The Blazing World: A Novel

by Siri Hustvedt

  Although the number of women artists has exploded, it is no secret that New York galleries show women far less often than men. The figures hover around twenty percent of all one-person shows in the city, despite the fact that almost half of those same galleries are run by women. The museums that exhibit contemporary art are no better, nor are the magazines that write about it. Every woman artist faces the insidious propagation of a male status quo. With almost no exceptions, art by men is far more expensive than art by women. Dollars tell the story. After giving up on a public life as an artist, Burden decided to experiment with the perception of her work through the use of masculine personas. The results were striking. When presented as the work of a man, her art suddenly found an enthusiastic audience. Caution is in order, however. Art world trends are constantly changing. The raw is in one day, the cooked the next. And there is an ever-present hunger for youth, the latest ingénue or mangenue on the menu. Might a young woman have served Burden equally well? Probably not, but the story cannot simply be told as a feminist parable, even though it seems obvious that sexual bias played a determining role in the perception of Burden’s work. And yet, each of her masks seemed to uncover a different aspect of her imagination, and it is not unfair to say that the trajectory of her artistic experimentation became a movement toward an increasing and almost sinister ambiguity.

  Anton Tish, who has disappeared from the art world entirely, seems to have been little more than a puppet. Phineas Eldridge, on the other hand, brought his own searing charm to The Suffocation Rooms they worked on together. He, too, has retired from art but not from speaking out, and his letter to Art Lights remains, to my mind, not only a tribute to Burden, the woman, but a perspicacious reading of her work.

  Burden’s involvement with Rune is, at least to me, both sad and mysterious. The controversy over his apparent suicide and the antics of Oswald Case, whose book Martyred for Art turns Rune into the genius-celebrity of a new technological era, have only blurred the real issues. It is true that four of the window pieces cannot be absolutely attributed to Burden, and there are those who insist they belong to Rune. The final verdict has not been made, and the uncertainty may continue for quite some time, if not forever. Nevertheless, a black-and-white treatment of the Burden-Rune story is uncalled for. It leads to mythmaking at its worst: The wish supplants the evidence. It ignores Burden’s autobiographical writings, which make a strong case for out-and-out theft of some of her pieces by someone, possibly Rune. In a notebook entry from September 12, 2003, she wrote, “Four works have vanished from the studio overnight. I am desperate.” Why would she write this if it weren’t true? Case’s theory is that Burden framed Rune by leaving written records that strongly hint at his malfeasance and that she did it out of envy and spite. Case relies heavily on what Rune told him, and he had access to almost none of Burden’s papers when he wrote his book. He quotes a single sentence taken from three pages of her writing that were published in the spring issue of Dexterity (2008), the year of her retrospective at Grace. “It is so easy for Rune to shine. Where does that effortlessness come from? How do people acquire it? He is so light. I am earthbound, a Caliban to his Ariel.” This is hardly proof of some Machiavellian plan to poach another artist’s career.

  I have only one personal note to contribute. When I saw The History of Western Art, supposedly the work of Anton Tish, at the Clark Gallery, I was struck by a passage etched into Venus’s inner thigh:

  Have not girls done as much for the doll?—the doll—yes, target of things past and to come? The last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll because it resembles but does not contain life, and the third sex because it contains life but resembles the doll.

  It is from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, a difficult, strange little novel. To be honest, I am not at all sure what is meant by this meditation on dolls, but I do know that in not one but in three of the works in her second show, Burden included quotes from that particular book. No one has exclusive rights to quote from Nightwood. Still, it struck me as curious, and then, when I looked inside the boxes that circled the large Venus sculpture, the little scenes bore such strong similarities to Burden’s early rooms with their small figures and oblique narratives that I felt sure Tish must have seen her pieces. Influences are normal, but these looked like the development of that earlier work, and I was bothered by the thought that he might have looted from works she had never shown. Not a single reviewer mentioned Burden.

  Through the son of a friend who knew Burden’s daughter, I got the artist’s telephone number in Brooklyn and called her. I introduced myself, explained the nature of my call, and asked her if she had been to the gallery to see the show, to which she answered, “No.” I discovered later that this was technically true. I then asked her if she was still making art. She said, “Yes.” I waited for her to say something more, then elaborated further, saying that aspects of the work seemed so close to hers that I found it alarming. There was a long, awkward silence. I could hear her breathing. Finally, she cleared her throat and then said, “Thank you. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”

  That was it. I had given her an opening. She didn’t take it. Harriet Burden had allies. I count myself among them. I am convinced that had she looked for a dealer, she would have found one, but even if she hadn’t, she could have taken another route. There are women’s cooperatives that show artists who fail to receive recognition from mainstream venues. I have seen some very good work exhibited in those galleries. Burden wanted her experiment, and she wanted to remain hidden. I can’t help but wish that she had been able to answer me then. At the same time, the masks must be considered as furthering what she did best—creating works of focused ambiguity.

  Bruno Kleinfeld

  (written statement)

  I met Harry during a dog-eared, smudged, scribbled-in-the-margins, stained, and torn chapter of my life. But that was a cosmetic problem, really. I am the proud owner of any number of tattered and beaten biographies that are still decipherable. Time creeps. Time alters. Gravity insists. As my mother used to say to me, “After fifty, Bruno, it’s just patch, patch, patch.” No, it wasn’t my going-on-sixty carcass with receding hairline and basset-hound cheeks that made that chapter so bad. It was that I had lost me. I was no longer the hero of my own life. Instead, I was lurking in the proverbial shadows as some goddamned minor character with only a couple of lines of dialogue here and there. Imagine getting up in the morning and scouring the apartment for yourself, turning out drawers and rifling through closets and checking under the bed for yourself. Where had I mislaid him, that bright, curly-headed youth with prospects shining just over yonder hill? Whatever happened to Bruno Kleinfeld? You may well ask. My person seemed to have sidelined itself in ways that meant I was no longer I. The imposter, Bruno Kleinfeld, the one who woke up in the morning in the ratty apartment in Red Hook, would have been a big surprise to the actual Bruno Kleinfeld, who was traveling boldly from one chapter to another in his fully authorized biography. But I simply couldn’t lay my hands on that Bruno and found myself stuck with the former, a sad sack who regularly ate Spaghetti Os for dinner and twice in desperation descended to gourmet tidbits for the doggy set. You see, he couldn’t pay his rent and had to go panhandling to his old friend Tip Barrymore in Park Slope, whose brownstone life looked far more like the one the genuine Bruno was living. Eyes. It’s all in the eyes. Tip’s eyes when he said he didn’t need it back. “I don’t need it back, Brune.” Brune is the only way to shorten Brun-O. Pupils askance, furtive, not straight double-barreled, not man to man. Poor Brune. He didn’t say it. Oh no. His eyes said it. Pity the bright boy of yonder hill? What the fuck? You’ve got the wrong guy, bub, the wrong Brun-O, old man. Take it on the chin. Take it in the gut. Garçon! Bring me a glass of the Fronsac and the steak frites tout de suite. With mayonnaise! Li
ttle dreams of meals. Little dreams of no roaches, of a smoothly working, rust-free toilet, of linoleum without chips and yellow stains. The sad little dreams of the poseur, that fake Kleinfeld of swollen proportions and disabled swing with no pop. Who was that guy that used to hit them over the fence, used to speed around the bases, used to be a schmooze artist, ladies’ man, seducer, used to be husband to three women and father to three daughters, promising author of two books of poetry, published by a major press, major, not minor (verses in minor key but not of the minor leagues), with tributes from luminaries plastered on back covers with that significant word he had relished, chewed over, sucked on long and hard: Whitmanian? The kid’s work is “Whitmanian,” and there were no less than three exclamation marks that ended sentences inside those blurbs by notables of international reputation, emphatic punctuation for emphatically bright boy who raked in grant money on strength of looming hill yonder, young, handsome poet whippersnapper who begins epic poem, poem for the ages, the poem to end all American poems.

  And he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and then he writes it again, and he cannot get it just the way he wants it. And as he writes it, the years pass; he marries and divorces, and he marries and divorces again and then again; children are born, and he is still writing the poem, and he cannot get it the way he wants it. Sometimes he can’t see it anymore. He is under the poem, and it is threatening to crush him. He wants the bullshit out of it; don’t you see? B.K. hopes to purify MS. of all B.S. and climb said hill, and he cannot get over it. There are days when he feels he is pushing the poem toward the top, and he can almost see the other side, but then, like Sisyphus, he cannot get it to roll over the summit.

  And so one morning in October, the false Kleinfeld is gently easing a turd from his aged ass into poorly functioning toilet bowl in aforementioned rat hole with the window shade slightly raised for viewing traffic below and large warehouse building across the street, where renovations have been underfoot for quite some time, and he sees her again, the woman he has seen often, nearly every day for many months, and has heard tell about, the tall, striding woman with a pair of tits that make his heart stop. There she is again in another coat, a fern-green number with wide sleeves and some kind of built-in scarf that sweeps over her shoulder. Kleinfeld has an idea that the woman has a closet with nothing but coats in it and another for boots, since those changed, too. She is wrapped up daily, he thinks, in the magic of money, which means simply this: You can tell she isn’t thinking about the coat or the boots; they just are. The poor wear their prizes—the gleaming new leather shoes, the just-off-the-rack sweater, the expensive gloves—with a stiff self-conscious air that gives them away. No, her mind is on greater things, he says to himself. You can tell by the little V between her eyebrows, a philosophical wrinkle, he believes, not a run-of-the-mill V carved in deep by sick worry about rent money and groceries. Hadn’t he spied her once, quite by accident, on the remote F train reading Schelling? God help us, the woman was reading Friedrich von Schelling on the F as calmly as if she were gliding through the Daily News. The old Bruno, the speed demon, had looked into Schelling once as an undergraduate and had taken a bad fright, equaled only by his opening up the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who also scared the boy witless. This was not some regular dame. No, this was a doll with high tastes, with ideas dancing in her head like fireflies. The lady’s hair was a jumble of curls and her eyes were big and wide and dark, and she had a long neck and wide, square shoulders, and that day, that October morning, as she crossed the street below him, just as she had crossed it many times before, he saw something vulnerable and hurt cross her face that came like a breeze and, as it blew, she suddenly looked very young. Her mouth, her brows, her eyes all contributed to the expression, which didn’t last long, but it seemed to Kleinfeld’s double, sitting there on the pot, boxers around his ankles, that the pain he had seen and she had felt had come and gone with a single grievous thought about someone.

  That vision kicked him loose. It kicked loose the kid, the base stealer, the poet of pizzazz, of confidence, and that lost charmer, the original Kleinfeld, returned, at least for a moment, and I (for it was I, the Bruno Kleinfeld of old) wiped my ass hastily but thoroughly, grabbed the jeans and shirt lying in a heap before me, whisked my jacket off the hook near the door with its four locks, checked the pocket for keys, hurtled down the stairway, out the door into the street, and chased the lady like some half-cocked troubadour. I yelled, “Stop!”

  She stopped and turned. She wasn’t my Harry yet. Oh no, she was the lady with the coats, who had swiveled on her boot heels to look down at me. She was tall, and the childlike look of vulnerability was nowhere to be seen. Her brows came together disdainfully, and I felt the loser rising up, the miserable faker, but it was too late. I stuck out my hand. “Bruno Kleinfeld, your neighbor. I wanted to meet you.”

  Harry, the stranger, smiled just a little, and took my hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Kleinfeld,” she said.

  I kid you not, the sun came out from behind a cloud at that very moment and lit up the street, and I grabbed the moment, for that is what we must do if we don’t want women to pass us by, and I said, “A fateful luminosity!”

  She looked confused. What had I meant? What did she think I had meant? I could see her struggle to understand. She smiled, embarrassed.

  “The gods approve!” I blurted.

  She examined me silently. I have rarely known anyone who took such a long time between sentences. Finally, she said, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?”

  She reminded me of Mrs. Curtis, my ninth-grade biology teacher at Horace Mann. Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld? This is America. Who says, “Of what, Mr. Kleinfeld?” except high school teachers?

  “Of us,” I said, “of our fortuitous meeting.”

  “I thought fortuitous meant by accident, by chance. It looks to me as if you’ve chased me down.”

  Harry and I agreed on the dialogue up to that point, word for word. The exchange was branded into what would become our mutual brain. We tussled over the next part of the scene. I still swear up and down and across and under and in every direction that I dove right in and asked her to dinner. She swore that we went round and round with the word fortuitous and that I had obviously blocked it out because she got the better of me in the etymology department. Latin, forte—by chance. The word does not mean “fortunate.” I know that! I had merely hoped that she had not noticed my wild pursuit of her post-dump (which she knew nothing about until later when I confessed that she had brightened my bowel movements many a day). Harry had a pedantic side, a persnickety grammar-teacher side that sometimes made me nuts. You thought about fortuitous, and you thought you said what you thought about it, but you never did. It happens. It happens. That’s what I told her, but she didn’t believe me.

  I’m not sure which Bruno Kleinfeld showed up at the restaurant three nights later. The character who shaved beforehand was the same old louse of useless recriminations. What woman would want the asshole in the mirror who’s been writing the same poem for twenty-five years, who teaches two creative writing classes at Long Island University for twelve thousand dollars a year, who does freelance copyediting and a book review here and there for next to nothing, who’s a failure with a capital F ? Anxiety cramped my lungs, and I puffed shallow breaths while I ironed my good shirt, the one my daughter Cleo had given me for my birthday the March before. On top of that, I’d borrowed the hundred bucks to take Harry out from Louise, the woman down the hall, who had waggled her finger at me and said in her screeching voice, “This isn’t charity, Bruno, you’ve got to pay me back!” My heart was running a marathon while I stood stock-still, and I had started to sweat in the clean, pressed shirt. The tension was paralyzing. I stood in front of my door for about five minutes. The force that pushed me through it was loneliness—the bad, restless, anguished, pulverizing kind of loneliness I felt I couldn’t abide anymore.

  And then, after the how-do-ye-do and the glances at the sti
ff paper menu and the ordering and the waiter who tells you his name is Roy or Ramon, in short after all the awkward pleasantry that goes on whenever two strangers embark on that voyage known as going-out-to-dinner, the gods or the angels or the fairies or the movie stars—any one of those unreal heavenly beings we all half believe in when convenient—smiled down on us as we sailed from salads of baby greens into a chicken dish we both ordered, a bit dry, with mushrooms. But while we were ingesting the desiccated fowl, it happened again: The authorized Bruno came roaring back in triumph to charm the Lady of the Coats, who charmed him back because she was funny and smart and oblique, too, making arcane comments even the full-blown genuine Bruno couldn’t really penetrate, but which made him awfully curious; and when the lady breathed, her breasts breathed with her, and he had to shut his eyes a couple of times to keep his head on straight.

  I think there were diamonds in her ears, and I know there was perfume in the general atmosphere of the table wafting over and up into my nostrils, a scent she said Napoleon, pipsqueak conqueror of Europe, had concocted for one of his wives, Josephine. He had just two, one fewer than me. The arrogant son of a bitch once said, “I am the revolution.” Well, that evening the revolution of Bruno Kleinfeld had begun, and I knew it had to be carried through or I would live forever as a state divided.

  I listened to her. I am not cynical when I say this is the first rule of seduction. There is no seduction without big listening ears. Call me Harry, she said. I called her Harry. I listened to her tell me about her two grown-up kids, one documentary filmmaker, one prose writer, and the grandchild who could do somersaults and had developed unusual passions for Buster Keaton and Peggy Lee, and about her dead husband, who had been half Thai, half English, the son of a diplomat, a man who had been at home everywhere and nowhere. He sounded like a smoothie to me—a lot of money and a lot of angles—the kind of guy who steals into a smoke-filled bar in one of those Hollywood movies from the forties, wearing a white dinner jacket as he scans the room with his foreigner’s eyes.