Nola : a memoir of faith, art, and madness

The evidence at hand: an autobiography-- complete with their mother's edits-- written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published as fiction; perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. But Hemley, hampered by a "larcenous heart" that covets his sister's story for himself, discovers that finding the truth in any life-- even one's own-- is a fragmented and complex task. __Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness__ is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for God. It is also a look at what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and the sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator. NolaA Memoir of Faith, Art, and MadnessBy ROBIN HEMLEYGRAYWOLF PRESSCopyright © 1998 Robin Hemley. All rights reserved.ISBN: 1-55597-278-0Chapter One The Invisible and Quiet Hand We believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble. EMILY DICKINSONMy sister and my brother inherited most of the spiritual genes in myfamily—I suppose by way of our maternal great-great-grandfatherAbraham, a village mystic in Lithuania, a colored photograph ofwhom graces the wall of my office. According to legend, he lived to be 117 or 105—accounts vary. Mygrandmother Ida told me that his secret was a cup of hot water withlemon every day, and that's the regimen she followed, religiously, butshe only lived to be 90. Ida used to tell me that people would comefrom all over Lithuania for Abraham's advice; in the picture, he wears ayarmulke and has a full gray beard and mustache. My father comes from a family of atheists, but he was always fascinatedby philosophy and by Eastern religions, and he and Nola wouldhave long conversations about Buddhism and Hinduism toward theend of his life. My mother and I are, I suppose, the agnostics of the family. For mymother, writing is her religion. Although her maiden name, Gottlieb,means "God love," I don't remember her ever saying a word to me onthe subject—with one exception—when I was seven and announced tomy mother that fairies were real but angels weren't—my sister's influence,no doubt. My mother thought this was a hilarious assumption,and made me repeat it to my father. But that's the only conversationon any religious subject that I can recall. I can't presume to think that my mother is without spiritual yearningswhatsoever—but we treat it the way other families might treat thesubject of madness perhaps. In some ways, for me, it's closely allied tomadness. A large percentage of people classified as schizophrenics seevisions and join cults. In my limited experience, that's true. Nola wasalways seeing visions, and while my mother has steadfastly claimed tobe a skeptic, I always felt she wanted to believe. In the early 1970s, theHemley household was Psychic Phenomenon Central. At eleven, I wasdoing automatic writing, a kind of spiritual advice column for myfamily and my mother's students, and I signed the columns "Shiva."My sister was communicating with her Guru Sri Ramanuja, whoseCentre of Being was located in Queens, New York, sometimes by way ofletter, sometimes by telepathy. I remember my mother hosting a séancein 1971. But now she dismisses all of that as a kind of game, or as herattempts to try to understand what was going on with her daughter. Still, someone accused my mother of being a witch—some disaffectedstudent, she thinks, who received a low grade, and she wasn'treappointed. That's part of the reason, in any case. At the time that mymother was coming up for reappointment at Stephens College, Nolasuddenly disappeared (one of several times), drove with an acquaintanceto New York to be closer to her Guru, and wound up in the psychiatricunit at Bellevue chained to a bed. For weeks, my mother hadno idea where Nola was, and when it came time to give the tenurecommittee her teaching evaluations and other documents she justhanded them a sheaf of papers and said, "Here. I can't do anymore.Nola has disappeared. I've got to go to New York." The committeemade no excuses for her and she wasn't reappointed. Here. I can't do anymore. Nola has disappeared. These are wordsI'm tempted to repeat, to shove the couple hundred pages of her journalsin someone else's hands and say, "You make sense of them. I'mgoing to New York to look for her." Gone for almost twenty-five years,run away for good this time. I know that eventually I'll have to throwaway the crutches of other people's voices, their words, and even throwaway Nola's own words. To rediscover her, I'll have to look into thosewordless places I've turned my back on. Sept. 1, 1994 Dear Robin, Here's Nola's "Journal." As you will see, she wrote in an extremely exaggerated style. I tried to edit the manuscript—with her consent—but I gave up. It was too much, and she couldn't do it herself. She also distorted facts. WHEN SHE QUOTES THE little speech to God that she made as a child, she says it was her "stepfather" who was with her—but it wasn't Cexcil, ixt was I. What actually happened was that we were climbing the stairs of the brownstone where I first lived in the Village, and as we came to the top floor, mine, she looked up at the small skylight and said: Oh God, I love you God, if I could see you now I would hug you, but I can't because you're invisible, aren't you, God?—Quite remarkable for a five year old, I xxxx thought. Of course, Cecil and I were married when she was five (on her birthday, actually, but she wasn't with us that time). There are other things she dxistorted—but you won't know until you've worked your way through the flourishes of her sometimes unreadable handwriting. She did type some of it, which may help. Love, Mom What my mother refers to as my sister's journal isn't a journal at all,but a memoir of sorts, titled "In Search of God, An Autobiography."It's about 150 pages, half typed and half written in my sister's script,and it was written the last year of Nola's life, when my mother thoughtthat writing might be therapeutic for Nola. I have to keep remindingmyself that my sister was twenty-four when she wrote her memoir, thatI'm nearly fifteen years older than she was when she died, and thatNola's aims were high ones. She didn't merely want to tell the story ofher life—the book seems as much of a book of spiritual instruction asanything else. Events are foreshortened and skipped over lightly inNola's telling—much of the text is addressed to people in general, exhortingthem to give up material things and self-love and follow herspiritual master, Sri Ramanuja. I also have to remember the year inwhich she wrote this, 1972. What immediately strikes me as I read through Nola's memoir arethe crossed-out passages. These are the crossing-outs of my mother,not censorship exactly, but my mother's higher calling always: to turnthe overwrought into art, to tone down, make something subtler, findexactly the right word. My mother edited Nola's manuscript withNola's permission, she says. Still, there's no denying that my motherwas exerting the same kind of control over Nola's words as I'm exertingover her own. Even in her letter to me, she wants me to know thetruth, that she (not my father) was standing with Nola on the stepswhen Nola cried out to God at age five. And my reaction: Why doesthat matter? Why is it important that I know of my sister's "distortions,"certainly ones so trivial? Perhaps there are some distortions offact in Nola's autobiography, but not distortions of the spirit. My sister,as she claims throughout her book, hungered for things of thespirit. Her writing begins, "I have always been obsessed with God."Here, my mother has drawn a line through the rest of the sentence,"and with the hidden." That seems like a perfectly fine sentiment tome, even a connection between Nola and myself, and I feel almost resentmentat it having been crossed out. While I have not been obsessedwith God, like Nola, I have, like her, been obsessed with the hidden,and perhaps my mother, even in the crossing out of such a simple lineis stating that she prefers to keep the hidden crossed out? Nearly everyparagraph has something crossed out, or a replacement made. In somecases, the editorial changes my mother made were good ones, but Iprefer to put the versions side-by-side, to compare the choices of mysister with the choices of my mother. When I first read the memoir, Ifelt my sister's presence more strongly than I'd felt it in twenty-fiveyears—despite the rhetorical flourishes my mother writes of, my sister'svoice, or how I remember it, comes through. The only way I cantruly describe my feelings from reading Nola's memoir is "drunk." Myhead reels with strange connections, almost explosions, stumblings ofpossibility. The first page and a half, sets the tone for the rest of the memoir.The italicized words are my mother's substitutions: I have always been obsessed with God and with the hidden. Nature has appeared to me, even as a child, to be a veneer; the product of erroneous vision which should in some way manner be corrected. As a child and adolescent I immersed myself was submerged in the occult, reading the imaginative most bizarre stories of I.B. Singer (who was a friend of my parents, also writers), hypnotizing friends to see whether they had latent psychic powers and doing so well in certain forms of schools work that it seemed to rush from some higher center of the brain rather than the ordinary process of laborious thought. Very early in life I was reading immersed myself in the most outrageous and mystical of fairy tales stories, preferring George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum's Oz series to something like Hardy Boys. Age made no difference to this preoccupation with the fantastic toward which I was pushed as if by an invisible and quiet hand. My life, accordingly, took on a more and more miraculous character, and I began to frighten my friends by intuiting their private thoughts. My earliest yearning for God was inspired by an Irishwoman who used to sit with for me when my parents went out. She was a devout but simple and unfanatical Catholic; I remember one Christmas kissing a little effigy of the Christ child when she told me that he had once lived to redeem the world. I was about five when I learned about Padre Pope Pio, the Italian saint who was said to bear the marks of the cross on his hands and feet in commemoration of his great predecessor. My parents were agnostic Jews, and completely unsympathetic with my thirst for the divine in spite of their own artistic temperaments bohemianism though I recall one incident which seemed to belie this. I was five, and I stood in the dining room watching my stepfather, Cecil Hemley chatting speaking with someone in the hall. A copy of Buber's I and Thou was on the buffet. Naturally, I had never read this before, and I was mystified by the title. I writhed in an effort wanted to understand what it meant; "Thou," a word which I had never heard before, sounded like a term for someone of immense importance. "Mother," I asked. "Is `Thou' God?" My mother, who at that time was preoccupied with her writing, answered carelessly that it was. I could not get that book out of my mind, however, and kept wondering what strange conception of God a grown man could have, and why it was necessary to write a book about Him when He was so apparent everywhere. I had not yet been initiated into the twisted habits of the world, which has to read books before it will see what it has always inwardly seen, and which requires proofs for the obvious. My stepfather caught me one afternoon in a kneeling position on the nursery floor, with my arms wildly outspread, crying out "Oh God. I love you and I wish I could shake hands with you, but then I'd only be shaking hands with nothing." He always made a joke of my piety; he was a Greenwich village intellectual and a cum laude graduate of Amherst, a kind of twentieth-century Faust, who thought he had exhausted the world's secrets with his own half diabolical mind, and refused to question the limits of his intellect, it was especially strange because Most of his poetry and prose were profoundly religious, though from the point of view of postwar America God had died. He used to recite me nonsense poetry about little children being devoured by lions and the Jumblies, who had green heads and blue hands playing mercilessly with my imagination until I had nightmares and I began to see real devils' heads peering out of the dark when I tried to sleep ... I had nightmares and screamed so terribly that my parents often had to put me to bed by force. I have to resist being an apologist for either my mother or my sister,in the same way I have to resist being critical or patronizing to either—althoughthis is an impossible task I've set for myself. How can one beobjective about one's family? How can one resist the urge to edit, to becomethe family spin doctor? There are old scores to settle, I'm sure,ones I'm not even consciously aware of—although, if I become aware ofthem in the telling, I'll let you in on them—perhaps. We are constantly,as we read, looking for conclusions, judgments to be made, sometimesvillains. I suppose I am the villain in all this for writing it down, manipulatingthe texts I choose to uncover for you, the juxtapositions. Iam playing God, manipulating. I suppose some might look at it thatway, and it's true in the sense that any writer manipulates. My sistermanipulates. My mother manipulates. Even the reader manipulates inthe conclusions she draws. Many of my mother's edits in my sister's manuscript seem entirelyjustified to me. The places I wince are those where Nola sounds tooself-important, a little pompous and self-congratulatory. Yes, I knowthose are qualities that fit me as well right now—criticizing my deadsister, for heaven's sake, who wrote those words nearly thirty years agonever knowing that her kid brother would pick them apart. And patronizing.I know, but that doesn't stop me from having those feelings,from wincing in certain places. Too much the writing teacher in me, Isuppose. Too much of my mother, whose religion is writing, who hasan alliance to the facts, but shudders at the truth, and to my father, themodern-day Faust with his "half diabolical mind" who feels he's discoveredall the world's secrets. That's where my father and I separatecompany. My mind, three-quarters diabolical, has not even uncoveredone of the world's secrets, although sometimes a secret feels close. I would have cut "I writhed in an effort," just as my mother had cutit from my sister's text, but there are other choices, other substitutionsthat I wonder about. For a moment, I'd like to put those questionsaside, and instead question my sister's views of events—did she reallyhave such a sophisticated notion of God when she was five years old?Asking my father about Martin Buber? Seeing God in everything?A young pantheist? I don't doubt it—not in Nola's case. I wasn't bornyet, and so have no way of knowing whether Nola was truly this precocious,although my mother corroborates the story of Nola's talking toGod—albeit in a different setting. But of course, my sister must exaggeratein places, as my mother warnedin her letter. Nola was sick when shewrote this. She was hallucinating attimes, talking to invisible beings whosurrounded her. How could she rememberevents straight-on? But I wasn'tthere and neither was my mother, notall the time, and so maybe everythingNola says is true, or at least no more exaggeratedthan anyone else's memory. We are not invading her privacy byasking these questions, by challengingher stories. Clearly, she meant for thisbook to be seen by others, just as my mother expected her journals tobe saved for posterity—the voice, the stance, is a public one. We are herreviewers. I couldn't imagine my own daughter, Olivia, at the same age, askingabout Martin Buber, but I can imagine the kindling of an interest inmetaphysics. Recently, my wife found a Canadian coin on a path in thewoods. The coin was dated 1929 and had a portrait of King George onit. Olivia wanted to know who King George was, and Beverly said heused to be the King of England. "What does he do now?" Olivia asked. "He's dead," Beverly said. "Who killed him?" Olivia asked. "No one," Beverly said. "He was probably very old and sick when hedied." "Where did he go?" Olivia asked. We had not really discussed this issue in our family, and so Beverlysaid, somewhat uncertainly, "I guess he went to Heaven." Olivia, sensing Beverly's hesitation, said, "Or maybe he went tocollege." I laughed when Beverly told me this, and recounted this anecdoteto several friends, as well as to my mother—it's the kind of ready-madestory one might expect to see in Reader's Digest, as one friend suggested.Still, I'm bothered that Beverly and I were so unprepared for her naturalcuriosity. If Olivia had asked me where one goes after one dies,I might have answered, "The bookshelf." I suppose that no story is entirely innocent when you examine it—Iwonder what signals we've been sending Olivia about the life of themind versus the spiritual nature of things. Heaven and college, insome schemata, could be seen as polar opposites. The intellect, I acknowledge,is a miserable failure when it comes to transcendence.Instead, the intellect traps us where we know we shouldn't be; knowledge,perhaps, was forbidden by God for our own safety, for our ownsanity. And yet, we keep after it, doggedly, toward our own self-destruction.That is the diabolical side of the pursuit of knowledge,the pleasure of it, disobedience, having a hand in what we know iswrong for us. A kind of intellectual leap of faith, if that's not a completecontradiction in terms; there must be something in it, we reason,we reason, we reason. What you must have noticed, as I did in the above passages from mysister's memoir, were those places my mother crossed out that werenot so much edits of style as edits of content. Why, I wonder, does shecut out these words: "I had not yet been initiated into the twistedhabits of this world, which has to read books before it will see what ithas always inwardly seen, and which requires proofs for the obvious."This seems like a perfectly intriguing and possibly true statement, althoughrife with interesting contradictions. I want that passage keptin my sister's book simply so I can argue with it. Nothing is obviousuntil we write it down, I want to say, defending words. The Koran, theBible, I and Thou, your own words, Nola, the words of your spiritualmaster, Sri Ramanuja. Whatever is "inwardly seen" requires all themore proof because who can trust what one sees inwardly? For mymother, crossing out these words must have been an easy decision—heresy,as she saw it, as I see it, even. And it's interesting that my mother crossed out the criticisms ofmy father, "... his own half-diabolical mind, and refused to questionthe limits of his own intellect ..." Not that my mother is protective ofmy father's memory—although she might have been in the early seventieswhen she made these editorial changes. More than once, she'stold me he was an egoist, and that many of Nola's problems mighthave been less severe if he'd treated her more kindly—she was not hisdaughter, and he could not bring himself to truly care for her.Perhaps my mother crossed out these words because she thought theywere overwrought, or perhaps she simply thought they weren't true,that he did question the limits of his own intellect. Still, this wasNola's version of my father, and she should be allowed her say. And, Ihave to remind myself that these changes my mother made were withNola's consent. Nevertheless, I want the original. My mother, too, felt conflict over letting my sister speak for herselfand retaining some control over the story. When my mother first toldme of the autobiography's existence, she said, "Her mode of expressionwas so flowery. I began cutting things out and I decided I didn't wantto cut anything out. I wanted it to be the way it is. It's very hard for meto face anything about Nola. So I never did anything with it." Almost every page in my sister's memoir has a revelation for me, butit's these opening pages that I choose to examine right now—anothercrossed-out passage, "the invisible and quiet hand." Who hasn't feltthat quiet and invisible hand, even if we call it coincidence? Coincidences—things fall into place in a way that most writers areused to—intuition is a word I might be comfortable with. Unlockingthe unconscious? That's a little too tainted, like the jargon of a late-seventiesworkshop. Fate? That's a word the whole twentieth centuryrenounces. I'm as skeptical as anyone else. I'm as gullible as anyoneelse. Synchronicity? I need to call this phenomenon something. Littlemiracle. I go to the edge of belief and pull back before I'm caught in it. Flipping through Nola's memoirs I find this quote: That which is passes away, but being does not pass away. That which knows passes away, but knowledge does not pass away. Thai which loves passes away, but love does not pass away. The quote moves me, because Nola wrote it, typed it, in her autobiography.Of all the pages of the text, it's this one quote that I takenote of. It seems almost a message to me, that I shouldn't mourn, butthis is too egocentric, the thought that my sister could have writtensomething twenty-five years ago, secretly addressed to me. I read everytext in this way, especially the texts that my family leaves behind. I mullover the quote and then consider using it as the epigraph of my book.Months later, my mother sends me a box of Nola's papers ... I find thequote again, although I wasn't looking for it, written on the back of apamphlet from Nola's guru. Yes, I know it proves nothing. I'm not tryingto prove anything. Quite the opposite. I'm afraid of proofs. Let'smock proof, mock the obvious. (I had not yet been initiated into thetwisted habits of the world, which has to read books before it willsee what it has always inwardly seen, and which requires proofs forthe obvious.) Nevertheless, the quote is exactly the same (That whichis passes away/but being does not pass away ...), although broken offinto lines like a poem, with these added lines: True Vision comes only to the seer Who sees beyond himself and his desires Sure, that's the basis of most religions, opposite of most art (exceptperhaps religious), setting its faith in expression of the self. What's remarkableto me isn't the idea so much as the juxtaposition, the factthat I have lifted it out of Nola's text once, on my own, and then,months later found the same quote, in her hand, in another batch ofpapers. Another passage in Nola's autobiography that stands out describesthe summer of 1967 when Nola traveled alone through Rome and theMiddle East. In Rome, she went to the Sistine Chapel and stood "forthree hours in suspension under the Sistine ceiling, trying to recognizeamong those luminous forms something in relation to my ownvision and that of Michelangelo." Just imagine a young Americanwoman who has visions standing beneath the Sistine ceiling for threehours trying to see if her visions matched Michelangelo's—searchingearnestly for sublime expression, confident that it can be found. And then, in that same box of Nola's letters and school papers andreport cards my mother sent, I come across a three-by-five manila envelopewith a clasp. The envelope is bulging with something, more papersI figure. When I undo the clasp, more than a hundred blankpostcards from my sister's trip spill out—four postcards of detailsfrom the Sistine Chapel on top. I study them looking for a vision otherthan Michelangelo's, looking for my sister in the portraits of the savedand the portraits of the damned. I'm torn between my mother's view of the world, salvation throughart, and my sister's, salvation through the spirit, not that the two aremutually exclusive. My mother reminds me that literature's roots arein the spiritual—the Dionysian mysteries, or the spiritual stories thatevery culture shares. And even these books have gone through manyversions, many differences of text and interpretation before an officialtext was agreed upon. I have kept a journal since I was sixteen, like my mother, and now Ihave a collection of about twenty hardback journals of various sizes,not ordered in any way. Sometimes I flip through them, making discoveries,rediscovering a story idea, an outline, an overheard snatch ofdialogue. After my grandmother died, I found among her belongings ablank journal with yellowed paper—a gray cover with the printed word"Journal" written in a kind of nineteenth-century script, although thejournal probably dated back only to the twenties or thirties, maybe theforties. I claimed this blank journal as my own, although this time Idid not have to steal it, as I did with the court papers about my sister Ifound when Ida was still alive. After my grandmother's death, we alsodiscovered that she had saved every tax return she had ever filed, datingall the way back to the first year a federal income tax was imposed.I almost wanted to save these documents, too. Of the few possessions of Ida's I claimed for myself, this blank journalwas one of them, and I used it as my own for several months, untilI realized that its yellowed pages were only going to become yellower,and if I wanted to save my words for more than ten or fifteen years,I had better find something else to write in. Yesterday, I was scouring all of my journals, looking for an incidentI had recorded in one of them around 1981. I never located the passageI was looking for, but instead stopped in this yellowed journal, thewords in it dating from my early twenties. I found an outline, or the beginningof an outline, of a story that I had started then abandoned,about Nola. The outline consisted mostly of questions: What is the story? Is it about Nola going mad? No, too long a tale. Is it about death? No, because the No Is it about Change? No or is it about love?—Yes If it is about any one of these four things, then the others must be removed. Cut out the madness Cut out the death These instructions seem to me now not so much the recipe for asuccessful story as instructions to myself, what I was telling myself toremember when I remembered Nola. The Evidence At Hand: An Autobiography - Complete With Their Mother's Edits - Written By His Brilliant And Disturbingly Religious Sister; A Story Featuring Actual Childhood Events, But Published As Fiction; Perjured Court Documents Hidden In A Drawer For Decades. These Are The Clues Robin Hemley Gathers When He Sets Out To Reconstruct The Life Of His Sister Nola, Who Died At The Age Of Twenty-five After Several Years Of Treatment For Schizophrenia. But Hemley, Hampered By A Larcenous Heart That Covets His Sister's Story For Himself, Discovers That Finding The Truth In Any Life - Even One's Own - Is A Fragmented And Complex Task. Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness Is Much More Than A Remembrance Of A Young Woman Who Was Consumed Her Entire Life By A Passion For God. It Is Also A Look At What People Choose To Reveal And Conceal, And An Examination Of The Enormous Toll Mental Illness Takes On A Family. Finally, It Is A Revelation Of The Alchemy That Creates A Writer: Confidence In The Unknowable, Distrust Of The Proven, Tortuous Devotion To The Fine Print In Life, And The Sacrifice To Writing Itself As It Plays The Roles Of Confessor, Scourge, And Creator. By Robin Hemley.