Vertigo

by Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta (Afterword)

Overview

A scholar's memoir of growing up and the powerful forces that shaped her as a woman and a writer; "her story will inspire all women" (Library Journal).
 
In this honest and outspoken reflection on her childhood, Louise DeSalvo explores the many ways literature saved her, both emotionally and practically. Born to Italian immigrants during World War II, DeSalvo takes readers back to the emotional chaos of her 1950s girlhood in New Jersey, growing up with her authoritative, distant father, her depressed mother, and a sister who later committed suicide. Reading and research were an anchor to her then, and widened her choices about her future in ways that weren't otherwise available to girls of that era.
 
A Virginia Woolf scholar, DeSalvo wrote a ground-breaking study on the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the reclusive writer. Here, she mines her own early days—and her adolescent obsession with Hitchcock's Vertigo—in an attempt to give her own life's path "some shape, some order."
 
Publisher's Weekly said, "Her clarity of insight and expression make this [memoir] an impressive achievement," and the San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed, "DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558617773
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	12/06/2018
Series:	Cross-Cultural Memoir Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
File size:	983 KB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fixing Things

IT IS A little more than a month after my sister's suicide in January 1984. I think that I am doing well. I am going through the motions of living a normal life, pretending that her death hasn't made much of an impact on how I am feeling. My diary entries are filled with prosaic happenings. About my children. About teaching at Hunter College. About trying to find time for my writing. I write that I wish I could work harder (though I later realize that I have been keeping to an excruciating schedule). I reassure myself that I'm handling my sister's death very well. I hope for a far more tranquil future.

But there are warning signs that all is not well with me. I start to break out in enormous hives that cover my whole body. My eyelids ache. My wrists, breasts, and neck are covered with angry red volcanic craters. They are so itchy that I scratch myself hard. I make myself bleed. Trickles of blood like lava seen at night run down my body. When I notice what I am doing, I stop myself, try to staunch the flow of blood, and apply another of the healing lotions someone has recommended. I can't understand why this is happening. I don't connect it with my sister's suicide.

I start swallowing antihistamines; they give me some relief. They make me sleep, and I need to sleep. They stop the itching, and I need to stop scratching. But when I awaken, I feel drugged, disoriented, depressed. I'm terrified of feeling depressed. Have always been terrified of it. To me depression is like a locked dark room I can't escape. It has no windows, no books, no doors, no hope, no paintings on the wall, no telephone, no handknit sweaters, no sex, no pasta, no reading, no writing.

Depression is a place I have visited more than once; I don't want to visit it again. Some people are lucky and get out. Others don't. I've gotten out. My mother, my sister didn't. I'm afraid that I'll wind up like my sister. Dead, at the end of a rope. Or like my mother. In a hospital, having shock treatments. So I stop taking antihistamines. Try to control the urge to scratch. Can't. The only color I feel comfortable wearing, now, is red. A red sweater won't show the blood.

One day, while I'm preparing to enter a class that I teach at Hunter College, I have a crisis. I describe it the next day in my diary.

"Yesterday I had an attack of nerves — anxiety. Broke out yet again in monstrous hives and then just before class got light-headed, afraid I was going to pass out. There's a wonderful student in my class who is a nurse. She helped me compose myself, and soon I could go on teaching. I think that I have been way too hard on myself, expecting myself not to be affected by Jill's suicide, and, at a difficult time in my life, I've stopped doing the things that keep me sane — good, hard, intellectual work, writing that matters to me, swimming, taking walks."

Mother's Day 1984 is a glorious day, and I have vowed to take a whole weekend off for rest and reflection. I write in my diary, to focus myself, to see where I have been, to chart where I will be going.

In no special order, I list the crises that I have lived through within the last few months. 1) My mother's hospitalization for an acute psychotic depression and her shock treatments. 2) My sister's breakdown and her suicide. 3) My father's anger at me for not being as available as he would have liked through these crises. 4) My hospitalization in the wake of a fainting episode. 5) A legal wrangle over one of my books. 6) My two sons' emotional crises in the wake of my sister's death and their grandmother's institutionalization. 7) My husband's knee operation. 8) My husband's business being in serious difficulty. 9) My car's being hit by a truck while I'm commuting to work; luckily, I'm not hurt, though the incident scares me.

I pause to take stock. Until I have written these events down in my diary, I have been unaware that I have lived through so many crises in such a short period, that I have been in the middle of a vortex of events and emotions.

This has been no ordinary period in my life, I tell myself. So why haven't I recognized this? Why do I expect myself to carry on as if nothing extraordinary has happened?

It's like I have amnesia. Something terrible happens. After, I feel stressed, or agitated, or depressed. Or I faint. But I don't connect these emotions or my fainting to what has happened. I can't figure out what I'm feeling or why until I start to write things down in my diary.

In the winter of 1980, as I am reading Virginia Woolf's early diaries, I start to keep a diary, in direct and somewhat sheepish imitation of her lifelong practice, which she began at the age of fifteen. My first entries are halting, nothing more than lists of things I've done or read, or of things I need to do or read for the various writing projects in which I am engaged.

From the start, though, I list in great detail the delicious things I have cooked or that I have eaten. (French squash soup; oysters with Gruyère; duck with orange stuffing and Cumberland sauce; crème brûlée for New Year's Eve.) Life, I have always believed, is too short to have even one bad meal.

By the end of the next year, I am experimenting with examining my life, with charting the course of my feelings, with giving my work purpose and direction, through remembering where I have been, through seeing where I am now, through writing about what I want to do.

Unlike Woolf, who was taught early that the events in her life and her thoughts were significant and worth recording, as an Italian-American woman with working-class parents, my experience was very different. Diary writing was certainly not encouraged by my family. Though I had scribbled away as a child, during my adolescence, I had never kept much of a diary. Writing anything that I was doing, anything that I was feeling or thinking, was dangerous in a household like mine in which one did not have a right to privacy, in which the contents of one's bureau drawers were routinely riffled through and inspected. It was apparently dangerous, too, for Virginia Woolf. I have noticed that the diary she kept at sixteen had a lock and a key, and that she also sealed sheets from another diary between the pages of a book she had purchased especially for the purpose (Dr. Isaac Watts's Right Use of Reason) to hide them from the prying eyes of her household.

Noticing these things in Virginia Woolf's life helps me understand my adolescent need for privacy, and how it was thwarted: it makes me think her household was not so different from mine, and that in understanding her household, I might understand mine.

Writing in my dairy, I am discovering, like studying Virginia Woolf's diary and her life, helps me understand my life. I think, as I write, that my journal acts as a kind of "fixer," as in photography. Like the chemical that you use to stabilize an image, to make it permanent. But I begin to see, too, that the other meanings of "fixer" also apply to why I write. I use my journal, my writing, as a way of making things better, of fixing things, and of healing myself, and as a way of taking a "fix" on my life. Of seeing where I am, and plotting a course for the future.

Doing intellectual work, I have always known, also makes things better for me. Thinking about novels has always helped me with the problems in my life.

In the summer of 1956, I am thirteen years old. I sit on the curb outside my house, talking about books with my best friends, Freddie and Susan. In an important way, what will become my life's work — studying literary creativity, studying the relationship between writers' lives and their work, and the relationship between their lives and works and our own as readers — is nothing but an extension of these childhood conversations. (I think of the opportunities young people miss when they construe the world from television, from movies, when they don't engage with one another, as we did, in hard talk, in painful talk, about what we are reading, and about the relationship between our lives and what we are reading.)

By now, each of us has discovered that the roofs of our houses and the closets of our basements are sometimes, though not always, safe hiding places from our parents' rages. We have each lived through years of separation from our fathers during World War II, through years of our mothers' terror during wartime. So far as we can tell, as a group of adolescents we are not extraordinary. We have survived the death of family members: Freddie's grandfather has died; so has mine; so has Susan's mother and five other members of her family in a fiery automobile crash that has burned the image of charred bodies into our brains through the pictures on the front pages of local newspapers. And we have just recently endured the suicide of a friend's mother, who, we are told, hanged herself by tying a rope around a doorknob, looping it over the top of the door, and kicking the chair out from under herself. My sister, particularly, is fascinated by this death, wants to hear its details repeatedly, even as I wish our friends wouldn't talk about it so much. I want to talk about A Farewell to Arms and how I am trying to find out what it is like to be in a war, something my father has lived through, but won't talk about. I want to talk about Raintree County, a novel that so terrifies me, I can't keep it in my room when I go to bed at night. (Many years later, I meet the author's son, and learn that the author committed suicide.)

As we sit on the curb, popping bubbles of tar with our sneakers, and sucking noisily on quickly melting ice pops as we talk about our friend's mother, and, at last, about the books we are reading, and the heat seduces us into lethargy and comradeship, I learn that I have lived through many of the same things as the heroes and heroines of these fictions. Talking about books verifies, for me, that the feelings I have struggled with alone in the solitary space of my private suffering are shared by other people, and that I am powerful enough and resilient enough to withstand hardship, and hardy enough to endure and to prevail. That I have already endured, already prevailed.

Without books, without talking about books, where would I be now? Without Of Mice and Men, Crime and Punishment, History: A Novel, Ghost Dance, Ceremony, The Bone People, Surviving the Wreck, Praisesong for the Widow, Woman Warrior, The English Patient, The North China Lover, Sons and Lovers, All Passion Spent, Housekeeping, Dreaming in Cuban, The Bluest Eye, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Farewell to Arms, Silences, would I have created a life for myself so different from my mother's, from my sister's? Filled with pain, yes, but not disabled from pain as they were? I don't think so.

Books were, at first, solid objects to hide behind. Hawaii, The Brothers Karamazov, Exodus were substantial books I could get lost in, safe screens to prevent me from watching my family. Something to hold in front of my face so that I could not see what was happening. I could hold Atlas Shrugged up in front of my face to ward off the blows.

"Louise is always hiding her face in a book," my family's words. True words. But hiding was necessary. A strategy for survival.

Events in books became a universe against which to measure what I was living through, a world through which I sought understanding.

The Voyage Out, To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room, Ryder, The Antiphon, Women in Love, Crazy Cock, Tropic of Cancer, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Learned Optimism, Trauma and Recovery, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Legacy of the Heart. It is as simple as this. Reading, and writing about what I have read, have saved my life.

I have read somewhere that the opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality. Somehow, knowing this helps me. Inscribed on a note card, this saying is tacked above my desk. It has become an avatar to staunch my chronic terror, which only dissipates the moment that I settle myself into reading and note taking, the moment that I put pen to paper, the moment that I tap out sentences, no matter how ragged or incomprehensible, on a keyboard.

Knowing that the opposite of depression is vitality serves as reminder that, for me, no matter how difficult, the act of turning toward whatever causes my pain, of reading about it in works of literature, and of trying to find the words to describe it, helps me modulate the feeling that I am in the middle of a vortex of events that is sucking me under and threatening to overwhelm me.

Once, a long time ago, when as a teenager I see Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, I understand that, like the hero played by Jimmy Stewart, I too suffer from vertigo. I look the word up in the dictionary that was my parents' gift to me the previous Christmas.

ver-ti-go, noun. 1. a disordered condition in which one feels oneself or one's surroundings whirling about. 2. the dizzying sensation caused by this. 3. a disease marked by vertigo.

Because I have taken Latin in junior high school, I am curious about the derivation of this word that so accurately describes a condition I suffer from (which they call a disease), and so I read on.

vertigo. (derived from Latin vertigo whirling movement, dizziness = vert(ere) to turn (see verse) + igo noun suffix.)

I have been trained well in dictionary skills by the nuns in my Catholic grammar school. I know how to use it to nail down the precise meanings of words I encounter in my reading, to learn their histories, to explore their roots and derivations. The entry says "see verse," and so I turn to the entry for "verse." I know that the word has something to do with poetry. But will it tell me more?

verse, noun, verb. 1. one of the lines of a poem. 2. to versify, that is, to turn a phrase.

Nothing new here. But what about the word's derivation?

verse. (derived from Latin versus a row, literally, a turning toward = vert(ere) to turn + tus suffix of verb of action; akin to -ward, worth.)

I ponder the differences. Vertigo: dizziness, an endless turning. Verse: an act of turning toward, somehow linked to the word "worth."

Vertigo; verse. The one, then the other. The one or the other. These words, through the years, become linked for me at a very deep level. To turn a phrase in the midst of my instability. By versifying, to transmute my instability, my vertigo into something that is worthwhile.

At an earlier point in my life, I had imagined that, one day, I would have my difficult emotional work behind me, and that I would know, once and for all, the secrets of serenity. That my vertiginous self would be conquered; that my instability would be behind me.

Now, though, I am beginning to see that the act of understanding is a lifelong, ongoing, shape-shifting process. One that is never over; one that I have to enact as often as I am able; one that I must try to enact especially when I feel I am unable, when meaning seems too elusive to grasp. And understanding, for me, means reading, means writing about what I read. And now, finally, writing about myself.

"The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality." Next to this talisman above my desk is another. A water-stained arrow-shaped piece of cardboard with the words YES YOU CAN inked in enormous black letters.

I found it on a table while visiting a friend at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park in New York City sometime around 1974, just before beginning work on the dissertation I was afraid I would never write. The National Arts Club intimidates me; it is filled with testimonies to lives of fame and achievement. As a working-class girl, born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, how could I hope to fulfill a life's ambition, to do serious intellectual work, to become a critic, a writer? Though I had read scores of books, not one had been written by an Italian-American woman. I had no role model among the women of my background to urge me on, though I had found inspiration in the works of African-American and Jewish-American writers.

I was thirty-two years old; wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, student, cook, knitter, no writer yet.

YES YOU CAN.

Sheepishly, I looked around the room, saw that no one was watching, tucked it into my purse.

I was not in the habit of stealing things. And I would have been mortified if anyone had seen me take it. But it seemed as if someone had left this behind so that I could find it. A foolish, simple saying. But I knew, as I snatched it, that I needed it, that I wanted to have it with me, to see it before me all the days of my life, as I see it before me now, on this beautiful autumn day in 1994, as I am writing, still writing.

YES YOU CAN. An antidote to the toxicity of the words the world flings at aspiring working-class girls: YOU CANNOT, YOU CANNOT, YOU CANNOT.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Vertigo"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Louise DeSalvo.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1. Cover Page,
2. Title Page,
3. Copyright Page,
4. Dedication,
5. Acknowledgments,
6. Contents,
7. Introduction,
8. Notes,
9. Works Cited,
10. Definitions Page,
11. Epigraph,
12. Prologue,
13. Chapter One: Fixing Things,
14. Chapter Two: My Sister's Suicide,
15. Chapter Three: Combat Zones,
16. Chapter Four: Finding My Way,
17. Chapter Five: Safe Houses,
18. Chapter Six: Colored Paper,
19. Chapter Seven: Spin the Bottle,
20. Chapter Eight: Boy Crazy,
21. Chapter Nine: Vertigo,
22. Chapter Ten: The Still Center of the Turning Wheel,
23. Chapter Eleven: Anorexia,
24. Chapter Twelve: A Portrait of the Puttana as a Woman in Midlife,
25. Chapter Thirteen: Personal Effects,
26. About the Author,
27. About the Feminist Press,
28. Also Available from the Feminist Press,

Editorial Reviews

"The writing here is terrific." —Los Angeles Times

"DeSalvo has one of the most refreshing feminist voices around." —San Francisco Chronicle

"One of the pleasures of Vertigo is its continual sense that DeSalvo's own history is as mysterious to her as it might be to us, that she, like her reader, is a stranger in a strange land, a perpetual traveler." —Newsday

From the Publisher