Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Still, I had a special feeling for American fashions in decades. Falling in love with a part of the past is a human habit. Surely it must start in those slanted oral histories given the young. Those handed me had had an oddly longer span than is customary. Born of a father and grandfather who had both waited to marry and rear families until near elderly, when I delved into that two-generational perspective which is a child’s usual lot, I unwittingly went much farther back. I heard nothing direct from that grandfather who, on record here as an elder of the synagogue in 1832, was probably born in the eighteenth century, and had died some fifty years before my birth, but I could listen to echoes of Civil-War Richmond—and 1850 Dresden and 1888 New York—from his much younger widow, who was still only ninety-seven when I was twelve. I didn’t much want to, being understandably more in love with my father’s dashing youth, which had taken place years before his marriage to my much younger mother, and in a decade the whole world already called the belle époque. Less than half a century gone, in our family it seemed still at hand. A decade? That was nothing. Instead of being timebound by access to such a stretch of it, within the usual terms of the human bondage I seemed to have been set free to wander as a citizen of time’s kind of time.

  By now, I am old enough to have seen clothing repeat itself, even on me, and to enjoy it. In Hollywood, I have just sported a jacket saved for its marvels since 1947, and once more so much the height of avant-garde fashion that the Fairmont in San Francisco had got into the papers for trying to bar me from the dining room—now that I was wearing pants with it.

  But I still know that the history of the imagination never repeats itself that knowingly. In art, you can die for love of an epoch—and die of it. Maybe in life, too. When I was first writing I had a friend so much in love with the ’20s that he admitted he would have preferred to have been young then, along with the writers he admired. Sad, I thought, for I was somehow sure they would never have given up their time for another—I would never want to give up mine. (And I still recall a remark heard at a play of his: “How can so young a man be so modern in such an old fashioned way!”)

  The Big Apple, as you may know from heritage or even experience, was a dance. It came after the Charleston, which came after the Bunny Hug (well after), and was followed by all those others it resembles. It was one of those dances—maybe all of them one spastic version of the Lebentanz—which leap up in America like crops. I never danced it. But I was there.

  What is the history of a writer, as a writer, outside the books? Is there an internal history, as a writer, which goes on alongside them? Is it worth talking about? I was never sure.

  Not yet published, a writer lies in the womb, marvelously private as one looks back on it, but not yet born, waiting for the privilege to breathe. Outside is the great, exhaling company of those who have expressed.

  First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is light. The spirit stands exposed, in what it at first takes to be the family circle of confreres. Everybody, shaped to one ear, is listening … but after that—one must live.

  What is a writer’s innocence? In my work, I begin early to ask what innocence is for anyone, to examine it.

  “I wanted my conviction—no, that is not the word—themes perhaps, to rise pure of themselves. In the uncontaminated country that I could sometimes glimpse in the depth of myself, there was another kind of knowledge that sometimes turned its dark fin and disappeared again, that I must fight to keep,” the young hero of my first novel, False Entry says. “Compromise has no taste, no muscle; one day it is merely there, in the bogged ankle, the webbed tongue.”

  I myself fear that logic will overtake the dream, and extinguish it. “The young act from a pure, breathless logic still ignorant of the conventional barrier between dream and possibility,” he wrote, under my hand. “When a man begins to act logically according to others. … then he has left his youth behind.”

  In heaven, there must occasionally be recording angels who can’t be as objective as required. They won’t go along with the theology that everything is known; they know better than that. Yet why has that supra-knowledge, so full of the abyss, been planted on dubious guys like them? It worries them. Even so, whenever one of them is kicked out and over the bars of heaven, it is for shaking his fist at the hills of grace, and shouting “I expect to know everything!” Adding as he falls, “A prince I know I’m not.”

  Lucifer takes his hand, or hers, and says, “Be a writer.”

  No stars fell when she was born. Yet she will address them.

  All through life she will waver, between that arrogance and that humility.

  Meanwhile, as I begin to practice the word-life, and both to learn and fear its postures, what gnaws at me most is the gap between words and action. Given the age I live in, I am bound to see that gap mainly in political terms; indeed it takes an effort of mind, even now, to recall that other ages have seen this same gap solely in terms of religion—the distance between word and action there.

  By this time, perhaps 1951, I had accumulated a certain amount of sub-political experience. Most of it in an ancient field to which my time would give the modern name of “race relations.”

  Back in the Relief Bureau (as both we and the clients called the Department of Public Welfare) many of my “co-workers”—a name slid over to us from sub-Marxist doctrine—had been black, as was my boss supervisor, Herbert Rountree—like so many of the middle-to-upper staff a trained social worker recruited from “private” welfare work to public—in his case from the Urban League. (Precinct heads were usually political appointees.) When I waltzed with him at an office party, my background silently waltzed with me:—On the one side, the Southern paternalism of my father, whose voice, when he spoke of Awnt Nell, the mammy, who had “raised” him, still shook with filial feeling—in the exact timbre, I now realize, with which he spoke of my grandmother. On the other side, my mother’s murmured “Die Schwartze!”—which was the way German Jewesses of her day warned the family not to talk of something-or-other in front of the maid. Barring an Ethiopian rabbi my father claimed once to have met, and Cyril, the West Indian elevator boy who had once coached me in Latin, educated blacks were unknown to them. And except for two handpicked brown girls who had been at Barnard—to me.

  I felt that Mr. Rountree’s large, gently astute eyes could see this, right down to my backbone, on which his hand was placed with a formality entirely to do not with race but with waltz. Thirty years later perhaps, and I Wasper and blonder, we might have had to sleep together to show our empathy over the world’s hangups. As it was, I gave him a provincial New York City girl’s peculiar confidence. I wanted to give him something. “Want to know something funny?” It had surprised me. “Until I went into the field, I never knew that there were dumb Jews!”

  Behind me now are the years between, the early 1940s, spent barnstorming small industrial cities: Wilmington, Elmira, Binghamton, and larger: Rochester, Detroit—in the wake of an engineer husband. Engineers then (and perhaps now) are among the most conservative middle-class elements. As young family men, often with a holy distaste for cities, which takes no thought of what sins their own profession might be committing there, they make straight for the safer suburbs, in which all the prejudices—anti-Jew and black, anti-crowd and even anti-art—are spoken of as entirely natural. These men, one collegiate step above the foundry and the furnace, have little of the rough-and-ready about them, often not even manual dexterity, and none of the individual workman’s craft-guild or underdog independence. Instead, they take having a boss for granted, buy cars and houses of a grade deferentially lower, just as in the famous Fortune magazine study of pecking-orders in monolith industry, subscribe healthily to the theme that General Motors—or Eastman Kodak or U.S. Rubber—is America, and in general are the Eagle Scouts of the corporate image. (Who, by and large, seldom made it to very top executive. This daughter of a lone, cranky but never subservient small-businessman, could have told them w
hy.)

  Wives meanwhile, are to conform, up the ladder of the country clubs, which are churchgoing and hard-drinking, in the obsessive way of the American on the rise, who has no other release. As a New Yorker I am out of it in one way, as a Jew in another (almost all engineers at this time were, like my husband, Christians). And as a secret artist (for I continue writing poems in between the housework) in a third way, perhaps the most significant. Except for a “sport” like my husband, whose family was musical, and for certain foreigners in his class at school, like his friends Viscardi and Khrennikoff, all these men, met from city to city, have passed through the college mill with scarcely a trace of “the humanities” to show for it; respect for those is not yet a part of this sector of American life. (As that sector’s resurgence, in each war, and in almost every President, clearly shows.)

  “Art” is the property of their wives, who paint the furniture à la Peter Hunt, read the gentle Babar books even to their boychildren (before dreams, if not before school), press for whatever theater tickets are bought, and fill their houses with a flurry of handcraft. … If ever I am brought to agree that the “fine” arts and the art-crafts are the same, it will not be the art-gallery weavers and potters who have persuaded me, but the memory of those women—and myself—bent over, flecked with wool and paint and yearning, in the middle of baby’s naptime, in middle America. …

  I am not writing yet—except for those poems, flung off in brief single seizures, in trances of regret for the intellectual life I seemed to have lost. I never send the poems out. I am paralysed, not only by the house-and-child life—which is a total-flesh-draining, a catatonia of rest for the beaverish brain, that in a way is craved—but by this immersion in a society where I feel not superior to it, but at first fatally out-of-step Susie, then submerged, and ultimately lunatic-wrong. (And by my immurement in a marriage where I cannot talk of these things to a husband, however kindly, who, brought up in just this sort of life, mildly subscribes to it unless argued to otherwise, which no doubt was his immurement.) Again I am learning what “society” is—and again, how different.

  Knowledge gotten like that, unconsciously and unphrased, unrecognized even as misery, is the deepest there is. On the surface, I remember the succession of towns by whatever oddities happened to us in them. In Wilmington, the “corporation” lawyer who lives across from us on a country road just recently shaken by the wedding cortege of the two opposing clans united by a President’s son and a du Pont heiress, has himself just been married late and for the second time, to Mattie X, an elegant lady, with white hair à la Recamier, whom, however, my mother-in-law, a Wilmingtonian, recognizes as the town milliner—a world of difference in that phrase! (Which Mattie herself—busy faking a lineage for herself via a French grandmother who had eloped here with the gardener and had expired on her deathbed when just about to point out her true patronymic in the Almanach de Gotha—is forever trying to repair.)

  In her husband’s pure white office, the walls bear column after column, goldleafed in Old English—the names of those nationwide companies who have incorporated themselves in Delaware, because of its favorable tax laws, and use his office as attestation. This was the “law” by which our neighbor lived, and the only way he practised it, allowing him to collect old glass, to serve us tomato juice in Napoleon’s champagne cups—and his wife of sixty summers to embarrass him by buying a modern “bride’s chandelier” out of American Home. Through her we are ratified for Lammot du Pont’s private dairy-list—the question startlingly put as “Would you like, my dear, to get cream from Lammot du Pont?”—who had by the way been present when she and her husband were churched.

  We were learning what a feudal name meant anywhere it sounded, in all the ranges of house and home beneath it, in a state it utterly owned. And how under the pseudo-hometownliness, the tycoons of Winterthur could make this visible. “Up at Henry Bielan’s,” (the du Pont brothers and cousins being thus called by their forenames), my husband, going with other staff at the Experimental Station, to the home of the du Pont who bosses it, is served drink in Moscow Mule mugs like those at any bar, but of a yellow metal; one gauche experimenter, inquiring of his host what the alloy is, has to be told it is high-carat gold.

  I “saw” no blacks that year; in the habit of the country there one did not “see” them, though they were everywhere. Besides, I am busy learning to live in houses with furnaces (of which I ultimately will know every variety from coke to gas to wood to coal) instead of in apartment houses; to can strawberries from our acre of them the night my first child is born, and to live two months alone with her, speaking only to her, just after (all our few friends being summer-absent), while my husband, having lost the chemist’s job his training hadn’t fitted him for, goes to other towns to find one. Later, in a story of mine, “Mrs. Fay Dines on Zebra,” those Negroes would appear briefly in a line or two, turtling on the Brandywine it would appear that I had seen them after all.

  And somewhere along this procession of towns and wildly various houses (huge ones no one else would have, or small ones which “everyone” had) as I see all the social classes in our so-called one-class America, and myself do a servant’s work—out of this comes what I am to write in “The Hollow Boy” about servants in America, black or white. As I brood over, and feel in my very knees—in the “housemaid’s” place there, and in my shoulders, in the yoke’s place there—the peculiar, self-levitating dreams and nonseeing rope tricks which are the diversionary morale of a money democracy.

  … Oh, I was seeing. But I still did not write. In Rochester, where the scarce job has been found (through a vice-president of Symington-Gould who is my husband’s godfather) I go to Forman’s, the best fashion-department store, and asking for a job myself on the basis of two post-graduation prior Relief-Bureau years as a Macy “executive trainee,” am told they do not employ married women—“Besides, why would a nice girl like you want to work?” I couldn’t tell him the whole truth, because I didn’t know it yet, about women, husbands, society or writers, so I said, “We need the money”—godfather didn’t pay very much. And am told, after being asked where my husband works and in what capacity, that it would do his status there no good, if I “tried to work.”

  Businesswomen, in the American provinces of those days, are not college graduates (who go into teaching if they stay single) but of a lower class; since they are perforce single, and have to “keep themselves up,” they are often also “racy” and “hard,” the kind of company a married man often goes looking for. Proper provincial girls might still not find it necessary to go to college; the bland, local Junior Leagues take care of what they had been reared for. Daughters of the new industrial rich want to be just like them—a young scioness of the Fruehauf Trailer-Truck Company, taking us and her husband to lunch at the Downtown Club (on her father’s membership) says, with sincere effort, when she finds out I already have worked, “Well now, it’s nice to be able to, like if you was a nurse, and your husband got sick. Or if you’re left a widow.” Then she smiles, with her sharp little muzzle, at her father’s employee, her husband.

  Half the conversation of these women of the middle industrial society I am meeting comes from venoms and satisfactions of which they are unaware. In their social evenings, sitting across the livingrooms from the men, they speak of their husbands as “He” to their faces, swapping their intimate habits, always barring the sexual ones: “Oh Jim, he always, Dick, he doesn’t like to, Bill, he won’t ever, for him I have to—” speaking more often of what regrettably isn’t than of what is, and never knowing how, in this coy chat, they take their revenge. Or for what reason it is taken. Sometimes, though, when a display of uxorious feeling is required, or even truly felt, they flirt with their husbands in a kind of sorority badinage. One never talks to another’s husband except by the way, and of the most womanly preoccupations; indeed the safe topics for either sex, and the great ones, are schools-for-the-children, and redoing the house. Or the cost of dental care. But
it is at a presidential election-eve party that I first learn to the full how, as a woman in this society, I am what the employment agencies call “overqualified.”

  We are in a large group of doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers and Kodak executives—not “old” Rochester (meaning old industry, a few of whose grandes dames I had met) but the heart of its middle sampling. All are upstate New York Republicans; we are Democrats. My husband is teased for it. The provincial, if he has to be polite to difference, doesn’t know what else to do.

  “And I suppose you vote along with him?” The nearer truth was that he voted with me; I’d converted him. But when I begin to explain, want to discuss (as all the men around us have been doing, to be sure unilaterally) and which, since I am young, supple, vague, doe-eyed, must sit less shrilly on me than it would later—a quiet coverlet is drawn over my attempt, first with kidding, then with ridicule, and at last stopping me short, with the kind of brute snarl, that we now call “redneck”—meaning workers who haven’t had the benefit of the “humanities.” Professional men of the time got it in the eye—reddened. Women didn’t have views. All they really had, in a case like mine, was hot pants. … It is confusing, I suppose, that women of energy, men too, often have both.

  As for the blacks, I never see them now. “We” never do. When they riot in the streets of Rochester in the 1960s, I will remember that. … Of how, once in a while up there, seated in a bus, I would see one, riding equally with us “up north here” on the aboveground railway, some old figure, dark, starched and Seminole among the white dishclout faces. … At the time, the ethnic resemblance of everybody to everybody up there takes my breath away; my heart is homesick for those dirty, spit-tied caravans where a half dozen flaming nations jostle each other at breakfast time. All riding in that New York indifference, which I now see as dignity. Into one of whose buses a lama might enter, pushing like peace against that weirdly resisting middle door (and no one will help him, nor no one comment) to stand between a bitten-off, baby-face old Sally of a theater usher in her round white stock, and an eyelashed goldfish of a garment-center chick, in her racing silks. …