When Rosemary Mahoney turned up this June on Entertainment Weekly's "It List" of trend-setters in the arts, she was tagged with the job title "storyteller." The magazine had it exactly right: in The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China and the NBCC-nominated Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age, Mahoney lets readers eavesdrop on her conversations with Chinese students and Irish pub denizens, conveying the atmosphere of two conservative nations in the midst of profound social change through the particulars of individual dreams and disappointments.
"There's as much revealed in the way a person lifts a glass as in what they say about some political issue," comments the writer, whose own conversation is as sharp and specific as her prose. The shapely architecture and elegant style of her narratives are obviously the results of careful craftsmanship, but Mahoney has little interest in discussing technique, preferring to focus on the content of her work. It's the story that matters.
Meeting the writer in person makes it easy to understand how she obtained the often intimate details that form the rich source material for her books. Mahoney has a powerful personality: she's very smart and she d sn't mince words. But because she projects warmth as well as an edge, her forcefulness engages rather than intimidates. She's full of entertaining anecdotes about everything from the Boston cab company for which she counted money while trying to write fiction in the mid-1980s to the posh Upper East Side apartment where the interview takes place. (It belongs to a friend working for GE in London; Mahoney lived here for five years before recently relocating to Providence, R.I.)
Mahoney encourages others' confidences by freely imparting her own, which for the first time occupy a substantial portion of her text in A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman (Forecasts, Sept. 14), out in November from Doubleday. On the surface, the book chronicles the two-and-a-half months that 17-year-old Rosemary spent working for the irascible 73-year-old author in 1978. But "it's much more about me than about Lillian Hellman," admits Mahoney. "I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you."
"A real eye-opener" is the way Mahoney now characterizes the bruising summer of 1978. A bookish, unhappy teenager, Mahoney idolized the air-brushed image of Hellman presented in the writer's brilliantly persuasive memoirs, An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. "Her life... was guided by honesty and courage," explains a passage in A Likely Story, "while mine seemed fearful and tainted and dishonest somehow."
Although she was a good student at St. Paul's, a prestigious New England prep school, Mahoney felt like an impostor. Her widowed mother was raising seven children on a schoolteacher's salary with the additional handicap of a leg paralyzed by polio; Nona Rohan Mahoney coped by drinking. Mahoney's memoir interweaves the tale of her trials chez Hellman with memories of her childhood in Milton, Mass., and pays tribute to her mother's wisdom and devotion while frankly delineating the shame and worry caused by her alcoholism.
The Diva's Apprentice
It was Mahoney's mother who urged her to send a letter to Hellman offering her services during the writer's residence on Martha's Vineyard. "I wanted something in my life to change," she says. "I thought if I could have a little bit of the strength she had, maybe I would be okay. I didn't think I was going there to be her housekeeper; I thought I was going to be her friend." Hellman, of course, thought she was hiring summer help, and much of A Likely Story's bracing humor comes from their clashing expectations. The older woman is cranky, exacting and not very nice; the younger is totally uninterested in the chores she was hired to perform and stunned that, as an unintentionally hilarious excerpt from her journal puts it, "this isn't as great as I thought it would be."
"I tried to keep it from the perspective of that 17-year-old," Mahoney comments. "At 37, I have a lot more compassion and sympathy for Lillian Hellman, but I wanted to get that mood and that feeling of being a teenager." Aware that some readers may take her youthful solipsism at face value, she shrugs. "You can't control how people react to your work. You write about a famous person and you're going to get slammed. Look at Paul Theroux and Joyce Maynard." Mahoney hasn't read Maynard's controversial memoir of her romance with J.D. Salinger, but she reviewed Theroux's unsparing portrait of V.S. Naipaul and respects "the big risk he took. It's harsh, but it's also incredibly affectionate, there's no question about his admiration for Naipaul, and I was quite moved by it. Why do we expect writers to be nicer than anybody else? They're just people.
"Now the question of whether it was fair -- well, when you're the one standing at the podium there's no such thing as fairness. Writing is not a genteel profession; it's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. Remember what Joan Didion said [in Slouching Towards Bethlehem]? `Writers are always selling somebody out.' I don't know that I necessarily agree with Janet Malcolm's statement that what a writer d s is morally indefensible, but in some ways she's dead right. You have to use the world, and I have had a terrible struggle thinking about how you write about real people honestly and yet respect some degree of privacy. It's very difficult. I was so depressed for a year and a half, writing A Likely Story, that I thought, `I'm going to have to give this up, I can't be a writer, this is much too hard.' You have a tremendous amount of power when you have the words between the pages and not the other person. I don't take that lightly; I think very carefully about the consequences."
The consequences that most concerned Mahoney were those that A Likely Story would have for her mother. Now 75 and sober, Nona Mahoney refused her daughter's offer to remove anything from the manuscript that distressed her, saying simply, "You have to write what happened." That didn't make it much easier for Rosemary. "I love my mother, more than just about anybody, and I admire her enormously: she's one of the smartest, bravest people I know. I wanted to make a portrait of her in all her complexity, and I think I succeeded; people who've read it just love her. The difficulty is, she's filled with regret over the effect her drinking had on us; that's going to be with her forever. I hated it when I was a teenager, but I can't blame her now for how she chose to handle her problems. Nobody died, we all got a good education, through it all I think she did a fantastic job. She d sn't think so."
Mahoney's academic history certainly justifies her belief in the essential soundness of her upbringing. While an undergraduate at Harvard, she won a prize for her fiction writing; she earned a masters from Johns Hopkins University and taught creative writing there for a year. (She's also received a Transatlantic Review Award for Creative Writing and a Whiting Writer's Award.) But she found teaching left too little time for her own work, and her aforementioned stint at the Boston cab company was even more disheartening. "I wasn't writing much. I was tortured about that, and purely by accident I came across a brochure from Radcliffe for this teaching exchange with China. I was totally shocked when I got it!"
Her exposure to the political and personal frustrations of students and colleagues at a provincial Chinese university one year before the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising initially seemed like excellent material for a novel. "But when I sat down to write, I thought, `Why fictionalize this?' The stuff that happened was way more compelling and strange than anything I could make up."
Published in 1990 by Fawcett Columbine, The Early Arrival of Dreams was edited, like Mahoney's two subsequent titles, by Betsy Lerner. "Each book has been with a different company, and that's because I don't want to lose her. I rely on Betsy enormously for help in the structure. It's not so much line by line, it's the shape, the balance, the roundness of the story. Also, she's incredibly psychologically perceptive; she gets the subtext, sometimes before I do. When I've finished a chapter, I'll send it to her, and she usually gets back to me within two or three days. Once she took a week, and I thought, `My career is over!' It's real torture for a writer, putting something out there and not getting a reaction. Betsy understands that." Mahoney has a more detached relationship with the Wylie Agency, where Z Pagnamenta currently handles her affairs, but she appreciates the agency's willingness "to intervene on the important points."
Scenes from a Pub
Whoredom in Kimmage began as a proposal by Mahoney to do a book about Dublin's tiny Jewish community. Houghton Mifflin, where Lerner was employed at the time, felt the idea was too offbeat and suggested she write about the changing role of Irish women instead. Although Mahoney agreed and dutifully interviewed lesbians, women's health activists and Ireland's ground-breaking female president, Mary Robinson, the solid, journalistic tone of those sections pales in comparison with the vigor of the scenes at Dillon's Pub in the provincial village of Corofin, where the writer befriended and unsparingly portrayed some pathetically lonely men. "There weren't a lot of women who hung out in the pub; their absence became an issue; in fact I guess it's clear to the reader, I can't deny it, which parts I preferred." The new Anchor paperback edition, which changes the book's subtitle from "Irish Women Coming of Age" to "The World of Irish Women," may better prepare readers for the pub scenes, Mahoney thinks: "After all, there are men in the world of Irish women, too."
Enthusiastically reviewed in America and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993, Whoredom in Kimmage received a much more ambivalent reaction from the community it observed so searchingly. "Many Irish women told me what I wrote was exactly what was going on there," says Mahoney, "but it made a lot of people angry in Ireland."I'm not interested in prettifying things," she says. "I write what I see. That's hard for some people; it scares them. People actually said to me, `Those men in the pub were drunk!' " She laughs incredulously: Imagine that, drunk in a pub! "The thing is, they feel drunkenness is shameful. I don't see it that way; I don't think it's a moral question. I'm not shocked by anything people do. What's so terrible? It's life."
Mahoney stands by her methods while remaining aware of the ethical issues they raise. "I wouldn't do the Irish book differently, but I don't think I would do it again. I just loved those people -- I wouldn't write about people if I didn't care about them. They don't see it that way; nobody I wrote about ever said so to me directly, but I heard it. The novel I'm thinking about might take place in Ireland, so I'm a little nervous about that."
She prefers not to say more about future projects, except to comment that "fiction is very scary, because what if I can't do it?" Despite the prizes she's won, Mahoney admits wryly, "I still have that disease of feeling that I'm not really worthy: everybody else is a writer, but I'm not; everybody else belongs at this fancy boarding school, but I don't. It's that weird duality that I think a lot of writers have. I'm not confident, and yet I'm oddly confident. You have to have a certain amount of ego to be a writer in the first place, and to write things that might be controversial. I've wasted a lot of time worrying about it: am I tough enough to do it? Well, I guess, or I wouldn't have done it. The day it's too difficult for me, I guess I'll stop."
