Q&A with Jane Alison

 

 

 

Jane Alison is the author of the new novel Villa E. It focuses on characters based on architects Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and Eileen Gray (1878-1976). Alison's other books include Meander, Spiral, Explode.  She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia, and she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Villa E?

 

A: The real story: that an architect of Le Corbusier’s (supersized) stature would become obsessed with the villa of a far less known female architect--so obsessed that he’d cover it with paintings, build his own cabin beside it, and subsume it, removing her name--this fascinated me.

 

Not only that Corb did all this, but why. Riddles like this swing open the big wide gate of fiction. How to understand what might have made him do this, inch by inch.

 

And beyond the mystery, I was intrigued by details: the strange sexual undertones of his relations with Eileen Gray and the house, the lyric justice of him swimming to his death just below the house, her literal elevation above it all.

 

The bare history opened up so many ideas, passions, sensual details, along with that riddle to try to solve.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and biography as you created your characters Le G and Eileen (inspired by Le Corbusier and Eileen Gray)?

 

A: Oh, biography would have included so much more! Gray’s work extended far, far beyond this villa.

 

But, as when you write a memoir and need to choose the veins of life to follow and leave out the rest, here, too, I wanted to focus on the incidents that spiraled around the villa, and let the rest of their lives just crack through occasionally.

 

There were a lot of facts to work from: details of the villa itself, documents about its making, cards from Corb to Gray, masses of manifestoes written by Corb, her letters to her niece and friends, and so on.

 

I could hear their voices, I felt, through reading their words, and in studying or visiting the objects they made, I felt that I could sense what problems and passions preoccupied them aesthetically.

 

The “fiction” came in envisioning crucial emotional or dramatic moments and going deeper into the mazes of their minds. I tried--mostly--to invent only in absences, or at the very least to bend a fact toward fiction.

Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: Research is a wonderful way to pretend you’re writing without quite doing it . . . no, it truly is a fantastic part of writing.

 

I read many bios and critical studies of both architects, as well as their own works and letters; visited as many of Corb’s buildings as I could (in France, Switzerland, the US); peered through a gate to try to see Eileen’s second house; looked at their furniture, paintings, collages, objects in museums and catalogues.

 

And above all went to the site itself, now called Cap Moderne. When I first went, 20 years ago, Gray’s house was only just starting to be restored and could not be visited, but you could walk right into Corb’s cabin. I visited three times over the years, and only on the third could I finally get inside her villa.

 

I’d say there were discoveries and surprises all along the way. A few tiny ones: Corb had a model of the villa made and kept it on his desk (along with the jawbone of his dog).

 

Gray’s niece became a very successful painter in a time of rough-boy English painters, and one of her friends was Graham Sutherland, who did the portrait of Churchill that Churchill famously hated--and this same Sutherland bought Gray’s second house, the one she built when she had to flee the villa.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it a “remarkable gender parable filtered through a sophisticated imagination.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I like it. It’s concise. I’d like to think I did more than “filter” this parable, but okay!

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A long (book-length) lyric essay about female sexuality, female potency, and . . . chickens. I got chicks three years ago and am besotted. They are, to me, a wonderful kind of dirty virgin that is immaculately fecund . . . A perfect egg each day, a piece of art, no rooster in sight. It’s  called “Self Portrait in Egg.”

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Maybe: men being monsters, men appropriating the work of women: this is nothing new. If anything, it’s more and more present. And what Corb did was monstrous.

 

But I don’t think a flatly portrayed “monster” could ever be very interesting. Nor is it true or fair. The Corb I made--Le Grand--is fully dimensional. We’re in his body, in his mind, in his mouth . . . sensing his weaknesses and failings just as he does.

 

Eileen, too, needed nuance. A woman as victim is a terrible drag on a narrative and on my mind. She had to have her own obstinacies and aloofness--and ways of flying over this historic affront.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Jane Alison.