Two tales of one city divided by class
Them: A Memoir of Parents
By Francine du Plessix Gray
The Penguin Press, 530 pp., $29.95
Welfare Brat
By Mary Childers
Bloomsbury, 272 pp., $23.95
Tales of immigrant life and social betterment have long been the stuff of memoir. But memoirists, necessarily focused on their own backyards, generally aren't positioned to report on both ends of the social spectrum at once. Considered together as two halves of one aspect of the American experience, the publication this month of two books that happen to hail from opposite sides of the same track provides what one book alone would not: an "Upstairs, Downstairs"-style look at the vagaries of the American dream.
As might be expected, Francine du Plessix Gray's ''Them: A Memoir of Parents" -- where all the protagonists are uncommonly beautiful, and everywhere whispers the rustle of dollars -- is already proving to be the memoir of the season, while Mary Childers's ''Welfare Brat" is not. One might suspect this is because glamorous, ambitious snobs are more fun to read about than people who subsist on government-issued cheese -- but the truth is, Gray's is an excellent book.
''Them" is blessed with the memoir's equivalent of good bones: epic scope and historic scale. The book's transcontinental, trans-generational arcs spring bravely from the Russian Revolution to Vichy France only to land -- gracefully, and on well-shod feet -- amid the dinner parties and summer homes of New York's mid-century fashion elite. But the tale is in the telling, and Gray's acumen, honesty, and elegant prose -- today in her mid-70s, she has long been an accomplished novelist and biographer -- are equal to the task of portraying her exceptionally complicated parents, while her exhaustive research and uncluttered perspective allow her to illuminate their relationship to their times in a way most memoirists cannot. The gorgeous and talented Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix and the equally talented and rapacious Alexander Liberman, one of New York's first power couples, would certainly expect as much.
Russian émigrés both, the two met in Paris in the late 1930s and together, trading on her beauty and his connections, fled war-torn Europe in 1940, not long after Tatiana's husband (and Francine's father), a French Air Force pilot, was killed. As their small child was shunted between friends and relatives, the lovers set about infiltrating New York society; within no time, she was none other than Tatiana of Saks, the era's most influential hat designer, and he was the art director of Vogue. The demands of socializing on the fashion circuit meant Francine was left alone most nights, but somehow she muddled through this neglect, seeking refuge in the company of cultured and generous family friends, excelling at Spence and Bryn Mawr.
But by the time she'd reached her mid-20s, the life her parents had created looked to Francine like so much emptiness. Indulging in the ultimate next-generation privilege she turned her back on their America, married a painter, moved to the country, and became a writer, in her own way presaging history's next tide. For by the 1960s the nation too was reinventing itself and rejecting the Libermans' world. In 1965, 23 years after she'd started designing hats for Saks, and one year after Lyndon B. Johnson declared his war on poverty, Tatiana was let go. Americans had things other than hats on their minds.
This was a development that, Mary Childers is well aware, changed her life. Growing up poor in the 1950s and '60s, she didn't have the luxury of downward mobility. One of seven children raised by a single mother in a ravaged section of the Bronx, she actually had nowhere to go but up. Very early on, she discerned as much, and shaped her late childhood and adolescence entirely around one goal: to leave the house by age 16, not pregnant and married like her older sister, but to go to college. Had she been born even 10 years earlier, she might not have become the PhD-holding higher-education consultant she is today, or have the insights and historical context needed to produce such a smart, important analysis of her own experience.
The Libermans' department stores and fashion magazines were a teenage Childers's instruction manuals. Working two jobs on top of her studies, and monastically going without things like proper food and bus rides, she was able to buy the twin sets and tweed skirts that allowed her to pass as a middle-class girl on her strolls down Madison Avenue. But social aspiration, she quickly discovered, is alienating.
Likewise, she learned, abstractions such as hope and beauty are different for the poor than for the rich. In Childers's world, there's a thin line between hope and delusion, and beauty can be a liability -- it's the pretty girls who get pregnant too young and repeat the mistakes of their mothers. When walking down unsafe streets, or riding the train late at night, Childers enjoyed ''controlling the exact degree of my ugliness. When kids on the train mock my appearance . . . I feel perversely triumphant."
As Childers's concludes, ''All lives are launched or derailed by circumstances, as well as by temperamental inclination . . . Nonetheless, economic and social class fundamentally influence the ways we cultivate our moments of inspiration and aspiration," and her book is proof enough. But taken alongside Gray's, her insistence that we can ''refuse to accept family habits and inherited disadvantages as if they are destiny" takes on a double meaning. In the end, the American dream is best realized when reinscribed.
Kate Bolick is the deputy features editor of The New York Sun. 
