Author Katherine Ashenburg, on the characters in her first novel.
A lot of visual artists have been supreme egoists, and the people around them suffer in great or lesser degrees from that.
TORONTO “When this book comes out I’ll be two months shy of 73.”
There’s a note of amused incredulity in Katherine Ashenburg’s voice when she talks about her late-flowering emergence as a novelist. But it’s definitely happening.
Sofie & Cecilia, her new book chronicling the decades-long friendship between two remarkable woman, has received rapturous advance praise from the likes of Barbara Gowdy and Jane Urquhart — yet it’s not as though she’s just emerged as a writer. She’s been that all her life. It’s her move into fiction that’s unexpected.
Ashenburg can already claim a distinguished career as a journalist and editor, as well as the author of a pair of critically acclaimed nonfiction books notable for their refreshing non-conformity. Only an adventurous mind would conceive of something like The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Vintage Canada, 2010). And the curiosity of a true social historian runs through the pages of The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002).
So she has an impressive track record already. But that hasn’t prevented her from surprising herself by turning novelist in her early 70s and perhaps surprising herself even more by straying far from the shores of North America to write an absorbing story about the Swedish art world at the turn of the last century.
“Old age fascinates me, especially now that I’m in it,” Ashenburg says. “And probably the best way for me to keep going is to use my writer’s muscle.”
She also likes changing gears. “I was an academic for 10 years, then a CBC radio producer for 10 years, then an editor at the Globe and Mail for 10 years. And I’ve been a freelance writer for a lot more than 10 years.”
Then she adds: “So isn’t it time to change my occupation again?”
She’s done so with a novel propelled by an easy unforced feminism — a novel that finds its inspiration in the lives of two revered Swedish artists, Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn, and the women who married them and nurtured them to the subjugation of their own substantial talents.
“I’d always loved the paintings of Carl Larsson, but I knew nothing about his life,” Ashenburg says. That changed 10 years ago, during an overseas publicity tour for her book on dirt. She had a chance to visit Larsson’s home in Sweden, and it was there that she learned more about him — in particular his marriage and his refusal to allow his wife to pursue a painting career even though both had studied at the same academy.
A seed had been planted, and in the resulting novel, published in Canada by Knopf, Larsson is reborn as Nils Olsson, a renowned Swedish artist. Sofie is his devoted, self-sacrificing wife — and Nils can proudly boast, without embarrassment, that his “greatest accomplishment” was stopping her from continuing with her painting. Although Nils expects her to fulfil her proper vocation — that of being a good wife — he is also prepared to indulge her when she turns to weaving and textile design in her free time. But as the novel ironically makes clear, Sofie begins demonstrating a degree of creativity that exceeds the works of her self-absorbed and artistically stagnating husband.
The novel provides further irony in the parallel marriage of Lars and Cecilia Vogt. Lars, who is based on the real-life Zorn, is a successful artist and notorious womanizer. Cecilia is the linchpin in his life, a gifted curator who is indispensable to Lars in managing his career. But in the process, her own talents are sacrificed — also her quest for happiness.
“A lot of visual artists have been supreme egoists, and the people around them suffer in great or lesser degrees from that,” Ashenburg says. But she’s firm in saying she wasn’t attempting to write a feminist tract.
“I’ve been watching the #MeToo movement with interest because women of my own generation and generations below me are still told — don’t rock the boat, deal with the hand that’s dealt you, the important thing is to please. That this is still happening in 2018 interests me a lot when I think of Sofia and Cecilia.”
The centrepiece of the novel is the friendship — tentative at first and then richly fulfilling — that endures between these two undervalued women, into old age.
“That’s where I started — but with fear and trembling and not knowing,” Ashenburg says in an interview in her publisher’s office. “I had revered novels too much to think I could ever write one — but here it seemed I might have an easy way in because I had these real characters. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was trace the very long path that Sofie and Cecilia take to becoming intimate friends.”
And again, she wanted to avoid polemic. There was no way she wanted to display the two husbands as monsters.
“I wanted to show that love, even for imperfect or complicated people who considerably frustrate your life, can remain — that these were partners who were imperfect but remained so important to these women.”
As well, the period of social and political change in the Sweden of the day seemed to serve Ashenburg ’s agenda beautifully.
“A thing I liked about that period and these women was that I kind of saw them born on a hinge between old ideas of marriage and what a woman might actually do under new ideas. That’s why I wanted them to live into old age … and flower.”
So what about her own years? “I feel pretty much the way I’ve always felt,” she says with a laugh. She reminds herself that three of her favourite novelists — Mary Wesley, Penelope Fitzgerald and Canada’s Ethel Wilson — didn’t begin publishing until they were in middle age.
“When you start late, you already have so much life and have seen so many stories that you have a bit of perspective. It’s not a bad time to start a novelist’s career, really.”