FOLEY: The problem of sex was a terrible one in the fifties, especially in the psychoanalytical community. They all believed in free sexual expression while at the same time they maintained a rigid sense of gender roles.

WEBSTER: That's the killer.

FOLEY: You think of Wilhelm Reich, whom you don't mention but who is certainly relevant. He was tossed into jail, where he died, for advocating that teenagers have controlled situations where they could have sex with one another.

WEBSTER: The way twelve year olds are supposedly doing now!

FOLEY: Yeah, if they're not murdering each other. "Murderous fantasies" are certainly a current issue! But you mentioned your mother's "fragile shape." Here is another fine passage from the book: the account of your mother's suicide attempt.

WEBSTER: (reading):

One morning, a few days after I gave Mother my poem about courage, I was sitting in my room reading when Weasal ["the immense black lady who cooked for us"] came in and asked me if I'd go see about her. "Your mother's usually up around six and it's past ten. Maybe she's not feeling well. Why don't you just take a look?" "Why don't you," I answered, burrowing down in my chair, knowing perfectly well that Weasal wouldn't take a liberty like that. Then I looked hard at her and saw she was really worried. She stood there shifting from one foot to another, her enormous weight of flesh straining the fabric of her uniform. "Okay," I said.

The scene takes place in a perpetually present tense. It is the moment when my mother became someone else, familiar but strangely alien. I walk down the hall and open the door of her bedroom a crack and look in. She is lying in her bed with her head turned the other way. I can hear her snoring lightly. I tiptoe around the side of the bed expecting her to startle and jump up, ask me why I'm disturbing her. Can't I see she needs to sleep? But she doesn't move. Her mouth is slightly open and I can see the veins just under the skin. I touch her arm gently. "Mom?" She doesn't respond.

I take her arm, just below the strap of her peach silk nightgown; my fingers sink into the soft skin. I start to shake her, first softly then harder. "Mom," I say. "Mom, wake up, Mom." Her head flops back and forth, but she doesn't open her eyes. For a moment more, I stare at the little violet veins in the lids, then I see an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the floor. I run back to the kitchen and tell Weasal to call an ambulance.

After that the whole rescue scene unrolls like a film in slow motion. I was watching, but somehow I was disassociated from the men in helmets and black rubber boots who came through the front door, one of them incongruously holding an ax, and rushed down the hall to the bedroom. A few minutes later they came out with Mother strapped to a stretcher.

I had been one girl when I went into the room and another by the time the firemen came to take my mother to the hospital. What she had done made a breach of trust between us that never healed.

FOLEY: That's a marvelous passage. As you read, I couldn't help thinking of your mother as Eurydice and of yourself as Orpheus. It's a deep myth for both you and your mother. You add, sadly, "We had become a family that was dependent on outside support." You believe in the family!

WEBSTER: Yes, I do.

FOLEY: Despite the experience with your mother and father. You felt that yours was a dysfunctional family, but you believe in functional families.

WEBSTER: Yes, I do. I think that if I have one value that's replaced my mother's belief in genius which you were asking me about before, I think it is love and the family. Love between men and women and love for the children.

FOLEY: Your mother believed in the family, too, but she was often in a state of denial. Denial is a big deal in this book, too. That's something which, as you say, runs in your family. Let's talk about the two mothers and the two Brendas. This seemed to me striking, that you conceived of your mother as doubled--not just "good mother" and "bad mother," but in a certain sense that. There is of course the mother before the suicide attempt and the mother after. And you conceive of yourself as doubled also. What was the doubleness in your mother?

WEBSTER: I talk about it later, after she's tried to commit suicide after my father died, when she became sort of a raging maniac on the one hand and a good--she was never a really good mother but she was quiet. When my father was alive she was kept in control and was fascinating and brilliant and beautiful. Never a good mother because she was cranky and nervous. But she was not violent and rageful, the way she was when she was crazy.

FOLEY: What I was thinking of was the split that you perceive as her glamor and her art vs. her treatment of you. For example, there's a passage in the book in which she's helping other people, and she's a wonderful mother--or at least something like a wonderful mother--to these other people, which she'd never been to you.

WEBSTER: That's true. She did in her older age have young people coming to her every night for dinner. When she died, they came to me at the funeral and said, "You're so lucky, you had such a wise woman for a mother, she helped me with this dilemma, I wanted to have a baby, she helped me find a doctor, she helped me do this." And in her art--and when she helped other artists. She would talk about the art she loved, which was a generous art that poured down like sun from heaven and filled people up with goodness. And I would always think, "Why couldn't I get some of that?" It was all going into the art. And she was wonderful with these young people--disciples almost--of hers and other artists. She was extremely helpful to them.

FOLEY: You regard yourself as a "realist" artist and as a "good" writer rather than a writer of "genius."

WEBSTER: Yes.

FOLEY: As opposed to your mother, who is not a "realist" but a "Romantic." Robert Creeley wrote in his book Echoes, "whatsoever [is] �€˜Rome' [is] home." He thinks we're all Romantics! But you've studied the Romantics, and this too has to do with the two Brendas. There's the Brenda who's the very serious scholar and, despite protestations to the contrary, rather ambitious: doing things that nobody else has done before. If you were a "careful" scholar, you would say, "Well, I'm just going to write the way other people have written." Lots and lots of academics have gotten by doing that. Not you! You decided to do a study of Yeats and a study of Blake that were quite controversial. (Yeats: A Psychoanalytic Study, Stanford & Macmillan, 1973 and Blake's Prophetic Psychology, Macmillan, 1983.) Some people didn't like these books and some people loved them--some people thought they were really eye-opening. You were writing about things that people hadn't noticed. Even with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem that's been written about abundantly, you notice new things about it. You were doing original work--which placed you at risk.

WEBSTER: And it got me in trouble. My advisors at the university were not very helpful about it. They even told me, "Why are you being so ambitious? Why don't you just take one little thing and do that. Why do you think you have to do all the works of Yeats? Isn't that too much for you, dear?" (Laughter)

FOLEY: Yes, you're so sweet, but don't threaten us! But that's exactly what you did. So there was risk-taking, and risk-taking in the area of the Romantics.

WEBSTER: And I did dedicate the Blake book to my mother. I did think of her as another crazy visionary artist. Blake is wonderful, but in his prophetic books I felt he was really going over the edge.

FOLEY: But the place where you couldn't be risk-taking--in fact where risk was danger--was the family.

WEBSTER: That's right. I so much wanted to be a good mother because I felt mine had been such a bad mother, and I so much wanted to give my children the things she hadn't given us.

FOLEY: What is "a good mother"? What does a good mother do?

WEBSTER: Well, I had it a little bit wrong. I thought it was somebody who puts herself totally at the disposal of the children. So that, for instance, I would never shut my study door. They always could come in and interrupt me. I felt like I wasn't my own, I was their resource. They may not feel that that worked.

FOLEY: What did your daughter Lisa say to you at one point? You have a dim sum dinner with Lisa, and Lisa says, "I'm not the same as you, Mom," and you say you finally get it. Lisa says, "That's what I've been trying to tell you for so long." You're saying you're putting yourself at the disposal of these other creatures who are forcing you to behave in certain ways towards them. Lisa was saying that you thought of her, she felt, as an extension of yourself, and in fact she was different.

WEBSTER: Yes, that's the negative side. I was so closely identified with my project of being this wonderful mother that I-- And I foisted others of my bad ideas on them as well. For instance, I fell into thinking of my son as a genius, which was hideously bad for him.

FOLEY: But very much part of your upbringing--especially given that he was the male child. It may be that the whole concept of "genius" is misdirected. This is a concept that could be dropped. The idea of genius is a way of browbeating people in some respects and allowing for bad behavior.

WEBSTER: Yes, it does allow for bad behavior. Very much.

FOLEY: There are lots of wonderful writers whom one wouldn't think of in that way at all-- as geniuses. It's a Romantic view of the writer. Freud is a Romantic, really. One of the things you say that's really wonderful at the end of the book--and in a way it's a kind of moral of the book--is, "The great thing about being human is that you can recreate yourself, not by analyzing but by active imagining. A difficult family isn't fate. It dawned on me that I was beginning to hope again." Here you're saying that through art--"active imagining"--you can recreate yourself, even recreate your whole childhood, which is one of the projects of this book. Having said that, however, you also told me that there were certain things that your family insisted on. This after all is a true story you're writing, one involving not only yourself but other people. There were certain things your family told you you couldn't write about.

WEBSTER: Well, they said, "Either you be a mother or--" One of my daughters said to me, "Either we will admire your art and be a part of that part of your life or we'll be your daughters." In this case they asked me to take out certain things which were really sort of important for my story.

FOLEY: Both your daughters?

WEBSTER: Actually, all three children. They all three wanted me to take it out. And I did. With great turmoil, because--

FOLEY: What did your husband Ira say?

WEBSTER: He probably thought I should take it out too. Because of the family. It would be terrible to have a book that was a little stronger perhaps but that left your family feeling that their privacy had been invaded.

FOLEY: So your mother was right! The children get in the way of the book!

WEBSTER: Well, in certain instances... Then when I see people who do the opposite, I get really mad, probably because I would have liked to be able to do it but I couldn't. I couldn't allow myself to ruin my peace with the people I care about.

FOLEY: Just as a side comment--I don't want to dwell on this too much because The Last Good Freudian is a very good book no matter what--but it sure sounds to me like you were being blackmailed!

WEBSTER: That's a thought.

FOLEY: Changing the subject, you were also analyzed by Kurt Eissler, and there's a lot in the book about him. Jewishness is an issue of the book too, as it is of psychoanalysis, and we haven't talked about that. All this is material for another program. But at the end of the book the word "fun"--which is associated with your husband, Ira--comes back. You're talking about your son's wife, Monique, whom you like very, very much and who is an artist. Your son and daughter-in-law have children and the children don't seem to be in the situation your children were in--or which you were in as a child.

WEBSTER: (reading):

Unlike my mother, [Monique] has a refreshingly unpretentious attitude about her rather remarkable success. The art world is fickle, she says; today they like me, tomorrow they may not. The main thing is to keep working. Her work has wit as a central element. She plays with the traditions of the older generation of artists--making her paint drip upside down, for instance, or at improbable angles, making her flat shapes interact in amusing ways, giving her works irreverent titles. She seems to be saying, look here, art doesn't have to be tragic or dead serious. It can be fun. It's only coincidence, I know, but she seems like the antidote to my family myth of artistic gloom, madness, and suicide. She is the living proof that you can be a good artist and a good mother at the same time and be full of joy as well.

FOLEY: Brenda Webster, thank you so much for being on the show.

WEBSTER: Thanks, Jack.

Jack Foley