Of Sinks and Secrets

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Andrew O’Hagan stole my character. No one owns a literary character or a real person who inspired a fictional one. Moreover, I had abandoned Margaret Watkins before I discovered her in a novel by O’Hagan.

To begin at the beginning, few people have ever heard of the Canadian woman who left a life of stultifying middle-class domesticity in Hamilton to become one of the brightest lights in modernist photography in New York City. The circles in which Watkins moved, including her students Margaret Bourke-White and Paul Outerbridge, and the exhibitions and sales of her work were more than enviable. Then, in 1928, in her forties and at the peak of her career, she decided to visit her aunts in Glasgow and spend a few months in Europe. She never returned.

After a few expeditions photographing urban life in Russia and Germany in the 1930s, Watkins seems to have almost stopped taking pictures. As her reputation waned, she devoted herself to the care of her three aged aunts. When she died in 1969, not a single person in Glasgow knew that she had been a photographer. Luckily, she had given a wrapped and tied box to her young neighbour, Joseph Mulholland, with instructions not to open it until she had died. When Mulholland, a journalist and later a gallerist, undid the wrapping, he was astonished to find more than a thousand photographs, some with exhibition labels. He spent forty years trying to resuscitate Watkins’s name, with some notable successes: in 2012, the National Gallery of Canada launched a show of her work, and in 2013 her most famous image, The Kitchen Sink, appeared on a Canadian stamp.

I have a more than passing interest in Canadian art, but somehow I knew nothing about Watkins until I read Sarah Milroy’s Uninvited: Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment, from 2021. The bravura of her photographs of dirty dishes and the sculptural folds of sinks hooked me immediately, as did the central mystery of her life: Why had she never returned to New York? Here was the perfect heroine for my fourth novel: a spirited, independent artist who exited at the top of her game. As I got to know my character, I would devise a rationale for that decision of hers. So I read everything that had been written about her and made a trip to her archives at McMaster University — the first of many, I was sure. Her letters — jazzy, ironic, full of telling details — were delightful.

But nothing happened. At a point where I normally would have begun writing, I didn’t. The girl who had left southern Ontario because she was “drowning in domesticity” had ended up drowning in domesticity anyway. It was a sad story, and I wondered if that was why I was stalled — even if some of my favourite novels end badly. Even if a novelist can change the plot.

I finally discarded Watkins and finished a completely different book (about a fictional woman I had already named Margaret). Then one evening I began wondering about Joseph Mulholland, still alive in Glasgow in his eighties. As it turned out, Google, always inscrutable, had kept a card up its sleeve. I had searched Mulholland and Watkins dozens of times, but now they appeared paired with a surprising third name: Andrew O’Hagan. What could he, the Scottish novelist and essayist most recently celebrated for Caledonian Road, have to do with reclusive, enigmatic Margaret Watkins?

Well, O’Hagan had happened to see Watkins’s signature photograph of dirty dishes, sought out Mulholland, and learned the whole story. His 2015 novel, The Illuminations, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, centred on an old woman with an obscure past in photography and her grandson. The woman, named Anne Quirk, was clearly inspired by Watkins, and I was miffed. But why, since I had already rejected her? The analogy that came closest to my feelings went like this: I had broken up with a boyfriend and later learned that he had a new, attractive girlfriend. The discovery made me reconsider the boyfriend: maybe he was better than I had thought. Maybe Watkins, who had caught O’Hagan’s discerning eye, was a more promising subject than I had imagined. Maybe I was annoyed at myself.

The Illuminations moves back and forth between Anne, sinking into dementia while living in a care home in Ayrshire, and her twenty-nine-year-old grandson, Luke, an army captain serving in Afghanistan. Watkins never married or had children, but O’Hagan exercises his novelistic privilege by giving Anne a long-time lover-mentor and a daughter who doesn’t arouse much affection in her mother. Luke, however, is a kindred spirit who shares his grandmother’s feeling for art and especially for light. Deftly counterpoising war and peace, men and women, old and young, art and the everyday travails of family life, O’Hagan forces them into collision, often with bruising results. There are grievances and secrets that have festered for half a century and, not surprisingly, families that don’t work. At least for this reader, it took a while for Anne to snap into focus, but that’s one of the difficulties of writing a character with dementia. All in all, it’s a very good novel, often beautifully written and psychologically canny.

Anne Quirk is not my Margaret Watkins, nor is there any reason she should be. As I saw when I based my first novel, Sofie & Cecilia, on some real nineteenth-century Swedish painters, historical figures in thrall to a novelist take some unpredictable twists and turns. Some are dictated by the necessities of plot, while others are more personal to the writer.

O’Hagan’s character comes to life most vividly in her memories of the fictional documentary photographer who was her lover. For my part, two different sides of the real Watkins had intrigued me: the solitary, mostly unmarked path of a single woman making her way in the 1920s art world and what I think of as the thinginess of her life. By that I mean her route from a childhood home crammed with bric‑a‑brac to her art practice, which often focused on the most prosaic domestic objects, and finally to the house in Scotland, packed to the rafters with memorabilia both precious and worthless. Of her aunts’ hoarded possessions, she wrote, “If I see one more black beaded bodice I shall be carried out screaming!” By turns, she loved these things and hated them; they fascinated and oppressed her. She made art from them, but in the end they were part of her undoing.

I’m no longer cross with Andrew O’Hagan. Rather, I’m grateful to him for shining a clear light on my attraction to Watkins, if only because it wasn’t what called to him. It would be a tidy and tempting conclusion to write that I’m reconsidering a novel about her, but that would be premature. Let’s just say I’ve moved the idea, which I had taken off the stove, onto the back burner.