Читать книгу Strange Paradise - Grace Schulman - Страница 13

Marriage was not my only conflict in 1957. I was torn between my passion for poetry and the wish to report news. Earlier, the course had seemed predictable: school, college, work. Marriage could wait, perhaps forever.

As long as I can remember, I was fascinated and overwhelmed by elders. While my mother urged me to seek others my age, the Bentley schoolgirls talked mostly of eyelash makeup and (yes, really) new fur coats. Grown into adolescence, I preferred to relax and listen to the witty conversations of my parents’ friends, whether or not I could understand them.

Monroe Wheeler was among them. At the time he served as director of exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He amused me with tales of seeking art in France, and I pictured him among artists and patrons laughing in a field of yellow flowers like the one in a Matisse canvas. His sophisticated anecdotes went beyond me, but he didn’t condescend: once, responding to my interest in modern art, he invited me to his office. I was elated. When I left, he had the elevator stop at floor two for my free visit to the Picassos.

His longtime partner, Glenway Wescott, was a writer I knew I could not dare to emulate. I found his novel The Pilgrim Hawk on my parents’ shelves, took down the book with its worn red cover, and tried to picture his characters in a great French house far away. Once, in a restaurant, Glenway turned to me and said, in no context whatever, “Monroe and I have not had sex since 1929.” I was startled, still a child, and before coming out was routine. My father looked quizzical, and I didn’t know whether it was in response to the subject or to the length of abstinence.

Through Wheeler, we met E. McKnight (Ted) Kauffer, a painter who worked with my father designing posters for American Airlines. Kauffer, who was born in Montana, had lived in London, where he illustrated T. S. Eliot’s Ariel editions, a series that included “Marina” and “Journey of the Magi.” He had come back to his native country in 1940, after the outbreak of World War II. As a family friend, he gave me books he’d illustrated, boxed sets of Green Mansions and The Anatomy of Melancholy. When I asked him for a book that would help me be a writer, he gave me Webster’s Dictionary, desk edition. As with Wheeler’s stories, at fourteen I was intrigued but abashed at my meager understanding of the words in those fine editions.

Kauffer and my father believed in making no distinction between fine art and applied art, and the painter happily illustrated a promotional pamphlet on fashion called “Paris” for Brighton Mills, a fabrics manufacturer. It was my mother’s discomfort that troubled me. When I grew old enough to judge her writing, she showed me a passage in her little book, something about a redingote—long, double-breasted, full—worn by a model at the Louvre.

“Do you like it?” she asked, searching for approval, aware that her fashion copy fell below her aesthetic reach. “What about the language? Is it written well?” Of course I praised it, but silently obeyed, even at sixteen, the sharp distinction between service to commerce and service to a higher power. The coat she adorned with hard-won phrases would give way to a shorter one the following season.

My mother knew it. All the while she wrote uncredited, she wanted to sign her work and address a more permanent audience. I felt it was her marriage that kept her from it, although she wouldn’t have put it that way. In my view she wore a mask, and her face shone through occasionally, with regret that she had sacrificed her talent for a man’s career, her ambition shunted into serviceable forms. As early as 1953, before the feminist protests, she nailed to the kitchen wall, partly hidden from sight, a framed cover of Ashley Montagu’s book The Natural Superiority of Women. Ashley had given it to her, unframed. He, too, was a frequent visitor. My father met him while taking classes at the University of London. Paradoxically, she’d half concealed his title with a houseplant. She was not accorded that superiority.

Although my father held the advertising agency until he died in 1980, he was constantly torn between principle and submission to clients. Once he visited a factory owner in Georgia, heard racial disparagements of carders and weavers, and slurs against a Jewish partner. At dinner, he was invited to say grace, a custom his host extended to guests. After a long pause, he pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket, knotted the corners, clapped it on his head, and uttered:

Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu melech ha olam . . .

He looked up at an amused but startled company, and finished the prayer.

For him it was not always that simple. For me his was a directive to hold fast, which has served me as a poet in a sometimes dismissive world.

An irresistible attraction was Frances Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart in the Diamond District of Manhattan. Frances had started it in 1920 as a literary haven, selling copies of D. H. Lawrence’s banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover. My father took me there for meetings of the James Joyce Society, where we heard talks by the Irish writer Padraic Colum and, once, scenes from Finnegan’s Wake read by the actor Siobhán McKenna. My father gave a talk on Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, referring to the history of Jews in Ireland.

A smiling woman with a cloud of white hair, Frances sat on a child-size wooden rocker in a small alcove, and greeted my father by kissing him on the mouth. “If I had a father like yours, I’d be floating,” she declared. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but liked it, nonetheless. After Andreas Brown bought the store in 1967, she remained as a consultant. In my teens I’d thrill to my father’s purchases of her selections for me.

Once Frances took me to a lecture by Joseph Campbell on myth and human experience. Afterwards I wanted to thank him. “How long did it take you to write that?” was all I could blurt out. “One day,” he replied kindly. Seeing my surprise, he added: “But—I did nothing else.” One of her visitors from abroad was Yukio Mishima, the Japanese author of Five Modern Noh Plays, as the first edition was called. At his book-signing in 1957, he inscribed one to me in Japanese ideograms. His language, translated by Donald Keene, swept me into a world of ordinary characters, a cop, a dancer, a salesclerk; and images such as a damask drum that made no sound. Joking in a fluent, fast-wforward English, a mixture of high diction and slang, Mishima was a princely man, conservatively dressed in jacket-and-tie. He was to shock the world in 1970 by committing hara-kiri publicly, in protest against a new Japanese constitution forbidding war. I would not have guessed from his cordiality, and his fine, earthy plays, that he was a martyr to the “samurai way.”

Among these elders, the only visitor who did not intimidate me was Marianne Moore, whom my parents met through Ted Kauffer, the designer of one of her books. When I was fourteen, Ted Kauffer and his wife, Marion Dorn, invited me to lunch with her in their apartment at 40 Central Park South. They said she was a great poet. I was struck by the combination of her humility and gorgeous vocabulary. I liked her humor, ranging from deadpan to high comedy. She told of swallowing a capsule whose red dye stained her blouse. Writing a complaint to the pharmaceutical company, she asked “If the dye has medicinal value, why not put it inside the capsule?” Inspired by her and by Glenway Wescott, I wrote my first poems and sent them to her. She wrote back, “The flawless typing shows the work to its very best advantage and is in itself a great pleasure.” It was my introduction to her way of dodging a negative response. She spoke truth tactfully, and with a positive spin.

Even before we became friends, I’d delighted in hearing about how she’d joined my parents at their favorite restaurant, La Caravelle, on West Fifty-Fifth Street. She wore a new red suit, and beamed when they noticed it. Once, my father took her to Moskowitz and Lupowitz, now vanished, an elegant Romanian restaurant on Second Avenue and Second Street. Guided by my father, Miss Moore enjoyed chopped liver, stuffed derma, and fricassee. Introduced to the headwaiter, she said, “Please give my compliments to Mrs. Moskowitz.”

With some others, I felt an outsider. Flying above my head were pointed words, some in bold type, for emphasis. They evoked laughter, relaying judgments about books, theater, and people. Not so with Marianne Moore. She spoke slowly, and her observations were meaningful. I listened intently as she said, “I walked through masses of bloom today in the park, white and pink cherry blossoms.” I woke to her verbs, as when she declared, of Anne Novak, my father’s longtime assistant, “I venerate that girl.” And to her metaphors, as in, “I’ve been beaten down this week. My nerves are in an eggbeater.” For my parents, she became a friend; for me, she was a steady light.

I visited Miss Moore often, on Cumberland Street in Brooklyn and then on Ninth Street in Manhattan. I wore my longest skirts because initially, when raised hemlines were in, she had said, eyeing my bare knees, “Grace, you are so fashionable.” I knew from her intonation how she felt about above-the-knee skirts, and made changes in my wardrobe. On one of the visits, speaking of her poems, she said, “I write in response to adverse ideas.” I read many of her poems with that in mind, noting that they begin with a response to an idea she debates: a quotation from a newspaper article, a poem, a friend. The tone of argument intrigued me, drew me into the poem. Eventually the idea developed into a book I wrote about her poetry of argument, Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement.

I continued to write poetry despite the fear of disappointing my seniors. At Bard College, I felt a failure when my poems were judged not good enough for Harvey Shapiro’s workshop. “Schoolgirl poems,” he said, placing his coffee mug on the sheaf I’d given him. Annoyed by the brown stains, I went to the college library, open round the clock with plush armchairs, and worked through the night to write for Harvey. After I slipped them in his mailbox, he waved at me on campus and said, “I liked your poems.”

But it was too late. I resolved to move on. Since starting Bard I’d hidden my longing for news writing. Secretly, I was drawn to journalism because it was outside my family’s ken, and therefore immune to their advice and help. Also, I was drawn to events that needed reporting. The first was my encounter with the brave general Humberto Delgado. He came to my family from José Bensaude, the Portuguese factory-owner’s son who had lived with my grandparents.

Delgado opposed the fascist government of Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, whose regime violated liberties from free speech to minimal attire, even on beaches. In protest, furious at the “proper clothing” rules, Delgado ran into the sea wearing a top hat, white tie, and tails. When he proposed an opposition candidate, Henrique Galvão, Delgado was exiled and Galvão imprisoned. Some years later, the general returned to Portugal and was shot.

He moved me, this man with slick black hair, coal eyes, and, despite bleakness, humor. I tried repeatedly to write a poem about his plight, and realized that only journalism could convey his suffering. I was determined to train as a reporter.

It was a trip to Israel, though, that turned the key. At nineteen, while still at Bard, I visited my father’s parents, who had escaped from Poland before Hitler’s rise to power. In Ramat Gan I met my grandmother, seemingly frail, who could handle a rifle and who fed chickens on her farm, talking to them in Hebrew and French. My sabta, as I learned to call her, wore high-topped lace-up boots in the style of Al Capp’s Mammy Yokum, mother of Li’l Abner.

I traveled with a student group lodged at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba. The Arab village of Qalkilya was within shouting—and shooting—distance. The border, which I could see, was a scene of bloodshed in a constant war. I had to go there.

Borders summoned me. As a child, visiting my mother’s parents in Brooklyn, I had a playmate with bright yellow hair that I liked better than my own brown curls. She lived across the street, beyond a white road divider. One day her mother called us in from play, washed our faces, and had me tell my grandmother that she was taking us to church to see the bride. “No, and stay on your side,” I was told. That white road divider burned in me like a scar.

Stay on your side or be shot. I could not obey. While others had lunch in Kfar Saba, I set out for the border. It was irresistible. As I came near, three Arabs in keffiyeh headdress waved at me to cross. They cast sidelong glances at my bare legs in shorts and my loose windblown hair. One of them offered me a cigar, an English brand. We spoke in French. I remembered the Israelis’ warnings—Don’t walk that path. They shoot you—but ventured farther. On my side of the border were date palms, on theirs, white sand. There’s rifle-fire at night. We chatted until I realized I had crossed the forbidden border. La frontière. I turned to leave. He extended a hand.

“Stay a while longer.”

“They told me there’s been fighting here,” I ventured nervously.

My new friend smiled and said, “Yes, but you see, we don’t become enemies until six o’clock at night.” He changed it, glancing discreetly at my wristwatch: “Well, maybe six-thirty.”

Callow I was, but the experience remained in my adult life as a comment on the nonsense of war, the tissue-thin covering of hostility over the human instinct for cordiality. That day I got back safely, but was reproachfully told that three soldiers had been killed on the same path.

One evening in Kfar Saba a handsome sabra came to visit the school—slim green shorts, strong thighs, intense blue eyes—and we talked until sunset. In time, we walked through the village and hitchhiked through Israel, a common mode of transportation. We stopped overnight at a kibbutz in Caesarea, where archaeologists were excavating a temple. We visited my grandparents in Ramat Gan, where, oddly, my grandmother prepared one big bed for us to sleep in, just as they had done in the kibbutz.

Sharing a bed was a custom based on the housing shortage.

It was not an invitation to have sex, nor did we take it as one. We were too amazed—to see the kibbutz farmers at work, to see the country whizzing by from the backs of hay wagons. I was no stranger to sex, having been initiated by the older doctor I’d met when in high school. But this chaste affair was a different matter. Every day Rafi picked a flower for me from a roadside shrub. He was courtly, affectionate, and undemanding. After I left Israel, I never saw Rafi again, but we corresponded. With his permission I used his picture in an article I wrote, and my father sent to his friend at the Berkeley Carteret, then a New Jersey newspaper. It was my first publication.

After Delgado, after Israel, I wanted to experience the world’s dangers and come through them whole. I left Bard to finish college in Washington, D.C., and, because of my article, was hired as an intern at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. After college, I worked on an afternoon daily newspaper, covering the police, the federal court, schools, and the sanitation authority. The Alexandria Gazette was located in a rickety wooden building in its Virginia city. Reporters stood on line to use the few standard typewriters with faded ribbons. The day’s stories were written against the din of the in-house Linotype machines and the city editor’s shouts for prompt copy. Sometimes he grabbed the page I worked on and tugged it out of my typewriter. I kept longer hours for less pay than the men on the staff, struggling to justify my gender in a newsroom, and was often asked to fetch coffee for them.

Even so, my assignments were absorbing. At federal court I covered the trial of a man accused of espionage; and at civil court I scribbled notes about a woman convicted of murdering her small children. In 1954, when the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education came on the tickers, I pulled out tapes from the Associated Press: segregation of schools— beaches—restaurants—theaters—libraries—with “all deliberate speed.” The news meant school integration in Alexandria.

My best breaks were storms. Things happened in the hospital, on the streets. Once when my mother, in New York, read that a hurricane raged through Northern Virginia, she phoned the Gazette to find out if I was safe. “She’s safely out covering the hurricane,” the city editor told her.

When I returned to New York, I found that women were seldom hired on newspapers. “Can I put a pretty girl like you on a night desk?” a managing editor asked even after he’d seen, on my résumé, that I’d worked on one for a year. After many tries, I gave up covering news for a job writing about books and records for Glamour magazine. Located in the Graybar Building, on Forty-Second Street, the office was hospitable to the woman beginning a career. Jill Krementz, a research assistant, showed me a camera she had received as a gift, and said she’d experiment with it after work. Elsewhere in the Graybar, Joan Didion sat typing her articles for Vogue. More numerous were the fashion editors, who wore stiletto heels, cursed in French, and spoke in italics to stress chosen words.

Something was missing. Before long, I was writing poems again. I knew I had to decide between alternatives, to live in one place or another, to stay on one side of the dangerous border or to venture off. In that restless period, my life resembled an oak in Central Park whose branches splayed out in many directions, south, north, east, west. At times I sat under the oak and stared upward through a tangled mass of leaves to blue sky. Now I stood puzzled before crooked branches.

As to wedlock, I heard the stress on “lock.” I could not consider a settled existence, certainly not in the staid 1950s with its fixed gender roles. Nor could I let go of a life-changing love, the tree trunk from which all branches grew.