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Overview
Much acclaimed for her novels, Mary Gordon is also a brilliant and wide-ranging essayist. Gathering together twenty-eight of her forays into nonfiction, Good Boys and Dead Girls provides a richly autobiographical context for the themes that mark her fiction, such as Irish-American life, Catholicism, embattled families, and the redeeming power of art. Many of the pieces offer insights into artists and other writers: There are admiring accounts of Edith Wharton, Stevie Smith, and Ford Madox Ford, and a piquant critique of the depiction of women by certain celebrated male novelists. Whatever the topic at hand, Gordon proves lively and illuminating company.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480414754 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
With the The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father (1996), Gordon turned her attention to her own family, examining the mysterious and complicated life of her father, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who died when she was seven, leaving behind a web of lies and half-truths about his past.
Gordon is also the author of three novellas, collected in The Rest of Life; a book of short stories called Temporary Shelter (1987); and two collections of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls (1992) and Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2003). In 2000, she published a biography of Joan of Arc.
She has received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a three-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. The Company of Women was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1983.
Gordon currently teaches literature and writing at Barnard College.
Born in New York to a Catholic mother and a father who converted to Catholicism from Judaism, Mary Gordon was raised in a strict, religious environment and at one time considered becoming a nun. She attended Barnard College and in 1978 published her first novel, Final Payments. She followed that with The Company of Women (1981), both books exploring the challenges faced by young Catholic women as they make their way in the larger, secular world. Her other novels include Men and Angels (1985), The Other Side (1989), Spending (1998), and Pearl (2005), the story of an Irish-American mother forced to reexamine her faith and political ideals as her daughter slowly starves herself during a hunger strike in Ireland.
With the The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father (1996), Gordon turned her attention to her own family, examining the mysterious and complicated life of her father, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who died when she was seven, leaving behind a web of lies and half-truths about his past.
Gordon is also the author of three novellas, collected in The Rest of Life; a book of short stories called Temporary Shelter (1987); and two collections of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls (1992) and Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2003). In 2000, she published a biography of Joan of Arc.
She has received the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writers Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a three-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for best short story. The Company of Women was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1983.
Gordon currently teaches literature and writing at Barnard College.
Hometown:
New York, New YorkDate of Birth:
December 8, 1949Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
A.B., Barnard College, 1971; M.A., Syracuse University, 1973Read an Excerpt
Good Boys and Dead Girls
and Other Essays
By Mary Gordon
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1991 Mary GordonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1475-4
CHAPTER 1
ON WRITERS AND WRITING
Good Boys and Dead Girls
I tell you they were not men after spoils and glory; they were boys riding the sheer, tremendous tidal wave of desperate living. Boys. Because this. This is beautiful. Listen. Try to see it. Here is that fine shape of eternal youth and virginal desire which makes heroes. That makes the doings of heroes border so close upon the unbelievable that it is no wonder that their doings must emerge now and then like gunflashes in the smoke, and that their very physical passing becomes rumor with a thousand faces before breath is out of them, lest paradoxical truth outrage itself.
Light in August
The truth, beauty, and heroism that Faulkner invokes in this description have inflamed the hearts of generations of male American writers. Faulkner is in fact describing the rash attempt of a group of boy soldiers to destroy Grant's stores in a small Southern town. The raid ends in a series of unnecessary and foolish deaths, whose effects reverberate through three generations. It is a member of a third wounded generation, Hightower, who calls up the image of the beautiful marauding boys as he broods on the castration of Joe Christmas by the fanatical frustrated soldier Grimm. The blood of one boy is on the hands of another, but the blood has been shed to avenge the honor of a murdered woman. Beauty. Truth. Heroism. Civilization is no place for a boy.
The image of the moving boy has been central in American writing. Motion is the boy's genius. He must be able to move. Move freely. Quickly. The boy on his strong legs cuts through the world, through time, constricting space, the accidents of birth, class, limitation, law. He wriggles out from under the crushing burden of fate. And fate's agent, the embodiment of unmoving weight, is female. She who does not move, who will not move, who cannot move. Who won't allow the boy to move.
The innocent boy killers. Let us concentrate for the moment on the first word: innocent. In poetry, the word, or its nominal, made its mark indelibly twice. First in Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning": "Movement of earth brings harms and fears / Men reckon what it did and meant. / But trepidation of the spheres / Though Greater far, is innocent." And then there is Yeats's famous passage from "A Prayer for My Daughter": "How but in custom and ceremony can innocence and beauty be born?" Is innocence a passive state, as Donne's lines would suggest, a natural freedom from something, a marvelous lack, the adorable minus that makes possible the immaculate whole? Or is it, as Yeats would suggest, a product of a willed isolation, willed by someone (possibly not the innocent himself or herself), a conscious holding back or being held back from the world?
The ambiguities involved in the idea of innocence create problems when we try to define the word. The OED defines it as "doing no evil; free from moral sin or guilt, pure, unpolluted, usually (in modern use always) implying unacquainted with evil, sinless, holy." These definitions skirt, of course, the difficulties about innocence, the problem of consciousness or volition. The OED allows the possibility that innocence is almost a physical state: pure, unpolluted, a state almost like virginity, a state whose terms are bodily. A passive state. But if we define innocence using words like "doing no evil" and include the terms "moral" and "sin," consciousness and volition are implied; the body and the mind are in some communion.
In the depiction of innocence in fiction, there seems to be a real split between Americans and Europeans. For English and European writers, the emphasis is placed on the innocent as "doing no evil"; as "free from moral sin." For Americans—and this is not surprising given our Puritan past—innocence seems to be a state of nonpollution, which can endure even through behavior that ought, in ordinary contexts, to be polluting.
I am thinking of four European innocents: Félicie in Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, Prince Mishkin in The Idiot, the Country Priest in Bernanos's Diary, and Portia in Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. Two of these characters are women and two are saints, so it should not be surprising that they are removed from the center of power. All of these characters lack ambition—that so American virtue—which may be a way of saying that they lack the belief in change. And all of them suffer more than they cause suffering. They keep trying to do good in the world; their sorrow is disproportionate, unearned, and unjust.
Writers of American fiction have a habit of describing innocence as if it were a state of election removed from behavior, impervious to the state of defilement resulting from bad acts. When the American innocent is punished for what he has done, the punishment is seen as metaphysically incorrect, the inevitable result of the pressures of civilization. This kind of American innocent, typically a young boy, first appeared in Melville's Billy Budd.
Billy Budd, the handsome sailor, epitomizes life, youth, health, and unselfconscious, broad, instinctual behavior. His world is the world of free movement, skilled, deft action; he is at home with the elemental, the natural. In the world of language, however, he is clumsy and mute: he is entrapped by words, the coin of civilized and settled life. Melville says of him: "to deal in double meaning and insinuations was quite foreign to his nature." Double meanings and insinuations are intrusions by language into the world of action. Billy is the victim of language. Claggart's accusation, that Billy tried to mutiny, has no basis in the actual world, in the world of action: it is simply a fabric of language. At the moment of his accusation, Billy both realizes the inadequacy of language and is paralyzed by it. His tongue stops and will not serve him. But his arm is ready. His arm can move. He strikes and kills Claggart. The movement of his arm is the medium of justice. He is destroyed by law, a product of language. The law requires that Billy be punished for the murder of the one who plotted against him. But the plot was motivated by the frustration of instinct, the stoppage of male physical desire. (The homosexuality at the center of Billy Budd makes Billy a complicated figure in terms of gender relations. Desire is all male in Billy Budd, and in this way it serves as only a partial paradigm for later American fiction, which is, of course, primarily heterosexual.) Billy is hanged because of the civilized notion that the good of the individual cannot take precedence over the good of the group.
In his book The American Adam, R. W. B. Lewis talks about the distance between the innocent hero and the world he must cope with, a strategic gap he cannot bridge. Billy Budd bridges the gap by an act of irrational, heroic forgiveness. He forgives his accusers, particularly the reluctant, Pilate-like captain, and in his utter submission to his own death, he rises above fate. But Billy lives in the nineteenth century; his twentieth-century brothers will not be, as Melville says of Billy, "like the animals, without knowing it, practically a fatalist."
The story of America is the story of the escape from fate. Europeans crossed the ocean in order to be free of it; the movement from the small town to the city is a move out of the grip of fate. The freedom and autonomy that America is meant to stand for is the attempt to define the self outside of the bruising authority of fate. In the language of American mythology, fate is that over which the self has no control; the ultimate limiter of individual freedom. It is the villain in the American dream. This dream is overwhelmingly male in its tone, and romantic—as Leslie Fiedler noted thirty years ago—about the pure relation between males in contrast to the muddled, corrupt relation between males and females. The female is the counterpart of fate in that her condition is fatalistic in the natural weakness that makes her susceptible to rape and vulnerable to death in childbirth. This natural weakness means that she requires protection, shelter, assistance. The boy on the run cannot stop to shelter a woman from violation or to assist her in the pangs of childbirth. In speaking of Cooper, Leslie Fiedler said that, in American literature, the only good woman is a dead woman. The habit didn't end with the Leather Stocking Tales.
It is more likely that a woman, at least a lady, can be kept healthy and alive in civilization than in nature. She is safest in the center of the world. But if we agree with R. W. B. Lewis that the "American hero must take his stand outside the world, remote or on the verges," the woman is the centripetal force pulling him not only from natural happiness but from heroism as well.
In earlier American literature, where the alternatives are a constricting civilization presided over by the schoolmarm or a limitless frontier graced by the noble savage, the pull of the woman is always decidedly weaker than the call of the wild. But as the frontier becomes a less real possibility—both in reality and in the imagination of writers—the pull of the woman, the woman pulling the man into the world, becomes a much more difficult force for the hero to resist.
Clyde Griffiths of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy is a boy who cannot master his fate. He is never on top of the rules of the world's game; his heroism is in longing, his inchoate desire for movement in a life where there is none. Dreiser describes Clyde's character as "fluid and unstable as water." He is tender; he can be impressed. In contrast to the cold, rocklike religiosity of his parents' life, his very motility is a kind of life force—they are living death. One of the terrific achievements of this novel consists in Dreiser's ability to convey the small dreariness of Clyde's childhood—he is the son of itinerant evangelists of the least flamboyant sort—and to contrast it with the bustle and shine of prosperous life. The things that money can buy—cigars, garters, furs, dresses that swish and glitter—are conveyed by Dreiser with a voluptuous excitement to which the reader is as susceptible as Clyde. The "good things in life"—as defined by upper-class American businessmen—take on a sexual charge in this novel, and sex for Clyde is never unconnected with class and social mobility.
Clyde is an attractive boy, but the first girl he desires uses him, manipulates her sexuality, doling it out in small pieces in return for presents of jewelry, perfume, and clothes. Clyde is so overmastered by this girl, however, that he refuses to help his desperate pregnant sister because he has promised Hortense a fur coat. At this point in the novel, Dreiser's moral position in relation to Clyde is masterful and subtle. He in no way softens his description of the sister's wretchedness to let Clyde off the hook; at the same time we are carried up by the sexual fever Clyde seems to have caught. The moral position is not rejected, it is merely seen to be out of the question, weak and tepid compared to the tremendous, vital allure of the world of things, movement, and sex that Hortense represents.
One night, while Clyde is still working as a bellboy at the "good" hotel where he learned about the "good" things in life, one of his friends steals his employer's car. In the course of this joyride, Clyde and his friends run over and kill a little (and, it might be noted, upper-class) girl. The first of the book's female corpses! Clyde and most of his friends run away. In starting a new life in Kansas City, Clyde meets up with his wealthy uncle, who offers him a job in his collar factory. The factory is located in a prosperous little town in western New York, with a cohort of "good" families in large houses, families whose wealth is earned by the workers of whom Clyde is both one and not one. This placement locates him exactly at the painful center of the unstable plane that is American social reality in the early twentieth century. Clyde becomes foreman in the factory—he oversees girls stamping collars—but he cannot mix socially with any of the girls he oversees, because he is his uncle's nephew. At the same time, he isn't supposed even to dream of mixing with his cousins and their friends. His anomalousness would immobilize him if he obeyed its dictates, but he doesn't. He rebels both up and down. He has a love affair with Roberta, one of the girls who works for him, and in the midst of this he is taken up by Sondra Finchley, a shining dream girl of his cousins' social set.
Dreiser makes both Roberta's attractiveness and her virtue real. She is a genuinely loving young woman who is sexually awakened by her feelings for Clyde. Hollywood's casting Shelley Winters, the perennial slut, to play her in the second movie version of this novel, A Place in the Sun, was a serious violation of the spirit of Dreiser's book. The confusion is an important indication of our culture's difficulty in embodying female sexuality as it connects to male violence. Dreiser's Roberta is a genuine innocent, forced by poverty to leave the "reduced grimness" of her decaying farm (in the marvelously named town of Biltz) in order to take up factory work, which is really beneath her. Dreiser makes the point that, like Clyde, she has an innate finesse, which makes mixing with rougher (read immigrant) girls in the factory difficult for her. Hollywood couldn't have Montgomery Clift kill a nice girl, but Dreiser faces the problem: in order to achieve his dream of social mobility with Sondra, Clyde must murder Roberta, who is morally and emotionally Sondra's superior. We can think of Shelley Winters as one of those girls who "asked for it," since we all understand that any woman who consents to sex and enjoys it is automatically deserving of murder or rape.
Sondra, on the other hand, is a dreadful girl who happens to be irresistibly beautiful and marvelously rich. Her clothes, her cars, her sports equipment, at least as much as her body, are the locus of her sexual allure. In a superb scene in Sondra's kitchen, Dreiser brings before our eyes all that Sondra represents for Clyde. Sondra has brought Clyde home after a dance, to make some cocoa. She is playing cook in her palace kitchen, and when Clyde admires the room she says, "Oh, I don't know. Aren't all kitchens as big as this?"—a thrillingly arrogant thrust of top-down sadism.
Clyde, thinking of the poverty he knew, and assuming from this that she was scarcely aware of anything less than this, was all the more overawed by the plethora of the world to which she belonged. What means! Only to think of being married to such a girl, when all such as this would become an everyday state. One would have a cook and servants, a great house and car, no one to work for, and only orders to give.... It made her various self-conscious gestures and posings all the more entrancing....
Having prepared the chocolate in a commonplace aluminum pan, to further impress him she sought out a heavily chased silver service which was in another room. She poured the chocolate into a highly ornamented urn and then carried it to the table and put it down before him. Then swinging herself up beside him, she said, "Now isn't this chummy? I just love to get out in the kitchen like this, but I can only do it when the cook's out. He won't let anyone near the place when he's here."
At the sight of her in her white satin and crystal evening gown, her slippered feet swinging so intimately near, a faint perfume radiating to his nostrils, he was stirred. In fact, his imagination in regard to her was really inflamed. Youth, beauty, wealth, such as this—what could it not mean?
Clearly, Dreiser wants us at once to realize Sondra's ridiculousness and the allure of all she has. Nothing about her is still; even her clothes glimmer and catch light. She is a moving girl. She is not slowed down by either poverty or desire. Power and freedom create motion, and in having more money than Clyde, being in charge of the sexual vector, and being far from any suggestion of maternity, she takes on the properties of mobility usually reserved for boys. Compare her kitchen to Roberta's house in Biltz:
So lonely and bare, even in the bright spring weather! The decayed and sagging roof. The broken chimney to the north—rough lumps of cemented field stones lying at its base; the sagging and semi-toppling chimney to the south, sustained in place by a log chain. The unkempt path from the road below ... the broken and displaced stones which served as steps before the front door. And the unpainted, dilapidated outbuildings, all the more dreary because of these others.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Good Boys and Dead Girls by Mary Gordon. Copyright © 1991 Mary Gordon. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
I ON WRITERS AND WRITING,Good Boys and Dead Girls,
Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome and the Shorter Fiction,
Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being,
William Trevor's Fools of Fortune,
Christa Wolf: Accident/A Day's News,
Mary McCarthy: Occasional Prose,
Mary McCarthy: Cannibals and Missionaries,
Stevie Smith: Novel on Yellow Paper,
Adam Hochschild: Half the Way Home,
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own,
Edna O'Brien: A Fanatic Heart,
The Priestly Comedy of J. F. Powers,
Ingeborg Bachmann: Children Were Only Allowed to Whisper,
David Plante: A World of Baffled Love,
Ford Madox Ford: A Man Who Loved Women, a Womanly Man,
II THE WORLD, THE CHURCH, THE LIVES OF WOMEN,
More Than Just a Shrine: Paying Homage to the Ghosts of Ellis Island,
Abortion: How Do We Think About It?,
Abortion: How Do We Really Choose?,
The Parable of the Cave; or, In Praise of Watercolors,
Offenses of the Pope,
Mary Cassatt,
Getting Here from There: A Writer's Reflections on a Religious Past,
More Catholic than the Pope,
"I Can't Stand Your Books": A Writer Goes Home,
III PARTS OF A JOURNAL,
Notes from California,
Having a Baby, Finishing a Book,
Some Things I Saw,
The Gospel According to Saint Mark,
About the Author,