PAUL BAILEY
on the outstanding artistry of the writer Dorothy Gallagher
I have been in love with Dorothy Gallagher’s writing since 2002, when I first read her unusual autobiography How I Came into My Inheritance and
Other True Stories. The book, as its title suggests, is a collection of reminiscences set down in story form, which means it is free from the usual constraints of the conventional memoir.
Gallagher’s true stories reflect, and respect, the messiness of everyday life, its inconsequentiality. They are set, mostly, in New York City, where she was born and raised. Her parents, Bella and Isidore, were Jewish immigrants from European countries in which pogroms and poverty had become distressingly commonplace. Isidore fled from Lomazy, a ‘dismal small town’ in Russian-occupied Poland, by stowing away on a ship bound for America. He was caught whilst still at sea. Gallagher’s grandfather was persuaded to cover the cost of his son’s passage and Isidore repaid the money to him in a registered envelope postmarked Galveston, Texas, and dated some time in 1914.
In Galveston, which was ‘hot as hell’, Isidore found a job driving a horse and a wagon filled with bananas which he sold to farmers in outlying farms. He was on the road for weeks on end, sleeping in the wagon and eating little else but bananas. He left Texas and travelled across the States in search of employment before settling in the Bronx. He met his Ukrainian bride on American soil. They married in 1920.
Bella is a radiant presence in all three of her daughter’s memoirs. (The second, which contains appropriate photographs, is called Strangers in
the House. It came out in 2006.) While Isidore was busy earning a living in the building trade, Bella kept house and attended evening classes. The couple were united in their admiration of the Soviet Union under both Lenin and Stalin, but hesitant about describing themselves as Communists – one of the dirtiest words in America back then as it is right now. They preferred the term ‘progressives’. They remained so, even after Bella’s sister Rachile and her husband Victor had returned from the Ukraine in 1933, completely disillusioned by what they had witnessed there. The newly-weds had visited that earthly paradise only two years earlier and had decided to make it their home. But it was in those intervening months that Stalin began the first of his many purges. The ‘progressives’ listened to the voluble Rachile as she warned them of the horrors to come but paid no heed to her. She was hysterical by nature. And now, 14 years on, comes Stories I Forgot to Tell You, which reads almost like a coda to its predecessors. It isn’t as lively or eventful as them, but there is a reason for this. Gallagher’s third and final husband, Ben Sonnenberg, with whom she lived for 30 years, died in 2010. When they first contemplated marrying, he told her that he has been diagnosed as having a mild form of multiple sclerosis. The disease didn’t stay that way. She charts its awful progress in Strangers in the House and the stoicism with which Ben endured it.
There are, as always in her work, scenes of grisly humour. In 1991, when the illness was beginning to assume total control of Ben’s body, the Sonnenbergs hired the services of a woman Gallagher refers to only as B. For three years, B seemed to be the perfect secretary-cum-carer, until Dorothy noticed that Ben’s bank account was dwindling steadily. Cash disappeared from his wallet. Ben, who had grown fond of B to the extent of helping her with a documentary film project, retained his faith in her. When B was eventually caught out, as late as 1999, it was discovered that she had robbed her now desperately sick and trusting employer of $40,000 above her agreed salary.
The wonderful thing about these three exceptional books is that they are often shockingly, hilariously funny, as befits a woman who takes her unlovely second husband’s Irish surname as her nom-de-plume. Thanks to her mother, she has immersed herself in the great works of Russian and European fiction, so that it isn’t surprising that her portraits of aunts, uncles and cousins recall Gogol or Chekhov or, in the case of the aged Isidore, the Dickens who created Grandfather Smallweed in Bleak House. The fact that these vivid characters are presented in an anecdotal fashion is testament to the seriousness of her artistry. The reader smiles, or laughs, and then begins to wonder why they are so amused.
Stories I Forgot to Tell You tells of the life she has led since Ben Sonnenberg’s death. She finishes writing a biography of Lillian Hellman and moves to a small apartment. Then, one day, she is sitting in front of the computer and, on the instant, begins writing a story for the husband who was the great love of her complicated life. One story leads to another. Some are about the past while others, most poignantly, are set in the present – about the pigeons mating on her balcony, for instance. She deals with the pain of bereavement with a bracing lack of sentimentality. Dorothy Gallagher, whose exiled family suffered untold but unforgotten misery, could never pen a misery memoir. I think I can hear her cackling at the very idea of it.
Stories I Forgot to Tell You by Dorothy Gallagher (NYRB, £13.99)
These three exceptional books are often shockingly, hilariously funny