by Pamela Paul
Together, we took trips to Wales and York and Scotland, listening to books in the car, attuned to the literature of our destination: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Elizabeth George’s Payment in Blood as we waited for goats to pass across the narrow streets on the Isle of Skye. On vacation in the States, we listened to adventure stories en route to Nantucket: Into Thin Air and Into the Wild and The Perfect Storm. Like me, he was an enthusiast, and when we discovered something new we seized on it together, almost gasping with pleasure over dramatic scenes. Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other’s first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we’d never truly tasted it before.
There was only one literary challenge left to overcome: poetry, which he of course appreciated instinctively, and memorized with ease. It was time. I needed to as well because we needed to find a poem. Every couple, after all, recited one at their wedding. It was basically a matrimonial requirement, like a purification ritual in the face of nuptial excess. And lo, miraculously and yet as if foreordained, we found our poem.
On a perfectly sun-dappled September afternoon, in front of friends and family in a flower-strewn copse in upstate New York, I hardly noticed anyone else was there as he read to me Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Love Song”:
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
I loved and even understood the poem.
CHAPTER 14
The Magic Mountain
Different Interpretations
It turned out the relationship wasn’t all mutual appreciation and understanding. Our fight over The Magic Mountain was prolonged and bitter and, in all likelihood, entirely in my head. Nevertheless, my husband had started it.
He was the one who had introduced me to Thomas Mann. I’d read his copy of Buddenbrooks in a swoon, and we immediately decided to take turns with The Magic Mountain, considered by many to be Mann’s masterpiece. That much we agreed on. Yet somehow, every time we talked about what was in the novel itself, things got testy. The Magic Mountain, with its complex geopolitics and layers of meaning, struck a discord.
Mann originally wrote The Magic Mountain after visiting his wife in a swanky sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where she was trying to recover her health. In the novel, Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, in his early twenties and about to embark on a career in shipbuilding, similarly travels to Davos, but to visit his cousin; he ends up staying on for years. There were certain eerie parallels at work. My husband and I had recently decamped to Europe. We, too, were isolated from our friends at home. We, too, weren’t quite sure what we were doing there.
Worse, we soon turned against each other. The Magic Mountain is by most accounts a deliberately ambiguous book, part satire, part social critique, part prophetic history. A good chunk of the novel is taken up by philosophical debates between two characters, Settembrini and Naphtha, curdled by the snide insinuations they volley back and forth. Naphtha: “‘What Herr Settembrini neglects to add is that the Rousseauian idyll is merely a rationalist’s bastardization of the Church’s doctrine…’” And from Settembrini: “‘Even war, my dear sir, has on occasion been forced to serve progress—as you yourself must grant me…’”
Somehow their endless quarrels became our own. We argued over who Settembrini and Naphtha were and what they were meant to symbolize and what they were arguing about. We could agree on nothing other than that we disagreed with everything the other person said. All the while, I wondered whether we were really arguing about Settembrini and Naphtha, or whether we were stand-ins for these characters—and if so, which one was I? The secular humanist Lodovico Settembrini, I’d like to have thought, even though he is considered by many to be a caricature of Weimar-era liberalism. Then again, I couldn’t be his adversary Leo Naphtha either, and anyone insinuating as much could just fuck off. Naphtha was a radical and a Marxist, and I despised the things he stood for. But then, who the hell was supposed to be Naphtha? We couldn’t both be Settembrini.
It didn’t matter. We’d ended up on opposite sides of the book, and this was only the bad beginning. Why were we even fighting about these imagined people? Why were we fighting at all? We had only just run off to London to embark on the rest of our lives. It couldn’t possibly have gone wrong already.
Obviously, two people in a relationship can’t always love the same things or understand why someone loves something you hate or reads it in a different way. We all know this, even if we don’t always entirely believe or abide by it, especially if we’re twenty-six and fully persuaded that true love means that disagreements are meaningless. Or that where there is True Love, disagreements naturally evolve into something adorable, to be laughed over in rom-com montage with a tender embrace and exhilarating makeup sex at the end. Or that two people in love must love everything about the other, even the things one person hates.
But it became clear that the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences. Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways. For me, a book like The Magic Mountain contested my essentially optimistic take on the world rather than overturned it; by forcing me to reexamine my convictions, it strengthened and reaffirmed them. Whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and books proved it.
I found that I liked to read books that challenged my point of view; he seemed to prefer to read books that confirmed his. He probably thought the same thing of me, only the opposite. In an essay called “Why Readers Disagree,” the critic Tim Parks theorizes that two people may see the same book differently in much the way misunderstandings occur within newly formed couples, because “people have grown up with quite different criteria for assessing behavior and establishing a position in relation to it.” It was as if our fundamental differences became manifest in how we read, slicing through the fog of infatuation. Who were we, and how exactly had we ended up together, the words on the page seemed to be asking.
None of this was really about the books. But under the circumstances, it was hard to enjoy what I was reading anymore, at least not in the same way. Already I was changing. My Book of Books had begun to reflect my husband’s interests, deliberately so. I wanted to know what he knew. I wanted our minds to align in a way that reflected our hearts. His books would be mine, too, part of our shared life. That’s not entirely what happened.
Nonfiction, where our disagreements were more starkly exposed, was even worse than fiction. Any book could set us at odds, and did. Read Modern Times, the defining road map to the twentieth century, my husband urged me; then I would understand his worldview. I’d had some previous Paul Johnson experience, having been suckered into the History Book-of-the-Month Club in high school the way normal kids signed up for Columbia House Records. Johnson’s Intellectuals was part of my ninety-nine-cent first shipment. Completely unaware of his politics, I’d read each essay in a state of growing confusion. Why was Johnson taking down each of these venerated philosophers? What did he have against Rousseau?
Still, I ventured into my husband’s Modern Times blushingly naïve. I didn’t know about Johnson’s slavish Thatcherism, his ardent defense of Nixon, his admiration for Pinochet, or the way he overtly manip
ulated historical fact to suit his political disposition. Here, I assumed, would be a useful brush-up on twentieth-century Europe.
Now that I was reading Johnson as a somewhat older, more sophisticated reader, one who’d actually studied European history in college (maybe having learned something after all), it came through quite clearly on the page. How was it possible my husband liked this guy? Johnson, I worried, was telling me something I didn’t want to know about the man I was in love with. Was it possible I didn’t know him at all?
That’s when I started reading behind his back. And Bob began to tell a different story, one populated by books that made an alternate case. These were books my husband had no interest in, books that perhaps opposed his interests. One day, browsing in Hatchards in Piccadilly Circus (the best London bookstore, btw), I came upon an essay in a Christopher Hitchens collection in which Hitchens described with gleeful and damning detail Johnson’s drunken boorishness and general despicability. Hitchens recalled watching Johnson bully a female foreign editor at the New Statesman. Here’s Hitchens’s description of Johnson:
“Don’t listen to her, she’s a Communist!” he kept bellowing, his face twisted and puce with drink. “Fascist bitch!” he finally managed, before retiring to a sofa on the other side of the room and farting his way through a fitful doze for the rest of the meal.
Hitchens had proved my case: Johnson was no authority. Read Modern Times, my husband had urged me; then I would understand. Now I feared I understood too much.
In any case, all this sleuthing was for naught. One of the worst aspects of arguing with my husband was that he unfailingly emerged victorious. Whereas my own memory was a dismal chamber of half-forgotten, half-thought-out notions that leaked precipitously, my husband’s was well stocked and airtight. Nothing fell out. He knew everything, or at least everything that proved him right. Mention Poland, and he could describe the country’s nineteenth-century history in detail; bring up Kentucky, and he had the name of every senator who had represented the state at the ready. Every single word he read he absorbed, digested with a cogent point of view, formulated into persuasive arguments, and then filed where it could be accessed at a moment’s notice, and, it seemed, used against me.
This remarkable retention initially filled me with awed admiration. Here was someone I could learn from, like having my own private library of a husband. “Click on him!” was a running joke among his friends when one of them had trouble remembering a fact or date. And now here he was, by my side, entirely clickable. But over time, my enthused approval congealed into an unattractive envy and, later still, a rage at him and a loathing for myself. How unfair that I didn’t share this skill, and what an asshole he could be when he used it so effectively against me.
It was just the two of us. We had few friends in London. Exceedingly efficient Charlotte had arrived from Time Inc. only a few weeks before me, and was already pregnant and working at Condé Nast; she and her husband lived perfectly in Chelsea with a ready-set crowd of professional expats who hosted well-orchestrated dinner parties. My husband’s new friends were a ragtag group of twenty-two-year-old grad students who wanted to talk about what they needed to study that night. I felt out of place in both worlds, neither student nor employee.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t an easy way to meet other people. Without official working papers, finding a full-time position at an actual company was a legal impossibility. The only loophole for an American was to prove that no one else in the European Union could do the job. With only a few years’ media experience under my belt, I could hardly pretend. Would-be employers at various Time Warner affiliates shrugged their shoulders helplessly.
Outside of job interviews, everyone assumed I was a housewife. Utility workers unfailingly addressed me as Missus and they weren’t far off the mark. Much of my day was spent food shopping, gym going, and household tending. My husband had a little money, so I could afford not to work. Don’t worry about it, he reassured me; after all, I was the one who’d had to quit a job to move to London. Having worked since I was fourteen and risen to the dubious title of “marketing manager” (yet another reason to ditch the Time Inc. job), I felt gratitude, guilt, discomfort, defensiveness, relief, fear, anxiety, and a growing sense of indolence. I roasted lamb chops.
On the bright side and for the first time in my life, I managed to land actual freelance work as a writer and editor, and was even paid small amounts of money for the privilege. After meeting a couple of editors at the Economist and sweating through a tryout, I was given a small monthly column on global arts trends. I could hardly believe my good fortune. Slightly less luckily but far more lucratively, I started editing internal publications for McKinsey, the global consulting firm and a place where nearly everyone wrote in jargon using English as a second language.
Both jobs taught me a lot about the work that went into good writing, building an argument, backing it up, and making a point. The first not only required me to write well, it also asked that I do so in a British accent; the second involved making bad writing less bad. But neither job, largely conducted from our London flat, did much to alleviate my feelings of isolation. On those occasions when I went into the Economist’s St. James headquarters, the plummy tones of the extremely English people who worked there scared me into near silence. For the first time in my life I was living with a partner, and I’d never felt more alone.
Here we were, having practically just met and now living together in London, separated from friends, family, jobs, and—not unlike Hans Castorp—cast away from our larger social tapestry. In theory and occasional reality, this was a lovely way to be in love. But with few other outlets, we began to turn against each other. We disagreed about books, we disagreed about politics, we had different worldviews, and we disagreed about the way each of us characterized the other. We were still in love; we just found each other disagreeable.
With growing frequency, the world out there became the basis for argument. I started to read with an eye to anticipating the fights; I’d lap up books, magazines, and newspapers with purpose, accumulating statistical backup and rebuttals for future intellectual showdowns. “Aha!” I’d gloat, when I found a particularly useful piece of data in an article or book, scribbling notes that I’d file away for future reference.
I was still no match for him. He could pull out a quote by Kant that he’d barely glanced at during a freshman-year seminar and swashbucklingly apply it to something I’d said, rendering it stupid and inert.
And he knew it. A year later, lying in our bed in Brooklyn, where we’d moved after London, he playfully pinned me down in bed and demanded to know the hero’s name from Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. I’d finished reading the novel only six months before. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than six hundred pages with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. (It’s Philip.)
This put me constantly on my guard. My defensiveness had the unintended consequence (a favorite phrase of his) of making me a better reader, a closer reader, cautious and more skeptical. In earlier blithe days, I’d simply allowed the content of books to gather agreeably in my head as I read and then file out when I was done. Now I clung to texts with determination, stowing away facts for future reference. I needed to be prepared.
If my childhood had made me an ambitious and voracious reader and my high school English teacher had turned me into a close reader, my husband made me a deeper reader and a more critical one. I’d gone from escaping into books and searching for answers to locating a considered remove, respecting my perspective on the work, and trusting my own responses. I hadn’t properly engaged with books before I’d met my husband; I’d never wrestled with a text. Before we were married, I’d never written a book review; a few months after we split up, I wrote my first.
And a funny thing happened when I devoted myself to the authors I vehemently disagreed with: I found I enjoyed reading them. There’s a personal
and intellectual challenge in being forced to inhabit another point of view, to reexamine your opinions and learn to make a case for them. As all debaters know, sometimes you figure out what you really think only when in opposition. If reading people who think along the same lines as you do is a comfort, reading the people with whom you disagree is discomfiting—in a good way. It’s invigorating. To actively grapple with your assumptions and defend your conclusions gives you a sense of purpose. You come to know where you stand. Even if that means standing apart.
Later, when it was all over, after the wedding and the separation and the divorce, it was hard to prevent the arguments from continuing to swirl around in my head. I couldn’t stop reading defensively, endlessly poised to prove that there was more than one side to any story.
I missed it. But what to do with that yearning for engagement? My husband was gone, living on another continent, and I was still putting up a fight. The positioning, the ready indignation, the fear of not having the facts marshaled by my side continued to wind up my brain as I scoured the newspaper over coffee and as I read any book, fiction or nonfiction, Victorian novel or twentieth-century biography. I’m ready now, I thought to myself. I know who I am. But the person I wanted to appreciate all that was no longer there.
For months and even years after we split, years in which we never actually spoke, I’d pull my ex into conversations about what I was reading, whether it was Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct or Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I expected he would think I liked because he’d always seemed to reduce me to simplistic views. It had felt unfair then, and it still stung. Well, I’d show him. I paused midbook and conjured him in my mind.