Karla: A Pact with the Devil
By Stephen Williams
Berkeley CA: Seal, 2004
544 pp. $11
Muse
By Dawn Marie Kresan
Toronto, ON: Tightrope, 2013
80 pp. $17
The female Muse can be either genius or villainess, depending… Stephen Williams’ true-crime book, Karla: A Pact with the Devil, appeared in 2003. While the vicious criminals—the once-Mrs. Teale and her ex, Paul Bernardo Teale—are now law-journal footnotes instead of newspaper headlines, one must not forget the police and prosecutorial bungling that permitted “Teale” to bargain for—and receive—a lighter sentence than that imposed upon her once-spouse.
Williams’ first account of the case, Invisible Darkness (1997), was an exquisite piece of investigative journalism that revealed a level of Niagara-region police incompetence that bordered on the malfeasant. Williams paid for his exposé by being treated to a 1998 police raid, confiscation of his papers, arrest, and a trial for breaking a court order, only to be acquitted in 2000. His prosecution smelled of persecution.Yet, officials embarrassed by the first book must have loathed the second. In Karla, Williams sifts psychological records, testimony, and correspondence with the then-inmate herself to reveal police whose failure to investigate the Teales made it necessary for them to cut a deal, to have the wife condemn the husband, and to proffer as her defence the incredible claim of battered spouse syndrome.
Williams finds that the Teales’s bore equal responsibility for the assaults, abductions, and murders that they committed and suggests that each was the other’s diabolical muse. He is a fine writer. He describes one lawyer, who, “in amazing arabesques of hubris and stupidity, managed to turn himself into a total pariah….” At 500-plus pages, however, the book’s about 200 pages too long. It’s exhaustive and exhausting. Also, as a neo-gonzo journalist, Williams puts himself too much at the centre of events. But, in writing a “j’accuse,” one needs to say, “Just the facts, sir!”
Dawn Marie Kresan’s debut collection of poems, Muse, re-animates the Victorian, redhead siren, Elizabeth Siddal, whose modelling provided the face of the greatest works of Pre-Raphaelite art from the brush, especially of her future husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. However, as Kresan’s bio for Siddal stresses, her own “small, artistic output would be forever overshadowed by her role as Pre-Raphaelite model, mistress, and tragic muse.”
To correct the repression of Siddal’s creativity, to rescue her from imprisonment in men’s silencing and exploitative portraiture, Kresan imagines Siddal’s responses to the male painters’ uses—and abuses—of her as well as her responses to the philandering of her lover and, briefly, her spouse, Rossetti. To paint her as Shakespeare’s Ophelia, John Millais bid Siddal “lie hushed in a bath, / heavy fabric radiating.” But the “sparse row of candles, / meant to keep you warm, have long ago / burnt out. A cough settles / in your throat. Water nestles in lungs. / Sickness a small price to pay for art.” These lines portray a selfish man exposing Siddal to sickness so that he can paint his masterpiece. But the next lines fall into cliché: “How perfectly you demonstrate devotion— / the descent into madness.”
If the imagery conjures up Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, his (and lyricist Bernie Taupin’s) saccharine elegy for Marilyn Monroe, later re-jigged to accommodate Princess Diana, it is apt that Kresan later presents Siddal and M.M. conversing and also a poem in which Di discusses “Fame and Fast Men.”
Kresan is keen to emphasize female genius. So Siddal (d. 1862) is placed in the company of much later women such as Monroe and the princess, but also writers Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In “Muse,” Kresan’s addresses Siddal directly: “By what authority do I speak of you— / sordid red metaphor through my colourless hands. / Your dead child and forgotten art used to enrich mine.” An imaginary girl inspires the strongest poem: “She weeps over useless stumps. / What is the point of keeping oneself clean / and sinless if the body will be torn / from itself in either case?” The lines have Margaret Atwood’s visceral concision: “Butchered, the knob-boned shorn-skin twists / like thick branches blown from a trunk, / bluntly chopped short before the edge of sky.” One doth hear the Muses singing….
