Family Affairs
MERKIN, DAPHNE
FAMLY AFFAIRS BY DAPHNE MERKIN A JL JLlthough I have been an admirer of William Maxwell's novel of adolescent yearning, The Folded Leaf, and of his redolent short stories, I was unprepared for...
...Fathers have become sympathetic and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to...
...the simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman's beauty in love stories, passion does not require it...
...So Long, See You Tomorrow is a rumination, too, upon the hazards of stepping outside the graph of one's apparent fate...
...If broken or debased in any way, failure...
...After that, there were no more disasters...
...Even though my mother had what amounted to the East Coast franchise on guilt manipulation, what she yelled about were things I thought I could learn to deal with...
...I kicked, cold, my telephone, lunch and department-store habits...
...0 n the Great-Circle Route (Simon and Schuster, 189 pp., $9.95), by Lucienne Bloch, might have been a fascinating novel as well if its author had been a little less tight-lipped about her visceral reactions to the events and people that cram its pages and a little more circumspect in her theorizing about Life Among the Privileged...
...My mother yelled about things like being called 'filthy Jew' when the dishwasher broke down or you spent too much money or had a fight about anything at all...
...There are an alarming number of crack-ups among Bloch's set, the pain stanched by money and the diversions that money buys...
...So the child who "knew I was not the apple of my father's eye," who wondered "Was I not the kind of little boy he wanted to have...
...The narrator's parents happily enroll her in a "progressive" school and encourage—nay, insist upon—her interest in the arts...
...No bumping, no passing, no straggling...
...What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time," comments the author-narrator, looking back some 50 years into the past to examine a brief encounter in the light of the present—a light alternately blear and pellucid...
...In this lean volume Maxwell also gives away more of himself than he ever has before—as if releasing a long-held breath—and the added incaution makes the book especially compelling...
...I didn't exactly dump my friends and family but I took away looking for endorsement, approval, in their eyes...
...It embodies the longing we all have—and artists, in particular, pursue—for coherence or, short of that, an angle of vision with which to sight the dissonances of our universe...
...It sounds ridiculous but it worked...
...One into one makes one, makes me one, makes me, makes my tune to whistle as I walk right along and along and out...
...So Long, See You Tomorrow is disarmingly simple...
...The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything...
...If obeyed, they would insure protection and success...
...I stopped depending...
...He went to his father now and said What am 1 going to dot And his father said Stay on this side of the boundary line till you get over it...
...the other is the young William Maxwell, who observes and conjectures out of his own quietly unhappy situation at home...
...I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists any more...
...Ultimately, following a de rigueur Bohemian fling or two, this erring Jewish daughter settles down with a Jewish doctor, produces three children of her own and observes the rather frantic lives of her rich New York friends with a remoteness that is meant to suggest, I imagine, the profound futility of it all...
...Her parents establish themselves on New York's Upper West Side and set about providing their children—four in all—with the private lessons and expensive clothes that are a stand-in among some families for more direct expressions of concern and affection...
...The narrator, brought to this country as an infant on the Nieuw Amsterdam, is the daughter of wealthy German Jewish immigrants...
...It is perhaps most importantly an attempt to redress the grievances of childhood—to go back, abetted by the resourcefulness of art, and fill in certain lasting voids: "Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end...
...The tale is a particularly unglamorous one, and the people are a sober, industrious lot...
...As it stands, this is one of the most bloodless memoirs I can recall having read, narrated in a voice that is markedly self-absorbed without even managing to convey the passion of its egotism...
...Not until the novel's end do you realize what a masterfully attenuated structure Maxwell has wrought, composed of many delicately unraveling skeins...
...FAMLY AFFAIRS BY DAPHNE MERKIN A JL JLlthough I have been an admirer of William Maxwell's novel of adolescent yearning, The Folded Leaf, and of his redolent short stories, I was unprepared for the supple power of his new work, So Long, See You Tomorrow (Knopf, 135 pp., $7.95...
...Lloyd has the sort of plain, unclinical response to his new-found dilemma that was still possible in those days before Freud unleashed the ideology of the couch: " He was in the habit of going to his father when he had a problem to deal with that was totally beyond his experience...
...In the space of a week, Cletus disappears...
...But it is inescapable enough so that she decides to learn her lesson from it, the lesson of radical subtraction that closes the novel: "I took away the unnecessary from my life, the fat of it, which turned out to be a great deal of it...
...Another interesting issue that the author only alludes to in passing is the ambivalent attitude of the religiously-observant German-Jewish upper crust—a small and immensely complex faction that has received nowhere near the literary attention of the "Yiddishe Mama" Eastern European families that have spawned so many nostalgic journalists and writers—toward so-called secular culture, a culture both coveted and disdained...
...I suppose you could say it was practical, in a large family, to lay down rules like tracks we could ride on...
...The trouble with these conclusions—that they sound, somehow, smug instead of hard-won—is the trouble with the book itself...
...It is an incalculably affecting work...
...But those rules had a sharp reality beyond the merely efficient or decorative...
...I stopped and I started...
...In the case of something consequential like marriage, however, they are prepared to exercise drastic vetoing power when their daughter comes home from Wellesley with a goy in tow: "What my father said meant most and I believed him, about sitting shivah for me...
...Dead people you don't see again or talk to or leave money to...
...Good enough advice, but if he didn't get over it...
...I started counting...
...Such writing is often called "effortless," in an attempt to explain the force of its simplicity, but of course that is misleading: it requires the most painstaking effort...
...Maxwell goes back to his books and his toy theater, and soon his family moves into the new house...
...In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw...
...The two boys play together on the scaffolding of a half-built house...
...I don't know what she looked like," the narrator says...
...Whether it was lamb chops or piano-practicing rules or company rules or religious rules or hair and dress rules didn't matter very much...
...they don't speak much but they derive solace just from each other's company as they seek refuge from separate, unfathomable calamities...
...One of them is Cle-tus Smith, the son of a cuckolded husband who eventually kills his wife's lover...
...Meanwhile, Lloyd Wilson's murdered body is found and, amid suspicions of his guilt, Clarence Smith drowns himself...
...They seemed to me to be totems loaded with powerful tribal spirit...
...So Long, See You Tomorrow (an unfortunately milky title for so unsoppy a work) is about an actual smalltown crime of passion that took place in the early 1920s and the ripples it created in the lives of two 13-year-old boys momentarily thrown together because of it...
...Most farm women of her age were reduced by hard work and frequent child-bearing to a common denominator of plainness...
...He falls in love with the wife of Clarence Smith, his neighbor and good friend...
...Lloyd Wilson is a tenant-farmer in Lincoln, Illinois who rises while it is still dark to attend to his daily chores...
...My mother died two days later of double pneumonia...
...The narrator meets Cletus right after the affair has been exposed and Clarence's wife has moved into town with their son...
...1 had a sense throughout that Lucienne Bloch undertook to write this book with so much at stake and so much she wanted to protect that she could not bring herself to let the reader in on any of the really interesting goings on...
...This question his father did not seem to want to answer...
...has grown up into a man who can, at last, confess to the hurt and bewilderment those feelings engendered...
...For starters, I quit the job that was undermining me...
...On low stools, your clothes ripped and the mirrors covered, you sat shivah for dead people, not for live Wellesley girls...
...In the process he achieves a perspective on them: "We were both creatures of the period...
...What mattered was that our lives at home were governed by rules from day to day, from then to now...
...Maxwell's has been one of those crucial early losses that is never fully accepted: "My younger brother was born on New Year's Day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918...
...But after my father spoke, waiting his turn, I didn't know if I could deal with dead...
...She yelled about children and Hitler and country clubs and Auschwitz and historical realities...
...Maxwell writes a pure, distilled prose so utterly without artfulness that it appears to be less a style than a habit of seeing...
...Bloch is good at conveying the obsession with regimentation that seems to be the unique endowment of the German race, Jew and non-Jew alike: "Rules were rules...
Vol. 63 • January 1980 • No. 2
