Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Claire: (as she sits down) “What’ya know! Maybe I should a gotten beaver after all!” (She looks carefully around the car, almost all of whose occupants are seated now, before she speaks in a low voice: “Honestly, the real black Ones I don’t mind. But those pale intellectual-looking ones—don’t they give you the creeps?”

  Selma (nodding) “They say you can always tell by the nails, though.”

  As the story ends, Claire is thanking God for the Eighth Avenue subway. “On the Seventh, you never get a seat.” New Yorkers of those days will remember that the Eighth Avenue train ended in environs wholly white.

  Claire: “Incidentally—what’s the matter your reaction time? I practically had to push you across the car. I told you—all you got to do is stand in front of a couple of them. Hun’ twenty-fifth, practically always. But the next one for sure. Hun’ forty-fifth, they gotta get out.”

  In “Hun’ Forty-Fifth” I have dug up an even hotter potato. The New Yorker tells me that the piece will evoke more controversy. And this time, is not strong enough to sustain it. Downheartedly, I agree. Jewish conversation is stuffed to the gills with what I had described, but reality is no excuse. I hadn’t intended anything on a grander scale. I should have. In that moment I learned this. Oughtn’t a writer know better the importance of what he was saying? And know it first? “Old Stock” was a story. Out of pure experience. “Hun’ Forty-Fifth” was only a rebuttal. Of a professional experience. In light reportage. On a killer subject.

  Still, what the piece says has a right to be said. No matter how? Or if “the wrong people” get ahold of it—which is why Jews are always saying we should close ranks?

  I have a sudden itch to know what will happen if the right people get ahold of it. I’ll send it to one Jewish periodical, then put it away.

  They reply swiftly that the subject is not within their scope. Maybe not.

  Or not yet within mine.

  By now I know that whether you write well or ill, you will never write truthfully about any ethnic group and please it; in humanizing it, how can you go on capitalising it? Yet, if I couldn’t stand with my own, what was I? A creature who, when the world cried “Chicken!” or “Traitor!” cried art? Until I could resolve that workably enough (which meant enough so that I could go on working) I often thought so.

  The work was the answer.

  … People stand together. Art stands with them, in their humanity. But art itself is not a standing together. I will have to learn that over and over.

  As for “Hun’ Forty-Fifth,” by now it’s a period piece. Nowadays on the subway, they may only have to get out somewhere around Riverdale.

  IN THE MID-1950s Philip Horton of The Reporter, overhearing me talk of a year spent working at Macy’s as anything from comparison-shopper-for-stocking-stretchers to head-of-stock-in-the-hat-department, asks me to “do a piece for us” on it. The magazine phrase already holds much that I fear. I haven’t the sociological stance for either the somber, “in-depth” approach of the serious journals, or the newer, light jazziness that is now growing on our commentators, perhaps from their sense that the “superficiality of our time” ought to be treated in its own rhythms. I had no “approach” and didn’t want one. … It is the hazard of all who commentate. And a stylish death for many writers. … Yet I am tempted. In spite of a hated year at that store, spent sunk in the misery of the college-graduate who is turned out, en grande tenue metaphysically, into a rough, cheap business, I had had only a smart worm’s view of the place. But more, ever since my fellowship year in England, I envy the serene mobility of writer-friends there, where writers as yet did not much teach for a living (or come here to, as they do now) but while working for the BBC perhaps, saw themselves as honorably able to rove anywhere in printed space. “Oh, I was only a Macy underdog,” I joke. “You’d have to get me to their President.” Next thing I know, I have an appointment with a vice-president; Horton has been told that my lack of reputation as a journalist proscribes anybody higher.

  Over a three-hour lunch with him—what fun to come in from the country and the children’s lunch to dawdle in the East Fifties like a real reporter!—we discuss this highly intelligent man’s—intelligence. He is an art-hungerer, for one thing. As one of the earliest to use good painters like Shahn in advertising, he is shortly to leave Macy’s for television, but between he and me and his analysis, we know that he isn’t going to be happier, trapped as he still will be in all the Byronic despairs of moneymaking.

  … This was my first encounter, in the business world, with what I shall call the phenomenon: Art Hunger As Expressed To Artists. I will learn to meet it anywhere, in all versions: in the college-president who ignores a celebrated banker and possible trustee whom I have helpfully seated on his right, in order to quote poetry to a celebrated poet on his left. In the former novelist, now a moviewriter, who tells me he lives and works abroad, not because he both loves his comforts and can’t bear the company of writers who write, but so as “to protect his real and future work from the hurly-burly of American literary life.” In all cocktailers who come up to you with the shy disclaimer “I’m only a successful family person”—generally female, and all from “A trade rather like yours”—generally male. The message is always the same. They had and have the same talent as yours, and the same art-hungers, but unfortunately “can’t spend the time for it”; they have plumped for reality. …

  So I tremulously bring out the phrase “will-to-fail”—not a bad effort in these encounters. Maybe money-making is his will-to-fail at art? And get my answer. “But I’m even a failure at failure.”

  For a second meeting, he invites me to dinner with Dr. Louis Finkelstein, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary—for me another heady glimpse at where journalism can get without ’arf trying—but I don’t get anywhere on Macy’s.

  Next Horton suggests a piece on Yaddo where I am going for the first time. I say no, but while there, in the first days of getting used to it and back to the novel, I write what I think is an animadversion against current theories of “Education,” but is actually a celebration of mine, and my lucky similarity of background to that of most good writers—attendance at a “good” but horrible intermediary school.

  Since then, I have been asked to speak at its graduation. If I do, one more dream of grandeur will have lost its savor—all the audience I would require are gone. But I have long since written the speech.

  I called the piece “Reeling, Writhing—and Grouping.” Here is part of what it said.

  An all-girl public high school in New York City, Hunter was enterable only by competitive examination, and was therefore known to the rest of the city (as Townsend Harris was for the boys) as a “school for grinds,” an epithet not undeserved when one considers the hours of attendance—nine to five—and the curriculum; all required, which consisted of four years each of Latin, math, history, English, oral English, three years of another language (a heady choice here, and the only one—French or German), and a year each of biology and physics, these latter a fairly new departure and considered somewhat dilettante, but still required. In addition we had two hours a week of physical education, this consisting of the “Simon Says DO THIS!” type of callisthenic performed, in winter, in a gym whose cellar gloom prepared us admirably for the speakeasies of our salad days, and accomplished in spring in the paved school yard under the eyes of the jeering populace, by which latter experience we almost immediately achieved that “group identification” which is such a premeditated part of today’s schooling.

  We did not covet this, but we had it all right. It was furthered by our costume—middy, tie, sneaks, heavy serge bloomers whose elastic must not be pushed above the knee, and black cotton stockings—all of which, except for the middies which we wore from home, were to be kept in our lockers like tiaras and under no circumstances to be taken home for washing during the term, lest we forget them and thus have too natural an excuse from our fifty minutes of eupepsia. It is not surprising, theref
ore, that the only other course that I can recall as being in any way connected with our personalities, with us—a stray weekly hour of hygiene—consisted almost entirely of instructions to wash. For the rest, I don’t remember the school’s ever being interested in our psyches or our future lives, or worrying about us as people in any self-consciously pedagogical way. And in the light of that, although I can still see my old school in all the Dickensian murk that should properly surround it, I can also see it as a really remarkable example, when you come to think of it, of what might be called “nondirective group alignment” or possibly “formation of student nuclei by closed-door method of group orientation.”

  Miss Webster, the principal, was one of those deceptively fragile steel-in-lace little old ladies for whom one would cast Helen Hayes if one could do so without the char-rm; she actually did wear, in 1928, high whalebone-cum-lace collars, occasionally embellished with an amethyst “drop” and lace halfmitts to match. She was often to be seen on the crosstown bus in the morning, in poke bonnet or toque, and rustling skirts that just cleared the floor, carrying a wicker basket which must have contained lunch but which I thought of as more likely to contain lettres de cachet in a gracefully sinister eighteenth-century way. Despite the crowding in the bus, a deferential space always surrounded her, and she never greeted us, nor did we want her to. Her very presence, a vinegar that might just be poison, had the effect of welding us together in a group as powerfully protective (and mayhap as valuable and healthy to persons of our age then) as any I know. Under her glance we knew that we were canaille, but we knew also without question that we belonged to a very special canaille, one marked by terrible hazard but angry promise—the young.

  A rabble we might be, but were all back there together. We would as soon have called her Louisa to her face as have tickled the Pope in the ribs, but behind her back we called her Lulu. She herself never learned our names, but addressed us by category only, in that “old New York” accent which must be extinct now, whose diphthongs resembled garage Brooklynese being spoken by a highly cultivated rabbit. When we were caught singly at some malpractice—and almost everything was one—we were “Girl!”—the sound of the “ir” being most akin to the French sound in “deuil”—making it “Geuil-l!” When we were caught together, it was “Geuills!” She also had a system of cards to be attached to our records for punishment or reward, these done up in the school colors, lavender and white, lavender for grace, white for disgrace. “Moral turpitude” was a phrase that appeared often on the white cards for infringements so tiny that I would weep now for their innocence if I could only remember them—but since almost all of us were Whites, we had an identity here too. Clubs were not forbidden but not greatly encouraged—they came out shyly in out-of-the-way corners in the spring like the arbutus that was the badge of the poetry club—and died of homework (three hours was about minimum) in the fall. The senior class ahead of us once dared to ask for a dance, and was advised that half the class might dress as boys and take the other half. Boys were otherwise never mentioned; Miss Webster would of course have been happiest in a world where the entire human race, one large group of solid lavender, might stand to attention at the sound of “Geuil-ls!” Nowadays the schools, for all their announced intention of turning out “citizens of the community,” foolishly arrange things so pleasantly that only a really degenerate nongrouper wants to leave school to be one. Miss Webster did it otherwise—with the back of her hand. Whatever the world might be, it was not Hunter, and we wanted to get there as quickly as possible. As for the teachers, they were excellent—at least at the now disreputable craft of forcing a large amount of substantive knowledge into our heads. Neither their psyches nor ours ever entered the situation. Even if either of us had known we had them, the schedule would not have allowed it. There were no discussions, debates, conferences; in class we declaimed, recited, or wrote, but never expressed opinions of our own, having none.

  When I went to college and made friends among the girls from “progressive” schools, I admired them exceedingly for two reasons. Whereas we had feared our teachers as our masters, they had only tolerated theirs as their servants; and they had marvelously numerous opinions, round and hard as bullets, which they discharged with the frequency and accuracy of Gatlings. I distinctly remembered my sensations when I first realized I had made a judgment of my own; I felt as if I had grown an antler between my ears, and I fondled it for days before I unveiled it.

  “Reeling and Writhing,” then, is my first piece of published journalism, and the beginning of a pleasant, intermittent relationship with The Reporter, during which Horton lighthandedly lets me do as I wish, which more often means that I write something and then submit it. Often, when I ask if he would be interested in a subject, I already have the article in the house.

  … Looking back on the half-dozen or so of them, I see how quickly the habit of the column, like that of the lectern, can also instill the habit of knowing. What the columnist must always be exceptionally wary of, is his own hates—those black beasts which may in the end collar-train him. The special malice of the sometime essayist, those light jabbings from the bleachers of another preoccupation—how thin they can grow, in comparison with the tumid rise of the real satirist, whose heart, gut, and growl are down there in the pit! A writer must be measured by how much he risks—but to this must be added the different kinds of risks there are. The power of the daily print, or the weekly or the monthly, may be lethal, but is less rarely interested in the universal. A writer who tells himself this when the reviews come out, may as a contributor forget it. Or become rather too fond of the jousting game. Or dry up altogether into the sweet ephemeral. Yet there hasn’t been a time in my writing life when I haven’t wanted some taste of all of it The Reporter gave me scope. Formulating my thoughts, I found them. I was never asked to write down to anyone. My first bookpiece was on a male writer; I was never confined to the “women’s department” of literature. Therefore I could write of Colette, or review Sybil Bedford, without feeling that I was bowing to such a policy. (In 1963 when the Times asked me to do a piece on Janet Frame—a writer who interested me—I told them I could not review a book by a woman for them, until more men reviewed books by women in their pages, and more women reviewed books by men. In these matters The Reporter did resemble The News Statesman and other British weeklies to which it was often compared.)

  In the end, though, I stopped writing for it before it stopped, doing a last piece early in 1966. Partly I did so because of its politics on the Vietnam war; I couldn’t see appearing even in the Views-and-Reviews back section of a magazine saying what it was “saying on the editorial front ones—which now had that rank flavor of the libertarian gone authoritarian. But I was also beginning to feel what I had almost begun to know at The New Yorker. When you write under the likelihood that a magazine will take your work, you will not be able to prevent taking your tone from it. No publication can avoid this, but it makes for stronger magazines than it does writers. Either you will write too much like them, or too much like yourself. In time, I would get sick of the gently roving stance of the reporter scanning the horizon for topics to be topical about. It was training my eye.

  Now THAT writing has become my life-habit, the guilt always attached to the role of observer has finally been annulled or numbed by the realization that this is what I am here for. Yet I know that I am now also doomed to observe that role the more. “The heart doomed to watch itself feel is not less worthy,” the hero of False Entry and I say, finally accepting our brand of the consciousness thrust upon us all—“this lambent perpetual in the skull, this responsible, ticktock, weeping flame.”

  During the years I am writing such things, I have also begun to teach. Partly from vanity—my own college, where as an undergraduate I had so often been in hot water, never really approved of, and where as an unknown, I have been turned down for an assistanceship some years before—now invites me to. But partly also because from the first, writing has begun earn
ing me good money, and I am already turning a thoughtful gaze on that relationship.

  Writing to me is still a privilege, and always will be. What I had since childhood been spiritually forced to do, I have finally—after some thirty years, found myself capable of doing. My relief and gratitude has been enormous enough. And now I am getting paid, as well. What I basically love to do, and must—sometimes a scourge but always my salvation—is also capable of paying for my physical life or supporting it also along many unrelated paths of appetite. How to keep the two paths separate?

  I am now in danger of becoming a “professional,” if I want to. Which means in part, learning to write not necessarily what other people want you to, but when. I had long since learned that I couldn’t write to any order except, now and then moved along in an inexplicable rhythm, to a sudden command of my own, from below. Even when I contracted to do an article, essay, or review on a subject absolutely of my own choosing, as soon as said, a fell weight descended. Somehow, what I had done was to cede to someone else that authority which should have remained mine. Whatever I would write under such circumstances could no longer be said to have come from the marrowbone of myself.

  As for my stories themselves, though they might never marry money, by now I know that if I will be just a bit more … suggestible, they might well go where more money is.

  Nobody much asks me to. Or to become a fan dancer, which I have sometimes thought of as a properly symbiotic arrangement for the support of verbal art. Or to set me up either as an out-of-towner’s mistress, or the front for a Mafia bar. (Mornings free.)

  Teaching, however, keeps being offered. I always find it hard to turn down any new experience. And teaching—which is as direct an application to vanity as the possibility of parenthood—is also one of the lesser public roles offered a writer.

  So, in order to remain an amateur, I become a professor. And soon begin to examine the role—for a writer—of that.