All happy families may be alike, but it’s not necessarily true of all happy marriages. Grace Schulman’s memoir, Strange Paradise, is the portrait of a relationship that began when Grace Waldman was a twentysomething strumming her guitar in Washington Square Park — what society in the late 1950s would call a “beatnik.” It ends with her husband Jerry’s death from heart failure in 2016. In between, Schulman charts her development as a writer and editor through the seismic variations of intimacy with her spouse, a research virologist whose work on influenza became the basis of all modern flu vaccines.
A New Yorker to the bone, Schulman grew up grounded in her Jewish family’s love of language and culture. Her maternal grandfather had run a poetry reading series at his local yeshiva. Her father took her to the Gotham Book Mart for meetings of the James Joyce Society. Her mother, an advertising copywriter decades before the Mad Menera, was a friend of Ashley Montagu’s and hung a framed cover of The Natural Superiority of Womenin her kitchen. She also taught her daughter to cherish her independence. For two years Schulman lived with but resisted marrying Jerry:
As to wedlock, I heard the stress on “lock.” I could not consider a settled existence, certainly not in the staid 1950s with its fixed gender roles. Nor could I let go of a life-changing love, the tree trunk from which all branches grew.
When she overcomes her misgivings, Marianne Moore — friend of her parents and an early reader of Schulman’s poems — is a wedding guest.
Schulman knows how to write a telling scene to reveal character. In her first meeting with her future in-laws, she announces, “Jerry passed his state boards,” meaning he was now “a board-certified internist.” Jerry’s mother replies, ”Yes, but you should meet my older son. Edward. He passed his boards right away. They tell me they’ve gotten easier.” Jerry shrinks as his mother insists, “Edward’s a real doctor, with patients,” rather than a researcher like Jerry. In a few bits of dialogue, Schulman captures the family tensions that will later contribute to the couple’s ten-year separation.
Some of Schulman’s best anecdotes involve her tenure as director of the 92ndSt YMHA’s reading series. Some writers, she explains, read at the Y on “national nights” made up of poetry and music; when Seamus Heaney read, a guitarist played Irish songs:
Afterward, at a reception in my apartment, Seamus’s guests sang. I was reminded of Jerry’s and my Sundays in Washington Square Park: here each guest would take a turn individually, on impulse, with a preface, such as, “Here’s a song my grandfather and I sang together in Sligo, as we did the dishes.” To everyone’s surprise, Elizabeth Bishop, who came to the reading and the party, joined in with a song she called “Laundry,” consisting of shirts, socks, towels, sheets, and other laundry items, and set to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”
Strange Paradise isn’t gossipy. Schulman doesn’t name names of her husband’s lovers, nor her own, during their decade-long split. There’s no snark in her description of Allen Ginsberg demanding a tea ceremony before his reading at the Y, and though any reading series director could rattle off a list of poets behaving badly, Schulman refrains. Neither does she discuss any difficulty she felt as a woman writer, or editor at The Nation — still, then, a male bastion. Instead the memoir focuses on what she learned from friendships with writers as different as Richard Yates and W.S. Merwin. Was it Moore’s example that kept Schulman from the discouragement and rage many women of her generation knew? Perhaps it was her resistance to gender roles, expressed throughout her marriage, that kept her steady. Or it might have been her PhD studies at NYU. As Schulman observes:
I noticed in those lists of authors that in English and American literature the first writer of every period and every genre happened to be a woman. Strange but true, women were the first speakers of Anglo-Saxon poems, a woman was the first English mystic, the first troubadour, the first biographer, the first author of a handbook on hunting, fishing and hawking.
Reluctant to marry in the ‘50s, Schulman is also reluctant to divorce in the ‘70s. She and Jerry still go to concerts and museums together, sharing trips to the Caribbean though living apart. When they reconcile, Richard Howard takes her aside at the local copy center to say, “You’ve gotten back together with a man your friends can stand, and that’s got to be salubrious.”
Schulman adds, “What friends did not know was that our renewed marriage, though loving, even blissful at times, was never easy.”
[Published by Turtle Point Press on August 21, 2018. 224 pages, $17.00 paperback]