ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703290010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: HILLEL ITALIE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kathryn Harrison's new memoir, "The Kiss," about her four-year love affair with her minister father, has stirred a critical controversy.
When Kathryn Harrison frowns, she says, it means she is thinking. To look at the author now, you would guess she is deep in thought.
``I wasn't prepared for how much people would be interested, for how much flap it would stir up, or how angry or threatened they would be,'' Harrison said recently over coffee, her pale fingers nervously handling a small pepper shaker.
The flap, the interest and some threats, too, are a result of ``The Kiss,'' one of those books that seems to have been written about more than it's been read.
``The Kiss'' is a memoir about a long love affair the 36-year-old author had in her 20s, a love affair with her father.
The first printing is strong - about 50,000. The first reactions are even stronger. Harrison says she has received threatening phone calls. An article in Vanity Fair depicted her as ideal for an audience more interested in voyeurism than in literature. A review by The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley was titled ``Daddy's Girl Cashes In.''
``It is a measure of the times that this book - slimy, repellent, meretricious, cynical - is enjoying the rapt attention of the god of publicity,'' Yardley wrote. ``As for Harrison, her own hungry eyes seem focused on the best-seller lists. The confession isn't from the heart; it's from the pocketbook.''
Meanwhile, positive reviews have come from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. Jacket blurbs include praise from Mary Gordon and Tobias Wolff, both of whom have written acclaimed memoirs; from personal essayist Philip Lopate and from child psychiatrist Robert Coles.
``A novelist with an exquisite command of the language dares look back at a childhood and youth of huge emotional and sexual complexity,'' Coles writes. ``What the book offers is an account of a moral victory - the re-emergence of a literate, thoughtful, disciplined, knowing sensibility.''
Harrison's critics see it this way: A young, attractive New Yorker with a powerful agent (Amanda Urban) and a well-connected husband (Colin Harrison, deputy editor of Harper's) shamelessly using her private life to sell books. Worst of all, she does this despite having two small children.
Harrison, in turn, sees herself as an honest writer with a story she felt compelled to tell, her only ``sin'' being the courage to discuss a subject many don't want to hear about. Yes, she admits she was troubled about her children, but she sees that as an inevitable conflict.
``There are no perfect answers in this situation. If I don't write this book, if I don't publish this book because of my children, then something exists between me and my children. Do I start to resent them because they seem to be the people who are preventing me in my life as an artist?'' said Harrison, who lives in Brooklyn.
``My life is torn between two areas: one is my family, and one is my writing. And the needs of children and the needs of books rarely go together. Where do my loyalties lie? With my children and with my work. I am torn between these two camps.''
The confessional book has a bad name these days, but its history is long and diverse. It can mean anything from St.Augustine to Faye Resnick. It can mean revelation or exploitation, the search for enlightenment or the act of self-promotion.
Suppose Harrison did write this book for profit; it's still risky to judge her by her intentions. First of all, art has never depended on good intentions. (Only blockheads don't write for money, Samuel Johnson said).
Also, if there's a First Amendment among writers, it's that you have to grant them their subject. To say something is unfit to be written about isn't just placing a limitation on the artist, it's placing a limitation on the art.
Harrison is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop who has written three well-received novels. She's been a judge for the National Book Awards, and her essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker and The New York Times, where she recently reviewed another much-discussed memoir, Mia Farrow's.
The story of ``The Kiss'': Harrison was still a baby when her parents divorced, and she was raised outside Los Angeles by her maternal grandparents. Her mother was a beautiful, self-absorbed woman who made Harrison feel unloved. Her father, unnamed in the book, was a Protestant minister she hardly knew at all.
A handsome, manipulative man, he re-emerged for a visit when she was 20. She was lonely and desperate, desperate especially to get back at her mother. At the end of his visit, she said goodbye to her father at the airport. He first kissed her face, then her lips, then pushed his tongue inside her mouth.
``In the years to come, I'll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain,'' Harrison writes. ``The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed. It's the drug my father administers in order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed.''
They were lovers for four years. She took a leave from school and eventually moved in with his second family. He told her it was God's will that they be together. Her mother told Harrison the whole thing was a way to get back at her.
The affair was joyless for Harrison and, by the end, she was having fantasies about killing herself. She broke it off after her mother became sick with cancer and died, in 1985. She has not seen or spoken to her father since.
The author says this was not the book she had set out to write. Looking to fulfill the first part of a two-book contract with Random House, Harrison started on a novel she says was as far from her personal life as possible. Maybe that was the problem; the further she tried to get from her family, the more its story kept intruding.
``I had written the first draft of a novel,'' she said. ``Nobody ever liked it very much. I didn't enjoy working on it. My agent was sort of lukewarm, and my editor just did not like it. She was sort of mystified by what was going on. And she said we needed to talk about what is going on with this book. She said, `It doesn't even seem like you're writing this book. Where are you?'''
The people least shocked by ``The Kiss'' should be those who have read Harrison before. ``The Kiss'' is not a departure but a continuation, a culmination for the author.
In her novel ``Exposure,'' a man takes compromising pictures of his daughter, as Harrison's father did. In ``Poison,'' a woman has an affair with a priest. In ``Thicker Than Water,'' the novel that most resembles her memoir, a young woman not unlike Harrison has an affair with her father.
``Even at the time it (`Thicker Than Water') was published I felt some disappointment, because it pushed the experience away from me,'' she said.
``I changed a lot of the family dynamics. I did not paint my grandmother or my relationship with my mother accurately. In the intervening seven years, I've come to a point of resolution with my mother and a much greater understanding of the dynamic between my mother and my father and me.''
Dedicated to her mother, ``The Kiss'' is written in a minimalist style using the present tense. Beyond the kiss at the airport, there are few details of physical passion. The most erotic passage is actually about Harrison's mother, in the viewing room, where Harrison bends over her casket.
``I touch her chest, her arms, her neck; I kiss her forehead and her fingertips; I lay my warm cheek against her cold one; and as I do, something drops away from me: that slick, invisible, impenetrable wall. ... And as it does, I gasp, I squeeze my mother's fingers. Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I say. My God, oh God, it's over.''
LENGTH: Long : 137 linesby CNB