I Begin Typing My Mother's Stories . . .
From Black Mountain to the shores of Lake Ajijic
“The Dance at The End of the War,” the memoiristic title story of the proposed short story collection of my mother, is the last story she published. Like most of her stories, there’s hardly a line between what she wrote and what she lived. At the time, I was living in North Carolina, and an acquaintance of mine was editing a special issue of The North Carolina Literary Review on Black Mountain College. My mother had recently written her autobiographical story about her time there, and it seemed a perfect fit for the issue. While it’s the last story she ever wrote, it’s the first story I entered into my laptop. I hadn’t intended to footnote it, but it happened rather organically.
Robert Motherwell and Elaine Gottlieb
Here’s how the annotated story opens:
THE DANCE AT THE END OF THE WAR
When the bomb fell, Sylvia was being driven to a small college in the south[1] that had given her a painting scholarship for one summer month. She was terrified by the news and told this to her brother, Arnold,[2] who was driving. Still in uniform, he could only comment – that means the war will be over soon—
He wanted desperately to have the war over because he had married a Belgian girl,[3] who hadn’t been able to join him yet. He also wanted to be finished with his stint in the Army so he could set up a medical practice in one of the New York suburbs. Everything had begun to annoy him. He drove faster than he should have, and expressed his dislike of attendants at the gas stations.
--When they see my northern license, they get hostile. Let’s split before we’re caught in some redneck flak.
They had stayed overnight at a guest house in Virginia, in a room with twin beds. She felt self-conscious about this, afraid that the landlady might suspect them of not being brother and sister. But when she and Arnold were each in their beds, separated by a night table, they laughed at the idea.
--You certainly get weird notions – her brother said.
She noticed an expression on his face, before he turned his back to sleep, that made her think of how much he must be missing his wife.
Sylvia wished they had brought some liquor. She needed a drink. But what she really wanted was to have the other bed occupied by Simon, her lover, who had just this day sailed for Hawaii.[4] She had met him at a USO dance. He had been teaching paratroopers to jump, but actually he was a writer. In Hawaii he was to be one of a team writing the history of the war in the Pacific[5]. She didn’t know when he would return or even if she loved him. Really loved him. Or if she understood what that meant. What was one supposed to feel? She missed him. Or was it just her body that missed him? She wanted to hurry and settle life’s problems, now that the war was certainly ending – in a way that suggested the end of all life on earth . . ..
This photo of my mother was taken in the summer of 1945 at Black Mountain and shows her with her teacher, the well-known artist, Robert Motherwell. My mother was torn for a time early on between visual art and writing. While she won a fellowship to study art at Black Mountain, she was also having success as a writer: a story in the Kenyon Review, a contract for an as-yet unwritten novel. Motherwell suggested she should go down to Mexico to finish her novel. After all, he told her absurdly, “there have never been any great women artists.” Naïve enough and unfortunate enough to live in a time when men could easily get away with such remarks, she gave up painting after that. Still, many of her journals contain ink-drawn portraits of women, disembodied and melancholic, perhaps in reaction to men who have stifled their dreams.
The story aside, in early August of 1946, my mother wrote from Mexico to my grandmother in Brooklyn. The letter begins with my mother’s attitude (at the time) towards personal risk. She began:
Dear Mother,
It is impossible to live without risking oneself. If you take no risks, you maintain a safe and monotonous existence. I think I am far from being courageous. It isn’t natural for me to risk myself. I have to force myself to do so, because I know that without activity there is no current. Things don’t move, life doesn’t progress or develop unless one strikes out in an original direction.
If I had never taken my airplane ride I would have missed not only an exhilarating experience, but a lot of time that was used to great advantage in Cuernevaca, where I met some very interesting people whom I shall continue to see. Then there are also people I know here through Meyer Schapiro. I am by no means alone . . ..
This must have been in response to my grandmother Ida writing a letter expressing concern, perhaps praising in a backhanded way my mother for being “courageous,” but asking her not to take too many risks. My mother, a romantic (though not incurable, it would turn out) sounds to me closer to twenty than thirty in this letter, with her tone of “I know how to live,” and the implied, “you don’t know how to live.” The two of them never quite understood one another – my mother thinking my grandmother too bourgeoise, and my grandmother thinking my mother too impractical (I’m assuming, as my grandmother never said an unkind word about my mother in front of me and my mother only hinted at difficulties with Ida, as we called her instead of “grandma”).
When my mother started her journey to Mexico, she wasn’t alone, but traveled with a woman her own age, with whom she soon parted ways. A falling out, my mother feeling her companion was too frivolous. Soon, she was on her own, meeting American expats and Mexican writers and artists, living fully in the moment of her greatest promise. She settled eventually in a cottage on the shores of Lake Chapala owned by an expat German couple, but her social life seems to have been active. At some point during her stay in Mexico, she traveled to Mexico City where she was invited to the house of Frieda Kahlo. The details are fuzzy but she told me more than once that when she showed up at Kahlo’s house, the great artist was not there. She was off accepting an award for her art. I wish I could quiz my mother now about more of that visit – what I remember most is that she was shown the artist’s bedroom, its walls crammed with art, and the centerpiece, a wooden bed that was itself a work of art. Perhaps I will eventually discover more about this visit in the vast store of letters and manuscripts she left behind.
[1] Black Mountain College
[2] Allan
[3] English, actually. Allan had served at the Battle of the Bulge, and often talked about a family in Liege who put him up. His wife was my Aunt Josephine, nicknamed Renny, who arrived on the Queen Mary as a war bride in 1946, was the first among the 456 women off the boat. She and Allan were treated by two reporters from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Herald Tribune to a night on the town and an article about them a day later.
[4] Cecil Hemley sailed for Hawaii in preparation for the anticipated invasion of Japan on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. In actuality, he and my mother had not yet met, and would not meet for another five years. She often talked about this other man, whom she had known since high school, but his name escapes me now.
[5] Definitely more obscure than that. It was actually The History of Censorship in the War in the Pacific.