One of the original cast members, also responsible for some of the choreography, was Childs. By 1976, when Einstein premiered, she was already a veteran of the avant-garde. She was a charter member of the Judson Dance Theater, the downtown art-and-dance collective that, though short-lived—it only existed from 1962 to 1964—was one of the most exciting moments of sixties culture. The downtown avant-garde was quite unlike the world in which she had grown up. The great-great-granddaughter of W. W. Corcoran, a banker who founded the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, Childs grew up on the Upper East Side: a conservative milieu of old Protestant money that, despite its geographical proximity, was in some ways as far culturally from the downtown art scene as it was from Tucson. After Sarah Lawrence, she began her dance apprenticeship with Merce Cunningham.
Her family’s reaction was tepid: “They didn’t care what I did as long as I wasn’t late to dinner.”3 As Philip Glass would translate many of John Cage’s ideas into the music of a new generation, so would Childs expand on many of Cunningham’s ideas in dance. She would also break with them, including the Cage tradition of dissociating music from dancing. And Childs would find ways to bring small chamber pieces into giant theaters: Einstein had its American premiere on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.4
“When I say something, multiply it by ten,” Childs once said.5 This was partly upper-class reserve. But it was also a principle that found a parallel in her choreography, in which a strictly limited vocabulary was repeated with tiny variations whose hypnotic effects were analogous to those of visual artists like Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, or Dan Flavin. If her choreography seemed straightforward to the uninitiated, it was extremely difficult to perform, the product of what the director Peter Sellars called “the most rigorous mind in the history of dance.”6 Like the incantatory repetitions of Glass’s music, Childs’s work was as much spiritual as artistic: a perfect example of the mystical tendency Susan identified in “The Aesthetics of Silence.” This was an art that “must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the ‘subject’ (the ‘object,’ the ‘image’), the substitution of chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence.”7 This was what Childs’s teacher Merce Cunningham saw in dance: “It seems enough that dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form, and that what is seen is what it is. And I do not believe it is possible to be ‘too simple.’”8
Childs was “austere but never cool,” Susan wrote. In her work, she saw the incarnation of those ideas of Kleist’s that had so attracted her to Cioran. These ideas, which, like the notion of progressive time, dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century, were a kind of spiritual ideal for Susan.
Kleist exalts as the summit of grace and profundity in art a way of being without inwardness or psychology. Writing when the characteristic modern oppositions of the heart versus the head, the organic versus the mechanical, were invented, Kleist ignores the obloquy already attached to the metaphor of the mechanical, and identifies the mechanical movements of puppets with the sublimity of the impersonal. . . . In Childs’s choreography, one is not a neutral but a transpersonal doer.9
In Lucinda’s work, Susan would discover an iteration—now in movement and music—of themes that had interested her all her life, and that had run through her own work since at least Against Interpretation. She acknowledged as much when writing about Childs’s work in “A Lexicon for Available Light,” which appeared in 1983. In her journal, she noted “a major theme of my essays: art as a spiritual project. Gravity and grace. (And projects of disburdenment—a lower aim.)”10
* * *
But like the romance in the film, their happiness would not last. Lucinda’s and Susan’s mothers both struggled with the same problem. Lucinda’s mother, also named Lucinda, was a society drinker who spent much of her time at the Cosmopolitan Club on East Sixty-Sixth Street. Like Mildred, she had had money and lost it; like her, she was lonely; like her, she was alternately dependent and distant, a woman who embarrassed her daughter, when she was training with Merce Cunningham, by insisting that she refer to herself, on her checks, as “Lucinda Childs, Junior.” As so much of Susan’s personality was constructed around a need to escape her parents’ world, so was Lucinda determined to escape hers. But they were unprepared for an enduring relationship. “In a family situation like ours,” Lucinda said, “we didn’t learn a whole lot about things that go right.”11
Back in New York, things quickly fell into the pattern of people from families where things never go right. Lucinda felt excluded from Susan’s literary world; Susan felt that she did not get enough attention from Lucinda, an artist with a demanding international touring schedule. In February 1984, they did manage to go to Japan, a country Susan first visited in 1979 and would love for the rest of her life.12 Lucinda remembered their conversations as one of the great legacies of their relationship, but Susan complained—often loudly—of what David called Lucinda’s “absolutely immovable silences.”13
Susan had been warned that Lucinda was not likely to respond to the kind of drama that was always a part of her relationships. Soon after their trip to Japan, Susan wrote in her journal:
L is a recluse, you know, said Bob Wilson in August 1982. . . . Almost two years later I say: L. is a recluse. That means someone who can’t mate—or won’t. Withdrawal from physical love, more and more infrequent; then banishing sexual gestures and caresses altogether; then the insomnia that requires sleeping separately sometimes; then the rule that we always sleep separately. Not to share sleep is not to share life.14
This was the same dynamic—one coming closer, the other pulling back—that marked most of Susan’s closest relationships, and began remarkably soon after they met. Lucinda would always love Susan, but Susan was not the right mate for a person who avoided conflict by retreating from it. After their return from Japan, in one of many such letters, Susan told Lucinda:
I can’t go on in a situation that makes you into a sadist and deprives me of all dignity and self-respect. I feel so misperceived by you. By your steady misrepresentation of my behavior and intentions, you make me into someone petty, without value, and your enemy. You don’t know how to recognize love, how to accept it, or how to give it.15
Susan’s criticisms of others were, habitually, criticisms of herself. In 1986, she confessed that her “inability to write narrative fiction comes from an inability (perhaps, more accurately, a reluctance) to love.”16 She projected that failing onto Lucinda, turning her into a caricature, the “Ice Queen.” This became a standard part of her repertoire: “You couldn’t go thirty seconds of talking about Lucinda without saying ‘ice queen,’” said Karla Eoff, who became Susan’s assistant a few years later. “When I was out with Susan and saw Lucinda, the expression on her face when she saw Susan and looked at her did not compute with what Susan said about her.”17
“Sometimes, because of Susan’s fascinating psychology, she needed me to be the Ice Queen,” said Lucinda. “I was not, I am not.” Yet Childs understood where the impulse came from:
She talked to me a lot about Mildred, but she would talk to me as if I was this person she could trust, this warm person. And then at other times she projected Mildred onto me in a way that was unfair and made me feel terrible. This was something she needed to do. I don’t know that I fully understood it at the time. I think she imagined things sometimes. You know, reasons why she could decide or declare that I didn’t love her. She would cook up some things that had nothing to do with anything—because I would have said something to somebody at a party, or she’d pick up on some little thing and turn it into something that it wasn’t.18
A woman who only said 10 percent of what she meant was confronted by one who said ten times more than she meant. Susan’s attempts to attract Lucinda’s attention sometimes veered into farce. Darryl Pinckney remembered a visit to Lincoln Center when Susan, knowing that Lucinda would be there, mounted an operetta of her own. “She took off her glasses so she couldn’t see,” he said. Since Susan was practically blind, sh
e lurched and stumbled down the aisle. “She had to be helped, which created a big scene—so that Lucinda couldn’t fail to see her arrive.”19
Yet Susan painted these episodes as instances of Lucinda’s coldness, her desire to hurt her, and saw herself as the injured party without the slightest desire “to make a scene.” Four years after first mentioning that they were breaking up, Susan was still trying to get Lucinda’s attention:
The reason I don’t greet you when I see you—I’ve been to the [ballet] three times in the last week, and you’ve been in the audience all three times—is that it’s nothing less than agony for me to see you. I still have the same feelings for you. So it seems insane to me to be sitting at the ballet in front of you, with someone else. When I see you I want to die. Or—otherwise stated—I want to put my arms around you. Or pass you my opera glasses. . . .
I honestly don’t know what to do. It’s ridiculous of me not to greet you; I certainly have no desire to make a scene or let anyone know what’s going on. But for now it’s more painful to me than, I think, you could possibly imagine.
I have been close to suicide in the last months and I’m not out of the dark place yet.20
These entreaties did not leave Lucinda unmoved—to the contrary—but she was stretched thin. “When Susan was talking about suicide, my mother was in the hospital because she had actually attempted suicide,” said Lucinda. Lucinda Senior recovered, and mother and daughter reconciled after Lucinda’s father’s death. After never having attended her daughter’s performances, she came to every one, for the rest of her life. And: “she picked me up and saved me when I was breaking up with Susan.”21
Lucinda and Susan likewise reconciled, but neither separation nor reunion would ever be complete. Fifteen years after their meeting, Susan wrote again. “We’re both fragile complicated people, who don’t find anything easy,” she said, “and neither of us like scenes.”22 She might not have liked them, but she had not learned to live without them.
* * *
Not learning a whole lot about things that go right: a striking number of Susan’s lovers and friends were scarred by addiction. “Irene isn’t my mommy,” she had written twenty years before. She used the same word—“icy”—to describe Lucinda that she had used to describe Mildred.
“X, The Scourge,” written around 1960, was ahead of its time. The first book about children of alcoholics was not published until 1978, the year of Illness as Metaphor.23 As with cancer, a moralistic mythology surrounded alcoholism, and the idea that the children of addicts might share certain pathologies was only beginning to be discussed among specialists. As more studies were conducted, an intergenerational pattern emerged.
People who grew up in alcoholic homes are drawn to extremes, wavering between grandiosity and flagellating self-reproach; between the hyperactivity of the perfect student and the lethargy of the depressive; between seeking attention and aggressively repulsing those ready to give it to them. Because of their difficulty in believing they are valued for who they are rather than what they do, they are tormented by impossible ambition: “She very early on assumed that she would deserve a Nobel Prize,” her sometime lover Jasper Johns remembered. This was not simply ambition; it was a need for constant affirmation.24
In 1983, Janet G. Woititz published the first popularizing work about the syndrome, Adult Children of Alcoholics. Published in Deerfield Beach, Florida, this book was unlikely to have captured Susan’s attention. Like its provincial place of publication, its accessible language shows how far from highbrow psychology this syndrome was when it was first being described. Books like Woititz’s owed little to high literary Freudianism, still dominant in the therapeutic professions, and descended instead from the grassroots therapies that originated with Alcoholics Anonymous. In circles like Susan’s, this literature was often belittled as “pop psychology.” But such works contained insights that would soon earn general acceptance, and help the many people who struggled with similar problems. Adult children of alcoholics, Woititz wrote, were torn between “Always tell the truth” and “I don’t want to know.” She called the conflict between demanding the truth and not wanting to know it “the greatest paradox.”25
* * *
As Mildred’s behavior affected Susan, so did Susan’s affect David. Not long after he was installed as her editor at Farrar, Straus, he began to fall short of her expectations. In public, she praised him extravagantly: “I’m very pleased with the arrangement,” she told the New York Times in 1982. “I have great confidence in Mr. Rieff’s judgment.”26 In private, though, she would berate him mercilessly for any misstep. In the proofs of Under the Sign of Saturn, she discovered that David had changed a reference to the “Black Stone of the Kaaba” to the “Black Stone of the Kabbalah.” Rather than assuming an innocent mistake or gently explaining the distinction, she got him on the phone immediately, and started screaming.27
Acutely alive to anything that felt like being patronized, Susan did not see that David was the same. Like Lucinda, he reacted to Susan’s increasingly desperate outbursts by shutting off. “It was like a love affair,” said Roger Deutsch. “They would have blowups and they wouldn’t speak to each other for days.”28 During these periods of estrangement, Susan resorted to the kinds of tactics that found her careening through the aisles of the Metropolitan Opera, using any pretext to get back in his good graces. When David’s Malamute, Nunu, was dying, Susan bombarded him with requests to visit the dying dog; David understood that these requests had nothing to do with the dog.
“I always thought, One day David will rebel against this,” said Steve Wasserman, a friend of both. “And when it happens, I don’t want to be around because it’s going to be very ugly.” The explosion came in 1982, the year of Town Hall—and the year Susan met Lucinda. “Susan summoned me and said, ‘David’s having a nervous breakdown,’” Stephen Koch said. Wasserman remembered: “He basically woke up in the morning in a fetal position and crying and weeping uncontrollably.”29 David was thirty.
The immediate cause of his collapse was his breakup with his girlfriend Sara Matthiessen, daughter of the writer Peter Matthiessen.30 On top of it all, his doctors discovered a growth on his spine which they feared was cancerous, and he had to be operated on at Sloan Kettering. This was the same hospital where Susan had had her mastectomy only a few years before. Then, David had upended his entire life to be with her, and “he thought that Susan would tend to him the way he had tended to her when she got cancer,” said his friend the writer Jamaica Kincaid. But Susan—whose own mother had notoriously evaporated as soon as a boyfriend came along—scampered off to Italy with Lucinda. “It was just unbelievable that she went,” said Kincaid. “We couldn’t believe she was really getting on the plane.”31
As there was no mention of David’s heartbreak over Sigrid in Susan’s journals, in the late seventies, there is not a single mention a few years later of his breakup with Sara, nor of his brush with cancer. The lump was safely, swiftly removed, and turned out to be benign. Despite this welcome news, mentally, Kincaid said, “David got worse and worse.” There was talk of putting him in Payne Whitney, a psychiatric hospital. Instead, he came to live with Kincaid and her husband, Allen Shawn. He spent six months there, alternatively laughing at their conventional life—“the regularity of Allen and me getting up and having breakfast, boiled eggs, you know”—and appreciating a predictability he had never known with Susan.
Then Susan came back and became the adoring mother. But David was very wounded by this, and that was the first exposure I had to her. It’s not ruthlessness. It’s just Susan-ness. None of the words or the ways of characterizing her behavior really fit. Yes, she was cruel and so on, but it wasn’t that, she was also very kind. She was just a great person. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a great person after I knew Susan.
There were no words for this: it was “X.” The incident, like so many others, seemed not to register with Susan. If she sought literary and moral models, she had none f
or relationships, for “things that go right.” This was not a problem that could be addressed with will, Kincaid said:
She really wanted to be a great mother, but it was sort of like wanting to be a great actress, or something. The mechanics of being a mother were really beyond her. It’s like if you put her on Mars and they spoke another language. She had no real instinct for it. I would say there was no real instinct for caring about another person unless they were in a book.
David was not in a book; and so Susan could not see him, or even know she should. “It’s a turning point in the story of the two of them,” said Kincaid. “Whatever themes of abandonment she had created before, this one had real reverberation.”32
Faced with an accumulation of woes—the loss of a great love, his mother’s rages, the tensions of editing her, a cancer scare—David broke down. His assistant at FSG, Helen Graves, daughter of the Texas writer John Graves, saw his decline. “He was mostly lovely to me when I worked for him,” she said. “I have never had a nicer boss. I spent huge amounts of time giggling hysterically because he was very funny.” But even before his health scare, he had started using cocaine. “He would always offer me a line,” said Graves. “He gradually got angrier and angrier, more and more edgy and angry.”33
His work began to suffer. Helen picked up his phone and constantly had to cover for him: “People would be yelling at me.” His addiction made Susan “miserably unhappy,” David said, but she responded with anger. “She was beside herself—beside herself—about David’s habit,” said her friend Robert Boyers. “She’d talk about it all the time.” At a moment in his life when David needed the support a more empathic parent might have offered, he knew he could not rely on her. “Having failed to quit a couple of times,” he finally got clean, once he accepted that doing so was a matter of life and death.34
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