Unfinished Business

by Vivian Gornick

  * * *

  THE PASSAGE GOES ON so long because Duras cannot bear to part from the memory of a time and place in which all that was supposed to knit up a growing creature’s sense of world and self was, for one memorable moment, richly present. Paradoxically, it is also the moment when she is keenly reminded that she has, in fact, been born into loss and abandonment, a prison sentence from which there is no hope of parole.

  I have read this passage again and again as the years have gone on, each time returning in spirit to the day my mother—I know, I know, it never happened—cut my heart out of the dress I was meant to wear to the party, each time imagining I would enter more fully into the psychic chaos woven into this memory, thereby coming out the other side a free woman. But no sooner do I come close than I, like Duras, veer away. Unlike her, I do not double back into the infatuation with desire that I now see as calculated not so much to obscure as to confirm the emotional free fall to which she had become devoted; even as I conclude that I, too, must be trapped in that selfsame devotion since my grown-up understanding doesn’t seem to yield release from the narcissistic wound any more than Duras’s lifelong plunge into erotic oblivion freed her.

  FOUR

  Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making. Duras was one of these writers. Another was Elizabeth Bowen, whose power I felt when I was young, but whose value I did not grasp until I was old. Quite early I gulped down three of her major books—The Death of the Heart, The House in Paris, The Heat of the Day—and then never looked at another word she wrote. I thrilled to the sense of mystery inscribed in Bowen’s inordinately original sentences, and to the feeling that something profound was being alluded to in them, but what exactly it was, if my life had depended on it, I could not have described. I remember following the sentences, often with a finger on the page, like a child or a non-English speaker, as though struggling to pick out meaning from an unknowable language.

  But oh, those sentences!

  Of the social incapacity of one character Bowen writes: “Vague presence, barely a silhouette, the west light sifting into her fluffy hair and lace wrappings so that she half melted, she gave so little answer to one’s inquiry that one did not know how to approach.” Of another’s: “He had a way of looking down while he spoke as though his thoughts were under his eyelids.” Then again: “From her marriage a kind of vulgarity Julian’s tentativeness aroused in her had been absent, and that year when, however little she knew of Henry, she had best known herself, had a shadowy continuity among her impressions.” And here’s one describing what it felt like for a character coming into London’s Euston Station late during a war-dimmed night: “Recognition of anybody by anybody else seemed hopeless—those hoping to be met, hoping to be claimed, thrust hats back and turned up faces drowningly.”

  What I could not see in those far-off years was that Bowen was slowing the narrative down with her involuted syntax so that the reader would come under her spell while she labored to get on paper an emotional experience for which there were perhaps no words—or never the right words, or words she couldn’t put in the right order—but one that nonetheless haunted her writing. Then, one day, not too long ago, I came across something the American poet Adrienne Rich had written about Emily Dickinson that struck me forcibly, and suddenly, there, front and center in my mind, was Elizabeth Bowen. What Rich had written about Dickinson was this: “I learned from her that there are extreme psychological states that can be hunted down with language. But that language had to be forged—found; made—it was not in the first words that came to mind.” I went to my bookshelves, picked up a Bowen novel, and started reading.

  On the instant, the text seemed to decode itself: its mission if not its meaning coming clear. Within months I was able to see that for thirty years and more she had created stories and novels meant to acquaint the reader with the power of the one thing—the extreme psychological state—that she deeply understood: namely, that fear of feeling makes us inflict on one another the little murders of the soul that anesthetize the spirit and shrivel the heart; stifle desire and humiliate sentiment; make war electrifying and peace dreary. One other thing I saw: she was one of those novelists whose work, taken as a whole, was a naked demonstration of the psychological damage that often provides the nerve current running steadily beneath the surface of a writer’s prose.

  Bowen’s 1948 novel, The Heat of the Day, was composed during the Second World War but completed only after the war when, as she said, she understood better—not completely, only better—what she had been writing about. Set in London in the fall of 1942, it is preoccupied with the unknown within ourselves breaking through during a time of devastation, revealing the fatal lack of fellow feeling beneath the civilized surface we assume as a second skin.

  In this novel, Stella, a forty-year-old divorcée, is in love with Robert, a survivor of Dunkirk whom she has met during the Blitz. In the midst of the affair, Harrison, a mysterious intelligence agent, materializes to tell her that her lover is a traitor. Stella refuses to believe him, but as the bombs fall nightly on London, Harrison’s menacing presence, now almost a daily reality, begins to eat into the oldest of her anxieties. When he insinuates that the war is only the evil of our own inner lives made manifest, she is pierced by the memory of her own past treacheries—that is, her own failures of feeling—and realizes that “she could no more blame the world than one can blame any fellow-sufferer: in these last twenty of its and her own years she had to watch in it what she felt in herself—a clear-sightedly helpless progress toward disaster. The fateful course of her fatalistic century seemed more and more her own: together had she and it arrived at the testing extremities of their noonday. Neither had lived before.”

  In a certain sense, all in the novel is tending toward the hour when the protagonist understands her own contribution to world despair—and that hour, metaphorically speaking, is noon because that is the time of day when the sense of aliveness is keenest in London in 1942; after that, one is only waiting for the bombs to fall. Yet Stella’s insight has not the power to determine her on a redemptive course of action any more than the horror of the Blitz had the power to maintain its initially high level of psychological terror. Remembering the first bombings in the autumn of 1940, she recalls the uniqueness of that time almost nostalgically: “Never had any season been more felt … No planetary round was to bring again that particular conjunction of life and death; that particular psychic London was to be gone forever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city. War moved from the horizon to the map. And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatization to it began to set in.”

  This, in Bowen, is a signature passage. The acclimatization to deadened feeling—in war or in peace—is her great subject. For her, this is the enemy of life, the criminal charge she brings against the human condition: that which allows us to adapt ourselves to the atrophied heart. Herein lies the inborn tragedy of this, our one and only life.

  * * *

  SHE WAS BORN IN 1899 in Ireland into Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and grew up in a cold, drafty manor house set down in a rainy, fogbound land, among people locked into a rigid sense of the responsibilities of privilege and tradition. Many of these people were brooding, strong-willed, emotionally intemperate; yet they feared impropriety more than death itself. As is said of a character in Bowen’s second novel, The Last September, “Life was to him an affair of discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him shocking.” From the start, she had all the metaphors she needed.

  When Elizabeth was five years old, her father had a mental breakdown from which he never fully recovered. When she was thirteen, her mother died of cancer. After that she lived among relatives and in boarding schools, feeling obscurely humiliated—even, as her biographer, Victoria Glendinning, puts it, “disfigured”—by her or
phaned state. It was then that she came to experience the relief as well as the isolation of guarded feelings. Years later, Bowen identified this period of her life as “the beginning of a career of withstood emotion.” From here on in, she—like most of her characters—would become an intimate of “life with the lid on.”

  The novel that is almost encyclopedic in presenting a full range of characters to flesh out the consequences of life with the lid on is The Death of the Heart, published in 1938. Mr. and Mrs. Quayne and their son, Thomas, are leading a proper suburban existence when suddenly, in his late fifties, Mr. Quayne kicks over the traces and has an affair with Irene, a young woman working in a London flower shop. When Irene becomes pregnant, Mrs. Quayne cheerfully expels him from the family home not because her heart is broken but because Mr. Quayne’s situation is morally (that is, socially) unacceptable to her. Quayne, Irene, and Portia, their love child, then, as in a nineteenth-century novel, exile themselves to the Continent and spend the next fifteen years wandering about Europe. Both parents die and the sixteen-year-old Portia is sent to live for a year in the Regent’s Park home of Thomas, her businessman half brother. However, neither Thomas nor his wife, Anna, is familiar with any degree of normal emotional expressiveness—in fact, the mere idea of such expressiveness makes each of them ill—and the home they have made for themselves is steeped in a silent propriety that serves them as social beings while masking a multitude of hungers and disappointments neither would know what to do with if brought out into the open. Soon enough Portia becomes desperate to figure out why in this house there are “no limits to the loneliness she could feel, even when she was feeling quite resigned.”

  The catalyst, however, for her ultimate mortification is Eddie, an old college friend of Anna’s brother. Eddie had once been a brilliant, beautiful scholarship boy longing to make his way among the rich and the wellborn at Oxford, many of whom had initially found him amusing—“he had a proletarian, animal, quick grace”—and then abruptly dropped him. His sense of insult is profound but instead of walking away from the source of the offense, he clings to whatever remnant of social connection remains available to him. Glued to the edge of a world that will never welcome him as an equal, he gradually becomes less and less real to himself while everyone else, of course, becomes even more unreal. Soon enough, Eddie is as emotionally detached as Adam probably was ten minutes after he’d eaten the apple.

  Detachment makes Eddie unreliable, but it is the emptiness within that makes him dangerous. When he meets Portia at the house in Regent’s Park, he courts her by persuading her that they are twins, similarly adrift in the brutish world of the unresponsive bourgeoisie. She, pathetically grateful for his attention, assumes a bond of love has formed between them. For a while Eddie pursues the relationship because her naivete allows him to “look right through her … without being made shamefully conscious of the vacuum there must be in his eyes.” In time, of course, betrayal is a foregone conclusion.

  Yet the appeal of Eddie is central to the strength of the book. Although ostensibly an adult, he is actually a true Bowen child, of whom there are many. As with Portia in The Death of the Heart, Lois in The Last September, Davina in The Disinherited, Leopold in The House in Paris, in Eddie’s presence we are face-to-face with the human fallout at the center of each of Bowen’s novels. In him, we feel a frightening innocence—the innocence of stunted empathy—lying just beneath the damage that has been done to each of the children, and that each in turn is destined to inflict on those who love them.

  * * *

  MY OWN EDDIE was a man I met at the age of eighteen (when I could easily have doubled for Bowen’s Portia), and to whom I remained in thrall for decades.

  Daniel, ten years older than I, was darkly handsome, extraordinarily bright, and possessed of a soft, soulful kind of courtesy that never failed to make me feel loved. But the real strength of the attraction between us was rooted in shared sensibility. In this regard Daniel and I were brilliantly matched. Ours was a communion of mind and spirit that Wordsworth might have admired. The conversation between us was its own work of art. We walked together by the hour, discoursing ardently on life, love, literature, each of us yearning, as in a Russian play, toward the remarkable intensity produced by the words that passed between us. This intensity brought peace, joy, excitement—in bed, on the street, at the breakfast table—a depth of well-being I didn’t know was missing from my life until suddenly it was there: in Daniel’s presence.

  Yet, it was also true that from our earliest time together, he sent such mixed signals about who and what he was that often, in the years following our breakup, I would wonder who that benighted girl (me) had been who had indulged in such willed blindness. When we met he told me three things about himself: one, he had been married and was now divorced; two, his parents were living in Europe; three, he was an ex-alcoholic. I soon discovered that he had been married twice not once, his parents were living in Kansas City not abroad, and on occasion he’d astonish me by belting down a drink. Also, he often didn’t call or come when he said he would, or he’d arrive two, sometimes three hours late with some disheveled account of his whereabouts, his eyes shining with delight at now—at long last!—being in my company. Within minutes he had led us away from his delinquency into some newly absorbing conversation in which I clearly was an invaluable participant. How he glowed when he spoke—and I responded poetically to what he said. “My beautiful, marvelous girl,” he would invariably beam, “you are life itself!” As I was besotted, I routinely chose to ignore that about Daniel which was transparently alarming. But perhaps chose is the wrong word.

  * * *

  IN 1923 BOWEN married Alan Cameron, an education administrator for whom she felt friendship not passion, and with whom she maintained a civilized connection until his death thirty years later. In the interim she had affairs, many affairs. “Sensation,” she once said, “I have never fought shy of, or done anything to restrain.” In 1941, however, in London, in the middle of the Blitz, she met Charles Ritchie, a thirty-five-year-old Second Secretary at the Canadian High Commission, and with him she fell deeply and irrevocably in love. For Bowen the affair was life-changing; for the unmarried, womanizing Ritchie it was only one among many that he habitually—even troublingly—conducted. Ten months after he and Bowen had met, Ritchie was writing in his diary, “Elizabeth is sad because she loves me more than I love her. It is sad for me too in another way.”

  Charles Ritchie was Bowen’s Eddie come to life. He was not only smoothly intelligent and well-educated, he was charm itself, could talk to anyone anywhere and make them feel they were persons of interest and value; in fact, almost nothing and no one could hold either his attention or his affection for very long. Although Ritchie would never have dreamed of breaking openly with the conventions of his class, in their presence he was made dangerously restless. In 1939, at the age of thirty-three, he was already confiding to his diary, “Family life makes me long for the brothel or the anchorite’s cell.” There resided within him a vast emptiness which he, too, medicated with sensation. He was attractive to women, and sleeping with them was his drug of choice. From the start, he was routinely unfaithful to Bowen.

  Nevertheless, their arrangement prevailed until death did them part. Ostensibly, the affair lasted because Bowen persisted in seeing Ritchie in an heroic light and he, in turn, fell in love with her view of him. But the real dynamic at the heart of their lifelong attachment was that each had recognized something crucial about themselves in the other—the disfiguring power of “withstood emotion”—and longed for rescue from its arid fate.

  This longing, unevenly shared as it was, sealed a bond between Bowen and Ritchie that was made dramatic by the extraordinary combination of need, cynicism, and self-deception upon which the whole affair fed. In a book called Love’s Civil War, published in 2008 by Victoria Glendinning, we have a selection of Bowen’s letters to Ritchie, and those diary entries of his written around the same time that she was writing these
letters. Together, they reveal a fifteen-year period of her writing passionate letters (actually the same passionate letter) over and over again, while he, at the same time, is confiding to his diary his bottomless dismay over his own spiritual dissoluteness. I choose a few selections randomly from the years 1945 to 1955, to demonstrate the astonishing disparity at any given moment between what he was thinking and feeling while she was fantasizing and effusing.

  Ritchie: “I don’t think of E as much as I did. I don’t even think about myself … How long can I stand the neatness and emptiness of my life?”

  Bowen: “Dearest … I think of you so much and love you so much … this past year has been rather like a year on the screen … one week differentiated from another [only] by your letters.”

  Ritchie: “Nothing gloomier than this Christmas has ever happened to me … I suppose someday this Death of the Heart, this paralysis of the mind, this dreary vacuum will end … The trouble is that when I begin to ask myself the question: What woman do I love? I am overcome by a sort of mental dizziness … I feel capable of loving any woman—up to a point—and in one way or another.”

  Bowen: “My darling … Our love is like something that we have given birth to: it has an independent existence of its own, outside temporary anguish and loneliness. It is like an angel … able to comfort us and bless us.”

  Ritchie: “Coming round the corner … to go up to my office, I thought that what I would like would be to find myself in a big double bed with a woman, with the curtains drawn and pink-shaded lights, and to fuck and smoke a cigarette and talk a little and … drink some champagne … and then do it all over again.”

  Bowen: “I am torn and demented by my longing for you … Oh my darling, what a year for us to have had! We are always near to each other, close to each other, all the week round, every week, but naturally this sense of each other floods in most at weekends, doesn’t it.”