SWEET CARESS, a fictional autobiography of a mythical woman photographer, not unlike the real Lee Miller

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

There was a mistake the day Amory Clay was born. Her birth was announced in The Times (of London) as the birth of  ”a son.” This begins William Boyd’s saga, the novel SWEET CARESS: The Many Lives of Amory Clay (Sept.Bloomsbury). Interestingly, this novel is not about a transgender person and, despite the title, it’s not a romance. It’s a fictional autobiography of a mythical woman war photographer, not unlike the real-life Less Miller, who went from the muse of Man Ray and fashion icon to the front lines of WWII and published her coverage in Vogue.

Yet Boyd’s skill is such that I began to accept Amory Clay, as a British member of the small club of freewheeling women who went where the action was. Like Clay, Miller also evolved as a visual artist. Martha Gellhorn, another member of the club, is also known for her relationship with Earnest Hemingway.
What is also convincing about Boyd’s novel is that he’s included snapshots of and by Amory. As she matures through the decades, as a person and artist so do the photos. It was strange to be wrapped up, in her adventures, believing she’s real and knowing she’s a conceit. But the author of Restless and Any Human Heart, knows how to build a very credible yet uniquely unpredictable character.

Amory evolves from a young girl on a farm, protective of her eccentric siblings, her sister the precocious musician, her oddball brother, and her strangely distant father. Her life opens up, when her uncle gives her a camera and she begins to photograph her world. Artistic and bookish, she captures the free life on the farm, under her mother’s care, until it ends. Despite the family’s poverty, Amory is sent to a boarding school, where she is groomed for a rare woman’s scholarship but that ambition ends. When, through her father’s madness, Amory suffers a major life trauma, she is never the same. (I think it’s inferred her need for action may arise from this.)

Amory decides to live by her camera and works for her uncle, a society photographer. When her sense of honesty interferes with the necessary flattery of the job, she goes abroad to make her name. Her subject, shots inside Berlin brothels, brings her enhanced visibility, but the British police shut her gallery. Amazingly, I had no problems accepting the truth of those photos and the revelation of how Amory took them.

She manages to take a steady job in New York shooting catalogue fashion for women–an accepted outlet for a woman photographer, And she shoots a volume of art photographs. Her love affairs in these eras, seem almost perfunctory, compared with her probing observations of place and people. These grow along with work that captures real life. As Amory shirks life as an object of desire, the path of safety, to do “her bit” for the war, the novel takes off. She finds the courage to capture what she sees, visions of conflict and how soldiers live.

But these are only some of the lives of Amory Clay, With her snapshots, you catch cunning glimpses of her as a “Lady” and mother. But these settings and people, historical and fictional, are sufficiently convincing. When the book was over, I respected her well earned wisdom and sense of self by her own definitions. I will certainly see the movie.

For what is probably one of the sources for Boyd’s heroine, read below about the real Lee Miller. I possess a book about her with photographs. They are art in action. Boyd’s snapshots are not even close. But his achievement is in bringing to life a portrait of a type of woman rarely depicted, one with talent and independence in an era of narrow expectations.