Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  Although now we could not stand the sight of each other, we still met at the dump and the post office, not for deliberate assignations but chance encounters, usually unwelcome.

  Not long after the futile discussions about putting Mother into a home—the quarrels over who would pay for it, whether the home would be near Franny or one of the others, whether it would be a retirement community or the more expensive assisted living facility—after all this effort, which Mother saw, with reason, as a plot against her, a power grab to dislodge her from her house, I was driving into the dump and saw Franny just behind me. Instead of getting rid of my trash in her presence, I drove off without disposing of it. I did not want to see her. More than that, I did not want her to see what I was chucking away—did not want her to know anything of me.

  When I headed back about an hour later, I saw Erma pitching trash bags off the back of her pickup truck. I circled the dump and did not drop my trash until I saw that she had driven away—Fred sitting in the passenger seat, his useless arm in his lap.

  Leaving the dump another day, I saw Rose driving in. I pretended not to see her, yet she unambiguously gave me the finger when I looked up.

  None of us went to church, for fear of meeting one another. Mother had her own reasons for seeing each of us alone. We welcomed these solitary audiences now, but did not go into the house if we spotted anyone else’s car in the driveway. If we passed each other on the street, at the Cape Cod Mall, or anywhere else, we did not say hello.

  We hid from each other for a reason. No one knows more about you than your family. No one can inflict more pain on you than a family member. So it was not surprising that we hid and, picking our way through the dangers, chose our allies carefully. We were more fearful of each other than of anyone outside the family. The very word “family” filled us with a dread of violation that was expressed as mockery or satire, as a general cynicism of the world at large, as a deep distrust of anyone’s motives.

  We were not believers, not (as I said earlier) cultists who smiled at Mother’s manipulation and turned cartwheels for her, or won races, and thanked her when we got awards. We were the subjects in Mother Land of her dictatorial rule, each of us a sullen dissident. She had taught us all the subtleties of betrayal.

  Lesson one was that attachment was always a mistake; lesson two, that sentiment was a weakness; lesson three, that trust was foolish and fatal, and the key to power was the knowledge of the other siblings’ secrets. Even something as simple as their movements was essential to knowing them. A trip to the dump was revealing, for what you discarded was a key to your life, and in knowing their secrets you possessed them, their essence, their strength. You might have to pump their friends or children for information; you did what you had to do, and needed to be as conscienceless as Mother, and as ruthless. Your knowledge neutralized them.

  None of these lessons came from a book, some dense study in the elements of power, or a leadership manual for CEOs, or a medieval treatise on kingship. Mother had never read Machiavelli’s The Prince or Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Yet her whole life, and especially her motherhood, was a vernacular paraphrase of these classics. For example, in Mother Land, as in Sun Tzu’s China, there were five classes of spies: local spies, inward spies, converted spies, doomed spies, and surviving spies. And she would have agreed with the Master that when these five spies were all at work, no one could discover the secret system. “This is called ‘divine manipulation of the threads.’ It is the sovereign’s most precious faculty.”

  Mother’s version of this was homegrown, refined in her family throughout generations of sniping and survival, in the same way that, after successive reigns of absolute monarchs, a diabolical tyrant is produced, the result of all those bad families, the years of whispering and backstabbing and discreet poisonings and espionage.

  Mother was a fox. Even at her advanced age, she read a great deal, but narrowly—romantic fiction and hagiography—always books that helped her to perfect her role as a wise old thing. The sententious crone whom everyone admires—“Lordy, I don’t know how she does it”—more common in fiction than in real life, was Mother’s persona. She was so far from the mainstream of human contact, she had to read books to find out how people lived and what they wanted. We all had to look outside the family for instances of kindness, generosity, and unselfishness. We had none, though even if we had, we would have kept them hidden, for fear we’d have been exploited for our sentiment.

  We knew all this through Mother, not merely because she was a liar, but because she was a terrible liar, inept and obvious. The special language that every unhappy family creates, the dialect of deception, was Mother’s native tongue. Because she was habitually mean in her giving, she assumed everyone else was too. What you gave her had to be second rate—why else were you handing it over?—and so she was never satisfied. In the same way, whatever you said to her had to be a lie—why else would you speak to her with passion? Only a liar would make such an effort.

  Knowing we would never find encouragement within the family—knowing in advance we would always be undermined—we sought it elsewhere. This need sent us into the world. Except for Franny and Rose, who had tied themselves to Mother, all of us had looked for a welcome we never found at home. So some of us became travelers.

  I say “we,” but I mean “I.” I was no better than any of them. I had everything in common, but I was peculiar. Early on, I had resisted Mother’s influence. That resistance, the sense that I was being watched and whispered about, gave me the motivation to slip away, to vanish and find my own path.

  I can only speak for myself when I say that all the negative aspects of growing up had some positive results. I learned this early in my best year with Mona, the year that set me free. I discovered that freedom is painful and lonely. I kept going. My history of coping in this family, negotiating with the others, hiding from Mother, made me adaptable. Mother was the queen of subversion. The fear that I might be subverted by her helped me in the scrutiny necessary to the writing life, the urgent feeling that everything matters: the tone of voice, the shading of vowels, the slightest gesture, the unexpected laughter, the touch of an anxious hand, the quality of light and shadow of a person. I had been both sensitized and hardened. My writing ability and my desire for solitude were intensified by my spells in Mother Land.

  Edmund Wilson’s mother said she’d never read a word of his. D. H. Lawrence’s father mocked his son’s writing and called it a kind of slacking. Joyce’s wife famously jeered at his verbal ingenuity (and was bewildered hearing him laughing in the next room as he worked on Finnegans Wake), and Joyce pointedly did not attend his mother’s funeral. Hemingway’s mother hated The Sun Also Rises and called it “one of the filthiest books of the year.” “Every page fills me with sick loathing,” she wrote to him. At the end of his memoir Family History, John Lanchester comments, “Once my mother wasn’t able to read my books, I finally began writing them.”

  Toward the end of her life, Edith Wharton wrote in a letter, “My literary success puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books.”

  Late in his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story called “An Author’s Mother.” Based on his own mother, it is the portrait of a philistine and an unappreciative parent. “Her son was a successful author. She had by no means abetted him in the choice of that profession but had wanted him to be an army officer, or else go into business like his brother. An author was something distinctly peculiar.” And later, “But the books by her son were not vivid to her, and while she was proud of him in a way, and was always glad when a librarian mentioned him or when someone asked her if she was his mother, her secret opinion was that such a profession was risky and eccentric.” Fitzgerald wrote the story in 1937, publishing it in Esquire. His mother was still alive, and though on her l
ast legs—she died a year later—she undoubtedly read it.

  Floyd left a piece of paper under the windshield wiper of my Jeep one day, a quotation written in ballpoint, headed “I’ve been reading The Rambler ​— it seems Dr. Johnson knew Ma.” And under it: “Equally dangerous and equally detestable are the cruelties often exercised in private families, under the venerable sanction of parental authority; the power which we are taught to honour from the first moments of reason; which is guarded from insult and violation by all that can impress awe upon the mind of man; and which therefore may wanton in cruelty without control, and trample the bounds of right with innumerable transgressions, before duty or piety will dare to seek redress . . .”

  “Shaw hugely disliked his mother. His family never helped him as a writer,” Floyd said one day, flipping open Stephen Winsten’s Days with Bernard Shaw and reading from it. “‘Fostered! Every conceivable difficulty was put in my way. I never saw my father with a book in his hand, and my mother ignored my existence completely.’”

  Floyd licked his finger and slashed at the pages.

  “He goes on, ‘My mother never had a friend and never made the least effort to win my affection, and I certainly made no effort to win hers. When my manuscripts were returned she wasn’t in the least interested. I don’t think she read a single one of them. She accepted me as a burdensome good-for-nothing, just what she would expect from the son of her husband. My father at least had satisfaction in seeing my work in print and actually praised, but never referred to it.’” Floyd shut the book and said, “Shaw was a great friend of T. E. Lawrence.”

  “I think I knew that.”

  “It was Lawrence’s exasperation with his domineering mother that made him want to go far away. You could say that his mother was the main reason for his becoming Lawrence of Arabia. And she hated his writing.”

  I wasn’t alone. So, when Mother told people that she had always known I was going to be a writer—or took credit for one book or another—smiling, with my unread book in her lap—implying that she had made me a writer, the statement was true, though in the opposite way she’d meant. She’d driven me to it. But then most of what Mother said was the opposite of what she meant.

  “Who is she?” Floyd had once demanded, back in the days when we’d discovered that Mother was secretly handing out money to the others and getting favors for it. I was not sure who she was, though I had some facts.

  This was the woman who had raised me. I had always suspected that in some profoundly negative sense she had made me a writer, even if it was as basic as having hounded me out of the house, forcing me to make my own life. The mathematical proof, in payouts, of the degrees of her sympathy, spanning the spectrum from generous to stingy, convinced me that she had kept me as an outsider, always insufficient. I had never been able to please her—that, I’d known long ago; I had stopped trying. Yet she figured in my life. I was sixty-four, she was ninety-seven; we were still linked. I had burgled her house and rifled her desk, and now I knew where I stood.

  You grow up thinking that a life of writing is made possible by someone serving you lunch and praising your work, an affectionate and sympathetic person to whom you read your novel in progress in the evening, the beloved name on the dedication page and beside it the affectionate words “who lived it with me, who made this book possible.”

  “It’s really rather wonderful,” says this—appalling word—helpmeet. “It’s one of the best things you’ve done.”

  “I couldn’t have written it without you” is the simpering reply.

  In that cozy household of loyalty, you labor in the slanted light of your gooseneck lamp, white paper, black ink, the aroma of thick soup or of roasted tarragon chicken from the kitchen, the grateful muse—mother or spouse—stirring the rich broth of the fragrant stew. Everything solid, everything positive, nothing but praise in the steady climb from the obscurity of the study to the sunshine of the wider world.

  But, no, it was not that way with me at all.

  The turbulence in the family, the very size of it, had made me seek the solitude of reading, the orderliness of writing. I had sometimes produced results. Instead of a big warm embrace or any affirmation, Mother—from my earliest years of reading and writing—had frowned at me and said, “You’re doing what?”

  She had rolled her eyes, sighed in impatience when she saw me typing on my old Remington, one finger at a time. The effort seemed a peculiar form of idleness, a waste of paper, a kind of ugliness even, something unnatural and unproductive. I was selfish, indulging myself; I was a dissident. And it enraged her that I would not let her see what I was typing. Far from encouraging me, she demanded that I not write—that writing was worse than a waste of time. Writing was misleading, wrong, and vain, revealing your foolishness to the whole world and disgracing the family.

  “What are you going to do with it?” She would stand in the doorway of the back room where I had hidden myself to write. “What will you do when you need money?”

  Mother was literal-minded. Proof was something she needed to hold in her hand, and not just hold but weigh. Only one thing had weight in her world.

  Money was the measure of everything: it represented work and honor, value and reward. Money was strength, money was goodness, money was praise, money was love. Money was a form of grace, even sanctifying grace. Though she had been stingy with it while we were growing up, Mother had dispensed it after Father’s death: it became an expression of her power, and perhaps of her insecurity. She bought Franny, she bought Rose, and they whinnied around her, to make themselves worthy of more. She owned them while making them believe that they possessed her. They were all sisters, with their hands in one another’s pockets. The ledger, the check register, was a sort of history, a secret chronicle of Mother’s true feelings.

  Money had always mattered. Early on, with the first sign of my love of writing, my pleasure in reading, she had thwarted me by insisting I get a job. I happened to be copying a paragraph from a novel into my notebook.

  “You can’t just moon around the house like this.”

  Mother Land was hostile to the intellect. So, as a high school student, I spent all my weekends and many of my weekdays stocking shelves at the Stop and Shop, working alongside smutty-minded men who taught me wisecracks and whist.

  Work is social. I learned a little about the lives of these cynical, foulmouthed men in white aprons, and I put this superficial experience into a worldly poem, which Mother found. I had typed it and accidentally left it in the roller of my Remington.

  “This is filth!” she said, making a disgusted face. She tore it up.

  She had found my fat green Olympia Press copy, in the Traveller’s Companion series, of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, and burned it. I had borrowed it from a guy at the Stop and Shop. There was something final and fanatical about her burning it rather than throwing it away. The man screamed at me for (as I claimed) losing it. “I’ll never get another one! It’s forbidden!” Books like that, being contraband, were treasured.

  Mother had never heard of Henry Miller, but she saw the word “fuck” in the text. She had never heard of James Joyce or Baudelaire. She sneered at my copy of Les Fleurs du Mal, my high school macabre period, reading the poems with a dictionary, along with Black Spring and Faulkner’s Sanctuary and the hard-core porno of Akbar del Piombo. I had copied out and hidden the E. E. Cummings poem “the way to hump a cow,” so that I could memorize it.

  the way to hump a cow is not

  to get yourself a stool

  but draw a line around the spot

  and call it beautifool

  All of this for Mother was kindling for a bonfire. She was a book banner, the latest in a long tradition of tyrants who feared and hated the unsparing word. Books were burned in Mother Land.

  Although she did not disparage reading, she said that work took precedence, because work represented ready money. Writing was destructive. “Who’ll publish it?” and “If you can’t make money fro
m it, what’s the point of doing it?”

  She read Frances Parkinson Keyes’s Dinner at Antoine’s, The Little World of Don Camillo, and I’ll Cry Tomorrow. She read the Pilot, Boston’s Catholic weekly, and the Maryknoll Magazine. She quoted Edgar Guest and twinkled on the lines “It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.” That was writing to her. So what on earth was I doing?

  She had no interest in my writing apart from a wish to sabotage it. She would have stolen my pen or snipped off my typewriter ribbon if I’d let her. The arrogant thought that I might publish something did not anger her; it aroused her pity. I was making a fool of myself by revealing my ambition, as though I was saying, “I’m going to buy a Rolls-Royce and drive it to the ends of the earth.” The desire to write meant I was getting above myself, and it would reflect badly on her. All writing was setting her up for humiliation. But working in a donut shop, stamping prices on cans of soup, or selling newspapers—that was ambition, and purpose, and it showed grit and virtue. It was money.

  “She wanted me to join the navy,” Floyd said after he’d published his first book.

  Dad was no different, but instead of being hostile he was quietly embarrassed by our bookishness. He had never read a word I wrote, or if he did, never mentioned the fact. It was like an embarrassing secret we shared, of a creepy proclivity I had, something that we couldn’t discuss without awkwardness.