Confessions of Madame Psyche. Dorothy Bryant

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      CONFESSIONS OF

      MADAME PSYCHE

       ALSO BY DOROTHY BRYANT

      THE KIN OF ATA ARE WAITING FOR YOU

      THE GARDEN OF EROS

      PRISONERS

      KILLING WONDER

      A DAY IN SAN FRANCISCO

      WRITING A NOVEL

      MYTHS TO LIE BY

       AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS

      ELLA PRICE’S JOURNAL

      MISS GIARDINO

      CONFESSIONS OF MADAME PSYCHE

      MEMOIRS AND LETTERS OF MEI-LI MURROW

      A Novel by

      DOROTHY BRYANT

      AFTERWORD BY J.J. WILSON

      THE FEMINIST PRESS AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

      NEW YORK

      Published by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York

      City College/CUNY, Wingate Building

      Convent Avenue at 138 Street

      New York, NY 10031

      First Feminist Press edition, 1998

      Copyright ©1986 by Dorothy Bryant

      Afterword copyright ©1998 by J.J. Wilson

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      Originally published by Ata Books, 1986.

      This is a work of fiction.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Bryant, Dorothy, 1930–

      Confessions of Madame Psyche: memoirs and letters of Mei-li Murrow/Dorothy Bryant.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 1-55861-186-X (pbk.)

      I. Title.

      PS3552.R878C6 1998

      813’.54—dc21

      97-42178

      CIP

      The Feminist Press would like to thank Celia Gilbert, Joanne Markell, Shirley Mow, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.

      Front matter design by Dayna Navaro

      Text design by Robert Bryant

      Typesetting by Ann Aanagan Typography

      04 03 02 01 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 1

      Contents

       1875–1906

       1906–1914

       1914–1919

       1919–1926

       1926–1930

       1930–1940

       1940–1946

       FROM THE LETTERS TO BUDDY: 1947–1959

       Afterword

       Notes

      In 1985 I received forty pages of typescript excerpted from “a much longer work,” along with a letter from Joy Goldman Meyerlin asking for my opinion on whether this material, written by her mother, was publishable. Intrigued by what I read, I visited Mrs. Meyerlin in Santa Cruz where, retired from a long career as a music teacher in New York, she lives with her husband.

      Joy Meyerlin had never known either of her parents, who, she was told, died in Europe during the 1919 influenza epidemic, when Mrs. Meyerlin was less than a year old. She had been reared in New York City by her father’s sister, who could tell her only that she had been “handed to me in a hotel room in Turin by Erika Newland, your mother’s sister.” During the 1940s she had written to her Aunt Erika in hopes of learning more about her mother, but received no answer.

      In 1970 Mrs. Meyerlin was notified that she was heir to the estate of Erika Newland, who had died in a rest home in San Francisco at age ninety-three. Coming to San Francisco to settle her aunt’s affairs, Joy Meyerlin found among her papers indisputable proof that her mother had not died in Italy in 1919, but at Napa State Hospital in 1959. She went to Napa, where her mother’s commitment in 1941 was confirmed, but she was denied further information because hospital policy seals patient records even from their families.

      She was, however, allowed to question staff who might have known her mother under one of several names: Mei-li Murrow, May Lee, or Madame Psyche, the name she had used as a professional medium. The chaplain, who has been at the State Hospital since 1950, remembered a woman called by these various names “sitting by Lower Lake, usually with a book.” He suggested that Joy Meyerlin talk to the hospital librarian.

      The librarian, who had been hired in 1958 to open the new patient library, remembered Mei-li Murrow as the donor of hundreds of books to the library just before her death. She showed Joy Meyerlin her mother’s name written on the flyleaf of a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing.

      Then she rummaged through a storeroom where she tries to preserve the writings and paintings of patients, pulling from it a dusty box that had been brought to her by an elderly attendant-volunteer after Mei-li Murrow’s death in 1959. In the box were twenty-seven notebooks and a drawing of Mei-li at age nineteen, evidently the only likeness of her in existence.

      There were also fragments of a few letters signed by Garin Buddell, the medical author and peace activist. Joy Meyerlin wrote to him and received a prompt reply in which he called her mother “my best friend during my hardest years, an extraordinary woman.” Doctor Buddell also sent 108 letters written to him by Mei-li Murrow. He was delighted to learn that the notebooks had survived and urged Joy Meyerlin to publish them and the letters.

      I asked Mrs. Meyerlin why she had waited fifteen years before attempting to publish her mother’s memoirs and letters. She replied that at first she saw the memoirs as private family history, personal, eccentric, containing facts about her newly-discovered mother which she was hardly able to assimilate, much less publish. Now in her sixties, about the same age at which her mother died, she had reconsidered. “My mother disguised the identity of many people mentioned in her. writing. That means she wanted her story to be published.”

      This book is Mei-li’s story as she wrote it in the twenty-seven notebooks and in her letters to Garin Buddell. I made only such changes as seemed essential for clarity. I removed passages of repetition, corrected obvious errors in spelling, and added punctuation where necessary. I then divided the notebooks into seven dated sections representing major periods of Mei-li’s life.