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FIRST PERSON AMBIVALENT: WHAT WENT WRONG WHEN
Daphne
Merkin's tribute to her parents on the dedication page of
Dreaming of Hitler--"For my mother and father, after
all"--carries within it a capsule history of both resentment
and forgiveness--a forgiveness that's undermined and made
resonant by a tone that's reflective, ironic: The tone of
someone who's been through the mill (as a daughter) but who's
also old enough to know what's grist for the mill (for the
writer).
The
essays that follow are meditations on a wide range of topics,
among them voyeurism, loneliness, Ecclesiastes, Claire Bloom's
dark but oddly banal memoir of the final days of her marriage
to Philip Roth, sado-masochism, the pleasures of sunbathing
in a more innocent era, and spanking fantasies. In fact, "Spanking:
A Romance" created such a stir when it first appeared
in The New Yorker two winters ago that its author became instantly
notorious. Shot through with both brave delight and a nearly
psychoanalytical introspection, the essay concludes with Merkin's
conviction that one "can class such behaviour as pathological
or, with greater poetic licence and less clinical judgement,
as part of the infinite human variety, but I have come to
believe that for me it was about nothing less gripping than
stating and restating, in an adult arena, the emotional conditions
of my childhood..." Merkin's exuberance and charm are
also revealed via an autobiographical anecdote: When a new
man in her life remarks (on their first date) that what she
probably needs is a good spanking, his words take such intense
possession of her that a few days later, at one of the perfume
counters at Saks Fifth Avenue, she overhears one of the salespeople
say "male bondage" when what she has actually said
is "nail varnish".
Under
a heading borrowed from Thomas Mann--Disorder and Early Sorrow--Merkin
groups a small collection of essays on the virulence of the
family. In one of these essays, "The Talking Cure Blues",
she interviews a particularly well-read psychoanalyst--it
turns out that during his student days at Columbia he took
classes with Lionel Trilling--in an attempt to discover his
version of "What Went Wrong When", and during the
course of this interview also learns that he believes that
"the fullness of the culture can rescue us from the damage
of early life."
The
damage of early life is also very much the theme of essays
on Gary Gilmore ("The Fall of the House of Gilmore"),
Anne Sexton ("When She was Bad"); and Sallie Bingham
("A Family and A Fortune"). Merkin is convinced
that no one really wants to hear the truth about families,
and "that the family remains, where almost all else has
fallen, an icon--imbued with sentiment and guarded from demystification."
She also prefaces her piece on Sallie Bingham with a chilling
quote from Ivy Compton-Burnett: "It will be a beautiful
family talk, mean and also full of sorrow and spite and excitement."
A
review of Searching for Mercy Street, a memoir by Linda Gray
Sexton, Anne Sexton's older daughter and the subject of the
eerily evocative Sexton poem, "Little Girl, My Stringbean,
My Lovely Woman", makes clear "just how long a maternal
shadow Anne Sexton casts" and Merkin wastes no time in
getting to the heart of this poet's flamboyant narcissism:
"The drama of her art, it appeared, was matched by the
drama of her looks, almost as if she were trying to envision
herself, as played by Anne Bancroft, in the forthcoming version
of her life: Tormented suburban wife and mother is released
by psychiatrist into the world of poetry writing, where she
ascends to the pinnacle, taking time off between mental hospitals
and Pulitzer Prizes to flash her gams."
After
she has been accepted into Robert Lowell's poetry workshop
at Harvard, Sexton becomes friends with another workshop member:
Sylvia Plath, and Merkin is astute on the comparative gifts
of these two remarkable poets: "As a late starter, Sexton
brought to the writing of poetry neither the erudition and
technical skill of Lowell nor the sheer rhetorical force of
Plath...The concluding lines of Plath's "The Applicant",
for example, 'My boy, it's your last resort / Will you marry
it, marry it, marry it,' have infinitely more resonance than
the final lines of a poem Sexton wrote about witnessing the
sudden onset of Lowell's madness: 'Or the prince you ate yesterday
/ who was wise, wise, wise.' Yet Sexton succeeded for a while
in spinning gold out of her deficits..." Merkin also
notes that Sexton's early poems, written at a time "when
Adrienne Rich was still wearing a good cloth coat and pearls,
retain their blistering directness, their startling air of
autobiographical impropriety."
A startling air of autobiographical impropriety is what many
readers feel defines Merkin's work as well, but in her case
the impropriety has been transformed into a candour so buoyant
it can't help but be appealing. It's a candour that's also
put to witty use when she tries to make some sort of sense
of that "most sacrosanct piece of erotica", the
Song of Songs. Beginning her essay by stating that everyone
lies about sex, more or less, "to themselves if not to
others, to others if not to themselves, exaggerating its importance
or minimizing its pull", Merkin then launches into an
unsentimental and playful exegesis: "Enter the Shulamite,
whoever she may be, love object or subject, bestride (or ridden
by?) this frisky colt of a text--canonical glitch or deliberate
oversight, Jewish original or Persian derivative, holiest
of holies or pure, unadulterated smut--called with arrant
hyperbole, the Song of Songs." But Merkin seems equally
intrigued by longing, and in an essay titled "Extramarital
Cravings", remarks that "there is perhaps in all
such literature a Swinburnian wish...for the easeful cessation
of consciousness that is the peace beyond longing, in which
the disturbing vividness of carnal attraction is extinguished
by the vast impersonality of time."
Merkin
has also added a coda to "Spanking: A Romance",
bringing the readers of the original essay up to date on what
turned out to be a tumultuous response, including many intelligent
and moving letters, as well as the not unexpected more problematical
mail: "anonymous, increasingly indignant missives from
a member of the Yale Club" and "invitations to get
together for the purposes of mutual exploration from as far
away as Alabama and Toronto". In having anticipated (and
satisfied) widespread curiosity about how the essay was received,
Merkin, as always, comes across as a lively writer whose thoughtful
self-absorption has been put to profoundly generous uses.
She is even, I suspect, an anomaly many readers will feel
grateful for: A flirt we can trust.
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