Behind the Words

In an ongoing series, Coast asks local authors to tell us about their latest work.

In The Marriage Artist (Henry Holt and Company), Andrew Winer, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, tells a universal tale of a family dramatically reshaped by the quest for personal freedom in the face of inherited beliefs, public prejudices and the unfathomable turns of history. In Winer’s novel, the wife of renowned New York art critic Daniel Lichtmann plunges to her death, and found beside her is her suspected lover, Benjamin Wind, the very artist Daniel most championed. Tormented by questions about the circumstances of their deaths, Daniel dedicates himself to uncovering the secrets of their relationship and the inspiration behind Wind’s dazzling final art exhibition.

What Daniel discovers is a web of mysteries leading back to pre-World War II Vienna and the magnificent life of Josef Pick, a forgotten artist who may have been the 20th century’s greatest painter of love. But the most astonishing discovery is what connects these two artists across half a century: a woman whose response to the tragedy of her generation offers Daniel answers to the questions he never knew to ask.

The Marriage Artist is a provocative snapshot of contemporary marriage, the recovery of a passion that history never recorded, and a fierce reminder of the way we enlist love in our perpetual search for meaning and permanence.

A former artist, art critic, graduate of UCI’s MFA program in Creative Writing, and the author of the bestselling debut novel The Color Midnight Made, Winer goes behind the highly acclaimed book, in which the characters set the author straight on a few points.

HERMAN, THE SCIENTIST
Let’s be empirical, Andrew, examine the facts, starting with your chapter titles: We Lose Our Love To History, Where Will It Be Recorded?, What Is Not Said Will Be Suffered, What Effect Can Art Really Have?, A Wife In The World, We Will All Be Wedded, and then the one you dedicated to me, The Atheist of Love (more on that in a second). It’s obvious you wanted to write a mature, ambitious novel about love and death, to capture the poignancy of life and its ephemeralness. Exactly the kind of book I’d never read.

But can we cut the crap and call this what it is? 1) A way for you to figure out why your father erased his Jewishness and all that implies, from the history to the culture to the God he couldn’t abide, and why you nevertheless have felt so intrigued by all these things; 2) A way for you to get a handle on growing up in the wreckage of free love.

You used me for your little research project. Calling me the “Atheist of Love?” Really, Andrew.

ALEKSANDRA, THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Oh, Andrew. Judging by the kind of marriage you assigned to me and your protagonist, Daniel, you seem to see love as some terrible disorder, one that reveals life’s darknesses, and drives the bewildered lover to seek something greater beyond the turmoil. Not necessarily religious truth, but something like it, perhaps to be found in the shapeliness of great art: the assurance that existence is not just a matter of accidents, but something that has meaning. 

Yet did I have to be such a vessel for your tragic outlook? Every other word from my mouth underscoring life’s fatality, its sad, gorgeous absurdity? Even the way your hero, my devastated husband, thinks about me (“history records what we do, not how we love”) – I can taste your love of Tolstoy dripping bittersweetly from these words, Andrew. Surely this is why you made me a Russian Jew and not just a Jew-Jew.

And don’t give me some spiel about me being “a conglomeration” of past lovers. You know very well which girlfriend I’m based on. (The one who began crying, on your first date with her, when she spoke of Anna Karenina. The one who turned to you during that walk in Central Park and said she’d never kissed someone so tall.) But why do you have me struggling with infertility in the book? Cheating, OK. An obsession with Versace, I’ll live with it. But infertility? Do not work out your problems with all your women on me.

And killing me off on page one, Andrew? What does this say? What does this say!

HANNAH, THE SURVIVOR, AND THEN THE NUN
I do not judge you for what you put me through. In fact, I thank you, for you and I both know that suffering is our only hope. And since I don’t want to be anybody, and am in no way attached to my character, I take no offense at your using me to work through what occupies your soul the most: love, dying and the search for that which remains forever hidden from us in nature, in events and in the incitements of our own soul.  

But I will say this: I’m worried for you, Andrew. You initially show my character in a good enough light – by having me wait in a line to marry a man I’ve never met. The anonymity of it, the selflessness, the submission to historical necessity: You put marriage in its proper relation to the cosmic order. If only that were your whole novel instead of the – well, what else can I call it but the mad journey of the flesh that you insisted I undergo in my marriage to Josef Pick. What kind of pleasure did it give you to watch a woman of the spirit being forced to reckon with the body – her own and a man’s? Was it a similar pleasure as watching a Jew become a Christian? The embodiment of the divine. Are you really that susceptible to man’s endlessly counterproductive hunger to witness it? And are you under the illusion that this novel is such an embodiment?

DANIEL LICHTMANN, THE ART CRITIC
Hello me. We both know that you might have made me – your hero, your stand-in, your better (or worse?) self – we know that you might have made me an artist, since that’s what you were. After you’d left the art world for the literary life, you never could let go of trying to imagine the perfect body of work, the show that would somehow be a summation of everything you’d ever wanted to say as an artist. You’re lucky that when the vision finally came to you – that arresting vision of couples flying around a gallery, holding hands as if ascending – you were a novelist, and therefore could “mount” that show in your novel, so to speak.  

I could accuse you of playing it safe, of having your cake and eating it too, but, seeing what you put me through, it would only come off as the false mud-slinging of a very embittered protagonist. And I can understand how making me an art critic gave you much-needed critical distance from art and the art world, and your own history with respect to both. In order to write well about those things, you knew that you needed to put at least two removes between them and you. Still, something came out in my story, the impotence of the critic as opposed to the artist, and I wonder, Andrew, if it frightened you. If you felt, as you wrote about me and my envy of the great contemporary artist whose final achievement ceaselessly mystifies me – and probably takes my woman from me – I wonder, Andrew, if you felt that you were looking in the mirror and seeing your own impotence reflected back at you.

I shouldn’t come across as so ungrateful, since you did give me the starring role. And, to use your own words from the book, a thought you attribute to me, actually: “The world had its own story, and it was not ours. We helped it along – with our lives we paid to be players – but rarely were we granted our dreams of speaking parts, and most of us never rose above anonymity.”  

JOSEF PICK, THE MARRIAGE ARTIST
Three things. One, I’m not the only marriage artist. Everyone in the book is. Are you a marriage artist, too, Andrew? Is that why you wrote this book? Two, did you have to offer me the greatest woman of the 20th century? You know of my external resistance to real goodness, including that within myself. You know how conflicted I am. You know these things, because you struggle with them yourself. Your expectations are too high for any human, thus your disappointment about the inconsistencies between personal ideals and personal behavior. Every character in the book is filled with such inconsistencies, but you had me act them out so brutally, so dramatically. I’m dead but still exhausted. Speaking of being dead: Three, did you have to wait until I was long gone to let Hannah see the marriage contract I finally made for her in the camps? If only I’d illuminated one for her when we were together, she wouldn’t have sought a marriage contract with God. But then this was surely your way of asking what, if anything, is still spiritual in art? I resisted that question, as you know. For me, my art served a different purpose. That contract I made for Hannah? And the other ones I hastily put together for the men in camp to commemorate the “last weddings in the world?” Those are not religious documents. And they aren’t just a hidden memory of the race. They’re a record of how people once loved. Perhaps you should view this book in the same light.

MAX WIENER, THE SURVIVOR
OK, so you finally did it. Found a way to reach across time and the walls put up by your own family to your ancestors in the last glory days of European Jewry. You, who, for reasons you could not identify, chose to study German when you were a child (when everyone else selected Spanish or French), you who were separated from your family history by marriage and assimilation and the great Atlantic ocean, have with this book inhabited yourself as a descendent of Habsburg Jews. Ah, but it’s a lonely place to live, this in-betweenness, looking to a past from this country of the now. For this reason, you and I are both in exile, Andrew. Or have you returned to your American self? Is that what this book was for you: a way to rid yourself of the burden of carrying past atrocities?