Mother of the Muses

I had the strange and somewhat disconcerting experience recently of reading a memoir about people I know. It was written by a woman who was, at one time, romantically involved with a close friend of mine. Both of them are writers, and her memoir details a time in her life after college when she, a young woman from a privileged background, took a poorly-paid entry-level job at the literary agency that represented J.D. Salinger, and simultaneously moved into a tenement apartment in Brooklyn with my friend (in a building that really should have been condemned; I was there many times). At the end of this time period, according to the memoir, she underwent an awakening that was both literary and spiritual in nature and jettisoned the apartment, the job, and the boyfriend.

The memoir may sound -- and perhaps is -- a trifle slight and self-serving. It's a coming-of-age story very particular to its time and place -- New York City in the 1990s -- but it's written with an appealing clarity and simplicity, and the author gets so many things right, including the changing seasons in the city; my friend (whom she paints in an unflattering, if fairly accurate, light); and, ultimately, the reality of suffering. One of her job duties at the literary agency was answering the voluminous fan mail sent to Salinger with an off-putting standard form letter. After reading some of these letters, however -- many of them from fellow World War II veterans -- and after belatedly reading Salinger's slim oeuvre, she comes to a deeper understanding of the human condition. She notes that Bessie Glass, the mother of Franny and Zooey, of Boo Boo, Buddy, and Seymour (as well as of Walt, lost in the war, and his twin brother Waker, a cloistered Carthusian monk), "is in mourning [for her two dead children]. As is the entire Glass family. A family in mourning, never to recover. A world in mourning, never to recover." The book is worth reading just to get to that moment, which comes near the end.

I didn't know the author that well back in the day, and I don't know whether her heart had always been open to the truth of suffering, or whether that realization was entirely catalyzed by her reading of Salinger. The author's ex-boyfriend has, in private correspondence, cast her compassion somewhat into question, but I suppose it's not really that important. What is important is the truth that art can effectively reveal certain aspects of humanity, including the inescapable fact of its suffering, and can also provide, if not the remedy for that suffering, then at least some assuagement.

This calls into question the purpose of the memoir as a genre. What is it for, really, and who among us has lived in such a way that merits such public retelling? The Salinger memoir appealed to me because I knew what the author meant. She describes with great care the weather, what she wore, and what she ordered at the deli, all of which are things that I like to know about; attention to such details in my own life is something that has always had great, almost talismanic significance for me. And even if she's not telling the truth about everything -- because who, in a memoir, is? -- she is nothing but truthful about the fact that, beneath the surface of things and phenomena, trouble is roiling, suffering exists, and even the best-intentioned of us cause one another unspeakable pain. If the Salinger memoir has merit, it's primarily because it sends out a slim shaft of light into the brokenness of things: the light of shared pain, of recognized suffering. We possess art, as Nietzsche said, lest we perish of the truth, and is not the purpose of art to alleviate suffering? Goethe wrote:

Now, Muses, enough!
You strive in vain to show
how anguish and joy
change places in the loving heart.
You cannot heal the wounds
that love inflicts;
but comfort comes,
kindly ones, only from you.



And Memory, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the muses.

Perhaps all art is an evocation of Memory, Mother of the Muses; as writers and as readers we summon her so that, as good mothers do, she might comfort us.

"I cry a lot because I miss people . . . "

I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

His words remind me of Holden Caulfield's proscription against telling others what's in your heart, because "if you do, you start missing everybody."

May the great writer and artist Maurice Sendak be finding things more beautiful than he ever imagined in the life after this one. May he know infinite mercy.

(Above: the poster for the Houston Grand Opera's 1980 production of The Magic Flute, designed by Sendak, in which Mozart is greeted by the Three Spirits.)

"To be a true artist, the performer must give up being on stage"

One of the fringe benefits of rehearsing at my old university is the out-of-date magazines that someone has been leaving for years on a marble counter just outside of the elevators (on a floor that Music shares with the French, Classics, and Theater departments).  I've gleaned many a few-weeks-old New Yorker and Chronicle of Higher Education there, and on this recent trip, picked up some New York Reviews of Books, in one of which I found this excellent short essay on J.D. Salinger.

The Young Unicorns

I woke up this morning with the incomparably delicious feeling that comes from having read a fantastic book the night before.  The book -- pace Enbrethiliel, in whose Madeleine L'Engle Novel Smackdown it fared rather poorly -- is The Young Unicorns, written in 1968, the third book in L'Engle's Austin Family chronicles.  While I wasn't crazy about the first in this series, Meet the Austins, which I also read recently -- it features a family whose cuteness seemed to me a benign, juvenile-fiction version of the preciousness of J.D. Salinger's much-maligned Glass family-- I was game to expand my knowledge of L'Engle beyond the Time quartet (and I can't but agree with Enbrethiliel that A Swiftly Tilting Planet is a towering accomplishment).  I couldn't find the second book in the Austin series, The Moon by Night, in the library, so I pulled a battered copy of The Young Unicorns off the shelf and took it home.  As soon as I had finished it, it took its place alongside The Brothers Karamazov and Clara as a book that I regretted finishing because I did not want it ever to end.

Now why would the perspicacious Enbrethiliel, with whom I concur on so many things, and I differ so much on the point of one YA novel?  I don't know.   To this reader, the book has everything.  The central argument is a version of the one that has been the downfall of many a good, intelligent, and pious man and woman since time immemorial:  the existence of real evil under the guise of goodness, beauty, and truth (in this case, the Anglican bishop of New York City).  The children in the novel are called upon, in their varying states of figurative and literal blindness, to choose good, but some are confounded by the glamour, as it were, of evil.  The theological problem of freedom -- the freedom to love and also to fall -- is posited against the tantalizing possibility of a return to a state of primordial goodness that is, however, compelled rather than freely chosen, and is, therefore, demonic.  And the climactic scene is truly disturbing and frightening.  And the book touches on race, class, exile, addiction, oedipal conflict, and disability.  And several of the characters are gifted musicians. And most of the action takes place in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, a New York neighborhood that I know as intimately as any.  While reading, I could trace each step of every one of the characters as they walked around the neighborhood as if I were walking with them, which gave me particular delight.  And is that a great cover, or what?  (The three Fab Four-looking fellows are members of a dangerous gang, the Alphabats, which is threatening to take over the city.)

Michael D. O'Brien, whose novels I also love, has been very down upon Madeleine L'Engle, which I do not love.  He calls her work "'Christian' neopaganism," and claims that the "foundation" of her work is "wrong."  I cannot bring myself to read his polemic on the evils of children's literature, so perhaps it's not fair of me to reject his argument, where it applies to her work, out of hand; and yet I do.  As with all of her novels that I've read, the message of this book is Christian on the deepest level, and, besides, it's a great read.

Franny, Zooey, Being, and Nakedness

Before my sister became a committed Buddhist, she was an actress.  In fact, not unlike the eponymous heroine in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, she was an exceptionally gifted actress, who nonetheless, like Franny, felt a searing spiritual lack at the heart of her life and craft.  In Salinger's novel, Franny is dissuaded by the ministrations of her wised-up brother from "wandering off into some goddam desert with a burning cross in her hands"; Zooey convinces her that she need not integrate her heartbeat with hesychasm in order to live an authentic life, but will better serve God and her fellow man, in whom she is to see Christ Himself, by returning to college and her artistic discipline.  My sister, on the other hand, in her own painful search for authenticity, alighted on an austere Tibetan Buddhist practice, abandoned her profession because, she claimed, she had only entered it to "get attention," and began moving all over the country with the man she would marry and working in various jobs to support him while he "took time off" to meditate.  She now teaches meditation to beginning practitioners in her Buddhist sect (in this sect, one has to shell out a lot of money to receive the higher, apparently secret teachings that enable one to work as a meditation instructor), and has gained some attention for her articles on using the everyday frustrations of parenting as tools toward enlightenment.

Back when my sister was a struggling actress, there was a period during which she, along with many other actors I knew working Off-Off-Broadway, got a string of parts in plays that featured a guy getting totally naked.  Apparently there was some sort of trend in early-millenial theater theory that a guy getting naked onsage was a good way to further a play's dramatic action or to salvage a foundering plot.  I went to a number of diverse plays by various playwrights in which a guy got naked, and would sit in the darkened house in a strange state of conflicting emotions that included both admiration for the naked actors' courage and heartfelt, head-hanging empathy for all those who had to share the stage with them.

To one of these cringeworthy naked-guy spectacles I once brought a boyfriend of recent vintage, and after the show we went out to eat at a nearby diner with my sister and a childhood friend.  My sister, our friend W., and I were giddy in the rush that follows any performance, even an embarrassing one.  We all ordered grilled-cheese sandwiches.  When it came time for Stoner-Carpenter Guy to order, however, he handed the menu back to the waitress with an air of noble renunciation, and said loftily, "Nothing for me."  Knowing he was a vegetarian, I helpfully suggested dishes like quiche or salad that would not be cooked, as our grilled-cheese sandwiches would, on a grill tainted with runoff from bacon cheeseburgers.  But as Stoner-Carpenter's demurrals became more insistent and began to take on an air of condescension, it occurred to me that he regarded us grilled-cheese eaters as persons to be pitied.  We thought nothing of the ethical contamination of our foodstuffs; indeed, we were happily munching away on cheese -- made with rennet, the lining of a cow's stomach -- pressed between packaged slices of non-whole-grain bread, all cooked together in animal fat.  While Stoner-Carpenter sipped his water, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and cried.  It seemed to me that Stoner-Carpenter saw through me to the deep, dark truth within:  I was morally deformed, a lesser human, a fraud.  I had lost his love through my unethical eating, and this loss, as well as the fiasco the night was turning into, was clearly my own fault.  Our relationship would go on like this for two more years.

I thought of these things today, while buying coffee at a gas station during a road trip with my husband.  The gas station-convenience store milieu suddenly called up from my memory another road trip, taken with Stoner-Carpenter Guy one winter long ago, during which, when we got out at a truck stop somewhere in Pennsylvania, he ordered soup to go and requested, to the bemusement of the cashier, that it be packaged in a soda cup rather than in a styrofoam bowl (styrofoam being, of course, lethally toxic).  And then, from these memories on to the essential questions:  How do we live?  How do we hew to, and honor, the truth?  How are we to be authentic?

The practice of hesychasm, though it suggests a gradual winnowing away of everything in the seeker that is false and not conformed to Christ, turned out not to be the appropriate path for Salinger's Franny; as to my sister, I have my doubts that an esoteric spiritual practice rooted in a foreign culture can possibly lead to the capital-T truth (and, of course, as a Catholic I believe Buddhism is, if not a false path, at least an incomplete one).  As for Stoner-Carpenter Guy, not long after the grilled-cheese incident I came upon him, for all his public show of eating only bread at a dinner party I was giving, surreptitiously wolfing down bowls of bouillabaisse in a corner of the kitchen.  But it's a tricky thing to make food your god, and especially so if you believe that eating confers moral status upon the eater, or, conversely, strips it from him (and that illicit drug-taking has no similar effect upon the user).

I remain filled with a kind of awed respect for all those actors who gamely got completely naked in those Off-Off-Broadway shows years ago.  If only it were as easy for the rest of us to humble ourselves right down to nothingness like that, to strip off all that is non-essential, and to open ourselves completely, in the terrifying vulnerability of our pitiful nakedness, to God.

Music and Memory, Part 4: The Fat Lady

As a young girl, one of the most exciting things about Christmas was the books my parents gave me each year.  While sometimes these gifts expressed my parents' own concerns -- I remember a few years when I received things like The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks and Native Son by Richard Wright -- there were also books that revealed a depth of sensitivity to my growing spirit that was not always apparent in our everyday interactions:  The Cloud of Unknowing one year, for example, and a book of Meister Eckhart's sermons.  But the best year of all was the one in which they gave me both A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Franny and Zooey.  I was eleven or twelve that year, and I read both books many times over the next decade or so.  Franny in particular was precious to me, so much so that, when my high-school boyfriend lost the copy which I, with an upswelling of feeling, had pressed on him (the same one my parents had given me), he was so worried about my reaction that he bought a new one, dog-eared several dozen pages, rolled it in the dirt, and slammed it in the door a few times before giving it to me (he confessed all of this when we broke up).

Franny and Zooey is a novel in two parts, each of them an eponymous short story originally published in the New Yorker (my father first read "Franny" in the New Yorker as a high-school student, and told me, that Christmas I was twelve, how thrilling he'd found it).  Franny Glass, a gifted young actress and college student from a stupendously gifted New York family, is suffering (not unlike Holden Caulfield) from an existential crisis occasioned by the sickening inauthenticity of the culture in which she lives.  In order to combat or at least ameliorate it, she has begun the practice of hesychastic prayer, which she's learned about from the anonymous classic The Way of a Pilgrim.  She ends up in a state of nervous exhaustion on the sofa of her family's Upper East Side apartment, where her brother Zooey attempts to rally her and send her back out into the world to accomplish her duties in it.  She cannot withdraw from it, he tells her, because she has a responsibility to the mysterious Fat Lady, whom he describes as a grotesque, quasi-Southern-Gothic figure sitting on her porch and swatting flies as she listens to the radio.  Then he lets her in on a secret:  the Fat Lady is "Christ Himself."

When my son was a newborn, I bought an old book of J.D. Salinger criticism from the discard bin at the local library, and read it as I nursed him.  I was surprised to discover the tremendous disdain in which the prominent literary critics of the 1950s and 1960s held Salinger and his entire fictional Glass family.  The critics were on the defensive -- sneering, for instance, at Zooey's reverence for the disgusting Fat Lady as a self-conscious badge of his and his family's intellectual superiority.  Salinger's Glass family is rather too good to be true, but hardly, it struck me, worthy of the spleen heaped upon it by actual flesh-and-blood critics. 

Revisiting Salinger, however, brought to my mind a long-forgotten encounter I'd had as a young singer.  I was about twenty years old, and was on a subway platform in Brooklyn, waiting for the train to take me to my voice lesson on the Upper West Side.  I was clutching my music in my hands -- one of the volumes of the Peters complete songs of Schubert.  As I sat on one of the hard wooden benches, a tall, muscular, middle-aged woman approached me and pointed at my music.  She tried to talk to me, but I couldn't understand; she was Polish and spoke no English.  Then, to my astonishment, she started to cry, pointing at my volume of Schubert and saying, over and over, "beautiful."  I was stricken.  Who was she?  She appeared, like so many Polish immigrant women in New York, to be a charwoman -- had she in fact been a singer?  I smiled at her, and tried to say something that might sound consoling, but she just shook her head, weeping, and when the train came, she ran to another car so that our awkward encounter would be severed.

I was troubled by this strange meeting, and for a long time after that, whenever I wanted to give up singing, I would think of the Polish woman on the train.  I started to see her as my own Glassian "fat lady," and decided that, if for nothing else, I should keep singing for her, and hope that it would bear fruit in her life in some mysterious way.  I wonder where she is now; I pray that she is at peace.

Above:  the cover of the French translation of Franny and Zooey.  I love the Hopper-esque cover painting.  Can anyone make out whether the gent in the picture above Franny's head (for it is Franny) is Kafka?