Unfinished Business

by Vivian Gornick

  The novella captures neatly the surreal quality of outsiders living inside a compensatory bubble of their own making, sealed in by the silence of the indifferent outer world. Always a humiliation to people of high intelligence and even higher ambition, among these passionately insulted temperaments such isolation breeds the meanest kind of insularity, and lends itself readily to stasis. Jacob alone recognizes the pathos inherent in their situation: “We have all come to a standstill,… as on an escalator, for time is passing, but we remain motionless.”

  I once found the stasis in The World Is a Wedding compelling; today I do not. A situation that years ago had felt not only true but important, now seems to approach caricature. Rudyard himself, whom I had admired extravagantly (with all his silly posturings), reads like a poor man’s Lytton Strachey, his own tittering unhappiness at not having had his genius recognized more absurd than touching. Yet, looked at historically, the novella signifies.

  When Saul Bellow began to write his glittering, take-no-prisoners prose, what he wanted was neither to serve high culture nor to save the Jews from embarrassment, it was to make the page explode with the taste of his own life: a taste that could never have made itself felt through the King’s English, it required a language all its own, one that broke the rules, courted transgression, became performative in the extreme. To this urgency every character in sight is sacrificed (no empathy here), but the writing burns up the page. Delmore, on the other hand, neither he nor his moment anywhere near ready for such savagery, was hobbled by the tenderness he could neither honor nor abandon, forever unable to decide how much of his people he was willing to let the world pass judgment on. While he could not bring himself to love his characters, neither could he bear to throw them to the wolves. It is this hesitation at the heart of his writing that defines the fiction of Delmore Schwartz. I once thought it gave the stories poetic vitality, now I see it as responsible for their inability to realize themselves, saturated as they are in a pained self-consciousness that prohibits the writer from fully inhabiting his material. To my own great surprise, I find the limitation not only moving but instructive.

  * * *

  IN THE LATE 1970S I traveled to Israel, charged with the task of writing a book-length piece of personal journalism about the country as I found it: on the ground, in the ordinariness of its daily life. I never wrote that book. I met some of the most marvelous people I would ever know, looked at some of the most striking landscapes on the face of the planet, felt living history in the faces all about me. Yet, however much I tried, during the months that I lived in Israel, through whichever of the various elements of identity at my disposal (Jewish, female, American), I was unable to connect. As the child of Yiddish-speaking secular Jews, the Hebrew language meant no more to me than any other foreign tongue; as a woman, I balked at finding myself in a country more sexist than my own; as a product of individuating America, I could not get past the appalling tribalism of the culture.

  One day during my time in Israel, I met one of the country’s great storytellers, A. B. Yehoshua, a writer whose work, at the time, I was barely familiar with. A friend in New York had sent him a letter of introduction on my behalf, and on an afternoon when I was in Haifa, the city where he lived and taught, I called and was invited to come right over. He was sitting at his desk when I arrived: a man in his mid-forties with a bulky body, a powerful face, and a mass of curly black hair. He looked up and said in a voice rising on a note of insinuation, “So why are you still living in the Diaspora? Why aren’t you living here where you belong?” I laughed. “You’re kidding,” I said. He told me that he most certainly was not kidding and went on to sketch a picture of my life in the States as one at risk in a Christian nation that, at any time, might turn on me; right now, at this very minute, I was standing on a narrow strip of beach with the sea at my back and the goyim, for all I knew, starting to advance on me.

  The visit lasted an hour, during which I said little while Yehoshua harangued me: exactly as he was to go on, over the next forty years, haranguing the Jews of the world who persist in living outside the state of Israel. To this day, in a voice laced through with contempt, he regularly thunders like a prophet of old that only Israelis are complete Jews. Other Jews are partial Jews—Jews who put on and take off their Jewishness as one would an article of clothing appropriate to the weather of the country in which they reside. It is painful to hear him speak so because he often sounds like a West Bank settler with a gun in his hand and murder in his heart, declaring the land of another his land. It’s the bully behind that sound that makes one cringe.

  In the years that followed my trip to Israel, I often tried and failed to respond to Yehoshua’s fiction because I could not get the sound of that bullying voice out of my head long enough to engage with the work. Then one day, not too long ago, I once again picked up an early collection of the stories written by this fiercest of Zionists, and this time—who knows why—the prejudice fell away and I was in the presence of a writer who, demagogue that he was, clearly felt compelled, when he sat down to write, to honor his own haunting sense of human existence over the political rhetoric that governed his public person. I began to read in mid-afternoon and continued straight through to the last page of the last story; whereupon I found myself sitting with the book in my lap, staring into a room now shrouded in a darkness that, mysteriously, felt lit from within.

  The stories in this collection were all tales of emotional disconnect, in marriage and in friendship, and they were soaked in an existential loneliness foreign to the nationalist rhetoric that Yehoshua himself spouted. These stories were both intensely concrete and yet possessed of the kind of immaterial suggestiveness that cannot help but deepen the reading experience. They were the work of a writer who, wanting to dive down into those psychic regions of loss and defeat common to all humanity, knew how to make metaphorical use of a situation as local as that of a sick, sweating man awakening in an empty flat in Tel Aviv on a hot summer morning sometime in the 1970s. This, these stories tell us, is how, at this time in this place, the creatures we call women and men, just out of Plato’s cave, are moving blind toward some vague understanding of what it is to be human. Any reader whose emotional reflexes were intact was welcome to take in the experience.

  The composite Yehoshua character who came to haunt my own imagination is a failing academic who’s balding, wears glasses, can’t complete his dissertation, hasn’t slept with a woman in five years, and is walking at an angle down a Jerusalem street beneath a burning sun whose heat and dazzle double the surrounding silence—a silence that only a region this hot, this remote, could generate; a silence that makes palpable—in rude, noisy Israel—the silence within.

  A version of this character is the protagonist of one of Yehoshua’s most powerful stories, “Three Days and a Child,” and his essence informs the protagonist of another important story, “A Long Hot Day, His Despair, His Wife and His Daughter.” In each case, the narrator is a man so ill at ease inside his own skin that when the mundane circumstances of his life threaten to turn hallucinatory, we’re right there with him because Yehoshua has put us deeply inside that unease: which, as it turns out, is not the situation but the story itself.

  In “Three Days and a Child,” the narrator is a high school math teacher who lives alone in Jerusalem, sleeps with a woman he does not love, has been working for years on a hopeless dissertation, and now, in the last days of the summer vacation, receives a letter from a woman he once loved passionately (although she hadn’t given him the time of day), asking him to take care of her small son while she and her husband study for university entrance exams. This woman has, for years, been the focus of the narrator’s extended fantasies of erotic humiliation, and while he now meekly agrees to do as he’s asked, it is with a mixture of negative emotions, all the greater for having been stifled, that he opens the door to receive the child. What follows is an account of the three days with the little boy—“end of summer, hot desert winds blowing over the lan
d”—wherein the narrator’s spirits repeatedly rise, fall, flicker, go dead, come back to life, now flaring with bitter nostalgia, now falling back into the inertia that is his daily companion.

  The narrator and the child go wandering about Jerusalem “stewing in its silence.” At the zoo, he sits on a bench and dozes off. When he awakens, the little boy is not there. He searches for the child with his eyes and spots him walking behind three older children along the top of a slanting wall. He watches with apparent indifference, thinking idly, “One incautious movement and he’ll be lying on the ground with a broken neck.” Not only did the narrator not care, “On the contrary, I was excited!”

  Very quickly, of course, he is rescuing the child, nursing him tenderly through a high fever, and now—allowing normal sympathy to stir in his bosom for the first time—acutely aware of the little boy’s forlornness. Paradoxically, his own sense of isolation is triggered—“Now my loneliness was undoubtedly greater than his”—and he is swamped with self-pity.

  He thinks with despair of his loveless relationship with the woman with whom he sleeps: “We may chance to meet in a crowded Jerusalem street … only last night we lay locked and now, as if by agreement, we ignore each other … so great is the pity we sometimes bear each other.”

  He thinks of all the times he has returned to the classroom where “a few moments after I entered the room the sun, too, would enter through the window. The light would glare in my eyes. It was pure torment.”

  He then daydreams a phone call to the parents to tell them that he’s at the hospital and the boy has died, and we are brought to the heart of the matter. In his fantasy he sees:

  The bursting into the hospital, assailing the nurses, the doctors.

  The meeting face to face.

  Her wonderful, crushed beauty.

  They at my feet, I at theirs. Clinging to each other.

  …

  The wonder of their not letting me go now … They would cleave to me then, surround me, as though their child were in me, of me.

  Would take me for their son.

  Because love—of love I have despaired.

  Because love—of love I have despaired.

  The protagonist of “A Long Hot Day,” in his turn, is a forty-two-year-old engineer who, due to a faulty diagnosis of cancer, has been returned against his will to Israel after nine happy months on a project in Africa. Waiting for reassignment, he is plunged into an abyss of aimlessness that puts him on a continuum with Yehoshua’s depressed math teacher.

  In Africa, he had “lived in solitude, conceived by him as freedom.” Back in Israel he experiences daily a domesticity that spells desolation:

  On one of the first mornings home—wife and daughter having gone off to work and school—our engineer awakens to an empty flat, brooding on the night before, when he and his wife had retired to their bedroom together for only the second time in nearly a year: “He put his arms about her. In spite of his abysmal tiredness he intended to be with her, to make love to her … But she pushed him away lightly, kissed the top of his head, slipped out of her clothes, put on a nightdress, got into her bed. He tried to insist … At last he let go. Anyway, there had been trouble even before his African journey … He gave in. She fell asleep at once.”

  Now, he paces, naked, through the house, “enters each room and closes shutters and windows against the heat … enters a sun-drenched kitchen and tumbles straight into the chaos left by his daughter. The butter is melting on the table, the milk going sour in the heat, the door of the refrigerator isn’t shut properly, jam is dripping over a dry slice of bread, a piece of nibbled cheese is on top of a load of dirty dishes—it’s as though a band of hoodlums had had their breakfast here instead of one thin, straggly child … He puts the kettle to boil, moves the entire pile of dirty dishes to the sink and starts chewing at the slice of bread left by her.”

  Slowly, the engineer drives himself to the edge of mental instability—he broods over his loveless marriage, starts napping in his wreck of a car, hoards the letters that a young soldier writes to his daughter—and all the while there is the “sun-charged morning” into which he must repeatedly awaken: “the sweltering air that is making the road wave and contort … the sun exploding silently, breaking up into a thousand sparks … splinters of light quiver between his feet, and over his head a canopy of coals.”

  Hardly a page in these stories is free of heat—the sun and the heat; the glare and the heat; the unexpressed yearning and the heat; the sexual dysfunction and the heat. It is there in every story: pressing into the narrator, driving him to experience, in almost equal parts, the landscape and the people on it (himself, first and foremost) as surreal rather than actual.

  Inevitably, I found myself comparing Yehoshua’s Israeli heat with the heat of, say, Camus’s Algeria or Coetzee’s South Africa. Their heat, too, goes hand in hand with an emotional unreality that allows people to do unspeakable things to themselves and to one another beneath a burning sun in the middle of nowhere. Yehoshua’s heat, however—unlike that of Camus or Coetzee—is neither sinister nor murderous; rather, it is anxious, depressed, exhausted. It’s the exhaustion that makes Yehoshua’s stories remarkable, even profound. It runs so deep it feels as old as time itself; as though it has been there since the beginning of instinctual life; as though, knowing as we do in the womb what is coming, we are exhausted in advance of being born. I turned the last page of “A Long Hot Day” and felt what I had never once felt reading a single word of Jewish-American writing: dread.

  Yehoshua was right when he said that Jewishness as such can serve metaphorically only in a place where Jews do not belong to a social subset driven to imagine itself in hyphenated terms but, rather, are the ordinary citizens from whose everyday life, at one with the culture at large, comes a wealth of suggestiveness that allows the writer to dive deep and come up with emotional gold. It did not occur to me until I came to re-read Delmore and Yehoshua in proximity to each other, that Jewish-American writing—essentially outsider writing—is deprived of that particular kind of literary richness, and always had been.

  And now I was led back to my earlier thoughts on why it was that I had never been drawn to setting any of my own work within the context of Jewishness-in-America. It flashed on me then that when I was growing up it was only the boys who were being prepared to become Americans, so to speak. The girls were being prepared to marry the boys who were going to become Americans. It was my brother, my cousin, my classmates who were to leave the neighborhood, face down social humiliation and perhaps worse, lay claim to a place in the larger world; we girls were to be waiting at home to soothe their anxieties, sympathize with their failures, cheer them on.

  By the time it was my turn to lay claim to something that resembled a withheld American birthright, it was not as a Jew but as a woman that life began to feel metaphorical. True enough, Jewish-working-class-immigrant had once seemed an identity carved in stone but now, in the 1970s, it clearly was as nothing compared with the unalterable stigma of having been born into the wrong sex.

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK on those visionary years what I find most remarkable is that, almost from the beginning, the women’s movement was philosophical in its nature, existential in its grasp. Yes, equal pay for equal work. Yes, pass the ERA. Yes, legal abortion and an end to job discrimination. But at the same time, and surrounding all this down-to-earth politicking, was an immeasurably larger insight within which the politicalness of life itself was being understood as one of the great signifiers. One feminist perspective after another—from psychologists, historians, political scientists, and literary critics—seemed to be addressing the whole of the human condition in its analysis of the insecurity and defensiveness at the heart of the social conventions that subordinated women. Society’s unspoken agreement that women would live a half life in order that men might have the courage to pursue a whole one was suddenly understood in the light of anxieties that ran deep. These anxieties made it very nearly im
possible to sustain without derangement the suspicion that one was, indeed, alone in the universe. Recognition of the fear of human loneliness as a motive force for sexism began to prevail among those of us who cared to think about original causes. And very soon we discovered that we were hardly the first feminists to have made the same connections.

  * * *

  I HARDLY KNEW who Elizabeth Cady Stanton was—a nineteenth-century suffragist? a friend of Susan B. Anthony’s?—when, sometime in that crucial decade, a feminist put into my hands “The Solitude of Self,” Stanton’s last public address, and I experienced both the shock and the excitement of realizing “We’ve been here before.”

  The time was January 1892, the place a packed convention hall in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Stanton, at the lectern, was about to step down from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. This would be her last public speech as the head of the movement. She looked out at the few thousand faces gathered before her. Many of them she had been gazing at for the past forty years, and for most of those years she and they had been as one; but the fight for suffrage had grown steadily more conservative while she had remained an unaltered radical, and by now she had been feeling this separation between herself and her beloved movement for a very long time. It had induced in her a terrible loneliness, unlike any that she had ever known, but the isolation had proved revelatory: she had come to understand emotionally what before she had understood with her reasoning alone.