I’ve written a novel and many short stories. Women have not played a significant role in many of them, standing on the sidelines and usually getting wronged somehow.
In a few stories, women have been the catalyst for action though those actions have not been ideal for a woman.
The worst example is my short story Yo! El Rey! Two of the characters are men. The narrator is younger and not named. His subject is Armando, a semi-famous painter (semi-famous for an artist these days is making a decent living off art) whose claim to fame is that he is “the last man to look into the eyes of Matisse.”
That line birthed the story. I heard it from the owner of a now-defunct gallery on Canyon Road here in Santa Fe. He was a friendly and intense man and, at the time, most of his gallery was dedicated to a single painter whose name I can’t recall.
The narrator's focus is Armando’s wife, who is much younger and beautiful. I wrote the story as an ode to painting and obsessive love. When it was finished, I realized it was more of a tale of two men exchanging a woman without including her.
My examination of love got a bit fairer with a very short story called Triangulum. It’s a beautiful, but tragic, examination of a one-sided affair conducted over the summer in Santa Fe. The narrator is a failed writer, perhaps simply a failure. Neither have names.
There are many more, but you get the idea - my characters do not fare so well in love, and the stories where women become much more prominent still have a bitterness that I can see now, but could not when I wrote them.
In Journey, American I will rectify this. I have been thinking of a strong female character - independent, smart, and fully functioning human being - for quite a while.
The great love of Journey’s life is the most unlikely person I could have chosen. However, this is fiction and it is my fiction, and I felt a bit of historical appropriation was in order.
My subject is largely based on Louise Brooks, who was quite real. Brooks was a wildly famous actress, the model flapper of the Twenties, who chose pleasure in the form of sex, drugs, and drink over becoming an artist on film. Fortunately for all of us, Brooks become an onscreen artist despite herself.
Brooks came out of nowhere to dominate the early Twenties silent films. Quickly sick of Hollywood, particularly Hollywood men, Brooks decamped for Weimar-era Berlin. One day, she took a walk in the Berlin Zoo where was spotted by Austrian director G. W. Pabst, who quickly scooped Brooks up.
They made a classic silent called Pandora’s Box. This propelled Brooks to the stratosphere.
She walked away from that too.
Her final movie was her first and only attempt at sound. It was John Wayne’s first movie. When she walked away from it, she walked away for good.
Brooks never saved or invested. She became an escort, an alcoholic, the author of a fine memoir called Lulu in Hollywood, and died a lonely and horrible bitch.
There is plenty to work with here. I’m only keeping the film chapter of Brooks’ life. The rest will be fiction.
I think all of us remember our loves as fiction - recalling the good, trying to forget the bad.
No matter how the story of love ends, we are always ready to begin the next.
Historical appropriation? No such thing in my opinion. If there is, we'd all better throw in the towel, especially me.
Solid~