BookScapes #2

Someone Always Nearby: An Origin Story

Several people have asked me about the beginnings of the O’Keeffe novel that’s coming out in November. I’ll do that here, and be available for your questions in the comment section of this post. It’s a bit of a long story, though, so if you might want to grab a coffee and settle in.

As you may know, Someone is the fourth in my series of historical-biographical novels about “hidden women,” women who stood behind and supported more recognizable people: Rose Wilder Lane, who co-wrote her mother’s Little House books; Lorena Hickok, the journalist who helped Eleanor Roosevelt find her voice; Kay Summersby, Dwight Eisenhower’s military aide and lover; and—in this novel—Maria Chabot, Georgia O’Keeffe’s woman-of-all-trades. In writing biographical fiction, I want to tell an engaging story that is nuanced enough to represent the layered complexities and contradictions of lives fully lived, but I stay as close to the documented facts of the characters’ lives as I can. I try to imagine the lives that were actually lived, and see them largely, in the context of their place and time.

I ran into Maria Chabot’s story in the late 1990s, a few years before Bill and I bought a house just 35 crow-miles over the mountain from Georgia’s famous Abiquiu house. I had long been fascinated by O’Keeffe’s career and by the “hermit” life she was said to have lived. I had visited the house and the O’Keeffe Museum. I had read all four of the major biographies (Robinson, Drohojowska-Philp, Lisle, Hogrefe), but I was especially interested in Jeffrey Hogrefe’s O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. His is the only biography that focuses on Georgia’s New Mexico life and in which Maria is more than mentioned, probably because his conversations with her were apparently quite lively.

Maria @Ghost Ranch, 1943. O’Keeffe Museum

I was intrigued by this 26-year old woman, who walked into the 53-year-old artist’s life in 1940 and worked for her throughout the decade. Who was she? What was their relationship? Whatever happened to her? I wanted to know more, but all I could find were rumors. Maria had founded the famous Santa Fe Indian Market in the 1930s, people said. She had worked among the Navajo and the Pueblo Indians. She had been a lover of Santa Fe artist Dorothy Stewart, according to rumor. Then (more rumor) she became Georgia’s lover. The two women spent at least half of every year together at Ghost Ranch in the early 1940s, but they quarreled because the exuberant, vivacious Maria was also quite jealous, even possessive. They were . . .

And so it went, gossip with much contradiction and very little information. I heard that Maria was a thwarted writer who had desperately wanted to write about their years together but Georgia refused to allow it. Then that Maria wanted to publish their letters—letters that still existed somewhere, but in terrible shape. But Georgia refused that, too. Then (after Georgia’s death) I heard that Maria, in her 80s, had gotten some financial support from the Museum and was actually working on the letters and on the story of her friendship with Georgia. Her book would be published soon. But in 2001, Maria died. Game over, I thought sadly.

So you can imagine how excited I was in late 2003 when I learned that Maria’s and Georgia’s letters—678 of them!—were to be published. I bought the collection (Maria Chabot—Georgia O’Keeffe, Correspondence 1941-1949) with enormous pleasure, surprised and secretly a little pleased to discover that Maria’s letters were more interesting than Georgia’s, written with a spirited attention to detail and a briskly humorous and self-deprecatory style that the artist . . . well,  lacked.

But it was obvious that the editor of Correspondence didn’t share my appreciation. In the introduction and throughout the collection, there were negative editorial remarks about Maria’s attitudes, her actions, her behavior—some I thought thin and unjustified, others just plain wrong. And the effort itself was wrong. Editors, I knew from my years teaching literature, should simply present the best version of the text, along with explanations of obscure words and historical references. It’s up to the reader to decide what the text means. I wrote to the editor with my frustrations. She didn’t reply.

But I had other things on my mind. I was working on several mysteries and a memoir and editing a book of women’s place-writings for Story Circle. I put Maria’s and Georgia’s letters away and didn’t think of them again until 2017, when Bill and I revisited the Abiquiu house and the O’Keeffe Museum, where some of Maria’s photographs and other materials were on display. I had already written the first three books in the Hidden Women series and it was time to think about another—and Maria Chabot elbowed her way into my mind. Was she a “hidden woman” behind Georgia O’Keeffe? What was the nature of their relationship?

I went back to the letters and biographies, of course. And after another two or three careful readings, I could put my finger on what had bothered me nearly fifteen years before. The editor, Barbara Buhler Lynes, saw Maria as a wayward, impulsive, hyperactive child who who was always causing trouble for Georgia and needed the artist’s constant discipline. Lynes’ editorial notes created a narrative that presents Maria unsympathetically while it celebrates the artist—an understandable if unacceptable bias, since Lynes had spent her professional life describing and cataloging O’Keeffe’s art. Now, in her editorial notes, she created a narrative about Maria (the bad girl, wild child, unconventional wannabe writer) and Georgia (the mature, patient, long-suffering finally-fed-up artist) locked into an increasingly adversarial relationship that ended in 1949, when Georgia—now a widow—permanently left New York and moved into the house Maria had built for her. This wasn’t the Maria I had come to know and admire for her courage, her energy, her determination. This wasn’t the story I read in the letters.

And that’s why I wrote the novel. I wanted to learn everything I could about Maria Chabot, learn how she’d grown up, who she was before she became Georgia’s “slave” (O’Keeffe’s word for Maria and her other employees), why she put all those years—uncompensated years—into building that house, what happened to her dream of becoming a writer, and more. And in the process, I came to learn a great deal more about Georgia O’Keeffe, an enigmatic woman who built a life and a career around an image of herself.

In another post, I’ll tell you what came next: about the difficult (for me) research tasks and the decisions I had to make about the place and time in the novel. And especially about the questions I needed to resolve in writing about another someone always nearby: a young man named Juan Hamilton, who came into the artist’s life when she was eighty-five and he was twenty-seven and stayed until her death thirteen years later.

Your turn. Questions? Thoughts? Please share.