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The Artist’s Muse
Kerry Postle
‘The author tells an evocative story that is both illuminating and engrossing at the same time.’ Allie Burns, author of The Lido Girls‘Lush and evocative.’Rosemary Smith‘The writing elevates this beyond many historical novels.’ Joseph MorganVienna 1907Wally Neuzil must find a way to feed her family. Having failed in many vocations, Wally has one last shot: esteemed artist Gustav Klimt needs a muse, and Wally could be the girl he’s been waiting for. But Wally soon discovers that there is much more to her role than just sitting looking pretty. And while she had hoped to establish herself as an emerging lady, the upper classes see her as no more than a prostitute.With her society dreams dashed Wally finds herself at rock bottom. So when young artist, Egon Schiele, shows her how different life can be Wally grabs hold of the new start she’s been desperately seeking. As a passionate love affair ensues will he be the making of her or her undoing?Praise for The Artist’s Muse‘Richly entertaining, wry and funny, and at the same time dark, thoughtful and allusive, I shall look forward to reading this one again, and any more that come from this writer.’ Kate Jackson‘A richly layered read, that delivers on many levels.’ Joseph Morgan‘Postle has taken me into a world full of characters that jump off the page with life, who inhabit a Vienna oozing with culture and modernity yet bursting at the seams at the height of empire and all the inequalities that go with it.’ Rebecca Barton‘This novel evokes a time and a place with such power. Wally Neuzil , so brave, yet so tragic, speaks with a voice to break your heart.’ Pam Dennis
Vienna 1907
Wally Neuzil must find a way to feed her family. Having failed in many vocations, Wally has one last shot: esteemed artist Gustav Klimt needs a muse, and Wally could be the girl he’s been waiting for. But Wally soon discovers that there is much more to her role than just sitting looking pretty. And while she had hoped to establish herself as an emerging lady, the upper classes see her as no more than a prostitute.
With her society dreams dashed Wally finds herself at rock bottom. So when young artist, Egon Schiele, shows her how different life can be Wally grabs hold of the new start she’s been desperately seeking. As a passionate love affair ensues will he be the making of her or her undoing?
The Artist’s Muse
Kerry Postle
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Contents
Cover (#u6356b2f3-2ac2-5747-a9f1-bb8743acaae5)
Blurb (#u1b29189e-21b7-509f-bb07-bed6368a20e9)
Title Page (#u3e1c880f-b4ad-5b7c-8628-07b8d9d3d6f1)
Author Bio (#ucd368ad6-823a-51bb-9fac-6d4a2f6c091a)
Acknowledgements (#ufbd641cf-1acf-5c28-8858-a22b092a76e8)
Disclaimer (#u24484fc8-b7e7-53e8-b53c-781420295d9c)
Dedication (#ub15ec2da-be56-5709-b409-b3d9fb858506)
Prologue (#ulink_d8a8c21b-b9a5-5abc-81ca-acbddff86eda)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_fbfde8c8-54e4-5cd5-9859-bd9c5e40ae37)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_0de1e431-6441-52dd-83ef-d252b82cddf3)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_8b5518d6-1d21-5b4f-937d-0971444614b3)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_0257ee48-503c-549b-86ec-85f82b20b618)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_d2f2ca8b-bc89-5e24-9913-dc0abd204341)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_494bd29d-880a-5ea5-920f-a4e5bf925be0)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_cd58eb50-84db-5ccf-81f1-e40d4ea037b2)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Endpages
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
KERRY POSTLE
left King’s College London with a distinction in her MA in French Literature. She’s written articles for newspapers and magazines, and has worked as a teacher of Art, French, German, Spanish, and English. She blogs on art and literature.
She lives in Bristol with her husband. They have three grown-up sons.
Kerry is currently working on her second novel set in Franco’s Spain.
Follow her on twitter @kerry_postle (http://twitter.com/@kerry_postle)
Acknowledgements (#u69323e55-19f5-5d3f-8d9b-f2a48bb26131)
For their unwavering support, Simon, Joe, Tom and Harry. For her unfailing belief in me, my mother.
For her time, patience, and curbing of my predilection for ribald double-entendres, Kate.
For their support and expertise, Hannah Smith and Helena Newton at HQ Digital.
I’m indebted to the following works: Jane Kallir’s Life and Works of Egon Schiele for dates and biographical details, Arthur Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Infernal Bridegroom’ from Une Saison en Enfer 1873 for the light it sheds on the nature of Wally and Egon’s relationship, Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter 1903 for its insight into the misogyny of the time, and Adelheid Popp’s autobiographical Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin 1909 for exposing the hardships faced by working class women at the turn of the century. As for Karl Kraus’s formula for a woman’s soul, I stumbled across it in Edward Timms’ Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist:Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna.
However, I would never have started this novel if I hadn’t visited the Leopold Museum’s stimulating ‘WALLY NEUZIL. Her Life with Egon Schiele’ in 2015. This exhibition posed more questions than it answered. The Artist’s Muse is my response.
Author’s Note (#u69323e55-19f5-5d3f-8d9b-f2a48bb26131)
Although inspired by a true story the facts narrated and the characters represented in this novel are fictitious.
For Simon, Joe, Tom and Harry
‘woman is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will.’
Otto Weininger, Sex and Character
Vienna, 1903
Prologue: Vienna (#ulink_0f37bf93-d115-5f62-a834-5c112edd01d8)
Modelling. The first time I did it, I didn’t like it. But Hilde told me to look as if I did. Or, failing that, to do as I was bid. I was only a child yet the future of my family – now living in Vienna, due to circumstances that I will reveal to you in due course – would depend on how well I got on in Gustav Klimt’s studio one gloomy Tuesday afternoon in November 1907. And Hilde, already successfully established as one of Klimt’s favourites, knew how much I needed – my family needed – this job.
Monday 4th February 1907
We had arrived in Vienna, city of hope, some nine months before that fateful afternoon in the studio, yet I remember it vividly even now. It was a brutally beautiful February day when we made the journey into the big city. As we set off, we must have made a strange sight. Katya was ten, Frieda eight, and Olga only seven, while I – the oldest and biggest of us – was twelve.
I, and even Katya, looked like giants, our young girls’ bodies bursting out of what we had on, exposing uncovered skin at wrist and ankle to the harsh cold of an Austrian winter’s day, while Frieda and Olga, wearing big-sister cast-offs, swept the floor with their hems. Our shoes, squashed-toe small or hand-me-down loose. But we dared not complain for fear of upsetting our mother whose life had now become a veil of tears, the tangible evidence of which she wore with the pride of the recently bereaved. It was hard to lift it up to see what she’d been like before.
Yet I for one was pleased to be going on this adventure. I had never been on a train before and the second the doors slammed shut, the whistle blew, and the engine started to hiss and puff its way out of the station, I was hypnotized. As I looked through the frost-framed windows, so the train took me on a mesmerizing trip past ice swords hanging from snow-tipped trees, single magpies frozen on walls, field upon field of virgin-white snow increasingly disturbed by man the closer we got to the city – and then there was bustle.
We had arrived in another world. We stumbled out of the carriage, our belongings slapping down on the stone platform like dead dogs behind us, our eyes taken this way and that by the coming, going, dashing, crashing, and hurtling in every direction of the bodies now swarming around us. Overwhelmed and in the way, we shuffled, dodged, and collided our way out of the station, the mist of the new gradually lifting to reveal, to my delight, a world of possibilities.
Velvet bows and fur trims whispered to me of riches. Well-soled, perfect boots tapped out the rhythms of success. Education and employment would be ours in this twinkling land of plenty.
I failed to notice my mother’s face, grief-grey, her brow furrowed by the yoke of responsibility, as she led us out into the cold Vienna air.
Like ducklings, we followed her, single file, climbing onto a busy tram, which drove us round the Ringstrasse. Grand and wide, it encompasses Vienna’s heart, and it shone that day, like a band of gold encrusted with monumental jewels shimmering against a heavy sky. Transfixed, I dropped my head against the window, the plump whiteness of my cheek squashed flat against its glass like a suction cup while my mind conjured up a waltzing world of sparkling interiors and sweeping staircases as dazzling façades danced before my eyes.
And I let myself dream of an opulent world, full of luxury, laughter, and ease, of all the magic I would find within this golden ring, encircling as it did this capital of empire. For a little girl like me, with her imagination full of grand balls and princes (who weren’t going to die in the night), the Ringstrasse was an ideal place to be.
The tram juddered. It veered to the right, crossed over connecting lines. But my cheek, momentarily squelched out of position, soon settled back into place while I now marvelled, dribble trickling down my chin, at the mannequins in ballgowns in the glittering window displays of a shopping street. Back in my innocent dream world once more I wondered which dress I would wear to the ball in the house with the sweeping staircase.
Yet in a second, with the blast of a klaxon and the scream of a horse, the spell was broken. Followed closely by the impact.
Your world, the way you see it, can change in an instant.
With the dull thud of metal and wood on flesh I was violently shaken out of my reverie. Something terrible had happened. Within seconds, hordes of people, shouting out excitedly in unrecognizable languages, appeared out of nowhere. It was as if they had pulled themselves up through the cracks in the cobblestones, their sewer-drenched poverty tainting the golden streets of the city of my dreams. Replacing fur-trimmed coats with filth-edged jackets; taffeta ballgowns with worn, ripped clothes.
What did they want? Why were they shouting? The travellers on the tram stood up to find out, blocking my way, though sounds of ugliness pushed their way through. It was only when the tram pulled away that I saw the encircling crowd: baying hounds around their weak and injured quarry. I heard a voice say, ‘’E’ll not get as far as the knacker’s yard,’ but I had no real grasp of what it was that I saw that day, even though I sensed its menace. I dream about it still.
However, if the accident had disturbed me, it was clear, from her trembling fingers, that it had disturbed my fragile mother more. She placed a shaking hand on my shoulder. It was time to get off.
She stood up; we followed, watching her exhausted frame nearly collapse as she struggled to lift her bag off the tram. I rushed to help her though she pointed me to little Olga who’d been lifted off the tram by a foreign-looking young man with a thick moustache and a wavy mop of dark hair, a book in a foreign language peeping out of his coat pocket. I said thank you and he nodded. I suspect that he wasn’t a true Austrian.
‘I’m so proud of you, Wally; you’re such a good girl.’ My mother sighed heavily when we’d all made it to the pavement. She gently pushed the hair away from my eyes, before kissing me on the head with a barely audible, ‘I can manage now. Please don’t worry.’ But she couldn’t. And I did.
As we stood there, an old, well-dressed man approached us. Cupping his hand over his mouth, he spoke quietly into my mother’s ear, his eyes roaming furtively over Katya, Olga, Frieda, and me. She found the strength to turn down his kind offer of help that afternoon but as I watched her I wondered how long it would be before she buckled.
It was clear that she was – we all were – going to find it hard to survive in this place of extremes. My poor, sweet, weak mother, her light frame resuming her heavy walk, tears rolling silently down her face, leading us to our new lives with all the enthusiasm of the condemned to the gallows. We knocked on the door of number 12 Favoritenstrasse. We waited for Frau Wittger to open the door with the chipped black paintwork. We had arrived in Vienna.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_c156c0e0-7472-58e0-99bb-a7348bc1795b)
The wind is cutting and the trees bare. It will not be easy. But I am twelve years old. We are at number 12 Favoritenstrasse. And I take this as a sign. It is time for me to stand tall, grow up, and look after the people I love. Mama knocks on the door. I stand behind her, holding myself as upright as I can after dragging two deadweight bags – mine and Olga’s – all the way from where we got off the tram.
It’s difficult to even stand (and as I glance round at Olga, whose head is against my skirt, Frieda who’s sitting on her own bag, and Katya who’s standing protectively behind the two of them, I see that I am not the only one of us having trouble), yet I grit my teeth knowing that I will be able to remove my boots with gaping holes in their soles very soon. And I will be strong. No one has come to answer the door to us yet. As I lean past Mama I wonder whether I have grown or she has shrunk since we caught the train from Tattendorf. Either way, one of us has changed. I knock on the door with more force.
As I wait for it to be answered, Mama fidgets and turns the scrap of paper over and over in her hand. She reads it again, just to make sure we’re at the right address and when Frieda asks, ‘Is this it?’ Mama looks to the heavens. I just think: twelve and 12. How could it not be?
