Rupert Thomson’s 10 novels are spectacularly diverse, covering brain damage (The Insult, 1996), female on male sexual violence (The Book of Revelation, 1999), enigmatic dystopias (Divided Kingdom, 2005) and origins and chance (Katherine Carlyle, 2015). They also share striking preoccupations with trauma, gender and identity. We meet Katherine, the heroine of Thomson’s previous novel, as a frozen embryo eight years before she is born via delayed IVF. Later, we see the teenage Katherine buying Gerhard Richter postcards in an art gallery shop, a moment that skilfully illuminates her struggle to make sense of the apparently contingent nature of her life: “His blurred portraits,” she thinks, “seem a comment on my own existence.” It’s the sort of ontological observation that Claude Cahun, the transgressive artist in Never Anyone But You, might just as easily make.
Thomson has drawn on the biographies of two pioneering female French surrealists to create a poignant fiction about same-sex love and self-transformation, set at a time when women’s voices were only just beginning to be heard. In his novel, as in life, Cahun is born Lucie Schwob in Nantes in 1894, the rebellious child of a provincial Jewish family. At 14, she becomes passionately involved with an artistic school friend, Suzanne Malherbe. Their developing relationship, which is necessarily secret, is given a timely cover when Suzanne’s mother is widowed and marries Lucie’s recently divorced father. The stepsisters change their names to the androgynous Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and set up a studio in Paris, where they get to know André Breton and his circle. Though they never officially join the movement, they share the surrealists’ rejection of family and religion, having the same “determination to re-enchant a disenchanted world”. The self-styled “neuter” Claude has already started her own assault on gender conventions, shaving off her hair, passing as a young man in public and posing for flamboyant photographic self-portraits.
Their love story is narrated by Marcel, who is two years older than Claude, devoted and forbearing. Claude is a labile creature of “heightened moods” who inhales ether, refuses to eat, and regularly threatens suicide. While on holiday in Jersey one summer she becomes infatuated with a fisherman because he has “the body of a statue”, and when he marries, she tries “once again to kill herself”. On finding Claude unconscious, Marcel notices that “her toenails were silver”. “Sometimes,” reflects Marcel shrewdly, “I wondered if her attempts on her own life might not represent a convoluted form of vanity.”
Is it vanity, or something darker? Cahun’s mother was afflicted by mental illness – Thomson’s Claude reflects, memorably, that “the inside of her mother’s head was scorched and blackened, like a pan that had boiled dry” – and eventually died in a mental hospital. As portrayed here, Claude exhibits similar touches of mania in her relentless drive to remake and expunge herself. The motivations of the real-life Cahun will always remain something of a mystery, but her art – which is still not as well known as that of her male contemporaries – packs a phenomenal punch. Reading Thomson’s description of her photographs sends you to look them up straight away, and they are every bit as unnerving as advertised, confident in their angry refusal of standard female roles. She dazzles and disturbs as her own shaven-headed double, a lipsticked weightlifter, or a doll-like child imprisoned in a cupboard. In the 1920s and 30s her frail, bald figure eerily anticipates the images of Holocaust survivors that would appal the world after the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
The outbreak of war finds the lovers, now middle-aged, living on Jersey in a farmhouse fittingly called La Ferme Sans Nom. During the Nazi occupation their ability to pass as two harmless sisters provides a useful cover for inspired acts of resistance. They type anti-war leaflets that they plant in the German barracks, come up with subversive drawings and rhymes and paint slogans on coins scattered around the local amusement arcade. If their campaign seems like a crazy game, then that – in a story rooted in surrealism’s off-kilter challenges to the way the world is supposed to work – is surely the point.
Thomson has created a taut, magnificently controlled novel about creativity and personal survival that is a lucid reflection of the period it describes, as the surface of a surrealist picture is lucid. At times, it reads like a Who’s Who of modernism – Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, James Joyce, Josephine Baker and Man Ray all feature – and at others like straightforward biography or social history. There are baldly factual passages that make you wonder why he has cast it as fiction at all, but then he will surprise you with the limpid clarity of an observation: a facial expression that is “delicate, but fully inhabited, complete, like a glass of water when it’s filled right up to the brim”; or this bonsai impression, perfect in its clinching final detail, of a view from a hospital window: “A rooftop. A gull. A pill-white sky.” Like Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism.
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