Writing becomes 'lifeline' for ailing Marysville author

She has written a book about him, a fact-based novel called The Search for Peter Hunt. It's an unusual work, but then it has to be, for Hunt was an unusual man: an exceptional artist, a shameless social climber, a liar extraordinaire.

His fibs and fabrications, his deceits and deceptions, flowed forth in endless and extravagant forms. He lied every bit as well as he painted, with just as much artistry and embellishment.

In her pursuit of the true Hunt -- well, that was a lie, too; his real name was Freddy Schnitzer -- Van Dine made a startling find. She builds a strong case that Hunt served as a model for the most unctuous sycophant in English literature -- Elliot Templeton, the colossal snob of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.

The Search for Peter Hunt is a detective story and a ghost story, a novel masquerading as biography. I found it quite brilliant.

Yet for all that, the best tale here isn't Peter Hunt's. It's Lynn Van Dine's. How a freelance writer from Marysville -- ill and unsure if she'd ever write again -- came to publish a book about an East Coast poopy-darling is a story in itself.

THE WEDDING took place in 1994 on Cape Cod, where Van Dine married Tim Weller, an editor at The Detroit News and a former managing editor of the Times Herald. His family has a summer home on the shore and Van Dine, dressing for the wedding in her mother-in-law's bedroom, noticed "a chest of drawers painted with little angels and hearts. It looked like nothing I'd ever seen before."

It was her introduction to Hunt, whose specialty had been turning second-hand furniture into brightly colored works of art. His style, influenced by the primitive art of the European peasantry, captivated Van Dine. On a later visit to Cape Cod, she tried tracing his designs in the hope she might learn to draw them herself.

The more she learned about Hunt, the more intrigued she grew. "I began hearing stories about Peter Hunt," she said, "about how crazy he was and how funny he was."

She approached Yankee Magazine about writing a story on the artist, whose work was fetching good prices. Given the go-ahead, she stepped up her research and interviewed many people who had known Hunt before his death in 1967. She completed the article in 1997, and it was published the following year.

AT THE SAME time, she found herself getting "sicker and sicker."

"I couldn't carry a train of thought," Van Dine recalled. "I didn't have the energy to do anything. At times, I was almost immobilized. Just to go to the doctor would wipe me out for days. It was real tough."

Her illness was diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, one of medicine's most mysterious maladies. Once called neurasthenia, chronic fatigue syndrome has similarities to mononucleosis. As many as 500,000 Americans suffer from the condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and yet no one is quite sure what causes it.

It is debilitating. Symptoms include headache, joint and muscle ache, tender lymph nodes, an inability to concentrate and a crushing weariness unrelieved by sleep or rest.

"You feel you cannot move," she said. "My muscles and joints were terrifically sore and painful."

Most disturbing of all was the loss of short-term memory. Her husband put up dry-erase boards around the house. "I'd write a note before I went to the next room," she said, for those times when she forgot where she was going or what she was doing.

AS ILL AS she was, her interest in Peter Hunt never flagged.

She learned that a box of Hunt's possessions, including letters and scrapbooks, had been stored at the National Archives in Washington D.C. She and her husband went for a look.

"Tim practically had to carry me, but he was wonderful about it," she said.

They photocopied the contents of the box and were delighted to learn Hunt, narcissistic to the bone, had saved every sentence ever written about him.

"It was a treasure box," she said.

It was her brother, Mark Van Dine, who first made a connection with The Razor's Edge.

"Mark is a voracious reader, and he remembers everything" she said. "He read the Yankee article and said, 'Peter Hunt sounds just like this character in The Razor's Edge,' which he hadn't read in 10 years."

The parallels were striking. Van Dine put together a 15-page timeline, demonstrating Hunt and Maugham traveled in the same circles for years and almost certainly would have known each other. Hunt, like the Elliot Templeton character, had been an ambulance driver in France during the First World War.

Most convincing of all: Hunt, though born in a New Jersey slum in 1896, pretended to be European royalty. It was one of his lies, and the title he took for himself was "Lord Templeton."

VAN DINE, once an award-winning feature writer for the Pensacola News-Journal in Florida, decided to try a self-cure. In effect, she would write herself to wellness.

"I just knew if I was going to get out of this chronic fatigue, I needed to write," she said. "For me, writing has always been an essential way to find myself."

She put no pressure on herself, but wrote for the sheer joy of the writing.

"My goal at first was to write one really good sentence a day," she said. "Just one sentence, but it had to be a really good sentence."

Slowly, one good sentence at a time, a book on Hunt began to take shape. She finished 10 pages, then 50, then 100 and 200. And then she tore it up.

"I just hated it," she said. "It seemed too dry. I started thinking, 'Peter would have hated this.'"

She could almost hear him saying it, almost hear his voice in her head. With his ghost perched on her shoulder, she began the book again.

THE NOVEL, the product of eight years of research and writing, is to be released officially on Jan. 1, although advance copies were sold at book signings on Cape Cod and at Christopher's Flowers in Port Huron. The Search for Peter Hunt has gotten excellent reviews in the New England media, where the folk artist is something of a folk hero.

With her illness in remission, Van Dine said she's feeling stronger than she has in many years. In finding Hunt, she also may have found herself.

"I realized as I was working harder and harder at this, I was getting stronger and stronger," she said. "The writing really was a lifeline."