Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  So, in my late thirties, I began at last seriously to write—that is, as steadily as I could in time and vision, on both the hidden and the evident in the life I saw. And almost unwarily, had seen. Like many beginners, in the first work I set about understanding a family—mine, in absentia—theirs, picking my way carefully through injustices collected and just awards on both sides, making my analytic peace with them. The difference from therapy being, that each time I dove into the matrix, I retrieved a shape—a story, true—and in it a shape beyond its shape. Then suddenly, after less than a dozen such close-to-autobiographical stories, their process is over; I want out, to the wider world.

  In other words, I have my health now. That long half-schizophrenia in which I am other than I seem, is over, the pane of glass gone, in a regeneration that seems to me magical; years later, when in the novella Extreme Magic I write in its concluding paragraphs, “For extreme cases there is sometimes extreme magic,” I will be amazed to have one commentator suggest that I have perhaps venally tried to impose a “happy” ending. What I have done is to stretch a dark story toward the light which I now know can occur in life.

  When my first out-of-the-family, “non-autobiographical” story appears—“In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks,” my friend and monitor, Julian Muller, who had become so by having discovered the stories and helped bring them to publication, calls to ask: had I ever known the people in the story?

  “No, just bits and pieces of various people. No one person like any of them.”

  “Congratulations, you’ve just written your second novel!”

  There was one remote family reference: my mother, in no way connected to the boy’s mother as far as I could see, had, during a postpartum breakdown after my brother’s birth, been for some months during my sixth year in a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. Which name, always said hushed, and of a place where I never was taken, had always sounded doomfully, linked with those recesses we keep, or in which we are kept. Once written about, it will no longer have that sound. As, once having set down the family stories, I will find that those incidents the mind had held in escrow until then, those depths that it had shaken me to recall, had now lost their power and even their configuration. But I will write more of mothers and daughters, and quite naturally, as men, in those configurations the world and the family pushes them toward, have written much of fathers and sons.

  A second non-family story, In The Absence of Angels (later, at the suggestion of my editor, John Woodburn, the title of a first collection), Muller doesn’t like at all, viewing it as a trend I ought to stay away from—it is political. It was he who had remarked, on seeing my first unpublished stories, that since they were of “a certain maturity,” it was surprising not only that I was comparatively young but also that I had no prior publishing history—he had expected to hear that I had “come up through the little reviews.”

  In some ways, though I still didn’t much read these, I was now belatedly going through the same history as some of those who had, or who had written for them.

  IN 1946–48, the American Labor Party, in and around that small river town, twenty-odd miles north of New York on the left bank of the Hudson, to which we had just moved, was almost certainly all but identical with a group who, it was later to be borne in on me, must have been a Communist cell. They were also my neighbors, all of us in a post-war euphoria, in this gentle idyll of a country still only half commuter, its legend-heavy corners filled with craftsmen who had begun arriving in the ’20s, to live perhaps in the loosely collective housing of men like Maxwell Anderson, who financed dwellings for his friends, and Henry Varnum Poor, who built them, or in rentable enclaves, such as the stone cottages of Mary Mowbray Clarke, a sculptor’s widow who with him had been involved in that historical Armory Show which had severed old painting from new. New couples arrived every day, from the city, from the war, ready for the dreams which such a countryside engenders—the farm-dream, the art-dream, the ecological one (a word heard early there). “Way of Life” for some meant “Proselyte it,” for others “This is our Preserve.” Everybody joined in dottily, enthusiastically, in the development of himself and his neighbor; it was a harmlessly effervescent way to live. Under the headlines, somewhere, people are living it now.

  In our first year in Rockland, “the county” as it calls itself, with housing still war-tight, we rent an eighteen-room American Gothic whose one wing we sub-tenant amateurishly. First to a nice young man—we chat of Howards End at first interview—whose wife however, a former model for Valentina, goes out of the house only once in six months after the birth of the baby, and then in Charles Addams black, and is forever complaining of the old house’s woes and our invisible landlord. Calling from the top of the stairs “Robber barons shall not steal my baby’s gold!” she refuses, in sub-Englishy accents, our offer to let her husband tend to his furnace, during zero weather, via our inner cellar stairs instead of their outer one. “Naow, naow that would be squatterstown indeed!” Somewhat pitifully, she describes to us how her mother when ill, is carried up and downstairs by her father. Finally, after further complaints we cannot solve, she leaves us, apostrophizing “Robert, call father; father will send the Cadillac for us from Connecticut!”—which he does. In some relief, we take in a nicely nondescript couple brought to us by an American Labor Party acquaintance down the block, the woman plump, homey and very outgoing, the man shabby-dour under her umbrella of “just folks.” Shortly he will be notorious.

  A pair named Carpenter, they give as employment reference a muttered “World News Corp.” or some such, which as once-bitten landlords we never check. Shortly after they are in, mail under the name of Zimmerman starts coming to them in our box, since though asked to, they have put up none of their own. (Later, I will understand that in an honest effort to annul the sense of property, they let the practice of sharing it slip vaguely into the art of sharing other people’s.) Though I sort and hand over the mail, the matter of the two names is never mentioned—perhaps they know I have voted or will vote for Henry Wallace, and assume the rest (in fact Henry and I at this point are no doubt in the same state of guilt by association). All I assume is that they have translated their name. Settled in, they invite us for coffee; I gravitate at once to the books, finding them to be almost entirely about Russia, evoking no comment from me, though Mrs. C. suddenly volunteers that her husband had worked for a newspaper in the southern town from which they had just come. I ask, which one? “Which town?” she says. “No, which newspaper?” Possibly I was not picking up hints, passwords I should have. Her answer does give me pause. “I forget.”

  From there it isn’t hard to notice that a weekly meeting of some sort does go on behind our common wall, and that Mr. C, whose silences Mrs. C. ascribes to hemorrhoids, commutes to the city by night bus, at what may well be newspaper hours: finally I deduce to my husband, “They’re Communists, and I bet he’s with The Daily Worker.” (He was in fact, as the newspapers broke later, their “librarian”—and the David Carpenter who reputedly made the microfilm for Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin.) Although he and his wife never appear at those vaguely open, Saturday-night drink-and-dance parties given by one or the other members of that group we sometimes meet going up our steps.

  Though most of the various people who did go to these gatherings may have been close to the inner workings of the Party, they were certainly not its philosophes. Small-business people, one generation away from the peddler East Side, middlewesterners emigrated from pa’s hatstore in Oshkosh to Greenwich Village and then “up to the county” (one of these will turn out to be a government spy), couples who had met at the Art Students League, labor organizers and their rich wives, they were breezily different from the other young “New York college people,” professionals or not, who had brought their babies and their liberal opinions to the county also, now found themselves in the then rockbound political home-ground of Hamilton—“Ham”—Fish, and democratically meant to do something about it. One ve
ry brawny little man—call him Johnny, a Slav, Hungarian perhaps, or Pole, with one of those felted over, neutered names which are as recognizable as an alias and as forgettable, has had “real” experience in the mines or the steel-works, which others of the group spoke of with respect; though he too rarely appears at parties, he and his younger wife, who has organized a nursery school, often have people in, in what elsewhere is more simply the suburban or Rockland County way of dropping-in, of those years. One’s house, if one liked it that way, or was socially eager, or came from the lonely years I had, could be a constantly receiving sieve.

  Several times, I am brought to these parties by a stubbornly gentle Canadian-born woman who is to become a lifelong friend; whatever her interest in the Party, its roots are a passionate kindliness toward people and against the ills they are subject to and subjected to (she never much bothers with the distinction), which perhaps prefigures the artist she is to become. One night, when I happen to tag along to Johnny’s, we find there a harried couple and their children, excitedly passing through from somewhere; though I am on the outer fringe and we don’t speak, their air of being on the run stays with me; years later, I recognize the man’s picture, as one of the five, (or was it six or twelve), leaders of the Party who were fugitive from government trial. If one recalls that no one at the time has ever yet spoken a word to me about the Party, that at best I am known to them as involved in the fight to get the local YMCA to open its pool to Negro children, it brings back, as their insistence on capitalizing Negro does, the whole loose folk air of their politics, in which to hum “Joe Hill,” or to join in when somebody guitars the “Landlord, Landlo-oord” song (the girl who sings it, I am told, is the actor Will Geer’s wife and “Mother Bloor’s” niece, but I don’t know who the Communist leader Mother Bloor is), sufficiently stirs up the collective Saturday-night sympathies. And to be classified a “good guy is enough to allow you to be there, even among surely deeper and darker political realities, and conspiracies. … It never occurs to me that aside from my vaguely liberal opinions, what makes me interesting to them is that I am a writer. And perhaps capturable.

  Intellectually they dismay me; if there is a secret dialectic they follow, it is certainly not one I can join. (I will still have to learn that I am incapable of joining any one group.) They are simple people, often of an endearing friendliness raggedly educated, wistfully ready to believe that group thinking will be high thinking. What attracts me most to them is their plain living, or their pleb experiences of it. In their conversation, even a sophomore’s logic, which at least acknowledges that certain traditional truth-questionings have been argued before in the world’s history, is unknown to them.

  “Facts” they trust far more than I do, to the point of seeing nothing false in a misuse of these. Someone anonymously sends me the weekly National Guardian, which indeed has a style—soup-kitchen revolutionary. In the last article I ever read there, the narrator, leaving a certain part of Czechoslovakia by passenger-boat, is given a dock-side sendoff by crowds of happy peasants handing him flowers, saying, “Give our love to Henry Wallace.” But that part of Bohemia has no seacoast! I confide as much to my friend, but without result; she has a saint’s need to see good.

  I have a writer’s need of it, and some ability to—but a disdain of absolutes. Shortly it must have become clearer that I was not going to settle for this one. At the last party I go to, as I sit on the arm of a chair, probably looking my disaffection, a woman who knows I have published in The New Yorker comes up to me. “Looky here, Richard Rovere is coming; just you wait.” (He didn’t.) Often, others too drop the names of philosophes they “know” (no one yet mentions Party) and so think will be attractive to me, all with the disarming simplicity of work errants preparing the way for somebody they judge more fit to meet their royalty than they.

  By this time, even if I were to meet the more august Communist thinkers—in New England perhaps, or France—it would make no difference—now that I have met this lower echelon. Whose argument now worries me far less than two other considerations: that too many of their members seem to want the coterie as much or even more than the goal—or else have anti-establishment hostilities, or procravings, which suspectly have very little to do with Utopias, or with political gains for us all. In the pursuit of any serious discipline: revolutionary, scientific, artistic, religious, even military, I am asking myself—how far ought the aim of camaraderie to go? Or the practice of it? And how purist is one to be in weighing those other archetypal motives which underlie the reddest flush of human devotion? (A few years on, at a World Federalist Saturday night, to which the women always bring fine foods, and where the company is chockablock with “media” people who are maybe easier on the ear—though let more years pass and many of the same will be heavy Unitarian—when my friends Joe and Bob, an editor of Life and a writer for The New Yorker, ask me why I don’t join—don’t I want world union, of course I do!—I will search these same profundities before I answer, “Your casseroles are too good.”)

  … Years later, when here and there I will finally meet those by now documented “former” Party bigwigs of the literary world, it will seem to me that their former-to-present lives, and their present appearances, shine out to me the better for having known their prototypes in that other lower echelon. All have become what every writer becomes if he and she lives long enough, and publishes widely enough—establishment. Some—and my prejudice is that these are almost always those who live closest to the nerve of art—still live lives of passionate views and statement, whatever their practice is. Others have been tamed to the power of the establishment. Plain living or not, high thinking or not, they have to me that definable air, meaner than hoped for, of men and women who once sought the good of others, and now, softly, have found it for themselves.

  There exists a sad, almost schoolgirlish essay—its antecedents a combination of “The Woman Who Sees” (a column in The Evening Sun when I was a child), the “Editor’s Easy Chair” columns in our Civil War Harper’s, and all the Atlantic Monthly essay contests I never entered, and its stance come down to me from all those minor elegists from Izaak Walton to Cowper, those diarists from Chateaubriand to Amiel to Rousseau, who had together taught me the humble obligation to meditate and observe—which was written in that last, valuable time before I knew for sure I had “views.”

  … Views I will be bound to propagate because, as a writer’s, are they not public property?—and to promulgate because people will listen to them. All this to be done of course, in the assumption that these views are “right,” and with the attitude that if a writer does this, he or she won’t have to do anything else. I am to find this attitude—in which, to be verbally engage is enough—intolerable as a private person. I will also find that on the barricades, even on such foot-high stiles as I venture, the habit of meditation creates a gap of its own. I would always leap back to the meditation … or forward, as I sometimes judged it … As a writer always will. …

  It costs ten cents (I said) to ride the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument; you can walk up the 898 steps and 50 landings for free. The Saturday in early September on which my husband and I, our fourteen-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, ended there a tour which had included various monuments and divers graves, was a perfect picture-postcard day. As the four of us stood on the hill overlooking the city, with the main points of the compass accurately pinned to earth for us—to the north the White House, to the east the Capitol, to the south the Jefferson Memorial, and nearest us, to the west, separated only by the long dark bar of its reflecting pool, the Lincoln Memorial—the minute, aerial photograph perfection of the scene only added to my depression. I recoil from the prearranged educational experience, on the grounds that anything of real value is usually acquired accidentally, at least by me. At such times, my view of history is dark, my separation from the crowd neurotically deep; as I stroll past the incised marble, the preserved trundle-bed. I keep up a constant, sub rosa collo
quy with the dead, in which only they and I know much less honorable they were, how much less honored they are, than the ladies’ associations and the restorers would make them out to be. Only they and I know how rude, philistine, and essentially inconclusive it is to be alive at all.

  Some one should have informed the talented retoucher behind the scenes that too much harmony between column and cloud makes the dangerous analogue between the two all the clearer. I looked guiltily at my children, standing next to me in the long line of people encircling the base of the monument, waiting their turn at the elevator. Had it been right for me to indorse for them this cardboard conception of “our nation’s capitol?” Ought I not remind my daughter that the real officialdom, out of sight or out of town, petty as its army of civil servants, immutable as its McCarthy, nervous as the hop-head journalese of its dateline, had little in common with the symbolism of the obelisk that rose in our center? Wasn’t it my duty to take her and my son (who had once asked, in our own northern town ‘Why do Negroes have to live in such untidy houses?’) to places not too far from the Lincoln Memorial and say “Here they are—the famous slums of Washington”?

  I turned away from the eternally prodding, parental dilemma. To the right of us, a farmer out of Virginia or Maryland, a neat-featured, evenly browned man with pomatum slicked along the one cowlick that shot forward from his cropped head was chivvying his wife on the ability to walk up, instead of waiting for the ride. The wife, more than buxom, but still with a look of the Saturday-night belle about her, smiled, droopy-lidded, into the sun and made no move. A boy and girl of about the ages of our children squirmed restlessly around her.