Hortense Calisher
Hortense Calisher was a prominent American writer known for her diverse literary contributions, spanning from short stories to novels. Born to a Jewish family in Manhattan, she graduated from Barnard College and began her writing career in the mid-20th century, achieving early recognition through publications in *The New Yorker*. Calisher's literary works often explore themes of Jewish identity, family dynamics, and the complexities of human experience, with notable titles including *Sunday Jews* and *Tattoo for a Slave*. Her writing style is characterized by dense prose, extended metaphors, and a blend of genres, ranging from domestic narratives to science fiction.
Throughout her career, Calisher remained an influential figure in the New York literary community, serving as president of both the American Academy and the PEN American Center. She continued to write well into her later years, with her final work published at the age of ninety-three. Recognized for her commitment to language and narrative exploration, Calisher's literature reflects a deep engagement with both intellectual ideas and the intricacies of everyday life, securing her legacy as an important voice in American literature.
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Hortense Calisher
Writer
- Born: December 20, 1911
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: January 13, 2009
- Place of death: New York, New York
A novelist and short-story writer, Calisher was a major presence on the American literary scene from her publishing debut in 1951 until her death in 2009. Her work deals with the gaps between the verbal and the gestural, between the felt and the thought, and between the ideal and the real.
Early Life
Hortense Calisher (hohr-TEHNS CAL-ih-shur) was born in were chosen to Joseph Henry Calisher, a Virginian Jew with roots in England and Germany, and Hedvig Lichstern, a German Jewish immigrant to the United States. Hortense grew up in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, and she graduated from Hunter College High School and Barnard College, after which she worked for a time for the city’s social services department. In 1935, she married Heaton Bennet Heffelfinger and moved with him to Nyack, New York, where they raised two children.
Between 1935 and the late 1940’s Calisher wrote a great deal, but she did not begin to publish until The New Yorker magazine accepted several of her stories. Divorced from Heffelfinger in 1958, Calisher married the writer Curtis Harnack in 1959; their marriage lasted until her death at the age of ninety-seven. Influenced by William Shakespeare, William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry James, and the Bible, Calisher is not usually categorized as a Jewish writer, but her earliest and latest work—in particular the novel Sunday Jews (2002) and the memoir Tattoo for a Slave (2005)—deals with Jewish identity, family life, and myth in deeply sustained and often startling ways.
Life’s Work
Beginning with the publication of her story collection In the Absence of Angels in 1951, Calisher established herself as a writer of the first rank who, at the same time, often puzzled critics and readers. Her subject matter ranged from the domestic lives of newly married couples to family sagas to science fiction and fantasy; her style was usually dense, given to extended metaphor and allusion. After her second marriage and her return to New York City, Calisher became a fixture on the New York literary scene and also traveled widely, sometimes on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. She was president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1987 to 1990 and of the PEN American Center in 1986 and 1987. Interested in novels of ideas and a longtime admirer of James, the author did not shy away from questions of consciousness in all their variety. She did not ally herself with any particular school, preferring instead to shape each work into a distinctive whole. A working writer well into her ninth decade, Calisher published her last volume at the age of ninety-three. In addition to the works cited here, Calisher’s novels include Textures of Life (1963) and Journey from Ellipsia (1966); her stories have been collected in the volumes Tale for the Mirror (1962), Extreme Magic (1964), Saratoga, Hot (1985), and The Collected Short Stories (1975).
Significance
To fans such as fellow writer Cynthia Ozick, Calisher has long been a touchstone, admired for the unity of her vision and for her commitment to literature in the fullest sense. That commitment has most often taken the form of a steadfast devotion to language and to a prolonged investigation of narrative form. The companion volumes False Entry (1961) and The New Yorkers (1969), for example, create a panoramic vision of English and American society while at the same time probing the inner lives of a handful of protagonists. Though she is often a miniaturist in her stories, the author’s veneration of the life of the mind keeps her work from straying into solipsism or provincialism. “Old Stock,” for example, and the autobiographical—and early—Hester Elkin stories take readers into mostly Jewish worlds without forsaking the rest of the social scene. Calisher’s novels and stories deal repeatedly with the gaps between the verbal and the gestural, between the felt and the thought, and between the ideal and the real. Her commingling of the everyday and the abstruse is also notable, and the attention to the human is a constant presence in her work, no matter how complicated her style and philosophizing become at times. Her range and depth, as well as her incorporation of intellectual concerns into much of her work, have guaranteed her a place in the canon.
Bibliography
Calisher, Hortense. False Entry. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. The author’s first novel, written in the form of a memoir, is a fine introduction to her erudite and ambitious style, and to some of the thematic concerns that link her often disparate works to one another.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The New Yorkers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. This companion volume to False Entry paints a vivid and original portrait of several interlocking families in the New York of the postwar twentieth century.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tattoo for a Slave. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. A memoir, this book tackles the question of Jewish American slaveholding in the author’s paternal family with nuance and probity.
Churchwell, Sarah. “License to Chat.” The New York Times, January 30, 2005. A review of Tattoo for a Slave, and a comparison of Calisher to two other Jewish writers.
Noble, Holcomb. “Hortense Calisher: An Obituary.” The New York Times, January 15, 2009. Obituary of the author gives a brief overview of her career.
Snodgrass, Kathleen. “Review: On Hortense Calisher.” The Iowa Review 24, no. 3 (Fall, 1994): 185-187. In this review of one of Calisher’s novels, Snodgrass discusses the author’s interest in the visual, the perceptual, and the dynamic.