The Blazing World

"I unabashedly love Harriet Burden, if anything because she sees herself very firmly as an artist and she’s mad as hell that the rest of the world doesn’t. So much of the narrative is built upon that anger. Harriet is a widow in her 60s and, when we meet her, her husband, who was a really influential New York art dealer, has just passed away. She has made installations for most of her adult life, she’s practised her art since she was in her 20s, but what she’s spent most of her days, most of her life doing, has been ignored by the art community. Not only because of who her husband was and because she’s only just emerging from his huge and flamboyant shadow, but also – she is convinced, I think rightly so – because she’s a woman. I should say that I’m not a visual artist – I just don’t have the aptitude – but I have friends who are and I always listen with great interest to them when they talk about that world, the world of galleries and getting your work placed. Women tend to encounter some very specific difficulties, and we find that with Harriet. And so, in her 60s, Harriet decides that she is going to try an experiment – she calls it her ‘masks’. Exactly, and so she launches three separate works and for each of these works she recruits a man to pose as the creator and to claim it as his own, do the interviews etc. The work is presented under his name. The plan backfires when, on her last project, the man – and again the reader is never quite sure what happened, we only get Harry’s view – refuses to remove the mask; he refuses to admit that it isn’t his work. The structure is very interesting – it’s told from multiple perspectives, from those of her children, her lover, her friends. And it’s also pieced together from Harriet’s journals, in a way that makes her similar to Sharon in my novel. In all of these books, there’s this contrast between the private space in which you feel free to work and produce honest work, and the more public space where you feel more confined, by your gender or your class or how others see you, and you feel a bit gagged. Harriet and Sharon both find refuge in private journaling. “Women lead lives of suppressed chances, lives full of roads not taken because they weren’t really an option” In part, Harriet’s story is told from the perspective of a biographer, Professor Hess, who is writing a study of ‘Harriet Burden: woman artist’, and he is basically doing detective work with her journals – which are funny and well-written and brightly coloured and alive – and he’s trying to find missing pages, missing details, and so on. There’s this portion of the novel when Harriet says it’s no wonder that the overwhelming percentage of patients with multiple personality disorder are women. It’s because women lead lives of suppressed chances, lives full of roads not taken because they weren’t really an option. And so women foster in themselves these little intricate lives in which they can exist on other planes and it’s all because, in their reality, those lives are not possible for them. I was reading an interview with Siri Hustvedt and I was really interested to hear about why and how she had created Harriet in the way she had, particularly when it comes to her age. Her being in her 60s seats her very firmly in second wave feminism – she would’ve been in her teens in the 1950s and ‘60s and her early 20s in the late 1960s. It’s a very specific time because gender roles were so much more rigid then – I mean, if you were coming of age in the 1950s and you went to your doctor to complain that you were having period cramps, the doctor would say that it was all in your head. That seems very telling. And so, after a lifetime of this suffocation, Harriet finds a kind of freedom in the private act of journaling and also, in the public sphere, she finds a kind of liberation in wearing masks, in passing as a man, or rather, passing off her work as that of a man. If you contrast that with Sharon and Mel in my book, they’re ‘80s babies, so they’re very much products of third wave feminism – they find their own sort of liberation with one another. They have, with their friendship, established a neutral zone where a lot of the social forces that would otherwise dictate their identities and how they present themselves and their work don’t exist. The normal parametres are shut out. Their studio is a private space just for them; each person is the other’s audience – it’s just them and their art. So, really, in both cases it’s the story of how making art becomes part of a protective mechanism for these women. And, with Harriet, we then see Professor Hess – and we’re never quite sure if it’s a he or she – trying to navigate through 60+ years of self-protective mechanisms. If I’m looking at it as an optimist, that Mel and Sharon can write so brazenly about themselves denotes a certain amount of progress. The brunt of their material comes from their lives and their histories, in part because their pasts have become stories that they tell to one another. So, in the little world that they have created for themselves, their own lives make up a kind of alternative canon that they share access to. “A woman can be the visual focus of a piece of work, there for the gratification of the beholder, but if the woman claims ownership it’s somehow harder for many to swallow” The fact that, with each other, they feel emboldened enough to own these stories, to take them and put their own faces to them, or, at least, a mask of themselves that they have created, is a sign of progress. That shows ownership of a voice that is very much female, I think – the story that they choose to put out into the world isn’t an easy one, but it’s the one that they have chosen and so they do it. As a writer and as a reader, I always feel buoyed when I encounter really great memoirs by women, or other stories about women artists – women who choose the story they want to tell and do it on their own terms. It’s always a surprise kick in the stomach to see that complaint still being so disproportionately directed at women. I guess a big part of it is that women were for so long, and still are to an extent, objects; a woman can be the visual focus of a piece of work, there for the gratification of the beholder, but if the woman claims ownership for said piece of work it’s somehow harder for many people to swallow. Exactly – and that’s why I was so keen to choose what seems like a bit of a niche theme, basically ‘women making things’. That sense of ownership makes me so glad when I encounter it, as a reader, as a writer and as a viewer; it makes me so glad to see those stories. They give me a sense of hope, and I like to sink down in that and keep reading."