A Sort-of Sequel to The Kiss: Mom Was No Picnic Either
The Mother Knot , by Kathryn Harrison. Random House, 82 pages, $16.95.You read that right, sister: 82 pages . There’s a certain defiant, fuck-you quality to publishing a book that short, isn’t there? It could be a masterstroke of editing-or marketing.
Angular and angry author Kathryn Harrison, who devoted over twice that space to The Kiss , her best-selling 1997 memoir about an incestuous affair with her father, has eked out a mingy little companion volume devoted to Mommy Dearest. More specifically, how she had her mother’s corpse disinterred, cremated and shipped across the country, at some cost, so that she could scatter it like bath salts off a beach near her summer home on the North Fork of Long Island. (“I opened the twist tie and stirred my hand through the contents of the bag …. “) Call it The Kiss-Off .
As we know from her copious earlier outpourings on the subject at hand (herself), Ms. Harrison experienced a miserable upbringing. She was conceived by parents still in their teens, who divorced soon after her birth, strong-armed by her maternal grandparents. Dad fled the scene, returning when his daughter was in college only to feed her bad pick-up lines (“I just want to hold you,” for example) and take her to cheap motel rooms, like some white-trash Humbert Humbert.
Well, it turns out Mom was no picnic either: Kathryn’s earliest memory involves being coldly pushed from her lap (“You’re going to make varicose veins”) and running to the garage to fume about it; later, according to The Kiss , there was “endless nagging about weight” that helped trigger a lifelong battle with eating disorders. Ms. Harrison took a break from constant calorie-counting while pregnant with her own three children, when, as she nicely puts it, “I understood my body as belonging to someone else, and I cared for it as I would a borrowed book.”
But at 41, a year from the age when her mother’s breast cancer fatally metastasized, she relapsed; at one point her stern internist threatened to hospitalize her for the very Victorian-sounding malady of “temporal wasting” (in her author photo, she does look troublingly bony and haunted). Having come to expect a “gasp” moment at some point in each installment of the Harrison Chronicles-in The Kiss , it was that wet, exploring paternal tongue-the reader may be disappointed to find that the major revelation in The Mother Knot is the memoirist’s middle-aged return to what she calls “that sanctuary of anorexia” at the very moment she was nourishing her infant children. “I’d used nursing to pare myself down,” she confesses, sitting in her analyst’s office. (One’s own real-life therapy sessions are stultifying enough; is there anything worse than sitting through someone else’s?) “I intended for my body to accuse my mother, testify to my having given the pound of flesh she’d withheld,” the patient loftily concludes.
Alleluia , declares her (surely long-suffering) shrink, which makes the patient wonder, “Did she sound fed up, or was I projecting my own disgust?” The self-doubt doesn’t last long: She unloads further, “listening with interest to what I was saying” (with more interest than we can muster, alas). She then congratulates herself on a session well done, a breakthrough: “Never had my discoveries been so revealing, or so directive.”
Odd though the concept is, this might’ve been the perfect meta-memoir of anorexia-with its bantam weight, its prose that seems dictated less by talent spilling forth than a kind of joyless, grinding discipline. Yet anorexia is far from the only chamber in the Harrison house of horrors (whole new wings were added last year with an essay collection, Seeking Rapture : nits! ticks! inadvertently murdered kittens!). Did you know Kathryn’s medical chart includes Graves’ disease and hour-long panic attacks? The maladies pile on, as if they might be correlated to writerly skill.
When her young son came down with a case of asthma bad enough to send him to the hospital, Ms. Harrison superstitiously blamed herself-and flirted with self-mutilation. Good , she thinks, as blood runs down her wrist after a household fix-it accident, her children looking on bemusedly. Bleed . The fascination with her plumbing doesn’t stop there. We are treated to the author’s tubal ligation, to the “hollow, pink coils of [her] intestines” and to her breast milk, a souvenir bottle of which she saves like a midnight snack among the family’s “foil-wrapped leftovers and cartons of ice cream.”
“I don’t want to know when she … when it arrives,” says her husband about his mother-in-law’s remains. (Unnamed in the book, the husband is Scribner executive editor Colin Harrison.) Yes, there are glimmers of humor, but on the whole there’s something Gothic and ghastly about Ms. Harrison’s ongoing fascination with bodily fluids and harbingers of death: vampires, floating corpses, “a black, destructive spirit, dybbuck or dervish, twisting out of my chest.” With her penchant for sequels and recurring villains, it’s a kind of Nightmare on Elm Street for the literary haute bourgeoisie.
The odd thing about Kathryn Harrison, given what a seriously messed-up chick she is, is how terrifyingly productive, hardy and prosperous she’s proved to be; turning out book after book (a biography, a travel narrative and five novels-on top of the Me material) and raising three apparently cherubic children with her aforementioned hubby in their capacious brownstone in Park Slope. That summer home; those foil-wrapped leftovers and cartons of ice cream; “seven hundred dollars’ worth of products from an allergy-management catalog” to treat her asthmatic son!
Not to leach sympathy for Ms. Harrison’s long and arduous coming-of-age, but a book like this just makes one think: You know what, she’s milking it .
Though lacking the pedigree, Stacy Horn, the founder of the online service Echo, had a much more compelling-if less icily highbrow-exploration of midlife crisis in Waiting for My Cats to Die: A Morbid Memoir (2001). That endearing, humanly squeamish book plumbed not only Ms. Horn’s inner demons but those of friends, senior citizens, pets. It was 307 pages, but it flew like the wind.
Alexandra Jacobs is a senior editor at The Observer.
http://observer.com/2004/06/a-sortof-sequel-to-the-kiss-mom-was-no-picnic-either/
--> Does knowing about the existence of this work (and perhaps the reviewer's scathing response to it) change any of the conclusions you have come to concerning the triangle in The Kiss and/or the author's intentions in publishing her memoir?
Here is the well-known New York Observer article by Warren St John:
http://books.google.com/books?id=UjYAEu3SIsoC&pg=PA124&lpg=PA124&dq=warren+st+john+new+york+observer+kathryn+harrison&source=bl&ots=RezEnEIDsK&sig=SyM4GgwgBxVBrLMQyeLrf9wN2Ds&hl=en&sa=X&ei=205pUvi1CeqE2QXZ44DwBA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=warren%20st%20john%20new%20york%20observer%20kathryn%20harrison&f=false
- Title:
- Doing daddy down. By: Powers, Elizabeth, Commentary, 00102601, , Vol. 103, Issue 6
- Database:
- Literary Reference Center
DOING DADDY DOWN
WHEN I was a child, there were
times when thought my mother should leave my father. Children only
slowly get a feel for the limits on action: if, I reasoned, my parents
still had checks in their checkbook, then why could they not write one
to purchase a new car (or bike, etc.)? If my mother sometimes felt as
much pain as she clearly did because of my father, then why could not
she and I, and later my sister and brother, simply move to Anaheim (one
of my dream destinations, home of Disneyland and near movie studios that
I hoped to crack) and start over again? My mother, so I thought, would
find a new husband (someone powerful, with connections to movie
studios), and life could resume afresh. In pursuit of this goal I used
to write letters to the Chamber of Commerce of Anaheim and Burbank
concerning housing and jobs.
I am shocked
now at how quickly I seized on divorce, on abandoning my father, as an
escape-hatch from pain. Among my own kind--that is to say, white
Southern Catholics--divorce was so uncommon that the closest I came to
knowing about it was through the case of a friend of a neighbor, a pious
woman who would not go against the sanctions of her religion to marry
the divorced man with whom she was in love. Of course, I never imagined
that one could actually do without fathers altogether, and my daydreams
always featured a new father to replace my own. This sense of
interchangeability I now regard as something of a moral failure, with
all due consideration for my tender years.
But
now the social forces that were subliminally affecting me so many years
ago have come, as it were, to fruition. At the end of the 20th century,
what with sperm donors, fertility specialists, selective abortion, and
all the other proxies of reproduction, biological paternity has come to
seem something almost quaint, and certainly tangential. To believe The
Modernization of Fatherhood, a recent academic study, (n1) the father of
the future will be interchangeable with the mother of the future or,
depending on your income level, with the modern nanny or social worker.
In a bland, nonjudgmental tone, this book details the development and
institutionalization of "parenting skills," "household division of
labor," "caretaking," and so on, quite as if actual biological fathers
were a commodity we could do with, or do without, as we pleased and as
circumstances allowed.
And if the notion
of the father as more than an accidental link to our physical
inheritance is rapidly disappearing, so too is any notion of the father
as a link to our spiritual inheritance, to the cumulative consensus of
the millennia--also known, by those hoping to usher it off the stage of
history, as the patriarchy. For women in particular, the easy
availability of birth control and abortion has meant a new freedom, not
only from unwanted conception but, in some cases, from all the burdens
and necessities represented so potently by the figure of the Father.
Indeed, as a number of recent memoirs suggest, some contemporary women
feel under no compulsion to make their peace either with their dads and
what they represent or, more generally, with anything having to do with
our cultural tradition and its claims. Their motto might be that of Mary
Wollstonecraft: "Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures
is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind."
KATHRYN HARRISON'S The Kiss(n2) by now a notorious book--notorious above all for the passages in which Harrison narrates the incestuous affair she conducted with her father. But even aside from the central subject of incest, The Kiss
offers more compelling themes for contemplation than Aeschylus or
Eugene O'Neill could handle in a dozen plays: self-mutilation, sadism,
starvation, necrophilia, soul murder by one's nearest and (supposedly)
dearest. Harrison's mother, as represented here, was a
real Medea, who liked to discuss her sex life and past lovers with her
daughter and took her to a gynecologist to be fitted for a diaphragm
before she went off, still a virgin, to college. So Kathryn
was a very confused individual when Dad, banned from the household
since she was a baby waltzed back into her life as a twentysomething and
the two proceeded to engage in furtive trysts as they crisscrossed the
country in their Lolita-like saga of turpitude.
At odds with the horrors Harrison
narrates (the authenticity of which has been doubted by some reviewers)
is a flatness of tone that is suggestive of someone merely going
through the motions of her emotions. Harrison employs a
postmodernist style--pastiche, sentence fragments, backtracking,
fast-forwarding, a general lack of narrative momentum. This grab-bag
style is about avoidance: the point, one might think, is that there is
no point. Such dead-endedness also characterized Harrison's
1993 novel, Exposure, which mixed kleptomania, cocaine, pornography,
classy exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, and suicide in about
equal portions.
The bland, affectless presentation, however, fatally undercuts Harrison's
desire (presuming she has such a desire) to make us appreciate her
situation as the victim of a predatory father. More than that, by
failing to set her story within the context of any larger repository of
shared human experiences, Harrison effectively
forestalls the reader from entering imaginatively into her life.
Although from one point of view this lack of cultural resonance may seem
purposeful--the author's break with the baggage of tradition cunningly
replicating her break from the evil Father--most likely it simply
indicates ignorance. Like many contemporary authors, Harrison
does not appear to be very well or very deeply read: it is hard to tell
from this memoir whether she is even familiar with the Oedipus story.
And without cultural freight, without history, although there may be
self-invention, there is no connection.
TOWARD THE end of The Kiss, at a Jewish memorial service for her grandfather, Harrison
finds herself healed of her unholy attachment to her father. Two other
recent books, Mary Gordon's The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her
Father(n3) and Nancy K. Miller's Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a
Parent's Death,(n4) similarly end at cemeteries. While such moments
often force us to come to terms, however feebly and tentatively, with
our past and our own place in the chain of transmission, both these
artful memoirs remain suffused with undigested resentments and with a
continuing and ultimately sterile refusal of family loyalty of any kind.
Mary Gordon's father died when she was
seven years old; her book recounts her quest as a mature adult to
discover and understand this "shadow man." In the course of her search,
which took her to archives and public-records offices from Massachusetts
to Ohio, Gordon, who is also the author of such "Catholic" novels as
Final Payments and Men and Angels, pieced together an American story of
Gatsby-like transformations. Her father's life traced an arc from
Lithuania, where he was born a Jew at the turn of the century, to
emergence as a conservative Catholic in New York in the 1930's, with
many a racy escapade in between.
Gordon
represents herself as having been almost agonizingly in love with her
father as a child. Thus, it was a shock to discover as an adult that he
was less than God (the comparison is her own), that he was possessed of a
vulgar side (he wrote for "humor" magazines), and that he may have been
a Jewish anti-Semite. As a writer, Gordon might at least be expected to
appreciate, however wryly, the fictions her father invented about
himself--e.g., that he had gone to Harvard with T.S. Eliot. Instead,
though her rage is to some extent disguised, censure inevitably follows
on her declarations of love:
Everything he
wrote or edited was patched together, cobbled together not very
smoothly, not very well. I'm not even left with the pride of the
daughter of a fine stylist. He was far from great; he wasn't even very
good.
Does the fact that he is, by every
standard, a failure, relieve me of the responsibility of exposing him?
And the fact that he is dead?
This memoir
gives new meaning to the sins of the ninth circle of hell. Even Lady
Macbeth hesitated to kill Duncan, her benefactor, because he reminded
her of her father. Shadow Man continually put me in mind of the East
German children who revealed to the secret police their parents' reading
habits or such mundane details as their choice of cigarette brands.
Ultimately Gordon's father is even indicted by his daughter, on the most
trumped-up evidence (one of her chapters is titled "Police
Investigation"), for the Holocaust and the crimes of Hitler.
Somehow,
I suspect that had he followed the really smart people of the 1930's
and gone leftward rather than rightward, this man's daughter would be
telling his story differently. But whatever he was in actuality, his
example seems to serve a larger purpose. In demonstrating the sham
nature of her father's existence, Gordon not only extinguishes him and
the tale he told about himself but exposes the spurious nature of other,
even more resistant, patriarchal institutions, including God Himself
and the Roman Catholic Church. The effect is to leave Mary Gordon
standing alone--the author of this memoir, the one and only author of
her own life. Amid so much else that arouses her displeasure, this, at
least, is a prospect that appears to please her.
A
SIMILARLY empty exercise in self-invention is Nancy K. Miller's Bequest
and Betrayal. It too is narrated in the first person, though the "I" of
the book is oddly decentered. (Miller, appropriately, is a professor of
literature of pronounced deconstructionist sympathies.) The memoir
takes the form of a kind of conversation, in which Miller's account of
her father's progressive debility and death from Parkinson's disease is
interspersed with the voices of writers like Philip Roth, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Susan Cheever, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and others,
all of whom have in one way or another given us their thoughts about
their fathers.
It is ironic that men who
daily stand on train platforms, in cold weather and hot, who worry if
the pain in their chest means they will die before they get their
children through college, should have produced a class of daughters like
Nancy K. Miller. That her father worked for decades as a lawyer on Wall
Street, which enabled her to attend Barnard College in the 1950's,
elicits not the slightest hint of retrospective gratitude. ("[H]e rented
space in the glorious Woolworth building," she comments tartly, "an
address his practice never quite lived up to.") Instead, after going on
to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia, and to become a professor, Miller took
her mother's maiden name. So shadowy is her father's existence that I
had to go back through this book and search for his given name.
In
writing about the intimate details of her father's sickness, Miller
declines to refer to her own feelings or to examine her conscience
concerning the propriety of what she is revealing. Instead, she hides
behind the work of her chosen interlocutors who, she suggests, have
committed "betrayals" of their own. Her betrayal, at any rate, comes not
from writing about her father but from her inability to honor him. It
is chilling to contemplate her lack of pity--of fellow feeling--for his
weaknesses during his final year, when there seems to have been no one,
including her, who cared whether he lived or died:
One
day when his fingers had grown so rigid that he couldn't, as he put it,
"snare" his penis, he wanted to get up and go to the bathroom. It was
late and wanted to go home. So looking and not looking, I fished his
penis out from behind the fly of his shorts and stuck it in the urinal.
It felt soft and clammy.
In passages like
this one Miller shows just how far she is from, say, Philip Roth, one of
her interlocutors, who in Patrimony (1991) similarly stooped to
exposing some of the most shaming episodes of his father Herman's last
year but who at the same time gratefully accepted not only his father's
inheritance but his own responsibility for guarding and transmitting it.
Blocked by the ideology of self-invention from acknowledging the
sacrifices her father made for her, Miller is ill-equipped to deal
either with his dying or with his legacy. Precisely because she is one
of those professors who have done so much to kill off the pleasure
people used to get from literature, I am tempted to nominate her as a
main character in the novel of human disconnectedness (by Philip Roth?)
that is screaming to emerge from this bloodless memoir.
IS
THERE a connection between the loss or repudiation of the figure of the
father and the failure of authors like these to create compelling works
of the imagination? It is almost as if, in severing themselves from
their patrimony, Harrison, Gordon, and Miller have
committed an act of impiety for which the Furies have taken just
revenge: they write very bad books. But perhaps the question should be
asked in a different way: is there a positive connection between
spiritual and literary procreation, such that a writer's progeny--her
books--owes something crucial to the attitude she takes toward her
inheritance?
Mary Karr's The Liars' Club,
which won a PEN award for nonfiction in 1996 and has been on the
paperback best-seller list for over a year, vividly links a family's
epic struggle to raise its children with the evolution of the daughter
into a writer,(n5) and in doing so points up what is missing from the
books I have discussed so far. The memoir takes its name from a group
that included Karr's father and several other men who cleaned the rigs
in the oil fields of East Texas, and who would spin tales as young Mary
sat and listened:
"I'll tell you just
exactly how my daddy died," Daddy says. "He hung hisself." This is
easily the biggest lie Daddy ever told--that I heard, anyway. His daddy
is alive and well and sitting on his porch in Kirbyville with his bird
dogs. I gawk at Daddy's audacity, while the men in the room shift around
at his seriousness.... They twist around on their folding chairs like
they would rather corkscrew holes in the floor and drop out of sight
than hear about somebody's daddy hanging hisself. Daddy unfolds the
blade of his pocketknife--dragging out their squirming for them--and
cuts a circle from a log of pepperoni. He lifts it to his mouth on the
blade edge, then chews, "This is kind of tough, ain't it?"
The
year in which these events took place was 1961, when Mary Karr was
seven years old. The events she relates in the second half of the book
occurred when she was nine. Even allowing for poetic license, the
immensity of detail and the display of nearly total recall suggest that
Karr learned well the art of lying from her father. And, like him, she
can draw out a story: the scene above takes place in Chapter 6 of The
Liars' Club, which is about when it finally dawns on the reader that the
child's mother was an alcoholic, a realization that in other books
would be the main point, and perhaps the only point.
Unlike Harrison,
Karr links her own story to our oldest stories, thereby allowing
readers much deeper access to the inner life of human beings than can be
gleaned from the usual confessional mode of contemporary memoirs about
incest or alcoholism:
It was during one of
those [college] visits that I found the Thibideauxs' burned-out house,
and also stumbled on the Greek term ate. In ancient epics, when somebody
boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can
usually blame ate, a kind of raging passion, pseudo- demonic, that
banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend,
said, "I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding." . . .
When neighbors tried to explain the whole murder-suicide of the
Thibideaux clan after 30 years of grass-cutting and garbage-taking-out
and dutiful church service attendance, they did so with one adjective,
which I have since traced to the Homeric idea of ate: Mr. Thibideaux was
Nervous.
All this is embedded in the
opening scene of the memoir, in which we also learn that Karr's own
mother was taken away because of being Nervous. Not until 145 pages
later do we finally get to witness the actual precipitating attack of
the mother's ate, a drunken rage during which she destroyed everything
of value in the house, including her own paintings and books and the
children's toys and clothes.
Beyond being a
well-told tale of troubles endured and troubles overcome, Karr's memoir
constantly leads one to think afresh about families and the complicated
ways in which children, even in the most trying and imperfect
circumstances, become moral beings. And to be a moral being, one is
reminded by The Liars' Club, means among other things to be imbued with a
sense of one's ties to others, including preeminently one's parents
and, beyond them, to the generations that recede far into the past.
IN
BOOK II of THe Aeneid, Virgil's epic poem, Aeneas flees burning Troy
carrying on kits shoulders his aged father, who in turn carries the
ancestral gods. Educated women with even modest means today have
libraries much larger than Virgil's, or Newton's, or Goethe's, and
certainly have better kitchens. Emancipation also means that women can
indulge all the opportunities for good and bad behavior, for
skullduggery and rectitude, that participation in the widest range of
public life offers. But it takes a writer like Mary Karr, grafting her
story to our oldest literary roots, to remind us that women also have a
stake in the transmission of our common spiritual inheritance, and to
demonstrate what is lost when they repudiate it.
(n1)
The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History by
Ralph LaRossa. University of Chicago Press, 281 pp., $55.00 ($18.95,
paper).
(n2) Random House, 207 pp., $20.00.
(n3) Random House (1996), 274 pp., $24.00.
(n4) Oxford (1996), 194 pp., $23.00.
(n5) Viking Penguin, 320 pp., $11.95 (paper).
~~~~~~~~
By Elizabeth Powers
ELIZABETH
POWERS is the author of two novels and co-editor of Pilgrim Souls An
Anthology of Spiritual Autobiography, forthcoming Simon & Schuster.
Her article, "A Farewell to Feminism," appeared in our January issue.
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