Rain Mountain
Review by Walter Cummins
Stephanie Dickinson is drawn to giving voice to people in physical and psychic pain, characters—real and fictional—at the fringes of society or, as in this book, celebrities famous for their talent but whose lives share the afflictions of the little known. Her previous books about the noted have been Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg and the award-winning Blue Swan, Back Swan: The Trakl Diaries. Now she links the fates of Jean Harlow and Bessie Smith, icons of the early twentieth century, one white, one black, in a series of brief revelations of their inner thinking or occasionally of others close to them that serve as postcard messages to the world. These postcards express likely reactions to exploitations of their personal vulnerabilities despite their significance in the entertainment world. Thousands were drawn to their movies or bought their records. Even this following failed to save them from manipulation.
Dickinson finds words for what each woman would tell the world if she had been free to expose her reaction to the life she was enduring. Each of Harlow’s postcards begins with a quoted excerpt—mostly unsavory—from biographies of her experiences and then imagines Harlow’s thoughts about the events. Smith’s thoughts are not prepared for by the words of an external author, with a few exceptions. Instead, her postcards follow designations for her condition under her best-known song titles, like “Tain’t Nobody’s Buzness If I Do.”
Throughout her short life of twenty-six years, Harlow was manipulated by her mother’s—also Jean—and stepfather’s greed for more profitable movies despite her pain of failed youthful marriages, including a brief one to producer Paul Bern, whose impotence led to his suicide. The passage from a Harlow biography by David Bret includes this detail: “He was found drenched in his wife’s perfume.” Dickinson imagines Harlow’s vision: “I bathe in kerosene and see my body flicker. Again he climbs in through the window still wearing my perfume. Mitsouko.”
Throughout, Dickinson takes a fact and transforms it into an illumination. A crucial example is Harlow’s death from nephritic bloating, her swollen shaven head. This postcard transmutes the image: “My head’s a fat porcelain doll and I’m peeing through my mouth. No bridge, Daddy, so where’s your hand? The water’s swift moving, but we walk in together. Fish swim past, bits of moving light. Shooting stars. I know where we are, Daddy, so you go back; I’ll stay.”
Harlow’s inner life is one of helplessness and inability to withstand abuse. Unlike Harlow, Smith’s instinct was to fight back, perhaps because of the power asserted by her six-foot size, the force of her voice, the independence of her attitude, and the aggressiveness of her lyrics. One example from a postcard refers to the Ku Klux Klan’s—robed creatures in peaked hats—refusal to let Smith be paid for a concert: “I was face to face with a white shape. His pupils had eaten their irises like cat’s eye marbles, doors into secret rooms, mine shafts you could fall into—no woman or song, just dead silence. Better run, you overgrown evil elf, or I’m going to kick your butt.”
Smith died at forty-three from injuries of a car crash. Harlow submitted to undiagnosed kidney failure from a childhood infection. In effect, she died from internal causes while Smith’s were external. She was killed by a force beyond the human: “Give me a minute and I’ll throw diction at you. I’m a verbatim gal. Hurry up, it’s on its way, the death train I’ve got to catch.”
Bessie Smith’s death postcard is one of the few introduced by an informational statement that concludes with, “Name of operation: Amputation of Rt. Arm.” Smith’s imagined reaction is “Where are you going with that hand? I hit the floor with that fist demanding my pay, kicking up heels and getting it. Damn me, I am not the Bessie in the hospital hallway bleeding into the thin sheet.” The Smith of the postcards refuses to give in, angry, citing her large size, her physical violence, her majestic voice, her strength, and her role as Empress of the Blues. Harlow is lost to begin with: “I’ve been drinking. The carpet is quicksand. The polar bear rug snowy. The stillness of death, which are the wages of sin. Baby, I need you, Mother Jean calls. Coming, Mama.”
The power of this book lies in Dickinson’s language—the words, sounds, and images that access interiority with a unique visual presence, startling verbal imagery, and deep emotional revelation.
