Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  Just as I light the lamp in the window in its honor, my husband enters, suggesting that we drive down to the consulate, where they’ll give us a cup of tea. At my answer, that we can’t because we’re having people in for it, his query is natural—whom? Invitations go by note of hand here, there being few telephones. I have been my own day-by-day messenger, and the RSVP’s are all in. They’re delighted to get a closer look. Nobody’s been in hiding except us. “Let’s see,” I say, “first there’s Mr. … Jamshid, I think it is. He has been in Germany. Very lively. Then there’s little Shaké—her parents have the nut shop. Armenians, I guess. Shaké is only 12 but she already has been through one whole French reader. Then there’s Mrs. Vartanian.” This is the beer lady. “I don’t yet know what she speaks, but her chauffeur is certainly very courteous. No doubt General Shabusteri already knows her. And his son Cyrus is studying English. Altogether, we should do very well.” I unwrap his muffler from beneath his dreaming gaze, take the briefcase from that abstracted hand. “Oh I know it’s all rather humble, compared to the university. But it’s a beginning. And besides—” I add this last very practicably, “you won’t have to run out and get a thing. I’ve whipped up a cake.”

  Two weeks later, in a hotel flat in Manhattan, on a raw Sunday, I sit re-reading yesterday’s letter from him. January’s sea of mud is upon us, days the color of same. Hard to believe that come spring this is the land of the peach and the rose. A shame you shan’t see it, but perhaps someday we’ll return here together. As plans go now, I should join you in New York by June. Love from me and the tea-girl. Today I ate the last of your cake. Before flying to America in answer to an emergency cable, I had made him another cake. That time the tea-girl had lost the other half of her suit. Just to think of her made me homesick. He was wrong about the color of days in Tabriz of course. I looked out the windows-how gray the dusks of the East Fifties! At home in never-never they are always blue.

  As I prepare to go, my daughter threatens to fall ill again, as she will do through the years; doctors have long since explained to me this strange dependency—“as for the womb” the first one said to me—in which a stay of even a day away from her, on my part, is a desertion. (And to which, I myself, through all the pitiable times of her troubles always subject in a way to that bitterly gleaming intellect, and temperament so much my twin, have fallen too deeply in thrall.) How can she or I know that my friend, more than any of them, will help both her and me with it? Meanwhile, since for my life I cannot help going, a friend, Holly Roth (herself later to die mysteriously, lost at sea in a storm off Morocco, from the deck of her schooner, her new husband at the helm)—will watch over her.

  On the lighter side—during what I suppose might be called the engagement period—I go to a party composed mostly of women poets, given for an acquaintance the painter Tobias Schneebaum, who is going to Greece—in a ship’s hold, as companion to and wrangler in charge of some bulls being exported to Salonika by the F.A.O. Not pushing the analogy, he asks if he can in any way help us. And sure enough, in due course his letter arrives. Marriage between divorced persons is difficult in that Greek Orthodox country; other than a marriage by a ship’s captain at sea—shall he arrange for it?—only one minister, the Presbyterian one, will oblige, and he is very busy; we had better write at once. Since the Persian mails are so untrustworthy, I do, in stilted language. Conscious that this is usually not the bride’s function (I believe I asked him to “favor us”) I promise confirmation from my intended, later. Tobias’ letter has added that the head of CARE “is very interested in you and would like to give you a champagne party.” We balk at that, but are sent a limousine to take us to Kafesias, nevertheless.

  There the minister takes us into his study, for a little talk. Perhaps it is exactly what we need. At one point, when he is saying that daily we must take some moments out of the worldly day to brood on things of the spirit, I burst out with a joyous “Oh, but we do, you see—we are writers!” To me it is an honest approximation of what is done in those mornings—and I suppose I think people ought to know. A minister especially, should be pleased to. My friend gives me a strong look. It says SHUT UP. Or the man won’t marry us—is what crossed his mind, he says later. But a pattern is set.

  The minister’s wife limps in, in polio-braces, to witness us. The vice-consul, Mike Bank, also attends. Toby is our best man. I see from his taut expression that what we are undertaking is serious. The marriage-certificate is a long, accordion-pleated affair, exactly like those postcard Views which fold to mail. I am wearing the “cerise”—from Bangkok.

  Later, going round the islands by steamer, at every stop, the shores are lined with people crowded on quays, clinging from the cliffs, with banners and dulcimers, cheering themselves hoarse. It is only for General Grivas, just out of exile, who is on our boat. But it feels as if it’s for us.

  A GHOST I ONCE knew—a man who did “autobiographies” of famous people, told me his hardest work came in making them interesting “afterwards.” People only want to read about their upward climb. “Once they’ve made it, forget it. Or if they’re ha-appy.” He snarled the word, with the artisan’s hatred for poor material. I heard it drag its peacock feathers in the dust.

  A sense of loving and being loved doesn’t change one’s “nature.” It gives men and women what it gives children—a confidence in what they are. And more openness in being it.

  Memoirs, I see now, aren’t formal compositions of what you remember—and what you care to say of it. A memoir is your own trembling review of what you did and do—what you can bear to say of it. In so much of my life, as here and now, the saying is the act. In varying shades of distinctness, it is my public life. No matter how private it seems.

  No life can be seen in a straight line, even afterwards. From the first, my stories and novels took this for granted. As I gained “worldly” knowledge—which means any kind one doesn’t begin with—they often took this for theme, or for part of it. After my new marriage, as was remarked, there was certainly more of them: so far five novels, a brace of novellas, considerable critical work as well as some prose and poetry never shown—as against a novel and two short-story collections mostly written between the first book and 1959. Serenity is good for work you already have in mind, or for summoning it; performance is nourished by a calm under whose routine, not dull but reassuring, all the blood can run into the book. Certainly I was freed of the lovehunt, and with a companion whose life-hunt was kin to mine. Since all our professional and “living” connections were in New York, we had settled there. Neither of us wished to return to the West, and though we flirted with suburbia and countryside, except for the long summers when we immured ourselves on islands in the sea or the woods, nothing came of it.

  But avoiding the New York litry life, which so many writers take postures on, has never been hard for me—so often those writers are not natives. To me New York is quite another thing—a home town, a habitat, full of ordinary people and their parties. As well as all the other arts—and theirs.

  Meanwhile, as a mother I could live less wastefully or oddly than I had had to do. My son could go on to school and college without feeling himself the preoccupation of a lone woman; for whatever his need, there were now two of us, actively. At any time, my daughter’s disease could rampage through her life and ours, and often did; our quiet periods were rare. Yet for her, as for me, there was now a solid aide, who could often do more for her than I. Slowly too, he helped free me of my own guilty dependence in that direction, doing it with honesty and good will toward her. All of us learned to trust his firm fairness, and lean on it. I learned from it. As I still learn from her illness, and from her death—the only tribute I can give. But all this, though so much, so much, is not the full point of the years since that second “extreme” change.

  The inner life of an ego has to be phrased otherwise. Mine seems to me a pilgrim still in progress, shedding fears like skins, which with age—and if life is as spherically returnable upon i
tself as I think it—may well form again, in old age’s version of them. I had never had purely sexual fears or puritanisms—I’m not sure why. Neither the restraints of a middle-class girlhood, nor the reprobations of a Germanic mother, had made me doubt my own candidacy or capacity. Maybe Jewish training doesn’t scar the child with sexual sin—as some other religions do—and perhaps my father’s Edwardian gaiety had helped. But otherwise, I had grown up, intelligent and a woman, in a country which wasn’t too sure of its respect for either condition. In a way—I have had to acquire the confidence in me that it hasn’t had.

  By this time I had passed through my fear of not being a writer, and of not finding a lover. Now I would have to pass through my fear of being a woman Writer. Which by this time had less and less to do with the external limits dealt us, or the statuses. The real danger had always been that it would restrict what I wrote. What I wrote would have to pass through this. The real limits of art are always self-imposed.

  In the next years, and next two novels, it is my luck to pass through this almost unwittingly—partly from circumstance, and partly because my aggressions have their eye on something else. True, I have joked to friends that after years as a male narrator, my next book (Textures of Life—1963) would be as “female” as I could make it, but I had also written that it would be about “the little things that push life on while we are waiting for the big ones to happen”—which, if books have a major theme, was its. Actually, the praise for False Entry has been a liberating one, and all considered, remarkably uncondescending as to what sex I was—in whatever areas I explore I have no fear of being dubbed a “kitchenmaid” writer. Meanwhile, if other woman writers here seem to me off in corners too balladeering, grotesque, or minimally satirical for me, I have enormous admiration for what they do in those corners, and haven’t yet logicked out for myself why they are in them.

  Certainly, in a third novel (Journal from Ellipsia—1965), I have no intention of writing a feminist one. Art is still not a standing together, even with them. Later, when a critic tells me it has been the first feminist novel of the decade and the new era, I am surprised. In it, I have had some fun with the taken-for-granted divisions between the sexes—and high time too—but the locus I have in mind isn’t even American, but “the world.” True, I have made use of an interplanetary visitor of undifferentiated sex, who had come here to find one, in exchange for some female scientists intent on emigrating to a planet where they could lose theirs. But to me the book really takes place in that terrible but thrilling gap between the word-masters of the human condition and its math-masters, between the humanists and the atomic symbolists—that gap whose consequences, pointed out to us by C.P. Snow, had been with me ever since, as a young philosophy student fresh from Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer, and all the other beloved anagogues in whose word-systems I had hoped to revolve endlessly nearer the touchstone, I had come up against the Quantum Theory and Max Planck—and had first understood the barrier nature of that other visionary side of the universe, over to which I could never travel first class unless I reversed my life, to learn its instruments.

  Expertise interests novelists, who usually despair of having all of them. Novels spring up in those gaps.

  I am feeling my oats because I am writing them.

  Chronologically, American writers of the era seemed to peter-out earlier than those of other nations. Perhaps not so much because of the nature of American success, or even of failure—but because continuity is not being expected of them. Some, only in their forties and fifties, already retreat into literary make-work, or sit on the one book, or find their idolatrous claques. But because of my late start, I am just beginning to expand. At an age when some writers mire, circumstance has so arranged it that I seem to myself to have just begun. Ideas in work ferment as fast as I can write them down; afterwards, I sit on in their buzz, their swarm. I tell myself sternly that any writing which happens after “the work” is only accessory—a leftover energy. Sainthood must be like that—it feels so good you want to be at it twenty-four hours a day.

  When you’re not on Sinai, you exhort. I still feel that for a writer, reviewing (or even other critical work) is in a sense going over to the enemy (and I will never quite lose that feeling) but when I do, I find myself hewing my way toward some body of ideas I didn’t know I had; during all this make-work, I must be formulating them. I write long letters to friends, and begin correspondences, the most continuous with Mary Sanford, a keen observer in foreign parts. And a vice which had first surfaced early in my writing days, begins to grow.

  Letters Of Indignation—from time to time, I write them. My friend gives them their name, when in the process of our living together, he finds out. A psychiatrist might say that I am merely releasing a basic anger, in a number of quite various but ever more socially acceptable guises. They do seize on me in the early morning—after who knows what dreams of insufficiency, unremembered? (But mornings is also when I work.) If I’m not careful, I’m likely to spend the day at one. (But then, I have often spent as long on letters of a few lines and of quite other kinds—one, for instance, that has to turn somebody down.) Maybe they surface at those times when I’m afraid, for all the reasons writers often are, to go on with what I’m working at? For we all know that anger is fear. Yes, partly.

  But outside the work, there are also real things to be afraid of, personally or socially—and at times I remember them.

  Though some portion of this enters the work. I no longer see the work as totally sourced in early angers which have been decently, artistically extended. I have departed from that early self-interpretation. Injustices, social and private, ferment in me, but I am incapable of writing a work about any one of them—a reason that does have to do with art, has protected me. No work I admire is ever really about one thing, in the sense that one can pluck its subject between forefinger and thumb, like a tiny, screaming homunculus.

  My mother used to accuse “all the Calishers” of “Jewish self-righteousness.” (Typified for me by my Aunt Flora, who simply had to make the best soup. Everybody conceded it. But she had to make this clear.) My friend agrees that Jews appear to suffer in a way peculiar to them, over having to put things right according to their lights, (but adds temperately that this is biblical.). Only then do I recall a passage in The New Yorkers where, after a long interchange, Austin, the young Quaker lawyer, replies to the Judge, a Jew—who has twice said to him “Well, that’s honest of you.”—“No. You people mean to be honest. We only mean to be fair.”

  In a chapter called, “The Honest Room.” These days I am brooding on honesties—of a writer’s life, of a Jew’s, of a woman’s life (in the novella called The Railway Police), of an American’s. In and out of books.

  As I look over these letters now, I see how the tone changes, or lapses, with the target. I have tried not to put in only those which make me look good. I see how, taken together, they make me look too good. With a strong flavor of Aunt Flora’s soup. Yet, snappish or high-and-mighty, or trivially insistent, they’re a part of me I cannot leave out. What is it they really want—justice? I leave them because, in a small way, they are a sign to me. Of what I want more than anything, morally. That my books and my life be—not discontinuous.

  I remember when the habit first seized me, a snowy blue day on the river outside my desk-window in Grandview, with the cardinal and the bluejay swooping contrapuntally in front of me and my wasted morning. And the letter, long since lost or torn up, boiled up in me without notice, from that black roux that must be at the bottom of all of us, of me. At the breakfast table, we had now and then been reading aloud from the music reviews of a daily critic with a ridiculously euphuistic style; in his hearing no one ever played an instrument—music was “elicited” there from.

  When I was eleven, this man, then training to be a concert pianist, had been my first music teacher, and a baleful one. Obscurely, I felt he was willing me not to learn. I was wistfully eager to, and under later teachers became one of t
hose amateurs able to play the Beethoven Sonatas with fairish bravura to close relatives—but under his baiting eye I was kept witless. One day, with a “Hang it!” he slammed down the piano lid not quite quickly enough to catch my fingers, and I was scared enough to ask my parents for somebody else.

  Of the letter, which must have poked fun at his style, I recall only the last sentence—“Isn’t it nice, Mr. X., that after all these years, you now write about as well as I play?”—and my shame at this nursery eruption, which left in its wake the same hangdog exhaustion as after a useless quarrel.

  I didn’t mail the letter, and that annoyed me too. How cranky was I?

  Some years later, I told the story to Virgil Thomson.

  “Poor man,” he said. “Prison broke him.”

  I was horrified then of course, at my pursing vengeance.

  “What was he sent up for?”

  Was there a spark in Virgil’s eye? “Molesting little girls.”

  None of the letters was written for publication. Each was in response to a circumstance. Each had two addresses, one being the receiver, the other myself.

  Exhibit A: Written to The New Yorker, in the person of my editor there, on the matter of In The Absence of Angels, a story they had congratulated me on, accepted, and then decided not to publish because of New Yorker editor Harold Ross’ fear that it would contribute to already dangerously excited public opinion. (I cover the details later on in the excerpt from “Ego Art.”) “Marion” refers to my then agent, Marion Ives.

  Dear Mr. Henderson:

  Marion’s told me that you are writing me a long letter about the decision on “In the Absence of Angels.” As you know, I’ve never before broken protocol by answering a rejection—and never thought to do so until now. But this time I feel I have to do so—and before I receive what will undoubtedly be a kind and considered letter from you—because I think that this time it is perhaps as important for you all to hear what my reactions are, as it is for me to voice them. Believe me, there is not an ounce of personal resentment against any of you involved here—it would be very much easier if I could write it off as such, or could dismiss it as outraged vanity or disappointment on my own part. It is precisely because I know what serious consideration you all have given this, and because from the length of time given it, and your and Mr. Lobrano’s comments, I think that I can assume that the quality of the piece was not the question here—that I can write you at all. I should appreciate it if you would let this be read by anyone who has had any part in the decision, including Mr. Ross. I know that, normally, he is pretty much protected from the hazards and complications of writer-reactions, but I should be grateful to you if you could arrange that he see this one.