Writing Fiction Steeped in the Art and Life of the Great Depression: A Guest Post by Arthur D. Hittner
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Writing Fiction Steeped in the Art and Life of the Great Depression: A Guest Post by Arthur D. Hittner
I love art. I’ve a particular affinity for the art of the Depression era, much of which is imbued with an emotional edge that reflects the perils of everyday existence during those difficult times. In my debut novel, Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse, I explored the creative mind of a struggling young painter in the New York City art world of the late 1930s. My most recent novel, Michelangelo of the Midway, is set in the Midwest a half-decade earlier and chronicles the trials and tribulations of a down-and-out artist who hooks up with a traveling circus to survive.
How does a writer of historical fiction tap into the mind of an artist from another era? In the case of Artist, Soldier, I began by devouring the colorful first-person accounts of the resourceful artists who practiced their craft in New York during the turbulent decade of the Thirties. Many of these artists owed their survival to the federal art programs of the New Deal. There can be no better source for the ambience of a time and place than the reminiscences of those who experienced it. To further gauge the tenor of the times, I perused the historical database of The New York Times whose articles offered a window into the events and controversies that shaped the lives of New Yorkers. Armed with this background, I could place my protagonist, the young artist Henry J. Kapler, in the midst of these events, as a participant, observer or commentator, as the story dictated.
For Michelangelo, I delved into the heartwarming, fictional account of the Brewer Brothers Circus as related by Gary G. Steele in his self-published, anecdote-rich, three-volume Gypsy Family Circus series drawn from oral histories of his own family during the early years of the Depression. I also immersed myself in contemporary and later historical accounts of the creation by artist Thomas Hart Benton of the remarkable (though little known) mural cycle on the history of Indiana created for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. These, together with other sources, informed the world of artist Burt Mason, the promising young protagonist of Michelangelo of the Midway.
But what of the creative act itself? How do you capture on the written page the inspiration that drives the creative process of the artistic mind? In Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse, I utilized two distinct approaches to tap into the creative impulses of Henry Kapler. One was to ponder an actual work of art and intuit the circumstances that may have brought it into being. I’ll call this the Chevalier Method, after Tracy Chevalier who created an entire novel from a single work of art in Girl With a Pearl Earring. Consider, for example, the painting reproduced below. It’s the work of Harold J. Rabinovitz (1915-1944), a now obscure American artist whose life and work provided the inspiration for the fictional Henry Kapler.
Writing Fiction Steeped in the Art and Life of the Great Depression: A Guest Post by Arthur D. Hittner
The following excerpt reflects how I imagined Henry might have approached the subject of this poignant work of art:
The Seventh Avenue Express was the subway Henry knew best. It stopped at Fourteenth Street, running north to Harlem and southeast to Brooklyn. With his sketchbook and a pocket full of tokens, Henry descended into the bowels of the city. He remained submerged for the better part of two weeks, riding from one end of the line to the other, observing and sketching. Surfacing only to eat, sleep, and attend his morning classes at the [Art Students] League, Henry became as much a part of the screeching, grimy, often creepy world of the underground as the foot-long rats that scampered through the stations like frantic commuters.
The stark interior of a subway car was the setting for Henry’s opus. [Reginald] Marsh had tackled a similar subject earlier in Why Not Use the “L”, portraying the indifference of passengers in documentary fashion. Henry would go further, injecting social commentary by staging a morality play within the confines of his canvas.
Henry sifted through scores of sketches for the characters to inhabit his composition. He roughed out a scene depicting two seated men on the near side of the car to the left, one with his head buried in a newspaper and the other looking blankly ahead; a third man barely awake across the aisle, his elbow resting against the seat back, his right hand propping up his weary head; and a young mother sitting beside him, straining to rein in her fidgety son. One last figure would complete the composition and supply the narrative: a sightless young man in shirtsleeves and dark glasses proceeding down the aisle toward the viewer, his left hand limply grasping a walking cane, his right palm turned upward in supplication. It was an all-too-familiar scene, variations of which he’d witnessed repeatedly during his self-banishment underground: a group of passengers, distracted by their own burdens, studiously ignoring the entreaties of a man less fortunate as he passes by seeking charity.
The second (and diametrically opposite) entrée into the creative mind of my protagonist was through the developing plotline, trusting that the story would inform Henry who would, in turn, create an artwork derived purely from my own imagination. In Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse, Henry’s muse, Alice Woodley, is a beautiful ex-chorus girl involved in an abusive relationship with a professional athlete named Jake Powell.
Consider this excerpt from Chapter Twenty-Two:
For much of the next forty-eight hours, the portrait of Alice consumed him. He realized that what he’d started to paint from life, he was now painting from deep within himself. What she’d told him, and how she’d spoken and acted, were as much a part of what he was now creating as the actuality of her physical being. He remembered the fist [Yasuo] Kuniyoshi had placed on the table in the classroom, and the shadow it cast. He’d captured the actuality of his model in their session two days earlier, but it took the succeeding couple days of laborious effort for the truth to emerge. He studied the painting closely. What had begun as a likeness of an extraordinarily beautiful young woman had evolved into a portrait of both beauty and vulnerability. This was not the hardened, streetwise woman that had surprised and disappointed him at the automat, although that was certainly a part of what she’d become. There was much more—and it thrilled him to discover it peering out from the canvas.
“Waiting” was the title he chose for the painting. It made sense to him. He perceived a young woman waiting to make sense of her life, to comprehend and reconcile the choices she’d made, to find a path forward.
Similarly, in Michelangelo of the Midway, I reimagine the great muralist Thomas Hart Benton at work (with the assistance of our protagonist, Burt Mason) producing his 26-panel, 250-foot magnus opus for the Indiana pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair:
Jenny watched Benton apply thick strokes of beige and cream along the torso of a weary farmer seated atop an old-fashioned, mule-drawn mower. Pigs, chickens, cattle, and sheep punctuated a rural landscape with a barn, windmill, and silo in the background. Broad, horizontal strips of off-white, tan, brown, pale blue, and dark blue combined to delineate the sky above.
Later on, Callie Swayze, the circus’s beautiful and acrobatic bareback rider and a principal character in the novel, discovers that she’d served as Benton’s inspiration for the bareback rider in the most controversial panel in the mural (you’ll have to read the novel to learn why!)—a case where fact and fiction meld serendipitously.
“Oh my God!” She finally spotted it: her figure rising in the upper right quadrant of the panel, silhouetted against the sky, balancing on her horse with a single foot, her arms extended overhead with a wooden hoop in her grasp. Below her, a red-coated lion tamer in a top hat cracked a whip menacingly while a circus tent rose up behind them.
In the end, the writer’s means for divining the artistic vision of his protagonist shouldn’t matter. What matters is that his character’s creative impulses feel genuine to the reader. The paintings portrayed in the novelist’s narrative should be equally accessible in the reader’s mind, whether the artwork has an existence in the real world or solely in the writer’s imagination. Whether I’ve succeeded in transporting you into the creative minds of Henry Kapler, Thomas Hart Benton or Burt Mason is something only you can judge. I invite you to read Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse and Michelangelo of the Midway and decide for yourself.
Writing Fiction Steeped in the Art and Life of the Great Depression: A Guest Post by Arthur D. Hittner
