Toxicology Page 15
It was a tense, silent dinner at the kitchen table, just the three of us. Mashed potatoes, roast chicken, boiled string beans. I’m in love, I blurted out. What? my father said. His face was flushed from scotch and sodas. What? my mother said. I’m in love with my professor, I said. My mother stared at me. What? my father said. You met her when you and Mom visited Mills, I said. I couldn’t help smiling, which made things worse. Her? my father said. Professor Fox, I said. Professor Jocanda Fox.
It all happened very fast. My father stood up, came around the table, and punched me. I remember spitting out a bloody tooth. Maybe two. My father shook with rage. He threatened to have me lobotomized. Threatened to call Mills and have That Mexican Whore fired. Threatened to call the cops and have That Mexican Whore arrested and deported. That Mexican Whore, he kept muttering. Ann—my mestiza mother with the anglicized name—sat frozen in her chair and stared at me.
Refuge
Aunt Elly took me in. Elly who had never married and lived alone and feared no one. She listened quietly when I told her about Jocanda. Have I scandalized you? I remember asking my aunt. No, Elly said. Why not? I asked. I seem to remember being slightly miffed. Why not why not? Elly laughed.
She gave me money and took me to the bus station. I remember trying not to cry as we said our good-byes. I sat in the waiting area for hours, paralyzed by indecision. Where should I go? What should I do? A cop wandered over and asked if I was planning on spending the night. He said it with a smile, but I knew what he was implying. I got off that bench and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. I’d read the books. I’d seen the movies. I wanted to be a writer. According to Peter Hawthorne—he was no longer Pop, Papa, Daddy, my father, just Peter Hawthorne—I was a pervert who needed to be lobotomized. There were plenty of unlobotomized, pervert writers in New York City. I’d learned that at Mills, from Jocanda Fox.
Flaming Horses
My parents were both killed in a car accident in 1962. They were on their way to Del Mar. Some guy driving a truck towing a trailer with two Arabian mares lost control. Jumped the median and crashed into my father’s Plymouth. Everything burst into flames. I was going to add “including the horses,” but I won’t. Aunt Elly sent me the rather lengthy obituary notice published in the Sacramento Bee. Needless to say, I was not invited to the funeral.
the INTERVIEW
Delacroix was born Mary Hawthorne eighty years ago in Sacramento, California. She was the only girl and the youngest of five children—referred to as W, X, Y, and Z in her memoir, California Melancholy—born to Peter Hawthorne and Ann Vargas. The family was prosperous, staunchly Catholic, well respected. Delacroix’s father was a prominent lawyer, active in local politics. He once ran for mayor of Sacramento and almost won. Delacroix’s mother was a former Miss Sacramento.
Delacroix went to Mills, then an all-women liberal-arts college in Oakland, California. The experience changed her life in more ways than one. In her final undergraduate year, Delacroix became sexually involved with literary scholar and translator Jocanda Fox, a visiting professor of Romance languages and literature from Mexico. Fox, who was fifteen years older than Delacroix, initiated the intense affair.
Little Deaths, Delacroix’s first book of fiction, tells the shocking story of a torrid love affair between a headstrong fifteen-year-old girl and her magnetic forty-five-year-old tutor, an ex-nun. The relationship culminates in a brutal murder. Delacroix was thirty-seven years old when the ninety-page novella was bought by Moss Blake, then editor in chief of Left Bank. The novel catapulted the press- and camera-shy author into the spotlight and international fame. A letter for her from Jocanda Fox arrived at the editorial offices of Left Bank.
In it, Fox expressed admiration for Delacroix’s novel and remorse about the way she had treated her former student. (“Mary/Eleanor: You were lovely and open and curious. I was monstrous and careless with your love, thinking only of myself.”) Fox informed Delacroix that Magda Beltrán was dead, shot while performing one of her sold-out concerts in Mexico City. The killer turned out to be the humiliated husband of a woman with whom Beltrán was having an affair. (“A fitting end for Magda, don’t you think?”) Fox then asked for permission to do the Spanish translation of Little Deaths. (“I will understand if you say no.”) Delacroix took almost a year to respond but finally gave her blessing. The two began corresponding regularly.
In the United States, an attempt to ban Little Deaths as obscene made headlines but was thrown out of the courts (see Howl, People v. Ferlinghetti, and Tropic of Cancer, Miller v. California). Delacroix kept declining requests for interviews and photos. Because of her sudden notoriety, she was forced to move from her tiny Greenwich Village walk-up and into the guest bedroom of the Upper West Side apartment Moss Blake shared with architect Philip Gottlieb, Blake’s partner at the time. The setup was temporary, as Gottlieb and Delacroix didn’t get along.
Tired of being “homeless” and anxious to start a new novel, Delacroix accepted an invitation from Fox to come to Mexico City and stay for as long as she liked in the palatial family home Jocanda shared with her twin sister, Guadalupe. Guadalupe was a prominent art collector and historian, rumored to have been the lover of both Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Delacroix lived in a guest cottage (Casita Verde) on the Fox property for six years. It was a productive time for her. She wrote two novels in quick succession, Onyx and Eyes of a Jaguar, also published by Left Bank. When Left Bank was sold to the Sandhaus conglomerate and promptly dismantled, Moss Blake resigned and started his own literary agency. Delacroix asked him to represent her. Blake remained Delacroix’s loyal agent, champion, and confidant until his death in 2002.
Our conversation took place in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District over the course of two evenings in the apartment Delacroix shared with painter Yvonne Wilder until Wilder’s death in 2007. The apartment was spacious, chaotic, and oddly elegant, with polished wood floors, high ceilings, shelves of books, and Day of the Dead figurines collected by Wilder and Delacroix over the years. Of course there were paintings and framed drawings by Wilder and other artists of distinction on the walls, including an early acrylic-and-paper collage by a then-unknown Jean-Michel Basquiat. (“He only wanted two hundred bucks,” Delacroix said to us. “Yvonne gave him a bit more. He was—shall we say—rather desperate at the time.”)
In the windowless study, described by Delacroix as “in a perpetual state of disorder,” there was a wall devoted to photographs. Wilder with her son, Benjamin. Lupe and Jocanda Fox with their dogs. Felix Montoya and Delacroix. Moss Blake with Delacroix and James Baldwin. Manuel Puig with Paloma Picasso and her ex-husband and business partner, Rafael Lopez-Cambil. A grinning and bedraggled-looking Basquiat. An unknown Asian woman.
A striking woman with slate-gray eyes and long white hair, Delacroix greeted us at the door in bare feet. She wore a beautiful, faded caftan embroidered with tiny mirrors. We sat down for the interview in her living room. We were offered a choice of tequila or gin and tonics, which we declined, and served tasty olive and goat-cheese tarts, which Delacroix had made herself that morning. Although she looked younger than her eighty years and was in a curiously chatty and convivial mood, Delacroix complained of a chronic sinus condition and painful, debilitating arthritis in her hands. She declined to be photographed for this article.
—Sasha Collins and Rajiv Gill, 2009
VOLGA REVIEW
After a lifetime of saying no to interviews, why did you finally say yes?
ELEANOR DELACROIX
I have no idea. I do enjoy that scrappy little journal of yours, but this may end up being one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.
VR
We are absolutely honored and thrilled to be here.
DELACROIX
Good for you.
VR
Tell us about your nom de plume.
DELACROIX
An homage to my Aunt Eleanor. My father’s sister. One tough cookie, incredibly smart and outspoken. Blamed the Catholic
Church for most of the world’s ills. I loved how she doted on me and always stood up to my father.
VR
Does “Delacroix” have anything to do with the painter?
DELACROIX
I chose it because the two names sound good together. That’s all.
VR
Your last work of fiction, Savage Appetites, was published by Sandhaus back in 1990. It’s been nineteen years of silence since then. Have you made a conscious decision to stop writing novels?
DELACROIX
I’ve made a conscious decision that it’s fucking okay not to be as prolific as some of my contemporaries. I’ve always been a slow writer. The older I get, the more agonizing it becomes. It’s all in the revisions, as I used to say over and over again to my poor students. So what if you think you’re brilliant? You have to try it again. Play around with the goddamn sentence like a painting. Hang it upside down, sideways, set the edges on fire. So maybe you end up going back to what you had originally, since that initial raw purge is usually the best. But so what? At least you might come to some sort of understanding. Of what works and why, that sort of thing.
VR
Sounds like torture.
DELACROIX
Writing is.
VR
Does it always have to be torture for it to be any good?
DELACROIX
I find the word torture sorely lacking. Nowadays all it brings to mind are unfortunate men standing on crates with sacks thrown over their heads. I prefer to think of writing as exquisite agony. Chalk it up to the Catholic in me, which—no matter how much I try—I can’t seem to shake.
VR
Not many people know you’ve taught.
DELACROIX
In Mexico. Cambodia. Never in this country.
VR
Is that true? We heard you once taught at Smith. And at Columbia.
DELACROIX
I’m not the sort of writer in fashion with current M.F.A. creativewriting programs, if that’s what you mean. First of all, I’m too fucking old. Yvonne and I—we were invited to lead workshops with women in Cambodia who had witnessed and experienced awful things during the reign of Pol Pot. Awful, awful things. So fucking awful that many of the women had gone blind.
VR
Hysterical blindness?
DELACROIX
That’s what some people call it. That word hysteria is an interesting one, isn’t it? And so we went. The conditions at the women’s center were pretty rough. I mean, these people had nothing. Most were illiterate, so . . . Yvonne and I brought suitcases filled with reams of paper, pencils and pens, charcoal sticks, sketch pads, watercolor sets, a tape recorder—whatever we thought might be useful. The women who were blind told or sang us their stories and dreams. The director of the center, a remarkable young K hmer woman named—shit! I can’t remember her name!—acted as our translator. Yvonne and I were humbled the long difficult month we spent with these particular women. Their suffering was enormous. Incomprehensible. It still haunts me, you know. Our enterprise was such a profound failure.
VR
How?
DELACROIX
There we were, two well-educated, well-fed, well-intentioned foreigners—but in the end, what the fuck did we really accomplish? Were these impoverished, blind women any better off? I hardly think so.
VR
What about Mexico?
DELACROIX
That was certainly a much happier and more gratifying teaching experience.
VR
The National Autonomous University of Mexico, wasn’t it? (Delacroix nods.) Did you teach in Spanish?
DELACROIX
My Spanish is a joke, but I tried. Thank God most of my students were fairly proficient in English. A lot of them were poets. Extremely well read. Extremely opinionated. Jocanda Fox was head of the department back then. She was responsible for my residency.
VR
Sarah Kirshner, in her book Sapphic Divas, wrote extensively about your relationship with Fox and calls it one of the most important and transformative friendships of your life. Do you agree?
DELACROIX
I was her student. She was my lover. What more can I say? Do you know I can revise one sentence, oh, maybe—
VR
Five or six times?
DELACROIX
More like twenty. At least twenty.
VR
That’s what you told your students they had to do in order to be good writers?
(Delacroix laughs and doesn’t answer.)
VR
The writer Felix Montoya was another close—
DELACROIX
I don’t want to talk about Felix.
VR
Then can we talk about your first novel, Little Deaths, which is considered to be your masterpiece?
DELACROIX
My masterpiece. Cute.
VR
When it was published, Little Deaths was panned by Malcolm West in the New York Times as—
DELACROIX
“Pretentious filth masquerading as high art.” Yup. I remember.
VR
West further dismissed you as “a perverse writer of modest talents.” The book went on to become an international bestseller in spite of all the negative reviews. How did you withstand the criticism and controversy?
DELACROIX
The book’s taboo subject matter was clearly the cause of much of the outrage, especially for a closeted old fart like West. I threw a party when that nasty son of a bitch died. I’m sure that my nonlinear narrative and juicy sexual descriptions didn’t help matters at all. West and a lot of the old-guard American critics hated that kind of experimental work. Especially coming from a woman like me! I was not part of the eastern cultural establishment. I was a college dropout, a queer nobody from fucking Sacramento, California. But Rebecca Ballantine came to my defense in the Evergreen Review.
VR
Yes, we Googled it.
DELACROIX
Really? I sold my archives to the University of Texas and never bothered making copies of any of my clippings. The young don’t know Rebecca Ballantine. Or anybody else I’m talking about, probably. Oh, how fabulous! I have a contentious relationship with my computer, but I love Google! Love Wikipedia!
VR
You’re on Facebook.
DELACROIX
I beg your pardon?
VR
Someone started a fan club. Eight hundred and sixty people have signed on as fans of Eleanor Delacroix.
DELACROIX
That’s insane.
(More laughter. Delacroix excuses herself to go to the bathroom and is gone for some time. She returns in a somewhat giddy, effusive mood. Delacroix pours herself a glass of tequila and lights up a Camel nonfilter.)
VR
What was your response to Ballantine’s assertion that, in spite of all the hot sex in your first novel, the coolness of your prose and the underlying theme of murder brought to mind Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and other writers of the nouveau roman movement?
DELACROIX
I was flattered, but—Nathalie Sarraute? What a hoot. Rebecca was one of the few respected critics who took my novel seriously, though. So did Malcolm West’s nemesis, that other closeted old fart, what’s-his-name.
VR
Leonard Schilling.
DELACROIX
Leonard Schilling, oh, God yes. In Playboy magazine, of all places.
VR
We Googled him, too. Schilling called your novel “a landmark in avant-garde lesbian feminist erotic literature.”
DELACROIX
Total bullshit. Schilling was always so busy trying to be hip he never made any sense. Avant-garde lesbian feminist erotic? Bring it on.
VR
But we like that he ended the article by saying, “Dirty books never go out of fashion, and Little Deaths is simply one of the dirtiest books ever written. Think of it as hot porn with brains. You won’t feel embarrassed
by reading it on the subway.”
DELACROIX
After that piece came out, Hefner’s people kept bugging Moss to have me do one of those interviews.
VR
You mean like—the official Playboy Interview?