The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  A. I wanted to show the full arc of Lee’s life, not just a section of it. As I worked on this novel, I saw that it became a story about consequences, cause and effect—this happens because that happened earlier—and sometimes it takes years, decades, for those sequences to manifest in a life. It was also important for me to show historical connections, almost a kind of inevitability in the way history unfolded, from the recklessness of the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, to the war that resulted from the poverty and unemployment the Depression created.

  Q. Since readers may not be familiar with Lee Miller, can you tell us more about her popularity as a model and in what regard her photography was held then, and today? Can you tell us more about the childhood rape that haunted her? Do we know what medical treatment she received and what mysterious ill health dogged her for the rest of her life? What happened to her in her later years?

  A. Lee’s father was a freethinker and he encouraged his only daughter to be equally freethinking. He encouraged Lee to pose for photographs, to learn to be comfortable in her body rather than be ashamed of it. I think that allowed Lee to heal as much as anyone can heal from the violence of rape. Because she was unbound by convention, and was startlingly, impossibly beautiful, modeling also made sense for her as a way to leave Poughkeepsie and live on a larger stage. Photographers as well as artists loved having her pose for them. You can see it in the photos of her: she treats her body like a medium as well as a message. She was unwittingly set up for scandal on some occasions, though. In one early modeling job she thought she was merely modeling an evening gown, but in fact the photo was used to advertise menstruation pads: it was the first ad to do so, and people were horrified that something so private was made public. Lee let the uproar die down, and went on modeling.

  It’s difficult to know how many people actually knew about the rape. For the novel, I imagined it as a closely kept family secret. Small-town gossip could be especially devastating then, and memories could be so long.

  The treatment for the gonorrhea Lee caught during the rape—this was before penicillin and other antibiotics—was gruesome to read about: acid douches, antiseptic sitz baths, catheters, swabs of the cervix with more acids, done in the hospital by staff and at home by Lee’s mother. The child would have had to let her body be completely taken over by the process, no modesty allowed. In a way, it must have been a reliving of the rape every time she was treated. No wonder her father encouraged her to separate feelings from physical acts. And because the treatment was only moderately successful at best, for years after—perhaps for the rest of her life—she would have been dogged by the aftereffects of the disease, the debilitating fatigue and fevers.

  After the war, after those images Lee took of the concentration camps and the general devastation, she eventually stopped taking photographs of anything other than family and friends. She turned to cooking and became well-known as a gourmet cook. She loved feeding people and Lee and Roland were famous for their hospitality. After Lee died, her son discovered crates of her photographs and journals, and they became the basis both of his wonderful biography about his mother, The Lives of Lee Miller, and the Lee Miller Archive at Farley House.

  Q. Why was it important to you that Nora’s daughter should also become a victim of rape? What parallels between the two women did you want to explore?

  A. More attention is being paid to the relationship between war and rape. Women’s bodies become so much collateral damage, a kind of territory to be “occupied.” We’ve seen this over and over again in current political upheavals. Historians are also beginning to research wartime rape and document its prevalence during previous wars. Savage Continent by Keith Lowe (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) is an eye-opening book about the raping in Europe during and immediately after World War II, and what happened to the children of those rapes.

  Dahlia is not raped by a soldier, but I still see her as a victim of the war; her rapist is empowered by the chaos of war. With so many men fighting at the front or surreptitiously in the resistance, or in prisoner camps, entire villages and towns were left more or less at the mercy of the men who stayed behind. And because there was such poverty and hunger, many women, housewives and schoolgirls as well, prostituted themselves just to keep food on the table. When sex becomes a commodity, lines are blurred between willing and not willing. The police were concerned with war crimes and keeping order; tracking down rapists wasn’t always a priority, even when the rapes were reported. In war everyone suffers, not just the soldiers.

  Dahlia is older than Lee was when her rape occurs. Even in fiction, I couldn’t bear the thought of forcing such violence upon a very young child; bad enough that it happens to Dahlia in her teens. I thought it important that there be that parallel with Lee, though, to show that rape isn’t limited to certain times or ages. It is Lee’s suffering, repeated in her daughter’s life, that forces Nora to learn how to forgive.

  Q. Can you tell us more about what happened to Man Ray after Lee left his life? Is his art as well regarded today as it was in the 1920s?

  A. Man Ray created one of the most recognizable images of modern art: that photo of a nude Kiki de Montparnasse with the fret holes of a cello painted on her back, making the woman’s body an instrument. That image will endure because, first, it is very beautiful and memorable, and second, because it is such an important statement about how men often objectify women. Man Ray was not a feminist in any sense of the word, but his images are important, often startling statements. Then, too, the violence of some of his images was a precursor of the violence to come in the war. His art was playful, but also in touch with something mysterious. I don’t think you can know twentieth-century art without knowing his art.

  Lee and Man became and remained great friends after their affair ended. I think Lee was one of those people with whom others just couldn’t stay angry. Eventually Man did move back to Paris and continued to live and work there.

  Q. I loved learning about perfume. Is Grasse still the perfume capital of France? Have artificial scents improved since the 1940s?

  A. I revisited Grasse when I was working on this novel. It’s such a beautiful place, one of my favorite French towns. And yes, they still think of themselves as the perfume capital, and with reason. They are still surrounded by fields of lavender and have several museums of perfume history.

  Whether the artificial scents have improved or not is a matter of opinion. Certainly many essences are easier and cheaper to replicate, so good perfume is more affordable. What I found fascinating is that plants, like wines, have vintages and will vary from year to year, depending on the soil, weather, and other growing conditions. Fragrance formulas have to be continuously reworked to maintain consistency so that, say, Chanel No. 5 made in 2014 smells like the Chanel No. 5 made in 2001.

  Q. You make postwar France sound almost as dangerous as during the war. Can you tell us more about reprisals imposed on ordinary people for aiding and abetting the enemy in Occupied France?

  A. People tend to think the war ended when peace was declared. In fact, the hunger, the rationing, the shortages, the upheavals, lasted for years after. The violence lasted as well, not in the form of battles but in retribution. Estimates vary, but in France alone hundreds of people may have been shot by snipers or knifed in the dark by people wanting revenge, especially against those thought or known to have been collaborators. This included women who had slept with enemy soldiers, and in dozens of towns women had their heads shaved; many were stripped naked and marched through the streets. Men felt emasculated by the war and the Vichy government; they reclaimed their manhood by punishing women and assassinating the collaborators. Thousands of people were put on trial for the crime of collaboration or simply for being insufficiently patriotic. Pétain himself was sentenced to life in prison. The Europeans had to rebuild their relationships, their towns, their countries, and this took time.

  Q. Can you tell us a little abou
t your background as a writer? Have particular writers influenced your work?

  A. When I was a kid, I read indiscriminately. Everything. My parents didn’t look over my shoulder at the titles, and my father even joked that I read books by the pound. He used to read Victorian poems out loud in the evenings: “The Face upon the Floor,” “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight,” “The Raven,” “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” . . . those great old story poems. I went to Catholic school, and the nuns raised a few eyebrows over some of the books I chose to do book reports on. My grandmother’s house had a small library full of the classics: Zane Grey, the Tarzan books, some weird and wonderful books about Victorian spiritualism. I would curl up there for hours at a time. I was, and remain, totally impressed that my grandparents, who raised ten kids in a small house, kept a room just for books and reading. I’ve read everything by Daphne du Maurier and Anya Seton, Dickens and Hawthorne. Popular authors like Romain Gary and Paul Gallico were a major influence when I was first mapping my way through my own fiction. I like the great storytellers, the narrative writers. Must be because of those great Victorian poems.

  Q. You live in a rural area of upstate New York. What role, if any, does geography play in your writing life?

  A. Geography helps form character, doesn’t it? Our families, our historical settings, our inherent nature and personality, and then the world immediately around us, our geography, make us who we are, I think. I grew up in the country, at the edge of a small town, and I can’t imagine what my childhood would have been like without trees big enough to climb, mud puddles up to my shins, robins’ nests in the bushes, and snowdrifts up to my waist. My childhood made me a daydreamer, able to get lost in my own thoughts and be quite content with my own company—key ingredients for a writer. My writing room, now, is on the second floor with windows all around and trees outside the windows, kind of like being in a big treehouse.

  Q. Where do you keep the pile of books you hope to read soon, and what titles are in it?

  A. I love this question! I do have piles of books all over the house. Ask my husband, who patiently goes around and places bookmarks in them for me, since I’m usually reading four or five simultaneously and I tend to leave them open, like huge butterflies, on top of all the furniture. My reading right now includes research for the next novel: histories, biographies, memoirs. Research is a great adventure for me. Pleasure reading at the moment is The Discovery of Middle Earth by Graham Robb, about the ancient Celts. I regularly reread two titles that are masterpieces of historical fiction: The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. My book group just finished the Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam and we were all delighted by it. I’m still reading books by the pound.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What did you most enjoy about the novel? What do you think you will remember about it many months from now?

  2. When Nora and Lee play together as children, Lee is the more daring. During your own childhood, were you more like Nora or Lee? Discuss the dangerous risks that Lee takes during the novel. Does she pay a price for her boldness? Is great risk-taking necessary for great achievement?

  3. If the friendship between Nora and Lee lies at the heart of the novel, what kind of friendship is it? How does it evolve over time? Discuss the ways in which they each betray the other, yet also save each other.

  4. In the author’s portrayal of ardent young love between Nora and Jamie, what details make their romance come alive for you? Why do you think Jamie betrays Nora? Is Nora right or wrong in not telling him about her pregnancy? Compare the Nora/Jamie relationship with the Lee/Man Ray relationship. Is one love more “true” than the other?

  5. Discuss how Lee’s childhood rape might have shaped her adult attitude toward sex and emotional intimacy. What other factors might have also contributed to her unconventional beliefs? Do you consider her behavior liberated or pathological?

  6. Like the main character in Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, do you wish you could have lived in Paris in the 1920s? Do you consider our own time inferior to the past, and if so, in what ways?

  7. Discuss the mother/child relationships in the novel—Nora and her mother, Nora and Dahlia, and Lee and Anthony. How is Natalia also a mother to Nora? Who among them is the “good” mother?

  8. Jamie never finds artistic recognition for his photography and ends up back in Poughkeepsie taking pictures of local events. Does he consider himself a failure? Do you? Discuss the role that changing taste plays in keeping him from success. Do you know an artist of any kind whose work is currently out of favor but who is perhaps worthy of recognition?

  9. As a model, Lee seems to be aware of how photographs objectify her beauty and turn her into something that isn’t fully real or female. Discuss how she and Man Ray explore this idea in their art and in their life together (for example, at Lee’s party). At the end of the novel, are there indications that Lee has moved beyond this subject?

  10. Lee describes photographing the Nazi death camps and taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub. What do you think the bath signifies for her?

  11. What does the panther in the Paris zoo represent for Nora?

  12. Do you have a signature scent? Would Nora think it suits you?