Getting Personal: Selected Writings
By Phillip Lopate
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Hasn't the explosion in memoirs and "creative non-fiction" occurred at the same time as the rise of Jerry Springer and all the assorted debasement-celebration TV shows? Coincidence? Or, were those writers watching Jerry, and Maury, and Oprah, and thinking "I want in on that!" If they have compelling material derived from their own lives, why can't they turn it into a novel, a short story, a poem?
It was with this queasy feeling that I approached Phillip Lopate's Getting Personal: Selected Writings, a feeling that did not go away, and only increased as I read the collection. "Willy" discusses his mother's affair, and how that affected all the family members. The descriptions of the crushed father, the alliances between children and the father, and against the mother, the mother pleading with her son (the author) all seem very real, yet, I couldn't help thinking it would be much better to have this material elevated and transformed into a short story or novel. Staying within his real family it remains small and the participants exposed, the reason unclear. "The Countess' Tutor" describes his experience as a tutor to a neighborhood boy, who he became annoyed with and started to secretly beat up. Again the details of the setting, of the people involved seems accurate from the tutored boy's mother's "penchant for black fur collars and feathery ruffs," to the boy Georgie, punching himself and saying "Dummy" when he made a mistake during the lessons to sneaking from lessons with his pupil to play illicit games of marbles on the floor with table legs and lamps as targets…however, something feels missing. At the end, after being found out that he was beating the boy, he says he had the "squeamish sensation of guilt that comes from not only knowing you did wrong, but knowing your true nature was found out. I would encounter that same sensation other times in my adult life, when I had to ask myself: How could I have done or said such a cruel thing?" and jokes finally "Like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, I apparently was one of the evil ones."
I thought it strange that he would put down his strange childhood behaviour not to immaturity but to a personality that remains in adulthood, but that is indeed what we read about in the following pieces. In "Osao" a girl he was interested in previously calls him, asking if he wants her new number. "Yes certainly" he says, and they talk about going to the ballet. "We hung up. I never called her back. I knew I wouldn't, even while I was making the offer, and I think Osao understood it, too." I'm not sure that she did. "Suicide of a Schoolteacher" again gets the details right: a depressing bureaucratic administration, students that are a mixture of indifference and sensitivity, colleagues that do not know or talk to each other, but again the author appears emotionally stunted. Unsure, he says he 'remembers' a time when the usually guarded or jokey teacher said "everything" was wrong and he was "even thinking of killing myself". The author points him on the back and tells him to cheer up, but doesn't really talk to him or do anything. "Was this a cop-out? Does it show the error of my frequent detachment?" he asks. Yes. On the next page a teacher speaks fondly of the dead teacher and says, "If only I had reached out more." "But he made it hard to reach out," I answered. "He never asked for help." If a normally guarded teacher told him he was thinking of killing himself, that sounds to me like asking for help. In "Modern Friendships" he says "At present, I cherish a dozen friends for their unique personalities, without asking that any one be my soul-twin. Whether this alteration constitutes a movement toward maturity or cowardly pragmatism is not for me to say." Ok, I will say it: cowardly pragmatism. Later he describes being only able to spend a certain amount of time with the people he calls his friends "I am capable of only so much intense, exciting communication before I start to fade; I come to these encounters equipped with a six-hour oxygen tank. Is this an evolutionary pattern of modern friendship, or only a personal limitation?" A personal limitation.
He does much better in his short humorous pieces "Getting A Cat," "On Shaving a Beard," "Never Live Above Your Landlord," and his schoolteacher stories "Hanging Out" and "Chekov for Children." He does seem capable of making some small emotional connection through the children through poetry and the staging of a play. Maybe it is just the big feelings with big people that are tough for him.
In the introduction, he defends his memoir writing by saying that he was attracted to the "confessional mode" in literature, and lists amongst other authors, Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is restrained as much as she is "confessional" and wrote poetry and used metaphors. Much was held bad even in her poems on the week of her suicide. Her novel was fairly autobiographical, but it was a novel, and was published under a pseudonym. Her honesty comes through in the emotional depth of her work. Lopate is the opposite - lots of details, not a lot of emotion.