SOURCE: “Assimilation Blues: Maureen Howard's Facts of Life,” in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 95–102.

[In the following essay, O'Brien explores the themes of assimilation and ethnic identity in Facts of Life.]

Narratives of exile and immigration arguably bring into sharper focus than other autobiographical modes the concept identified by Philippe Lejuene as “the autobiographical pact.”¹ One reason why this may be the case is that there is an implicit struggle in autobiography, an application to the self of the sense of confrontation and critique that is applied to the objective world in Realist fiction. The experience typified and challenged in both Realist fiction and autobiography can, very generally, be called change. And in the age of capitalism, which also happens to be the age when change has become the structural principle of both social reality and the models of identity to which that reality gives rise, no change is more comprehensive than that articulated by the immigrant experience. Its comprehensiveness may be appreciated not only with regard to the actual immigrant generation itself, but also in view of its lingering effects on subsequent generations.

Quite apart, therefore, from its numerous artistic excellences and from the fact that its combination of detail and insight make it a unique record of the Irish-American experience of embourgeoisement,² Maureen Howard's Facts of Life³ functions as a meditation on the mercuriality of an identity trained in, but not conditioned by, a strong awareness of ethnicity. The roots of the tension between training and self-awareness that pervades Howard's novels are explored in a way that reveals the limitations of identity conceived of solely in terms of its ethnic origins and the problematic shapelessness of identity conceived of without an adequate negotiation of those origins.

The vehement panache of Maureen Howard's Facts of Life is not just a matter of style, a matter of applying the cosmetics purchased through a Smith education and life in academia (if “life” is what institutions offer academic wives). The ability to put on the makeup is certainly there:

I wish someone had noted for art's sake—it is pure Chekhov—my grandfather's feelings when he bought the property on which he was to build his grandiose house from Mr. and Mrs. William Abbott Parrott, the faded Yankee gentility for whom his mother had served as the Irish maid.

(97)

More often than not, though, “art's sake” is beside the point. A sardonic, satirical, self-mocking tone announces its impatience with high gloss and finishing school and the assumption that one of the objects of experience is syntactical etiquette.

Time and again the social surface doesn't hold good. My lace mantilla lay gently folded in a puff of tissue paper: it was finer than the veils the parish girls would wear (always, always finer, the single tedious note of our supposed distinction). My white gloves buttoned at the wrists with pearls. These clothes would never be worn. I picked up a grapefruit knife and tried to commit suicide.

(34)

This, from later life, of a literary luncheon: “There was something pure in the utter filth of the experience” (117). Writing, here, is not an apology for order. Its force and conviction derive from its resistance to conferred codes, a resistance all the more winning for the attempts to identify with those codes—whether they are the attitudes (posture, deportment and declamation as the budding daughters of middle-class Bridgeport should embody them) or as a faculty spouse: “My education and career were sham intentions, smart mid-century substitutes for the embroidery work and social graces of an earlier time” (73).

Is there an alternative to belonging? Not on your life. But it seems that there is also no alternative to the pressures that ostensibly belonging brings. The question forever naggingly remains, belonging to what?

Maureen Howard organizes her “life” and its “facts” in three categories—culture, money and sex—one of the effects of which is to remind the reader of race, class and gender. And an obvious case might well be made for the synonymity of class and money, gender and sex. Maureen Howard doesn't make it, possibly because of its banality, though possibly also because issues of empowerment and disenfranchisement arise more predictably in the context of these two categories. They've entered our awareness. They're easier to assimilate, seem prominent in public discourse. They may even be related: sex is a kind of money, gender a sub-set of class. Or at least to say something like this tends to be less provocative than to speak about the possibly denaturing effects culture—the normality of manners, the quotidien participation in “civilized society”—can have on race, a category which, like many others, culture believes it can control by erasing.

Whatever inherent interest culture and race possess, intersections between them are of interest if only because of the interminable dialogue of the deaf that the two categories seem to carry on in America. Perhaps the dialogue only seems that way because of the difficulty the immigrant has in getting a hearing, or because a hearing only seems plausible when mimicry is the mode of articulation. Chico Marx says, “wadsa madda for you?” We laugh, being given to believe we know what he means. The black butler is by definition happy in his work, we accept him (he's presented as acceptable) because he's always smiling, according to the popular image, according to an image the very transmission of which defines the power of cultural institutions. The image validates that power, not the subject upon which it feels free to draw. Notre Dame sports teams are nicknamed “The Fighting Irish”—but that's different (we're different), that's good, clean fun: no harm meant, no harm done, don't be so sensitive, all it means is that we Irish have made it. …

Maureen Howard is not an immigrant, though. She comes to us by way of a Seven Sisters education, university teaching, publications with the brightest and best in toney journals. So why is so much of her story taken up by contests against images of conformity, with distinguishing oneself in terms but against the grain of institutional standards and expectations, with a persistent sense of breaking off, breaking out, breaking away? Partly—the understandable part?—because of admissions like these:

I said yes to the academic poetry of that time which had grown out of stale criticism [the scene is Kenyon College] and yes to the limp refined productions of Shakespeare that had begun to seep out of our new repertory theaters over the fetid landscapes of high culture and yes to the staggering simplifications of all the Abstract Expressionists, because—ever aiming to please I had let myself be told.

(78)

But partly too, perhaps, because her origins were Irish. This part is more obscure, less easy to find a language for, rooted in a landscape whose character, whose difference, seems to exist because it was the site of those first, formative rejections and resistances. If life at Kenyon was “a colonial existence which seemed unreal even as I lived it,” (79) that may have been because it was all too reminiscent of the limbo of designated culture that was the author's girlhood. “Colonial” seems to mean here vulnerable, adrift, frontier in the depressing sense, marginal—terms which are usually associated with the colonized.

The point here is not so much an uncharacteristic verbal lapse as an expression of the difficulty in establishing a place to be, a difficulty which culture is supposed to render recognizable and then sublimate (green thoughts in green shades). A more complicated example of the same bifocal state of mind may be elicited from the following. Northrop Frye, on a visit to Kenyon, gives “the impression of a generous man, so committed to his work that he could not fathom my triviality” (78). Compare the man of culture's impact with that of Jasper McLevy, “the famed Socialist mayor of Bridgeport” (3). He is presented only to be satirically dismissed by the author's mother with the help of “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain” (3). The dismissal is replicated by “famed”—the very thing McLevy is not.

What is of interest here is not drawing attention to those occasions on which the author's language seems to say the opposite of what it means, or to note the empty irony of the dismisser dismissed, much less to accuse the author of snobbery, or even to make a case for the rehabilitation of McLevy on the grounds that one more anecdote about Northrop Frye is of much less interest than a word or two, however cursory, on what “socialist” meant in Bridgeport long ago.⁴ Rather—as in the case of the dual applicability of “colonial” and “colonized”—what emerges most convincingly is the writer's position between high and low, between the preacher and the converted, between local and international, between home and world. The position could be that of a person undergoing both the inevitability of assimilation and the failure of assimilation to be completely successful or credible. The position could be that of the writer negotiating between the various versions of being declasse and marginal, between origin and apotheosis, between facts and the life that they betoken.

What her mother experienced as contradictory, the author takes fully conscious responsibility for by making it problematic.

I sensed that my mother was a misfit from the first days when, dressed in a linen hat and pearls, she walked me out around the block. She was too fine for the working-class neighborhood that surrounded us. (4) At Smith College she was homesick but stuck it out. She dare not disappoint her father. One of the social clubs was called the AOH, mocking the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the members took shanty Irish names—Mudeater O'Climint and Annie Rooney Terhune. She made tea dates and went on happy walks with a few friends. In the name of the Burns family she read Heine and Schiller, Faust and more Faust. The answers to mathematical problems that no one could solve in class came to her in her dreams.

(100)

Mother is a misfit because she has espoused culture, dragging the young Maureen and her brother to concerts, citing and reciting fragments from years of spare time immersed in minor and not so minor poetry, establishing standards, suggesting roles, indicating paths onward and upward, per ardua ad astra, the ne plus ultra of the immigrant's dream of education (not that she is an immigrant either: she is faithful to her immigrant father's educational designs for her, however, not daring to disappoint). Mother's father, Grandpa Burns the asphalt magnate, is a “provincial patriarch” (102). He designs and builds a car, “the supreme American machine” (103)—Maureen Howard quotes from a book produced to commemorate this automotive phenomenon. The book contains a story of pleasurable escapism in the form of a world tour. At the end, the lucky lady tourist in question, widow of an industrialist,

stands midst her souvenirs looking out the window of the anvil works on the flourishing cornfield by the Delaware River where she hopes, magnificently, to build homes for all her men and their families. There are no trade unions, no anarchists, nor is there any child labor in the land. It is the willed romance of the early twentieth century.

(102)

Culture is a vehicle to the promised land, en route to which Mickishness and its squalid struggles are jettisoned. To be cultured is the assimilationist dream. To be cultured is to be as empowered as one's masters, to speak their language. Culture is a replica of wealth, internalized, edifying, sanitary, harmlessly acquired, beneficiary retained. Grandpa Burns's car was a flop, but the “willed romance” of its fetishism persists. And, in Maureen Howard, persists with such completeness that only interrogation, challenge and repudiation will preserve it, will preserve its true nature: “what the past will yield if we are truthful” (51). True nature is a tendentious, not to mention arrogant phrase. A nature that is more satisfying to behold because rendered more complexly, rather than as a rationale, rather than as the kind of response to cultural experience articulated by the author's father.

I'm circling back to the problem of Joseph McCarthy. I have refused to understand my father's admiration for that twirp who manipulated two Presidents. I have tried to justify his allegiance on the grounds that my father wanted revenge, along with the Senator from Wisconsin, on a society that had treated the Irish like guttersnipes and cartoon drunks when he was a kid.

(67–8)

Such a scenario seems just as far-fetched as the existence of a socialist mayor of Bridgeport. But it might well be just as true. And it is a scenario that is difficult to come to grips with, speaking as it does of bitternesses, resentments and frustrations that are hardly convincing watchwords of assimilation. The escapism of culture and its mythology of assimilation (the best things in life are free) are more understandable than a politics of vengeance, articulated by the patriotic Senator in terms of purity and danger, terms that delimit the immigrant's hope and his voyage towards it, his ghetto (sorry, neighborhood) and the world beyond it. Better culture than race. Better Faust, a thousand times, read in a chilly dorm, late into the night, alone, in the cause of self-improvement and rising in the world and belonging.

Part of the conviction of Facts of Life is Maureen Howard's awareness that she is saying something that has not been said before. This awareness underlies much autobiography, understandably, with its interest in recuperation, rehabilitation, naming of unfamiliar parts, coloring in a landscape where a cultural desert was thought to have existed. Chicago or Boston may be thought worthy of the quality of attention she brings to her story—but Bridgeport? Chicago and Boston would have furnished different books, however, less intimate, a little more predictable perhaps, whereas the very unlikelihood of Bridgeport seems to make for piquancy: its anonymity is given its alter ego in the notoriety and daring of Maureen Howard's view of it. She makes it complex, the way real places are supposed to be. In her hands it both is and is not “a vaudeville joke of a town” (11). And all the details are in place, the way they tend to be in autobiography, presented as an inventory of personal and family appurtenances, but utterly familiar as soon as they're mentioned. Whoever writes his or her life turns out to have written the lives of many.

And, being autobiography, tension between a self that longs and a world that lures is only to be expected, with routines and rituals of assimilation as temporary reliefs from the tension. Race and roots are what you belong to; culture what you grow into. Everybody who might read this book has been somewhere within its orbit. We are all educated, we all leave, we are melted down, recast. We can't go home again. Here again, strictly from the point of view of genre and without belittling the qualities or diminishing the pleasures of Facts of Life, Maureen Howard has not done anything exceptional by reminding us of a generation's uncertain but distinctive trajectory from home to world. It's the same old story, the one about identity as a venture capitalist's prospectus, a tale of virginity and how to lose it, all too familiar, yet ever fresh in each retelling, with Listerine-breathing nuns and boyfriends from rough neighborhoods, “Catholics in good standing, pure potato-famine Irish, gone fine with our cut glass and linens from McCutcheon's” (13).

What gives Facts of Life its urgency and its pointed, rather flaying, style is that it also speaks of something unmeltable, irreducible: At the shaded, turreted Academy of Our Lady of Mercy the nuns all but insisted that my body was on loan like a library book or a company car. My arms and legs but above all my womanly appurtenances, mons veneris, the very curve and tilt of my womb existed for a higher purpose. How many years has it taken to claim myself—big ass, caesarean scar, broad hands good for scooping potatoes out of the dirt of Killarney … the mockery, will I ever leave off. (172)

Probably not, if we're lucky (in answer to those last words). And it's not that the earthy coalescence of the feminine and the Irish should be noted in order to clinch some kind of case. There isn't a case to be made, because the making of cases is part of the process of assimilation, tending to standardize in terms of a prefabricated good what should be allowed its own particularity and distinction. Maureen Howard is nowhere more convincing than when she shows how she could not be institutionalized. Besides, that's not a particularly well-written sentence, its fragmentariness seemingly enacting a resistance to what it seeks to order. (And in any case, Killarney dirt … ?! Or is that a joke at the expense of Emerald Islers?)

What seems new is the celebration—mordant, ironic, merciless, restless, as is often the condition of the autobiographing “I”—of certain energies that have resisted virtually everything to which they've been attracted. There's something here that is a continual going on from, as Facts of Life's closing paragraph (to cite the most obvious instance) winningly attests:

I am walking up lower Madison Avenue in an old straw hat, circa 1918. Yes, always the heightening. The last golden hour of the day. Everything is clear: the rose marble of the Morgan Library, mahogany bushes, tulips on the verge. Soon to marry, I am twenty-three years old in a blue suit, size eight. Natural time. I hardly touch ground the last blocks to Grand Central, but come triumphantly to rest alone on Forty-second Street, on the edge of evening. I am beginning. My life is beginning which cannot be true.

(182)

There's something here that, by being a continuum of uncertainty, is true to life. And it isn't even that that in itself is new, particularly (there's no intention, much less need, to Molly-Bloomify the author)—though one respects and is glad for “always the heightening,” which is undoubtedly one way to characterize unassimilable energy. More than that, it seems that what Facts of Life most powerfully and poignantly reminds us of is how few books there are like it, how little known they are (beyond Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and Harp), how prone we seem to be to representing ourselves in the cultural graffiti of Greenery—proofs, perhaps, of assimilation and its discontents.

Notes

1. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975). The theoretical essay on which this volume is based appears in translation in Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, translated by Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989): 3–30. In his foreword to this volume, Paul John Eakin summarizes the concepts as follows: “In effect, the autobiographical pact is a form of contract between author and reader in which the autobiographer explicitly commits himself or herself not to some impossible historical exactitude but rather to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life.”

2. Unique as to quality of recall and formal complexity, as comparisons with Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957) and John Gregory Dunne's Harp (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) readily reveal.

3. Maureen Howard, Facts of Life (Boston: Little, Brown: 1978; New York: Penguin, 1980). Subsequent citations to Penguin edition.

4. A treatment of the life and times of Jasper McLevy may be found in Maureen Howard, Natural History (New York: Norton: 1992) at the conclusion of the “Double Entry” section, facing pp. 295–97.