the numerous distinguished visual artists, male and female, who were respected by other artists, received mixed reviews, and didn’t attract big collectors to their work.

  Reviewers of every ilk like to feel they are above a work of art. If it puzzles them or if they are intimidated, they are more than likely to trash it. Many artists are not intellectuals, but Burden was, and her work reflected her wide learning. Her references spanned many fields and were often impossible to track. There was also a literary, narrative quality to her art that many resisted. I am convinced that her knowledge alone acted as an irritant to some reviewers. I once had a conversation with a man who had excoriated her first one-woman show. When I brought up his review and offered a defense of her work, he was hostile. He was not a stupid man and had written well on some artists I admired. He had attacked Burden’s work as confused and naïve, the very opposite, in fact, of what it was. I realized that he had been inca
pable of a fair-minded appraisal because, although he prided himself on his sophistication, the multiple meanings of her carefully orchestrated texts had eluded him, and he had projected his own disorientation onto the work. His last words to me were “I hated it, okay? I just hated it. I don’t give a damn about what she was referring to.” That conversation has stayed with me, not as a story about Harriet Burden so much as a lesson for myself: Beware of the violent response and the sophisms you may use to explain it.

  Then there is the question of sex. It has often taken women longer to gain a hold in the art world than men. The remarkable Alice Neel worked without much attention until she was in her seventies. Louise Bourgeois made a breakthrough with her show at MoMA in 1982. She was seventy. Like Burden, these women were not ignored but gained prominent recognition only late in their careers. During her lifetime the painter Joan Mitchell was known and admired, but it wasn’t until after her death that her place among second-generation abstract expressionists began to grow enormously. Grace Hartigan was the only woman in MoMA’s legendary New American Painting exhibition in 1958–1959. Eva Hesse, who was at Cooper Union only a few years before Burden, died in 1970 at age thirty-four of a brain tumor. She didn’t live to see her star continue to rise or the power of her influence on younger artists. But when she was alive she complained that her work did not receive the serious attention given to the work of her male colleagues, and she was right. There were many reviewers who reviewed her life, not her art. Lee Krasner’s work was subsumed by her husband’s in the eyes of the art world. Jackson Pollock was and is deified as a Romantic hero. A year before Krasner died, a retrospective of her work was mounted, but by then, she said, it was “too late.” Mostly, the art business has been about men. And when it has been about women, it has often been about correcting past oversights. It is interesting that not all, but many women were celebrated only when their days as desirable sexual objects had passed.