Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Up here where I am, in the outland of the real country, not a stone is cosmopolitan, or pied beyond nature. The bus is for the pieced mornings of spinsters, idlers, housewives, cripples, or the evening bird-talk of stenographers. Each person who can, rides his own vein of life, in a car. Sundays, we do it also, driving to Palmyra and Joseph Smith’s Mormon dream—only a hillside, to Painted Post—only a crossroad garage, to the Oneida community—a silver Utopia tarnished into a factory for sterling, and to the dying reservations where the squat Indians sit unfeathered, plaiting their fingers in the sullen, wampum-colored air. So we ride on like everyone else, for the standard cheap Sunday with the children in the back, while the old names: Ticonderoga, Canandaigua, lash our faces with history, and the small rain of the present scours the lakes. Transportation is the psychic skein of existence here; it is how the people here hunt whatever lyric winds that blow.

  Twenty years later, riding the whole of New York State through the Ontario region to Michigan, I will understand these people back then, in their lamaseries of kitchen and field, their strange spas and mountain follies, their stiff springtimes—the men all the time so sexually delicate of finger, in the finite distance between them and the machine. I will see enough at last to write in The Last Trolley-Ride about that inland-outland transportational dream, always dying and resurrected, from barge to wagon to rail to car to plane, brought up short only by the easy horizons of the coastal cities, and of mixed peoples.

  All this time, back there, there is a war. In the last years of it, we move to Detroit, arriving on the day of the race riots which have erupted at Belle Isle. At the luxe hotel on Lake St. Clair where the U.S. Rubber Company has temporarily quartered us, the management, joining with the permanent guests, decrees that the Negro domestic staff is to be quarantined at the hotel, since if these “good” ones go back the long route to their homes in the slums of Paradise Alley, “it might be dangerous for them.” Now at last, I too can see those others, the “bad” ones, as in their mythic violence and their real, they hang invisibly from the roof-tree of every white inhabitant.

  In Grosse Pointe, we find a huge house for rent, almost the only one anywhere. Not lake-front—only a six-cylinder-fortune house (as we joke to one another)—whose heirs will rent it cheaply until sold. The lease, when it comes, is “for occupancy by three persons only, of Caucasian race.” When I ask what will happen when we become four, as is plainly to be, Mr. Sutter, the heir, says that when the baby comes, the lease will be so amended. I haven’t the will to ask, “And what if it’s black?”—not from fear (though that does exist—where else would we go?)—as from a deeper depression. I am living, possibly for always, among people for whom the words I use as acids and reliefs, the possibility even of verbal solutions to life, mean nothing. “Even in the hat salon at Hudson’s—!” Mrs. Sutter, a suburbanly pretty woman, adds “—you can’t be sure what you try on hasn’t already been on one of their greasy heads.”

  Detroit itself is in the midst of another twenty-buck silk-shirt war; gas rationing, because of which we had let be carted away our beloved nine-miles-per-gallon classic old Packard, means little here; the lake buzzes with motorboats. Big-wig restaurants and company-clubs serve filet; meat-rationing is for the poor supermarket fools. I now think of the East as more moral; it will take another war, and richer friends, to teach me that bank profiteering is merely more hidden. We are meanwhile meeting the blatant “new” machine-tool-and-electronic rich; by this time I know that there are always these new ones—as opposed to the more elegant, older industrial rich, who have had their “humanities” and sometimes make use of them. Suppliers to the war, these new ones are a thick-psyche’d breed, with the terrifying animal sureness of those who know themselves to be the wave of what is—and do not reflect on it. Fighting a happy, redsnouted, clambake “operation,” they have the fat, satined-up wives of men who go to whores, and the expensive, anemic houses which come out of first-generation military contracts. One of them spends thousands to illuminate the local church like a ballroom for the one night of a daughter’s wedding—and the church allows it. But all the Grosse Pointes, Park to Farm, ring with anti-reform, anti-Roosevelt “sick” jokes, and the Detroit Symphony goes out over the air under the sponsorship—all it could get—of “Sam’s Cut-rate Store”—until an older industrialist (chemicals) rouses the new money to civic-mindedness.

  I go and do what women are immemorially urged to do in wartime, especially when the bleeding goes on somewhere else. From Balaclava helmets, to Bundles for Britain, to USO, down the ages it’s all bandage-rolling—and part of the quieting corruptions to which women have immemorially lent themselves, in the name of good works. Always finding by instinct their proper niches and social class.

  … Mine has retrograded—or advanced. Early in the war, in Rochester (where on the Sunday afternoon of Pearl Harbor we two and child have been symbolically caught in a bookshop) I have been somehow organized into a group of the daughters and wives of its rich clothiers, women who (as our energetic hostess confides to me) would otherwise not have done anything. As we fold and ply, their talk and their diamonds flash equally rainbow; what we could have been sewing for an atomic war, I can now no longer imagine.

  In Detroit, I work for election reform with the League of Women Voters, campaign for Roosevelt (under the aegis of the electrical workers’ union’s notorious Briggs Local), and when I get back to the house hang his picture in the bay (in defiance of the Park, which thinks it low to hang party posters, and knows where it stands, anyway)—and teach the new baby to do his fine razzberry of a “Pffui,” whenever I say “Gonna vote for Dewey, Pete?” Sad anodynes of women, when they live cattycorner to world responsibility, sad games of all men, when they live under conditions for which they are indirectly not to blame.

  In the Relief Bureau, I had learned that any food tickets I brought—or any emotional welfare I might bring—if as has been suggested, I train to be a psychiatric social worker with one of those private agencies which now took over where public welfare left off—would not be even as much as a thumb thrust in the dike of human economic misery. Now I realize that in a war, unless a woman can kill for it, or will dance for it, she has no honest position in it. To be a woman pacifist is as nothing; since for us (and me) there is no risk. This must be why women, since getting the vote, or one half of Athenian citizenship, now appear to me to have done little since except sit down and let the political facts roll by, until once again it is time to cooperate blindly—wartime. Until women come under full and equal military service (I think to myself)—nothing to do with WACS or WAFS—they cannot hope to have any of the secular powers which men took for granted, including the possible right to refuse to fight. All secular power was related to it. Once they had it, their own pacifism might mean something … though I wasn’t at all sure that women, given military power, might not show the same divisions of opinion as the men. I could be so bright about all this, and so distant, because I have now faced a fact—I don’t want to play any of these roles.

  The role I want to play is evermore hidden, not a role at all, but an overwhelming need. Certainly not merely to be a writer, for though I have a deep, natural yearning to have an honorable place in the world, co-essential with what I am in the family, and using intelligences that seem to be lying fallow—I never think of the role of the writer as other than on the printed page, have never met a writer, and somehow never expect to.

  The urge I have is a personal mysticism, somehow to be worked out between external fate and this self I have been fated with, which has a physico-religious-sexual impetus to complete itself in print. As it remains thwarted, I begin to feel more and more caged off from the realm of those lucky ones who are “allowed” to do as they were meant to do, or who will it; an almost palpable wall of glass seems to be between me and them. I droop (it seems to me now) exactly like those specimen animals, rat or primate, whom the experimenter frustrates into depression or frenzy by keeping them from their
natural patterns of life.

  I was and am, I think, a species of human meta physically; since that time I have met too many in or near my pattern for it not to be so. These are the recording ones, who must forever confirm reality by making a new piece of it—verbally, tactilely, visually, musically, kinesthetically—and by doing so, bring themselves into the line of being, so confirming themselves. Any worldly ambitions that accrete are after-the-event even for the most greedy of these people; as artists it is only that other “hunger which will keep them truly alive. When that dies, then the inborn pattern dies with it, exactly as all other processes in life do—exhausted or diseased, or simply played out in a richness that is now done. Or, more likely, in a combination of all of them. Sometimes, in a long life in-the-pattern, there are little dyings and remissions; oddly, it is when this species is physically cut off from its “work” that it feels most cut off from other people. Immersed in such work, such a one doesn’t think about reality; he or she is it. He is being “allowed” to do what he has to. Like those others, or like the luckiest of them.

  Curiously, during all those hibernating sub-catatonic years, when at times I cannot read good prose or poetry from sheer despair at what could be done and I not doing it, when I dive into detective books as into a manhole, reading ever faster and more depressively—all along I know very well who is not allowing me. And that certainly it is not outward circumstance. (Certainly not because I am a woman, or a woman busy with children and without household help; I was never able to take that excuse route, which applies only to the surface things, and not to that inner life which is non-exclusive for both women and men.)

  Psychiatry never occurs to me, and not only because, outwardly, I am performing conventionally. Instinctively I feel that neither the impasse, nor the solution, is entirely to be found in my intrapersonal life, present or past. This pattern I am in is, as far as possible in humans, an impersonal phenomenon, (bound to the psyche of course, but somewhere a-psychic), a religious one if you like, with the godhead residing in the work done. To which the personality of the worker, a feeder, a soma, might indeed be “everything,” yet have to be so without benefit of a clergy—alone.

  … My guess is that the best work still is done alone, safe from a stranger’s invasion of that matrix which feeds it. Safe even perhaps from any amelioration of that madness which can also feed it, out of those insights which a collaboration, however “freeing” to the person, cannot give. A mind which has been freed to work by a process other than the work, is not the same, can never be the same, as the mind which has found its own precarious balance, murderous insight, and life celebration—within the process of itself. Psychiatry or psychoanalysis can no doubt be an experience within that process, but for writers particularly it perilously apes their own self-process. The examined self—when the examiner is the unaided self—is different. Indeed some writers, after the psychological process, though often conventionally kinder, wiser, happier or blander than before, also seem addicted to self in a way that the still-unraveled are not. And of course they have altogether another process to go to. To resort to. Whose standard, however delicately refraining from the older, obvious norms, somewhere generalizes towards these, somewhere pities “madness” and venerates “health.” Yet conversely, has no god-head of its own—except its process. …

  Art is its own form of life. Psychoanalysis is. Consider Blake or Genet, Whitman, Colette, Proust, Shakespeare, Shelley, Sappho, Firbank, or Chekhov, Beckett or Poe, the Brontes or Dickinson, Turgeniev, or Joyce or Dickens—doing both. Or the qualitative changes in the work of those, in our lifetime who have.

  But, by 1951, I have been writing for four years, publishing for three. What has occasioned it? We are back East. In an air I am more at home in. My parents have been dead since 1942—is it that I can now say what I will of our family life, released from both it and from being a child? Is it that my own children are now of school age? That we have a house from which we no longer move? Among friendly people, of like culture, to whose aims I am almost not ashamed to confess mine?

  … Hoards of selfhood have had to find their spillway; I have had to burst or break. The line between the two has been very thinned. For too long, I have been in that state where one knows oneself to be something, someone, other than what appears. (Somebody whom no one else suspects one of being, or recognizes one as being.) This is paranoia then, unless one proves oneself by becoming what one feels one is.

  Until I do write, there is a shame in confessing that I want to, so I don’t confess it. And in a way, this makes a bind which helps keep me from writing, or from the posture of it—which might have helped. Most of all, to begin, I need my own self-approval—which hasn’t come as easy or early or naturally as it does to some. (Yet in the writing schools, whose students are given the posture—of being a writer—on a platter, plus an immediate audience, I question whether they are not often also reduced from the rage of their own instincts, kept from that inner pressure to erupt, which has its own marvels. The attic poet, the attic soul, is often nourished by more than poverty.)

  I have had plenty of approval, writing from the time I was thirteen, and through college. Once out, and into the life-shock, what I lack is my own. Even that modicum of self-approval necessary to begin writing, to put myself in the stance of it, does not come easy and natural. No doubt, that has its roots in family history. But also, I have been so fed on the wondrous dead of literature; it seems lèse majesté to try to align oneself at their side. Yet I can do nothing less. Harboring all this, I am gauche and private; from childhood I have known that privacy is the bourgeois’ enemy.

  (“He’s a very private person,” a fashionable prates at me; they know that in “artistic” circles, this is felt to have worth. Yet an artist’s privacy is an illusion. Rather, he is a fanatic, on whose scrolled flesh the marks are meant to be read. In some nations this may still be done at a respectful distance from his life. In ours, almost the last to have it so, were the Transcendentalists, in their sweet country commune. Shared barriers help. And a whole later generation revered Eliot for having fled us.)

  When the courage to write finally comes, it may be simply because I have lived long enough. Perspective means having lived in a severe state of perception for some time. That I knew I had done; I had things to say; worthy or not, I had to say them. The story I write, almost the first since college, and the first published, is done in my head as I walk the younger child a long hilly mile to nursery school, call for him later—and twice in the routine walk it alone. Often on these solitary parts of the trip, as the story increases in my head, I find myself fighting for breath (though I am strong and have never fainted in my life) barely able to get to the house, where I fling myself down, and recover. Once I leave the child, no longer talking in his process, I am no longer safe. When I am walking with him, he is like an amulet by my side, while that story, which I am making about grandparents unknown to him, can go on.

  I do not know that the name of my breathlessness is panic. On my occasional day-in-town, I begin to have it on the long lines waiting for the bus from New York back to Rockland County—going home, is that it? But once on the bus, thinking the story, I am safe. I fight for breath now in crowds, at parties, I who love parties and am a New York City swimmer in crowds. It begins to happen anywhere. Thought can begin unawares, anywhere; whether it can begin, can be permitted to, is what is at stake. The panic comes closer finally—into the house. But the story is some pages now, I can no longer hold it in my head. Writing, breath is forgotten. Finished, these are my people, me. And slowly finding other stories, I write them. I have my breath now. The process that made the panic allays it.

  … As for “hearing” the sequences of prose at some length before indicting them—(as I have just this moment done with the preceding paragraph)—I have always done that, holding in my head anything from a sentence to a page, just as I would for sections of a poem. More than that amount can often be projected but not as precisely�
�and only in impressionistic patches to be phrased later: figuratives waiting to be found. (And onomatopoetic effects waiting to be struck out.) This makes for a prose that can always be read, often subtly demands that. Sometimes leading dangerously to a rhetoric which, loving its own rhythms, may stray too far from sense, or fall into marvelous accident—but towards a prose that in all its inflections is somehow a voice.

  … I did not intend any of it, in those terms. From the first, when it begins to be said that I have a style, am a “stylist,” I chafe. Doesn’t this mean I have nothing to say comparable to the way I say it—or else that anything I say will all sound the same? I do have in mind an image of sentences I would like to read: long lean branches of them, with buddings here and there or at the end—of fruit, or short stoppages, in sudden calm. And a prose, centrally aural-visual, which would make one hear-see. The “disappearing” style once so vaunted by Maugham and so fondled by the hacks—that seems to me merely a “showing,” with no room or vision left for “telling”—and done in an understatement which never dares overdescribe. The best style seems to me so much the fused sense of all its elements that it cannot be uncompounded—how-you-say-what-you-say, so forever married that no man can put it asunder. Its elements may be anything; the expression may be as elaborate or violent as the meaning is. (No one ever raises the point, if it is as mild as the meaning is.) The word “prose” itself is what should all but disappear in the mind as one reads; just as in poetry, one accepts the marriage of idea and word, but does not too dividingly congratulate. The marriage of meaning and manner is then its own lawful issue, a new object or presence, made accessible. What words make at their best is an open fortress of meaning.