“Lay Figures is a richly imagined novel set in Depression-era Saint John, where the vivid world of artists comes to life, their loves and losses shaping what they create. With war changing the destinies of those around her, the young writer Elizabeth MacKinnon searches for a subject that will allow her to realize her potential. Her exploration of what inspires art, for herself and for others, makes for a very compelling read.”
Anne Simpson, author of Speechless
“Lay Figures is beautifully written. Blagrave’s prose flows easily and is full of robust descriptions of both the cityscape and landscape…[his] descriptions are evocative and vivid, enveloping readers in sensory language…. Above all, Lay Figures provides a fascinating look into what Blagrave rightly labels ‘the under-sung city of Saint John….’ A captivating commentary on art and creation, love, lust, and betrayal, social disparity, and the cultural history of the Maritime region.”
–The Miramichi Reader
“Lay Figures is a rich, satisfying, and enormously entertaining reading experience. [It] presents the lucky reader with both the glamour and the grit of art making while staying true to the plain, very unromantic fact that artists are not born, they are made…. Vivid, evocative, well-written, and beautiful.”
–Arabella magazine
“Novels about the lives of artists rarely get it right. Mark Blagrave’s Lay Figures is a rich, enormously entertaining exception. Like Atwood’s Cat’s Eye or Corbeil’s In the Wings, Lay Figures presents the lucky reader with both the glamour and the grit of art making. The questions and challenges faced by Blagrave’s artists are eternal, and more vital today than ever. Saint John is Canada’s Atlantis: a once thriving cultural hub whose contributions to Canada and the world are too often forgotten. Lay Figures brings the era and the city that was back to vibrant, sexy life.”
–RM Vaughan, poet, essayist, and author of Bright Eyed
“Just as great pressure creates diamonds, the Great Depression squeezes some ambitious, cosmopolitan artists back into their hometown. WWII looms and Saint John, with its contrast of old-money gentility and proletarian grit, seems an unlikely place to create art that will shine in the world outside. But the artists find that the city ignites their talents in ways that Paris, New York, and Chicago didn’t. A bohemian procession of writers, models, actors, directors, and artisans are drawn to the energy that radiates from the studios, where the artists work, socialize, engage in sexual intrigues, and—with urgency and without apology—argue the purpose of art in a world where commerce and war rule. In Elizabeth, Mark Blagrave places the perfect participant/observer in the centre of this turbulent cast of characters.”
–Costas Halavrezos, host of the Book Me! podcast
“Mark Blagrave is a superb stylist, and his novel Lay Figures is an intoxicating love letter to a salty Maritime city and its misfit community of poets and painters and dreamers.”
–Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Knife Party at the Hotel Europa
“Blagrave’s book has captured a series of stills in historic Saint John and spread a fine dusting of silver on an ordinary life starring one Lillie Dempster that will not fade to black for some time in the minds of readers…. Rendered in splendid detail, the city of Saint John—as much as Lillie—is the central character of the novel. Blagrave effectively creates a film montage of early Saint John—its streets and businesses, bars and bootleggers, and above all its temperament.”
–New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal
“Enormously entertaining novel…. Blagrave skillfully weaves fact and fiction…an engaging tale of excess and exploitation.”
–The Fiddlehead
“True to its time, it is a slice of film life, a you-are-there invasion of cinema in its infancy.”
–The Sun Times
Copyright © 2020, Mark Blagrave
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.
Vagrant Press is an imprint of
Nimbus Publishing Limited
3660 Strawberry Hill Street, Halifax, NS, B3K 5A9
(902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca
Printed and bound in Canada
NB1402
Editor: Bethany Gibson
Editor for the press: Whitney Moran
Copy editor: Kate Juniper
Design: Jenn Embree
Cover design inspired by Wood Lay Figure with a Mirror by John Bulloch Souter
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and places, including organizations and institutions, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Lay figures / Mark Blagrave.
Names: Blagrave, Mark, 1956- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200162012 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200162020 | ISBN 9781771088329 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771088336 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8603.L296 L39 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.
“You won’t be able to wash it off. Smashing the walls would be the only solution, I’m afraid. The pigment is part of the plaster, you see.”
The landlord stops scrubbing, short of breath, sweating even in his singlet, and most likely overdue for his lunch. I don’t think he wants a lesson in fresco painting, but there would be no point in his slapping a careless coat or two of paint over the work.
“It’s a calcium-based colour you see, and it bonds into the plaster as it dries. Quite permanent. It will just come back to the surface if you paint it over.”
I am not sure this is true, but I am frustrated with William, and, after only a few minutes looking at it, I would like to see it utterly and irretrievably destroyed.
The landlord and I stare at the grotesque figures leering out from the plaster, which cover every inch of the four walls and one corner of the ceiling. I wonder what he is seeing in them.
“Why couldn’t he have painted on canvas like an ordinary person?” he grumbles, dropping his brush into the bucket.
“An ordinary person?”
“Or worked in a factory and left my walls alone.”
I am about to say that he did work in a factory, twice, actually, but decide I don’t owe the man anything, neither explanation nor excuse. More importantly, I don’t want him realizing how well I knew William and prying into things I am trying to forget. He might try to hold me responsible, come after me for the damages (as he sees them). Better he should be left thinking we were simply neighbours in his cheerful dump of a building, strangers who might have nodded on the stairs or begged one another to ask their friends to keep the noise down on a Saturday night. I am grateful that, as far as I can see, William has not included my face in the mural. The landlord could not possibly make any connection. He has only invited me in to view his problem because he heard me on the stairs.
“His rent was paid up. That’s something. But it’s not going to cover the expense of getting rid of this.”
“I heard he joined up. Enlisted in the air force.” Perhaps stirring the patriot in the man might stifle the complainer. He can simply consider destroying William’s mural his contribution to the war effort this week.
“What a fellow like him is going to do for the air force, I’ll never know.”
“A fellow like him?”
“You know, an artist.” He lisps the word, raising one shoulder, crooking his elbow, and letting his wrist flop: the universal symbol for pansy.
As it happens, I do know artists. Especially this artist. I expect William will shoot down more Germans than any career officer. He has never done anything by halves. “Right.”
“You know of anybody who might be interested in this place? I’ll put the sign out, but it’s always good if we can get somebody a tenant can vouch for. Somebody more like you.”
If I didn’t know better, I would think he was flirting. “I’ll keep my ears open.” I cringe at the stupidity of the expression. Keeping one’s ears uncovered would be more accurate, but odd. Unstopped?
The man does not seem to share my concerns. “Much obliged. Why he couldn’t have gone and rented himself a studio….” He takes my elbow, pulls the door closed behind us, and begins creaking down the stairs away from me. I can smell the boiled cabbage in his immediate future.
Staring at the outside of William’s locked apartment door, its abstract shapes of flaked paint a sharp contrast to the painstakingly drawn figures teeming over the walls inside, I think I should try to find Henry. If anyone knows why William decided to cover the walls of his apartment with indelible images and then leave, Henry will. Everyone tells him everything—and what they don’t, he finds out anyway.
The cat yowls from behind the door of my flat. I can hear it as I climb from the landing below. It needs to be fed. In a manoeuver practiced over thirty months, I unlock my door and sweep with my foot as I enter, to make sure it doesn’t escape. William used to tease me about keeping it indoors, made all the predictable jokes about the metaphor of the locked-up kitty. Only he didn’t use the word kitty.
I drop a mound of mashed chicken liver on a saucer. William used to badger me about that, too. He said the cat ate better than most people we knew. It didn’t matter to him that the butcher slipped me the chicken livers for free on a Saturday when he hadn’t found buyers for them that week. You couldn’t win that kind of economic argument with William. The inequity he could see in front of him was what troubled him, not the background factors that might actually explain it. I listen to the cat’s motor purring as it vacuums up the liver, enjoying it much more than any person I know would. If William were still around I would descend the stairs and cross the hall to make exactly that point. My typewriter dares me to join it across the room and get some work done. Instead I grab my coat and leave the flat, nudging the cat away with my foot as I close the door.
Princess Street is deserted, probably thanks to the rain. I glimpse the back of the Capitol across the street and consider going to see a film (it doesn’t matter what, anything to get lost in), but there is no change in my pockets. And I should be saving every penny. I head west toward the harbour and down the hill to Prince William Street, where I decide to break into William’s studio. Seeing his apartment makes me wonder what other bizarre legacies he may have left.
Henry Ward is on the landing outside the studio when I arrive. He claims he has been waiting for me to appear. We don’t speak much right away. Henry is a wonderful hugger and I need that first.
“You’ve seen it then?” he asks, finally. “He was obviously a bit off the rails. We knew that, of course…his behaviour the last few months.”
“I could kill him. Why leave something like that behind, something nobody can do anything with? The apartment’s un-rentable as long as it’s there. The walls will have to be torn back to the lath. He has to have known that.”
“What did you think of it, though?”
“I didn’t get a really good look, but I could see it was strong. Miserable, and mean, I’m afraid. All that allegory…if that’s what it is. Did you know?”
“I saw it last week. He was too drunk to care much, but he obviously didn’t want anyone knowing what he was up to.”
“He would have already known he was leaving when he started painting it. The walls were bare a few weeks ago. At the birthday.”
The birthday. We were all invited for a drink, which turned into several. It was the last time William had let me into his flat, and not many days before we stopped speaking altogether. Someone had produced a bottle of sparkling wine (I don’t think it was champagne) and the cork had bounced off the plaster, leaving a small nick. Henry had commented on how odd it was that a painter’s flat should have no art on the walls. Emil Bojilov (who must have been the one to pop the cork) suggested that the newly nicked wall was now a sculpture, or at least sculpturesque. William, who liked Emil but could never allow that a potter might actually have an informed aesthetic opinion, said it was just a shitty bare wall that had been made even shittier by accident. That had led to a debate on the relative merits of intentional and aleatoric art making, which remained unresolved as always.
“He could have chosen to do something portable. Something that could outlast his lease. But I suppose that was his point, really, wasn’t it? About the fragility of what we make?”
“I think so,” I say, more to fill the air than because I have an answer.
“He was very upset about losing the post office commission.” Henry does not say anything about William’s losing me, if that is even what happened. “It’s nothing like the cartoons for the post office mural, though, is it? The bright colours, all those classical figures…I’d never have imagined William was that interested in mythology.”
“I really didn’t get that good a look, Henry.”
We hug again in the silence that follows, and then Henry asks: “Ready?”
“No. But let’s go ahead.”
We don’t have to break in. Henry has been holding the key the whole time, I realize now. It has to be put in just so or the lock sticks. When I had a key I sometimes fumbled with it for fifteen minutes. Henry demonstrates the knack on the very first try.
Turpentine and linseed oil. All painters’ studios smell of them, but the exact mixture in William’s, combined with the scents of dust and booze and sweat, has always held unique associations for me, from the first time I entered this room.
I had only just started living on my own when I bumped into Suzanne Pickard on Prince William Street that day and she insisted I follow her here. She was modelling for him then. They were lovers, too, though they did everything they could to keep the two dynamics separate in those days.
An unfinished canvas of one of William’s newsboys is the first thing Henry turns around in the abandoned studio. Newsboys make cheap models, though not as cheap as friends.
“I can’t believe he didn’t sell this one,” he says.
“Master McPhee,” I say, recalling the boy’s name from the one time we met. “He would have had to finish it to sell it.”
Not finishing it was William’s way of paying respect to the model. The newsboy had been found in Market Slip not long after his second sitting for the picture. It was not clear whether he had fallen in the harbour and frozen to death before he could drown, or frozen to death and then rolled in. The coroner did not spend a lot of time on cases like his.
I count out five studies of Suzanne as Henry turns the paintings one by one to face the room, as if he is playing solitaire or telling a fortune. You can read in the studies their brief history: model to lover-model to model again. A thoroughly worked charcoal sketch, head and shoulders only, stands beside two much rougher full-body portraits that are frankly, exuberantly, pornographic. Like something Egon Schiele might have done. There is a sketch that reeks of Modigliani and one with a whiff of Degas.
But it’s the sixth one that really interests Henry. “Do you recognize it?”
“It’s Suzanne again. But as what? As Daphne, I think. Those leaves on her hands.”
“Obviously it’s Suzanne, but where have you seen it before?”
Of course. The mural.
We start flipping through the dozens of canvases and boards with new purpose, hoping to piece together how the mural came to be—thinking that if we can trace William’s process we will understand better what he was trying to say as he covered his apartment walls. Frank Gray is recognizable in a smudged charcoal sketch, crowned in laurels that William can only have meant ironically for his arch rival. Movina Sudorfsky is caught on kraft paper, her dancer’s body still, her face an intricate patchwork of rounded beach stones. Next to it is a tiny oil study of Reuben Weiss holding Movina’s pug in what looks like a peaceful pose until you notice the startled look in his eyes. We can find nothing of Henry, and nothing of me, though I know William has not sold anything for months. Perhaps he painted over.
After fifteen minutes of shuffling and reshuffling the contents of the studio, Henry bounds across the room and throws open a window. We both need air.
“God, I love that view,” he sighs.
The studio is only two flights up from Prince William Street, but the city’s dramatic topography thrusts it about six stories above the harbour. I look across the grey water to the Carleton shore, the steeple of St. George’s, the Martello Tower with Partridge Island below it.
“William always worked with his back to the windows. Said they were too distracting. If he hadn’t needed the light, I think he would have boarded them over. He did paint the harbour once or twice, of course, as a change of pace, but he never painted it from inside here.”
“No. This place was for painting the figure, for serious portraiture. The real stuff, I mean, not this recent banal caricature.” Henry waves dismissively at the rows of studies we have lined up along the walls behind us, and then returns to looking out the window. “I think we should photograph it.”
“The mural? I told the landlord he would have to smash it.”
“For posterity.”
“How in hell did he get all that work done in his apartment without my knowing?”
“Who did he want to find it?” Henry asks. “Apart from the landlord, obviously.”
We wait for Tuesday evening before we break into William’s vacated apartment, because the landlord goes out every Tuesday evening. I don’t know why I assumed that Henry would have a key. It is only after we have made the plan that he tells me he doesn’t.
“I don’t think the lock is particularly good,” Henry says. “They never are in these old places. There are lots of gaps, and dry rot. It doesn’t take much to get in if you are determined.”
Living in the same building with the same kind of lock, I don’t find this very reassuring, but I know it will be helpful for our purpose.
I feel a pang of sympathy for the landlord who will now have to repair the doorframe too. Henry is able to wedge a screwdriver into the crack to pry the strike plate away from the wood. The screws barely resist. Then he uses the end of the screwdriver to chip away the wood in front of the mortise. The still-extended bolt slides out from the lock body through the broken frame when he swings the door towards us.
“What if the door had swung inwards?” I ask as he pockets the screwdriver. “Isn’t that more usual?”
“Lucky for us.”
I stop Henry as he reaches for the light switch. “Won’t that draw attention?”
“The landlord is out, you said. Who else would care? If anyone is attracted to the light we’ll tell them we’re William’s friends, come to clear out his things. That’s the truth. A version of the truth.”
The single bare bulb on the ceiling does little to dispel the gloom and even less to illuminate the walls. The painting must have been done mostly during the day, unless William brought in special lights. We start on the south wall, allowing our pupils a minute to dilate. There is Suzanne: in port de bras, midway between fourth and fifth positions, her hands and forearms sprouting twigs and leaves.
“Did he see Suzanne as a victim?” I ask Henry. “I mean, it’s ultimately disrespectful to Daphne, isn’t it? Daphne was raped. I don’t think Suzanne was raped. Frank is certainly not a rapist.”
“William always saw things his own way. Larger, exaggerated. You of all people know that. He didn’t draw sharp lines between things the way many of us do. What Frank might call a ritual of seduction, William might see as rape. Especially given the way things always were between them, the tensions, the competition. Unless….”
“What?”
“Unless we are starting from the wrong end.”
“Of the room?” I turn myself a half revolution clockwise.
“Of the relationship. What if we start from Frank here as Apollo? Those laurels.”
“Oh. That makes sense. It’s a dig, then. Frank crowned with laurels he didn’t deserve.”
“Or something a little deeper,” says Henry. “William always scorned Frank’s measured approach, his cool calculation. He loved to mock it. When he wasn’t bawling me out for choosing to teach painting instead of doing it,” he added.
“And so he paints Frank as Apollo, the Greeks’ cold calculating god. And the Daphne portrait just flows out of that because of Suzanne’s involvement with Frank. Collateral damage.”
Henry squints around the room, “It would make sense then for William to be Dionysus but I don’t see that anywhere, do you? Just a minute. There he is.”
I am not ready to look at William yet. “Apollo was Leto’s son, right?”
“I think so. You’re the literary one.”
“Does that help us with Movina here?” I run my hand over William’s depiction of what can only be Niobe. The cold plaster of the wall enhances the illusion that she has turned to stone. Movina’s tears are so perfectly executed I half expect my fingers to get wet. “Niobe mocked Leto, didn’t she? Something about how blessed she was with her seven sons and seven daughters, while Leto had only two children: Apollo and Diana.”
“And so Leto got her children to kill Niobe’s seven sons. I remember that part, but none of their names.”
“And then, although she was devastated, Niobe was foolish enough to boast that, while she had lost her sons, she still had seven daughters. With predictable consequences. But Movina has no children. That we know of.”
“She would certainly not have kept them secret. Movina doesn’t know the meaning of the word. We’re being too literal, I think.” Henry turns back to Daphne and Apollo. “But is there something to be made out of Frank as Apollo killing Movina’s happiness? Maybe when he broke off their affair?”
“Or is William simply trying to say that even if Movina turned to stone she would still find a way to be an emotional maelstrom?” I sound arch, but I am not prepared to accept responsibility for Movina’s grief at Frank throwing her over for me.
It crosses my mind that we may be trying too hard to wring meaning out of it all.
Then we locate poor Reuben Weiss. It is the bloodiest depiction of Actaeon either of us has ever seen, which is saying quite a lot. His body is divided among the dripping mouths of a pack of six hounds. His head lies on the ground. For all its grim realism, his face is oddly formalized, fixed. Still recognizable as Reuben, it is also the mask of Tragedy. There is perhaps something of the marionette in it, too.
“I’m surprised the hounds don’t have human faces.”
“I don’t suppose he thought it necessary,” is all that Henry says.
“Shall we get to it? Is there enough light?”
Henry has unpacked his camera, the Gandolfi. He unfolds his tripod, screws the camera on, and begins fiddling with the bellows. I have been counting on this total absorption for what I need to do. I sidle over to the sideboard and lean my right elbow on top, while my left hand slides the uppermost drawer out three inches—just enough to allow me to feel around. It seems empty, so I slide it out further to be sure I can reach right to the back. William could have pushed the pages I am looking for back there.
If Henry hears the drawer he has decided to ignore it. There is nothing there, and nothing in the other either.
“Can you help me? I could use a second pair of eyes to make sure I’ve managed the best framing. It’s a big work for a small room. I don’t want to miss any of it.”
It is hard to make out much on the viewfinder’s ground glass in this dim light. That the image is upside down doesn’t help, but learning to see differently is one thing I have managed over the past few years. Still, it is slower work than I would have imagined. I have little experience of proper cameras and Henry is very painstaking.
Each framing takes ages, and the film plate has to be changed for each shot. That the clock on William’s mantel has run down doesn’t help. Every time I look over, I think for a second that time is actually standing still.
When we arrive at the birth of Adonis, I can tell that Henry is quite uncomfortable at what he sees. The cue for William’s crude visual pun is there in Ovid, of course, one of the half-dozen-odd stories about incest, in which, for seducing her father, Myrrha is turned to a myrtle plant, and from her arborified womb Adonis is born. The infant Adonis in the mural is clearly William. It is one of several appearances he makes on the walls, in various guises. Myrrha has been reduced to a single, giant, and intimately rendered anatomical feature, sprouting a wild growth of twigs and leaves. A bush-bush, Suzanne would say. The effect is undeniably erotic, if grotesque. Henry doesn’t ask me to check his framing of this section.
When we have moved the camera through all three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, Henry asks out of the blue: “Did you find it?”
“I don’t know what you mean. We should hurry and pack up now. I don’t know how long the landlord’s poker night goes. I suppose it depends on his luck.”
“And you’ve had none? Could I help you look? Or is it something unmentionable?” Henry giggles like a twelve-year-old.
I consider telling him I am looking for a corset and riding crop just to see his reaction. “It’s papers, the carbon copies of that manuscript I was working on for a while. Those social sketches. Trivial stuff. I’ve destroyed the original and was hoping to finish the job here, but I can’t find the copies.”
I had given them to William in a series of installments over a period of nearly two years. I didn’t know why I felt he needed to see what I was writing moment by moment. Maybe I just wanted to give him proof that I was writing. The first batch was produced early in September 1939, when he was still with Suzanne. At that point, with the war beginning, what I was writing may have had something to do with a fear of extinction. As time went on, I think I wrote and shared the sketches to show that I was there, that all of us were there, in that place and time.
William said that was only because I hadn’t yet found anything bigger and more worthwhile to write about.