Judith Thurman - A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

For Martha Saxton

I write with my left hand. Left-handedness used to be considered a malign aberration (sinister is Latin for left), and in the generations before mine, left-handed schoolchildren were routinely switched. Enforced conformity, especially, perhaps, when it selects an inborn trait to repress or persecute, breeds intolerance for difference of all kinds. Singled out for bullying or conversion, a child internalizes the message that she isnt right.

I have a bittersweet memory in this regard. My father had been switched by an implacable Hebrew schoolteacher whod made him sit on his left hand for six years. Even in old age, he still flexed it compulsively, though I reckoned that other childhood humiliations had also numbed him. Our relations were mostly silent, and I pined for his attention. But when I was learning to write, he sat patiently by my side, holding my wrist so it wouldnt hunch over like a cripples back. He wanted to endow me with a beautiful handthe signature of a lady. I dont think he realized how illegible his love was.

In the contemporary world, belonging to the left-handed minority (about ten percent of the population) is a minor inconvenience. But when I started kindergarten, at the height of the McCarthy hearings, my mother, Alice, warned me not to describe myself as a leftie. Why, I asked her? It could get us into trouble, she said darkly. I had no idea what she meant, and her anxiety was cockeyed, since my parents only cell was our four-room apartment. Yet the tone of that caution sobered me to the core. It hinted at a guilty secret that a careless word could betray.

My mothers demonsher abiding terror of some imminent catastrophestill haunt me. By the time I could see her with detachment, she was a sedated recluse who had designated the task of living to her only child. In that sense, our roles were reversed; I attuned my behavior to her fragility. I dont know what her own aspirations might have been, except that she revered language, and her gift to me was insisting that I should. During the Depression, shed taught Latin and English in a Boston high school, but on her wedding day, she forfeited the job. It went to a man, she was told by the principal, who had a family to support.

Alice accepted her dismissal timidly, without questioning its injustice. Perhaps her ambitions for me were a deflected protest. I was lucky, however, to have two maiden aunts. The feisty old maid in an uptight family is often an ally to her wayward niece. Eva, my fathers sister, managed a used bookstore near Harvard Square. She was wraithlike and tweedy, with a smokers deep voice and wrinkles. Evas a character, the family liked to say. Whatever small luxury they sent hera toaster, a winter coat, a banknote tucked into a birthday cardshe gave it away. It went to a poet on scholarship, or to the unwed mother who lived upstairs. I first heard the expression free love from Eva, uttered with reverence. She meant something heretical, I think; she meant to let me know that virginity is a false idol. Even as a child, I marveled at her ardor.

Unlike Eva, my maternal aunt Charlotte wasnt a romantic, though unlike her sister, she inhabited a body that gave her pleasure. Arkie, as I called her, was built like an otter and could swim two miles in the ocean. She taught me to ride a bike and to build a campfire. She had spent her youth as an activist in the settlement house movement. Later, she ran a state unemployment bureau staffed mostly by closeted socialists like herself. Arkie took a dim view of patriarchal institutionsreligion, capitalism, marriage. She liked to quote one of her professors at a womans college: He has to be a very good husband to be better than no husband at all.

Both my aunts got stuck caring for their elderly parents well into middle age. But then they moved into their own bachelor digs not far apart in Cambridge. They often traveled together, adventurously. Had they been born in a later era, they might have been lesbians, and perhaps they were, covertlyI hoped sothough we never spoke of intimate things. Of course she was a lesbian! Alison Bechdel said to me of Arkie. (I was visiting her in Vermont, reporting the profile in this volume.) Straight women didnt dress up as Gene Autry (a singing cowboy of the 1950s). When I stayed with my grandparents, as I did every summer, Arkie sang me to sleep in a Stetson, chaps, and a six-shooter.

At the age of eighty, Arkie came to live with me, and helped me to raise my son. (I, too, was an unwed mother.) I once asked her if she was happy. We were living in Paris for a year, while I did research on Colette. She kept house for us without a word of French, and her only company, for most of the day, was a rambunctious two-year-old. Youre too sentimental about happiness, she said. No critique has served my craft better.

The writers I most admire never use a careless word. Their sentences are unimprovable. Style is character, Joan Didion asserted, in an essay on Georgia OKeeffe whose surface is as taut as a drum skin. Didions character was elusive, above all to herself, unlike OKeeffesan artist, she wrote, with palpable envy, who seems to have been equipped with an immutable sense of who she was. A style like Didions is often the result of arrogance, painfully unlearned.

All men are deceived by the appearances of things, Heraclitus wrote, 2,500 years ago, even Homer himself, the wisest man in Greece. The poet was alerted to his self-deception by boys catching lice: What we catch and kill we leave behind, they told him, but what escapes us we bring with us. What we bring with usembedded in our flesh and bugging it; embedded in art and animating itis the mystery of how we become who we are.

That mystery has been my subject from the beginning; with every new piece of work, I grope my way into it. First Impressions, a reportage on Paleolithic art, suggests my point of departure. It recounts the accident by which three spelunkers found an entrance to the Chauvet Cave, which had been sealed for millennia. They were attracted by an updraft of cool air coming from a recess near the cliffs ledgethe potential sign of a cavity. Theres a hidden cavity in every story, a recess of meaning, and its often blocked by the rubble of your own false starts, or by an accretion of received ideas left behind by others. That updraft of freshness is typically an emotion youve buried.

I write about the lives and work of other people in part to understand my own, while avoiding what I feel obliged to do here: talk about myself. In most of my essays, a passage or even just a sentence surprises me with a private truth I couldnt otherwise have expressed freely. In my study of Emily Dickinson, its a reflection on depressive mothers. Their daughters, I write, often feel a propitiary impulse to make some sacrifice of their aggression and desire, perhaps because they feel guilty about their own vitality. In my reading of Elena Ferrante, its a riff on primal attachments, for which hostile love is an antidote. Ambivalence, I suggest, is Alison Bechdels default mode: the voice that narrates her graphic memoirs both yearns for and mistrusts closeness. In taking the measure of Rachel Cusk, I begin with a description of her narratora Cusk-like British writer named Faye. Friends and strangers tell her their stories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. While sharing their dilemma covertly, Faye lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows she extracts something cleara sense of both her own outline and theirs.