Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  But socialism had other difficulties. For one, while we tend to think of immigration as a tide that brought us the socialist Germans of Milwaukee, the socialist Finns of Minneapolis, and the socialist Jews of New York, never mind the socialist Dutch of Reading, Pennsylvania—and how one cheers their radical initiatives of rural cooperatives and credit banks; of state-owned terminal elevators, flour mills, packinghouses, and cold-storage plants; of city-owned coal yards, ice plants, stone quarries, and electric utilities; of cooperative housing, hot-lunch programs in the elementary schools, and direct election of school board members; of civil service standards for the police and fire departments, public works for the unemployed, and free medical care—that same tide brought in the far more numerous potato-famine Irish and southern Italians, most of them Roman Catholics inclined to obey the priests of a Church whose anathematizing of godless socialism had been codified in two different papal encyclicals. And the Militia of Christ had more money to spend than was ever discovered in a Wobbly strike fund.

  For another, while Lipset and Marks call our electoral system a wash, neither inhibiting nor encouraging socialism or any other third-party alternative, they arrive at this judgment by apples-and-oranges analogy. The logic of a primary-and-party-convention process, they inform us, “is fundamentally similar to the two-ballot system” in many European countries: “Party factions, which in a two-ballot system would be separate parties, can contest primaries and then coalesce with other factions in the general election, or run independently as third candidates.”

  This is so much static, obscuring the fact that what our primaries do is aggrandize the two-party system at the expense of outgunned, outmanned, out-soft-monied Greens, Trots, Flat Earthers, and Right-to-Lifers. To vote at all in a primary I must be registered in one or another party, and choose only among its competing candidates. Whereas in France, for example, any registered voter can vote for any party in the first round. All those parties receiving one-eighth of the vote advance to the second round, with time off between to form coalitions with like-minded partners. Even the smallest of parties has a chance to advance during both rounds. In France besides, on a local level, half of all elected officials must now be women. More wondrous still, the passionate particularities of a party vote for the European Parliament will be reflected in their exact proportion to the total count, whether that proportion constitutes a majority, a plurality, a handful, or merely a single deputy. It’s a mosaic instead of a duochrome; the grand theory accommodates and approximates its noisy fractals.

  For a third, the American Socialist Party opposed the First World War. Many socialists, after all, had voted for Woodrow Wilson when he promised to keep us out of it. But he lied. And while socialists all over Europe rallied to the slaughter under their respective flags, the American party stuck to its principles, for which it was repressed—and not only by the usual firings of teachers, shutting down of newspapers, breaking up of meetings, and arrestings on suspicion, but by the infamous Palmer Raids, the refusal to seat duly elected representatives in Congress and state legislatures, and the jailing of Eugene Debs. Never mind that the American party was right (a point that seems not to have occurred to Lipset and Marks). So severely were they punished for opposing a criminally stupid bloodbath that the party never recovered. The authors insist that only the native-born white component of the movement suffered unto extinction, mostly out West; that the big-city ethnic enclaves hunkered down and kept on trucking. But American socialism lost its shock troops, its assembly-line and Deep South labor organizers, its youth brigades, and whatever élan it might have mustered for the the long struggle against not only metastasizing capitalism, but also serial-killing Stalinism.

  Because of course it was the Stalinists who took over left-wing organizing in the Popular Front period, even as they lied about their ultimate loyalties. And when they, too, succumbed to Cold War paranoia and McCarthyite repression, there was nobody left to pick up the sticks and do any stitching. “We were, most of us, fleeing the reality that man is alone upon this earth,” wrote Murray Kempton in his elegy for thirties radicalism. “We ran from a fact of solitude to a myth of community. That myth failed us because the moments of test come most often when we are alone and far from home and even the illusion of community is not there to sustain us.”

  I would like to feel the way Nadine Gordimer felt when Susan Sontag asked her, on public television in the late eighties, whether she didn’t agree that the old categories of left and right had become outmoded. Gordimer smiled sweetly: “Well, Susan, I still believe with Jean-Paul Sartre—that socialism is the horizon of the world.” But I am reluctantly persuaded otherwise. Obviously, the utopianism I concocted for myself in high school in the fifties—equal parts of John Dos Passos, the One Big Rock Candy Union in the fitful memory of an old Wobbly I met on the Pike in Long Beach, California, and the bad dreams of the United Auto Workers area rep who let me follow him around to local union halls while he popped Antabuse to keep from drinking himself to death because he felt guilty for surviving the CIO’s left-wing purge—was all a bagpipe dream. How lonely the literature seems where I’ve made my makeshift home.

  How full of hopelessness are Melville in Benito Sereno, Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Richard Wright in Native Son. How problematic our romance with money in the gangster novels of Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, and William Kennedy. How improbably often the characters in our canonical fiction are on the run, like Ahab and Huck, or Neal Cassady and Rabbit Angstrom. How deeply weird and perverse is our fascination with the iconology of the filthy rich: the famous Steichen portrait of J. P. Morgan with a paring knife and an endangered apple; the Spruce Goose of Howard Hughes; the Rosebud sled of Citizen Kane; the death-in-the-saddle of Nelson A. (for Attica) Rockefeller; the severed ear of the kidnapped Getty; John Jacob Astor, who slaughtered all the otters in Hawaii before building us a library; Daniel Guggenheim, who cut a silver deal with Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and helped out King Leopold II of Belgium with his Congo before endowing us a museum; Andrew Carnegie, who before he gave us a music hall, also gave us the Homestead strike….

  We have seen the future and it’s selfish. Lottery! Globocop! It seems to me that Lipset and Marks should be a lot sadder than they sound—but then they, too, are all right, Jack.

  Maureen Howard’s Big as Life

  IN THE LAST panel of Maureen Howard’s splendid new triptych of novellas—after the love affair between a professor and a foundation executive; after a Sligo mermaid flees a Wall Street stockbroker’s gothic playpen to become a nurse; after church hats, folktales, property rights, banking secrets, and an altar of dandelions and wild garlic—Big as Life dreams itself into the nineteenth-century head of John James Audubon, the birdman who killed for his art. To which, as is her recent habit, Howard adds some memoir, recalling a sixteen-year-old Maureen who first looked at Birds of America in the Bridgeport Public Library in 1946, discovering there “an ardor brought to information of feathers, claws, beaks, flight, color, to song and violence, which was my natural world, too, though I hadn’t known it.”

  Her winged world: from Bridgeport, Connecticut, “a vaudeville joke,” and Irish America, a lacework bog, to delirious New York with its Potemkin bohemias. From sex and money as family secrets, to marriage and children as botched experiments, to art and history as magnetic compass points, to writing and teaching as the calisthenics of moral intelligence. “We may be creatures of our time and place,” she has said, “but we make choices, not always for the best, when we love and work.”

  Love and work, songs and violence, class, politics, literature, and womanhood—on these grids, she plots us. At least since Natural History (1992), her brilliant project has been to superimpose one grid on another on a third, fourth, and fifth, for depth perception and spectrum analysis. “Exhaustive events,” Artie wrote Louise in A Lover’s Almanac (1998), “cover all possibilities. So that’s where we must be… on the island of overlap in the beauty of intersection.” Almanac was
the first book in a projected quartet on a calendar grid—the seasons in symbolic rotation. Thus, after an Almanac winter of discontent and expiations, these three tales for spring, these complicated Easter bunnies of renewal and redemption.

  Why Howard isn’t cherished more is mystifying. It’s as if, while nobody watched, Mary McCarthy had grown up to be Nadine Gordimer, getting smarter, going deeper, and writing better than ever before, and she was already special to begin with. Maybe it’s bad timing—the feminist novel, Bridgeport Bus, a couple of years too early; the radical-sixties novel, Before My Time, coming to us after Watergate; the New York intellectuals novel, Expensive Habits, a sort of Ancient Mariner nobody wanted to listen to after all that selling out; the great postmodern pastiche, Natural History, obliged to compete near the end of the century with morose minimalisms and sullen memoirs. Or maybe it’s her unpredictability and impatience—you just can’t keep on leaving home, or minting earrings out of the exhausted vein of silver plate in the Irish American foothills, or rehearsing the same old road show of wayward girls, harmful husbands, angry academics, impudent strangers, suspicion of money, quarrels with the past, ambition, and corruption. Half card sharp, half Gypsy, she always finds another game.

  And maybe it’s her refusal to compromise. She hasn’t learned, after all, “not to want the things I cannot have.” To each new haunted house, she brings not only her outcast eye but also her child’s hunger for grand passions, homely objects, happy endings, and big ideas; for contour, sinew, and resonance. Like Mary Agnes Keely in Bridgeport Bus, at her mother’s deathbed, “I must contain it all—all—coolly in my mind while the artifice burns in my heart.” She is almost too much for us. Like the Emerson she plundered for an epigraph to Expensive Habits, she dreams a dream of Eden’s apple and of Newton’s, too—“that I floated at will in the great ether and I saw the world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, ‘This must thou eat,’ and I ate the world.” But she is also Ben Franklin, the slyboots so crucial to A Lover’s Almanac, the inventor of bifocals and lightning rods, rocking chairs and water wings. Rocking chairs and water wings!

  Howard’s chain-smoking, pill-popping, channel-switching father—with his seminary schoolboy smattering of rhetoric and apologetics and his adhesive grudge against a society that treated the Irish “like guttersnipes and cartoon drunks”—was “a terrible man,” perverse and crude, who “never got out of his chair to get himself so much as a glass of water all his life.” Or so his daughter told us in Facts of Life (1978). But he was also a detective, with a badge, a gun, and a railroad pass.

  Her mother—fey, fragmented, “somewhat wistful” and “too fine for the working-class neighborhood that surrounded us”—graduated from Smith, quoted Schiller, and married down, for passionate love, at age thirty-three, after which she carried herself “like a grieving queen.” But she was also artsy, with a “near perfect eye” for lotus pods and asparagus ferns. And when she wasn’t washing twenty-dollar bills in dish detergent and drying them on a towel rack (because “money is so dirty”), she dragged her children to concerts by the Budapest String Quartet, rather than the circus.

  One grandfather made a pile in the contractor business, married a department store clerk crazy about opera and horses, and conveyed his patriarchal self about town in a luxury Locomobile. The other, having failed to organize workers at Singer Sewing Machine, settled for a political patronage job and walked each day to the county jail.

  So Maureen, playing Puck and Portia and reading Eugene O’Neill, knowing that she was “a sinner from the start, never one of the good girls the nuns fussed over,” grew up a plump and pigtailed hostage to piano lessons and modern dance, in a household where mom carved Mary, Joseph, camels, and lambs out of bars of Ivory soap while dad sang “Danny Boy” with tears in his eyes and rooted for Joe McCarthy. She only went to work in the public library in the first place because she thought her parents needed the money—and then all of a sudden saw those Audubon prints, as Big As Life, and decided to fly away.

  For a writer “at the beginning of my long caeer as an escape artist,” this is a pretty good tool kit. “I am not the lady I was meant to be,” she didn’t have to tell us.

  Her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales (1960), was a Randall Jarrell campus production she would rather we ignored, like a first marriage, simply practice. But her second, Bridgeport Bus (1965), was a Fear of Flying before the feminist resurgence, as if Bridget Jones’s diary had been written by Rebecca West, Maud Gonne, and Hildegard of Bingen, and very funny, like early Waugh. No American heroine has ever been more wayward, nor more pregnant, than Mary Agnes Keely, a white whale, a “Molly Mick.” And in her pilgrim’s progress from Bridgeport to Greenwich Village, from a job in a zipper factory to a job at Wunda-Clutch the miracle grip, from virginity to martyrdom and from reading to writing, Mary Agnes is more than a match for Studs Dedalus.

  Maggie Flood in Expensive Habits (1986) is equally Irish (née Lynch), also a writer (including screenplays), has likewise not succeeded in telling the whole story, and may be dying at age forty-five. Before her heart is bypassed, she has amends to make: Her first husband didn’t deserve her unkind first novel; her only son is owed “some uncorrupted text.” But also scores to settle—with the editor who “took me to be raw material like sugar cane and refined me into a small bowl of salable white crystals to draw the ants.” And the Hollywood director who turned her into a pretentious movie. And the left-wing New York intellectuals who patronized her. You may notice in these pages hanks of Lillian Hellman’s hair, rags and bones of Philip Rahv and Hannah Arendt, and the passing resemblance of poor Pinky, the father of Maggie’s child, to Robert Lowell and Dwight Macdonald. But Expensive Habits is best described as a self-punishing American version of Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter.

  Yet all her heroines are self-punishing, harder on themselves than we are. This is why they’re so refreshing in the modern period of crybabies sanctioned by designer therapists. Even as they peel off the Irish, they accuse themselves of envy and class animus. They have no sooner buried their tin-pot fathers and cannibal mothers than they dig them up again to keen—the same sad song on the same damned harp; burning themselves instead of peat. Or, swimming up through fathoms of money to butter knives, serving plates, golf trophies, maybe a clavichord, probably Princeton, certainly a horse, they get the bends, as if they didn’t deserve these goodies, as if anybody does. Don’t look back on the potato famine or you’ll turn into a bottle of Guinness.

  And I should say “we” instead of “they.”

  So they try to read their way out of the discrepancies—Mary Agnes with the French poets; Laura Quinn with Frost, Freud, and Joyce; Maggie Flood with Plato, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Anne of Green Gables. And to politick: civil rights, Vietnam, Bed-Stuy, Woodstock, Pentagon. And to mediate: Mary Agnes writes parables and playlets, as well as ad copy, before her short stories, while all around her in a lofty Village, poets pose and artists arty. Laura’s books include a novel, and she also tape-records a lot. Maggie goes from fiction to screenplays, before confessing all like Augustine, while Pinky in a basement full of alcoholic fumes compiles his secret archive: “family tales,” “scraps of romance,” “naive realism,” “correspondences.”

  Which blasts the heath for Natural History, a multimedia novel asking why, in 1945 wartime Bridgeport, a socialite vamp with a Southern accent got away with murder. Because Natural History is an Oedipal mystery, keep your eye on the county detective. But spectacle and illusion are the bigger villains. Bridgeport, home of P. T. Barnum, Walt “Pogo” Kelly, Remington rifles, and Sikorsky aircraft, may have declined from an Arsenal of Democracy into needle-park housing projects and jai alai frontons. But not as seen through the self-deceiving eyes of the Irish Catholic Bray family, who imagine the city and themselves in children’s stories, fairy tales, stage plays, film scripts, lives of the saints, and a double entr
y that mimicks the Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin, with narrative to the right while on the left we shop in a typographic mall of time-coded mugshots, history lessons, odd stats, snide asides, quotes, and jokes.

  In this dreamscape of stage and screen, circus and rodeo, museums, marching bands, and even operatic stagings by the Catholic Church of our “primary narrative myth,” nobody notices the real-life disappearance of Peaches, who turns coat hangers into wire effigies of men who abuse her mother. And when a name and an identity are both erased from a computer file, we sense that Maureen Howard is about to go digital, virtual, and World Wide Webby. And so she does.

  A Lover’s Almanac is the story of two pairs of lovers coiled in a double helix. Artie, a young mathematician, and Louise, a young artist, love each other, but are both so callow they let talk-show issues get in the way. Besides, neither is sure of being the real thing: the first-rate mind, the genuine original. Cyril O’Connor, Artie’s grandfather, and Sylvie Neisswonger, an Austrian refugee, loved each other fifty years ago. But Cyril married Mae, the good Catholic daughter of his Wall Street boss, to escape his boggy origins (cop father drinks, mother is abused), while Sylvie went home to the nice man with the okay stepchildren. It is, however, a new millennium. Sylvie is alone in Connecticut. So is widowed Cyril in a leather chair in his Fifth Avenue apartment, reading the books he gave up for money. And so, briefly, they will put their stories together while Artie and Louise dream up ways to tear theirs apart. “It seems,” says Louise, “you must reinvent yourself to meet love’s impossible demands.” Well, yes.

  But A Lover’s Almanac is also a captivity narrative, where everyone is kidnapped, if not by Indians, then maybe Freud, or Marx, or bad luck, or probability theory. To all her other intersecting grids, Howard has added mathematics and music, astrology and Egyptology, medical science, a Mayan calendar, and what she calls “The Endless Page.” Scroll down, she tells us. And we do, learning a lot about dairy farms, number theory, conceptual art, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Edison, Darwin, Newton, and St. Paul. But we don’t find out what happened to Sissy, orphan of the savage streets. Nor who Artie’s real father was, back in the radically permissive sixties. So many data and coordinates, such a density of language, and I haven’t even mentioned the machine-gun italics when the author wants to confide in us herself—and still we never know enough to be positive about anything.