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CALISHER, Hortense

Born 20 December 1911, New York, New York

Daughter of Joseph H. and Hedvig Lichtstern Calisher; married Heaton B. Heffelfinger, 1935 (divorced); Curtis A. Harnack, 1959; children: Bennet, Peter

The older child of a German-born mother and a Southern father, Hortense Calisher was reared in an upper-middle class Jewish family. After earning her B.A. in 1932 at Barnard College, she worked as a sales clerk, model, and social worker in New York City. She began publishing short stories in 1948.

In Herself (1972), an aptly titled autobiographical journal and meditation on her life as a writer, Calisher proclaims her emphasis on the individual, based on self-trust and acceptance. She rejects controversy in literature as well as group action in politics. Her stories and novels intelligently and sensitively chronicle the experiences of the self: the loneliness of individual consciousness, epiphanies of communication, and pain of "tiny knife-moves," especially within families and between lovers.

In the Absence of Angels (1951) includes Calisher's best short stories. "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks" affirms the potential for love between two young people, emotionally deprived but old in responsibility. "The Woman Who Was Everybody" and "A Wreath for Miss Totten" show the sensitive individual and the "unsolicited good [act]" against the mask of the self-satisfied average. The title story affirms the moral importance of observing oneself and others fairly despite political differences. In this and subsequent short story collections—Tale for the Mirror (1962) and Extreme Magic (1963)—Calisher includes semiautobiographical stories of the Elkin family. She develops themes from her Southern and Jewish heritage in "May-ry" and "Old Stock," explores the familial tensions of her girlhood in "The Coreopsis Kid," and "The Gulf Between."

Textures of Life (1963) accomplishes Calisher's aim to portray "that dailiness which subtly pushes our lives on while we wait for the overt event." Two married women, mother and daughter, learn fundamental lessons; the bourgeois mother learns to accept her artistic daughter's rebelliously austere lifestyle, while the daughter lowers her artistic goals and modifies her austerity. Only their husbands, however, consciously perceive that they all tread "the path between surprise and compromise" amidst the joys and inexorabilities of life.

Three disappointingly unfocused novels explore the older generation's puzzlement over the younger generation's entry into adulthood: Queenie (1971) lightheartedly describes the heroine's sexual coming of age as she rejects commercial and political sex for true love and revolution; in Eagle Eye (1973), young Bunty Bronstein tries to evaluate his past and build his future through a computer; while Standard Dreaming (1972) finds plastic surgeon Neils Berners agonizing over his lost son, seeking emotional support from a sensitivity group of deserted parents and intellectual relief from a theory that runaways signal downward human evolution. He finally continues his healing vocation and accepts his wandering son's freedom.

On Keeping Women, Calisher's 1977 novel, shows the breakup of the family as liberation. She sensitively depicts the independent decisions of Lexie and Ray, as well as their four children, to leave the family home to achieve self-fulfillment. In her work in the 1980s Calisher expanded the range of her fictional forms and subjects. Mysteries of Motion (1983) imagines the first civilian space travel. In what Calisher claims is the first novel of "character" rather than science fiction set in space, six lives are revealed on a space journey. In 1985 she published short works under the title Saratoga, Hot, including "Gargantua Real Impudence," "The Library," "The Sound Track," "The Passenger," "The Tenth Child," "Survival Techniques," and the title story.

The strict roles assigned to both sexes and the complexities of gender and sexuality are recurrent themes in Calisher's work, as are loneliness and individuality. The Bobby Soxer (1986) takes these themes to the limit, narrating, through the eyes of a teenage girl, her discovery that Aunt Leo, a maiden aunt, had male and female organs. Although Aunt Leo is the pivotal character, she has little to do with the story that unfolds; that of the girl, her town, her extended family, her genteel Southern mother, her father, and his business ventures. The book won the Kafka Prize in 1987.

In Age (1987) an aging couple, Gemma and Rupert, agree each should keep a diary for the other to read after the partner's death. Their awareness that they are facing the end of life is reinforced through the suicide of two friends and the death of Rupert's first wife. They abandon the diaries when they realize one will have to read alone. This deepening sense of loss that comes with advancing age continues as a theme in Kissing Cousins (1988), a memoir in which Calisher pays tribute to both her Southern and Northern heritages, as she has done in other novels, and to the value of memory. Nurse Katie Pyle is a relative only through the connection of their Southern families and their Southern Jewish heritage; she and Calisher remained emotionally close throughout their lives. The independent Pyle went to war as an army nurse and later continued a nursing career. As they reminisce, Southern expressions color New York memories and the extended family appears loving and eccentric. Pyle dies, Calisher has her memories. Kissing Cousins, as well as in most of Calisher's work, is sorrowful, rich in language, loving in tone. Her language is powerful, her dialogue accurate, her memories vivid. The people in her stories are not terrible, eccentric, or bizarre, but believable in their faults and virtues.

In the 1990s Calisher received a little of the critical attention she has long deserved. Her writing, alternately characterized as difficult, exasperating, pretentious, exciting, superlative, beautiful, Byzantine, or linguistically exuberant, depending on who's doing the reviewing, both challenges and rewards. What no one has disputed is that she continues to produce highly original and intelligent work.

Calisher's In the Palace of the Movie King (1994), moves over and through the tale of displaced Russian filmmaker. The novel examines the loss of meaning and self, as well as that of language and place within a societal context. It is about immigrant experience and, to an extent, the experience of every person ever subject to a sense of marginality. The book is as much concerned about what it is to be dissident and newly American in the latter half of the 20th century as it is with the meaning of meaning. The Novellas of Hortense Calisher (1997) collects seven of Calisher's short novels, peopled with complex characters caught up variously in infidelity, growing up, and family secrets. The collection includes one previously unpublished novella, "Women Men Don't Talk About," which finds a woman weaving a compelling myth around her absent husband, until a fascinating stranger threatens to rupture its fabric.

In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997) shows that Calisher, nearing ninety, maintained a perceptive and lively interest in the cadence of contemporary life. It is the story of a young woman of color who falls in with some bourgeois white revolutionaries and takes the fall for them, spending a good portion of her life in prison. When she is released, she must refind her memory and herself. Though many critics found the novel disjointed, others praised its kaleidoscopic quality and the way in which it slowly, but ultimately thrillingly, makes the reader privy to the protagonist's growing sense of self.

In a 1992 article, Calisher wrote of how a writer's psyche is in part formed by the anecdotes they hear about their culture when they are children. Such a premise is vintage Calisher: a subtle, elusive, deeply refractive notion with its roots in both epistemological thinking and a playful interest in the tone and tenor of the culture in which she lives.