Herma Read online

  HERMA

  A NOVEL

  MacDonald Harris

  * * *

  A delightful literary rediscovery by the National Book Award-nominated MacDonald Harris, Herma is the colorful, fanciful, and moving story of a willful young opera singer at the turn of the century.

  * * *

  As a child in Southern California in the late 1900s, Herma exhibits an incredible talent for vocal mimicry. Her gift will eventually take her from the choir of her country church to the Paris Opera, thanks in no small part to the machinations of her daredevil agent, Fred Hite. It is an opulent rags-to-riches tale full of excitement, sexual intrigue, and decadence, and features cameos by Puccini and Proust, among others. Herma and Fred are glamorous and adventuresome guides to turn-of-the-century San Francisco and Paris, but there’s a secret at the heart of their intimate relationship.

  This twinned hero and heroine pair and the profound connection between them makes Herma the most ambitious novel in the repertoire of one of America’s greatest and most skilled writers.

  Also by

  MacDonald Harris

  Private Demons

  Mortal Leap

  Trepleff

  Bull Fire

  The Balloonist

  Pandora’s Galley

  The Treasure of Sainte Foy

  Screenplay

  Tenth

  The Little People

  Glowstone

  Hemingway’s Suitcase

  Glad Rags

  A Portrait of My Desire

  The Carp Castle

  The Cathay Stories and other fiction

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  © 2015 The Estate of Donald Heiney

  Foreword © 2015 Michael Chabon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-1286-7

  Not having had ancestors like other people, I have been forced to invent them.

  This book is fearfully dedicated to them, in the hope of placating their spirits.

  She was a genuine product of the far West—a

  flower of the Pacific slope; ignorant, audacious,

  crude, but full of pluck and spirit, of natural

  intelligence, and of a certain intermittent,

  haphazard good taste. She used to say that she only

  wanted a chance—apparently she had found it now.

  Henry James, The Siege of London

  CONTENTS

  Also by MacDonald Harris

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Michael Chabon

  I. SANTA ANA

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  II. SAN FRANCISCO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  III. PARIS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  Foreword by Michael Chabon

  No one, observing MacDonald Harris, would have taken him for a literary genius. He did not dress head to toe in black. He never posed for a photograph in a wrestling singlet, in Zen robes, or atop a granite outcrop whose austere majesty was echoed by his windswept quiff. There was no hair at all, at least by the time I became his student and his friend,1 to invite the wind’s attention. The luster of his pate gave his head the appearance of the polished ball end of some precision-engineered chrome socket, or an observatory dome. You might have supposed that the mind inside that dome was busy working up new techniques of heat dissipation in airplane engines, but not new plots, new characters, a simile for the way orange blossoms smell at dusk. He wore button-down shirts, tucked into jeans that were belted and pressed. His preferred footwear was the kind of tan hybrid of sneaker and Oxford shoe favored by energetic elderhostlers. He lived with his wife, Ann, a former schoolteacher, in a ranch-style house on a 1960s vintage block where Newport Beach sidles up against Costa Mesa, a town, a neighborhood and an architectural style that are as close to ordinary as Southern California gets. He liked to drink wine but he did not abuse or fetishize it; when on occasion he hosted a party for faculty and students he served the stuff out of boxes with spigots.

  Even his nom de plume, adopted no doubt at least in part because his patrilineal ancestors had encumbered him with a surname that only Philip K. Dick could envy, was a kind of bland wrapper, unobtrusive, understated, faintly Canadian. MacDonald Harris: lose the Mac, or reverse the terms, and you would have something as ordinary as a ranch house in Costa Mesa.

  Sometimes, it is true, he would wear a floppy-brimmed bucket hat and a square-cut jacket, vaguely suggestive of an interest in trout fishing or photo safaris. But—as with the lustrous cranium—if you saw him in his goofy hat and jacket, you would have been less likely to think “There goes a literary innovator gifted with an original and unfettered artistic imagination” than “There goes a chemical engineer who enjoys birdwatching and cultivating succulents.”

  I’m not sure whether MacDonald Harris—who wrote several really wonderful novels, among them the one you hold in your hands—chose to conceal himself in the guise of mild-mannered professor Donald Heiney, or if an everyday unobtrusiveness simply came as naturally to him as the making of art. I am sure—and I say this in full awareness that it takes one to know one—that the man was a freak.

  I don’t intend to suggest, with this word, that his psychology was in some way aberrant or neurotic, though if his psychology was in no way aberrant or neurotic this would make him unique among writers of my acqu
aintance. Nor do I mean to suggest that his behavior was odd, though I know it struck a few of my fellow graduate students in the UC Irvine English Department, and probably some of his colleagues, that way. He could be abrupt, in manner, speech and gesture and sometimes all three at the same time. He might start talking French or Italian at you when you were not expecting it, a burst of Paul Verlaine, or some bit of off-color Roman folk witticism, which he delivered in a peculiar side-of-the-mouth style, somewhere between Popeye and Groucho Marx. He had a bad ear, and at a dinner table, or while conducting a writing workshop, his need to aim the good ear at whomever he was listening to—and he was a very good listener—sometimes gave the movements of his head and body a herky-jerk, clockwork-man quality. His behavior was, come to think of it, probably a little bit odd; but it was never, even remotely, freakish.

  When I say that Don (as he was known to friends, colleagues and students alike) was a freak, I mean to say that in his being a writer at all, as with a blue lobster or a bell-shaped tomato, there was something unaccountable and surprising. This proposition would certainly not have come as news to Don. The unlikeliness, the exceptionality of the imagination that flowered secretly in the darkness of his skull as a child and adolescent, is the unstated but recurrent theme of his “Memoir of My Early Years.”2

  How the heck, Don seems repeatedly to wonder in this charming and too-brief essay, considering the kind of writer he became in the context of a fairly unremarkable, early 20th-century Southern Californian bourgeois childhood, did that happen?

  Of solid, respectable Southern California pioneer stock, Don grew up on Oxley Street, in South Pasadena, in a seemingly placid household that was literate but not literary and neither Dickensianly penurious nor Jamesianly lavish, in a family that appears to have been relatively untouched by dysfunction or defining catastrophe. He was an indifferent student—except in English and typing class—indifferently educated, with little outward ambition. Before World War II altered the course of his life he found himself confronting, with what seems to have been relative equanimity, the possibility of a future as an escrow officer. MacDonald Harris—with his passionate love of language and languages, his ability to invent, inhabit and describe both imaginary worlds and the hearts and minds of their imaginary denizens, and above all with his wry, bleak, somehow Continental vision of the world—could not have been predicted to arise in such circumstances. He was not called for, as it were, by the available data.

  And yet there along the streetcar routes, in the sunny orange-scented expanse between Balboa and the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, down among the escrow officers, the suave polymath, relentless wonderer and master prose stylist MacDonald Harris came, fitfully, slowly, secretly into existence. The unlikelihood of this outcome, and Don’s resultant view of human identity as a kind of freak accident, provides an undergirding structure of mystery to much of his work. Like the “Memoir,” the typical MacDonald Harris novel convenes a panel of inquiry charged with accounting for and explaining the accident, the beautiful unlikelihood, of identity. Nowhere is this investigation conducted more thrillingly, or with greater delicacy of effect and formal perfection, than in Herma.

  A reading of the “Memoir” suggests strongly that the depiction of Herma’s early years, in the most delicious passages of MacDonald Harris’s most delicious novel, was clearly modeled on Don’s recollections of his own boyhood. Both narratives share numerous details of incident, character and setting: the taste of a favorite type of date cookie, daylong family streetcar outings to picnic at Newport Beach, a rusticated crone of an aunt in possession of an ancient, even mythic lump of sourdough starter.

  Such echoes of Don’s boyhood in his presentation of Herma’s girlhood might encourage a reader of a particularly shoddy and illegitimate bent3 to seek parallels to Don’s earliest experience of literature and writing in Herma’s musicophilia, and her discovery, while still young, of her brilliant and preposterous musical gift. And for all the evident understanding of music and music theory that grounds the musical passages in Herma (Don was a talented amateur pianist), Herma’s gift for singing (only a transposition of two letters distinguishes it from signing) is a peculiarly literary, indeed novelistic one. It isn’t just a matter of her possessing, by the age of four or five, absolute pitch and a two-octave range. Herma has the novelist’s gift of impersonation, of using her throat and lungs the way a novelist uses his imagination: to reproduce the sound of another human voice, with all its quirks of timbre and tone. Herma’s musical gift is also—and here MacDonald Harris risks straining the reader’s credulity to make explicit the connection between his art and Herma’s—a gift of language, as it becomes clear that her ability to sing flawlessly in the Russian and Italian of the opera recordings that are her teachers is not mere parroting but a mysterious osmotic ability to master any tongue.

  But was young Donald Heiney a prodigy, then, like Herma, or did he think of himself, at any point, that way? Not, I would suggest, in the sense in which the word “prodigy” is commonly employed. The “Memoir” describes Don’s early infatuation with and devotion to reading, a devotion that deepened and intensified as he got older to the point that it began to trouble his father, as Herma’s singing troubles hers. And Don recalls “that some of my compositions—I remember an impressionistic sketch of ships in Los Angeles harbor—were reprinted in the local paper, the Alhambra Post-Advocate.” Undoubtedly the Alhambra Post-Advocate was an esteemed, reputable and widely-read organ; but this is hardly precocity to compare with Herma’s near-magical ability.

  The key to the matter—to the underlying vision of Herma—can be found in a passage of the “Memoir” that I referred to above, the one in which Don describes his father’s mounting dismay over the impractical, useless, non-required reading that Don so enjoyed:

  My father once caught me in my room, on a weeknight, reading a forbidden book. I remember that it was Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton, a satire on the British class system and fairly advanced reading for a sixteen-year-old. He was unable to pronounce two of the three words of this title. But he shouted, “Is this your homework? Is it?”

  There was something about the fervor of Don’s relationship to reading and writing that worried his parents. It struck them as uncanny, unnerving, the way Herma’s singing unnerves her parents, particularly her father. And it’s in this sense—in the degree to which Don’s mother “disliked me or was hostile toward me in ways she did not understand herself” and his father “was deeply but silently disappointed with the way I was turning out”—that Don’s reconfiguring of his childhood as the childhood of a prodigy ought to be understood.

  The etymological roots of the word prodigy—like those of monster—lie in the uncanny, in the unaccountable appearance of portents and omens: an eclipse, a whirlwind from a clear blue sky, the birth of a goat with two heads. A prodigy, like a monster, like a two-headed freak, makes manifest the weird and cryptic nature of the gods’ intentions, taunts us with our inability, no matter how assiduously we astrologize and interpret, to fathom their unreadable hearts. The birth of a freak—a two-headed goat, a musical prodigy—reveals the fundamental truth of the universe: that the fundamental truth of the universe will remain forever concealed.

  Whether with pride and delight, as in the case of young “Georgie” Borges, or with anxiety and disappointment, as seems to have been Don’s unfortunate case, it is a proven tendency of families to view an incipient writer in their midst as a kind of monster. Whether they have the blessing and encouragement of their family, or their family’s scorn and disapproval, writers grow up feeling, at least some of the time, that they do not belong in the house they were born into, will never be understood there. Writers are mutants; some crucial part of their existential DNA is unshared with their parents or siblings.

  I remember a conversation I had with Don, when we first got to know each other, in which it emerged that we were both ardent admirers of Borges’s wonderful short story “The House o
f Asterion,” a retelling of the myth of the Minotaur from the monster’s lonely point of view. Don considered himself something of an expert on minotaurs—his fourth novel, Bullfire, had been built around his own peculiar reconfiguring of the Minotaur myth.

  In considering the legend of Asterion, monstrous prince of Crete, Don told me, it was Borges’s genius to see him as a prince, as part of a family, the son of King Minos and Queen Pasiphaë, the brother of Princess Ariadne; and thereby to arrive, unexpectedly, at the story of Georgie Borges and of all writers everywhere: the Memoir of Our Early Years; the autobiography of a freak. For the family of a writer, as for the Royal Family of Crete, there will be always a monster in the house: a creature who remembers things nobody else seems to remember, notices things everyone else seems to have missed, wonders things that no one else would ever bother to wonder; a creature who comes to dwell, by and by, at the heart of a labyrinth of his or her own making—a labyrinth of words.

  No doubt much could be written, and around the UCI writing program there was a fair amount of speculation, as I recall, about the genitally expressed nature of Herma’s particular form of freakishness (quite apart from her singing ability), and what that strange sexual convertibility might or might not reveal about the proclivities, anxieties, and hangups of her (and eventually his) creator. But this point of speculation was never important to me at the time; it seems even less important now, when good, odd, brilliant, cruelly forgotten Don Heiney, the man to whom I owe my entire career as a writer,4 has been dead for more than twenty years. Suffice to say that a profound tension between the brute facts of human duality, of which gender forms only one aspect, and the longing for some kind of crystalline unity runs all the way through MacDonald Harris’s work, and he found many other ways of expressing that tension besides this book about a girl named Herma who can turn herself, at will and thanks to the remarkable agility of certain of her nether muscles, into a boy named Fred. But Don never found a way of expressing that tension more poignantly, more strangely or more beautifully than in telling us the story of how Herma discovers that Fred, whom she can never meet, or touch, or speak to, is the love of her life.