What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

by Lynne Tillman

  LT: Was doing the 20 lines like automatic writing?

  HM: No, it wasn’t. I only did one set of automatic writing and I discussed it in one of the 20 line pieces. It was like automatic writing only in that I set myself a limited task, but it was quite different in that I had a subject which I stuck to. Or several subjects. But the writing was as they say, “off the top of my head.”

  LT: Certain themes return in your work, one of them, the journey. Which reminds me of Barrett Watten’s designation of you in his essay in the Harry Mathews Number of The Review of Contemporary Fiction: “Harry Mathews, having chosen exile . . .” I wondered how you felt about that. You’ve been living in Europe since 1952?

  HM: That’s right.

  LT: How did you see that move then and how do you see it now?

  HM: When I first left America I was very happy to leave the country and what I have to immediately add to that is that I didn’t know the country and I didn’t even know New York City, what I knew was the life of the well-to-do Upper East Side and that life seemed very discouraging to me in terms of what I wanted to do. I was talking to Larry Rivers the other day about that and how, when I went down to what later became my stamping grounds, Greenwich Village, among painters, I felt so out of my element, I felt even worse there than I did among the Upper East Side crowd which was not particularly appealing to me (although of course, there are good friends to be found in all places), so then I went to Europe. It was like a kind of going into exile or might have been interpreted as that, although what it really felt like was going back to a place which was very familiar and which had been sort of mysteriously familiar. I didn’t come back to the United States at all for six years and then I came back a little bit, I didn’t like it and then I came a little bit more and liked it a little bit more, and of course by then I’d met John Ashbery and through him many other friends here and I was discovering a whole other aspect of New York City and the country. I don’t know America very well, I haven’t traveled it nearly as much as I’d like to, but that original aversion to it vanished. And in any case, even if my departure might have been a kind of expatriation at the beginning, it never amounted to a separation from my identity as an American. I’ve never been anything else, I’ve never thought of myself as being anything else. It always astonishes me when people ask me, “Oh, you live in France, well, do you write in French or are you a French citizen?” First of all, that doesn’t happen all that easily in France, it’s not the way it is here where people come, move here and do become citizens. I may have had a desire to reinvent myself in terms of being, if not a Frenchman, a person living in France, a person living in Italy, a person living in Spain; I very quickly learned that you never leave home. And I think the great advantage of having gone to Europe and having lived there is that it allowed me to become more aware of my American-ness than I would have if I had stayed here.

  LT: How did Locus Solus, the magazine that you did with other Americans in Paris, come about?

  HM: Only John Ashbery was in Paris. Jimmy Schuyler and Kenneth Koch were living in New York at the time. And it came about because we, all of us, wanted to be published more. We did this sort of self-centered thing, we published ourselves and our friends. I hadn’t yet found a publisher for The Conversions, my first book. I’d published a few poems here and there, John had published his first book, Kenneth had published one or two books, and Jimmy had published, I think, a novel and a book of poems. But we were all anxious to see more of what we wanted, not only in terms of publishing ourselves, but of seeing writing we liked published. Although this is much truer of them than of me. I was much less in touch with what was going on in America than they were because of the fact I’d been living in France, I hadn’t kept up, and I didn’t have the contacts.

  LT: So you didn’t meet Georges Perec until much later?

  HM: Yes. In 1970.

  LT: Cigarettes is dedicated to him, and it felt especially right because of the ending, with its meditation on death.

  HM: A lot of people died in my life, in a very short time. Between 1980 and 1986 both my parents died, Georges Perec died, several other friends died. So as I was writing Cigarettes, I had experiences of death which are probably reflected in the book. Historically I dedicated it to Perec because when we met we were both going through fallow periods and then he really climbed out of his pit and wrote this fantastic book, Life, A User’s Manual, which Cigarettes didn’t pretend to rival. But the fact that he did it and with such panache and such exuberant diligence, got me out of my reluctance to start a novel again. I was reluctant because of the great difficulty I’d had in publishing The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. I didn’t want to go through that again. It had been a lot of work and it ended with a lot of disappointment in years of waiting for it to be published. I said, Georges had a lot of excuses not to write if he didn’t want to and he came up with this extraordinary novel, so I should, too. Cigarettes has nothing to do with Life, A User’s Manual, but his having done the book did inspire me.

  LT: Cigarettes’ last pages are very moving.

  HM: Did I tell you that the pages about the actor in the railroad station (near the end of the last chapter) were the first pages of the book I wrote and the ones that immediately follow—the concluding pages—were the last? There’s the description of this impeccably dressed actor who is hired to be an extra man at social functions, but he’s also an extra like an extra in the movies. I cared about him. I really cared about that passage, with the book ending with that description. Let me just read it.

  “In such circumstances, I sometimes think that only the residual strength of the dead beings inside me gives me power to survive at all. By that I mean both the accumulated weight of the generations succeeding one another and, as well, from the first of times when names held their objects fast and light shone among us in miracles of discovery, the immortal presence of that original and heroic actor who saw that the world had been given him to play in without remorse or fear.”

  It’s clearly the original and heroic actor of whom I had no inkling at the time I began the book who provides the unheroic actor in the railroad station.

  LT: This would be a good place to end, at the end of the novel, but I have the alphabet questions I initially planned to ask.

  HM: Ask them all, go ahead.

  LT: “A” for art world. In Cigarettes there’s quite a lot about the art world.

  HM: That question could have a very long answer—I was married to Niki de Saint Phalle, and I’ve known artists all my life. I’ve been friends with people in the group on both sides—dealers, editors of art magazines, and so forth. I really have no particular insight or attachment other than that.

  LT: “B,” beauty, there’s an elegance, a beauty to your writing.

  HM: Beauty is something which moves in after the point of works of art have been lost.

  LT: “C,” Cigarettes the title. Why that title?

  HM: The question, “Why is the book called Cigarettes?” is a question that should be asked.

  LT: “D” is dreams. Do you use them directly?

  HM: Occasionally. I think that Phoebe’s egg hallucination is a dream I had. And the chapter called “The Otiose Creator” in The Conversions was a dream of Niki de Saint Phalle.

  LT: “E”—we’ve gone over this—exile.

  HM: Yes, though I’ve never been exiled.

  LT: “F,” fantasy, father, fake, any of those?

  HM: That’s a very interesting grouping you’ve made. More about you than about me, perhaps.

  LT: “G” is games and genius.

  HM: Games yes, genius no.

  LT: You use games, you don’t care about genius?

  HM: No comment, please.

  LT: “H,” horses.

  HM: A very good letter. I don’t want to find out why but—I love horses. I used to love playing them. My second job, when I was 19, was walking hots at Suffolk Downs.

  LT: “I,” insurance, a scam in Cigarettes.<
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  HM: People are very much concerned in Cigarettes with keeping control, and that’s got to do with assurance, which is the English name for insurance, and also with taking out insurance, like Allan’s wanting the woman to have an orgasm before he does being “money in the bank.” They’re all into that. To go back to what you said about money, it shows that money isn’t just what happens with the money—it happens in all the other things they do.

  LT: “J,” jokes and jealousy.

  HM: Jealousy is no joke. Jealousy is a bad joke. Jealousy is an unspeakable emotion.

  LT: Many of the relationships in Cigarettes, for instance, between Morris and his sister, Irene, and between the two sisters, Pauline and Maud, depict that unspeakable emotion.

  HM: Jealousy is hateful and very hard to deal with and I think it’s probably more unspeakable in a man than it is in a woman.

  LT: Why?

  HM: Sexual jealousy, that is. I don’t think I can stand going into it.

  LT: “K” for Kafka. Especially because of Tlooth.

  HM: Not The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium? I had an epigraph from Kafka at the beginning. He’s finally being read in a way he deserves—one of the most explosively stimulating, funny and unclassifiable writers that’s ever lived. And the tremendous effort to make thoroughgoing interpretations of his books, which was the way he was read when I first came into contact with it—treating his work as allegory to my mind sprang from that terrifying ambiguity.

  LT: For “L,” lines, as in 20 Lines a Day.

  HM: Twenty lines a day keeps the dustbin away.

  LT: “M,” memory.

  HM: Memory is an irresistible fiction.

  LT: And then for “O,” “P,” and “R,” the OuLiPo, Perec, and Roussel. “Q” is quizzes.

  HM: I thought it was Queneau. Queneau’s the only living “writing father” I ever had; and the OuLiPo is my writing home in France; and Perec—Perec is irreplaceable.

  LT: “S,” sexual difference. In Cigarettes, Louisa, the mother of Lewis, is afraid of men, they’re incomprehensible to her. And in the chapter “Priscilla and Walter,” Priscilla talks about men’s fear of women. This fear may be one of the themes of the book.

  HM: I think that’s true and it seems undeniably true that men are terrified of women and women are terrified of men. The reasons aren’t the same, but they’re compelling on both sides and totally imaginary. Although, in the case of women’s fear of men, men have gone out of their way to provide a lot of evidence for that fear.

  LT: “T,” translation.

  HM: Ahhh. Vaste sujet! Maybe writing is never anything else but translation—ultimately, a translation which cannot be identified.

  LT: “V,” vice and virtue.

  HM: That makes me feel comfortably 18th-century.

  LT: In Cigarettes, people want to do good sometimes, worry about it, but feel they’re doing wrong. There’s an interplay of good and bad—not great evil. Maybe there’s a better “V” we can think of.

  HM: No, it’s a very interesting one and, after all, that’s what came to your mind. In all four novels, virtue is wishful and vice is a misinterpretation of reality. A misinterpretation of what’s there.

  LT: “W”. . .

  HM: What was “U”?

  LT: Oh, “U”! I missed that. The unconscious. It’s perfect that I forgot it.

  HM: It speaks its own language which is not what we say or write. I like to invent ways in which I can outwit myself and allow it to manifest itself.

  LT: What would be a “W”? Virginia Woolf?

  HM: What is “W,” just “what.” What I haven’t said in this interview, and one thing would be that despite apparent appearances, my books have always been written out of passion concern and love.

  LT: “X.” All the X words.

  HM: X is an algebraic symbol. It means what you say it means. Not only what it means. It’s a variable.

  LT: You play with variables.

  HM: So I would say that anything I have said in this interview, the opposite is probably also true.

  LT: “Y”? What about yearnings?

  HM: It’s a word which I think I have used several times and it’s a word which has always touched me a great deal—it seems to be what runs life.

  LT: Yearnings.

  HM: Not necessarily, “Whatever is, it shouldn’t be that way.” There’s also room for, “Whatever is, should be more so.”

  LT: “Z,” zealot because of the sects and religious references. I was wondering where your zeal lies.

  HM: You can’t have too much of it. You can’t have too much zeal, but you can’t have too few zealots.

  I is for I

  The Autobiography of Eve

  A Mind of My Own1 is the autobiography of Chris Costner Sizemore, better known as “Eve.” Sizemore was the case study upon which The Three Faces of Eve, a popular 1957 movie directed by Nunnally Johnson, was based. Joanne Woodward played Eve, winning an Academy Award for her virtuoso performance as a woman under the influence of a mental illness, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). In the movie Woodward metamorphosed, before the camera and without special effects, from Eve Black, “the party girl,” to Eve White, “the mother/wife,” to Jane, “the intellectual woman,” enacting a female Jekyll / Jekyll, and Hyde as constituted through a psychiatric/cinematic lens.

  Sizemore has been dogged by her cinematic representative “Eve,” who made her a celebrity, although no one knew who she was—Sizemore didn’t go public until the mid ’70s—and, more disturbing, neither did she. In a sense her life has been mediated, if not constructed, by the movie that gave her “fame in anonymity.” Sizemore was supposed to have been cured of MPD by her first psychiatrists, Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, which is what The Three Faces of Eve portrays; and Lee J. Cobb, playing the psychiatrist who discovers her illness and works through it with her, is nearly as much its star/hero as Eve. But A Mind of My Own tells another tale: Sizemore writes that it took twenty more years for her to overcome MPD, to become, as she puts it, “unified.”

  Ironically, Sizemore did not see the movie until November 16, 1974, an event of great meaning to her and her family, and one carefully documented in the book. “My alters” (her other personalities), she writes, “had been barred from its world premiere in Augusta, Georgia, because Drs. Thigpen and Cleckley believed that seeing it could be highly detrimental to the stability of the patient who, they had wrongly claimed, was cured.”

  Sizemore’s book takes up her life after the movie and explains how she worked through her illness with her new analyst, Dr. Tony A. Tsitos, how she strove to bring together her alters, to allow her various personalities to find expression or representation through just one conduit or self. After unification, her newly won self learns the difficulty of existing in the so-called real world. She must make amends with her husband, who has, in a sense, been married to many wives—“whichever one was ‘out’ was my wife”—and to her children, both of whom, she explains, were given birth to by alters and had formed attachments to their alter-mothers and to others of her personalities. With a new psyche in place, Sizemore now pursues a career as a painter (some of her alters had painted), making work that represents her former illness and current “wellness.” In addition to painting, Sizemore actively campaigns for the mentally ill, especially the sufferers of MPD, speaking in front of large audiences around the country as an advocate for their rights and their ability to be helped. She has also worked hard to get MPD recognized as a bona fide mental illness, to make the disorder exist in representation not just as a movie but in the annals of the psychiatric establishment. (In 1980, MPD entered the medical language by way of the APA’s handbook, the DSM, as 300.14 Multiple Personality.)

  The issue of representation in all its complexity is critical to Sizemore’s life, and its multiple meanings show themselves throughout her book, a book in which she speaks of her own multiplicity. MPD itself, understood as an intrapsychic battle waged over mind and bod
y by warring selves or representations, is a condition that embodies such issues. As Sizemore recounts her life she often compares herself with the movie Eve, with whom she seems at times to have a kind of sibling rivalry. (Even after she is unified, she is given presents by her husband and family in the name of that alter.) She likens herself to celebrities—Liz Taylor, for one—in a conscious effort to emulate successful female role models. She presents herself as “cured patient,” as “artist,” as “writer,” as “normal woman, wife and mother,” to public, family, and friends. Overwhelming at times is Sizemore’s need to achieve representation and to make representations in the world—in all of these guises. “In short, I struggled to be all things to all people.” A Mind of My Own showcases a dizzying display of what she has done and who has praised her, making this reader wonder whether the self, once unified, is almost destined to become self-congratulatory.

  Perhaps to offset this burgeoning narcissism, Sizemore’s preferred mode of writing the self is the quote. Like literary devices, the many alters are in a sense already quotations. These personalities offer their thoughts through Sizemore, as memories and dialogue, or through their diaries and notes. When their voices enter, paragraphs read like sketches for bizarre sitcoms in which characters such as Retrace Lady, Strawberry Girl, or Purple Lady vie for “point of view” or dominance.

  But even when not representing the alters, who are in a way the unconscious’ quotations, Sizemore writes her life as a series of quotes. Rather than saying what she thinks, she cites herself having said the thought at another time. Or instead of incorporating into her narrative someone else’s comments about her, she puts their sometimes innocuous remarks in quotes. The curved marks of punctuation distance the reader from her words and set off the ideas as if they had arrived from far away. The effect is to make the unified self Sizemore so urgently wants recognition for a fabrication of fragments and statements, an aggregate of impressions rather than a seamless unity. It may not be the result she desired, but it is a better reflection of the problems of the constructed self and of representing that self. Overall, the use of quotation attests to her desire for authenticity. In this regard the book’s ultimate sentence is striking—again in someone else’s words: “Chris Sizemore is real.”