Herself (16 page)

I know that in that other work,
the
work, no matter how seemingly objective, I somewhere lay my own life on the line. Yet I have no desire to make my own life a public work of art. Should I—as some have? No, I am not that kind of artist. I have a need to push myself through the human extravaganza the
other
way. Yet this book, like those others in their way, has to be true to the happenings.

Since 1958, I have had among my papers a certain “Journal From The Far East,” kept by me and sent in lieu of letters, in exchange for one kept and sent similarly, from Iran. I decide to include it here, abridged for length and lesser trivia. And to reveal the necessary background. I do this for a reason as personal as you want. A life looks hard, vain, empty, without its love. In my case, it would be a lie. For extreme cases, sometimes—an extreme magic. Once again.

When you look at Iowa City, seat of the state university, from one approach at sunset, it still looks (then) like the last movie-set of a frontier town. That low, paper-cut facade still clings to the prairie at its base and to the turn of the century at its square, dribbled roofline, promising in its center the feedstore and the horse-trough. You know otherwise, even if the streaking cars aren’t advising you. Behind there is the usual university-town prospect with its seedy porches, null college buildings, and perhaps one Palladian hall. Yet it is still a western approach.

It was the farthest west I had yet been.

I had never heard of the Writers’ Workshop, and when I arrive there still have little idea of what such a workshop is. Each time I had turned down the offer of a year’s teaching, the price had risen. At home, my earnings had begun to be counted upon. And I had a divorce to settle, dragged out by a partner who would not assist—or leave. So, accepting the offer for only a half-year, again I left the children behind me, to schools and father. Once I had the divorce and some modest situation, I intended to devote my time to work,
the
work, and to them. I had found I was unfitted for casual sex, which depressed me. Or for short passions, which in my case were really the obsessional outbursts of a personality still on-the-search. For that not-impossible, born-at-the-other-side-of-the-world (I always knew that) Platonic half whom one at birth had become separated from. In whose existence I at the moment did not believe.

At the depot, I am met on the one hand by the couple who are my landlords-to-be—he with a long, Grant Wood neck, she with what must be a hundred spit-curls, set in rows like Papuan teeth. On the other hand are my friends the Bourjailys with their Anna, Tina calling out in her amused voice, “I recognized the coat!” (Worn since London, a long, hooded, pocketed jewel of a reversible, in which it is possible to live like a tent, it will serve me as a
chadur
in Persia, though I can’t know that yet.)

And in the middle, a tall man, with a face. I see it yet, with its strange look of recognition, that it doesn’t want to make. It is seeing the same look on mine. He has come out of courtesy to meet a traveler, not a woman. I have not come to meet a lover—the lover. Because the face is handsome, I even wisecrack to myself like a smart chorine—“Uh
-uh
, Hortense. No.” The last time I say it.

We become an accepted couple, the beaming faculty displaying a restraint softer than New York’s would be, and effortfully more cosmopolitan. As for the rest of the place, the Workshop especially, it is a blend of a rural Athens with a Greenwich Village when it too was doe-eyed with its own dreams, set down in a campus autumn ringed round with football and “homecoming” queens, where we play handball with an all-poet team. It is the perfect place for an idyll we don’t know is going to last.

The Workshop is a shock. They really mean to
make
artists. Much of the student work is mediocre, sometimes rising to good, though with that fell tone to it which tells one it is doomed to remain what it is; an alarming proportion of manuscripts is bad—and a few students, maybe one or two, are first class. They are already
made
, by God or the Devil, California or Brooklyn, and are there for time out and money—in order to make. I tell the head, Paul Engle, “When they’re no good, I want to say to them ‘What are you
doing
here?’ When they’re good, I want to say to them ‘What are
you
doing
here
?’” He says brightly “That’s what we pay you for. Your personality.”

So I am for this lovely moment absolved. To be for the first time in my life with a man whose intelligence leaps with mine and is capable of outrunning it, whose sexuality does the same. From differing lives, we find constant points of similarity. We listen alike—to the rest of the world. And we know too much to think this merely the entente of love.

A Lutheran boy with six siblings, from a working farm where country skills were taken for granted, and a Jewish girl with the streets in her blood, an only child until she was seven—we both felt that we had become writers, or humanists, from having sat young in the outer shoals of large, anecdotal families. We both wrote mornings, after which we craved physical activity and then perhaps, company, although we had a capacity for silent, inner living—which unnerved other people. His wife had felt shut out when he closed his study door; my husband, though compliant, had been at a fatal distance from what I did there.

I have since known many artists who live with non-artists; there is always a separateness. The non-artist is forced to admire, or to stand off, or to serve. And there is always a rub between the two routines. I cannot now imagine living with someone who doesn’t share that other unspoken rhythm. Days when one or the other was not working and was feeling it, were likely to be our worst; then we were like anybody else. To people who find one artist’s life queer enough, two together are a riot; the prospect of two writers getting on seems to pique most of all. Or perhaps it is the old concept that every artist is doomed by his demon never to get on in that way, to be alone, emotionally. We were to be, in a way, but knew that. We were never to “share” the work, until it was done. But we belonged to the same cell.

Meanwhile, we had no thought of marriage, on this rebound, absorbing though it was. Too much was unsettled, in any case, and not only divorces. His so recent wife, though now with the man of her choice, wrote often of returning after the child she was bearing was born. I had my children, and my resolve. During the next year we separated several times, I to Stamford, in the spring of 1958, to teach, where he visited me, he to Iowa for the summer, where I visited him. (Once, when I was flying to Mexico for divorce papers, we arranged to meet in Chicago on my way back. On the flight down, the president of a Texas Methodist university gave me his card, no doubt tabbing me as one of those divorcées—he laughed when I said
I
was a professor—and tried to persuade me to stay overnight in El Paso—presumably with him. I refused, and from the plane watched him being met by a woman no doubt his wife. Saved his card though; it was such a classy one. We left it stuck prominently on the mirror of the Chicago motel.)

By now absences were a travail. We solved the problem with visits ever wilder. In the fall, he was to go abroad as a Fulbright lecturer, and had opted for Tabriz, in Azerbaijan. That past winter, the International Educational Exchange Service, which during those years specialized in exporting our culture (and to whom I had once applied, on the suggestion, both of us full of drink, from Richard Blackmur, who was going to Japan for them) had asked me to join a summer symposium in Japan. I had turned it down—the novel was going too well—and I cannot take seriously either summer programs or symposiums. (Once, I heard a woman say proudly that her son had gone “to a supposium”—which seems to be apt.) As a writer, my application to the I.E.S. had languished, except for a reply, ominous during this McCarthy-probe era “Yes, Miss Calisher, we know who you are and what you are doing.”

But now I am a professor, no matter what Texas Wesleyan thought—and on their preferred list. So I write asking to join whatever program they may have in Iran. Just then Iraq bursts into flame, curtailing their Middle-East projects, but after some bargaining it is suggested that if I will do a three-month tour of Southeast Asia for them, they will drop me in Iran as I have asked to be—I hadn’t said why.

I have brought love and the U.S. government together, but the joke is private. So far. We plan to live together in Tabriz, perhaps even to the end of my children’s school year. Because of the place being both Islam and a tiny foreign community, we weigh whether it will be easier for us to live as married. Decenter too, for them. Though we dislike the pretense. As for actual marriage, we haven’t spoken of it. His marital status is still in question; his wife and the other man had once flown to Mexico for “papers,” but she had reneged and come home without—later sending on mail-order ones.

Perhaps we ourselves are trying out marriage, in our own way. “Marry him!” my friend Alma—on whom I have relied for the conventional approach—says when I bring up the differences in our ages, I the elder. “He’s older now than your first—(five years my elder)—will ever be.” Her acerb look adds, “And in some ways, my dear, older than you.” Right. My friend Mickey says lightly “Oh do marry him—it’s so much easier in hotels.”

And on the Southeast Asia diplomatic circuit as well. For very soon, some weirdo—one of the gods perhaps, fresh from a summer conference course in fiction—takes over our script. We have never been certain whether or not his wife—now hopefully “former”—knows of our connection, though we hope that perhaps the academic grapevine has done its work. Shortly we do hear that she and her new husband and baby have been posted to Bangkok. Where, in discharge of their duties and mine—we will most surely meet. (In the Journal they are J. and R.) Proprietary letters from her to my friend still keep coming, indicating she feels that the option to return to him is still hers. When my friend, leaving the U.S. ahead of me, gets to Tabriz, her greeting awaits him. “Welcome to this side of the world!”

We too are struck by how small it is. Since I, in my modest way, am to be a public personage over there, we decide, consulting by letter, to spare ourselves and the U.S. any domestic drama. The prospective lie bugs me—like somebody else’s mucilage I have got stuck in. Not my style. Nor his. But we shall try to be as seemlily married as the occasion appears to demand.

Meanwhile, we have decided that during the separated part of our travels we will keep journals, and exchange. The following, somewhat abridged, is mine.

S
EPTEMBER 11th or 12th
, nearing the Aleutians
—(Somewhere we cross the International dateline.)

Washington was bland and brilliant when I arrived at about one in the afternoon. Although the airfield is in Virginia (where, as some said, it always feels warmer than D.C.), the atmosphere already had for me, as it always does, the reflected memory of central Washington, the white, null buildings of a nation’s public grandeur. I did not see these this time. Instead, after tucking myself away in the Presidential, a small hotel, old-fashioned but pleasant even to price ($5 per diem as against the Statler’s expense account $13) I walked around the corner to the offices of the International Educational Exchange Service. Housed in a separate building away from central bureaucratic Washington, it is, as one of the staff informed me, somewhat a stepchild of the State Dept. It felt strange, after so many months of corresponding with titled names under the august blue S.D. imprint, to meet Mrs. G., inhabitant of a small office, and suffering humanly from a bad cold. Colwell was out ill also; mortality runneth high perhaps, among these step-children. Man next to her handles Latin-American cultural requests; said Vance had written to him giving my name. (They heed people who speak Spanish.) Gave V. a strong recommendation—imagine he will be asked to go next summer.

The main impression of my visit—that I was told nothing. It was assumed that I knew why I was going and what to do—I cd not decide whether or not this was intelligent on their part, or the resignation of routine. Appointments had been set up however—first with Miss Wilkins, the financial head, who explained, in hallowed tones, about ‘per diem’—pronounced ‘per dye-em.’ In any case, it hangs heavy over every S.D. person—all women of this type—the figure-handlers, bursars, comptrollers, have an air of the religious about them; they affect me like certain librarians of my childhood—with the best will in the world, listening to them, as I do, with the prim air of the very good child, I know I shall be in Dutch with them ere long.

Then the briefing. Two hours approx. for 4 countries. A Mr. Gregory, eager to get back to his car pool, escorted me thru various divisions of the Bur. of Far Eastern affairs. On Thailand—Mr. Buschner; Manila—Mr. Brand; Japan—Mr. Derr. It was my strong impression that they did not know why I was there—I was ill-equipped to tell them, and cd scarcely ask them whether they had heard of the IEES. Mr. B. was outraged at the limited time given. Intelligent man, but he cd but tell me bits and stuff—such as—it is an insult to cross legs and point the toe or sole of foot at the Thais. Suggested I hear some of their music. Gathered he loved the T’s; his face brightened when I spoke highly of those I had met at Pat’s in London. Suggested I contact the man sent by New Asia Foundation to teach journalism at Thomasat U. Gave me a pamphlet—of which I already had 2 copies, and, I suppose, his blessing.

Mr. Brand (Mr. Gregory told me
sotto voce
) might be a bit of a wind-bag. Certainly B. loved to talk, but he did it well, and was by far the most informative. I gathered that he had earned the reputation the enthusiast often does among staff with more routine incentive—or else Mr. G.’s ride home was in extreme peril. B. showed me a copy of the
Phil. Free Press
—comes out bimonthly, article on the short story by N. V. M. Gonzalez, their most eminent novelist, a member of Santos’s group. I gather that these are the more conservative nationalists—the younger and more arbitrary, leftist or whatever group—this was not clear—cluster around the
Manila Chronicle
. Their idol, however confusingly, is Claro Recto, Japanese puppet gov’t member during their regime. Other names—Nettie and Fred Ramos—leaders in the group of young writers at the Univ. of P. Also a litry lady—Mrs. Nakpil, very energetic, has ulcers. Random comments—the Islands have a long super-cigarette the size of a cigar, that I must try.