A few years ago, a friend in her 60s started resisting films any longer than about 90 minutes. Another, a septuagenarian and lifelong reader, jokes these days that any author who intends to write more than 300 pages should have to produce a note from their mother.
Margo Jefferson’s new memoir is a pleasing reminder that we have not quite seen it all. And Jefferson delivers her surprises in fewer than 200 potent pages.
With “Constructing a Nervous System,” the distinguished thinker, who in 1995 won a Pulitzer Prize for her book reviews and cultural criticism in the New York Times, shoves aside old ideas about memoir as mere biography. Her approach is an almost poetic presentation of fragments of her experiences as they ricocheted off artists whose work and lives she has found meaningful. It’s an extraordinary reading experience — the first book I recall wanting to reread immediately after reaching the end.
How, I kept wondering, does Jefferson make this work? With only pieces of her biography in place — she is the younger of two daughters born to a pediatrician father and a perfectionist mother — she lures us into a dreamy and peripatetic journey of the mind and heart. She uses her elegant voice and some theater lingo to persuade us to focus on her nuanced ideas about race, class identity and, to some extent, family.
Early on, we learn that Jefferson was an extraordinary, precocious child. At 8 or 9, she was learning Greek mythology, pulling her parents’ jazz records out to listen to them by herself and making imaginative connections between them. Pianist Bud Powell captivated her.
“I made [Powell] Theseus, of course, the hero wresting beauty and harmony from a monster’s grasp,” she writes. She did not yet see what she would later come to recognize about Powell, whose short life encompassed musical transcendence and mental illness. Only later would she recognize in him the Minotaur:
“Bud Powell was a genius-monster, made genius through hour on hour of ravenous music listening and practice; made a monster by years of cop beatings, medications, liquor, breakdowns, electroshock treatments, heroin and forced confinements in mental institutions,” she writes. “Half man, half beast — the designation assigned blacks and enforced by law and practice.”
Pages later, she triangulates the connection, this time adding her father, whose long, dedicated hours at work and struggles with depression made him less available to his daughter than she wished. “Why couldn’t Bud Powell find a way to be Theseus — slay the monster, defy the men who’d made him one, and outwit the monster inside himself?” she wonders. “Why couldn’t my father find time to gather me in his arms each day and take solace in my company?”
Jefferson exudes charisma on the page with a voice that commands attention almost regardless of content. As a Black woman in her 70s and a veteran critic able to draw on a rich trove of cultural experience, she draws us into her thoughts about particular artists she admired in youth and then saw anew with the perspective of age. The hindsight almost invariably includes new thinking about the role that race played in those earlier experiences.
Novelist Willa Cather is a good example. Jefferson invokes her several times, once as she recollects a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend during the 1970s, where they gazed upon Jules Breton’s painting “The Song of the Lark.” The purpose of the story is both to share a revelation that emerged as Jefferson and her friend talked about the art and to note that the painting gave Cather the title of her third novel. Jefferson reveres Cather’s wisdom and loves “The Song of the Lark,” the tale of young Thea Kronborg, who sets out in search of her independence and a life in music. But later, Jefferson returns to Cather to note the complex problem of loving her. “Song of the Lark” is riddled with references to its heroine’s “milky” white skin and blond hair, betraying, as Jefferson sees it, Cather’s fetishization of the Nordic and disinterest in making American Blacks a part of her work. As a college professor, Jefferson taught “The Song of the Lark” to classes of mostly White women. She struggled with how to open their eyes to the problem of this “white rapture” while not alienating them from herself or the gifts the novel had to offer.
“I wanted them to be disappointed — roundly disappointed in this major American writer Wilella Sibert Cather,” Jefferson writes. “As I’d had to be, time and time again, in a lifetime of reading white writers.” The nuance of this moment is the kind of thing Jefferson does best. “Constructing a Nervous System” offers the reader an opportunity to become comfortable with the discomfort of life’s contradictions. Jefferson dives deep into the life of Josephine Baker, in whom, she says, “will and desire were conjoined.” She finds connection and contrast between James Baldwin and Sammy Davis Jr. And toward the end, she recounts the harrowing history of actress Janice Kingslow, whose taste of success in the 1940s quickly evaporated after Kingslow wrote about Hollywood’s request that she change her name and agree to pass as White; she refused.
Stylistically, “Constructing a Nervous System” is a diary that often stops to directly address the reader. It’s a stage performance and maybe a therapy session. Above all, it is meaningful cultural criticism. Jefferson invites us to rethink our experiences with art while finding resonance in intimacies that she shares from her own life. I still can’t say I know exactly how she manages to make this all succeed. I only know that she does, and it is splendid.
Karen Sandstrom is a freelance writer in Cleveland.
Constructing a Nervous System
