Applying her well-honed
skills as historian, scribe and observer, Patricia Hampl tells
the story of trying to do right by both her parents, who resembled
each other not at all.
Patricia Hampl has written a decidedly
old-fashioned memoir, to my great relief. No abuse, no trauma,
no high drama of any kind, only a thoughtful and ardent tribute
to a normal childhood in a middling city (St. Paul) in a middling
state (Minnesota) with modest parents who gave their children
the inestimable gifts of security and love. But her book is
no treacly sermon on an Edenic past. Rather, it's an intense
gaze at "the spiral of wonder and wounds that accounts for
the bravery of supposedly ordinary people in allegedly ordinary
lives."
In "The Florist's Daughter," Hampl sits by her dying mother's
bed, her duties as a daughter nearly done, and walks into
memory.
Any child's parents are, like the weather, simply inevitable.
Only the adult, looking back with the eyes of experience,
can see them as people: contradictory, puzzling, mysterious,
infuriatingly complicated. What Hampl has so generously done
is to treat her parents like fully imagined characters in
a complex novel. She is not the center of this book as she
was in her first memoir, "A Romantic Education," but the observer,
historian, scribe, a daughter trying to do right by two people
who resembled each other not at all.
Her Czech-descended father was a man of silence and patience
who trusted in the essential goodness of other people, even
when they were swindling him. The greenhouse and florist shop
he managed were more than a job; they were a passionate vocation,
the cultivation of useless but necessary beauty.
No wonder that his daughter, who watched him raptly as he
designed exquisite bouquets and arrangements, would chase
the elusive nature of beauty in all her books. Does it have
rules as "the highest token of reality"? Is it elegant human
artifice or the transient reminder of death and resurrection
that flowers so achingly evoke?
Her Irish mother was what we would call a piece of work. She
belonged to the Irish "grudge culture," learning "to level
the world with a strangely knowing mistrust, an ice chip of
irony on her slouched shoulder." No cheerleader for her husband's
trade, she "was a spy in the house of beauty, an ironist regarding
the world he decorated so earnestly for people he trusted,
people she regarded with a narrowed eye, waiting and seeing."
She was Experience to her husband's Innocence. She also was
a creature of language, addicted reader and fabulous storyteller.
Hampl has married both her parents' ways in her writing. Her
style moves easily from the high lyricism of wonder and delight
to the unfooled coolness of irony and skepticism. Take her
descriptions of St. Paul. The city is seen in all its meanness
and ugliness, but it also is a seductive presence, as much
a protagonist as Stan and Mary Hampl and a proper subject
for poetry.
"The St. Paul streetlights dissipated their glow rather than
shed it on the crusted snow banks. This was strangely beguiling
-- that light could be conscripted into the service of obscurity.
... A faint tea-dance violin floated over it all." What breathtaking
metaphors Hampl can pull from her verbal store. "What a romantic
city it was, full of believers, wrapped in pride and insecurity,
those protons of provincial complacency."
And this: "The ice ... not a squeak, not a hiss, but a cello
note like heavy silk slowly, intentionally ripped."
What gives her writing such intensity is her belief that "buried
truth was seized up in metaphors and melodies. ... Only poems
and music ... could express the real things, which were the
unsayable things." She is practicing a metaphysics of language.
Sometimes, in her ardent pursuit of truth and or beauty, she
gets carried away. I don't know, for example, what it means
to "give over the heavy lifting of the real freight of your
soul."
But I can only admire her passionate attempts to parse reality
-- as if she were attending closely to a text, pressing the
juice out of every sentence and paragraph and translating
it into her own luminous words. |
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