This “peculiarity” in Sue, as she herself puts it, has been the bane of her existence. Many men have been drawn to what looks like her ethereal purity—all of them certain that hers is a virginal fear that will evaporate once intimacy is achieved—only to come up against the brick wall of a frozen resistance that will weaken as her love for Jude grows but will never dissolve out. Throughout her troubled life, Sue will be pulled around by the agitation that the prospect of sexual love sets up in her, bringing misery to everyone who gets involved with her as she—herself without a clue as to why the dread never lets up—wrings her hands and stamps her feet and cries, “I can’t, I can’t!”
There’s a haunting moment in the novel when Sue is trying to explain to her bewildered and deeply insulted husband why she cannot sleep with him. But of course she can’t explain—what is there to explain? you repel me?—and at last, in an anguish as confusing to her as it is to him, she cries out, “Why should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn’t hurt other people?” In answer to which the husband himself cries out, “But it does—it hurts me!” She stares, speechless at him. She really does not know what he is talking about.
Only slowly, over the years, reading and re-reading this passage did I come to realize that the failure of emotional imagination in the novel belongs entirely to Sue. It is because she cannot see herself as others see her that she cannot fathom the unhappiness she inflicts on all who love her. It dawned on me then that she cannot see herself because she does not know herself; does not want to know herself. It is herself with whom she cannot live; herself from whom she is in constant flight.
Racing down a clear track of memory, I thought, What a long road this novel and I have traveled together—and with so many stops along the way.
When I first encountered Sue’s devotion to erotic abstinence, I found it thrilling. Her holding herself apart from sexual love—because the integrity of her very being seems to depend on it—touched a chord of response in me that, in my twenties, felt prescient: as though something elemental was just now coming into focus. It was the double bind of sexual love: its attraction-repulsion. Rarely if ever had I seen it addressed in the novels I’d been reading and never as a key development in a major female character. I felt myself intensely sympathetic to Sue’s plight. At the heart of her remarkable behavior lay something extraordinary: the mysterious, exciting possibility of an all-in-allness that might be achieved through oneself alone.
Ten years later courageous abstinence had lost its glamor, and Sue was getting on my nerves. Now she just seemed sexually frigid, and I was horrified by her grotesque regression into religiosity. At the time, I was teaching the novel in an adult education course and when a smart-ass student called out, “Ah, f’chrissake! Does she have to go crazy? Can’t she get a job?” I felt myself in sync with the philistine’s exasperation. Why, indeed, was Hardy never holding her to account for the lunatic behavior I now found repellent.
A decade later, when I again met up with Sue, my feelings had undergone yet another sea change. I had just had an illegal abortion, and to my dismay was experiencing a sense of foreboding I myself found shocking. Somewhere deep inside, in a place I could not put a name to, I, secular to the bone, was experiencing something like fear of retribution. One day during this time while I was out walking, the words formed themselves in my head, “For this you will be punished.” I went upstairs and, as though sleepwalking, took Jude off the bookshelf and turned to the sections on Sue’s disintegration into religious mania. Now I read them, sort of marveling, and I shuddered, as I read, thinking of the wealth of superstitious dread that must sit lurking just below reasoning mindfulness, in even the most unlikely of people. For the first time, I felt, I understood …
What was it that I—yet again—was understanding for the first time?
It was the darkness at the heart of Sue’s passivity: that willed blindness in her that I knew so well. Oh yes, there was being born into the wrong class in the wrong place at the wrong time, but what Hardy had made radiate in Sue was the ancient fear of taking in one’s own experience. What I was now “understanding for the first time” was how deeply that fear revels in its own unknowingness, how mocking is its resistance.
When I read Jude again, most recently, I wondered, as I turned the last page, if the book had finally finished saying what it had to say to me.
TEN
The other day I was asked a question of fact that I could not answer about a book I had once known well but hadn’t looked at in years. Naturally, I thought if I just riffed through it, I’d soon have the information that now eluded me. As it happened, the copy of this book that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched for decades, was a cheap 1970s paperback that began to fall apart in my hands as soon as I had picked it up. I turned back the cover and the first page came instantly away from the spine of the book; then page after page came loose and bits of paper from their crumbling edges began to rain down. Soon I was looking at more than four hundred loose pages lying all about, on my lap, on the desk, on the floor.
Somehow, this devastation-of-the-book went through me like an electric shock. It was as though the physical book had been a living thing, and I could not bear to sweep its tortured remains into the trash. I began picking up random pages, holding one after another up close to my eyes as if committing to new memory its fading print, and then to my nose, as if intent on inhaling some essence-of-book. After that, I alternated between concentrating on individual pages and examining the dried-out glue along the spine, as if it held some scientific secret that would explain what had happened.
Suddenly my attention was caught by the sight of a sentence I must have underlined some forty years ago, and after that a paragraph I’d encircled, and in a margin two exclamation points standing side by side. I looked first at the underlined sentence: it puzzled me. Why’d you underline this, I asked myself, what’s so interesting here? Then again, look at this one you’ve also underlined—how obvious!—what were you thinking? My eyes drifted to a sentence on the page opposite where nothing was underlined, and I thought, Now here’s something really interesting, how come this didn’t attract your attention all those years ago?
How come indeed.
I began to read the various pages with reader’s marks on them; and then I began to piece them together, like an archaeologist poring over ancient fragments to see which order will yield some design worth having been excavated, and soon enough I saw my younger reading self clear enough, marveling at the most elementary insights this wonderful book had yielded up. Very nearly, it was as though I’d written “So true!” all over the margins.
I put the pages back together in their proper order and sat down to read the book anew, this time underlining and encircling in a pen of another color the sentences and passages that now struck me as worth noting. Then I bound the pages together with a thick rubber band and put the book back on the shelf where it had been sitting all this time. I hope I live long enough to read it again, with a pen of yet another color in hand.
ALSO BY VIVIAN GORNICK
The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir
In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt
The Romance of American Communism
Essays in Feminism
Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory
Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
Approaching Eye Level
The End of the Novel of Love
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The Men in My Life
Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, reissued as an FSG Classic in 2005; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for The Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introduction
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
Also by Vivian Gornick
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Vivian Gornick
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71660-8
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