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Authors: Siri Hustvedt
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practical purposes, she had been invisible. Well, I guess she’s having her fifteen minutes now—from the grave.
Rachel Briefman
(written statement)
I agreed to contribute to this book only after long conversations with Maisie and Ethan Burden, as well as with Bruno Kleinfeld, the companion of Harriet’s last years. I also corresponded with Professor Hess and became convinced that this book about my friend Harriet Burden would illuminate aspects of her life and art for the many people who have now discovered her work.
Harriet and I met in 1952 when we were twelve years old at Hunter High School. There were only girls at Hunter then. I sat beside Harriet in French class and, before I ever said a word to her, I watched her draw. Although she seemed to be wholly engaged in the class—always ready with a conjugation—she never stopped drawing. She drew faces, hands, bodies, machines, and flowers inside her notebooks, outside her notebooks, on bits of scrap paper, anywhere she could find a blank surface. Her hand appeared to move by itself, idly, but with uncanny precision. From a few lines sprang characters, scenes, still lifes. Who was this tall, solemn girl with the magic hand? I told her I was impressed, and she turned to me, waved her hand in the air, put on a faux-spooky voice, and said, “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The horror movie starring Peter Lorre featured a musician’s amputated hand that committed murders and played the piano.
Years later in medical school, I read about neurological patients with alien hand syndrome. Some brain-damaged people have found themselves with an upstart hand that does exactly the opposite of what she or he wills it to do: unbuttoning a shirt that has just been buttoned, turning off the water before the glass is full, even masturbating in public. In general, alien hands cause dismay and havoc. At least one rebellious hand in the medical literature tried to strangle its owner. After I had read about these limbs with minds of their own, I called Harriet to tell her, and she laughed so hard she came down with a fit of the hiccoughs. I mention this because the joke still resonates. Harriet, who soon became Harry to me, was smart, gifted, and exquisitely sensitive. She could sulk for hours in silence when we were together, and then, just when I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she would throw her arms around me and apologize. Although I wouldn’t have said it at the time, her drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains.
We studied together, and we daydreamed together. I imagined myself in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, marching down hospital corridors, ordering around nurses, and Harriet saw herself as a great artist or poet or intellectual—or all three. We were intimates as girls can be, unhampered by the masculine posing that plagues boys. We talked on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t. We shared our torments and analyzed the girls in our class. We were pretentious children who read books we didn’t understand and embraced politics we knew little about, but our pretenses protected us. We were a team of two against a hostile world of adolescent hierarchies. My mother once said to me, “Rachel, all you really need is one good friend, you know.” I found that friend in Harriet.
Too much time has passed for me to recapture us as we were then. I have treated children and adolescents in my practice for many years now, and my knowledge of their stories, as well as my own analysis, has surely reconfigured my memories. Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. The fact that I knew Harriet until she died in 2004 has also changed my understanding of our early
Rachel Briefman
(written statement)
I agreed to contribute to this book only after long conversations with Maisie and Ethan Burden, as well as with Bruno Kleinfeld, the companion of Harriet’s last years. I also corresponded with Professor Hess and became convinced that this book about my friend Harriet Burden would illuminate aspects of her life and art for the many people who have now discovered her work.
Harriet and I met in 1952 when we were twelve years old at Hunter High School. There were only girls at Hunter then. I sat beside Harriet in French class and, before I ever said a word to her, I watched her draw. Although she seemed to be wholly engaged in the class—always ready with a conjugation—she never stopped drawing. She drew faces, hands, bodies, machines, and flowers inside her notebooks, outside her notebooks, on bits of scrap paper, anywhere she could find a blank surface. Her hand appeared to move by itself, idly, but with uncanny precision. From a few lines sprang characters, scenes, still lifes. Who was this tall, solemn girl with the magic hand? I told her I was impressed, and she turned to me, waved her hand in the air, put on a faux-spooky voice, and said, “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The horror movie starring Peter Lorre featured a musician’s amputated hand that committed murders and played the piano.
Years later in medical school, I read about neurological patients with alien hand syndrome. Some brain-damaged people have found themselves with an upstart hand that does exactly the opposite of what she or he wills it to do: unbuttoning a shirt that has just been buttoned, turning off the water before the glass is full, even masturbating in public. In general, alien hands cause dismay and havoc. At least one rebellious hand in the medical literature tried to strangle its owner. After I had read about these limbs with minds of their own, I called Harriet to tell her, and she laughed so hard she came down with a fit of the hiccoughs. I mention this because the joke still resonates. Harriet, who soon became Harry to me, was smart, gifted, and exquisitely sensitive. She could sulk for hours in silence when we were together, and then, just when I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, she would throw her arms around me and apologize. Although I wouldn’t have said it at the time, her drawings and later her paintings and sculptures seemed to have been made by a person I didn’t know, but whom she didn’t know either. She needed the Beast with Five Fingers, a creative imp that broke through the restraints that bound her as surely as ropes or chains.
We studied together, and we daydreamed together. I imagined myself in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, marching down hospital corridors, ordering around nurses, and Harriet saw herself as a great artist or poet or intellectual—or all three. We were intimates as girls can be, unhampered by the masculine posing that plagues boys. We talked on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t. We shared our torments and analyzed the girls in our class. We were pretentious children who read books we didn’t understand and embraced politics we knew little about, but our pretenses protected us. We were a team of two against a hostile world of adolescent hierarchies. My mother once said to me, “Rachel, all you really need is one good friend, you know.” I found that friend in Harriet.
Too much time has passed for me to recapture us as we were then. I have treated children and adolescents in my practice for many years now, and my knowledge of their stories, as well as my own analysis, has surely reconfigured my memories. Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past. The fact that I knew Harriet until she died in 2004 has also changed my understanding of our early
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