{"id":113480,"date":"2023-06-11T18:50:16","date_gmt":"2023-06-11T17:50:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=113480"},"modified":"2023-06-12T18:23:35","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T17:23:35","slug":"tricky-wife-tricky-life-catherine-laceys-biography-of-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/tricky-wife-tricky-life-catherine-laceys-biography-of-x\/","title":{"rendered":"Tricky Wife, Tricky Life: Catherine Lacey\u2019s Biography of X<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kazuo Robinson.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X<\/em><\/a> (Granta, 2023)<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018X\u2019 was often used in such a way, a placeholder for people or things discarded, hidden or unknown. Malcolm X, Madame X, solving for x.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The narrator of Catherine Lacey\u2019s Biography of X<\/em>, C.M. Lucca, tells us this around three quarters of the way through her book. Besides \u201cMadame X\u201d, 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 \u201cX\u201d, the deceased artist, C.M.\u2019s 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., \u201ca 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.\u201d This is something like the way the painter Agnes Martin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> Clyde Hill, a script filmed by Wim Wenders, a large scale conceptual exhibition called The Human Subject<\/em>, and a retrospective at MoMA. Her work involved several pseudonyms and much of what critics called \u201cself-transformation\u201d, 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<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s work. She includes in Biography of X<\/em> notes from X\u2019s journals, from Theodore Smith\u2019s 1997 biography A Woman Without a History<\/em>, and much detail from the New York art scene of X\u2019s time. There are black and white photographs of X\u2019s relations, professional associates, and of X herself in her many guises.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 Lacey\u2019s, not C.M.\u2019s \u2014 revealing that many words attributed to X in the narrative were taken from others including Flannery O\u2019Connor 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\u2019s most basic fictional premise: that it is a biography published in 2005 by Farrar Straus and Giroux. It\u2019s an odd biography that is so preoccupied with its own composition, which sometimes has the urgent sibilance of more personal writing \u2014 reading the paper \u201csection by section in search of something I\u2019d never find\u201d \u2014 and generally makes so much of the biographer\u2019s feelings, telling us that \u201cI felt as if I\u2019d been rejected by my own child\u201d, or that \u201cI could feel the place on my back where her arms had been\u201d. A more believable framing might have been something more like a bereavement memoir, nonetheless including the research into X\u2019s 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\u2019s included, that Lacey and presumably her publishers intended for the novel\u2019s presentation. A possibility to be acknowledged here, lest the present writer seem myopic: Biography of X<\/em> is published in Biography of X<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Eight years after X\u2019s 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\u2019s understandably upset, and at this late stage questions the whole biographical effort: \u201cI should have known better than to have even tried to explain even a minute of her life.\u201d 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.\u2019s 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 \u201caggravate\u201d to mean annoy, \u201cfortitude\u201d for daring ingenuity, \u201cimplacability\u201d for calm. Other problems escaped editors\u2019 notice. C.M. calls New York gallery visitors \u201cself-sacrosanct\u201d. She recalls that X and her ex-friend or more Connie \u201cbehaved irrationally about\u201d each other. The search for just the right word lands on bad consonance: \u201cWith 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.\u201d That pairing of \u201cferocity\u201d and \u201cvelocity\u201d is accidental slam poetry. The metaphor in the following proves as protean as X with her many performance art personae: \u201cHer 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.\u201d C.M. doesn\u2019t work with simile a lot, and runs into trouble with this one: \u201cIt was a mad clarity, the kind that passes overhead like a brief cloud on a bright day.\u201d The effort at originality has come up against stubborn convention: it’s hard to sell a \u201ccloud\u201d, so often a symbol of confusion, as a symbol of its opposite. This from Anthony Burgess\u2019s A Clockwork Orange<\/em> shows how to revive conventional metaphor with original phraseology, to make the old new: \u201c\u2018As an unmuddied lake, sir,\u2019 I said. \u2018Clear as an azure sky of deepest summer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Biography of X<\/em>\u2019s oddness as a biography, these sentence-level problems don\u2019t compromise verisimilitude; journalists sometimes write badly. But to give them and Lacey some credit, C.M.\u2019s good eyes and ears are those of any good reporter. One of X\u2019s stalkers passes as \u201cjust another jittery club girl pacing the sidewalk in a fur stole and jagged lipstick\u201d, the \u201cjittery\u201d and \u201cjagged\u201d paired more tastefully than the stole with the lipstick. X\u2019s charming ex-wife\u2019s table manners give some interest to yet another interview, as in C.M.\u2019s account she \u201ctwisted a coy shoulder forward and tilted toward\u201d, and with dessert served but much more to recount, \u201cslowly ate the perfect spheres of ice cream, one flavor at a time.\u201d C.M. gives summary of the press for X\u2019s tell-all exhibition The Human Subject<\/em>, and the New York Post<\/em>\u2019s headline is just right: \u201cSerial Scammer Says She Did it for Art!\u201d Could it be that writing other people\u2019s lines around counterfactual notions, as all novelists do but Lacey sets out do more extensively with Biography of X<\/em>, 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\u2019s creepily accurate: \u201cComing out of the fifties and sixties \u2014 there was a real opening up of attitudes in the sixties \u2014 and then in the seventies everything became \u2014 it was the pluralistic seventies, you know?\u201d C.M.\u2019s 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 \u201cproblematize the question of authorship\u201d. It is hoped that the above derailment \u2014 one was just talking about journalistic talent for description \u2014 serves as preview of the trickery the novel intends.<\/p>\n

There is something about Manhattan\u2019s art, music, and to a lesser extent literature in the 70s and 80s that has stuck for many of Lacey\u2019s age and younger. That would be Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Sontag, Kathy Acker, Vito Acconci, Basquiat, etc. It\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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: \u201cShe\u2019d 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.\u201d Much of this world was evoked with better style and more convincing detail in Rachel Kushner\u2019s The Flamethrowers<\/em> (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\u2019s partner. Biography of X<\/em>\u2019s C.M. is subordinated to her wife and subject, having long trusted X\u2019s 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\u2019s many artistic projects, but with distance and equivocation. Biography of X<\/em> is holding its alluring object out for the reader to see with arms fully extended and slight tremor in the hands.<\/p>\n

Besides those interested in New York from 1972 to 1995, or in loving someone with an artistic temperament, Biography of X<\/em> 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: \u201cI 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.\u201d Once that note of resignation and humility has been played, Lacey relies upon it to give the novel its mood. Thus, \u201cwe cannot see the full and terrible truth of anyone with whom we closely live\u201d at the end of Connie\u2019s chapter. And our memories are not trustworthy: \u201cTime takes those sensations away and without them the story seems simpler and we hold that simplicity up and call it clarity.\u201d For variety, a neuroscientist who knew X is brought in to say, \u201che 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\u201d. Finally, C.M. is dissatisfied with the coroner\u2019s take on X: \u201cThey 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.\u201d 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\u2019s also the final solemn-voiced reminder of our basic ignorance. And if we can\u2019t 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\u2019s hands up one last time, and offers, what, Life<\/em>?<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE REVIEWER<\/strong>
\nKazuo Robinson<\/strong> is a writer based in New York. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal<\/em> and Cleveland Review of Books<\/em>, and is forthcoming in The Oxonian Review<\/em>. He maintains a Substack<\/a> where he writes all about fiction. Twitter: @rudedaubings<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is something about Manhattan\u2019s art, music, and to a lesser extent literature in the 70s and 80s that has stuck for many of Lacey\u2019s age and younger. That would be Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Sontag, Kathy Acker, Vito Acconci, Basquiat, etc. It\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s bookshop.<\/p>\n

Kazuo Robinson<\/strong> reviews Catherine Lacey<\/strong>‘s Biography of X<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113484,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113480"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113496,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113480\/revisions\/113496"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}