Missing Men A Memoir

by Johnson, Joyce

• ISBN13: 9780670033102
• ISBN10: 0670033103
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-26
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

Joyce Johnson’s classic Minor Charactersis valued not only for its portrayal of her relationship with Jack Kerouac but also for its stunning evocation of what it meant to grow up female in the 1950s. In Missing Men, Johnson gives us an even more revelatory self-portrait as she examines—from a unique woman’s perspective—the far-reaching reverberations of fatherlessness.Born in 1935, she was an orphan’s daughter, named for her grandfather, an immigrant poet from Warsaw who killed himself when her mother was only five. Johnson would marry two artists who were also fatherless. James Johnson died in a motorcycle accident, making her a widow at twenty-seven. Peter Pinchbeck, obsessed with reinventing abstract painting, was unable to commit himself to marriage and fatherhood. Telling a compelling story that has shaped itself around absences,” Missing Menpresents us with the arc and the flavor of a unique New York life—from the author’s adventures as a Broadway stage child managed by her implacable mother to the fateful encounters that later brought her love and ultimately left her to make her way alone as an artist in her own right.

Author Biography

Joyce Johnson is the author of three novels, including In the Night Caf+¬. Her other books include Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957-û1958. Her articles and fiction have been published in major magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper-'s, Vanity Fair, and O Magazine.

Excerpts

Preface I once had a husband who started obsessively painting squares?three squares in shifting relationships to each other on what appeared flat ground, colored emptiness. He explained to me that the negative space in his work was as important as the positive, that each took its form from the other. What interested him most was the tension between them. I remember being fascinated by his concept of negative space, though negative seemed the wrong word for something that had so much presence. I was still young then, too young to look at my history and see how my life has shaped itself around absences?first by happenstance; ultimately, perhaps, by choice. one Samuel Rosenberg?s Daughters Toward the end of her life, when I thought my mother?s defenses were finally down, I asked whether she remembered her father?s death, which occurred when she was five years old. ?Oh, yes,? she replied brightly. ?He was in a trolley car accident, and we never got the insurance.? Then she looked at me with the glimmer of a crafty smile. ?You?ve asked me too late. I?ve forgotten everything.?She had never spoken of what it was like to grow up without a father. In fact, she seemed to lack a recollected girlhood, except for one memory she was willing to call up: the Victory Garden she?d tended during World War I, when her family was living near Bronx Park. Her garden was at the top of a long hill. When she was in her nineties, her mind kept wandering back to that sunlit patch of earth, and she would marvel over and over that the carrots she grew there were the sweetest she?d ever tasted. Otherwise, except for her singing, which had pre-dated my arrival into the world, it was as if my mother?s life and memories had begun with me. ?I have a trained voice,? I?d sometimes hear her tell people. In a bitter way, she seemed proud of that fact. On the music rack of our baby grand was an album of lieder by Schubert, her favorite composer. Once in a while, when one of my aunts induced her to sing, she would reluctantly sit down on the piano bench to accompany herself, and her voice would sound to my astonished ears like the performances that issued from the cloth-covered mouth of our wooden radio. Whatever was ?classical? was welcomed into our living room, but if you switched to the wrong station and got the blare of a blue note, my mother would give it short shrift. ?Popular,? as she dismissed all music that was not classical, was ?dissonant? and therefore no good, with an exception made for melodies from certain Broadway shows. For months she dusted and cut out her dress patterns humming ?My Ship,? a song from Kurt Weill?s Lady in the Dark. She even decided to teach it to me, though it was really too difficult for a four-year-old. ?My ship has sails that are made of silk,? I remember singing shyly for my aunts and my father, with my mother prompting, ?The decks are trimmed with gold,? in her radio mezzo as I faltered. When I was older, I learned that she had actually been serious about her singing, with ambitions of performing Schubert on the concert stage; at some point, though, she had simply given up. The family didn?t want her going on tour, she told me, and besides, there had been no money for further voice training. But perhaps her need and will to sing hadn?t been strong enough. I never felt my mother was passionately musical?or passionate about anything except the rarefied, lonely life she envisioned for me with her at my side?effectively shutting out all other relationships?as she guided me toward my destiny of early success. Her singing may really have been a means to ends other than music itself?a way of setting herself apart as ?special,? a possible escape route from the blight that had descended upon her sisters. Most of all it may have represented her sole bearable connection to the cultured, artistic father she scarcely remembered, the one thing she had from Samuel Ro