THE ARTIST’S WIFE

An inventive, vividly written fictional autobiography of Alma Mahler (1879–1964).

The full-figured blond beauty of Fräulein Alma Schindler, daughter of a famous landscape painter, is much admired in Vienna’s musical and artistic circles. When partial deafness ends her plan to become an opera singer, she turns to composing, while also daydreaming about marrying “the way that you might stand above a ravine and imagine yourself falling.” She’s set her heart on an artist, provided she can find one who’s pure, brave, and manly enough to dominate her. Starting with painter Gustav Klimt—a talented peasant, but still a peasant, according to her outraged family—she trifles with one man after another, finally choosing composer/conductor Gustav Mahler. Jewish-born Catholic convert Mahler can’t resist this self-styled Aryan goddess of love, who nurtures his genius and inspires his greatest music. But after the birth of their first daughter, Maria, the role of muse begins to wear thin; soon pregnant again, Alma feels she’s turning into a doughty housekeeper. When Maria dies of diphtheria, the grieving family sets sail for America, where Mahler triumphs, then sickens of heart disease. Later, while taking the waters at an Austrian spa, the couple meets a young architect, Walter Gropius, who falls immediately in love with Alma. But he won’t marry her after the great man dies, and so she begins an affair with Czech expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka—a liaison that ends badly. Years afterward, she marries Gropius, by then busy inventing the Bauhaus movement. Moving right along, she eventually leaves him for another Jew who can’t resist her: popular Austrian author Franz Werfel. The two narrowly escape the Holocaust and wind up in Hollywood, along with other famous European ex-pats. Franz dies, and Alma lives on 20 years more, old and fat and ultimately disappointed, even by her own death.

Unlike his high-minded heroine, Phillips (Snakebite Sonnet, 1998) scrupulously avoids any worship at the shrine of art: the result, thankfully, is highly entertaining.