“Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing” and “Surprised in Translation”

Mary Ann Caws is one of those remarkable writers and scholars whose wide and prolific accomplishments could intimidate the critical pants off a reviewer. A Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, she is the winner of many honours and awards (including Getty and Guggenheim fellowships), the acclaimed translator of French literature (notably Surrealist poetry), and the author of apparently numberless books across a spectrum of art-historical and literary topics. She has written about Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Dora Maar, Robert Motherwell, Marcel Proust, Henry James and Pablo Picasso, to name some but by no means all. She has examined the rich relationship between visual and verbal creativity. And recently, she has produced the two quite different publications under review here: Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing, which celebrates the lives of seven exceptional women of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Surprised in Translation, a meditation on the delicate art of, yes, translation.

When used with reference to women artists, “eccentric” is a word that usually pushes my indignation button. Too often—and especially in the case of Emily Carr, one of the artists discussed in Glorious—it is deployed by those in power (the patriarchy, we used to call it, during the second wave of feminism) as a form of denigration, a means of deprecating or even disposing of the achievements of brilliant and oppositional females. Carr, for instance, was seen for decades as that cranky old lady with the hairnet and the monkey, a characterization that, despite her great recent curatorial acclaim and art-market success, is still used in the promotion of her work by and to those who clearly have no understanding of her art. (A few years ago, some marketing folks in Victoria decided to flog an exhibition of Carr’s work with a poster headed “Emily Carr/ Eccentric,” printed in big letters above the much smaller qualifier, “Artist-Author-Genius.” Imagine a museum show titled “Vincent Van Gogh/Nutter.” Or how about, “Paul Gaughin/Deadbeat Dad”?) Still, I had to override my automatic reaction in the light of Caws’s take on the E-word. With respect to the women she portrays in individual chapters—Judith Gautier, Suzanne Valadon, Dorothy Bussy, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Dora Carrington, Claude Cahun and Carr—“eccentric” seems to denote the ability to defy social convention and renounce stereotypical gender roles in order to lead a fully creative life. In establishing her arguments, Caws quotes frequently from the journals and letters of her consistently eloquent subjects.

A surprising focus here is the seemingly helpless enthrallment of a number of these women to men of stature and acclaim. Writer, translator and prodigious scholar of Chinese and Japanese literature, Gautier was a (much younger) lover of Victor Hugo and an obsessive devotee of Richard Wagner, about whom she wrote copiously. Bussy, a translator and minor writer (her only novel, Olivia, was published first in 1949), developed in middle age a life-altering passion for the homosexual writer André Gide (whose work she also translated). Carrington, an artist of remarkable individuality, was famously and unrequitedly in love with another homosexual writer, Lytton Strachey. (In a strangely ironic twist, Bussy, who was Strachey’s sister, saw Carrington’s love for Strachey as ludicrous and pathetic. That was some years before the onset of her own ludicrous and pathetic feelings for Gide.) Carr, although Caws doesn’t delve into it here, was a devoted disciple of Lawren Harris. (Whether that devotion was coloured by passion is hard to know, since none of her letters to him survive. Tellingly, she carefully preserved his letters to her.) Cahun, although a flamboyant lesbian and lifelong thwarter of gender expectations, developed what Caws calls a “spectacularly inappropriate” and completely un-mirrored love for André Breton. On first reading, it might seem these “glorious” women spent much too much time defining themselves through their relationships with more famous men.

Again, however, Caws turns our preconceptions around by attending not to the demeaning, inequitable and hopeless aspects of these relationships, nor to their sometimes tragic consequences (Carrington killed herself in despair a few weeks after Strachey died), but rather to the ways such “eccentric” attachments expanded the lives of the women who formed them. In some cases, although the sexual attraction could never be reciprocated, deeply loving friendship did issue forth from the unsuitable objects of desire. More importantly, Caws argues, such misplaced passions fed the creativity of her glorious women. Carrington would not have painted one of the great works of her short career, her 1916 Portrait of Lytton Strachey, had she not been so intensely focused on her subject. And Bussy might not have written her novel, in which her painful feelings for Gide were transformed into a story of a schoolgirl’s lesbian passion for her teacher.

The most tragic—and least glorious— story told here is that of Modersohn-Becker, whose inability to be adequately “eccentric”—to defy convention and refuse marriage and motherhood (as Carr so clearly did)—led directly to her premature death and the truncating of her promising painting career. In this light, falling in love with a homosexual looks like a wise form of both birth control and career preservation.

Glorious Eccentrics is an intriguing book, filled with delightful detail and revelations into all varieties of creative, emotional and spiritual conviction; it also serves up insights into the spectrum of self-confidence through to self-doubt. Still, there are some odd errors here, prompting me to wonder where Caws’s editors were. Problems with punctuation, dropped words and phrases, and repetitions mar the text. (We only needed to hear once Carr’s sad little prayer, written in her journal, “Oh Lord I thank Thee for the dogs and the monkey and the rat.”) More glaring errors of fact also should have been caught. In the chapter on Claude Cahun, Caws writes that Cahun was “completely bilingual, like Emily Carr.” She must mean Dorothy Bussy. Carr was one of the most obstinately monolingual artists in the history of Canadian art. (In fact, Caws notes earlier in the book that Carr did not speak French—more than a minor hindrance when she travelled to Paris to study art.) Caws also reports that Mayo Paddon proposed marriage to Carr in France: it was England. Someone should have caught these problems before the book was published. They diminish its scholarly credibility although not, ultimately, its impact.

In her conclusion, Caws restates her interpretation of eccentric as behaviour “generally deemed inappropriate to the circumstances of the life as received.” Then she adds, “Against the givens of each situation— set by social or traditional norms—these seven women made distinctly unusual choices, rejecting a behavior that would have been thought rational, choosing, rather, the irrational, the unexpected.” Coming from an expert in French surrealist poetry, “irrational” is glorious praise.

Surprised in Translation speaks to a select readership: translators (of course), poets, students of language and comparative literature. It consists of a close examination of the complexities and nuances of the translation process and advocates for a condition of “slippage” between the original text and its versions in other languages. In translation, Caws opposes the literal and the “mimetic,” and scorns “servile imitation.” Slippage is where the art and the surprise come in— although she cautions that it “must not interfere with the essential— which is to say conceptual—shape of the poem….”

Through a series of elegant chapters, Caws cites examples of her own translations—of Stéphane Mallarmé, André Breton, Paul Valéry, René Char and more. She also leads us through translations executed by talented others: Mallarmé of James McNeill Whistler, Roger Fry of Mallarmé, Charles Mauron of Virginia Woolf, Yves Bonnefoy of William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett of himself. In her final chapter, Caws illuminates her choice of title—“Surrealism wants to be, has been, and always was about surprises”—and ends the book with a quote by Breton: “I touch nothing but the heart of things I hold the thread.” ■

Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women Painting and Writing, Mary Ann Caws, New York & Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, cloth, 152 pp, $35.00. Surprised in Translation, Mary Ann Caws, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 128 pp, $25.00 (US).

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a contributing editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.