A Life in Chameleons

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

A Life in Chameleons recounts the queer and fascinating life of Leopoldo Fregoli, an Italian quick-change artist known as ‘The Chameleon’. Fregoli is born just before cinema first jerks into motion and lives in constant fast-forward. A Life in Chameleons stages Fregoli’s story as the moving image of a life.

Fregoli’s daring feats of drag entangle him with the Lumière brothers, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller, the duelling actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, his stage double (and lover) Romolo, and the mad futurist F.T. Marinetti. As Fregoli changes himself into them, the narrative splices new forms together; with every jump cut, he is a new actress. But the only women in the life of Fregoli, really, are the ones he becomes himself. When women like Fregoli’s wife, Velia, begin to ask their own questions about becoming, he can offer them nothing more than empty dresses and hapless jokes. Both a light waltz among the extravagant characters of early cinema and a queer feminist slant on life-writing, A Life in Chameleons is a sort of biography written in film strips.

164 pages, Paperback

Published September 28, 2023

About the author

Schwartz holds a PhD in comparative literature (Italian/French) from the University of California, Berkeley and currently teaches writing at Stanford University.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Life in Chameleons is Selby Wynn Schwartz's debut novel, although the second to be published. The manuscript for this was submitted to Reflex Press in anticipation of the publisher's 2021 Novella Award - which this won - before the release of After Sappho by Galley Beggar Press a year later. It's interesting to compare the two. In terms of form, one can readily spot the similarities, both novels employing Schwartz's now-familiar fragments or cascading vignettes. This one is centered on the real-life Leopoldo Fregoli, a performer known for various personas and characters. I see connection here to Schwartz's scholarly work on the history of drag performance, this novel complimenting her expansive view of queer themes that isn't beholden to modern conceptions reflected in pop culture. The tone of this is less dour than After Sappho and quite funny in places. A six-page bibliography concludes the text, reflecting the extent to which this is in conversation with an array of scholars and other sources.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fregoli of course had many lives, one right on top of the other. And so his biography could only be a scattering of scenes, a series of short films, a court-métrage of characters. In the antic traffic of everyone Fregoli became, in the overlapping of shawls on cravats on petticoats on a pair of black trousers faded to red, there was an andirivieni to rival any train station.

Live time ran so quickly through Fregoli that sometimes the film caught fire

A Life in Chameleons is published by Reflex Press, having won their inaugral 2021 Novella Award.

Reflex Press launched in December 2018 as a spin-off from the Reflex flash fiction competition. After two years of running the competition and reading over three thousand pieces of flash fiction from over one thousand authors, we came to an inevitable conclusion: there is a lot of outstanding fiction being written, most of it by unpublished authors, most of whom are destined to remain unpublished.

That’s a situation we want to change. As a small, independent press, we are able to take risks on the forms largely ignored by mainstream publishing: flash fiction, short stories, and novella-length fiction. We’re also not afraid of writing that is challenging, unusual, or just plain weird.

The author Selby Wynn Schwartz is now known for her next book, the Booker-featured After Sappho, published in 2022, but Reflex picked this one out of 173 entries from 18 different countries before that.

Some of the novel's style will be familiar to readers of After Sappho, particularly the “cascading vignettes”, a welcome diversion from the character and plot driven novels that tend to feature in much literary fiction, and the extensive research which, far from being presented as an academic treatise, is then lightly fictionalised and presented in a compact and highly readable fashion. The figure of Lina Poletti links the two stories.

Although compared to the Greek chorus of After Sappho, A Life in Chameleons does have one central character, Leopoldo Fregoli the famous turn-of-the-20th century quick change artist, and who successfully managed the transition from live performance to the early days of film. And the novel serves as a queer retelling of the history of that medium.

Fregoli is perhaps most famous today for giving his name to the The Fregoli delusion a "disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise" (Wikipedia). Fregoli's own ability was the opposite, convincing audiences, and even his own friends loved ones, that a single person, himself, was actually several different people - for example the story has his (long-suffering) wife hiring him as her new maid.

Onstage, though, he was three thieves and a policeman. He was everywhere at once, in different hats. He was, in order of appearance, Elvira, her lover Enrico, her father Timoteo, the beautiful French ballerina Mimì, and a cook named Pasquale. There were no entrances and exits. No one ever touched any one else onstage. There was only a glance, a blush, a bow.

After a show, Fregoli liked to be doubted. People wouldn’t believe he was really Mimì.

it is me always me only me

SONO IO SEMPRE IO SOLTANTO IO

A Life in Chameleons is also a far lighter, funnier, book - such as a running gag about the Lumière brothers who calmly went about patenting their cinematic inventions while others (including Edison) missed the commercial significance of the new form or were caught up in bureaucracy:

Months went by while Filoteo Alberini waited to become the Edison of Italy, the man of his age.

In the meantime the Lumière brothers breezily invented their cinématographe and had it patented in Lyon. In short order it had conquered the world. Then they went to lunch.

The citation when the book won the Novella Award explains what follows far better than I can:

A Life in Chameleons recounts the queer and fascinating life of Leopoldo Fregoli, an Italian quick-change artist known as ‘The Chameleon’. Fregoli is born just before cinema first jerks into motion, and he lives in constant fast-forward: this novella stages Fregoli’s story as the moving image of a life. In the opening chapters, Fregoli’s daring feats of drag entangle him with the Lumière brothers, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller, the duelling actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, his stage double (and lover) Romolo, and the mad Futurist F.T. Marinetti. As Fregoli changes himself into them, the narrative splices new forms together; with every jump cut, he is a new actress. But the only women in the life of Fregoli, really, are the ones he becomes himself. When women like Fregoli’s wife, Velia, begin to ask their own questions about becoming, he can offer them nothing more than empty dresses and hapless jokes. In the end, moving beyond the realm of Fregoli’s antic imitation, the novella shifts its spotlight to the women who have been upstaged by his spectacular transformations. The last chapter belongs to Velia, who reframes for herself what this life has been. Both a light waltz among the extravagant characters of early cinema and a queer feminist slant on life-writing, A Life in Chameleons is a sort of biography written in film strips.

Fregoli's own relationship with women is a key secondary element to the novel.

Fregoli among women

There are very few women in the life of Fregoli except for the ones he was himself. He liked women well enough. He liked their ringlet curls and the stiff stays of their corsets, he liked the bright trickle of their voices filling up a drawing room, he liked the flash of their clever hands as they stitched. Fregoli thought that women were a fine thing indeed.

Women were also on the whole a better joke than men were. To appear as a man you had to be something. To appear as a woman you simply appeared in a dress. Then everyone laughed.

And this way in which the women are somewhat upstaged by Fregoli plus the shifting nature of his own character naturally lead to After Sappho as the author explaoned in her Booker interview:

The first time I experimented with this interweaving of vignettes was in a novella, A Life in Chameleons (forthcoming from Reflex Press), where I was trying to echo a cinematic form of glimpsing a life scene by scene. I thought of that book as a life told in film frames, with many cross-cuts. After Sappho gave me more lives, and more complex ways of inter-braiding them – and the pleasure of reading more work by women.

Highly recommended - definitely for After Sappho fans but this will appeal also to those who found that too dry.

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Sappho was definitely not my cup of tea. It was too dry and disjointed for me to care about anything in it. A Life in Chameleons is a wholly different thing, although one can recognize Schwartz in it clearly. Namely, it is still thoroughly researched (we get a couple of pages of sources at the end of the book), and it is still a bit dry, but the most important difference is that it is very funny, though the humor is mostly rather droll. Schwartz does an incredible job of relating theater, the birth of cinema, fascism, cross dressing, lesbianism, and I must've missed something there are so many fascinating themes. It got me thinking about what role queerness must have played in the birth of what has come to be known as cinema. Animals, for example, have been mostly documented and theorized (poor Topsy), but I can't remember anything that does the same in relation to queerness on the formal and material level. This is how I imagine myself writing fiction.

[George Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy breezy beautiful
IT IS ME ALWAYS ME ONLY ME
Fregoli Fregoli
Sveglia

[Renée · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chameleons have sticky-licky tongues, cone-shaped eyes that move independently, and bodies that change color based on their mood. Through nine sections built of vignettes drawn from history and imagination, Selby Lynn Schwartz’s “A Life in Chameleons” traces the life of Italian quick-change artist Leopold Fregoli (1867-1936), also known as Il Camaleonte (the chameleon).
Read my full review here:
http://necessaryfiction.com/reviews/a...