Ex en Provence

Art and literature are in a twentieth-century mood. Between this year’s Venice Biennale (where over half of the featured artists were dead), the “neglected classics” reprint wave, and the MCM furniture boom, it’s easy to feel like everything new has already been done.

Forty years after the late Fredric Jameson heralded the dominance of “dead styles” in the New Left Review, we’re still waiting for a rupture, mired in a convergence of technocapitalism, climate doom, and intense politicization without mass politics. We can’t wield much power through elections or unions and we can’t imagine new futures, but following the archival turn of second-wave feminists, we can at least recover forgotten histories and elevate neglected voices.

Jane Alison’s novel Villa E arrives in the same spirit of revival. Here, the neglected twentieth-century woman is the modernist Irish designer Eileen Gray. It’s August 1965; Gray is eighty-seven and blind in one eye, and she’s spending a week on the French Riviera to design an extension for a house she’d built decades ago. Not the titular villa, the famous E-1027 (which recently reopened after a lengthy restoration funded by the Getty Foundation)—but another house she designed nearby, the Tempe à Pailla. She built this villa to console herself after E-1027 was annexed by a pair of men: first, by her former lover, an architecture critic and social climber named Jean Badovici, and then, infamously, by Le Corbusier.

But Corb is staying on the French Riviera, too. In fact, he’s just a short drive away, in a cabanon next to E-1027, doing battle with the past in parallel.

This brief, chiseled novel alternates between their perspectives, circling around the same key events of the 1920s and ’30s. Gray built the house and Badovici received the credit. But Corb knew the truth, and he was both flattered and affronted by how this woman extended his modernist principles to build a house not like a machine, but more organically, like a mollusk. And then, in a fit of inspiration and/or sublimated sexual violence, he painted and/or defaced the clean white walls with eight ugly Picasso rip-offs. As Alison tells it, Gray was devastated and withdrew; Corb went on with his career.

The drama unfolds in their wildly different versions of the same story. It’s all very sensory and psychological—very modernist. Sometimes the prose requires more patience for lyricism than I have; there are a lot of stacked nouns, like “rocks and pines and cactuses and sea.” At other times it speeds along like a thriller, propelled by the dueling close points of view and clipped sentences.

A lot of the fun of Villa E lies in spotting the stranger-than-fiction bits. Did Corb (in the novel, Le G) really carry the bone of his dead wife in his pocket? Did he really bind a book in the fur of his dead dog? Did Gray walk a panther on a leash around Paris? Check, check, check. Alison creates a mostly credible pair of fictional psyches out of these outrageous people to make sense of how Gray was nearly written out of the history of architecture, until she was restored to prominence by a recent wave of scholarship and cultural production.

The novel’s Eileen is profoundly sensitive and sensual; her ties to loved ones are intimate but few. And E-1027 emerges in her image: It responds gracefully to sun and wind, affords her privacy, and comes alive with ingenious, delicate features, like the movable Satellite vanity mirror that allows Badovici to see his neck while shaving. It’s that same private love that made Eileen happy to give him equal billing for the villa. He’d played his little part, sure; but then critics hailed the house as “Villa Bado” as soon as the concrete had dried, and he only felt mildly guilty about it.

The problem is that it was Badovici’s house. The deed was in his name. Gray couldn’t buy land on the coast as a noncitizen. But in Alison’s telling, her departure from the house is not just a legal matter. It’s also about the more slippery issue of her sensibility, her very being, which Alison depicts as totally allergic to PR. She was too introverted (and too proud) to claw the house back from the horde of art world status-seekers for whom Bado had rolled out the red carpet. She’s not into self-mythology. She’s no Le G.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Le G is aging badly. While Eileen lucidly observes her own frail body and thinks, “How fine … to be a human animal porous to this world,” Le G is more or less pounding his chest and grunting, Mediterranean man! Architect-sculptor-swimmer-diver! His misogyny is often drawn in broad strokes, literally—he’s still struggling to draw three women on a single plane (a lifelong fixation of his, it seems, beyond his E-1027 mural Three Women). He wants flat, pliable muses! He harbors dark fantasies about building a windowless hospital. (E-1027, meanwhile, is “porous” like Gray herself, with ample windows that look out onto the bay.) And he doesn’t realize it yet—he’s more attuned to myth than reality—but he’s extremely constipated. It’s giving him “a feminine dream” of being pregnant with a cat. Do we need to be told that he hates having feminine dreams? I wouldn’t think so, but nevertheless: “Let’s move past the humiliation of having a feminine dream,” he thinks to himself.

Eileen’s calibrated mixture of pride in her work and regret over relinquishing it is followed directly by Le G muscling through a fog of ego and self-delusion so thick he only dimly realizes that his biographer has mistaken him as the builder of E-1027. It’s a revealing blip in the life of Alison’s Le G—so this is how a brilliant woman becomes a footnote in a man’s biography. Another such blip occurs at a fictionalized lunch with Eileen in 1937, before he vandalized the house. He gets drunk and delivers a long monologue that begins with a paean to her genius and ends with him disrobing and grabbing his genitals. A few pages later, we get Le G’s version: “He had invited her to join him! Proposed a collaboration! Yet been rebuffed!”

Villa E can be read as a #MeToo novel, and Alison takes care to ensure that it’s a psychologically astute one. Le G is a human Corb: He’s lonely, sick, grieving his late wife, and emotionally blocked. Eileen, too, is much moodier and more circumspect than the dauntless Female Designer that we encounter, for example, in the video for a (failed) crowdfunding campaign to repair E-1027, before Getty stepped into the breach. But why so psychological? Where’s the twentieth century?

It’s 1965, after all. The US is crushing communists on multiple continents; Africans are struggling to eject their colonizers; there are Nazis on trial in Germany (the same Nazis who put bullet holes in E-1027?)—to say nothing of 1922 through 1957, when the novel’s flashbacks occur. But these are not characters who think much about the world, beyond oblique references to “the war” that only lead back to their own personal histories and thwarted drives. That windowless hospital was meant for the city of Venice. Where did the money come from just after fascism and defeat in war? It’s unfortunate that questions like this—not to mention Corb’s alliances with the Vichy government and Mussolini—are made irrelevant in Alison’s novel.

It’s not like there’s no sense of history in the book. It’s just not located in the actual events of Corb and Gray’s world. Instead, we get third-person interludes set twenty thousand years ago in a cave on the coast. Again and again the novel circles back to this cave, where early humans touched the walls and felt twin impulses: to create and to dominate. “There, that smoothed knob with a runnel midway—like a girl’s secret part: a boy might run his thumb up and down the slender runnel, take his charcoal and do it, too.” A primitive Le G, of course.

Villa E cops elements of modernism—fragmentation, perspective, the self—without a feeling for the forces that made people want to write like that, or the forces that made Le Corbusier and Gray build things the way they did. It wasn’t all toxic masculinity (Corb) or feminine sensitivity (Gray). In the grip of several overwhelming historical transformations, people were seriously asking: How do we remake the world?

But that’s a lot of raw material. Like a good modernist, Alison is interested in precise, controlled narrative forms; she even wrote a book about them, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (2019). The form she wants to make is something like a mollusk, in homage to Gray’s house-like-a-shell and its spiral staircase. A spiral has a single point where its whorls originate. She needs a similar point of origin. History is too shaggy; it’s antithetical to the demands of her formal device. But the cave fits, and she does make it say something that seems true about human nature: that the desire to remake the world is, on some basic level, a violent one.

Is that true? Not entirely, the novel seems to concede; in the end, the cave paintings are redeemed by the image of a little girl who wants to paint on the wall, too: “But let’s try something else now: lift her on shoulders, make her tall, yes, so she can leave a mark up high.” You might conclude that the best we can do for Gray and all neglected women is to dig them up out of the archives and, in the lingo of publishing and nonprofits, elevate them. That is a fine thesis for a crowdfunding video. But it’s a milquetoast one for a novel.

There’s a sensual scene near the end that depicts Eileen alone at dinner, pleased by her work, at peace with the past. It’s no spoiler to say Le G dies while swimming the following day. So that is Gray’s revenge: Corb gets an ambivalent death; she gets to become someone we can applaud ourselves for elevating. She dies eleven years after the novel ends. I imagine her death was a little less moral, a little more irreducible.

Like any architect, Corb was close to power, not just in the ’twas-ever-thus way of early humans marking up caves, but in the I-need-millions-of-dollars-to-build-this-city way so characteristic of the twentieth century. Governments don’t build cities anymore; that takes place in the misty realm of the private sector now. Therefore we have fewer world-historical Corb types. The world is being remade, but how and by whom? I would like to read more novels that show men, women, and art as complex historical contingencies, not because I’m interested in the past for its own sake, but because I’m interested in the future.