Between Me And Life
A Biography of Romaine Brooks
Meryle Secrest
Robert de Montesquiou called her the ‘Thief of Souls’, and the theft exposes the artist as much as her subject; small wonder she clung so fiercely to finished works, refusing to hand over even commissioned ones, or hounding owners to return them. Childhood was an unremitting nightmare: her mother, arbitrary, unintelligent, and immersed in a sickly demonic spiritualism, was in love with her mad son; the two daughters were hustled around Europe and expected to gratify every phase of his lunacy and their mother’s unpredictable whims. Brooks wrote in her note- books: ‘My dead mother gets between me and life. I speak as she desires I act as she commands [ To me she is the root enemy of all things.’ Meryle Secrest is clearly right in seeing this combination of tyranny and rejection as permanently damaging; throughout her life Brooks was hypersensitive, breaking off friendships at the smallest imagined slight.
The repeated pattern was a proud retreat into herself rather than risk openness to others and with it vulnerability and acknowledgement of her own fallibility: even Natalie Clifford Barney, for fifty years her loyally devoted lover, received back, unopened, a letter in which she had named Romaine ‘first in my thoughts and deepest in my heart’. Utterly cut off, the apartment in Nice closed tomb-like against the Mediterranean sun, the artist’s death re-enacted her mother’s with chilling irony. Paranoid, often self-punishing, she was none the less a great painter, beautiful, indomitable, and capable of inspiring love in the most exigent and unusual people: even Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, a parody of lesbian relationships motivated by wounded male self-esteem, affirms her qualities despite the satire. A biographer whose approach is insistently psychological risks being reductive, and this book shows us too much of the damaged child, too little of the unique individual; appalling upbringings are after all common, and great artists are not. Meryle Secrest regrettably concentrates on hypothetical reconstructions of feelings and motivation at the expense of a factual chronological account: Brooks knew, among others, Remy de Gourmont, the Princesse de Polignac, d’Annunzio, Colette, and Somerset Maugham, but they wander through the emotional scenario with little sense of period either artistic or social, and the sequence of events is often unclear.
The cosy tone appears self-indulgent but is, I think, attendant on a misconception of what biography should achieve: an organized, detailed narrative of a life based on evidence available to research must take precedence over a record of the biographer’s response to the subject. It is useful to have many of the line-drawings reproduced, but why does the apparatus not include a short-list of the writings and the provenance of the works ? Romaine Brooks was an important artist admired in an extraordinary intellectual milieu: her biography should have relied less on psychology and more on the art critic’s and historian’s interpretative disciplines. ~ Gay Clifford, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), pp. 390-391
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Details
| ISBN | 9780385034692 |
| Genre | Autobiography/Biography; Grier Rated |
| Publication Date | Oct-74 |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 432 |
| LoC Classification | ND237.B872 .S42 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | Great |
| Subject | Art / American / General; Art / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions; Art / General; Art / History / General |
| BookID | 1089 |
