Peter Everett: Bellocq's women

By CHERYL PEARL SUCHER*

Artists known only through the evidence of their art often spectrally inhabit the worlds captured by their unique vision.

Leaving behind only ephemeral traces of the facts of their lives, they can become the fodder for elaborate imaginative reconstruction as their relative anonymity becomes an intriguing aspect of their creativity, leaving the work to invent the life.

American erotic photographer E.J. Bellocq, known for his salacious yet seductive portraits of the prostitutes of notorious Storyville, the red light district of fin-de-siecle New Orleans, was just such an inspiration for Peter Everett's posthumously published ninth novel, Bellocq's Women, a fictional biography similar in style to his earlier novels Matisse's War and The Voyages of Alfred Wallis.

Writing at the turn of the millennium about the turn of the last century, Everett chose as his final subject an artist whose work captured the chaotic moral and cultural fervor of New Orleans during the post-Civil War reconstructionist era, a place where jazz was invented in whorehouse parlours, brass bands accompanied funeral processions to cemeteries raised above sinking delta bayous, and dentists were hanged for performing perverse experiments on willing prepubescent charges.

Bellocq's erotic portraits of young women were not rediscovered or admired until the 1950s, nearly a decade after his death. It seems fitting that Everett metaphorically referred to the passing of his own century by recreating the violent, permissive yet creative currents that marked its beginning.

The New Orleans of his vision is a place where nothing ever stopped and everything was possible, influenced, perhaps, by its French and Caribbean provenance. The city's liberality, lawlessness, tempestuousness and artistic and culinary fervour become the subject of the author's fascination and revulsion as he invents the life of his protagonist, a young man running away from an emasculating, domineering, God-fearing, Catholic mother, who discovers himself and the substance of his desire only behind the velvet shade of his complex new box camera. Inept at love and unsuccessful in romance, he succeeds only in capturing the transience of emotion in the bold carnality of his beloved women.

What is fascinating about this vivid book, with its startling images and surreal dream sequences, is that even though his world is masterfully invoked, the figure of Bellocq remains as blurry as a shadow on a lens. Ultimately, he remains but a mirror of his times, the mysterious collector of extraordinary portraits of unforgettable women whose sensual truth he was born to capture.

* Cheryl Pearl Sucher is a Dunedin writer.

Vintage

$24.95