I have never approached my own life in my fiction. I think I have been afraid of confronting my childhood—not for the reasons one might expect, or not only for those reasons, but because of a superstitious feeling that to drink from those wells is to drain them dry. I once asked my friend Aharon Appelfeld, the great Israeli writer, why he did not write his autobiography, since he lived through as harrowing and fateful a childhood as any man from the last century.
“If I do,” he told me, “I will no longer be able to write my novels.”
It may be that a similar notion has made me so resolutely impersonal in my own work. Instead of my own past I have written about history; instead of children, old people; instead of my pain, the sufferings of Indians or Jews. “Don’t look into your own heart and write,” I tell my bewildered students. “Try to look into someone else’s.”
I did not think that my ninth book would be any different. I was going to write an ambitious novel about an American architect whose monument to Mussolini ends up endangering the entire Jewish community of Rome. Then, in the midst of my research on Italy in the 1930s and 40s, I found myself pulling down Proust from my bookshelf.
This was an odd thing to do. I had already forced myself through In Search of Lost Time twice—once when I was in college and again in the early Nineties, when the emended Moncrief translations began to appear. Nonetheless, I persevered, reading no more and no less than two pages every night. This proved an excellent technique. Proust, of course, is notoriously difficult: What happened to that antecedent? How did I get into this parenthetical clause? Will I ever get out? The great thing about the Epstein method is that there is never more than one page to go. It’s possible to reread, rediscover, and not encounter the headache that comes from pushing on through a maze of compacted prose. Moreover, this regimen, like the novel itself, is an adventure in time: it involves a simultaneous commitment of five minutes and five years. I felt, and, since the five years are not yet up, still feel, the rewards of my task: there, at the end of the day, waiting on my pillow like an enormous Godiva chocolate, is the black bulk of the book. What I have found is that a nightly appointment with a noble mind has the power to refresh and purify even the most wasted day.
About three weeks after I began my way through A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, I sat down at my desk, picked up a fresh legal pad, and, after the usual amount of Talmudic fiddling with the sports pages, started to write. What emerged had nothing to do with Rome or Mussolini or the vanquished Ethiopians who were forced through the same Arch of Titus that had been erected to celebrate the defeat of the Jews.
What I saw before me now was a teenager in a Buick convertible driving along the Pacific Coast Highway with a woman trying to protect her blowing hair and another adolescent who had his arms around the family spaniel to make sure it would not “at the sight of a skunk or a cat or—rising out of the haze-hung ocean—a silvery dolphin, leap into the opposing stream of cars.” A double take. Why, that fellow at the wheel resembled me! Wasn’t that my mother looking into her compact mirror? The curly blond hair, the blue, glittering eyes, and, yes, the gap in his teeth when he smiled—that was my brother. I remembered that day: we were driving to Malibu to meet the man who wanted to marry my mother. Suddenly I understood why I had plucked down the volume of Proust. I was going to need Marcel’s courage and Marcel’s example. If he could write about how he would wait in literal breathlessness for his mother’s good-night kiss, perhaps I could depict my own past with its equivocal caresses.
That meant a return to where I had dared not go: the past. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud has this to say about the relationship of experience and imagination:
E.T.A. Hoffman used to explain the wealth of imaginative figures that offered themselves to him for his stories by the quickly changing pictures and impressions he had received during a journey of some weeks in a post-chaise, while still a babe at his mother’s breast.
How absurd this notion seems at first glance. But let’s take a second one and try to imagine what, for an infant, such an excursion must have actually been like: first the horse, its brown, sweating rump, its smell, its constantly bobbing head; the shouts of the horseman, the crack of his whip, the constant clatter of hooves on the cobblestones; the light winking down from the leaves of the trees, the pale faces of those who stand at the side of the road; and always the sensation of being held in the mother’s arms, at the mother’s breast. There is nothing preposterous about the idea that such powerful forces might well seep into the adult imagination over no matter how many years.
As it happens, I have a similar memory, one that derives from about the same age that Hoffman dates his. At the end of San Remo Drive, I tell those gathered at my mother’s funeral what I told them in real life: how at the age of one she and I sat in a rowboat in a lake in Los Angeles. It was probably MacArthur Park. It was probably Sunday, because the man in the boat was talking through a megaphone made from that day’s rolled up funny papers. Was that my father? Or a stranger? Were there even multicolored comics in 1939? If that was, in fact, the date, then my mother might well have been pregnant; it is possible that I could feel my brother moving as she pressed me against her. “Nothing was certain, save for the green grass, the blue sky, the white clouds, and the undeniable fact that my mother was holding me in her arms.”
We all have a first memory. Why is this one mine? What made it stick above, or through, a myriad of others? The answer, I think, is that there was a second rowboat in my life, one of brown lacquered wood that the man who wanted to marry my mother took me out in that same afternoon we visited him at Malibu Beach. I remember how the haze, now more like a fog, descended, cutting us off from the shore, where my mother and brother were waiting. It made the horizon disappear as well. My mother’s suitor, in my opinion a phony Frenchman, shipped his oars. He took out a cigarette. He lit a match, holding the little flame up into the surrounding gloom. It was at that instant that I knew he wanted to kill me. “I had read with absolute certainty the contents of his mind.” That’s what I wrote in “Malibu,” the first story of my Novel from Memory: and that I was able to write it meant, of course, that I had been wrong.
Why did my first memory of a rowboat never leave me? Why did the second memory not only remain but become available to my imagination? The crucial thing, I think, is that an infantile event was echoed by an experience in childhood, and that both were highly charged by an erotic, if not actively oedipal, drama: the proximity of the mother, the threatening father, the megaphone, the oar. Many have remarked that an artist is someone who has not lost contact with his childhood; what I hope to add is that for an event in the past to remain accessible to the artist it must have happened twice.
I do not mean to say that the artist is merely someone who immerses himself in what others have repressed. Madmen do that. To paraphrase what Jung said to James Joyce when he sought help for Lucia, his stricken daughter: she is floundering in the same waters through which you dive. What I have left out of the nexus between memory and imagination is understanding. The artist does not simply reexperience; he shapes. That is the idea that came to me as I started to speak to the mourners at my mother’s funeral. “I am trying to think of my first memory,” I told them, both on the page and in life; and as my mind went back to that day off Malibu Beach, I realized that over time I had come to understand that I had projected my own murderous impulses onto the ersatz Frenchman. He didn’t want to kill me; I wanted to kill him.
I want to give two more examples of—what shall we call it? A twin memory? A doubled recollection? At my desk in Brookline I began to remember more and more: the time our black servants drove my brother and me into the desert; the time two black workers were connecting sewer pipes to our house on San Remo Drive; the time our gang drove down to a bar and brothel in Tijuana. While my psyche was floating thus in the past, the present, with all its demands, intervened. The phone rang. It was a doctor in California. My mother, aged 89, had just had a heart attack. I’d better fly out right away. There is a certain irony in how, at that precise moment, life intersected art. I had been writing a scene about how my mother, emerging from our swimming pool, told me about how she had neglected her second son—“I never picked him up. I never sang to him. I never read him a book”—in lavishing all her love on me. Then, after a kiss, she added, “I’ll tell you the truth. You’d have both been better off if you’d been orphans.”
I stopped the scene. I got on a plane. I arrived at Cedars/Sinai. There was my mother, chipper, lively, asking for her glasses so she could read the latest New Yorker. “Oh, to be eighty again!” she said with a laugh. But the next day I noticed that when she wiped her lips there was blood on the handkerchief. At my alarm she said not to be silly. The ventilator has scratched her throat; she was fine.
But she was not. In the hallway a doctor explained that overnight she had had a second attack; it had ripped a hole in the wall between the two lower ventricles of her heart, and the blood, instead of being pumped out, was pooling between them. No heroic measures would avail. She had only hours to live. My brother, hearing this, cried out mysteriously, “Well, if there’s no life, there’s no death!” and ran from the hospital. I returned to my mother’s room. I saw that her face, in relaxing, was transformed. “It was growing younger before my eyes, as in a film that was running backwards. She was sixty; she was forty; she was the girl who had stepped off the Super Chief at Union Station.” I continued to watch as the blood swished back and forth for another half hour, until she, I think to her own surprise, was gone.
That was on December 27, 2000. The next day I drove out to 1341 San Remo Drive, the house we had bought from the actress Mary Astor in 1947. With my heart in my mouth I walked up the drive and knocked on the door. An elderly lady came out and, after I explained who I was, exclaimed, “I remember Lillian Epstein!” This was the young bride who had bought the house from us nearly a half century before. She invited me in. No sooner had I stepped inside than I did a double take. “Wait! Isn’t that our old dining room table?” She nodded. I turned in the other direction. “And isn’t that our sofa?”
“Yes, dear,” she answered. “And that is your mother’s baby grand.”
She beckoned me through the living room into a small music room and bar that was attached to it. Miss Havisham threw open two cabinet doors. There was our Capehart, just as we’d left it, its arthropod arms immobilized in mid-air. And not just the Capehart. “Here were out old 78s, album after album, Schubert and Schumann and Brahms; Toscanini’s version of the Beethoven symphonies; Robeson’s “Ballad for Americans;” Rogers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart.” It turned out that this family had managed to raise six children in our old house and not move a stick of the furniture.
Everyone has a particular home in their past—often from early adolescence—that has been imprinted on their experience and that will always be theirs, a home that any number of newer inhabitants will only be renting from the true owners. As I stood on that familiar ground I knew not only that this mansion had never left me but that I was going to appropriate it for my new novel. What novel? I hadn’t even known I was writing one. It was there, on those premises, that I realized I was.
In other words, this house on San Remo Drive served the same purposes as the two rowboats. It, too, was doubled: the house from the distant past where my brother and I had climbed the cork trees and dug divots out of the lawn with a seven iron, and the house seen from the new angle of my adulthood and my own mother’s death. Thus it, like the little boat off the Malibu shore, would be subject to my imagination and find its way into San Remo Drive.
In my life, as in the novel, my father died when I was thirteen. Unlike the events in the novel, his place was taken by his identical twin—talk about doubling!—Julius J. Epstein, the man with whom he had written Arsenic and Old Lace, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca. Julie died three days after my mother—that is, on December 30, 2000. In the novel I conflate the two funerals into one. What happened to me at those combined ceremonies is much like what happens to the aged Marcel when he returns for one last gathering at the Princesse de Guermantes’. He can hardly recognize the alluring people into whose society he had attempted to ingratiate himself when a young man. The women are trembling and pale and so bent that it is almost as if their dresses had become entangled in their tombstones. The lips of the men tremble as if they were saying their own final prayer.
So, too, at the funerals I attended I saw many of the glamorous figures—the actors and actresses, the directors and writers and agents—who had so dazzled me with their wit and beauty and bright spirits when I had been a boy in knee pants. They, no less than the members of Parisian society, were huddled atremble together. “They seemed to know they were standing on the edge of a cliff, at the palisade that marked the continent’s end, and that the wind that was blowing about them would seize each and all and like pumice-stone dolls hurl them down.”
Yes, this was a doubled vision: the memory of glamour, the sight of decrepitude. With the rowboats, remember, I had to have an insight into myself: that it was I, not the Frenchman, who had harbored the murderous impulses. I had to learn a lesson at the funerals as well, a lesson that is perhaps the single most essential prerequisite for anyone who hopes to make art. It is the same lesson that comes to Marcel at the Princesse de Guermantes. It can best be described as the shock of mortality. I do not mean the frailty of these figures from the past. No, what Marcel learns, and what I learned as well, is that I too was growing old.
Best to get back on the airplane, return to Massachusetts, and attempt to pick up the words I had left on the page. In a beautiful passage, Matisse writes that the great thing about art is that no matter what the vicissitudes of the painter’s life, no matter what sufferings and privations he might have endured, when he returns to the canvas the sunflower will still stand before him, just as had left it, awaiting its completion. I uncapped my Pelikan pen. I finished, I hope seamlessly, the scene of my mother coming out of the pool.
I am going to leave the last word to Richard, my shadow self, as he completes his first work of art, a painting of the flowers in his mother’s ruined garden. The sad-faced pansies have been uprooted. No matter. He works from memory. “So it is, I discovered, that all art is created: not from the actual objects or the life we see around us, but from the images of our childhood, with its early sorrows and many joys, that we carry undamaged within.”