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Publishers Weekly, June 14, 1993 v240
n24 p51(2)
Susanna Kaysen: her startling memoir recalls the novelist's experiences at a psychiatric hospital. (PW Interviews) Missy Daniel. Abstract: Susanna Kaysen's third book and first nonfiction work, 'Girl, Interrupted,' is based on Kaysen's own experience as a patient in McLean Psychiatric Hospital. The book has been published by Random House under its Turtle Bay Books imprint. The book and Kaysen's career are discussed. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Cahners Business Information "I think language makes the world go round," says Susanna Kaysen with conviction. "Describing things, trying to pinpoint them, to define or expand them with words, makes the world stay on its course." And when the world goes off course, language can also come to the rescue, as Kaysen's newest work suggests. Her first and second novels, Asa, As I Knew Him (1987) and Far Afield (1990), were published by Vintage. This month, Kaysen makes her nonfiction and hardcover debut with Girl, Interrupted (Nonfiction Forecasts, Apr. 19), a memoir of the nearly two years she spent as a teenaged patient in McLean Psychiatric Hospital.
Kaysen sits with legs crossed beneath her on a low couch. She is small and thin, dressed in leggings and a roomy collared shirt. The humble gray typewriter she works at rests under a window not far away. No computers and disks for this writer. "I like paper, all kinds of paper, and I like manuscripts," she concedes. Girl, Interrupted was the first-- and the last--bound reader's copy edition to be published by Turtle Bay Books. Of the demise of the short-lived Random House imprint, Kaysen can only say that she is "very sad, very sad. I was abroad most of the year that my book was in production"--in Turin, Italy, a city and a country she adores--"and I didn't really get to know the people [at Turtle Bay] until I came back in the spring. Then, almost immediately upon my return, it happened. Our relations took place under the shadow of this event. It seemed to me that it was a small and cohesive group of people who worked happily and productively together. That's unusual in publishing." Kaysen would know. For 15 years she made her living as a freelance editor and proofreader in Cambridge. But now that she has become a writer who is edited, she admits, "I'm every editor's nightmare, and I know it. I'm terrible; I won't take any suggestions for changes." Eight years ago, Kaysen the editor was working for the American version of the Italian art magazine FMR in an old house in Cambridge, not at all unlike Dinah Sachs, the narrator of Asa. Her co-workers were Michael Downing, also a novelist, and former Harvard University Press editor Elyse Topalian. "Michael and I spent all our time complaining about how we were writers and shouldn't have to do this [sort of work]. Of course, we hadn't finished books, and no one had published a word we had written. Elise suggested we call her friend Jon Matson at Harvard University Press. His father was Harold Matson in New York, and Jon worked part-time at the Press and part-time as an agent. He took Michael on, and a year later, when I finished Asa, I sent it to him. He said, 'This is a wonderful book. I don't think anyone will ever publish it, but I'd like to take you on as a client.' "And to this day, Jon Matson is Kaysen's agent. "Anybody who takes you when you aren't anybody is somebody to stick with," she declares. Kaysen has had a string of editors. Gary Fisketjon bought Asa, but he had left Vintage by the time it came out. "Then Carolyn Reidy took it up. Pat Mulcahy and Carolyn both bought my next book, but by the time it came out, Pat had moved on and so had Carolyn, so I had Robin Desser as an editor, and we have established a long-term editorial relationship. She took me through Far Afield, and I also sent her Girl, Interrupted while I was writing it."
So why did Kaysen do "the loony bin book," as she describes it, at all? "I can't really explain it. I think a quarter of a century is enough time to look back on something. It was 25 years since I had been in the hospital when I finished the book." When she first began work on it, the writing took shape as short vignettes about slipping into the mysterious "parallel universe" of mental illness and spending it in the sanctuary--or prison--of a psychiatric hospital. There are about 30 entries in all, some as brief as two pages, and she says, "They came to me as complete nuggets like that. I wrote about four, and then I thought I should also get hold of my medical records." With legal help, she eventually did, and promptly put all 360 pages of these documents into a drawer. "I didn't read them for three years, until I had written most of the book, because I felt it would change my memories, and I wanted to exhaust my version of it before I got theirs." Then Kaysen decided to interweave a dozen pages of the hospital records into the book, "because the contrast between their language and my language was interesting. Their record provided a viewpoint on the experience that I couldn't provide. I didn't have their kind of clinical detachment and particular prejudices and thoughts. And there was a taboo that I wanted to break. I was interested in making public something that is considered extremely private. "There were more horrid parts of the medical record that I didn't publish. I could have really made myself look bad, but I decided not to. Doing it was a way of saying, 'This is as bad as it gets.' "She adds, "It wasn't a pleasure to write, I can say that. It wasn't agony, but I had to get back to that stuff, and it put me in a terrible frame of mind. Occasionally it made me feel completely nuts, just desperately nuts--not because I couldn't write, but because I was so squished up against horrible feelings. I felt very far from my old self, and that was a source of pain, too. The memories of being 18 were so awful. Thank heaven I survived it." Kaysen speaks and writes about the experience with wit and anguish. As a consequence, Girl, Interrupted may draw comparisons with Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar--but Kaysen brushes off the prospect. "It's not a very good book," she whispers of Plath's 1963 autobiographical novel about a young woman's breakdown. "I re-read it after I had finished my book, and it seemed to me like a potboiler. She wrote it to make money, and said so-- and that's not terrible. There may be an element of cashing in on your illness, but... it should be good for something!" The good of Kaysen's books includes, in each case, elegant and telling observations about language. In Asa, a story about love and friendship, danger and innocence, Jews and WASPs and "the search for the male Yankee soul," Dinah, the narrator, declares that "writing this is my last effort at transubstantiation .... I will make, by words, the body and blood of a human." She says of her lover Asa Thayer, an editor: "Asa believes in print. Print is not only the reality of his working day, it is a firm reality in itself. It endures, it is final, it is true." In Far Afield, Jonathan, the protagonist, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology who travels to the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic-as did Kaysen and her former husband, an anthropologist--is led there by "language love." His "home was the English language, a large mansion. He roamed its deep German basement, leaned against its Latin pillars, admired its Greek buttresses and joists, disliked but was familiar with its French interior furnishings... Sangfroid was spit in the beer. Why say cogitate when you could say think?" And in Girl, Interrupted, Kaysen--a patient at a hospital famous for having housed poets Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and singer Ray Charles--asks, "What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?" Elaborating, the author now replies, "All the great English poets, Chatterton, Keats, Eliot--the list is endless--were manic depressive. I wasn't, but it's curious why this is a poets' illness. That didn't occur to me while I was in McLean, God knows. All I was thinking was 'get me out in one piece.' Not until I was halfway through the book did I think of all those other writers at McLean." This writer who loves words, who says, "They make me feel that things are okay, on course somehow," confesses to being an impatient reader who is "not much of a highbrow. The trouble is, I forget anything I ever read," Kaysen explains. "I have read thousands of books, but I have no memory. I do like Thomas Hardy, but the truth is I read him 20 years ago, and I haven't read him since. "It's terrible, but I don't read books anymore. I read a lot of junk, and I like it. I rumble around in modern fiction, but I don't quite know where I am or what I'm looking for--distraction and entertainment, I guess. I find it very difficult to reread George Eliot or Charles Dickens. My capacity to read this sort of prose has eroded. When I read Henry James, I really struggle." Even the writers she loves most-- Thomas Mann and D.H. Lawrence-- are now hard for Kaysen to read. "I tried to reread some Lawrence recently, and I threw it across the room. But I loved him; he was so important--the passion and the sermonizing and the kind of insanity with language, driving language just to the wall with his repetitions and all that coded stuff. It told me something about the freedom the writer has to do what he or she will with language. But damned if I could read Women in Love again." In fact, Kaysen believes that painting, not writing, is the higher art. Her title, Girl, Interrupted is drawn from the title of a painting by Vermeer, and figures eloquently in the memoir's final pages. "There is a nostalgia in Vermeer's paintings," Kaysen remarks. "You feel like you are looking at the moment that's already past. You are partaking of a nostalgia for a moment that's gone, and somehow he has painted it gone. It is the perfection of the moment, but you feel the sadness. I don't think a writer can do that. Though I believe that words hold up the world, I still think they are so clumsy and banal compared to painting. It's rare to get a real frisson, a jolt, from reading. You can get one from poetry, but it is very unusual to get one from prose. A novel is cumulative, it wears you down," she concludes. And then she hastens to add, with a laugh, "I don't mean as the writer. I mean as the reader." Kaysen's first novel probes the experience of being a Jew and infiltrating the world of New England WASPs and Yankees. "Do only Jews have skin and nerves?" she wrote. Yet at the same time, the book hints at a Christian vocabulary and imagery, with characters yearning for grace and speaking of transcendence. "Sometimes I look back on Asa and feel like a lot of that stuff was facile," Kaysen acknowledges. "I don't think it is an easy topic, and I didn't come to grips with it in any serious way. But I do think a lot about Jews and what it means to be a Jew and what the Jews are for in the world." Kaysen says she wasn't raised in the Jewish religious tradition; her father was an academic, and--like most Jews in Cambridge-- the family's "religion" was the academic and the intellectual. In a Christian world, Kaysen believes, what comes to hand for a writer are Christian images. "Catholicism is the only organized mystery and transcendence in the modern Western world. But I don't think Jews are very interested in transcendence. Judaism has to do with something quite different-justice and sanctity and living a correct life in this world. It's got a practical, judicious side that is very appealing. I've thought of writing a book about Jews, but I wouldn't presume to. I don't know enough to approach the subject." But she does believe there is some book, another book, in her, and when she begins to write it she will sit at her typewriter surrounded by a few small talismans--a Venetian glass fish, for one, and a fortune from a Chinese fortune cookie that she has framed. "In love you can shine like a brilliant star," it reads. Perhaps in writing, too. | |||
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