Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  My father’s education, formally stopped at the age of twelve when he jumped out of a school window and ran away after having been rapped over the knuckles with a ruler by a female teacher, never really ceased. A great reader, he had taught himself a little Latin and small Greek, spoke a French patois the New Orleaners did, from some residence there, and could swap fake German with my mother, in an accent that disturbed her as possibly Yiddish. Years later, in a chance quote of his, I recognize it as merely the way a self-taught Virginian might pronounce Goethe. His literary knowledge was a flossy quicksand; often only the names had stayed on top, but he knew what was to be got from books, and wistfully honored it. His own father had had a drygoods store in Richmond, but whatever schooling my grandfather might have picked up in his trek from Liverpool to the U.S.A., he had likely been but an average merchant. (When I stood in the old Richmond graveyard, closed since 1917, I could mourn this with real envy; half the early department-store names of America seemed to have come out of it. Among these Samstags and Hochschilds, and Hutzlers, only the Calishers had not achieved either a brokerage house or an emporium.)

  But even as a child, I doubted that only the Civil War had ruined their fortunes—early sensing a Southern illusion carried North. My father wasn’t a beaver businessman either, although until the twentieth century caught up with him, his own brand of panache and small-town independence had done him well. But his mother, born in Dresden, must have brought a taint of learning with her; her elder brother, Siegmund Bendan, had been visiting professor of philosophy at New York University, and some Ben-Dan before them, a rabbi. When, on graduation, I finally confess to my father what I will never reveal to others later, that I want to be a writer—at the moment a poet—he brings out a notebook of his own poems, never before mentioned, flicked now under my eyes only tangentially, and at his death lost, saying “Looky here. I wanted to. But you can’t make a living out of poetry, m’dear.” Already the family flesh was a little corrupted with art yearnings! It is left to me to make the next transition between bourgeois and bohemian. “I don’t want to make a living out of it!”

  Meanwhile, my mother keeps up a onesided battle-of-the-hierarchies. When she is angry at him, usually over his allegiance to his clan of matriarch mother, overbearing sisters and dependent brothers, she will try to bring them down a peg, in the peasant way. For while education is no longer suspect to her—indeed envied for what it can Americanly do, she shrewdly sees that what they do have of it they exaggerate. Besides, it is more than likely the very thing in them that bleeds the money away; somewhere along the line they have become incapable of caring most about money. Though by now herself an incipient collector, already glimpsing the road between money and art, she still knows, in her own words “what comes first.” Her supreme contempt however, is for their secure Jewishness, on which she cannot shame them, even when she voices her opinion that the family name had probably begun as Kaliski—name-endings à la Russe or Pole being the worst she can think of.

  It was possible. Somewhere in the England of my greatgrandfather, Calishers had turned into Curtises, vide my father’s first cousin, Julius Curtis, and even to Campbells (in a notorious case of mistaken identities, in the 1930s, a cousin of ours, Bertie Campbell, spent some years in prison for another man’s offense, until pardoned by the Governor of New York State.) Though like many early synagogues in America, the one in Richmond (Beth Shalome) had had the Sephardic ritual, much of the congregation had been “German.” We had had a few “Spanish” connections, and also, like any English-Jew emigré I met in those days, claimed relationship with a Chief Rabbi of England, in our case through some cousins named Belais, one of whom, Diana, had become president of the Anti-Vivisection Society here. (Had she got it from watching him ritually slaughter chickens?—I always wondered.) But there is incontrovertibly a town named Kalisch which was always being swapped back and forth across the German-Polish border. And I agree with my mother; we probably came from it.

  By now however, my father, in his second-generation Southernness, is quite simply a certain kind of smalltown American. In the Richmond of his birth in 1861, everybody either did know everybody else or had the idea that he could—to which were to be added all the levelings of a town first under military siege, then suffering the long effects of it. Jews there were often just people, or if socially mobile, always from their own centers of racial pride. I suppose this is why Southern Jews, up to recent times, have been so remarkably comfortable in themselves. As Jews and as Americans, they had pride-of-birth covered from either side. I saw that my father, in any company—of which, by the time I knew him, he had had a varied lot—could not be patronised. Either Southern comfort, or else what his wife called his “Jewish cheek,” would always take care of it.

  What would compromise me with some Jews later, was that I had no recent shtetl tradition. The flaccid “reform” Sunday School I attended up through confirmation had no flavor of it, nor did the synagogue itself, where history was making a fast beeline between Judas Maccabeus and the present, on its way to Long Island—on which most of the congregation had their eye. Chosen as a nearby compromise with my mother’s neutralized ambitions, my father shrugged at it and used it only for the high holidays—she never went at all. But would the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, where he wanted us to go, have fed me more of Mittel-Europa? I doubt it. Until I read of the shtetl and met its traces in friends, I had literally never heard about it. The mass of Americans who had its sub-Talmudic humors and pogrom legends very close to the ear, would always find it hard not to believe that I didn’t have it too, and was only hiding it. (Probably I must really know Yiddish and was hiding that too.) After a while, I did learn to hide our length of time in America, finding early that the very span itself—which to me was history and family memory—to them was patronage. Finally, it would keep me from being a “Jewish” writer, in the rising American tradition of that ethnic. We had been here too long. And I wanted more.

  I wanted to be—what I was. After all, I had been taught to be that. We were merely farther on into the mixed American swirl. It never crossed my mind that my work would have to deal with this. It simply never occurred to me not to. The spoor of the crossbred American, ever in more complex overlay, excited me. I was that mixture myself.

  … In the lingo of democracy, America has always been a classless nation. Yet writer after writer, from James to Faulkner, from Dreiser to Fitzgerald, has proclaimed the opposite. A work that does so here, or a writer, is always in danger, at least at first. For Americans, to go back in time is to be a recidivist, a snob, unless, like a Lowell, you are already in the national mind very clearly defined. (Then it is patriotism.) Class difference, when finally admitted in the United States, was thrown to the sociologists. Who have treated it as such a stinkbomb of a subject should be—without humor and without human coloration. So that none of us skunks would smell of the results.

  In the zoo of the social sciences is where the musk-glands of humanity are removed—for study. A novel doesn’t study—it invents. Inevitably, it represents. In the end, the novels a nation chooses to keep, to admit to its heritage, are always those which in some way cohere its own images of itself. Often, in America, these have been class-images, of some class structure the nation doesn’t yet know—or refuses to know—it has. Yet among the great European novels I had been bred on, those I most grappled to me were the least naturalistic or realistically representative; I would always choose a Dostoevski over a Tolstoi. My American heritage was showing.

  An Englishman of the widest reading once said to me of a novel of Joyce Cary’s which I couldn’t “see” as I thought I “saw” the others, “You can never understand why we so took it to our hearts. It so represents us as we know we are.” As they already know they are, from centuries of being it. Americans resist any classification, or confirmation of what they are—as if from the founding fathers’ imperative to do so because change will be their greatness. Conversely, we:—or its middle class
—love the masochistic trendbooks like Vance Packard’s, or any of those sociological simplifications which lightly flay us with those forms into which we may already have congealed. What we ask of literature, prose or poem, is that it give us back our national experience, in myth.

  We asked it early. And got it, long before Jung, sometimes in a book like Moby Dick—which had to wait. As seekers of our myth rather than our realism, in the novel we were closer to German and Russian literature than to that of the language in which we spoke and wrote. And the genius of “our” novel, in so far as one could still separate it from the ever widening nonnational stream of them, often seemed to lie in those regions where, asked for myth, it could still give it, almost to the farthest poetic reaches of prose.

  But all a writer thinks of when he or she first starts is “Well, now I am here.” And what do I do now? Next? Dare I? Can I?

  After that first story collection in 1952, though writing steadily, if very slowly, I did not publish the expected novel, or any book, for another nine years. Partly because I still had stories to write, and because the vision of the novel I dimly saw (beginning in 1953) took its time. I saw it as something literally real enough for a reader to “walk around in,” yet non-real enough for those flights from the subscribed-to-ordinary in which for me the heights of literature lay.

  I was beginning to have a host of fragmentary subjects, or mythic preoccupations, but as yet had no “world” to put them in. Certainly no national one. When it came, a novel-of-the-self grafted on a novel-of-event, it took a man, not a Jew, from that England which “we”—nation and family—had in part come from, to a South where that same “we” had in part arrived. And on to New York. Written through the late fifties, published in 1961, the only Jews in it were an English family, half mythic certainly, in the man’s beginnings, and their American counterpart, sought out by him close to the book’s end. The event-climax of the book (too soon for its length, some said, and until I completed the sequel and saw the whole, I half-thought so myself) was black-white. In these Ku Klux Klan sections, I had hit on a mythic-real we ourselves maintained as a nation. But I wanted more.

  That book, False Entry, ended with a climax-of-self, in the man’s realization of his first “mythic” family through his second and American one, whose members appeared only in a kind of prelude of themselves, enough being left unanswered to set people asking me about them for years. I kept it to myself that when I had finished the book in the usual beatific daze, instead of going to the cupboard for the usual lone, Palladian drink, I had surprised myself by setting down and locking away a page of quick successive notes for a book on them, not to be taken up again until after two novels and other shorter works in the intervening four years. In the “sequel,” The New Yorkers, which takes place before the action of False Entry (I learn to think of them as one chronicle, approachable from either end, fitting together like the halves of an almond and publishable as A Single Story) I will take up that second Jewish family, with its Czech servitors and Viennese hangers-on, but in tandem with a Protestant family of like realm, following both through the ramifying world of New York—and time. …

  By then, novels of consecutive time, written in ours, begin to bore me; I don’t think time is that, nor is this the order I would most wish to impose on it. Time should radiate complexly, as it does in life, or does for me. Nothing in art should be in too straight a line. … When I take up the sequel, its people impose their own labyrinth, of events and style. I also find in myself an ironic dryness less concerned with self-emotion than it is with society. And either book, will be less than the sum of the two, and better understood, better completed, as part of the whole. Even the West African in the second book (in the present climate, would some think of him as a token black?) complements those Negroes in the first one—a conscious man, Anglicized toward the “real,” as opposed to their mythic group-dark.

  I see that now; I had no thought of it then, and maybe write here what ordinarily I would only muse—in order to show that later on, one can. Was I trying to express the whole American stream of consciousness in my time, what was in our event-stream, and the blood-directed stream of our collective minds? I can’t tell you. Not even now. A writer should never let himself know what he “wants to express” or wanted to, other than in the doomed-to-be words of the actual work. But one thing I did know as I wrote them; this second book was about class—here.

  Meanwhile, back in the first years, I continue prowling the world of Jews I do know. I would soon write another story, One of the Chosen—about a well-assimilated Jew who, like me, had never suffered too many slurs, and thought he was safe—already my guilts were rising, as with non-sufferers all over the world. And all over unscathed America. After living in England again, I would write “Two Colonials,” which had to do with the way some tiresome Christians romanced Jews in a way we did not do ourselves. Together with the early piece I quote from, they were all I would do in that vein. I would not write of Jews again until The New Yorkers, where, returning as if to the earliest genre pictures of my own childhood, I took up again, in an effort to set down its mythic-real, the relatively unsung world of the Jews I knew best.

  “Hun’ Forty-Fifth” (originally titled “Hun’ Forty-Fifth They Gotta Get Out”) is a period piece about the way some Jews felt about blacks. Twenty years ago. And now? During the New York City teachers’ strike, one of them, coming up to me at an art show “because I already know how you’ll feel” all but shouts niggerlover at me; though as a Jew I should be “one of us,” I will not join in the “This is how we feel” of her special establishment. l am a traitor because I will not “stand together” with her and them.

  It is then, and in the weeks that follow, when black resentment against “Jew teachers,” “Jew merchants,” also finally gets out into the open, even into the papers, that I think of what happened to “Hun’ Forty-Fifth,” so long tucked in a drawer. It’s only an anecdote, on a subrosa subject to whose complications “nobody” except Leroi Jones and some other blacks “wants to contribute”—not the Mayor, not the Jews—and not me? I already know how it can be when, warily looking around me to assure myself that only Jews are present I mention, only as a contribution to history, those streetcorner “slavemarkets” where Bronx housewives not too many years ago used to bid for black dayworkers. “It’s not good to bring these things up,” they tell me. I am not sure. I am sure—and have been for years now—that there is a hierarchy among minorities too, which has extended even to literature.

  By the time I write “Hun’” I have begun to be aware of what underlies Southern comfort. I know now who it was my father patronized. (When, some years later, I write a story called “Mayry,” which begins “My father, born in Richmond about the time Grant took it, was a Southerner therefore but a very kind man,” the copy-editor who is checking it for publication, very much a Southerner, will call me up to ask if I don’t mean the “but” in that sentence to be an “and”). So by now did many Southerners, and writers. I have been raised in the North; it can never be my total subject as it can for them. I am only half-Southern anyway. And Jew as well. How many sides am I fated to see?

  (The side I shall see most and longest will be a matter for literature, not of racial controversy or any other. I will have to learn over and over, that the blended subject is the most difficult, anywhere. The normal literary treatment for “minority” feeling is to segregate it by ethnic strain. Certain subjects are sacredly reserved for one kind of treatment, which is comfortably apprehendable, and like a sermon or a good recording ratifies what we already know. Mixtures, of people or theme, only make trouble. They make new subjects, new ways of seeing.)

  One penny postal from the mail on “Old Stock” had amused me. “Miss Calisher doesn’t know anything about Jews. Furthermore she doesn’t know anything about the Catskills.” Its girlish complaint reminds me of the girls I had known so well in the garment district; its undertone of “Us!”—that proud-anxious sigh from the
sinuses, is one I have heard all my life. Lightheartedly, I set down their conversation. Perhaps I had literally heard it—and I have a parrot-ear. Their lingo, as they straphang on the Broadway train, is unconsciously self-certain.

  Claire Brody, the chatterer, the leader, and on the job-hunt, describes how that day, an employment agency has sent her for a job off Seventh Avenue; they have mistaken her name for Brady. Without once saying “Christian”—but all Jews who read will know—she describes the firm, the interviewer’s innuendoes and the turndown—and her righteous wrath.

  “‘Mr. Buck,’ I say, ‘My brother, an electrical engineer, he couldn’t get a job before the war—don’t bother to ask why. Right now there’s a shortage, he’s working, they don’t ask about his religion.’ They ask, he says, he’s going to tell them he’s a member the Ethical Culture Society—culture for what he learned in the night school, ethics for what he learned in the daytime.”

  But all this time in the crowded car, she has been urging her confidante to stand in a certain place. “Hurry up, dope, like I told you. Over there.” They attach themselves to a new set of straps above two seats “occupied by a very black young man in an eclectic maroon hat and a very light-skinned Negro woman in a severe blouse and horn rims, who was reading from notebooks in a leather portfolio.” As the train enters the 145th Street station, the young man gets up to leave; Claire makes Selma take his seat at once. As the woman too gets up to go, the two girls see that her fur coat and Claire’s are almost identical.