The Blazing World

Rachel Briefman (written statement)

I agreed to contribute to this book only after long conversations with Maisie and Ethan Burden, as well as with Bruno Kleinfeld, the companion of Harriet’s last years. I also corresponded with Professor Hess and became convinced that this book about my friend Harriet Burden would illuminate aspects of her life and art for the many people who have now discovered her work.

Harriet and I met in 1952 when we were twelve years old at Hunter High School. There were only girls at Hunter then. I sat beside Harriet in French class and, before I ever said a word to her, I watched her draw. Although she seemed to be wholly engaged in the class — always ready with a conjugation — she never stopped drawing. She drew faces, hands, bodies, machines, and flowers inside her notebooks, outside her notebooks, on bits of scrap paper, anywhere she could find a blank surface. Her hand appeared to move by itself, idly, but with uncanny precision. From a few lines sprang characters, scenes, still lifes. Who was this tall, solemn girl with the magic hand? I told her I was impressed, and she turned to me, waved her hand in the air, put on a faux-spooky voice, and said, “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The horror movie starring Peter Lorre featured a musician’s amputated hand that committed murders and played the piano.

Years later in medical school, I read about neurological patients with alien hand syndrome. Some brain-damaged people have found themselves with an upstart hand that does exactly the opposite of what she or he wills it to do: unbuttoning a shirt that has just been buttoned, turning off the water before the glass is full, even masturbating in public. In general, alien hands cause dismay and havoc. At least one rebellious hand in the medical literature tried to strangle its owner. After I had read about these limbs with minds of their own, I called Harriet to tell her, and she laughed so hard she came down with a fit of the hiccoughs. I mention this because the joke still resonates. Harriet, who soon became Harry to me, was smart, gifted, and exquisitely sensitive. She could sulk for hours in silence when we were together, and then, just when I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she would throw her arms around me and apologize. Although I wouldn’t have said it at the time, her drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains.

We studied together, and we daydreamed together. I imagined myself in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, marching down hospital corridors, ordering around nurses, and Harriet saw herself as a great artist or poet or intellectual — or all three. We were intimates as girls can be, unhampered by the masculine posing that plagues boys. We talked on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t. We shared our torments and analyzed the girls in our class. We were pretentious children who read books we didn’t understand and embraced politics we knew little about, but our pretenses protected us. We were a team of two against a hostile world of adolescent hierarchies. My mother once said to me, “Rachel, all you really need is one good friend, you know.” I found that friend in Harriet.

Too much time has passed for me to recapture us as we were then. I have treated children and adolescents in my practice for many years now, and my knowledge of their stories, as well as my own analysis, has surely reconfigured my memories. Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. The fact that I knew Harriet until she died in 2004 has also changed my understanding of our early friendship. I do know that the passionate girl became a passionate woman, an omnivore driven by an immense appetite for ingesting as much learning as she possibly could. That hunger never left her. There were other forces that impeded her path.

I have a photograph of us taken when we were twelve or thirteen in my parents’ apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. It requires no effort to return to the room. The apartment’s spaces live in my bones, but I must work harder to penetrate the young strangers in the snapshot. Tall Harry stands beside short Rachel. We are wearing cotton dresses, cinched at the waist by matching belts, and saddle shoes with anklets. Harriet’s hair is pulled back in a ponytail and mine is loose. Harriet’s body is blooming; mine is just beginning to bud. Neither of us looks comfortable in front of the camera, but we have acquiesced to the command “Cheese,” and the result is two strained, if not false, expressions. When I look at the picture now, I am struck by its banality, but also by how much it hides. As a vehicle of memory, it resists inner reality. The document of an instant, it records what we looked like then. The high feeling that ran between us, the secrecy of our confidences, the pact of friendship we made — all of that is missing.

Harriet and I were “good girls,” high-achieving, cooperative students who might as well have had gold and silver stars plastered to our foreheads; but my best friend’s character had a saintly streak I lacked, a rigid moral imperative that probably came from her Protestant father. I liked Professor Burden. Remote as he was, he was never less than kind to me, and when he talked to us, I remember that the corner of one side of his mouth would often move upward in an expression of amused irony, but he rarely showed his teeth. Unlike my expansive, loudmouthed father (who had his own problems), Harriet’s father was physically awkward, prone to self-conscious pats of his daughter’s arm or quick, hard hugs that were more like speeding collisions than expressions of affection. When he stood up from a chair, he seemed to rise for a long time, and when he was finally erect, he loomed over us, a rangy, thin, pale, balding being. He liked to expound to us on philosophy and politics in a language that was often beyond our comprehension, but Harriet would listen to him rapt, as if God himself were talking. I don’t remember any self-righteousness in his speeches. He believed in tolerance and academic freedom, and, like my own parents, he railed against the monstrosity that was the Red Scare. But it is not what is said that makes us who we are. More often it is what remains unspoken. Even as a girl I felt the coiled-up tension in the man as he sat in his large chair, his long fingers curled around a martini with two olives. As far as I could tell, his thoughts were usually elsewhere.

As little children during the war, Harriet and I had lived without our fathers, and we remembered their return. My father never saw combat, but Professor Burden had been part of an intelligence unit in Europe. According to Harriet, he had never said a word to her about it, not one word. Once, when she asked him about those years, he picked up a book and began to read, as if the words had never come out of her mouth. Before he went off to war, he married, and Harriet knew that her father had alienated his family because the girl of his dreams was Jewish. It wasn’t a permanent rift; the Burdens came to nominally accept Ruth Fine and their granddaughter, but the Burdens were snobs — pure and simple. No money, but heaps of old-money notions that included an unarticulated anti-Semitism. Although Harriet’s father had rejected the pinched world of his parents, he was nevertheless its product. He worked long hours, was meticulous, dutiful, and self-punishing. Praise for his wife and daughter was meted out in small, grudging doses. I never saw him irritable or angry, but then, his self-restraint was so powerful it prevented all spontaneity. It was her father who came up with the nickname “Harry.” As a psychoanalyst, it is hard for me not to see a wish parading openly in the “pet” name.

I marveled at the absence of all bickering and banter in the Burden household. Ruth yelled at Harry from time to time, but never at her husband. My own parents were subject to regular melees followed by periods of standoff, and although their struggles often pained me terribly, I was more accustomed to conflict at home than Harriet was. (I also had two brothers who were masters of the choke hold.) A young person always extrapolates human reality from her own life. However anomalous that life may be to others, it is normal for the one who lives inside it every day.

At the same time, I envied the harmony in the Burden household. Ruth was affable, efficient, and appeared to believe in her wifely duties, not as a yoke but as a calling. She had a sharp sense of humor and was subject to fits of giggling, sometimes so extreme she found it hard to stop. Once, after she dropped a pot roast on the floor of the kitchen and watched it slide with its abundant juices across the floor and hit the leg of a stool, she laughed so hard the tears streamed down her face. After she recovered, Mrs. Burden scooped up the chunk of beef, popped it back into the pan, and “made a few repairs.” We ate the dinner without a word to the patriarch, but Ruth winked at Harry and me throughout the dinner, which gave me a wonderful feeling of conspiracy.

Because the pot roast chaos was an anomaly in the Burden household, it became an object of hilarity. My own mother, a translator from French and German, worked at our kitchen table. Before we ate dinner, she would shove her manuscripts to one side, and then, when she discovered drips of spaghetti sauce on her pages in the morning, she would yell, “Am I raising pigs in this family?” I now think that Ruth Burden ordered her world to keep anxiety at bay and to preserve the quiescent surface of her husband, who was roiling underneath and drank his three martinis every evening to subdue the rising floods. I liked Mrs. Burden’s touch; it was warm and affectionate, and she lavished it on Harry and sometimes on me. When I spent the night, she would tuck us in, old as we were, and I liked the feel of her hand on my forehead, liked her perfume and the sweetness of her voice saying good night to us.

After Harriet had Maisie, those passionate maternal emotions, as well as a zeal for order, seemed to take possession of her. She threw herself into motherhood and domesticity in a way that, frankly, startled me. She became her mother, not so easy because she also desperately wanted to be her father — philosopher-king. Harry and I used to meet every week for tea after she had seen her psychotherapist, a colleague of mine, Adam Fertig. One afternoon she rushed in a few minutes late and, apologizing, sat down opposite me. “Rachel,” she said, “isn’t it strange that we don’t know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves it’s shocking. We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it’s the wrong story, which means we’ve lived the wrong life.”

We talked about our stories that afternoon, about self-deception, and Harry’s fury at her lot. Neither her family story nor cultural politics nor her temperament can explain what happened to her. There are clouds in all of us, and we give names to them, but the names make divisions that aren’t always there. There were storms inside Harry, whirlwinds and tornadoes that went their various destructive ways. Her suffering ran deep, and her suffering did not begin as an adult. I remember her standing in front of the mirror, tears streaming down her face. She was probably fifteen or sixteen. “I hate the way I look. Why did I turn out this way?”

The popular girls at Hunter bragged on Tuesday about having dates for Friday and Saturday nights. Harry and I pretended to keep ourselves aloof from such petty concerns, but what teenager doesn’t want to be admired and loved? What person, for that matter? I suppose her appearance was the arena where the more pernicious aspects of America touched her — the sense that she was too big to be attractive to men. The truth is Harriet was striking. She had a beautiful, strong, voluptuous body. Men stared at her on the street, but she wasn’t a flirt, and she wasn’t socially graceful or prone to small talk. Harriet was shy and solitary. In company, she was usually quiet, but when she spoke, she was so forceful and intelligent, she frightened people, especially boys her own age. They simply didn’t know what to make of her. Harry sometimes wished she were a boy, and I can say that had she been one, her route would have been easier. Awkward brilliance in a boy is more easily categorized, and it conveys no sexual threat.

Not long ago, I reread the book Harry loved best when we were in high school: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. We often read the same novels, and the two of us had polished off Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, all of Austen, and much of Dickens by then, but Frankenstein became Harriet’s archetypal text, a fable of the self, a scripture for the reality of Harry Burden. Although I was taken by the story as a foreboding myth about the developments of modern medicine, I did not read it again and again. Dr. Frankenstein and the book’s vapid female characters held little interest for Harry. The person she loved was the monster, and she used to quote long passages from his chapters by heart, declaiming them like an old-fashioned poet, which made me laugh, even though I was bewildered by her fanatical attachment to the Miltonic creature.

Reading the book again as an adult, however, I felt a door had been opened. I walked through it and found Harry. I found Harry in a novel that had been written by a nineteen-year-old girl on a bet. In 1816, Mary Shelley was spending the summer in Switzerland with her husband, their neighbor Lord Byron, and another person less celebrated whose name I cannot remember. The challenge was to write a ghost story for the pleasure of the others. Mary was the only one who fulfilled the bargain. In the preface, she writes that the story came to her in a “waking dream,” as one image after another possessed her. She watched as a “pale student of unhallowed arts” created a monster.

“Behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

It is impossible to forget the novel’s essential story. I knew the terrible being Frankenstein makes is so lonely and misunderstood that his very existence is cursed. I knew his awful isolation is transformed into vengeance, but I had forgotten, or probably had never felt before, the ferocity of his feeling — his fury, grief, and bloodlust. And then I came across these lines spoken by the monster in Chapter 15:

“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions steadily recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

I felt as if Harry’s ghost were speaking to me.