James Cahill

James Cahill has worked in the art world and academia for the past fifteen years. His debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, and his writing has been published in Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Daily Telegraph. Cahill divides his time between London and Los Angeles.

Cahill's new novel is The Violet Hour.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?  

The title threads into the story in all kinds of ways. Colour plays an important role – the main character, Thomas Haller, is a famous painter who is celebrated for his abstract canvases. At the beginning of the novel, he has just created a new series of pictures in violet. The phrase itself comes from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ (“At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea …”). That timeless image of an evening sky is ironic, because what follows in Eliot’s poem is a bleakly realist episode: a young female typist comes home from work, bored and tired, before her boyfriend forces himself on her.

Like ‘The Waste Land’, this novel is about the fragmentary, cacophonous nature of experience. It is set in the high-end world of contemporary art, but its themes are universal – loss, longing, beauty and desire. Thomas, the painter, is caught between romantic ideals and the inescapable, haunting facts of his experience. More generally, the phrase captures the novel’s interest in endings. Another character, Leo Goffman, is a real-estate tycoon in his eighties – the twilight of his existence. He spends his days surrounded by his art treasures, looking back at his life with a mixture of regret and defiance. Lorna, the third main character, is a British art dealer in her forties who has arrived at a personal impasse. Her girlfriend is about to leave her, and she’s wondering what her life will now be like. Many scenes in the story take place at the interval between day and night. There’s a pervasive mood of transition: lives entering new phases, relationships ending or reforming.

What's in a name?

Thomas Haller, the renowned abstract painter, was born in Switzerland. Haller is a common Swiss name; it’s also the surname of Herman Hesse’s antihero, Harry Haller, in his novel Steppenwolf (1927). Thomas, like Harry, is an enigma. At the beginning of The Violet Hour, he has retreated from the art world to live an outsider’s existence in the mountains above Lake Geneva. And like Harry Haller, he is conflicted – shifting between a refined version of himself and a more unruly, instinctual self. But not all of my characters’ names carry a symbolic meaning (much as I love allegorical, allusive names). Lorna Bedford, Thomas’s former art dealer and oldest friend, represents the ‘conscience’ of the story – she is the character with whom readers will perhaps identify most closely – and her name just came to me, early in the writing. It felt strong and elegant. I might have been thinking of the British literary critic Lorna Sage, but there’s no great meaning behind it.  

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

  It’s almost impossible to say. Sometimes, even now, I read my own work after an interval and find elements that surprise me. I think – I hope – that the younger James would have admired the writing style, and that he would have enjoyed the mystery and humour of the story. My younger self might have been startled by the detail and regularity of the sex scenes – startled but not put off, I suspect. The setting of the novel, in the international contemporary art world, would probably have felt strange and unfathomable. I began working in that world in my early twenties (in many ways I still do), and it has formed the backdrop to my adult life.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?  

The Violet Hour begins and ends at the same time and place – a summer’s evening in London, on a quiet residential street. At the opening of the story, we see a young man emerging onto the balcony of a tower block, and then suddenly – inexplicably – falling to his death. Over the course of the story, we will learn how this random, tragic event is connected with the lives of each of the main characters. The scene, which was loosely inspired by the ancient myth of the fall of Icarus, went through a number of revisions. I wanted to create the sense of the opening shot of a film, or maybe a painting. I wrote the final scene of the novel before I’d written many of the earlier episodes – I always knew, more or less, how the story would end.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

  None of my characters is ‘me’, but on the other hand, as a novelist, you have to inhabit the minds and personalities of the people you portray. So in a sense, you become those characters in the process of writing them. Leo Goffman, the octogenarian billionaire in The Violet Hour, lives a life that is entirely unlike mine. And in terms of his personality, there isn’t much connection (at least, I hope there isn’t) – Leo is egocentric, grasping and unrepentant. Even so, there are things that redeem him. I tend to find that even the most unpleasant characters in fiction, unless they’re cardboard cutouts, have traits with which a reader can identify.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?  

All sorts of things influence my writing, from every region of my life. One important reference is cinema, in particular film noir and melodrama. In fact, the title of the novel could be seen as an allusion to Sunset Boulevard (sunset being synonymous with the ‘violet hour’) – Billy Wilder’s classic movie about a fading Hollywood star, Norma Desmond. That film was a touchstone for the plotline and themes of my novel. Thomas Haller, the artist, is a version of Norma – imprisoned by a certain image of himself, living inside an elaborate illusion. The Technicolor films of Douglas Sirk were another important reference. Thomas is a Sirk fan, and spends hours watching those films in his home cinema. I like the way Sirk’s films combine

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--Marshal Zeringue