2ND PROOF

VIRAGO

MODERN CLASSICS

710

Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was born in Galesburg, Illinois, and attended Knox College before moving to New York in the 1940s. There she began exhibiting at the Julien Levy Gallery, becoming known for her very personal and powerful surrealist paintings. In New York she met and married Max Ernst, moving with him to Arizona in the mid ’40s, and then to France in the mid ’50s. Two decades later, after Ernst’s death, Tanning returned to New York, where she embarked upon a new and ambitious series of paintings, increasing both the scale and the scope of her work. Her work is included in collections at the Tate Gallery, the Georges Pompidou Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston. Tanning published her only novel, Chasm: A Weekend, when she was ninety-four. She also wrote a memoir and two collections of poetry.

Copyright

Published by Virago

ISBN: 978-0-34901-263-6

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Dorothea Tanning

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Copyright © Mimi Johnson 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Virago

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Destina Descending

(chronology)

In 1682, Destina Kirby, of Portsmouth, England, married a seaman, Tray Thomas, first mate of the Georgic, plying the seas between England and the New World. On its next voyage, she joined him. As a pair they settled in Maine but soon moved to Massachusetts. A daughter was named for her mother, Thomas being so much in love as to be unwilling to admit that any other name existed; indeed, he declared that no female descendant of theirs should ever be called otherwise. Not to dwell overlong on their life in Naumkeag, it may be noted that, Thomas continuing in his profession, the two Destinas were much alone for long periods, and after three years, due to a tragedy at sea in which Thomas was drowned, the condition became permanent. The mother, dreamy and introspective, often whiled away the long evening hours after her little girl was asleep in writing verses always addressed to a ‘you’. These she kept locked away; but they were later ferreted out during her trial for witchcraft, and were declared by her judges to be addressed to the devil himself. Her poems, her much envied beauty and the fire opal (a souvenir from Thomas’s exotic travels) were enough to send her to the flames in the 1692 witch hunt. The kindness of a neighbor was responsible for the rescue of the little girl, that lady having run to the schoolhouse, taken Destina, and brought her to the inn. There a ragged caravan was on the point of leaving and the bewildered child was thrust into it without a word as it rolled away. She was seven years old.

Destina Thomas’s is a long story that must be abridged here. Enough to say that at age fifteen she was employed as a seamstress and wardrobe mistress for the family of Simon Bentby, a chief justice in Boston. His was a rather grand household: a large family of some fashion, principally three elegant daughters and a son, Josiah, for whom elegance meant nothing at all. In fact his sighs were reserved for Destina Thomas whose beauty so far eclipsed that of his sisters that despite her excellent work with needle and thread the young ladies conspired to have her relieved of her employment. She was nineteen years old.

In 1707, Destina Thomas finally married Josiah Bentby, but shortly after, died in childbirth. Their child, Destina, born 1708, could not adequately console her heartbroken father, who after several years remarried, albeit so disastrously that he took sail from Boston one day with his seven-year-old daughter for London. As a London beauty, Destina Bentby was in no hurry to marry, but on reaching the age of twenty-seven she finally accepted what was then the only life available to a decent woman.

In 1735, therefore, she married the Rt. Hon. Lord Sevenish of Sussex, and, as Lady Destina, presided uneventfully over a country estate with her family of two sons and their much younger sister, Destina (born 1750), who, as will be seen, did not come to appreciate the halls and gardens of Sussex. In 1766, she eloped to Paris with a poor relative, John Lansing, who believed himself to be an artist. Pursued by an agent of the infuriated Lord Sevenish, they fled with their two-year-old Destina (born 1767) to Rome. There, Lansing found employment as assistant in a painter’s atelier, while his wife and, later, his daughter, served as artist’s models. The younger Destina, with her handsome face and truly beautiful body, became a favorite subject for the sculptors of the day; it was even rumored that she was the model for Canova’s Hebe figures and the celebrated Psyche.

In 1797, Destina Lansing, weary of adventures, married a Roman politician, Carlo di Cola, member of the consulta straordinaria. She had become something of a figure in the salons of artist and nobleman alike. Her daughter, Destina (born 1807), like her grandmother Sevenish, preferred the former.

In 1830, Destina di Cola married an impecunious actor (name unknown), who, after a year, left with his commedia troupe and forgot to return. Her equally headstrong daughter (born 1832) was, in her turn, captivated by a Captain Converse, an American explorer whose El Dorado was simply the far west of America, which he declared to be his imminent destination.

In 1857, Destina di Cola, bewitched not only by the captain but by his stories about the world beyond Europe and even New England, married her American. She then used her influence to help raise the funds they would need for their adventure, and together they crossed sea and land, arriving miraculously in territory wrested from Mexican control in 1848, a southern outpost of California. Only one child, a girl called Destina (or Dessie, by her father), was born (1867) to this couple who battled the wilderness, developing a toughness undreamed-of back in Rome. Captain Converse lost no time in staking his claim to lands as barren as they were vast. Water was eventually discovered nearby, and after seventeen years the ranch had so prospered that Dessie was sent, over the objections of the Captain, to Italy for an education that her mother felt was not to be had at home.

In 1887, Destina Converse was married to Vittorio di Vicini, descendant of a once-great family of Florence, long since strangers to a bank account. His palazzo of phantom plumbing, leaky roofs and peeling plaster gave her what her father, the captain, would have called ‘the creeps’. She vowed that her own daughter (born in 1890) would fare better.

In 1917, after two unsuitable engagements, Destina di Vicini was married off to the Austro-Italian Baron Heinrich von Schönwald. Their only child, a daughter (the baron had fully expected a son), was born in 1920 and betrothed at birth, as part of some merger, to the son, already age twelve, of a prestigious family of neighboring industrialists.

Dismayed by their luxuriously vapid life and appalled at her husband’s gross self-interest, the baroness, in a plot as picturesque – and as dangerous – as it was successful, decamped with her child to America and the distant ranch which, though empty (her grandparents had died), seemed to be waiting for them. Or so felt the Baroness Destina as she drew in a deep breath of crystal desert air.

In 1937, her adored daughter Destina, now seventeen, was literally abducted by emissaries of her father, Baron Heinrich, and brought back to his villa. There, an almost immediate disappointment turned to boredom and regret. The omnipresence of Fascism seemed not to disturb the baron who, in fact, didn’t appear to mind it at all. What had been represented to the girl Destina as a more civilized lifestyle struck her as sinister and unreal; an independent spirit had been forged in her desert home. Prevented by her utter powerlessness from escaping back to her mother and her beloved dunes she often roamed the countryside. An idyll with a young man of the village on leave from the army resulted in a ‘situation’ intolerable to her grand family, and the disgusted Baron in a hasty arrangement married her off to an acquaintance. This man was Raoul Meridian. Her baby girl, born the following spring (1941) and named Destina, would carry his name while he set out, alone, to claim and inhabit his wife’s American ranch, where he was obliged to endure the presence of her mother as part of the bargain. The baroness waited for years in the old ranch house for her daughter’s return; Meridian always finding some reason to delay her arrival. During this time he was engaged in building the strange edifice he professed to be for her reception. Seventeen years passed in this way, as Windcote was born.

Returning to Europe on one of his always mysterious errands he learned that his wife had died and her bereft daughter, aged seventeen, was with child, father unknown. He did not inquire, he asked no questions – he offered marriage. What in the eyes of the world would have been a shocking admission was avoided by his carrying her off to Windcote, where, as we will see, having borne her child (1958), a daughter, she soon ends her life. That child is Destina Meridian, with whom the reader is about to become acquainted.