 Amateurish and revealing autobio of remarkable artist
What is it that happens to intelligent people who sit down to pen their own autobiographies? They may be the most insightful people in the world, and highly talented within their own field, but when they try to describe what they've seen and felt in their lives they become dunderheaded and inarticulate. I thought of this phenomenon some months back when I read Kay Jamison's 'An Unquiet Mind.' Jamison is a psychologist who suffered most of her life from severe manic-depressive illness, so I picked up her book partly because I wanted to read all about the screaming-mimi emotional rides she's endured. Yet she writes most of her book at a weird remove, as though she was in a fog most of her life. Jamison is very given to grossed-up generalities that give you no sensory data--'I enjoyed myself in spite of a turbulence I sensed within me.' That's not an actual line from her book, but it could be.It could be a line from Erica Rutherford's book, too. Here is a person who lived as a man for 50 years, was married four times and a father twice before going through a sex change; worked as a professional actor, set designer, film producer, commercial sculptor, fine artist, gallery curator--even, incredibly, spent several years in South Africa as a farmer--so can be considered to have a fine banquet of experience to spread out before the reader. What we get instead is a dull year-by-year account of what Eric/Erica did from childhood onward. The book is so plodding it reads like something produced in fulfillment of a degree requirement. Indeed, I rather suspect that Erica wrote it years before the publication date in 1993 and let the ms collect dust because she knew it was lifeless and didn't know or care to find out how to rewrite it. The book stops suddenly in the latter 1970s, just after Erica has had sex-change surgery (an event described in such circumlocutory fashion that it is not entirely clear whether she ever completed that harrowing journey). But then comes the book's dessert: a tart pudding of an essay by Eric(a)'s last wife, Gail Ambika. Gail can write far better than Erica--she gets in there and says what she means. She's a tremendous relief from Erica's pleasant generalities. She felt angry and depressed and neglected during much of her time with Eric--but Erica never told us that. She was contemptuous of Eric's primpy crossdressing in the years leading up to the sex change--surely Eric(a) knew that, but didn't bother to tell us. Is there anything good to be said about Erica's story? Well yes, quite a bit, though it could have used an editor and proofreader (the publisher seems to be a letter-slot operation on Prince Edward Island). Toward the end it becomes apparent that Erica has suffered from chronic depression throughout her life, and this, not the transsexualism, is the real background to her tale. All of her wives also suffered from some sort of mental illness, either manic-depression or depression (the second one ended up a suicide). The marvelous thing is that Rutherford endured so many spirit-crushing relationships and episodes without having an artistic spark thoroughly crushed out.
|