Almost a Memoir

Detail from Cover

Many of the stories collected in Juana Culhane’s The Tattered Lion are not exactly new, having appeared in Bird on the Wing (2011), The Celestial Monster (2008), or The Revelations of Dr. Purcell (1992). Culhane manages to make them new, however, by reframing them as something almost like a memoir. All fourteen stories, while fiction, are “influenced or haunted” by her late husband, the renowned artist and animator Shamus Culhane, whom she affectionately calls her “tattered lion.” Together, they are meant to “paint a portrait” of him and of part of their nearly forty-year relationship. Most of the stories follow two characters, Joanna and James (ciphers for Juana and Shamus, whose birthname was James), through the highs and lows of their life together: from their first encounter in an elevator to their last moments on his deathbed, from their trial separation to their eventual reunion, from the passions and insecurities of youth to the ravages and realizations of old age. What is perhaps most striking—and interesting—about the collection, however, is the way in which it ultimately fails to provide a clear portrait of either a man or a marriage. Despite a number of references to James’s career, his fascination with Mayan archaeology and Greek myth, the exotic trips he took with Joanna, and the smaller pleasures (say, a favorite Japanese restaurant) they enjoyed closer to home in New York, Culhane often flattens or avoids details of character, scene, and backstory. In lieu of these details, she offers a narrative strangely compelled by abstractions: desire and disappointment, jealousy and forgiveness, joy and grief, identity and disintegration, art and illusion.

The collection begins at the end, in effect, with “Cave of the Patriarchs,” a story that stages a quarrel between three deceased patriarchs—father, father-in-law, and second husband—over one absent (and presumably living) woman, Rosa, symbolized by a red rose withering away at the foot of their cave. Each patriarch is invested in Rosa for a different reason: her father wants her to be his protégé, her father-in-law wants her to be his lover, and her second husband (James) wants her to prove she loves only him. In keeping with its mythical quality, the story eventually resolves with the realization that the quarrel over Rosa is futile—each man already has what he really needs. Instantly, the rose regains its strength. Of course, the fact that the story is set in the afterlife suggests that this kind of resolution was not achieved in life itself. Indeed, many of the subsequent stories in The Tattered Lion show how Joanna is implicated in similar conflicts right up to—and even beyond—James’s death.

In particular, Culhane continually returns to the problem—and repercussions—of James’s jealousy and possessiveness. In “Stone Rubbings,” a visit to a site of Mayan ruins is overshadowed by the sudden news that Joanna’s father has died—news that triggers James’s own fears of abandonment. Initially, he scolds her for wanting to leave for the funeral: “You’re acting as if you’ve lost the one and only love of your life!” Though he immediately apologizes for his outburst, he betrays his jealousy again later, albeit in an altered form: “I’ll bet there isn’t one person who hasn’t loved doing this to you,” he remarks while they are making love. In this and other stories, James’s jealousy emerges, paradoxically, as both unfounded and justifiable. On the one hand, the collection offers no real evidence of Joanna’s unfaithfulness to James—aside from a one-night stand during their separation, she seems to have been a loyal wife. On the other hand, she continually doubts her desires and intentions, wondering, for instance, if she really was too attached to her father growing up, and if it is possible that her heart does not belong entirely to James.

This self-doubt emerges...