William Eggleston: The Outlands, Selected Works
One hundred never-before-seen images by America’s greatest living photographer and a new short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Rachel Kushner.
martyrs to the cause. They bequeath demons and migraines. They trample boundaries and withhold affections. They undermine or usurp ambitions; it can seem as difficult to draw a line between the emotionally undernourished and the artistically inclined as between the protofeminist and the willful teen. Thurman does not take sides, but nor does she pull punches. (Amid the screeching maternal wipeouts, it is lovely to come upon the 2017 tribute to Maira Kalman’s mother, Sara Berman. After her divorce, at sixtythree, Berman dressed exclusively in white, for reasons she never explained. Her wardrobe wound up as an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Emily Dickinson was in her late twenties when her mother suffered a nervous breakdown, a slow-motion event that sent the poet to the sanctuary of her room. The years of Emily Norcross Dickinson’s collapse and of Emily Dickinson’s greatest productivity coincided. The illness seems to have contributed to a violent neediness on the daughter’s part. Certainly it knocked Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom Emily Dickinson cultivated a long friendship, sideways. “I never had a mother,” Dickinson explained to Higginson. Bravely, she speculated, “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” From the wings Thurman chimes in:
The daughters of depressive women often feel a propitiatory impulse to make some sacrifice of their own aggression and desire, perhaps because they are afraid to overwhelm an unstable figure on whom they depend; because they feel guilty about their own vitality; or to disguise rage—as much from themselves as from their parent.
Marina Abramović may have had the opposite problem. Communist partisans in World War II Yugoslavia, her parents served on the front lines. They wound up richly rewarded by Tito, who appointed Abramović’s father to his elite guard, her mother, Danica, to an agency that supervised historic monuments. Danica encouraged her daughter’s art but could be severe. Marina lived in fear of her. She also attempted any number of ploys to claim her mother’s attention, for which she was beaten.
Danica modeled an “ostentatious stoicism” that anyone familiar with Abramović’s work will recognize. She did not believe in pain. The toxicity of maternal self-sacrifice hangs about Abramović’s childhood. “Nobody has, and nobody ever will, hear me scream,” Thurman quotes Danica as boasting, two paragraphs after Abramović has separated masochism from art for Thurman: “The sense of purpose I feel [is] to do something heroic, legendary, and transformative; to elevate viewers’ spirits and give them courage. If I can go through the door of pain to embrace life on the other side, they can, too.”
“Wanting people to like you,” the novelist Rachel Cusk tells Thurman, “corrupts your writing.” Cusk got a head start, in a household that felt repressive and disapproving. She was blamed for everything; her childhood was a study in guilt and anger. Only once, at a particularly dire juncture, did she feel that her parents loved her. Birthdays might invite phone calls about the pain of her delivery, in an understaffed hospital, in a blizzard.
Cusk felt she met for the first time with kindness only as a young woman, at Oxford. Grievances, real and imagined, piled up. Attempts at a peace with her parents misfire. Cusk determines finally, near the end of her time with Thurman, that it is easier to live as an outcast. We do not need Thurman to remind us that Cusk’s mother is familiar to us from several novels, in which we have met women who can seem, in Thurman’s words, “a perfect storm of narrow-mindedness, seething resentments, and vituperative retaliation.”
The mirrors are not always so perfect nor the lips so pursed. Alison Bechdel’s mother passed along the message that life should not interfere with art. (Both Cusk’s and Bechdel’s mothers had found themselves standing professionally before closed doors that opened only later, in time to admit their daughters. The good fortune may have been difficult to forgive.) Thurman has a chance to observe Helen and Alison Bechdel in action: they circle each other, avoiding the personal, holding each other at a formal distance “like partners in a minuet.” Alison Bechdel works in a genre to which women came late and which, in its essence, subverts the parental stronghold. “I sometimes think I became a cartoonist because my mother simply doesn’t get comics,” she remarks, comparing her work to a ringtone to which the adults in the room are deaf.
The desire for attention is both crazy-making and futile. It falls to Alison Bechdel’s partner to note that Helen has a rather oblique way of expressing herself: “She brags about Alison to other people, for example, but won’t praise her in person.” She will carefully correct Bechdel’s pages but offer no comment on them. She withholds hugs. It is her mother’s very refusal to touch her that powers Bechdel’s 2012 Are You My Mother? With an assist from Alice Miller, the influential analyst, Thurman steps in. From the fragile, creatively frustrated mother, the child who demonstrates her otherness will not elicit the desired care. She will instead make a bid for compliance, stashing her unruly feelings underground. She will do anything to please. (For some time the working title of Bechdel’s book was a play on Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child.) Even with Are You My Mother?,
Bechdel worries. Would the book fail at “one of its prime objectives: making herself visible to the one living person by whom she most longed to be seen”? Thurman solicits Helen Bechdel’s opinion on her daughter’s new pages. She gets little satisfaction. Helen is less forthcoming still with Alison. Reviewing six years of work, she allows: “Well, it coheres.”
Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the Little House on the Prairie
books, also leads us back to the land of hunger artistry. Again a mother’s martyrdom reads, to a daughter, as personal reproach. Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, felt her parents had abandoned her to an emotional desert. She could do nothing right. Her mother proffered not an ounce
of affection. “She made me so miserable as a child that I never got over it,” Rose wrote in her journal. Rose wound up collaborating with her mother on the Little House volumes, for which she served, depending on the account, as either editor or ghostwriter. The two divided a career between them, a particularly odd arrangement as Wilder had believed she was writing an autobiography. For Rose the result seems to have been an opportunity to belittle the woman who belittled her. “I’m trying to train you as a writer for the big market,” she lectures her fifty-eight-year-old mother. “You must understand that what sold was your article, edited. You must study how it was edited, and why . . . Above all, you must listen to me.” The relationship is turned on its dissatisfying head. A child lays down the law; a parent is punished. In Thurman’s telling, the case is one of a mother infantilizing a daughter who, intentionally or not, returns the favor.
A
published essay reads differently when it lands between hard covers. It has aged or matured. Sometimes it has gone stale. Its spark may or may not survive. And it has acquired a family. It exists not only in itself but in its resemblances and distinctions. Its siblings may show it up. Tics and preoccupations reveal themselves, as, to varying degrees, does the author herself. For whatever reason, the “I” of Cleopatra’s Nose is more forthcoming than the “I” of A Left-Handed Woman.
With time, Thurman has removed herself to the middle distance.
To return for a minute to the dancing: “There were still not many avenues of glory open to ambitious virgins who couldn’t tap dance,” she regretted in 2002, recalling her childhood search for a heroic future. “The career prospects for a girl who couldn’t tap dance,” she notes this time around, “were depressingly limited.” The yearning is tempered. Glory is nowhere on the table.
Thurman’s breadth of interests is great—she has written on pearls, on architecture, on hair products, on tofu—but with the new anthology she has also largely left the inanimate world behind. She writes less often of men, although, as she points out, four of the seven men in these pages dressed women for a living. She gravitates still toward the convention flouters and definition defiers, toward the taboos that, internalized, erupt into art, toward the women who flee the frame. “Even to establish the bare facts of her life in a conversation, like the one we were having,” she writes of the playwright Yasmina Reza, “stirs her fear of captivity.”
What else do we know about this person writing as, or at least masquerading as, Judith Thurman? She is an only child. She enjoyed a short career as a Catholic. For her tenth birthday, she got the Amelia Earhart overnight bag of her dreams. In the late 1960s she butted heads with her father, who did not agree that Kissinger was a war criminal. She likes dogs. She wanted to be a brain surgeon, a profession at which she has arguably succeeded. She can count in Japanese. She takes her espresso bien serré. She owns two strands of pearls. She is not claustrophobic. She speaks four languages and is especially fluent in fashion; for some part of the late 1960s, she was a YSL addict.
She does the crossword. She was an unwed mother who raised her son in a Manhattan brownstone. She met Balthus in her twenties and Jackie O in her forties. She is a good sport: yes, the linguistics convention, but she has also played paintball with a group of twelve-year-old boys. She could use an additional closet. She remains—I can testify to this, having shared a stage with her—a lefty. She may well have flirted with badgirldom, but she has made imperfect strides. Before she accepts a drink in Japan, at 10 AM, she does the math. It is a reassuring 9 PM in New York. She frequents thrift shops. She is wary of sentimentality, allergic to grandiosity, drawn to virtuosity in every form. She clambers past received wisdoms like a mountain goat.
As it turns out, there is reason why she might have an eye out for the fragile, critical, or catastrophizing mother. Hers, we know from Cleopatra’s Nose,
was the first of Thurman’s lost women, “a fugitive from a life she might have lived.” Exquisitely attuned to language, Alice Thurman—briefly a New Yorker
receptionist, less briefly an English and Latin teacher—was a grammarian of the first rank. On the publication of Ulysses, she punctuated Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Thurman’s high school essays came in for the same treatment. When her first New Yorker galleys were returned to her, they bore a set of markings familiar from her childhood, their margins “almost a work of art, every inch finely tattooed with wispy hieroglyphs, like the feet of a Moroccan bride.”
Nor, as we might have suspected, was that all. At eight, Judith Thurman took to writing verse. Her mother recopied the juvenilia into a binder, inserting among the pages half a dozen poems of her own. Later she insisted they were Thurman’s work. She had simply forgotten them. With that single act of maternal gaslighting—as Thurman notes, boundary-obliterating Alice was simultaneously showing her up and cheering her on—a career was hatched. Thurman writes, she says, partly “to discover the nature of my affinity with an elusive subject who was only rarely real to herself.”
Thurman reports that with each subject she gropes her way along, to be surprised eventually “with a private truth I couldn’t otherwise have expressed freely.” The floundering— that tentative feeling of the way— brings to mind Elizabeth Hardwick’s description of the essay: “the slithery form, wearisomely vague and as chancy as trying to catch a fish in the open hand.” Thurman and her obsessions often recall Hardwick, though as far as I can tell the two writers converge only with Margaret Fuller. She is a nineteenth-century rock star in both of their views, if a more exasperating one in Hardwick’s rendition. Here is Hardwick on Fuller’s tendency to push male friendships to the limit and then double back: “She is so often not quite in touch, confused perhaps by the dramas of friendship, a sort of insufficiency in nuance, missing signals.” Thurman tenders a simple formula: “She could love and desire intensely, but rarely at the same moment, and she could think and feel deeply, but not often in the same sentence.” Less lush than Hardwick, she shares her gift for distillation.
Thurman too is equal parts cerebral and seductive, though foregoes the occasional splashes of vinegar. She pulverizes clods of research. She is wildly, often thrillingly allusive. The worldliness may be her trademark. Not everyone can get away with comparing Anne Frank’s gift for detachment to Jane Austen’s, or Chanel’s aristocratic followers with those of Joan of Arc. The essayist is by definition a magpie but it takes a particularly well-traveled one to locate the Goya in Jacqueline Kennedy’s funeral veil or the streak of Rousseau in Teresa Heinz Kerry’s pronouncements, to suggest Marie Antoinette as a prototype for Emma Bovary, or to compare the “chasteness” of Alice Oswald’s Homer translations to Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “In both cases,” writes Thurman of the decidedly different casualty lists, “you find yourself mourning other people’s children as if they were your own.”
Can a woman, I found myself wondering as I read A Left-Handed Woman, be debonair? The word carries with it a nonchalance that has been unavailable to those of us at permanent odds with our hair, who tug our onstage skirts toward our knees. But it is a sly insouciance that so lights up these pages and that makes Thurman’s voice so distinct. She brings a dash of the Continent to the task, smuggling perfectly rounded epigraphs into the mix with the ease of an Old World maître d’hôtel leading you to the sole meunière. (Reigning over an intellectual century, Beauvoir and Sartre are, in Thurman’s hands, “a pharaonic couple of incestuous deities.”) She admits that she thrills to the perfectly formed sentence but we hardly need her to tell us as much. The voice is so exact it can pinch. Her prose has high cheekbones.
Thurman leaves us with her meditation on D. M. Black’s new translation of Purgatorio. It’s a thoughtful gift, as— mid-ascent to the heavenly world— Dante offers up an address where, with a bit of effort on our parts, demons and diabolical habits fall away. The process, observes Thurman, is “slow and arduous, like analysis.” Also like analysis, it promises relief. She sends us striding toward the liminal heights. And then, with six liberating lines of Dante, our essayist darts off. There are crumbs on the chair. You conclude the appetizers really do have it all over the entrées. Tell me you don’t see what I mean about the lingering perfume.