Mind Picker: Second Place

I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it has to do with the building of the second place and with what we decided to use it for, which was as a home for the things that weren’t already here — the higher things, or so I thought them, that I had come to know and care about one way or another in my life. I don’t mean that we envisaged starting some kind of community or utopia. It was simply that Tony understood I had interests of my own, and that just because he was satisfied with our life on the marsh it didn’t automatically follow that I would be too. I needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions. And those people did come, and they did communicate, though they always seemed to end up liking Tony more than they liked me!

Second Place is much more accessible than what I’ve come to expect from Rachel Cusk, but I leave this novel, once again, feeling like I don’t perfectly understand what she’s trying to tell me. I will say that this is incredibly interesting: an interesting format (epistolary) that makes for interesting observations (on art, motherhood, the burdens of femininity, male freedom) while tracing out an interesting plot (which is, apparently, based loosely on real events in the lives of some famous artists). I was intensely interested throughout this entire short read and ended the experience feeling enriched; I cannot ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A brief plot overview: In letters to her friend Jeffers, “M” recounts having been in Paris as a young wife and mother, and after seeing an exhibition of the famous painter “L”, she felt such a connection to his landscapes that she knew she could no longer stay in her marriage. Many years later, after marrying her new husband, Tony, and relocating to his home in the marshlands, they renovated a second cottage on their property to use as a sort of artists’ retreat — to keep M connected to the world she, a semi-successful author, had left behind — and eventually, L accepts an invitation to stay in this “second place”. The majority of the plot recounts this visit and what it taught M about herself.

There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman — but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallised in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke. It’s a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise. We get our dictionaries and we puzzle it out, and avoid some of the parts we can’t make sense of or understand, and some others we know we’re not entitled to, and voilà!, we participate. It’s a case of borrowed finery, and sometimes of downright impersonation; and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male. The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy.

Nearly every page of Second Place has something quotable on it, so I can’t help but excerpt with abandon. What Cusk (or, at any rate, “M”) has to say about motherhood:

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!

On femininity:

I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself. Brett had seemed to me to have everything, and yet in that moment I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.

On marrying later in life:

When you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole land masses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation: people could live in and around Tony and me in a way they could never have entered and inhabited the dark core — whether living or dead — of an original marriage. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. The second place was one such bridge, and Tony’s silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

On art:

I think I understood then that his illness had released him from his own identity and history and memory so violently and thoroughly that he had been able at last to really see. And what he had seen was not death, but unreality. This, I believe, was the discovery he had made, and it was what the night paintings told of — and the question I wish I had asked him that afternoon on the marsh was about what came after that discovery, but perhaps L didn’t know the answer to that question any more than the rest of us do.

And I want to make a note on the real life events that inspired this book (so feel free to skip this part if you’d rather not know): This is apparently based on Lorenzo in Taos, a “loosely” epistolary recounting of the time that D. H. Lawrence and his wife stayed at the artists’ colony in Taos owned and run by famed socialite and patroness of the arts Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony. In Lorenzo in Taos, the letters are written between Mabel (“M”), the poet Robinson Jeffers, and Lawrence himself (“L”), and while I have no idea how closely the plot of Second Place adheres to the real life events in New Mexico, I’m left wondering if this nonfictional component makes the whole more or less interesting overall. I did find it an odd detail that in Cusk’s novel, M’s husband Tony was adopted as an infant, with no knowledge of his birth family, but as he had a dark complexion and features that look like photographs of Native Americans, M states that “more than anything he looks like one of them”. To then discover that Mabel Dodge Luhan’s husband was Native American made that whole passage feel...weird. Why the uncertainty in Cusk’s version? If their marshland home is presumably in Britain, why not definitively explain why a Native American was brought up there or just not mention his ethnicity? In the same vein, I have no idea what other true details were lifted or adapted or elided (did Mabel find Lawrence’s novels similarly transformative?) and I find myself somewhat less impressed for knowing the inspiration.

And yet...I was mesmerised by the writing here, consistently interested in the storyline, and found myself nodding along and underlining more passages than shared here; Cusk is a master at her craft and this is undeniably art.