A creative kinship is at the heart of Harriet Scott Chessman's novel Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper--between Mary Cassatt, the American Impressionist painter who lived and worked in France, and her older sister, Lydia, whom Mary used as a model until Lydia's death from Bright's disease in 1882. Chessman, who teaches the personal essay at Yale and Bread Loaf School of English, explores five of Cassatt's tenderly unsettling paintings in a kind of novelistic memoir, through the voice of the retiring, ailing sister, Lydia. The novel, published in a rare sisterly collaboration between two small presses, the Permanent Press and Seven Stories, reproduces the paintings in brilliant miniature.
"Haunted" by Cassatt's work for years, Chessman knew that if she began to write about the artist--in fact, she was under contract at one point to write a scholarly tome on Cassatt for Stanford University Press--"it would be fiction." Rejected for tenure at Yale (where she used to teach American women novelists, modern British fiction and Gertrude Stein), Chessman stepped back from academe to develop her own work--children's fiction and a novel that eventually found publication at the Permanent Press in 1991, Ohio Angels.
"I don't think I could have written in the way that I have if I had kept my scholarly hat on," she says. She had been researching memoir and autobiography ("writing that doesn't have an intention of moving out into the world"), and wondered over many years, how to approach a known life, such as one of Cassatt's elusive, inwardly directed subjects, who contains within her a million, secret stories?
"I felt intimidated by Mary Cassatt," says Chessman, a Granville, Ohio, native, whose brimming cheerfulness belies a soft-spoken fragility. As she speaks with PW over cappuccino at the Atticus Bookstore, just outside of Yale's Gothic gates, she frequently greets a passing acquaintance. "I think in my own imagination I'm more like Lydia." A surprising confession, perhaps, given that Chessman portrays Mary as gifted, ambitiously pursuing a masculine profession and open to an amorous friendship with fellow Impressionist Edgar Degas, while Lydia is the prudish, sometimes jealous, faltering shut-in.
Chessman researched Lydia and found nothing actually written by her. "I was almost glad," confides Chessman. "I stopped looking." Instead, she relied on her self-taught instincts as a writer and how Cassatt's paintings of Lydia--drinking tea in sunlight, embroidering in an autumn garden, driving a child and groom through a dark wood--"spoke" to her. "I have thought, imagined and dreamt my way into her world." Does she fear the wrath of art historians who might scoff at her novelistic invention, such as the intimation of an affair between Cassatt and Degas, which is not documented? "I've had to earn this sense of confidence," admits Chessman, who credits reading Gertrude Stein with helping her become a writer. "Because I had been, and still am, a scholar, I had a scholarly audience most clearly in mind, yet now I think of my audience as people who simply like both art and good fiction."
An unavoidable comparison between Chessman's novel and Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (Plume), a fictionalized account of a servant girl employed and painted by Vermeer, might have helped the novel along its publishing way. Martin Shepard at the Permanent Press, which specializes in "artful fiction," and Dan Simon at Seven Stories, publisher of literary nonfiction and fiction, had been discussing ways of working together, when Chessman's novel, listed as forthcoming from the Permanent Press, was given to Simon to read in manuscript. Together, they were looking for a title that Seven Stories could present to the U.S. book trade as a potential "breakout book." Simon loved Lydia Cassatt; and the two presses agreed that their partnership would begin here. Shepard explains that the partnership "did enable us to take advantage of Seven Stories' experience in reproducing color prints, as well as offering us the opportunity to get wider distribution"--through Publishers Group West. Judith Shepard oversaw the actual editing of the novel--minimal, according to Chessman, who nonetheless made myriad changes thanks to last-minute historical details unearthed by her research assistant at Yale. And the Permanent Press handled the lion's share of subsidiary rights, including U.S. paperback rights to Plume and a bevy of foreign sales--almost all of them to publishers who did Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Chessman's novel is currently the number one selection on the BookSense 76 list for November/December.
"This is a very different book [from Chevalier's], not only because it has to do with a woman artist, but because the essential relationship is loving," Chessman says. "The voice is more like a voice in a diary, between the public and the private." Originally, she had planned the novel to follow Lydia to her death, but that made Chessman too sad, and she ends on a note of lingering hope and beauty in a letter Lydia writes to Mary. Chessman compares Cassatt's masterly paintings of Lydia to a writer's finding her voice. "I actually think Cassatt became so courageous as a painter because of having her sister be one of her earliest models." Lydia's death meant the loss of a cherished companion, as the two women were unmarried and childless, and from this point on and for the next 30 years, as if in consolation, or tribute, Cassatt took up painting children in earnest, for which she is best known.
