Letters From London - Letter 11 - Perdita
"I cannot write another novel about a courtesan," he tells himself, even as he feels his heart lunge.
It is one of his new favorite paintings immediately.
The painting’s subject is a white woman in a powdered wig, her face turned to the side as she looks down to something we cannot see, her face and figure framed by an ocean’s shore, a bright seam of light spreading along the horizon, and dark clouds gone black overhead. The black choker on her neck is worn high, like he’s always imagined for the woman wearing a magical choker to hold her head on her neck in the famous fairy tale. In fact, she seems to be her, viscerally her, a lock of her hair drawn down to cover where the cord ties in the back.
Her expression to his mind is that of someone who has had her revenge on whoever it is she sees below, but he is almost certainly projecting. Is it dawn, or evening?
The title of the painting is “Contemplation,” the subject, one Mrs. Mary Robinson, or Mary Darby, Mrs. Thomas Robinson, also often called “Perdita,” after a role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale she performed as a young actress. The artist is Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted her several times. It is one of three paintings of this novelist, poet, courtesan and actress that hangs in the Wallace Collection in Marylebone, London, and on the day he first sees it, he tells himself I cannot write a novel about another courtesan, even as he feels his heart lunge toward the painting and the black sky above her head, matched only by the cord around her neck.
He went at the suggestion of a friend and former student who lived in London now, Kaytie, as it was a favorite of hers. The museum was created out of the art collection of a Sir Richard Wallace, the sort of collection he had come to appreciate warily, for the way a private collection could be said to be the product of a single person or a family’s conversation about aesthetics, at best, or at worst, a portrait of that family’s inexplicable obsessions. A rich family’s collection had no obligation towards representing a period accurately or offering lessons in history, though of course it would all the same.
The Wallace Collection is located in the building where Sir Richard Wallace had once lived, as if the art had managed to supplant the heirs by the end. And in this case, the collection had—Wallace had died without legal heirs. The Georgian mansion in Marylebone became a museum to the art collection at Wallace’s request. But when he looked, months after he had left the museum and the painting lingered in his mind, he found a story more interesting than that.
Sir Richard Wallace could have been a background character in his second novel, The Queen of the Night, his first and thus far only novel about courtesans, except it seems he was an incredibly kind and thoughtful man, relentless in his commitment to the public good and thus an unlikely character in fiction. Wallace is popularly thought to be the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, Richard Seymour-Conway. He came to Paris at around the age of seven, and was raised by his father’s mother, the Marchioness of Hertford, known as Mie-Mie. Francis Charles Seymour-Conway, the 3rd Marquess, had married her and begun the collecting art in earnest with her money—she was the only heir of William Douglas, 4th Duke of Queensbury, an extremely wealthy man at the time of his death.
Wallace worked as a secretary and assistant to the 3rd Marquess and was a passionate assistant in the creation of the collection, and after the death of the 3rd Marquess, he was almost immediately performing the same duties for the 4th Marquess, who appeared in the journals of the Brothers Goncourt—what we can call a kind of who’s who of the era— described as “A complete, absolute, unashamed monster, even more of a monster than his brother Seymour, who redeemed the black wickedness of his family with certain generosities.”
Other details on the aforementioned black wickedness are harder to find at a glance but it seems worth saying that the 3rd Marquess inspired villains in two different novels, Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and Comingsby, by Benjamin Disraeli, respectively.
When the 4th Marquess died, it was a month before the start of the Siege of Paris and the Franco-Prussian War. Wallace discovered himself to be in straits very like his grandmother, Mie-Mie, inheriting a vast fortune and homes and estates in London, Paris and Northern Ireland. He married his longtime mistress, legally recognized his son, secured his art collection against the war and then spent the Siege funding two ambulance services, one for British citizens in Paris, the other for the French Army, and even personally handed out cash to the poor in need of urgent supplies and housing. It would have made for an interesting scene in The Queen of the Night, Lilliet meeting with a kind man urgently passing out money during the Siege of Paris.
He received a baronetcy from Queen Victoria, 1st Baronet, as a thanks for his great service during this crisis, but he was not allowed by her to pass down his title for having married his wife so many years after the birth of their son.
Unmentioned in many of the articles about his art collection are the water fountains he had installed as a gift to the city of Paris, and the story of the Wallace Fountains of Paris is here. But perhaps you are wondering as to how this leads back to the painting where this began? Well, the 3rd Marquess and his wife were subscribers to the poetry of Mary Robinson, and patrons of hers. Given the reputation of the 3rd Marquess this may have meant something more but he is not listed as among her notable lovers. All the same, three portraits of her in a single collection suggests, well, a sustained attention. Into this kind of implication a fiction can form. But her life and career were much bigger than this suggests.
A footnote: much of Sir Wallace’s art, money and property were inherited by his own assistant, Sir John Scott, eventually a lover of Vita Sackville-West’s mother, Lady Sackville, and so there is a short description of the Paris apartment and the Paris part of the Wallace Collection that did not travel to London in her book about her grandmother, Pepita.
*
He and Kaytie went off for drinks at a fairly whimsical bar, the exterior covered in fabric flowers, the menu many pages long. He had come to resent cocktail bars like this at times and yet he still gave them a shot now and then, as he was an easy mark for someone waving a fancy vermouth at him, which in fact did happen shortly after they were served. How do they know me so well, he wondered.
He sipped at his drink with her and when they were done, she paid, a treat for him turning in his novel proposal. As he walked home through the night, he thought about the idea of really living in London. Kaytie is American also and was perhaps the first to be a little cool to the idea of moving there. “People don’t really socialize outside the network of people they went to school with so much,” she said. The only place she regularly found strangers talking with each other was, well, his friend Damian Barr’s now defunct literary salons. “People talked to each other there,” she said, toasting it a little mournfully.
*
“Are you thinking about moving to London?” He doesn’t remember who asked the question first, and his first answer was a joke: “Maybe just for the election.” At the age of 56, he is weary of presidents, skeptical of them or at least the process for choosing them in America. Well before Trump he had tired of trying to elect the president with the lowest kill rate, to figure out who that might be—it was not obvious. Then came Trump and the way Twitter had become a long exercise in fact checking Trump, or even just muttering the truth to yourself in the dark, and that had become unbearable also, even as the alternative was worse. The sad sack spectacle of him back on the campaign trail in 2024, somehow while under indictment, his gleaming orange face like a handbag Melania would never buy, and the nonstop parade of his open mouth in photos as he could never close that mouth, well, how to escape that? Except to expatriate even briefly, temporarily. And could that even do it? Would it be worth all it involved?
How much of you was formed by a place? How much of your personality was about proving yourself or surviving in relationship to this or that system that might not exist at all somewhere else? What would be released if you just went somewhere else? What if he had moved to Berlin in 1990, or to Edinburgh? Who would he be?
He had seen Trump’s mouth so often while he was in office, he’d come to feel like Trump’s dentist. No more of that, please.
And yes he knew the problems in London and the UK as they were a mirror to the American ones, and in many ways had a common root: Cambridge Analytica. He knew enough to know that he didn’t want to move there yet. But maybe it could serve as a temporary shelter. Maybe that.
*
While buying a plane ticket for Dustin to go home briefly for a week, a pop-up in the app had asked him if he wanted to insure the flight, as, did he know? An emergency room visit in the US was regularly upwards of $35,000. He declined the insurance, as they had insurance. But the warning from American Airlines about the country he otherwise lived in has lingered for a long time.
Each day he woke up in that Brunswick Centre apartment and looked out on the pale white apartments across the way, then down to the Chinese grocery, the K Beauty Bar, the hot pot restaurant, and the noise of the day would rise and fall, and there was something less lonely to it than the silence of the Vermont woods. Though he had once sought that silence too, hoping for it to bring him back a sense of himself. But the noise of London had now restored something else.
This foreign studies program he was leading was not meant to be a trial stay, just four months of work, but then almost immediately it was that. In the first days, they’d been giddy with the possibilities of their new neighborhood. They could go to a movie in a theater as easy as going downstairs. They went out to eat, met friends out, saw people for lunch and for drinks, dinner. They went to museums, the theatre, queer crafts fairs, queer picnics. They made new friends, reunited with old friends, took trips out to Brighton, Norfolk and Oxford. Or they stayed in with a book. They watched almost no television at all either way, unlike back in America, where it had become, frankly, a too frequent habit.
He was very aware though that his visit was protected by the institutional forces that would likely not be in place if he and Dustin were to come back on their own; no per diem and no rent support. What would a life here be like was an interesting question to entertain. How would it change them? But also, how had it already changed them?
He ate muesli now, for example. They both did. Sometimes twice a day. It didn’t make sense. Also he craved scones, several times a day also. Specifically the sultana scones he could buy in little four packs at Sainsbury. He still drank gin but no longer with tonic, usually just a martini on the rocks or a drink he and Dustin had dubbed the Jean Rhys, after her preferred drink of sweet vermouth and gin, as detailed in David Plante’s Difficult Women. He would drink a Jean Rhys and think of her trying to write her autobiography with Plante’s help. The folder of material she had stamped with the words “TO BE DESTROYED UNOPENED IF ANYTHING SHOULD HAPPEN TO ME.” He liked the idea of that as something to put on his grave.
Perhaps more significant than eating muesli and scones: while living in London he had finished a novel proposal, a screenplay and a long review of the new Ed Park novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. “I guess you needed to be out of the country for longer than a few weeks,” his agent had said of it all on the phone, and they laughed. Had it been so obvious? But she had known him over twenty years now. She knew him in ways he didn’t know himself. They laughed because it was true.
Maybe not an expat life, then. Maybe just some long visits would do.
I’m so glad. I think lifestyle is too often a focus. When in many cases what we want are different systems.
This was so interesting, I knew nothing about Wallace, although I've visited the collection in the past. All those Parisian water fountains! Who knew!