=Books recently read: Holy Skirts by Rene Steinke=

This past summer I read Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa http://walkingeyeball.blogspot.com/search?q=baroness+elsa , a scholarly, tightly-researched biography of poet-artist-proto dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Lohringhoven. Rene Steinke's novel Holy Skirts can be thought of as an entertaining companion piece to Gammel's book. Holy Skirts is an imaginative dramatization of the Baroness's unusual and dramatic life. As she acknowledges in her afterword, Steinke has based her novel very—and let me emphasize it very—loosely on the facts, compressing, distorting, and often simply making stuff up to suit her plot. She excuses the liberties she takes by claiming that she is interpreting the facts as she believes Elsa herself would see them. This strategy would be more defensible if Steinke cast the narrative as a first-person autobiography, but the use of a third-person author omniscient voice gives the novel an authority that it oughtn't to have, especially for those who don't know the facts and who won't read the tiny print in the dry afterword. A faux first-person account would also have made the distortions of known facts more defensible on the grounds that we would have been subject directly to the Baroness's highly eccentric view of reality. I highly recommend reading Gammel's book before or directly after Holy Skirts if the reader has any interest in being able to separate fact from fiction. This is a distinction, as it happens, that seldom seems very important to me. But in this instance, I'm glad I did know the difference because Steinke's characterization of Marcel Duchamp, just to cite one particularly annoying example, seems to me to be wildly off-base. 

To cite others:

Can canaries talk? The verdict seems to be no, they cannot. But the canary that Elsa wears in a cage in Holy Skirts can. Or maybe she's just imagining it can? If Elsa is an unreliable narrator such a hypothesis would work; the problem, as noted above, is that she isn't the narrator of the book.

Did Marcel Duchamp really shave her pubic area in a movie shot by Man Ray? Much is made of this scene in Holy Skirts as symbolism and eroticism, but, no, it appears never to have happened, or if it did, it was Man Ray who shaved her.

Didn't Djuna Barnes famously say that about Elsa's (possible) suicide, that it was like a joke without a punchline, and not the (fictional?) character of the painter Sara Alright?

You know what this book is like? It just occurred to me. It's like the movie version of a book you've read where they've cut, compressed, and changed things around so it will all fit into a 90-minute cinematic format. As you're watching, you can't keep from poking your companion in the ribs and whispering "that's not the way it happened in the book. In the book…" 

Your poor movie-going companion! They're just trying to enjoy the movie, munch their popcorn, and don't need your sharp elbow in their ribs or your hot lips in their ear every thirty seconds  You know you're making a nuisance of yourself, just like I am here, but you just can't help pointing these things out. 

Having dispensed with these caveats, Holy Skirts is a lot of fun and Steinke writes a beautiful and poetic prose. The Baroness is undeniably a fascinating character, ahead not only of her own time, but our time as well. One can hardly imagine a time she wouldn't be outside of. One can sympathize with Steinke's dilemma of trying to fit such a sprawling, self-contradictory "mess" of living into some sort of fictional order. She does so not only by creatively recreating the historical record but organizing her book around the main loves of Elsa's life: her three ne'er-do-well husbands and Marcel Duchamp. 

That Elsa's life should ultimately be defined by her search and failure to find romantic love is debatable, if not a downright objectionable and reactionary interpretation of such a powerful forward-thinking female persona, but so be it. Elsa's fierce and uncompromising independence and poetic ambition, her difficult childhood, as well as the dark undertow of madness (aided and abetted by an underlying syphilitic condition) constantly threatened her life and sanity and make it more than likely that even with the best and most devoted lover in the world she would still have managed to fuck things up. As bad as her husbands may have been, Elsa could not have been any picnic to live with either, as evidenced by the reactions of even her female friends to her many alienating antics.

Let's face it, folks. The Baroness Elsa von-Freytag Lohringhoven may have been a great person to visit, but no one would have wanted to live there. And I feel that Steinke did us a disservice; she shouldn't have shied away from that fact just to make her main character more sympathetic and, gak, likable. I can't help but believe that the Baroness herself would have found such bourgeoisie commercial motivations anything less than vomitable. The whole point of the Baroness Elsa von-Freytag Lohringhoven is that she was objectionable, a challenge to every staid and sensible position, that she was utterly unsympathetic. Her personality was conceptual: it posed a direct attack on all convention, including the convention that we have to sympathize with a person to love them. She's the prototypical square peg individual in the round hole of the world. That's what makes her such a compelling heroine—a star by which to guide one's life, but like a star, not one to ever actually reach, less one burn up, collapse, and become a black hole just like she did.

So go ahead and read this book for the entertainment. But read Gammell's book for the facts.