Some of these lines I quoted in the novel. Still, I have no sense that the book began within a month or so of the miscarriage: only the chronology tells me that. In memory, the two seem months, many months, from one another; several times, when I’ve recounted the happenings to other people, I’ve spoken of them as if they actually were.
In both cases, the disjunction in memory was strong enough to make me, now and again, even argue the facts, till their proximities were fixed by document and deduction:
A careful and accurate biographer can, here and there, know more about the biographical subject than the subject him- or herself.
My favorite autobiographical memoirs are Osip Mandelstam’s The Noise of Time, Louise Bogan’s Journey Around My Room, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Goethe’s Italian Journey, Paul Goodman’s Fire Years: Thoughts During a Useless Time, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an African Slave, Michael McClure’s and Frank Reynold’s Freewheelin’ Frank, sections of Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street, and parts of Barthes by Barthes.
With those brief and intense models shamelessly in mind (with the exception of the Goethe, the longest is just over 250 pages), I am not about to try here for the last word on event and evidential certainty. I hope it’s clear: despite the separate factual failing each is likely to fall into, the autobiographer (much less the memoirist) cannot replace the formal biographer. Nor am I even going to try. I hope instead to sketch, as honestly and as effectively as I can, something I can recognize as my own, aware as I do so that even as I work after honesty and accuracy, memory will make this only one possible fiction among the myriad — many in open conflict — anyone might write of any of us, as convinced as any other that what he or she wrote was the truth.
But bear in mind two sentences:
“My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen.”
“My father died of lung cancer in 1960 when I was eighteen.”
The first is incorrect, the second correct.
I am as concerned with truth as anyone — otherwise I would not be going so far to split such hairs. In no way do I feel the incorrect sentence is privileged over the correct one. Yet, even with what I know now, a decade after the letter from Pennsylvania, the wrong sentence still feels to me righter than the right one.
Now a biography or a memoir that contained only the first sentence would be incorrect. But one that omitted it, or did not at least suggest its relation to the second on several informal levels, would be incomplete.
The Peripheries of Love
1
1. Demolition for the Village View Apartments hadn’t quite finished: July dawns you could still wander the small streets (shortly to be replaced by concrete paths between scrubby lawns and red-brick buildings) and, among the devastated acres, catch sight, in the muggy morning, of fires here and there beside one or another still-standing tenement wall. Off beyond the Jacob Riis Houses with their green sliver of park, the East River’s sluggish oils nudged the city’s granite embankments or bumped the pilings beneath the Williamsburg Bridge: girder, cable, and concrete rose from among the delis and cuchifrito stands, the furniture and fabric stores, the movie marquees on Delancey Street to span the night waters — where cars and subways and after-dark cruisers took their delicate amble above the blue-black current banked with lights — before, above the Navy Yard, striking into Brooklyn’s glittering flank.
In the summer of 1961 no one had yet named it the East Village: it was still the Lower East Side. It was the cheapest neighborhood in Manhattan. Rumors of three- and four-room apartments to be had for thirty-five dollars a month ran through the bohemian population of the city — as it was still called back then: the young people who came down to Washington Square Park on Sunday to play their guitars and sing, which included me and any number of my friends, or the slightly older ones who hung out in Village coffee shops.
After three days of looking, the best Marilyn and I could do was a four-room apartment for fifty-two dollars a month. How we wondered, would we pay the astonishing rent?
1.1. Behind the public school, the five-story tenement toward the end of East Fifth Street was the building into which the landlord, who owned a goodly number of apartment houses in the neighborhood, just happened to put all the interracial couples who came to his dim, store front office out on Avenue B, looking for a place to live.
On the top floor, there was Terry (eighteen, plump, and Italian, from upstate New York) and Billy (thirty-five, black, and vaguely related to me by marriage). They and their one — then two — offspring lived together in a living room crowded with a foldout couch and a kitchen very full of a newly purchased washing machine. Shortly after we moved in, Bill and Terry took over the management of a tiny Greenwich Village coffee shop on the north side of Third Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street, the Cafe Elysée, where, with my guitar, I would go to sing in the evenings and pass the basket, along with the likes of Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, Dick Glass, Lisa Kindred, Fred Neal, my long time friend Ana Perez, a friendly and talented youngster, Vic Smith, from whom I learned endless guitar riffs, and an extraordinary blind Puerto Rican guitarist, Jose Feliciano, who slept on our living room daybed for a couple of weeks before taking an apartment upstairs in the same building with his girlfriend (and later wife), Hilda, Ana’s sister. Alex, who was a very lanky, very black, very stoned folksinger, and his wife, Carol, who was a very blond, also very stoned dancer, lived on the fourth floor. I was nineteen. Marilyn, my new wife, was eighteen.
2
Marilyn Hacker, “Catherine Pregnant,” in