The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Memorialised in more than wax
LITTLE Edward Carey Gallic Books, £10.99
human nature in its less fine manifestation – were frequent, as is typical of border or frontier regions; and, just to keep the reader attentive and alert there is much political trimming, turncoatery and pragmatic switching of sides.
This continued even into the 20th century, when Dumfriesshire’s county and burgh representation seemed to oscillate, though not unrepresentatively, between Liberal, Unionist and even Labour interests.
You’ll find no mention of Keats in McCulloch’s Dumfriesshire. It would be odd if there were, because he shows no great interest in native sons either. There is a brief mention of the great engineer Thomas Telford, who was born in Westerkirk, Eskdale; there’s a picture only of Thomas Carlyle, who was born and is buried in Ecclefechan, and left a corner of his heart in Craigenputtock, but nothing is said about him or his famous irascibility; no mention, either, of Hugh MacDiarmid (or Christopher Murray Grieve), who hailed from Langholm; and sadly nothing about Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the inventor of the bicycle, who was born in Keir and did his work at Courthill Smithy. Perhaps Dumfriesshire McCullochs
don’t talk to Dumfriesshire Macmillans. Stranger feuds have been known.
So rich and dramatic is the historical personnel that perhaps these modern references are not needed, but the tone is cooler and more detached as a result.
A pity, perhaps. Some years ago I got astride Kirkpatrick Macmillan’s invention and explored Dumfriesshire. It’s where the Mortons hail from: somewhere near Thornhill, as far as I can determine.
There is a Half Morton parish further to the south and east, as if to remind me that I’m unlikely to make such an expedition again, and certainly not on a bicycle. If I were to, I’d have McCulloch’s book with me, even if that required separate transportation. It’s a big book, packed with detail and incident.
It’s too objective and unflinching to become a vanity possession for proud Dumfriesians. For anyone who wants an attractively slanted, if not exactly biased, primer on Scottish history as a whole, it’s very hard to beat.
THERE are some people who seem like ideal subjects for a novel. Anne Marie Grosholtz, known to most of us as Madame Tussaud, is one of them. She spent her life using wax to make exact replicas of famous people – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Louis XVI, Voltaire – then putting them on display for the public, for a small sum of course.
She was so obsessed with capturing the faces of history that it is not surprising she embellished the facts of her own past so it could match the drama of other lives.
We do not know, for example, whether she was actually the sculpture teacher to Louis XVI’s youngest sister Elisabeth, as she claims, or if she lived in a cupboard in the Palace of Versailles.
But in Edward Carey’s wonderfully weird novel of Marie’s life (she was mostly known as Marie, but Little to some) he rightly makes use of all these possible truths for his fiction.
It makes for some great scenes, including one where the young Marie teaches Elisabeth that her servants “have the same innards” as she does. The young princess looks aghast and disbelieving. When she is at last convinced, she looks with resentment at her servant, then says, “‘How horrid.’”
Later Marie takes Elisabeth out to see the poor and downtrodden citizens of Versailles. When revealed in all its gruesomeness, the human body is a great leveller.
What adds further artistic credence to Carey’s novel is that it is told in the first person and in the style of those great bulky Victorian novels that sought to capture the fullness and variety of a person’s life, from beginning to end, or, in Marie’s case, from dirt-poor poverty to fame.
It is apposite then that in 1850, the final year of Marie’s life, Charles Dickens turns up at her house and waxworks showroom in London to write about her: “A thief, of course. I tell him everything.”
In real life, Dickens had just finished writing David Copperfield, often thought of as a veiled portrait of himself. Dickens was an expert at capturing the human body in a few lines, and using that body to shape a character’s personality. Carey is also a great caricaturist.
His novel is full of his own beautiful illustrations (in this regard, Carey’s novelistic approach is similar to that of Alasdair Gray). One of the first things we learn about Marie is what she looks like. She has the large “Roman” nose of her mother and the jutting chin of her father. Marie’s persona is pointy and feisty, and it shows: “I nosed and chinned my way into life.”
She is born in Strasbourg in 1761. Her father, a soldier, dies before she is six years old. Not long after, she and her mother move to the Swiss city of Berne.
They are to be the domestic help of a master of wax anatomy, Phillipe Curtius. After Marie’s mother commits suicide, however, Curtius becomes Marie’s guardian and she becomes his apprentice.
They move to Paris, where Curtius makes a living sculpting the heads of all and sundry, and live with a meanspirited and selfish widow. Curtius is shy and easily manipulated by the widow, and Marie is belittled and ignored.
There is, however, a picaresque element to Marie’s life and she won’t be shunted aside. She is witness to great historical upheavals, most notably the French Revolution. She is locked up during the Terror, then released to make a cast of the guillotined head of Robespierre.
The name Tussaud, incidentally, is from a botched marriage to an engineer.
Carey reproduces, or invents, all of this with relentless energy, giving Marie an appropriate sense of history as spectacle. Whatever the real truth of Anne Marie Grosholtz’s life, she lived up to a feminised version of Herodotus’ dictum: a woman’s character is her fate.
With determination, intelligence, artistic nous and luck, she became one of the great people of history she aspired to be. Now someone has even written a novel about her.
That’s not a bad way to be memorialised: the facts and untruths of your life laid down on paper with flair and finesse.