>>FEATURE
LITERARY JOURNALISM CONVERSATION (with Rosemary Sullivan)
Monday, July 24
Rolston Recital Hall (The Banff Centre)
Rosemary Sullivan sips her cappuccino, then leans back and relaxes into her chair on the patio. On the table, she sets an uncorrected proof of her 11th book, Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in France, a story of artists trapped and waiting for rescue in wartime France.
On her laptop in her office at The Banff Centre, she displays the 15-minute short film The Road Out: El Camino al Olvido. Shot by Juan Opitz, her partner of 23 years, Sullivan plans to use the short as a kind of trailer for the book. It sets the historical scene for Villa Air-Bel, while providing readers with powerful visuals of the area surrounding Marseille. The film also introduces many of the characters of Villa Air-Bel, which spans the years 1932-42. "One of the things that fascinated me," says Sullivan, "is the idea that war begins long before it actually begins."
Her way into the Second World War is through a young American, Varian Fry, who travelled to Marseille in 1940 as a representative of the U.S. Emergency Rescue Committee in the south of France. Fry came to Villa Air-Bel for soirees and outdoor Sunday lunches that attracted many of the era’s great artists and intellectuals, including André Breton, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, André Gide, Henri Matisse, Victor Serge and Remedios Varo.
The 500-page non-fiction work opens with a dinner party, says Sullivan. Then she catches herself, "Well, actually, the book opens with an escape. My brilliant New York editor, Claire Wachtel, said, ‘I want an escape to begin the book.’" Short chapters move the reader quickly into the early wartime milieu of France. Sullivan’s research included interviewing Carrington, who was Ernst’s lover during the height of Villa Air-Bel. Sullivan asked her why she didn’t leave France in 1939. Carrington replied, "We couldn’t imagine a world other than Paris. You must remember what Paris was in those days before the war. Paris was wonderful. Paris was freedom."
The Literary Journalism Conversations on Monday nights in July are the public face of the month-long Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre, which is directed by Sullivan, and was previously led by Robert Fulford, Alberto Manguel, Michael Ignatieff, and most recently, by flamboyant Mexican intellectual Alberto Ruy Sanchez. In 1992, Sullivan came to Banff as one of the eight fortunate writers selected to spend a month crafting an extended non-fiction piece. Her project at the time was an essay on romantic obsession, which eventually became her book Labyrinth of Desire (2001). "It was here that I learned to risk the personal," she says.
Audiences of the popular series in Banff are used to authors risking the personal. This year’s series opened with John Vaillant discussing his efforts to get close to the mysterious anti-hero Grant Hadwin, the man who cut down the famed 300-year-old Golden Spruce in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The final conversation on July 31 features Elena Poniatowska Amor, who fled Europe with her family during the Second World War for Mexico. She is the founder of the newspaper La Jornada and Mexico’s first feminist magazine, Fem.
On July 24, Rosemary Sullivan will talk about the writing of her new book, Villa Air-Bel, with a screening of Juan Opitz’ film The Road Out, which is based on the book of the same name. Together they will speak about the travels they undertook as they followed these stories of escape. |
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