Using a painting to anchor a story is not a new device. Susan Vreeland and Tracy Chevalier used works by Vermeer to fuel totally dissimilar works published in 1999, “Girl in Hyacinth Blue” and “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
Margaret Forster builds her quiet gem, “Keeping the World Away,” around the work of a much lesser known Welsh painter, Gwen John. This haunting story is rooted in art’s ability to speak to the soul, provided the world allows the room for the soul to listen.
It is tempting to describe this work, which unfolds through a prologue and sections devoted to each of six women, as a collection of linked short stories. But the linkages are stronger than each woman being changed by experiencing a single painting. The central characters, or their forbears or heirs, pass within each other’s orbits, meeting or not by slim coincidence.
Forster focuses first on Gwen, creating the sense of an intensely introspective young woman who will inevitably grow into an equally introspective artist. In viewing a Vermeer at London’s National Gallery, Gwen is surprised to find “she admired it more from a distance, and this seemed curious to her. She thought it meant that the artist was outside the painting and not condensed within it. She herself was in what she drew and painted. She knew she was.”
She studies at London’s Slade School, and briefly in Paris, but her work is overshadowed by the more vibrant pieces painted by Augustus, her younger brother. Emotional turmoil that accompanies the end of an obsessive affair with the sculptor Rodin gives voice to vision in an oil painting depicting the corner of her room in Paris. It is, like the artist, an inward looking piece; muted shades of green, mauve and gold show a sparse space with a table, a wicker chair, a window with a lace curtain open to the Paris light of early morning.
The painting starts its long journey when Gwen gives it to a friend, who sees in it “An empty room, a mere corner of an empty room, with no one in it, and yet Gwen’s presence so powerfully there. … There was such longing there, she thought. For the quiet pleasures of a walk in the sun and the picking of primroses. A life outside which had been brought inside? But then she held the small canvas at arm’s length and looked again. It was in fact the opposite: a life inside which had been brought outside. The empty chair, the parasol leaning against it, the table bare except for the flowers – they were all disguises … . The corner of the room was soon invaded by the real Gwen, the distraught Gwen longing for her maitre who would no longer visit her.”
The picture is lost in travel, and finds its way to Charlotte, who “could see herself so clearly as an artist.” But neither she, nor the painting’s subsequent owner, Stella, can become the artists of their aspirations. The realization, in both cases, is tied to the painting and the strong sense that it has flowed from a brush of an artist who inhabits her work in a way they never can.
Painting passed on
Lucasta is an artist, and she comes to the picture through her mother, who had never been fooled by its prettiness. “It looked peaceful, innocuous, but she thought the hand that painted it might have trembled. Effort was there, an absolute determination to be calm. Someone’s breath was being held. And the sense of waiting, the anticipation of someone’s arrival, was painful.”
Lucasta passes the painting on as a parting gift to a married lover. His wife, Ailsa, finds the work after her husband’s death.
Lucasta, initially, is taken neither by the work nor its provenance. Over time, though, the painting becomes a symbol of what she is trying to accomplish in the years left to her, “to live independently and simply, as the painting suggested life should be lived.”
The novel’s last section involves Gillian, Ailsa’s granddaughter, whose life has been shaped by the painting’s absence. But in this artist dwells a distillation of the family’s talent.
Though not related by blood, she is in many ways Gwen’s spiritual heir, and hardly the last of a line of women who, upon studying the painting, “would respond to its simplicity and yet who would not be fooled into imagining there was neither passion nor longing within it.”
Forster’s quiet telling of the painting and the women it touches feels deeply of truth. As the painting and its narrative passes through each pair of hands, contemplation of the bare room and the woman just out of the frame blocks the noise of the world, allowing each woman to discover the truth she most needs at that juncture. And as the painting journeys and the stories accumulate, the reader is also tempted to an introspective reverie, this time inspired by a novel that pushes the world away as completely as the work of art at its center.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Keeping the World Away
By Margaret Forster
$24.95
