When We Argued All Night (38 page)

—Harold's famous, Jess said. What would your father have thought?

—Oh, he'd be mad. And excited. He'd buy ten copies of the book and give them to everyone he knew. He'd show them his name in the index. That thought made her pick up the book and turn to the back, checking for
Arthur Saltzman
, who apparently appeared many times in the book. She stopped and turned off the TV.

—Are you looking for the quote? Jess said.

Brenda looked up
grandchildren
in the index but it wasn't there.

—It sounds like something from the first page or the last, Jess said, and she was almost right: there was a preface, and Brenda looked at the first page of the preface, and then the last page of the preface, and there it was.

—This will sell copies, Jess said.

—It will please Harold, Brenda said. Will it make him less sad?

—About your father? Jess said. No. Sadder.

—They can't talk about it, Brenda said.

—Argue about it.

—Argue.

Brenda's cell phone rang. She took it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. David, she said. She took the call.

Acknowledgments

Thanks first to Edward, who got well, and who makes a toast to literature whenever we eat out. He and Douglas Bauer, April Bernard, Susan Hulsman Bingham, Donald Hall, and Susan Holahan read the manuscript of this book and offered helpful suggestions. Warm thanks to them and to others who steadily gave help, wisdom, and companionship: Ben Mattison, Lisa Yelon, Andrew Mattison, Jacob Mattison, Jill Mulvey, Sandi Kahn Shelton, Anita Taylor, Ann Leamon, and Jude Stewart. Thanks, too, to Naomi Tannen and Joe Mahay for quiet time in the mountains.

Thanks to the Crossett Library at Bennington College, and to my colleagues and students in the Bennington Writing Seminars, who remind me with their work and passion why we read and write.

Thanks to my loyal and ever-surprising agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, and her associate Sarah Levitt. Much gratitude to my brilliant editor, Claire Wachtel, to Elizabeth Perrella, and to all the clever people at Harper Perennial.

Thanks always to the MacDowell Colony and to Yaddo.

Many books were useful in the writing of this novel; I'd especially like to mention
The New York City Teachers Union, 1916–1964
, by Celia Lewis Zitron, New York, 1968.

P. S.

Insights, Interviews & More . . .

About the author

A Note by Alice Mattison

W
HEN
W
E
A
RGUED
A
LL
N
IGHT
is set in Brooklyn, where I grew up. It was after the time of immigrants from Europe and their politically radical children, but before the borough acquired its present lively cultural life. In the Brooklyn of my childhood—the late forties and fifties— the Dodgers played in Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza smelled new, and each year school closed for Brooklyn Day, with a parade including scout troops and mothers (no fathers) pushing baby carriages with crepe paper streamers wound around the spokes of the wheels.

I grew up near Highland Park, at the northeast end of the borough. Intellectual life was in Manhattan, where my college friends and I saw films at the Thalia, believed that the paintings in the (free) Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum were our personal property, and walked the island late at night.

Living at home, I commuted to Queens College. My spare time was spent not with fellow students in a dorm but with relatives who loudly said what they thought whether or not it made sense, and who stuck to positions so outlandish that anyone listening who cared to write would eventually write about people like them. While living the heartbreak and comedy of family life, I studied English literature, Latin, and Greek. The disparate parts of life had to be made to connect, and figuring out how could be a life's work.

After earning a doctorate in English literature at Harvard, I taught composition, mostly in community colleges; I was no scholar but loved to teach. I now teach fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MFA program at Bennington College.

With my husband—who directs a project employing people with a history of mental illness, addiction, or homelessness—I live in New Haven, Connecticut, where we brought up our three children and where I am a longtime volunteer at a soup kitchen. My fiction, I believe, reflects a life spent in close touch with others, always— paradoxically—seeking time alone for writing. It's about urban people with close bonds. My characters are often of my parents' generation, and their concerns are not quite those of the present day—but are ours with a difference. I return to certain questions: How can we live morally in private life? How can we live private life at all, given history's ravages? What are our responsibilities to the larger community? How can we endure the people we love?

 

When We Argued All Night
is Alice Mattison's sixth novel. Her others include
The Book Borrower
,
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
,
Hilda and Pearl
, and
The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman
; her four story collections include
In Case We're Separated: Connected Stories
. Mattison's stories, essays, and poems have appeared in
The New Yorker
, the
New York Times
,
Ploughshares
,
The Threepenny Review
,
Ecotone
, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in
The Pushcart Prize
,
Best American Short Stories
, and
PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
.

About the book

An Interview with Alice Mattison
by Ann Leamon

Your earlier books have primarily dealt with women—women's friendships and relationships between mothers and daughters. What was different in writing about the friendship between two men?

 

It didn't occur to me to write from the viewpoint of men when I was younger. I remember hearing that Jane Austen never wrote a scene in which no woman is present—presumably because she'd never been present at such a scene, so she couldn't say what might take place. One day, on a bus, I overheard a frank conversation between two men and realized that contemporary life gives us chances to guess what it's like to be people different from ourselves. Jane Austen might never have overheard two men she didn't know talking to each other. It's easier now for a woman to imagine what a man might think or do than it used to be—or for a man to imagine being a woman.

Still, though I wanted to write this book, I postponed it. It seemed daunting—maybe because the main characters would be men, maybe because it would cover so much time. But at last there was no other book to write except this one; I had to write this one. All writing projects are potential disasters, after all. It isn't as if everything will be fine if you just write about what you know firsthand—and sometimes it's harder to write what we've experienced; we become shy, or self-consciously awkward. The hard projects demand to be written eventually, and really, they are no harder than anything else.

Once I began writing, maybe because I'd had the book in the back of my mind for many years, it came readily. Or maybe it came readily
because
I was writing about men. When the book was done, I happened to say in an e-mail to a former student that it was easier to write than my other novels, and she wrote back and asked why. All I could say was that the characters wanted to be written about, and some of my other characters had been reluctant, slower to make themselves known. That's not something one can say about imaginary people and sound trustworthy—although we know that for many authors, characters seem to take on life as one writes. The men I know in real life seem to have, on the whole, a greater willingness than the women I know to take up space, to be visible—or maybe it's a greater sense that they have a right to take up space and be visible. It was as if Artie and Harold were urging me on. Whether I felt this because of the era in which they grew up, because of their particular personalities, or because they are men, I can't say.

 

Some of your earlier books—particularly
The Book Borrower
and
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
—deal with an episode in the past and the impact of a moment in history on the characters' later lives.
When We Argued All Night
takes in almost the entire sweep of the twentieth century. We meet Artie and Harold when they're twenty-six, and they're ninety-four at the end of the book. What challenges did this pose for you in conceptualizing and writing the book?

 

When I set out to write this book, I'd just finished a novel (
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
) that takes place in two weeks' time—two weeks that are fourteen years apart but are narrated in detail, day by day, morning, afternoon, evening. I didn't feel like doing that again soon. Writing that book, I had to keep in mind whether the characters had eaten meals yet and make provision for them to do so; I had to put them to bed, get them up in the morning. Now I wanted to write a novel in which the characters would eat lunch on their own time.

That gave me the opposite problem—writing about long stretches of time. In some chapters, decades pass. I'm more at ease describing a moment in time than several years all at once, and the chapters in which many years passed took the most work. Gradually I saw that I had to dip into a year and find the right moment in it, narrate that, and pull back again.

My characters ate lunch only when that seemed to contribute to the story, but maybe every novel includes a certain amount of housekeeping—the kind of careful attention to not terribly interesting detail that doesn't feel creative at the time but is essential. This time I had to keep track of how old the children were in any particular year, and since their birthdays are not all in the same month, I couldn't just add the number of years since they'd last appeared. I suppose all novels present difficulties— it's the nature of the form.

As for writing about the whole twentieth century—or most of it—I am no historian, but I can read. I read newspaper stories to know what my characters might be thinking about during particular weeks and months. I also came to the task with some first- and secondhand experience. Some historical events are occasions I remember, like the war in Vietnam. Some I heard about. I knew from my parents and aunts and uncles, and my husband's parents, that although some people were embittered by the Great Depression, others, with little to expect or hope for, became adventurous and resourceful. I knew that not everyone in the “Greatest Generation” served in the war, and that in the fifties not everyone lived in the suburbs in households consisting of stay-at-home women and men with boring corporate jobs. Artie and Harold don't resemble my parents in detail, but like them they are urban, they are not surprised when women work, and they are more threatened by the ugliness of McCarthyism than by corporate jobs or the need to conform—issues I never heard about growing up in Brooklyn in an opinionated family, with grandparents who worked in the garment trades, and aunts and uncles who did everything from driving a taxi to breeding German shepherd dogs, but who never ever conformed. There's much about the twentieth century I don't know, but I tried to be faithful to what I did know.

 

How did the Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust affect people in your family? How did those events and your family's experience of them affect you?

 

During the Depression my mother's degree from Hunter College, one of the free city colleges, didn't help her get a job: she said that to be a Macy's salesclerk you had to have gone to a fancier college than that. She worked in a factory for a while and later qualified for a WPA job and became a teacher of the homebound—children with disabilities who couldn't get to school—and she did that all her life. My father, like Artie, sold photographs to newspapers; then he worked for the welfare department; eventually he learned stenography and became a court reporter. My parents were engaged for five years before they could marry—they couldn't afford rent and lived with their families.

I think my father was more troubled by the Depression than my mother was. He remained a worrier; she came out of the experience optimistic: I don't think she'd have thought of teaching the homebound on her own. The WPA changed her life.

When the war started, my father was not drafted because of a minor physical problem. The war meant Hitler to my parents, and they could barely speak of it, though my mother mentioned hearing Hitler's speeches on the radio, listening with horror though she didn't understand what he was saying. My grandparents were in America, but some relatives had stayed behind in Europe, and nobody talked about them. The exception in my childhood was a visit of two cousins who had escaped to Israel. My grandmother's Yiddish was now almost English— nobody understood the visitors, they didn't understand us. If I came across a photograph of other European relatives and asked my mother about them, she'd just say “Hitler.” I never heard the term
Holocaust
until I was an adult.

My mother spoke of learning about the death camps when they were liberated in 1945, and it wasn't until I read about the period so as to write this book that I understood that people who read the newspaper carefully, and could bear to believe what they read, knew about them as early as 1943. Alfred Kazin wrote of what he knew in one of his three memoirs,
New York Jew
. (The others are
Starting Out in the Thirties
and
A Walker in the City
, parts of which I read aloud, as a teenager, to my illiterate grandmother because it was about East New York, where we lived.) The
New York Times
didn't give the extermination of the Jews the emphasis one would expect, but if you look for the old stories, they are there—and in my book, Harold knows about it.

Growing up, I thought of the thirties and early forties as a period when my parents had something they'd lost by the time I knew them. In their stories, they seemed more passionate, more adventurous. I've often written about the years when they were young, maybe trying to recover what was lost.

 

The history of the Communist Party in the US is not widely known. How did you become interested in it, and in the impact of the McCarthy investigations on teachers?

 

I wasn't what was called a “red diaper baby,” but my parents had friends who were or had been Communists, and I knew a girl named Joan, after “Uncle Joe” Stalin. My parents were ardent Roosevelt Democrats, but it was ordinary for people like them to feel positive toward the ideals of the Communist Party, and my mother talked about going to a Communist Party meeting in the thirties—like Artie, she was put off by the coercive discipline. After the last few decades, in which we've heard so much about communism as a horror, it's hard to remember that the party represented a plausible and progressive way of thinking in the thirties.

During the McCarthy era, I was old enough to be aware that something was troubling and frightening the adults in my family. A family friend, who had never been a Communist, lost his teaching job. I scarcely knew him, and my parents believed that children should be protected from hearing about trouble. When children are kept from knowing facts but sense feelings, they are more affected than if they were told everything. I found the event unforgettable, and I've twice written about New York teachers losing their jobs because of McCarthyism—in an earlier novel,
Hilda and Pearl
, and now here.

 

Teaching runs through the book—Artie and Harold are teachers at various levels, Brenda is a teacher before she starts building playground sets. How has teaching (good and bad) informed your life?

 

My mother, as I've said, was a teacher of the homebound— children whose disabilities, in the days before ramps and elevators in schools, kept them home. She traveled from house to house, teaching children in grades one through six. She and my father seemed to assume I'd become a teacher, as so many girls did, and they expected me to live at home during college and attend one of the (then) free city colleges, as they had. I did. My parents were not ambitious, but they were slightly ambitious for me: they hoped that I might go away to a university after college, earn a master's degree, and become a high school teacher. I grew up wanting to teach (as well as write) and have taught all my life, but in community colleges and four-year colleges. However, I absorbed my parents' admiration for high school teachers and still feel it. The high school I went to, Franklin K. Lane in Brooklyn, was full of gifted, serious teachers, men and women of astonishing depth and learning. Best of all was an English teacher, Agnes Jaffe. I love to write about teachers—I'm still trying to thank them.

 

The cabin on the lake is an important location for the characters even though they identify strongly as city people. Do you have a “cabin on a lake”? What role does it play in your life?

 

There is no cabin on a lake, and there have been many cabins, some on lakes. Many summers, my parents rented cabins in the Adirondacks or New England for a few weeks, often in bungalow colonies. Years later, my husband and I discovered we wanted to take the same kind of vacations—though we like more remote cabins than they did, with as few people around as possible.

 

If you could, would you buy such a cabin, or is part of its magic that it's not yours?

 

I've never wanted to own a cabin—one would always be worrying about the leaky roof—and in my book, the people staying in the cabin, experiencing something important there or thinking about it, usually don't own it. The cabin in the book represents—as such vacations represent in my life, I suppose—respite: physical and imaginative freedom. You can't take that for granted: no one can own that. People have always written stories in which characters from cities or towns come to understand a truth when they go into the woods, into the wilderness. It's in the Bible, in
King Lear
, and in books as different as
Pride and Prejudice
(Elizabeth Bennet understands that she's in love with Mr. Darcy when she meets him by chance on his wooded estate, which she tours with her aunt and uncle) and Toni Morrison's
Song of Solomon
. The cabin—the woods—is where my characters, too, learn who they are. I'm one of those people for whom letters of the alphabet and numbers have colors in the mind and, at times, so do books. This one, long before it was written, was “green book.”