In a world where success is measured by dollars earned, and fame, for a writer, is often accompanied by movie deals and celebrity status, author Mary Gordon is a rarity. Whether her new book “The Rest of Life” sells 100 copies or 100,000, Mary Gordon says she does not care.
“Artistic success is not measured by selling,” Gordon says, sitting in her room at the stately old Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee before her appearance that day at a bookshop in suburban Brookfield.
“People think I’m being pretentious but I don’t even know how well the book is selling because it’s so far away from what is important-that is, to meet the standards of writers whom I love, living and dead,” Gordon says. “If I had some patron who said, `I’m going to provide everything you could possibly want in your life in the way of material comfort,’ and I knew that I had some people out there who were moved by what I did, that would be successful.”
Gordon’s latest work, “The Rest of Life,” a collection of three novellas, has been on several best-seller lists since its release in August, and the critical response has been overwhelming.
Gordon, 44, is the author of the novels “Final Payments,” “The Company of Women,” “Men and Angels” (all published by Random House) and “The Other Side” (Viking). She also has written a collection of short stories and a collection of essays.
Born in Far Rockaway, N.Y., she was the only child of an Irish-Italian mother and a Jewish father who was 50 when she was born. He died when she was 7.
She grew up in an Irish working-class neighborhood on Long Island, a culture she has drawn on extensively in her fiction. Although the family was working-class and ethnic, her father was a writer and an intellectual who had once written speeches for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, traveled in European intellectual circles in his youth and later converted to Catholicism.
A graduate of Barnard College in New York City and the writing program at Syracuse University in New York, Gordon had established herself by the mid-1980s as one of the most gifted novelists of her generation.
In her novels and short stories, Gordon explores the inner lives of women with emotional depth and with richness, beauty and precision.
In “The Rest of Life,” Gordon became interested in writing “something that marked the in-between, equivocal nature of what it is to be a sexual woman. It’s not `Anna Karenina’-it’s not high tragedy; it’s not like you have sex and the next thing you know you’re under the wheels of a train. And it’s not musical comedy where it’s happily every after, and it’s not `The Donna Reed Show’ “
“Particularly in `Living at Home,’ ” she says of one of the novellas, about a doctor who works with autistic children, and her Italian journalist lover, “I wanted to say, it’s not perfect. We are coming to our lovers from a world that is very corrupt about the messages it gives in relation to men and women.” Nevertheless, she continues, “sometimes something can be found. I thought particularly that in `Living at Home,’ these people had an imperfect relationship, but it was a relationship that made both of them larger and they both could be themselves within it.”
“Immaculate Man,” the second novella, involves a social worker, a divorced mother of two whose lover is a priest. “In `Immaculate Man’ I wanted to talk about a woman who had lived without sex in her life for quite a long time and had had a full life, but there was this component of liveliness that was missing, and I also wanted to talk about the endemic insecurity about one’s own desirability that women have.”
This latter issue deeply concerns Gordon. “There is a billion-dollar industry out there to make us all feel undesirable, to make us feel that there is some other woman who has some other operation, or has some other product, or is younger, or has different clothes, or is more `aerobicized,’ or whatever it is. There is this constant message to us that the way we are is not good enough. Every woman I know, and I know some really strong women, most of them feel there is something wrong with the way they are sexually.
“You can talk to any woman and she will tell you in detail what is wrong with her body,” she says. “My nose is too big, my thighs are too big, my breasts are too small, my lips are too small. You know it’s deeply, deeply crazy and young girls are dying of it.
“There are real martyrs to this cause. I haven’t made a whole lot of progress about it and I’m 44 years old. I’m better than I was. . . . I no longer feel like I have to put a paper bag over my head, but I think it’s a real tough nut for the women’s movement to crack, and I don’t have any good ideas about it. I really don’t have any answers.”
However, she believes this is a good time for women. “For one thing,” she says, “I think you have an option of not having a family life. To be a woman unattached to a man and not to be in danger and not to be completely marginalized and still to have a life has been a very rare thing in the history of the world. I just think the cat’s out of the bag and it’s not going to go back in again.
“The radical right can do whatever it wants to put women back in the home, but they are not going to stay there. For one thing, economically they can’t. And once you’ve tasted the joys of speech and freedom and saying `I,’ you’re not going to put that back that easily. So I think this is a better time to be alive as a woman than ever, despite the fact that everything’s not resolved.”
In Gordon’s eyes true marriages are as rare in real life as they are in her fiction. “I feel that relationships between men and women which nourish both and lead to mutual growth and mutual joy and enrichment rather than constriction are very rare, very rare,” she says.
Yet women have a drive toward relationships that is both fundamental and problematic, she says. “If you are heterosexual . . . and you look around at most male-female relationships and you are a rational person,” she says, “you say, `Oh, my God, I’m not doing that gig.’ But there’s something about being sexual that plugs you into life in a particularly vivid way, so I think we’re in a very transitional state.”
Gordon, who lives in Manhattan, is married and the mother of Anna, 13, and David, 9. Although her husband, Arthur Cash, is a professor and scholar of 18th Century literature, she keeps her artistic life and family separate. She relies on feedback from three friends: a professor of literature, a newspaper editor and a drama critic.
“Fiction,” Gordon says, “does something that nothing else in the world does. It looks at the inner life of human beings and their behavior and it says, people can be one thing and also another thing, and those two things can be completely contradictory, and there can be enormous areas of ambiguity and complication in the human heart.
“What makes me nervous about a world, which seems to me to be getting increasingly less reflective, is that people want things very flat, very simple, and life is not flat and simple, and I think that at this point it’s up to the fiction writer to explore those complexities because not many other people are doing it.”
She says she worries that she has brought both of her children up to be reflective people, not to be so materialistic and try to feel responsible.
“I don’t know how many other people like them are going to be out there in the world, so that scares me,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve handicapped them for ordinary life.”
Gordon is deep into two new writing projects. She hopes to finish in 1995 the first, a work of non-fiction about her father.
She is working simultaneously on a novel about a mother and a daughter. “The mother was a very political person in the ’60s, and the daughter comes of age in the ’90s and goes to Ireland,” she says. “For a variety of reasons, she gets involved there with some IRA types and decides to go on a hunger strike, thinking she’s following her mother’s ideals.
“One of the things I’m writing about in this novel is what I see as a great modern problem, which is that people want life to be simple and to say it’s one thing, just do this one thing. I see it everywhere, in the search for fundamentalism, in the search for nationalism. I think Bosnia is the objective correlative of it. People want to say, `I’m one thing, I absolutely know what I am, and you’re not it, you’re not what I am.’
“I’m very interested in the anguish of being a modern person in an age where we have so much information that sensible people know that there’s not any one answer. And yet we have this atavistic longing for a single path.”
Gordon, who writes the first draft of all her manuscripts in longhand, spends three full days writing during the week, and gets up early on weekends for an additional three or four hours of work. When not at home writing, she teaches fiction writing at Barnard College.
“I wish there were 48 hours in the day, because I’m overworked and overbooked all the time, but there is something very wonderful about being with young people who care about literature,” she says. “It gives you hope, because otherwise you can just feel that well, the torch is going to go out with me-everybody else is watching MTV.”
