Harriet the Spy; Fitzhugh, Louise
It was Mrs. Boloten at the Cote St. Luc Public Library who told me everything. I have a sense of being plunked sheepishly before her in my pink, horn-rimmed glasses and asking. No, not asking. For as in the old testament story of Passover, I think I was the daughter (son in the story) who didn’t know how to ask. At any rate, plunked there, I hoped someone would direct me. Tell me where I would find what I needed. And Mrs. Boloten did.
Somehow she knew. She steered me toward books and stacks and card catalogues. Showed me how to work this thing called a brain and what I might put it to. Connected me to the world. For years, I went to Mrs. Boloten and, like a pastry chef bringing out one gorgeous dessert after another, she made my eyes widen. She said, ‘Read this,’ and I did. There was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume. But at the peak of that fictional croquembouche was Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh. I had no idea what I was getting.
I took Harriet home and began what I now consider my strange relationship with novels. I seldom read them, but when I do, I carry them for months and months reading them bits at a time. I read for five minutes in bed, for ten minutes walking home, for a few on the bus (because that makes me motion-sick). I carried that book around making it last.
I was twelve when I got Harriet the Spy out of the library. I had friends. But they changed or I did. Grade six is a treacherous time for girls. My best friend was hated, by me, on alternate days and vice versa. Not much was safe. In my family, my Dad was powerful. He blazed like a ferocious star with us, these small planets, revolving around him. I was bad at sports and did not join teams. My eyes were crossed so baseball was out of the question. On weekends, my friends went to the Cavendish Mall. I went with my family to the Eastern Townships where there were forests and no guides.
There was some relief out in the country. For though I didn’t trust myself to navigate the strange pathless place, it was a reprieve from the agony of grade six, the shifting alliances and betrayals. The trees stood there and I visited them. One day, I took the book for a walk. It was fall, a cool orange-leafed day, and I didn’t go far. I remember sitting at the edge of the road on a tree stump. The peace of no one meant I could come forward a bit within myself. Surface. It is one of those carved-out moments. Sitting there reading about Harriet, how she carried her notebook around, and wrote in it secretly about her friends and family. This is what she did with her aloneness. She wrote everything down! When they discovered what she had written, it was gasp-worthy. The anger. Shocking. Sitting there, I saw I was already that. I had not yet started writing, but I recognized myself.
Thirteen years later, I sat in a full auditorium and Audre Lorde came out onto the stage. I'd never heard of her. A friend had insisted I come. So I went. Audre Lorde looked small in what I think was the elegant Wigmore Hall in London, England, in 1986. She stood alone on an empty stage. All I knew was that she was a feminist, which meant I was supposed to like her, and a poet. I was worried I wouldn’t get it. And that it would have nothing to do with me. In the same way I stood in front of Mrs. Boloten not knowing how to ask, I sat there, dumb.
It was the year her collection, Our Dead Behind Us, came out and she was reading from it. I don’t remember any of the poems. Only her looking out at the audience with a stark clarity and saying, "Know where your power is." I wasn't sure what she meant, yet I felt it ringing in me. All the doubt that came with bad eyes, fear of asking, a bad sense of direction, led to a feeling of no power at all, all the belief that other people had power -- those who were “political,” which I wasn’t or “wealthy,” which I wasn’t or male, which I wasn’t. Only the quiet absorption of every book and friendship and family tension was mine. Silently, internally mine. And perhaps there was a power in it, in me to do something with it. It was all I had. Was it anything?
I was at least thirty before I started to write. I wrote about what I had begun writing about in the diaries I kept in the days of the Cote St. Luc library, diaries any girl keeps about the unfair and the fickle. I was always writing about David Shapiro and Francine Taras, about the Strawberry Girls, the ones who wore strawberry lip gloss and "Love’s Fresh Lemon Cologne". Who dotted their i’s with hearts. And while the writing changed, Harriet the Spy and that quote by Audre Lorde stayed.
I have taken this writing out of my notebooks and typed it into poems and put it in the world. And yes, people got mad at me. I nearly lost some of them for writing things that seemed urgent and needed telling. The telling is not the hornet’s nest, it is the poking of the hornet’s nest. And everyone got stung, me included.
There was a time the telling was more important than any relationship, the need to speak more urgent. Each time, the decision taken meant asking, "Am I willing to risk this? Am I willing to lose this person in order to write this poem?" If the answer was yes, I went on. That process still goes on. It doesn’t feel as terrifying or as risky. But that’s just this week. Who knows what I’ll write tomorrow. And where it might get me or what it might cost me. I only know that with writing there is always a risk that someone will turn away. But in not writing, or not speaking when I need to speak, there is a turning away from myself. And that’s where I started. That’s where Mrs. Boloten came in.
Ronna Bloom has published three books of poetry. Public Works, published by Pedlar Press, was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award in 2005. Personal Effects (Pedlar Press, 2000) was acquired and translated by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Ronna is a psychotherapist in private practice and teaches at the University of Toronto. Her poems have been included in anthologies, textbooks and broadcast on CBC radio. Her fourth book, Permiso, will be published by Pedlar Press in the spring of 2009.
Harriet The Spy
Louise Fitzhugh
Published by Delacourte Press, an imprint of Random House Children's Books
Originally published by Harper and Row, 1964
Our Dead Behind Us
Audre Lorde
Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1986
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Sunday, June 8, 2008
More Than Just the Facts, Ma'am -- Madonna Hamel
The White Album; Didion, Joan
As a child, I wrote before I read. I know that sounds pompous. And it makes no sense. (I didn't say my spelling was any good.) But I really did. I'm sure I felt compelled to wriggle out of, and away from, my singular reality and the way to do that was to try to describe it and thus bring myself into the clear light of a shared day of humanity. I had a small perfectly square orange scribbler (that came in packs of four primary-coloured scribblers) into which I poured configurations of feelings. I didn't read (that is, I didn't actively seek out reading material) because I didn't need or want more of the world pouring into me. Too much information confused and disoriented me. I needed to find a familiar space with easy-to-follow directions and a simple, manageable beautiful view. And that space was between the covers of my perfectly square scribblers.
I didn't realize at the time that I was telling myself stories in order to live. That's a paraphrase of the opening lines to Joan Didion's "cover essay," 'The White Album', from her landmark collection of creative non-fiction essays of the same name. The book came out in 1979, the same year I finally found "my people", a group of mature students who, collectively, specialized in the literatures of Japan, France, the Soviet Republic, Ireland, England, Australia, South Africa, and Canada. My own fascination was with the writers of the American south. I was twenty-one at the time. But I could have used that book when I was eleven.
Growing up in north-central BC, in Prince George, the pulp and paper capital of the world, I knew I had to tell the truth but I wasn't capable of telling it without feeling, or without extensive details that went beyond "just the facts, ma'am." I didn't know that there was a style of writing that was being developed at the time by writers who felt the same way: Truman Capote, Tom Wolf, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion, among them. However, I was developing a growing awareness that stories had a "saving grace-quality" to them: as the years stumbled along, I learned that relationships, vacations, fashions, meals, and many half-baked projects and notions could crash and burn, but at least they made good copy.
What I didn't realize, until I discovered Didion, was that an artist could write about a huge global event right alongside her own little life as if her life, also, mattered. Personal catastrophes could intermingle with social ones and the news quality of the overall "piece" could still retain its integrity. You could be considered both journalist and diarist and no one would think the less of you, or raise an eyebrow at your fanciful rhetoric. As long as the all the decimal points were in the right place, they would still respect you in the morning. Here was a writing style that owned up to myriad influences, be they neuroses, family, alma mater, geography, anatomy, diet or addiction.
Didion's particular personal influences, when writing The White Album, included a looming possible divorce, a "certain organic disorder of the central nervous system", a packing checklist for last-minute flights and the fearful prospect of driving a rented car over the Carquinas Bridge. And these influences were as relevant to the overall text and carried as much literary weight as receiving the news of Bobby Kennedy's death while standing on a balcony in Hawaii, awaiting the arrival of Jim Morrison in a recording studio, discussing the commercial prospects of Soul On Ice with Eldridge Cleaver and his parole officer and hearing the news of Sharon Tate-Polanski's death while sitting in the shallow end of a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
I learned of Sharon Tate's murder from "The Vancouver Sun", the big city paper we only got on weekends. It made front page news, with a disturbingly sexy photo of the "Valley of The Dolls" starlet juxtaposed under the headline. That was my first exposure to the coupling of sex with violence and it packed a psychic punch. I had, at eleven years old, somehow surmised that pretty women were susceptible to violent deaths. I glanced at the article against my better judgment, catching phrases "pregnant. . . dead baby", "the word 'PIG' in blood. . . on the door", "stabbed sixteen times" then left the kitchen, chilled to the bone, despite the August heat. I sat on the back stoop pondering my fate and how, inexplicably, it was intertwined with Tate's. I sat there for the better part of the afternoon, dreading nightfall and the fact that I wouldn't get any sleep because the murderers were still at large and might well be headed for the border.
I'm forty-eight years old and, last week, I was in a Philadelphia bookstore talking with my lover's cousin Cleat about the things we fear and love. I was beginning to believe that we resonate with others based on whether or not we look at the world through enough of the same fear and love lenses. Cleat loves jazz and theatre. I love travel and books. We both fear poverty of all kinds. While comparing phobias and philias, I spotted on a shelf directly over his left shoulder a big book with the title "We Tell Each Other stories In Order to Live". I thought to myself: I know this phrase. It's the kind of thing despairing artists say to talk themselves off the ledge. And walking over to the shelf, I saw it was the title of a new anthology of Didion's non-fiction books. I bought the book with the intention of rereading The White Album, the essay. I wanted to see if it still hit as hard as it did upon first reading back in '79, when it came out, and I was an impressionable "comp lit" student, with my first real boyfriend and a newly-acquired taste for espressos.
It did. Especially section 10 of the essay. (The essay is divided into fifteen sections.) It talks about how, in those days (the late 60's) in LA, "everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable". There was a "mystical flirtation with the idea of sin" and with "the idea that it was possible to go too far". Her own community in Hollywood was experiencing "the jitters". She claimed that "dogs barked every night" and "the moon was always full". (Which, of course, the latter wasn't, but the image lent emotional colour to the idea that a palpable insanity lurked behind every door.)
And this is the part I remember most: on August 9, 1969, she "was sitting in the shallow end" of her sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills, when the phones started ringing with the news of the murders at Sharon-Tate Polanski's home. Speculations flew back and forth regarding methods of murder, number of murderers and the involvement of drugs. And then: "I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised".
I've now reread that essay four times and and I'm on the third reading of the book in its entirety. I observe that the story of Sharon Tate's murder has less hold over me now than than Didion's discussion of her marriage. While I appreciate the chill that ran through me reading Didion for the first time when I was twenty-one and was prompted to recall my reaction to the Tate murder when I was eleven, I also appreciate that stories change. Even the ones we think will keep us alive.
Sometimes telling stories discharges their "energy-hold" over us. Sometimes the telling wears the groove deeper and keeps an attachment alive. Stories, the Buddhists remind us, can become crutches, blinders, parentheses around a potentially much bigger reality. Stories can even become noisy melodramas that keep us from a life of simple, momentary pleasures. But Didion knew this, too. After that now-famous first line -- "We tell ourselves stories in order to live" -- she warns the reader not to get too dependent on personal stories: "I am talking about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself... my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear clues and no longer did." Of course, given the events of those last years of the 60's, her reaction was understandable, some would even say, normal.
The White Album still confirms for me that even the most terrible human behaviour can be borne -- if only in a miniscule way -- by telling our stories with all that we love and and all that we fear. But I have also come to believe that, as writers, we should always be a little troubled and relieved by the premises of all our stories. And I am ever-thankful for Didion's stories, which relieve and trouble me still.
Madonna Hamel is a writer-broadcaster and monologist. Her band, "Auntie Maddy", was a regular feature on the Quebec City performance scene for eleven years. She is now based in Toronto. You can visit her website at www.madonnahamel.com .
As a child, I wrote before I read. I know that sounds pompous. And it makes no sense. (I didn't say my spelling was any good.) But I really did. I'm sure I felt compelled to wriggle out of, and away from, my singular reality and the way to do that was to try to describe it and thus bring myself into the clear light of a shared day of humanity. I had a small perfectly square orange scribbler (that came in packs of four primary-coloured scribblers) into which I poured configurations of feelings. I didn't read (that is, I didn't actively seek out reading material) because I didn't need or want more of the world pouring into me. Too much information confused and disoriented me. I needed to find a familiar space with easy-to-follow directions and a simple, manageable beautiful view. And that space was between the covers of my perfectly square scribblers.
I didn't realize at the time that I was telling myself stories in order to live. That's a paraphrase of the opening lines to Joan Didion's "cover essay," 'The White Album', from her landmark collection of creative non-fiction essays of the same name. The book came out in 1979, the same year I finally found "my people", a group of mature students who, collectively, specialized in the literatures of Japan, France, the Soviet Republic, Ireland, England, Australia, South Africa, and Canada. My own fascination was with the writers of the American south. I was twenty-one at the time. But I could have used that book when I was eleven.
Growing up in north-central BC, in Prince George, the pulp and paper capital of the world, I knew I had to tell the truth but I wasn't capable of telling it without feeling, or without extensive details that went beyond "just the facts, ma'am." I didn't know that there was a style of writing that was being developed at the time by writers who felt the same way: Truman Capote, Tom Wolf, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion, among them. However, I was developing a growing awareness that stories had a "saving grace-quality" to them: as the years stumbled along, I learned that relationships, vacations, fashions, meals, and many half-baked projects and notions could crash and burn, but at least they made good copy.
What I didn't realize, until I discovered Didion, was that an artist could write about a huge global event right alongside her own little life as if her life, also, mattered. Personal catastrophes could intermingle with social ones and the news quality of the overall "piece" could still retain its integrity. You could be considered both journalist and diarist and no one would think the less of you, or raise an eyebrow at your fanciful rhetoric. As long as the all the decimal points were in the right place, they would still respect you in the morning. Here was a writing style that owned up to myriad influences, be they neuroses, family, alma mater, geography, anatomy, diet or addiction.
Didion's particular personal influences, when writing The White Album, included a looming possible divorce, a "certain organic disorder of the central nervous system", a packing checklist for last-minute flights and the fearful prospect of driving a rented car over the Carquinas Bridge. And these influences were as relevant to the overall text and carried as much literary weight as receiving the news of Bobby Kennedy's death while standing on a balcony in Hawaii, awaiting the arrival of Jim Morrison in a recording studio, discussing the commercial prospects of Soul On Ice with Eldridge Cleaver and his parole officer and hearing the news of Sharon Tate-Polanski's death while sitting in the shallow end of a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
I learned of Sharon Tate's murder from "The Vancouver Sun", the big city paper we only got on weekends. It made front page news, with a disturbingly sexy photo of the "Valley of The Dolls" starlet juxtaposed under the headline. That was my first exposure to the coupling of sex with violence and it packed a psychic punch. I had, at eleven years old, somehow surmised that pretty women were susceptible to violent deaths. I glanced at the article against my better judgment, catching phrases "pregnant. . . dead baby", "the word 'PIG' in blood. . . on the door", "stabbed sixteen times" then left the kitchen, chilled to the bone, despite the August heat. I sat on the back stoop pondering my fate and how, inexplicably, it was intertwined with Tate's. I sat there for the better part of the afternoon, dreading nightfall and the fact that I wouldn't get any sleep because the murderers were still at large and might well be headed for the border.
I'm forty-eight years old and, last week, I was in a Philadelphia bookstore talking with my lover's cousin Cleat about the things we fear and love. I was beginning to believe that we resonate with others based on whether or not we look at the world through enough of the same fear and love lenses. Cleat loves jazz and theatre. I love travel and books. We both fear poverty of all kinds. While comparing phobias and philias, I spotted on a shelf directly over his left shoulder a big book with the title "We Tell Each Other stories In Order to Live". I thought to myself: I know this phrase. It's the kind of thing despairing artists say to talk themselves off the ledge. And walking over to the shelf, I saw it was the title of a new anthology of Didion's non-fiction books. I bought the book with the intention of rereading The White Album, the essay. I wanted to see if it still hit as hard as it did upon first reading back in '79, when it came out, and I was an impressionable "comp lit" student, with my first real boyfriend and a newly-acquired taste for espressos.
It did. Especially section 10 of the essay. (The essay is divided into fifteen sections.) It talks about how, in those days (the late 60's) in LA, "everything was unmentionable, but nothing was unimaginable". There was a "mystical flirtation with the idea of sin" and with "the idea that it was possible to go too far". Her own community in Hollywood was experiencing "the jitters". She claimed that "dogs barked every night" and "the moon was always full". (Which, of course, the latter wasn't, but the image lent emotional colour to the idea that a palpable insanity lurked behind every door.)
And this is the part I remember most: on August 9, 1969, she "was sitting in the shallow end" of her sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills, when the phones started ringing with the news of the murders at Sharon-Tate Polanski's home. Speculations flew back and forth regarding methods of murder, number of murderers and the involvement of drugs. And then: "I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised".
I've now reread that essay four times and and I'm on the third reading of the book in its entirety. I observe that the story of Sharon Tate's murder has less hold over me now than than Didion's discussion of her marriage. While I appreciate the chill that ran through me reading Didion for the first time when I was twenty-one and was prompted to recall my reaction to the Tate murder when I was eleven, I also appreciate that stories change. Even the ones we think will keep us alive.
Sometimes telling stories discharges their "energy-hold" over us. Sometimes the telling wears the groove deeper and keeps an attachment alive. Stories, the Buddhists remind us, can become crutches, blinders, parentheses around a potentially much bigger reality. Stories can even become noisy melodramas that keep us from a life of simple, momentary pleasures. But Didion knew this, too. After that now-famous first line -- "We tell ourselves stories in order to live" -- she warns the reader not to get too dependent on personal stories: "I am talking about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself... my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear clues and no longer did." Of course, given the events of those last years of the 60's, her reaction was understandable, some would even say, normal.
The White Album still confirms for me that even the most terrible human behaviour can be borne -- if only in a miniscule way -- by telling our stories with all that we love and and all that we fear. But I have also come to believe that, as writers, we should always be a little troubled and relieved by the premises of all our stories. And I am ever-thankful for Didion's stories, which relieve and trouble me still.
Madonna Hamel is a writer-broadcaster and monologist. Her band, "Auntie Maddy", was a regular feature on the Quebec City performance scene for eleven years. She is now based in Toronto. You can visit her website at www.madonnahamel.com .
Monday, May 19, 2008
Reading Across the Ocean -- A Rite of Passage -- Isabel Huggan
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; de Beauvoir, Simone
In the autumn of 1966, just as I was turning 23, I sailed for Britain on the Cunard Franconia. I’d spent the year after university working as a copyeditor for the Macmillan Company in Toronto and, although my pay was only $75 per week, I’d saved enough to cross the Atlantic. In those days the cheapest fare, whether by air or sea, was around $200: I reckoned that seven days of fun was a better deal than ten hours cooped up in a plane, and booked passage from Montreal to Southampton. On the ship there were several Rhodes Scholars on their way to Oxford: the atmosphere, in the bar or on the dance floor, was giddy, exciting and full of promise, for every one of these confident young men seemed on his way to be somebody. By contrast, I didn’t have a clear goal other than leaving my good-girl girlhood behind.
My father had seen me off in Montreal – my mother was recovering from heart surgery and had stayed back with my sister. On my departure, he presented me with a long-stemmed red rose, which I then threw back to him, rather dramatically, just as the ship pulled free of its moorings. In “Knowing People”, the final story of You Never Know (Knopf, 1993), I made use of this moment in fiction:
"My father had given me a carnation corsage to wear, and I threw it down to him as the ship began to move, in what I imagined was a symbolic gesture. I wanted no connection with my parents. I was off to Europe to free myself at last from their embrace. He caught it and waved it at me, and then began pinning it on my mother’s jacket. She was weeping furiously, as if she knew what was going on in my mind."
During that year at Macmillan’s, I had been befriended by an older woman named Billie who was the first – and for that the most memorable – feminist I’d ever met. Divorced, and bringing up her son alone, Billie was smart, tough and utterly unsentimental in her evaluation of people and ideas. Knowing I had aspirations to be a writer, she gave me a photocopy of Tillie Olsen’s essay “Silences” that had appeared in Harper’s, and bid me think deeply about what I intended to do. Later, she lent me her copy of The Second Sex, which we discussed at length with the other copy editors during tea breaks and, before I left, she suggested the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, to read on the voyage.
“You’ll see yourself in these pages,” she said.
Reading while stretched out in a deck chair, sipping hot Bovril delivered by a steward, I soon discerned that similarities between Simone’s life and mine were not immediately obvious – in fact, the details could not have been more different. For a start, she was born Roman Catholic in Paris in 1908 just three years before my mother was born Protestant on a farm near Lake Huron: the crucial distinctions multiplied as the pages turned, but I began to understand why Billie had wanted me to read the book.
Here was a sensibility to admire! Here was a writer unafraid to examine her life with a fierce and meticulous honesty! Indeed, here was a woman I could learn from and emulate: Simone, who as a child had dutifully obeyed her bourgeois parents and conformed to their religious and social practices, eventually found the courage to follow her own heart and mind. During her early twenties, she blossomed into an extraordinary, unconventional individual – and a prolific writer – seeking only to be true to herself.
Could one want anything less for oneself? This was exactly the kind of person – the kind of writer – I wanted to be: fearless, determined, and fastidious about uncovering and expressing the truth, in life and in art.
I read her Memoirs passionately. Her account of adolescence described how she had felt confined in a cage of expectations, from which it was necessary to escape in order to survive. Amusingly, I believed that I too was liberating myself from middle-class constraints – on a luxury ocean liner (albeit in steerage). I grasped the comic irony even then, but it did not distress me, for Simone herself took years to loosen her family ties, and was still living at home – with a younger sister who was a willing accomplice to adventures into the seamier side of Paris – at an age when I’d long been independent. For years she straddled two worlds, but as she matured, her reading of philosophy (as well as contemporary novelists like Gide, Fournier, Cocteau) pushed her over into the realm of self-determination where she was free.
As soon as I settled in London that fall, I acquired Force of Circumstance, the second volume of her autobiography, which traces Simone’s unusual romantic involvement with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and her own growth as a writer and intellectual. This book was even more compelling and inspiring than the earlier one, and led me to buy two of her novels, She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. I was initially surprised by what I read, for it seemed that events in her fiction exactly matched events in her memoir: she’d clearly absorbed Jean-Paul’s advice to allow her self to invade her art and to use her own experience, barely disguised, as material. Somehow, this discovery was hugely freeing, as if what Simone had done validated and legitimized the act of transforming one’s own life into fiction, and I saw other writers I was reading then – Drabble, Lessing – in this new light.
I think it is no accident that within a decade I had begun writing a series of stories about a child who felt herself to be unfairly caged by life in a small Ontario town in the 1950s (The Elizabeth Stories, Oberon Press, 1984). In the Gallimard edition (1991), the title is L’Échappée Belle, “the perfect escape”: the French translator understood the heart of the book. Here are a few lines from “Jack of Hearts”, the third story:
By all odds, I should have been dragged down by the life I led as a child in Garten. I should still be there, or somewhere like it, forced under by my upbringing and all the expectations around me. But luck was with me, and small pockets of defiance multiplied beneath my surface, keeping me afloat, preparing me for that final escape.
Reading her in 1966, I was struck by how scrupulous Simone was in her self-examination, exposing inconsistencies, jealousies and weaknesses as well as describing, without false modesty, her great intelligence and ego. I admired her for that, and for openly admitting personal confusion regarding various matters. For example, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she told of how she detested the idea of matrimony but at the same time wanted to marry her cousin Jacques; she could hold two opposing thoughts in her mind at once, as I so often did – wanting to stay single, at the same time as longing to love and be loved. Somehow, by writing so honestly, she allowed readers to forgive their own contradictions.
There must be thousands of women like me who read Simone de Beauvoir at a similarly impressionable age, who came to the same conclusions and made the same commitments: we would free ourselves, we would be ourselves. We would live by our ideals. Unlike some of the influential feminist texts of that period, Memoirs was not intentionally “instructive” but simply a record of a life: still, it stayed in my knapsack as a kind of Bible, as if Simone would show me the path.
In the two decades since her death in 1986, facts have gradually emerged about Simone’s adult life (most recently, in Tête-à-tête, the fine study of Beauvoir and Sartre by Hazel Rowley), giving her old admirers a rude shock: indeed, she may not have been as devoted to the truth as we believed. Her autobiographical works presented a certain “face” by leaving out details that would have altered the picture considerably, and her apparent self-criticism was only a literary ruse. Still, no matter what we learn now, what she wrote then, and how we read it, changed a generation of women in a manner not only benign but beneficial. We admired her because she dared to be herself: why then couldn’t we?
Re-reading Memoirs today, my reactions are overlaid with images of Simone gained through her later work and letters, and through biographies which have cast a harsher light on her life than she did, for all her seeming frankness. But, as Hazel Rowley writes in her introduction to the new paperback edition of the Memoirs, “This is the fifty-year-old author smiling at her youthful dreams, but in fact she never lost them and she was right not to. It is impossible to read about Simone de Beauvoir’s life without thinking about your own.”
Just as wise Billie had said.
My life turned out not at all like Simone’s: by 27, although I’d claimed at 23 I’d never marry, I was married, and by 34 I had a child. I have led a conventional life and it would be difficult to find any similarities, except one: I too have written from my own experience – “using what is given” as Bronwen Wallace said about using her own life as material – in part, I believe, because Simone’s work gave me that early “permission”. My last book, Belonging (Knopf 2003) combining memoir with short stories, aimed to make clear the intimate relationship between experience and fiction, sisters in pursuit of the truth.
I have lived in France for nearly nine years, on the edge of mountains where Simone hiked on holidays as a young woman, and not far from the Limousin region where she spent her childhood summers. It is only three hours by train to Paris, the city where she spent her life and where she died, but it has never occurred to me to make pilgrimages to see where she lived (although one cannot sit in a café with a notebook without thinking of her). Still, she stays with me as a kind of guide, and for more than 25 years, wherever I’ve set up a desk, above it I have hung a present from my husband: a framed enlargement of a quote from an interview in which she was asked for advice for a young writer:
"Je lui dirais de lire, d’étudier, d’apprendre, de réfléchir. Je lui dirais, écrivez : c’est un grand bonheur d’écrire malgré toutes les difficultés. Et puis occupez-vous du monde autour de vous, essayez de vous engager dedans."
**
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone de Beauvoir
First published in its English translation in 1959
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005
**
Isabel Huggan, author of The Elizabeth Stories, You Never Know, and Belonging: Home Away From Home, spent the first 43 years of her life in Ontario, and has lived abroad for the last 20. She crosses the Atlantic twice every year to return “home” to Canada, and then to go back “home” to France. She has been a mentor in the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program for the past decade, and also gives writing workshops in France and Switzerland.
In the autumn of 1966, just as I was turning 23, I sailed for Britain on the Cunard Franconia. I’d spent the year after university working as a copyeditor for the Macmillan Company in Toronto and, although my pay was only $75 per week, I’d saved enough to cross the Atlantic. In those days the cheapest fare, whether by air or sea, was around $200: I reckoned that seven days of fun was a better deal than ten hours cooped up in a plane, and booked passage from Montreal to Southampton. On the ship there were several Rhodes Scholars on their way to Oxford: the atmosphere, in the bar or on the dance floor, was giddy, exciting and full of promise, for every one of these confident young men seemed on his way to be somebody. By contrast, I didn’t have a clear goal other than leaving my good-girl girlhood behind.
My father had seen me off in Montreal – my mother was recovering from heart surgery and had stayed back with my sister. On my departure, he presented me with a long-stemmed red rose, which I then threw back to him, rather dramatically, just as the ship pulled free of its moorings. In “Knowing People”, the final story of You Never Know (Knopf, 1993), I made use of this moment in fiction:
"My father had given me a carnation corsage to wear, and I threw it down to him as the ship began to move, in what I imagined was a symbolic gesture. I wanted no connection with my parents. I was off to Europe to free myself at last from their embrace. He caught it and waved it at me, and then began pinning it on my mother’s jacket. She was weeping furiously, as if she knew what was going on in my mind."
During that year at Macmillan’s, I had been befriended by an older woman named Billie who was the first – and for that the most memorable – feminist I’d ever met. Divorced, and bringing up her son alone, Billie was smart, tough and utterly unsentimental in her evaluation of people and ideas. Knowing I had aspirations to be a writer, she gave me a photocopy of Tillie Olsen’s essay “Silences” that had appeared in Harper’s, and bid me think deeply about what I intended to do. Later, she lent me her copy of The Second Sex, which we discussed at length with the other copy editors during tea breaks and, before I left, she suggested the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, to read on the voyage.
“You’ll see yourself in these pages,” she said.
Reading while stretched out in a deck chair, sipping hot Bovril delivered by a steward, I soon discerned that similarities between Simone’s life and mine were not immediately obvious – in fact, the details could not have been more different. For a start, she was born Roman Catholic in Paris in 1908 just three years before my mother was born Protestant on a farm near Lake Huron: the crucial distinctions multiplied as the pages turned, but I began to understand why Billie had wanted me to read the book.
Here was a sensibility to admire! Here was a writer unafraid to examine her life with a fierce and meticulous honesty! Indeed, here was a woman I could learn from and emulate: Simone, who as a child had dutifully obeyed her bourgeois parents and conformed to their religious and social practices, eventually found the courage to follow her own heart and mind. During her early twenties, she blossomed into an extraordinary, unconventional individual – and a prolific writer – seeking only to be true to herself.
Could one want anything less for oneself? This was exactly the kind of person – the kind of writer – I wanted to be: fearless, determined, and fastidious about uncovering and expressing the truth, in life and in art.
I read her Memoirs passionately. Her account of adolescence described how she had felt confined in a cage of expectations, from which it was necessary to escape in order to survive. Amusingly, I believed that I too was liberating myself from middle-class constraints – on a luxury ocean liner (albeit in steerage). I grasped the comic irony even then, but it did not distress me, for Simone herself took years to loosen her family ties, and was still living at home – with a younger sister who was a willing accomplice to adventures into the seamier side of Paris – at an age when I’d long been independent. For years she straddled two worlds, but as she matured, her reading of philosophy (as well as contemporary novelists like Gide, Fournier, Cocteau) pushed her over into the realm of self-determination where she was free.
As soon as I settled in London that fall, I acquired Force of Circumstance, the second volume of her autobiography, which traces Simone’s unusual romantic involvement with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and her own growth as a writer and intellectual. This book was even more compelling and inspiring than the earlier one, and led me to buy two of her novels, She Came to Stay and The Mandarins. I was initially surprised by what I read, for it seemed that events in her fiction exactly matched events in her memoir: she’d clearly absorbed Jean-Paul’s advice to allow her self to invade her art and to use her own experience, barely disguised, as material. Somehow, this discovery was hugely freeing, as if what Simone had done validated and legitimized the act of transforming one’s own life into fiction, and I saw other writers I was reading then – Drabble, Lessing – in this new light.
I think it is no accident that within a decade I had begun writing a series of stories about a child who felt herself to be unfairly caged by life in a small Ontario town in the 1950s (The Elizabeth Stories, Oberon Press, 1984). In the Gallimard edition (1991), the title is L’Échappée Belle, “the perfect escape”: the French translator understood the heart of the book. Here are a few lines from “Jack of Hearts”, the third story:
By all odds, I should have been dragged down by the life I led as a child in Garten. I should still be there, or somewhere like it, forced under by my upbringing and all the expectations around me. But luck was with me, and small pockets of defiance multiplied beneath my surface, keeping me afloat, preparing me for that final escape.
Reading her in 1966, I was struck by how scrupulous Simone was in her self-examination, exposing inconsistencies, jealousies and weaknesses as well as describing, without false modesty, her great intelligence and ego. I admired her for that, and for openly admitting personal confusion regarding various matters. For example, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she told of how she detested the idea of matrimony but at the same time wanted to marry her cousin Jacques; she could hold two opposing thoughts in her mind at once, as I so often did – wanting to stay single, at the same time as longing to love and be loved. Somehow, by writing so honestly, she allowed readers to forgive their own contradictions.
There must be thousands of women like me who read Simone de Beauvoir at a similarly impressionable age, who came to the same conclusions and made the same commitments: we would free ourselves, we would be ourselves. We would live by our ideals. Unlike some of the influential feminist texts of that period, Memoirs was not intentionally “instructive” but simply a record of a life: still, it stayed in my knapsack as a kind of Bible, as if Simone would show me the path.
In the two decades since her death in 1986, facts have gradually emerged about Simone’s adult life (most recently, in Tête-à-tête, the fine study of Beauvoir and Sartre by Hazel Rowley), giving her old admirers a rude shock: indeed, she may not have been as devoted to the truth as we believed. Her autobiographical works presented a certain “face” by leaving out details that would have altered the picture considerably, and her apparent self-criticism was only a literary ruse. Still, no matter what we learn now, what she wrote then, and how we read it, changed a generation of women in a manner not only benign but beneficial. We admired her because she dared to be herself: why then couldn’t we?
Re-reading Memoirs today, my reactions are overlaid with images of Simone gained through her later work and letters, and through biographies which have cast a harsher light on her life than she did, for all her seeming frankness. But, as Hazel Rowley writes in her introduction to the new paperback edition of the Memoirs, “This is the fifty-year-old author smiling at her youthful dreams, but in fact she never lost them and she was right not to. It is impossible to read about Simone de Beauvoir’s life without thinking about your own.”
Just as wise Billie had said.
My life turned out not at all like Simone’s: by 27, although I’d claimed at 23 I’d never marry, I was married, and by 34 I had a child. I have led a conventional life and it would be difficult to find any similarities, except one: I too have written from my own experience – “using what is given” as Bronwen Wallace said about using her own life as material – in part, I believe, because Simone’s work gave me that early “permission”. My last book, Belonging (Knopf 2003) combining memoir with short stories, aimed to make clear the intimate relationship between experience and fiction, sisters in pursuit of the truth.
I have lived in France for nearly nine years, on the edge of mountains where Simone hiked on holidays as a young woman, and not far from the Limousin region where she spent her childhood summers. It is only three hours by train to Paris, the city where she spent her life and where she died, but it has never occurred to me to make pilgrimages to see where she lived (although one cannot sit in a café with a notebook without thinking of her). Still, she stays with me as a kind of guide, and for more than 25 years, wherever I’ve set up a desk, above it I have hung a present from my husband: a framed enlargement of a quote from an interview in which she was asked for advice for a young writer:
"Je lui dirais de lire, d’étudier, d’apprendre, de réfléchir. Je lui dirais, écrivez : c’est un grand bonheur d’écrire malgré toutes les difficultés. Et puis occupez-vous du monde autour de vous, essayez de vous engager dedans."
**
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone de Beauvoir
First published in its English translation in 1959
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published in 2005
**
Isabel Huggan, author of The Elizabeth Stories, You Never Know, and Belonging: Home Away From Home, spent the first 43 years of her life in Ontario, and has lived abroad for the last 20. She crosses the Atlantic twice every year to return “home” to Canada, and then to go back “home” to France. She has been a mentor in the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program for the past decade, and also gives writing workshops in France and Switzerland.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
What Larks! -- Terry Griggs
Great Expectations; Dickens, Charles
It’s the late sixties and some of my contemporaries in the big world–lots I suspect–are at this very moment smoking-up and just generally feeling groovy. Me, I’m sitting on a school bus in transit from my wretched new highschool in Strathroy to my wretched new home in Komoka (an embarrassing name that I can’t even say without thinking of grass skirts and Hawaiian guitars). I am not feeling groovy. I am in exile from my sociable, connected, larky life, my big-lake-small-pond existence on Manitoulin Island. My expectations for the move (mad parental decision, don’t ask) had been rube-istically hopeful–an off-island adventure!–but hope had drained rapidly down a sinkhole of Southern Ontario non-joie-de-vivre. It’s only highschool-hell, but I don’t know that yet. Only later do I realize how pitiable are those who cite highschool as being the happiest years of their lives.
So. I’m sitting on the bus, glum and dispirited, with four books on my lap that I’ve ordered from a school book club. This is an unprecedented, possibly desperate, purchase, as to date I’m a casual, take-it-or-leave-it reader, not a besotted one. Ironically, given the situation in which I feel I’m mired, the title of the topmost book on my pile is "Great Expectations". I open this book to the first page and. . . fall. I fall headfirst, headlong, head-over-heels into the rest of my life. A literary life, who would have thought? Which is not to say that I go to lots of parties, conferences, writers’ retreats and pubs (the latter at least is tempting). I don’t, hardly ever. But my life is pretty much defined by a kind of willing captivity, an enchantment, a tumbling into that graveyard with Pip and Magwitch and then not clambering back out, but taking a years-long meander through a purely verbal landscape.
What did I find in Dickens’ work that was so compelling (as opposed to the torture that Dickens apparently was for Evelyn Waugh, subjected as he was to his father’s nightly readings)? I found what was missing: richness, wit, flights of fancy, linguistic prowess, verve, heartfelt and brilliant storytelling. I found an astonishingly lively mind and the absorbing company that mind had so thoughtfully provided. I found what resonated, what mattered most when later I began to try my own hand at getting a few words down. What I’ve written is epigrammatic in comparison with his vast output, puny in accomplishment, but I, too, am much given to extended metaphorical riffs, comic exaggeration, stylistic bravura, and embedding fantasy in language itself.
If, as the Welsh say, English is “the thin language,” Dickens' use of it surely belies the assertion. Even the two words of the title, "Great Expectations", promise a wealth of wordy entertainment for the reader, and worldly education–and grief–for its main character. It’s also one of those books so widely read over the years that it has entered the cultural bloodstream–Miss Havisham in particular, the balked and moldering bride and Pip’s tormentor, has broken free of the text itself and wanders among us. I expect it’s her haunting my own work in the form of a menacing and mysterious elderly female character who determinedly keeps popping up, most recently in a character called Mrs. Havlock (not too obvious, eh). Married at last! Although her husband is suspiciously missing–revenge at last!
I’ve moved a few too many times of late and my library has been shuffled and scrambled and piled here and there. I’m a fairly orderly person, a small-time control freak, but I can’t exactly say where my book club copy of Great Expectations has gotten to. I know it’s buried somewhere in the book midden, a cheap edition with crappy cover-art, the binding held together with masking tape. But it’s one of my treasures, and I would never consider giving it the old heave-ho, as I have, unsentimentally, given many other books during occasional cullings. Would I rip out my own dog-eared and tattered heart?
Kindly Joe Gargery’s catchphrase in the book–“What larks!”–has become something of a catchphrase for me, too, and something of a philosophy. Suits my temperament anyway. I’m all for fun and merriment and for the resilience that an intelligent optimism brings. If one is going to try to wrest a life and a living from writing, then a functioning sense of humour does come in handy. In daily literary practice, business end included, there are of course many expectations that won’t be met, and some that are met in ways one would never expect at all. Not long ago, I discovered that a book of mine was being used as a prop in Sears catalogues. Being the sort of person who always tries to read book titles when they’re used as decorative backdrops in advertisements, I have to admit to being surprised to find my own displayed on chair slipcovers and coffee tables, the colour of the book jacket a perfect match for the décor. Well, books do have their uses, some more prosaic (as it were) than others. Even my younger, bummed-out self might have been amused.
Terry Griggs
Bio
Terry Griggs was born and raised on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario, in London. She has published a collection of short stories, two novels, the most recent being Rogues’ Wedding, and the Cat’s Eye Corner series of novels for young readers. Her works have been nominated for various awards, including the Governor General’s Award and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, and in 2003, she won the Marion Engel Award. Currently she lives in Stratford, Ontario.
It’s the late sixties and some of my contemporaries in the big world–lots I suspect–are at this very moment smoking-up and just generally feeling groovy. Me, I’m sitting on a school bus in transit from my wretched new highschool in Strathroy to my wretched new home in Komoka (an embarrassing name that I can’t even say without thinking of grass skirts and Hawaiian guitars). I am not feeling groovy. I am in exile from my sociable, connected, larky life, my big-lake-small-pond existence on Manitoulin Island. My expectations for the move (mad parental decision, don’t ask) had been rube-istically hopeful–an off-island adventure!–but hope had drained rapidly down a sinkhole of Southern Ontario non-joie-de-vivre. It’s only highschool-hell, but I don’t know that yet. Only later do I realize how pitiable are those who cite highschool as being the happiest years of their lives.
So. I’m sitting on the bus, glum and dispirited, with four books on my lap that I’ve ordered from a school book club. This is an unprecedented, possibly desperate, purchase, as to date I’m a casual, take-it-or-leave-it reader, not a besotted one. Ironically, given the situation in which I feel I’m mired, the title of the topmost book on my pile is "Great Expectations". I open this book to the first page and. . . fall. I fall headfirst, headlong, head-over-heels into the rest of my life. A literary life, who would have thought? Which is not to say that I go to lots of parties, conferences, writers’ retreats and pubs (the latter at least is tempting). I don’t, hardly ever. But my life is pretty much defined by a kind of willing captivity, an enchantment, a tumbling into that graveyard with Pip and Magwitch and then not clambering back out, but taking a years-long meander through a purely verbal landscape.
What did I find in Dickens’ work that was so compelling (as opposed to the torture that Dickens apparently was for Evelyn Waugh, subjected as he was to his father’s nightly readings)? I found what was missing: richness, wit, flights of fancy, linguistic prowess, verve, heartfelt and brilliant storytelling. I found an astonishingly lively mind and the absorbing company that mind had so thoughtfully provided. I found what resonated, what mattered most when later I began to try my own hand at getting a few words down. What I’ve written is epigrammatic in comparison with his vast output, puny in accomplishment, but I, too, am much given to extended metaphorical riffs, comic exaggeration, stylistic bravura, and embedding fantasy in language itself.
If, as the Welsh say, English is “the thin language,” Dickens' use of it surely belies the assertion. Even the two words of the title, "Great Expectations", promise a wealth of wordy entertainment for the reader, and worldly education–and grief–for its main character. It’s also one of those books so widely read over the years that it has entered the cultural bloodstream–Miss Havisham in particular, the balked and moldering bride and Pip’s tormentor, has broken free of the text itself and wanders among us. I expect it’s her haunting my own work in the form of a menacing and mysterious elderly female character who determinedly keeps popping up, most recently in a character called Mrs. Havlock (not too obvious, eh). Married at last! Although her husband is suspiciously missing–revenge at last!
I’ve moved a few too many times of late and my library has been shuffled and scrambled and piled here and there. I’m a fairly orderly person, a small-time control freak, but I can’t exactly say where my book club copy of Great Expectations has gotten to. I know it’s buried somewhere in the book midden, a cheap edition with crappy cover-art, the binding held together with masking tape. But it’s one of my treasures, and I would never consider giving it the old heave-ho, as I have, unsentimentally, given many other books during occasional cullings. Would I rip out my own dog-eared and tattered heart?
Kindly Joe Gargery’s catchphrase in the book–“What larks!”–has become something of a catchphrase for me, too, and something of a philosophy. Suits my temperament anyway. I’m all for fun and merriment and for the resilience that an intelligent optimism brings. If one is going to try to wrest a life and a living from writing, then a functioning sense of humour does come in handy. In daily literary practice, business end included, there are of course many expectations that won’t be met, and some that are met in ways one would never expect at all. Not long ago, I discovered that a book of mine was being used as a prop in Sears catalogues. Being the sort of person who always tries to read book titles when they’re used as decorative backdrops in advertisements, I have to admit to being surprised to find my own displayed on chair slipcovers and coffee tables, the colour of the book jacket a perfect match for the décor. Well, books do have their uses, some more prosaic (as it were) than others. Even my younger, bummed-out self might have been amused.
Terry Griggs
Bio
Terry Griggs was born and raised on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario, in London. She has published a collection of short stories, two novels, the most recent being Rogues’ Wedding, and the Cat’s Eye Corner series of novels for young readers. Her works have been nominated for various awards, including the Governor General’s Award and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, and in 2003, she won the Marion Engel Award. Currently she lives in Stratford, Ontario.
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