Gender Bender

It’s hard to decide which is cheekier: this book’s title or its subtitle, “A Woman’s Story.” The story being told might seem relatively standard: A married California woman, whose daughter is grown up, becomes obsessed with another woman, the “brilliant, seductive, lost, ambitious” Hadamar, and comes to feel things she has never felt before. What is novel, and mostly beguiling, is Kim Chernin’s insistence on providing her own interpretive frame for the experience. In relation to the elusive Hadamar, she was never anything but female, except that she was not a woman wooing a woman but something more like a boy discovering his powers of attraction. The persona of a boy is presented less as a metaphor than a fact, admittedly, a metaphysical fact.

There seem to be two ways of overcoming cultural (and internalized) barriers: to seek to dissolve them and establish a continuum, or to eroticize the barrier and then transgress it, gathering to yourself the prohibited energy of the Other. Chernin’s entanglement with Hadamar (this name is not the real woman’s, while the author appears undisguised) took place in 1978, at a time when the cultures of women’s and gay liberation were officially more preoccupied with an androgynous agenda than with the sort of postmodern appropriation of gender properties that nowadays goes under the rubric of Queer.

To some extent, Chernin explored both options, for instance attending a women’s conference in Santa Barbara that was much preoccupied with resurgent images of “the goddess,” but flirting (as boys will) with women in the bars after the conference sessions. At the same conference, she wasn’t above accepting a man’s invitation to dance, if she felt like it, a considerable taboo in context. She seems to have instinctively opposed a feminism based on excluding the masculine.

Still, that was the ‘70s. Now we live in a time, as David Halperin has lamented, when sexual identity can be claimed as a matter of strategy or prestige, and young women on campus who sleep with women are likely to describe themselves as bisexual, while those who sleep with men are capable of insisting that they are lesbian. Kim Chernin’s evasions are not like this: They lead to discoveries.

The term “boy” seems to carry some of the charge for her that it had for Christopher Isherwood, who grew up in a world of oppressively manly family portraits, all facial hair and duty. A boy, though, was the opposite of a man, as well as the opposite of a woman.

Loving Hadamar as a boy changes things in a number of ways for Kim. It gives her a different sense of Hadamar’s femininity, and it also provides her with a new set of romantic tactics. Now she is impatient, direct and able to leave. She isn’t bound by the old covenant and has an elusiveness of her own. Hadamar, no stranger to being courted by both men and women, is wrong-footed by this heretical approach to passion.

Kim’s body changes, along with her perception of it, becoming trim and lean, a transformation that is rendered somewhat mystically in the book, as if diet, exercise and a new set of preoccupations (before the infatuation Chernin was something of a recluse) made no contribution to it.

The Berkeley milieu in which Kim meets Hadamar has a high-toned quality which might seem comical if Chernin’s writing were less assured. Wealth, culture, history may not make a love affair any easier, but they certainly lend a certain gloss to the telling of it. It is one of Kim’s great triumphs to persuade Hadamar to sing again, after decades of silence, in a contralto voice of near-professional quality, and to praise in all sincerity a pen and ink drawing that also turns out to be Hadamar’s doing. Later the pair of them translate a lullaby from the German and set it to music.

There is a nice symmetry in Kim, having resurrected her inner tomboy, thus retrieving an extinct identity of Hadamar’s, whose artistic ambitions were silently quashed long ago by her husband. A husband who is capable of giving as a present an authenticated Beethoven notebook page (a sketch of the Waldstein sonata, no less) is a worthy adversary, but Kim offers something that is alive.

Occasionally the rapport between the women becomes a little portentous, with Kim having visions that turn out to correspond with Hadamar’s family history. They play a lovers’ game over which the icky aura of Shirley Maclaine seems all too plainly to be hovering: “I saw us together at the opera in Vienna; she remembered the white cashmere shawl she had been carrying. We met on the Kahlenberg; she remembered the bowl of whipped cream on our table. We took long walks in the Alps, ran across each other in a first-class carriage on the way to Greece. She needed a sleeping compartment; I gave up mine.”

It’s a rare soul, seemingly, that remembers its unglamorous incarnations. For all that, “My Life as a Boy” succeeds in convincing the reader that the stakes were high in this romance. When we read, early on in the book, that it was “as if we had stepped into an undertow and could only clasp hands and be drawn out together,” that “drawn” contains the threat of its echo-word, drown.

Playing the boy seems to be an intricate and bittersweet maneuver, one that may still require “a woman’s wits,” “an ability to read silences, interpret casual gestures, pick up cues that haven’t been given.” It’s worth wondering whether the mother of a son rather than a daughter would romanticize the immature male enough to attempt it.

As a boy, Chernin is able to leave her husband Max without acrimony, for why would a boy want a husband? Chernin is sophisticated enough to acknowledge that there may be a sort of latent contempt in the boy’s love for women. A double sensibility has its glories and its failings, is able to see both sides but perhaps not act without a freight of introspection: “I wonder how our lives might have turned out if I had behaved more like a born-boy, less like a crossover boy. . . .” The impulse to play Prince Valiant can end up with an impersonation of Prince Hamlet instead.

It’s a shock to realize that the relationship described so intensely in “My Life as a Boy” was, technically, unconsummated. In fact, the whole adventure could have been experienced as a defeat of the most crushing sort, because Hadamar and Max became a consummated item, leaving the narrator, for all her emotional inventiveness, edged into the role of love’s loser, a Lost Boy, even.

Yet that is not the impression left by the book. Readers may approach “My Life as a Boy” with the sneaking suspicion that a potentially banal narrative--leaving your husband, coming out--is being gussied up with some rather recherche rhetoric. But 20 years after the event, Kim Chernin has been able to write about her love for Hadamar with a great freshness, without either nostalgia or bitterness.

When we mourn a lost love, most of what we mourn is a lost possibility for ourselves, but Kim Chernin seems to have sustained the possibility outside its original context. In her only previous romantic near-miss with her own sex, she had defined herself as a woman, and somehow the collapse of that intimacy left nothing behind, hardly even a memory. But loving Hadamar was a transformative experience even without sex: She got what she was looking for, someone for whom she would change her life.

On the last page of “My Life as a Boy,” Chernin speculates that there may be “a new kind of woman that comes to exist only by passing through the transitional phase of a boy.” This woman will presumably love women (the book is dedicated to Renate), but along the way, Kim Chernin has experienced, and passed on, a female possibility far from the accepted patterns--a reformulation of Courtly Love, almost, for the late 20th century. She must be ironically amused, or else exasperated, to see how the Library of Congress, in its Cataloging-in-Publication Data given at the front of the book, brusquely eliminates nuance and restores the categories it recognizes: “3. Lesbians--United States--Biography.”