Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  During a year when I commute once a week to Boston to teach, I have time to reflect on the difference between “being” a writer, and “doing” it. Here are five Monday nights from a journal:

  Monday, the 1st

  Never trust the private journal of a writer; give his confidence your sympathy and before you know it you may be standing in the middle of what is merely another work of art. No, these Monday nights here, after talking the stars into the skies with students, I want the fraternity of some dear colleague whose customary vehicle is not words—and as usual, I find myself with a painter, a habit since the age of thirteen, when, not daring to steal from the public library, I copied out great passages from the notebooks of Robert Henri. What a period piece we are back there, he and I—and perhaps now! For, remind myself as I will, I never buy that book, not fearing to find it less good, but mourning the decline of both situation and passion—in which a book is for stealing. Tonight, howsomever got, I have the journal of Delacroix, along with coffeepot, pound of coffee and immersion heater—all of which gear the university has so far overlooked my keeping on week-to-week in the room in the faculty lodge where they quarter me on these visits. Usually they give me the same room; at least the picture on the wall is the same—an original Eilshemius—and that’s certainly my gear in the bottom of the closet, tucked back of the beautiful sliding door that doesn’t slide. Elegant as the lodge is, it is motel-style, a long wing of rooms budded on one another—open the door of any, and pop, one is sucked into the beatific light of that roving public cell, the ultimate cellule of alone. Someday the room won’t be the same—I’ll know by the picture—but what if my gear is still there? For that terrible philosophic abyss, I hope to be ready. These solipsistic nights, another personality takes over, dropped on my head like a sack, the minute I enter. Suspended here, between the day’s process of being a writer to all those young faces, and the faraway humbler apparatus of doing it at home in New York, I examine these alternatives in the muttering underhand of conscience. And I don’t leave Delacroix here; I keep him in my bag.

  Monday, the 2nd

  Comments on the pitfalls and sublimes of art are not what I read him for these days, although his can shake one in those depths of gratitude always waiting for the kindred “ahoy” across the waters. “Style can result only from great research, and the fine brushing has got to stop when the touch is going well. I must try to see the big gouaches by Correggio at the Museum. I believe they were done with very small touches.” It’s the note of authority, underlaid with doubt, that one loves and shivers to. And these days I hunt it most where he scolds and scares himself for being in or out of his society. “I believe that seeing … people from time to time is not such a danger to work and the progress of the mind as it is claimed to be by many pretended artists; to consort with them is certainly more dangerous. … I must return to solitude. … How is one to retain one’s enthusiasm about anything when one is at all times at the mercy of other people, and when one has constant need of their society?”

  “Society” may have enlarged since his day, but the ins and outs of it for the artist are always much the same, no matter how stated. For Mann—the artist yearned to be loved by the bourgeois for those very differences that must be flaunted but made it impossible; to this he added that guilt, now almost traditional, of those who neglect “life” in order to record it. Whereas it seems to me that an artist may be bourgeois or revolutionary—the in-ness or outness merely shifts ground—and recording may be his treasure, not his burden. And each man, from ditch-digger to clerk, stands aside for some part of his day, from what each has agreed to call “life.”

  What I am rightly afraid of is those seductions—social, financial, even intellectual—which persuade me to speak like a writer, act like a writer, teach like a writer, even write like a writer, at the very moment when I am not being one. Once the public personality begins, however humbly—I think of it as a paper costume inside which one squirms like a child, mindful that rain melts, paper tears, but still rather proud of the accordion pleats on one’s forehead—the problem is how to go about one’s real business, assuming one knows what that is. Lately, I’ve concluded that there’s less gap than one would think, between those who clench up on some island, and those who antick the public halls—each is a posture, and the expense of spirit, to say nothing of ego, is the shame. Here in America many still envy the European artist, whose role in society appears more fixed, and it is certainly true that under our curious freedom, where class roles are not admitted, one no sooner strikes a match than an attitude flames. Perhaps it’s merely easier in one’s own country to see how people play the fool. But surely, of all our artists, our writers seem least able to move without a sociological creaking. After all, America does have so much paper.

  Monday, the 3rd

  “Neither the ardent promises of your best friends, nor the offers of service by the powerful ought to make you believe that there is anything in what they say, as to results.”

  If ever I hanker after a coterie I’ve only to imagine how it would have been to have been born into one—a Southerner say, or a trueblue baby daughter of the Little Aorta Review. That way one might manage it, the way one bears up to one’s nose. Now and then one misses the support, of course, as of any uniform. But my thoughts no sooner go into committee than they want out again, like improperly trained dogs. Is it an oddity that those who don’t scorn the influence cabals often look down on those who teach? Much needless worry has been expended over the possible destruction of writers by teaching. If a man is sucked into scholasticism, or silenced, it seems more likely that his stamina for that aloneness which should be part of his gifts has never been strong. Teaching is hard. But every man spends part of his life-energy away from his most personal work. Fashionably considered, the university is not a part of going “life” at all, as against the pursuit of homosexuality in Algiers, or strong drink in Connecticut. But I find it impossible to exclude from at least tentative reality any place where so many people are.

  Nothing’s been said on what the university can do for the writer, apart from boarding him. It should never be his atelier—that sort of thing practiced anywhere, at parties or on podiums, gets into the work well beyond its due. What he represents is a unique approach to literature—the artist’s—and this is all he should teach. He can teach that there are no permanent rules, else literature would die, that the best work abides by the “form” only enough to leave it, that one observes the inner discipline of a book, watches how its ideas dance within the framework of its times. He is careful to lean lightly, if at all, on the personal life of the author, and in the presence of good or great work he never forgets to elaborate on the wonder of it—the best place to be lavish with detail.

  At first, it’s tough to teach without the convenience of the small arbitraries; later, the very arbitrariness of the attitude itself stiffens the spine. The risks to the republic are obvious, which may be why even the braver universities prefer to keep only one of him at a time; the danger to him is that he may act like a poet instead of being one, which can happen anywhere.

  Meanwhile, even in a sloppy age some of the young are severe enough to be made happy in the sight of a discipline going on somewhere, even if the pursuit of it is so strait that the instructor himself is often confused. In their society, and sometimes with colleagues, I nearly find out what I think, and that, aside from the human attraction of food, wine and sympathy, is what I ask of society. A university is a place where the currents of the intangible flow continuously, and are paid consistent honor. I must have such a contact in my life somewhere. I’ll do the rest, on paper.

  Monday, the 4th (for Delacroix a Monday, too, Sept. 13, 1852)

  “Look here! Fool that you are, you get a sore throat from discussing with idiots, you go arguing with silliness in petticoats for a whole evening, and you do that about God, about the justice of this world, about good and evil, and on progress.”

  As a petticoa
t myself, I note that too much of the podium turns a writer of our sex into either a diseuse or a scold—what it makes of the men is another story. As for parties, everybody knows about them, yet we can none of us get rid of a naive hope that Parnassus is in session somewhere, perhaps there. And so it is, often with the non-performing wives to serve at the stewpots. Ergo Mrs. Coo and Mrs. Graze, whom I met there last evening.

  I found Mrs. Graze attending the statuspot. As the wife of a critic, she resembles those doctors’ wives who are all but able to practice medicine themselves. Give her a push, and she is off. In one sentence she found Fitzgerald lightweight, mildly approved of Mr. Angus Wilson as a man who had entertained her, demolished Henry James as a family enemy, and was able to settle any contemporary by bringing in Tolstoi. Authors met in the flesh infuriate her. Secretly, she feels that an author loses caste by being met so—surely if he were anybody he would not be at the same party with Mr. and Mrs. Graze. But as soon as met, it is her custom to dig like a trufflehound to find out whom he knows. Woe betide him if he admits to acquaintance with any of her more eminent name-drops. Soon as he leaves the conversation, she hisses after him’: “Snob!”

  Mrs. Coo, usually younger, attends the malice-pot, with a zombie unawareness of why she wants me in the broth, although I know; at her age I was a nonperformer myself, luckily without entrée to such parties. She and her editor-mate have just made their home headquarters for a new magazine; the wastepaper problem is already such that now and then a tiny Coo is temporarily lost. “You have a book coming out too, haven’t you?” she says. I nod, the hair meanwhile rising on my pelt. Her chin lifts like a gourmet’s: I see just what roils behind her skinny, post-Radcliffe eye. “Is it goo-ood?” she says.

  But one should never be surprised by their arrogance; one forgets that they have always before them what looks to them like the spectacle of ours. I suppose les artistes picnic best backstage in house slippers, where, in the company of only the company, there’s some chance it may be divine. And even there—how many Coleridges are best left in Xanadu! Mrs. Graze is right, really. Authors should not be met.

  Monday, the 5th

  The worst has happened here. My room has been changed, and the gear in the closet is not missing. If it were only that, I could postulate the maid. But I should have known there’d be some variation I hadn’t imagined. Room, Eilshemius, gear hidden in the corner, all exactly the same as was—only the number on the door has been changed. Life is a movable feast then, a tour in a post chaise, but who’s to be considered as moving, it or you? The answer is—quick over the abyss, and be damned to being. Start doing. Postulate a book.

  Or a story. Think for instance of yesterday morning at the hairdresser’s, when the voice came murmuring from behind some bead curtain of femininity, “Sure you know Pearl, sure you know her. Dirty-mouth Pearl?” A girl with fine potentialities, Pearl. Or remember going to the dairy farm all that Iowa winter, how the rainbows squeaked in the snow as the car stopped at the milk house, opposite the barn loft where the redbone coon-hound sat watching. You thought his rightful name a farmer’s joke, and were told his breed never made house dogs, yet all that winter you yearned to have one of him, to take back to New York—and still yearn. Reflect now. Could it be that you want not so much to have him as to be him, that red king of the hayloft, looking down? Start the real story.

  “… an invitation to dine with the Duc de Montpensier. Fatigued. In the evening fatigue and frightful humor; I stayed home. As a matter of fact, I am not sufficiently grateful for what Heaven does for me. In these moments of fatigue I think that everything is lost. … Got a good night’s rest. Went back to my studio; it put me into a good humor.”

  That’s it—the only way to cure the pains of the private journal, and the proper place to end it. Trust us there, where we begin to trust ourselves.

  PART II:

  ON THE MIDWAY

  MIDWAY IN A NOVEL, I sometimes stop, lodged in space above it, looking across its expanse, up and down its territory, as if it is a natural phenomenon of which I am oddly in command. From its own riverbank, I am seeing the other side of it—the part I have not written down, or am leaving out. I see the flow of light on the side opposite to my dark, my willed dark. Or the black stream of the world’s sores, going past my impudently bobbing, saucy light. At times the book then takes a turn—or sees there is no turn it can take. Here is where a book can grow more complex, plashing out almost beyond the maker. Or where it simples down, like the tail-end of a foetus, into its own fixed curve. Here a book leaps over its own boundaries, or holds fast to its own joy in them.

  Once, writing a novel whose first-person narrator was intensely searching his own history, the word “I”—that mote forever burrowing under the skin, that tic hiccupping down the page—became impossible to both of us. Next chapter, the book glided into third-person—I can swear I did not do it consciously—and stayed there until the “I,” that honing self, felt decent again. To me, in the finished book that point-of-change seemed too nakedly clear. But, as often with nude bathers, nobody noticed it.

  Now, here I stop. What am I doing in this “auto” of a book? Under the flag of a prefix that from “auto-erotic” to “automation” always seems to signify the worst side of the self. In the column of “autos” in the Shorter Oxford at my side, I don’t find much to salve that suspicion, rather some sinister confirmations of it that are new to me. “Autofacture,” or self-making. “Autolatry,” or self-worship. “Autonoetic,” there’s a nice one: self-perceiving! But followed by “autophagous”—self devouring. Sweetened again by “Autophoby”—a fear of referring to oneself. “Autophony” gives me pause—“observation of the resonance of the practitioner’s own voice in auscultation.” Also “Autopserin”—“a patient’s own virus administered homeopathically in cases of itch.” Is that what I’m after?

  Buried among the listings, I find a familiar, a risky comfort. I am making an Autonym—“a book published under the author’s own name.” This time written against the author’s usual habit of thinking: that a writer best ignores the process of writing, that a reader best ignores the private life of these, both of them trembling only in the presence of the work, to which belongs the honor and the scrutiny.

  Does a writer ever see his own oeuvre? I hope not; that will be the Ave atque vale of a shade. We don’t laboriously and cannily construct such a totality, or even envision it; we accumulate it. In America, the European concept of oeuvre, which compounds a time with a single history, expecting a teleological goal from the writer, and serious language-worship from everybody—is still not admitted. An oeuvre is a body of work which, like a true body, interacts with itself and with its own growth. We here in America are not allowed the sweet sense of growing them while in life; even after death, the obituary quickly picks over the works for “what will last.”

  Yet if a writer’s work has a shape to it—and most have a repetition like a heartbeat—the oeuvre will begin to construct him.

  In 1952, the Guggenheim Foundation gave me some money to get up and go. That’s the way I wanted it. Applying, I describe myself as still a half-time writer wanting to be full-time, eager to get out of my country for a year, in order to see it from outside. I want to sit and think, and I want to sit and think in Europe. I warn them that though I won’t be able to write during such a time, it would all come out later. Candor has kept me young and foolish beyond my years; this time it may have helped. But when the money comes, I realize that I can only get away for the eight months the children can be in boarding school. I go to New York, to the Guggenheim offices, for advice.

  “What do the other women you have given writing fellowships do,” I ask “when they have children?” I don’t expect a blueprint of how to proceed under the onus of the award (for that it half is). I’m groping for the assurance that other women had done what I am going to do—have left their families for a working period, or a period important to the work, just like any man. … Already, being a wri
ter had given me certain freedoms, which though I worked at home may have been only those of any working mother, but I was confused on this, and so were my friends. … Guilty or not, I am going of course, but it will help if I am told that in the fellowship of artists, female or not, this is ordinary. “Come to think of it,” Jim Mathias says, “I don’t know as we’ve had any women Fellows in Creative Writing who have children.” We tally the ones who come to mind. That is so.

  I know too well what I think of this to discourse on it now; we all do. But in those beginning years I was often to be the only family woman among serious writers and other artists and this had its effects. At almost my first editorial lunch, I hear a famous woman fiction-editor of the day whisper to my agent “But she’s so normal!” and want to snarl back Naht so normal as all that!, maybe meanwhile hacking off an ear to drop in her shrimp. Or at least giving her a Lesbian goose under the table. It seems to me that I am mad enough for artistic purposes; conversely, as I get to know artists in all fields, they often seem—particularly the best ones—proportionately in better control of their madness than the general population.

  But it could take its toll of one—not to be able to lead the artistic life, not being a bohemian—at least to the eye. One had to react to it. As a woman artist with a family and a conventional family set-up, I was being scrutinized with male values for artists—often by other women artists—and by myself. A curious position, akin to others I had found myself in, maybe as the only heterosexual in a totally homosexual drawingroom, or the only city individual in a provincial one: out of step, and honey, are you so sure you’re right? (Does one have to be? In step anywhere?) I am learning that bohemians, aliens, unconventionals, artist-in-groups or artists who believe in a way-of-life as part of art, will press their conventions on you as cheerfully and insistently—as the conventional. With the same failure to distinguish the outer and the inner ways of life.