From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 2.1 - The Artist, the Model - Striking a Pose

Beryl Bainbridge's novel about Samuel Johnson, According to Queeney, is the source of a second epigraph in A Kiss Before You Leave Me. (For the first, and more general remarks about Bainbridge, According to Queeney, and the real-life characters who appear in it, see here.) By the time I came to this passage in my first reading of Queeney I was so much in the habit of smiling indulgently or ironically over what Bainbridge's Johnson did and said (that's the explanation most charitable to me, at least), that I misread it. That's what I believe today, at any rate. I'll explain.

Johnson is of course best known to readers of our time as the subject of James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), considered by many the greatest biography ever written in English. It's a 'classic', part of our or 'our' cultural heritage, one of the 'great books'.

When Boswell is first mentioned in Bainbridge's novel, the future great book is but a gleam in its young author's eye. And Johnson, in this scene, shows little faith in Boswell's ability to capture Johnson's likeness in words:

"[Boswell's account of our conversation] will not be accurate, for man's compulsion is to replicate himself. Think of painting--one has only to examine a portrait to see in the sitter a resemblance to the artist."

Ten years ago, I smiled ironically (and wrongly, I believe) at the skepticism Johnson (Bainbridge's character) expresses about Boswell's accuracy as a verbal portraitist; today, I think, I can better entertain a 'straight' reading of the passage. I used to set more store by Boswell; today I'm more conscious of the tension between Boswell's Johnson and Hester Thrale's--i.e., between the classic, 'great books', canonical version of Johnson on one hand, and Johnson as captured by the other chronicler, who was at one time categorized by some simply as his 'mistress' but whose own writings about him and her era form an alternative account increasingly appreciated in our own time.

What first recommended these lines to me as an epigraph, though, was their introduction of the notion of involuntary self-portraiture, the muddying of distinctions between artist and model, portraitist and 'sitter'. When we first see Miranda posing for Jack, their conversation takes off from his sense that her place is to be nude, his to be clothed; hers to pose, his to depict. While he sketches (and lectures) her, she gives free reign to her imagination... inadvertently planting the seeds for one of his first 'sensations': some fifty pages later, we find him--them--at work on a diptych entitled 'His and Hers', in which artist and model appear to switch roles: in the second panel, he is portrayed as her model, nudity and all. Their differences, their dissymmetry, are by no means dissolved or even suspended: the less expected of the two panels is still an elaborate joke or stunt, and his exhibitionism cannot be cast as a simple corrective. Of course, his career and their relationship are still in the early stages.

But what about the claim made by Bainbridge's Johnson, that the portraitist transforms the sitter, in the sense that portraiture is always to some extent self-portraiture? There may well be some truth to this. Perhaps the (male, let's say) portraitist skews the portrait in his own direction--whereas the (female, let's say) model guides the development of the artist in a less predefined way. This is, at least, one possibility.

From Beryl Bainbridge, 'According to Queeney': Epigraph 1.1 - Better in Translation

Beryl Bainbridge (1932-2010) was admired by critics throughout her career but achieved greatest popular success with the historical novels she published in the final decades of her life. At home in England the popular press cast her as the Susan Lucci of the Booker Prize (always a bridesmaid...), and I always found that this distracted potential readers from her fine, dry wit and the nuanced sensibilities that set her apart from the herd (even the Booker herd). She's been on my mind lately because of the recent publication of her posthumous novel The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress (set in the year of American assassinations, 1968) and of this morning's announcement of the new Booker shortlist (where she's not even a bridesmaid this time).

One of her best historical novels, According to Queeney (2001), presents a view of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) through his relationship with 'Mrs. Thrale' (Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi, 1741-1821), a relationship that literary historians believe grew to be far closer than the one between Johnson and his best-known biographer, James Boswell. The novel provides two of the epigraphs for A Kiss Before You Leave Me, including the first epigraph of all:

[Dr. Johnson told Mrs. Thrale] that he had written her a letter which he wished her to read when she was alone. It was not for careless eyes and was in French. 

'Why French?' she asked. 

'The sentiments in it,' he said, 'are best conveyed in another language.'

Bainbridge's reader well understands by this point in the novel the embarrassment of the great (not to say immense) 18th-century lexicographer who wants to draw even closer to a much younger woman, the wife of his best friend (a wealthy brewer and Member of Parliament), in the midst of the couple's entire household, of which Johnson himself was a member for extended periods of time. Even (or especially?) lexicographers may be reluctant to call things by name, even or especially the things they desire. (The letter itself, when Mrs. Thrale finally reads it, turns out to be more puzzling than conventionally seductive.) The tension here could be seen as residing in the ambiguity of the word 'best'. 'Best conveyed in another language': conveyed most effectively (as we might expect of a great lexicographer) or conveyed in the way discretion, secrecy and embarrassment dictate?

Of course, French is not just any 'other language', especially to an Englishman, and especially in the great century of libertinism (and marivaudage). When we smile at the lines Bainbridge gives Johnson, our smile embraces all of this.

The question of translation and multiple languages crops up in A Kiss Before You Leave Me with Jack's grandmother Elise's diaries, which Miranda agrees to translate, and never really goes away. (See 'In Context, Out of Context', paragraph 5.) We readers are uncertain, especially at first, why Elise insisted that the diaries, which she kept in French, be translated into English; we don't know what the choice of languages meant to her at different points in her life. But we do suspect that the content of the diaries is erotic (we're right), and we'll soon see that the diaries both (a) seduce Miranda as a reader and translator and (b) pull her in the direction of a relationship with Elise's (married) grandson: the book as go-between, as in Dante (see 'Five Faces of Emma', paragraph 2), with an assist from a different sort of matchmaker.

We'll return to Bainbridge's Johnson, and to the binary opposition between Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, when we talk about the second epigraph from According to Queeney.