Emily Fox Gordon - Book of Days: Personal Essays

ALSO BY EMILY FOX GORDON

Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy

Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered

It Will Come to Me

For
Anne Farber

Phillip Lopate

T rue personal essayists are extremely rare. At first it might seem an easy thing to do: you need merely chatter away about yourself, your experiences and opinions. But then the complications set in. How to know where to begin the monologue, and how much or how little historical background information to include; how to choose each time a topic of appropriate scale, one that will not be so trivial as to peter out after three pages, nor too complex to allow for sufficient depth in less than forty; how to merge seamlessly anecdote with reflection, scene with summary; how to inject enough tension into the ruminations spine so that the reader will pursue a mind tracking itself on the page with the same engrossment as he would a mystery story. The requirements for the job are stiff: they include a quirky, cultivated, unconventional mind, the detachment to be able to laugh at oneself (or at least not take ones wounds too solemnly and self-righteously), a quick wit, for condensations sake, a talent for elaboration, and a sparkling, textured prose style that can sustain attention when all else fails. To keep refining a voice that is at once charmingly likable and shockingly frank, alive to its owners flaws and its own contradictions, and to do this in essay after essay, over decadesthis is a game few can play.

Emily Fox Gordon can play it. She does do all of the above and more, and this is why she is, to me, the most consistently interesting and satisfying personal essayist to have newly appeared in the last ten or fifteen years. I relish her comic genius for self-mockery: for turning the I/Emily character into an alarming social danger to herself and others, one forever longing to be accepted into a club she secretly (or not so secretly) disdains. I love her sharp satiric eye for the pretenses of bourgeois academia, the insecurities of bohemia, and the ideological fashions of the politically correct: see, for instance, her hilarious portrayal of the Kangas in Faculty Wife. I cherish her ability to engage Kafka and other weighty literary or philosophical texts, without losing sight of the human-all-too-human, subjective investigator who is rummaging through them. And withal, I find deeply admirable her ability to sift through her feelings about serious, sober subjects, such as long-term marriage, illness, and the need for extended family, with a tenderness and maturity that always have the final word. She is an evolved human being; she has done her psychological homework; and in that respect she gives us what we who love the personal essay are seeking underneath all its wit and style: wisdom.

There is one more impediment, or temptation, that gets in the way of someone who would like to swear devotion to the personal essay: the greater popularity of the memoir. A writer has no sooner to effectuate a few graceful, sure-footed personal essays than the editors or literary agents she solicits will be telling her she should recast her book proposal in the form of a memoirpreferably one revolving around addiction, abuse, poverty, or some other nasty problem whose overcoming will yield the desired triumph-of-the-human-spirit results. In her essay Book of Days, Gordon tells ruefully the tale of how she was seduced, not once but twice, to write and publish memoirs, instead of being allowed to bring out a collection of personal essays. She also has some intriguing things to say about the differences between the two forms: the almost formulaic narrative, with its redemptive, triumphalist imperative, found in memoirs being published today, and the circling, skeptical, less imperiously conclusive mentality of personal essays, which, to her, reflects more faithfully the truth of daily life. As it happens, I do not share her reservations about her own prior efforts: both Mockingbird Years and Are You Happy? strike me as priceless accomplishments, happy examples of the best in contemporary memoir. But I applaud her for continuing to brood intelligently and scrupulously about the consequences of memoirizing her life; and I am glad that she has finally gotten her wish, in the form of the present book. For this superb, delightful, thought-provoking collection of personal essays gives us the sublime Emily Fox Gordon (how she, who so dislikes receiving flattery, will hate me for saying that!) in top-notch form, and in the genre of prose writing with which she most identifies.

T he photograph is small, printed on shiny black stock, black and white and curled at the edges. It represents me, at age two, sitting in the lap of what we called Library Hill, my arm loosely slung around the neck of our German Shepherd. His big head is cast upward as he tolerates my embrace, and his tongue lolls rakishly. We sit in a dent in the long grass. The wind has unsettled my tam oshanter; the shoulder button of my overalls has come undone. My dog and I look happy, and a little idiotic.

Photographs like this are marked by the pathos and authority of a different time. In another, my mother poses with me and my infant brother, standing in front of our boxy Plymouth station wagon, grayish white in the picture but in historical fact a pale aquamarine. The year is 1949. She is wearing a mouton coat and heavy shoes with ankle straps. Her hair looks frizzyshe had probably just home-permed itand her face is tired and pretty and young. My brother is a faceless bundle in the crook of her arm. Enough time has passed, enough of destiny has been realized for all three people in this picture so that looking at it gives me a little shock. Its as if Id been waiting for a chronically turbulent pool of water to clear and, as a reward for my patience, had seen at the bottom a small brightly colored stone. We lived in two houses, one after the other, both rented from the college for, if I recall correctly, $125 a month. The houses sat next door to each other in a gentle declivity on a small meandering street next to the library and across from a freshman dormitory and the small white clapboard building which housed my fathers department. In both houses we children felt the influence of the undergraduates, their beer parties and the shouts of their impromptu lacrosse games, from one direction, and the emanations of the alumni at the Williams Inn from the other, their chuckles and hoots over martinis in the lounge. Williams is a very old school; its campus is uncloistered, mixed with the town. At least it was then. Now both of my childhood houses are coeducational dorms.

The first house was low-slung and rambling and painted gray. After my family moved next door it housed the chairman of the Williams drama department and his dramatically bohemian wife. Wild parties spilled out onto the lawn and were gossiped about. Thornton Wilder, there for the Williams Theatres production of