But there were a few obscure and mysterious years in her 20’s that she had written nothing about, the years after she left her first husband, a gifted and nasty alcoholic playwright, and before she met my father. As it happened, those were the years that I was most interested in.
As a single mother who often finds herself careering through the city in a cab late at night in a party dress, I was naturally curious about this period of my mother’s life when she was a single mother careering through the city in a cab late at night in a party dress. But she wasn’t willing to talk about it. By the time I was born, she had reinvented herself as a doctor’s wife living in a brownstone off Park Avenue, and there were four children, two cats, two dogs, summers in Nantucket and no trace of the wildness and searching and unsettledness of her 20’s.
So a year and a half ago, when my mother handed me the manuscript of her new memoir, “Art and Madness,” she had never mentioned a single one of the racy or disturbing things in it. I was encountering these stories for the first time in Times New Roman.
I read about her affairs with married writers like Doc Humes, , and others; I read about her taking my older sister, who was then 3, to Doc Humes’s house in the middle of the night because he was having some sort of psychotic episode, and sitting up with him while my sister slept on his bed, and then dropping him at Bellevue in the morning, on her way to taking my sister to preschool; I read about her waking up next to the lanky George Plimpton one morning with my sister crawling onto the covers, asking, “Who’s this?”
My mother wanted to be a writer, but because being a writer seemed so implausible to a young woman graduating from college in the late ’50s, she wanted to sleep with a writer. The book captures the bewildering, incoherent melding of Eisenhower values with a late beatnik obsession with the artist. So there is my mother in jeans and sandals, a battered paperback of Camus on her night table, with thoughts like the following: “I hoped to meet a writer and fix him dinner eternally.”
In her saga of these strange, scrambled times, my mother is satiric about other people: “She seemed like the perfect Radcliffe girl caught in a Chinese dope den.” “He seemed to know everything, or maybe it was everyone.” And yet she writes about no one more sharply than she does about herself: “I had the morals of a 4 year old.”
She is primarily concerned with the loneliness, the excess, the blazing irresponsibility toward children of that early ’60s circle of artists and writers; she is not particularly interested in the exhilaration. “Art and Madness” is a conversion narrative, and she is writing as an ardently converted conventional person.
The point is that she turned against all this bohemian stuff; she is not now a huge believer in happiness, or perhaps I should say joy, outside of marriage or settled life. Terry Southern’s wife tells her that she doesn’t regret anything that happened, and would do it all again, and my mother writes: “I, on the other hand, would never do any of it again. Never.”
But because my mother is a transcendently good storyteller, the stories get away from her. They tell themselves, and the exhilaration, the excitement, the thrill of taboo breaking, the magnetism of some of the men, are there on the page, in spite of her better, more responsible intentions.
Is it strange to stumble across all of this intimate family history in a polished manuscript practically en route to a publishing house? I would be lying if I said it wasn’t. But I had learned about my mother walking in on her father and his mistress in her country house with a group of college friends, or her aunts stealing her mother’s fur coats and jewelry while her mother lay dying, from my mother’s books; my mother’s voice telling me stories as a child, and her novels and memoirs, blend together to the extent that to this day I couldn’t tell you which is my great-grandfather’s real name and which is the name she invented for him in her novels.
I’m comfortable in this ambiguity, and live there, too: is it a bedtime story or is it life? This perverse romantic commitment to the story, to the words on the page, to the pinning down of awkward truths other more well-adjusted people might be contented not to pin down: I grew up in it and I don’t know anything else.
My response to this particular manuscript with its particular unburied secrets, though, is to act as if I am a scholar, and someone has handed me a riveting historical account of early ’60s literary New York. My mind immediately runs toward a cultural analysis of the women of the period, or changing attitudes toward the artist, in a way that conveniently obscures the fact that the woman draped across the couch at the Paris Review party is my mother.
As a piece of social history, though, the memoir is fascinating because my mother is traversing the same social circles I do, only a half-century earlier. What her generation identified as charisma in their famous writers would now be labeled “alcoholism.” Where she and her friends were devoted to the idea of pure art and flouting convention, the novelist we admire sells his novel to the movies, lives in a town house in Brooklyn, or a loft in TriBeCa, and has a good car, his bohemianism and rebellion against conventional mores basically confined to shopping at Whole Foods, with a life, in short, that suspiciously resembles that of the banker next door. (My mother recalls a date she had with my father where she called something “bourgeois,” and he, the son of immigrants, a doctor, said, “What’s wrong with bourgeois?” And my mother, embarrassed, couldn’t quite answer. But maybe the intervening decades have answered for her, and maybe we could use a little more critical distance from material things, a slightly greater obsession with the sublime sentence, who knows?) And then, of course, the casual and flamboyant adultery my mother describes would be judged the next morning by our healthier, more staid, more quietly unhappy couples; the cheating would be rare and furtive, and certainly not part of the ambience and festivity of, say, a book party, which is now altogether a brisker, more businesslike affair. And I don’t think we ever quite achieve the boozy, dissolute fluidity of those parties and happenings she describes, an atmosphere summarized as, “Somebody slapped/ Somebody’s second wife somewhere.”
To me what’s most striking reading my mother’s memoir is the stylish chasm between their world and ours, the pleasurable sensation that we have progressed. But is the literary scene completely different from our own? It is different, surely, and a 25-year-old like my mother would feel entirely comfortable harboring writerly ambitions of her own. However, if you go to a Paris Review party on White Street, or an N+1 party, you will still find the young male novelist, now ironic, self-deprecating, exquisitely confident, in his plaid shirt and glasses, just back from Buenos Aires, maybe, and the girls who eagerly orbit him. So there is still a certain amount of accommodating, affirming female energy circling the male editors and writers; a certain male radiance to be fed off of and deferred to and seduced. The dynamic is different, definitely more subtle and fashionably post-feminist, but it would be dishonest if I said that the Paris Review party circa 1964 was entirely unrecognizable to me. In fact, standing in their crowded offices the other day, next to the bar, the wilder scenes from the book still in my head, I almost expect to see my mother, in her daisy print minidress, cropped ’60s hair, kohl-circled eyes, with the cigarette she doesn’t actually know how to inhale, walk in the door. ( nytimes.com )
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