{"id":19801,"date":"2011-08-22T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2011-08-22T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=19801"},"modified":"2011-08-23T12:49:09","modified_gmt":"2011-08-23T16:49:09","slug":"the-late-great-theodora-keogh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/22\/the-late-great-theodora-keogh\/","title":{"rendered":"The Late, Great Theodora Keogh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Theodora Keogh in Paris, 1948. Copyright Karl Bissinger.<\/p><\/div>\n

For the last fifteen or sixteen years I\u2019ve been making portraits of people (in rich, resonant, analog sound) with an old cassette recorder: spoken-word portraits.<\/p>\n

In my library in Paris are hundreds of magnetic tapes stacked in their fragile, transparent cases. Each tape carries the specific testimony of a single person who has lent time, presence, and a few vibrantly unreliable anecdotes to my experiments in biography.<\/p>\n

Like Ortega y Gasset\u2019s definition of culture\u2014culture is what remains after you\u2019d forgotten everything you\u2019ve ever read\u2014these tapes are an archive of minds and memories reduced to their absolute essences. Every one of them is worth a thousand photographs to me.<\/p>\n

Which is why I\u2019m kicking myself that I never recorded the voice of my wonderful friend, the late, great Theodora Roosevelt Keogh. <\/p>\n

From the end of the forties to 1961, the beautiful, talented, temperamental, generous American expatriate dancer and writer Theodora Roosevelt Keogh (1919\u20132008) wrote nine vivid novels as sensational, in their way, as anything you\u2019ll ever read.<\/p>\n

She wrote her novels the way people used to write them: on rackety typewriters in walk-up apartments and hotel rooms in Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9<\/strong>s<\/em> on Paris\u2019s Left Bank, where she\u2019d moved in the late forties with her new husband, the designer and illustrator Tom Keogh. This was after she graduated from Miss Chapin\u2019s School, made a formal debut in New York Society, dipped into Radcliffe, and ran away in wartime to dance in a ballet company in Rio de Janeiro (and high-kick at the Copacabana) with Alexander Iolas, the future New York gallerist.<\/p>\n

Fifty years later, gossamer webs of gossip still cling to Theodora Keogh\u2019s life. No, her pet margay did not<\/em> bite off her ear in the Chelsea Hotel. Stimulated by the atmosphere of that once-lively refuge, the margay took a few irritated nips off an earlobe, after which Theodora styled her hair a little differently.<\/p>\n

And, no, her second husband, Tommy O\u2019Toole, wasn\u2019t<\/em> a tugboat captain. More like a steward on the Circle Line when Theodora met him, although he and Theodora did live on a tugboat in New York harbor while she was writing a novel in a neighborhood bar.<\/p>\n

For a woman who grew up without the money her social advantages implied\u2014she was the namesake of her grandfather, President Theodore Roosevelt, and the favorite niece of his witty daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth\u2014Theodora always took care to select her own society. But she never had to choose between living it up or writing it down. She did both\u2014and at the same time, too.<\/p>\n

Keogh\u2019s novels are mostly set in places she\u2019d lived in intensely and knew by heart: the Upper East Side of New York, the Left Bank of Paris, the North Shore of Long Island.<\/p>\n

Manhattan is a great beast in her New York books, prowling restively between vaguely tidal waters like a dragon getting ready to doss down for the night. She made her Paris quartier (our<\/em> Paris quartier, since I live around the corner from where she wrote) come alive in visceral prose as the postwar terrain it was, throbbing with impermissible desires and criminal thoughts and centered on a street shaped, appropriately, like a goblet of wine.<\/p>\n

A natural democrat, she enlivened her work with immigrants, foreign accents, and character actors from the underclasses. In two of her books, homosexuals are the major protagonists (The Double Door<\/em>, The Other Girl<\/em>). In others, beautiful women have affairs with underage boys or traduce their conventional husbands in states of magically-compelled trance (The Fascinator<\/em>, The Mistress<\/em>, My Name Is Rose<\/em>).<\/p>\n

She never stopped exploring the secrets of the flesh. In Meg<\/em> (1950), the father of a twelve-year-old girl is magnetically drawn to his daughter\u2019s best school friend\u2014and that attraction is returned. A middle-aged music critic in Paris nearly abandons his new marriage for an eleven-year-old child criminal from the streets, and they kiss (Street Music<\/em>). An entire Egyptian family falls in love with a chic New York model past her prime (The Mistress<\/em>). Adult twins make love and suppress a murder (Gemini<\/em>). A teenage heiress, kept apart from life like a princess in a tower, enters a secret door and sleeps with her father\u2019s paid male lover (The Double Door<\/em>).<\/p>\n

But if passion is Keogh\u2019s real subject, it\u2019s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Keogh and her margay at the Chelsea Hotel. Photograph by Morgan Wilson.<\/p><\/div>\n

You could say that Serendipity\u2014the good luck goddess of life-writing\u2014led me to Theodora Keogh. And you\u2019d be nearly right.<\/p>\n

It was winter, it was Switzerland, and the library I was researching in for my biography of Patricia Highsmith kept its archives inhumanly chilled. I was bone cold most of the time. I hadn\u2019t heard of the novel Meg<\/em> or of its bodacious author\u2014but when I found Highsmith\u2019s youthful, heated, uncharacteristically positive review of Keogh\u2019s first book, it was like a touch of the tropics on all that permafrost.<\/p>\n

Never one to praise women out of bed, Highsmith loved Keogh\u2019s novel\u2014really<\/em> loved it\u2014and I could see why. The character of Meg is modeled on Theodora as a child: a willful, adventurous twelve-year-old who covers her skinned knees in tattered pants, joins a gang of bad boys, blackmails a teacher, carries a knife, calls out a child molester, and likes to refer to herself as Roland. If Highsmith had ever written an entire novel about a child (God forbid), it might have looked a little like this one.<\/p>\n

Curious about the only woman writer Highsmith had ever smiled on in print, I wrote to Keogh in North Carolina, where she\u2019d been living reclusively in the country for decades: widowed, now, from a third marriage; her work as a novelist put away. And she wrote back in her large, loopy handwriting with its lovely, lousy spelling\u2014the spelling of a woman who has lived a long time in other languages.<\/p>\n

I was the first person in ages, she wrote, who wanted to talk to her about her novels: her first new fan. (She has many new fans now.) She\u2019d already mislaid my letter and forgotten my name\u2014no doubt, she added, this was because her mother told her that people love to listen to the sound of their own names. She was delighted to hear from me. She still did a ballet barre every day. Could we speak as soon as possible?<\/p>\n

And so Theodora Keogh and I met each other in the old-fashioned way: first by correspondence and then by telephone. We made a relationship with our voices, which suited us both. And we kept on talking on the telephone, weekly, for hours on end (in rich, resonant, analog sound, because we\u2019d both held on to our landline telephones), for the next six years, until she died. I read her attentively; she did the same for me.<\/p>\n

God, she was charming. All Theodora\u2019s talents were on display in our conversations: her gift for detailed description (her vignettes were like Vermeers); her sensual apprehension of the world; her ardent and very specific recollections.<\/p>\n

She loved the aristocratic, small-nosed look of animals that come from the East\u2014like Arab racehorses and her Nubian goats. She thought white wine was interesting only when you could see the Rhine through a glass of it. Anything about Jeanne d\u2019Arc<\/em> interested her. She could recite long passages of poetry\u2014reading aloud had been a big feature of her Roosevelt childhood\u2014and she had a terrific memory for old songs in French and American. She was always<\/em> excited about something.<\/p>\n

It was Theodora\u2019s amour propre that kept us from meeting face to face. She said she felt \u201cdiminished\u201d physically, but \u201cherself\u201d on the telephone. In her early eighties when we started speaking, Theodora could have passed a voice audition for a worldly thirty-eight-year-old. Her voice was an emollient\u2014smooth, chaleureuse<\/em>, empathetic, and buffered by an elegant American diction which has been almost lost in the present day. Like so many attractive women, she\u2019d lied heroically about her age to lovers, to husbands, and to at least one U.S. government agency: the Department of Social Security still thinks she was born ten years later than she was.<\/p>\n

I loved Theodora dearly, admired her tremendously, and could never bring myself to record her.<\/p>\n

For now, the voice of her brilliant contemporary, the composer and diarist Ned Rorem, has to mark her place for all of us:<\/p>\n

\n

When I knew her in the nineteen-fifties, Theodora was our best American writer\u2014certainly our best female writer. With her (estranged) husband, Tom, they represented all that was good about America to everyone in Paris.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>Joan Schenkar\u2019s latest book is <\/em>The Talented Miss Highsmith<\/a> (Picador, 2011). She lives and works in Paris and Greenwich Village.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last fifteen or sixteen years I\u2019ve been making portraits of people (in rich, resonant, analog sound) with an old cassette recorder: spoken-word portraits. In my library in Paris are hundreds of magnetic tapes stacked in their fragile, transparent cases. Each tape carries the specific testimony of a single person who has lent time, 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