Marc Chagall's upstate studio
and RIP Joan Didion, talking to Hua Hsu and the Brooklyn Book Festival
It’s amazing, for less than $300,000 you could actually buy Marc Chagall’s former art studio in upstate New York, now a rustic 2-bedroom cabin.
Hi, I’m Carolyn, upstate New York’s leading realtor-slash-book critic. Today, realtor me is tripping out. How is it possible that you could live in Marc Chagall’s art studio? I mean, clearly it’s because it’s been in private hands for decades, and is just, like, a house with a quirky history. But how amazingly cool.
I looked at a couple of different sources to check the Marc Chagall claim, which seems to check out. In the mid/late 1940s, when Chagall was living in New York and after his first wife died, he began a relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil. Trouble is, she was married to someone else, and soon became pregnant. The two found a place upstate, a farmhouse and studio. Chagall had the studio amended so it had big windows, which it no longer does. It’s just a rustic cabin, but it is the place where he created a lot of art in the latter half of World War II.
McNeil and Chagall stayed together for seven years, then she found someone else, and he moved back to France after the war ended. Virginia wrote a memoir about their time together (My Life with Chagall, published by Dutton in 1986). Apparently later owners of the property split it up; now the farmhouse has one owner and the studio has another. It’s the studio that’s for sale for $240,000. I have no connection to this property, but I am a real estate agent — if you want to buy it, I can show it to you and we can make it happen. I’d love to see it.
Writing: Didion’s farewell
Last week I went to Joan Didion’s memorial in New York City and wrote about it for the LA Times. I had decided to ask the people who knew her best if she was more New Yorker or Californian. I had always felt like New York claimed her — sure she was a native Californian and had lived in LA for a glamorous stint, but as famously as Didion had moved away from NYC, she also famously moved back. She lived in the same apartment with her husband John Gregory Dunne for decades; she stayed there after he died. (And wrote The Year of Magical Thinking about it, as of course you know).
I didn’t have the nerve to talk to any of her family, although on my tape I can hear, in the background as I was talking to Calvin Trillin, Griffin Dunne talking to Hilton Als (who I just realize did a Paris Review interview with Didion in 2006). I wanted to ask the person I thought was Bob Balaban, who also has strong roots in both LA and New York, but he was wearing a mask and I think there are probably thousands of people in New York who, masked, look a little like Bob Balaban.
Anyway, Calvin Trillin told me she was Californian. And Fran Lebowitz, the New Yorkiest of New Yorkers, said California before I could finish my question. So New Yorkers really connected her to California after all.
It was a somber event with a stunning final song by Patti Smith, who covered Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” with only an acoustic guitar accompaniment (by Tony Shanahan). In the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it sounded amazing. The entire event was recorded and is still on the church’s website (but it doesn’t sound quite as good; it’s echoey and kind of hard to hear). I only met Joan Didion once, for 2 minutes at a huge publicity event, so I have no idea what she would have liked. But I would like to think she would have liked it quite a bit.
Writing: Hua Hsu’s new book
A few weeks earlier, I’d met up with cultural critic Hua Hsu at Bard, where he’s got a new appointment, to talk about his memoir, Stay True. The book is out this week and so is my piece about it (also in the LA Times). There are always more things in a conversation than you can include in a story, like how he ended up in Rachael Ray’s magazine eating Chinese food — “someone we knew worked there and needed a bunch of Asian people” — for a photo spread. The magazine is in his office.
He’s kind of a collector. Maybe it’s endemic to cultural critics, wanting to keep lots of ephemera connected to music and art and culture and words and that time you were in a magazine.
Anyway the book is terrific, a distilled history of his youth, that moves into a very smart about friendship and a super close examination of his college years, because his friend Ken was killed before their senior year began. Trying to get past that death is what Hsu pinpoints as the real beginning of him as a writer. Although it seems like his gift was there all along.
Coming up: Brooklyn Book Festival
The Brooklyn Book Festival wraparound events are going on now, and the festival itself will be on Sunday, October 2. I’m honored to be moderating a conversation between Don Lee (The Partition), Claire Messud (A Dream Life) and Elizabeth Nunez (Now Lila Knows), about their books. The panel is titled Character Studies and we’ll be at the Center for Brooklyn History, 128 Pierrepont St., at 4pm. It’s free. Join us.
And email me if you want that Chagall cottage. Seriously.