Chocolates for Breakfast Page 23
Pamela Moore was still in Paris (“to find my identity,” she later wrote in her Contemporary Authors entry) when Bantam issued Chocolates in paperback in July 1957. That edition sold nearly six hundred thousand copies by the end of the year and, had Pamela returned to America at that point, might have consolidated her celebrity. Another thing that might have completed her fame would have been a movie version of the book, but no such film was made, perhaps because the studio moguls were wary of her unsentimental view of Hollywood. Pamela’s reasons for going to Europe were clear: like the heroine of her book, she wanted to be taken seriously, not only as a writer but as a person. In Europe, Chocolates not only made the bestseller lists but was favorably reviewed in both Italy and France, whose pundits warmed unexpectedly to a novel in which Pamela had added scathing attacks on American society. In America, the public wanted to know about Pamela’s boyfriends and eating habits; “in Paris,” she observed, “they wanted to know my politics and metaphysics.”
Her timing was fortuitous; the first stirrings of the Beat movement—in the form of “Howl,” On the Road, and contraband chapters of Naked Lunch—were already before the public, and the “alternative” culture that continues to beguile aging columnists and sell running shoes was in its nascent stages. In Europe, where all subsequent translations of her book were based on the French nouvelle édition, Pamela Moore was perceived as part of this culture. She spent 1957 and the first months of 1958 explaining herself in the press and on radio and television in France and Italy. She was even listed in a multivolume literary encyclopedia published by the prestigious Milan house Mondadori in 1961. The entry includes a photograph of her posing in a coffeehouse that was probably in Paris but could have just as easily passed for Greenwich Village, complete with guitarist, mazes of cigarette smoke, flattened paperbacks, and black-clad denizens.
In the spring of 1958 she returned to America. But she was not interested in resuming her career as a celebrity. She got married instead. Her husband, Adam Kanarek, was of Polish-Jewish origin and had very little in common with the residents of Beverly Hills, the Westchester horse set, or the habitués of the 21 Club and the Stork Club. The couple settled down in New York, where he enrolled in law school.
By early 1959, Pamela, with her husband’s encouragement, had resumed writing. She completed her second novel quickly; the use of a diary in the book’s final pages suggests one source for her facility as a stylist. It was submitted to American publishers and rejected—unsurprisingly, since in terms of theme, style, and characterization, it was very different from Chocolates, and none but the most understanding publisher or editor is keen on such a step from a writer, especially when the earlier book has been the bonanza that Pamela’s was. Instead, it was issued by her French publisher, Julliard, as Les Pigeons de Saint Marc in 1960 to favorable reviews. Similarly her third book, East Side Story, was issued by the London-based publisher Longmans in 1961; however, the book received a one-paragraph notice in the Times Literary Supplement and scarce notice elsewhere.
Still, she was a writer, so she kept on writing. In 1962, L’Exil de Suzy-Coeur appeared, only in France, and she traveled there with her husband and gave some interviews to Paris Match and Le Figaro Littéraire. Soon after this came what must have been hopeful news: Simon and Schuster accepted her fifth book, The Horsy Set. At the very end of the year she became pregnant. Things were going well, and given that Pamela Moore appears to have been suffering from bipolar disorder (her description of Courtney Farrell’s mood swings in Chocolates is precise enough that a psychiatrist reading the book today might find it difficult to refrain from a long-distance diagnosis), it would have been preferable for things to stay that way, given the absence of meaningful therapy for such a condition in that era.
But things did not continue to go well. The Horsy Set, a story set in the wealthy, decadent world of show-horse racing in which her sister was such a prominent figure, received no notice in the New York Times, nor in any of the major news magazines or literary and cultural weeklies. What few reviews it received appeared in daily papers in those cities on the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines where show horses were big news, presumably to let the locals know that they might figure as characters in a book. Hardcover sales were minimal. Dell issued a paperback edition at the end of 1963, in what must have been a large printing—it shows up in secondhand stores about as often as Chocolates. But that one printing remained in stock for nearly five years. (Also in 1963, Doubleday reprinted it, bound with a war novel by another writer, as part of a book-club series called Stories for Men.) Pamela’s bid for recognition as a serious writer had failed utterly; the publication of her fourth novel as The Exile of Suzy-Q in April 1964 by the second-rate house Paperback Library served only to underline this fact. The birth of a son, Kevin, and her husband’s admission to the bar were all the compensation for this misfortune that she received.
She kept writing. Her sixth novel was tentatively titled “Kathy on the Rocks.” Its protagonist was a washed-up writer, contemplating her failure. Pamela’s model, F. Scott Fitzgerald, had taken sixteen years to travel the path from This Side of Paradise to “The Crack-Up”; she had covered the distance in less than half that time. Through the early months of 1964, as Chocolates was reissued and as stray readers in news shops and drugstores discovered she had other books, she continued to work. One of the characters in her new novel, according to Detective Robert Gosselin of the NYPD, “talked about marital difficulties and suicidal tendencies . . . there was a reference to that guy Hemingway and how he died.”
On Sunday, June 7, 1964, she reached the end of the line.
It was late afternoon. Her husband was out of the apartment. Her nine-month-old baby was asleep in the bedroom. She sat in the living room, at her desk, and wrote in her diary. “If you put it all together,” Detective Gosselin told the press the following day, “the last four pages, under the date June 7, indicate that she was having trouble with her writing and intended to destroy herself.” He said that the pages describe the rifle barrel feeling “cold and alien” in her mouth, and continued: “She wanted the last four pages, the suicide note, added to the novel she was working on.”
Pamela Moore finished writing, inserted a .22 caliber rifle into her mouth, and pulled the trigger. Her husband found her on the living-room floor. She was three months short of twenty-seven.
“Kathy on the Rocks” was never published. In September, Dell issued Moore’s second novel under the title Diana; both it and Suzy-Q were out of print by the following year. Bantam reprinted Chocolates thrice more; it went out of print in America for the last time sometime in 1968, about when Dell pulped its last copies of The Horsy Set and not long after what would have been Pamela Moore’s thirtieth birthday. In England and Europe, her books stayed in print until a little after the turn of the decade.
Since then, her work has never been reprinted. Apart from a 1982 reference that drew my attention to her, the Contemporary Authors sketch (last updated in 1968), and an entry in Who’s Who of American Women for 1965–66 (apparently compiled before her death), her name appears in almost no books or reference materials. She has been the subject of no articles since the newspaper stories immediately following her suicide. Nor does she figure in any academic discussions of feminist literature, despite the fact that some of her work clearly prefigures the great awakening of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Don Moore, her father, was rediscovered when the movie version of Flash Gordon came out in 1980, and he colorfully recounted his years in Hollywood for movie and science-fiction magazines that year. He didn’t discuss Pamela. He died in Florida in 1986.
Isabel Moore continued to write for a time. In 1965, under the pseudonym Grace Walker, she published a biography of her surviving daughter, the full title of which is: Elaine Moore Moffat, Blue Ribbon Horsewoman: The Complete Life Story of a Champion Rider Who Learned to Cope with Life by Dealing with Horses. Four years later, she published Women of the Green Café, a paperback
novel about lesbians. In 1970, she published That Summer in Connecticut, a smoothly written but cliché-riddled account of a May–December romance that indicates the difficulty she must have had understanding her younger daughter, given the generational gulf that separated the women who came of age before the 1950s and those who matured just as the implications of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex were beginning to resonate in America.
Had Pamela lived and continued writing, perhaps she would have ultimately proved incapable of serious literature and would have finished her career composing smart but schlocky bestsellers, stylish counterparts to those of Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins. But her work frequently manifests a fairly sophisticated awareness of her society and its workings, whether satirically or melodramatically expressed, that is absent from the other two writers. This awareness gives lasting value to Chocolates and, to some extent, The Horsy Set. Pamela’s writing may have been polished, but still it was the work of a woman who either could not or, to some extent, was not allowed to mature as a writer; a woman desperately in need of the kind of social changes that the feminist movement brought into being over the years that followed. From a purely clinical perspective, and given Chocolates’s description of bipolar depression and how The Horsy Set, in its most frantic pages, epitomizes a classic “mixed state,” it is important to remember that those years also saw the introduction of the first, and rather ineffective, medications for depression. Pamela Moore’s chronicles of an America that is still with us in some ways, and in others as distant as the world of Jane Austen, deserve serious critical examination.
About the book
In the Next Room
by Kevin Kanarek
ONE CLOUDY AFTERNOON in the summer of 1964, Pamela Moore adds several pages to her diary. The script is neat and lucid; the hand of someone who has made a decision and wishes to set it forth clearly.
She has kept a diary ever since she was a fifteen-year-old student at boarding school. Her journal has often consisted of notes to herself, ideas, outlines and drafts of stories. Over the past year, however, she has recorded in detail the circumstances of her own life: pregnancy, a difficult birth, and a long stay in the hospital; her return to the small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where she has struggled to regain her health, adjust to her new role as a mother, and resume her writing.
She sets down a detailed record of her arguments with her husband, Adam, and all the ways in which she feels abandoned by him. “There is my $6000 in the bank, but he won’t give me a vacation or let me hire a baby nurse!”
Adam, she writes, dismisses her ideas and questions her seriousness. He tells her that it’s too late to do what she aspires to. She’s already beaten. “I’m 26 years old, I’m 26 years old. I keep repeating that to him so much that I feel sometimes I’m secretly 36 and lying to us both.”
A year earlier, pregnant and unable to finish her fifth novel, she had agreed to let her husband direct her writing—not just in the business aspects and the critiques of her drafts, as he had been doing until then, but in everything. She recalls the elation, the eagerness with which she told him her Big Decision. “The final and irrevocable submission of my will and being to his,” she calls it. “I can’t write without him. We really are one.”
June 7, 1964. In the diary, she writes that before leaving for work that morning, her husband yelled at her for overfeeding the baby. But she is hardly eating anything herself, she writes, because there is no one to care for her, to cook a meal or even take her out to a restaurant. “Yesterday, ice cream and a doughnut. Today, so far, just coffee.”
In the diary, she promises herself that she will no longer argue with him, no longer cry. She returns to a conclusion that seems to her inescapable: artists cannot love, and that by loving Adam so deeply, she has betrayed her art.
The summer afternoon has suddenly grown cooler, Pamela notes. A thunderstorm gathers. “Pure literature,” she writes of the dramatic shift in the weather, as if the clouds are setting the stage for what she is about to do. At the end, she writes: “this diary should be added on to the unfinished [‘Kathy on the Rocks’].” There is a .22 caliber rifle in the closet, which Adam keeps in their small apartment for protection. It was her birthday present to him four years ago. She uses it to shoot herself.
I was in the next room, nine months old to the day, when this happened. The newspapers say I was asleep.
Pamela Moore was my mother, but I never really knew her. I’ve heard it said that for an infant, when someone leaves the room it’s as if he or she has left forever. When that person reappears, it’s nothing less than a miracle.
For me, my mother reappeared mostly through her books— copies on bookshelves, larger piles of the later titles that sold fewer and fewer. There was also the unpublished writing that filled a locked filing cabinet in my father’s office and folders stacked in a small, unused room with peeling green paint in the ancient apartment on 110th Street in Manhattan where my paternal grandmother, whom we called Baba, lived and where Pamela had sometimes stayed, to write and be fed Baba’s Polish home cooking.
When I was thirteen years old, I lived in that 110th Street apartment for about a year, after my father and stepmother divorced, and Baba took it upon herself to initiate me into Pamela’s full history. Baba had survived the Holocaust by hiding for three years in the Polish countryside with my father and my aunt, who later took care of me after my mother died. The three of them had spent the last year of the war living in a hole in the ground under a barn.
Most people try to turn their backs on such horror; Baba savored it. When I asked, “How did my mother die?” the answer was “She didn’t just die! She shot herself!” Baba’s version of my mother’s story was very tabloid, like the brittle newspaper clippings she gave me along with a copy of Chocolates for Breakfast. It was the hardcover edition with the line drawing of the girl on the cover, so, of course, I assumed that girl was Courtney, and Courtney was Pamela. And the black-and-white author photo, her immense eyes with dark circles around them—that also was Pamela. I’d like to think that even without all the dramatic buildup—this is your mother’s soul, take it and read it—I still would have liked the book. But I loved the book. It is very odd to acquire at age thirteen an aloof yet sensitive and melancholic teenager for a mother. I have continued rereading Chocolates at the junctures of my life where I needed . . . not guidance, necessarily, but to be reminded of something that preceded memory.
Who killed Pamela Moore? Of course I wondered what had actually led to my mother’s death. Choose one or more of the following: early celebrity, followed by a career on the skids; a difficult childbirth with complications for months after, including a likely case of undiagnosed postpartum depression; a marriage that had begun as a salvation but was becoming a prison. Added to these immediate circumstances were preexisting conditions. Pamela had had a difficult childhood, including her parents’ bitter divorce, a mild-mannered and absent father, and a ruthless mother who was not above seducing her daughter’s high-school sweetheart, John (the likely model for Charles Cunningham in Chocolates). The novel that Pamela wrote at the age of seventeen includes an episode of severe cutting and a suicide, both of which are seen as having a cleansing, redemptive effect, chastising the grown-ups and reminding them of their responsibilities. It is a very young person’s seductive view of suicide as a means of somehow making things right again, a view that Pamela may not have ever outgrown.
The years I spent with my father from ages six to eighteen gave me a vivid picture of all the ways he might have been an accessory to my mother’s death. After a lifetime of trauma, his default emotion was rage, and he was often vicious to others without seeming to realize his effect. He had learned, perhaps in hiding during the war, that the best way to motivate and engage people was to threaten them with doom. His work as a lawyer had fortified an innate tendency to be cynical and overbearing. He would later make pronouncements such as: “Feminism is nothing but an epistemological construct whi
ch holds that Zelda was a better writer than F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
There was the matter of Pamela’s last diary, which included the suicide note—a big red bounded ledger that the police held on to for a while and that still bears the evidence-room stamp. My father was very undecided about letting me see that volume. He once showed it to me briefly, but he didn’t tell me where it was hidden until a few months before his death. “I may decide to destroy it,” he periodically reminded me, and when I asked why he would even say that, he responded, “Because I am the hero of those diaries!” There was anger, and also real pain, in his words.
It turned out he had never read that volume. A few days before his own death, he asked me what was in it. I said something about the logic of a sixteen-year-old girl who thinks that, because her prince is late in saving her, she must die.
My assumption had always been that Pamela learned from Adam not to trust in her own experience, but rather to impose on it some larger plan. I blamed my father, with his legalistic mind and didactic tendencies, for teaching her that ideas are all that matter, and that raw emotions and sensations are, as he would put it, “simply nonsense.”
But then, in my late thirties, having lived for a while in France, I came upon the French edition of Chocolates and was amazed at what I found. The French text was very different from the English, and in these new passages I could see the first stirrings of a change I had felt so strongly in my mother’s writing. By this time, I knew the basic chronology of her life and work, and I knew that the French edition was published several years before her marriage to my father, at a time when they had just met. So contrary to the theme of most of his stories about her, and most of what she wrote about him in later years, Adam did not sit solidly at the center of Pamela’s entire cosmos. He had rivals for that role, and neither he nor I could understand her without understanding their influence.