Imagine that you are on a subway platform following your daily routines, moving to and from work, shopping, meeting friends. And imagine there is a man wearing a black veil at the end of the platform, rising and falling with each intake of breath.
Mr. Rick Moody, the author of Garden State and The Ice Storm, begins his memoir, The Black Veil, with just such a scene. His fascination with the black veil of the title comes from the figure of Handkerchief Moody, a New Hampshire minister from the Seventeenth century who took up the veil which was not removed until his death. This Moody book is also the subject of the famous Hawthorne story, The Minister’s Black Veil, from which the author derives the name of the book. Each chapter heading is a direct passage from the story of this minister, who, as a small boy, accidentally shoots a close friend, and upon the death of his wife, takes up the veil.
Mr. Moody is actually a descendent of a Puritan preacher named Handkerchief Moody. In researching his descendant’s story, he tries to reach catharsis with his own mental health issues. Time for Moody is malleable as he traces his own family’s genealogy and his own personal history through an interchanging narrative where Mr. Moody’s personal shame for the divorce of his parents becomes part of the shame of his ancestors’ genocide of the Native Americans.
Shame, whether of an imperfect preacher or of being a child of divorce, is an important part of this tale. Some of the parts that I enjoyed most were his travels with his father or alone in some of the more remote corners of New England, kicking the moss off the gravestones of past Moody ancestors in an effort to uncover his family history.
The setting is equally malleable, as we travel from his childhood in New Canaan, Connecticut, to boarding school days in New Hampshire, college and a pour suicide attempt in Providence. There was depression and drinking in San Francisco, a failed love and failed work and finally a private mental hospital stay in Hollis, Queens, after his alcoholic girlfriend broke up with him as part of her own rehabilitation.
The climax of the story occurs when he visits an old family quarry and literally stares into the abyss, the same abyss that the veil itself represents. The veil represents the void within himself and inside all of us from which shame, depression, and anxiety emanate like the breath of a sadistic god. In finding the courage to confront this abyss, and to live with it, Moody is able to defeat his own alcoholism and anxiety and to fulfill his true potential as a writer.
This mixing of time and place, of personal history with familial history, and of the investigation into the meaning of the black veil is a rare technique into the investigation of one man’s depression and how that relates to American history as a whole. There is the feeling in this story that Moody is not just suffering for himself, but for his entire family and for the unresolved personal stories left littered throughout this country’s history. The veil itself can be many things and could be one thing. In this way, the book and the story itself are also black veils, hiding the mysteries of loss, redemption, and the contents of the very soul behind a veil of words.