Herself (34 page)

But outside the work, there are also real things to be afraid of, personally or socially—and at times I remember them.

Though some portion of this enters the work. I no longer see the work as totally sourced in early angers which have been decently,
artistically
extended. I have departed from that early self-interpretation. Injustices, social and private, ferment in me, but I am incapable of writing a work about any
one
of them—a reason that does have to do with art, has protected me. No work I admire is ever really about one thing, in the sense that one can pluck its subject between forefinger and thumb, like a tiny, screaming homunculus.

My mother used to accuse “all the Calishers” of “Jewish self-righteousness.” (Typified for me by my Aunt Flora, who simply
had
to make the best soup. Everybody conceded it. But she had to make this clear.) My friend agrees that Jews appear to suffer in a way peculiar to them, over having to put things right according to their lights, (but adds temperately that this is biblical.). Only then do I recall a passage in
The New Yorker
s where, after a long interchange, Austin, the young Quaker lawyer, replies to the Judge, a Jew—who has twice said to him “Well, that’s honest of you.”—“No. You people mean to be honest. We only mean to be fair.”

In a chapter called, “The Honest Room.” These days I am brooding on honesties—of a writer’s life, of a Jew’s, of a woman’s life (in the novella called
The Railway Police),
of an American’s. In and out of books.

As I look over these letters now, I see how the tone changes, or lapses, with the target. I have tried not to put in only those which make me look good. I see how, taken together, they make me look
too
good. With a strong flavor of Aunt Flora’s soup. Yet, snappish or high-and-mighty, or trivially insistent, they’re a part of me I cannot leave out. What is it they really want—justice? I leave them because, in a small way, they are a sign to me. Of what I want more than anything, morally. That my books and my life be—not discontinuous.

I remember when the habit first seized me, a snowy blue day on the river outside my desk-window in Grandview, with the cardinal and the bluejay swooping contrapuntally in front of me and my wasted morning. And the letter, long since lost or torn up, boiled up in me without notice, from that black roux that must be at the bottom of all of us, of me. At the breakfast table, we had now and then been reading aloud from the music reviews of a daily critic with a ridiculously euphuistic style; in his hearing no one ever played an instrument—music was “elicited” there from.

When I was eleven, this man, then training to be a concert pianist, had been my first music teacher, and a baleful one. Obscurely, I felt he was willing me not to learn. I was wistfully eager to, and under later teachers became one of those amateurs able to play the Beethoven Sonatas with fairish bravura to close relatives—but under his baiting eye I was kept witless. One day, with a “Hang it!” he slammed down the piano lid not quite quickly enough to catch my fingers, and I was scared enough to ask my parents for somebody else.

Of the letter, which must have poked fun at his style, I recall only the last sentence—“Isn’t it nice, Mr. X., that after all these years, you now write about as well as I play?”—and my shame at this nursery eruption, which left in its wake the same hangdog exhaustion as after a useless quarrel.

I didn’t mail the letter, and that annoyed me too. How cranky was I?

Some years later, I told the story to Virgil Thomson.

“Poor man,” he said. “Prison broke him.”

I was horrified then of course, at my pursing vengeance.

“What was he sent up for?”

Was there a spark in Virgil’s eye? “Molesting little girls.”

None of the letters was written for publication. Each was in response to a circumstance. Each had two addresses, one being the receiver, the other myself.

Exhibit A:
Written to
The New Yorker
, in the person of my editor there, on the matter of
In The Absence of Angels
, a story they had congratulated me on, accepted, and then decided not to publish because of
New Yorker
editor Harold Ross’ fear that it would contribute to already dangerously excited public opinion. (I cover the details later on in the excerpt from “Ego Art.”) “Marion” refers to my then agent, Marion Ives.

Dear Mr. Henderson:

Marion’s told me that you are writing me a long letter about the decision on “In the Absence of Angels.” As you know, I’ve never before broken protocol by answering a rejection—and never thought to do so until now. But this time I feel I have to do so—and before I receive what will undoubtedly be a kind and considered letter from you—because I think that this time it is perhaps as important for you all to hear what my reactions are, as it is for me to voice them. Believe me, there is not an ounce of personal resentment against any of you involved here—it would be very much easier if I could write it off as such, or could dismiss it as outraged vanity or disappointment on my own part. It is precisely because I know what serious consideration you all have given this, and because from the length of time given it, and your and Mr. Lobrano’s comments, I think that I can assume that the quality of the piece was not the question here—that I can write you at all. I should appreciate it if you would let this be read by anyone who has had any part in the decision, including Mr. Ross. I know that, normally, he is pretty much protected from the hazards and complications of writer-reactions, but I should be grateful to you if you could arrange that he see this one.

For a long time now, I’ve been telling anyone and everyone who would listen to me that
The New Yorker
was the one magazine I knew which could be trusted to make its decision purely on quality, on its own judgment of that, within the reasonable limitations of length and fitness for inclusion in a national magazine. I told them that, granted that a piece satisfied your critical standards, you were the one magazine which could be trusted not to refuse, for commercial convenience, a piece which might alienate or disturb a portion of your readership. You took “The Middle Drawer,” despite what you called its grimness, and despite the cancer taboo, and it is just possible that two stories on a similar theme by other writers, one in
Harper’s
and one in
Bazaar
which appeared not too long after, may have been helped into print because you did it first. You took “In Greenwich,” which had ticklish material too. And, in discussing “Old Stock,” when I told you my admiration for-the magazine in doing that in the face of obviously expected reaction, you remarked that, from your own experience,
The New Yorker
had no concrete taboos, but demanded of a story with a ticklish subject only that it be done extraordinarily well.

I have told people too, and will continue doing so, that the impeccable, honest, and deeply thoughtful editorial guidance of all of you, has been of inestimable value to me in my own development. As a matter of fact, I am glad to have the opportunity of saying to you, with thanks, something which reticence would otherwise prevent me from saying. With you, the editorial process which at first, in my inexperience, I found so harrowing, (as you remember) had become something I relied on, welcomed and trusted. If I’ve become gradually aware that style, however interesting to the writer, must subordinate itself to theme, if I was finally able to make the transition from reminiscence to real fiction, and if, finally I felt strong enough to tackle bigger themes, it was in a large part owing to the confidence and help which grew because of what I could expect in interest, taste, and rectitude, from
The New Yorker
. It’s an odd and unhappy state for me to be in—to feel compelled to tell you how seriously you’ve undermined a confidence you helped me so much to build.

It’s strange, too, that this should come about over a story which concerns itself so intimately with the importance of a writer being allowed to say freely what he feels he must say, and with the larger significance of that for everyone in the world today. Censorship begins when a writer is denied an audience, not on grounds of craftsmanship, but on grounds of what is cautious and politic. We do not yet have despotic government censorship in this country, but we do have a growing censorship of another kind, sometimes frankly commercial, sometimes misguidedly benevolent, which is exercised by those who feel that, for one or the other of these reasons they have the responsibility of protecting their public from what the public is supposed to be too unready, too unenlightened, too weak to consider.

When a magazine, out of the most benevolent intention, begins to underestimate and overprotect its public, then it has taken a fatal step. When one such as yours, which has always been so conspicuous for making up its own mind, begins to take soundings, test out opinions, then it had better take its own pulse too. For this is what the slick magazines do every day. They tell writers that they desperately need “good” stories, and subsequently they tell them “This is a very good story; but not for a mass audience.” I submit that, from the best motives, however well rationalized, this is what you are doing here. It is unthinkable that, with you, it could ever end in any appreciable depravity, or even mediocrity of purely literary taste—but it could conceivably end in
The New Yorker
’s being left with only its justly vaunted good literary manners, from which conviction has subtly slipped away.

For me, it means that when I hear a revered and respected editorial mouth say: “Miss Calisher, we hope to have something from you very soon. We desperately need good stories!” my inner comment will certainly be “The hell you say!” And that is the very worst thing that can happen to me, and all the writers like me. Bonuses for production are a fine thing, and no one appreciates or needs them more than me, but the best stimulus for the production of “good” work, for the serious writer, is his awareness of the existence of a market which is incorruptible against “popular” demands, however judiciously disguised these may be, and which, as one of your editors once memorably said to me “may make errors of judgment, but never of justice.”

I am sad to have to admit at last, and to you, what I’ve been so long denying to myself—that it is not arrogance, but wisdom which dictates that the writer put trust in no one but himself.

Sincerely,

Hortense Calisher

Best as always, to you all personally. I guess I had almost rather have had you say it was a bad story. This way I feel as if Grandmother had kicked me, and had fallen and cracked her own spine in doing it.

They printed the story (
In the Absence of Angels
).

Exhibit B:
Written to a reader who had protested that the first line of a story called “Mayry” made it impossible for her to read on—though she wrote on.

April 14, 1961

To Mrs. X

Etowah, Tennessee

Dear Mrs. X:

Your letter, forwarded by the
Reporter
, interested me very much, since, as their reader, you can’t be that “stereotype” Southerner against which you quite properly inveigh. A point of the story was that although an attitude deep and general enough to be called stereotype does exist among intelligent, literate, kindly Southerners, it is a very much more subtle one, miles away from the Simon Legree, white trash kind of thing. What is it? The story, since it is fiction, does not attempt to define it, but merely to show it in action.

In the ironic “My father was a Southerner, but a very kind man,” the “but” was of course expected to detonate in the reader’s mind, make him wonder why the narrator feels the need to apologize, “does he mean that to be a Southerner means that one cannot be kind—what nonsense” etc. In real life, it corresponds to the apologetic “but” that often sounds in the minds of those of us who are constantly called upon to explain, often abroad, the peculiar division in the mind of that very Southerner whose personal culture and conduct is of the highest (in our history some of the best we have) yet who on one moral point has a beam in his eye that contradicts all the rest of him. Yes, we must apologize for that kind of Southerner—as we would be unable to do, or might not bother to do, for others. As a Southerner one step away, I have had to do so all my life.

Since your letter assumes, as Southerners so defensively often do, that any criticism is likely to be from ignorant visitors comparable to those touring Englishmen who used to write such confident, superficial quickies about the States, I must therefore be personal enough to make it clear that such is not the case here—knowing that you will forgive me if I do that very Southern thing, talk ancestry. My people came from England to Virginia shortly after 1800, and I’m the first generation to be born away from it, though not actually bred so. Even in New York as a large family constantly replenished from the South and visiting back and forth, we remained Southern to a degree that now seems astonishing.

To a child growing up in Northern schools, this divided heritage was often confusing. My father was the kindest man in the world—how could some of the things he thought be morally wrong? We were very much more responsible about our Negro servants than many Northerners—just as some of the South is at this present moment more paternally responsible to its Negroes, within certain limits, than much of the North. Yet, as a Northerner, perspective made it possible for me to see the stock attitudes on both sides. When I enter a restroom marked “White Ladies,” I know both a Northerner’s shock, and what my Aunt Flora’s response would be if I expressed it—for I know all the rationalizations with which “good” Southerners must defend themselves, and dare not let themselves see behind. One of these—the story tries to show it—is that Negroes are “children,” incapable of the grown-up emotions, and are best “handled” so. But I had been made to see, even in an only partially desegregated community, that any section of the human race shares its whole range of emotion and intellect, low to high, remaining only as “different” as it is kept. All this is no particular credit to me; it was forced upon me. It wasn’t so daring to think it, as it would have been in Tennessee—and much easier to see it since the evidence was all around me.

So be fair to me, Mrs. X, and honest with yourself—and read the rest of the story. Perhaps you may still find it “not short enough” for comfort. For it is written, not by that vacationer you hopefully posit, but by someone whose accent returns to its origin after five seconds with a Southerner (and will never in life be able to put a proper Northern “i” in a word like “five”).

You’ll find no easy stereotypes there either, other than May-ry herself, who like many Negroes of her vanishing class in real life, is something of the stereotype we have made of her. The Southerner you will find there is unfortunately not one to be dismissed humorously, but a decent, honorable, cultivated, deservedly beloved man—whose manners restricted his humanity. In fact—since it isn’t that stereotypes are getting “thicker” but that defenses are getting thinner—you will have to summon all your “sense of proportion” and “humor” not to let yourself know what I mean when I say again: “He was the kindest man in the world, but a Southerner.”

Sincerely,

Hortense Calisher