Never Anyone But You is the fictionalised story of the lives of Claud Cahun and Marcel Moore by Rupert Thomson (Corsair 2019).
Cahun was born in 1894 into a provincial, but prominent, intellectual Jewish family; her birth name was Lucy Schwab. When Lucy was four years old, her mother began suffering from mental illness, which ultimately led to her permanent internment at a psychiatric home. Educated privately school in England, after experiencing antisemitism at high school in Nantes, she studied at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. She began making photographic self-portraits as early as 1912 and continued taking images of herself throughout the 1930s. Around 1914, she changed her name to Claude Cahun. During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with lifelong partner Marcel Moore. Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe in 1892) was a French illustrator, designer, and photographer.
The two became step-siblings in 1917 after Cahun’s divorced father and Moore’s widowed mother married. For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Moore collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. Cahun appears in a multitude of self-portraits in various guises such as aviator, dandy, doll, body builder, vamp and vampire, angel, and Japanese puppet.
In 1937 Cahun and Moore settled in Jersey. Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey and the other Channel Islands, they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. In 1944, they were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out. Cahun died in 1954, Moore in 1972.
Never Anyone But You brings out the span of their creative life togethers: the articles and novels, the design work, and their friendships with Henri Michaux, Robert Desnos, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Andre Breton, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. Moore narrates the story. It explores Cahun’s desire not to be reduced to her gender, rather to embrace a life of gender fluidity. Cahun has come to be regarded as central figure in photographic modernism since her work was rediscovered in the 1980s.
This is not a novel about photography and says relatively little about its practicalities, yet the medium is pervasive with around forty reference spread through the book. Some of these are evidential and relate to the wider context of their lives, some treat photography as a source of abstract or metaphorical ideas, others refer in passing to pictures of Cahun.
What we do get in an insight into their broad photographic practice – I use the word ‘their’ to reflect the way in which the novel portrays them working together. In Jersey, Moore narrates:
At Claude’s insistence, I took roll after roll of film – Claude striking poses on the wall outside the hotel, Claude reclining in the shallows at low tide, Claude pressed against a lightening-blasted tree. She claimed the photographs helped her to think about herself, the many possibilities that lay before her. Who she could be. (p. 72)
When Moore collects several rolls of processed film she expresses dissatisfaction with one of her pictures of Cahun because of her own shadow in the background. Cahun thinks it’s a success, it’s a reflection of their relationship; Moore is unconvinced.
I took out Claude’s camera and turned it in my hands. A Kodak Type 3 Folding Pocket model with red bellows and a spirit level, it had belonged to her father, though he never used it with any great enthusiasm. There were very few pictures of Claude as a child. ‘You don’t think it’s time we invested in a new model?’
‘What’s wrong with that one?’ Claude asked.
‘It’s twenty years old – at least.’
She gave me swift, sly look. ‘You’re not blaming the camera, are you?’ (p. 90)
Later, Moore reflects on their earlier time in Paris. ‘We took many photographs that year – Claude in a black swimsuit, Claude dressed as a sailor, Claude with an elongated head, like a reflection in a fairground mirror – some of them acquitted a fleeting notoriety…’ (p.108). In Jersey Moore photographs Calude dressed as Hitler.
Towards the end, after Cahun’s death, Moore recalls how they worked together: ‘…when I was photographing her. There was no communication – or rather the communication was unspoken, based on familiarity and intuition. She knew I would know what to do.’ (p.301)
Thomson repeatedly uses phrases that point to collaboration: ‘We would live quietly, take photographs.’; ‘There were our photographs…’; and ‘We took dozens of intimate photographs…’ (my emphasis). This is somewhat at odds with the way Cahun is treated as a photographer in most photo histories, with Moore receiving only brief mentions. However, Claude’s Wikipedia entry gives a more balanced picture.
Cahun’s work was often a collaboration with Marcel Moore. Cahun and Moore collaborated frequently, though this often goes unrecognized. It is believed that Moore was often the person standing behind the camera during Cahun’s portrait shoots and was an equal partner in Cahun’s collages. With the majority of the photographs attributed to Cahun coming from a personal collection, not one meant for public display, it has been proposed that these personal photographs allowed for Cahun to experiment with gender presentation and the role of the viewer to a greater degree.
Moore’s own Wikipedia entry paints a similar picture.
Marcel Moore is best known as Claude Cahun’s collaborator. … However, recent scholarship suggests that Moore was not only a muse but also had an active hand in the creation of some of Cahun’s best-known works. In an essay for the 2005–2006 exhibition Acting Out: Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, curator Tirza True Latimer argues that Claude Cahun’s own photographs are not so much ‘self-portraits’ as collaborations with Marcel Moore. At times, they photographed each other posing alternately in the same tableau. Moore’s shadow is visible in some photographs of Cahun, making visible her own role behind the camera.
The way Thomson portrays Cahun as the thinker and writer and Moore as the visual artist is consistent with these perspectives. And he makes Cahun the dominant one in the relationship, which reflects her subsequent profile compared with Moore.