Writer Mary Gordon's Search for Her Father

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JUNE 09, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 060901np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Mary Gordon
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Mary Gordon, is the author of several bestselling novels about the conflicts facing contemporary women, and she's written many essays relating to her life as a Catholic in conflict with the church.

In her memoir, which has just come out in paperback, she writes that at the age of 44, she discovered she wasn't the person she thought she was. Let me explain: the memoir is her exploration of her father's life.

In doing the research into his past, she learned that he wasn't exactly who he said he was, and when she learned that, she had to alter her sense of who she is.

I spoke with her last year after the publication of her memoir "The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father." Mary Gordon read a passage from the beginning of the book.

MARY GORDON, AUTHOR, "THE SHADOW MAN: A DAUGHTER'S SEARCH FOR HER FATHER": "My father died when I was seven years old. I've always thought that was the most important thing anyone could know about me. I've told his story hundreds of times because I thought his life was extraordinarily interesting -- extraordinarily complex."

"And in telling his story, I took on the luster of having an interesting and complex father. No one could know me very well without knowing some of the high points of his history: his riotous youth at Harvard, then in Paris and Oxford in the '20s; his career as the king of Cleveland soft-porn, the editor of a humor magazine called "Hot Dog"; his conversion in the '30s from Judaism to Catholicism; his turn at that time to the political right; his becoming a Francoist, a Conglinite (ph)."

"This isn't the first book I've written about my father. When I was 10 and he'd been dead only three years, I attempted his biography. It began: 'my father is the greatest man I have ever known.' For many years, I believed it. Well into my adulthood, he was the untouched figure of romance."

"He was so much more compelling than other people's fathers. He was a writer and a convert. While he was still alive, I'd watch him walk into the station on his way to work in the city, wearing a hat and hard brown shoes, holding a thin leather briefcase."

"Unlike other children's fathers who wore caps and carried lunch pails, on his way home from the train station, he would fill his pockets with candy and walk down the street giving sweets to all the children on the block. Thanks, Mr. Gordon, they would say -- the children who didn't speak to me and to whom I had no wish to speak -- no wish and no need. Why should I talk to children? I had him."

"But the whole enterprise was a charade, a costume drama. He wasn't going to work. His work was a series of schemes to get rich men to bankroll him in his magazines. Occasionally, he was successful, but not for long -- never long enough for him to support us. It was my mother's money that bought the candy for the children. He was the Pied Piper on her salary."

"And his gifts didn't make the children stop taunting me with the information their parents had given them: we know your father doesn't have a job."

GROSS: That's Mary Gordon reading from her new memoir The Shadow Man.

Mary, why did you want to investigate your father's life now? Why now?

GORDON: You know, that's the most obvious question to ask and the most impossible one for me to answer. The whole project started out of writing itself. I was writing something that I thought was about my grandmother's house.

I had an image of my grandmother's house, which I followed and wrote about, and I realized in writing that, that I was really writing about my father's death, because we had moved there after my father died. And then I -- I kept writing about the moment of my father's death, and how that was such an enormous break for me.

And I suddenly had a great number of pages, and it occurred to me in a terrible way that I didn't know this man that was the most important man in the world to me -- this man that I thought I knew so well, I really didn't know at all. And that there were ways that I could know him better.

So I -- in a way that's very mysterious for me, I said to myself: it's time now. It's time to do this.

GROSS: You know, you said in the passage that you read -- you said that your father's death was the most important thing anyone could know about you. Why was that so important in your definition of yourself?

GORDON: I think that that moment of loss was really a defining moment for who I was -- that a person who had lost at a very early age was the person whom I shaped myself around. And it was the moment that all my work came out of, in a way -- the recognition of loss; bearing witness to loss.

It also gave me a real differentness from everyone around me. I was marked by loss at a very early age, and the loss of the person who was most beloved and most important to me. It was also the end of joy for me, in my childhood. I had to rediscover joy in adulthood.

GROSS: And it was the end of joy not only because your father died, but because you moved into your grandmother's house where things were much more somber?

GORDON: Well, they were much more harsh. They were somber and un-playful and I was constantly under surveillance and constantly judged as wanting. Whereas in my father's eyes, nothing I did was less than spectacular, less than glorious. So it was a tremendous shift of focus.

GROSS: And at your grandmother's house there was constant disability. Your mother had had polio. Your aunt had had polio. Your grandmother was around 78. You say, you were always the most capable person.

GORDON: Yes, I say that one of the other important things about me is that I always feel like the most able-bodied person in any room I'm in. I mean, I could be, you know, in a room with Arnold Schwarzenegger and I'd still feel more -- somehow, I'll lift that for you, Arnold. Don't -- you know, don't tax yourself. I can do it.

I think it's a feeling that a lot of women have, of being more capable or more able to do things than other people. But with me, it was very literally inscribed at an early age.

GROSS: I think one of the things that must have made your father so interesting to you is that he seemed to have such an interesting life. He edited a humor magazine. He was involved with soft-core. I mean, these are not things that typical fathers did.

GORDON: No. Particularly not typical working-class fathers, and class is a very important element in my history, as I think it's a very important and well-kept secret in American life, because my mother was very working class, and her mother and that family that I moved into. And my father, really, presented me with a world that included the larger world.

One of the things that differentiates the middle from the working class is how much of the larger world do you feel you have access to. And my father suggested to me that I had access to the whole world. And because he had done so much or he had told me he'd done so much, he actually did both more and less than he told me.

But he did always give me a sense that other people's fathers were going to work and being responsible and respectable, and he was being adventurous and romantic and it was very exciting.

GROSS: What did you know about his humor magazine Hot Dog before you started researching your father's life and what did you find out when you actually found Hot Dog in an archive?

GORDON: Well, when I was 12 years old, I was going through some of my father's books, which were mostly very high-minded, very religious books. And I opened up one of these religious tomes, and I saw something called Hot Dog.

And I had known, in some odd way, that my father had edited a magazine called Hot Dog, and I opened it up. I was 12. I was the most law-abiding, puritanical 12-year-old. My entire life was based on Audrey Hepburn in "The Nun's Story." That was my ideal for myself -- just perfection and exclusion and absolute obedience to the rules.

And I opened this magazine, and saw a bare-breasted woman, saying "lover, come back." And I had to say: my God, this is my father's magazine. So as a law-abiding and Antigone-like 12-year-old, I took the magazine. I ripped it into shreds, and I flushed it down the toilet. And I said: nobody will ever know about this again.

Well, I did look -- I've used all the, you know, computer-based searches and everything, and I found copies of Hot Dog in the New York Public Library, in Brown, and later tracked it down to some collectors.

And of course, looking at it as a woman in her late '40s, in the late 20th century, it's nothing. But it's corny, and that actually became more embarrassing to me than the fact that it had a bare-breasted women, you know, which would embarrass me at age 12.

But it was so corny and it was so provincial and so of its time. At the same time, he was always trying to be serious, so there were these, you know, one-liners like, you know: some guys get married; others get by. And on the next page, there'd be an article about Flaubert.

And it was the same tremendous incoherence that marked everything about my father. And I would think: what did these guys think that were buying this magazine, for pictures of chorus girls? And all of a sudden, they're reading about the temptation of St. Anthony?

And I was wonderful in that way of my father always trying to put things together that couldn't possibly be put together.

GROSS: Well, had you thought when you were young that he was like a wonderful writer, and that you could never live up to how good he was?

GORDON: Oh, exactly. I thought he was just elegant and intellectual. And the single hardest thing in this project for me, and some of my beloved friends really had to endure a lot of abuse from me, was: I would show, you know the first time that I wrote a draft of the chapter about what my father did, there were pages and pages of his prose.

And finally, a friend of mine said: "you know, Mary, we're interested in your writing, not in his. You're a much better writer than he was." I said: oh, you know, something unprintable -- how stupid you are.

And finally a woman in my agent's office said this has to be radically cut. Nobody can read him. He's not interesting. That was the single most disturbing thing for me -- having to understand that he really wasn't that good a writer; that there was a lot of incoherence; a lot of bombast; a lot of undigested or half-digested ideas. And that I was, in fact, the writer that he wasn't. That was terrible.

GROSS: Why was it so crushing to find out that he wasn't the great writer you had imagined?

GORDON: I think that he made a place for me in the world of letters. And if I had knocked him out of the place that he made, then it's that, I guess -- I don't know how this works psychoanalytically -- but it is an Oedipal moment, I guess, even for a daughter, when you have, you know, in a way, killed the father who gave you life.

If I had to say: "I'm better than he is," that that was almost a way of killing him or stealing something from him. And I felt that he was so vulnerable in his death, and I had stolen something from a beloved dead man. I had stolen the primacy of place in the world of letters that he had created for us.

GROSS: Must have been useful, though, to have thought of him so highly, because that gave you -- that helped you make a place in the world of arts and letters. I mean, you know, you kind of inherited a place there if you thought he was so good.

GORDON: Yeah, and I know that -- believe me, I do know that my father was quite mad and in ways that were not always benign, although the malignity didn't touch me directly.

But what is really a great gift that my father gave me, that a lot of women don't have was that he said: this world that I inhabit is yours. And there is nothing that you can't do because you're a woman. You are my heir.

And he gave me a tremendous self-confidence in the world of language and thought. From the moment of my being a tiny child, he gave it to me. He brought me into it. He said: it's ours and it's yours.

And so there were a lot of things that I didn't have to un-learn, that some girls did.

GROSS: Mm-hmm. My guest is Mary Gordon. Her memoir about her father is called The Shadow Man. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

Back with Mary Gordon. Her memoir about her father is called The Shadow Man.

Your father lied about several pretty important things. He'd been married once before marrying your mother, and he never let on about that. He lied that he was an only child. He wasn't an only child. And he lied -- he said he was born in Ohio. He was really an immigrant.

What purpose do you think these lies served in his life?

GORDON: I think that being who he was was a torment for him. And I think he lied as an anesthetic. I think it relieved the torment. He had to make himself a person he could bear to be. I think he couldn't stand being an immigrant. He couldn't stand being a Jew. He couldn't stand being uneducated.

Why he lied about being married before -- I think he just, after a while, wiped out the past. And also after his conversion, it would have created problems of canon law for him if he wanted to marry my mother. So, I think that he really found his life unbearable, and his position in the world unbearable, and he had to create a new life that he could bear.

GROSS: Your father was Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. Do you think that that was part of that changing of himself so he could find himself and life more bearable?

GORDON: I think so. I think that one of the sad things is that I came up against so many dead-ends and so many blank walls. My father would be 102 if he were alive now, so practically everybody that was connected with him was dead.

I can only imagine that his family life or his life in the community was anguishing to him, and I think that being a Jew in the early part of the century -- it's remarkable, when I started to research it, how anti-Semitism was just in the drinking water.

You couldn't get away from it. And I think that was unbearable for him and he wanted a place in the great cultural life of Europe that was not a marginal place. I think he saw the life of the mind, the life of art as his way out of the tumult of this immigrant hubbub that he couldn't bear.

GROSS: Did you know when you were young that he had converted to Catholicism from Judaism?

GORDON: Yeah. One thing about my father was he never tried to pass, and he used his status as a convert. I mean, you kind of have to understand the culture of the Catholic Church from about 1930 to 1960. To be a Jewish convert was a real mark of distinction, and in a way my father picked the perfect place where he could leave his Judaism, but not have to hide it.

So that as a Catholic convert, you could say: OK, I've left that. I'm not a Jew anymore, but I was a Jew. I don't have to pretend I'm not, and as a matter of fact, it is a badge of my superiority that I have left error and found my way to truth.

So he didn't have a lot of the anxieties of a name-change or, you know, the terror that somebody would find out he was Jewish. He never did that. What he did was actually a little bit more complicated and a little bit more sinister, because he said: I'm a Jew. I know what they're like, and they're really dangerous, and I can tell you the insider story.

GROSS: Well, some of his writing was really quite anti-Semitic, and he supported the Fascists in World War II.

GORDON: Yep, he did. He was very strongly a Francoist. He was an isolationist into 1943, which is really late. He was kind of denying that Hitler was very bad. You know, he said: well, he's bad, but there are a lot worse, and as a matter of fact, the English in their persecution of the Catholic Church in Ireland were just as bad as Hitler.

He was pretty pro-Mussolini. And where this came from, I cannot imagine, except a kind of phobic determination to embrace the other.

GROSS: Did you pick up on this hate when you were young? Or did you find this anti-Semitism as an adult, researching your father?

GORDON: I found it as an adult, and it was crushing for me. It was morally annihilating for me, almost, because I had really loved him and still do, and have to endure the truth that he was really saying hateful, wicked things.

And I had had his magazines, and the way that we erase things that are unbearable to us I think is always very interesting. I must have known, since at least my early 20s, that he had written this anti-Semitic stuff, but I just didn't take it in until I sat down, really, to read him almost as an author who was not my father.

And so it was only a few years ago, when I had to look at this stuff and then research more of it, that I had to confront the horror of his hatred and self-hatred and the virulence and the nastiness of what he said -- and it was excruciating for me.

GROSS: So what are you re-writing about yourself, knowing more about who your father really was? What changes about who you are?

GORDON: I feel like I am a less-fathered girl now, and more of a woman who doesn't define herself so much by him; that I'm more alone and now the next however many years of my life are a task in which he has less and less of a place. And in a way, that's very sad, but it's a little bit exhilarating.

GROSS: Why is it a little bit exhilarating?

GORDON: Because I'm grown up. I'm not primarily a daughter anymore. I don't define myself as being his in that way. And to say I'm not -- the most important thing about me is no longer my being a daughter. It does make your lungs expand a little bit, however painfully.

GROSS: Mary Gordon, recorded in 1996, after the publication of her memoir The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father. It's just been published in paperback.

We'll continue the interview in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with the second part of our 1996 interview with Mary Gordon. Her memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, has just come out in paperback. Part of the book is, of course, based on her own memories of her father and her childhood. Many of those memories turned out to be distortions.

You say that you not only lost your concept of your father while writing this book, but you lost your faith in memory. And I would like to here read my favorite sentence from your new memoir.

You write: I enter the cave of memory which nowadays seems like a tourist trap in high season. And you go on to say: everyone's talking about memory -- French intellectuals; historians of the holocaust; victims of child abuse; alleged abusers.

What do you mean when you say that "the cave of memory nowadays seems like a tourist trap in high season?"

GORDON: Well, kind of what I said -- there's a new industry in recovering memory, and partly it's very important and partly it's very vulgarized. I think that we believe in memory in a very unsophisticated way.

So, for example, the topic that's so much on everybody's mind: abuse. You know, suddenly everybody you know had an abuse story, and the question is: were they really abused or were they not?

And this is what's anguishing, I think, about memory, is in questions of justice, it's enormously important to try to figure out what really happened. But the more you try to unravel the past, the more the mix of fact and narrative overlay becomes inextricable.

And people go back to the past, as we said, trying to find the golden ancestor; trying to find the criminal. And then people want, as in the case of the Holocaust, I think, to erase the past and say it didn't happen at all.

The trouble with memory is how complicated it is, and to really confront that is a project that very few people, you know, who happen to be on Geraldo on Thursday morning for example, are willing to do.

GROSS: How reliable did you find your memories were?

GORDON: Oh, terrible. It was really shocking. Also, for a novelist or for a writer you believe in memory as, you know, the gilt-edge stock that you can constantly get dividends from. And you know, then you find out you bought a swamp in central Florida.

All these things that I would have sworn happened, I couldn't really pin down, and a lot of the times I went back and found that, you know, they couldn't have happened, and that I made them up, and they were so real to me.

I can tell you the smells and the tastes and some of them may not have happened at all.

GROSS: Give me an example of one of those?

GORDON: Well, I had a memory of being with my father on a merry-go-round in a subway terminal. And I can tell you what the hotdog stand was like. I can tell you what the signs were like. I can tell you what it smelled like.

And I know that there could not have been a merry-go-round in a subway terminal. Who would put a merry-go-round in a subway terminal? But for me, I have a very clear memory of being with my father in that place which could not possibly have existed.

I have memories of conversations with him, which, as I try to imagine saying the things that I believe he said to a seven-year-old, they're incomprehensible. He could not possibly have said them.

There were just images that were so strong that I believed happened that didn't really happen.

GROSS: As you were writing your memoir about your father, and shifting through your own memories in trying to find out things that you never knew at all, your mother was losing her memory. She was in her 80s, as you were writing this, and she was losing so much of her memory, she was already forgetting that she had been married to your father.

GORDON: Yeah. She didn't -- she doesn't recognize his face in pictures. She asks who she was married to. What's interesting about my mother's loss of memory is that she remembers only her mother and me.

And so I was desperately trying to find this person, my father, and she had lost her husband -- the image of him; the memory of him; the sound of his voice -- with absolutely no pain and no regret. And so I was even more alone in my memories of him.

GROSS: What did it make you think about in terms of the ultimate value of memory -- watching your mother so completely lose hers and really not -- your mother wasn't even able to recognize what it was she'd lost.

GORDON: It just made the whole issue of memory more and more vexed, because I could see that without memory, my mother had become less alive, not really herself any more.

And so that thing that we call a "self," I understood, is so constituted by memory. And yet there she was. You would have to say she's the same Anna Gordon. She's alive. She's clearly human. She is capable of response.

And so simultaneously, she was herself and absolutely not herself, and I had to understand both those things at once: the absolute essentialness of memory to the definition of a self and the fact that one could still exist as a human without it.

GROSS: You say watching your mother, that you realized, you know, one of the advantages for her of not having memory was that she had no dread, 'cause she'd always forget what it was that she was facing. She didn't have to relive the terror of a painful medical test.

But then you say: but how is pleasure judged if it can't be relived? I thought that was an interesting observation.

GORDON: It became a very practical issue, because she's in a wheelchair and she's, you know, immobile. It's difficult to get her from place to place. So I would always say: oh, you know, do I take her down to the garden? Do I take her to my son's play?

Because I would go through these incredible physical machinations to arrange something pleasant for her, and literally 20 minutes later, she wouldn't remember it.

And she would enjoy it at the moment, but then the next time I had to, you know, say: am I going to get an ambulance for her? Am I going to push her down this hill? I would question, you know, what's it worth if she doesn't remember it?

And you have to really shift your focus in a radical way and say: it is only the present, and the present is worth something. But since we're all kind of capitalists of our own expenditure, I think, it makes it very vexed. How much do I do? How hard to I work? How much do I try to make a good time for her?

And I used to desperately try to make a good time for her, and I've let up on it a little bit because since she doesn't remember it, it is worth only what it is worth at the present, and it's very strange to have to make those calculations.

GROSS: Another paradox that you faced while writing this book -- you say there wasn't a day when you didn't wish your father was alive, but at the same time, you were beginning to think that your mother might not be better off if she died.

GORDON: Yeah, it's -- my mother is somebody I have a heartbreaking love and tenderness for. One of the things that hurts me very much is when people read what I wrote about my mother and say how cruel I am and how angry I am at her and how much I must hate her. I don't hate her. I love her very deeply, and she breaks my heart.

And her fate breaks my heart. She really sits and stares most of the day, and you know, the question is: is this being alive? Would she be better dead? She's not in pain. She's not suffering, but she's not really alive.

And so I sometimes think: well, you know, it's time for her to go now. You know, she's lived enough. This is not really a life. It's time for her to go. Although I'm sure when she does die, I'll feel enormous grief.

But my father is still, for me, a relatively young, vital man, 'cause he exists in my life. So I can fantasize about his coming back and, you know, I'll walk outside the studio, and there he'll be, and we'll go off and have lunch together and it will be heaven.

GROSS: My guest is Mary Gordon. Her memoir about her father is called The Shadow Man. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

Back with Mary Gordon. Her memoir about her father is called The Shadow Man.

You know, your father is so full of surprises, still, for you. You're still, like, learning things about him because he died when you were seven and he lied so much about his life. Is you mother an already really well-told tale? I mean, do you think that there are really secrets in her life and things that you'll eventually find out about that will shock you?

GORDON: I think there are secrets, but I'll never find them out. No, nothing would shock me, because I think -- I wish I had been able to know more of her inner life. She's a heroic woman.

She was a polio victim and she worked all her life 'til she was 75. But she was a woman of great imagination and dreams which, in that working class way, had to be repressed to get on with life. And I wish I had more access to her dreams and I never will.

So in terms of a biography, you know, I don't think I'm ever going to find out that she had, you know, a hot love affair with a sailor. But I wish I had known what her desires and her dreams were. Those might surprise me, but I never will know them.

GROSS: There was something in your book that reminds me of what you're saying also. When she was in the nursing home, there was a questionnaire that was supposed to be administered, and you decided to ask her the questions yourself.

And the questions all had to do with the quality of life and whether she was happy or not. And she responded positively to all the questions, as if she was perfectly content and happy and comfortable. And then you said what to her?

GORDON: I said: do you really mean that? Are you really happy? Or are you just afraid of making a fuss? Do you think that that's unseemly to complain? And she said: yes. You know, I don't want to seem to be a whiner.

And it was another heartbreaking moment for me, so finally -- I mean, talk about, you know, the questionnaire comes out the way you want it -- Did I want to hear that she was unhappy? Did I redo the questionnaire -- but finally I said -- you know, and she would -- she's a person who respected people's work so much, because she importantly defined herself as a worker.

I said: mom, it's these people's job to get the right information from you and if you don't answer the questionnaire honestly, they're not going to be able to do their job well. And she said: oh, OK.

And then she talked about her own grief and her own despair. But it was so important to her to be a person that didn't complain; that kept going; that did endure. And it was only when she saw that she could be helping somebody else's work that she felt the responsibility to be honest.

GROSS: And confessed to how miserable her quality of life was.

GORDON: Yeah. Yeah. And how much she had lost.

GROSS: But you know, I was wondering if you thought that a lot of her inner life was that way when she was younger -- that she wouldn't confess to anybody what she was really thinking or feeling, because it would be perceived as: she was whining.

GORDON: I think that is the immigrant story, in some way. You just keep going. You just, you know, you just do it. And it's something that I admire very much, in a particular way, but it's at an enormous price. It's really, you know, what is not said really just gets buried and does some terrible things to people.

I do think, though, that my mother had a very deep spiritual and religious life, so that even when she's saying, you know, I'm pretty miserable now, she believes that it's God's will and she's going to get her reward in heaven.

So the despair is not thorough-going for her, 'cause I think she enters into a very deep religious place, even now, when there's not much else left of her consciousness.

GROSS: Without memory, does she remember much about her religion?

GORDON: Yep. What's -- the other thing that's so amazing is what is left of her memory. She remembers every prayer that she ever said. She remembers every saint. And she remembers the word to every song written between 1910 and 1950.

So she will -- she doesn't know what her husband's name is, but if you ask her to sing, you know, "Peg O' My Heart," she's got every verse. And all the mysteries of the Rosary. So prayers and song have really remained for her. It's very strange.

GROSS: You know, I think for a lot of people, there's always a couple of voices in your head that are kind of directing you or helping you make decisions or whatever. And I think, you know, a lot of us internalize our parents' voices.

But sometimes you realize -- you get old enough to realize -- that those two voices are actually in conflict; that your mother and father would have seen this thing quite differently.

And so you have these two competing voices in your head, arguing about what the correct moral or ethical or practical stance is on something. Do you know what I mean? And I wonder if you have that in your mind?

GORDON: Well, I think it is always the practical as opposed to the impractical. You know, that my father's voice tells me: just follow your vision; go as deeply as you possibly can; give yourself over to it utterly. And my mother's says, you know: what about your place in the world?

That is not to say fame or success, because both of them were very highly ethical people, in that they didn't care about money or success at all. They cared about virtue in some way.

But my mother is always saying to me, you know: get on with it. Don't dawdle. Don't dream. Get on with your business in the world. You have a relationship to other people. Whereas my father's voice says: just give yourself to the vision, wherever it takes you.

And that's a real conflict -- whether I want to be a practical person in the world or a visionary.

GROSS: Well, yeah, in fact, you know, you wrote a piece recently about the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis auction, and in that op/ed piece, you refer to your mother. And you say that -- she was always saying: it doesn't pay, you know, about a lot of things. She'd say: it just doesn't pay, and that you say she created a world, like an interior world, where OK, loss was kept at a minimum, but pleasure was always suspect and beauty was thought a waste of time.

GORDON: Yeah.

GROSS: I thought how interesting it must have been for you to be brought up in a home where beauty if a waste of time, and then you become a writer and artist.

GORDON: One of the stories about my mother when she still her her memory, and she always had a great sense of humor that I think underscores this was, you know I had written, I think, four or five books at the time, and I was looking at a Bergdorf-Goodman catalogue, looking at things which I could never have dreamed of buying -- you know, these white silk suits and things like that.

I was thinking: oh, God, I'd love to have that; oh, isn't that beautiful -- that is so beautiful. And my mother looked at me and said: when exactly did you become such a superficial person?

LAUGHTER

GROSS: And so beauty was just a sign of your shallow -- you know...

GORDON: Yeah.

GROSS: ... being interested in beauty.

GORDON: And so if you take that to questions of style -- as I tried to write beautifully, there's always something in me that's saying, well, you know: why are you doing this with you life, when, you know, there are children in east Harlem that can't read; and there are babies in Africa that, you know, have no food and you are devoting yourself to beauty -- and for what? It is a very great conflict with me.

GROSS: How do you resolve it?

GORDON: I just know I'm not good at anything else. So that makes it a lot easier.

GROSS: Well, Mary Gordon, I really want to thank you a lot for talking with us.

GORDON: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: Mary Gordon, recorded last year after the publication of her memoir The Shadow Man. It's just been published in paperback.

Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Mary Gordon
High: Mary Gordon is the author of several bestselling novels, about the conflicts facing contemporary women. Her 1996 memoir, "The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father," was released in paperback last month. In the book she writes that at the age of 44, she discovered she wasn't the person she thought she was. As she researched her father, she discovered truths about him that forced her to rethink who she is. Gordon's father died when she was seven. Gordon has written several bestselling novels, including "Final Payments" and "The Company of Women."
Spec: Books; Women; Family
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright (c) 1997 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. under license from National Public Radio, Inc. Formatting copyright (c) 1997 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information please contact NPR's Business Affairs at (202) 414-2954
End-Story: Mary Gordon
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: JUNE 09, 1997
Time: 12:00
Tran: 060902np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: They Might Be Giants
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:55

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Commentator Milo Miles recently dropped in on a sort of summation concert by the rock tricksters They Might Be Giants. While the group revisited the many styles it has played over the years, Milo says They Might Be Giants also made points about the pop audience and pop history.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP SONG BY THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS)

SINGER: X T C
(Unintelligible)
Fighting for that place in rock and roll
There is no right or wrong

Just when you're it's finished
With XTC (Unintelligible)
Flies back up the (unintelligible)

X T C, this is Adam

MILO MILES, FRESH AIR COMMENTATOR: Thank heaven for rock nerds, on stage and in the audience. The fans at the recent sold-out They Might Be Giants show in Boston's Avalon Club couldn't have been more in harmony with the performers. There were few pierced body parts or confrontational haircuts, and lots of sensible shirts and minimal makeup.

This is the type of rock fan more slighted than any other, but more numerous than hipsters and toughies imagine. I didn't once see anyone trying to look baaaad at Avalon. It was kind of refreshing.

This may not sound like an ultra-modern bunch, but They Might Be Giants could only exist in a mass media and multi-media art world where rock and roll has been thoroughly established and mined.

Head honchos John Lanelle (ph) and John Flansberg (ph) love not just rock, but all kinds of music: hick, country, and sleazy Vegas croon; and lullabies and Christmas ditties. But everything comes chopped up and re-assembled with irony and fervor in cheap, but sophisticated technology.

If They Might Be Giants did not exist, the drum machine would have had to invent them.

Lanelle and Flansberg have been putting out albums for 11 years, and they began the show with what they called a memorial tribute to themselves -- that is, back in the '80s when the band was just the two of them and their electronic toys. This explains why numbers were short with simple arrangements.

The spirit of "Go Along With Our Nakedness" allows Flansberg at one point to simply holler: "awesome guitar solo. Awesome guitar solo," rather than crank one out. And if there's an accordion player who can show more skill and wit without making fun of his instrument than Lanelle, they should send me a tape.

No, not you, Weird Al.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS SONG)

SINGER: As a body (Unintelligible)
It was the personal factory closing up.
Guess it's sad to say you will romanticize
All the things you've known before.

He was not, not, not so great
He was not, not, not so great
(Unintelligible)
There's a pounding; at the door.

Well, it's a mighty zombie
Talking up some love and posterity
So the good old days never say good-bye
And you keep this in your mind

Need some love, love, lovin' arms
Need some love, love, lovin' arms
And as you fall from grace
The only words you say are:

Put your hands on the perfect hat
Put your hands on the perfect hat
Put your hand inside, put your hand inside
Put you hand inside the perfect hat

MILES: The unpredictability of performing with machines for accompaniment allowed the old They Might Be Giants to be both punk rough and pop precise, which matched their image as bent intellectuals with big ears.

At Avalon, they performed wise-guy jokes like a song where the point is to remind you you're getting older every second you listen to it. Then they turned around and did New York City, a perfectly sweet straightforward ditty about love in the concrete jungle.

The surprise is how rugged Lanelle and Flansberg sounded when they added a full band back-up as they have on their last two albums. Dan Levine (ph) on trombone and Jim O'Connor (ph) on trumpet were in particularly fine form on the MTV hit "Bird House In Your Soul" and on the new single "S-E-X-X-Y." Both tunes are layered sandwiches of fun and lust and gawky romance.

In concert, these and a few other aggressive numbers show They Might Be Giants pulling off the coup of making unadorned, utterly entertaining rock and roll that is neither old-fashioned or consciously rootsy.

Flansberg's attempt to get everyone into a big conga line didn't quite work, but only because the place was too crammed with the faithful.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, LIVE PERFORMANCE OF "THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS")

SINGER: S E X X Y; more than enough
Around the clock, with nobody else
S E X X Y

There she is
Standin' on the bed
Cookie in one hand, with arm at head
S E X X Y

GROSS: Milo Miles is a music critic based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dateline: Milo Miles, Cambridge, MA; Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest:
High: Music commentator Milo Miles reviews a recent show of They Might Be Giants.
Spec: Music Industry; They Might Be Giants
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright (c) 1997 National Public Radio, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. under license from National Public Radio, Inc. Formatting copyright (c) 1997 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information please contact NPR's Business Affairs at (202) 414-2954
End-Story: They Might Be Giants
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.