The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  After dinner, I sat at one end of a brocade-covered couch, while Roger sat beside me in a velvet-covered armchair. A stream of chitchat formed itself all around us and, separately, we each joined in from time to time; but repeatedly I saw Roger’s eyes rise above the faces of the company and come to rest on the larger surround. When he did, not only was his pleasure unmistakable, his satisfaction seemed profound. Clearly, the ease with which he wore his clothes extended to the ease with which he inhabited this room. As he looked about him, he absentmindedly stroked the velvet arm of his chair with an absorptiveness that made the caress of his hand seem that of a lover on the arm of the beloved. At the same time, he periodically eased his body forward in the chair to pick from the coffee table a marble egg that rested on a worked-gold stand, rolling the egg about smoothly and again lovingly in the palm of his hand, then returning it carefully to its place on the stand. When he spoke, he held his wineglass in such a way that he seemed more aware of the feel of the crystal stem between his fingers than of the words coming out of his mouth. It was as though the people in the room were figures in the foreground of a history painting, our host clearly heir to the painting.

  I found myself thinking, Who or what is this reminding me of? Another minute and I had it. I was watching Ashley Wilkes, a man of developed sensibility and liberal inclination made inert by a will bound to a way of life rather than a spirit in consultation with itself.

  For a moment, Roger Newman—working in the ghetto, in love with Jane Brown—had had an overpowering need to experience passion firsthand. His considerable intelligence had told him that it was a plus, as well, to know what was being said and done on those streets down below; but it had always been a given that any foray into them would be in the nature of a temporary investigation.

  As the lawyer and I were walking down Park Avenue at midnight, I said to myself, Henry James would have written this story, not Edith Wharton. Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.

  * * *

  When the influence of European modernism crossed the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century, it made its first full stop in Greenwich Village. There, a generation of artists, intellectuals, journalists, and social theorists came together to make a revolution in consciousness. Among them were women and men whose names are now inscribed in the history books: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Sanger, Eugene O’Neill, Emma Goldman, Walter Lippmann—an unlikely collection of cultural bedfellows drawn together by the spirit behind the movement. Experience was now king, and everyone wanted it: unimpeded sexual adventure, alarmingly bold conversation, extreme eccentricity of dress; declaring oneself free to not marry or make a living, have children or vote. These became the extravagant conventions of downtown radicalism—and none adhered more strictly to them than Evelyn Scott, a writer of the 1920s whose name was once known to every Village modernist. Thirty years later, Scott was living with her husband, an alcoholic English writer, in a boardinghouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; both of them now old, ill, half-mad, and almost wholly destitute.

  In 1963, Evelyn died and the English husband, through the intervention of old friends, was repatriated back to London, where he died a few years later, in an alcoholic stupor, in pretty much the same boardinghouse as the one Evelyn had died in in New York. His remains were a collection of shopping bags, small suitcases, a trunk or two. These were hauled off to a book and antiques shop in the Camden district of London, where they gathered dust for a decade and more. Then they were shipped off to a junk shop in Yorkshire. There, one day in the late seventies, an amateur book dealer, a man of literary taste, opened one of the trunks and came across a collection of Evelyn Scott’s letters, diaries, and novels (both published and in manuscript). He began reading. At first mystified, he was soon absorbed. Who was this woman? How had she come to write these books? Why had he never heard of her?

  The book dealer (his name was D. A. Callard) spent the next five years, on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to answer these questions. The fruit of his labor was a biography, published in 1985 and called Pretty Good for a Woman (a crack made by William Faulkner about Scott’s work). When the book was published in the United States, a friend came over, tossed it on my coffee table, and said, “This is your cup of tea.” And so it was.

  She was born Elsie Dunn in Tennessee in 1893. From earliest childhood she was experienced as wild, literary, sexual. In 1913 at the age of twenty she ran away to Brazil with a forty-four-year-old married university dean. Here, the odd couple renamed themselves Evelyn and Cyril Scott. They lived together for years, ran about the world, had a child, shared every outlier view going. From this relationship Evelyn emerged determined on an outrageous life.

  In Brazil she began sending stories and poems to the little magazines back home. She had a talent for the ideas and syntax of Imagism; her work was accepted; her name began to be known. By the time she arrived in Greenwich Village in 1919, she was connected. Within thirty seconds she knew every writer and painter in the neighborhood, and they all knew her.

  In the Village the air itself was filled with anarchism, Freudianism, sexual radicalism. Evelyn embraced it all: violently. She began writing for the Dial, the Egoist, the Little Review. She championed Joyce and Lawrence, published poetry of her own and then novels and criticism in a fairly steady stream over the next fifteen years. All in all she wrote a dozen novels, two volumes of poetry, two memoirs, and a play. Her writing was alternately brilliant and unreadable—sometimes composed in the style of stream of consciousness, sometimes that of German expressionism, sometimes that of Dos Passos modernism. In whichever style, the writing was over-the-top. The word megalomania appears in more than one review of a Scott novel. It might also have been applied to her personality, marked as it was by fantasies of its own high-minded purity and its demands that others be as nakedly honest in life and art as she was. In his memoir Cyril Scott said of her, “The only mark of ‘goodness’ [that she recognized] was complete lack of reticence. This she called ‘honesty’ … and broke with whoever objected.”

  She took lovers easily and frequently, among them the critic Waldo Frank, the poet William Carlos Williams, and the painter Owen Merton, father of Thomas Merton. Williams met her when she was twenty-seven. He thought she had a talent that would mature. Very quickly he changed his mind. He found her a woman of extraordinary willfulness who demanded surrender, both in her relationships and in her prose. The willfulness, as it turned out, prefigured a capacity for obsession that would eventually morph into full-blown paranoia.

  Yet she was exciting and memorable. A remarkable group of people—including Emma Goldman, Kay Boyle, Caroline Gordon—remained attached to her, touched as they were by the brilliance and the madness, the driving hunger that had found release in bohemianism but could not be disciplined to better the work.

  When the 1920s came to a close, an entire generation of artists suddenly found its work unwanted. Overnight, lyrical modernism had given way to social realism, and Evelyn Scott’s writing (along with the writing of many others) was a thing of the past. No longer able to get her work published, she became seriously disoriented. An acute sense of persecution developed and, convinced that the Communists were plotting against her, she began writing continuously of the Red menace: in print, in private correspondence, and finally in letters to the FBI.

  The years passed and soon she and her husband were scraping by in that boardinghouse room on the Upper West Side. Sometime in the late fifties, the poet and critic Louise Bogan ran into Evelyn on Broadway and later wrote of the encounter in a letter to her friend May Sarton:

  I had a sad and rather eerie meeting, early this week, with poor old Evelyn Scott … frayed and dingy and more than a little mad … She is not only in the physical state I [myself] once feared, but she is living in the blighted area of the West 70s, that area which absorbs the queer, the old, the failures, into furnished or hotel rooms, and adds gloom to their decay. It was
all there! She took me to a grubby little tea room, insisted on paying for the tea, and brought out from time to time, from folds of her apparel, manuscripts that will never see print. I never was able to read her, even in her hey-day, and her poetry now is perfectly terrible. Added to all this she is in an active state of paranoia—things and people are her enemies; she has been plotted against in Canada, Hampstead, New York, and California; her manuscripts have been stolen time and again, etc. etc. As you know I really fear mad people; I have some attraction for them because talent is a kind of obverse of the medal. I must, therefore, detach myself from E.S. I told her to send the MS to Grove Press, and that is all I can do.

  The two women parted on Broadway, one turning north, the other south. They’d each taken only a few steps when Evelyn looked back and cried out, “But I must know the editor’s name! I can’t chance having my poems fall into the hands of some secretary!”

  Imagine: I might have been just around the corner on West End Avenue, a college girl daydreaming herself into a writing life at the very moment that Evelyn Scott was crying out, “I must know the editor’s name!”

  * * *

  In a student coffee shop near NYU, two young women are talking.

  “Guess what?” one says. “I saw Romeo and Juliet on Broadway last week.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the other says. “Is that thing modern?”

  A frown creases the forehead of the theatergoer before she says, “The setting is modern, the language is old. But it works.”

  In a booth across the aisle, two young men sit reading.

  “Guess what?” one says.

  The other one looks up from his book.

  “Flaubert’s mother wrote him a letter in which she said, ‘Your mania for sentences has dried up your heart.’”

  The same frown creases the forehead of the respondent before he says, “Meaning?”

  * * *

  For many years I walked six miles a day. I walked to clear my head, experience street life, dispel afternoon depression. During those walks I daydreamed incessantly. Sometimes I daydreamed the past—idealizing remembered moments of love or praise—but mostly I daydreamed the future: the tomorrow in which I would write a book of enduring value, meet the companion of my life, become the woman of character I had yet to become. Ah, that tomorrow! How wonderfully its energetic projections got me through innumerable days of wasteful passivity. Not unlike Seymour Krim, I never tired of imagining new scenarios for my daydreaming life as I tramped the streets and boulevards that many years of steady walking covered. Then, just as I was turning sixty, an unusual development sent this cozy setup into a tailspin.

  That spring I was teaching in Arizona and walking daily along a road at the edge of the town, taking new pleasure in the physical beauty that surrounded me (the mountains, the desert, the clarity of light), but, as usual, running a movie in my head. One afternoon in April, right in the middle of the film, a kind of visual static—something like the static on a television screen—cut across my inner field of vision; the “story” began literally to break up before my eyes and then it actually terminated itself. At the same time an acrid taste began to fill my mouth and, deep within, I felt myself shrinking from: I knew not what.

  The entire incident was so strange, so baffling, that it mystified rather than alarmed me, and I thought to myself, An aberrant occurrence, expect no repeats. But the next day exactly the same thing happened. There I was, walking along the black-topped road, another movie under way in my head, when again: the story short-circuited itself, the acrid taste filled my mouth, and again I felt myself blanching before some unnameable anxiety. When on the third day the entire process repeated itself, it became clear that a sea change was in progress.

  Before long I became sufficiently gun-shy—I had begun to dread the nastiness in my mouth—to want to suppress the daydreaming; and lo and behold, it turned out that I could. Now, no sooner did the images start to form in my head than I found myself able to wipe them clean before they could take hold. It was then that the really strange and interesting thing happened. A vast emptiness began to open up behind my eyes as I went about my daily business. The daydreaming, it seemed, had occupied more space than I’d ever imagined. It was as though the majority of my waking time had routinely been taken up with fantasizing, only a narrow portion of consciousness concentrated on the here and now. Of this I was convinced, because of the number of times a day the bitter taste threatened to take up residence in my mouth.

  The insight was stunning. I began to realize what daydreaming had done for me—and to me.

  Ever since I could remember, I had feared being found wanting. If I did the work I wanted to do, it was certain not to measure up; if I pursued the people I wanted to know, I was bound to be rejected; if I made myself as attractive as I could, I would still be ordinary looking. Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed itself: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life—love it more than I loved my fears—and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.

  Turning sixty was like being told I had six months to live. Overnight, retreating into the refuge of a fantasized tomorrow became a thing of the past. Now there was only the immensity of the vacated present. Then and there I vowed to take seriously the task of filling it. But, of course, easier said than done. It wasn’t hard to cut short the daydreaming, but how exactly did one manage to occupy the present when for so many years one hadn’t? Days passed, then weeks and months in which I dreaded waking into my own troubled head. I thought often in those days of Virginia Woolf’s phrase moments of being—because I wasn’t having any.

  Then—seemingly from one day to the next—I became aware, after one of my street encounters, that the vacancy within was stirring with movement. A week later another encounter left me feeling curiously enlivened. It was the third one that did it. A hilarious exchange had taken place between me and a pizza deliveryman, and sentences from it now started repeating themselves in my head as I walked on, making me laugh each time anew, and each time with yet deeper satisfaction. Energy—coarse and rich—began to swell inside the cavity of my chest. Time quickened, the air glowed, the colors of the day grew vivid; my mouth felt fresh. A surprising tenderness pressed against my heart with such strength it seemed very nearly like joy; and with unexpected sharpness I became alert not to the meaning but to the astonishment of human existence. It was there on the street, I realized, that I was filling my skin, occupying the present.

  * * *

  “I don’t like male energy. Too hard, too forward, too direct. It’s not really interesting. The gestures, the motions, the whole repertoire. Too limited. Not like with women. No nuance, no modulation. It’s not attractive. And then sometimes it’s suffocating.”

  I’ve heard many women speak these words or words much like them. This time, however, it was Leonard who was speaking them.

  * * *

  Release from the wounds of childhood is a task never completed, not even on the point of death. A friend of mine, dying of cancer, was still locked into a power struggle with a husband who had failed to provide her with a marriage that compensated for what she had suffered at the hands of her own brutish family. Although this husband had been consistently faithful—and a trouper throughout her long, terrible illness—my friend had never trusted him any more than she had her philandering father. One day when she was weeks from death, the husband asked me to spell him while he made an overnight visit to some friends in the country. Next morning, no sooner had I taken his place at her bedside than my friend clutched my arm and croaked at me, “I think Mike has another woman.” I stared wordlessly at her. “I won’t stand for it!” she cried. “I want a divorce.”

  It’s five o’clock on a Sa
turday afternoon in summer, and my mother and I are walking on the avenue that fronts the Manhattan housing project where she lives. The sun is blazing down on the usual: sirens screeching, car horns honking, Con Ed drilling, while three Hispanics have an argument, two gay women embrace, an addict slides down a storefront window. Neither of us pays them any attention, especially not my mother, who is relating a tale of grievance to me. In one sense, this neighborhood has made a New Yorker of my mother; in another, she has remained the stubbornly life-offended woman she has been nearly all the years I have known her.

  We run into Mara, a neighbor who’s usually seen walking with her husband. Now, here she is on her own, on her way to a six o’clock movie. We stand talking for a moment or two, then go our separate ways.

  “It’s Saturday night,” my mother says, “she’s walking around alone?” Her voice drips insinuation.

  “It’s five in the afternoon,” I say.

  “By the time she gets out of the movie it will be night,” she says.

  I shrug.

  “Maybe her husband’s out of town,” I say.

  “Why, he’s a salesman?” she says.

  A few blocks on we run into Mrs. Grossman, another neighbor from the project. This woman is well dressed, carefully made up, eighty years old if she’s a day.

  “Tell me,” she says to my mother, “is it true Lionel Levine is dead?”

  “Yes,” my mother says drily, “he’s dead.”

  “Did he die alone?”

  “Yes, he died alone.”

  “Tell me,” Mrs. G says, her voice now smarmy, “was he a nice man?”

  “No,” my mother says flatly. “He wasn’t a nice man.”

  “Oh…” Mrs. G clucks insincerely. “That’s too bad. Really, that’s too bad.”

  Barely out of earshot my mother says, “Everybody hates her.”

  Now comes Boris, an old lefty shaking his fist at us while still half a block away.