Unfinished Business

by Vivian Gornick

  * * *

  I STILL READ to feel the power of Life with a capital L. I still see the protagonist in thrall to forces beyond his or her control. And when I write I still hope to put my readers behind my eyes, experience the subject as I have experienced it, feel it viscerally as I have felt it. What follows is a collection of pieces written in appreciation of the literary enterprise as I have encountered it through the reading and re-reading of books that made me feel anew all of the above.

  ONE

  I was twenty years old the day an English teacher put into my hands Sons and Lovers. Until then I’d never even heard the term “coming-of-age novel,” but I knew one when I saw one; and D. H. Lawrence put the matter so starkly and so dramatically that, even at that tender age, I felt myself communing with the primitive conflict at the heart of the tale. I read the book in one gulp, came back to class entranced, and from that day forward Sons and Lovers was biblical text. I read the novel three times within the next fifteen years, and each time identified with another of its major characters: the hero, Paul Morel; his mother, Gertrude; his youthful lovers, Miriam and Clara.

  The first time around it was Miriam, the farmer’s daughter with whom Paul loses his virginity. I got her immediately. She sleeps with him not because she wants to, but because she fears losing him. During intercourse her terror is such that instead of yielding to the experience, she lies beneath Paul—lost to his own sexual delirium—thinking, Does he know it’s me? Does he know it’s me? Miriam’s primary need is to know that she is desired, and for herself alone. The dilemma was devastating: I felt the heat, the fear, the anxiety engulfing each of these two, but most especially I felt it as though I was Miriam herself. I was twenty years old: I needed what she needed. The next time I read the book I was Clara, the working-class woman who is sexually passionate, wants to engage with erotic life, but still is alive to the potential for humiliation hidden in her need to feel that it is she who is being desired and again, for herself alone. The third time I read the book I was in my mid-thirties—twice married, twice divorced, newly “liberated”—and I identified with Paul himself. Now preoccupied with desiring rather than being desired, I gloried in giving myself up to the shocking pleasure of sexual experience itself—rich, full, transporting—imagining myself now, like Paul at the end of the novel, the hero of my own life.

  When I came to re-read Sons and Lovers again recently, in shall we say my advanced maturity, it wasn’t so much that I found I’d gotten many of the details wrong (which I had), but rather that my memory of the overriding theme—sexual passion as the central experience of a life—was wrong. This, I now saw, was not really what the book was about; and I found it all the greater and the more moving that I had held it close to my heart all these years for a set of not misinformed but insufficiently informed reasons. It was also one of the first times that I saw clearly that it was I, as a reader, who had had to journey toward the richest meaning of the book.

  Set at the turn of the twentieth century in a mining village in the English Midlands, the narrative follows the progress of the Morels and their four children. Gertrude (a schoolteacher of romantic sensibility) and Walter (a fun-loving miner) first meet at a dance, she drawn by his good looks, his gaiety, his talent for dancing while he, in turn, is attracted by her responsiveness to his own sensuality. They develop a passion for each other and they marry. He promises her a house of her own, a good enough income, and tender fidelity. Soon enough, she discovers that on none of these can he deliver: “He had no grit, she said bitterly to herself. What he felt just at the minute, that was all to him. He could not abide by anything. There was nothing at the back of all his show.” He, in turn, is startled to find that she cannot bear disappointment well: it turns her bitter and austere. In no time at all, he, bewildered by the constant sense of accusation he now feels at home, escapes to the pub every chance he gets.

  Eight years down the road (when the book begins) Mrs. Morel is thirty-one years old, pregnant with her third child, living in undreamed-of poverty both material and emotional, and repelled by her husband whom she (and the children along with her) now experience only as a hard-drinking, violent lout.

  As romantic sensibility does not desert Mrs. Morel, it is to her sons—the one daughter has no presence at all—that she inevitably turns for the kind of companionship required to feed emotional starvation. At first William, the eldest, seems to be the one whom she hopes to make a soul mate, but it soon transpires that it is Paul, the second son and our protagonist, with whom she had really been destined to merge. When he is still an infant in her lap, “she felt strangely toward the infant … It seemed quite well, but she noticed the peculiar knitting of the baby’s brows, and the peculiar heaviness of its eyes, as if it were trying to understand something that was pain … Suddenly, looking at him, the heavy feeling at the mother’s heart melted into passionate grief.” Her soul’s anxiety has entered into the babe: at the age of three or four he cries for no reason, grows melancholy for no reason. But the reader understands: the reason is that from birth on, Paul and his mother have been as one.

  And now we know this is not exactly “mother love” at work here. These are the thoughts and feelings of a woman who sees her spiritual salvation joined to that of this boy who, in thrall to his mother’s adoration, will, as a teenager, declare that he will never leave her but, as he grows to young manhood, ineluctably discover that the life within is pulling him toward the kind of self-discovery that demands she be left behind.

  The metaphor Lawrence uses for Paul’s wrenching dilemma is, of course, erotic love. As Paul’s need for it grows—and the two women, Miriam and Clara, become the instruments of his awakening and initiation—he delves ever deeper into its extraordinary force until he finds that passion has the ability to mimic liberation (this I remembered well), but not actually deliver it (this I did not remember at all). The struggle at the heart of the novel is not between Paul and his mother but between Paul and the illusion of sexual love as liberation. It was this last it was taking me forever to understand.

  When I was a girl in the 1950s, the culture was still joined at the hip to those restraints of bourgeois life that kept erotic experience at a distance. This distance fed a dream of transcendence linked to a promise of self-discovery interwoven with the force of sexual passion. Only then we didn’t call it passion, we called it love; and the whole world believed in love. My mother, a communist and a romantic, said to me, “You’re smart, make something of yourself, but always remember, love is the most important thing in a woman’s life.” Across the street Grace Levine’s mother, a woman who lit candles on Friday night and was afraid of everything that moved, whispered to her daughter, “Don’t do like I did. Marry a man you love.” Around the corner Elaine Goldberg’s mother slipped her arms into a Persian lamb coat and shrugged, “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man,” but her voice was bitter precisely because she too believed in love.

  In the ideal life, it was felt—the educated life, the brave life, the life out in the larger world—that love would not only be pursued, it would be achieved; and once achieved transform existence; create a rich, deep, textured prose out of the inarticulate reports of inner life we daily passed on to one another. The promise of love alone gave us the courage to dream of leaving these caution-ridden precincts in order to turn our faces outward toward genuine experience. In fact, it was only if we gave ourselves over to romantic passion—that is, love—without stint and without contractual assurance, that we would have experience.

  We knew this because we, too, had been reading Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and The Age of Innocence all our lives, as well as the ten thousand middlebrow versions of those books, and the dime-store novels coming just behind them. In literature, good and great writers as well as mediocre popularizers had sounded depths of emotion that made readers feel the life within themselves in the presence of words written to celebrate the powers of love. Like everyone else reading Sons and L
overs in the mid-twentieth century—and by everyone else I mean the educated common reader—I experienced the book as an essence of this conviction that to know oneself through the senses was to arrive at the heart of human existence.

  Now, in late age, marveling at Lawrence’s turbulent account of this world-making delusion, I wondered, as I read, how it had escaped me that the characters in Sons and Lovers are themselves deeply embittered over the consequences of a life posited on sexual passion—and this almost from the start. While she is still pregnant with Paul, Mrs. Morel begins to wander in her mind. She can barely figure out how she came to be where she is, “and looking ahead, the prospect of her life made her feel as if she were buried alive.” Why buried alive? Because, encased as she is in spiritual loneliness, she is drowning in dissociation. “‘What have I to do with it?’ she said to herself. ‘What have I to do with all this? Even the child I am going to have! It doesn’t seem as if I were taken into account.’”

  This was a speech I did not at all recall. And why would I have recalled it? It sounded more like a woman speaking in 1970, in the midst of the therapeutic culture, than in 1910 when the Freudian idea of the self was just being born. I had thought of Mrs. Morel as a grim-faced woman whose obsessive involvement with her own betrayed dreams of life has stripped her of dimension; but there she is, conscious, in the midst of the endless quotidian, of that deadliest of deprivations: an inner life gone missing.

  Then there is Morel himself. I remembered him as a Caliban, but he is only a childish man whose gift (his only gift) for innocent sensuality has been steadily eroded by the lack of the very thing that could have made him a better person: sympathetic partnership. In his youth, he had been a great dancer with a love of music embedded in a heart that yearned only to be light. But he, too, has been left crying in the wilderness, his head filled with chaos because he is a sentient creature who cannot speak to himself, does not have the words with which to approach his own joyless existence. (Where am I in all this?) It is precisely his inarticulateness that makes it hard for him to come straight home after work, which in turn leaves his wife, even though she now hates the sight of him, doubly trapped in the misery of normalcy outraged: “[She] sat alone. On the hob the saucepan steamed; the dinner-plate lay waiting on the table. All the room was full of the sense of waiting, waiting for the man who was sitting in his pit-dirt, dinnerless, some mile away from home, across the darkness, drinking himself drunk … persisting in his dirty and disgusting ways, just to assert his independence. They loathed him.”

  “They loathed him” cannot be repeated often enough in this book. On page three Mrs. Morel hates Morel; on page five she holds him in contempt; on page eight she loathes him. Then it starts all over again, and these repetitions go on for most of the novel. For a book devoted to “love” the unremitting rage flung down on page after page is sobering.

  Yes, they loathed him, but they also were him. Paul would rather scrape the skin off his body than admit to any shared characteristic, but—and this I certainly did not remember—he is actually as moody and thin-skinned as his father. “He was the sort of boy that becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of warmth.” Somewhere within himself Paul must know that all sensuous feeling in him—tender or murderous, ever ready to burst the skin—comes from Morel. But if he had let himself think about the split within himself, it would have made him ill. So Lawrence doesn’t make him think about it, but allows the reader to do so.

  And then there is William, commonplace William, whose ill-fated life is a small dramatic foreshadowing of erotic disasters yet to come. William has the soul of an accountant: absorbed in his white-collar job in London, which he expects will bring him money and a rise in social status, he quite cheerfully comes home less and less, as children bent on making their way in the city do. But one Christmas, still in his early twenties, he brings home Lily, a secretary to whom he has engaged himself. She is beautiful and he is besotted with her at the same time that he seems permanently irritated by her because she is vain and stupid and—now that he sees her through his mother’s eyes—gets horribly on his nerves. Torn apart by the conflict within himself, William quarrels with Lily at the drop of a hat, instantly regrets his bad behavior, then lets his head fill once again with blood: “He repented, kissed and comforted the girl … [but] in the evening, after supper, he stood on the hearthrug whilst she sat on the sofa, and he seemed to hate her.”

  The mother goes into shock at what she sees happening to William—that’s how it seems to her, it’s happening to him, as in a Greek tragedy. “She raked the fire. Her heart was heavy now as it had never been.” She herself had been lured into marriage by sexual attraction, but this sort of desperation over its power to enslave—raw, open, uncontrolled—this no one of her generation had ever seen. She immediately recognizes it as world-shattering.

  As, very nearly, does William himself. His hunger for Lily is hateful to him: it humiliates him and drives him to act in ways that he himself holds in contempt. He knows that Lily is guilty of nothing more than being herself, yet he cannot refrain from heaping blame on her for his own wretchedness. In a burst of despair he cannot control, he cries out to his horrified mother that should he die, Lily would forget him in a few months, that’s how shallow she is.

  Passion, passion, passion: hard, mean, wracking: neither sensual nor romantic, only boiling—how could I have forgotten this—passion that is more like war than love: the rawness behind the longing for sexual ecstasy, the depth of its anguish, the fear of ruination, the consequence that can never be undone. It is a stark and unforgiving look we have here at the price sexual hunger could exact a hundred years ago. Inescapably, as I now read on in Sons and Lovers, I found myself remembering all those mediocre novels about marriage being written at the same time by H. G. Wells, novels in which the same conflict is often at the heart of the narrative: a working-class boy who longs to rise in the world, but meanwhile is perishing for want of a sexual life and talks himself into marrying the first girl who seems willing to lie down with him if only he will marry her. Invariably, the protagonist in these novels feels dread at committing himself to such a marriage, but the dread loses out to the killing need. It’s a situation Wells knows from the inside out; any reader can understand what he is talking about, but his writing is not up to making us feel the anguish inherent in the situation. It is with Lawrence, whose few pages on William and Lily are penetrating, that it is brought to vibrant life. William is a figure much more like a Wells protagonist than he is like his brother, Paul, but it is on his behalf that Lawrence makes us shudder because what he sees in him he sees everywhere and in everyone.

  Luckily for the book, William dies not long after the beleaguered Christmas visit, and it will be left to Paul to sort it all out. It is through him that Lawrence will investigate exactly how much devotion either to the flesh or the spirit is required to address what I now saw as the underlying concern of Sons and Lovers: how to construct a self from the inside out.

  Poor Miriam—and again this I did not remember at all—what a bum rap she gets in this book. She too craves a real life, one that will turn on experiencing herself. Miriam is sixteen when she and Paul meet, brown-eyed, black-curled, beautiful, and inclined toward religion because—as it has been for millions of women before and after—it is the only text available that lifts her from the grubby claustrophobia of an existence whose horizons are right up against her face. Lawrence sees her situation plainly but—so identified is he with his protagonist—he cannot afford to give her the sympathy that might make her a more central character than he needs her to be. So he gives her to us like so:

  [She was like] such women as treasure religion inside them, breathe it in their nostrils, and see the whole of life in a mist thereof … She loved tremblingly and passionately when a tremendous sunset burned out the western sky … or sat in her bedroom aloft, alone, when it snowed. That was life t
o her. For the rest, she drudged in the house,… quivered in anguish from the vulgarity of the other choir-girls, and from the common-sounding voice of the curate … [and] her brothers, whom she considered brutal louts … She hated her position as swine-girl. She wanted to be considered. She wanted to learn … If she could read, the world would have a different face for her and a deepened respect … Her beauty—that of a shy, wild, quiveringly sensitive thing—seemed nothing to her. Even her soul … was not enough. She must have something to reinforce her pride, because she felt different from other people.

  This sense of difference in Miriam is, for Lawrence, a double-sided coin. Paul shrinks from the religiosity, but when he sees her in church “his soul stirred within him,” because she seemed “something more wonderful, less human … something he could not get to.”

  It is interesting—and somewhat painful—to see that this inchoateness in Miriam is treated with suspicion while the same (actually much worse) inchoateness in her brothers—these wild, hardworking farmhands whom Miriam and her mother are constantly trying to civilize through scripture—is analyzed with equanimity. Although these boys “resented so bitterly this eternal appeal to their deeper feelings … yet it had its effect on them … Ordinary folk seemed shallow to them, trivial and inconsiderable. And so they were … painfully uncouth in the simplest social intercourse, suffering, and yet insolent in their superiority” (just like Miriam). “Then beneath was the yearning for the soul-intimacy to which they could not attain because they were too dumb, and every approach to close connection was blocked by their clumsy contempt of other people. They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.”