The Memory of Joy. My Mother with Her Lover, Charles, on Holiday in Washington, D.C. 1950’s.
My parents broke up for a decade or so before I was born. During that time, my mother began to see a man named Charles. He was a twin, and adored her. My mother’s given name–Miriam–was shortened to Marie when she was a girl. When she was involved with Charles, he shorted it further to Mimi, or Meme. (I cannot pass Cafe Meme in the West Village without thinking of them both.) I sometimes wonder if he made a twin of her name. My sisters adored Charles, and then things changed, and then my parents got back together, and then I came along, and I love this photograph of my mother wearing a dress she made herself–including the rosette–and I wonder if Charles loved the upper part of her arms, as I did, and the way she would toy with her bangs sometimes, and her little incredulous squint, which was the only way she could hide her shyness in the face of love, could this be happening to me?, as Charles, smiling broadly, stares broadly into the sun of her touch.
Kathleen Widdoes in almost anything. Given the specificity of her appearance–an unexplained “ethnic” look that manifested itself, largely, around the eyes–Widdoes was often cast in films as the “different” girl, the intellectual second banana to the more flighty star–viz Julie Christie and KW in “Petulia,” for instance, or the “artistic” albeit organizing Helena in “The Group.” Indeed, Widdoes remains one of greatest Mashas–the penultimate angry outsider–I have ever seen. In Sidney Lumet’s alternately dreadful and fascinating 1968 screen version of “The Seagull”–you can hardly understand what Simone Signoret is saying in the movie, and Vanessa Redgrave is an entirely too robust Nina–Widdoes’ Masha treats sex and death as the same thing. When we first see her she’s just had a roll in the tall grass but it means nothing to her; she’s pinning up her hair as she talks about being in mourning for her life. In the George W.S. Trow-penned “Savages,” Widdows sports a tuxedo and awkwardly tap dances around the proceedings, like a white skee ball on an over polished floor. One great honor: KW came to a reading I gave last spring; she’s a writer now, which makes perfect sense given what she always projected on screen: a writer’s isolation, all dressed up in costuming that worked around her remarkable face. (In this she resembles one of my sisters, a woman of high style with a remarkable face.) During the Q and A after my talk, I made
the mistake–based on a magazine article–of assuming KW had gone to The Actor’s Studio. KW paused before she spoke. “But I never studied acting.” Still, while KW may not have chosen acting, it chose her. Herewith a quote from Kennedy Fraser’s 1973 essay, “Style,” which is a perfect title card to accompany Kathleen Widdoes movie persona–a persona that contributed a great deal to developing my way of seeing–and the various looks my sister sports when she walks around town. My sister: my intellectual conscience with heavily rouged cheeks, my first poet.
Fraser:
Style is rarely glimpsed in times like these, which at best encourage its humble relative, good taste. While style and taste have been known to intermingle in the past, the currently widening gap between them reminds us once more of their fundamental enmity. The world of the merely tasteful…is bound to barricade itself, in the end, against style, which is individual, aristocratic, and reckless….But then style is more rewarding than the ways of elegance or taste: it is more akin to philosophy, and it is surely closer to an art.
Listen here, Nina, who did you belong to? Certainly not to me, or any other critic or journalist who’s limited to and limited by the facts, no matter how admiring, trenchant, or true, they’re flat, and you come from another country altogether, one where interpreting the fictive and the autobiographical, sometimes simultaneously, defined your days, and you literally underscored those worlds at the piano, which talked as you talked, maybe that was the only conversation you could ever really have, in any case, who could get far enough inside that communion, the one between your voice and the keyboard, to say let alone accurately describe who or what you belonged to, certainly not documentary filmmakers like Peter Rodis, who directed an informal-seeming 1969 portrait of you, nor Nadine Cohodas, one of your more earnest biographer’s, and certainly not Stephen Cleary, who co-authored your 1992 memoir, “I Put A Spell on You,” a book rife with landscapes and recrimination, Nina in love and disappointment in Barbados, Nina in love with black power in Liberia, Nina bored in Switzerland, Nina feeling friendless in Los Angeles, Nina changing planes, Nina sometimes jettisoning family members, managers, promoters, musicians to get at or not get at the music in her head, her hands.
Listen here, Nina, who did you belong to? Certainly not to your first name, Eunice Waymons, she who was the sixth of John Davan and Eunice Waymons’ eight children, all of whom were born and partly raised in Tryon, North Carolina, where the industrious John was a barber, among other occupations, and Mama kept house and close to the Lord, He was everywhere in Tryon, a town on the border of North and South Carolina, spit and it would land somewhere near the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I don’t know how much you believed in place as a source of your art, Nina–I do know that after a while you could not live in America for fear that it would murder you just as it murdered the people you loved, people blessed and cursed by racial consciousness, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X–but sometimes, if I close my eyes, I can hear the Blue Ridge Mountains in your voice, I’ve seen them at dawn, a natural wonder that makes one wonder, the edges of the mountain peaks actually are blue and sort of glowing, as if God outlined them with his pinky finger, it’s the same blue you make me see in several of your more well known tunes, such as “Black is the Color,” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and “Be My Husband.” syncopated tunes clotted with the dirt one finds at the bottom of a dirge, as lonely and solid as that, and as true.
Listen here, Nina, who did you belong to? Maybe some to Mrs Massinvotch, or Miz Maizy, as you called her after a while, your beloved English-born piano teacher in Depression-era North Carolina, you met her and began to study with her while you were still a child, about whom you wrote, “The first time I went to Mrs. Massinovitch’s house I almost fainted–it was so beautiful,” which pretty much describes your feelings about Miz Maizy herself, about whom you also wrote, “That first Saturday morning when I walked in my new tutor was standing by the grand piano. I thought then the same thing I thought every time I saw her for the next forty-five years: how could one person be so elegant?,” and how amazed is the talented child when she is recognized, and is made to feel less strange in her various intensities by someone who sees her, especially when it’s another female, not your Mama, Nina, she couldn’t love you properly or enough, where did you come from?, in any case Miz Maizy did see you, Nina, she saw the classical pianist you both thought you’d be, then the musical hybrid you became, you always went back home to see her, which is why the claim that you hated white people always seemed ridiculous to me, what you struggled for was an equality of the soul, it hurt you and perplexed you that human beings could be so shitty, but you stood firm in your belief in the family of man, and that given enough instruction people could get their manners straight, for instance you refused to start playing at one of your first recitals until your parents were moved from the back of the auditorium to the front of the house, a move that I wouldn’t call bold so much as necessary, evidence of your moral rigor when it came to the big issues like mutual respect but a rigor you were less apt to follow in your personal life.
Listen here, Nina, who did you belong to? Maybe some to those kids who gathered to hear you play at the Midtown in Atlantic City in 1955, you were twenty-one, you took the job to help pay the bills, you treated that dive like a concert hall, and by demanding respect from the audience–you’d stop playingif one of those drunks made a crack–the boozy clientele began to respect themselves, as listeners, and that only intensified after you began to sing, the Midtown’s owner said you’d have to sing, too, if you wanted to keep your job,so you added your voice to your musical conversation, and in that way you developed your way–classical keyboard technique, black voice, superlative acting, and the mystery of style–that expressed itself in I don’t know how many live performances, studio albums, bootlegs, and so on.
Listen here, Nina, who did you belong to? Certainly to my sister, Bonnie (christened Yvonne), who wrote poetry and played the trumpet and wore thrift store clothes in our late nineteen-sixties black Brooklyn world, and one day, while watching our black and white Vietnam infused television, you came on, Nina, and as you played my sister murmured, “She’s so beautiful,” and our mother, looking critical, looked at you, Nina, and said, “Yvonne, that is the ugliest woman I have ever seen,” and I could see my sister collapse into herself, and it took me years to understand that any idea of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and based on what they themselves feel about themselves, and my mother was not unique among the women of her generation to find Nina ugly, and my sister Bonnie was not unique among the women of her generation to feel otherwise, and to say it, but to still be crushed when our mother’s approval regarding Nina was not forthcoming, couldn’t our mother see she was as much a part of the “Four Women,” story as the next black girl?, and that what Nina was offering up was something extraordinary, pathos that was not marred by sentimentality, and I turned away from my sister and mother as they had this exchange, and their silence was even greater than their words, women oftengo silent in their anger when the conversation turns to beauty, and what other women should and shouldn’t look like, and as a result of their silent about their bodies and another black woman’s body, I didn’t want to think about Nina Simone ever again until, in the late nineteen-eighties, I fell in love with a Dutch man who was a real Nina connoisseur in ways Americans weren’t back then, he had every bootleg, every VHS image, and his interest in blackness frightened me, he treated Nina as a kind of oracle or goddess, which didn’t leave much room for anyone else’s interpretation, let alone mine, in any case why would that Dutch man think that a black woman, self-exiled from her own country for many years and who, in fact, ended up living in the Netherlands for a time, needed to be understood when in fact what she was singing about was her understanding of how we are all misunderstood, wanderers in strange countries, sometimes called ugly, and sometimes revered to the point of no longer being human at all, and this was Nina’s audience for years: women like my sister and too reverential white queens.
Listen here, Nina, who do you belong to? Certainly to Meshell Ndegeocello, who initiated a different kind of conversation with you on her new record, a record that gets at you while deepening her understanding of her own artistry by finding her own notes in between your notes, which is to say this record is a conversation between two women, no matter the other personnel, including myself, a conversation that no doubt began as an homage but if you listen to Meshell’s other albums, you will understand that she’s not taking no for an answer when it comes to eliciting a response from anyone she loves, like you, Nina, on the other hand Meshell doesn’t shut you up by deifying you but by helping to keep you alive in her own way, which includes not defending you against those women who thought you were ugly or wrong by contradicting their respective internal realties, she opens you up to their conversation, and hers, no matter how painful, she let’s you speak, Nina, by encouraging all those complications, complications one hears in her own voice, which is underscored by her famous bass, and her desire for communion, which is her wish, Nina, as much as it was yours.
Let me tell you something about Daddy. He was very handsome, a lady killer who buried two partners while he lived in his own isolation. You could not reach him except by telephone; he was inviolate, the chief citizen in his own word filled world. Daddy didn’t like to share. He had a room in his mother’s house, but he preferred his children visit him in a cinema, a restaurant, any place that helped him preserve the sanctity of his own skin and fears. On the rare occasion that one visited him in his room, one saw it was stacked high with newspapers. He read newspapers obsessively; the facts helped feed his nihilism and terrors. It occurs to me now that Daddy’s fright–he was only alive to disaster–was, in the end, about his own body, that is, tabloid words reflected his out of control skin–he had eczema on his hands, his elbows; I now have eczema on my hands and elbows–and his Tourettes, which no one ever talked about, even as he talked and talked. He repeated words and phrases, and touched objects–lamp posts, trees–as he passed them, sometimes over and over again. What kind of man was this? His masculinity was at war with itself. I saw him realizing that. And I saw him wondering this: Was he a man, or a series of sick thoughts in a sick skin? Or did I wonder all that? As a child I was already a writer–an occupation where you imagine closeness between characters, or yourself and others, but you can only achieve this by being alone. Like father, like son. As a child, as a teenager, the experience of visiting with my father was exhausting because he could not separate his harmed skin and out of control trying to be controlled self from your gender; your illness was his illness and then because he was frustrated by the limits of his mind and body–this included his race–he either exploded when you said something or pretended you hadn’t said something. That was all I knew about fathering, or, more accurately, what I knew about being a son, and for a long time, until I began to see other experiences: one young man I know filling up with a joy so complete when he showed me his baby’s son beautiful face, and curly hair, that he could barely speak, and then there were other fathers who understood their sons as being different than themselves. It has taken this long for me to understand that love doesn’t have to be exhausting, a job, played out in a restaurant or a cinema. There’s pleasure to be had in mentoring, and love for no reason at all. Let me tell you something about Matthew Barney and what I learned about Daddy tonight as I looked at Barney’s game changing show at the Morgan library. It’s called “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney,” and it’s a profoundly good exhibition for a number of reasons, including this: it’s an unequivocally interesting show. If I had to say it was “about” anything, it would be a kind of exhausted masculinity, or masculinity that has run up against the brick wall of itself, leaving, in one room, dismantled weights, scrawled messages and graphs–science as male, logic as the game of men–and in the main rooms, display cases filled with drawings, sketchbooks, postcards and other ephemera relating to the late Norman Mailer, whose practically unreadable–but I’ve read it–1987 novel, “Ancient Evenings,” is the source for Barney’s still-being-worked-on opera pieces and films that proceed under the title, “River of Fundament.” In the first case, before entering the show in the main room proper, there’s Diane Arbus’ portrait of the novelist (Mailer: “Giving Diane Arbus is like giving a kid a hand grenade.” Power recognizes power) and, with it, postcards referring to the book, and, moving on, Barney’s small drawings of Mailer’s head, which, in other cases, becomes a satyr head, the satyr being a creature Barney bought to life in his famous “Creamester” film series (1994-2002) where masculinity becomes something else entirely. The body, male or female, what to do about it as the balls drop, and the flesh becomes hard or soft, and the ass becomes a neutral, “genderless,” place of pleasure or power–the ass as object of desire, and controlling object: how long can you hold your shit? This finger? This tongue?–and then there’s the mind and desire as a glob of Vaseline inviting all extremities in but not out, certainly not unchanged, look at how sticky they are, now, and how they glisten, like succubi in the terrible garden of one’s imagination. Also in the cases: paperback novels drawn on, magazine covers drawn on, postcards, “reference” material showing football players, or Houdini, another shape shifter who used to hang from his ass, and then Mailer again and what have you: books as drawings, men as drawings, lives as drawings. If I could draw Daddy for you now, what would he look like? Something composed of many lines and bumps on the skin, a Vaselined tic moving toward and moving away from his own progeny whose collective genderless ass he sometimes beat with a belt in a bid to discipline them and let his presence be known, after which he would talk, talk, talk, on the telephone waiting for someone’s forgiveness, all the while living like a mixed metaphor, like an electric jellyfish, sucking and feeding and sucking oxygen out of its own blue ocean, struggling to survive.
This photograph was taken outside our apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, around the corner from Barbra Streisand’s high school, and next door to a gas station (a fact that inspired the book reports I wrote about ecology and pollution that year). Our flat was in a two family house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz–Holocaust survivors who gave me my first typewriter, a manual Olivetti “their son, the doctor,” had used in college. To get to our place, you had to climb a steep flight of stairs; when I went to Amsterdam for the first time, I understood the houses, the steps: they were in the architecture of my feet and memory. I loved the Schwartzes, and the mysteriousness of their flat–the Sabbath candles, not turning the electricity on, sitting quietly in the heat. Sometimes, when we didn’t have a TV that worked, the elderly couple invited us downstairs to watch television with them. “The Brady Bunch.” In the TV glow that reflected a laugh track family I did not know, I tried hard not to stare at Mrs. Schwartz’s tattoos–the blue numbers on her arm. Who had done such a thing to her, and in what world? I had yet to see piles of the dead in ditches in strange countries with strange names. Treblinka. The Schwartzes had survived. That’s what our mother said. Survived. That was more than a word. I loved my brother and sometimes, when our mother was at work, we’d cook. I read recipes in books. We tried everything, mostly bread. Sometimes it didn’t rise, but we made it anyway. Because I loved and admired the Schwartzes so much I wanted to be Jewish. Once, not understanding, I blew a sputtering sabbath candle out–I thought I was protecting them from potential fire and harm. Mrs. Schwartz looked away, while her husband lit the candle again. I have yet to forgive myself. When the Schwartzes moved to Florida, our building was taken over by terrible people who shoved us out–the inevitable rejection of the poor–but I held on to that typewriter.
My parents broke up for a decade or so before I was born. During that time, my mother began to see a man named Charles. He was a twin, and adored her. My mother’s given name–Miriam–was shortened to Marie when she was a girl. When she was involved with Charles, he shorted it further to Mimi, or Meme. (I cannot pass Cafe Meme in the West Village without thinking of them both.) I sometimes wonder if he made a twin of her name. My sisters adored Charles, and then things changed, and then my parents got back together, and then I came along, and I love this photograph of my mother wearing a dress she made herself–including the rosette–and I wonder if Charles loved the upper part of her arms, as I did, and the way she would toy with her bangs sometimes, and her little incredulous squint, which was the only way she could hide her shyness in the face of love, could this be happening to me?, as Charles, smiling broadly, stares broadly into the sun of her touch.
