Interview: Ellis Avery
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Ellis Avery’s second novel, The Last Nude, is as juicy and sexy a book you’ll find this year. A fictionalization of real-life Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and the muse who loved her in 1927 Paris, The Last Nude has all the elements of a bodice ripper: lust, betrayal, unrequited love, the threat of war, and large sums of cash. But Avery’s a consummate researcher and an intellectual as well, and there are big ideas in this book – ethics, morality, and the life of an artist, to name a few. All together, The Last Nude is a deeply satisfying and thoroughly entertaining read.
eMusic’s Jami Attenberg caught up with Avery fresh off her book tour and talked to her about hearing her characters speak, the difference between being a poet and a fiction writer, and why writing historical fiction is like being a DJ.
The Last Nude is really dialogue-intensive. Also, because it’s written in first person, you needed to ensure that it rings true from a conversational-sounding perspective. Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing it? What do you do in order to ensure that it sounds natural?
I do, in fact, read the book aloud as I work. I also hear the characters speak in my mind, especially when I write dialogue. And then for The Last Nude, I regularly consulted the OED online to see if the locution I was hearing in my mind was something people would actually say in the 1920s, or, as often happened, if it actually popped up in the 1950s. It’s not surprising that so many 1950s-isms would sound natural to me, since that’s when my parents were locking in their own adolescent patterns of speech in contrast to their parents, but that’s all the more reason to try to write more consciously.
I haven’t seen you give any readings yet for this book, but I recall seeing you on tour for your last book, The Teahouse Fire, and you performed a wonderful little tea ceremony during your reading. Are you doing anything like that for The Last Nude?
For The Last Nude, first I tell the story of my encounter with the Tamara de Lempicka painting – it was a painting from 1927 called Beautiful Rafaela – that inspired the novel. Then, I try to give the audience something special they wouldn’t get if they just stayed home and read the book. In this case, it’s the chance to experience firsthand one of the early stages of work on the novel. Once I decided this was the story I had to write, I bought a second-hand book of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings, cut it up and spread out the images on my desk until words, rooms, and characters began to emerge. At my readings, I pass out laminated copies of de Lempicka’s paintings for people to look at and pass around, so that they can enter Tamara de Lempicka’s clear-edged and luminous world visually as well as aurally.
Have you ever seen any truly great readings that impressed you? How important is the performance aspect to you?
One of the best readings I ever attended was Emma Donoghue reading from Room. I loved that out of a 15-to-20-minute presentation, she only actually read for maybe five to seven minutes. Beforehand, she talked about the book and about various responses to it she’d encountered, afterward, during the Q&A period, she asked the first question. I hadn’t known you were allowed to take control of the room, the time and the audience in that way: Ever since attending that reading, I’ve tried to take a page out of her book.
Do you enjoy giving readings?
I do enjoy reading aloud, which perhaps is why it’s hard for me to listen to the audiobook, even though I’m sure professionals do it better. (In my teens, my mother and I were the lay readers at our Catholic church, so I came by it early.) I don’t memorize or act out the book, but I do try to use my voice to highlight the contrast between Rafaela’s young dialogue and older narration, give Tamara a little bit of an Eastern European accent, vary my speed to keep the audience awake, and let the audience in on Rafaela’s emotional experience of what she describes.
There’s a real musical quality to your work – I know you have another life as a poet. How does your poetic sensibility inform your fiction writing?
I’m flattered that you find my work musical; thanks! I don’t listen to music while working, unless there’s something I specifically need to look up or describe, such as the sound of shamisen music for The Teahouse Fire, or the sound of Josephine Baker’s singing voice for The Last Nude. But I do have, as you said, another life as a poet of sorts: For the past 13 years I’ve been writing a haiku a day. Certainly, the haiku-writer’s work of crystallization and compression, as well as that of using sensory impressions rather than explanations to convey emotion, is part of my novelist’s toolkit, too. And the practice of taking walks and seizing at phrases and images, and then locking them into sentences, is something that may be easy to do as a novelist because I do it every day as a haiku writer. And when I’m writing a sentence, I’ll often know how many more syllables and stresses it needs before I know what the words are that will fit into the metric pattern I hear in my mind.
When I started college I was a poetry major, and my freshman writing professor told me to switch to fiction. He said all fiction writers are failed poets.
But do you think fiction writers are failed poets? I think some fiction-writers are would-be film directors! I also think many poets spurn things that many fiction writers prize: character, causal relationship, the desire to make the reader care what happens to the characters next. Maybe the biggest difference between contemporary poets and fiction writers is that accessibility seems to be a dirty word for many poets and a less-dirty word for many fiction writers. I suspect neither fiction writers nor poets found themselves completely at ease in the world as children, whether it was the world of the family or television or high school, and writers of both stripes deal with that unease by making a world of their own out of words. I think many fiction writers use their skill with words to lure strangers into that world; many poets use the same skill to give strangers the pleasure of having found their way in.
This book is so remarkably research-intensive. I rarely have patience for such things, and would rather just make things up in my head all day. But you seem to revel in it, and there are just layers upon layers of fact and fiction interwoven together. Can you tell me about how research fulfills you, and how you know when to take off from fact?
Well, first of all, I’m a total nerd, and once something is interesting to me, I want to know all about it.
That said, my biggest source of inhibition as a writer is wondering if anyone will care what I have to say, and I so admire writers who deal with that affliction in better, perhaps less cumbersome and time-consuming ways than I do. Research – and writing historical fiction – helps me overcome that block. Obviously someone – the scholar or biographer I’m reading – thought it was worth writing down the first time, so it seems less crazy to think someone – the reader of my novel – will think it was worth writing down a second time. The historical facts I work with are the stepping stones that let me get across the river of the novel, or the vines that let me brachiate from branch to branch above it.
People often ask me, “How much of The Last Nude is true?” Anything that sounds like the product of an overheated imagination – Tamara picking up Rafaela in a public park, the sex with sailors in shacks by the Seine, Tamara eating oysters off the body of a young girl at a party, the cocaine, the absinthe, and so on – all that is true. It’s documented in Laura Claridge’s excellent biography of de Lempicka, or in de Lempicka’s daughter Kizette’s biography of her mother’s life. I see that as one kind of work that historical fiction writers do, a kind of DJ work, bringing together samples and laying them side by side.
