A collection of dreamy and somewhat nightmarish images from my files, some disturbing, others confusing, and still others just plain weird. A few are images of what is now popularly called liminal space, a phenomenon which I thought I was the only one to perceive, as in - why does this familiar place look oh, so strange and frightening? Why is everything just a little bit "off"? HOW DO I GET OUT OF HERE?
Saturday, October 8, 2022
Thursday, October 6, 2022
OSCAR LEVANT: Good-bye, and good night
GOOD-NIGHT, OSCAR LEVANT
CANDICE BERGEN APRIL 1 1973
Notes on an all too brief encounter in Hollywood
APRIL 1 1973 CANDICE BERGEN
“Good-night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are. . . .”
On an April afternoon in Los Angeles, the Walter Matthaus gave a luncheon for the Charles Chaplins. People began waging their campaign for invitations in early March.
The weather was sublime; the kind of day that strangled you with the joy of living. It was a day that made abandoning the East for the West a rational move. It was a day that made everyone glad to be alive . . . or almost everyone. . . .
Sulking in the shadows, a spectral silhouette, loomed the face that launched a thousand analysts. Was I seeing a ghost? I thought Oscar Levant had been dead for years.
This was one of his rare sorties of the last decade and he observed it by scowling fiercely from the deep recesses of a rocking chair.
A die-hard New Yorker assaulted by western resort wear, he wore a dark and somber suit that looked like it last saw action in the 1950’s with Harpo Marx at “21” or Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin.
His feet sat passively in slender, shining wing tips reviewing the passing parade of patent leather boots and white Gucci loafers. It was as if he were a British colonialist struggling to maintain civility amidst savages.
“Oscar Levant”—the name was a household word, like “polio" or “anemia;" a name synonymous with merciless humor, hypochondria, insomnia, insanity, George Gershwin, and chain-smoking. He was a brilliant, sickly legend—terrified of living and petrified of dying.
I loved him in movies but he always looked like the stand-in’s stand-in, or the anemic son of a studio head. There was this ugly guy wisecracking with Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, or falling over Fred Astaire and I could never figure out how he ever got there.
But in Rhapsody in Blue he played himself—concert pianist, wit, Gershwin’s old friend and foremost interpreter of his music—and he stole the movie.
He wrote three books—A Smattering of Ignorance, The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, and The Unimportance of Being Oscar—crammed with anecdotes about celebrities and insights about himself: his army of analysts, the legion of doctors, his addiction to pills, the convulsions, the shock treatments, the mental hospitals. All told in crisp, concise story form.
His television show in the late Fifties was a weekly video happening. People everywhere were exclaiming, “Did you hear what Oscar said last night!” Because Oscar would say anything. And did.
Taking time out for assorted nervous breakdowns, he returned to the air in 1960, announcing:
“This is Oscar Levant in Meet The Mess. This is Oscar Levant, who has made insanity America’s favorite hobby. My show is now syndicated. It goes to the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Bellevue in New York, and the psychiatric ward at Mt. Sinai in Los Angeles.”
I was never so excited to meet anyone. What with his penchant for pretty girls and my fixation for ailing underdogs, we were instantly smitten.
He clutched my arm and I helped him outside. He seemed very ill and had great difficulty walking. “How old are you?” he asked, without much hope.
“Twenty-five.”
“I’m sixty-five,” he said proudly. And while he looked awful, it was hard to believe. He seemed more like a little kid imitating a dying old man.
“I’ve always been very boyish,” he offered offhandedly. “William Le Baron at RKO called me Peter Pan. . . .” Tremors contorted his face into grimaces, interrupting his speech.
I asked Oscar if he were all right. What a dumb question.
“My wife took me to a doctor and he treated me for Parkinson’s disease, which it turned out I didn’t have,” he said venomously, “but the treatment gave me Parkinson’s symptoms.” He stopped short.
Looking steely and suspicious, years of service on her sleeve, his wife June appeared and took his arm, announcing as if to a child, “Come on Oscar, it’s time to eat lunch now.”
He glowered at her furiously, muttering, “I read where Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack from smoking too much. Maybe I should start again.” And sulking and seething, he was firmly led away.
After lunch, I asked him if I could take a photograph. “Of course,” June answered quickly. “Where do you want us?”
I pointed to a chair I had for Oscar. He had barely lowered himself onto it when June landed on his lap. His face went ashen and he limped into the house, cawing crazily, “June’s trying to murder me! She sat on my lap and almost killed me. . . . She almost broke my legs!”
Later, I went to say good-bye to Oscar. “Will you talk to me?” he pleaded, immersed in an overstuffed sofa.
“I’m sorry, I have to leave.”
“Can’t you stay a little longer?” he asked weakly.
“I really can’t, I’m sorry,” and I bent down to give him a kiss.
“I love you,” he said plaintively, looking up at me from the depths of the couch.
“I love you too,” I said. And I did.
On a Thursday, four months I later, I called him about possibly arranging an interview the following week. “Can’t you come today?” he croaked urgently, as if next week would be too late. I could.
It was the same old, large house he had lived in for twenty years— across from Jimmy Stewart, down the block from Lucille Ball—the kind of house you don’t notice on a street with homes designed to be seen.
Oscar sank slowly into a chair in the living room—faint from opening the front door. There were no maids. The house was silent and simple.
With his pajamas discreetly buttoned at the neck while a robe, slightly askew, slid off his shoulders, he looked like a kid home sick from school.
Extraordinary hands, a pale, translucent yellow, dangled delicately from his sleeves—elegant and sensitive contradictions of the fiendish face. His furtive eyes were a faded green and his teeth looked like old piano keys. His hair lay limply in oily strands, and blistered, black leather slippers hung on veined, snow-white feet. As a physical specimen, he deviated violently from the ideal.
It was as if his face and body had already begun to die. Oscar was merely dispensing with preliminaries.
He camouflaged his terror with toughness and impatience, bombarding me intensively with stories familiar from his books.
“You know what I said about Zsa Zsa Gabor? She not only worships the Golden Calf; she barbecues it for lunch.
“And I used to say I grew organic marijuana and I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
“I also said ‘I live on the periphery’ and ‘So little time, so little to do,’” he announced proudly.
Squeezing out the words with winces and grimaces, he sped on in spurts, “Judy Garland loved me. We met and she hugged me and I said, ‘This is the greatest embrace of pharmacopoeia in history.’
“Joe Kennedy loved me too. He leaned over to me once at Pavilion and said, ‘You know, you’re one of the only Jews I like.’”
The stories flowed like wine. “When Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe got married and Marilyn became Jewish, I said, ‘Now she’s kosher, he can eat her.’ And they took me off the air,” he crowed triumphantly.
“You didn’t see my show. I was brilliant on that show. It was after I had left all the mental hospitals, God, all the pills I took. . . .”
He continues in frantic free association, “Did you see Mick Jagger on the Cavett show? All that hollering and sybaritic dancing. He seemed overripe, priapic. Do you know what ‘priapic’ means? A continual state of erection. And it’s very. . . .” He begins to sing, “It’s very clear . . .” and trails off.
“I had quite a time in London in 1946. I was slightly priapic myself. There was a club . . . well, I laid every dame in the place—except a Jewish girl named Mimi. And she’d make café au lait. I was so impressed by her manners. A prostitute. You know what she said to me? ‘I suspect you of buttering your toast on both sides.’ So I told my analyst and he said, ‘Why didn’t you have an affair with her?’
“I couldn’t. I liked her.”
He was like some Lewis Carroll character who spoke in rhyme or riddle. His idioms were anecdotes and the songs he sang.
“My father was a great man,” he raced on nonstop, “he died very young. What of? I don’t want to say the word. It’s too terrible what he went through. I left it out of the book.
“My father told me a story once: A boy killed his mother and cut out her heart and the boy tripped and the heart said, ‘Did you hurt yourself, son?’
“My father told me that about my mother. It really bedeviled me,” he paused, looking pained.
“One of my sisters-in-law had the chutzpah to tell me that while my mother was carrying me, she tried to get rid of me during her pregnancy.” He looked at me, incredulous. “Isn’t that a helluva’ thing to tell a young boy?”
He continued compulsively, “Once I said to Bill Inge that September was the worst month because my mother died in September. But Inge said that August was the worst month because he went to Menninger’s and it was always empty in August. All the doctors were on vacation.”
He stood up shakily, sashed his robe and sat down, “You know I read a lot. This eye closes when I read and when I play the piano it stays open. Does my blinking bother you?” He looked suddenly concerned. “Is it pretty bad?”
June entered briefly. “She’s a terrific dame, terrific,” Oscar said soberly when she left. “She used to make her entrance to my act doing a cartwheel on a cane.”
Suddenly the old green eyes darted in my direction and he angrily erupted, pointing a fragile finger accusingly, “Why aren’t you taking notes? What’s the matter? Don’t you like my stories? These are terrific stories!”
Oy. Of course they were terrific. Although I’d read most of them. But what I wanted was something more personal than a performance. I replied that I loved the stories but that I wanted to hear more about him.
“These are about me!” he insisted.
Hmm. So I explained that he was one of the most special people I had ever met and I wanted very much to know him.
“Really?” he said in a small, surprised voice. And bravely battling gravity, he smiled. It was like watching salmon swim upstream. I melted.
“Help me into the den,” he said. “I want to play you something.”
He shuffled in and sat down at a piano, the top thickly thatched with old sheet music. “I can’t play too long,” he warned. “I’ve got arthritis in my back and Morton’s neuralgia in my feet and I’ve had this bacterial disease. . . .”
He opened a piece of music and smiled softly. It was like finding his first love. “I love songs more than anything,” he crooned quietly, almost to himself. Then he said hastily, “Half the keys don’t play,” and he began playing But Not For Me, confiding happily, “These are lyrics no one knows—the third verse.”
And in his robe and pajamas and a faltering falsetto, he sang softly, “It all began so well,/ But what an end./ This is the time a fella’/ Needs a friend./ He ain’t done right by Nell./ However, what the hell/ I guess he’s not for me.”
I’ve had more than my share of moments in my life, but this was one of the best. He savored it a second then snapped, “You know what Ira Gershwin said about me? Oscar is a masochist because he wants his cassock kissed.”
And then he disappeared into a mountain of sheet music, ferreting furiously, surfacing triumphant. “Look what I found!” he crowed, waving Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. He played it slowly, with “customary arthritic abandon.” “That’s one of the pieces I played the night my mother died. I haven’t played it in years.”
Frail, pale hands flying, slippers scurrying over the pedals, piano wires rattling; Oscar was in his heaven. Now all was right with the world.
Music was the miracle drug, a magical time machine; the tremors and blinking disappeared, his ailments vanished. Radiant and rapturous in the arms of his music, he went from Prokofiev to Schoenberg like a madman in love.
At the front door, he asked timidly, “Is it okay if I kiss you good-bye? Just on the cheek,” he added properly. “I don’t have any designs you know.”
It was a sunny summer evening, Oscar peered outside, turned on the porch light and asked anxiously, “Can you see all right?” I was hooked.
The next day he left a message to call him. I phoned from a friend’s house and he asked for the number and called back; he’d remembered more stories he wanted me to take down.
Then he announced proudly, “My grandson came to visit me today—I kiss him. . . . Could I call you?” Assured he could, he sighed, “Well, I feel like I’ve found a friend. Thank you very much for listening to me.”
He phoned over the weekend and I was out, so he called my friend, sometimes two and three times a day, with tales of George Gershwin and Alexander Woollcott, Humphrey Bogart and “Paganinny,” as he pronounced it.
I called him Monday at two o’clock to confirm our visit at four. “Oh no,” he wailed urgently, “that’s too late, come over now. Give me ten minutes.”
Twenty minutes later, I rang the bell. June, who was just leaving, answered it. Oscar was upstairs resting after practicing the piano and she went up to get him.
“Oh God,” I heard June gasp over and over. I froze. Well rehearsed after thirty years, she called the emergency squad. “Come right away, there’s something wrong with my husband. I think he’s dead.”
I went upstairs. June was standing in the hall trembling. “He had a towel over his face,” she stammered. “He covers his head with a towel because he always sweats after practicing. I thought he was taking a nap.”
He was lying in bed, waxen hands across his chest, flanked by a battery of pill bottles. The faded green eyes were locked wide ahead. His mouth was stretched taut and open in a soundless, outraged scream.
I had never seen anyone dead before. In the movies someone always feels for a pulse, so I felt for his pulse. My heart was beating so hard I could only feel my own.
I couldn’t believe it. The man who was constantly terrified death would arrive before you did was dead. I always thought he was kidding. We had always mourned him. He’d devoted his life to dying—he would die forever.
We were going to be buddies. I was looking forward to a siege of phone calls, an assault of anecdotes. I had been dreaming of afternoon visits and talks, listening to him practice in the late-day sun with the keys that didn’t play and the piano wires that rattled and Gershwin and Berlin and Schoenberg. . . . I was going to be his friend.
Now he lay there like a furious old bird. Shot down quietly on a summer afternoon, with no fanfare or glory, no grand farewell; he died in bed with a towel on his head, his slippers off and his pajamas on.
For a man who spent his life dreading it, death seemed cruelly anticlimactic.
“What is—what was the man’s name, Miss?” asked the young policeman routinely filling out his forms.
“Oscar Levant,” I said.
He showed no signs of recognition. A tourist bus glided by on its guide to movie stars’ homes.
“The poor thing,” June whispered as they carried him out.
BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. First of all, hurray - I never thought I would see this piece in its entirety, though I hunted for it for years. It was paraphrased in the Levant bio A Talent for Genius, but I realize now that some key details were left out. I think I have an idea why.
Candice Bergen obviously could have had her choice of professions, given the lurid and loving way this piece is written. She spares no details about how macabre a presence Levant was at only 65, and yet, the unique charm and sweetness dwells deep even in a thoroughly wrecked and prematurely old man.
There were surprises in this piece, but not many. No surprise that June Levant was a bit of a drill sergeant who probably arranged every detail of the last fifteen years of his life, but a rude surprise in that his death wasn't at all what I thought. Reading the bio A Talent for Genius, the authors seemed to be implying he lay down for a nice little nap, and then peacefully died. It wasn't that way at all, obviously.
The details Bergen sets down are brutal - I won't repeat them, because I can't. He died with a look of horror on his face, like he had been struck by lightning. The great conductor Leonard Bernstein, another tortured artist who had a sort of running feud with Oscar, was wasting away from cancer and emphesema, when suddenly one day his whole body stiffened, and he shouted, "WHAT IS THIS?" - and died.
Death came calling, and instead of stealing away with him or bearing him up on gauzy wings, it shoved him hard and knocked him over. Both of them, really, were just bucked off. And yet, their deaths matched their tormented, unhealthy, driven lives, both men paradoxically attracting doggedly loyal, loving support right to the end.
I am pretty sure the description of his death in the biography was watered down for a reason. It was written with a lot of input from June Levant, and though most of it is vivid and detailed, there's a hard sort of shellac over some of it. A veil was drawn over that harrowing face, perhaps in deference to her. I don't mean to be too hard on Mrs. Oscar, who obviously had a formidable task in looking after her husband in his prematurely invalid state. But I also believe she had a role in pushing him out into the spotlight on late night TV and quiz shows, where he looked so gruesomely awful that his old friends could barely suppress gasps of horror when they saw him. It could be argued he wanted and needed the stimulation, but at that point he seemed hardly of this world any more: a somnambulist, a walking ghost.
The authors use ghostly images to describe Levant again and again in the biography: "a spectral presence", "wraith", "shade", and so on. Candice Bergen lays it on very thick, perhaps TOO thick in places. And what killed him? He was a four-pack-a-day smoker and drank up to 40 cups of coffee a day, supposedly did not drink, but sucked up copious quantities of Demerol and any other painkillers he could lay hands on, finally just gobbling whatever pills his "friends" brought over when they visited, even birth control pills. It takes a toll. But like Bernstein, he also wore himself out from the inside. One day, the heart too frail for living just stopped, and he was unceremoniously kicked off the mad ride that had been his life.
“Good-night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are. . . .”
On an April afternoon in Los Angeles, the Walter Matthaus gave a luncheon for the Charles Chaplins. People began waging their campaign for invitations in early March.
The weather was sublime; the kind of day that strangled you with the joy of living. It was a day that made abandoning the East for the West a rational move. It was a day that made everyone glad to be alive . . . or almost everyone. . . .
Sulking in the shadows, a spectral silhouette, loomed the face that launched a thousand analysts. Was I seeing a ghost? I thought Oscar Levant had been dead for years.
This was one of his rare sorties of the last decade and he observed it by scowling fiercely from the deep recesses of a rocking chair.
A die-hard New Yorker assaulted by western resort wear, he wore a dark and somber suit that looked like it last saw action in the 1950’s with Harpo Marx at “21” or Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin.
His feet sat passively in slender, shining wing tips reviewing the passing parade of patent leather boots and white Gucci loafers. It was as if he were a British colonialist struggling to maintain civility amidst savages.
“Oscar Levant”—the name was a household word, like “polio" or “anemia;" a name synonymous with merciless humor, hypochondria, insomnia, insanity, George Gershwin, and chain-smoking. He was a brilliant, sickly legend—terrified of living and petrified of dying.
I loved him in movies but he always looked like the stand-in’s stand-in, or the anemic son of a studio head. There was this ugly guy wisecracking with Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, or falling over Fred Astaire and I could never figure out how he ever got there.
But in Rhapsody in Blue he played himself—concert pianist, wit, Gershwin’s old friend and foremost interpreter of his music—and he stole the movie.
He wrote three books—A Smattering of Ignorance, The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, and The Unimportance of Being Oscar—crammed with anecdotes about celebrities and insights about himself: his army of analysts, the legion of doctors, his addiction to pills, the convulsions, the shock treatments, the mental hospitals. All told in crisp, concise story form.
His television show in the late Fifties was a weekly video happening. People everywhere were exclaiming, “Did you hear what Oscar said last night!” Because Oscar would say anything. And did.
Taking time out for assorted nervous breakdowns, he returned to the air in 1960, announcing:
“This is Oscar Levant in Meet The Mess. This is Oscar Levant, who has made insanity America’s favorite hobby. My show is now syndicated. It goes to the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Bellevue in New York, and the psychiatric ward at Mt. Sinai in Los Angeles.”
I was never so excited to meet anyone. What with his penchant for pretty girls and my fixation for ailing underdogs, we were instantly smitten.
He clutched my arm and I helped him outside. He seemed very ill and had great difficulty walking. “How old are you?” he asked, without much hope.
“Twenty-five.”
“I’m sixty-five,” he said proudly. And while he looked awful, it was hard to believe. He seemed more like a little kid imitating a dying old man.
“I’ve always been very boyish,” he offered offhandedly. “William Le Baron at RKO called me Peter Pan. . . .” Tremors contorted his face into grimaces, interrupting his speech.
I asked Oscar if he were all right. What a dumb question.
“My wife took me to a doctor and he treated me for Parkinson’s disease, which it turned out I didn’t have,” he said venomously, “but the treatment gave me Parkinson’s symptoms.” He stopped short.
Looking steely and suspicious, years of service on her sleeve, his wife June appeared and took his arm, announcing as if to a child, “Come on Oscar, it’s time to eat lunch now.”
He glowered at her furiously, muttering, “I read where Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack from smoking too much. Maybe I should start again.” And sulking and seething, he was firmly led away.
After lunch, I asked him if I could take a photograph. “Of course,” June answered quickly. “Where do you want us?”
I pointed to a chair I had for Oscar. He had barely lowered himself onto it when June landed on his lap. His face went ashen and he limped into the house, cawing crazily, “June’s trying to murder me! She sat on my lap and almost killed me. . . . She almost broke my legs!”
Later, I went to say good-bye to Oscar. “Will you talk to me?” he pleaded, immersed in an overstuffed sofa.
“I’m sorry, I have to leave.”
“Can’t you stay a little longer?” he asked weakly.
“I really can’t, I’m sorry,” and I bent down to give him a kiss.
“I love you,” he said plaintively, looking up at me from the depths of the couch.
“I love you too,” I said. And I did.
On a Thursday, four months I later, I called him about possibly arranging an interview the following week. “Can’t you come today?” he croaked urgently, as if next week would be too late. I could.
It was the same old, large house he had lived in for twenty years— across from Jimmy Stewart, down the block from Lucille Ball—the kind of house you don’t notice on a street with homes designed to be seen.
Oscar sank slowly into a chair in the living room—faint from opening the front door. There were no maids. The house was silent and simple.
With his pajamas discreetly buttoned at the neck while a robe, slightly askew, slid off his shoulders, he looked like a kid home sick from school.
Extraordinary hands, a pale, translucent yellow, dangled delicately from his sleeves—elegant and sensitive contradictions of the fiendish face. His furtive eyes were a faded green and his teeth looked like old piano keys. His hair lay limply in oily strands, and blistered, black leather slippers hung on veined, snow-white feet. As a physical specimen, he deviated violently from the ideal.
It was as if his face and body had already begun to die. Oscar was merely dispensing with preliminaries.
He camouflaged his terror with toughness and impatience, bombarding me intensively with stories familiar from his books.
“You know what I said about Zsa Zsa Gabor? She not only worships the Golden Calf; she barbecues it for lunch.
“And I used to say I grew organic marijuana and I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.
“I also said ‘I live on the periphery’ and ‘So little time, so little to do,’” he announced proudly.
Squeezing out the words with winces and grimaces, he sped on in spurts, “Judy Garland loved me. We met and she hugged me and I said, ‘This is the greatest embrace of pharmacopoeia in history.’
“Joe Kennedy loved me too. He leaned over to me once at Pavilion and said, ‘You know, you’re one of the only Jews I like.’”
The stories flowed like wine. “When Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe got married and Marilyn became Jewish, I said, ‘Now she’s kosher, he can eat her.’ And they took me off the air,” he crowed triumphantly.
“You didn’t see my show. I was brilliant on that show. It was after I had left all the mental hospitals, God, all the pills I took. . . .”
He continues in frantic free association, “Did you see Mick Jagger on the Cavett show? All that hollering and sybaritic dancing. He seemed overripe, priapic. Do you know what ‘priapic’ means? A continual state of erection. And it’s very. . . .” He begins to sing, “It’s very clear . . .” and trails off.
“I had quite a time in London in 1946. I was slightly priapic myself. There was a club . . . well, I laid every dame in the place—except a Jewish girl named Mimi. And she’d make café au lait. I was so impressed by her manners. A prostitute. You know what she said to me? ‘I suspect you of buttering your toast on both sides.’ So I told my analyst and he said, ‘Why didn’t you have an affair with her?’
“I couldn’t. I liked her.”
He was like some Lewis Carroll character who spoke in rhyme or riddle. His idioms were anecdotes and the songs he sang.
“My father was a great man,” he raced on nonstop, “he died very young. What of? I don’t want to say the word. It’s too terrible what he went through. I left it out of the book.
“My father told me a story once: A boy killed his mother and cut out her heart and the boy tripped and the heart said, ‘Did you hurt yourself, son?’
“My father told me that about my mother. It really bedeviled me,” he paused, looking pained.
“One of my sisters-in-law had the chutzpah to tell me that while my mother was carrying me, she tried to get rid of me during her pregnancy.” He looked at me, incredulous. “Isn’t that a helluva’ thing to tell a young boy?”
He continued compulsively, “Once I said to Bill Inge that September was the worst month because my mother died in September. But Inge said that August was the worst month because he went to Menninger’s and it was always empty in August. All the doctors were on vacation.”
He stood up shakily, sashed his robe and sat down, “You know I read a lot. This eye closes when I read and when I play the piano it stays open. Does my blinking bother you?” He looked suddenly concerned. “Is it pretty bad?”
June entered briefly. “She’s a terrific dame, terrific,” Oscar said soberly when she left. “She used to make her entrance to my act doing a cartwheel on a cane.”
Suddenly the old green eyes darted in my direction and he angrily erupted, pointing a fragile finger accusingly, “Why aren’t you taking notes? What’s the matter? Don’t you like my stories? These are terrific stories!”
Oy. Of course they were terrific. Although I’d read most of them. But what I wanted was something more personal than a performance. I replied that I loved the stories but that I wanted to hear more about him.
“These are about me!” he insisted.
Hmm. So I explained that he was one of the most special people I had ever met and I wanted very much to know him.
“Really?” he said in a small, surprised voice. And bravely battling gravity, he smiled. It was like watching salmon swim upstream. I melted.
“Help me into the den,” he said. “I want to play you something.”
He shuffled in and sat down at a piano, the top thickly thatched with old sheet music. “I can’t play too long,” he warned. “I’ve got arthritis in my back and Morton’s neuralgia in my feet and I’ve had this bacterial disease. . . .”
He opened a piece of music and smiled softly. It was like finding his first love. “I love songs more than anything,” he crooned quietly, almost to himself. Then he said hastily, “Half the keys don’t play,” and he began playing But Not For Me, confiding happily, “These are lyrics no one knows—the third verse.”
And in his robe and pajamas and a faltering falsetto, he sang softly, “It all began so well,/ But what an end./ This is the time a fella’/ Needs a friend./ He ain’t done right by Nell./ However, what the hell/ I guess he’s not for me.”
I’ve had more than my share of moments in my life, but this was one of the best. He savored it a second then snapped, “You know what Ira Gershwin said about me? Oscar is a masochist because he wants his cassock kissed.”
And then he disappeared into a mountain of sheet music, ferreting furiously, surfacing triumphant. “Look what I found!” he crowed, waving Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. He played it slowly, with “customary arthritic abandon.” “That’s one of the pieces I played the night my mother died. I haven’t played it in years.”
Frail, pale hands flying, slippers scurrying over the pedals, piano wires rattling; Oscar was in his heaven. Now all was right with the world.
Music was the miracle drug, a magical time machine; the tremors and blinking disappeared, his ailments vanished. Radiant and rapturous in the arms of his music, he went from Prokofiev to Schoenberg like a madman in love.
At the front door, he asked timidly, “Is it okay if I kiss you good-bye? Just on the cheek,” he added properly. “I don’t have any designs you know.”
It was a sunny summer evening, Oscar peered outside, turned on the porch light and asked anxiously, “Can you see all right?” I was hooked.
The next day he left a message to call him. I phoned from a friend’s house and he asked for the number and called back; he’d remembered more stories he wanted me to take down.
Then he announced proudly, “My grandson came to visit me today—I kiss him. . . . Could I call you?” Assured he could, he sighed, “Well, I feel like I’ve found a friend. Thank you very much for listening to me.”
He phoned over the weekend and I was out, so he called my friend, sometimes two and three times a day, with tales of George Gershwin and Alexander Woollcott, Humphrey Bogart and “Paganinny,” as he pronounced it.
I called him Monday at two o’clock to confirm our visit at four. “Oh no,” he wailed urgently, “that’s too late, come over now. Give me ten minutes.”
Twenty minutes later, I rang the bell. June, who was just leaving, answered it. Oscar was upstairs resting after practicing the piano and she went up to get him.
“Oh God,” I heard June gasp over and over. I froze. Well rehearsed after thirty years, she called the emergency squad. “Come right away, there’s something wrong with my husband. I think he’s dead.”
I went upstairs. June was standing in the hall trembling. “He had a towel over his face,” she stammered. “He covers his head with a towel because he always sweats after practicing. I thought he was taking a nap.”
He was lying in bed, waxen hands across his chest, flanked by a battery of pill bottles. The faded green eyes were locked wide ahead. His mouth was stretched taut and open in a soundless, outraged scream.
I had never seen anyone dead before. In the movies someone always feels for a pulse, so I felt for his pulse. My heart was beating so hard I could only feel my own.
I couldn’t believe it. The man who was constantly terrified death would arrive before you did was dead. I always thought he was kidding. We had always mourned him. He’d devoted his life to dying—he would die forever.
We were going to be buddies. I was looking forward to a siege of phone calls, an assault of anecdotes. I had been dreaming of afternoon visits and talks, listening to him practice in the late-day sun with the keys that didn’t play and the piano wires that rattled and Gershwin and Berlin and Schoenberg. . . . I was going to be his friend.
Now he lay there like a furious old bird. Shot down quietly on a summer afternoon, with no fanfare or glory, no grand farewell; he died in bed with a towel on his head, his slippers off and his pajamas on.
For a man who spent his life dreading it, death seemed cruelly anticlimactic.
“What is—what was the man’s name, Miss?” asked the young policeman routinely filling out his forms.
“Oscar Levant,” I said.
He showed no signs of recognition. A tourist bus glided by on its guide to movie stars’ homes.
“The poor thing,” June whispered as they carried him out.
BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. First of all, hurray - I never thought I would see this piece in its entirety, though I hunted for it for years. It was paraphrased in the Levant bio A Talent for Genius, but I realize now that some key details were left out. I think I have an idea why.
Candice Bergen obviously could have had her choice of professions, given the lurid and loving way this piece is written. She spares no details about how macabre a presence Levant was at only 65, and yet, the unique charm and sweetness dwells deep even in a thoroughly wrecked and prematurely old man.
There were surprises in this piece, but not many. No surprise that June Levant was a bit of a drill sergeant who probably arranged every detail of the last fifteen years of his life, but a rude surprise in that his death wasn't at all what I thought. Reading the bio A Talent for Genius, the authors seemed to be implying he lay down for a nice little nap, and then peacefully died. It wasn't that way at all, obviously.
The details Bergen sets down are brutal - I won't repeat them, because I can't. He died with a look of horror on his face, like he had been struck by lightning. The great conductor Leonard Bernstein, another tortured artist who had a sort of running feud with Oscar, was wasting away from cancer and emphesema, when suddenly one day his whole body stiffened, and he shouted, "WHAT IS THIS?" - and died.
Death came calling, and instead of stealing away with him or bearing him up on gauzy wings, it shoved him hard and knocked him over. Both of them, really, were just bucked off. And yet, their deaths matched their tormented, unhealthy, driven lives, both men paradoxically attracting doggedly loyal, loving support right to the end.
I am pretty sure the description of his death in the biography was watered down for a reason. It was written with a lot of input from June Levant, and though most of it is vivid and detailed, there's a hard sort of shellac over some of it. A veil was drawn over that harrowing face, perhaps in deference to her. I don't mean to be too hard on Mrs. Oscar, who obviously had a formidable task in looking after her husband in his prematurely invalid state. But I also believe she had a role in pushing him out into the spotlight on late night TV and quiz shows, where he looked so gruesomely awful that his old friends could barely suppress gasps of horror when they saw him. It could be argued he wanted and needed the stimulation, but at that point he seemed hardly of this world any more: a somnambulist, a walking ghost.
The authors use ghostly images to describe Levant again and again in the biography: "a spectral presence", "wraith", "shade", and so on. Candice Bergen lays it on very thick, perhaps TOO thick in places. And what killed him? He was a four-pack-a-day smoker and drank up to 40 cups of coffee a day, supposedly did not drink, but sucked up copious quantities of Demerol and any other painkillers he could lay hands on, finally just gobbling whatever pills his "friends" brought over when they visited, even birth control pills. It takes a toll. But like Bernstein, he also wore himself out from the inside. One day, the heart too frail for living just stopped, and he was unceremoniously kicked off the mad ride that had been his life.
BLOGGER'S NOTE. This is a repeat, but it's one I particularly like. It took me years to track down this article, which until that point I had only seen excerpts of. It is both tender and macabre, which kind of describes its subject. Rest in peace, Oscar. You deserve to.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
NASTY SWEARING SQUIRREL disrupts the neighborhood!
I have never been sure WHY squirrels do this, as it's never obvious what the threat is. I'd say it's territorial, but this isn't the time of year for defending babies. There is plenty of food in the yard from all our bird feeders, which they constantly drain. The babies were sort of weedy this year, and the adults don't look so good, smaller, with thin tails, and a lot of fur missing. The huge cedar tree in our back yard is a sort of high-rise apartment tower for birthing and raising their young, and we often see pregnant or nursing squirrels.
Though the ubiquitous blacks aren't very cute this year, the greys with their sweet faces, white tummies and big, fat, puffy silver tails are much nicer-looking, but very rare. In fact, everywhere we've lived, greys are much more rare and look totally different, plumper and prettier. But I have read in many places that the blacks turn INTO the greys. This makes no sense at all, as they are so physically different, and we do not ever see an interim stage as we do with mallards, where the males "fledge" over a period of months.
These days the smaller red squirrels are even more rare. With those, you mainly hear a short, sharp bark that can go on forever. Only once I saw one on the back fence, flapping its tail violently and swearing away, but sounding more like a distressed bird (which I thought it was, initially) than any kind of squirrel. These I very rarely see in the back yard, but when we go on our trail-walks they will approach us fairly timidly, hesitantly, as if hoping for food.
Even as I write this, I hear yet more swearing in the back yard. What is going on here??
Even as I write this, I hear yet more swearing in the back yard. What is going on here??
Monday, October 3, 2022
PULCINELLA: Stravinsky, chagrin d'amour, and CLOWNS!🤡
Pulcinella is a ballet by Igor Stravinsky based on an 18th-century play—Pulcinella is a character originating from Commedia dell'arte. The ballet premiered at the Paris Opera on 15 May 1920 under the baton of Ernest Ansermet. The dancer Léonide Massine created both the libretto and choreography, and Pablo Picasso designed the original costumes and sets. It was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev.
OK, enough Wikipedia (and I only use it because I'm too lazy to put it in my own words). This video is hardly the ideal Pulcinella, but the ideal Pulcinella may exist only in my own mind. It was one of the recordings I grew up with, and we played the spots off it, mainly because my father was on a Stravinsky kick and wanted to hear everything he ever wrote. I remember the music vividly, but not the conductor, the orchestra or the record label (else I might be able to track down a reissue).
As a kid, I suppose I knew a little bit about the ballet, something about clowns jumping around in those white outfits they wear in Europe, but of course I had never seen it. I still haven't seen it. I've never even heard a live performance of the whole work, only the ubiquitous suite. But always I had an echo in my brain of that first recording. I own five Pulcinellas now, and I don't listen to any of them because that first one spoiled me for anything else.
Why? The voices. The three singers, tenor, baritone and mezzo-soprano, are the spirit of the piece, and all too often they sound wooden, as if they just don't get it and are only singing the notes. The piece has to be conducted with a certain irony and even satire, a sour edge contrasting with lamb-gambolling sweetness. The music is often at odds with the odd-sounding words, which in fact have nothing to do with Pulcinella and the commedia dell'arte. The words are more like medieval sonnets about thwarted love. And yet they are splashed against this odd rococo backdrop, this motley set painted by Picasso.
There were a few Pulcinellas on YouTube, and a while ago I tried to find a good one. There is a rare performance of the ballet, but it's chopped up into 10-minute pieces. A more complete one exists, but someone has recorded it with atrocious sound distortion, as if they didn't even notice the music. What is the matter with people today??? I doubt if I will ever find the perfect combination, and besides, all those clowns jumping around is distracting when I would rather concentrate on the melancholy sweetness of the music.
Anyway, it took a hell of a long time to find a translation of the Italian words, and it wasn't on the internet either, but on a set of CD liner notes, with type so small you had to take a magnifiying glass to it. It had the Italian on one side and the English on the other, like a menu.(I once bought Coles notes for a Chaucer class, and it was the same deal) I had to transcribe the words line by line, and it took a while. I thought I posted something about it already, after all that work, but I can't find it. If this is repetitious, please forgive me.
Since I decided against the ballet version, which in fact was pretty silly, I had to make a few (gulp) gifs to fill the gap. I was trying to get something across which, as usual, I didn't quite. When you look up pulcinella, you get punchinello, a nasty little creature in a Milky the Clown-style puffy white suit, a conical hat and a nasty bird-beak. He's menacing, is what he is. He'd scare little children. But wasn't the commedia the thing that brought us Punch and Judy? Maybe they called it something else back then.
Pulcinella
by Igor Stravinsky
(Tenor)
While on the grass
the lamb grazes
alone, alone
the shepherdess
amid the green leaves
through the forest
goes singing.
(Soprano)
Content perhaps to live
In my torment I might be
If I ever could believe
That, still far away, you were
Faithful to my love,
Faithful to this heart.
(Bass)
With these little words
So sweet
You rend my heart
To the depths.
Fair one, stay here,
Since if you say more
I must die.
With such sweet
Little words
You rend my heart
I shall die, I shall die.
(Soprano, tenor, bass)
I hear say there is no peace
I hear say there is no heart,
For you, ah, no, never,
There is no peace for you.
(Tenor)
Whoever says that a woman
Is more cunning than the Devil
Tells the truth.
(Soprano, tenor)
There are some women
Who care for none
And keep a hundred on a leash,
A shabby trick,
And have so many wiles
That none can count them.
One pretends to be innocent
And is cunning,
Another seems all modesty
Yet seeks a husband.
One clings to a man
And has so many wiles
That none can count them,
None can number them.
(Tenor)
One pretends to be innocent
And is, and is cunning
Another seems all modesty
Yet seeks a husband,
There are some
Who care, listen, for none.
Who cling to a man
And who flirt with another
And have a hundred on a leash
A shabby trick,
And have so many wiles
That none can count them.
(Soprano)
If you love me, if you sigh
For me alone, gentle shepherd,
I have pain in your suffering,
I have pleasure in your love,
But if you think that you alone
I should love in return,
Shepherd, you are easily
To be deceived.
A fair red rose
Today Silvia picks,
But pleading its thorn
Tomorrow she spurns it.
But the plans of men
I will not follow.
Because the lily pleases me,
I will not spurn other flowers.
(Soprano, tenor, bass)
Sweet eyes, bright with love,
For you my heart languishes.
BLOGGER"S NOTE! This is a summer repeat from something I posted in 2014. I received so many cool comments from people over the years, including one that I got just today! So I'm re-posting them here.
Unknown August 6, 2021 at 1:40 PM
Thankyou so much for your wonderful online posting that I found when searching for lyrics to Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Wherever you are at present...I hope you might access the BBC audio broadcast from London's Royal Albert Hall tonight (6th August 2021) ...part of the Promenade Concert Series. I've been listening at home in Somerset, England on a digital radio...but searching on my laptop for something audiovisual. Your series of dancing clown 'clips' completed my understanding of the spirit of this piece.
Replies
Margaret Gunning August 6, 2021 at 3:44 PM
Thank you so much! I'd forgotten I posted this SEVEN years ago - my formatting wasn't so hot then (I'll try to fix it!). I no longer run ads for my novels either! I may be able to pick up the concert on YouTube, maybe after the fact. I've seen some of the Proms videos before, my favorite being the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony. Glad you enjoyed this blast from the past!
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WanderMonkey January 31, 2022 at 6:26 PM
Many thanks for posting the lyrics. When I was younger, I preferred the suite version, with no singing. But now well into middle age, and become more fascinated with the Commedia Dell'arte, I have a much bigger appreciation for the full ballet and its plot. But I still don't know Italian, so this is very useful!
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Margaret GunningJanuary 31, 2022 at 8:00 PM
Pulcinella was part of the background music of my youth. Though I was raised with (so-called) "classical" music, my Dad's taste in recordings was eclectic, and included the "modern stuff" (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Barber, Shostakovich, and even Gershwin) which many of his confreres disdained. When we first listened to this work, we all laughed at the second-to-last movement with its goofy trombone-slides and double-bass stretches played in the highest register, an earthy and clownish effect. Stravinsky runs the gamut, as far as I am concerned, and can be tender, satiric, eccentric, mercurial, savage, and very funny. His Ragtime piece makes me laugh out loud, for some reason, maybe because it sounds so dire! Thank you for taking me back to this nearly-forgotten post.
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AnonymousOctober 3, 2022 at 5:12 AM
Thank you for the info!
Replies
Margaret GunningOctober 3, 2022 at 10:19 AM
You're welcome! I may re-publish this one some time, as I sometimes do, given the fact I've kept this blog going for TWELVE years now - and if I don't remember the piece, no one else will either. It pays to recycle!
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Joe Cooke December 6, 2023 at 3:06 PM
I learned about Igor Stravinsky by reading a book by Aaron Copland. The first piece I heard was the Rite of Spring, but I found that I preferred Petrushka and Firebird. I realized then that Stravinsky was constantly re-inventing himself and always trying new things. I got interested in his neoclassical period through Capriccio. Later I heard the Serenade, which I eventually got in score, for study. Pulcinella was something I added to my Spotify playlist. I'd heard it before, but moved past it for the Symphony of Psalms. I just watched Pulcinella on YouTube. The one I watched was: Basler Ballett, Academa of St. Martin in the Fields, cond. Sir Neville Marriner, choreography Heinz Spoerli Vers. 1980. It was magnificent! It makes much more sense to me as a ballet, because that's what the music was written for. Stravinsky's preference for orchestral versions seems to derive from the disastrous debut of the Rite, but he wrote beautifully, and from the heart, for the ballet, and knowing that, I find I appreciate his work so much more.
Replies
Margaret Gunning December 7, 2023 at 11:59 AM
Thank you for your comments! It delights me to see that people are finding this post after nearly ten years. I'll be looking up that video for sure.
Christina HilaSeptember 8, 2024 at 7:28 PM
In July 2024 I saw an orchestral and voice performance of Pulcinella at Lincoln Center, NY. I love Stravinsky and his ballets and was privileged to see him conduct in person in Italy in 1962. I had never heard more than the first piece of Pulcinella. I was, however, disturbed by the English translation . I felt that it did not express the sarcasm and tongue and cheek which is so essential to the Commedia dell’arte. Perhaps the ballet would express it better. It was fun however that the Philharmonic did the piece.
Margaret Gunning September 9, 2024 at 11:07 AM
Wow, you're really fortunate you got to see him! We had an album of just the suite in the 1960s and played the grooves off it. I never had any idea what the words meant, but I noticed some oddities. There did seem to be some clever verbal twists in it, such as:
Mentre l’erbetta
pasce l’agnella,
pasce l’agnella
To me, "pasce agnella" sounded a lot like "Pulcinella", so I wondered if it was a clever Stravinskyan pun.
Then there was this:
tra fresche frasche
per la foresta
cantando va.
tra fresche frasche
cantando va
per la foresta
cantando va
cantando va
cantando va
Oh, surely this repeating and repeating of "la fresche frasche" was meant to be satiric, as it sounded like "music/shmusic" or some such clever pun. "Cantando va" sounds a bit silly when sung over and over again.
I am sure any translation would be inadequate, as musical jokes don't translate that well, but I surely see some sly in-jokes here and there. I still love that clownish, almost cartoonish passage towards the end with the sliding trombones, before that incredible final chorus with all the singers, which actually makes me cry.
I'm far from a musicologist, but as a child I was saturated in "classical" music. I did get to hear and see Leonard Bernstein in 1967 (first performance at Centennial Hall - I remember every part of it!), and at some point I saw and heard George Szell, but he didn't interest me too much and I called him George Sizzle. But then, I was something like ten years old!
Margaret Gunning September 9, 2024 at 3:01 PM
I just thought of another one that always struck me as funny:
Bella, restate qua,
restate qua,
ché se pit dite appresso,
se dite, dite appresso,
io cesso moriro,
cesso moriro, moriro, etc.
These lines are full of the playful repetition that makes the words sound kind of silly. I particularly like the "etc." here, and the "moriro, moriro, moriro, moriro" ("I will die, I will die, I will die, I will die") is sung in a jaunty, cheerful way!
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Thursday, September 29, 2022
💋WILLIAM FREAKING SHATNER!!😻
It's WILLIAM FREAKING SHATNER in an early performance on Playhouse 90. Shatner was pretty much a journeyman actor in those days, but always employed, before Captain Kirk came along and his career exploded like one of those star thingies (supernova?). But unfortunately, it was cancelled after a mere three seasons, and the bottom dropped out for a while. He was stuck doing Loblaws commercials and depressing bits in forgettable movie-of-the-week things. But Kirk would rise again when the movies came along - not the first one, which was a disappointment and almost brought the whole thing to a screeching halt - but the SECOND one, The Wrath of Khan, which as we all know is one of the best adventure movies ever made. Kirk is Starbuck in this one, hunting the mighty whale with the Latino accent we remembered from all those Maxwell House ads (and the "real Corinthian leather", whatever THAT is). What I like best of all is that I am STILL WATCHING WILLIAM SHATNER, every single week, hosting a show called The UnXplained (with is self-unexplanatory). It's not as fun to watch as Weird or What?, a series from ten years ago when he was still limber enough to ride in on a Segway or a horse and do some comedy bits between stories. But it's still a treat to see a 91-year-old LEGEND whose career started before I was born, who really never did hit the unemployment line even when he had to live in his camper for a while. And the cherry on the sundae is that he's not above a sort of good-natured self-parody. AND HE'S CANADIAN, guys - does it get any better? He's a Jewish Lithuanian from Montreal. All that, and such a fox!
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
What's that sound? Barred owl of British Columbia
When I first heard this sound, very late at night when I was sitting at my desk, I had no idea what it was.
I should have been used to weird wails in the night: the first time I heard a pack of coyotes massing together for a group howl, it made my scalp prickle. This wasn't the primal ascending moan of a wolf howl, but a high, falsetto trilling. punctuated by the odd husky bark that could NOT have been made by a dog. Hearing a dozen or so of them trilling and even squealing made me wonder if I was hearing things. I had to look up the sound of them on YouTube, of course. Coyotes do not sound AT ALL like the ridiculous noises from cowboy movies (likely made by wolf howls or even mastiff groans). REAL coyotes make weird, otherworldly, scalp-prickling soprano trills.
But this was different.
This was an almost fake-sounding owl call, a "too-whit, too-whooo!" like in an old cartoon. Then it got louder, then suddenly escalated into the most bizarre, apelike jungle sounds, and I knew I was hearing something wild.
When I looked out my window, I saw flashes of white diving and swooping between the treetops. I knew this was no kid pretending to be an owl.
And though I could not believe the jungle-sounding quality of the calls, I had to conclude we either had escaped chimpanzees, or owls in the back yard. I had to look up "Owls of British Columbia" on the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (the BEST WEBSITE EVER, about anything at all - simple, elegant, beautiful to look at or spend time in, and PACKED with readily-summoned information, including what they eat, where they flock, and a dozen or so sounds each species produces) to make the match.
But it wasn't my last encounter with the spooky, magnificent barred owl of British Columbia. Walking along a very familiar stretch of trail which cut through my suburban neighborhood, I saw that telltale swooping flash of white. But it was daytime! Didn't owls sleep all day? Not this one, apparently. It looked to be a juvenile, still somewhat fuzzy of feather. I didn't have my camera (as I did a couple of years ago when I miraculously happened upon a small family of pileated woodpeckers on the same trail), and I think ran back to get it and feared I had missed the moment.
But then there was movement in the bushes.
On the forest floor, there was the owl, ripping a small dead animal into strips and devouring it with gusto. It was quite fascinating to watch. He or she had obviously been hunting during the day, and - even more miraculous - wasn't at all afraid of me, though I was only a few steps away. I never did get a good shot of it before it finished the daytime snack and flew off with a wide-winged swoop. I have since heard their weird cries during the day, and have even tried the trick of imitating their calls to attract them (though it never worked for me). But they are still a mysterious, wingy presence in my back yard, one owl calling to another or having three- or four-owl conversations from different parts of the woods.
I have one more barred owl story, and it isn't even mine. My daughter-in-law is hardly a bird watcher, in fact she is wary of them ever since seeing that Alfred Hitchcock movie as a kid. Late one night she heard a strange flapping noise in the back yard. Something had landed! She described it as a "great huge honkin' BIRD in the yard", which had landed on the top bar of the swing set to take a breather from the rigors of hunting. Then it took off and sailed away.
Here's the thing. I've never truly captured the sounds or sights of these birds, and even going on YouTube was a bit frustrating. But then I struck gold. There is an ENTIRE CHANNEL dedicated to owl sounds, and I did find splendid examples of those hoots and cries - BUT, the channel has still pictures only, and as usual I had to have visuals! So I cobbled together some photos - which I didn't take, unfortunately, but they do convey some of the eerie, mystical presence of these night birds.
So if you play the YouTube videos at the same time that you look at my gifs and stills, you will get some idea of the magic of these things with their wizardly swoops and whoops.
Monday, September 26, 2022
OBITUARY BLUES: am I undone?
To say that there was family estrangement was like saying the Titanic had a bit of a leak. It had gone on for years, but over time the smoking ruins seemed to be farther and farther behind her.
Over forty years, her husband’s family became her family. And she was welcomed in. His mother became her Mum: honest, practical, funny, and in her own no-nonsense way, accepting and loving.
When she died at age 96, a peaceful death that almost anyone would envy, it caused a strange reaction in her. She wondered where her own Mum was. Meaning, the one who’d given birth to her and raised her with sublime indifference while favoring her eldest two siblings.
All through her childhood she had been haunted by the feeling that her parents had not wanted her, that she had been a mistake, someone they were ashamed of and would rather not have around. Later, her feelings of estrangement were vigorously denied and shouted down as “wrong”. It simply did not happen. She had wonderful parents. What was wrong with her? She had to stop feeling this way, now. This was true of most of her feelings, which apparently she was not allowed to have.
Then there was Garth, her older brother, a brilliant person who became more and more odd as years went by. He ended up on the streets of Toronto, a schizophrenic, and died tragically young in a fire.
Garth had been the only one who had listened. But then, there was something wrong with him too, something the family just couldn’t acknowledge or forgive.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to google her mother’s name, particularly since her obituary immediately sprang up like a ghost from the grave.
Remembering her Mum-in-law’s gracious, inclusive obituary, she wasn’t expecting it to be anything like that. But she couldn’t in her wildest dreams have imagined what she now saw in front of her.
She read it.
She read it again. Then, again.
She wasn’t in it.
Wasn’t there, wasn’t there at all, no nor any of her kin (no husband, no kids, no grandkids!): so apparently she had never been born, never been raised, didn’t in fact exist at all.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Garth wasn’t there! Garth had been stricken from the record as well. Photoshopped. Edited out.
One wonders how anyone can possess the ruthlessness to pretend that two of their children never existed. Perhaps her elder sister had written this (but certainly not against her mother’s wishes), and surgically removed Garth just to devastate and wound her further. Her two oldest siblings were proudly mentioned, along with “two grandchildren” (though she really had four) and no great-grandchildren (nicely negating the four of them, too).
She could not think of one single thing Garth had done in his whole life to intentionally hurt the family. For that matter, her own attempts to try to explain the abuse that had nearly destroyed her had been completely subverted, turned around, and treated like a mean-spirited attack on them with absolutely no grounds: a pack of lies told to deliberately damage and destroy them.
I did it just to make them feel horrible, she thought. I was like that, wasn’t I? Vindictive, hurtful, a destroyer of family happiness and harmony. It was intentional meanness, complete fabrication. I was the perpetrator of horrible, unforgiveable abuse.
If even one of them had taken maybe one minute, one second to listen to me and try to understand, would my frantic efforts have escalated the way they did?
When everything is turned upside-down like that, and inside-out, it can make you feel a little crazy. To say the least. It was a craziness that took a devastating toll.
And now. . . now, well, it looks like that particular problem is neatly solved because I’m not even here! But Garth makes me feel so much worse. The only thing he ever did to the family was to be ill, with an illness that surely must have been caused by the twisted reality of a family who lived in its own little universe of truth and lies. In a moment of rare vulnerability, I remember my sister once said, “Garth went crazy for all of us.” What had happened to that tiny crack of openness to the truth? Why did it slam shut with such vehemence?
I always suspected my parents were ashamed of him, ashamed of his illness and of what became of him, and secretly wished he would just disappear. And now their most fervent wish had come true. If you can pretend the problematic elements in your family never existed, if you can apply an eraser to the parts of it you are uncomfortable with, it’s ultimate power, kind of like God: bringing people into the world; taking them away again.
An obituary is a public life-record, an attempt to encapsulate many decades into a single paragraph. My family must have a very strange notion of economy of expression.
There is NOTHING my children could do to make me erase them like this: if my son were an axe-murderer serving a life sentence, if he had accused me of being a heroin addict or a whore, if he had attacked me and hurt me in the worst way he could think of, I would never pretend he had never existed, never erase him from the permanent record of my life.
Because he is my son.
She looked at her mother-in-law’s obituary again, wondering if there was such a thing as Providence, after all. It was just possible. She had been thrown out of the family – no, unmade! – but landed safely in another family where that kind of insanity didn’t exist. No, not “landed”, but walked out of one, and into the other. Of her own free will.
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