ALICE CONE

A GOOD FOUNTAIN: RACHEL CUSK’S SECOND PLACE

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021. 183 pages. $25

Central to Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place is the idea that art can nudge a person into awareness—into recognition of one’s own existence and that of the world: people, places, objects, moments, now. The story is presented as a long address, written by a woman identified as M to someone named Jeffers. Its conflict is this: having seen the paintings of an artist identified as L, years ago, when she was a young mother unhappy with the trappings of her life but momentarily alone in Paris, M was jarred into awareness: I am here. Consequently, she knew she needed to live in a different way and she changed her life, leaving her husband and causing a great deal of pain to herself and her loved ones but eventually coming to live a simpler life in this beautiful, isolated place, a marsh on the edge of the sea, with a new husband named Tony, whose attention to the moment seems to be an innate trait—a man who does not need art to jolt him into recognition but who accepts his wife’s need. M’s mind is restless, inquiring, analytical. Apparently, she’s a writer (although the reader doesn’t  learn this until midway through the book), and her need to connect with art and other artists is met when the couple builds a “second place” on their property where painters, writers and the like can stay and do their work, for extended periods. M’s dream has been that L will come—she wants him to see her marsh and present it to the world; she wants him to see her. As the one whose work awakened her, L is given, by M, the responsibility of going further. Although she can see the marsh as it is and has in many ways come to recognize herself, M’s vision does not appear to be enough. She seems to need affirmation from L. 

The plot unfolds after an unnamed global crisis (which I took to be the 1929 stock market crash) leaves L with few options and he finally accepts M’s invitation, bringing a beautiful young woman named Brett to the marsh with him. This story allows Cusk—through M’s narration and her long paragraphs of analysis, the few drawn-out scenes and the stunning descriptions—to explore two questions regarding the role of the artist. The first has to do with the extent to which the artist’s mission gives him (the singular masculine pronoun is purposeful here) the leeway to be self-absorbed (oblivious? inconsiderate?), in order to do the work, and the extent to which the artist must (oxymoronically?) negate his sense of self, allow his sense of self to dissolve, in order to become a channel for the work. The other question has to do with the mental freedom such work requires—a freedom that includes but is not limited to permission—and the extent to which that sort of freedom has been denied women, historically and systemically. 

M tells Jeffers that when she saw an image of one of L’s paintings on a sign advertising the Paris exhibition, she was struck “by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. . . . [an] aura of male freedom [that] belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it,” going on to say “that as women we grow accustomed to translating [that freedom and that experience] into something we ourselves can recognise.” In short, male artists have been afforded the freedom to represent the world as they see and experience it—which is not necessarily the way women see and experience the world. (Consider these lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 poem ”Käthe Kollwitz”: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open.”) It should go without saying that artists must be afforded not only the freedom to tell the truth about their lives but permission and time. M reminds us that when a group of people are not afforded freedom of being or thought, there remains not only a range of knowledge to which they are not privy but a way of being in the world that they “know [they’re] not entitled to.” So, according to M, female artists and writers “impersonate” the males—adopting a male way of writing instead of finding their own way and winding up feeling as if some aspects of themselves are “male,” as if “the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in [them] than most.” 

And so, for M, there arise the twin problems of feeling inadequate—as if she’s a failure as a woman—and being despised—for refusing to submit and be a woman. L actually accuses her of such a refusal, and in retrospect, M suggests he was afraid of being devoured (which is different than dissolving), as he had been afraid, in childhood, that his strident mother (compensating for her own position in society?) would devour him. I believe most readers will understand that M’s problems are the result of the position assigned to women in twentieth-century society (not so different than that assigned to women in other centuries), but I take it as good news that at least one female reviewer does not seem to understand what it is like to feel inherently restrained—coerced (in part by the art available to her!) into feeling as if art were the province of men only. Like Cusk, I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, and I can relate to M’s issues on many levels, so while I was stymied by what I took to be that reviewer’s misunderstanding of M’s statements about the aura of freedom in male art, I am heartened by her inability to relate.  

That journalist’s review is one of a handful I have read since finishing the book, but before I read the novel, I refrained from finishing any review beyond the first—the one that made me want to read Second Place in the first place. This shrewd review notes the ambiguity surrounding the novel’s characters and setting, remarking that the story seems to occur “in some indeterminate prefeminist past.” At first, as I began reading the novel, I envied the way this critic was able to read the narrative blind, with the freedom to sort out its puzzle for herself—because, by then, her final paragraph had led me to discover that Cusk had based M’s experience on the writings of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who, in her memoir Lorenzo in Taos, depicts the sojourn that D. H. Lawrence (who happens to be Cusk’s literary mentor) and his wife Frieda had made to Dodge’s New Mexico estate. (The memoir is written as a series of letters to D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence and the poet Robinson Jeffers.) By the time I reached the end of the novel, however, I was pleased to have known of the book’s connection to both Lawrence and Jeffers: I happened to be familiar with one poem by each of them, and I found these two poems to be vital to my understanding of Cusk’s novel.

Lawrence’s “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” begins with the line “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” with the speaker asking to give way—that he might become a vessel through which inspiration could flow, a “good fountain” that would “blur no expression, spoil no whisper.” The poem helps me to understand both M and L’s notion that an artist must get out of his own way (dissolve), in order to become a channel for the work, and the way the truth of this notion plays out in the story. Although L acts like an egomaniac, milking the privilege of being a talented, well-known artist for all it’s worth, it is only after he has had a stroke—after not only his ego but “reality” itself begins to dissolve—that he is able to see M, in his painting of her and her daughter, Justine. 

Of course, it is important that L does not paint or see M earlier. This is something she has to do herself. It has not been enough that her husband Tony can see her; it would never have been enough for the artist to see her, either. By the time M is swimming with Justine within the phosphorescence of the marsh, she has given up on gaining L’s attention and gone on with her life. She is present, within the moment, and the painting depicts her presence, illuminated within the darkness, as well as her concord with Justine, the now-grown child from whom she was separated for a year after she left her first husband, and who has come to serve as a mirror for her mother, having abandoned both the “frumpy frocks” she used to wear and her safe but ineffectual boyfriend, bringing the novel full-circle.

It also seems important that L’s acknowledgment of M does not become evident to the artist himself until later. He continues to insult her, spouting venom, long after he has left the marsh. It appears that while he was painting, he was, in fact, simply a channel, unaware, as the wind blew through him (which indicates to me that artists do the work for their own sake as much as for the public’s, hoping to be shown something true and be awakened, and which is why I believe we must beware of boycotting, or “canceling,” artists who appear to be rude or small-minded).

            In any case, L does acknowledge, at the end, what he has seen of M. In the letter found in his Paris hotel room after his death, L apologizes, saying she was right about many things and that he misses her place, asking why things become “more actual afterward” and ending both his letter and Cusk’s book by saying, “This is a bad place.” He’s talking about Paris—with its artifice—where he went to be with the daughter of his former lover, a woman with whom he had shared a summer in California, just being and swimming in the ocean, but to whose daughter he would turn as a predatory, older but famous man. 

The trappings of a culture in which fame grants men the license to lure young women to hotel rooms bring to mind “the seine-net/gathering the luminous fish” in Robinson Jeffers’s “The Purse-Seine,” as does Paris itself, which represents the city in the poem—with its “galaxies of light,” where we have imprisoned ourselves and around which “[t]he circle is closed, and the net/Is being hauled in.” Likewise, the swimming women in Cusk’s novel—the beloved of L’s youth, swimming in the Pacific, as well as M and Justine, swimming in the phosphorescence of the marsh—bring to mind the phosphorescent sardines in the poem’s first stanza. Until they are caught, these incandescent fish are visible only in the dark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Cone teaches creative writing at Kent State University, where she has also worked for the Wick Poetry Center, as teaching artist and programming assistant. In 2022, Cone taught a class at KSU’s Florence Summer Institute called “Beginning Again in Italy: Women’s Journeys and Our Own,” and in 2023, she will teach “Traveling and Writing” there. With an M.A. in poetry writing from Boston University, Cone has led workshops for students in public schools, veterans at a homeless shelter, seniors in a nursing home, and providers at a hospital. Her poetry chapbooks include As If a Leaf Could Be Preserved (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and Shattering into Blossom (Interior Noise Press, 1998); her latest novel (unpublished) is The Trickster Center. Recently, Cone became a grandmother.