How to Be Both

The British philosopher Edmund Burke believed that not only the mind but the body can react intensely when confronted with the aesthetic “sublime” — works whose disturbing power can be registered without being fully comprehended. He described the physiological experience of sublime delight as “negative pain.” You might feel a shimmer of it at a museum, as you stroll through an exhibition of eerie Romantic landscapes; or at the theater, if a play surprises you with an uncanny insight, as happens in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, when, in the final scene, characters who have inhabited the same house in different centuries begin interacting with each other, unwittingly, across time. The playwright’s intimation: all lives, past and present, intersect and unfold simultaneously in the world’s ongoing record of itself.  Cue goosebumps.

Ali Smith’s newest novel, How to Be Both, is a sublime puzzle of this kind. She has ingeniously constructed her book to contain two discrete halves, each written in an utterly distinct voice, each centered on an unusually strong-willed and androgynous female artist. One of her protagonists, an accomplished but underpaid fresco master, lives in fifteenth-century Italy, in the towns of Ferrara and Bologna. The other, a sixteen-year-old girl who’s just beginning to evince a gift for photo and video collage, lives in present-day England, in Cambridge. Calamity, coincidence, and history’s connective tissue bring the two lives into fertile juxtaposition and interplay. In a fruitful act of generosity to readers, Smith has issued this novel in two versions; one begins with the Renaissance woman; the other begins with the modern girl. After you have read this richly resonant novel once, you can flip the order, reread, and absorb the interconnections in the opposite direction.

The copy I read starts with the fresco artist Francescho del Cossa, the “slim and boylike” daughter of a Ferraran stonemason, who spotted her artistic talent early. After the death of Francescho’s mother, the father had dressed the girl like her brothers so her gender would not prevent her from putting her talent to use at the Este court. Francesco (no h) del Cossa, it should be added, was a real person, about whom very little is known and whose masterpiece — a series of allegorical frescos portraying the daily life of a Ferraran duke — was rediscovered late in the nineteenth century, hidden under a layer of whitewash. Smith has fleshed out the painter to suit her narrative, making the artist female (in the style of Shakespeare’s Viola), furnishing her with a lifelong platonic male friend and a bevy of female lovers, whom the artist boldly seduces. Smith vividly conveys Francescho’s industry and inspiration, showing her grinding colors to make her paintings and devising loaded, playful symbols that she will work into her frescoes on the walls of the Schifanoia Palazzo — the Este summer palace, whose name means “escape from boredom.”

The painter’s story, though, begins with a more radical escape, as Smith yanks her consciousness from the Renaissance to the modern day. In a short, imagistic poem set outside of time and space, Francescho describes the sensation of being pulled up through earth, through bricks, walls, and centuries, into a British art museum. Her first sight is the back of a handsome young boy (actually, the sixteen-year-old girl of the novel’s second part, Georgia — George, for short), staring raptly at del Cossa’s painting of Saint Vincenzo. Francescho’s first thought is that her unwilled reentry into a “grey and horseless world” must be divine punishment for irreverence in her art. The museum, she guesses, is a “purgatorium,” where she has been brought to expiate her crimes. “I am now for some unforgiven sin reborn into a place of coldness and mystery,” she concludes. But when George leaves the museum, Francescho finds herself inexorably dragged along. “It is as if a rope attached to the boy is attached to me and has circled me and cannot be unknotted and where the boy goes I must go whether I want it or don’t.” As she trails George, taking in twenty-first-century Britain and its morose inhabitants (mistaking cellphones and tablets for religious “votives” and “icons,” Francescho imagines contemporary citizens must be “heavy in their despairs”), she reconstructs the shards of her vital, sensual life and work in the Quattrocento, allowing the reader to imagine her in her three dimensions. She does not despair at her time in the purgatorium: “I am intrigued not hopeless,” Francescho reflects. “In mystery there is always hope.”

A similar aura of mystery surrounds George, but she does not detect the presence of hope in it or sense the watchful eye of her shadow companion. George’s section of the novel begins in January 2014, four months after her mother’s sudden death (from an allergic reaction to an antibiotic). Clever, multilingual, artistic, and assertive, George is too cynical to be easily consoled. Her grief-stricken father cannot guide her, and she rebuffs the overtures of her concerned school counselor, Mrs. Rock. In May of the previous year, George had traveled with her mother to Ferrara, because her mother (an artistic provocateur who created pop-up online advertisements called “Subverts” that exposed social injustice) had seen a picture of a del Cossa fresco in a magazine and became so fascinated that she resolved to see the frescoes in person and to take her artistic daughter with her. Given the “constant sexual and gender ambiguities running through the whole work,” the mother told George, the artist might possibly have been a woman. “I could make a reasonably witty argument for its originator being female,” she said. In Italy, George savored the frescoes but bristled (as any typical, touchy teenager would) at her mother’s incessant efforts to place the sights she was seeing in their historic context. “That was then. This is now,” George scoffs. When her mother chides, “Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us?” George retorts that the discussion is “pointless,” and such questions are “hardly relevant now.” “You know, Georgie,” her mother replies, “nothing’s not connected.”

Less than a year later, genuine mourning has replaced George’s adolescent cafard, and the truth of her mother’s remark sets off a scattershot process of synthesis in the grieving girl. “How can someone just vanish?” she thinks. The voice Smith has created for George is faultlessly affecting; proud, youthful, and unaccepting of its own vulnerability. With art, George attempts to reassemble the meaning of her mother’s life and bring direction to her own. She tells none of this to the counselor. When Mrs. Rock sits with George, trying to draw her out, the girl deflects her concern and rudely corrects her grammar. Unable to reach George through emotion, Mrs. Rock readjusts her aim and approaches her through intellect. Originally, the word mystery didn’t mean something that could be solved and explained, she tells the girl. To the ancients, a mystery was a “closing, of the mouth or the eyes” and “an understanding that something would not be disclosed.” The counselor’s tacit concession — that she cannot “solve” the mystery of George’s mother’s loss, that it has no answer that can be expressed — intrigues the girl. She had asked her father, she once told Mrs. Rock, “Do you think, when we die, that we still have memories?” “No,” he had said, with finality.  But still she wrestles with the question and soon brings it up again with a new friend, a girl named Helena — H for short — who is, it seems, in love with her. “When we die,” George asks H, “do you think we still have memories?” H, like Mrs. Rock, like Francescho, like the ancients, does not pretend to certainty. “Who knows?” she says. “Good answer,” George nods. She has adopted Francescho’s belief: “In mystery there is always hope.”

George’s mother once had asked her, “Can we never get to go beyond ourselves?” “No,” George had responded with mistaken assurance. In How to Be Both, Ali Smith grants all her characters that freedom. “Maybe I . . . never ended?” Francescho thinks with wonderment, upon entering George’s world. Neither, the author tantalizingly suggests, does anybody.

Detail of “Allegory of April” by Francesco del Cossa via Wikipedia.