Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

When she took credit for Rune’s work, she went too far. I struck up a friendship with Rune when I interviewed him for a profile in The Gothamite in 2002. Not long after he committed suicide (yes, I believe it was intentional), on October 17, 2003, I began thinking about writing a book. I wanted the real story, to find out what actually happened to Rune. My book Martyred for Art (Mythrite Press, 2009) is Rune’s story, and I stand behind it. I spent a couple of years on it, doing in-depth reporting — making interviews, chasing clues and documents. Read the book! It’s at your local bookstore. Order it online.

Harriet Burden bought and paid for Tish and Eldridge. Without her bags of money, neither of them would have fallen in with her. That’s a fact. Rune was a celebrity, an art star. His crosses were commanding millions. Rune didn’t need her. Whatever he did with her, he did as a lark, an amusement, an aesthetic dalliance. No one can blame her for wanting to latch onto his fame. The problem in the end was that Rune turned out to be a lot more than she had bargained for. His genius as an artist far outstripped her fussy, pretentious work. The twelve Larsen windows are triumphs. I do not believe she made any of them. And, of course, he outmanipulated her with one stupendous gesture: his own corpse. The film he took of his death will last. In it, he revealed the alienated truth of what we have become in this postmodern, soon-to-be cyborgian age.

The first time I recall laying eyes on the woman was in Tish’s studio when I traveled to Brooklyn to snatch a couple of quotes for the piece. She looked like a cartoon character, big bust and hips, huge — six-five, maybe — a galumphing jump-shot-sized broad with long, muscular arms and giant hands, an unhappy combination of Mae West and Lennie in Of Mice and Men . She lumbered around the studio with a tool belt, and when I asked her what she did there, she told me she was “Anton’s friend” who “helps him out with things”—not inaccurate when you think about it now. Before I left, I shook her hand and said casually, “And what’s your opinion of Anton’s work?” She practically bit my head off. “There’s the outside and the inside; the question is: Where is the border?” I didn’t quote that obscurantist comment in the article, but I recorded it in my notes. I have it on tape. She went on for some time, waving those meaty hands, barking at me, nodding.

She had one thing right. I don’t think she would have gone over with dealers or collectors, although who knows? They can get used to anything if it’s sold right. But whether they could have sold her without remodeling, I’m not convinced. She was too excited. She quoted Freud, big mistake — the colossal charlatan — and novelists and artists and scientists no one’s ever heard of. She dripped with earnestness. If there’s one thing that doesn’t fly in the art world, it’s an excess of sincerity. They like their geniuses coy, cool, or drunk and fighting in the Cedar Bar, depending on the era. Before I published the Tish article, I found out that the weird woman in the studio was Felix Lord’s widow, and the story clicked: a flush widow and her protégé. He was a kept boy, if not for his adorable, slender hips, then for his talent.

What puzzled me was why I didn’t recognize her. I must have seen her multiple times before that day with Tish. I was a regular at openings and, at least twice, I’d been to cocktail receptions uptown at the Lords’ spacious digs — noisy, packed, stand-up dos with revolving hors d’oeuvres and snarky, competitive small talk. Still, I have a keen eye, and my ears can take in a suggestive sentence fragment from across the room, and yet Mrs. Felix Lord had left no trace whatsoever. For all practical purposes, she had been invisible. Well, I guess she’s having her fifteen minutes now — from the grave.

I agreed to contribute to this book only after long conversations with Maisie and Ethan Burden, as well as with Bruno Kleinfeld, the companion of Harriet’s last years. I also corresponded with Professor Hess and became convinced that this book about my friend Harriet Burden would illuminate aspects of her life and art for the many people who have now discovered her work.

Harriet and I met in 1952 when we were twelve years old at Hunter High School. There were only girls at Hunter then. I sat beside Harriet in French class and, before I ever said a word to her, I watched her draw. Although she seemed to be wholly engaged in the class — always ready with a conjugation — she never stopped drawing. She drew faces, hands, bodies, machines, and flowers inside her notebooks, outside her notebooks, on bits of scrap paper, anywhere she could find a blank surface. Her hand appeared to move by itself, idly, but with uncanny precision. From a few lines sprang characters, scenes, still lifes. Who was this tall, solemn girl with the magic hand? I told her I was impressed, and she turned to me, waved her hand in the air, put on a faux-spooky voice, and said, “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The horror movie starring Peter Lorre featured a musician’s amputated hand that committed murders and played the piano.

Years later in medical school, I read about neurological patients with alien hand syndrome. Some brain-damaged people have found themselves with an upstart hand that does exactly the opposite of what she or he wills it to do: unbuttoning a shirt that has just been buttoned, turning off the water before the glass is full, even masturbating in public. In general, alien hands cause dismay and havoc. At least one rebellious hand in the medical literature tried to strangle its owner. After I had read about these limbs with minds of their own, I called Harriet to tell her, and she laughed so hard she came down with a fit of the hiccoughs. I mention this because the joke still resonates. Harriet, who soon became Harry to me, was smart, gifted, and exquisitely sensitive. She could sulk for hours in silence when we were together, and then, just when I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she would throw her arms around me and apologize. Although I wouldn’t have said it at the time, her drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains.

We studied together, and we daydreamed together. I imagined myself in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, marching down hospital corridors, ordering around nurses, and Harriet saw herself as a great artist or poet or intellectual — or all three. We were intimates as girls can be, unhampered by the masculine posing that plagues boys. We talked on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t. We shared our torments and analyzed the girls in our class. We were pretentious children who read books we didn’t understand and embraced politics we knew little about, but our pretenses protected us. We were a team of two against a hostile world of adolescent hierarchies. My mother once said to me, “Rachel, all you really need is one good friend, you know.” I found that friend in Harriet.

Too much time has passed for me to recapture us as we were then. I have treated children and adolescents in my practice for many years now, and my knowledge of their stories, as well as my own analysis, has surely reconfigured my memories. Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. The fact that I knew Harriet until she died in 2004 has also changed my understanding of our early friendship. I do know that the passionate girl became a passionate woman, an omnivore driven by an immense appetite for ingesting as much learning as she possibly could. That hunger never left her. There were other forces that impeded her path.