Book by Daniel Bullen explores famous couples' open relationships
1
2
3
Around the time he was turning 30, writer Daniel Bullen was wondering about a subject that many people start considering at that age: marriage.
"I was looking at this hurdle of marriage, wondering, 'What's it going to take to get over that, and does it make sense anymore?' " Bullen said during a recent interview. He remembers his girlfriend at the time bringing home an article from a women's magazine that had the rhetorical headline "Is Fidelity Dead?" It was his need to examine the issues of marriage, commitment and what he calls "wandering desire" in his own life that prompted Bullen, who's now 39, to explore the romantic lives of several famous artistic couples, who all practiced some form of open relationship. How did these people balance love and attachment with their need for independence, and how might their shared creativity have helped them overcome jealousy and pain?
The result of that research is "The Love Lives of the Artists: Five Stories of Creative Intimacy," the first book by Bullen, a former Amherst resident now living in Montague. It's a sort of specialized biography, one that looks closely at the relationships of the artists - and the various people with whom they had affairs - rather than their work.
From the French philosophers and writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to the Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Bullen has fashioned an intimate look at the good and the bad of these relationships: enduring intellectual and emotional bonds to fights, loneliness and nervous breakdowns. Kirkus Reviews summarized Bullen's work as "a captivating exploration of artists seeking personal happiness amid the turmoil of professional success."
"The book really focuses more on their development as lovers, as people, rather than their development as artists," said Bullen, a former instructor in literature at the Commonwealth College at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "I wanted to look at these relationships in an open way, not be moralistic or judgmental about them, even when there were things that made me think, 'Well, that's not something I'd do.' "
"The Love Lives of the Artists," published by Counterpoint Books of San Francisco, also profiles Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin; and Lou Andreas-Salomé and Rainer Maria Rilke. Except for the last couple, who met in the late 1890s in Germany, all the artists profiled in the book met in the early decades of the 20th century, when a series of culture shocks - the carnage of the First World War, the rapid mechanization of life - were causing some to question whether marriage had become outdated and erotic love was the last truly intimate experience in an increasingly dehumanized world.
"You have this growing mass media that's making things available in different ways, you have the tragedy of World War One - there's just a new way of thinking about things," Bullen said. "You have writers like D.H. Lawrence saying 'Industrialization is horrible but you still have inside of you your own humanity and your tenderness and your sexuality, and that's what will keep you going.' "
That kind of thinking led Sartre and de Beauvoir, who met as university students in 1929, to forge a nontraditional union in which they refused to marry or even live together, each saying the other was free to explore additional relationships. "In part it was an inflammatory gesture at their parents, but as you read about them, you can understand what they're thinking," Bullen said. "There's this rush of power - 'We can do this! We can have an open relationship!' Of course, things eventually got more complicated, for them and all the other couples."
Love lives
The starting point for Bullen was when he read "Henry & June," a 1986 book based on French author Anaïs Nin's diary entries from the 1930s about her relationship with Henry Miller, the American writer of "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn," and Miller's then-wife, June Mansfield. Then Bullen saw the Salma Hayek film "Frida," about Frida Kahlo and her stormy marriage to Diego Rivera, a notorious womanizer, and he began looking at the lives of other artists.
He wanted above all to find artistic couples where the partners were of roughly equal stature and viewed their relationships as part of their larger creative projects. But as he read biographies, he says he found most of them provided scant details on the artists' love lives, or portrayed them in stereotypical fashion - the "enfant terrible," for instance, who can't resist the temptation of other lovers, or the "culture hero," who transcends the limitations of bourgeois marriage for the sake of his or her art.
"I didn't get any sense of how the decisions these artists made about love affected their lives and their work," he said. "The biographies tended to ignore the consequences - they wouldn't connect the nervous breakdowns with the relationships, the crises of conscious that would change things."
Stories to be told
Yet in reading the letters and journals of those same artists, Bullen sensed there was something more he could bring to the table. "I definitely had to piece things together, but there was a story there to be told."
Sartre and de Beauvoir, for instance, wrote openly to each other about their affairs and used the experiences in their writing; Beauvoir sometimes slept with another woman, just to get the experience, and then passed the woman in question on to Sartre in a variation on a ménage à trois. Yet even as both artists believed they were maintaining their own versions of faithfulness to each other, jealousies, regret and fear crept into their lives, notably when de Beauvoir became involved with American writer Nelson Algren in the late 1940s, an affair she felt might pull her away for good from Sartre.
Meanwhile, in 1918, Georgia O'Keeffe became a protégé of Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer turned modern art promoter, after he saw some of her drawings. She took up painting full time in New York with his support and the pair married, even though he was nearly 24 years older than she. But when Stieglitz began an affair with a younger woman in the late 1920s, O'Keeffe began to distance herself physically, moving to New Mexico for long periods to paint and indulging in a few brief affairs of her own.
"I think the question for me when I started this book was 'Do artists live by a different set of rules?' " Bullen said. "In my heart, I feel I've answered that, and the answer is 'No.' "
As he writes in the book's epilogue, "In spite of [the artists'] brave attempts to rise above human feelings - to be, themselves, eternal in their decisions and in their work - certain facts of the human heart still applied to them, and they had to accept that jealousy and anger, fear and desire, pride and self-loathing all took up time, and a definite amount of emotional energy."
Bullen, who moved to the Valley in 2004 from New York began "The Love Lives of the Artists" about eight years ago but put it aside for different periods to work on a novel. When he revised the book a few years ago, he sent query letters to potential agents about it. One agent he contacted was Robert Lescher, who had been Georgia O'Keeffe's agent as well, something Bullen hadn't known at the time. "He wrote me the nicest letter," Bullen said. "In the publishing business today, that's virtually unheard of." It was Lescher who brought the book to the attention of Counterpoint Press.
In the end, Bullen says he was struck by the intellectual bonds the artists he studied were able to maintain, despite the pain their emotional lives might bring one another. O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, he noted, "spend all this time apart, but they still have this merged sense of what the artistic sense is."
Did the pain, then, justify the art in the end? Probably not, Bullen says - but it still makes for a fascinating story. As O'Keeffe once put, "I put up with a lot of foolishness for the sake of something bright and beautiful."
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
