Ritchie: “With me love for a woman is always linked with a need to betray that love: a compulsion which I dread and desire.”
Bowen: “[There are times when] I begin to feel almost ill with longing for you, and life becomes an almost unbearable strain.”
It wasn’t long before I realized that Daniel was a pathological liar. If he went out for a newspaper, he said he was going for cigarettes. If he said he was working late, he was probably at a movie, if having dinner with one friend more often than not it was with another. It was as though it was important that no one knew where or what he was doing at any given moment. The lying went hand in hand with an equally pathological unreliability. Waiting for him in a public place—store, restaurant, library—was almost certainly a prescription for disaster.
I was so unaccustomed to such behavior that at first I was only startled, and the first few times merely demurred. Then I remonstrated, then I grew exasperated, then I fell into a rage. “Don’t you see how insulting this is,” I would cry, “how discounted you make me feel?” Sometimes I wept or screamed or withdrew. Nothing I did reached him. Invariably, he would stare at me or hang his head or murmur feeble words of apology, but always he looked puzzled. He genuinely could not fathom why I was taking on so.
One evening at a party given by some acquaintances of mine, I came out of the bathroom in a somewhat darkened part of the apartment where the party was taking place, to find Daniel and the hostess in a clinch. I must have cried out because they broke apart and the woman fled. I still remember my heart pounding in my chest and my head feeling like it was about to explode.
“Are you sleeping with her?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Are you thinking of sleeping with her?”
“Not especially. I was just curious. What are you getting so excited about?”
“What am I getting so excited about!”
The thing I remember most from that incident was how devoid of all affect Daniel’s entire demeanor—face, voice, body—remained throughout this exchange. For the first time, it occurred to me that emotionally he was somewhere on some other planet.
That night, Daniel confided, quite casually, that he envied me the strength of my feelings. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that from the time he could remember he himself seemed to have nothing that resembled an ordinary complement of emotions. “Whatever it is that people feel when they’re happy, sad, confused,” he said, “I don’t. I don’t feel it. I never have. It’s as though there’s a leak somewhere in me, and it all got drained out.”
“But,” I said, “when I tell a joke you laugh. When that girl in the wheelchair came into the restaurant you rushed to help her find a seat. When we make love you’re passionate.”
His smile was rueful: “That’s just me passing for normal. I’ve studied people for years to see how they act in various situations … and I’ve taught myself to imitate them. I’ve slept with women who’ve told me I’m a good lover (you’ve told me I’m a good lover) but, as we all know, the body responds even when the brain doesn’t. No sooner do I achieve orgasm than I’m wishing myself gone because then I must demonstrate the tenderness I never feel, yes, even with you. In the end they all leave me, as you will leave me, and y’know, when you do I won’t even feel lonely. I’ll just feel weary. Weary to death. You know that word, inanition? It’s got my name on it.”
Suddenly, my young heart was flooded with luxuriant pity. I saw him then as a stricken creature stigmatized by some heroic woundedness; a sacrifice, even, to existential damage; poetic in his affliction; even bearing somehow—and here’s where the appeal grew dangerous—some mythic burden of redemption for the rest of us. I vowed silently never to desert him.
Over the years, Daniel betrayed and deceived and defrauded me countless times with open infidelities, public embarrassments, ruined vacations; even embezzled bank accounts. Yet, repeatedly, I was seduced anew, the combined power of his life-giving conversation coupled with the pitiable vacancy at his center holding me fast.
What I failed to register throughout those years was that I had become addicted to a peculiar sense of well-being that came only when Daniel and I were in harmony and deserted me when we were estranged. It was as though knowing him had brought into consciousness some primitive set of hungers that I could neither identify nor hope to satisfy on my own. At those times I felt a kind of drift within myself I had never before experienced. If I had but realized it, I was in thrall to some romantic ideal of trust between us (the one he routinely betrayed) that provided all the excuse I needed to persist in the delusion that I was grounding myself, all the while I remained in free fall.
* * *
BOWEN HAD ACTUALLY been writing Charles Ritchie into her characters long before she met him; and nowhere more so than in Max, a protagonist in The House in Paris, published in 1935 and one of her more tragic explorations of life with the lid on.
The house belongs to Mme Fisher and her daughter, Naomi. To make ends meet, the two women take in upper-class English or American girls spending a season in Paris. Fifteen years before the book opens (sometime in the 1920s), the English Karen Michaelis, aged eighteen, is one of these girls. She and Naomi become fast friends, and talk endlessly about Max, a darkly unapproachable young man of French-English-Jewish extraction who works in a bank and comes to the house to visit Mme Fisher.
Five years later Max and Naomi show up in London, now engaged to be married. Karen, too, is engaged to be married: to Ray, an Englishman of her own class. Neither Max nor Karen feels passion for the people they are to marry, and on this visit they realize that they are, and always have been, painfully attracted to each other. A few weeks later they meet in secret, spend a night of love together, agonize over their star-crossed situation, and part. Returning to Paris, Max breaks his engagement to Naomi, is taunted by Mme Fisher, a horrifying self-hatred overcomes him, and he commits suicide. Karen, meanwhile, is left pregnant, has a nervous breakdown, gives the baby up for adoption, and marries Ray.
In Bowen’s talented hands this melodramatic tale becomes a metaphor for all in life that can hardly be expressed, much less realized. As it is Max not Karen whom life has already twisted out of shape, it is he who bears the burden of articulating the hopelessness within which they are caught. He begins by describing how he came to be engaged to Naomi.
A born outsider (not for nothing that drop of Jewishness), he has been adrift within himself all his life: a man in his own eyes a bad lot, on the one hand cautious, on the other sly; despairing of life on the margin, tormented by inappropriate desires, never for a moment able to make peace with himself. One day, Max tells Karen, he and Naomi were both in the sitting room of the house in Paris, speaking together as they always had. She was sewing, he lying wearily about. She encouraged him to unburden himself to her, and as he spoke she let her pity for him shine through. Suddenly, Max says, “I looked back at my humiliations, my ridiculousness and self-deceptions, and dreaded others. You do not know what it is to be suspected and to know why. What it is to have no wall to put your back against.” He saw then that Naomi’s pity “was the only pity I did not resent … I went across to her chair and asked her to marry me.”
As he speaks, Karen sees that at the same time that Max understands the unholiness of his alliance, both to Mme Fisher and to Naomi, he also grasps the strength with which he is compelled to cleave to it; the dread he feels at being left alone with himself: the self that isn’t there.
You do not know what it is to be suspected and to know why.
Of all the characters in Bowen’s work to whom I have resonated, it is Max above all who makes me feel I stand at the edge of the abyss. Max through whom the primitive fear of consciousness itself comes most alive; the fear rooted in the suspicion that should we get to the heart of things we will find: nothing.
* * *
ONE NIGHT a few years ago Daniel suddenly turned up on my doorstep, wanting to know why I had let him hang around
for so long. “Ever figure out what was in it for you?” he asked.
FIVE
After Bowen, it came to me that the word “dread” seems to apply most often when the story in question turns on a tale of self-estrangement; when it turns on a tale of cultural estrangement the word that leaps to mind is “angst.” Angst, of course, eats away at the soul every bit as much as does dread, but it lends itself to different literary concerns. With angst, the tropes of modernism take a back seat, as those in its grip, so far from being preoccupied with existential nothingness are intent on making eloquent the despair of exclusion.
Mine was the last generation of children born in America to the Jewish Europeans who arrived in this country around the turn of the twentieth century. To a large extent, we remained shaped, throughout our lives, by our parents’ anxiety-ridden experience of life on the periphery and, collectively speaking, began quite early to set down a literary record of what it meant to be Jewish-in-America: how it felt to be pushed to the margin, generation after generation. The story was first told through straightforwardly immigrant novels like The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), then continued with the self-consciously poetic Call It Sleep (1934), and concluded in the 1950s and ’60s with the work of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth who brought to the enterprise a language-changing brilliance that made literary history. After that, assimilation did its work and the experience as a whole failed to capture the interest of serious writers, none of whom could bring the necessary outrage to bear on what was no longer a live reality; outrage, of course, being the sine qua non of Jewish-American writing.
Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about this large body of work written by Americans for whom Jewishness was central, and wondering how well it actually has transformed testament into a literature that will last. What, after all, can the ultimate achievement be of a body of prose riddled through with an anxiety that is nonstop complaint, an irony that barely masks supplication, and the kind of satire that deprives all but the narrator of empathy? How deep can it go, how far can it reach, how long endure?
And oh, yes, another thought I’ve had: how was it that it had never occurred to me, when I was coming of age as a writer, to place my own work within the context of Jewishness-in-America?
* * *
ONE OF THE WRITERS I read as a young woman who now seems emblematic of a moment in its history when Jewish-American writing hung delicately in some cultural balance, hovering between the passivity of the past and the chutzpah of the future, is Delmore Schwartz. When I was young I read him as a clear instance of literary arrival, today I do not; but today I see his work as if its author knew where his kind of writing was headed, and he balked at going there.
Born in 1913 in Brooklyn into a household where more Yiddish than English was spoken, and the family relation to the world was characterized by a mix of crude and shrewd common to those not at home in the culture they inhabit, Delmore—everyone called him Delmore so I will, too—became an epitome of this arriviste generation of Jewish intellectuals whose writing was both precocious and reverential, at one and the same time an original and a keeper of the culture.
By the time he was in his mid-twenties, Delmore was a presence among the New York literary intelligentsia: a luminous wunderkind whose personality—shaped by an amalgam of immigrant culture, urban street smarts, and a besotted adoration of European literature—was marked by a mesmerizing torrent of words that poured incessantly from him. In Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, we have Delmore as we ourselves might have experienced him. The major characters in the book are Charlie Citrine (a barely disguised Bellow) and the poet, Von Humboldt Fleisher (a not-at-all disguised Delmore Schwartz). As an introduction to an evening of conversation taking place sometime in the early 1940s, Citrine gives us a taste of Humboldt’s talk:
“Reasoning, formulating, debating, making discoveries, Humboldt’s voice rose, choked, rose again … he passed from statement to recitative, from recitative he soared into aria … Before your eyes the man recited and sang himself in and out of madness.” First came politics—a long, wild disquisition on Eisenhower, McCarthy, Roosevelt, Truman (clearly, it’s the 1940s); then came pop culture: the tabloid columnists of the day, Walter Winchell, Earl Wilson, Leonard Lyons, Red Smith; after that, on to General Rommel and from Rommel to John Donne and T. S. Eliot; then “the sayings of Einstein and Zsa Zsa Gabor, with references to Polish socialism and [American] football tactics and the secret motives of Arnold Toynbee, and (somehow) the used-car business. Rich boys, poor boys, jewboys, goyboys, chorus girls, prostitution and religion, old money, new money, gentlemen’s clubs, Back Bay, Newport, Washington Square, Henry Adams, Henry James, Henry Ford, Saint John of the Cross, Dante, Ezra Pound, Dostoevski, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Gertrude Stein and Alice, Freud and Ferenczi.”
Here we have the classic description of the feverishly talented, fast-talking New York Jew, yet imprinted with the conviction that to serve the literary culture formed by modernism was his vocation. Within a decade after World War II had ended, he would be unleashing all this pent-up brilliance to a culture-changing fare-thee-well, but in the 1930s and ’40s—and this, I think, is the ultimate significance of Delmore Schwartz—could mix the high-minded with the vernacular only in private. To write about Jews was one thing, to sound like one quite another.
Delmore’s novella The World Is a Wedding, grounded in a situation that he understands in his nerve endings, is a transparent illustration of both the toll and the benefit that this constraint conferred. Somehow or other, the protagonists, rather than standing revealed through the story’s perfectly formed English sentences, seem trapped in them. And then, in one sense it’s as though the author is mocking the characters for letting themselves be thus caught, in another he clearly sympathizes with them. We, the reader, experience a startling potential for tenderness in Jewish-American writing that would be thrown under the bus once it came into its own.
The main character in Wedding (said to have been modeled on Paul Goodman but surely a stand-in for Delmore himself as well) is a brilliant misfit named Rudyard Bell. To spend one’s life making and thinking about literature and its cultural meaning is, for Rudyard, more than a calling, it is a responsibility. As he sees it, it is the obligation of the artist and the intellectual to reject the allure of mass and middlebrow culture because those cultures foretell the death of literature as we know it. It is, equally, Rudyard tells himself, the task of the critic to preserve for the common reader the culture within oneself that makes poetry flourish. When Rudyard graduates from college, at the height of the Great Depression, he decides his writing is too important for him to try to get a job. He will stay home and write plays.
His aunt had suggested that he become a teacher in the public high school system until he had proven himself as a dramatist, but Rudyard … said that to be a playwright was a noble and difficult profession to which one must give one’s whole being. Laura Bell had taken care of her younger brother since he was four and she said then that Rudyard was a genius and ought not to be required to earn a living. Rudyard accepted his sister’s attitude as natural and inevitable, such was his belief in himself and in his power to charm other human beings. Thus, in a way, this refusal to become a teacher and to earn a living was the beginning of the circle.
The circle is composed of a group of self-styled intellectuals in their late twenties, early thirties, who, trapped by the Depression into occupational stasis, meet every Saturday evening in Laura’s apartment to lick their wounds; otherwise known as discussing art, literature, and philosophy. Among them are an unemployed wannabe philosopher; an unemployed (also wannabe) journalist; two grade school teachers; and the owner of a business agency—all Jewish, all possessed of literary ambition. Laura, a buyer in a department store, is the only one making money. Bitter because she can’t find a husband, she drinks in the kitchen while preparing the midnight supper for the group, calling out wildly every now and then, somewhat like a demented Greek chorus, th
at life is unfair. For all of them, Rudyard’s refusal to become a teacher and earn a living represents a noble rejection of the crass world where all that people do is make a living. As Rudyard himself puts it, “For us … it is not so much what we accept as what we reject that is important.” This credo alone persuades them that their Saturday night meetings are a testament to inborn superiority.
Worship of literary talent and philosophical intelligence dominates the members of the circle, along with the ever-rising anxiety that others may have more of it than they do. This anxiety induces the absurd imperiousness with which they all speak, and allows social behavior of the crudest order to pass for normal.
One by one, the psyche of each member of the circle is dissected in the mind of another of the story’s characters fully enough for the reader to see that each is preoccupied with separating himself, if only in his own mind, from the others, as each has no means of defining himself except against those he most resembles. Jacob Cohen, for instance, the most generous-spirited of the group, walks the streets of the city during the week, thinking about his friends as though “borne forward by the feeling that through them he might know his own fate, because of their likeness, difference, and variety.” So what is Jacob thinking?
Francis French is a stiff-necked homosexual who is destroying himself with his obsessive pursuit of sex; Edmund Kish cannot argue a point without letting his interlocutor know that he considers him a fool; likewise, Ferdinand writes stories whose “essential motive … was the disdain and superiority he felt” about the members of his parents’ generation. Then there is Marcus Gross, an insensitive oaf who, when Rudyard praises the philosophical genius of his own plays (which he does regularly), tells him that his plays don’t get produced because they’re not about anything; whereupon Rudyard tells him he is a Philistine, and everyone starts talking at once. Soon enough, one of them complains that in all the evenings he’s been coming here he has yet to utter a complete sentence, and Laura shouts from the kitchen, “I have not uttered a complete sentence since 1928.” Ah, Laura! When she complains that Rudyard, who lives with her, reads a newspaper at the breakfast table and a book at the dinner table and at neither meal does he speak to her, he replies, “Reading is superior to [conversation], in general, as authors are superior to other human beings.”
Unfinished Business Page 6