by Wendy Lesser
I should say a word about how I started reading science fiction. My parents were divorced when I was six. My father, who until then had worked in the San Jose office of IBM, took a job with the New York branch and moved east; my mother, my younger sister, and I stayed in the three-bedroom, linoleum-tiled, flat-roofed Palo Alto tract house my parents had bought when I was three. (Tract house perhaps conveys the wrong impression: these redwood-frame houses, called “Eichlers” after their designer and builder, were manufactured en masse in the 1950s as starter homes for aspiring young suburbanites, but they were—and still are—considered nice properties, and the one my parents bought in the Greenmeadow subdivision for $20,000 in 1955 would today sell for about $500,000.) When my father moved out, he left behind in the two-car garage a conglomeration of assorted possessions that he apparently could not bring himself either to dispose of or to take with him. Among these were five copies of a magazine called Unknown Worlds, vintage 1942.
I can still remember the crackly feel of the old paper and the monochrome look—olive green, I think—of the black-printed covers. I discovered these magazines the summer I was ten, and I spent a large portion of that summer avidly reading and rereading them. Some of the stories were by Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, and other people who went on to science fiction fame; several, amazingly, were written by L. Ron Hubbard (though I didn’t know enough then to be amazed); many of my favorites were by someone with the unlikely name of L. Sprague de Camp. I would lie on my bed on a hot summer afternoon and read Unknown Worlds until I was too terrified to be alone any longer. Then, dazed with the effort of getting up too suddenly, I would wander out onto the sunlit, grass-lined, clean, new streets of nearly identical Eichlers, and even the shadowless world of Greenmeadow, populated by my friends and neighbors, would seem to emanate some of the lurid uncanniness I had absorbed from my reading. When my father came on one of his semiannual visits, I asked him whether the magazine still existed, and if so, whether I could have a subscription. But Unknown Worlds had long since gone out of business, so he bought me instead a five-year subscription (one year at a time: my father is generous but never extravagant) to a monthly called Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Two things broke me of science fiction. The possibility of drawing together the imaginary and the real, of finding places in the mind that were also places on earth, was first shown to me by “real” novels and by cities. And because I was a suburban child, the city itself was a novel to me: a place where miraculously diverse characters acted out their unknown and therefore fascinating fates on a seemingly limitless stage.
My first city was San Francisco. However young and small it may seem by comparison to European or East Coast capitals, it was more than enough of a city for me. I remember the zeal with which I decided I would learn the city—by observing where the Number 30 bus went, by figuring out the order and direction of Clay, Washington, Jackson, Pacific, and most of all by walking everywhere. Instead of attending classes during my last semester of high school, I persuaded the school authorities to let me take an unpaid job in San Francisco. (Since the job was for a firm of city planners, my employment was deemed sufficiently educational to replace my lost semester, but my father couldn’t get over the fact that I was working for no pay. In a way, he was right to worry: it was to become a lifelong bad habit.) I spent most of my lunch hours, and quite a few of my supposed work hours, walking through San Francisco’s various neighborhoods. Each house I passed became my house, each view my own private discovery. My first sense of the city was therefore intimately linked with a feeling of possession.
Yet a city only really becomes your own when you let go of it a little. The special quality of both cities and novels is that they are enriched by previous use, handed to you by others, made intimate by your awareness of their vastness. Both the novel and the city live by projection: immersing yourself in a crowd of characters or citizens, you become defined in relation to them; you lose yourself to find yourself. The city was not something I could take home, like a product in a suburban shopping mall. It was only mine as long as I left it in place. And so the owner had to give way to the observer. Meanwhile, a similar thing was happening to my novel-reading. I began by demanding identification, by wanting to be the characters or have them be me. I didn’t like novels about alien personalities. Emma Woodhouse was a pill, Sonia Marmeladov a pathetic martyr, Adam Bede a stuffed shirt, and Esther Summerson was too smirkingly self-effacing to be borne. Every novel, then, was judged by how strongly it made me sympathize with its central characters. Since I was sixteen years old and had spent my entire childhood in redwood-framed suburban comfort, this didn’t leave much to identify with.
But as I gained the city by beginning to let go of it, I also began to give literature a longer rein. It was not that I grew to like Esther Summerson (does anyone?) but rather that I came to understand the value of not liking her. That a world could be alien to me and still mine—that empathy was a hard-won claim and not an easy virtue—was something that both novels and cities could teach me.
And finally they were also able to teach me their own limits. Eventually I learned that San Francisco was not the only city, and that its Washington Square—the broad expanse of bench-lined lawn in front of Saints Peter and Paul Church in North Beach—was a mere shadow of the “real” Washington Square, the one in Greenwich Village. And even this New York Washington Square was by now a faded reality beside the fictions it had generated: the beatnik hangout, the playground for Grace Paley’s mothers and children, the locus of Thirties intellectual strolls, and most of all the title of a novel by Henry James.
Washington Square is the type of novel I would have hated when I was sixteen. The heroine, Catherine Sloper, is a frumpy, somewhat slow, exceedingly sweet-tempered girl who is caught between a stern father and a sleazy beau, neither of whom really loves her. She is not the kind of character one would want to identify with in the first place, and the likelihood of identification is made even smaller by the poor little fate she ends up with in this novel. If the novel is supposed to be about sympathy, it is maudlin; if it is about irony, it is cruel. Yet Washington Square is finally neither maudlin nor cruel, and one must therefore conclude that the novel, like the city from which it draws its name, gains its meaning from something other than the easy substitution of one human being for another. In fact, the best novels, like cities, emphasize the impossibility of such substitutions: they reveal the difficulty of feeling empathy in the face of the strongest demands for it. Washington Square is about the severe limits on one person’s ability to feel for and judge on behalf of another—and it is also about our innate desire to see others as mere projections of ourselves.
Nowhere in the novel is this conflict exhibited more strongly than in James’s description of the Square itself. “I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations,” he says,
but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has the kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in venerable solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commended itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, following the nursery-maid with unequal step, and sniffing up the strange odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that time formed the principal umbrage of the Square, and diffused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to dislike as it deserved; it was here, finally, that your first school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, with a saucer that didn’t match, enlarged the circle both of your observations and yo
ur sensations.
And by this time we have become Henry James. The twentieth-century child of the California suburbs is expected to “remember” this childhood of nursery maids and blue teacups. The process of projection is seemingly complete and apparently unthinking: “you” the reader have quite naturally evolved into the author, whose own “early assocations” were precisely those of the upper-class Washington Square existence. Yet the transformation is neither complete nor unthinking, for just as you have begun to take possession of this fictional childhood memory, Henry James interrupts you with the final line of his description: “It was here, at any rate, that my heroine spent many years of her life; which is my excuse for this topographical parenthesis.” The vividly remembered Washington Square has become a mere “topographical parenthesis” in a novel, the “heroine” of which is precisely not the sort of person into whom one can comfortably project oneself. The illusion of projection, in other words, has been shattered by a reminder that we aren’t all the same person, and that novels aren’t life.
If this is a sad reminder, it is also a relief. Henry James would be the first to admit that novels can limit life as much as they can enrich it. And sometimes the sober realizations that novels impose on us, such as the awareness that people can never truly identify with each other, or that life is a matter of alienation, isolation, and false projection, get temporarily wiped out by an unexpected urban event. I am thinking in particular of something that happened once in Washington Square—my Washington Square, the one in San Francisco.
It was a warm Sunday afternoon during the month of June. I was passing by the Square on one of my habitual walks through the city, and the usual assortment of ancient Asian couples, Italian families, aging flower children, and miscellaneous other San Franciscans were disporting themselves on the grass. As I glanced over the park, I noticed that two raggedly dressed, heavy-set men, apparently drunk, had begun to fight. Actually, it was hardly a fight, but rather a case of the tougher man picking on the weaker one, in the manner of a playground bully. The tough guy pulled off the weak one’s shirt and strolled away with it, leaving his victim looking helpless and pathetic (as one does when violently deprived of clothing in a public place). And then, just as I had decided the whole disturbing incident was over, a man in a knit cap—a longshoreman, from the looks of him—who had been standing with an entirely different group in the park, left his friends and headed toward the tough guy. Now, I thought, they’ll start to fight. But the longshoreman just took the shirt away, walked over to the weaker drunk, and handed it back to him—an act of pure and gratuitous kindness, following from nothing and leading nowhere. The longshoreman went back to his friends and I continued on my walk, pleased that for once the city had violated my novelistic notions of causality, projection, motive, and pattern.
WISH FULFILLMENT
or those of us who love Dickens, the need for him goes very deep, as if it were a primal urge, or a deeply buried childhood memory waiting to be touched upon and reawakened. In my case, at least, he is a childhood memory. One of my earliest literary remembrances is of my mother reading aloud the whole of David Copperfield to my six-year-old sister and my eight-year-old self. These readings always took place on the couch in our living room (the same couch in whose cushions I had once hidden my little sister’s favorite blanket and then, in my typically cavalier and reprehensible way, forgotten all about it, so that it stayed lost for months). My sister and I would sit on either side of our mother as she held the book in her lap. Sometimes I would glance over at the words on the page, but more often I would just stare off into the distance and listen. I could already read to myself, of course, and less than two years later I would attempt A Tale of Two Cities on my own (and repeatedly attempt it, four or five times, until I finally got past that obscure and contrary first paragraph). But this was different from reading to oneself. This was immersion.
Sometimes my mother would stop to weep at a particularly sad passage—the death of David’s mother, for instance, or the much later death of Dora—and I would demand impatiently, “Why are you stopping? Keep reading!” This was not just the impatience of an eight-year-old to hear the rest of the story (although it was in part that: patience has never been one of my virtues). It was also the distress—I would even say the resentment—of a child confronted with an adult’s tears. And in my case the normal childish distress (Who will keep me safe from sadness if even the adults are crying?) was augmented by a feeling that my mother’s tears were a rebuke to me. She and my sister were sensitive, I was hardhearted: that is how she had defined our emotional territory, or so I believed. “When we told you about the divorce, your sister cried but you didn’t,” my mother had reminded me more than once. Perhaps she only meant it as an invitation to express my sadness, but I took it as a criticism of my capacity for feeling.
A Berkeley friend of mine reports a related but opposite incident from his own life. When he first got divorced, his three young children would come to stay with him on occasional visits, and he decided it would be nice to read David Copperfield to them, as it had been read aloud to him when he was young. But after a few chapters his youngest daughter, who was then four, asked him if he could please stop: it was too much for her, all this intense material about childhood and loss. “It was like mainlining emotion,” says my friend, making a gesture that suggests a hypodermic applied to his inner arm.
I envy and admire that little girl’s willingness to admit her feelings of loss. Such confessions have never come easily to me—least of all when dealing with a parent (least of all when dealing with a father). And I agree with my friend’s assessment of the situation, which is also an assessment of Dickens’s appeal. But what makes that appeal unique is the way we are allowed to absorb all of Dickens’s emotionality—gorge ourselves on the sentiment, wallow in the occasional silliness, long for a happy ending, and eventually get our wish—yet still feel clean and free at the end. Most sentimental writing leaves you sick to your stomach, so that you feel sated but sullied when you reach the end of it; and most novels that give you exactly what you think you want (the average mystery, for example) leave you with a terrible sense of letdown—with the discovery that what you thought you desired isn’t satisfying after all. But Dickens never disappoints in this way. He gives you more than you imagined you wanted. He wounds you and then he soothes you, but he leaves you with a residue of what it felt like to be wounded, a tangy bitterness that cleanses the sweetness of the happy ending.
If you feel this way about Dickens, you never get over the fact that you have exhausted all the available novels by him. It’s all very well to reread David Copperfield every few years (well, better than all very well: it’s marvelous), but there remains an appetite for new material that is not appeased by these old satisfactions. Whenever I’m in an unfamiliar bookstore, I find myself unwittingly looking under the “D’s,” irrationally hoping that I’ll be surprised by a new Dickens novel.
For a long time I had half a novel left. I kept The Mystery of Edwin Drood for last because I knew how I would suffer when I reached the last page Dickens had written. To the usual distress one experiences when a mystery novel is lost in mid-read (the acute anxiety about how it all turned out, the immediate concern about being able to buy or borrow a replacement copy, the outright desperation to know the end) would be added all the despair of being ripped untimely from the warm, dark, soothingdreadful hideaway created by Dickens’s language. I wasn’t sure I could stand this feeling. But I was perpetually tempted. Finally, when I was in my early thirties, I gave in and read the unfinished novel.
I can still remember the horrible feeling that came over me when I reached the last words of Dickens’s version (“and then falls to with an appetite”). In my edition, Edwin Drood came packaged with Master Humphrey’s Clock appended to it, so I didn’t even have the warning signal of the pages dwindling to an end: I was reading happily along in a volume that still had plenty of pages left in it, and then, turning a page,
I was suddenly ejected from the story. I was lying in the bathtub (where I do some of my best reading) and I groaned aloud—such a serious groan that my husband anxiously called out, “What’s the matter?” It was impossible to explain the full extent of what was the matter; it seemed foolish to be so disappointed by something I had known perfectly well was going to happen.
In my willful, wishful dream, I am back in that bathtub and the pages go on and on, to the end of the story as Dickens would have written it. The sentences after “appetite” are all written in the same rich, hilarious, enveloping, convoluted Dickensian prose as the rest of the book; this is no patched-together finishing-up job by a diligent scholar, but the thing itself. And as I read this Real Thing, I realize that I don’t care all that much about how the mystery turns out: I don’t care, ultimately, whether my feeble guesses in midstream proved to be right or wrong. What I care about is that Dickens finally had the chance to shape the novel to his (and my) satisfaction. “The novel is significant, therefore,” said Walter Benjamin, in one of my favorite quotations of all time, “not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” That is why my dream wants to replace the incompletion imposed by the novelist’s death with the completion offered by the novel’s.
VOCABULARY
t is a common narcissistic fantasy to believe that the world as one knows it started with one’s birth, and that prior to one’s own appearance all was darkness and antiquity. My particular generation—located at the heart of the baby boomers, midway between Bill Clinton and Madonna—has taken this tendency to an extreme. Thus we would be likely to believe that no one before us had ever argued for school desegregation, worried about the apolitical masses, lived in split-level houses, used automated tools, got sick because of mislabeling, got well because of tetracycline, slept on Posturepedic beds, favored clitorial sex, laughed at Scientologists, mocked Interpol, complained about wolfwhistles, turned from the vomitous rubberiness of pallid U.S. cooking to the pleasures of tapenade, consumed hallucinogenic drugs, taken over multi-use college buildings to protest unjust wars, or elsewhere indulged in a widespread habit of fervent, loud, public gabbiness.