Loving Modigliani

Praise for Loving Modigliani What a story Linda Lappin has to tell in the short life and long legend of Amedeo Modigliani, compulsive seducer, dedicated decadent and artist whose vision, like El Greco’s, seemed to warp the very air. But it’s the verve and authority with which Lappin centers her story on the parallel life (and afterlife) of Jeanne Hébuterne, artist and Modigliani’s model and lover, that amplifies the achievement of this scintillating tale, which is also a love story, a ghost story and a treasure hunt through the decades for a lost masterpiece. Through Jeanne’s female gaze the great tapestry of Paris and its fervid art scene is rendered with twice the depth of field and emotional color. The result is a novel of high originality, page-turning pace and a poetic precision so impeccably deployed that the book unfolds like a living, breathing, 3-D spectacle in the reader’s mind. — Don Wallace, author of The French House What is there of Jeanne Hébuterne that truly survives? Does her legacy exist in print, in rumor, in idle or self-interested speculation, in a handful of inherited objects, in artworks of dubious provenance, or in occasional incomplete exhibitions? Loving Modigliani continues the work Linda Lappin began in her novel about Katherine Mansfield, Katherine’s Wish, extending the inquiry into the life of another marginalized woman artist of the Modernist era. This time the scenery is Paris, Montparnasse, and various places in Venice, Rome, and the Côte d’Azur, and the subject is Jeanne, the common-law wife and muse of Modigliani, whose own talent has been ignored and reputation betrayed and mishandled for over the past hundred years. Thoughtfully and with acute observation and imagination, Lappin employs a variety of genres, styles, and subject matters—ghost story, mystery, historical detail, private journal, academic inquiry, and curatorial malfeasance—to recover what there is of Jeanne that we can possibly know. These depictions, along with ambulatory evocations of our favorite city, give us an opportunity to speculate on who in fact she might have been. —Thomas Wilhelmus Ambitious…courageous…compelling…unique. The atmosphere in Loving Modigliani is so vivid and imaginative, the characters incredibly rich. — Miriam Polli, author of In a Vertigo of Silence Linda Lappin's Loving Modigliani is itself a declaration of love, for Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani's model and common-law wife, as well as a notable painter in her own right, whose suicide at twenty-one is the point of departure for a thrilling trans-twentieth-century fantasy. Ghost story, art-historical mystery, purgatorial character study, and living map of Montparnasse, Loving Modigliani imbues fact and counterfact with the forms, colors, and textures of classical poetry as Modigliani imbues painting with the qualities of sculpture—towards a higher vision, a higher compassion, a refined appreciation for this world and for the others it obscures. A tour de force and wild ride. — James Wallenstein, author of The Arriviste Part 1 Afterlife: A Gothic Fairy TaleOut the Window January 26, 1920 The ringing in my ears ceased with the dull thud of a heavy weight hurled out from a high window, crashing into the courtyard. I blacked out as a wave of pain surged through my body, traveling to the tips of my fingers and the roots of my hair. I’d barely had time to glimpse my brother André’s face gawking through the open window frame, to hear the neighbor’s cat yowling on the balcony below us or the precipitation of feet on the stairs. Then there I was, conscious again, rather bewildered but intact, suspended in the air a few inches above that bloody heap on the cobblestones. A taut, transparent string protruding from my belly seemed to be attaching me to it. While André knelt weeping beside the broken thing lying amid the shards of the potted sage plants kept by the concierge for her digestive tisanes, my parents’ faces appeared in my bedroom window, ghostly through the organdy curtains. I wanted to reassure them that I wasn’t hurt, so I dashed towards the door, but the string at my middle pulled me right back to the courtyard. I wanted to tell them it was all a mistake, and to please go back to bed. Despite the terrible row I had just had with André about what I should do now that Modi was dead, I wasn’t angry at them anymore. There was no need for them to be so upset, and I was truly sorry for waking everyone up, but the words on my lips produced no sound or effect. Soon enough, my parents withdrew from the window, and my brother went back inside after an agitated consultation with the concierge, who had come shuffling out in her bathrobe. A few moments later, up on the fourth floor, all the windows banged shut. The concierge threw a sheet over my corpse in the courtyard, crossed herself, and began to sweep up the mess I had made, muttering prayers or perhaps blasphemies, for I couldn’t really hear properly. An eerie hollowness in my ears drowned out all external sound. I waited for them to come get me as the broom licked about the edges of the sheet and the concierge’s feet in red felt slippers padded up and down. Surely they wouldn’t leave me here for long, stretched out on the gravel and dead leaves blown in from the street? Then I thought: who could carry me up those stairs at that ungodly hour? It would take at least two men in the condition that I was in, my waters ready to break. My father’s back couldn’t have withstood the strain. All our neighbors were quite elderly, and André couldn’t have handled such a task alone. So I guessed they had decided to wait until morning before trying to move me. The rest of the night passed without event. Unfamiliar constellations gleamed in the gutters before sinking over the edge of the roof. The neighbor’s tabby, on a nocturnal prowl, scuttled up to sniff me, but ran off in a frenzy when I reached out to stroke it. Frost bloomed on the cobblestones around the bundle in the courtyard from which I averted my gaze. Finally, at dawn, Monsieur LeRoux, the dustman, making his daily rounds, collected me in his rusty wheelbarrow after a long conversation with the concierge. I say “me” when perhaps I should say “it” or perhaps “us”—there seemed to be two of me now—me and that thing—but I wasn’t yet completely convinced as to what or who I was now. Once in the wheelbarrow, I thought we’d go upstairs to my family and, though I sincerely wished to apologize to all three of them, I dreaded seeing them again. Our relationship had been strained long before this, ever since I had moved in with Modi and we ran off to Nice in spring 1918 to wait out the end of the war. My father had exploded when he found out I was expecting Giovanna, and my mother all but disowned me when she realized we weren’t ever getting married, even after our second child was on the way. True, Papa had fulfilled his duty by coming with me to the hospital to see Modi for the last time. Still, I knew he could never forgive me for what I had just done. My father was a fervent believer, and I had committed sin after sin. As for my brother, I understood he felt betrayed, but what could I do about that now? I steeled myself for a rough confrontation at the top of the stairs, but instead, Monsieur LeRoux twirled the wheelbarrow around, and, with its contents still modestly covered with the concierge’s sheet, rolled out of the courtyard and into the street. Tethered, I was tugged along behind, bobbing like a balloon fastened to a baby-carriage while Paris stirred from its winter sleep. We followed the route I usually took to Montparnasse on my way to lessons at the academy in 14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, or to the studio where I lived with Modi at number 8. I used to love walking to school in early morning, delighting in the smells—steam and soap from the laundries, fresh horse manure in the street; the blue smoke from the chestnut vendors mingling with buttery gusts from the bakeries and coffee percolating in dim cafés where sleepy waiters would be tying on their aprons and polishing tabletops with rags. But now, although I could see perfectly well, my sense of smell had evaporated—these odors I loved were more like a half-remembered scent caught in the back of my throat and I could only hear as from a great distance underwater. It was like when you have a very bad cold and you are up in the Alps and your ears just won’t pop and you feel as though your head is wrapped in cotton wool. We rolled along the Boul’ Mich, jostling street sweepers, tobacco vendors, boys shouldering bundles of newspapers, and a red-cheeked old lady draped in a shawl, just in from the country, selling tangerines from the Midi. And when I saw the luminous citrus glowing at the bottom of her willow basket on the curb, I thought: I must buy a tangerine for Modi; they are so good for a fever—and I reached into my pocket for some change, but to my surprise, there was nothing in my pocket at all, no money, not even a handkerchief. It wasn’t even my pocket, but the pocket of André’s scratchy wool bathrobe, which, inexplicably, I was wearing out in the streets of Paris, and I couldn’t remember why. Yet no one seemed to notice, even though the robe didn’t close in front because of how big I was. Also, my feet were bare, and yet my toes didn’t feel the least bit cold. I plunged my hand into the basket to pick up a tangerine, but my fingers couldn’t seize it. As I observed my fingers scrabbling about in the bottom of the basket, trying to grab an elusive tangerine, my new situation began to sink in, and I panicked. But no one heard my horrified shriek, no one paid me the slightest attention, not even the fruit-vendor who frowned and recounted the tangerines in her basket. Meanwhile, the wheelbarrow was rattling on without me. Terrified that I might be left behind, I raced to catch up and was catapulted through the air and snapped back into place by the elastic string at my navel. Tentatively I touched it, but its texture repelled me: clear and stretchy as a jellyfish tentacle, and a bit sticky, like old egg whites. It shimmered like mother of pearl. A storm of questions whirled in my mind, but I was too scared to dwell on any of them, and besides it took all my strength to keep up with the wheelbarrow. Cutting across Rue Joseph-Bara, where Modi’s friend and dealer, Leopold Zborowski–Zbo— lives with his wife, Hanka, we bounced over a pothole and my left foot poked out from under the sheet just as an elegant lady wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and veil crossed our path. The poor woman nearly fainted from shock. Monsieur LeRoux paused to help her, then carefully tucked me in again so that nothing showed, not even a strand of my hair, and we proceeded to the place I called home, Modigliani’s studio in Rue de la Grande Chaumière. A sickening anxiety filled me as we approached the tall door painted Prussian blue, still closed at that hour, because I understood Modi would not be there and I had no idea where he was or what was going to happen to us now. Monsieur LeRoux lifted the brass knocker and hammered on the door with insistent blows, which I imagined more than heard. The concierge, Madame Moreau, opened, and another animated discussion ensued as the dustman must have explained to her what was in the wheelbarrow, how it got there, and what he intended to do with it, while Madame shook her head vigorously and thrashed her arms as if to say that under no circumstances could I be left there on her premises. The blue door slammed shut in our noses, so we trundled on as the sun rose and the streets bustled with an army of clerks, shopkeepers, housewives, and dandies going about their business after the little people, the true Parisians Modi loved: the sweepers, waiters, rag pickers and delivery boys, had made the city ready for them, allowing another Paris morning to take place.