Book Review : Memoirs of a Golden State of the Mind

The State of California: Growing Up Foreign in the Backyards of Eden by Ted Pejovich (Alfred A. Knopf: $16.95, 192 pages)

“The State of California” is a memoir, not a work of history or political science as the title might suggest, and it’s rendered in the language of dreams, odd and eerie, random and rambling, and sometimes almost too intense: “A meditation on the lives of those of my family who left their homeland and who lived their lives everywhere else thenceforward, as strangers,” Ted Pejovich explains, “on the dreams I dreamed in my father’s hat, out in that garden that was California in the fifties, and in that golden sun.”

Despite its glib and wholly misleading title, “The State of California” is not one of those hackneyed celebrations of the Golden State, and it’s mercifully free of the cheap ironies, ersatz local color and brittle wit that are the hallmarks of journalism about California.

In fact, if it were not for the title and a brief introduction by the author, the reader might not even notice that California was the scene of Pejovich’s childhood. In the most fundamental sense, Pejovich persuades us that his childhood was spent in some netherworld of the imagination that is only incidentally linked to the here-and-now of California or any other place in the real world.

Indeed, Pejovich comes across as a contemporary Homer after a successful psychoanalysis, a bard with a perfect grasp of his own daydreams and nightmares. Indeed, he turns the stuff of childhood into a grand and solemn myth.

All-Perceiving

And the genius of the book is Pejovich’s evocation of the world as it appeared to an all-perceiving, half-comprehending young child: the muted passions of strong but tormented fathers and uncles (“My father said that he would rather wake up and be a chicken in a pot than wake up in a house where a man had to fight to put a piece of food on a kid’s plate”); the darkly maternal attentions of an aunt, given to blood-chilling curses, who replaced the child’s missing mother (“Let the snake drink at your eyes . . . Sleep with the wolves, be like the wolves”); the impossibly exotic allure of the girl next door (“I could sometimes see Jenny Dove . . . pull the caterpillars off the roses . . . and bite one in two with her front teeth. . . .”); and the intimate folklore of family history (“. . . the Hard-Time-lived-through truth that only a woman bereaved by a young-fallen-down husband gets to know. . . . “).

Pejovich’s afflicted mother, locked away in a hospital, is the central enigma of a childhood filled with vague but powerful mysteries: “My aunt said that my mother would strangle us in the night while we were sleeping,” Pejovich recalls, “and there was just no telling what a woman like that would do around a fuss of young girls and a boy rat-scared of the dark . . . , a little boy you would have to be wall-crawling crazy to forget you ever had. . . .”

Struggling for Truth

Young Pejovich struggles to penetrate the fearful secrets, to draw close to some imagined source of heat and light. For example, his father keeps a frilly pink nightgown in a dresser drawer for those rare and perilous occasions when mother is sent home from the hospital.

But when young Pejovich dares to try on the garment--a heartbreaking gesture of intimacy with his absent mother--his aunt descends on him like a vengeful exorcist, “ripping sideways and longways until she had the silky thing all off of me . . . and ripping the silky rest of the nightgown into rag strips in front of my sisters, saying that she would put the snake back into the box where it belonged, into the cardboard box in the hall closet with all the rest of the crazy things that slithered out of that stubborn man’s mind.”

Pejovich is an accomplished, even a spectacular stylist, even if his work tends to be a bit too showy at times. He favors paragraphs and even whole chapters that consist of single breathtaking sentences.

The very first paragraph of his opening chapter, for example, is a flashy downhill run that describes the author’s odyssey to Montenegro, his father’s birthplace and his ancestral home: “ . . . out there against God and the tide just two strokes shy of sin. . . .”

Run-On Narrative

By the second chapter, the author holds his breath and gives us nearly a dozen pages of run-on narrative without a full stop: “ ‘. . . leaving the two brothers remaining, my father and . . . my youngest uncle . . . take the train down to California in the next year when Death had taken up the rope again, down to the California of what they had heard was all sun and sea and redwood. . . .”

These verbal acrobatics are not without effect--the narrative is both urgent and brooding, a bubbling stew of memory and mystery--but, then, they are not always easy on the reader. Indeed, I kept wishing that someone would read the book out loud to me.

Not surprisingly, we are told that Pejovich is a performer in theater, opera, television--a singer, an actor, a dancer--and his story, which resembles an epic poem in more ways than one, really ought to be declaimed and not merely read. (The author describes just such a scene in the book itself, a moment of potent if oblique eroticism.)

And so I found myself imagining an audiocassette version of “The State of California,” or at least a public reading at Dutton’s or Midnight Special or Beyond Baroque. I am confident that the author’s performance, like the book itself, would be hard to resist and impossible to forget.