Second Place

 

This is the first of two books about artists recommended to me after I performed a reading of my then work-in-progress-novel which features an Australian artist. 

Second Place is a strange little work form a well-reputed author, Rachel Cusk, with ten previous novel publications, as well as works of non-fiction. The plot is summarized on the back cover: “A woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives … But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence soon twists the human patterns of her secluded household”. The Afterword tells us that Second Place “owes a debt” to Mable Dodge Luhnan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos, a text that deals with the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. In other words, this book leans on another, and the shared theme is the desired and then regretted presence of the artist figure in one’s second home. (Like having an artist-in-residence in your own backyard, complete with ego, vision, and live-in-lover).

Cusk tells the story in the first person in the character of M, a middle-aged woman who has retired into the countryside in rural France with a second husband, Tony – a local man who seems as part of the landscape as the coastal terrain. M is never aware of Tony purchasing an item of clothing (he wears clothes from his adopted father and grandfather). Surely that alone would make a warm-blooded woman restless. M’s daughter irritates her, too, mainly due to her slavish deference to her husband Kurt, who M notices puts her down with little criticisms delivered “in a quiet voice”. Despite their relative youth, the daughter and husband are the “image of middle-aged dullness” (p. 79). This, too, might drive a woman to seek the presence of a famous landscape painter and hope for some indefinable spark to enter her life.

The Lawrence figure is an artist referred to as L. He’s seen better days. Once he was famous and vetted and exhibited – but on arrival he seems rather remote. For M. he still holds a mysterious attraction, as she explains to Jeffers (who hears L’s tale throughout the novel in a deliberate tick of the clock). M says, “I loved Tony and I loved Justine and loved L, Jeffers, even though the time I spent with him was so often bitter and painful, because he drew me with the cruelty of his rightness closer to the truth” (p. 134). 

Now, the fault may be mine, but I do feel that this love is stated rather than developed in the novel, and as the story is told in a matter-of-fact tone, any metaphysical attraction or connection is implied rather than demonstrated for the reader on the page. Later in the novel, L suffers a stroke and is hospitalized, returning to the farm after a stay in hospital with a “sliding kind of step … bent legs and hunched over shoulders” (p. 174). It is clear L’s companion (Brett) isn’t built to be a nurse, as someone who had “never taken care of anyone or anything in her life” (p. 176). M’s final words in the novel (before a letter from L ends things) echoes around the idea of passionate feelings and moments of revelation, recorded in L’s night paintings: “The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. Do you think, Jeffers?” (p. 207).

This Jeffers says, “Yes, quite possibly.” This is the Second Place: the alter-ego is the artist who seeks the truth, rather than one of these people who either just exist, or who create without the heart to do so truthfully.

Onto the second book – and in the meantime, if you are after a book which fully explores the ego of the modernist artist in full flight, I recommend Patrick White’s The Vivisector (a painter who whose stroke only draws him closer to the mysterious ability to capture the unreal).