Rebecca Miller's first novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, recipient of
that lucrative accolade, a Richard & Judy Summer Read sticker, is a
woman's book. When, last week, Miller did a Q&A at the Royal Festival
Hall, there were only five men in the room and one of them was the bearded
Canadian waffler interviewing her and the other was me, prepping to do
something similar the next day. It was clear that everyone else, the women
in the audience, were in love with her heroine. Pippa Lee is the much
younger wife of an octogenarian Manhattan publisher. Having traded in a wild
youth for the dubious status of “artist's wife”, we root for Pippa finding
liberation in middle age. Anyone who thinks Warning: When I Am an Old Woman
I Shall Wear Purple is the last word on female emancipation needs to read it
urgently.
Personally, I am even more fascinated by Herb, the husband, the satyric,
pensionable man of letters. Old age repels Pippa. “Herb wasn't old-old. Not
yet. He was old, but his face was still basically on. He didn't have the
gaping mouth, the glassy eyes, the imprecise movements of the truly aged.”
Reading those lines, I thought of Rebecca Miller's father, the American
playwright Arthur Miller. I met him when he was 87. A delightfully strident
interviewee, recently widowed, he was not old-old, but he was on the cusp.
Thirty months later he was dead.
The day after his daughter's talk, we meet in the courtyard of a Bloomsbury
hotel (she mostly divides her time between her husband Daniel Day-Lewis's
farmhouse in Ireland and a New York duplex). I scrutinise her for family
resemblances, but there is no giveaway in her face, still, at 45,
exceptionally pretty and young, if not young-young. But she has her father's
height and, also, his big hands, designed, you would think, for the plough
not prose.
Had she, I ask, lived in fear of her father's death? She had. “As a young girl
I was very worried about my father dying. As it turned out, he survived a
long, long time, but I was convinced he was going to die when I was really
young and that was very frightening to me. He seemed old to me. I would see
other people's fathers and they seemed so much younger.”
Yet he went on for ages? “He really did. Almost 90 years and I think he...I
mean it was terrible that he had to die, but on the other hand he got to be
completely himself all the way to the end of his life.”
He died at home in Connecticut in 2005 surrounded by his family, the death,
she thinks, he willed himself. I quote from John Mortimer's autobiographical
play, A Voyage Round My Father, about how a father's death is meant to be
liberating, but how, in his case, he just felt bloody lonely. “I think it is
a little bit of both. Primarily, it's a kind of missing, you know, but I
think that, for writers, the death of their parents is something a little
bit liberating too, to be completely honest.”
When I interviewed Arthur, his third wife, Rebecca's mother, the Magnum
photographer Inge Mörath, had died of cancer only nine months previously. I
had asked how he was coping. “It's far more boring than when you've got
someone you really care about around,” he said. “Rebecca keeps foisting
housekeepers on me and I keep trying to escape, but it's useless.” He did
not stay bored for long. A little while later he took up with an artist,
Agnes Barley, some 55 years his junior. Just before his death it was
reported that the two had become engaged. After it, Rebecca ordered Barley
out of the family home. In interviews with Rebecca, Barley has always been a
taboo subject, but I ask about her anyway.
Was she at least pleased her father had had companionship towards the end of
his life? “Yes. Yes. I mean I think it's always really a complicated thing
when a family that's been formed around a certain marriage is no longer
formed around that marriage. It can't help but be a complex transition.”
Does she still see Barley? “No,” she says, but she has clearly reflected on
how she dealt with the affair. “It's difficult, I think - and this is one of
the things the book deals with - just seeing your parents as people. It is a
very difficult thing to do. If it was your friend you'd probably be
thinking, ‘Oh great, you know, terrific that you have a companion' and the
rest of it, but I think children feel that they own their parents. I see it
with my own children, that my behaviour has to be the behaviour that they
expect from me.”
One does not want to see them as sexual beings? “I think it's a very primal
repulsion that comes from some deep thing inside of human beings that we
can't really get our heads around it.”
I obviously don't know Agnes Barley, but on paper the young artist who
volunteers to be an old artist's wife fits the themes of Rebecca's novel,
and, indeed, her previous short story, Julianne (from her 2001 collection,
Personal Velocity) very well. It is almost as if she conjured up Agnes
Barley to fill a generational gap left by that dying breed, the Artist's
Wife, a type well known to her growing up, but now almost extinct. The
artist Alexander Calder's wife, Louisa, was, she says, a good example: an
embroiderer of pillows, painter of wall art, baker of bread, talented
hostess. “My mother was a kind of mix, I suppose. She definitely played the
part to a degree, but she had such a strong life of her own that ran
parallel to taking care of my father and the house. She did her bit, for
sure, but she was an artist in her own right and very serious about it.”
Growing up with the playwright and the photographer in Connecticut, Rebecca
was unlikely to settle for being an artist's wife herself. Indeed, she says,
she was raised to be an artist “of some kind”. (Interestingly, her
half-siblings from her father's first marriage are, respectively, a weaver
and a film producer.) The problem for her, once she had left Yale, where she
studied art and French, was what kind. She took up painting and sculpture.
(In 2003 she produced a faintly embarrassing book of “blind” cartoons drawn
without looking at the page, A Woman Who.) Then she began acting, in 1994
playing the painter Neysa McMein in the movie Mrs Parker and the Vicious
Circle, although she says her instinct was for comedy. She realised that
what she really wanted to do was direct and on sets was spying at the man in
the canvas chair. Once she got together with Daniel Day-Lewis, she realised
her acting was a kind of joke. “I just didn't have the talent, to put it
bluntly.”
“I was like somebody trying to find a pair of socks at the bottom of the
drawer and throwing everything out until they find them.” So now the
polymath has cut down and is just a wife, a mother, a novelist and a movie
director with three films behind her - Personal Velocity (adapted from her
book), Angela and The Ballad of Jack and Rose - and one still left to edit:
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee starring Robin Wright Penn. “I think I
finally found the socks.”
In 1996, after going through a modest laundry-pile of men, she also found
Day-Lewis. Coincidentally, she had already sent him her screenplay of The
Ballad of Jack and Rose. Almost a decade later, as her husband, he got
around to making it with her. The traditional question would concern how it
felt filming her husband having sex with another woman (in this case, the
actress Catherine Keener)? But here the more pertinent query is how it was
to shoot her husband's death, for Day-Lewis delivered one of those painful,
beyond-acting, performances of which he is capable.
“That whole period, the last two weeks of shooting was very difficult because
he got very, very thin. It was remarkable. The way he walks up the stairs at
the end of the movie he does seem like such an old man, like a dying man. It
was absolutely believable. It was as if his skin hurt. But you enter into
this weird zone when you're filming. As his wife alone it would have been
just intolerable for me to watch, but I was also directing the movie so I
needed it to be that real. So it was kind of conflicted.
“I also knew that he had the capacity. He ultimately survives these
things. He knows how far he can go. He's not a kid. He's not just
experimenting and not knowing how to control it. But I have to say there was
one moment where he sits up in the bed and answers the phone and you can see
his internal organs in the back, the back of his spine, every muscle and I
thought you could see his kidneys and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God'.”
The “autobiographical kernel” of Jack and Rose, which was about the almost
incestuous relationship of the Day-Lewis character and his daughter (Camilla
Belle), was, she says, that fear of her father's mortality. It is obtuse, of
course, to read autobiography into every fiction, but some stories demand
it. I am surprised, for instance, that no one has asked her about the
genesis of her short story, Louisa, the story of a young artist trying to
break free from an overbearing artist mother and becoming a series of
artists' “wives”. In the end she realises she cannot compete with her twin
brother, Seth, who died aged two days. To me, Seth sounds like a stand-in
for Rebecca's brother Daniel, the baby with Down's syndrome born four years
after her and immediately institutionalised.
Am I right? “Probably, yes, probably.”
Did she realise that when she was writing? “Yes. I mean, I think it's very
hard for writers honestly to untangle where things come from. Seth is sort
of another self. To what degree it has to do with my own brother I'm not so
sure - or even another relationship that I might have had in my life. I
think the thing about fiction writers is that they're people who want to
hide. They don't want to reveal everything about themselves because
otherwise they would be autobiographical writers or memoirists. I think
fiction writers are people who are naturally quite secretive and who hide
their true self in surprising characters and places that you wouldn't think
to look.”
You certainly do not find Daniel in Arthur Miller's 1987 memoir, Timebends.
Indeed, his very existence - he still lives with the elderly couple who have
looked after him for years - would not be publicly known were it not for a
censorious Vanity Fair feature last year about Miller and “the Down's
syndrome child he deleted from his life”. It alleged Miller had barely
visited his son as he grew up. The conscience of American letters lay flayed
and exposed.
“I just think,” says Daniel's sister, “that it was undertaken in the spirit of
irresponsibility and actually, finally, a kind of malevolent spirit - as you
say, to take someone down without looking at it with any subtlety or having
really spoken to the people that they needed to speak to to really get a
sense of what it all meant. So I find it very disappointing.”
Does she see her brother? “I see Danny all the time. He comes to us in
Ireland. He's very much part of our lives, part of my children's lives.”
Was her husband instrumental in bringing him into the family? “No. That was
something that came from the Vanity Fair article. Daniel is very close to
Danny and certainly once I had a family it became, you know, in a way
easier. Daniel has been wonderful, wonderful about him, but to say that he
somehow was outraged [about the way he was treated] just came from one of
these silly quotes that they got from people.”
It sounds, I say, as if it has been a transformative five years for her: the
deaths of both parents, the birth of her second child, her first novel. She
says that she feels almost like a different person. “I'm much more of a
woman, really, than I was when I started writing Pippa. Not that I was a
little girl, but you get to a point in your life where you realise that loss
is just going to be part of it. That is life. All the more reason to see the
humorous side.”
Rebecca Miller is sometimes painted as the precious, secretive daughter of an
intense, entitled family. Her marriage to an actor with a similar reputation
has not helped. But what I take from our encounter is how funny she can be
and how intimate, qualities that will come as a surprise only to those who
have not read her. I'm sure she made an old man very happy. I am just glad
he was her father.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, published by Canongate, £7.99
