A Careful Guilt
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Nobody admits to liking memoirs as a genre. It’s so easy to pretend we don’t care about the intimate thoughts of strangers. But we do. Toward the end of Hortense Calisher’s memoir, “Tattoo for a Slave” (Harcourt, 336 pages, $24), an Irish lawyer sums up the conceit that animates the memoir industry: “Every Irishman worth his salt considers his life a book someone else wrote.”
Ms. Calisher, whose memoir caps a long and distinguished career of novel-writing, knows exactly what she is doing. “So, perhaps all the mulling of the autobiographic is not wholly wasted then? For what we might actually yearn for as we flounder in the solipsism of ego is – company. A meeting of minds.” Ms. Calisher revels in the “solipsism of ego,” writing in a stream of consciousness that is conscious of its audience. Hers is a memoir that scrambles the usual litany of complaints about memoir – or, to put it a different way, it is a real, old-fashioned memoir.
She is writing not at the beginning of her career, but the end. She actually has something to confess. She does not feel sorry for herself. And she is not straightforwardly narcissistic; in fact her memoir depends on the internal contradictions of an America “designed not to have a class system, by forefathers who at that very same moment deeded us their own.” Granddaughter of a German Jewish immigrant who became a slave-owner prior to the Civil War, Ms. Calisher feels a careful guilt.
Putting that expectation in the reader’s mind, Ms. Calisher delays for most of the book. Her moral cat’s cradle is intensified by the appearance, at her father’s table, in New York City, of cousins and uncles who have just immigrated from Germany, as monied refugees, in 1938. The pain promised by this set-up is never delivered, however. Instead, Ms. Calisher relies on the hardy tradition of the family novel, which in the case of “Tattoo for a Slave” concerns keeping secrets. The driving interest is essentially political: Who knows what, who has real power. The ultimate discovery that her family owned slaves is a bravura flourish on the politics of Southern reminiscence.
Ms. Calisher does not shy away from the richness of a fully generalized Southern consciousness:
The account of my Southern half seems to me indulgently long; I had caught their rhythm again, and the divagating style into which I was born. Also their self-approval, which when contemplated, offends. Yet it is a folklore style really, in which divagation, the power of the added subjective clause, if never quite innocent, has its place.
It is Ms. Calisher’s gift to adopt modes that, if not quite innocent, have their place. But besides the bad habit of endless distraction and qualification, I would add another stylistic indulgence: a somewhat herky-jerky holding of the reader’s hand.
“Consider now the matriarch.” Thus Ms. Calisher introduces a section on her grandmother. “But now (that is, back then),” she writes, parenthetically underlining a relaxation of tense. She commits obscurities only to unpack them: “If my cousin had just shut up. Der Vater kommt. That is the old expression for fathers, important fathers. Or was. Meaning: watch out.”
Ms. Calisher’s staccato elision is of course part of her campaign to wrap the reader up in her “solipsism of ego.” But it still gets old. She has been often compared to Henry James; she even wrote a book called “The New Yorkers.” Like James, she is a writer of deep manners, ever eager to suggest who knows what in a way that makes the reader feel privileged. But where James was supremely tactful, Ms. Calisher is immediately intimate.
In this ambition – to make insider patter an art and a confession – Ms. Calisher resembles another contemporary Jamesian writer, James McCourt. Like McCourt’s recent memoir of gay life in New York, “Queer Street,” Ms. Calisher’s memoir is at its best when it becomes a cultural history of the city. Her father, after transplanting himself north, became an upscale perfumer, and Ms. Calisher’s remembers his old office, always with the perfectly dignified secretary and its gallant atmosphere of salesmanship.
The title “Tattoo for a Slave” refers not to an ink-on-flesh idea, but to a drumbeat mantra:
Remember the slave.
Remember the slave.
Remember the slave.
Ms. Calisher makes a show of not invoking the word “remember” until the last few pages of her memoir. “Save that word for when it will be most deserved.” She makes a talisman of the word, as she does of her various family legacies. Filial piety leads, in this memoir, to a larger piety that, via her many backtracking clauses and allusions, is difficult for the reader to approach.