Jane Alison’s new book, Villa E, is an ecstatic examination of artistic obsession and self-embodiment, inspiration and legacy, memory and aging. The story revolves around Villa E-1027—the real-life modernist villa on the French Riviera created by architect-designer Eileen Gray—and the irreconcilably problematic relationship it created between Gray and the notorious architect, Le Corbusier. We recently interviewed Alison, a creative writing professor at the University of Virginia, about the new book.
C-VILLE: How did you encounter the story of Villa E-1027, and which aspects of the story first grabbed you?
JA: I learned of the story almost 20 years ago … when I was living in Germany with my then-husband, a professor of urban design. He attended a lecture about Gray’s villa and … the story intrigued me at once: Corb’s outrageous vandalism and theft of Eileen’s house, of course; the strangely indeterminate sexual undertones of his actions; Corb painting her walls naked, like a cave painter; the dark perfection of his swimming to his death in the cove below the house.
An early image that turned out to be one of those intuitive kernels: Corb (called Le G in the novel) poised on the beach, about to swim that final day, observing his own footprint, and how that spoke to the swath of his ambition: leaving a mark in matter.
Your work consistently engages the mechanics of human desire and Villa E is no exception. What challenges did you encounter in getting under the skin of both characters?
Le G’s lusts, earthiness, and bombasticism made him pure pleasure to write. I wanted to be in his body and feel it as he guzzled cold wine and mussels, did sweaty old-man push-ups. … Eileen was harder because she had an aloofness and refused to wallow in herself. But her love of the senses, of being a human with a body alive to every atom of the world that might flow through: This is where I began to find her.
Describe your research and what it was like to spend time at the restored Villa E-1027.
The compound of Eileen’s villa and Corb’s cabin is now a protected World Heritage Site, but it wasn’t when I began research in the early 2000s; I could simply walk into Corb’s cabin, while the villa was closed for renovations. By the time I did get inside the villa, I was well-steeped not only in photos and drawings of it, but in the many scenes I’d already written there in those early drafts. So it felt not-quite real, looking at the actual place through veils of other versions.
Research itself had been extensive and leisurely: Reading bios and critical studies of both, as well as their works and letters; visiting as many of Corb’s buildings as I could; peering through a gate to try to see Eileen’s second house; looking at their furniture, paintings, collages, objects. Because of that primary image of Corb painting naked, I also researched cave-painting and visited some caves. One I did not visit but wish I could have is the underwater cave of Cosquer, not too far from the villa.
There are refrains throughout the book, from mantras of each character to sections that consider the roots of human expression. What led you to incorporate these interludes?
Cave-painting was central from the start, as was the idea of leaving a mark in matter. Among the wonderful aspects of the Cosquer Cave is that the people who painted there not only blew pigment around their hands to leave prints but also pressed their hands into the very soft stone high up. This is so exciting, pressing your hand into liquid, living stone. And it turns out that most of the hands that left marks in the cave belonged to girls and women. I wanted to dance from that earliest instance of pressing oneself into the natural world to other instances in the same area—the Ligurian Coast down into Italy—over several thousand years. So I included other refrains: ancient people pressing cockle shells into pottery; a man terracing the slopes; an Etruscan tomb painting of a boy diving into the sea.
In the time you were working on this novel, you also published Meander, Spiral, Explode. How would you describe the cross-saturation that occurred as you were researching and writing these books?
This novel took a long time to write because I could not find the right form or angle. So I threw the project out in about 2012. In the meantime I had to write a short nonfiction novel, where the main motions occur in the narrator’s mind, to get me thinking more about consciousness in this project; and then Meander, Spiral, Explode, to discover the form that had been lurking in my drafts all along: a spiral. The novel focuses on the last week of Corb’s life and everything we can know … comes from his jagged, unwilling memories and Eileen’s obsessive memories. I think that this kind of remembering can feel like spiraling, and in fact both Eileen’s villa and Corb’s cabin are structured by spirals. So the novel finally found its form as something like a double helix, with alternating sections between the two characters, as they wind around each other and wind into the past.