Authors: Hortense Calisher
I was married now, to the only engineering grad of his class to get a job within the year; against my $27.50 per week, he earned $25. In the late ’30s, if you had that much, you could rent anywhere; after teasing 20 hopeful landlords, we settled in a beaut just off Fifth, north of the Museum: top floor of a former mayor’s mansion, fireplace, park view if you stretched, and roof garden—for which we paid $65 per month with concession, which brought it to $55. I bought a white sofa for it—years later, after all the child battering, it was still called that—and I know exactly why I did.
Maybe it was partly those movies you love now, for their fizzy blondes and musical staircases, down which trip the dimplies, singing,
eyes right
, “It payzz to be good—”;
eyes left and a time step
.
“
Ye-
ah
, but not much!” Maybe I did see them, those chocolate-soda fantasies of the end-of-the-week, already-borrowed-on paycheck. I can’t remember. Hollywood twinkled in our slang, anyway; some men were “Come into my log cabin” letches, and an employer went after you with a “penthouse ploy.” But, although the “precinct” was union organizing, and labor was shouting “Joe Hill” to every sky, I never saw until much later those other
documentary
signs of the times, like the I.L.G.W.U’.s revue
Pins and Needles
, or Pare Lorentz’ film
The Plough That Broke the Plains
. (Often the ’30s never saw its own movies, you see. They didn’t know enough to be with it. Or they didn’t have the dough.) The real reason for my sofa was simpler—I knew it was the ’30s, now.
I came home of a night, soaked from the urinal a man had thrown at me for not bringing him a relief ticket, or maddened with the sight of two children their insane mother kept starving no matter how much I brought, or wondering what I should do about a former longshoreman who slept with all his daughters as they reached puberty—now that his youngest, weeping it to me in the hallway, had. Or how to counsel the Italian mother of eight who, denied a diaphragm by priest and thrift, had secretly crocheted one. We were supposed to “refer” all “problems” to a “private agency.” What was a private problem, as compared to a public one, I could no longer say. But I knew I was in society, now. Only barely in my ’20s, I was already so rich with its realities that I almost couldn’t stand it. The sofa? That was a dream, from decades past. So every night, after peeling off clothes later to be inspected for the bedbugs the desks that had replaced the orange crates were swarming with, and after a wash in my inside bathroom, I tiptoed guiltily over to my past—and sat down on it.
Then, in a burst of glory-works—Roosevelt, the Dust Bowl, WPA, TVA, NRA, pick your alphabet—the decade ended. Or slipped quietly through the psyche’s mousehole. There’s a war on now, a real high-class war. Some of the same unity is visible, and gaiety—the bonhomie of a terrible mess that everybody’s in. We’re in the Army Ordnance now, traveling with a baby, on half the salary, which doesn’t always come through on time.
Once, in a new town, we go to the store with $5 to cover the ten days to the end of the month and, after setting aside the baby’s milk money, buy beans, flour, lard, a bacon slab, two cans tomatoes, and eggs. Sugar and spices we carry with us; no coffee, a little tea. We could telegraph “home,” but we are gourmets now, weighers of experience. At night, for health, we carefully lick the baby’s cod-liver spoon, each to a side. I make muffins with a water recipe I know, lard cookies with lemon extract, beans with Bell’s seasoning, and bacon with beans. We have a roof, a fireplace, a sink, wood in the yard, toilet in the house, all needed beds and tables, and a musical instrument.
On the last night, I play a flourish on it, and set forth our dinner—a triumph. For each of us, one half of the last of everything—of a muffin crowned with a poached egg, crossed with bacon, sunk in “cream” sauce, and, on top, from some Christmas box, a bubbling rind of cheese. We’re not perky or grand; we’re temporarily cozy, and fearful. We are ordinary, for our time. The decade I came out to was over. But that night, and often after, I could feel it inside me, reassuring me of what was real.
Every decade sooner or later gets authenticated in every detail, maybe by a later one that falls in love with it. For years, the ’20s have been our
belle époque
, congealed by us into a mélange of Riviera tennis matches with Gertrude Stein leading Gatsby, and diamonds-are-girl’s-best, dusty answer, to death-by-toreador—in the revolutionary afternoon. That’s the easy, highlighting way. Now it’s the turn of the ’30s, and we can all see that film-fashion image coming, in the berets and the bell-bottoms, and Humphrey Bogart’s revisited nonsmile.
Nice, all of it, but it’s not the straight story. What is? No decade is ever all economics, either, any more than it is only what it wears, or sings. And a decade is never itself only. For some people, the ’30s will always be the time they first heard the Bach
passacaglia
as well as “Those Little White Lies.” All the sex in the world is in every decade, and all the subjects of literature. So, the mountain of what I haven’t mentioned, from Mae West to dance marathons to the rise of John Dewey to the decline of Jack Dempsey, doesn’t oppress me. I’ve my own dream, or artifact.
I pick—an apple. My nickel Cézanne, it now holds an era, polished by the decent, trembling fingers of the past. In it I see us, then and now. Some men never got over that time; they lost their confidence there, sitting at idle windows, in vague West Virginias of the soul. Others, like me, have merely an odd way with money, call it healthy or ambivalent. At times we can’t spend money, at times we can’t save it—depending. We’re often not good at getting jobs, but are beavers when we do. And many a woman among us, no matter her stock list, and sables, feels safest with an egg in the house. No wonder some of the young, in search of the pure, are nostalgic for our bitter-bright youth. No wonder
we
are. In any decade, men and women have to settle for themselves the connection between money and life. The ’30s showed us—the difference.
Still, I had a special feeling for American fashions in decades. Falling in love with a part of the past is a human habit. Surely it must start in those slanted oral histories given the young. Those handed me had had an oddly longer span than is customary. Born of a father and grandfather who had both waited to marry and rear families until near elderly, when I delved into that two-generational perspective which is a child’s usual lot, I unwittingly went much farther back. I heard nothing direct from that grandfather who, on record here as an elder of the synagogue in 1832, was probably born in the eighteenth century, and had died some fifty years before my birth, but I could listen to echoes of Civil-War Richmond—and 1850 Dresden and 1888 New York—from his much younger widow, who was still only ninety-seven when I was twelve. I didn’t much want to, being understandably more in love with my father’s dashing youth, which had taken place years before his marriage to my much younger mother, and in a decade the whole world already called the
belle époque.
Less than half a century gone, in our family it seemed still at hand. A decade? That was nothing. Instead of being timebound by access to such a stretch of it, within the usual terms of the human bondage I seemed to have been set free to wander as a citizen of time’s kind of time.
By now, I am old enough to have seen clothing repeat itself, even on me, and to enjoy it. In Hollywood, I have just sported a jacket saved for its marvels since 1947, and once more so much the height of avant-garde fashion that the Fairmont in San Francisco had got into the papers for trying to bar me from the dining room—now that I was wearing pants with it.
But I still know that the history of the imagination never repeats itself that knowingly. In art, you can die for love of an epoch—and die of it. Maybe in life, too. When I was first writing I had a friend so much in love with the ’20s that he admitted he would have preferred to have been young
then
, along with the writers he admired. Sad, I thought, for I was somehow sure they would never have given up their time for another—I would never want to give up mine. (And I still recall a remark heard at a play of his: “How can so young a man be so modern in such an old fashioned way!”)
The Big Apple, as you may know from heritage or even experience, was a dance. It came after the Charleston, which came after the Bunny Hug (well after), and was followed by all those others it resembles. It was one of those dances—maybe all of them one spastic version of the Lebentanz—which leap up in America like crops. I never danced it. But I was there.
What is the history of a writer, as a writer, outside the books? Is there an internal history, as a writer, which goes on alongside them? Is it worth talking about? I was never sure.
Not yet published, a writer lies in the womb, marvelously private as one looks back on it, but not yet born, waiting for the privilege to breathe. Outside is the great, exhaling company of those who have expressed.
First publication is a pure, carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is light. The spirit stands exposed, in what it at first takes to be the family circle of confreres. Everybody, shaped to one ear, is listening … but after that—one must live.
What is a writer’s innocence? In my work, I begin early to ask what innocence is for anyone, to examine it.
“I wanted my conviction—no, that is not the word—
themes
perhaps, to rise pure of themselves. In the uncontaminated country that I could sometimes glimpse in the depth of myself, there was another kind of knowledge that sometimes turned its dark fin and disappeared again, that I must fight to keep,” the young hero of my first novel,
False Entry
says. “Compromise has no taste, no muscle; one day it is merely there, in the bogged ankle, the webbed tongue.”
I myself fear that logic will overtake the dream, and extinguish it. “The young act from a pure, breathless logic still ignorant of the conventional barrier between dream and possibility,” he wrote, under my hand. “When a man begins to
act
logically according to others. … then he has left his youth behind.”
In heaven, there must occasionally be recording angels who can’t be as objective as required. They won’t go along with the theology that everything is known; they know better than that. Yet why has that supra-knowledge, so full of the abyss, been planted on dubious guys like them? It worries them. Even so, whenever one of them is kicked out and over the bars of heaven, it is for shaking his fist at the hills of grace, and shouting “
I
expect to know everything!” Adding as he falls, “A prince I know I’m not.”
Lucifer takes his hand, or hers, and says, “Be a writer.”
No stars fell when she was born. Yet she will address them.
All through life she will waver, between that arrogance and that humility.
Meanwhile, as I begin to practice the word-life, and both to learn and fear its postures, what gnaws at me most is the gap between words and action. Given the age I live in, I am bound to see that gap mainly in political terms; indeed it takes an effort of mind, even now, to recall that other ages have seen this same gap solely in terms of religion—the distance between word and action
there
.
By this time, perhaps 1951, I had accumulated a certain amount of sub-political experience. Most of it in an ancient field to which my time would give the modern name of “race relations.”
Back in the Relief Bureau (as both we and the clients called the Department of Public Welfare) many of my “co-workers”—a name slid over to us from sub-Marxist doctrine—had been black, as was my boss supervisor, Herbert Rountree—like so many of the middle-to-upper staff a trained social worker recruited from “private” welfare work to public—in his case from the Urban League. (Precinct heads were usually political appointees.) When I waltzed with him at an office party, my background silently waltzed with me:—On the one side, the Southern paternalism of my father, whose voice, when he spoke of Awnt Nell, the mammy, who had “raised” him, still shook with filial feeling—in the exact timbre, I now realize, with which he spoke of my grandmother. On the other side, my mother’s murmured “
Die Schwartze
!”—which was the way German Jewesses of her day warned the family not to talk of something-or-other in front of the maid. Barring an Ethiopian rabbi my father claimed once to have met, and Cyril, the West Indian elevator boy who had once coached me in Latin, educated blacks were unknown to them. And except for two handpicked brown girls who had been at Barnard—to me.
I felt that Mr. Rountree’s large, gently astute eyes could see this, right down to my backbone, on which his hand was placed with a formality entirely to do not with race but with waltz. Thirty years later perhaps, and I Wasper and blonder, we might have had to sleep together to show our empathy over the world’s hangups. As it was, I gave him a provincial New York City girl’s peculiar confidence. I wanted to give him something. “Want to know something funny?” It
had
surprised me. “Until I went into the field, I never knew that there were dumb Jews!”
Behind me now are the years between, the early 1940s, spent barnstorming small industrial cities: Wilmington, Elmira, Binghamton, and larger: Rochester, Detroit—in the wake of an engineer husband. Engineers then (and perhaps now) are among the most conservative middle-class elements. As young family men, often with a holy distaste for cities, which takes no thought of what sins their own profession might be committing there, they make straight for the safer suburbs, in which all the prejudices—anti-Jew and black, anti-crowd and even anti-art—are spoken of as entirely natural. These men, one collegiate step above the foundry and the furnace, have little of the rough-and-ready about them, often not even manual dexterity, and none of the individual workman’s craft-guild or underdog independence. Instead, they take having a boss for granted, buy cars and houses of a grade deferentially lower, just as in the famous
Fortune
magazine study of pecking-orders in monolith industry, subscribe healthily to the theme that General Motors—or Eastman Kodak or U.S. Rubber—
is
America, and in general are the Eagle Scouts of the corporate image. (Who, by and large, seldom made it to very top executive. This daughter of a lone, cranky but never subservient small-businessman, could have told them why.)