Kristen Lavransdatter

Statue of Kristen Lavransdatter, Sil, Norway

Set in medieval Norway, the story of Kristen Lavransdatter is so rich in the understanding of both the seen and the unseen worlds, and their relationship, that it must be read in its entirety. It has enthralled people all over the world since its completion in 1927 by Sigrid Undset. Its historical and cultural accuracy helped win her the Nobel prize for literature.

Kristen is the favored daughter of a wealthy Norwegian landowner, born about 1260 A.D. Even as a young woman, Kristen’s spirit gets her in trouble. She loves a peasant boy, though her father has betrothed her to a neighboring landowner. When the boy is killed, his mother rages that it happened because of Kristen. Kristen is sent to a convent in Oslo until the gossip dies down. When Erlend Nikulausson, a knight of noble birth, rescues her and a friend, she quickly loses her heart, and even her body, to him.

When Kristen goes home, she insists she will marry no one but Erlend. Her father resists, but after three years of Kristen’s stubborn insistence, he gives in and Kristen and Erlend are married. Kristen is pregnant, but she has told no one, not even her husband, and wears the golden bridal wreath and long flowing hair reserved for virgins at her wedding.

Near the time of the child’s birth, Kristen is utterly miserable at all the sin she has kept quiet about. Fearful of dying in childbirth, she confesses all to her husband’s brother, a learned priest. After a difficult birth, Kristen is delivered of a beautiful, unmarked boy. Binding him on her back, she goes barefoot to the cathedral at Nidaros, to the archbishop of Norway, for absolution.

Though Kristen’s early years are very dramatic (the movie made by Liv Ullmann based on the book ends with her marriage), I loved the continuing story of her later life. At first Kristen has one son after another, five sons in five years, and is ill much of the time. But, when Erlend spends several years away in the north, she recovers and becomes just as blooming and lovely as when she was a girl. She works hard to restore Erland’s neglected household and brings honor to it.

Simon, the landowner Kristen was first betrothed to, is now married to Kristen’s younger sister. When Erlend’s attempt to return a Norwegian king to Norway’s throne fails, he is tried for treason and Simon, because of his enduring love for Kristen, contrives his release. Erland is returned to his family, but his lands are forfeited to the Swedish crown and he and his many sons must move back to Kristen’s much smaller farmstead. Kristen, in her turn, when Simon’s son is expected to die, takes upon herself the sin of witchcraft to save him.

No matter how deeply they love each other, Erlend and Kristen cannot keep faith with each other during everyday life. Kristen worries constantly that her sons will now have to leave home, as her lands will not support seven sons. When she finally says so, Erlend packs up and rides away to a small ghost-ridden northern farm, the only thing he owns. Their sons suffer and so does Kristen, but she cannot apologize. When Simon dies, he secures Kristen’s promise to go and make up with Erlend. Kristen does. The two of them are happy alone there in the unkempt place. “Yet never, more than now, had he seemed the son of chiefs and nobles. So fairly and easily he bore his tall slim form, with the broad shoulders somewhat stooped, the long, fine limbs.” When she goes home to their sons, Kristen is again pregnant.

Erlend and Kristen are not destined to live long and happily. Erlend dies defending Kristen’s honor once again, and Kristen enters a nunnery, giving herself at last to God. She nurses people when the plague comes, and finally it claims her too.

Every one of the characters in the book is filled out with humanity, including the priests who befriend Kristen. None of them forgets the past, either. Both kinds of being, the intrinsic unchangeable self and the self that unfolds in time are always sensed in these remarkable people who lived so long ago in a feudal culture that affected their every movement, while they fought, as we do, to become the people they were meant to be.

At one point, I felt I was so involved with this book I sent my copy away! Like Kristen I first married a weak and possibly dangerous man and tried to redeem our life by steadfastly providing a courteous and seemly home for us. I could easily understand Kristen’s fears and her struggle, and I was heartened as she grew into a wise and valued woman. My worn copy of this book (which came back to me) was translated by Charles Archer and J.S. Scott, but I understand a new and better translation by Tiina Nunnally is now available.

Dalva Northridge

Dalva, portrait by Jim Harrison

The story of Dalva Northridge is both contemporary and ageless. The main character in two books by Jim Harrison, Dalva [published 1988] and The Road Home [published 1998], Dalva’s is an American story.

When we first meet her, Dalva is 45 and it is 1986. She has just lost her job as a social worker in Los Angeles due to her direct involvement in the case of an abused kid. It would take too long to go through “channels” to help him, so Dalva just took him to a hospital. Having made an enemy of his powerful abuser, Dalva decides to go home.

Home is an inherited ranch in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Her great grandfather Northridge acquired it after failing to help the Sioux (called Lakota among themselves) adjust to their lives after their losses to disease and battle, and the extermination of the buffalo. Northridge imported thousands of trees, made shelterbelts around his land and became nurseryman to the area. He also married a Sioux woman after his Swedish wife died. The son that resulted is Dalva’s grandfather.

Dalva’s mother Naomi has her own homestead nearby. She has been a country schoolteacher for most of her life, a lover of birds and animals as is Dalva. When Dalva’s father died in the Korean war, she and her sister were raised by her mother and grandfather.

Time means very little in Nebraska. The decisive events in Dalva’s life recur again and again for her. Riding around the ranch on her horse, she circles the places where the great love of her life occurred. Duane Stone Horse came to the ranch in 1956 and began to work for her grandfather. Dalva fell in love with him. She slept with him only once, but became pregnant and had a son at 15. Duane disappeared when he was told Dalva is his half sister. His mother, a Sioux woman, had slept with Dalva’s father at a hunting lodge a year before Dalva was born.

Dalva’s baby is given up for adoption at her grandfather’s insistence. We are not given all the details of how Dalva survives this, but she is helped by her close family. She goes to college, gets a master’s degree and works at various jobs. In one page she tells the story of her working history: “I had always worked because nothing whatsoever in my background had prepared me to act like a rich person, a notorious non-profession, the dregs of which everyone has witnessed in life, or in magazines and on television … All of this adds up to a wonderfully undistinguished career, but an interesting enough life.”

She is in New York in 1972 when Duane Stone Horse calls Naomi from Key West. Dalva goes to him. Duane is dying and wants Dalva, and his son if she can find him, to have the benefits accruing from his army career. He has a sackful of medals from having spent a record amount of time in combat in the Vietnam war, but his kidneys, liver, pancreas, stomach are all shot, the trailer where he lives full of medicine bottles. The captain of a fishing boat marries them and Duane and Dalva fall asleep holding each other. In the middle of the night Duane disappears, riding his horse into the ocean. His body is never found.

Dalva never finds a love to equal her love of Duane. She continues to work, but uses her wealth to fuel her uncompromising nature and restlessness. When she comes home to the ranch in 1986, she begins to look for her son, although everyone tells her it is up to the son to look for her. Also the Northridge saga envelops her. At the ranch are Dalva’s great-grandfather’s secret journals, valuable paintings and native American artifacts which many think belong in a museum. A Stanford historian says that “other than southern New Mexico with its remnant Apache and Comanche conflicts at the end of the century, this was the last area in America where the full collision of cultures had taken place.”

The summer Dalva returns to the ranch, Nelse, a young man who “prefers sky to ceilings,” arrives to work on a Breeding Bird Survey of a section of the ranch. He works with Naomi, who knows instantly that he is Dalva’s son because he looks so much like Duane. He has been nosing around Dalva for months, afraid of showing himself. When he finally meets Dalva, he says she doesn’t look old enough to be his mother. “Oh my God I was only a kid when I had you,” she says.

Finding her son helps Dalva in many ways. Nelse is much like Duane and they become, she thinks, the closest of friends. It is also clear he is able to take on the Northridge mantle and inherit the ranch. In May of the next year, Dalva and Nelse go on a camping trip together, but Dalva is ill. She is taking many pills and has an appointment at Sloan-Kettering in New York. When Nelse realizes how ill she is, he pushes up the appointment. Dalva has ovarian cancer, which has metastasized into the rest of her organs. She refuses the radical chemo and radiation offered and goes back to the ranch to say goodbye to her beloved family. She goes to Key West and drowns herself, writing in a final journal that “I hope I am going to join my lover.”

Dalva’s story is embedded in a rich, overlapping narrative told by many characters. The notebooks of the first John Wesley Northridge tell of his life in the late 1800’s. Dalva’s grandfather, mother, uncle and son each tell their own stories, as does Dalva herself. The picture that emerges is of the kind of nobility which results from hard work, luck and inheritance on the dry plains of western Nebraska. “How could this happen, when there’s an ocean?” asks Dalva when she sees what is done to her charge in Los Angeles. Nelse says, “Drugs are vehicles for people who have forgotten how to walk.” Though Dalva has spent much of her life in cities, she is not in sync with civilization, but with the natural world as it still exists in less-inhabited places.

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti 1924, by Edward Weston

Tina Modotti was at the center of artistic and revolutionary movements in Mexico from 1923 to 1930. She was born in Italy in 1896 and became a fine photographer, before becoming a communist and doing aid work through International Red Aid. Mysterious and provocative, her life gives one answer to the pressing question of how art and life can be integrated. She was 46 at the time of her death.

As a young immigrant to the United States, Tina lived in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, becoming involved in film and meeting Edward Weston, who financed his photography with a portraiture business. Tina became his favorite model. When Tina decided to move to Mexico, Weston left his family (though taking his eldest son with him) and went with her. Tina apprenticed herself to Weston, learning photography and print-making, and in return, managed the studio they opened in Mexico City.

Mexico was in a cultural renaissance and Weston’s photos of Tina were published ahead of their arrival. They were welcomed everywhere. Their friends included the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco and many others. Tina’s photographs (made with the large format cameras Weston favored) began to be published and shown alongside Weston’s. She became the favorite documentation photographer for the muralists. Rivera met Frieda Kahlo at one of Tina’s parties.

“Tina had become increasingly idealistic and was moving towards a deeper commitment to revolutionary art and politics,” writes her biographer Margaret Hooks in Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. The great love between Weston and Tina eroded due to jealousy. Both of them took lovers as they pleased. When Weston returned to California in 1926, Tina took an apartment which became a center for local communist leaders and political exiles. She also began to photograph social injustice, political rallies, workers and the poor.

In 1927, Tina became a member of the communist party. She was involved with Xavier Guerrero and the Cuban Julio Antonio Mella whose assassination was never solved. A student who knew her at the time writes: “She was a free woman; I mean, she did not have the usual limitations that women in Mexico had. She was very intelligent and quick to express herself, a rapid thinker … extroverted and very sure of herself. What immediately attracted you to her was her great human empathy.” As the political stew thickened around her, she was estranged from Diego Rivera because of politics. She became the victim of sensationalist journalism and police surveillance. In 1930 she was arrested and deported to Europe.

In Europe, Tina was no longer able to support herself with photography. She worked for communist aid organizations and went to Moscow with the nefarious Italian operative Vittorio Vidali. In Moscow, she gave up her camera and photographic work. During the Spanish Civil War, she was in Spain, working in hospitals, sometimes in disguise, for the Republicans. As Spain fell to the Fascists, Tina joined a wave of refugees crossing the Pyrenees into France with no more than the clothes on her back.

When Tina tried to land in New York in 1939, her sister waiting for her, she was turned away. Immigration officials were reluctant to let in Spanish refugees and insisted Tina continue on to Mexico. She traveled under an assumed name, but was terrified Mexico would not take her back. She did get back in to Mexico, however, and spent her time working with aid organizations for the Spanish refugees. Her health grew poor and she stayed home more, typing and translating. She died in a taxi of heart failure three years later.

I first learned about Tina from the Daybooks of Edward Weston. The work Weston did in Mexico depended upon Tina’s friendships and language abilities but when he left Tina in Mexico, I lost track of this intriguing, mysterious woman. In Margaret Hooks’ above-mentioned book the rest of the story is told. The book is filled with portraits of her by Weston as well as her own most famous photographs.

Modotti’s work is the complement of Edward Weston’s. She said at one point, “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art.” Weston had said the opposite. Her epitaph was written by Pablo Neruda:

“Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,

bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,

combined with steel and wire and

pollen to make up your firm

and delicate being.”

Aksinia Astakhova

Mikhail Sholokhov’s books, translated as And Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, written 1926-1940, turn on one of the most grounded and passionate relationships in literature. Aksinia Astakhova and Gregor Melekhov are neighbors, their farmsteads on the banks of the Don at the end of the village of Tatarsk.

Kuban Cossack

Still only 20, Aksinia’s husband Stepan doesn’t love her. When Stepan is mobilized, Gregor and Aksinia fight off the feelings they have for each other without success. Soon the whole village knows of their liaison. “After the mowing Aksinia was a changed woman: as though someone had set a mark, burned a brand on her face. … She carried her happy, shameful head proudly and high.” They talk of running away, but Gregor feels there is nowhere to run to. “I’ll never stir anywhere away from the land. Here there is the steppe and something to breathe.” When Stepan gets home, he beats Aksinia savagely. Aksinia lives with him anyway, drowning her thoughts in household duties.

For the sake of honor, Gregor and Aksinia stay away from each other. Gregor’s parents marry him off to Natalia, who loves him. Natalia shrinks from bodily pleasures, however, and Gregor cannot help but think about Aksinia. Gregor leaves his family and goes to work at a nearby landowners’ estate, taking Aksinia with him. When Gregor is called up for military service in 1914, he leaves Aksinia on the estate, with their child. War with Austria begins.

Gregor’s family first receive a message that he died in battle, then a message saying he is alive. Gregor spends a long time in the hospital. He has received the Cross of St. George, but is beginning to see that he is fighting for an upper class which disrespects him. Aksinia’s little daughter dies. Left alone on the estate and in great pain, she allows the landlord to come to her. When Gregor comes back, he punishes both of them and leaves, going back to live with his parents and his wife.

Battles become more confusing. The Russian army fragments as some become Bolsheviks. In a battle, Gregor saves Stepan, Aksinia’s husband. “Strongly Gregor defended his Cossack honor, seizing every opportunity of displaying immortal prowess … but he knew that he no longer laughed as in former days, that his eyes were sunken and his cheekbones stood out sharply. He knew what price he had paid for his crosses and medals.” War turns to revolution and then to civil war. The Cossacks fight on the side of the White Russian army and Gregor is made an officer. Aksinia returns to Tatarsk on the Don when her husband returns from prison in Germany.

The Don area is enclosed on two sides by Red forces in the civil war. Gregor is home on leave now and then. Natalia has given him two children. She reproaches him for drinking and going with women, but he says “I’ve got no pity left for anyone. The war’s dried it all out of me. … Look into my soul and you’ll find a blackness like an empty well.” In fact, he sends for Aksinia, asking her to come to the nearby town where the regiment is stationed. “Occasionally Gregor awoke after a brief, stupefying sleep and saw Aksinia’s attentive eyes fixed on him in the twilight as though she were learning his features by heart … ‘I want to look my fill of you. They’ll kill you; my heart tells me so.’”

Natalia lays hands on herself. Gregor’s family believes his wife went to her death because of Aksinia and do not want anything to do with her. The area around the Don is being fiercely fought over. When the Whites retreat from Tatarsk, Gregor takes Aksinia with him. But she catches typhus and he must leave her. When she is well again, she makes her way home after many days. Gregor’s mother comes to ask after him and from that day on Aksinia and his family are united in their concern for him. That spring, the women of the village sow a little wheat on the parched earth.

Gregor switches sides and fights for the Reds. When the civil war is finally settled and the Reds take over, Gregor returns home, where his mother has now died, his sister has married a Bolshevik and Aksinia is glad to see him. The Reds are suspicious of Gregor, however, and arresting former officers of the Whites. Rather than be punished, Gregor disappears and fights with a rebel band. There is no discipline, however, and he finally can’t stand it. He returns to his village for Aksinia, who joins him, riding off and camping in a lovely dell. “I’ve learned to live like a hare,” he tells her. They are surprised and shot at by a patrol. Aksinia is hit. She never speaks or wakes. Gregor buries her, losing all interest in life until he finally goes back to look for his children.

At different points in my young life, I needed to know about passion: whether it was allowed, whether it could be survived. The Cossacks described by Sholokhov own up to passion. They live with it in close proximity to each other. This is a long tale, in which there is much fighting and discussion of politics. But it is clear that the real passions of the Cossacks involve their land and their families. Aksinia has no allies in this story, nothing but her love of Gregor and the great, fecund steppe. In the end she sits beside Gregor in the grass as he sleeps. “’My dear, Grisha darling, the grey hairs you’ve got!’ she whispered. ‘So you’re growing old? And yet it’s not so long ago that you were a boy.’”

Kezia Burnell

Katherine Mansfield

The child Kezia Burnell stands in for the writer Katherine Mansfield in her family stories “Prelude” and “At the Bay,” and the delightful story “The Doll’s House,” all set in New Zealand in the 1890’s. It is this little kid, resistant to class and wealth consciousness and fascinated by the world, that makes these family stories incomparable.

Kezia’s family moves from Wellington to a small suburb at the edge of a bay, a beautiful spot where the early morning mist recedes, leaving “the leaping, glittering sea so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it.” On the day of the move there is no room in the buggy for Kezia and Lottie, so they are made to stay in town with a neighbor, and go out with the store-man later. The neighbor boys tease them asking them whether they would like strawberries and cream for tea, when all there is to eat is bread and dripping. Kezia “sat with her head bent, and as the tear dripped slowly down, she caught it with a neat little whisk of her tongue and ate it before any of them had seen.”

The girls have never been out so late. Kezia falls asleep in the wagon and when she wakes they are stopping in front of a long, low white house with a verandah where the lights flicker from room to room as someone walks through with a lamp. It is Kezia’s grandmother, come to welcome them. In the morning Kezia explores the garden, finding a tall, mysterious plant, swelling up with cruel leaves and a tall fleshy stem. Her mother says it is an aloe, which blooms once every hundred years. When the cousins come to play the next day, they watch Pat the Irish handyman chop the head off a duck. The children are terribly excited, but Kezia wraps her arms around Pat's legs and demands he put the head back on. At dinner her father slices into the duck with great pride.

Stanley, Kezia’s competitive father, swims early in the morning in the bay. When he goes off to work each morning, the women folk he leaves at home heave a sigh of relief! The children rush to the beach to spend the day with their cousins, Kezia stopping to wait for her younger sister who cannot climb over the stile. Their aunt Beryl bathes with a cold society woman and their mother dreams the morning away in a steamer chair under a manuka tree, beside her latest child, a son. She has little energy and leaves the work of the household to Kezia’s energetic grandmother.

In the evening Kezia and her siblings and cousins assemble in the washhouse, each of them a different animal. Pip, the bull with a pack of cards, explains the game. “It was very exciting, sitting there in the washhouse; it was all they could do not to burst into a little chorus of animals before Pip had finished dealing.” It grows dark and the children wish someone would come to collect them. Finally, Lottie screams when she sees a dark face pressed against the window. It is their uncle, come to take the cousins home.

When the children are given a wonderful doll house so big it won’t fit in the house, it is put on wooden boxes in the courtyard. The side of the house swings back to reveal the rooms inside, carpeted and wallpapered, with furniture. “But what Kezia liked more than anything, what she liked frightfully, was the lamp.” The dolls were too big, looking like they didn’t belong, but the lamp was perfect. The Burnell children are allowed to ask their school friends, two by two, over to see the doll’s house, everyone except the Kelveys who are shunned because they are the daughters of a washerwoman and an unknown father. Kezia wants to ask the Kelveys to see the doll house, but her mother says she may not. When she does sneak them into the courtyard to see it one day, her Aunt Beryl surprises them and drives them off. Upon leaving, the younger Kelvey says to her sister, “I seen the little lamp,” sharing with Kezia reverence for the beautiful little object.

As a young woman Katherine Mansfield couldn’t stand the provincialism of her home and demanded to go live in England. “Prelude” was an early story published by Hogarth Press in 1918. The other two were written somewhat later, when she was no longer able to return to New Zealand due to her deteriorating health. She wrote to her father “the longer I live, the more I return to New Zealand. A young country is a real heritage, though it takes one time to remember it. But New Zealand is in my very bones.” Mansfield died of tuberculosis at 34.

Kezia is a nostalgic look back at a kind, resourceful and courageous little girl sustained by her wonderful grandmother. I doubt Mansfield herself was quite this perfect! But the intuition and the ability to see what was important must have been there. All of the members of the extended Burnell family are wonderfully described in the three stories about them. They each have their personality and their reasons, concisely and vividly rendered. I wanted for a long time to write a screenplay using the stories of this family in their evocative landscape. Mansfield’s stories are rightly celebrated, often feeling as if they were written yesterday. But none are richer than those with the little Kezia at their heart.

Rosa Burger

Rosa Burger, the main character of Nadine Gordimer’s book Burger’s Daughter (1979) is first seen at age 14 outside the prison where her mother has been interned, bringing her a hot water bottle and a quilt. Both her father and mother are white Afrikaner leftists in South Africa during the time of apartheid. They know they will be imprisoned for their beliefs, but continue to do what they can to work toward “the national liberation of the African people, and thus the abolishment of discrimination and extension of political rights to all the peoples of this country,” as her father states in the last speech he is allowed.

Nadine Gordimer

When both of her parents successively die, Rosa is left free, as her friend Conrad says, but wrestling with their legacy. She has work as a physiotherapist, but slips further and further away from the political friends her parents cultivated, seeking a life of her own. But it takes a long time, and she must dig down to understand how conditioned she is to the high-minded political cause which is more important than the individuals who try to perpetuate it.

Her friend Conrad says, “I am the only person alive.” That is the existential truth for him. But for Rosa, it is not. Rosa reminds him of “the bourgeois fate, alternate to Lionel Burger’s: to eat without hunger, mate without desire.” The Burgers embraced communism because at the time it was the only way to get beyond race. Rosa sees that her parents “had a connection with blacks that was completely personal. … The political activities and attitudes of the house came from the inside outwards, and blacks in that house where there was no God felt this embrace before the Cross. At last there was nothing between this skin and that. At last nothing between the white man’s word and his deed.”

Rosa continues moving outward. She wrests a passport from one of the “new Afrikaners” and, though under surveillance, uses it to go to France. She wants to know what it is like somewhere else. Katya, her father’s first wife whom Rosa has never known, welcomes Rosa to her home in a village near Nice. Rosa is taken in to the frivolous community, in which pleasure, food, sunshine, gardens, pets are the only reality. They are thrilled when she meets a man who becomes her lover, a professor down from Paris, Bernard Chabalier. The paintings of Bonnard crystallize the place for her. In them Chabalier points out, it is as if nothing’s happened. Not the growth of fascism, two world wars, the occupation. Katya and her friends live from day to day.

Rosa and Chabalier travel together, he outlines the life she might live with him in Paris. They are very much in love. But in London, Rosa runs into the black man who had lived in her home when they were children, Baasie. He is angry with her, angry that Rosa’s father is extolled while his, who also died in prison, is forgotten. He refuses to see Rosa again. But the talk with Baasie ignites her. She can no longer live in Europe as if nothing was happening. She returns to South Africa and takes a job in a black hospital.

In 1976 during the Soweto riots, the hospital is filled with victims. Rosa sees that it is the children that are now making the demand for human rights, radicalizing their parents. “The children kept on walking toward the police and the guns.” Rosa is detained on October 19, 1977, like hundreds of others, without charges. In the women’s prison she finds ways to communicate with other women she knows, singing and laughing together. Her lawyer expects that she will get out, though will probably be under house arrest.

Nadine Gordimer, who died this year on July 13, did not consider herself as political as the “white hard-core Leftists” working in the atmosphere of apartheid in South Africa. But she was a member of the ANC and aided the revolutionaries. Lionel Burger is somewhat modeled on Bram Fischer, Nelson Mandela’s defense attorney. In the 1960’s when Mandela and Fischer were imprisoned, Gordimer considered leaving South Africa, but decided not to. “I wouldn't be accepted as I was here, even in the worst times and even though I'm white,” she said. Staying was a political act.

Perhaps none of us believe we have done enough to end suffering, yet all of our daily choices have political consequences. In this book, I saw the powerful contrast between the community in France in which each person looked out for his or her own material advantage, and the high-minded community in South Africa fostered by Rosa Burger’s family, which worked for human rights.

Aline Charigot Renoir

Detail from Luncheon of the Boating Party

Pierre-Auguste Renoir met his wife, Aline Charigot, in 1881 in Paris. She was 19, a dressmaker, and he was 40, an impoverished painter, whose work had hung in the first Impressionist exhibition. All of my knowledge of Aline Renoir comes from the wonderful book Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir, first published in English in 1962. Almost nowhere else have I found such a clear picture of the wholeness of a consciously-created family. It was due in great part to Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ideas, but in Aline he found the perfect partner.

Aline Charigot had grown up in Essoyes, near Burgundy. Renoir admired her skill. “She had hands that could do things,” he told his son. She is to be seen in a number of Renoir’s pictures. Jean Renoir writes, “From the moment he took up a brush to paint, perhaps even earlier … Renoir was painting the portrait of Aline Charigot.” Since Renoir’s time, his son asserts, the world has seen an influx of little round, plump beings with beautiful red cheeks.

Aline wanted to have children, which didn’t exactly fit in with the requirements of a man who had devoted himself to painting. Due to fears that he could not support her, and the travel he was doing for his work, they did not marry until 1890. But in the end Renoir decided life without Aline would not be complete. “She gave me the time to think,” Renoir told his son. “She kept an atmosphere of activity around me, exactly suited to my needs and concerns.”

In the early years in Paris, the Renoirs gave little dinners for their artist friends serving bouillabaisse or chicken saute with mushrooms; if money was scarce, pot-au-feu. No matter how hard times were, Aline always managed to receive her husband’s friends. Her cooking was quick, uncomplicated, definite and orderly. “She fitted in well with Renoir’s rule of making plenty out of little. ‘Use only the best, but frugally.’”

“By confining her activities to what she knew best, she won the admiration and respect of all who met her.” Jean Renoir writes that one evening at the opening of an exhibition, Degas noticed the simple little dress Aline was wearing and said to Renoir: “Your wife looks like a queen surrounded by mountbanks.”

Aline did not spoil her children. “It’s much easier to let them have their way, but it makes life harder for them later on,” she said. When Jean Renoir was growing up, the Renoirs took a house in Essoyes for the summer holidays, a wine-growing region with vaulted cellars hewn out of rock where the Renoirs would get pitchers of wine. Aline’s talent for management was very important as the household grew larger and she herself became less active. When the Renoir’s last house in Cagnes was purchased, she remained a “peasant to her fingertips,” he son writes, tending olive and orange trees, planting vegetable gardens and vineyards.

Because it was so important to him, Aline organized the household around Renoir’s work. In looking at it so long, she grew to love and understand his painting. He thought that “profound, dramatic or passionate concerns set the seal of the transient on face and body, whereas … art is concerned only with the eternal.” Renoir was “always discovering and rediscovering the world at every instant of his existence, with every breath of fresh air he drew. Whether he painted the same girl or the same bunch of grapes a hundred times, each occasion was a marvelous revelation to him.” Jean Renoir writes: “In his world mind is liberated from matter, not by ignoring it but by penetrating it. The blossom of the linden-tree and the bee sipping the honey from it follow the same rhythm as the blood circulating under the skin of the young girl sitting on the grass … The world is one.”

Though we don’t get to live quite like French peasants, Don and I certainly have their tastes.  And we do, as best exemplified by the Renoirs, prefer the real to the romantic. Aline Renoir’s emotional intelligence matched Renoir’s commitment to his work and nurtured in her children an equal love of the real world. Her son Jean Renoir is among the world’s great filmmakers, having made The Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion in the 1930’s. And then he wrote Renoir, My Father! Aline Renoir exemplifies for me the art of living well.