The Tattooed Heart
& My Name is Rose
The Tattooed Heart
& My Name is Rose
Two Novels by
Theodora Keogh
Selected and Introduced by
Lidia Yuknavitch
Published by Pharos Editions, an Imprint of Dark Coast Press
3645 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.
www.darkcoastpress.com www.pharoseditions.com
The Tattooed Heart Text Copyright © 1953, Renewed 1981 by Theodora Keogh, all rights reserved
First edition 1954 by Farrar, Straus & Young
My Name Is Rose Text Copyright © 1956, Renewed 1984 by Theodora Keogh, all rights reserved
First edition 1956 by Farrar, Straus & Cugahy
First Pharos Editions Printing May 2014
Pharos Editions version reprinted by arrangement with Sallie Free
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Lidia Yuknavitch
ISBN-13: 9781940436128
Library of Congress Control Number:
All Rights Reserved
Digging for Matter
Introduction by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lately, I’ve taken to digging up women.
What I mean is, I’ve become obsessed with going back and down and under to find women writers whose work made it possible for the rest of us, for the present tense of us, to “matter”. I’ve developed this obsession in relation to finding the “market” for women writers in the present to be an abject abyss of dead tropes and formulaic forms, whereas the “matter” in the writing that came before us, even from dead women, remains astonishingly generative.
As my profound case study I give you Theodora Keogh, a novelist who wrote nine novels in the 1950’s and 60’s that, to be modest, blew the doors and windows off of what we mean when we say “women’s writing.” When we say “women’s writing” today, unfortunately, we mean a subset of writing entirely dictated by market-driven gatekeepers of money-making products. Whereas Theodora Keogh’s novels perform the act, the verb, the glorious excess of an actual woman writing. Writing through her body, to be precise. Without flinching or pulling punches.
Imagine that.
Her debut novel, Meg, is about a 12-year old girl who drifts away from her private school friends toward the streets where she is raped. She published Meg in 1950. That was where Theodora Keogh began. Think about that for a minute. From there she went on to publish The Double Door, a novel in which a cloistered teen heiress finds a secret door and ends up making love with her father’s paid male lover, The Fascinator, where a young girl is seduced by a sculptor, Gemini, an incest and murder narrative about twins, Street Music, a story in which a music critic falls desperately in love with a child criminal, and The Other Girl, a fictionalized retelling of the Black Dahlia murder.
And it wasn’t just her themes that ruptured the literary landscape. The formal moves she performed in each novel were every bit as daring as her contemporary male counterparts—which is probably the least interesting thing I could say, so I’ll say this as well: her formal moves interrogated subjectivity from the specific site of a woman’s body.
Like many of her characters, she also lived a full and novel-worthy life in France. She was dancer. She was friends with all things and people Paris Review, including the Plimpton. She was a designer, she worked for Vogue, she divorced and remarried, she bought a tugboat and married its captain, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, she divorced and remarried again.
She kept a Margay as a pet; it nibbled her ear into a different shape.
And she wrote nine formidable novels.
So why haven’t you heard of her?
It’s a good question, isn’t it.
With Pharos’ re-release of My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart, we can turn away from the glitz and gleam of the market, away from “women’s writing,” and look back at what a woman writing looked like on the page. In My Name Is Rose, by alternating between first person and third person, Theodora gives us an unhappily married woman who writes her second self alive through a passionate affair only available in the pages of her journal. A passionate affair with an underage boy. What emerges is the crisis between two women—the women we are from the inside-out and the women we are told to be by cultural scripts of “wife” and “mother.” Written in 1956.
Similarly, in The Tattooed Heart, a girl nearing adolescence spends a summer with her grandmother and discovers a younger boy in the wooded hills of the Long Island shore. The two revel in the younger boys childhood fantasies, almost as if it is possible to hover at the cusp of things, until the adult world around them shatters the possibility space of sexuality and creativity.
It’s as if all of her novels meant to explore the form and content of passion—what territories of the body, life and language are available?
As Joan Schenkar wrote in her wonderful essay “The Late, Great, Theodora Keogh” which appeared in The Paris Review Daily, “But if passion is Keogh’s real subject, it’s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.”
Thrillingly, then, we get a chance to go back, down, under. Like Anais Nin. Like Virginia Woolf. Like Gertrude Stein. Like Marguerite Duras. Like Djuna Barnes. Other women writing who I keep digging up to reassure myself that we always knew exactly what we were, and are, doing.
Lidia Yuknavitch
THE TATTOOED HEART
to Hal Vursell
CHAPTER ONE
Twilight turned June’s reflection into a shadow. Slowly, as though by witchcraft, the mirror rendered back to her the hues of her flesh, the twin gleams of her eyes, the tawn of her hair, refused all but the nebulous outline of a young girl.
“Shall I turn on the light?” asked June aloud of the room.
But she was listless and did nothing, simply stood on there and felt the soft yet chilly night breeze contract her heart.
Half a year ago (how long it seemed!) June had been put to bed with one of those fevers that come from raw milk. She remembered herself quite well from those days: a thin, sinewy child, wild and rough as either of her two brothers. What had happened to that child? Where had she gone? Ah, she had vanished during those feverish nights and in those languid mornings she had disappeared, because the June who had risen lately could not have much to do with the June who had lain down. That homely drink of milk from which she had swallowed fever had contained, it seemed, another germ as well: the more ruthless one of adolescence. Yes, somewhere during the hazy aches of her illness, June’s childhood had gone forever. It was unfair. She had had no chance to say goodbye, no chance to make ready for the next guest.
June was displeased by the shape in the cupboard mirror. She saw herself as thickened, softened and spoiled, without purity of line. Her legs, because of a new fullness in her thighs, appeared shorter, her waist too small above her hips. Then, too, the dark, changing flowers of her bosom dismayed her and rubbed against her clothes. June was still weak from being in bed and was not allowed out or downstairs, so she was free to contemplate for hours these differences in her person.
As