Frank & Grace

Grace Hartigan’s life has one big puzzle.

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We think over that exile in Baltimore. Has Cathy Curtis solved the mystery, the solution as simple as a love match? Did this woman, able to successfully split the emotional from the sexual, for once allow them to fuse, making her union with a provincial professor inviolable? Did she stay in Baltimore because of hubby? who may have been brilliant; but was certainly mad, and this known within years of the marriage. We wobble across the ice rink of our doubts.

The answer is surely New York. Grace didn’t leave this city. She ran away from it. So hard to maintain one’s kudos in a city where each new generation rushes to push the old one off its skyscrapers. There is Frank O’Hara’s growing distance - he had a new female confidante: Patsy Southgate - a portent of her imminent fall. Already she is on the way out. It is a theme of the book: Grace’s invisibility in art history. In truth, she was never a large figure. Much of her reputation parasitical on better known artists and fashionable curators; these latter beginning to lose their influence or going out of business. And always there is Frank, curator and poet, who has found other muses to inspire him. The apparently brilliant scientist is her escape route: in Baltimore, where she is the only famous artist, she can make others believe in her genius. Not that she cynically married this man. At first she would have been captivated by his insanity; it is the pull against the push of her disenchantment with New York. Once out in the wilds she finds exile congenial.

Frank locked eyes with Grace over dinner, making LeSueur feel like a fifth wheel. Afterward, Frank lingered at Grace’s bedroom door and said he wanted to sleep with her. “And ruin this? No way?” she said. (Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition)

Exile begins here, at the bedroom door in this house in the Hamptons, when Frank O’Hara wants to bed his muse, and Grace refuses. He turns away, leaving the muse behind, whose presence will fade, and vanish, without a trace, like perfume in summer air.

It is a wonderful myth; the artist’s only reality. Frank O’Hara, the great poet of the age, who vivifies lesser souls, tries to couple art with life, turning his muse into a lover. Grace keeps the distance, but…a threshold has been crossed, Frank having transgressed the proprieties. Art and life, mistakenly believing themselves one, have come too close, tainting the relationship. The muse brought to ground loses her influence. The poet rebuffed turns his gaze away, taking his magic with him. Grace, whose success depends on her social circle and Frank’s curatorial power, feeling their loss, scarpers.