Heritage

Posted by: Kevin Coyle

This post was curated from an article written by Joanna Moorhead for The Guardian

In most families the ghosts are dead but in my family, somewhere out there, our ghost was still alive. Her name was Prim, and she had left us on an autumn day in 1937, when she was only 20. Prim was the empty chair at Sunday lunch. She was the unseen aunt at the christenings of her nephews and niece. She was the cousin who hadn’t turned up, yet again, at the latest family funeral. And, just occasionally, she was the misty-eyed, faraway look on the face of Great-Aunt Maurie, who was her mother.

Throughout my childhood, I never heard a good word said about Prim. As far as our relatives were concerned, she was deficient, disloyal and dangerous. She was an impossible creature, a wild child, an unfathomable puzzle of a girl; a young woman who refused to be tamed and who eventually, when she had wreaked more havoc than any family could reasonably be expected to bear, simply flounced off into the sunset. These were the snatches, picked up from Maurie and from my grandmother Miriam (who was Prim’s aunt), and from Prim’s brother Gerard (who was my father’s best friend as well as his cousin, and a regular visitor to our house when I was growing up). Prim, the family narrative went, had simply refused to fit in: she had been expelled from various schools, had failed to net a husband during her season as a debutante, and then she had been caught up in some scandal so shocking that my great-aunt and my grandmother still seemed to be reeling from it decades later. If you asked anyone in the family, the story was that everyone else had behaved entirely reasonably throughout. “It certainly wasn’t us,” one of my cousins told me, years later. “It was Prim; she was the reason everything went wrong.”

There are two sides to every story; but when you run away from your family only one story remains. And that story, retold by the people you have hurt and horrified, becomes embellished and embroidered. You leave behind memories of your shortcomings and your mistakes, and you take the good times and the character strengths with you in your suitcase. Or that, at least, was what seemed to have happened with Prim. Saddest of all, as I was to discover, your story stops on the day you leave. What happens to you next – however brilliantly you do, whatever you make of yourself – happens in a parallel universe that your family are not connected with, not interested in, and not even aware of.

And yet, family never ceases to matter; genetic bonds, even ones that have been neglected for decades, cannot be severed. So when Prim opened her door to me in October 2006 in Mexico City, 5,000 miles away from Lancashire where we both grew up and 60 years after she left it behind, I realised something completely unexpected. I had come to look for her on a whim, after a chance conversation about how renowned an artist she had become in her adopted country. I am a journalist, always on the lookout for a story – and what a story this one sounded.

My father’s renegade cousin, when I researched her life online, had not simply run off to be an artist’s model, as my grandmother had once told me: she had left for love, the love of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Max Ernst. And with him she had been at the heart of the surrealist movement in Paris in the 1930s. When the second world war divided them, she had been incarcerated for a while in a Spanish asylum; and then, by way of more adventures, she had gone to Lisbon where she married a Mexican diplomat, and journeyed on with him to his country. But there, where the family story stopped, the rest of Prim’s life continued: over the next six decades, based sometimes in Mexico and sometimes in the US, she had been at the heart of a small, female surrealist cell. She had painted canvases and created sculptures and written short stories and novels: she had become our family’s unseen (by us) Renaissance woman. For decades she had been relatively unknown: the mainstream art world had passed her by, and the dealers neglected her. But then, in her eighth decade, she had slowly but surely found fame. Her work had been rediscovered by art historians; female surrealists had been “reclaimed”, acknowledged for their individual talents rather than their role as muses. And by the turn of the 21st century, she had become in her adopted country a kind of national treasure – feted, admired, and honoured for her extraordinary achievements.

It was a cracking tale, and I tracked Prim down in the hope of hearing more about it, and telling it in this newspaper. But in that moment on her doorstep, and in the days that followed, I realised to my surprise that my expedition to find my long-lost cousin had very little to do with journalism, and a great deal to do with being family. I could see traces of my father and other relatives in her face, her mannerisms and – especially – in her sense of humour, and I sensed that she felt a similar connection with me. Unlike most people I interview, with whom I have to create a bond, with Prim the bond was already there; I didn’t have to try at all.

To read this article in its entirety click here