The Family Romance

...fAUREEN Howard is of course a 1 novelist (a good one who gets better each time out) and a strong critic...

...The tone is carefully hedged, as it is so often when feeling runs most powerfully, by irony and archness, a subtle defense against charges of facileness...

...In the family changing cubicle on the public beach she first becomes aware of stirrings she calls "unfocused lust"—the "first mysteries of sex and my own childish sexuality...

...O, what we are made to endure in this vale of tears...

...AH this not by way of presenting bouquets but in order to raise a question about memoirs in general and this one in particular...

...Now, that such a man should dote on McCarthy as the scourge of all beneficiaries of Ivy League Arts degrees is no surprise—his furious daughter will concede only that he was a "decent reactionary"—but what was she to make of this...

...Nothing is what it was: memory, devious, sweet, duplicitous, cunning, benign memory, is the great fiction-making furnace...

...And what are we to salvage from the great flux and how arrange the shaping elements so that we have in the writing of a wholly plausible character—the writer as her own heroine who creates the life out of materials not imagined, or not wholly imagined, but given and lived, and therefore inescapable—deprived of the imagination's escape hatches...

...a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal and other magazines...

...Nor does the memoirist go easy on herself: so many years later she confesses to still resenting the humiliation of being sent to Smith to vie with those glittering girls in ill-fitting homemade clothes while her brother was made to suffer the agony of a part-time student job in the bursar's office at Yale, though her family was well able to afford a free ride...

...If one demands everything of the book and is unwilling to settle for less it is because Maureen Howard required everything of herself: to get the facts of her life into something like steady focus and plot the route, across dangerous terrain, from there to here, showing us where the scars are and how they were come by...

...And one day soon after this sacred rite, Miss Ruby would vanish as she had come, unannounced and unremembered, bound no doubt for some other vacant store in some other Bridgeport...

...and it is too easy to score off the lamentable Fines— there must be more to be known of those "phonies" than met the child's eye, more than mere pretentiousness, vanity, affectation, downright silliness...

...Seen from a safe distance, on the neutral ground occupied by the unscarred observer (unscarred by these scars, anyway), the saga is familiar enough—a shade too familiar but we are dealing with life not art: anxious, submissive, genteel, mother bustling about in the kitchen, gruffly affectionate, clumsily loving hamfisted father engaged in some elaborate cover-up (now a cop, once a choirboy and seminarian) chivvying his puzzlingly brilliant, awkward, stuttering boy (what else had the boy to defend himself and do battle with...

...Life presents her with metaphors...

...She notices that in hanging up her clothes her decorous mother has taken care to tuck her stockings and girdle far out of sight...

...Holtons—Howard is also a lapsed actress and a believing playwright...

...What kind of fiction do we make of our lives...

...Holton of the sort who turns up in the autobiographical annals almost as often as the Miss Rubys—a lady fallen on hard times but no less a lady for that, indeed all the more of one, who presented herself to her young charges as the impeccable model of what a Lady, at that time already a dying art-form, should be...

...Miss Ruby would strive crazily to bring her pupils to performance pitch...

...An improbable sorceress: Miss Ruby Weinstein, the teacher of these wretched children, an Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham of the outback, burning for beauty with a hard gemlike flame, a shaman of art, possibly half-mad and surely absurd, conducting her studio out of a Depression-abandoned store on a commercial street, weekly displaying her skinny, nearly nude body gyrating in expressive figuration to her small class of dazed and awestruck girls (Maureen, bug-eyed with wonder and alarm, was then being taught that the only good body was one chastely concealed from chin to toes)—O, there is a Miss Ruby Weinstein in every artist's life, messenger of the holy fire, in whatever shape, sex and disguise...

...8 December 1978: 785 The author's mother, a Smith graduate and former schoolteacher (Latin and Algebra), devoted to the finer things of life, now mistress of the domestic arts, with endless adages and lines of verse and doggerel at her disposal for every occasion no matter how remote, herself the daughter of Bridgeport's emperor of asphalt, himself up from poverty by the sweat of his brow and an eye for real estate and a generation removed from the potato famine—Mother wanted nothing but the best for her only daughter...

...We take our examples as they come...

...A Lady, properly speaking, carries her head thus, and walks so, and occupies a chair in this manner and no other, and of course never crosses her limbs and always enunciates her vowels as prescribed by the Mrs...

...and remarks: "The answer to that one can interest only me and will interest me forever...

...The Attitudes imitate both 'Facts of Life...

...what troubles her troubles me, though not perhaps in the same way or to the same degree...

...By Maureen Howard...

...In a marvelous brief passage she describes the making of asphalt—which was the making of the family fortune—as, not to put too fine a point on it, the making of "hot shit...

...Such humiliations...

...182 pp...

...Holton is too easy and too vulnerable a target for derision, and in any case we derive from the most implausible sources, among them the Mrs...

...Holton moved beautifully to the highest reaches of Art, instructing her greatly gifted pupil in elocution, recitation—and, above all, in The Attitudes, sad to say a wholly lost art known only to antiquarians of those slender turn-of-the-century volumes directed at the anxieties of arrivistes dreaming of better things...

...Later, still a child though now edging into awareness, Maureen had the great good fortune to come to know actual professional practitioners of the arts after a fashion—the Fines, Leslie and Clare, he a failed commercial playwright, she a writing machine for producing trash...

...The section of Maureen Howard's finely executed, sly, resonant memoir* in which Miss Ruby dances is called "Culture," the first, longest, perhaps richest of three, the other two "Money" and "Sex": taken together, the "facts of life," a sufficient triad for a life...

...why then, she asks, "did my father choose to display his jockstrap sprung with the shape of his balls on the most prominent peg...

...How is it possible to be both dry-eyed and generous, suspend loving kindness and deal as harshly as we must with ourselves and with those who did not know they were harboring a writer in their midst...

...What the hell was she watching all the time...

...Well, him, as a matter of fact...

...her own daughter asks her in her turn, on the evidence of one side of the ledger...

...but who could have expected that the bad joke of modern dance for mom-tormented, obese, illfavored, ungainly children would prove oddly exciting, liberating—it is not too much to say a turning point—for the watchful little incipient novelist...

...as her enchanted reader I am interested in the passion and ordeals of her life...

...Such illuminations—into the genesis and mystery of experience—are artfully staged, the emotion observed with high self-awareness and at the same time allowed the full play of its own life...

...Miss Ruby did not provide the only archway to the temple...

...Grandfather, the self-made tycoon of asphalt and shrewd investments, enthroned in the big house with his wife, a lady of some culture bred in New York, the remote capital, from whom Bridgepprt was the distant "country," their daughter, Maureen's mother, married, as they saw it, beneath her station in life, a girl with all the advantages and seemingly settled into the good life of the spinster schoolmarm in her own pretty room just down the hall from Dad's where she'd be above all safe—when, at the age of thirty-three and unexpectedly kindled, she ups and marries a shiftless character four years her junior and from the other side of the tracks, Irish, yes, but the wrong kind of Irish, former choirboy, lapsed seminarian, courthouse "lawyer" and actual county Detective, or, as his daughter would say, a "glorified cop," a man who would come to table in his undershirt, dismay his wife and disconcert his son and daughter by uttering forbidden words and off-color jokes, behave in a manner "perverse and crude" one day and "charming and urbane" the next, bully his family with bits of erudition ruthlessly recalled from his old days in seminary, and later, already confirmed in his admiration for J. McCarthy and the Reader's Digest, loudly lament that of all his family he was the only one without a college degree—all this family drama enacted in the little house nestled in the shadow of the dynastic big house as if spawned by it...

...The family saga, briefly sketched, bursts with promising materials...

...8.95...

...she's taken aback and recalls tender moments in childhood, herself and her father together at last, away from the intruding others, particularly a scene when she stands at the window, a forlorn princess, awaiting her father's late return from work while the others, out of patience, heedlessly, coarsely eat their dinner for two...

...they have to do with absent mi ndedness, a fine carelessness (spoiled rotten by doting women in his upbringing, the kind of boy who leaves socks and underwear where they fall) and the natural procedures of undress (last object off the body, last on the peg, and devil take the hindmost...

...when, that is, she wasn't watching her mother and brother, grandparents, aunts, neighbors, friends, anyone careless enough to wander into her field of vision—hadn't even made her First Holy Communion (which, of course, she "mucked up") and already sopping up the primal world for her true vocation...

...These lapses, if they are that, are few and minor, and in the face of the achievement scarcely matter...

...Little Brown...

...in due time they did perform, tripping this way and that when not actually colliding with each other, their art unfolded before an audience of giggling, whispering, unworthy mothers come to see what they were getting for their money...

...Narrative time, fictional time: in retrospect there is no other—what seemed contingent at the chronological time of its occurrence looks very like destined when seen from the present as the traversing mind invents its life out of "actual" circumstance...

...Holton or the Fines, not Mum or Dad, not the author herself...

...while at home the star pupil was being instructed by the resident Lady where to conceal the Kotex from the eyes of Father and Brother...

...How do we understand and absorb our experience where even extraordinary intelligence notoriously falters, distorts, mis-reads—in the fiery circle of the family, ringed round and charged with electric fields...

...no doubt more than a little nervous with his strange, gifted, watchful daughter, unlike anyone he'd ever known or heard tell of...

...MAUREEN HOWARD'S 'FACTS OF LIFE' The family romance SAUL MALOFF H I OW CAN we read our lives through the mists and turbulences of four I decades and hope to meet ourselves face to face—to catch ourselves in SAUL maloff...

...Everything she so impressively is makes of her an immensely selfconscious writer and witness to her life, at once a novelist scanning it for the illuminating moments, persons, correspondences and the intervening critic, herself perched on her own shoulder as she writes, whispering, pointing, reminding, warning, correcting, scoffing: in a word intimidating...

...Now three: I am interested...

...My "answers" number a round baker's dozen, all of them interesting, a few of them awesome...

...and these instances hardly suggest the richness of a memoir composed of many such moments...

...those moments of being (tableaux, scenes, pulse beats) which separate themselves out of the drift, divigations, false turnings and enter the underground stream, moments which, amplified by memory, swell to intense magnitude and come to seem, as we gaze into the abyss, the time of our life...

...Howard saw, one feels, only what she was disposed to look for, then abruptly turned her attention elsewhere...

...The problem, as I've made tiresomely clear, is a grievous and treacherous one...

...life and art—teach, well, the striking attitudes and gestures broadly, very broadly, expressive of feeling and emotion for those who don't happen to possess any of their own, a kind of silent film each frame appropriately labeled for the emotionally analphabetic...

...Rich,real rich, Hollywood gold: an estate in Westport, a Park Avenue penthouse, chauffered limo, the stuff dreams are made on...

...Accordingly, the little girl was given over to the nuns for schooling, and to dancing classes (social and "modern") for the graces...

...and allowing the passage to stand in isolation she later comes upon her mother, standing at the kitchen sink furiously scrubbing ten- and twentydollar bills in strong detergent and hanging them up to dry...

...But Maureen Howard is too good a writer and too fine an intelligence to accept facile answers to impossible questions: finally, feeling is left in a state of suspension, tension, irresolution, as it must be...

...Clearly it would have been of interest to at least two others...

...The appalling moment explodes against the earlier passage and produces a long-echoing resonance, vindicating the author's risk, Commonweal: 788 proposing an imaginative truth where a lesser writer might have given us a memorized equation: psychoanalytic flummery...

...Nor does the later application to them of the Strindbergian paradigm quite suffice...

...Of the nuns we hear, I'm afraid, the familiar horrors...

...Holtons of the provinces...

...Unremembered, that is, by all save the only shiksa in class, little Maureen sensing in Miss Ruby a true if lunatic priestess of Art, and later thinking of her, gratefully, as she cast about for early exemplars as just that...

...How do we see it across half a lifetime...

...Now initiated to high art, the oppressed child was entailed to the town's gentlewoman, a Mrs...

...The truth is we can't confidently say, as we are never admitted into the man's interior life (any more than we are to mother's—unless we are to assume she had none—or brother's...

...and several psychodynamically and imaginatively flat ones which serve the purpose neither of art nor life—,they have nothing to do with a' 'choice'' to' 'display...

...How, then, do we talk about it—what tone of voice do we employ, what attitudes do we assume...

...How is it possible not simply to cherish and cuddle our mortality, to love it to death...

...She knows this, of course, and knows that the problem is always to find the point of balance...

...Such agonies...

...From manners, conduct, behavior, ladyhood, Mrs...

...but "the money is so dirty," her mother reasonably replies...

...but we know something of the wily author's and she knows better than we the brief joys and lasting sorrows of the blind Greek king...

...That's crazy, she tells her mother...

...She is widely and deeply read, formidably intelligent, a striking stylist with a cast of mind both penetrating and sardonic—a witty and not seldom a deadly ironist...

...Sometimes the delicate touch goes heavy: Mrs...

...No one—no life—can long withstand the withering ironic voice: not Miss Ruby or Mrs...

...Did she hate her father...