Frida Kahlo consumes the heart and soul of a passionate novelist

What can elevate a mere human -- born without fanfare, fated as we all are to muddle through mortality as best we can -- to cult status? “Cult” meaning here not the commercially orchestrated mass prostration before entertainment’s idol-of-the-month, but the real thing: acknowledgment of the power of one iconically perceived life to cross the boundaries of time, space and culture. The individuals who fall under a cult figure’s influence first experience the joyful shock of encounter, followed by a shiver, the premonition of deep personal transformation. Cult status depends on neither virtue nor its opposite. Think of Mother Teresa, Rasputin, Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, Evita Peron, Elvis Presley. Think too of the painter Frida Kahlo, to whom novelist Carole Maso’s intense prose poem, “Beauty is Convulsive,” is dedicated in every sense of the word.

Communist. Free lover. Flamboyant cripple. Life partner of Diego Rivera. Kahlo, the artist who has inspired countless articles and books, not to mention the current eponymous movie, was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon on July 6, 1907, in suburban Mexico City. Her mother was Mexican and Indian, her father Austrian Jewish. Frida was an early favorite subject of her father, a portrait photographer, and later became his coloring assistant.

“And her beloved papa photographs her and she adores -- makes love to the lens even then.

Live your life.

Embrace the life you’ve been given.

Your grave image. Even then. All is

Votive: desire....

Listen: the drums. And then you leave the frame.”

This early passage portends some of the key themes of Maso’s impressionistic yet painstakingly exact word-painting. “Beauty is Convulsive” (the title taken from a line by her friend and mentor, poet Andre Breton) is on one hand an interpretation of Kahlo’s life, riven by the physical trauma of her traffic accident at 19 -- broken pelvis, damaged organs, initially given up as unsalvageable -- as essentially a Passion in the Christian meaning of extreme suffering and sacrifice. In 28 short sections, with titles such as “Because I wanted you (O Mexico),” “Gringolandia” and “Votive: Oblivion,” it also charts the writer’s desire for deepening “communion” with her biographic subject.

Maso’s aim in writing to and for Kahlo is for “the distance ... to diminish between us.” There is the importunate shift into direct address, as in the passage above. And the foreshadowing (“embrace ... even then”) of the agony awaiting the boisterous child Frida. Finally we hear Maso’s tender, frustrated acknowledgment of her subject’s elusiveness -- how Frida will always escape her father’s lens frame, the biographer’s adoring eye, the lies and strictures of bourgeois morality, the immobilizing braces, traction devices and wheelchairs, the spiritual impoverishments of chronic pain, of infertility, lost love.

Something refreshing, and humble, informs Maso’s eclectic approach. Much of “Beauty is Convulsive” involves collage, pastiche, documentation. Prose, poetry and a good deal of quotation from Kahlo, her doctors, friends and family, and Rivera. “Look at her work ... adorable as a beautiful smile and profound and cruel as life’s bitterness.” Not all the quotes are attributed, and the effect of this chorus of eyewitnesses, in which Maso’s voice mingles, is to keep all focus on Kahlo, on filling out the moving, fleeting picture of her, while dispensing with the conventional stutter of footnotes or he said/she said. A subsuming of the author’s ego.

Gradually, however, it is Maso’s voice -- beseeching, adoring, consoling, confirming -- that dominates, eventually to solo. Her identification with Kahlo grows more explicit and agitated, for example in the unassuageable bitterness over catty put-downs leveled by reviewers at Kahlo both during and after her life: “Frida Kahlo’s specialty was suffering, and she adopted it as an artistic theme as confidently as Mondrian claimed the rectangle....” “Rivera was a better artist than his wife, but it’s she who is now enshrined as a saint. Her self-portraits sell for the requisite millions.... “ In the next paragraph, with scarcely a moment’s transition, we encounter another reviewer’s inexplicably venomous put-down: “An astonishingly vapid pornographic fantasy, from the Brown/Columbia professor.” It’s a bold substitution: Here the poison dart has been aimed not at Kahlo the painter but at Maso, the writer. These and their ilk are disturbingly recognizable barbs, delivered in familiar, oleaginous tones, the kind of criticism the world reserves for “women’s” art.

In the final chapter, “World Tonight,” the parallel between pen and brush glows even more explicitly. “And she is sucking the blood from her brushes, free. And she is looking in the mirror and she is painting the earth .... And the gringa is sucking on a pen and writing this: You are walking -- a dirt road -- free of pain.” In the last pages, decorum is torn away as Kahlo’s clothes were in the accident. Maso’s incantatory description of her conjured-up subject’s embrace takes on extraordinary power. It is the full shock of encounter. Hard to read through, and yet -- like Frida Kahlo’s painting -- impossible to look away from.

*

‘Beauty Is Convulsive’:

The Passion of Frida Kahlo

Carole Maso

Counterpoint: 170 pp., $24