The Painted Kiss (31 page)

T
he act of writing historical fiction is inherently a compromise. The
literal
truth, as opposed to the
artistic
truth, of characters’ lives rarely (if ever) allows for the successful plotting of a novel. In attempting to solve this dilemma, instead of altering the facts to fit a dramatic narrative, or dramatically changing my narrative to fit the facts, I chose to focus
The Painted Kiss
on the aspects of a life that are omitted from the historical record or which pass into obscurity with the death of the subject and her contemporaries. How Emilie Flöge met Gustav Klimt, what they talked of while they boated on Lake Attersee, what she thought and felt about him, what he thought and felt about her—these are things that history cannot tell us, though the frustration of not knowing is compensated by the opportunity to imagine.

In trying to hew as closely as possible to the facts of Emilie Flöge’s life, I have relied on Susanna Partsch’s
Klimt, Life and Work
(Munich 1993), Wolfgang Georg Fischer’s
Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge
(Vienna 1987), Angelica Bäumer’s
Gustav Klimt: Women
(trans. Ewald Osers, London 1986), and
Klimt
by Frank Whitford (London 1990). Because Emilie Flöge was not a famous artist or political figure, her mention in the historical record is a bare outline that begins and ends with her salon and with varying interpretations of her connection to Klimt.

Occasionally I have intentionally diverged from what I know to be the literal truth. People and events were omitted from the novel for purposes of simplification (for instance, Emilie had a brother who does not appear in the story), or dates were changed for dramatic effect. In the novel Klimt makes the pastel drawing of Emilie when she is twelve, but the real drawing I am referring to was done when she was seventeen, and there is no evidence that he drew either of her sisters. Klimt would have sketched the pregnant model Herta for the painting that became
Hope I
within a year or two of its 1902 completion date, but I have him drawing her in 1890. The character of Gerta who appears briefly at the beginning of the novel could be any number of women who were in and out of Klimt’s studio during those years, but all of the other women in the italicized passages did exist, and more or less in the situations in which I chose to show them.

Many historical figures appear in the novel—Carl Moll, Adele Bloch-Bauer, Alma Schindler. I cannot claim to have captured their essences accurately. Carl Moll did in fact become Minister of Culture under the Nazis, but the episode in which he appropriates Emilie’s art collection is entirely fictional. The portrayals of Alma and Adele are necessarily colored by the views of a biased narrator, and in the interest of telling a good story. Alma reported in her memoirs that Klimt broke her heart. Adele wrote no such book, and the nature of their relationship is pure speculation on my part. The aim of historical fiction is not to render the past exactly as it happened—an impossible task—but to imagine it as it might have been.

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