A Nonstandard Staircase

I have drifted away at times from the original purpose of this Staircase Writing web journal. Here is a very literal return to the concept of Staircase Writing -- the staircase in the cottage we call Tim's House (in West Cork), which I painted in homage to the colorful village streetscapes common to this part of Ireland.

As I embark on my new novel and leave 2011 behind, it's a good moment to reflect on the notion of "l'esprit d'escalier," staircase wit, but instead of dwelling on the wise and witty things I wish I had said, or done, or, for that matter, the things I wish other people had said or done, it's a good moment to gather intentions to get my work done in the weeks and months ahead. Out with the old, in with the new. It's a transitional moment for me in a number of ways, and it's time to stop looking back and start looking ahead.

(If there is anything of an elegiac tone here, it is not about this blog, and there will be fresh posts in the new year.)

Tomato Paste in My Lunchbox

My mother put tomato paste in my lunchbox by mistake. I was in third grade. As I reached into my red lunchbox for my can of what was supposed to be pineapple juice, I put up my hand so the roving lunch lady could come to me and punch those two triangular holes in my juice can, with the can opener she wore on a string around her neck. As she bore down on me, I saw to my horror that the oddly heavy can in my hand, identical in dimensions to the juice cans of the era, was in fact a can of tomato paste.

I yanked my hand down and bent over my lunchbox, thrusting the erroneous cylinder of tomato paste deep into the wrappings of my peanut butter sandwich, hoping nobody had glimpsed this embarrassing artifact of my mother's fogginess. The lunch lady crossly demanded, "Who had a hand up here? There was a hand up?" I kept my head down in anxious contemplation of my pleated skirt until she gave up and stomped away.

Sometimes my sandwiches were on bread that was blue with mold, or were made with irridescent ham. I was used to pretending to eat those sandwiches. The tomato paste was worse. I felt let down in some new way.

That was nearly fifty years ago.

How I wish certain experiences around the publication of my newest book did not make me think of that can of tomato paste, and the shame of feeling that all the other kids have nice lunches while I have to pretend to have a nice lunch and hope that nobody notices the difference.

The Culminating, Superb "Miss Gandy"

Last night I saw the new, nearly perversely static Clint Eastwood-directed movie, J. Edgar. Sitting through this bizarre film (awards for makeup and costumes, for sure), it was hard not to think about my father's FBI records, some 800 pages on Sidney Kaufman gathered over nearly forty years, especially given that Helen Gandy and Clyde Tolson were the two supporting characters in the film. Here is some of what I wrote about them in The Memory Of All That:

"There is a marvelous rubber-stamped list of names of FBI personnel to whom copies of the Kaufman documents were circulated. This was their work; this is what they got up every day to do — process this Confidential, Classified, Secret, and Top Secret information about my father. I like to imagine them, sitting at their desks, typewriters clacking and phones ringing in the background, like a newsroom. There is much to do, fresh reports on the Subject: Sidney Kaufman to pore over, there is new information gathered by SA [redacted] or reported by “[redacted], an informant who has in the past furnished us with reliable information” (or even better, information provided by the occasional “[redacted], an informant who has in the past furnished us with reliable and unreliable information”). Presumably there were reports written about these reports. Individuals must have been assigned to analyze and come to conclusions about the information that had been so painstakingly compiled about the Subject: Sidney Kaufman. Meetings must have occurred, decisions must have been made about further interviews with informants reliable and unreliable, and all those pretext phone calls must have been scripted and scheduled. And all of the reports were typed up, copied, circulated, and filed with all the other accumulated Sidney Kaufman information.

By the late sixties, the rubber-stamped copy list had been streamlined to simple names, but I must admit to a preference for the more traditional earlier iterations, when each name is given the honorific “Mr.” and then there is the culminating, superb “Miss Gandy.” This list of names reads:
Mr. Tolson
Mr. Boardman
Mr. Nichols
Mr. Belmont
Mr. Harbo
Mr. Mohr
Mr. Parsons
Mr. Rosen
Mr. Tamm
Mr. Sizoo
Mr. Winterrowd
Tele. Room
Mr. Holloman
Miss Gandy

I really love this list, which changes only slightly through the years of documentation of Sidney Kaufman’s activities. It is a sequence of names rich in possibility, yet, seeing it repeat throughout the pages of these files, it becomes reliable and familiar, like a wallpaper pattern or a melody. The names, when seen again and again, start to have a delightful rhythm and inevitability that invite memorization, like the presidents of the United States, or Latin declensions.

The roster of FBI employees who were copied on the steady flow of classified information about Sidney Kaufman over all those years is intriguing. Clyde Tolson was Associate Director of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s sidekick. Lou Nichols and Alan H. Belmont were Assistant Directors. John P. Mohr was head of five FBI divisions; he was the number three man after Tolson in FBI hierarchy. Alex P. Rosen was the FBI supervisor on the John Dillinger case and on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Joseph A. Sizoo was in the Domestic Intelligence Division. E.A. Tamm was an Associate FBI Director. Frank C. Holloman was s supervisor in the FBI Headquarters in the Crime Records Section, the Fugitive Desk, Plant Survey Section, Special Intelligence Section, Informant Section, and the Records Division.

“Miss Gandy” was Helen W. Gandy, J. Edgar Hoover’s ferocious and devoted executive assistant for fifty-four years. It is known that over a period of months following his death in 1972, she destroyed tens of thousands of pages of his “personal” files thought to contains the fruits of illegal wiretaps and a vast array of incriminating information about numerous public figures and government officials and their family members, as well as detailed reports from the spies Hoover maintained in every White House administration. Her devotion to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover was that of a nun’s devotion to the Church and the Pope. Their relationship was decidedly odd; Hoover never once called her by her first name. Her mother was painted by Thomas Eakins.

J. Edgar Hoover is not on this list, because just about every document in my father’s files is a memo to The Director. The FBI surveillance of Sidney Kaufman that began in 1936 and apparently ended in 1972 is almost identical to the span of Hoover’s FBI Directorship."

Forest for the Trees

Not being able to see the forest for the trees is a truism we all know. But until last week's devastating storm swept through Connecticut, leaving some 20 inches of snow, tens of thousands of damaged trees, and downed power lines all over, I hadn't thought very much about the phrase in a literal sense.

Our house is in a heavily wooded spot, and we had terrible damage here. The oaks and maples were still in full leaf, which is why they were so susceptible to damage, as the leaves were like sails in the high winds, and they also held the snow and ice, which would have slipped through bare trees with less impact.

In my five days of dark and cold (and no water either, because we are on a well that requires electricity to run the pump), even as I began to deal with the aftermath, arranging for the downed trees to be cut up and cleared, identifying the broken trees with dangerous hangers (which need expensive attention, thus the need to triage -- tree-age -- and only do the work on the trees near the house, leaving the trees on our wooded hillside as they are, though some of them are so damaged they will probably come down through the winter), I realized I have spent years not seeing the trees for the forest. Only at a moment like this, as these massive oaks and maples are tilted and strewn and broken in jarring new ways, do I really see each tree.

My only source of warmth, the roaring fires I built each evening in our fireplaces (it's an 18th century house with four fireplaces that throw heat nicely), were made with the cut, dried, and stacked logs of wood from other trees we have lost through the years. I depended most of all on chunks of oak to burn steadily through those cold nights.

I couldn't work during the power failure. I really depend on electricity. These days, people have taken to calling books "physical books" to distinguish them from e-books (the way an ordinary clock is now an analog clock as opposed to a digitial one), but for a long while they have also been called "dead tree books," too. I am sure there is a useful metaphorical lesson in here somewhere.

What Would Edith Wharton Do?

Many religious Christians wear a bracelet with the initials WWJD? As I embark on my new novel, I have an imaginary bracelet which reads WWEWD? Instead of Jesus, what would Edith Wharton do?

Inspired also because I am in Paris at the moment, just three blocks from her house at 53 Rue de Varenne, I have been reading her exceedingly odd book, The Writing of Fiction, published in 1924, when she had been a Parisian for a decade. Very often I don't agree with her, but I am finding her thoughts on writing fiction to be suprising and sometimes fantastically illuminating. On the subject of dialogue in the novel, she writes:

"The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culmnating moments, and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore. This lifting and scattering of the wave, the coruscation of the spray, even the mere material sights of the page broken into short, uneven paragraphs, all help to reinforce the ocntrast between such climaxes and the smooth effaced gliding of the narrative intervals; and the contrast enhances that sense of the passage of time for the producing of which the writer has to depend on his intervening narration. Thus the sparing use of dialogue not only serves to emphasiz the crises of the tale but to give it as a whole a greater effect of continuous development."

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, My first novel, published in 1995 and now available in a new paperback from Broadway and, like all six of my books, as a download for e-readers (I am fortunate and pleased to have all of my books in print and available for e-readers as well), is concerned with perceptions and reflections. It's about seeing yet not perceiving. The main character of the novel, Harriet Rose (who also makes an appearance in my third novel, The Little Women), didn't acknowledge the uncanny work of Diane Arbus, who was obsessed with twinning and mirroring and multiples, as she narrated her thoughts and feeling about her own photography. It would have been a good element to include in the story, and I regret not having devoted sufficient thought in that direction.

About photography, Diane Arbus said: "The process itself has a kind of exactitude, a kind of scrutiny that we're not normally subject to. I mean that we don't subject each other to. We're nicer to each other than the intervention of the camera is going to make us. It's a little bit cold, a little bit harsh."

Not Exactly Family

My mother's first husband, Justin N. Feldman, has died, at age 92. He was a lovely man whom I enjoyed knowing, though ours was an odd connection. His New York Times obituary today was lengthy and fascinating. He was someone who made things happen, most notably as a manager of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 New York Senate campaign. Earlier, he was a campaign aide for John F. Kennedy, having entered reform politics in the late 1940s as a leader of the Fair Deal Democratic Club, a group of reform Democrats dedicated to breaking the political influence of Tammany Hall.

My mother, to whom he was married in 1942 (a complete fizzle of a marriage that lasted three years on paper though it was over in half that time), was omitted from mention in his obituary, and his second wife is described as his first. His third wife, to whom he was very happily married for many years, is Linda Fairstein, the former sex crimes prosecutor who is now well known for her thrillery crime novels. We had a warm friendship, my husband and I, as well as our daughters, with Justin and Linda, and the omission of my mother from the story of his life is strange, yet somehow it is not unexpected.

The New York Times itself (Mr Grimes, the obit writer, surely could have found this in his own paper's archive, if I can read it with two clicks) reported at length on their wedding on April 25th, 1942: "The marriage of Miss Andrea Swift Warburg, the daughter of James P. Warburg of this city and Mrs. Faye Hubbard of Bend, Oregon, to Justin N. Feldman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Hyman Feldman of Yonkers, New York, took place yesterday afternoon in the home of the bride's father and stepmother, Mrs. Warburg, at 34 East Seventieth Street...The bride and bridegroom dispensed with attendants. The bride wore an afternoon gown of beige crepe and a small matching hat, and a corsage of white orchids."

My mother's mother, "Mrs Faye Hubbard of Bend, Oregon," a.k.a. Kay Swift, was not there that afternoon. She was not present at any of her daughters' weddings. (When my aunt April was married soon after this, she wrote a letter to a friend remarking on this, saying "April has married her Italian, surrounded by no relatives, on Staten Island.")

I cannot imagine my mother even knowing what "an afternoon gown" might be, let alone wearing one in beige crepe with a small matching hat. It was another life, but a false start -- the start of another life she almost led -- a life I like to imagine would have been far happier than the one she lived, though I would not exist. Had Justin died before my book went to press, I would have written about this odd experience of reading his obituary which made no mention of my mother.

UPDATE October 3 -- The NYT ran a correction, not naming my mother, simply saying that they had omitted one of Justin's divorces.