Novelist Cathleen Schine is at home in Venice, tucked away in a Craftsman bungalow on a pedestrian street with her wife, Janet Meyer. But it took her quite some time to settle on the west coast. Schine was a New Yorker for decades, and even though Meyer works as a movie producer in LA, they hesitated. The red-eye commute couldn’t last forever.
“I’ve been on the coast for 20 years, when my kids were in school,” Schine says of her Abbot Kinney Boulevard home. “At a certain point I realized that the excitement in New York didn’t really excite me anymore.”
After her mother died in 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic sent everyone home, Schine began thinking about a novel that would portray a different kind of New Yorker, enchanted by the neighborhood – and not just the Venice of today, but also the lower version of the old days. decades. Schine’s story quickly opened up an oft-overlooked story: the time of World War II, when fleeing artists, including Thomas Mann and Arnold Schönberg, turned Los Angeles into a kind of Central Europe in exile.
“Künstlers in Paradise” brings 20-year-old Julian Künstler to Venice as a contemporary expat. Housebound by the pandemic, his grandmother and her devoted housekeeper, Agatha, send Julian’s parents west – to help his grandmother, but perhaps also to end his aimless sojourn on the East Coast.
“I know a lot of these young men who are in a bit of an awkward phase, like Trollope’s hobble, somewhere between childhood and adulthood,” says Schine. “My love for this stage comes from raising two wonderful young men, although I’m very careful not to write about them. I don’t want to steal all of their stuff!”
However, the story begins in 1939 when 11-year-old Salomea “Mamie” Künstler – Julian’s grandmother – lands in Los Angeles with her family. Fleeing Hitler’s Vienna, the Cultivated Artists (German for “artists”) arrive just as the Nazis invade Poland.
On the day the world changes, Mamie takes in a new world through her car window – a world that in many ways no longer exists today. “People then just did what they wanted,” explains Schine. “There were houses with towers, places designed to look like castles or farms, and you never knew what was going to be on which corner. And you had all those places that were totally imaginative, like the Brown Derby that was built in the actual shape of a hat.
Then there are Mamie’s fellow emigrants – the artists of the Pacific. “All these brilliant people, conductors and composers and writers and performers, ended up in LA and I was absolutely fascinated to read about them,” says Schine. “But I didn’t want to write a straightforward historical novel. That could get very picky.” Also, “one of the great things about writing novels is that you can explore until you lose track of understanding or get bored.” (Schine completed a master’s degree from the University of Chicago in medieval history, but dropped out and “snuck away” to New York. “I was the worst historian,” she says.)
She was also late to LA’s artistic legacy. For too long, Schine admits, she was “a prejudiced New Yorker who felt LA was a cultural wasteland and had no history. Incorrect! doesn’t always work. Schönberg, expressionist composer, considered himself one of the most important figures in modern music, but he can’t even get arrested in LA, let alone become famous.”
The Austrian taught at USC and UCLA before independent music departments existed, influencing generations of composers. He appears in Mamie’s stories, as does Mann, whose beautiful Midcentury Modern home remains an important part of the cityscape.
The book draws a subtle parallel between Schine’s refugee groups – those who watched Europe burn from afar in the 1930s and those who endured the pandemic as it ravaged the East Coast.
“One day when the isolation set in, I was sitting in our Venetian garden smelling the jasmine and watching hummingbirds and butterflies,” Schine recalled. “It was very quiet, no cars on the street, no planes in the sky, a kind of eerie silence. When I talked to people in New York, sirens could be heard in the background day and night.”
She paused. “I’m not trying to compare the pandemic to the Holocaust. They’re completely different. But I know these debts of exile. That feeling when you’re safe and the world you love explodes and falls apart and dies.”
Mamie, like a 90-year-old Scheherazade, always fails Julian with her stories and knows just how much to tell him to keep him interested and on her side. She shares photos and anecdotes with the panache of a high-end pusher, saving one of the most notable for last: a story about the reclusive Greta Garbo, whom she and her grandfather meet on the beach.
Artist’s is Schine’s twelfth novel, but she acknowledges that, with its time shifts and focused implementations, it was particularly difficult to calibrate. “I don’t sketch my books,” she says. “I’m like, ‘What happened to Mamie? How will Julian react?’ I think the kind of gradual layering of different details became part of the structure.”
Their easy flow has its advantages. It “always” leads to some kind of fringe character that ends up being my favorite character, she says. In this book it is Agatha, whose origins are vague, but who never abandons her angry employer and always carries a handbag on her forearm. “I had no idea what was going on with Agatha until the very end, but as the manuscript progressed, I started to care about her. She could have been disposable. It’s more of a retaining wall.”
Schine isn’t the kind of writer who sets a minimum number of pages per day; she can go three months without writing a word. But she’s thinking of a book, “some kind of ‘Buddenbrooks’ thing” (referring to Mann’s masterpiece, written before he went to work in the Pacific Palisades). Schine’s tribute is about a merchant family in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she grew up and where her father owned a lumber business.
“It’s very close to my home and a lot of it will be based on my family’s fortune,” she says. “I’ll see if I can do it.” Meanwhile, after twenty years of commuting and three years of isolation, she tries to learn more about the city she now calls home. “I had to teach myself to read the LA Times instead of the East Coast papers. It’s only been a few years. Old habits are hard to break!”
She confesses that she only recently learned the exact coordinates of the San Fernando Valley. “No wonder I kept getting lost! When I leave this neighborhood, it’s google maps, double check. It’s always an adventure. It’s taken me a long time to feel like living here.” But she graduated. “Now it is.”
Patrick is a freelance critic, podcaster, and author of the upcoming memoir Life B.
Cathleen Schine speaks to Michelle Huneven on March 21 at 7 p.m. at Vroman’s in Pasadena.
Source: LA Times