Richard Russo's Elsewhere
is a painfully honest memoir. It is lovingly
detailed. It appears that we have some shared
family history, his novels focusing on many similar issues particularly his
relationship with his mother, the theme of Elsewhere. He is among the many contemporary American writers
I admire most, such as John Updike, Pat Conroy, Anne Tyler, Anita Shrive, John
Irving, Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Philip Roth, John Cheever, and
Raymond Carver (among others, I'm sure I've left someone out). They
speak directly to me. And somewhere in
this blog, I've connected these writers to many of my own family issues.
But of all of them, Russo's writings seem to come closest
to my own family angst (see my entry on his novel, That Old Cape Magic), and
Elsewhere hits my funny bone as well and
reveals the roots of his fictional world. Russo had almost a symbiotic relationship with his mother,
but it was an approach-avoidance issue, a mother who on the one hand he tried
to keep at whatever distance he could (without much success), for the sake of
his individuality and for the sake of his family, but, on the other, obligingly
(and lovingly), took responsibility for, particularly as she aged.
When Russo was a young child, his mother worked for GE in
Schenectady, living with Russo's grandparents in Gloversville and commuting
(after divorcing her ne'er-do-well husband - the kind portrayed in Russo's Nobody's Fool and The Risk Pool), asserting her independence by paying her parents
rent. During WW II, when my father was
away at the front, my own mother worked for Atlantic Burners (a local heating oil
distribution company) in Queens, NY as a secretary/administrative assistant and
for years I would hear about how much she missed being a professional woman. We too lived with her parents at the time,
with my primary care being passed onto my grandmother and great-grandmother,
who lived with us as well.
Russo details the decline of the leather business, it's
impact on his home town, Gloversville, and his family, a story eerily close to Philip
Roth's family's leather business, and the decline of Newark, as told in his novel
American Pastoral, perhaps one of the
best novels of the late 20th century.
These were generations of families in the same business, as mine was in
the photography business for more than 100 years, and, that kind of business too
changed to such an extent that it eventually just faded away.
I was amused by Russo's statement My mother did love mirrors, often practicing in front of them. My mother liked to pose and preen in front of
mirrors, painstakingly putting on her make-up. In fact, she was very caught up
in her appearance and good looks. She
knew she attracted men, something that infuriated my father at times.
But from there, Russo's relationship with his mother, and
me with mine, diverge greatly, mostly because, unlike Russo's parents, my parents
stayed married (when they should have been divorced) and I was not an only
child. There was my sister in the mix,
and that changed the dynamics. During my
troubled teenage years, I made it a point of being out of the house as much as
possible as my parents waged war. And
after college I moved further away and by the time of my second marriage, I was
hardly speaking to my mother (or vise versa), not that I'm particularly proud
of that period, but I had to protect my wife and kids. She was a rageaholic, perpetually assigning
blame for her unhappiness to others. She also was a borderline alcoholic which
only fed the flames. Nonetheless, we had some kind of reconciliation before her
death, for which I am grateful.
In later years, my mother turned to art and she was an
accomplished painter of still life, portraits, mostly working in oils. I'll give her credit for seeking a creative
outlet, and she was a good artist but sadly, except for this pencil sketch she
did of me (a very idealized version of what I looked like at about 12), I have only
one of her oil paintings.
But getting back to Elsewhere,
Russo had the devotion of a saint toward his mother, who had declared,
basically that it was he and she against the world, making him promise (as a
child) to always look out for one another, almost as if he were her spouse, not
her son. Even in later years, after
Russo had married (his wife, Barbara, another saint as well) and had daughters
of his own, she reminded him of their "pledge" to one another:
One of my mother's
most cherished convictions was that back on Helwig Street - she and I had
pledged an oath, each to the other. She and I would stand together against
whatever configuration the world's opposition took-her parents, my father,
Gloversville, monetary setbacks. Now, forty-some years later, I was a grown man
with a wife and kids, but this original bond, she believed, was still in force.
However fond she was of Barbara, however much she loved her granddaughters,
none of that altered our original contract, which to her way of thinking made
us indivisible. She'd never really considered us two separate people but rather
one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born
twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common
destiny.
His dissection of her motives, self defense mechanisms,
lack of friendships, dependency on him demonstrates that great writers are
great psychologists. Later he learns
that his father's offhand foreboding that "she's crazy" had some
grounding in that she was OCD
Still, his mother taught him to
persevere (although never understanding why he would want to be a writer with
his fine academic credentials that would assuredly lead to a tenured, secure
position). He even chose lower paying
positions. teaching less, to pursue his writing objectives, not succeeding at
first, sort of like when I decided to go into publishing rather than into a
more lucrative insurance underwriting position (at the time), as well as choosing
not to go into my father's business...
Long after she
returned to Gloversville from Tucson, I began a decade-long academic nomadship
during which I jumped from job to job, trying to teach and be a writer at the
same time. For a while, after our daughters came along, we were even poorer
than we'd been as graduate students. And I was a bad boy. Caring not a whit
about tenure and promotion, thumbed my nose at the advice of department chairs
about what I needed to do to succeed in the university. I left jobs for other
jobs that paid less but offered more time out of the classroom, In the summer,
when many of my colleagues taught extra classes, I wrote stories and spent
money we didn't have on postage to submit them to magazines. I wrote manically,
obsessively, but also, for a time, not very well. I wrote about crime and
cities and women and other things I knew very little about in a language very
different from my own natural voice, which explained why the editors weren't
much interested.
Later in life Russo finds that voice, and a discipline,
and has an epiphany one day as he is looking at the books and periodical
articles he had published -- that his writing was the result of an obsessive
personality, like his mother's ...
The biggest
difference between my mother and me, I now saw clearly, had less to do with
either nature or nurture than with blind dumb luck, the third and often lethal
rail of human destiny. My next obsession might well have been a woman, or a
narcotic, a bottle of tequila. Instead I'd stumbled on storytelling and become
infected. Halfway through my doctoral dissertation, I'd nearly quit so I could
write full-time. Not because I imagined I was particularly gifted or that one
day I'd be able to earn a living. I simply had to. It was the game room and the
dog track all over again. An unreasoning fit of must. That, no doubt, was what
my mother had recognized and abhorred, what had caused her to remind me about
my responsibilities as a husband and father.
It didn't take long
for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my
temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. Because - and don't
let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that
later) and obstinacy. Feeling your way around in the dark, trying to anticipate
the Law of Unintended Consequences. Living with and welcoming uncertainty.
Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming
clutter. Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the
finish line for a year or two, or five, or maybe never, without caring much.
Putting one foot in front of the other. Taking small bites, chewing thoroughly.
Grinding it out Knowing that when you've finally settled everything that can be,
you'll immediately seek out more chaos. Rinse and repeat. Somehow, without ever
intending to, I'd discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used
to call sheer cussedness - character traits that had dogged both my parents,
causing them no end of difficulty - to my advantage. The same qualities that
over a lifetime had contracted my mother's world had somehow expanded mine. How
and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea. Call it whatever
you want - except virtue.
It's a writer's astute introspective view of what writing
is all about. And how one's upbringing
and genes ebb and flow in his fiction.
His mother passed on a love of reading, and as Russo
says, you can't be a writer without first being a reader. My own childhood was spent bereft of books
and I can't remember my parents reading other than the occasional potboiler, Time and Life magazines, and my father's subscription to the Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Essentially, I grew up without books, except,
of course, at school, and I think that did damage to me as a writer, in spite
of writing this blog, and making half assed attempts at short stories and
poetry. I rarely read anything on my own other than Jules Verne.
On the other hand, my father instilled a work ethic in me
and my mother taught me typing and encouraged my attempts at music (except for
the guitar which she condemned). I still
consider typing 70 WPM (unusual for a young man in the 1960s) to be the basis
for a successful career, as silly as that might seem. That is how I got my job in publishing. And the piano has blossomed into something central
in my retirement, a place where I can go to express myself and be at peace with
the world.
Russo was looking at his mother's book collection during
one of her many, many moves, all of which Russo was left the responsibility for
engineering, commenting...
She claimed to love
anything about Ireland or England or Spain, but in fact she needed books in those
settings to be warm and comfy, more like Maeve Binchy than William Trevor. Not surprisingly,
given that she'd felt trapped most of her life, she loved books about time
travel, but only if the places the characters traveled to were ones she was interested in. She had exactly no interest in
the future or in any past that didn't involve romantic adventure.
Still, illuminating
though literary taste can be, the more I thought about it, neither my mother's
library nor my own meant quite what I wanted it to. If my books were more
serious and literary than hers, that was due more to nurture than nature. If I didn't read much escapist fiction, it was
because I lived a blessed life from which I neither needed nor desired to
escape. I wasn't a superior person, just
an educated one, and for that in a large measure I had my mother to thank.
Maybe she'd tried to talk me out of becoming a writer, but she was more
responsible than
anyone for my being
one. Back when we lived on Helwig Street, at the end of her long workdays at
GE, after making her scant supper and cleaning up, after doing the laundry
(without benefit of a washing machine) and ironing, after making sure I was set
for school the next day, she might've collapsed in front of the television, but
she didn't. She read. Every night. Her taste, unformed as mine would later be
by a score of literature professors, was equally dogmatic; she read her Daphne du
Mauriers and Mary Stewarts until their covers fell off and had to be replaced.
It was from my mother that I learned reading was not a duty but a reward, and
from her that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary
existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations
from which readers are exempt. You can't make a writer without first making a
reader, and that's what my mother made me
I can't help but think of Pat Conroy's My Reading Life which is also a memoir,
and in which his mother plays a central role in Conroy's love of reading and
then writing. There are so many
similarities, including their mothers' shared love of the same novel, Gone With the Wind.
I had a dream after I had read Elsewhere, during the early morning hours when I can at least remember
a snippet of what I dream. I was sitting
with Richard Russo's son (he has only daughters), and I mentioned to him that I
would like to meet his father, something I didn't feel daunted about (as I felt
the one time I might have had the opportunity to meet John Updike at a PEN
conference, but did not have the courage or the opportunity, I can no longer
remember). That little boy I was talking
to in the dream was obviously me, and as I talked to him, I gradually woke up
with a sense of sadness overcoming me, for the lost opportunity, wanting to ask
my mother one last question: Why, Mom?
But Russo's childhood was far from "ideal" as
well (is there such a childhood?), such a burden -- the "pledge" his
mother made him take as a child. And
yet, he is one of our finest storytellers today. Richard Russo, thank you for sharing your
story with us, for your honesty, and for being the writer you've become. You were a good son.
