Fantastic Metropolis

With the advent of photography, the monied class of the Victorian era saw that any peon and his brother could now own a portrait. As this was one more assault on their elevated status, they chose to up the ante and the business of commissioning painted portraits verily exploded. Many of the famous painters of the time, like Sargent, were swept up in this thriving trade since the money was exceptional and could be made relatively quickly. Like Sargent also, many painters saw this trade as detracting from their more serious work and were torn between the cash and their artistic vision. Some of the portraits painted in this time period have since become those works that we now specifically remember these artists by. In The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, I somewhat disparage Sargent in favor of Albert Pinkham Ryder, but, make no mistake, this is only for the sake of the story. Both of these painters and many more from that time period were truly remarkable no matter what they chose as a subject.

The story of my novel involves a well known portrait painter, Piambo, living in 1893, New York City. He has built up a thriving business doing only portraiture, but he longs to have the time to discover and pursue his own creations. Then he gets a strange commission, a request from a Mrs. Charbuque to do her portrait. If he accepts, she will pay him so well that he will be able to retire from portraiture for a spell and take up his own work without compromising the life style he has grown accustomed to. There is only one stipulation. He is not allowed to see his patron. She sits behind a screen and tells him stories about her life, and from her words he is to capture her likeness. If he should succeed in rendering a portrait that is precisely her, she will triple his commission and make him wealthy beyond his dreams. He accepts and what follows is a mystery, a history, a tale of intrigue, a love story, an investigation of the seen and the masked with intimations of the fantastic.

I can trace the idea for this story to my job as a professor of Literature. I usually teach writing courses at the college I work at, but I also teach a class in Early American Literature. One of the writers I have been lecturing on for the past eight years is Emily Dickinson. Dickinson was a very enigmatic figure, and there is much apocryphal legend that has grown up around her. It is known that, at times, when people would visit her, she would sit behind a screen or up around the corner where the stairway turned and converse with them. Each year, in preparation for my lectures, I would read as much as possible, new material and old. One of the things I always went over just to refresh my memory as to biographical touchstones was the piece on her life in The Norton Anthology of Early American Literature. An item that always caught my fancy in this essay was the statement concerning a friend of hers, Mabel Loomis Todd, who knew Emily her entire life but only actually saw her in her coffin. This then eventually grew into the seed of the idea that gave birth to The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. When I had finally finished writing the novel in the fall of 2001, I went to the Norton book to grab that statement to use as a quote to preface my book. I searched and searched for the line, but to my amazement, I could not find it. What had existed for eight years straight, two semesters a year, was gone. I realize now that it had never been there at all, and I wonder how much of what I see in my life is an instance of this same phenomenon.

As a reader, I see the characters of a novel in my mind. They take on features, hair color, expressions, bulk and height, becoming real individuals as I imagine them through the language, watching them play out the drama. Sometimes their profiles are based on people I know, but other times they are completely idiosyncratic personalities I have never met before. So, while the reader is reading The Portrait, he/she is seeing the characters of Piambo (the painter), his friend, Shenz, Samantha, clearly. Their features have all been created through words. When Piambo tries to see, in his mind, Mrs. Charbuque, he can’t, or, in fact, she keeps changing. I want the reader to have the same experience Piambo is having as he tries to decipher her looks from her words but at the same time see Piambo clearly. I am greatly interested as a writer and a reader in how we form these mind pictures when reading. It’s really kind of a miracle the way it works—an entire world, populated with vibrant personalities springs to life when we open the cover of a good book and move our eyes across pages covered with wiggles of ink.