Where am I going, where have I been? I lost my head and I lost my sleep and I lost my heart (to my cat: I love her, I’m very sure). I didn’t mean to abandon you and I did not forget about you. I’m back now. Guess, what, though! Write down your guesses before you turn to the next line:
(Khnopff, ” I Lock My Door Upon Myself”)
—I am writing a NOVEL and I really mean it this time, not like all the other times! It lives and grows in my twilight consciousness and so I have to be careful not to lose my rememory along with head & sleep or all my notes will be gone. Write them down? Impossible. Someday they’ll point at me on the street, Look, they’ll whisper, there she goes, the Joan Aiken of Sara Grans; the Sara Gran of Jane Gaskells; the Jane Gaskell of Conrad Aikens; the Conrad Aiken of Vernon Lees; the Vernon Lee of Joan Aikens! and then they’ll have to go around all over again. I can not tell too much about it because the slightest breath of boredom or criticism from an audience withers my grand delusions as sure the frost creeps over the wild strawberries in November. Does the frost come in November? my delusions must be carefully nursed in the hothouse of the imaginarium through November at least, and later they will be cold-hardy enough to run around outside. enough to say I have a file with lists in it that say things like
OWLS & AUNTS / AUNTS & PROTESTANTS / APPLES OF SODOM / PASSAGE GRAVES / CAMERA OBSCURA / MAGIC LANTERN / WESTMINSTER CATECHISM / DETECTIVE AGENCY CORRESPONDENCE COURSE / “MR. ARCULARIS” / ORACULAR HEAD / COAL-CELLAR / WEREWELF
and many other things as well. I don’t know how you write a novel, but me, I am going to go on with my list until it’s long enough, and then I’ll go back through to add commas and (occasionally; sparingly) verbs. and then if it’s still not long enough I’ll put in some more aunts.
This is not a “tip” I got out of some book on “writing novels” for “hacks,” it is my own idea. No stealing!
MEANWHILE I have been seeing ghosts in the wild mushrooms and in the little rabbits that cluster, both of them, here and there along the darkening path homeward every evening. One day as I was approaching the witch-circle of oak-trees that often houses the haunted rabbits, I thought I saw a human shape in the gloom but he was not positioned in a way or a place that my weary eyes could figure exactly. This then is a new tree, I thought, grown up overnight as they do sometimes, or a shadow, probably.
As I drew closer I saw that he really was there, this man: his back to me and the road (dangerous!) his front to a tree, as close as could be (presumptuous!); his elbows bent his arms up in the classic hands-up-who-wants-to-die. It was clear as clear could be that I wasn’t interrupting some pagan rite, he wasn’t praying to the tree or doing an Apollo-Daphne indiscretion. That hands-up pose has only one meaning, the only explanation was the tree was robbing him. He was being held up. But for what!
Call me a coward or call me a tree-sympathizer, I do not care, I did not step in to save him. I walk by that tree four days out of every week and that means it knows what I look like. I am not prepared to make an enemy of this tree. In this way I am like the dolphin in Aesop’s fable of the ape and the dolphin, he who was loyal to humankind and betrayed his fellow beast, and ever since then the Dolphin is a byword for a traitor. I am a lowly chambermaid of the Trees, and while I am not going to drown anybody of my own class and kind as did the Dolphin, just to show off my loyalties, I am not going to step in when I see them (the Trees) intimidating some guy, either. This is my morality, and what a morality it is.
The main ghosts I have to do with this week are a mouse Theo may or may not have introduced to the torments of Hell—either it is dead or it will be one day, and either way it will be back to cast its sorrowful eyes up at me—and the spectres of my parents. I do them too much honor by calling them ghosts but I have got used to it so I keep on doing it. Here is a remnant of a thing I was writing ages ago. It got too long and windy to finish so I have cut out the 90 percent of it that hasn’t got any ghosts in it, the way Michelangelo used to sculpt his sculptures by chipping away every part of a marble block didn’t look like a ghost.
—If my ideas about my mother are half imaginary and the other half imaginary, my ideas about my father are completely imaginary all the way through. I like to be dismissive about my real ghost dad, to put him in his place, but I used to have strong feelings about my phantom fathers in potentia. All I mean by that is my mother’s ex-boyfriends, who were all of a type—older Jewish theoretical physicists and a few rogue bureaucratic functionaries for the state of New York—and now all ghosts as well, but who used to seem, from the perspective of one safe from ever meeting them, glamorous in a withered and sorrowful way my real father never approached, and representative therefore of a more withered and sorrowful and glamorous lost early life than the one really given to me.
It is likely that he did wither in his last months, my father, but I can’t tell you about it, not that I would, because I don’t know anything about it. I was in the house, and he was in the house, but he wasn’t there or I wasn’t there. When illness settled in to stay and the secret trips to Boston for experimental trials stopped, he closed the doors of my parents’ bedroom on himself and I don’t believe we saw him again until he was in his coffin, except once, when my mother finally put her foot down hard and said Either you tell your own children you are sick, or I will.
If she hadn’t done that, he would still be silent behind that bedroom door these thirty years later for all I would know about it. My dad would have preferred to live forever, but failing that I bet he would have settled for being a Rose for Emily situation. This is hard on the Emily if it isn’t her idea. She had already accepted the commandment not to tell his mother or his sister that he was ill, or anybody else, either, anybody who might have helped her, the sole bearer of these burdens. My mother was a simple woman, and having promised not to tell anybody he wasn’t feeling so well, she didn’t tell. When his sister heard the news of his death she ran out into the street half-dressed in only a housecoat, her hair undone, crying and calling out for help. His own mother was, I believe, told her son had died only after the funeral was concluded; in any case she wasn’t there. Probably she was sedated.
Living as secret nurse-confidante to a dying man whose secrets she was ordered to keep was a burden my mother shouldered willingly, but when she was ordered to keep those secrets even from the infantry in her own house, who were four and seven at the end and whose lack of questions were probably as upsetting as questions would have been, she rebelled, very slowly, over a period of years. A moral upheaval this profound takes some time. My mother was being ground up between two unyielding principles: that a person’s private medical information is absolutely, inalienably his own; and that you don’t tell lies to children.
I think—I am guessing—that she knew her ultimatum would force my father’s hand, but I shake with fear for her in the event it had not. She would have had to tell us anyway; she’d said she would. and that would have been a betrayal of the kind she took most seriously, then and always. But what could he have done to her that was worse than what he did do? NOT haunt her? float off in a ghost huff and secret himself away in his old silver pocketknife in the shoebox at the bottom of the closet? what a blessing lost.
—But so at the last viewing before the end, for the Revelation, we were ushered in for an audience at my mother’s behest as one is by the lord chamberlain to see the Queen, and there in the inner chamber were told that Louis Quatorze, our Father, the Migraine King, the Silence-Demander, had such-and-such a misfortune of the gullyworks, explained in the most technical medical language the old son of a bitch could work up, and did these ignorant children have any questions. Technical questions, we understood him to mean, and he probably did mean; he was a theoretical physicist before retiring to consultancy and hobbyist bizarreries, was briefly a guest lecturer at Berkeley, and I can only imagine he spoke to us as he did to his students. At no point did he say something so simple as I am sick; he left that to us to glean from what reference books we could find, at our leisure.
I am told that in this stage of my life I deferred to my elder brother for all our joint decisions and joint statements, a thing I find so unbelievable that it may explain why I cannot remember much of anything before I was six years old—any of this. the spirit rebels.
But so we went away and looked up “cancer” in the Encyclopaedia, and came back and said (to our mother, who else): The Britannica says that cancer of this stage and type can be fatal, is that so? and my mother allows that this is so. and we go off and think some more and come back, and my brother says Well, we’ve been thinking about it, the two of us, and it seems to us that when he dies you have to either marry someone else or go to work, and if it’s all the same to you, we’d prefer that you go to work so that our routines and lifestyles are as disrupted as little as possible; we don’t like strangers, you know.
My mother did know. My mother, sole support of her household, then responsible for keeping alive three human souls who would all have died in a matter of days without her care, had the kind of steel that allowed her to look the chief of this arrogant pair of King Babies in the eye and hear him inform her that she would have to “start” working soon, to please him, and reassure us that we were all of the same mind on this matter.
As for myself, memory is unreliable but I don’t think I really understood that there was a special thing happening, different from what goes on in other households, or that there was a thing I didn’t know until I did know it. Ask the infant Me what a father does, and I would say: Your father goes into the innermost room of the house sometimes and never comes out again alive: that’s what happens. One isn’t allowed into one’s parents’ bedroom, that’s normal; your parents do secret adult things in there, in the center of the labyrinth, like die slowly. A man withdraws and withdraws from you until one day he comes out again, not slowly but all at once BANG there he is flat out horizontal on a plinth, Impatience on a monument, at home to visitors for once, one day only, and everybody comes to see him in his own little room where nobody is allowed in, only room in this room for him. Then in his little room he goes in the ground and is finished. Having collected Quiet from you all your life, finally he gives it back to you with interest. Two weeks later you have your fifth birthday party, with rented ponies.
Is this strange? But I think this started very slowly, around the time I was born. And to ask, during this slow years-long retreat into the center of the world, Why is he doing that? would be to suggest that there are other things a father might do with his time than to get very little and far away, as the boy wishes to be in the Lucy Lane Clifford story. How would I know about that.
(To be fair, there was one other thing I recall he used to do with his time, pre-withdrawal, which was to go into his office, shut the door, and let it be known through my mother that there were to be no noises in the house. In these times he would have been working on his Manuscript, some manner of mathematico-philosophic treatise that I in my dismal ignorance follow so poorly I couldn’t say whether it was intended to be a textbook, or a regular book, or only a private amusement.)
At his funeral they say my brother leaned over to whisper to me consolingly Well, at least we won’t have to be quiet in the house all the time anymore. But the joke was on him—was it? well, it was on someone—because I stayed quiet for years and years afterwards. No particular reason.
—Enough about that! Back to my mother’s legendary ex-boyfriends. I know now that anybody she’d married might have ended the same way and maybe sooner; her types were smart but unsound, not wholesome. In spite of that, every one of them represents to me a might-have-been, a better universe where I am exactly the same as I am now, but all of my mother’s miseries were just a little different.
There was Marcel, for instance, a Franco-Polish war refugee who had a mournful mien and a cigarette in every photograph, looked like a handsomer William Powell, might have married her if she’d worked on him enough. (He is a ghost now).
Now, the idea of having to work on a man to make him marry you makes my heart fall down inside me and rest its head in its hands, but it was part of the work of getting to be a married woman for some time, in some parts, and getting to be a married woman was part of the work of getting to be a mother, in those same parts. It was all a very logical if tedious piece of machinery that you had to put together with your own hands, piece by piece. My mother loved machinery, loved elaborate jigsaw puzzles and had a good ten-year run of enthusiasm for those math & logic digests that used to be sold in grocery check-out lines and on newsstands, and include, I think, the same kind of problem they put on LSATS and the boringest part of the GRE. My mother liked a hard problem. One day she abruptly stopped her pencil-scratchings, and when I asked why, shrugged and said there were no more difficult ones left so the fun had gone.
If getting to be a mother is not your own endgame (it isn’t mine) and is not even very legible to you as a prize, you are going to be a bad auditor of the kind of stories that make up the backstory of a woman such as my mother. But all it is is a particular variant of the Great Game which was, which is, I guess it always is, to recreate your own childhood with the bad parts removed: and back here among the antiquities that means marriage first, children after, your own house and absolute sovereignty in it, no begging to the bank, and nobody comes in who isn’t invited. But this beautiful winning hand starts with Husband. I know it’s a tragedy, you don’t have to tell me.
My mother played at defying the game sometimes, but only—as with this Marcel—only when she could take or leave the prize. This makes her sound indifferent to his charms, but my mother, a self-dramatizing asthmatic and fanatical cigarette hater, put up with him and his mournful European smoking for enough years that he must have been even sexier in person than he seems to be in pictures, which is plenty.
When she walked away from Marcel he might have gotten her back if he’d run fast enough after her, but he let go by the critical moment and anyway was injured to learn that, since he had never proposed, she had never stopped seeing other men. Or it could have been just the one other man she was seeing—my father, also off and on for years—but the principle was the point, and the principle was she was free to entertain or be entertained by a regiment if she wanted to, because she was not engaged. He would have known that she took this position, claimed this right, but he would not have understood until it came to the point that it was real, more than a pose. There’s some similarity here to the story she told of her eventual betrothal to my father, though that one ended a little differently, and no surprise: like Popeye, my mother was what she was and whatever that thing was, she was it all the time.
And so is a ghost! This comes to me now, I wasn’t leading up to it, but it’s true, isn’t it? A ghost doesn’t change, a ghost is a regular wherever it goes, a ghost doesn’t switch up its habitual route home to throw off ghost-hunters. To make a ghost learn something is as good as banish it; to change it is to solve the puzzle, and when the puzzle is solved the story is over. Some even say ghosts linger on earth because they can’t change. When the barman says to them, as he says every night, The usual, ma’am? they could go on to their reward if only they could say No! Something new tonight!
I don’t say that, I think it is boring. but I lean to it right now because it lets me say that my mother was more of a ghost when alive than she is now, in death, where I change her all the time to suit my needs. I think that’s poetic.
Very excited for your novel! All my emails these days are from politicians who are trying to save us but need more money to do so, it's very nice to get good news!