Literary / Historical Fiction
Date Published: 09-25-2202
Publisher: Woodpecker Lane Press
In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the life of Alice Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era, and second-wave feminism. She worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to live life on her own terms, and above all to paint.
Hard WhiteSelf Portrait (1980)
I start with wood and canvas, the wood assembled into a stretcher, the canvas stretched over the wood frame then primed with a ground of white gesso (chalk, glue): hard white, I call it. Hard white because it doesn’t allow for errors or a change of mind. If you go back and re-draw something, the ghost of your earlier idea is there for everyone to see. You can try to erase what you drew, but the ghost image will still be there, so why bother? You have to just work over it. But I like that. It keeps you honest. And it’s like life — our errors and changes of mind, our detours, our wrong turns are what make us who and what we are. Some painters like the canvas stretched loose; I like it tighter, with a little more play, a springiness under my brush. I begin with drawing. Drawing is the essence of painting. Drawing is seeing; seeing is the beginning of knowing the world. Those people who look at Jackson’s work and say, “My two-year-old could do better than that” know nothing. They don’t know how to see. They don’t understand the structure he’s created, the layers he’s applied — the same way life applies layers to us all, gradually shaping us into the people we become — so that each of his paintings builds to a symphony, that’s what makes them sing. In the same way, each of my paintings is layer on layer of knowing, knowing learned through hard experience, knowing myself, knowing the individual I’m painting. Insight is another word for knowing. Earned is another word for learned.Beginning (1900)I am born with the century: 28 January 1900, in Merion Square. Merion Square is in Pennsylvania, which is a square-ish sort of state, and during the time I live there I learn the people who live in Pennsylvania are square-ish sorts of people. “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence” is the state motto. Just try to find any excitement there.January, the month that I am born, is a monochrome month in Merion Square: there is snow on the ground, and overhead the sky is a white-ish shade of gray. The trees are bare, their black branches snaking up into the dull sky like veins. Some days are brilliantly sunny and clear, but many are overcast and smudgy. There are six people in my family when I am born: Mother, Father, Hartley, Albert, Lillian, and me. After I am born my eldest brother, Hartley, dies of diphtheria. He is eight years old when he dies. This leaves a hole in my family. It is there through my childhood, a dark, blank hole in the background of family life. It is not mentioned often, but it is present behind many conversations. When I am two another brother, George, arrives, but the darkness remains. My first memory is the color red. It is the color of the walls of the living room in our house. Later, Mother tells me, “Nonsense. It’s impossible you could remember that. We moved from that house when you were six months old.” But she’s wrong: I remember it — a red like bruised cherries, like the purpling sky when sunset slips deeper into night. Bruised walls and a family with a hole in it is where I begin. We move away from the house with red walls, and then we move again until we finally settle in a bigger, nicer house in Colwyn, where people live in square houses and doze away their days. The air in Colwyn is thick, and time there moves as slowly as a deep, sluggish, muddy river does. Father works for the Pennsylvania Railroad; this may be why we live near the railway tracks. Father is descended from opera singers. He turned his back on them and embraced the gray and the dull, and yet, when Mother says, “None of us will ever be remembered,” he says, “Well, I’m not so sure about Alice.” Maybe he recognizes in me whatever he turned away from in the opera singers, some tongue of flame, some spirit of revolt. At any rate, it tells me Father sees me differently than Mother does. His comment suggests he and I share a connection I do not have with Mother, and perhaps he understands me in ways she does not. Mother’s family is full of stories; stories were what she brought to her marriage. In the stories, her family is populated by signers of the Declaration of Independence, by Revolutionary War heroes, by a rich liquid-soap magnate. She brought many stories to the marriage, but not much money, only tales of former wealth. Wealthy ghosts (supposedly wealthy, Mother says they were wealthy) hover in the background of our family. It seems my parents are in thrall to those old stories, those old ghosts — my mother certainly is. There are standards those ghosts feel must be maintained, Mother tells us. She speaks for the ghosts, her voice lodges in my head, transmitting their opinions: a lady must have clean fingernails, clean hair brushed smooth every day, a lady needs to be clean in thought, word, and deed. A lady always sits with her legs crossed at the ankles, and she never touches her face. So many rules. A lady could spend her whole life remembering and following the rules, and at the end of her life where would she be? Sitting inside — ankles neatly crossed, fingernails clean, face untouched — and she would discover life had raced past and left her behind. At least, this is how I see it. This causes some friction between me and Mother. I try to do what she wants, to be the ladylike girl she wants, but it never works; despite my best efforts, my fingernails are dirty, my hair is messy, my clothes are stained and grubby — how they end up that way is a mystery to me — and the part of the room I share with Lily is messy; I move too fast, bump into things, bruise myself. Careless, careless, careless, Mother says. It seems to me, when Mother tells me all these rules, the ghosts have a lot to say about how I should behave, but not too much to say about how my brothers should behave. (Lily is not part of the ghosts’ conversations; for some reason there is none of this friction between her and Mother, Lily needs none of the guidance that I do. Mother and I are like flint and tinder, between us we create sparks that flare into fire; Lily and Mother are like two voices linked in harmony. I think of Mother and Lily as two different voices for one person — but I have to admit there are instances Lily surprises me. Sometimes when Mother has been harsh with me Lily takes me to the bedroom we share and reads me a fairytale.) The brothers are allowed to come and go as they wish, they are not required to help with the housework. Or maybe Mother missed those messages from the ghosts.The house we live in is really two houses, which share a dividing wall. The building is built of brick and each house has two windows on the top floor and a roof sloping down towards the back away from the street. The neighbors live in their house on the other side of the shared wall. Our house is not big, but it is fine, and inside it is nice: there are heavy drapes that muffle the sounds from outside and make the light in the front room murky; there is a breakfront with Mother and Father’s good china that is only used on special occasions. There is a Tiffany lamp that hangs over the table in the dining room; there are books; the furniture is solid and shiny. We are not rich, but we are not poor, and according to Mother, we have wealth in our background, and we may find ourselves wealthy again, so we need to know how to be it when our fortune arrives.The houses stand in what was once a pear orchard. Sometimes on a hot summer evening I think I can smell the pear blossoms, or the memories of the pear blossoms: pear blossom ghosts. If our house were not attached to the other it would sit on its own with a lawn like an emerald carpet unrolling all around it. Instead, both houses are crammed onto a small lot, and each has its own tiny yard. The house feels squashed in place; it feels cramped inside.Behind the house run the railway tracks. Sometimes when she is doing housework Mother hums, “The railroad comes through the middle of the house and the trains are all on time.” Every time a train goes past — rattling the walls, shaking the china in the china cabinet so the plates clink against each other — it’s a reminder there is a larger world out there, past the town limits, maybe in Philadelphia, which is not far away, maybe beyond the square border of Pennsylvania entirely, a bigger, more varied, more exciting world than Colwyn. Things are happening in that world, things are changing there while I sit in our house — dark, the curtains drawn against the neighbors’ prying eyes (Mother is convinced they spy on us), cramped with the collections of heavy flatware, and porcelain plates, and bowls — or in a schoolroom, with my legs crossed at the ankles, following the rules.
About the Author
Melanie Dugan is the author of Bee Summers (“a carefully wrought portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life.” Brenda Schmidt, Quill & Quire), Dead Beautiful (“the writing is gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance (“heartwarming, amusing and…downright sexy,” Midwest Book Review), and Sometime Daughter (“Stunning debut,” Kingston Whig-Standard). Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards, including the CBC Literary award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
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