THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996 TAG: 9604110432
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
SWEET MYSTERY
A Book of Remembering
JUDITH HILLMAN PATERSON
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 276 pp. $23.
Judith Hillman Paterson's memoir, Sweet Mystery: A Book of Remembering, is part social history, part psychological study, part biography and all poetry.
Paterson writes with a heart-wrenching honesty that grabs readers from the opening paragraph: ``My mother died when I was nine and she was 31, so of course I remembered her. Her fear of being alone, the insomnia, the terrible fights with my father, the uncontrollable drinking, the vacant stare and slack mouth. The tartyeasty smell of beer on her breath, powder and tobacco loose in her purse, a favorite plaid dress gone rank with sweat. No matter how hard I tried to forget, I remembered.''
A professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, Paterson is the author of several literary studies and a magazine and newspaper writer. Sweet Mystery should receive critical acclaim. It deserves to be short-listed for a National Book award or a Pulitzer prize.
Focusing on the years 1935 through 1944, Paterson tells the story of her birth and early childhood in Montgomery, Ala. During that time, her mother has three other children, two miscarriages and several breakdowns. The family moves from Alabama to New York, then back to Alabama. Her father joins the Navy after Pearl Harbor is bombed.
In Alabama, people drink Royal Crown cola and use white Wonder, a silver colored salve to treat everything from stuffy noses to bruises. They eat lunch in their own kitchens with ``colored'' help but do not eat with them in restaurants.
Paterson's parents are loving but emotionally frail. Both were traumatized by the childhood loss of a father. Both need to fix all the ills of the people they love. Both are insecure and easily frustrated. Both are obsessive; both are alcoholic.
Paterson began writing this memoir as she became subject to periods of uncontrollable depression and rage. Her own marriage had failed; her younger brother, who smoked and drank excessively, died of cancer in his early 40s, and her two sisters' marriages also ended.
As Paterson wrote, she hoped to be able to understand and to exorcise the demons of her past. But her memoir is much more than a 1990s version of True Confessions. It has the soul of William Faulkner and the readability of Harper Lee, who rightly calls the book ``remarkable, tender, excruciating, compelling.''
The one slight flaw concerns the number of characters. Paterson writes of her extended family and friends and traces her family back through several generations. A family tree would help readers to remember who is who.
The principal characters are Paterson's mother Emily (``a woman who could look into a suicidal abyss one minute and deny the existence of all suffering the next''); Paterson's father Duke (``I will see him transmute so instantly and so totally out of one demeanor into another that it begins to seem impossible that the two could belong to the same person''); her father's mother, Gram (``my grandmother is the bedrock of my life''); and her mother's Aunt Bessie (``Bessie gave me the things I most needed - a mental and imaginative escape from family troubles that might otherwise have swamped me'').
If the book has a tragic heroine, it's Emily Hillman, the mother Paterson idolized. She was born in 1914 into an aristocratic Southern family that lost most of its money during the Civil War. Afterward, they found alcohol, pills and insanity. Emily was no different. Everyone in the family ``wanted nothing so much as to forget her suffering, forget the short life she had lived, forget the failed mother everyone assumed she had been.''
But in Sweet Mystery, the family memories return to be most sensitively recorded. MEMO: Diane Scharper teaches memoir writing at Towson State University.
``Radiant,'' her second book of poetry, will be published this month. by CNB