INTERVIEW LEANNE SHAPTONIs it a novel? Is it a catalogue? It's both – a touching and intimate love story, written by Leanne Shapton, woven into photographs of personal items up for auction. Now Paramount Pictures have Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman lined up to star in the movie
THERE'S A HENRY JAMES story which set Leanne Shapton's heart thumping even before she'd read it, and when you look at the title – The Romance of Certain Old Clothes– it's not hard to see why. James's earliest ghost story was published in 1868, and when Shapton eventually got her hands on a modern reprint – in a strange, cobbled-together edition which had an uncanny air all of its own – she devoured it. At the heart of the story is a locked trunk of a dead woman's beautiful clothes, clothes she has forbidden her surviving sister ever to wear; the rest you can possibly imagine for yourself.
"I love the idea of the invisible meaning that old things carry," says Shapton, a Toronto-born illustrator and writer who is now the art director of the Op-Ed page at the New York Times. "Stuff is haunted. And if something is rare, or one-of-a-kind, and you happen upon that thing, or it speaks to you, you take on a responsibility to that thing. You're its mother now."
It’s a line itself almost worthy of a Jamesian ghost tale. But if there is an eeriness to the world that Shapton herself has just created out of the idea of old things and the stories they enclose, out of other people’s cast-offs and remnants and hand-me-downs, it is a quirky, witty eeriness, unnerving us not with the thought of ghostly footsteps but of human stumblings, of the myriad lives we lurch through and of the flotsam and jetsam we pile up along the way.
Shapton's Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, just published in the US, is an invented auction catalogue of things accumulated by a New York couple. Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights last month, and have already attached Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman to the deal for a romantic comedy.
Lenore writes an award-winning baking column called Cakewalk for the New York Times, and Hal is a globe-trotting photographer, and the book follows the course of their four-year relationship. From scribbled-upon napkins to home-made menu cards, from toast racks to T-shirts, from postcards to pyjamas, from bedside lamps to backgammon pieces, the funny, shabby, touching fragments of a life put shakily together are presented in a frank, neatly-photographed chronology, each black-and-white image briefly annotated in the cool, impersonal lexicon of the auctioneer.
Alongside this formal inventory are the informal photographs of the couple themselves. Shapton cast two of her close friends as Lenore and Hal, and between them they do a very convincing job of depicting the moments, both ordinary and elevated, both spontaneous and self-conscious, of these four intense years.
Through clues and cues and glimpses, the narrative of this relationship unfolds. “Lot 1246,” reads the passage beside the backgammon set. “A leather backgammon game set. One outside case corner is slightly charred; otherwise good condition.” How did the corner get charred? Read the description of the next lot, a handwritten note from Hal to Lenore. Looks like Lenore has quite a temper. Lot 1306, a vintage white-noise sleep machine kept, we are told, on Hal’s side of the bed, shows “irreparable damage, as if struck by a hammer”.
Then again, as several other lots make clear, Hal is no angel, either. There’s the 1930s leather and oak armchair, the birthday present which awaited him at the birthday celebration at which, it seems, he failed to show. There’s the pair of blue-framed sunglasses which, we are told, belonged to his ex-girlfriend, and which now perch, in a photograph, on the nose of a grinning Lenore. A note of apology from Hal, included in the same lot, suggests that she stopped grinning pretty quickly when she found out from whence they had come.
Lot 1105, meanwhile, is a five-times-folded pros-and-cons list on yellow foolscap, in Lenore’s hand, reading in part: “drinking? celebrity fixation, bad breath, always travelling, doesn’t care about food, withholding.”
Each lot comes with a guide price; $10-15 is the damage for that little gem. And, of course, it’s not all fuss and drama; there are, too, the little love notes, the vintage paperbacks exchanged, the home-made CDs and pots of jam, the shared toothbrush mug and the his-and-hers Swedish clogs. Also, the his-and-hers tweed suits, picked up, evidently, during time spent together in Ireland: “tailored by William F. Frazer, Hospital, County Limerick”, the lot description reads. What’s kitsch bumps shoulders with what’s quietly lovely; what’s bizarre makes a perfect bedfellow for what’s banal.
Shapton's publishers call Important Objectsan illustrated novel. Shapton, who has published two illustrated books previously – the elegiac Torontoin 2003, and Was She Pretty?, a sharply-narrated meditation on sexual envy in 2006 – says she herself thinks of it as a story, "a love story in the form of an auction catalogue."
Whatever it is, it comes with ecstatic blurbs from Dave Eggers ("wildly romantic and erudite") and Amy Sedaris ("I am jealous"). And from the minute you pick up the first thread of the narrative, their rapture reveals itself as infectious. Important Artifactsis a gorgeous, evocative oddball of a book. It gifts its reader with just enough detail to let the story of Lenore and Hal come vividly, compellingly, often hilariously to life, and with just enough mystery to let that story trail the touching echo of things lost, things unspoken, of things that might have been. Which seems fitting, because it was through her fascination with things that Shapton found her way towards these characters and their tale. Specifically, through her fascination with the things of Truman Capote.
“I got hold of a catalogue for an auction of Capote’s personal effects in New York a few years ago,” Shapton says. “And from looking at it, I realised that you could read biography into things. You know, the way a successful biography is often one which hones in on a condensed period in someone’s life, and this catalogue acted like a biography of the last eight years of Capote’s life, the years he didn’t write about.”
She loved, too, “the language of the lots”, as she puts it: the descriptions of the ice skates, the needlepoint pillows, the tuxedo from the Black and White Ball. “Just how dry and cold and calculating and value-specific it all was,” she says. “And all those phrases, like ‘chips and losses’, saying more than other types of language ever could.” And so Shapton, a self-confessed magpie (she says she gets her love of “old junk” from her father, who collected vintage Studebaker cars, though her own tastes incline to slightly more portable finds) found something else to hoard in her East Village apartment: single-owner auction catalogues, preferably with a glimmer of celebrity, or tragedy, or both.
“There was a lovely one for Marilyn Monroe, with her tortoiseshell headbands, and her old lipsticks,” Shapton says. “It was so poignant, and so heartbreaking, and the storytelling was so good, just in the pictures and the descriptions.”
From a catalogue for an exhibition of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath correspondence at the Grolier Club came the idea of a book about a couple, as well as an aesthetic built on black-and-white photographs (one photograph in the book, in fact, mimics the famous 1956 shot of a smiling Plath leaning back into the arms of a smiling Hughes, both of them looking off into the distance).
Thus was planted the seed of Important Artifacts. Shapton, who thinks of herself as an illustrator, found it hard, at first, to accept that she was planning a book in photographs rather than in drawings. She wondered, for a while, whether she could draw an entire auction catalogue, but eventually she saw that photographs could be just as much "by hand" as could illustrations. The notion came to her of "a way of reading photographs the way you read fiction," she says, "of spending a different amount of time looking at photographs, looking in them for different things."
Her couple’s story would be not only narrated through visual images, she decided, but would be very much preoccupied with the look of their relationship and of their lives. “I think that’s a New York thing,” she says. “There’s a visual life here that attracts people. They come here, and they make pictures.”
The anxiety about self-image that her characters feel comes through, also, in the things they acquire during the course of the story – in the things they show one another, in the gifts they exchange. Like Shapton herself, Lenore and Hal have a thing for “old junk” – most of the items in the auction catalogue are vintage. And while this includes some beautiful, timeless things – the 1930s chair, a Lanvin tea dress, an Elsa Schiaparelli astrakhan coat, a Hasselblad camera, an Olivetti typewriter, first editions of cookbooks and novels and poetry collections – it also includes its share of tat, with gaudy little figurines, such as the yellow poodles on the front cover, playing a particularly prominent role. All in the name of irony, of course. That the very studied, self-conscious workings of irony were present in the love story of Lenore and Hal seemed important to Shapton.
“I think when people give each other stuff, especially old stuff, it’s laden with meaning,” she says. “And a lineage and a legacy to an item implies a depth of trust, I think. So, by giving each other these things, Lenore and Hal were trying to go deeper than they actually were on paper. They were trying to be more to each other than they actually were. He saw her as something she wasn’t quite, she saw him as something he wasn’t quite. Which is what we all do. And I think they really wanted the relationship to be something that it wasn’t, which is why there ended up being so much crap.” Crap, of course, which Shapton herself had to source. But if the search was painstaking, it was hardly painful; ever since she was a high school student, wearing men’s houndstooth jackets and army surplus monkey boots (while simultaneously longing to wear an Edwardian dress to her prom), Shapton has been something of a vintage queen.
The research period for Important Objectsfound her in full-on magpie mode, hunting for some 400 bits and bobs, and she turned to eBay and other online sources, she says, only if she was having trouble finding something very specific. Otherwise, it was all about the thrill of what a wander into a thrift store or a charity shop or a flea market might unearth, about what her rummagings amid real dust and real clutter might produce.
But all those $5 and $10 finds must add up? Is there a bursary for car boot sales? "Yeah, I kind of went for broke," Shapton admits. Which is why, when she was offered the art editor post at the New York Timesfive months ago – "I know, all my friends are saying I must be the only person hired by a newspaper this year" – she took it without a second thought. It does leave her too exhausted to do any creative work outside of work hours, she says, but it's teaching her a lot, she says, about different ways of reading and of getting information across.
As for the real-life versions of the fictional effects of Lenore and Hal – all those scarves and scrabble sets and salt shakers, all those hats and handkerchiefs and handwritten notes – they’re still in Shapton’s life, albeit out of her sight, packed away in storage boxes in a house upstate. She doesn’t quite know what to do with them, she says. “Though [the Brooklyn bookstore] Spoonbill and Sugartown offered to host an auction of it all,” she says, with a grin. “Which doesn’t seem such a bad idea, I suppose.”
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, is published in the US by Sarah Crichton Books, $18