Seducing the Demon (23 page)

Now my beloved grandparents are dead, my athletic, musical father is astonishingly dead, and my unforgettably fierce mother is fading away. My sisters have their own lives, partners and children and troubles, and so do I. They sometimes act like my worst enemies. This dream of eternal togetherness is outlandish. But if I take myself back to the child I was then, I understand the fantasy of the Roundling as safety, stasis, freedom from sorrow. Nothing changes. Nobody dies. Nobody grows up—or old. Why did I suddenly remember this long-buried fantasy while writing this book? I haven’t thought about it since I was a child.

Because writing is an attempt to preserve the past, to keep it safe and hermetically sealed in a sort of time capsule. Writing is the ultimate Roundling, keeping us all young and together forever.

Nobody can write without wanting to bring the past into the present or without wanting to show how the past informs what happens today. The deepest struggle we experience, the struggle that makes us the unhappiest, is the attempt to stop time and keep all our attachments intact. Attachments cause pain. We must learn to detach and writing is the opposite of detachment. Or is it?

I’ve been fencing with attachment and detachment particularly in the last few months since my father died. I want to write about him, but I don’t want to freeze—or murder—him in the pages of a book. For years I thought I understood him, but it was only in the last phase of his life, when he was ill, that I suddenly saw him as a tough little Jewish boy from Brownsville fighting for his life with his fists, his wit, his tenacity. I understood why he was often so stubborn and so hostile under all his humor. Stubbornness probably saved his life when he was young.

He wasn’t the tallest or the strongest boy, but he was the most determined. He could shoot baskets as accurately as the tall guys. He could flatten anyone who called him “kike.” He loved the piano, but he was a drummer to his bones. Sometimes you can’t know people till they are almost dead.

What a fighter my father was! During his last hospitalization he tried to escape from the emergency room, from the ICU and from his hospital suite on the fancy private floor of Mount Sinai. He was right. It was the pneumonia he caught in the hospital that would finally do him in at ninety-two and not any of the three types of cancer he got and conquered. He seemed to have foreknowledge of his demise and struggled like mad to get away from those resistant germs he knew were awaiting him. He pulled out breathing tubes, peeing tubes, IVs. He did not go quietly.

More than once I kept him from getting out of bed. How could I have done that? Once someone is in the hospital, he is bound by the iron rules of the institution. I have always hated institutions and so did my father. In his frenetic exercising twice a day, in his attempt to control his money, his daughters, his sons-in-law, his wife, he was expressing his need for absolute freedom from the rules of others. He lost that freedom at the end.

Sadly, I played my own part in his loss of control. I didn’t mean to. He was failing, but now I wish I had let him escape the hospital that killed him.

He never would have had a fantasy of a Roundling. His greatest fantasy was escape. He escaped at the piano, the drums, the basketball hoop. He escaped by exercising, by traveling all over the world, supposedly for his business but really because his temperament required it. He always wanted to get away. I know men are made differently, but he was even more of an escape artist than most men. Why do you think I chased those demons through hotel rooms all over the world?

None of us in that Roundling will ever escape. We should be buried in it together. Because the Roundling is, in fact, a cemetery. It’s a sort of pie-shaped burial plot, like the famed Sedgwick pie of Edie Sedgwick’s eccentric Massachusetts family.

That was the poem the mousy male social worker (with the long gray ponytail) from the Palliative Care Team (I called them the Death Squad) quoted to my father in the hospital.

He had studied Buddhism. Detachment? Surely you must be kidding.

“Bullshit!” my father hissed. “Pure unadulterated bullshit.”

“But Mr. Mann, you would be happier if you turned over the decisions to your daughters and gave them permission to—”

“Bullshit!” Then he wanted the little notebook he carried everywhere with him. He had no energy to read aloud, but he drummed on the page—stabbing it with his index finger:

The social worker was speechless. Nothing—not his M.S.W., nor his Buddhism class—had prepared him for this. He was out of words. We all waited, listening to my father struggle to breathe. “Very nice poem, Mr. Mann,” he finally said.

“Bullshit!” said my father. “Get out of here!”

 

 

My father started out as a pianist, drummer, bandleader,
tumler,
but
tumler
won. He wound up in business, first as a salesman, then as the founder of his own company.

Because he loved music, worshiped musicians, our house was filled with music. We were dragged to concerts at the Philharmonic every month before we had any idea what a privilege it was. I remember being a bored thirteen and escaping to the ladies’ room, where I could practice applying my Powder Pink Revlon lipstick. Bartók or Ives or Beethoven conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos or Leonard Bernstein would be thundering through Carnegie Hall. What an ingrate I was! My father sent my younger sister to lure me out. I knew I was being an ingrate and I was guilt-ridden. Yet I have grown up with a love of music that mirrors his. I don’t play an instrument and I consider myself a troglodyte for this lapse, but music thrills me more than any other art. He gave me this gift.

Our parents’ attachments become our own. Often I’ve thought that if I could have opened my musical of
Fanny Hackabout-Jones
before he died, he would have been prouder of me than for any book I’ve written. Which is saying a lot. He was proud of me, but he showed this mostly to other people when I wasn’t around. He loved to hector me about everything I was doing wrong with my career. I wasn’t doing enough PR. I wasn’t hassling my publishers enough. I was too laid back.

Laid back? For most of my life, I have been bedeviled by ambition and professional jealousy (which I counter with defiant generosity like a witch trying to break her own spell). I’ve only recently learned how to love the work itself without expectation—something he never learned. Perhaps this joy in the work and not the outcome is what is meant by detachment. I achieve it only at rare moments, but when I do my writing flies.

Did he ever know this joy? I doubt it. Nothing was play to him after he became a businessman. Everything was work. Except music.

 

 

I started out to be a painter and switched to writing to avoid competing with all the painters in my family. (Probably I also had more talent to write and was freer in using it than if I had gone into the family racket.) But you can’t give up seeing the world as a painter does even if you no longer paint. You are doomed to see kaleidoscopes of color in white eggshells and rainbows in black seas.

My reason for giving up painting was cowardly and it goes back to my troubled relationship with my mother. In my teens, I began to paint colorful rambunctious fantasy portraits that were at odds with all the academic traditions my mother and grandfather held dear. While my mother didn’t destroy these canvases, she made it very clear that they were infra dig.

“We used to draw in charcoal first, then in pastels in order to win the
right
to even
use
oil paints. And we never drew from the figure
[figger,
she said in the English manner] till we had mastered plaster casts.” The inference was clear: I was jumping in without perfecting my craft.

In the fifties, abstraction was the only permissible language for American art. All the academicians in my family felt threatened. How could I understand that? I was only a kid, looking for my own language in color or words. I wanted to find a language that was neither academic nor abstract, but the world of painting seemed so hemmed in by familial restrictions that I fled to words. Poetry became my refuge. Yet in writing poetry, I was drawn back to the artist’s palette of cobalt blue, alizarin crimson, viridian green. I sought flaming watercolor skies.

It’s not unusual for whole families to be painters. Think of Tintoretto and his daughter, Marietta Robusti. Or think of the Bellinis—before they became peach-flavored drinks. Or consider Artemisia Gentileschi and her father. Painters tend to grow up in studios. It’s possible to see the making of art as a continuum rather than a competition. But in my family, competition was rampant. My grandfather had two talented painter daughters whom he carefully trained, then tried to crush. He would have been much happier as Tintoretto when he could have delegated his daughters to painting angels’ wings and folds in satin. In Tintoretto’s time, art was still a cooperative enterprise. Many hands were needed to cover immense canvases or ceilings or walls.

By the twentieth century, the idea of the sole genius artist steeped in ego had corrupted everything. By definition, there can only be one genius. The others are reduced to
assistenti.
Especially if they are girls.

We have lost so much by looking at art this way. In fact, all artists stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, just as all writers drown out choruses of the dead.

I was raised to be a fierce competitor, so I must have felt that by competing with my mother I would kill her. Whatever message I was given, my own interpretation was, “Only one of us can paint and live.” I withdrew from the field. Better be a writer than commit matricide. But of course I never kissed pictures of painters, so maybe the drive was never there.

Or maybe I lacked the requisite grit for the physicality of painting or sculpture. My early paintings show promise. They are not bad—even though I stopped before I discovered a style. If I was hiding from my own matricidal yearnings, I went on to kill my mother with words. Do all writers kill their parents with their work—then try to resurrect them (as Philip Roth has done in
The Plot Against America)?
The tenderness toward his parents in that book erases the earlier caricatures. They have been dead long enough for him to love them.

 

 

When I imagine the painter I might have been, I see myself stretching my own canvases as my grandfather did, and priming them myself. But I imagine much huger canvases than anyone in my family actually painted. What are my subjects? Not horses like Rosa Bonheur‘s, nor giant sexual blooms like Georgia O’Keeffe‘s, nor beheaded men like Artemisia Gentileschi’s—though these are all images I love. No. My huge canvases are awash with whirling color like the cosmos at the beginning of time. There are exploding suns, clouds of gases, rings of planets that have disappeared. Perhaps I will paint again when my mother dies.

Here the demon enters.

“Why doesn’t she die already?”

“I don’t want her to!”

“Yes you do! First of all, you’ll be free of those depressing visits she never remembers you made and you’ll get more of her money! Won’t that be nice!”

“I don’t want her money.”

“Liar! You could use it. You’re so extravagant. You could buy a house in Italy. How about that? And you could paint there!”

This is absurd. My mother no longer paints. She lies in bed dreaming most of the day, and she has forgotten that she ever painted. Why can’t I pick up her brush as easily as a tree produces a green shoot? We all grow out of and extend each other. My daughter took to writing as a baby seal takes to swimming. But I think I made her passage easier. I never criticized her work or insisted that she read my own. I never believed that my journey was the only possible journey. I refused to be her critic even when she protested that I was too uncritical, too enthusiastic. I understood that any word of direction from a parent carries the weight of an iron anchor dropping into the sea. It may take the child’s enthusiasm with it. A parent can never criticize a child too little. A parent can never encourage too much. Criticism can be found everywhere. The one place you don’t need it is at home.

Writing was a way of reinventing my own childhood. I could make it more horrible than it was and heal myself that way. Or I could make it better than it was. Both approaches can be curative. In writing, I had power over the very people who made me feel utterly powerless when I was a child. Even the most horrible childhood can be made tolerable just by writing about it.

I’m thinking of Augusten Burroughs’s crazy childhood in
Running with Scissors,
a book I love. Here’s a kid whose father deserts him, whose mother is a mad, selfish narcissist and a terrible poet, who is turned over legally to an insane psychiatrist—and yet who thanks his parents at the beginning of the book for giving him the materials of a writer’s childhood. He’s absolutely right. What would a writer like Augusten Burroughs do with a happy childhood? Nothing. It could have silenced him. Of course he is being tortured with a lawsuit for telling his truth. In another age, he might have been burned at the stake.

I think of my own family
mishegoss,
which I have shamelessly milked for three decades. Or Woody Allen’s. Or my daughter’s. When I’m being honest, I kneel down and thank God for my crazy parents. I’ve accepted the fact that we only get so much from parents. The rest we have to provide ourselves. Writing is a way of bringing myself up all over again. I could never have done this as a painter. I must have known intuitively that writing was the only way to live my life.