by Linda Herrick

The legend who lived for love

It must be tough, being a biographer. Carolyn Burke, whose book on American war photographer Lee Miller inspired a dramatic image-driven session at the Auckland Writers Festival a few years ago, decided her next subject would be the legendary French chanteuse, Edith Piaf. Much of her research entailed lengthy periods of time living in Paris. How ghastly. Then she heard of two men living in Marseilles who were obsessive Piaf collectors — so she had to go down to the balmy French Mediterranean coast to meet them. Twice.

“They have the biggest collection of Piaf records, films, memorabilia of all kinds,” says Australian-born Burke, on the phone from Santa Cruz, California, where she has lived for many years. “They even had her car. I sat at the wheel of her car. And they had her little black dresses, her handbags. I was able to get as close to her in a physical way as possible. It was quite thrilling.”

Extremely thrilling, actually, for someone who has been enchanted by Piaf since she — Burke — was 19, and living in Paris in the late 1950s while she studied French at the Sorbonne. Piaf was in her mid-40s at the time, and alarmingly frail.

“I lived in a maid’s room on the top floor of a seven-storey building,” Burke recalls. “I had to walk up seven flights of stairs. I gave English lessons to the family, and they called me ‘La Miss.’ I first heard Piaf on the radio — I was very impressionable and thought, my, this is amazing. Then I learned from my French professor that he considered her an example of perfect French diction, so I started singing along with Edith Piaf songs to perfect my French.

“Piaf was still alive, doing what the French press called her ‘suicide tour.’ She was so ill, they were taking bets on whether she would die on stage. She did indeed fall quite ill that year, and had to stop singing for almost a year, but you heard her songs on the radio all the time, and she was always in the papers.”

Ill as she was — arthritis and liver ailments after years of drinking and addiction to pain killers — the indomitable Piaf wasn’t quite finished. As Burke relates in her book, No Regrets, the singer made a remarkable last surge, inspired by a song. “She wouldn’t see anybody — she’d had several surgeries and long convalescences, but she still wasn’t doing very well,” says Burke.

“One evening the composer Charles Dumont came to her apartment with a new song, but she wouldn’t see him. Then she changed her mind and let him in — this is the story he told me in an interview — and he played the song we know in English as ‘No Regrets.’ She perked up and said, ‘Play it again.’ Gradually she sat up and called in her entourage. She had him play it 20-something times, all night long, and it had an unbelievably tonic effect.”

Piaf was convinced she could return to the stage, and booked the Olympia Theatre in Paris to give a programme based on the new song. “Dumont wrote a lot of songs for and with her, and so that is the story of how she revived,” says Burke. “By the end of the year [1960] she was back with a long run at the Olympia and everyone talked about her resurrection. She had sheer will and determination in great quantities.”

Other books have been written about Piaf’s life, including her own “whitewashed” memoirs, The Wheel of Fortune, and an unreliable biography by the singer’s lifelong friend (very much on and off), Simone Berteaut, aka Momone. “While Momone’s account of Piaf’s life was highly picturesque, not to say sensational, you have to use it with great care, because she told a lot of lies to inflate her own importance,” says Burke.

Burke was fortunate, because she came to the project at exactly the right moment. In 2006 the embargo expired on a huge collection of Piaf’s correspondence held by the French Bibliotheque Nationale — the National Library. The letters were mainly between Piaf and poet Jacques Bourgeat, who the singer regarded as her spiritual mentor. But first, Burke had to gain several kinds of approval, not least of which involved etiquette, from the literary lawyer in charge of the Piaf Foundation in Paris.

“I had to go over to Paris to see him. I speak fluent French, and that certainly helps. I had several long interviews with him, and he could see how I was thinking about the project, and I guess that satisfied him.

“I had some trepidation about being an outsider coming in and trying to work on this national icon. Because I have lived in France a lot, I also know something about how to behave, and that really helped. If you don’t follow the protocol and do things properly, the doors will shut.”

Access to the letters and the lawyer’s full backing meant Burke’s biography could include lengthy quotes from those letters, the first time they have been published in English. Piaf’s words give an insight into a woman who was born and raised rough (her father was a tiny acrobat, her mother a drunk who abandoned her) but possessed a keen intelligence and a determination to learn. Burke was astonished to discover Piaf was fascinated by Greek philosophy.

“It was a complete surprise. I learned that from the correspondence — it really allows us to see her in a new light. She talks to Bourgeat about Plato — you can’t believe it. When she went to tour Greece after World War II she was quite disappointed that modern Greece was not the way she had imagined,” she laughs.

When Elizabeth Taylor was married to Eddie Fisher, she demanded that he read “improving” literature, and a similar, amusing detail emerges in the book that Piaf made her lovers, or “protégés,” study the heavy philosophical works she thought were so important. For some, it was more than a struggle.

“Some of them were not so delighted with Edith’s reading list,” Burke laughs, “but another thing I learned from the research and interviews was how generous she was with her protégés, how much she taught them. Yves Montand [one of Piaf’s earlier lovers and a singer of French cowboy songs when they first met] owed an immense amount to her, because she decided to pass on her own training. He’d been singing those cowboy songs in French until he met her. Then he became a huge star.”

It is staggering to read about the number of relationships Piaf had, and the fluidity with which she passed from one man to another. Burke admits even she was surprised.

“I even thought of putting all their names in an appendix, but my editor didn’t want me to do that.”

She doesn’t necessarily agree, though, that Piaf was essentially a lonely person. “To look at it from another angle, she was very adept at forming an alternative family through affinity, all those various musicians and impresarios, the people that gave her a lot of companionship. She couldn’t bear solitude — but things didn’t always work out so well with her men.”

The great love of Piaf’s life, the boxing champion Marcel Cerdan (who was married), ended in 1949 when he died in a plane crash on his way to join the singer in New York. They had been together for less than a year. “I can think of only one thing, to join him,” Piaf told Bourgeat in a letter quoted in the biography.

“Their relationship was fraught, to say the least, because he was married,” observes Burke, “and they were both so famous they were hiding from the press. Who knows what would have happened? She certainly idealised him and the relationship.”

What the book makes clear was that Piaf was always searching for a “perfect love.” Burke believes that may have stemmed from the abandonment by her mother.

“Her mother left her when Edith was 2, although when she retold the story in later years, she made it worse by saying it was when she was 2 months old. Later on, when she was a success, her mother tried to profit by singing Edith’s songs and extracting money from her all the time. I think that failed mother-daughter relationship must be at the bottom of her inability to accept that love is never perfect, and it’s always a set of compromises, which must be more difficult when two entertainers are involved. She was searching for perfect love — not too likely to find it on this earth.”

When Piaf died in October 1963, her great friend, writer Jean Cocteau, said on state radio: “I never knew anyone who was less protective of her spirit. She didn’t dole it out, she gave everything away . . . only her voice remains.” An hour later, he too passed away.

Nearly 50 years after her death, Piaf’s voice endures, her persona revered around the world, her singing copied by many, with varying results.

“Piaf seems to present the virtues and the resilience of the little people, the spirit of battling on no matter what your circumstances are, and finding your way,” says Burke.

“Another part of it is her extraordinary voice, that is still so powerful. Practically all the female singers in France trying out for French Idol learn the Piaf songs as if she is the gold standard, and they have to show that if they are real singers they will perform Piaf.”

Edith Piaf

Born Edith Gassion, December 19, 1915, in Belleville, Paris. Her father Louis Gassion was a street acrobat; her mother Annetta abandoned them both when Edith was 2 years old. At the age of 14, she joined her father on his street performances, when she first started singing. She had a baby girl when she was 16; the child died of meningitis aged 2.

Her singing career took off in 1935 when she was discovered by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, later murdered by crime mobsters. Her manager changed her name to Edith Piaf, cleaned up her image, and her career started to soar. After the war she became hugely popular across Europe and the US.

Married to Jacques Pills (in 1952; her friend Marlene Dietrich was matron of honour) and Theo Lamboukas (1962). She died of liver cancer in 1963.

by Helen Greenwood

In telling the life story of Edith Piaf, the biographer gets the chance to explore
a world far removed from most people’s experience

Nothing moved Carolyn Burke, the author of a new Edith Piaf biography, as much as seeing the photo of Piaf’s daughter in the performer’s handbag. The little girl died of meningitis aged two. “Piaf rarely spoke about her, and no one ever saw the photo, but she carried it around with her for the rest of her life,” Burke says.

“Seeing that photo was devastating, as it was to look at the little black dresses with their prostheses, so that her broken arm, which never healed properly after the car accidents, didn’t look crooked on stage,” she says. (In 1951, Piaf was seriously injured in what would be the first of three near-fatal car crashes.)

Burke’s book is fittingly called No Regrets: Edith Piaf after the star’s famous song. In it, the Sydney-born author breaks Piaf out of the clichéd cage that has captured her legacy since her death in 1963.

Burke documents Piaf’s self-destructive behaviour, the addictions and the lovers. But she reveals “the little sparrow” as a courageous woman in control of her own destiny, who was a consummate artist and a generous muse, who loved to laugh and had a strong spiritual side.

“I’m drawn to write about women who have to be extremely plucky and inventive and determined in order to do what they feel they must do as creative artists,” says Burke, who will be talking about No Regrets and artists’ lives at this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival.

“With Piaf, I have a subject who is literally downtrodden, impoverished, at the beginning. I came to understand what it might be like to be a person who was entirely excluded from the whole social system, who wasn’t even working-class, who was from a family of outcasts.”

In writing her portrait of the diminutive French singer with the huge voice, Burke scored several coups. She was the first person outside France to read Piaf’s correspondence with her mentor, the poet Jacques Bourgeat.

“This man gave her a reading list and they would go away for weekends in the country and read together,” says Burke, who was totally surprised by Piaf reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Plato. “I got an intimate look at her development from street urchin to something entirely different. Bit by bit, he taught her a different way of thinking about herself and her life.”

Despite her meteoric rise in the world and her self-education, Piaf never shed the inheritance of her upbringing. Abandoned by her parents, she grew up with grandparents who ran a licensed brothel, worked on the streets and mixed with the Pigalle hoodlums.

Burke also gained access to rare home movies and recordings and privately held letters. As she was writing, Christie’s sent her details of the love letters Piaf wrote to the French bicycling champion Louis Gérardin, which were sold at auction in 2009.

Burke began working on No Regrets in late 2006 after her book Lee Miller: A Life was released earlier that year. “It was very scary to begin with,” she says. “I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it. I dithered for a while. There must be at least 35 books about Piaf in French and English and they are still coming out in France.”

The turning point for her was an invitation to a memorial service held for Piaf at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris by a group called L’Association des Amis d’Edith Piaf.

“At first, I felt awkward and strange. I sat and listened to what people were saying and to her songs, ‘Hymn to Love,’ ‘Mon Dieu,’ all the songs about earthly love that can also be understood as being about divine love, love on a spiritual plane. Then something happened that allowed me to see this is a subject of great general appeal and one that transcends any worries and petty concerns I might have.

“We all walked to her grave together, and people put down their flowers and said a few words. Then, in good French fashion, we all went out and had lunch with lots of wine. By the end of this lunch, I thought, ‘Maybe I can do it.’”

After her graveside epiphany, Burke found she could do a lot. She delved into the Bibliothèque Nationale’s archives to pin down Piaf’s wartime activities from news clippings and reports of postwar French purges.

“There were lots of rumours and innuendoes. In the end, I was able to see that she acted bravely during the war, defied the Nazis in a number of different ways and paid to shelter her Jewish friends and help them. The most remarkable thing, which was known but not properly documented, was she helped French prisoners of war to escape from German Stalags.”

Burke is happy she has shed light on this lesser-known side of Piaf’s life. Still, there was no avoiding “the endless cast of lovers,” composers with whom Piaf collaborated, boxers and cyclists and, famously, her protégé Yves Montand.

“I had to to think, ‘How did this one matter to her?’ and ‘What did this one do for her at this point of her life?’ I didn’t want to organise the book around the men in her life. Men are hugely important to her and to the rest of us. However, I wanted to write the story differently from the way it has been typically told in the past.”

Burke’s recasting of women’s lives runs through her two other biographies, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (1996) and Lee Miller: A Life (2006). Is Burke in danger of becoming a serial biographer?

She laughs and says, “It is an odd choice of vocation, doing other people’s lives. A lot of it has to do with the circumstances of my own life. I might not have chosen to do this had I lived elsewhere and in a larger city.

“These books allowed me to live in my imagination and in very interesting places and at interesting times. They allowed me to travel and enter artistic milieus that were very stimulating to me, a way for me to know the kind of people I wanted to know but didn’t have in my daily life.”

Burke lives in Santa Cruz in California, a town with a population of 50,000 and a campus of the University of California, where her husband has retired from teaching. She has been there for 35 years, though she was born in Sydney in 1940 and lived in the city until she was seven, when her mother divorced, remarried an American and moved to Philadelphia.

In 1959, aged 19, on her way to further her classics studies in London, Burke stopped off in Paris and fell madly in love with the city.

She wangled a way to study French at the Sorbonne, giving English lessons to earn money. That was when she first heard Piaf’s “throaty tremor,” as the desperately unwell singer was on her “suicide tour,” as the press called it. To improve her accent, Burke used to belt out Piaf’s songs in the shower.

She returned to the US and completed a PhD in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, making trips to Paris when she could afford to do so. She regularly visits Sydney, where her mother now lives.

Burke doesn’t deny for a second that writing about women in Paris is an excuse to hang out there.

“It was always one of my deepest wishes from the age of 19 when I first fell in love with the place. I’ve probably had some of the happiest times of my life living in Paris. I’ve been writing a novel off and on set in Paris before World War I. It seems to feed my imagination in a variety of ways and is the place I really love to be, in addition to Sydney.”

You once met Lee Miller in Paris. Can you tell us a little about that meeting and what was it about her that made you want to tell her story?

By chance, I found myself next to Lee Miller during a slide talk on Man Ray given in Paris by Sir Roland Penrose, her husband. Though the unfashionably garbed woman seated beside me no longer looked like the blonde beauty of Man Ray’s photographs of her from the 1920s and 30s, I recognized her profile — the one being shown on the screen as “solarized” by Man Ray. We got into conversation, which continued after the talk at the Café de Flore and the next day at her apartment. She told me about her childhood in Poughkeepsie, her flapper days as a model in Manhattan, working with Jean Cocteau on his provocative film Blood of a Poet, and life in Egypt during her first marriage but said little about her years as a World War II photojournalist. At the time, I felt an affinity with this brave, quirky woman, whose death of cancer three months after we met came as a shock. My feelings intensified when I later saw her photographs, especially those from the death camps. It was astounding to learn that the beauty who had inspired Man Ray and Cocteau was the same person who unflinchingly photographed at Buchenwald and Dachau.

Although she could have remained a 1920s flapper out of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Miller became, first the muse for great artists like Man Ray, Cocteau, and Picasso, and then an artist/photographer in her own right. Was it merely fate, such as her first meeting with Condé Nast who literally pulled her out of the way of an oncoming car, or was there something in her nature that drove her?

Lee Miller responded to accidents of fate by embracing them, especially when they allowed her to move in new directions. In childhood she learned the rudiments of photography from her father; during adolescence she took dance lessons, studied stage design in Paris and painting at the Art Students League in New York. Miller believed that she was meant to be an artist but it was not until she began modeling for the great photographers of the 20s — Steichen, Genthe, Hoyningen-Huene — that she turned to photography as her art form. Working with these men, she absorbed techniques that served her well when she became Man Ray’s assistant in Paris in 1929 — a job she talked her way into despite his initial lack of interest. They soon became lovers. Within a short time, she was taking commissions as his partner, “Madame Man Ray.” Yet within a few years, Miller’s need to control her fate drove her to leave him and set up her own photographic studio in Manhattan.

How did her childhood trauma of being raped by a family friend, and then the subsequent nude photography she posed for as a teenager for her father, affect her as an adult?

Miller dealt with these experiences by pretending that they hadn’t happened. Not even her closest family members knew that for years she underwent excruciatingly painful treatments for the gonorrhea resulting from the rape — treatments at first administered in secret by her mother, a trained nurse who abhorred both germs and scandal. Her father’s peculiar attempts to help his daughter get over her sense of being damaged goods included telling her that sex and love were different things and taking nude photographs of her in the name of Art, as if to reinforce the idea that she should forget or detach from what happened to her.

During her adolescence the ethos of “Flaming Youth” seemed to confirm the desirability of what we might call a split between body and psyche. As an adult, Miller made it a point to embrace masculine freedoms. She took it for granted that she should choose her sexual partners; her many lovers remained close to her after the end of their affairs. At age 40 she wrote, “I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute, all my life — I had a wonderful time,’ but I know, myself, now that if I had it over again I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affections.”

Yet the damage done in her early years caught up with her after the war and her marriage to Penrose — in her bouts with alcoholism, depression, and her disinclination to go on with her photographic career despite the wide acclaim it won her. “I looked like an angel, but I was a fiend inside,” Miller told an interviewer toward the end of her life, as if she had internalized the puritanical mind set she always claimed to despise.

Although she was considered by some to be a beauty on par with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, what were her own feelings about her beauty?

Lee Miller made use of her spectacular looks to get where she wanted to go, often charming admirers from whom she had something to learn. She was quick to see that her beauty allowed her to move freely in a number of worlds — the Social Register as depicted in the pages of Vogue, where she posed as a “young thing,” the smart set of New York’s artistic bohemia, later, French high society, whose adventurous members sponsored the avant-garde projects that mobilized her artistic spirit. Yet during the war she was happy to abandon fashionable life, and fashion itself, to don her army uniform. Throughout the years of her travels with the GIs, the woman who had been known as a snappy dresser wore olive-drab fatigues — as if delighted to shed the obligation to be a beautiful object and become a full participant in history as it was happening. Toward the end of her life, she clearly didn’t give a damn about her looks. Perhaps she was glad to be free of them!

While she had been a photographer in her own right, what catapulted her into becoming a war correspondent/photographer? And what were the circumstances of the famous photo of her taking a bath in Hitler’s bathtub?

Miller was living with Penrose in London during the blitz: some of her most stunning photos of war damage there were included in Grim Glory, a 1940 picture book intended to gain American support for Britain. As a foreigner Miller couldn’t enlist in the service branches open to women, but she documented their war work for UK Vogue. Writing the stories that accompanied her photos during the build-up to the 1944 invasion, she learned from her friend David Scherman, a Time-Life photographer, that she too could get accreditation from the U.S. Army — her passport to the war zone.

From then on, she covered battle fronts from St. Malo to liberated Paris to the downfall of Germany — where, after a harrowing day documenting the liberation of Dachau, she and Scherman were billeted at Hitler’s house in Munich, then US Army headquarters. Neither of them had bathed in weeks. After arranging the room like a set (with a classical statue and a photo of Hitler), they took turns photographing each other. Miller sent back her images minus the sequence in Hitler’s tub, a macabre souvenir that would not be published for decades. Though she once joked about washing off the dirt of Dachau in Hitler’s own tub, she told her intimates that the stench still remained in her nostrils.

What would you consider to be her best or most haunting photograph from the time she was a war correspondent during World War II?

The moving German Guard, Dachau, an image that meets reality on its own ground. We see the dead guard floating in his water-logged uniform, a diagonal mass in the water that will be his grave. This elegant composition documents the war while using light and shadow to hint that the guard’s death, though justified, is somehow redemptive. Its mysterious beauty implies the issues — grief, responsibility, memory — that would haunt Miller long after the end of the war.

How do you balance images of Lee Miller as war correspondent and fashion icon? Which aspect of her life do you feel she is remembered more for today, and do you think she would want to be remembered that way?

It still amazes me that someone who began life in upstate New York in the early years of the twentieth century should have accomplished so much, in so many arenas. So I’d have to say that these seemingly diverse images of Lee Miller, as fashion icon and as photojournalist, demonstrate her remarkable range, and that furthermore, they suggest that we are all capable of more than we imagine or accept given the limits of background and/or training. John Houseman’s recollection of a battle-weary Lee in Montparnasse at the liberation of Paris in 1945 brings together these disparate aspects of the whole-hearted person she was: at that moment, “she became the symbol of freedom, the Statue of Liberty walking into La Coupole.”

You also wrote the biography of Miller’s contemporary Mina Loy, the poet/painter. Was it these particular individuals or the time period in which they lived that drew you to their stories?

Again I’d have to say both. I first heard of Mina Loy when living in Paris and immersing myself in the lives of the expatriates — Joyce, Pound, Stein, Brancusi, Man Ray, Natalie Barney, and Djuna Barnes, all Mina’s friends. (In another fortunate accident, I was living on the rue Campagne-Première, the one-block street where Mina, Man Ray, and later Lee Miller resided.) I learned about Lee while researching Mina’s friendship with Man, so you could say that one remarkable woman led me to another. Certainly the time period played a large part in my choice of subjects, but also the accomplishments of both women and their ways of taking or making freedom, to borrow a phrase from Lee Miller — who, by the way, was a friend of Mina Loy’s though almost entirely unlike her.

Your upcoming book is on fin-de-siècle France; is it also a biography?

I suppose you could call it a historical fiction, or to be more precise, a biographical mystery. It has characters who existed and some I’ve made up; they all become involved in the search to solve a crime that actually took place, but somewhat differently from the way I tell it. To my delight, when things are going well, my characters speak to me. I take down what they say, as I did in my role as biographer. One kind of writing seems to have inspired the other. And in my imagination, I’m still immersed in those expatriate circles, hanging out in the Montparnasse cafés or walking down the Boulevard Raspail to the one-block street I shared, at different times, with my characters.

Ron: I first met Carolyn Burke several years ago, when I interviewed her about her biography of Mina Loy. Last year, she wrote Lee Miller, a biography of the acclaimed photographer that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle review. She suggested to me a month ago that she’d love to chat with Hazel Rowley, who had just published Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about some of the issues surrounding literary biography. I thought it was a great idea, and here we are . . .

Carolyn: I’m interested that rather than writing a conventional biography, you chose to write about Sartre and Beauvoir’s relationship. How did you decide on this approach? What were the consquences for the way you shaped the narrative? What sorts of things did you choose to emphasize, to omit?

Hazel: I was keen to move away from womb-to-tomb biography, and to feel freer as a storyteller. And I did feel freer. I have never enjoyed writing a book more. Obviously I still had to get the facts right, but I didn’t have to take on board their whole lives (the narrative begins in the summer of 1929, when Sartre and Beauvoir met, and it pretty much ends with Sartre’s death in 1980). I talk about their writing lives and their iconic roles as public intellectuals (intellectuels engagés) because these were important aspects of their relationship, but I didn’t feel obliged to fill out the picture. What a liberation! After my other books, I felt as if I were wearing dancing shoes.

I tried to give equal space to Sartre and Beauvoir. It’s true that most readers sense that my sympathy lies with Beauvoir, but I admire both of them in many ways. Sartre’s insecurities made me feel a real tenderness towards him. He drank a lot; he took enormous quantities of speed; at times he was on the verge of madness. It’s my belief — contrary to public opinion — that he needed Simone de Beauvoir more than she needed him.

What did I choose to emphasize or omit? As philosophers and as writers, Sartre and Beauvoir adamantly believed they should tell the truth. I was guided by the same principle in my book. I wanted to tell the truth about their relationship and not to whitewash their behavior, but the fact is, their love life does not always show them in their best light, and I was conscious of the danger of trivializing these two twentieth-century icons. In order to tell this story without simply muckraking, I took pains to sketch in the broader picture — to give a sense of their intellectual trajectory and their writing.

At the same time, I was determined to keep the book fairly short. I had loads of material. I was dealing with not one but two people, and this love story contains many other characters as well. The danger was clear. I could easily produce summary rather than story. The answer, I realized, was selectivity; I had to trim my narrative with a sharp razor. What to choose? Well, you tell stories that are revealing. Above all, you tell a good story!

Hazel: How did you solve this problem, Carolyn? Your Lee Miller biography also gives a lot of focus to a relationship. You made some interesting decisions about how to present your subject’s relationship with Man Ray, her mentor, lover, and employer when she was a young photographer in Paris. What were your reasons, and how did these choices alter the way you told the story of their affair?

Carolyn: When I began writing, Lee’s professional reputation had long been overshadowed by her relationship with Man. His erotic portraits of her, as well as the scandalous aspects of their affair, colored everyone’s understanding of her role in his life, not to mention his in hers. The familiar case of the beautiful woman artist who is known chiefly in relation to her male companion! First, I wanted to bring out her contributions to their artistic partnership, which had not been adequately presented (like her role in their discovery of the technique they called “solarization”); then, I wanted to see their relations through both partners’ eyes, with, I admit, the emphasis on what Lee felt — judging by her words on the subject and the visual record of its permutations in her poses for Man, who saw her nude body as his “material.”

These emphases also meant exploring the Surrealist milieu in which Man operated (André Breton considered him the Surrealist photographer), especially in its treatment of the women who gravitated toward the movement. Within a year of Lee’s arrival in Paris in 1929, Man’s portraits of her were appearing in Surrealist magazines, where she was promoted as a quintessential “femme surréaliste.” His untiring focus on her anatomy, whole and in parts, may have resulted in her decision to photograph outdoor scenes, humorous “found” images or moody Paris shots inspired by the work of Eugène Atget, and her relative lack of interest, judging by her own, in the human body.

And when it came to their break-up in 1932, precipitated by Lee’s decision to return to New York to open her own studio, it meant shaping the narrative to bring out her reasons as well as his reactions, just as their reconciliation five years later received narrative emphasis so that I could continue to write about their lifelong affinity, especially in their later years.

Carolyn: Could you describe how you came to writing about the Beauvoir/Sartre relationship? Was it initially one or the other who attracted you?

Hazel: Their relationship had always interested me. In my twenties I wrote my PhD on Simone de Beauvoir and existentialism. As a graduate student — it was 1976, and this was one of the highlights of my life — I interviewed her in her apartment in Montparnasse. Like many others in the women’s movement, I looked to Beauvoir as a model independent woman. Her relationship with Sartre had me fascinated. As I say in my preface:

When I read Beauvoir’s memoirs in the late 1960s, I was exhilarated — intoxicated, one might say. She made the impossible seem possible. Didn’t we all want an intellectual partner with whom we could share our work, ideas, and slightest thoughts? Didn’t everyone want to write in Paris cafés amid the clatter of coffee cups and hubbub of voices, and spend their summers in Rome in complicated but apparently harmonious foursomes? Who wanted monogamy when one could have freedom and stability, love affairs and commitment?

Thirty years later, I wanted to come back to the relationship that had meant so much to me over the years, and see what it was really like. What the world knew about it came almost entirely from Beauvoir herself: her memoirs, her letters, and what she said to Deirdre Bair, her biographer, in the 1980s. I wanted to know more about Sartre’s point of view. I wanted to talk to their friends and lovers. What did they feel, after all these years?

Hazel: And you, Carolyn? Why Lee Miller? She’s less well known than Beauvoir, and this is risky for a biographer. I’d never heard of her before you brought her to my attention.

Carolyn: Which is amusing, since Lee was already known in Paris as a notorious femme moderne by 1929, when Beauvoir and Sartre were getting together. But they moved in different circles, even though they frequented some of the same cafés in Montparnasse.

I was drawn to Lee Miller as a subject by stages. First, when I came to know her in 1977, a few months before her death. I was working on Becoming Modern, my biography of Lee’s friend Mina Loy, at that time and met Lee in one of those fortunate accidents. We hit it off; I interviewed her extensively; I felt an affinity to her, just as you say, as a creative woman who managed to combine love affairs and commitment while pursuing an independent life.

But it was not until 1990, when I saw the first travelling exhibition of her astounding photographs, that I knew I had to write about her. I can still feel the visceral impact of her World War II images, especially those from Buchenwald and Dachau. The realization that the iconic beauty who had adorned the pages of Vogue then became the first woman photojournalist to document and analyze the chaos of war-torn Europe was simply too stunning to resist.

I have to say that while writing about her, I felt emboldened by her spirit. It was exhilarating to pace my narrative to her headlong rush into experience even before the war — going to Paris to study with Man Ray, acting in Cocteau’s movie Blood of a Poet, taking off to Egypt in 1934 with her then husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, organizing treks into the desert to escape from cosmopolitan Cairo — all this was tremendously exciting. As the biographer must, I followed in her footsteps, sometimes literally, sometimes in my imagination.

Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern is the first full-length biography of Mina Loy, one of the most compelling personalities of the early twentieth century. She knew all the right people, forming relationships of varying degrees of closeness with Gertrude Stein, Filippo Marinetti, Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Cravan, Man Ray, and others. Loy was no avant-garde groupie, however, proving to be an accomplished visual artist, poet, and writer — albeit one who, until now, has languished in obscurity for several decades. Her life, as Burke writes in the opening pages,

opens the door to an era of spirited exchanges between American and Continental vanguards . . . Mina’s travels and her assemblage of art from shards are related: their metaphors of waywardness and fixity, fragmentation and wholeness, hint at her movements toward a state of grace. For her life is also the story of a soul’s progress.

Ron: What first drew you to Mina Loy?

Carolyn: I was something of an apprentice expatriate myself when I discovered her. I’d lived in France for five years, and I doubted whether I would ever return to the United States, so I had a strong interest in the memoirs of expatriates. It was as if I was sorting their lives and experiences in order to make sense of my own, although I wasn’t fully conscious of this. When I found references to Mina Loy in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Being Geniuses Together and the other scattered books that mention her, I responded with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy for a person who seemed so remarkable, but also seemed to have disappeared from history.

She was described by various people as a painter, a poet, a maker of lampshades, a woman who was incredibly beautiful and witty, who was somehow scraping by while raising two daughters, who was friends with people ranging from Gertrude Stein to James Joyce to Man Ray to Peggy Guggenheim, and I thought, “How could such a person disappear?” I was drawn to her out of a mixture of curiosity, admiration and affinity.

Ron: So much so that you spent fifteen years working on her biography.

Carolyn: Yes. I came back to the US with my infant daughter to join my husband in California and was quite disoriented, having been away from the US for so long. I taught part-time and translated books from French to English, and did a few other things, but I was always working on the Mina Loy project as well. It was very hard to do from California. I went on research trips when my husband was on sabbatical or when I was able to get grants. But it was a way to keep in touch with the way my life had been before coming to California.

Ron: Biographers often find that the lives of their subjects end up “speaking” to their own lives.

Carolyn: If there’s an affinity, that’s often what drives the research, the hidden similarities and themes that touch the biographer’s own life. In my own case, there were some that have become obvious over time. They include the expatriation theme— I was born in Australia, moved to America when I was young, and then travelled to France at nineteen, after which I lived there as often as I could. That seemed to link me to Mina Loy, who travelled extensively — far more than I, and at a time when it was unusual for women to do so much travelling on their own. So I was drawn to her as a traveller, a woman whose art expressed such a strong desire for the other, for the foreign, for a larger view of the modern condition than she could find at home in London.

While I was brought up in America, my mother — like most Australians of her generation — looked to London as the center of culture, the place to which any intelligent or artistic person might wish to go. But I always knew that Paris was where I wanted to go, just as it had been for Mina. Growing up in a British culture and then escaping from it, to find out what it didn’t offer — particularly what it didn’t offer women — that was one dimension of the affinity. There are others as well, ones that are more personal.

Ron: Authors of literary biography often have to struggle with the balancing act between the life of the subject and the criticism of the literature. How did you handle this tension in this book?

Carolyn: I was very much aware of that problem because of my training in English literature, and I came to this project with the mindset and experience of a literary critic. Nobody had said that I could write a biography, nobody had said what the form was. The more I looked at other people’s biographies, the more I realized that the form was really up for grabs, that people didn’t necessarily write in a linear fashion. There are many modes of biography today, some more experimental than others.

But I didn’t feel that I could take that many stylistic liberties, particularly with the life of somebody who was not as well-known. There was so little reliable information available about Mina Loy that I felt my responsibility was to put together as much I could about the shape of her life and the multiple contexts in which she lived. Because she’s primarily known as a poet, there was an obligation to talk about her poetry; at the same time, I didn’t want readers to think that I was yet another biographer reading a poet’s work as coded autobiography or as windows into her life.

Personally, I don’t think that there’s a reductive either/or choice between doing “pure” literary criticism or autobiography; I think there are subtle ways of blending the two. My solution was to consider the poetry in sections that serve as interludes, points in which we can step back from the narrative of her life to look at the poems, where they can be seen in their historical context.

Ron: Of course, in some cases there is coded autobiography in Loy’s poems, as with anybody’s.

Carolyn: Of course. But if you set the poems in their historical moment and talk about the forces brought to bear on the autobiographical content, I think you’re doing more than bringing out the autobiography. I certainly don’t think that poems come from nowhere, although I was trained in the New Criticism, which emphasized the form at the expense of personal content. That’s a useful way to learn to read, but it’s limiting at times.

Ron: Mina Loy was a lot of things to many different people, and allied with many different artistic, social, and political movements of the early twentieth century. And while she was romantically linked with many of them, she was also a highly productive artist in her own right, not a hanger-on.

Carolyn: I see her as quite representative in that way. She was quirky and eccentric, but you can see in her a connection between the artistic radicals and the political radicals. And there was certainly more to her than being the lover or wife of this or that artist. There’s a famous photograph of her by Man Ray, a profile of her wearing a thermometer as an earring. Recently, a scholar at Yale showed a slide of the photograph and said, “Oh, yes, that’s Mina Loy, Arthur Cravan’s wife.” That was all he said, without going into anything at all about her own amazing range and artistic production. It’s terribly easy for women in that period to be reabsorbed into history as the companions to famous men.

Ron: This biography came out at the same time as a new collection of her poetry, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, from Farrar Straus Giroux, your publisher. How much did you know about that collection’s development, and did you coordinate anything with Roger Conover, its editor?

Carolyn: My book was contracted to FSG about six years ago. At that point, I very much wanted there to be a new edition. It wasn’t until a few years later, discussing the need for another edition of Loy’s poems with my editor, that I learned that he was in contact with Conover, Loy’s literary executor, and that they decided it would be timely to bring out a new edition of her poems. The previous edition, The Last Lunar Baedeker, was a very beautiful book, but had a number of textual errors which a new edition could correct. The only problem that it gave me was that my book had to be held back in order to come out at the same time as the poetry, but in the long run, this may be better for both our books. It’s certainly better for Mina Loy.