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- [00:01]
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- [00:51]
James Cahill
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- [01:01]
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- [01:31]
Movie Trailer Voice
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
G.P. Gottlieb
1939 London. The evening was so still it could have been a picture. Hold on. Starting over. The evening was so still that it could have been a picture if anyone had been watching from the neighboring tower block. The scene might have resembled a panoramic painting, a modern day Bruegel, only without the people or the final shot of a film. The deserted road below, the treetops and roofs. The dome of the Imperial War Museum. The sky turning lilac. Evening sunlight was catching the edges of things. A terrace of 1970s houses receded along one side of the road, meeting the vertical form of a Victorian water tower. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm talking to James Cahill about his second novel, the Violet Hour. Set in various magnificent places around the world, the novel revolves around three main characters. One, a billionaire art collector, the second, a successful gallery owner, and the third, a troubled but famous artist. They've all found and lost love, and their lives all revolve in some way around creating, selling or collecting magnificent art. Hi James, thanks for joining me today.
- [03:02]
James Cahill
Hi guys. It's great to be here with you.
- [03:04]
G.P. Gottlieb
So the first character we meet in the violet hour is the billionaire art collector Leo Goffman, one of the biggest names in real estate in New York. Can you please introduce him and explain? Why does he have to have a painting that he sees in an art journal?
- [03:21]
James Cahill
Well, Leo, as you say, is the first character we meet. He's one of three main characters in this story. And he is an 80 something real estate tycoon and he's an art collector, a big time art collector. I mean, really, his life apart from real estate has been amassing this monumental, incredible collection of modern masterpieces that he lives surrounded by in this penthouse apartment of his in New York. And Leo, I have to say, is probably the most difficult character in this book. He's a complex entity. He's very egocentric, vain, grasping, and like many art collectors, he wants what he wants. And when he sees this painting in Art Forum, this particular beautiful lilac hued painting by an artist, a well known artist called Thomas Haller, Leo just falls in love with it. And he needs that painting, he craves it. And partly it's just the collector's desire to have the thing that he's laid eyes on and set his heart on. But there's a reason Leo has set his heart on this painting, a deep reason that we'll learn about as the story progresses. But I can give you a little window into it, which you've got.
- [04:40]
G.P. Gottlieb
Let me ask another question.
- [04:41]
James Cahill
Okay? Okay, you're gonna.
- [04:43]
G.P. Gottlieb
He gets the gallery owner, Lorna Bedford, on the phone and she says the painting's not for sale, but she's always been this painter. You mentioned Thomas Haller's dealer. So Leo pushes back. Interesting situation. Is it similar to an author who suddenly switches publishers?
- [05:02]
James Cahill
I guess, yes. I guess there are some correspondences with that sort of situation. It's unfortunate. Lorna is Thomas's oldest friend and for a long time she was his dealer, his art dealer. And she really was responsible for making him this great abstract painter, this worldwide phenomenon that he's become. And Thomas has now passed her over for this bigger, glitzier dealer, this Gagosian style figure called Claude Berlins. And Lorna is feeling very hurt and very sore about this. And you're right. Leo rings her, thinking that she still represents Thomas and she can perhaps help him out and secure him this painting. But it quickly transpires that she's no longer working with Thomas and Thomas has abandoned her. He's kind of abandoned the whole New York art world though. This is one of the mysteries about Thomas. He's run away from that whole scene. And he's set up home on the shores of Lake Geneva. And again, this is something we'll understand better as the story goes on, why he's run away from this whole world that had seemed to define him up until now.
- [06:10]
G.P. Gottlieb
So we've met the first three important characters of the story, and now there's a fourth character we never meet because he dies. Can you address Luca and his. What's going on?
- [06:24]
James Cahill
Yes. Well, Luca, in a way, you actually meet him before anyone else without realizing it. And I think I can say this because it happens on the very first page. So this isn't really a spoiler if you're going to read the story, but there is a. A scene in London at twilight. It's the violet hour, literally on a summer's evening, and everything is still and calm. And it's a sort of cinematic view of a street in London. And we see this young man appear on the balcony of a tower block, and suddenly, unexpectedly, he falls from the tower and plunges to his death. And I wanted it to feel a little bit like a Fool of Icarus moment, although there are lots of other references besides. And one. One reference which I could say more about perhaps later, is the film Sunset Boulevard, which famously begins with a man face down, dead in a swimming pool. Anyway, that's where we first meet Luca. And over the course of the story, you will gradually understand how this tragic, unexplained death is, in a way, interthreaded with all of the lives and the desires and the regrets of the three main characters who we just discussed before.
- [07:33]
G.P. Gottlieb
So it's a bit of a mystery. But you're not calling it a mystery, this novel, correct?
- [07:39]
James Cahill
Well, no, it is a. I mean, that question of what happened to Luca is absolutely a mystery, which I hope will keep you reading well into the story. And I mean, Galise, I wanted it to have, in a way, the semblance of a murder mystery. And some people have described this story as an art world, murder mystery stories, which is fine by me because it's set in the art world, the contemporary art world, but there is also this mystery running through it. And I have played a little bit with some of the conventions of thrillers. For example, that death at the beginning. I'm aware that there's almost a cliche at work in the sort of this death of a young person at the beginning, which is gonna take some time to understand. And I was thinking about that genre a bit as I went along with this, but it's other things Besides, I mean, the mystery is one component of it, I would say. And it's about much more than that in terms of how these different characters, lives and memories all lock together.
- [08:38]
G.P. Gottlieb
I'm not sure if I mentioned that I really loved this novel. It is so rich with so many stories. The three main characters, we hear their entire backstory throughout the. Not all at the same time, but we slowly find out. Can you talk a bit about Lorna Bedford's trajectory?
- [08:58]
James Cahill
Yeah. Lorna, for me, really is. I think of her as the conscience of the novel. She's a British woman in her mid-40s. She's an art dealer, and she's lived in New York for the last, say, 20 years or so. And at the very beginning of the story, when we meet her, she professionally is very successful. I would say she's at the top of her game. She's very highly regarded, very respected. But she's reached a certain impasse in her life because her longtime girlfriend, Justine, her girlfriend of 13 years, is about to leave her. And so Lorna is facing this. This change, this unwanted change in her life, which is going to cause a lot of emotional upheaval already. Is causing up emotional upheaval. And Lorna, as we've touched on already, was Thomas Haller's great friend and his first art dealer. They were friends from the time they met in the 90s as students at St. Martin's School of Art. But over time they've grown apart and, and. And that gradual separation from one another has been now cemented by Thomas deserting her for this other dealer. So Lorna's facing various problems at the beginning of the story, but I think, I hope, as the story progresses, she grows as a character and she manages to outgrow her old life and, you know, in many ways her story. But the story of all of the three main characters, I think, is about how you deal with, you know, your life so far, your past, you know, past events, past circumstances, memory, how you sort of grapple with all of that and keep on going instead of being, I guess, overwhelmed by everything that's happened or things that have gone wrong in the past.
- [10:40]
G.P. Gottlieb
I thought one of the themes of the novel is the fragility of love and relationships. Can you say more about Justine, the lover who leaves her and what's going on with her in the novel?
- [10:55]
James Cahill
Yeah, well, Justine comes into the story at various moments. I guess she's a secondary character, but she's quite an important one because she is the woman. She's 13 years younger, I think than Lorna, or maybe a decade younger, at least. I can't quite remember now, but they've been together around a decade as well, at the time the novel begins. And I'm interested often in relationships and the way in which they tend to involve some sort of imbalance, whether it's an age difference or the fact that these thinking about Lorna and Justine, the fact that these women are at different stages in their career. So early on, Lorna was the successful, better known one. And over time we find out that Justine has gradually, well, not quite supplanted Lorna, but certainly sort of acquired her own status, her own professional renown. And this has caused certain frictions in the relationship. And this relationship is gradually unraveling over the course of the story. I suppose there is finally a moment where it is absolutely over, but it takes a little bit of time to reach that moment, which I think is often how relationships do go out, with more of a whimper than a bang. And I. I suppose in general, I'm interested in, you know, the complexities of relationships, you know, the difficulties that have to be worked through in them. You know, for all of the beautiful, romantic, loving, exhilarating moments, there's also, I think, often a lot of low level pain or hard work or, you know, antagonism that just has to be endured or somehow accommodated. And that's certainly the case with Lorna and Justine. Justine is not a very easy character, I'll accept that.
- [12:41]
G.P. Gottlieb
No. And her new book sounds almost like a caricature of obnoxiousness in academia. What's the name of it? A self help manual crossed with a takedown of neoliberalism. I'm wondering who you're making fun of with that title.
- [12:58]
James Cahill
I. Well, yeah, no, you're right. I mean, there is a. There is a little bit of fun being made of a certain kind of academic turned popular writer. Justine is a psychologist or maybe a psychiatrist. I think she and Lorna have a little argument over which one it is because the definition has changed from time to time. But yeah, that is the title of Justine's new book, which is. Which is just out. And because she's busy going around the world promoting this book, Lorna is being left alone. And that is also, I think, at the beginning of the story, the moment where she realizes that this relationship is probably irredeemable. I think of Lorna at the very beginning of this story, a little bit like Antonio in the Merchants of Venice saying, in sooth, I know not why I am so sad. And in that story in that play. It's because his boyfriend, I guess, has left him. And I was thinking that Lorna is in a somewhat similar situation as Justine goes off on her world tour to promote this, as you say, rather ridiculous book. Lorna's left alone. I wasn't poking fun at anyone really though, no one specific. And I try not even to poke fun at my own characters because I don't want them to be to be sort of the whipping boys or girls of some some mockery of mine.
- [14:20]
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- [14:47]
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- [15:11]
G.P. Gottlieb
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- [15:19]
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- [15:22]
G.P. Gottlieb
feel good about and the same delicious taste kids can't get enough of. All made with no artificial dyes. Try Welch's Fruit Snacks today. Okay, the story quickly makes clear that you, James, understand the intricacies of valuing art, the enormous sums of money that many of us don't understand, and the problems caused, for example, when a Mapplethorpe photo is no longer considered politically correct. It's all pretty intriguing. And I'm quite sure that everyone wants to know what was your path to becoming an art world insider?
- [15:58]
James Cahill
Oh gosh. Well, to answer that, I suppose I have to go right back to when I was a teenager. I became very interested in art and books and literature and simultaneously. And at one point I sort of toyed with the idea of becoming an artist or being an artist. I always liked doing art at school, the high school. And anyway I went down a more academic literary route and originally I studied classics and English, in other words ancient Latin and Greek and English. So I was always interested in the relationships between different cultures. And then I began moving more towards art history, and that's what I went on to study. And I then, for a long time, worked in the London art world in a gallery. But at the same time, I had a kind of parallel career as a writer and in academic research. So I've always had this kind of twin track between the commercial. The sort of the cut and thrust of the commercial art world versus the more, I suppose, the more supposedly more rarefied theoretical space of academia. But for me, the two have always been there simultaneously. And so I am interested in those two sides of art. Art is a commodity in the contemporary art world. It can sometimes be a very valuable commodity, but also more theoretical, academic questions about what art can be, what it's for, why we make it, et cetera.
- [17:21]
G.P. Gottlieb
So you mentioned we know about Thomas Heller, the artist, and we learned that Lorna had an affair with him years ago, and it's actually a huge story in her life. And it complicates Thomas Haller's switching of dealers. Can you say more about that?
- [17:41]
James Cahill
Yeah, I guess it complicates a number of things because Thomas is gay and so is Lorna, and so it complicates their sexual identities. For one thing, that we learn that that happened, I suppose it was to call it an affair, maybe a slight stretch, because what. What we learn was that they had from early on this incredibly close platonic relationship. And Thomas originally was a figurative painter. He painted representational subject matter, including portraits. And he depicted Lorna. This is back in the 1990s, when they were in their late teens or early 20s. And this very intense, prolonged phase of depicting her resulted in them having this drunken one night standing, you know, and stranger things have happened between gay people just occasionally. And this is what occurs with them. And it's a. It's a funny one off, unpredictable, unpredicted, and certainly unrepeatable thing that happens there. But it does have massive ramifications for their lives and their friendship. And I mean, that friendship in general, back in its earliest phase, is what Thomas is really thinking about a lot in later life. He has this incredible overpowering nostalgia for that formative moment in his life. And I guess a lot of people have that about the time they were at university or very early in their career. They look back at that time through rose tinted spectacles. But for Thomas, that nostalgia, that desire to get back to that sort of Eden moment, is completely paralyzing and overpowering and has sort of destroyed him in the present day.
- [19:18]
G.P. Gottlieb
Mm. He also gets. He gets his own trajectory. In the book, when we first meet him, he's devastated about the death of his beloved dog. Not so devastated about the mystery to which we are no longer going. You know, we're not gonna refer to it. Cause it's a mystery. But can you talk about that? Can you tell what's going on there?
- [19:40]
James Cahill
Well, this is the eve of Thomas big comeback show in London. As I say, he's moved to this other dealer. This more powerful, more glamorous blue chip gallery called Claude Berlins. And he's about to open this show. This major new exhibition in Mayfair in London. And on the eve of this show, we watch as Thomas returns to his hotel. And of course, it's a very luxurious hotel. It's Claridge's in Mayfair. And walks into the room to find that his beloved Rottweiler has died while he's been out and is dead on the carpet. And he just gives into this moment of utter grief. Now, there's a few reasons why this happened, why this event happens. And it's tricky to go into them without giving too much away. One thing, though, which I could mention is that I said before the story is somewhat inspired by Sunset Boulevard. Well, I don't know how well you know the film. Or how well listeners will be acquainted with this film. But early on where we first meet Norma Desmond. The great film star of yesteryear. When you first go to her house on Sunset Boulevard. She's in this bizarre moment of laying to rest her dead pet monkey. And I was slightly thinking of this when I created this scene. Where Thomas then performs this very strange funeral rite for his dog in the hotel bathroom. And partly this establishes him as a total eccentric. Someone who lives entirely according to their own rules, their own ideas, their own sort of strange confected ceremonies. That's part of what that occasion is for. And I will just mention that as the dogs. The poor dog is dead. It doesn't matter. But as the corpse of the dog is lying in the bath. And he's washing starts to leak this dye. And we realize that Thomas has been dying. His dyeing the fur of his dog to keep it looking young. And it's an early insight into part of the strangeness of him. That he can't bear the idea of his dog getting old. To the extent that he has to dye its fur. And as that dye leaks out into the water, it makes this kind of lilac color. Which, of course, is the. The theme, right, the title of the book.
- [21:59]
G.P. Gottlieb
Another theme in the novel. In addition to the art world and everything else we've been talking about is money. Leo the billionaire asks how many human interactions aren't about money at some level it's everywhere, always has been. So I can't argue. But how much of that is your opinion?
- [22:17]
James Cahill
Well, very often what my characters say doesn't correspond to what I think. And that's probably a good example. I mean, you can argue what Leo argues that at some level everything we're talking about connects with money and commerce in some way because that's what human lives are run on. But Leo has particular reasons for thinking and saying that. And whether he even thinks that in his heart of hearts is questionable. I mean, Leo does have a redeeming side, which we see in his love of art, which is not purely an acquisitive thing. There are other aspects to it as well. But he makes that comment about money. It's in a flashback scene where he's having a massive row with his academic brother who he loathes, and they have completely different worldviews. And Leo is probably at that point doing that thing that we often do in arguments where you occupy a sort of exaggerated version of your usual position. You get forced into an exaggerated version of your worldview for the sake of the arguments. And he says it to rile his brother and to upset his brother who is sort of very performatively unmaterialistic. So Leo is at that point being the opposite and trying to call out his academic brother for the idea that you can live in a world where money doesn't call the shots or money isn't relevant. But I can understand how a reader of this book might get the impression that it is a lot to do with money because it is to do with the high end contemporary art world. And that's a world in which a lot of money is sluicing around.
- [23:56]
G.P. Gottlieb
They're not just wealthy or selling to the wealthy, they live in a rarefied world. So everybody wants to know, asking for a friend, how did you do the research for this book?
- [24:09]
James Cahill
Well, I should point out that this is not the world I inhabit. So it did require quite a lot of research. I'm really fascinated in depictions of these sorts of worlds, whether it's on TV or in films or in books, going back to someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald. These strange, insular worlds that run according to their own peculiar law and codes. And I suppose the research was multidimensional. But one thing to point out maybe is that I suppose I'm not either endorsing or satirizing this high end international world of collectors and gallerists and artists, you know, blue chip artists. I want to just reflect it as. As honestly as I'm able to. And partly, you know, a lot of it is my own experience because I did work in a gallery where these sorts of wealthy people were our clients. So I had a little bit of a window into the lives of these people. But I did also want to reflect the experiences of people who are very much on the outside of this world. And in the story, there are characters, I'm thinking particularly of two of the unsuccessful artists that we meet who are really on the periphery of this whole glittering orb of the art world, looking in and wondering how to get in, whether they even want to get in, sort of looking on with a certain contempt. And I was. I was keen also to reflect that outsider's experience.
- [25:45]
G.P. Gottlieb
Can you say, what about the writing process do you most love and what do you most abhor?
- [25:54]
James Cahill
It's not a process I find easy. So it's much. It's much more easy for me to talk about what I abhor, which is, I suppose, just the. The fact that it's hard. It is tough. Part of me understands why writers are so tempted to give in and utilize AI for me, it would be an absolute red line that I just could not cross. I wouldn't be able to, I think, you know, whether. Even if I got away with it, I wouldn't really get away with it because I would know that I had used it. And so that's something I wouldn't ever countenance. But I do understand why people attempt to. Because it's not easy. The original composition, when it's just me and a blank piece of paper and a pencil, which is often how I work, can be quite hard to get something going once I'm at the stage of editing. Further down the line, once I have some text to work with, even if I know it's not the finished article, that somehow is a lot easier. So the original moment of composition for me is almost never particularly easy. I don't really abore any of this. I mean, I suppose I love it in a way, otherwise of course I wouldn't be doing it. But I do find it hard. I prefer to have done it than to be actively doing it. I'm happy once I've sort of turned something out.
- [27:09]
G.P. Gottlieb
I hear you. I understand. Totally understandable. But AI is really good. If you're done with the. The whole draft and you want to find out if there are any extra quotation marks Weird punctuation, spelling. They're great for that.
- [27:25]
James Cahill
Oh, absolutely. And AI for, you know, for grammatical errors, also, you know, typos, all that kind of thing. Absolutely.
- [27:32]
G.P. Gottlieb
An entire field of trees dies every time you ask it about your spelling mistakes.
- [27:36]
James Cahill
But there is that.
- [27:38]
G.P. Gottlieb
There is that. So James, what are you working on next?
- [27:42]
James Cahill
Well, Galit, I have a non fiction book coming out later this year. It's coming out in November in the US and a little bit sooner than that in the uk and it's called the Beverly Hills Housewife. And it's really an art book, but it's many other things besides. It's the story of a single David Hockney painting from 1967 which was called Beverly Hills Housewife. And it shows a very glamorous middle aged woman in her modernist home in Beverly Hills. And she's wearing a bright pink dress and she looks marvelous. And no one really knows who she was, but this book is the story of who she was. She was an art collector called Betty Freeman who became in her later years a really renowned, formidable patron of experimental classical music. And she was a great friend of David Hockney for the remainder of her life. And, and this book is very much the story of their original meeting, Hockney's original enchantment with Los Angeles, and then this friendship which lasted the remainder of her life. And I think for each of them was a very life defining thing. So that's what my, my next book is all about.
- [28:50]
G.P. Gottlieb
Okay, thank you. So, wow. When did you sleep and eat? Also? Just wondering.
- [28:57]
James Cahill
I don't know. I don't know.
- [29:00]
G.P. Gottlieb
Thank you so much for joining me today. James Cahill, it's been a pleasure. Pleasure.
- [29:04]
James Cahill
Thank you, Khalid.
- [29:06]
G.P. Gottlieb
And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped mystery series and host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I've been talking to James Cahill about his novel the Violet Hour. Hope you all have an intriguing novel to cuddle up with today. And always happy reading. Sa.