Sometimes What is Right in Art is Sad
Susie Anderson on Siri Hustvedt
I write a lot about art. Initially I was a sad poet who wrote love poems and wrote essays about art. Now I write love poems about art, and the sadness is implicit. But what is the sadness? It’s in the longing, the looking. It’s in the distance from when something was first seen. I don’t mean to imply that all memories are sad. Even the ones that used to hurt tend to soften with age. Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (2003), says it better than I can:
I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.
What I Loved is one of the only books I’ve read multiple times in my adult life. It’s the first book that comes to mind when I answer the question of favourites. I’ve bought three copies of it in my lifetime, yet only one remains in my possession because the first and second copies I owned have been thrust upon other people, with an emphatic foreword about how big an impact it’s had on me. I think favourites and what we love are intrinsically linked, that favourites are the things that we love the most. There is the feeling of loving a book, a piece of art or a person, and then there are the qualities that make it into the thing that you love, the qualities that make it a favourite. But can you look at something and appreciate it just for what it is, not what it reminds you of? Or does it always have to relate to a memory of a time or place? My reading of this book and its place on my shelf is a reflexive experience of favourites, love, art and life; the act of writing this essay reignites it all.What I Loved follows the friendship between art critic Leo Hertzberg and artist Bill Wechlser as it evolves and endures over three decades. Spanning from the seventies to the nineties in New York, Hertzberg and Wechlser’s friendship blossomed at a time when apartments in the Bowery were still financially attainable for unknown artists. Hustvedt uses art and everyday objects (a knife, envelopes, Grimm’s fairy tales, children’s toys) as symbols that imply deeper intimacies between the two men, as well as between their wives, girlfriends and children. They meet in the sometimes real, always fake art world of New York in 1979, which becomes more thrilling to the reader and increasingly surreal to Hertzberg as he ages, and especially as his eyesight grows worse and his perceptions of the real world become more dreamlike.
Augmented by Hustvedt’s fascinations with the woman’s place in art history and psychoanalysis, this novel is dense, yet due to its pace you never feel as if you are bogged down by the discussions of hysteria, art theory or psychoanalysis as they unfold alongside the action. What I Loved is also filled with subplots of fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, and their psychological interpretations, but it's Hustvedt’s knowing command of what motivates us to love—as mediated through Leo Hertzberg—that I remember most vividly. Hustvedt charts Bill’s ascent to art-stardom with perfect caricatures of Art People and university intellectuals and arrives at the grungy art world of the late nineties that Bill’s child Mark enters as he comes of age. Though the retelling of their friendship’s beginning is a charming snapshot of time, it's Leo’s return to the questions of why we love and what we love that enthralls me.
Since I first read it in 2014, I’ve recommended What I Loved repeatedly, to various friends, lovers and colleagues. Structured in three acts, it is extremely difficult to write about this book without giving away one of the major plot points. All I can say is that everything before that devastating moment is imbued with yearning for happier times. A slow tension mounts through the first act, with Leo’s melancholic retelling of how he met Bill, his first wife Lucille, and how the two couples end up having children within six months of each other. But Lucille and Bill’s marriage ends while Mark is still a toddler, and the young, beautiful student Violet takes her place as Bill’s new wife, a position she asserts through a series of sexually charged letters that she delivers by hand to his studio in the Bowery.
At the start of the second act, a sudden, tragic event provides some relief from the nostalgia of Leo’s retelling of how these two couples came to be. Because of his meandering reflections in the first act, it feels somehow inevitable that Leo’s child Matthew should die unexpectedly while the group is on their annual family holiday. The symbolism and imagery around Grimm’s fairy tales begin leaking into Bill’s art practice after the tragedy, a poignant ode to the lonely child-figure in paintings that Matthew created. Before he died, the latter was inspired by his so-called Uncle Bill to paint, and created a recurring character Dave, who was always pictured alone apart from a cat called Durango. When Leo suggests he paint a friend for Dave, Matthew says painting ‘doesn’t work that way, you have to feel what’s right, and sometimes what’s right in art is sad.’
While Bill’s career reaches new heights after Matthew’s death, Leo’s marriage to Erica disintegrates. The third act revolves around Mark’s troubled adolescence, and Leo finds himself chasing him halfway across the United States. Now 17, Mark has fallen in with the wrong crowd. They are led by Teddy Giles, a mysterious young artist who has shot to fame with his shocking installations and performance artworks. Leo visits Giles’s accommodation on the hunt for Mark, described as a horror version of Warhol’s Factory, as he observes Mark’s waif-like girlfriend drifting in and out of consciousness. What began as a reflection on love, psychotherapy and art quickly becomes a tense thriller as Leo—charged by an unwavering dedication to his now deceased friend, Mark becoming a proxy for the son he’d lost—embarks on a scavenger hunt of sorts. Objects and paintings from the boys’ childhood homes are stolen and turn up as talismans and symbols in Giles’s art. These scenes perfectly capture the fear of an old man grasping at the last vestiges of his youth, especially as he grapples with his gradual irrelevance in the New York art scene: Leo is made to feel increasingly redundant in the gender nonconforming, genre-defying art world that both young men inhabit. Leo is perplexed by what he sees, upset by what he doesn’t understand. He finds himself unable to come to terms with his loss, wondering which boy feels more like his son. As the book concludes, his grief is still palpable, and he muses about the ghosts of lost love that followed him through his life, and the art that united them all.
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Art is how and why the friendship between these two men began. Leo first came across Bill Wechsler’s art in a group show at a small gallery in SoHo in 1979. Nonplussed by the other works in the show (‘thin minimalist works that didn’t interest me’) he is drawn to ‘Self Portrait’. What I Loved opens with a long reflection on the contents of this painting: it shows a woman sitting with her face turned away from the canvas, another woman’s shoe leaving the frame and a very small yellow NYC cab, with the shadow of the person who depicted it enveloping the first woman. Leo debates its meaning, wondering if the shadow is Lucille or Violet. He also contemplates the idea of the self in general. Given that it is painted by a man, yet only depicts women, how indeed could it be a ‘self portrait’? And if the painter is out of frame, then where is the self located? I see ‘Self Portrait’ as an artistic rendering of the feeling of new love, of a woman who is just coming into full view but slightly turned away from the object of her affections—their relationship is still full of mystery. This is the Hustvedt of it all: her male characters are given more insight into relationships and intimacy than they deserve, whereas her female characters are bit players in the lives of men. In her novels, male characters often express unrealistic self-awareness through their art, or they offer a critique (at least in the case of ‘Self Portrait’) of masculinity that belies their personality. This is more explicitly addressed in Hustvedt’s excellent 2014 novel The Blazing World, where a little known late-career female artist uses a younger male as a proxy for her work, and it is through this that she skyrockets to fame.
From Leo’s description of ‘Self Portrait’, it appears that Hustvedt is making a statement about a wide-eyed man. He is out of frame, looking with optimistic hunger at his new lover yet only present as a shadow looming over her. In his eyes she is beautiful, mostly because she is not yet fully known. This new lover can see that her position has only recently been vacated, as a small loafer exits the frame; the painter’s shadow dominates with a sense of foreboding as he homes in on the object of his desire. With her back turned, the mirror becomes a device for her to see him—and us—looking at her. ‘Self Portrait’ is one interpretation of how we love: you try to see someone for who they are, but they can turn away at any moment, with everything they feel and know about you turning away along with them. Seismic shifts of intention, moving the power of love through microcosms. It is generous of Hustvedt to attribute this work to a male painter. In my opinion, the notion that a man could have created this work of art is quite unlikely.
It becomes clear that the woman whose foot exits the frame of ‘Self Portrait’ belongs to Bill’s first wife Lucille: she is a woman on her way out of something. Lucille is a poet who speaks in a lyrical, philosophical way, expressing herself by distance. She remains an aloof curiosity throughout the whole book, half a woman and specifically half a mother, as her child is shunted carelessly between Bill in New York and her in Houston, as she embarks on a year-long university posting there. Leo recounts a sequence with all the women in his life, beginning with Violet who expresses frustration at being a stepmother, that no matter what she does ‘Lucille is always there’. The next time Leo and Erica see Lucille in person, it is at an art event after she has moved back to New York. She turns up looking vivacious and uninhibited, yet too drunk, so Leo takes her home. She gradually sobers up and after a conversation about love where she ‘ties herself into linguistic knots’, they sleep together. Leo worries whether Lucille was trying to get closer to Bill by sleeping with him, or if she is using sex to take something from his friendship with her ex-husband. The reader begins to sense that Leo may have been trying to become closer to Violet, through the woman who was married to Bill first. So while Hustvedt never makes this clear, this is the moment when Leo starts to ask himself: what is it that I love?
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Love is the kind of drama that excites me on an existential level. I am always looking beyond a piece of art to find the place where love has seeped in. I spend hours recalling times where I felt intensely connected to someone, or a relationship that will change the course of my future—being exactly in that moment or close to it, trying to remember when something started. Though the title What I Loved is simple, and comes across as almost flippant, it evokes Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995), which wonders if it is possible to return to the place of absolute commencement. And so I wonder: where are the origins of love? Exactly what is that moment of beginning?
Reading this novel for the third time, I am still trying to pinpoint the ‘what’ of the title. What was loved, and by whom? If Hustvedt is referring to one of the men, then did Bill really love either Lucille or Violet? What about his child, Mark? Did he love painting? And was Leo’s enduring connection to Bill, Violet and Mark a way to deflect his grief around losing his own child? I also ask myself: what about the women? Does it matter who or what they loved?
But this book, with all its horrors, distance and intensity is also a device I use to work out who—or indeed, what—it is that I love. Giving someone a copy of What I Loved is my way of saying: ‘This is my favourite book. You are my favourite person. You are what I love.’ Every piece of poetry I write expresses moments in love. To say ‘you are what I love’, from a universal ‘I’ to the universal ‘you’. To me, Hustvedt’s book sends a message of love—in the past, present and future—just like this essay does. Towards the end of the novel, Leo tries to sum up his friendship with Bill, and between the women and children in their lives:
I invoke ghosts that can't satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory. Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. Writing is a way to trace hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.
Long after a relationship had ended, my ex-lover and I started an email correspondence. We were living in different cities, and with that distance creating a safe sense of lofty romanticism, I recommended he read What I Loved. Already predisposed to philosophical musings, he wrote me a short essay in return, saying it had become his new favourite book. It was a time in my life where I said the kind of things like, ‘I think we will always be able to write to each other like this.’ I had always hoped I would experience the kind of intense love that others would envy, and Leo’s early description of Bill and Violet summarises the longing I craved:
I could only guess at what had passed between them, but I sometimes felt that their intimacy had a courage and fierceness that I had never known, and the awareness of this lack in myself made me feel vaguely restless. The feeling lodged itself in my mouth as a dry taste, and I suffered from a longing that nothing could satisfy.
We tried to see one another in person again, over the years, but I found that his smell had changed entirely, and the intensity we experienced in person was no longer captivating. What we were seeing was an idea of each other, and the idea of who we could be if we were loved by each other as we were, but not as we are now. He most recently wrote to me after seeing my name in the newspaper and asked if I had moved back to Melbourne. I often teeter on the edge of asking myself if it is worth meeting up with him for a coffee. Inevitably I decide that it is not, and instead I am writing.
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Works Cited
✷ Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003).
✷ Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics 25: 2, 1995, pp. 9-63.
Susie Anderson uses words to evoke compassion and encourage resistance. Her poetry and nonfiction is widely published in print and online. She is a Black&Write! 2021 Fellow and is currently working on a poetry manuscript. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria, she grew up in Horsham, Victoria and currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne.