Margo Jefferson’s New Memoir Experiments With the Form in Startling Ways

CONSTRUCTING A NERVOUS SYSTEM
A Memoir
By Margo Jefferson
197 pages. Pantheon Books. $27.

If Margo Jefferson had gone into one other career — cabinetmaking, let’s say — she’d be the sort to attract and redraw plans for a cupboard, construct and tinker with the cupboard, stand again to take a look at the cupboard from each angle, probe the aim of woodworking, take a break to go look at 2,000 different cupboards, then disassemble her personal product and begin from scratch with various instruments, creating an object that now not resembled a cupboard however carried out all of the features of 1 in startling methods.

Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, not a cabinetmaker (that I do know of), however that is the spirit by which her second memoir, “Setting up a Nervous System,” proceeds. Her experiment is immediately efficient.

The e-book is a companion to Jefferson’s first memoir, “Negroland,” which gained a Nationwide Guide Critics Circle Award in 2016. “Negroland” instructed the story of rising up amid the Black bourgeoisie of Chicago; Jefferson’s father was a distinguished physician and her mom a trendy socialite. Margo and her sister, Denise, have been despatched to ballet class and kitted up in matching wool coats with Persian lamb collars; they mastered orthopedically right posture and crisp speech. Poise, poise, poise.

In “Negroland,” Jefferson requested: “What has made and maimed me?” Her new e-book begins by cross-examining what that “me” consists of, posing the query of tips on how to creator a memoir while you chafe in opposition to the idea of authority. Two options come to thoughts. One, go mad. Two, redraw the boundaries of the style. Jefferson selects Choice 2, and the e-book’s title is a sly description of the challenge, with “nervous system” referring to not anatomical fibers and cells however to the supplies — “chosen, imposed, inherited, made up” — that jumble collectively into an id. And that will, with talent, be coaxed right into a narrative.

A fast flip by means of the pages would possibly set off alarm bells for these terrified of italics, daring sort, capital letters, dictionary definitions and chunky quotations. However it is a e-book for deep submergence, not fast flipping. That is appointment studying. Clear the schedule and commit.

Issuing instructions just like the above is one in every of Jefferson’s methods. “Learn on,” she orders at one level. At one other, discussing Bud Powell, she insists: “Don’t pity him.” She writes within the first and second individual — and in addition, as a result of why not, within the voice of Bing Crosby. She borrows the self-esteem of a forensic procedural to analyze Willa Cather’s work. There are letters, calls to motion, track lyrics, aphorisms, annotations, unearthed journal entries, a concept of minstrelsy. There are excerpts from Charlotte Brontë, Katherine Mansfield, Ida B. Wells, Czeslaw Milosz; allusions to Beckett, Robert Louis Stevenson and Dante.

It takes a powerful sensibility to make all of this jump-cutting not solely coherent however hypnotic. Jefferson’s sensibility is one in every of exquisitely private engagement with artwork. Sure, a part of the e-book is a hypertextual rumination on the character of memoir, and there’s a dusting of conventional autobiography — she writes about her father’s melancholy, her instructing profession, a love affair — however within the dance between autobiographer and critic, the critic is main.

Early within the e-book, Jefferson recollects retrieving a handful of Ella Fitzgerald information from her dad and mom’ assortment. Having been raised to exalt bodily impeccability, a preteen Jefferson was squeamish on the sight of Fitzgerald’s “sweat and dimension” on album covers and TV appearances. She couldn’t reconcile the voice’s model of femininity with the truth that Fitzgerald possessed purposeful sudoriferous glands. In revisiting her personal discomfort, Jefferson expounds on the connection between Black girls and sweat, labor and glamour.

These encounters with artists — Powell, Josephine Baker, Harriet Beecher Stowe and past — are ravishing and rigorous, however they’re interrupted with fretting and self-admonishment. “I’ve reached an emotional stalemate right here,” Jefferson writes, and “This confessing and reckoning have exhausted me” and “STOP! Gather your self, Professor Jefferson.” A drill sergeant has infiltrated the nervous system.

Coming upon one in every of these sentences is a jolt of surprising intimacy, like glancing throughout the road and seeing a neighbor wander bare previous the window. In “Negroland,” Jefferson wrote in regards to the semiotics of self-presentation — how an unmoisturized elbow or knee signaled deficiency, whereas a closet stuffed with occasion-specific pocketbooks stood for irreproachable preparedness. Her jittery bursts energize a writing fashion that’s equally meticulous.

I hesitate to ascribe Jefferson’s examined self-consciousness fully to gender or race or class. All of these substances matter an incredible deal, however additionally it is true that some persons are born self-conscious and a few individuals turn into that approach, whereas others by no means do. (Everyone knows specimens of that supernatural anomaly, the confident human.) I say this to not obscure the specificity of Jefferson’s life — the expression of which is the purpose of any memoir — however to situate it in an inventive custom that features Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo and Ingmar Bergman: ruthless self-excavation that’s scrupulously freed from solipsism.

Jefferson writes about craving “license” as a younger girl, dispensation to play “with kinds and personae deemed past my vary.” She has — together with different latest innovators within the type, like Carmen Maria Machado, Pleasure Harjo and Maggie Nelson — grabbed maintain of that permission slip and torn it to shreds.