Whatever happened to Tama Janowitz?
Bright lights, big hair: Once upon a time, in a gallery somewhere in Alphabet City, you might have glimpsed the 1980s NYC literati swilling champagne and snorting Bolivian marching powder under the gleeful gaze of photogs from Interview, the Soho Weekly News and the New York Post’s Page 6.
Dubbed the literary Brat Pack, writers Tama Janowitz, Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and Fran Lebowitz pioneered a kind of authorial celebrity that’s become commonplace. Young, smart, photogenic, they exuded a detached downtown cool.
Janowitz joined the club with her second book, the 1986 story collection “Slaves of New York.” The story that got everybody’s attention was “Modern Saint #271,” featuring a part of the male anatomy that dared not speak its name.
“Nobody wanted that story,” Janowitz writes in “Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction,” not even the photocopied magazine that finally published it. “Nobody then used the word penis except perhaps for doctors.… You can’t explain to people, when you are writing about the past, how taboo things were then ….”
Janowitz memorably evokes her anxiety when first speaking the story’s opening sentence — “After I became a prostitute I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size” — at a group reading at Symphony Space. “Out in the audience there was a sharp intake of air … and then they began to laugh … [i]t was like throwing a bucket of water on everybody. Icecold water. They woke up, they were alive, my story was alive.”
It’s a great scene, the instant a writer suddenly realizes her power. Sad to say, it’s one of the few moments in “Scream” when one gets a sense that Janowitz may have been an author whose work changed how Americans write about sex and power (and real estate).
But Janowitz, like her New York cohort, is still best known for her early work (with the exception of Ellis, who saw controversy and success with “American Psycho”). All are essentially one-hit wonders, and some readers may hope Janowitz can break out of this particular club with “Scream.”
While there are some fine and even heartbreaking chapters, the book is surprisingly scattershot, leapfrogging from the recent past to the author’s childhood, to New York City and London in the 1970s, to her 1980s heyday, when she was on the cover of New York magazine, beautiful with a Medusa’s mane of dark hair, and palled around with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed.
But the balance is weighted toward dysfunction rather than glamour. Janowitz’s father was a wealthy, philandering, pothead psychiatrist who, well into his 80s, consorts with drug dealers and keeps a sawed-off shotgun under his bed. As depicted here, his behavior to his wife and daughter was so appalling that one wonders why on earth Janowitz didn’t sever contact with him decades ago.
Her accounts of her mother, the noted poet Phyllis Janowitz, form the memoir’s emotional core, especially as Phyllis develops dementia and her daughter moves to upstate New York to care for her. There, the former scenester consorts with a hunky contractor, but her observations of the people she meets are off-puttingly sour and condescending.
“They had the bleak haunted look of men who had never eaten anything outside of the hamburger, mayonnaise and Dorito food categories. … [Yet] they were all as interesting to me — or more interesting! — than the ‘sculptors’ and ‘artists’ and ‘actors’ in New York hustling and jockeying for position and trying to impress ... . ” Most of Janowitz’s fish-out-of-water anecdotes about rural life backfire: one sympathizes with the socalled hicks she’s lambasting rather than the poor little “it” girl.
Janowitz herself remains pretty much a cipher, dropping information but not insight. She owns eight poodles: Why? She appears to be sleeping with the contractor and also still married to her husband — what’s that about?
We’re told what bum luck she’s had, often living in poverty; yet she owns real estate, graduated from Barnard cum laude, received an M.A. from Hollins on a full scholarship and was accepted to the Yale School of Drama. In the 1970s she lived in London and witnessed the birth of U.K. punk. After the success of “Slaves of New York,” she met famous artists and writers and got magazine assignments to travel to Machu Picchu, Egypt, the Amazon, Wyoming, Anguilla.
But it’s all described so fleetingly, randomly and dismissively that the effect is like meeting an intriguing stranger who, by way of introduction, holds up a box of personal photos, dumps them onto the floor, then walks away.
“I wasn’t writing about ‘nice’ people ,” Janowitz states about her early work. “I found rotten people to be more interesting.”
Her memoir features a lot of rotten people but its final chapters, dealing with her beloved mother’s death, are harrowing and heartrending. One wishes she’d chosen to focus more on this one complicated, loving, resilient person and less on the rotten ones.