Mementos of Southern Ambiguity

...But her own family circumstance, Calisher has always insisted, bred in the bone a much larger sweep of time...

...BUT THE PAST the Calishers cling to is more complex than that suggests...

...Whatever "kindness" Southerness may encompass, there is no escaping the stain of slavery...

...At some point they emigrated to England, from whence her now British grandfather came to Richmond and married a much younger Dresdener...

...Born in 1861 in Richmond, Virginia, the then capital of the Confederacy, he was the seventh of eight children...

...The "but" is not a typo, she informed him, it is part of a certain moral ambiguity implicit in being Southern...

...To this complicated mix is added Hortense Calisher's younger mother, the Cinderellaofthe family...

...She is the daughter of a father who did not marry until his 50s (her mother was two decades younger...

...There were no revelations to be expected when she opened the drawer, only the painful reiteration of her mother's personality and the power it had held over her own...

...She gets her talky, circumambulating style from them...

...Tattoo observes with splendid specificity: "They all had...

...Wardour Street does not show up in Tattoo for a Slave, Calisher's 25th book, but the bits of family history that made a brief appearance in Herself are lyrically expanded here, giving the whole a shape that more closely resembles what we think of as autobiography...

...Born of a father and grandfather who had both waited to marry and rear families until near elderly, when I delved into that two-generational perspective which is a child's usual lot, I unwittingly went much further back...

...Longevity and Southerness combine forcefully to create an obsession with the past in Calisher's family...

...Memento still seems to be a fully Southern word," she remarks...

...The "tattoo" of the title, I suspect, is meant in both senses of the word: "tattoo" as the bugle call at the end of the day that recalls soldiers to their quarters, and the "tattoo" whose patterns, once pricked, cannot be expunged...

...Keep," she hears forebears intoning from their graves...

...Weighed against the locked drawer of her mother's character, it is hardly surprising that young Hortense chose to cleave to her affectionate, witty, entertaining father and his stable of Gothic Southern relatives...

...One might imagine that at the advanced age of 93 the author is finally ready to spend her literary capital, and to some degree she does...

...Keep...

...Readers familiar with Calisher's oeuvre will recognize her mother from the early stories "Old Stock" and "The Middle Drawer...

...The mine from which Calisher excavates Tattoo encompasses a remarkably wide swath of American history...

...Having lost her own mother at birth, she arrives off the boat at 16 without a single word of English...

...Certainly themes in the autobiography already surfaced in "The Middle Drawer": Holding the key to her dead mother's locked drawer, "she shrank before it, reluctant to perform the blasphemy that the living must inevitably perpetrate on the possessions of the dead...

...Her mother, Calisher writes, "is convinced that as an immigrant, though some of those soar, because of her 'clodhoppers' she will remain forever a peasant...

...Interestingly, though, the fictional representation seems more vivid, more truthful, more full of insight than the real one in Tattoo...

...Coiled at the heart of her psyche . . . are her size-10 feet...

...Calisher's grandmother, 97 when the author was 12, lived with her family in two back rooms of their New York apartment...

...In the manner of earlier generations of fully assimilated immigrants, her father views his roots as antecedent rather than defining: He considers, his daughter tells us, "by mere nativity, that he is Virginian to the core...

...For if I interpolate her here in what is intended to be a Southern story to the hilt," the author remarks, "this is because, during all her life with us, she herself would be an interpolation...

...Early on, an editor questioned the first line in a story that described her father as "a Southerner, but a very kind man," asking whether she meant "and...

...Shoot...

...In her more enthusiastic moments, one must admit, her lyricism can run away with itself, sometimes crossing the line to absurdity...

...After her parents' deaths, Calisher comes across an envelope with an insurance receipt covering "servants" along with "marbelized iron mantels" and other property...

...The policy expired in 1856...

...We are, she implies, indelibly marked by history—our own and that of others...

...That was nothing...

...A decade...

...From the very beginning of Calisher's career, critics have noted with some degree of irritation her fondness for "verbal fancywork" and "intrusive mannerisms...

...But when she gets it right, as is often the case, she gives us spectacular and memorable moments of recognition, illumination, empathy, and sheer pleasure...

...Her Virginia gentleman father, in fact, emerged from what she calls "a mongrel mix" of German-Polish Jews...

...We can only feel grateful and amazed that she continues to give us the benefit of her long and complicated experience of life...

...I heard nothing direct from that grandfather who, on record as an elder of the synagogue in 1832, was probably born in the 18th century...

...Yet as one might imagine too, her capital is so multifaceted, so full of apparent contradiction, that it imposes its own particular order—part memoir, but the meaning also partly inscribed in the metaphors and mirrors novels employ...

...Born in 1911, she came of age during the Great Depression, lived a housewife's life in the postwaryears now remembered as the era of "the man in the gray flannel suit," threw herself into the politics of the Vietnam era, and survived to become one of the most prolific fiction writers of her generation...

...In her family events of half a century ago seemed "still at hand...

...So the servants in question were in fact slaves, although the word is never mentioned...

...The social anxieties Hortense's mother suffered surely contributed to her being a pursed-mouth disapprover among chattery, story-telling Southerners and made her a "foreigner" in the family...

...I am inclined to agree with Angus Wilson, who wrote of Calisher, "She hits her targets at a point more vital than the usual marksman knows to exist...

...nonfiction making liberal use of fiction's techniques—Hortense Calisher was writing in her "autobiographical work," Herself(1973): "I don't believe that the short story or the novel—or the symphony, or the sculpture of the object—should ever stand still enough in artistic time for us to say unequivocally what it is, or should be___What you really see, if a piece of work is good enough, is the particular order it has self-imposed...

...Is this because the stories were written closer to her mother's death, when memories were fresher, or because for Calisher re-creating "reality" is simply a better way of getting close to truth...

...Leaping from first to third person, from a portrait of Depression New York to a travel journal, to letters to an editor, to a discussion of the difference between American and European novels, Calisher playfully asks: "Is this an autobiography she writes—when you'll never get to know what she was doing that day in Wardour Sfreet, at halfpast three...

...biographies morphing into novels...

...She gave no one her confidence, her daughter recalls...

...the loose, ramshackle vocabularies that their birthright seems to breed, hot in the mouth as if they were spitting peppercorns: 'Gee whittakers...

...Calisher opens Tattoo with her father's assertion that "Your grandmother never kept slaves,"but close to the end of it we discover the truth at the heart of what looks like ambiguity...

...Class is a source of endless concern for her as well—perhaps explaining why, as a young and attractive woman, she chose to marry a much older man...

...In sharp contrast to the spate of confessional memoirs published during, say, the last decade, Calisher's Herself was a self-portrait constructed with mirrors, mostly eschewing the kind of personal history we have come to expect from autobiography...

...Crazy chile!' Or languid with pure love of the syllable: 'Hon, you sure look tatterdemalion.'" There was, however, always a "but" in the equation...

...Excising the German accent, andjettisoning along the way the too big embroidered handkerchiefs and funny red flannel underwear she has brought with her, Calisher's mother is desperate to lose any traces of her too present past...

...contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "TLS" Long before it became fashionable for postmodernists to poach genres—novels borrowing from biographies...