By Kazuo Robinson.
Catherine Lacey, Biography of X (Granta, 2023)
“‘X’ was often used in such a way, a placeholder for people or things discarded, hidden or unknown. Malcolm X, Madame X, solving for x.”
The narrator of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, C.M. Lucca, tells us this around three quarters of the way through her book. Besides “Madame X”, a John Singer Sargent painting of a French socialite, the associations are rather obvious, and most likely have occurred to the reader by this stage. That makes this moment uncharacteristic for C.M. and for this novel, which intends mystery, density, and that related cardinal virtue of contemporary literature, ambiguity. Of course C.M. has not declared what treasure is marked by X, what value stood for by x, or how her “X”, the deceased artist, C.M.’s wife and subject of the biography, compares to her predecessor Malcolm. There is much unsaid, and much more besides unknown to C.M., and Lacey is rather taken with the unknown. As she writes, as C.M., “a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely.” This is something like the way the painter Agnes Martin’s penciled grid lines might be thought to extend beyond her canvases, even unto the ends of the world, but hers do not drip at the edge or spill over; in analogue to that messiness C.M. describes is the imprecision in her attempt at biography, which that passage would help excuse as inevitable, if not deliberate.
The following is fictional. X (1945-1996) was a New York based multimedia artist. Her career highlights include collaborations with David Bowie, novels published under the nom de plume Clyde Hill, a script filmed by Wim Wenders, a large scale conceptual exhibition called The Human Subject, and a retrospective at MoMA. Her work involved several pseudonyms and much of what critics called “self-transformation”, as in the careers of Andrea Fraser and Adrian Piper. She had two wives before her widow, a journalist named C.M. Lucca. Lucca published her Biography of X in 2005 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, after several years of research starting with a trip to Byhalia, Mississippi, where X was born and christened Carolina Luanna Walker. Interesting to note, the year of X’s birth, 1945, was the same year in which several Southern states seceded and formed the Southern Territory, a Christian confessional state, and in which the libertarian Western Territory was created with a stance of neutrality to the new Northern and Southern territories. That of her death, 1996, was the same year that reunification began. Lucca met with X’s surviving family, with her former associate Ted Gold, with whom she participated in the Revelation Rifle Affair and escaped the Southern Territory, and with the gallerist Ginny Green who exhibited much of X’s work. She includes in Biography of X notes from X’s journals, from Theodore Smith’s 1997 biography A Woman Without a History, and much detail from the New York art scene of X’s time. There are black and white photographs of X’s relations, professional associates, and of X herself in her many guises.
Lacey has put much thought into the range of fabricated diary entries and letters, as well as interviews with and articles on X, cited with footnotes. Many of the written sources, though non-existent, are credited to real writers such as Rachel Aviv and Renata Adler. The story contains and the footnotes cite modified versions of real people, such as a musician named Brianna (Brian) Eno, and a writer named Richard (Rachel) Cusk. Outside of the frame, so to speak, the novel has several endnotes — Lacey’s, not C.M.’s — revealing that many words attributed to X in the narrative were taken from others including Flannery O’Connor and Susan Sontag. A long letter from X to the novelist Denis Johnson concludes with a quote from a Johnson novel, not acknowledged within the biography but in the endnotes, and a line from a review of an earlier Lacey novel is reused as a quote about a novel written by X, as Cassandra Edwards. All this convoluted tracery distracts from the novel’s most basic fictional premise: that it is a biography published in 2005 by Farrar Straus and Giroux. It’s an odd biography that is so preoccupied with its own composition, which sometimes has the urgent sibilance of more personal writing — reading the paper “section by section in search of something I’d never find” — and generally makes so much of the biographer’s feelings, telling us that “I felt as if I’d been rejected by my own child”, or that “I could feel the place on my back where her arms had been”. A more believable framing might have been something more like a bereavement memoir, nonetheless including the research into X’s life in order to correct the record and deepen the tribute. What would be lost then is the kind of dry, documentary mood of Conceptual Art, X’s included, that Lacey and presumably her publishers intended for the novel’s presentation. A possibility to be acknowledged here, lest the present writer seem myopic: Biography of X is published in Biography of X’s world, one where the fifty states are not ten years reunited, where the Vietnam War never happened, and where perhaps the conventions of biography are different.
Eight years after X’s death, C.M. finally enters her office, and there finds a bit of correspondence that will lead her to an awful something hidden in a storage facility in Santa Fe. She’s understandably upset, and at this late stage questions the whole biographical effort: “I should have known better than to have even tried to explain even a minute of her life.” A widow is of course compromised as a witness to character or a chronicler of a career and a life, and X is impossibly complicated, and every person is impossibly complicated, and so on. None of this really excuses C.M.’s more mundane writerly confusion. Perhaps there was no SAT in her counterfactual America, but all that SAT vocab is still useful when used correctly, and it might be time for a review: C.M. uses “aggravate” to mean annoy, “fortitude” for daring ingenuity, “implacability” for calm. Other problems escaped editors’ notice. C.M. calls New York gallery visitors “self-sacrosanct”. She recalls that X and her ex-friend or more Connie “behaved irrationally about” each other. The search for just the right word lands on bad consonance: “With X, you could; her ferocity was evident in her body. And photographs did it little justice, could never convey the feeling she sent into a room, her hunger, her velocity.” That pairing of “ferocity” and “velocity” is accidental slam poetry. The metaphor in the following proves as protean as X with her many performance art personae: “Her drive toward a career as an artist was derailed by the Goldman assassination in April of that year, then extinguished when the Great Disunion occurred that autumn.” C.M. doesn’t work with simile a lot, and runs into trouble with this one: “It was a mad clarity, the kind that passes overhead like a brief cloud on a bright day.” The effort at originality has come up against stubborn convention: it’s hard to sell a “cloud”, so often a symbol of confusion, as a symbol of its opposite. This from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange shows how to revive conventional metaphor with original phraseology, to make the old new: “‘As an unmuddied lake, sir,’ I said. ‘Clear as an azure sky of deepest summer.’”
Unlike Biography of X’s oddness as a biography, these sentence-level problems don’t compromise verisimilitude; journalists sometimes write badly. But to give them and Lacey some credit, C.M.’s good eyes and ears are those of any good reporter. One of X’s stalkers passes as “just another jittery club girl pacing the sidewalk in a fur stole and jagged lipstick”, the “jittery” and “jagged” paired more tastefully than the stole with the lipstick. X’s charming ex-wife’s table manners give some interest to yet another interview, as in C.M.’s account she “twisted a coy shoulder forward and tilted toward”, and with dessert served but much more to recount, “slowly ate the perfect spheres of ice cream, one flavor at a time.” C.M. gives summary of the press for X’s tell-all exhibition The Human Subject, and the New York Post’s headline is just right: “Serial Scammer Says She Did it for Art!” Could it be that writing other people’s lines around counterfactual notions, as all novelists do but Lacey sets out do more extensively with Biography of X, is something like the performance of alter egos by an artist like X? There is what appears to be a ventriloquist job done on David Bowie, talking about his collaboration with X, and it’s creepily accurate: “Coming out of the fifties and sixties — there was a real opening up of attitudes in the sixties — and then in the seventies everything became — it was the pluralistic seventies, you know?” C.M.’s footnote tells us he said this on BBC2 in 1988, but a look at the endnote reveals that this is something he actually said on Australian TV in 2004. For those who enjoy fiction, the interaction of the footnotes and endnotes will be an additional reward of a second reading, and for those with an academic interest, it will no doubt “problematize the question of authorship”. It is hoped that the above derailment — one was just talking about journalistic talent for description — serves as preview of the trickery the novel intends.
There is something about Manhattan’s art, music, and to a lesser extent literature in the 70s and 80s that has stuck for many of Lacey’s age and younger. That would be Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Sontag, Kathy Acker, Vito Acconci, Basquiat, etc. It’s not only the fashionable and the cerebral but the seedy too, all within one borough, and within one life: X, as was Acker, is briefly involved in a Times Square sex show called Fun City. The nostalgia, or just simple longing, affects Biography of X, and Lacey exploits it too, giving gossip about Richard Serra, reconstructing a session at Electric Lady with Tom Waits with X as producer, and taking her to readings (with heckling!) at St. Mark’s bookshop. This is all to change as the city becomes more expensive, and, many feel, less creative, as a reckless life in the arts becomes less practically conceivable. The concurrence of X’s death with the end of the fictional tripartite American system in 1996 comes with this third demise implied, that of a spirit which involved promiscuity, drugs, and much restless movement. X returns home to her friends Connie and Oleg after one of many transformations, and perhaps one of many ordeals: “She’d cut her hair short and wore dark lipstick and smeared black eyeliner. Her shirt was sleeveless, her jeans ripped. She wore clunky combat boots and stank of ammonia.” Much of this world was evoked with better style and more convincing detail in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013), most of which takes place in New York in the 1970s. There the narrator, Reno, though a southwestern transplant, was an artist as well as artist’s partner. Biography of X’s C.M. is subordinated to her wife and subject, having long trusted X’s claims about art, those which justified the sometimes bad treatment, the one violent incident and many unexplained absences. She no doubt could speak in a sophisticated way about X’s many artistic projects, but with distance and equivocation. Biography of X is holding its alluring object out for the reader to see with arms fully extended and slight tremor in the hands.
Besides those interested in New York from 1972 to 1995, or in loving someone with an artistic temperament, Biography of X will most entertain those fiction readers who enjoy the following. First, you perceive a subject enveloped in mystery. Who was X? Then you learn a little bit more, maybe make some connections and speculations. She was a product of her time; she replaced Evangelicalism with art and identity, etc. Finally you realize how little you have actually learned, how little one can learn, and how terribly mysterious everything really is. Besides the banality of the lesson, the problem is how early this process is completed. By page 60, in which C.M. has explained the American Disunion, and comments that having lived through it, she is too close to understand it, she has already concluded that it will be the same for her research: “I will never understand X, either, will never be able to get far enough away from her to see who she was or to comprehend the facts and contradictions of her life.” Once that note of resignation and humility has been played, Lacey relies upon it to give the novel its mood. Thus, “we cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live” at the end of Connie’s chapter. And our memories are not trustworthy: “Time takes those sensations away and without them the story seems simpler and we hold that simplicity up and call it clarity.” For variety, a neuroscientist who knew X is brought in to say, “he found it humbling that he could still not always discern what was happening in the most intimate of intimate spaces, within his own body or mind or the spirit”. Finally, C.M. is dissatisfied with the coroner’s take on X: “They gave me a document that described her body in the most discrete terms, as if we could ever say for certain where she ended and where the world began.” This is meant to reformulate the issue of lone artistic genius versus social embeddedness, or indeed that of the individual versus the collective. But it’s also the final solemn-voiced reminder of our basic ignorance. And if we can’t even draw the outline around the subject, separating her from the world, then what is the subject of and perhaps more fitting title for this work which returns so often to quandary? One throws one’s hands up one last time, and offers, what, Life?
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal and Cleveland Review of Books, and is forthcoming in The Oxonian Review. He maintains a Substack where he writes all about fiction. Twitter: @rudedaubings
