This Close to Happy

by Daphne Merkin

  One of the most intolerable aspects of depression is the way it insinuates itself everywhere in your life, casting a pall not only over the present but the past and the future as well, suggesting nothing but its own inevitability. For the fact is that the quiet terror of severe depression never entirely passes once you’ve experienced it. It hovers behind the scenes, placated temporarily by medication and a willed effort at functioning, waiting to slither back in. It sits in the space behind your eyes, making its presence felt even in those moments when other, lighter matters are at the forefront of your mind. It tugs at your awareness, keeping you from ever being fully at ease in the present.

  When I’m depressed it’s hard—almost impossible—to keep track of the reality that even the most extreme depression will pass with time, or can be made to pass more quickly with the help of medication or therapy or some combination of both. It is not, for instance, “the blight man was born for,” which happens to be death and is, in point of fact, unavoidable, even for those lucky people who’ve never had a suicidal moment. The phrase is from the poem “Spring and Fall,” which was written by one of my favorite poets, the self-loathing nineteenth-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. I imagine Hopkins as having been fat and white and sweaty, reeking of despair. In the sonnet “My Own Heart,” he wrote: My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind, / Charitable. He may, in fact, have been thin and pristine, but what I do know to be true is that he had an ongoing lover’s quarrel with God and that he died in his rooms at the top of a building that was once part of University College in James Joyce’s Dublin and now houses a sleek restaurant.

  It is probably all but impossible from a contemporary perspective to avoid at least nibbling at the speculation that Hopkins’s anguished bid for signs of divine attention—his “cries like dead letters sent / To dearest him that lives alas! away”—was a sublimation of his homoerotic urges. But what I find more interesting, and far more moving, is the poet’s pre-Freudian approach to his own undeniably depressive nature, which leads him to interpose his religious calling between himself and his conviction of hopelessness; it is his lack of faith he blames for his condition, rather than his genes or his childhood.

  I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day, Hopkins wrote in another poem. Lives there a depressed person who doesn’t recognize this sentiment, who isn’t familiar with the feeling that the end of a night’s sleep is the end of recumbent escape—that to be awake is to be hauled back into a pained consciousness? All in all, the number of days that I’ve woken up with anything but a deep longing to burrow further under the covers, the better to embrace the vanished night, add up to pitiably few over a lifetime. What would it be like as an adult to open my eyes with a feeling of even mild anticipation? For many years now, the only periods of my life during which I can recall waking up with something approaching receptivity to the day ahead are those in which I have started certain energizing medications.

  But even on medication, there is nothing tempting enough to make me want to rise, much less shine—not even a languorous morning at a tropical resort, where all that awaits me is a prettily set breakfast accompanied by the sound of chirping birds. Not even the fact that I have always loved lying in the sun, soaking up the rays. Aside from sleep and the numbing of awareness that can occur during a certain sort of sex, only tanning provides the kind of self-obliteration that enables me to forget the blackness. It seems significant in this regard that many famous depressives, like the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, have taken pride in the bronzed color of their skin. The ever-observant Plath noted to a young male correspondent during the summer of 1950, when she was seventeen, that she was so deeply tanned that women stopped her on the beach to ask what suntan oil she used. But the real fanatic was Sexton, who loved the sun so much that she sought out beach resorts even when she had to sit under an umbrella because of the Thorazine she was taking.

  I can remember waking up in an elegant hotel in Rincon, on the western end of Puerto Rico, for instance, where there were petals floating in a bowl on the bathroom sink and nothing but the sunshine and the ocean to fill my days, with a familiar sense of dread. I’m not sure what I was dreading, although I suppose I could have found reasons scattered about. I could, for instance, have pinned it to the piercing dissatisfaction with my body that would inevitably follow upon my pulling on a bathing suit, or the fact that I felt increasingly claustrophobic in the company of the man I was with. But there are always reasons, if you look hard enough; there is always a telltale cloud inside the silver lining. The point, of course, is not to look.

  Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall” comes with a dedication, “To a Young Child,” and is a rumination on the awareness of self that is accompanied by the consciousness of mortality—both being part of a specifically human endowment. The poem begins: “Margaret, are you grieving, / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” Hopkins liked to put his own original touch on the language, stringing words together willy-nilly (he had a particular fondness for hyphenated arrangements, such as “dapple-dawn-drawn” and “blue-bleak”) and scattering punctuation marks as he saw fit. I used to like to recite these lines out loud when I first read them; their sad music made me feel eloquently mournful, as if I were speaking on behalf of all the anonymous sufferers from depression. Sometimes I substituted my own name, just for the effect, like trying on someone else’s coat: “Daphne, are you grieving, / Over Goldengrove unleaving?”

  No one has ever asked me anything remotely as formal and gentle and just plain comprehending as this when bleakness overtakes me. They are more likely to say casual, disbelieving things like, “It can’t be so bad,” or gruff ones like, “Come on, try and pull yourself together.” When I was young and despondent, they dispensed with even the brusque kindness of those remarks. “There she goes again,” one or the other of my brothers would announce, rolling his eyes, when I would start on one of my crying jags. It would begin as a neighing sound through my nose, as though I were a filly coming ’round the bend, and proceed from there to something louder and weepier. Sometimes, when I wonder why this blackness got started so early and why it has stayed around for so long, it seems to me that it would have helped to look on myself as a kind of Margaret grieving for the end that awaits us all—to have that sort of elegiac perspective. As it was, I grieved over everything indiscriminately and no one ever inquired into it. “You like to be sad,” my mother frequently said to me, with her usual Germanic lack of sentiment. As though it were a choice. Hopkins would have understood, I am sure of it.

  I envy Hopkins his faith, complexly negotiated as it was, and have often wished my own Jewish upbringing had provided more of a religious anchor; I imagine a belief in God must come with a dazzling sense of purpose. Somewhere along the way, however, I substituted a more tentative and secular faith in the power of art to uphold and console. I think I share with Hopkins not only a delight in words but an underlying conviction that language can transmute personal pain into a shared grief about what living in the world entails.

  “Spring and Fall” ends starkly—“It is the plight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for”—and I suppose the poem can be read as an exploration of the sobering idea that all paradises are lost paradises, and that to be born is to be expelled from the Garden. It cannot be said to be about depression—but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. And, too, the implicit bereftness of Margaret made me feel less alone. Although I recognize that people who aren’t depressed are not automatically superficial or inauthentic—terminally perky, like morning newscasters—in my heart of hearts I believe they are deluded. For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.

  Then a beautiful day comes along and throws the issue back in your lap.

  13

  My mother was a victim of history, of catastrophic world events, in a way none of her children had been, and som
e responsive chord in her had hardened early on to any but the most compelling of disasters. For complicated reasons having to do with her father’s political allegiance, she could not go to university in Palestine and was instead sent back to Europe in 1938 to attend a women’s teaching seminary in Chernowitz, which is now in Ukraine; she got back to Palestine by the skin of her teeth. She also lost a clutch of close relatives in the concentration camps, including a grandmother, two uncles, and a favorite widowed aunt together with all but one of her five children.

  I learned about the Holocaust when I was too young to understand its implications except personally: as a murderous hatred aimed at me. I remember looking at an album of photographs, taken by Nazis for their own documentation, depicting Jews having their beards cut off and being made to wash the streets on their hands and knees. My mother had acquired this album on one of her trips to Europe with my father; it was only much later that I wondered uneasily why she had thought to show it to me at such an impressionable age, before I could make sense of it.

  I was equally unable to make sense of something else my mother did in this connection, which was to casually draw tiny swastikas on the inside of my arm with a ballpoint pen, starting when I was about eleven or twelve. This strange ritual, which first took place one evening when I was sitting next to her desk in the upstairs hallway, going over homework, was never introduced or explained, and eventually ceased as suddenly as it had begun. My mother drew the swastikas methodically and neatly, one after another, a daisy chain of swastikas. I remember watching with fascination, my heart beating wildly, although I couldn’t bring myself to ask what she meant by it. I’m sure she would have made some kind of ghoulish joke if I had questioned her, playing on my childish fears, as was her way: “Oh, you know, I was one of them in my youth. Don’t you know I’m a secret Nazi?” When I was young and unhappy she would tell me to think of the concentration camps and nothing would seem so bad by comparison. Rather than a useful perspective, the extreme tactic simply instilled guilt in me for being unhappy in the first place.

  Did my mother suffer from survivor’s guilt of a specialized, previously undocumented sort? On some unarticulated level it was clear she had been traumatized as a sixteen-year-old by having to leave her beloved Frankfurt—with its marvelous zoo and the hills just outside the city, called the Feldberg, where she used to hike with her family—and, of course, by the discovery of what the Nazis had been up to. But on another level she seemed eerily cool-hearted about the whole thing, almost as though she identified with the aggressors.

  This was something I wondered about even more after she showed me a short story, one of a group she had written after she came to New York in 1949 and signed up for a famous writing class taught by Martha Foley at Columbia. She had been serious about writing in English (her third language, after German and Hebrew) and had been considered talented enough to be taken on by an agent named John Schaffner, who represented Ray Bradbury and Craig Claiborne. The story in question was called “To Be One of Them,” and told of a young Jewish girl who attends a Nazi rally and is transfixed by the impassioned oratory. The story was powerful but disturbing, and had more than a grain of autobiography in it, since my mother had actually been to just such a rally before her family left Frankfurt for good in 1936.

  One of the things that struck me most about it, though, was the bravery it took to see beyond the usual strictures into the enemy’s allure. It was like her, to take a different position than the one you would have expected her to take. As a mother, her unpredictability may have been problematic, but her subversive imagination—her impulsively denouncing herself as the Wicked Witch of the West, for instance, sparing me the trouble of having to draw her attention to her badness—was an aspect of her that I admired. Still, there was no doubt that the theatrics and sadism of the Germans excited her in some peculiar way.

  What I also realized fairly early on was that Jane, although a tyrant in her own right, both feared and worshipped my mother, giving me an early lesson in the power of sadomasochistic attachment. My mother only once in a while broke out of her cool remove to offer Jane crumbs of approval that were all the more gratefully accepted for being so infrequent. More worrisome was my mother’s endgame: Was Jane, certainly in many ways her “creature,” also her instrument, exercising stringent discipline in her stead? Or had my mother refused to come to terms with the level of violence in her own household—insidious and actual—by the simple act of pretending not to know about it?

  Years later, my mother admitted that she considered Jane to have been one of her “mistakes,” explaining, with a dazzling degree of indifference to our welfare, that she had deliberately chosen someone we wouldn’t grow attached to so we wouldn’t end up preferring Jane to her as she had preferred Helena—the warmhearted woman who looked after her and her four siblings—to her own mother. I don’t know if she accurately sized Jane up when she first met her, but she had certainly succeeded in ensuring her own preeminence in our affections by picking a caretaker who offered no competition. Still and all, I wondered: Whose side was my mother on? Mine or Jane’s? The Jews’ or the Nazis’? Why was she so fascinated by cruelty, the glint of metal, in herself and others? And above all: How could I make her love me?

  14

  Perhaps because my mother’s admiration was reserved for a kind of intellectual facility that didn’t show any sweat, I never fully imbibed, during those so-called formative years, the lesson of consistent application—of “chair glue,” as the current idiom goes, or sitzfleisch, as the pungent Yiddish has it. It’s a lesson Jews and Asians are supposed to be particularly good at instilling in their children, one that involves unceasing effort and the deferral of immediate gratification for long-range goals. It usually requires a steady parental presence offering coaching and reinforcement, and there wasn’t that kind of presence for me or my siblings. I went through Jewish day school in a helter-skelter style, ignoring what I wasn’t good at—math and science and who said what to whom in the Bible—and focusing on the subjects I liked: English and history, Hebrew and Talmud. (I liked the loop-the-loop reasoning of Talmud so much, those digressions that ingeniously led back to the main point, that I continued to study it with a private teacher after I finished high school.)

  Although I was capable of demonstrating intense interest in a variety of subjects, I tended to pull back from too much absorption in any one thing—lest I lose sight of the flickering, mutating essence that stood in for a more integrated self. I never understood how people made it through years of law school and medical school, grinding on and on, how their furies didn’t upend them along the way. Which isn’t to say that I don’t have my own kind of tenacity—I can read for hours on end, and when I am involved in my writing I don’t notice the passage of time—but that it is fitful and given to moods. I blame this on my inherent darkness, my inability to envision the day after today, but I must also admit to a certain faltering supply of will, self-discipline, call it what you like—that nub of stamina without which nothing major is accomplished. No wonder I fell upon Cyril Connolly’s 1938 book Enemies of Promise, that ur-document of unfulfilled creative talent, with such avidity when I came upon it in my twenties, recognizing the outlines of my own dilemma in its exploration of foiled potential. “Somewhere in the facts I have recorded lurk the causes of that sloth by which I have been disabled…”

  All the same, from childhood on I had been a voracious reader, desperate to escape my surroundings, and I look back on my summers in Atlantic Beach as one long, impassioned immersion in books. While other girls my age hung out at the beach, comparing tans and flirting with the cute lifeguards, I would lie in the garden in one of the tattered deck chairs with the webbing hanging out—my mother could never be bothered to replace them—and lose myself in reading.

  My fare included modernist novels (Christina Stead, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green); fat biographies (Lytton Strachey, Diane Arbus, Edie Sedgwick); and shapely memoirs by everyone from Virginia Wool
f’s niece, Angela Garnett, whose Deceived with Kindness put a different spin on Bloomsbury than the one I had known, to a title I loved, Tears Before Bedtime, by a kittenish English writer named Barbara Skelton, whose husbands included Cyril Connolly and the publisher George Weidenfeld, and whose legion of lovers numbered among them King Farouk. I can still remember the ping of amazement I felt upon discovering Henry James, the way he wove the sinuous movements of his characters’ interior consciousness into the elaborate orchestrations of his plots. For a while, my own life “hung fire,” to borrow one of James’s signature expressions, as I imagined myself into the life of Isabel Archer, standing on the verge of a splendid future but about to make a huge misstep—to be bedazzled by the wrong man, a girl after my own misled heart.

  Then again, my sexual identity had been a conflicted issue almost from the start. It began with my precocious worrying that I was a lesbian, attendant upon my discovery of the word when I was ten, because I longed to sleep next to my mother in my father’s place, and also because of the sense I had that men, like my father, were a closed-off territory. Added to this was my persistent fear that I was insufficiently (by which I meant imperfectly) “feminine,” despite all evidence to the contrary. True, I got my period late enough (I was almost sixteen) to make me wonder whether I was going to get it at all, but when I finally did, my figure developed at an alarming rate, endowing me with large breasts that were all the more conspicuous because of my narrow hips.

  Big boobs or not, there were other circumstantial developments—a few errant hairs around my belly button, and unruly eyebrows that grew together in the middle—that were somehow enough to persuade me that I wasn’t truly, genetically female. I addressed my fear of being unattractively hirsute by undergoing the painful ministrations of an electrologist named Madame Geva, who worked out of a tiny, overheated room on Lexington Avenue, and left me with too wide a space between my eyebrows when she was done.