Books in Canada

January 2007

 

Cease to Blush, by poet and novelist Billie Livingston, is an immensely readable tale of two women: Vivian Callwood, erstwhile model and actress, and her mother Josephine, a famous feminist academic. These are not the gals on the Mother’s Day cards; this relationship is a bitter blend of hopes unmet, expectations defied, and approval withheld.

 

Vivian arrives at her mother’s funeral late, unsuitably dressed and badly hung over. To the disgust of her mother’s partner, Sally, and their friends, she cannot muster any conventional demonstrations of grief. Behind the red suit and the brassy dye job, though, Josie’s disappointing daughter is full of self-loathing and regret. “I was a dark troll, terrible from every pore.” Vivian has always assumed she and her mother would make peace: “I had anticipated this scorpion dance of ours might fade away in my forties. But she hadn’t given me the luxury of time. I was furious with her for it. I was always furious with her but this was the capper.”

In life, the highly principled Josephine deplores Vivian’s bohemian lifestyle as a waste of her intelligence. For her part, Vivian is so busy flouting her mother’s views that she doesn’t seem to notice what a perfect example she’s become of the things Josie fears: as a background extra, bit actress, and murder-show corpse, she’s frequently the objectified woman her mother laments. Occasionally, Vivian seems to interpret lots of grotty sex as sexual liberation. When she meets her current boyfriend, Frank, he leads with “Hey, didn’t I rape you about ten years ago? On What Evil Lurks . . . I was the second guy that chased you into the woods, remember?” Now the enterprising Frank has arranged for Vivian to embark on a career as a masked performer of Internet porn.

In death, Josephine’s secrets are uncovered when Vivian opens a trunk in the basement and discovers artefacts of another life. Josephine Callwood, lesbian feminist professor, is also Celia Dare: “Stripper, Impressionist and Gangster’s Moll.” Vivian sets out to flesh out the details of Celia’s story, tracking down former colleagues and associates. Here, Livingston uses a combination of Vivian’s own words, excerpts from Celia’s letters to her roommate Annie, and a third-person account from Celia’s point of view, constructed by Vivian. It’s a good recipe: the late Josephine is vividly replaced by her fascinating earlier self.

 

Young Celia Dare is a poster girl for gilt-edged helplessness: lovingly ensnared by the gangsters who adopt her, the entertainers whose company she keeps, and even by a famous politician whose captivation with her doesn’t quite extend to public friendship. In her career, she is most successful when she impersonates others-she is a talented impressionist who mimics great singers of the day, black singers through the ages, Carmen Miranda, and even men. It’s not clear why she doesn’t have her own voice. Even she doesn’t really understand how derivative she is. She is hurt when someone says he’d love to hear what her own voice is like: “it hadn’t occurred to her she’d been using anything else.” A shadowy cast of all-knowing mob characters keep Celia protected and supported like a cherished pet-until a government investigation makes her dangerous to them.

Where fiction intersects with iconic images and events, the back stories of the people on the margins can be a rich, if speculative, source. Celia’s story unfolds against the wild, dissolute nights of Las Vegas in the early 1960s, during a painful period of conflict and awful public loss in America. Her companions are a who’s who of the comingled worlds of politics, entertainment, and the mob: Sinatra, Louis Prima, Dean Martin, and Marilyn Monroe rub shoulders with gangsters and the Kennedy family, and Celia is there. These glittering scenes are among the book’s best. Livingston’s cool-daddy dialogue is perfectly pitched, and her portrait of Celia’s scornful boyfriend is a hilarious if maddening reminder that even beatniks were sometimes chauvinist pigs. Like Forrest Gump, Celia Dare wanders into some legendary scenes; Vivian’s reconstruction actually suggests Celia is the mythical “woman in the polka-dot dress” at Bobby Kennedy’s last speech.

 

Cease to Blush is hugely entertaining, but poses a significant challenge. How did Celia, gangster’s girl and high-end peeler, become Josie, the “feminist who ate Vancouver”? This is a troublesome disconnect. It’s not easy to reconcile Josephine, an outspoken academic, with Celia, the entertainer whose relationships are always pitched on dangerously uneven ground. To be fair, there can be no firsthand account of this makeover-in the absence of a convenient diary-but it’s a bit of a leap. In an effort to narrow the gap, Vivian imagines Celia as clever and wickedly sharp-tongued. Sometimes this taxes our credulity: she rebukes Frank Sinatra for being nasty, flirts with Dean Martin, and scolds Jack Kennedy about Bobby’s relationship with Senator Joe McCarthy. As she writes about the woman who would become her mother, Vivian can’t help knowing what she knows about Josephine, so Josephine’s sense of outrage and tart wit are often part of Celia’s demeanour as well. We’re reminded how fallible this account is when Frank Sinatra actually utters words to Celia that have earlier come from Vivian’s boyfriend (also called Frank): “I stared down at the words on the page, and saw my Frank smeared all over Sinatra.”

 

Vivian has made a career out of scorning her mother’s principles; now, she discovers that she and her mother are not so different, and she seems more affected by this than by 30-odd years of feminist rhetoric. Was Josie’s feminism ultimately irrelevant? Perhaps Vivian’s sense of her mother as a fugitive from predatory men makes her own escape possible. In summoning up her mother’s other self, Vivian constructs a “truth” that may help her shake off her own entanglements. In the end, the story of Celia Dare is just what her daughter needs to hear. As for its truth . . . truth is a moving target anyway. And as Celia’s roommate Annie West contends, “the past is the past and the truth changes every five minutes.”

 

Nancy Fischer (Books in Canada)