When Mary O’Hara left her first husband, taking her two small children, she was on her way to a new location and staying in what would have been a hotel in those days (the Twenties) when she felt a migraine coming, a condition only survivable for her by taking strong medication that would knock her unconscious. She thought, “What can I do to keep these kids busy for a couple of hours?” Her solution was a child’s game: two big balls of twine which she used to create a complex web of cross-tied twine that filled the whole room with strings going in every direction, anchored in strange places. She gave each child the last little end of string with instructions to wind it back up. It worked. She woke up beside two sleeping kids and two big balls of string.
This is a pretty good description of writing a novel. Two balls of string -- one for the writer and one for the reader -- one making the web, one unwinding it. And this is why in seminary, faced with the brain sprain of understanding a new author, usually a theologian, my practice was to look for his (they didn’t believe in “her” though they pretended to) autobiography or, failing that, at least some life-sketch somewhere. Twenty years earlier I had learned in acting class to find the “spine” of the character and work from that. For instance, if you want to understand Paul Tillich, everything is explained by his life on boundaries, teetering over the edge of the Nazi abyss. Well, except that he was incredibly seductive and loved to be spanked, but that was also explained by the way he was raised. Nursemaids and their knees, you know.
Richard Stern taught us to use our own lives for raw material -- but to transform them, the way he did when he wrote “Other Men’s Daughters,” about a professor who fell in love with a student. But flip the genders, make the blondes brunette, and vice versa. This is what O’Hara did in “The Devil Enters by a North Window.” Reading alongside the novel the autobiography “Flicka’s Friend” reveals that her preoccupation with infidelity comes from marriages to two tall, handsome, charismatic men who were not faithful, a characteristic considered rather normal in men but intolerable in women. I could suddenly see that she had tried to get a grip on the subject by making it the woman who was unfaithful -- successfully and forgiveably -- and by showing how it tortures some spouses. (A “sister” in the novel knows she has “bought” her husband and that he is unfaithful, but she doesn’t care. Much. She just dies fat and too soon, in agony.) The AUTHOR is Bart Wyngate, her protagonist. Of course.
As we all do, she accepts blame and has her fictional self do the same, which works fine since he is a minister, more than a little narcissistic which everyone encourages, confusing his happiness with theirs. But both she and the minister have a terrible dream, a huge dark shape that comes out of the night, crushes the chest, and tears out the tongue. (Mary O’Hara had polio as a child and always had curvature of the spine.) In the novel this seems related to a terrible prediction about one of the sons: “protect him from the dark dog that follows him.”
The second dream is this: “From some high place I was looking at the interior of a huge glass dome. It was symmetrical, empty, silent, lit with a pale silvery gray translucence. Far, far away in the distance a single motionless figure stood on the center of the gray stone floor, wearing a dress of tight dark gray wrapping.” This is a dissociation dream. The novel reveals at the end that at age four the unfaithful wife was passionately kissed by a grown man, which twisted her development. Dissociation is often a result of childhood sexual invasion.
I wonder whether Mary O’Hara wasn’t one of the large fraction (one-third?) of children who are sexually molested -- more than kissing. In the autobiography she reveals that she loved her husbands, who often behaved like fathers -- picking her up and carrying her to bed, undressing her, washing her, putting on her nightclothes and cradling her on their laps -- but she really disliked sex. The first husband resorted to prostitutes (not off the street, but the kind associated with partying which fit with his political ambitions) and the second one constantly found young women he would “take care of” as he took care of Mary, nudging her over so he could wash the dishes for her, re-doing her little projects, improving them. She resented it, felt she was crowded out of her own space. But always thought there was some secret somewhere. Her father objected to both men, wanted them thoroughly investigated and discovered them to be bounders. Yet his invasion of her life was just as bitterly resented.
The whole difficulty is easily made a religious problem, particularly when every ethical consideration is sexualized. The Twenties in Los Angeles (which doesn’t feature at all in the novel) were much like the Sixties in San Francisco, a great celebrative challenge to the status quo. What God gave Mary was the Flicka trilogy, which meant she could go back to her people in the East and build her own house. (Biblio-salvation, a concept rapidly being lost.) Of course, it was her own great capacity for effort and recovery that “God” really gave her. And the greatest price she paid in her life was not the loss of her marriages but the loss of her daughter to cancer. The original real equine prototype for Flicka died and she always felt that if she’d been more devoted, she could have saved the colt.
The real life problem for Mary and her sisters was that their mother died young and their grandmother and the least motherly aunt took them over, dragging them all over Europe, treating them like pets to be disciplined and dressed up. Education was a matter of bourgeois standards and graces, luckily including languages and music. Then their father married a stable, cheerful, but unglamorous woman and they went home. Next, on to boarding schools where I doubt there was much comfort or understanding. This is where the yearning and vulnerability to charismatic men came from, I’m sure, and behind them stands the progenitor: God, who is also the Ultimate Molester.
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