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The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions
by Rick Moody
(Little, Brown & Company, May 2002)
In the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Steve Olson writes
of two genealogical researchers who claim to have found mathematical
proof that everyone of European ancestry is in some way descended
from both Muhammad and Charlemagne. Absurd as it may sound,
the theorem actually makes sense if you give it the proper
amount of time to gestate. As you go back in time, it logically
follows that number of your ancestors increases exponentially:
four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents,
etc., until you have thousands, and even millions of ancestors
(of course, you have to go back pretty far for this, but it's
theoretically possible.) The link to the Middle Ages might
be erroneous, however, as a man named Joseph Chang, a statistician
at Yale University, claims that his research shows that the
most recent common ancestor for people of European descent
lived only about 600 years ago.
If either scenario sounds improbable, and they very well might
be, you're more than welcome to do the math yourself. At heart,
research in the field of genealogy speaks to a certain interest,
no matter how slight or fleeting it may be, that most of us
share in finding out a little bit about our lineage. It's
troubling to think of the unnumbered strangers who have played
a decisive part in determining your genetic makeup. You wonder
what they'd think of you, if they were intelligent or funny,
cruel or callous, what they were doing, what they were thinking
at the decisive moments of history, and whether they fell
on the side of wrong or right in history's great moral debates.
Likewise, digging up old photographs of grandparents or distant
relations can often produce a strange shudder of recognition
as you're struck by a certain feature-the slope of a chin,
a crooked smile-that looks disarmingly familiar. Personality
traits, of course, can also be inherited, like your grandfather's
stubbornness or your father's way of speaking, giving rise
to a whole new batch of difficult questions.
Just what, in the end, is our genetic inheritance worth? Is
it a deterministic blueprint? What is passed on and what gets
left behind? How is this decided? Dangerous and self-destructive
traits like a predilection toward alcoholism and/or suicide
seem to be passed down the family line like some sort of horrible
secret, though this knowledge has generally failed to keep
the cycle from repeating itself. In the end though, what is
the link between the past and the present? Rick Moody, author
of Demonology, The Ice Storm and Purple America,
sought out answers to these questions to try and better understand
the alcoholism and mental breakdowns that plagued his twenties.
In his latest book: The Black Veil: A Memoir With Digressions,
he delves into the lore of his family's tall tales to find
out if he is related to Joseph "Handkerchief" Moody,
an infamous 18th century New England pastor who killed his
best friend during a hunting accident as a child, and who
wore a veil over his face as an adult for reasons that were
never fully clear, but one can surmise likely stemmed from
a particular brand of fanatic Puritan guilt. "Handkerchief"
would go on to become the model for the character Parson Hooper
in the Nathanial Hawthorne story "The Black Veil",
first published in 1837, giving rise to the Moody family myth.
What Moody has done here is weave the tale of his own breakdown,
battle with alcoholism and search through the small towns
of Maine for traces of his ancestral heritage, with a scattershot
account of his crippling social phobias. Curiously interwoven
into the narrative is an account of the canon of literary
criticism surrounding Hawthorne's "The Black Veil."
There are times when Moody's use of this lit criticism becomes
a bit heavy handed, as it's rather dull reading, and you begin
to wonder what the point is. In fact, Moody might have been
better served in titling the book: The Black Veil: Digressions
With a Memoir, as he tends to jump between genealogy,
family stories, the history of rock quarries in New England
and the aforementioned criticism, with no real segue to tie
the strands of thought together. In the sections of the book
where it does resemble a memoir, though, it's clear that this
book is in no way a kiss-and-tell, as you won't find any stories
concerning contemporary writers in compromising positions
or off-screen tantrums in the film adaptation of The Ice Storm.
In fact, little mention is made of Moody's literary career
at all, and even less of his interpersonal relationships,
both choices helping preserve the emotional distance Moody
has traditionally constructed in his fiction. The prose, while
emotionally compelling, is studied and aloof, at times slipping
into the parlance of 18th century literature, and sounding
a bit awkward while doing it.
In a way, the cool, steady hand Moody employs as he renders
both the fictional worlds and his own life story gives the
reader a deeper glimpse into the author's psychology than
even he perhaps intended. Often, as he's writing about his
parents' divorce or his live-in alcoholic girlfriend or the
"long fourth of July" he spent in a mental institution,
he avoids a linear retelling of his experiences in favor of
summoning the spirit of the event. In fact, the book often
feels as if you're reading excerpts from his mesmerizing third
(and most recent) novel Purple America. Such a sense arises
from the hard-won detachment at work in the prose, or how
Moody seems to float above the events of his life. But perhaps
we have discovered, after three novels and two collections
of short stories, that this is exactly how Moody sees the
world. Maybe he feels as if he stands just outside the events
of his life, giving orders on how to steer the ship, but letting
the currents take him where they might. Of course, this is
his trademark, and a writer with a lasting, definitive style
is a force to be reckoned with, but as a reader, we expect
something a little different from a memoir, or at least a
book that calls itself such. We seek a little more humanity,
perhaps, some concrete description of places and things without
the literary veil that defines the friction between invention
and reality that we so covet in fiction.
The book itself, eschewing the traditional memoir's approach
to laying out the facts and hoping-simply by the act of writing-to
come to terms with a life, makes no claim at understanding,
or for that matter, judgment. "This account," Moody
says at the outset, "never settles for the orderly where
the disorderly and explosive can substitute, because obsession
is not orderly, it is protean, like consciousness." In
writing about Handkerchief's veil and the volume of literary
interpretation which has sought to explain it, Moody is writing
about the veils, both emotional and physical, we all wear
to cover up our innermost thoughts and those past acts we
can barely bring ourselves to admit. Leading the reader through
a lengthy rundown of veil references in Hawthorne's writing,
and discovering that another ancestor of his wore a veil in
the 18th century, Moody begins to wonder what it would be
like to wear a veil himself. Here, Moody puts more effort
into describing his buying of the fabric to make the veil
than what it felt like to wear it, or discussing how long
he wore it, or where he wore it, and as such we're given little
along the lines of "memoir" material. Realizing
that he was too embarrassed to wear it in front of friends,
he wondered what the point was in making the veil at all:
"For there is no veil without eyes to perceive it, no
concealment without others who might once have seen, as among
the blind there are no veils, and so if I veil myself by myself,
am I really veiling myself at all?" Good question, rhetorical
as it may be, as we're never told if he ever bothered to wear
the veil, even in private.
Sometime around 1985, when Moody would have been 25 years
old and living in Hoboken with his girlfriend, an odd terror
began welling up inside him, springing from unknown tributary
of fear: "I was convinced that I was going to be raped,
forcibly, sexually violated by some unnamed male, penetrated,
bruised, inseminated, in a way that really suggests the reality
of rape…some complete, total rape that would be remembered
for the threat of being murdered, held down, left bleeding,
violated, something trickling from me." Of course, as
with the rest of the book, this seems to be as much literary
invention as it is truth. There is no telling, from Moody's
account, of just how serious this was, or how he managed to
overcome this fear. It simply exists alongside suicidal fantasies
for a few pages as he explains his drinking and drug use,
but no resolution is ever offered. Did he see a therapist?
He does talk a bit about the time (a month?) he spent in a
psychiatric ward in Queens, but did this "cure"
him? He does mention that these feelings gradually began to
subside, but offers no reason why. It wasn't only this irrational
fear which took hold and kept him from holding down jobs or
even forming close relationships; other conspiracies, other
plots, began to form in his mind. "Theories grew in me
like backyard vines, grew to invade the healthy part of me,
grew to muscle my own desires and ambitions aside, until I
was in an adjacent property, isolated, a cankered soul macerated
with cares and discontents, while this idea went on to conduct
my life without me." It didn't help that at the time
he was working a job in publishing that he hated (he never
says exactly what, or where, it was, only that he was fired,
as was the case with other jobs he held) and that he was drinking
heavily at the time.
Unlike so many other memoirs, Moody assigns no blame for his
troubles. He chastises neither parents nor siblings nor friends
or lovers for failing to see the warning signs of his drinking
or irrational neurosis. Not knowing whom to blame, in part,
is what led him to Maine in search of his family's roots and
to try and uncover just who exactly Handkerchief Moody was.
Perhaps tracing the genetic chain would help provide some
clues as to what was happening to him. What should have been
the major find of his search, though, a translated copy of
Handkerchief's diaries (they were written in both Latin as
well as some obscure code) turned out to be little more than
an account of "weather and masturbation." It seems
Handkerchief "defiled himself" on an almost nightly
basis in his sleep, and loathed himself for it.
Finding numerous other diaries, journals, letters and historical
records to pore over, Moody delves into the births, marriages
and deaths of his ancestors without ever really getting to
the heart of what he is looking for. But how could he? The
journals, houses and named things we leave behind are merely
the ballast which keeps us afloat during our years. Just as
Handkerchief wore the physical veil to keep others from seeing
his face, so too have all our ancestors kept that which we
most desire to know hidden from posterity. But there are secrets
even in Moody's storytelling, and in the last pages of the
book he confesses that in his search he discovered that Handkerchief
Moody actually wasn't a relation of his, and the stories his
family had passed down about being related to a man mentioned
in a Hawthorne story were untrue. It's an almost heartbreaking
revelation, and one wonders why Moody would allow himself
to write at such length about shared characteristics when
he knew that he was writing about someone wholly unrelated
to him. It's one of many questions the book raises concerning
the overall point of the enterprise.
What, in the end, did Moody hope to discover in his foray
into the past? The same thing any of us would hope to find-a
hint of truth, some semblance of causality, a dialectic that
would lead to some universal understanding. What he found,
however, was that "Maybe…concealment is essential
to identity…[because] we need a part of us that will
never be known, so that the more we reveal, the more we are
enveloped in veils, layers that refuse to be known, additional
integuments of guilt and concealment, such that any memoir
is a fiction, an arraigned narrative, a bildungsroman, just
as many fictions are veiled memoirs." What Moody found,
in other words, was that those things which we keep inside,
our deepest fears, motivations and remembrances, are the things
most easily lost to history, and as such are unknowable.
--Paul McLeary
 
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