The Journal I Did Not Keep
Page 1
ALSO BY LORE SEGAL
FICTION
Half the Kingdom
Shakespeare’s Kitchen
Her First American
Lucinella
Other People’s Houses
TRANSLATIONS
The Story of King Saul and King David
The Book of Adam to Moses
The Kingbird by the Brothers Grimm
The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm
Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, in collaboration with W. D. Snodgrass
FOR CHILDREN
More Mole Stories and Little Gopher Too
Why Mole Shouted and Other Stories
Morris the Artist
The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky
The Story of Old Mrs. Brubeck and How She Looked for Trouble and Where She Found Him
Tell Me a Trudy
All the Way Home
Tell Me a Mitzi
THE JOURNAL I DID NOT KEEP
Copyright © Lore Segal, 2019
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: June 2019
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN: 978-1-61219-747-0
ISBN: 978-1-61219-748-7 (eBook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Segal, Lore Groszmann, author. | Lacey, Catherine, 1985- author of introduction.
Title: The journal I did not keep : new and selected writing / Lore Segal; introduction by Catherine Lacey.
Description: Brooklyn, NY : Melville House Publishing, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018216 (print) | LCCN 2019018274 (ebook) | ISBN 9781612197487 (reflowable) | ISBN 9781612197470 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3569.E425 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.E425 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.5409–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018216
Designed by Beste M. Doğan
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3857-0 (hardcover)
Ebook ISBN 9781612197487
v5.4
a
Remembering my mother, Franzi
Contents
Cover
Also by Lore Segal
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION BY CATHERINE LACEY
PART I: THE JOURNAL I DID NOT KEEP
The Raggaschlucht
The Fountain Pen
Black Bread
Failure
Sardellen Butter
A Child’s War
PART II: FICTION
New and Uncollected Fiction
Dandelion
Divorce
Ladies’ Days of Martinis and Forgetting
How Lotte Lost Bessie
Ladies’ Lunch
Making Good
Hilda
Fugue in Cell Minor
Going to Hell
Noah’s Daughter
Selected Fiction
From Other People’s Houses
The Children’s Transport
Mrs. Levine
From Her First American
The First American
The Summer
From Lucinella
Lucinella Apologizes to the World for Using It
Visit from the Gods
Quarter Turn
From Shakespeare’s Kitchen
The Reverse Bug
Other People’s Deaths
Leslie’s Shoes
From Half the Kingdom
The Arbus Factor
The Ice Worm
The Drowned Man
PART III: NONFICTION
Memoir
My Grandfather’s Walking Stick, or the Pink Lie
Spry for Frying
The Moral in the Convex Mirror
The Mural
Prince Charles and My Mother
The Secret Spaces of Childhood: My First Bedroom
Essays
Memory: The Problems of Imagining the Past
The Gardners’ Habitats
Jane Austen on Our Unwillingness to be Parted from Our Money
Passing Time: a Review of Nog by Rudolph Wurlitzer
Translating the Olden Times
Table Talk: “Nice”
Plots and Manipulations
Afterword to the 2018 UK Edition of Other People’s Houses
How to Be Old
Columns
From The New York Times’ “Hers” Column
On Goodness
On Argument
On Courtesy
From The Forward Column on the Weekly Bible Portion
What Did Adam Know and When Did He Know It?
A Spoiled Child
Michal in Love
INTRODUCTION
BY CATHERINE LACEY
Lore Segal was walking in her Upper West Side neighborhood when she realized that a sentence she’d written fifty years earlier had contained the wrong word. The sentence had described a woman as having a “useless bosom.” But only then, five decades later, did she realize that this bosom had not been “useless” so much as it had been “unused.”
“An unused bosom!” she thought to herself. “Unused!”
This restless, persevering intensity animates all of Segal’s work, and the careful reader might find its roots in the momentous circumstances that first unearthed her talents. At the age of ten in 1938, young Lore was one of the first children in the Kindertransport program, sent by train from Vienna to England in an effort to spare her from the increasing presence of the Nazi regime in Austria. Once there, she set to writing a series of letters to convince the refugee committee to bring her parents to England—a highly unlikely reunification, but one that did indeed occur.
In Other People’s Houses, her 1964 debut novel that has been described by some as a memoir, Segal scrutinizes the sappy metaphors she used in those letters. Young Lore’s infatuation with an image of a rose frozen in the snow seems to both perplex and amuse the older Lore—and yet at the time she believed her metaphors worked! Her parents escaped the Holocaust on a domestic workers visa, though their daughter was prohibited from living with them, shuffled between five different English families before going off to university. Those tumultuous years instilled, as Cynthia Ozick wrote, “a permanent sense of being human contraband,” and established Segal’s inimitable style—dry and exacting but buoyed by a resolute sincerity. She emerged from her adolescence in England as one of those rare minds that meets life’s essential volatility with respect instead of fear, honesty instead of sentimentality.
In 1961, a decade after she immigrated to New York City, Lore published her first of many stories in The New Yorker and married David Segal, a young editor who quickly rose to become an influential senior editor at Knopf. Her lifetime of nomadism and displacement came, at least in some ways, to an abrupt end. She’s lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan ever since, where she’s kept a strict morning writing practice. “Even my children knew if they were going to break their leg, they had to do it after one p.m.!” she recalled. Though she is a self-professed “slow writer,” Segal is endowed with an unflagging work ethic and a wide range of talents. She’s written five novels, eight children’s books, dozens of short stories, and many translations, including a volume of Grimm’s fairy tales and a portion of the Bible.
“It’s very embarrassing to say I’ve translated the Bible,” she admitted. “I have to move very rapidly to the next sent
ence!” Among Segal’s accolades are a Guggenheim Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards, and a nomination for the Pulitzer, so she’s surely put this good-humored humility to work over the years. It’s a temperament just as apparent in her writing as it is in her apartment: a pair of googly eyes transform a light switch into an amusement; the worn interior of a closet door charts the heights of her children, friends, grandchildren, and a lone dog. Most (but not the dog) have overshot Segal’s petite stature, but a nearby portrait drawn by her friend and collaborator Maurice Sendak captures her outsized wit and ferocious intelligence: she’s depicted as a rejoicing, Sendakian Wild Thing.
In 1985 Segal published the novel Her First American, which follows a young Austrian refugee named Ilka, who falls in love with a powerfully charming and prominent black intellectual in 1950s America. Ilka is as wide-eyed as most twenty-two-year-olds, but she has an uncommon sort of fearlessness—the kind that seems to have never known fear. Carter Bayoux, her older and wiser inamorato, introduces Ilka to the ways in which race, class, religion, and prejudice function in America; as Stanley Crouch notes in an introduction to one edition of the book, these were topics that the majority of white American writers had long been too afraid to touch. Segal’s fortitude and personal history make her the ideal mind for such a task, while her munificence and astute perceptions prevent the story from veering into the polemic. The novel, hailed by many as a classic, took her eighteen years to write and has a modernist touch, especially in the crackling bits of dialogue and an almost deadpan sense of humor—yes, humor. Despite the heavy subject matter, her sentences always have a way of working toward some wry, dark truth. But the heart of Her First American is the powerfully drawn humanity of both the main characters. One is estranged from her country; the other is estranged within his country. Their love comes partly from the friction between that shared sense of half-displacement.
Segal’s output and diligence are all the more impressive when you learn that her husband died after only nine years of marriage, leaving her to support their two children with a still somewhat nascent writing career. She did have the help of her mother, Franzi, who lived to one hundred and also knew what it meant to be widowed young. Aging—with all its wisdom and indignities—seems to have always been one of Segal’s subjects, and this may be one of the reasons her work has flourished in this later stage of her life.
In one story, “Ladies’ Lunch,” a character named Lotte, whose son has banished her from Manhattan to a nursing home upstate, pronounces herself dead. A friend asks Lotte over the phone if she just means that she feels as if she were dead. The answer is no. “If I saw Dr. Barson or any doctor, he would look down my throat and see the four yellow spots dead people have,” she says. “The question is whether, now that I am dead, I can die again, a second time, or is this what it is from here on?”
In fact, aging may be less Segal’s subject than these many deaths we die at many different ages, and how they are so often (or always) on terms painfully far from our control. In another story, one in the form of a letter, Lotte notices an estranged friend getting into a cab. “I could tell that you simply did not see me,” she writes, excusing the apparent snub. But in the next paragraph, Lotte just as quickly begins to reexamine her own words: “How simple is this ‘simply’?”
There’s an impulse here to suggest that “simply” is never so simple, but Segal would likely object to the word “never.” Over strong cups of coffee a few weeks ago she made her objection to “never” very clear. There is no never; there’s just no such thing. This called the proposed title to this very collection into question. Alternative titles were thrown around, but was it too late to change the title only a few months from publication? For this writer it is never (or perhaps rarely?) too early or too late to edit.
To assemble this collection she had to read stories she hadn’t considered in as many as six decades. “It’s not really what you want to do,” Segal said, shaking her head; the impulse to revise them could not be avoided. Henry James, she mentions in the prismatic story “Dandelion,” didn’t stop himself from editing his early work, so why should she? At a reading in 2009 for the re-release of her 1976 novella, Lucinella, Segal was caught crossing out words and lines, rewriting sentences, even striking entire paragraphs before taking the stage. Her editors were horrified, but she didn’t see what the problem was.
What could be contained in a revision of Lucinella, in particular, seems particularly felicitous in 2019. The novella is a satirical depiction of literary New York of the 1970s; today’s readers may be struck both by the casual and less casual forms of misogyny that permeate much of the book. Some scenes show us how forty years has changed the way “women writers” are seen and treated, while others feel painfully contemporary.
And here we are now, still early in this twenty-first century, but still trying to undo the erasures and canonical omissions of the male-dominated aesthetics of American mid-twentieth-century fiction. Every season, it seems, another overlooked or semi-overlooked novel is dusted off and recognized as much more groundbreaking or particular or innovative than the last generation of critics allowed. If you’ve been keeping up with these “re-discoveries” your recently-re-appreciated-non-white-male-writer-of-the-last-century shelf should be getting pretty heavy by now. When we consider the names and novels that seem to define America’s last century from this distance of a few decades, we can now see how many of them echo each other in style, sensibility, and subject matter. But while there are cousins of Segal’s style and the breadth of her work, there are no peers, no echoes, no comparisons to be made. What’s more—she’s still here, still writing, still editing, still looking for the exact word, still trying against all odds to make sense of this strange country and the many lives that can be led within it.
PART I
THE JOURNAL I DID NOT KEEP
THE RAGGASCHLUCHT
The reason I gave myself for not keeping a journal was the assumption that memory would select what could be useful; what I was going to forget could not have been worth remembering. Useful, I think, always meant “copy” to me, which I laid away in the back of my mind to someday write about. Memory as the writer’s sketchbook. What I forgot was that they were going to be dead, all the grown-ups who remembered the details, dates, and locations.
It required Google to retrieve the name of the Raggaschlucht, a spectacular gorge cut into the Carinthian Alps, through which we passed in what must have been our last family holiday.
And am I right in remembering that the banks in Vienna closed for the month of August? My father, chief accountant at the bank Kux Bloch and Co., was fired after Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938. By December he had got me onto the Children’s Transport to safety in England, so our Raggaschlucht excursion must have taken place the August of 1936 or ’37, when I was eight or nine.
If you looked up on the right, the cliff wall rose sheer toward the blue distance. Dare yourself to look down through the gap between the stone ace and the wet boards underfoot and you saw the whitewater rapids foaming way below. My left hand grabbed for the rope whenever it came within reach, but rope must run straight between any two points to which it is attached and could not follow the walkway trying to hug the natural irregularities of the rock.
I could see my tall Vati in his summer gear—knickerbockers, his alpine hat with the feather—walking with the guide some way ahead. I knew that my Mutti was coming behind me.
* * *
—
Our passage through the Raggaschlucht is some eighty Augusts ago, but the memory still recurs every once in a while—is it once a month, once a year? What I recollect is not only, or not mainly the drama of the natural scene; nor is it possible that I was not afraid for myself, but I don’t remember that I was. What I do remember is what I could not have seen—the view of my own back from where my mother, clinging to the rope, set one precarious foot before the other at a distance she could not have crossed if I was going to lose my footing. If
I slipped I would plunge into the roaring, spitting water hundreds of feet below.
I don’t know that this was my childhood’s first experience of empathy, but it is the first of which I remember being aware: It interested me to know that my mother was terrified—terrified for me—and there was no turning back. A refinement of her hell of terror was there was no relief in sight. The feather on my father’s hat had disappeared where the rock wall took a turn to the right to hide the extent of the passage that lay ahead.
* * *
—
My friend Bessie regrets the word “empathy,” which, she says, has replaced honest “sympathy,” but we agree that the words are not synonymous. Sympathy pities another person’s experience, where empathy experiences that experience. Both depend on an awareness of that other reality, about which my memory has laid away two usable stories.
* * *
—
First story. It is a midweek afternoon three years after the Raggaschlucht adventure, and I’m walking home from school. Home is the large Victorian house—it is called Belcaro—where I live with my two elderly foster mothers. At the bottom of the hill I pass the postman leaning against the wall. In the U.S. he would be a mailman, but this is Guildford, a country town some half hour south of London. The postman is taking a breather and I have one of those life-altering insights: The postman has a life outside the times I’m used to seeing him hand the day’s letters to Josie, the maid, at the kitchen door: The postman, it comes to me, lives in a house which must have a kitchen; he eats his dinner with a wife, maybe, and his children? Like me, the postman sleeps in a bed.
* * *
—
I congratulated myself on my capacity for human empathy until the day of a party that I gave in New York on a dog day in summer when the air conditioner was down. My second story. I wore my sleeveless white. As I stood chatting with my friend Jack, I was empathizing with his discomfort due to the number of layers of cloth he wore around his throat. Count them: The shirt collar, which folds over on itself, makes for two layers. The tie has a minimum of three layers of cloth. Jack’s jacket collar mimics the shirt, but with stiffener between the two layers, adding six more layers, making for eleven layers of fabric! Here came Bessie who said, “Jack! Chrissake, take off your jacket. And get rid of the stupid tie.”