Sari Wilson

Reviews & Essays

Mary Gordon's Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity

Provincetown Arts, July/August 2000

Mary Gordon's newest book, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity, is a beautiful collection of thematically-linked essays that revisit the places of her past through the interpretative lens of the present. The essays, though weighted toward childhood — her grandmother's house, her babysitter's house, camp and churches — take us to her current position as an English professor at Barnard College. The narrative is non-chronological — after her father dies in one essay, he shows up in the next, jangling his pocket change — but is held together by treatment of place as a condition of the imagination, as much as a physical space. Time itself comes unmoored from reality as Gordon embraces the extra-temporal realities of our lives — the mythic, imagistic, metaphoric — even while anchoring her writing in the concrete details that give memory its powerful hold.

Gordon, the daughter of an Irish-Italian Catholic mother and a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism, grew up post-WWII in a Long Island suburb. Her father was an intellectually ambitious but financially unsuccessful writer; her mother, a secretary, paid the bills. Gordon describes her parents as "serious people," brought together by their faith, married on the threshold of middle age. Often at odds with her mother's extended family and with the values of their suburban community, Gordon's family found togetherness only in its devotion to the Church. She writes about herself as an odd, dreamy child, at once stubbornly self-sufficient and achingly lonely. Growing up in an atmosphere of grave spiritual intensity and constant bickering over money woes, Gordon often felt like an imposter-child, a grown-up in a child's body. She didn't see the point of other children's play, and she found comfort only in incessant reading and the gloomy romance of her parent's religion (Fifteen Saints for Girls was a favorite childhood book). When Gordon was seven her father died of a heart attack and she and her mother moved into her grandmother's house, a place that haunts this book and that figures prominently in her struggle for an identity independent of her family and religion.

The opening essay, "My Grandmother's House," is the tour de force of the book, combining the ruminative complexity of a master essayist with the inexorable plot pull of a Shakespearean tragedy. Before her father's death, Gordon is often left at her grandmother's house by one of her busy parents; she fears this place — its gruesome crucifixion paintings, its rectitude — but she also "knew it was a privilege to be in that house." All the objects there seem to harken back to a mythic, ancestral past that the young Gordon identifies as having "nothing to do with America." Soon after Gordon and her mother move in with her grandmother, the interior is redecorated at the insistence of an aunt, in the style of the day. Gordon watches as wall-to-wall carpeting is installed, as throw pillows replace doilies. "From that day on," Gordon writes, "my grandmother grew old. She went on cleaning and cooking, but the charmless modern surfaces she tended gave her no joy. For the first time in her life, she was the victim of minor illnesses. She got colds and sore throats; she sprained her ankle; she took naps in the afternoon. In a year, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and in two years she was dead." The permeabilty between the body and its environment is revisited again and again in these essays. Indeed, Gordon's humble subjects inspire wide-ranging, meaty ruminations on faith, greed, the nature of identity. After finishing "My Grandmother's House" a question lingered with me: What cultural and social spaces are now being eclipsed in our headlong rush toward the new?

In "Boulevards of the Imagination," Gordon takes New York City as her subject. She recalls the New York of her girlhood imagination (where European war refugees holed up in Central Park West apartments, playing violins and reading philosophy) and the New York in which she, as a teacher, writer, and culture-creator, has now earned a place. Although the adult Gordon's New York is the most "real," we are left with an indelible sense of these New Yorks existing in tandem — and somehow in dialogue. But Gordon can also stick to the script when she wants to. "A Room in the World" is a fairly traditional treatment of place, a paean to the artistic succor and soul-pleasing beauty Gordon found while summering in a Truro beach house.

The dialectic of the Catholic struggle — between sin and absolution, guilt and grace — forms a powerful current in Gordon's writing. Her faith can be traced from a devout, obsessive variety, to a more self-accepting and joyous kind that she begins to discover, while in Rome, sitting in the shadow of Saint Peter's, with her "back turned on the Vatican." In contemplating issues of faith, Gordon's metaphorical language sometimes fails her. Take, for example, an episode involving Father B., a liberal priest, who often visits the family. Gordon's father regularly yells at Father B. for his "unorthodox" views on Church doctrine, then falls to his knees and asks Father B. for his blessing. This ritual fills Gordon with alarm. "I knew everything this was supposed to mean: that it didn't matter that my father had insulted Father B. as a man ; the office of the pristhood was infinitely respectable and humbling to him [her father] . . . . I didn't believe in the possibility of this division of identity   — the object of scorn, the sacred vessel; the persecutor, the humble penitent — although it was part of my faith to do so." She concludes, "In resisting this tableau I knew that I transgressed, but I felt I was right, and my sense of rightness was the first window letting in a disturbing light that fell straight onto the white stone of ancient practice." Since this was the first hint of Gordon's lasting relationship with her childhood faith, I wanted to understand exactly what she was talking about: what Catholic doctrine decrees such a dual identity? How, exactly, has her opinion of this doctrine changed over the years? What would this mean to her relationship to her faith, the tenants of which were so inseparable from her upbringing? "White stone of ancient practice" is a beautiful metaphor, but its power is aesthetic rather than truly descriptive of a moment that I, as a non-Catholic, felt I needed to better understand.

In "The Architecture of a Life with Priests," Gordon recalls the priests she knew as a child, and in so doing contemplates the border between the sacred and the ordinary. Gordon's devout parents were introduced by a priest and, growing up, the Church functioned as a sort of extended family. "There was a way in which the sacred spaces that we lived by were transportable, or portable, and that is because every place a priest visited, every place he stopped or stayed, became, by that virtue, and for those hours, sacred." Gordon accompanied her mother (who was something of a priest groupie) when she drove a local padre, Father B., to visit with his aged mother in a depressing New Jersey apartment. "Father B. would clear space on the dresser and say Mass. . After the ritual moment, the apartment became its ordinary cavernous self; the light of the sacrament went out, and it was only a place inhabited by an old lady, with the unfresh smell of overworn taffeta and perfume with a used floral scent." Although Gordon develops a more complicated, personalized relationship with Catholicism, she cannot give up her faith in a priest's ability to transform ordinary places into sacred places. The implications are too disorienting. "If a priest was a man, like any other . he was emptied of potential to transform the places where he'd rest, impermanently, his anointed head. And these transformations were the only ones I could imagine myself a part of. So I, too, would be deprived of transformation."

It occurs to me that I've focused on Gordon's childhood essays here, which points me toward a paradox in her writing: as the essays approach the presumably more lucid present in Gordon's life, the writing is in fact less emotionally vivid, less inhabited. The beauty of her sentences, the acuity of her observations feel as if they are being offered in place of the searching emotional curiosity of the earlier essays. The lovely and masterful writing begins to seem like an beautiful reliquary whose contents are being safe-guarded, much like the regal New York City institutional architecture she writes about so admiringly. In the final pages of the book, she tells us, "The great buildings I staked my dreams on are not longer marked for me by their emptiness. I use them; they are places where I work. I no longer walk silent, awestruck in the New York Public Library; it is a place I do research. I look at paintings in the Metropolitan Museum mostly for the refreshment of my soul, but sometimes to write about them. And some days, when I am on the East Side and I want a place to write for an hour or so, I sit at the tables in the European sculpture wing, turn my back on a Rodin, sip a cappuccino and look out the large windows at the park . . . . I need these great buildings, what they provide, what they suggest, for my work." But here's the thing: it's hard to imagine a public building having a private life. Like institutional architecture, which can deflect private revelation and intimidate us in the silence of its unimpeachable existence, the final essays in this book intimidate and frustrate me. I feel that I've lost connection with the complex emotional terrain of Gordon's life. Even basic, orienting, biographical details become sketchy and when they come, they come at strange points. I spent much of "Boulevards of the Imagination" thinking that Gordon was divorced (since, though she talks about her family, she never mentions her husband), only to find Gordon, at the very end, referring to herself as "married." Perhaps Gordon was leery of impinging on her family's privacy? Or perhaps the distant past acquires a romantic glow that inspires imagination, an inspiration that didn't transfer to her adult life? Seeing Through Places ends with Gordon looking with wonder at her life — at where she is now — and saying with pride and gratitude, "I am here." But where is here, precisely? I want to share in Gordon's victory but I'm not familiar enough with the battles of her adult life to do that.

In the end though, this criticism does little to diminish the power of Seeing Through Places. The striking, potent and original meditations on the relationship between the self and its environment give Seeing Through Places a rare power — the power to sanctify memory through metaphor, and the self through language.

©2000 Sari Wilson

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