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A fictionalised biography of Lee Miller, a model, photographer, and journalist. It focuses on the three years she spent in Paris as the assistant, student, collaborator and lover of Man Ray but there are also glimpses of the many other aspects of her life.
She must have been a truly remarkable person. She was raped by an uncle, contracting gonorrhoea from the encounter, when she was seven. Her modelling career began with her father taking nude photographs of her when she was a teenager; it took off when, about to step into the road in New York, she was saved from being hit by a car by Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue; it ended when a shot of her was used in an advert for menstrual pads. She went to Paris at the end of the 1920s to become an artist and ended up working and living with Man Ray. This was the height of surrealism. She discovered the technique of solarization which became a feature of the photographs of Man Ray and her. (The book credits her with discovering the technique but it would be more correct to say that she rediscovered it, it had previously been described in print in 1859.) The book suggests that she left Man Ray after he claimed credit for some photographs of a girl's head in a Bell Jar (I wonder whether this photo suggested the title of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?) which won a prize; she felt that he was trying to control her. Whilst in Paris she also acted in one of Jean Cocteau's films and modelled for the French Vogue.
Her subsequent career was with the English Vogue. She was first a fashion photographer and correspondent and then a photo-journalist, at first during the London Blitz and then joining the American troops after the D-Day landings. She took a picture in St Malo of the first US use of napalm. She took photographs in the newly liberated Dachau. She had her photograph taken in Hitler's bath on the day he committed suicide. After the war she reinvented herself as a cordon bleu chef and cookery correspondent, marrying the man who founded the Institute for Contemporary Arts.
The novel is written from Lee's perspective, in the third person and using the present tense. This gives us access to Lee's thoughts, while at the same time creating a distance between the reader and the narrator. The principal characters, Lee and Man Ray, are both given depth and nuanced complexity. For all his role as principal antagonist and de facto villain, he is shown to be deeply in love with Lee and he perhaps understands her (especially regarding her father's abusive behaviour) better than she understands herself.
The final chapter suggests that the pair of them meet in 1974 "forty years since they last saw each other" which heightens the drama but is contradicted by other accounts.
The technique of focusing heavily on three years in a long life makes for an interesting novel but I wondered whether the flashbacks and flashforwards contributed much to the overall book.
Selected quotes:
- “She told him that until he puts a sidewalk on the downs and lines it with cafe bars, she's not going to be wasting her time tromping through the hillsides.” (Prologue)
- “She ... panicked, as if her life were a balloon and she had just let go of the string.” (Ch 1)
- “Her letters read like excerpts from an Anita Loos novel, full of non sequiturs and gossip.” (Ch 8)
- “The next day, Lee wakes up with a clear head, and it feels like a gift to have the energy for everyday tasks. Why doesn't she appreciate it more when she is healthy?” (Ch 9)
- “When I look at a picture of you, I want to feel exactly as good as I felt when I was taking the picture. Photography can capture reality, but how does it capture emotion? Isn't the emotion what makes reality real?” (Ch 14)
- “The Illuminated moths wings of her lungs inside her chest, shot through with cancer.” (Sussex England)
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