Speaking of The Pelton Papers: A Conversation Between Margot Livesey and Mari Coates

Margot Livesey and Mari Coates first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. At the time, Margot had published one book of stories-plus-novella, Learning by Heart, and one novel, Homework. She was “assisting” the famous writer Mari had signed up to work with, who had disappointed Mari by not offering comments on the short story she’d brought. Mari then turned to Margot who provided Mari with her first serious critical evaluation. Mari had read the stories in Learning by Heart during the conference, saving the title novella for later. Reading this at home in San Francisco, she was stunned to see that here, Margot was accomplishing with ease what Mari aspired to: fiction based on real life. She wrote Margot a note, extolling the novella and thanking her again for reading her story. Margot wrote back and they began a correspondence. It was Margot who suggested Mari apply to the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, in which she was teaching. They worked there together and have remained friends.

This interview—a conversation, really—comes out of that association and was conducted via email, before everyone was ordered to shelter in place. Along with Margot’s warm and generous friendship, she has provided Mari with literary shelter for more than twenty years, which Mari calls “above and beyond anything I had a right to expect.”

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Margot Livesey: I’m delighted to be talking about your wonderful novel, The Pelton Papers, which follows the life of the early twentieth-century modernist painter, Agnes Pelton. Your novel is so beautiful and atmospheric that I couldn’t help feeling that Agnes’s story had just sprung onto the page, but I know it has been in the works for a while. How did The Pelton Papers come to be? Can you tell us the origin story?

Mari Coates: I think there were a couple of origins, if that’s possible. First, I was interested in Agnes Pelton because I grew up with some of her paintings—the more conservative realistic ones. My grandparents were friends of hers, and she was a presence in our house with portraits of our family and a couple of lovely landscapes. Years later, after I moved to San Francisco, I discovered that she had also painted abstracts. A retrospective exhibit, the first major curated study of her art, was taking place just across the bay. When I saw those pictures, which are luminous—I don’t know how she did that—I was stunned. There were so different from the work I knew! I was enthralled and wanted to know everything about her. Once I started reading the exhibition catalog—Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature, a brilliant rendering of her life and work by curator Michael Zakian—I was amazed at who she was and how difficult it must have been for her to make a life in art. I was very moved, awestruck actually, at her persistence in spite of a difficult family history, her delicate health, crippling shyness, and constant worries about money.

ML: But why fiction? Why not a biography?

MC: As I was beginning my research—the exhibit took place in 1996—there was nowhere near as much information on her as there is now—I found a few other short publications and brief mentions of Pelton in other exhibition catalogs. I was struck by a recurring phrase— “We don’t know this, or we can’t know that…”—things I wanted to know. Did she have a partner or love interest? Was she gay, as many have suggested? I spoke to Michael Zakian and asked him, and he said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim.

ML: So, Agnes’s romantic feelings, which you portray so intensely at various junctures in her life, before her time in Europe and later back in America, are all invented?

MC: They are.

ML: She did have a fraught background, though, and a lot of discouragement, didn’t she, even as she made a name for herself early on with the Armory Show in New York in 1913, and then later in Taos with her patron Mabel Dodge. But I also was touched by the novel’s account of her childhood in Brooklyn, with her mother, a piano teacher, and her grandmother.  You describe the household in a very intense, almost gothic way—a house of secrets.

MC: Yes, that’s exactly right. It was a house of secrets, and also, sad to say, a house of shame. But I was captivated by the idea of three generations of women, all living together and caring deeply for one another. It could not have been easy growing up there, but it is a fact that Agnes did not move away until after the deaths of first her grandmother and then her mother.

ML: You mentioned your grandparents were friends of hers? How did that connection come about?

MC: As a student and young man, my grandfather had been her neighbor in Brooklyn, and both their families were members of a religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In reading Zakian’s book I learned about the 1875 scandal that had led to this family connection. Agnes’s grandmother was Elizabeth Tilton, who admitted to an affair with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a famous abolitionist in his own right. This affair led to a lawsuit by Elizabeth’s husband Theodore and a six-month trial that the tabloids covered with great enthusiasm. The notoriety devastated Elizabeth. She was banished from Beecher’s church, Theodore divorced her and exiled himself to Paris, and she was left abandoned. The Brethren welcomed her, and she spent the remainder of her life as a member. Elizabeth was modest, shy, and deeply religious, and refused to allow visitors or newspapers into their house. I believe that Agnes was permanently scarred by all of this.

ML: I suppose that is why the novel’s near romance with her friend Alice is so poignant. And you hint at something along those lines with her friend Dane Rudhyar. Both of these characters were actual friends of hers, right?

MC: Yes. Alice Brisbane, later Thursby, was herself a Paris trained artist, but then she married and gave up her art. After she was widowed, she moved to New York and established herself as a socialite—there’s a fantastic portrait of her by John Singer Sargent—and did indeed decide to take on Agnes Pelton as a project. It makes total sense to me that one could fall in love with a patron like Alice, who firmly believed in Agnes and did everything possible to further her career. She met Dane Rudhyar on her first stay in California. He was a composer who became a famous astrologer and wrote many books on the subject. He struck me as almost feline in nature, which I thought would be attractive to Agnes.

ML: I know that this book took a long time to write and I admire your persistence in figuring out Agnes’s story and the best way to tell it. Can you talk about the difficulties you encountered?

MC: Well, it did take a long time and I tried to quit more than once, but somehow Agnes would come back into my consciousness and I would pick it up again. I was inspired by how she herself persisted in painting her abstracts no matter what else happened. I wanted to do likewise. Some of the difficulties were entirely self-inflicted. For instance, the decision to cover her entire life. I felt a sense of obligation about this, that what I was learning about her life simply demanded inclusion. It seemed that Agnes herself was insisting on this. She also had very clear ideas about what I could and could not say! When I was given a month at Ragdale, I was elated about the unrestricted time and the freedom it implied. I reminded myself that this was fiction, and therefore I should be free to turn the story in any direction. But my fumbling attempts did not lead to anything. I was also using my time there to read and absorb the research material I had brought. I had heard Agnes’s voice in solitude and had thought of the project as just me and Agnes, communing with one another. But so many others came into it! Every time I dipped into another reference, it felt like I was opening a door to a room crowded with laughing, chattering people, and it was all overwhelming and terrifying.

ML: But like Agnes herself, you persisted, so you must have been enjoying the work even though it felt daunting.

MC: Oh, I was. I loved seeing the places where she had lived and traveled. I loved learning about the Armory Show. I read Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs and loved the bristling excitement of the 1910s in New York City. And we, my wife Gloria and I, did things like travel to Cathedral City and Taos. We also flew south for the day to Orange County from San Francisco to see a marvelous exhibition that paired Agnes with Georgia O’Keeffe—seeing her paintings up next to O’Keeffe’s was a complete thrill. And made us ponder yet again why O’Keeffe was so successful and Pelton was not.

ML: Did you come to any conclusions about that?

MC: I did. The obvious one was that O’Keeffe had Alfred Steiglitz championing her in his 291 Gallery and then marrying her and taking care of the business side of things. Also, I think temperamentally O’Keeffe was always absolutely confident about her talent, whereas Pelton suffered anxiety about hers and stopped painting for years at a time. There’s also that background of growing up with two women who had retreated from life. And lastly, she treated the making of art as a spiritual practice, which meant she needed solitude and inspiration, and she took all the time she needed with each painting. Many of them took years to complete.

ML: And now she is again the focus of a major museum exhibition.

MC: She is! It’s so exciting. It was put together by the Phoenix Museum of art, traveled to Santa Fe, and will open in March at the Whitney in New York before returning to her desert and ending at the Palm Springs Art Museum. I cannot wait to see it.

ML: And how fitting that The Pelton Papers is being published in this year of Agnes’s rediscovery. For me, one of the deep pleasures of your novel is how beautifully you write about both Agnes’s life and her work—the two deeply intertwined. Reading your pages, I felt I could already see her work, but I am very happy that I will now be able to see her paintings not only in your words but in the world. Many congratulations on this wonderful accomplishment.        

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MARI COATES lives in San Francisco where she has been an arts writer and theater critic. Her regular column appeared in the SF Weekly with additional profiles and features appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, Advocate, and other news outlets. Her first novel, The Pelton Papers, is due out in April from She Writes Press, and she holds degrees from Connecticut College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Find her on Facebook (Mari Coates Author) and at maricoates.com. 

MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street (winner of the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award), Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, Homework, and Mercury. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was born in the Scottish Highlands, currently lives in the Boston area, and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.