Seducing the Demon (24 page)

When we’re young, our parents cast these huge shadows. Then they shrink and shrink until it’s time to put them in a box. How would I have survived these metamorphoses without writing? And how would Molly have survived without it? Her acid humor is her survival tool. It ate through whatever shadow I cast.

My demon thinks I want to murder my mother. Can he possibly be right? I have often wondered why writers are so obsessed with murder. Is it because we all need to murder our parents in order to go on?

Writers are murderers of more than parents. They murder everyone they love. Time and again I have found that once I have frozen a person in a book I can hardly remember what the real person was like. While writing, I have the sense of having oversimplified, of fixing the character with too few complexities and too many exaggerations—because writing must necessarily be more dramatic than life—but years later I can only remember the person who inspired the character through the scrim of my own words. Everything else about the person is lost to me.

My first husband, for example. I wrote him as “The Madman” in
Fear of Flying
and now that is all I can remember about him. But he was more than just a madman. Who
was
he? The poetry of his schizophrenia was compelling. He thought he was Jesus Christ, but he had done the research. He was a medieval historian, after all. Did I murder the real person for the sake of the fictional one? Is he still alive? Is he still angry with me? We had such a close connection once and now he is only a character frozen in a book.

Last year I had lunch with my first love from high school, and sometimes I run into him shopping in the New York neighborhood where we both live. When I see him, I hardly recognize him because he looks so unlike the image in my head and his cameo in
Fear of Flying.
He startles me. Do I want him to stay frozen? Not really. But my nostalgia is more comfortable than the reality. I’m sure that in writing about him, I exaggerated to make him more vivid. That’s inevitable. But it knocks off the real person.

When I tell a story at a dinner party, my husband always says, “Remember, this is a story being told by a novelist!” He means I have a tendency to embellish, to make the story more dramatic, to buff up the jokes so they are funnier and shine the dilemmas till they seem symbolic. A storyteller does this naturally, without even being aware of it. My tendency to dramatize murders ordinary life and ordinary people. I care more about drama than ordinary people and ordinary life. I’m lucky to be married to a person who knows this about me and finds it amusing.

Don’t hang out with novelists unless you can live with their murdering real life in favor of fiction. Don’t be a novelist unless you can tolerate this. It’s a short jump from murdering real people to murdering your characters. Most novelists can make that jump for the sake of drama. Novelists always lie about how much it hurts them to murder their characters, but don’t believe them. The passage from life to death is the most dramatic of passages, and novelists love it no matter what they say about weeping over their pages. Novelists love to weep.

Why is crime so rampant in novels? Why is murder such a hardy MacGuffin for novelists? Because there’s nothing more theatrical. Breaking any of the Ten Commandments is good for plotting a novel. But murder and adultery are best. In fact, the more commandments you can break in a single novel, the better.

When I look back on my eight novels so far, I find I haven’t murdered enough people. Death is a great plot device.

The frequency of brutal murder and dismemberment in fairy tales and folk ballads shows us how prevalent these fantasies are. What I fantasize I also fear, because I naturally believe that my foulest fantasies will be turned back against me.

Alan Lomax, the folk historian and collector of traditional ballads, noted that more than half of the folk ballads he collected in America recounted murder, usually the murder of a young woman by a boyfriend.

The interesting thing about folk ballads and fairy tales is that they relate the events of murder with no apologies and no psychologizing. They simply assume everyone will understand that violent behavior is as prevalent, more prevalent in fact, than loving behavior. When we sing Childe ballads or read fairy tales, we are deep in the human unconscious. It’s a dark and bloody place.

 

 

My grandson was born and my father died within one month of each other. My grandson has my father’s father’s name. As I watch Max develop, I see in him things I used to see in my father: a delight in clapping his hands as a kind of speech, the soul of a percussionist, a mad desire to climb as high as he can. I don’t know what stories Max will tell me, but I have the feeling they will be important ones. I have barely begun to make sense of my father’s stories but I believe that if I keep writing about him, I will unravel them. Max is a clean slate, proof that the world is always beginning again. We have complicated conversations in which only two words—“dog” and “car”—are in a common language. Everything else is
lalala
or
deedlee, deedlee.
Yet because I love him so much, I understand him perfectly. If life is a series of intersecting novels, we are only in the prologue. Since I understand everything I love by writing, I will inevitably write about him as I have written about my daughter and as she has written about me. Writing is not a hostile act but an act of understanding—even when it’s satirical, even when it’s bitter. You only write about the things you care about. Indifference doesn’t need to be put into words.

When I was in my twenties, I thought I didn’t want to have children, because Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf didn’t have children. What a schmuck I was. I have learned more from Molly than I ever learned from Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. I expect to learn even more from Max, because I’ve become less self-obsessed.

I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into parenthood, but grandparenthood is easy. I saw him and thought,
Mine.
There was no ambivalence, no anxiety. I always knew he wouldn’t stop breathing. I crawl behind him on the rug in perfect bliss. He stops to inspect a toy and I stop to inspect it too. He makes up nonsense words and I make up nonsense words. Hours go by in a sort of trance. It’s not that he is so much more interesting than my daughter was at that age, but because my anxiety is gone, I can truly experience him. I can see the world from his point of view. I am in the land of deedlee. He has no self-consciousness and I have lost mine.

This was impossible when I was a mother. I was so afraid of being lost in motherhood and angry like my own mother that I fought the dropping of self-consciousness you can experience only with a baby. It’s not that I completely lose my adult mind with Max, but I do at moments. When I come back from the land of deedlee, I am suddenly struck by his vulnerability and how the Nazis would have snatched him from his mother’s arms and killed him. Or killed him in his mother’s arms while I watched. And then killed me. Mercifully— since I wouldn’t want to be in a world where he and she were not. My grandson reminds me of the cruelty of the human race. At his briss I worried about letting him be circumcised for fear a new wave of anti-Semitism would doom him. I wanted his penis to be left alone so as not to mark him. So my joy in him is punctuated by sheer terror. This must be how my grandparents felt. Why else would my grandmother have lathered my little hands between hers, saying she was “washing away the Germans”?

When I look at movies of my daughter as a baby, what I see is the openness of her face. She trusts adults to take care of her. She trusts her mother and father. I watch her nod her head loosely then learn to steady it, learn to grab things, learn to sit up, learn to walk, learn to run, I see her growing confidence. All the while I know that when she is four, her parents will separate and her whole world will come apart. I wish I could seize the film and change its ending. I wish I could protect the baby frozen on this film. Yet when she was four, I could not change anything. Nor could her father. I am so pained by this that I eject the disk.

Not long after Molly’s father and I separated, I wrote a kids’ book about divorce in which everything comes out all right. It was called
Megan’s Book of Divorce
and it featured a spunky little girl who never tired of plotting to bring her parents back together. In it, divorce was a sort of lark. The kid got double presents, double toys, double people to spoil her. She was cynical and knowing about the dad’s girlfriend and the mom’s boyfriend. She played the adults against each other.

I look at the book now and I think it wasn’t about Molly at all but about my own wish fulfillment. If I could have really gotten inside Molly’s head and dealt with the divorce, the book would have been very dark. But I was trying to make it all O.K.—as much for myself as for Molly. I was trying to rewrite history in the guise of a children’s story.

I often do this in writing and don’t realize it till years have passed. I cannot bear very much reality. I often wonder how people who don’t write endure their lives. At least I can get through the pain by making up stories. Sometimes my funniest stories have come out of the blackest despair.

 

 

When I go over to my daughter’s house to play with my grandson, I find him surrounded by educational toys. Everything he touches counts, pronounces the names of colors, oinks, moos, neighs, barks or sings in an irritating little electronic voice. He is drowning in didacticism.

What are we so afraid of? Are we afraid these kids won’t learn by imitation the way the rest of us did? Why do we need all these Baby Einstein toys? There is a kind of panic inherent in this endless preaching. It’s as if we think our children are in danger of whiling away their early years in fantasy. God forbid. Every moment of their lives must be crammed with counting and spelling. I notice that Max’s proudest achievement is in finding the little switches that turn these voices off. He is forever turning toys over to probe their mechanical guts. Aha! Rebellion! This generation will surprise us with their reaction to all this motorized talking. Will he disconnect all the robots in sheer fury and read books instead? Already he loves to sit contemplatively and turn the pages of books. We may be surprised by the reaction of this generation to our cramming didactic toys down their throats. I hope so. Play is far more important than drilling. If kids can’t play, who can?

This love for didacticism and mistrust of fantasy invades every corner of our culture. It must stem from America’s puritanical origins. But when fantasy does creep into children’s lives, they are so grateful for it. This accounts for the success of Harry Potter and
The Lord of the Rings.
Children don’t need more cramming. Fantasy is what they need.

In the time I have written and rewritten this book, Max has gone from six months to nearly two. He now calls me in the morning and says, “Hi Erica, Hi Erica, Hi Erica. I love you.”

Because I have returned from the odyssey I’ve described here, I am able to give myself to him completely. Margaret Mead, who was one of my mentors—though I only met her once briefly and knew her chiefly from her books and articles—thought that the way we raise children was of paramount importance to culture. She studied it all her life—whether in New Guinea or the United States. Whenever I see Max exploring his world, I think of her extraordinary understanding of children and our bond with them. She once said that instead of complaining that a child cried so much and kept us from our other work, we should say, “The child smiled so much.”

I think back on all the dire predictions that were made in the sixties and seventies—
If women have the birth control pill they’ll stop having babies, if women work outside the home their children will be criminals, if women earn money they’ll scare away men—
and
all of
them have proved to be absurd. Women are still wanting babies and having babies. Men have been liberated to be fathers. Children are still hypnotizing their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. The world has not stopped. What I have learned is that the fearmongers are usually wrong about change. It’s wonderful to have lived long enough to see it.

“How was the Toddler Center?” I ask Max, who now goes up to Barnard one afternoon a week to play with other toddlers. We are in my study, where I have a huge toy train set waiting for him. He is engrossed by the toy trains, making them crash and fall all over the floor.

I make long lines of trains and he proceeds to pick them up and drop them as though he were King Kong. He is not interested in talking to me about school or anything that is not here and now. All he wants to do is play with trains. But he is entranced with naming.

“Ok-y-pus,” he says, picking up the aquarium car with the octopus inside.

“Zebra,” he says, lifting the car with the zebra that pops up.

“Ga-raff,” he says, looking at the car with the tall giraffe.