On Group Portraiture and the Secret Histories of Art: Paul Elie and Julia Cooke in Conversation

A decade and change ago, Paul Elie taught a class that I found formative. Its focus was first books, and he talked about each assignment in revelatory terms, prodding us graduate students to connect exciting dots: between a first book and what followed in an author’s career; among similar books of totally different theme; around varied cultural touchpoints that did not feel but were, of course, linked.

This is the energy I felt in his most recent book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Generative and instinctive, it pulls philosophically and aesthetically disparate-seeming artists into conversation with a whirlpool-like momentum. I had been familiar with many of the artists at its center, but not like this—Elie’s descriptions of the scenes, artworks, and controversies that I thought I knew are riveting, fresh with a different historical weight and focus.

I wanted to talk to him about the art of group portraiture, as my own most recent book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changes Work, Writing, and the World, rests firmly in that territory. At first, I thought this was a departure—when I’d studied with Elie, I’d been working on narrative journalism—but after our talk, I’m not so sure. –Julia Cooke

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Julia Cooke: A few months ago, you wrote to me that group portraiture seems especially alive with possibilities right now. I stumbled into it accidentally, but now I wonder if it might be disingenuous to focus a book only on one person. I’ve wondered lately if anything more specific might feel like a partial telling. What seems especially alive to you about the mode, and what about right now makes it feel ever more so?

Paul Elie: It’s the books that make the approach feel vital. Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, about the great painters in New York in the 1950s, which I’ve been savoring across several months. Evan Kindley’s forthcoming The New York School, about poets in the city in that moment. J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now, which I got as a Christmas gift.

I too stumbled into group portraiture accidentally. I was working as an editor with FSG, and there was a folder in the file cabinet that held the contract for a long-awaited book by Louis Menand, which Jonathan Galassi had signed up back in the typewriter age. Well, the manuscript finally came in, and the book finally came out: The Metaphysical Club, about writers and thinkers who developed the school of thought known as pragmatism in response to the carnage of the Civil War. Meanwhile, another manuscript Jonathan had arranged to publish was taking shape: David Hajdu’s telling of the then-overlooked story of Bob Dylan’s emergence out of the Greenwich Village folk scene, along with Joan Baez—and Joan’s sister, Mimi, and her boyfriend, the novelist Richard Farina. I was the editor of that book —Positively 4th Street—and got to learn group portraiture on the job. David’s approach at once complicated the idea of Dylan as a driven lone genius, gave a fresh perspective on Joan Baez, and recovered the improvisatory quality of the sixties before they were The Sixties.

I got a sense of group portraiture as a means of authentic storytelling, and as a realm of formal innovation, involving narrative and point of view. I still see it that way, even if reviewers rarely make the point.

Just then I was sidling up to a subject of my own: the literary Catholicism of postwar America. I knew that Robert Giroux had visited Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton one after the other in 1960. I found out that Walker Percy had paid Merton a visit at the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1967, and that Dorothy Day back in the twenties had socialized in the Village with Caroline Gordon, later a mentor to O’Connor and Percy. So the idea of a group portrait emerged.

But back to your question: Why does group portraiture feel especially vital right now? One reason is that it moves things away from the dutiful. I find that too many biographies involve a checking-off of authorial obligations: the obligation to be a resource that covers all topics, or to promote a “new discovery” out of proportion to its importance. Cradle-to-grave biography often obligates the author to treat all aspects of a person’s life as equally interesting, and it puts in play a scheme of character development that tips unduly toward childhood and family.

With group portraiture, the obligations are more literary and artistic. OK, these people knew one another or had what Walker Percy called a “predicament shared in common.” So let’s put them in time and space together. Let’s feel their conviviality; let’s set out with them as they deal with the predicament; let’s work it out in narrative time. Writer, reader, and protagonists become involved in a common pursuit of the kind celebrated by Richard Holmes in his writing about biography. Insights and kinships emerge almost unbidden—called forth through juxtaposition.

JC: You’ve successfully put into words exactly what I found so compelling about writing Starry and Restless. While I had a hard time paring down each protagonist’s life prior to the late 1930s (and for Emily “Mickey” Hahn, that was especially tough, since her life was one self-making adventure after another from childhood on) it was freeing to focus on the nexuses. I was thrilled where they actually met in life, yes, but I also loved reading into the far more frequent overlaps in professional challenges, personality traits, issues of love and motherhood, and historical scenes that echoed among their lives, not to mention the specific people and all the juicy gossip therein.

Insights and kinships emerge almost unbidden—called forth through juxtaposition.

One commonality our books share is the tension between the individual and the group. Not in the writing—you deal masterfully with weaving specific people into the groups they moved in, establishing the U2/Eno-centric music scene, Smith/Mapplethorpe, Morrison and the writers around her, etc—but in terms of how these people saw themselves. All three of the women at the center of Starry were staunchly individualistic and gravitated differently toward and then away from a sense of being part of a group. You quoted Czesław Miłosz on the “savage individualism” of the poet—I felt such an affinity there with the way these women moved through the world.

I wonder whether, on a writing level, examinations of creative people necessarily lend themselves to a group treatment, because that back-and-forth dance is a central theme of creativity itself. There is an inevitability to group portraiture that feels, to me, so authentic to artistic production. But it can be unruly, I think, and just keep growing and growing. How did you start The Last Supper—did you know who its protagonists were from the start, or did the list grow as you went?

PE: I wound up with a larger group than I’d expected. With The Life You Save, the core four were set early on. With Reinventing Bach, figures I’d seen as protagonists of separate sections—the organist Albert Schweitzer, the cellist Pablo Casals, the pianist Glenn Gould—turned out to have engaged with one another through the time-transcending medium of recordings. So the book wound up as a meta-group-portrait along the lines of a Bach suite.

With The Last Supper, I knew the focus would be on the eighties and on certain figures: Andy Warhol; Bono and U2; Madonna; Toni Morrison; Martin Scorsese. But for some time after the contract was signed, the book wouldn’t “go.” As I looked more closely at the eighties, I saw how many other figures were dealing with belief: Leonard Cohen, the Neville Brothers, Prince, Patti Smith, Keith Haring, Tom Waits. What had been a book about Catholic-facing artists became a book about crypto-religious ones. The realization that the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses broke out in England just a few days after The Last Temptation of Christ came out joined those narratives. Ditto for the realization that Jean-Michel Basquiat died of an overdose in lower Manhattan the same day The Last Temptation opened in midtown. If I was really going to do the crypto-religious eighties, I’d need to depict a large and unruly cast. It was daunting. I hardly felt up to the challenge of the last 25,000 words—involving Robert Mapplethorpe, ACT-UP, and then Sinéad O’Connor—but I think I met the challenge and I think that’s an especially strong section of the book.

As an ex-editor, I found it humbling to drop my preconceptions and meet the needs of the material. How did the writing process go for you with Starry and Restless? Was it group portraiture from the get-go, or did the figures come together by accretion? I’m thinking of the striking account of the role of women in journalism early in the book. Was that your setting-off point, or was it something you uncovered as you worked through the careers of your subjects?

JC: I love hearing about those last 25,000 words—that, for me, is where the book comes together most excitingly, in the roil and almost unbelievable yet retrospectively inevitable-feeling commingling. I found myself exclaiming aloud at various points.

That account of women in journalism was torturous to write. Starry is propelled by my real and personal anger that these women’s contributions to the genre have been minimized or elided altogether. They were working alongside the men whose names I learned in school, working independently but also in conversation and competition with them, sometimes inspiring them. I wish I’d had the opportunity to see them on a syllabus in the dignified light of placement alongside the men they influenced. The fact that they’d been there the whole time, when I was learning about Mitchell and Talese, frustrates me. Plus, on an expressly factual level, any telling of American journalism in the early and mid 20th century that doesn’t include them—and more broadly, the real proportions of women working in the era—is a false telling. Their work was so interwoven into the fabric of what the press was producing, what other men went on to make, how sourcing was considered, etc.

That was the idea that set me off on the book, almost exclusively—I had not intended to move so much toward these women’s relationships, tensions as mothers and wives and friends. I’d also imagined including more women. Dorothy Thompson and Virginia Cowles were going to be more central. But then I got deep into researching their lives and everything changed. For one, Cowles didn’t leave an archive, so she was a little ghostly, and I couldn’t give her the interiority I wanted to achieve on an aesthetic level. Then I realized that while Thompson fascinated me, I didn’t love her writing, so she slipped away—the book is so long as is.

And last, I found myself wanting more and more of the people themselves, living, which changed the focus of the book. When I handed in my first draft, my brilliant and patient editor, Jenna Johnson, said something along the lines of “this is good but it’s not the book you sold me. Let’s discuss.” I had written it in an intense time of my own life, when more emphasis on motherhood was, naturally, what I was seeing. As I (we) worked to bring those two visions together, I knew that the first section bore the weight of setting the professional frame in order for me to have more freedom to focus on the lives, the story, the scenes that compose the bulk of the book. It took some real editing to get the proportions I wanted.

Part of the issue for me is research. I do a lot of it, I love it, and it can be hard for me to pare back. What were the hardest and most rewarding parts of research for The Last Supper?

PE: I had the sense that I was writing a secret history. There’s so much that has been occluded by the broad-brush depiction of the eighties as the awful age of Reagan, yuppies, shoulder pads, mullets, and synth-drums. Again and again I’d find something startling in the material.

To take one, Martin Scorsese directed the video for Michael Jackson’s song “Bad,” filming in Harlem and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Brooklyn. Along with Scorsese’s film crew, a second crew was there producing making-of-the-video footage—so that you can see Jackson and Scorsese, the greatest living performer and the greatest living director, interacting down in a subway station whose appearance has hardly changed.

I had the sense that I was writing a secret history. There’s so much that has been occluded by the broad-brush depiction of the eighties as the awful age of Reagan, yuppies, shoulder pads, mullets, and synth-drums. Again and again I’d find something startling in the material.

At the time Scorsese was under pressure from Christian fundamentalists to cease work on The Last Temptation of Christ, and it turns out that he had his team prepare a small poster and mount it on one wall of the station. WANTED: FOR SACRILEGE, it says, over a pair of mock mugshots of Scorsese. In the video, he zooms in on the poster for a moment—showing himself as a crypto-religious wanted man, and revealing “Bad” as a kind of video parable about the way a real artist outfoxes his adversaries through skill and style, the way Michael Jackson does the gang members in the dance sequence.

JC: I had that sense of secret history too! Everything I wrote felt very obvious, in a hidden-in-plain-sight way, once I started working on this book. And that subway scene perfectly encapsulates something else about The Last Supper, which is how much of a revelation your New York is. It’s vivid and unlike any 1980s New York that I’ve ever read about. It had me feeling the city in a totally different way, moving through it alive to subtexts and rebellions I hadn’t considered. I can’t shake the image of the crowd of people standing around waiting to see The Last Temptation of Christ for three full hours, filling up a street, being shouted at by protestors.

I think place is really important in group portraiture—on a craft level, the basic anchors of when and where bear more weight when I’m expecting the reader to keep track of an ensemble cast of busy, intersecting lives. I find the where to be easier to establish and write into than the when, but I am aware that the when is especially important, too.

PE: And place really is important in Starry and Restless. “I am going to Spain with the boys,” Martha Gellhorn tells a friend in a letter before setting out, and a couple of pages later we get your bravura sketch of the Hotel Florida in Madrid as an archetypal “wartime hotel”: “Rooms contained beds but also contained a living room or a kitchen, hot plates on dressers and Spanish hams suspended from coat hangers”—hams Hemingway had brought in. You go on to note that the rooms were rented out in terms of safety, with the low rear ones being the safest and the high front ones the most dangerous. It’s an amazing, Mitchell-level account of how stuff works.

I’ve found across several books that it’s key to know who was precisely where precisely when. The Last Supper changed when Leonard Cohen came into the book. His most crypto-religious songs—“Hallelujah,” “If it Be Your Will,” et al.—were written in the mid-eighties. Well, he really came into the book when I realized, through Sylvie Simmons’ biography and other sources, that the notorious episode where Cohen falls to his knees in a room at the Royalton Hotel, seeking inspiration for fresh verses of “Hallelujah,” places him on West 44th Street circa 1985—and that just then Martin Scorsese was working in an editing studio in the Brill Building: 1501 Broadway, near West 44th—the next block. Does it matter? It matters, in the act of writing, because you feel you are onto something—are making something objective, not just spinning webs of comparative analysis. And it matters for narrative purposes.

So much of The Last Supper involved characterizing songs, movies, music videos, paintings, and so on. I wound up opening one chapter in the form of an establishing shot from a movie. Do you think of what you are doing in comparison to other media—documentaries, say, or ensemble-cast productions like The Wire?

JC: Yes, exactly. And it’s hard to justify or encapsulate or elevator-pitch—how can I summarize what it’s “about”? I talk about journalism and canonicity but also lives and friendship and travels and motherhood and ambition. And all the while I might be thinking, secretly, yes, yes, yes, it’s about three very specific people, who were complicated and made work that is important to a real historical record, but it’s also sort of a book “about” the speculative interiority of most of the wanderlusty, deeply ambitious woman writer I’ve met, too.

PE: “Wanderlusty”: there’s a title for a future book!

Is there anything about Starry and Restless that never comes up? If a writer setting out were to ask, “What should I know about this kind of life-writing that I might not find out otherwise?”

JC: Is it too sentimental for me to circle back to two things you said in that long-ago class? You’d told us to write the book we needed to read but couldn’t find—that’s very much what Starry was, for me. And you also said “follow the heat,” which I have turned into an image of a hand hovering above papers in a Madame Blavatsky-esque way, sensing where in a document the true interest lies. To me, that applies especially acutely to writing about other people’s lives. There is so much there: so much content, so much life, so much influence, so many connections with other people that really mattered, and with massive socio-political currents, too. It’s so important to find the heat and follow it.

PE: It means a lot to me that you remember those class sessions. At Georgetown, I teach mainly undergraduates, focusing on shorter work, but the “what’s the essay that only I can write” approach applies just as well. It’s still a setting-off point for my own work.

This year one student, a senior, has gotten Starry and Restless as a kind of graduation present: a first book for her adult life as a writer. It’s no small thing that the book, with its own heat and light, is now there for her, and for writers like her.

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The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s by Paul Elie is available from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.