INTRODUCTION: COLLECTING ONESELF
I write with my left hand. Left-handedness used to be considered a malign aberration (“sinister” is Latin for “left”), and in the generations before mine, left-handed schoolchildren were routinely “switched.” Enforced conformity, especially, perhaps, when it selects an inborn trait to repress or persecute, breeds intolerance for difference of all kinds. Singled out for bullying or conversion, a child internalizes the message that she isn’t “right.”
I have a bittersweet memory in this regard. My father had been switched by an implacable Hebrew schoolteacher who’d made him sit on his left hand for six years. Even in old age, he still flexed it compulsively, though I reckoned that other childhood humiliations had also numbed him. Our relations were mostly silent, and I pined for his attention. But when I was learning to write, he sat patiently by my side, holding my wrist so it wouldn’t hunch over “like a cripple’s back.” He wanted to endow me with a “beautiful hand”—the signature of a lady. I don’t think he realized how illegible his love was.
In the contemporary world, belonging to the left-handed minority (about ten percent of the population) is a minor inconvenience. But when I started kindergarten, at the height of the McCarthy hearings, my mother, Alice, warned me not to describe myself as a “leftie.” Why, I asked her? “It could get us into trouble,” she said darkly. I had no idea what she meant, and her anxiety was cockeyed, since my parents’ only cell was our four-room apartment. Yet the tone of that caution sobered me to the core. It hinted at a guilty secret that a careless word could betray.
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My mother’s demons—her abiding terror of some imminent catastrophe—still haunt me. By the time I could see her with detachment, she was a sedated recluse who had designated the task of living to her only child. In that sense, our roles were reversed; I attuned my behavior to her fragility. I don’t know what her own aspirations might have been, except that she revered language, and her gift to me was insisting that I should. During the Depression, she’d taught Latin and English in a Boston high school, but on her wedding day, she forfeited the job. It went to a man, she was told by the principal, “who had a family to support.”
Alice accepted her dismissal timidly, without questioning its injustice. Perhaps her ambitions for me were a deflected protest. I was lucky, however, to have two maiden aunts. The feisty old maid in an uptight family is often an ally to her wayward niece. Eva, my father’s sister, managed a used bookstore near Harvard Square. She was wraithlike and tweedy, with a smoker’s deep voice and wrinkles. “Eva’s a character,” the family liked to say. Whatever small luxury they sent her—a toaster, a winter coat, a banknote tucked into a birthday card—she gave it away. It went to a poet on scholarship, or to the “unwed mother” who lived upstairs. I first heard the expression “free love” from Eva, uttered with reverence. She meant something heretical, I think; she meant to let me know that virginity is a false idol. Even as a child, I marveled at her ardor.
Unlike Eva, my maternal aunt Charlotte wasn’t a romantic, though unlike her sister, she inhabited a body that gave her pleasure. “Arkie,” as I called her, was built like an otter and could swim two miles in the ocean. She taught me to ride a bike and to build a campfire. She had spent her youth as an activist in the settlement house movement. Later, she ran a state unemployment bureau staffed mostly by closeted socialists like herself. Arkie took a dim view of patriarchal institutions—religion, capitalism, marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a woman’s college: “He has to be a very good husband to be better than no husband at all.”
Both my aunts got stuck caring for their elderly parents well into middle age. But then they moved into their own bachelor digs not far apart in Cambridge. They often traveled together, adventurously. Had they been born in a later era, they might have been lesbians, and perhaps they were, covertly—I hoped so—though we never spoke of intimate things. “Of course she was a lesbian!” Alison Bechdel said to me of Arkie. (I was visiting her in Vermont, reporting the profile in this volume.) “Straight women didn’t dress up as Gene Autry” (a singing cowboy of the 1950s). When I stayed with my grandparents, as I did every summer, Arkie sang me to sleep in a Stetson, chaps, and a six-shooter.
At the age of eighty, Arkie came to live with me, and helped me to raise my son. (I, too, was an unwed mother.) I once asked her if she was happy. We were living in Paris for a year, while I did research on Colette. She kept house for us without a word of French, and her only company, for most of the day, was a rambunctious two-year-old. “You’re too sentimental about happiness,” she said. No critique has served my craft better.
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The writers I most admire never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable. “Style is character,” Joan Didion asserted, in an essay on Georgia O’Keeffe whose surface is as taut as a drum skin. Didion’s character was elusive, above all to herself, unlike O’Keeffe’s—an artist, she wrote, with palpable envy, who “seems to have been equipped with an immutable sense of who she was.” A style like Didion’s is often the result of arrogance, painfully unlearned.
“All men are deceived by the appearances of things,” Heraclitus wrote, 2,500 years ago, “even Homer himself, the wisest man in Greece.” The poet was alerted to his self-deception by boys catching lice: “‘What we catch and kill we leave behind,’” they told him, “‘but what escapes us we bring with us.’” What we bring with us—embedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating it—is the mystery of how we become who we are.
That mystery has been my subject from the beginning; with every new piece of work, I grope my way into it. “First Impressions,” a reportage on Paleolithic art, suggests my point of departure. It recounts the accident by which three spelunkers found an entrance to the Chauvet Cave, which had been sealed for millennia. They were attracted by “an updraft of cool air coming from a recess near the cliff’s ledge—the potential sign of a cavity.” There’s a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and it’s often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion you’ve buried.
I write about the lives and work of other people in part to understand my own, while avoiding what I feel obliged to do here: talk about myself. In most of my essays, a passage or even just a sentence surprises me with a private truth I couldn’t otherwise have expressed freely. In my study of Emily Dickinson, it’s a reflection on depressive mothers. Their daughters, I write, “often feel a propitiary impulse to make some sacrifice of their aggression and desire, perhaps because … they feel guilty about their own vitality.” In my reading of Elena Ferrante, it’s a riff on primal attachments, for which “hostile love” is an antidote. “Ambivalence,” I suggest, is Alison Bechdel’s “default mode”: the voice that narrates her graphic memoirs “both yearns for and mistrusts closeness.” In taking the measure of Rachel Cusk, I begin with a description of her narrator—a Cusk-like British writer named Faye. Friends and strangers tell her their stories, “and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves.” While sharing their dilemma covertly, Faye “lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows … she extracts something clear—a sense of both her own outline and theirs.”
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After fifty years of dissembled groping, I thought of calling this collection “Wear and Tear.” “You’ll frighten off young readers,” a friend warned me. “Indefinite Article” was another wry title that appealed to me. But it alluded too obliquely to The Left-Handed Woman, a novella by Peter Handke. The connection merits an aside.
Handke found the title I have reborrowed from him one evening in Paris, where we’d met in the early seventies. I’d moved abroad after college, and those years in Europe were my graduate school. Every aspect of its culture—class, speech, dress, food, décor, politics, and sex (especially sex)—was coded in a manner both fascinating and arcane to the provincial American I was. Decrypting the codes was good training for my future vocation. I had one mentor in particular, an elegant Frenchwoman with whom I used to stay. She balanced a prestigious career with her duties as the wife of an important man, and her life seemed glamorous, though I aspired to a different one. Madame G. worried it wouldn’t be secure, or not, as she liked to say, “when you’re alone at my age.”
Perhaps I’d related our conversations to Peter—I don’t remember—but when he read the note my hostess had left on the kitchen table, it made him laugh: “Ce soir, à 9 heures, réunion des féministes gauchères américaines.” (She’d invited another friend to dinner, also a left-handed expatriate, who shared my outspoken allegiance to women’s liberation.) I suspect her teasing tone appealed to him as much as its suggestion of a naïvely militant New World sisterhood. He took out a notebook and wrote something down.
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Men are a minority in this volume (if not in this Introduction) and four of the seven were couturiers who spent their careers styling—and eroticizing—the feminine figure, at times perversely. “The true function of fashion,” Charles James believed, “is to arouse the mating instinct.” Yet unlikely affinities are sometimes the most revealing ones. Alexander McQueen, for example, was often accused of misogyny; he was pugnaciously gay and working-class; he brutalized his clothes, and sometimes his models, and he killed himself at forty. But on his right arm, he’d tattooed a line of poetry spoken by Helena, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.” That anguished outcry, by a lost woman, whose desire is mocked and rejected, alludes to a wound that McQueen’s work and mine both seek to dress.
The transcendence of shame is a prominent theme in the narrative of women’s lives. The shame of violation; the shame of appetite; the shame of anger; the shame of being unloved; the shame of otherness; the shame, perhaps above all, of drive. Seventy-five years ago, in the lower-middle-class milieu where I grew up, the career prospects for a girl who couldn’t tap dance were depressingly limited. I scoured literature for exceptions, and there were some. But nearly all of them had achieved distinction at a price their male counterparts didn’t have to pay. In that respect, one might say they were all left-handed: they defied the message that they weren’t right.
The price of self-possession used to be spinsterhood, if not the convent. (“I’m always happiest when dressed almost like a nun,” Miuccia Prada once remarked. “It makes you feel so relaxed.”) A few brazen rebels braved ostracism. (The two Georges, Sand and Eliot, welcomed their exemption from polite society; it gave them more time for their spinning.) A few women writers found exemplary spouses—wives, in essence—of whom Leonard Woolf and Alice B. Toklas are the epitomes. But many of those unions were childless, and it’s still a daunting feat to juggle art and maternity. Even Colette, that great poet of female carnality, felt unsexed by the exercise of her powers. She’d understood before almost anyone that gender is a bell curve, yet she despaired of being what she enviously called a “real woman.” (The “real” women were her husbands’ mistresses.) It wasn’t obvious to my generation how or if one could become oneself, an individual, without performing what the psychoanalyst Louise Kaplan memorably called a “female-female impersonation.”
In resisting a generic definition, many of my subjects have fetishized uniqueness. The witch, the sibyl, the priestess, the martyr, the diva, the vestal, the femme fatale—these are some of their guises. A stylist aims for unsparing specificity, but a stylized persona risks becoming a caricature. Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, is a poignant example. She was the first American foreign correspondent of her sex and the author of a foundational work of feminist history. “I shall always reign through the intellect,” she boasted. But her dazzling mind was housed in an unlovely carapace, and she resigned herself to being “bright and ugly.”
I recognized my own grandiosity in Fuller’s. Until puberty, I, too, was outsized and ungainly. I compensated, as she did, by showing off as a know-it-all. One of my teachers mocked me with the epithet “Miss Importance,” and she cast me in our school play, The Mikado, as Katisha—a deluded old woman who is spurned by a prince. Since I couldn’t carry a tune, I had to deliver her solos in singsong: “My soul is still my body’s prisoner!” I later destroyed all my class pictures.
In rereading these essays and profiles, all but two of which were published in The New Yorker between 2006 and 2021, I was proud to realize how much I managed to write; it was a bleak era in my own history and America’s; we were both coming apart. But I also felt a pang of obsolescence—an awareness “of the extent,” as Didion puts it, “to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.” She believed that loss was peculiar to her generation, though I suspect each aging one is similarly humbled. “Whatever I have made for myself is personal,” she concluded, ruefully. “If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man’s fate in the slightest, I would go to that barricade … but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.”
There are, however, some endings which give you a taste of happiness. Most of the time, a piece of prose lies on the page bristling with cleverness, yet inert, until I hit upon the precise sequence of words—the spell, if you like—that brings it to life. At that moment, language recovers its archaic power to free a trapped spirit.
Copyright © 2022 by Judith Thurman