Historical Tale of Art and Obsessive Love

THE SILENT WOMAN

A Novel

By Susan Dodd

William Morrow

336 pages, $25

After serving as a captain in the most prestigious Austro-Hungarian cavalry regiment, the Viennese painter Oskar Kokoschka returned from the Great War as battered in spirit as he was in body. Drawn to the German town of Dresden for its noted sanatorium, whose “exceptional costliness attested, he thought, to its curative powers,” Kokoschka settled in, hoping for a speedy recovery so that he could resume painting. But the world around him lay shattered.

In “The Silent Woman,” critically acclaimed author Susan Dodd depicts the epidemics, starvation, food rationing and general suffering that plagued Europe during and after World War I. But in this historical novel--in which Dodd acknowledges having played “fast and loose with historical fact”--she focuses on Kokoschka’s obsessive amorous entanglements and their disturbing relationship to his art.

While the first half of the novel gathers its insights and momentum slowly, collecting too much mundane detail, the novel eventually builds its brittle psychological portrait into an unnerving tautness. Born in 1886, the 30-year-old Kokoschka finds himself obsessed with Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, with whom he has carried on an affair before and after the composer’s death. Beautiful, sensuous and extraordinarily self-centered, Alma becomes the passionate center of the painter’s vision; indeed, she serves as the very lens by which he views all that he paints.

When Alma abandons Kokoschka to marry a well-known architect, the painter feels utterly bereft; barely able to eat or paint, he teeters on the edge of an emotional and physical breakdown. Now teaching in Dresden’s art academy while attempting to paint, and lodging with Hans Posse, the city’s sympathetic museum curator, Kokoschka drags through his misery of days, seeking consolation from his students and from Hulda, Posse’s young and painfully naive housemaid.

Dodd excels at depicting the intricate irrationalities of obsession, showing Kokoschka spinning strangely and wildly out of control.

Enlisting the services of Fraulein Moos, a talented doll maker, the artist commissions a life-size doll modeled after his beloved Alma. He also convinces Hulda, whom he has renamed Reserl, to help ready the house for the statue’s arrival. She will be Kokoschka’s co-conspirator, preparing meals and arranging Madame Alma’s (the dummy’s) gorgeous clothing.

Drawing from Kokoschka’s letters, and those from Fraulein Moos, Dodd renders the painter’s bizarre desires and behavior with eerie realism. But it is Reserl who emerges as the novel’s most poignant character, with her innocent faithfulness and desire to love and be loved by the grieving artist:

“Reserl lifted one hand from his shoulder and laid it along the side of his face. Her chapped fingers smelled of onion and garlic. She wondered if the scent repulsed him, if he noticed the roughness in her touch. His lips were slightly parted. She covered his mouth with her own and breathed into him.

“His eyes remained closed.

“She might have been a blanket.

“Reserl twined her arms and legs about his body, lifted her mouth from his. His breath grieved like a high and distant wind.

“He will never love you. An ache spread out from her center, until the whole of her being was overtaken. Reserl recognized the cramp. Nights long ago, as a child, she had groaned and writhed with it. Growing pains, her mother had said.

“I must grow larger, Reserl thought. If I am to hold him.

“She must not think.

“He will never love you.”

Dodd’s descriptions are lush, and her brooding dialogues are full of interior asides by her central characters. Sometimes the novel’s language gets bogged down by its own heaviness, but often this heaviness enhances the stifling psychological atmosphere that makes the story so dramatically convincing. Art has its costs, the novel suggests.

Despite his acute self-involvement, Kokoschka has his own idiosyncratic scruples. He bitterly comments on the slavish rates the art academy pays its models, yet he doesn’t hesitate to use them. Even toward Hulda, Kokoschka exhibits a certain protectiveness, at least initially, hesitant to tamper with the young woman’s innocence.

But ultimately, Dodd shows, art remains more urgent and even necessary for him than real life.