Elsie Michie

Chapter One—“Mixed Reviews”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”

Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”

The last time I saw my father, he told me the final family secret, the one I needed to know before he went to his grave. He was seventy-nine and married to the anesthesiologic technician he had passed off as his wife while he was still living with my mother. He had already had one heart attack. The hardening of his arteries was so bad that they had to put him on medication to dissolve the plaque. But the drug also softened his bones. His vertebrae started to crack. He could only stand for short periods of time. His back couldn’t support the full weight of his body. He had a chemical version of osteoporosis. But when they put him on medication to counter that, his antibodies started attacking him and he began to lose vision in one eye. Then they put him on steroids to suppress his antibodies and he became like a person with AIDs. When I came to visit him and brought my dogs, he told me I had to use a nylon rather than a leather leash. Anything organic could carry germs that might kill him. As I write this, I realize how ridiculous it sounds. After all the dogs were organic. I was organic. Would we kill him?

The steroids had made him fat, like a little buddha, his face round with virtually no lines. He sat on the sofa most of the day, his newly formed belly poking out gently between the buttons of his blue and white striped pajama top.

That is where he had been when I had visited him a few months earlier to take him a copy of my book, the book that had gotten me tenure at Louisiana State University where I was about to become an Associate Professor of English.

I hadn’t planned on showing my father my book. I wasn’t sure he would care. But then I talked to my father’s brother, my uncle Willie, the one who wasn’t an upwardly mobile high achiever. He didn’t go to college and medical school like my father or become a CPA like his younger brother my Uncle Roy. When World War II came along, he went into the army. When I was in high school on an exchange program in Paris, he told me, that he got trench foot there. After the war he drove an elevated train for the Philadelphia Transportation System, as his father had done before him. I had loved my Uncle Willie since I was a child. Every Fourth of July his family and ours celebrated together at a park called Green Lane. We went swimming in the lake and my uncle would pick me up and throw me far out into the water. I remember the slippery feel of his body, the freckled muscles in his broad shoulders. I would come back again and again, and he would throw me again and again until he was exhausted. Each time I sailed through the air I would scream with delight.

That is what I wanted to do when my first book was published. I had worked so hard, and almost not finished it in time. When the first copies arrive in the English Department mailroom, I was so excited that I picked up the box and carried it with me to the class I was about to teach. I unwrapped it there, as if it were a Christmas present, held up a copy, and my students clapped for me. When I told my uncle, he said, “Oh, your father must be so proud.” And I thought, Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he would be excited, happy for me.

So I went to visit him and took a copy with me. It was already in paperback because it was in a feminist series and my editor at Cornell said, in a comment that made me laugh to myself, “Feminists won’t buy hardbacks.” The cover has a bright fuchsia border framing a black lozenge that displays the book’s title in long lacy letters: Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer. I handed it to my father. He looked at the front cover and said nothing. So, I said “Turn it over.” The back had a blurb from a professor at Johns Hopkins, a university my father revered because it is so good in science. The blurb called my book “extraordinarily interesting,” “a tour de force.” I watched my father read slowly, the whole back, including the two-sentence biography that followed the blurb. Then he raised his head and said, “I forgot you went to Yale.” That was the only comment he ever made about my book

And I thought then, as I do now, Why did I go back to see him again after that? But I did. And the next time is worse. Perhaps, as he weakened, his body falling apart around him, and I strengthened, knowing myself better, achieving what I wanted, he needed to put me in my place. All I know is that I was sitting there once again, on the couch, beside my father, a penitent, hoping for his blessing, his approval. It was just me this time, no book. And he did have something to say. He wanted to tell me about the time before I was born. “Your mother and I met,” he began, though I knew this already, “when we were doing our residencies in New York City.” My mother had told me her stories about that time, about how happy they were when they first met, running down the street laughing and holding the ends of a curtain rod they just bought for their new apartment. Its stairway was so small that they had to have the grand piano my grandmother gave my mother hoisted up and brought in through the wide living room window.

“When we decided to get married,” my father announces, in a voice that sounds almost clinical, “we agreed not to have children.” My mother was supposed to foster his career so he could become famous like his advisor, the renal physiologist Homer Smith who wrote a book called From Fish to Philosopher about how the kidney determines the functioning of all living things. “Your mother broke that pact. She had you.”

I listen and grow cold, especially around my feet. My toes curl inside my shoes. My body fills with the adrenaline of fight or flight. I can’t fight. I want to run. I fear what my father will say next, what verbal knife he will wield to cut the ties that bind us. But I stay. I need to hear what he is telling me, to know that I have not imagined being rejected since before I was born. It is not a hallucination. I listen silently, saying nothing, showing no pain, neither apologizing nor defending myself.

He pauses, turning his head to one side like a bird so he can look me in the eye. His face bears the gravity of someone who is about to tell you a home truth. And I think about the phrase “home truth” and how often the most painful truths are about home, about family. Then he says, calmly and deliberately, as if he has been thinking about it for years, perhaps my whole life, “I didn’t want you before you came, and I didn’t like you after you got here.”

When I was a child and went to visit my father’s parents in their West Philadelphia rowhouse, I loved the objects scattered throughout its dimly lit rooms. They were so different from the things that filled the airy suburban house where my doctor parents lived. A bronze statue of a woman in a tunic holding up a glass torch stood on the newel post at the bottom of the staircase that ran along the wall their house shared with its neighbor. Upstairs on my grandparents’ bed sat a kewpie doll with its lavender ruffled satin skirt spread wide, doll they had gotten in Atlantic City when they went on vacations there before my grandfather retired and they started going to St. Petersburg, Florida and sending me orange water every spring as a present.

The living-room mantle had a sword hung beneath it that my grandfather had brought with him when he emigrated from Alva, Scotland in the early 1900s. On top of the mantle was a glass sphere with a scarlet rose suspended inside that commemorated my grandmother hearing Billy Graham preach. Two tiny, plastic Scottie dogs sat beside the sphere, one black and one white. Each stood on a small block of metal. As a child, I was allowed to take them down and play with them. When you aligned them one way, the attraction was so strong, the two rushed together with a click as if part of one thing. But when you pried them apart and turned one around, you couldn’t bring them together no matter how hard you tried. I was fascinated by the slippery feel of the air, the invisible power keeping them from touching: repulsion.

When I went to graduate school at Yale I got Distinction on my oral exams. I studied for months and months, almost got an ulcer, and had to have valium in the house in case I needed it to help me sleep. I read all day every day and became an expert in nine literary periods from Beowulf to the present day. The only time I took a break was to have dinner. Then I would watch M*A*S*H*, which reran every weekday at six. Tears would run down my cheeks as the doctors and nurses raced to unburden the landing helicopter in the show’s opening credits. They were the only people I had seen that day. Fear paralyzed me. Surely, I couldn’t cram enough into my head to pass. But then I would calm myself, as a mother does with a child, saying “You’ll be all right.” I imagined my examiners asking me the questions I wanted to answer and me telling them proudly everything I knew.

The exam day came. I walked into the English Department seminar room in Linsly-Chittenden Hall and faced, at the end of a long seminar table, a quintet of professors who asked me weird, quiz-show-like, stump-me questions about hags in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and pigs in American literature. Instead of choking, I talked and talked. I was filled with things--feelings, information, ideas. I was dying to share them.

At that time, my last examiner, Harold Bloom, was obsessed with epiphanies. So, he asked me about Walter Pater, the Victorian art critic and scholar, who believed that “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real to us,--for that moment only.” This is why I love writing; it captures the moment when all the details, the little things that seem random, suddenly come together, as if you had turned a kaleidoscope and the bits and pieces of colored glass fell, with an almost audible click, into place.

Bloom began talking about Virginia Woolf, a writer my feminist mother loved. He compared Woolf to James Joyce, as if the two were identical. On the spur of the moment, without thinking, I disagreed with him. “No,” I said, “Epiphanies don’t work the same for a woman as for a man. Woolf’s epiphanies never belong to a single individual. They are always shared.” As I spoke, a sigh ran round the room. Tension eased. The exam was a rite of passage. They were waiting for me to stop telling them what I thought they wanted to hear, to stand on my own, and assert my ideas with confidence, with pride, with certainty. As soon as I contradicted Bloom, they knew they were going to give me distinction.

My husband Alex says that all families depend on what he calls “phantom contracts,” things that everyone knows, that tell you how you are supposed to behave, but that no one puts into words. Being in that room where I was examined by five famous Yale professors was like that. Everybody knew exactly what they were looking for, but they had never told each other what it was. So, they couldn’t tell students what they needed to do. Students just had to prepare and hope, and then suddenly, as if by magic, you crossed the boundary that separated you from the professors and became one of them, part of the family that is academia.

As I turned to walk out of the room, one of my examiners, a world-famous expert in eighteenth-century literature, renowned for his acerbity and wit, came over, opened the door for me, and said, “You know more at this moment than you will ever know at any other moment in your life.” I think now that he was right. But I wasn’t ready then for loss, for diminishment. I brimmed with excitement. I wanted to tell someone else. So, I ran to call my physician mother, who was still so disappointed that I had gone to graduate school in that useless subject English that she tucked a subscription to the Scientific American into my Christmas stocking every year. I should have known better. But I imagined her sitting in the big Victorian house, where she lived alone, after my father left her to marry someone else. Her aged poodle Inky would be beside her, and she would be wearing one of the ancient ratty sweaters she loved, waiting, I hoped, to hear how my exam had gone.

I wanted her to share the exuberance that had ruled me for the last few hours, the exuberance that had gotten me, victoriously, through the exam. That delight flooded the phone. It infused my voice as I told her, still babbling, about everything that had happened, about everything I knew, about how they responded, about what I had won. At last, I took a breath and gave her a chance to reply. But I heard in her voice not joy but anxiety, anxiety I had known since I was little. The first thing out of her mouth was not “Congratulations” or “I’m happy for you” or “good job,” but “Is there anything higher you could have gotten?” She was sure I was deceiving myself, that the award wasn’t as important as I thought it was. She wanted to bring me down to earth, back to reality. If she had planned for a week or a month or a year, I used to tell my friends, she couldn’t have come up with anything that would have deflated me more quickly.

As I grew up part of me remained stuck in the past. The image I have is of the needles we used to keep in tiny brown envelopes and insert into the arm of the phonograph player that sat in the basement recreation room. We had records for children made not out of the usual black but red and yellow plastic. They were educational. One was a life of Tchaikovsky that played snatches of his music, excerpts from Swan Like and The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture and the Symphonie Pathétique, which exuded the sadness I already felt as a child. But, when you played those records, the needle could easily get caught in a scratch on the plastic disc. Then it would stutteringly repeat the same musical phrase over and over until someone jogged the arm and moved it forwards past the damaged place.

That was how writing felt. I couldn’t write much, and when I did write, I couldn’t move forward. I would make the same point over and over, trying obsessively to be completely accurate, to get the wording exactly right. I could write while I was still in graduate school. There was someone there, a professor, to tell me my work was good. But once I went out into the professional world, I became pathologically afraid of critique. When I shared my work with a fellow academic, he asked me, in a voice full of kindness, whether I was proud of what I wrote, I think because its tone was so tentative. And I realized with sadness that I hadn’t yet learned how to believe in myself.

I remember sitting at table in the sunshine at a conference at the University of North Carolina. I was an Assistant Professor at Tulane, giving a paper on--I can’t remember what--one of the Victorian novels I love, perhaps Jane Eyre. I was drinking a cup of tea between sessions, sitting by myself in a garden and eavesdropping, as I am wont to do—I savor weird scraps of conversations about other people’s lives where there is no context to explain them, and they sound like odd lines of poetry. Three women, graduate students or early assistant professors, were laughing and talking eagerly about showing their academic writing to their mothers. Did their mothers like it? Did they understand it? Were they proud of their daughters? As I listened a shadow passed over as if someone had walked on my grave. My mother hadn’t seen any of my writing. I didn’t publish a word until after she died. I feared her response.

I lost the job I had at Tulane University because I hadn’t written enough. Then I took another job at LSU, where, finally, after almost eleven years of trying, I finished my book and got tenure. But the people who wrote to support my promotion had to defend me because I had published so little. After tenure, I stalled out completely. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I didn’t get an award. But I was. The English Department was named a “pillar of excellence,” and its most famous and successful professors were given raises. I didn’t get one. I was sure I deserved it. I was a brilliant scholar, a great teacher, someone with very few articles, but all of them important, little gems. That is how I kept myself from facing my shortcomings, by imagining that I was magically better than everyone else and that my talents, though not shown in publications, would, of course, be recognized.

The day I didn’t receive the raise, my husband Alex came to pick me up in the green Dodge Caravan he had bought to ferry daughters around. I was in the passenger seat, where the girls usually sat, sobbing hopelessly, when he turned to me, with the directness I have come to love, and said “I think you are paralyzed in your writing.” He swears now that he never used that word. It is impossible to remember. Maybe paralyzed was the word I used, engraving my failures on my heart in fire the way that the finger of God writes on the stone tablets in the movie The Ten Commandments. I know how to condemn myself.

But Alex was diagnosing not judging me, and that made all the difference.

The following summer I was attending the Dickens Universe in Santa Cruz, California, where professors, graduate students, and the public live for a week among the redwoods, see the fog--the marine layer--coming in from the Pacific every morning and evening, and discuss a Dickens novel like David Copperfield or Great Expectations from morning to night. Standing in the din of the opening cocktail party, amidst the chattering, semi-drunk, voices of people who were intensely glad to see one another again, I heard, in what seemed both a still small voice and a clarion call, the words “writing therapist.” The professor who said them had been working with a woman in Houston, Cynthia MacDonald, who specialized in writer’s block. And I thought, Houston isn’t that far from Baton Rouge. Maybe I can work with her. Maybe she would work with me.

As soon as I got home, I looked up her phone number and was so excited—nervous really—that I wrote it down not on a pad but on the top of one of the brown cardboard boxes where I store my museum quality jewelry collection. I still have that box, a record of the moment, the instant really, when I asked for help. I called Cynthia, and she told me gravely--she had a very resonant voice--that she had never worked with someone from out-of-town but she would try. We set up appointments for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I would meet with her the first day, write for her the second day--this sounds like the Creation of the World—and, on the third day, she would decide whether she could work with me.