He has been trundled off stage so she can get a better look, but the effect is of a triangle losing one corner with nothing to take up the slack. Harrison's intention may have been to follow up the conclusion she came to in The Kiss : that her relationship with her father was, for them both, all about her mother. I am not sure what these lurid stories are for, nor in the end this book. When her children get lice, she scours the apartment carpets are steam-cleaned and specialists are brought in to comb everyone's heads at $60 an hour. Her account of finding a tick on her daughter's head and the elaborate ways in which she tries to kill it sounds like someone pursuing themselves into the darkest of corners. Several times, Harrison lets rip with a violence and revulsion she cannot allow when dealing with the people she so obviously loved. Nursing her mo-ther, she identifies with St Catherine, who tended a cruel nun with the same disease and made a ritual of draining the woman's tumours and drinking the pus. She touches on her anorexia and desire for mortification and of course, rapture. She is trying to convey a sealed, pseudo-English childhood of Sunday school and overdone roasts, but it becomes so airless that it is a relief to get a glimpse outside into 60s and 70s California: a room-mate with 11 self-help books, a shoplifting friend with Buddhist parents, the hippies on the beach.Ĭrushed and abused, when she does respond, Harrison is extreme. Some moments and gestures are so deliberated that readers might feel as if they were turning the pages under water. Harrison's prose is metic-ulously lyrical like aspic, it gives every detail the same gelid texture and depth. She was nursed by the 24-year-old Kathryn, who lists the medicines she administered in the same way as she lists her children's toys. Har-rison's mother "lived her short, pretty life outside the constraints of time" and died of breast cancer.
She gave in to marriage at 40, fetched up in Los Angeles and had a daughter who was every bit as imperious and indulged. The grandmother's tale is also one of fear, of a brother who "died of dirt", vegetables washed in carbolic soap and Orpington hens shipped out from England.
In a moment of active investigation (which makes clear how passively she is recounting the central story), Harrison pursues this man, who she discovers was a fraud. She refused all suitable young men, including a millionaire who added up the restaurant bill on his shirt cuff, and was once engaged to a White Russian prince who later married Elizabeth Arden.
Harrison is more relaxed when writing about her grandmother's youth in Shanghai, which seems to have been one long afternoon matinée of "Forty coolies!", a trousseau by Lanvin and travel on the Orient Express. She is pleased to have constituted "happy chaos" and "happy nonsense" and it sounds like a truly happy home, only her tone is too controlled to convey anything so spontaneous. The children's room is bursting with the things she did not get to enjoy. Seeking Rapture begins with Harrison as mother.
Certain anecdotes are repeated verbatim, perhaps because after all, Harrison finds that there is only one version of her life, one sequence. These two provide enough drama and hurt on their own, but it is still disconcerting to follow Harrison through her life story once more, this time without the defining context of her father. Harrison's focus has shifted to the mother who gave birth to her at 19 and the grandmother who brought her up. In this second memoir, the monstrous and adored father has been airbrushed out, and those who have read The Kiss will find he leaves quite a gap.
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