The Virgin of Bennington
Sayers, Valerie & Norris, Kathleen
BOOKS Faith, sex & poetry Valerie Sayers K athleen Norris opens her new memoir with an epigraph from Saint Augustine's Confessions, and the youthful adventures of the first few chapters...
...My favorite glimpses involve famous people in awe of other famous people: Patti Smith describes how she sat on the curb sobbing after Bob Dylan came into the bookstore where she worked...
...Her account of her old friend's final days is simple, pure, and intense, as per instructions...
...Norris is interviewed to be the roommate of the Andy Warhol star Ultra Violet, who declines to offer the room...
...Naming names is as problematic in sex as it is in politics: you can't do it without betraying a confidence or calling your own self-promotional instincts into question...
...BOOKS Faith, sex & poetry Valerie Sayers K athleen Norris opens her new memoir with an epigraph from Saint Augustine's Confessions, and the youthful adventures of the first few chapters suggest that this book may be Augustinian in content, at least when it comes to the sinning...
...While Norris is not always successful in drowning herself— it's hard to imagine a memoir that completely submerges its author—she comes closest in her portrait of Kray...
...She seems ready to move on to other lives, other narratives...
...After Bennington, she went to work for the AAP and began to publish her own work...
...This involves a frank discussion of her initiations into the sexual and pharmacological experiments of the early seventies...
...One of the impulses of The Virgin of Bennington seems to be to complete her oeuvre of spiritual questing by filling in the secular blanks...
...At twenty-six, she abandoned New York City for a family home in South Dakota, and began a spiritual search that led her to join a local Presbyterian church and later to become a Benedictine oblate, experiences that she has explored at length in her previous books...
...When Norris first meets her, she's a woman in her fifties...
...Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels...
...Though Norris is indeed a virgin most of the time she is a student at Bennington College in the 1960s, she soon enough has an affair with a woman and another with a married male professor...
...Some of the most bracing passages in the book come from Kray's own writing, especially her correspondence, which is filled with energy and passion...
...If the beginning of this book is an emotional striptease, by story's end it is a loving testament to a wise old friend...
...The narrative moves forward chronologically, then loops back on itself, sometimes creating a subtle echoing effect, occasionally leaving a reader with a sense of deja vu...
...Let me admit straight off to some old-fashioned hesitancy about the name-dropping in the accounts of her sexual adventures, which are otherwise handled with wit, tenderness, and a healthy dose of self-forgiveness when forgiveness is called for...
...Though The Virgin of Bennington uses Norris's own experiences as the angle through which we come to know her friend, it is Kray who becomes the anchor and the conscience of the book...
...after a stint at the 92nd Street Y, she has come to the AAP with a mission to revitalize poetry in the United States...
...She combines confessional prose with cultural commentary, narrative with argument, plain declarative sentences with lovely lyrical passages...
...That deadpan line is typical of Norris's commentary on her own role in the sexual revolution...
...At this point in her literary career, Norris may have offered us enough of her own story...
...But sex, despite the come-on of the title and the first few chapters, is not this book's major theme...
...Actually, that seems to be the direction in which Norris is heading...
...I thought it over," Norris writes, "and decided it was the least a friend could do...
...That effect may be heightened for those who have read Norris's other nonfiction...
...As in her previous autobiographical works, Dakota and The Cloister Walk, Norris employs a hybrid form: Here it's part popular history of the 1970s poetry scene in New York, part meditation on a writer's coming of age, and large part biography of the late Elizabeth Kray, director of the Academy of American Poets (AAP) at the time Norris worked there...
...Her method in all three memoirs, and in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, is quirky and original...
...Norris is, famously, a poet who was raised in a Protestant family but left religious practice behind when she left home...
...While most of the lovers are anonymous, a couple of famous ones are cited, which seems a little...star-conscious, perhaps...
...With a little editing, and of course a change of title, The Virgin of Bennington could easily be a straightforward memoir about Elizabeth Kray rather than another memoir about Kathleen Norris...
...Her appreciation for the power of language moves her to quote widely, from Scripture to poetry to conversation...
...Her inventive schemes—to put poets in the schools, to pair translators and poets at readings of international work, to ask established writers to introduce emerging poets—have shaped a generation's view of how poetry might move into this country's public sphere...
...James Tate phones the AAP office to report that he's sitting next to Little Richard at the airport...
...To Norris she writes: "To describe simple, pure, intense experience requires a drowning of self in the oblivion of language...
...But Gerard Malanga, iconic downtown figure—poet, photographer, and co-founder of Interview magazine— becomes a friend for life...
...Her picture of the time is wonderfully economical: a reader gets in-focus snapshots of Max's Kansas City, the 92nd Street Y, and a party where all the women are wearing hot pants and some of the men are not behaving well...
...At one point she takes to sleeping with a dancer who is beginning to doubt his homosexuality...
...14 The most loving portrait, and the bulk of the book, belong to Betty Kray, Norris's mentor and supporter extraordinaire of poetry and poets...
...Besides, there's plenty of opportunity for joyful name-dropping in Norris's descriptions of the New York readings and club scenes...
...Shortly after her post-graduation arrival in New York City, her adventures begin in earnest...
...As in much of Norris's nonlinear nonfiction, parts of this book seem to have been imagined separately and later spliced together...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 10
