Trying to make sense of one's life (and a parent's)

Honor Moore has published three books of poetry: Red Shoes (2005), Darling (2001), and Memoir (1988). She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems, of The New Women's Theater: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, and co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt. She teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University's School of the Arts. She's also written a singular memoir, The Bishop's Daughter (2008).

Honor was born in October 1945, the first child (of nine) of Paul and Jenny Moore. Paul (1919 - 2003) was "the beneficiary of vast wealth." His grandfather had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a founder of Bankers Trust and US Steel. Paul grew up on an estate with horses and golf and tennis. He was sent to private schools, including St. Paul's in New Hampshire where a visiting priest was instrumental in encouraging young Paul to become an Episcopal minister—High Church Episcopal ("Bells and Smells Episcopal") a form of the church that would be Catholic except for the Pope.

Paul became a Marine captain in WWII, was wounded on Guadalcanal, and met and married Jenny while still in the service. Once he was mustered out, he enrolled in General Theological Seminary and in time became a Father and a father. The family moved to Jersey City where Paul became the pastor of an inner city church that they lived beside. They did not live in voluntary poverty, however. Honor writes that "the life they made in Jersey City was modest compared to how they could have lived, and they made a commitment to try to share the lives of those they ministered to."

Paul was so successful in building the Jersey City parish, he was invited to become the dean of the cathedral in Indianapolis and eventually became the bishop of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. At St. John's, as The New York Times obituary writer reported, "Bishop Moore spoke out against corporate greed, racism, military spending and for more assistance to the nation's poor, pursuing his political and social agenda in both the city and within the national Episcopal denomination. He was an early advocate of women's ordination and, in 1977, was the first Episcopal bishop to ordain a gay woman as an Episcopal priest."

Honor has a sure hand leading the reader through her family history so that we are never bored by the births, deaths, crises, and tensions within the family. It's an extraordinary story not simply because Paul Moore became an Episcopal priest rather than, as his family planned, a Wall Street banker or lawyer or because he had nine children. It's exceptional because he was gay. Or, if not gay, bisexual.

In The Bishop's Daughter, one senses Honor attempting to make sense of her father and her mother and herself as she writes. She is fairly candid about her own sex life: She was first sexually active with boys and men, then for twenty years with women, then she returned to men. As a child and girl she struggled, without saying as much, to obtain her mother's attention, but her mother had eight other children who also wanted their mother's attention, plus the usual responsibilities of being the minister's wife. Honor says in the memoir she spent years in weekly sessions on a psychiatrist's couch.

She write about her own discovery of Paul's homosexual desires and that her mother "became certain my father had lovers outside of marriage, and that the lovers were men. She made the discovery, I was told by a friend in whom she confided, not as the result of a single event, but from putting things together—a series of suspicions suddenly becoming in her mind enough of a certainty for her to consider leaving my father . . . " She did not, however, leave him; she died in 1973 and Paul remarried two years later.

For most of Paul's life, being gay was a stigma. The unanswerable question: How would his life had been different if he had not had to live much of it (a major part? an insignificant part) in the closet? Would Honor Moore and her siblings even exist? Unanswerable, and thankfully she does live on through her poetry and this remarkable memoir.

Trying to make sense among the surrealists

Courtney Maum has written three novels. Because I heard her speak at the Wesleyan Writer's Conference this summer, I looked up her second novel Touch, which was published in 2017. It's a fairly conventional story set in the near future; the self-driving car which ferries the narrator around New York City is virtually sentient. It's wonderfully well-written and in places made me laugh out loud. And while the surface is slick the underlying theme (message?) is serious: We are in danger of losing our humanity to our devices. Put down that damn cell phone and look at me! Touch me!

Maum's first novel, I'm Having So Much Fun Here Without You, was published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, so she started with a major publisher. G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin published Touch, suggesting (to me at least) that Fun did not meet Touchstone's sales expectations. And although Touch was one of NPR's "Best Books of 2017"; a New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice; one of Glamour's "The 6 Juiciest Summer Reads”; one of the New York Post's “The 29 Best Books of the Summer”; and one Huffington Post's “24 Incredible Books You Should Read This Summer” I suspect it was not the breakout best seller Putnam had hoped it would be. Which brings us to Maum's third novel, Costalegre, published in July this year by Tin House Books, the publishing arm of the now defunct Tin House literary magazine, and hardly a giant publishing company.

Costalegre is so different from Touch in setting, mood, tone, situation, and story that one could make a case that they were written by different people who happen to share the same name. I suspect this means that some of the readers who loved Maum's first two novels are going to feel betrayed by Costalegre.

According to Wikipedia, "Costalegre is a series of different beaches, capes and bays of all sizes and extensions distributed along the Pacific Ocean on the western coastline of the Mexican state of Jalisco, in an area located between two other major and very well-known tourist centers, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco and Manzanillo, Colima. In recent years, the Jalisco state government has promoted this zone as a tourist attraction, grouping all these beaches under the common name of 'Costalegre,' which literally translates as 'Coast of Joy,' but the area has been known as 'The Virgin Coast' of Mexico for a long time."

Costalegre is set in 1937. Leonora Calaway, a wealthy, thrice-married American art collector, has brought a group of surrealists to a Mexican resort to save them from a Nazi regime that certain artists, writers, and thinkers as "cultural degenerate." The book is a series of diary entries of various lengths by Lenora's neglected fifteen-year-old daughter Lara.

Lara is lonely, bored, and observant. There are no other children her age, and her mother forgot to engage another tutor for her. She fills her days as best she can: "I changed for lunch. Who cares. Sometimes it feels as if my beauty is this expected thing I must show up with, so I try not to, but I guess I'm vain, as well. I didn't want my mother to whine about how she would have preferred the white dress to the pink one, how my hair shouldn't be banned. Even Baldomero puts his word in: says when my hair's down, that it's striking. Legrand reaches for it, runs it through his stubby fingers. A treasure, he says. An international one."

Costalegre was inspired by the actual relationship between Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen. I didn't know that when I read the book because I do not usually read the flap copy. Too often  it either tells me enough to spoil the story or is badly inaccurate. At the end of the book, however, in the note from the author Maum writes,"I researched maniacally for this project, until some of the experiences I read about became part of my own makeup. It is a testament to the personality of the American art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the artists she supported that so many of them felt moved to document their time creating—and promoting—art under her protection . . . ."

Because you've read this, you cannot not know that Lara Calaway is Maum's idea (notion? conception?) of Pegeen Guggenheim, and I don't know whether that makes Costalegre more or less satisfying to read. I do know that for all Maum's research, the novel does not read like a research project. It reads like the diary of a fifteen-year-old girl trying to make sense of a world drifting into a senseless war among a group of ex-pat artists and writers for whom "sense" is concept to be subverted. Without knocking the pleasure I found in reading Touch, I found Costalegre more thought-provoking and ultimately more rewarding.