The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  In the end, however many words are spilled between them, Everard is undone by the need to master, and Rhoda by the humiliation of self-doubt. He retreats into a conventional marriage, and she achieves a sexless independence. For one brief moment only, a small part of each of these people had reached out to embrace the difficulty of struggling toward the integrity required to form a “new” alliance—and had then fallen back to that place in the spirit where it is acceptable to no longer go on making the effort.

  Following Rhoda Nunn as her polemics flare and her emotions terrify, we see that she could never have managed the consequences that the conflict between her and Barfoot have set in motion. It is her confusion that makes her so real. Hardy’s Sue Bridehead, James’s Isabel Archer, Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, are all magnificent creatures—and all similarly confused, if you will—but it is in Rhoda that I see myself and others of my generation, plain. No other writer has captured the progress of our smarts, our anxieties, our bravado, as exactly as has Gissing by putting Rhoda Nunn through some very recognizable paces. Imagine (as I can all too readily) the ignorance behind that cold passion with which she, having seen the feminist light, so proudly pronounces, No equality in love? I’ll do without! Children and motherhood? Unnecessary! Social castigation? Nonsense! Between the ardor of Rhoda’s rhetoric and the dictates of flesh-and-blood reality lies a no-man’s-land of untested conviction. How easy it was—for us as well as Rhoda—to call out angrily, To hell with all that! How chastening to experience the uncontrollable force of feeling that steadily undermines these defiant simplicities. As Rhoda moves inexorably toward the moment when she fails herself, she becomes a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which so many of us have found ourselves, time and again.

  Sometimes I think that for me the gap has become a deep divide at the bottom of which I wander, as though on a pilgrim’s progress, still hoping to climb its side to level ground before I die.

  * * *

  A church in my neighborhood runs a soup kitchen. Every morning a line of men (I never see women on the line) stretches from the church door to the end of the block and around the corner. So many of these men are barely standing on their feet—this morning I saw one with an eye half out of its socket, another partly naked under a raincoat too tight to button—yet invariably they speak quietly among themselves, exchange newspapers, honor one another’s places on the line if one drops out for a moment, all the while glancing with such patience in their eyes toward the open church door.

  In the mid-1930s, a journalist named Orville John covered a fruit pickers’ strike in the Imperial Valley in California and was so moved by the dignity of the strikers that he wrote of them as men bearing “ruined faces worthy of Michelangelo.” Today the line outside the church brought that memorable phrase floating back into my head.

  * * *

  Last night at dinner I was telling Leonard that I’d just seen an early-thirties movie in which the leading lady plays an aviatrix (that’s what she’s called, an aviatrix) with whom a wealthy businessman falls desperately in love. Her spirit, her courage, her passion for flying: all undo him. At first, the pilot is in heaven: she’s going to have it all; but no sooner are she and her lover married than he demands that she stop flying. Now that she’s his wife, she’s too valuable to risk. It develops that for the businessman, the wife’s ability to pilot a plane had been the equivalent of good looks in other women: an advantageous card she held in every woman’s competition to attract a worthy husband and protector. Now that that had been accomplished, there was no further need for her to go on flying.

  Made before the code of decency took effect, the movie was wonderfully written—that is, the script was grown-up—and acted with just the right amount of grit, glamour, and pain. How come, I ask Leonard, now that we’re forty years into liberationist politics we can’t come up with anything nearly as artful as this? There isn’t a movie, play, or novel with dialogue as good as this about the way we live now.

  “That’s simple,” Leonard says. “Once the conflict goes public, politics thrives and art goes south. People like us are left staring at an Internet post of a raised fist, a pink ribbon, a ‘right on’ tattoo.”

  * * *

  My mother received her invitation to the annual benefactors’ luncheon at the Philharmonic and asked me to come along as her guest. Her attendance at this luncheon is a family joke.

  When she had passed the thirty-year mark as a subscriber to the Philharmonic’s Friday afternoon concerts, she—who lived on Social Security and a tiny union pension—was invited out to lunch by the orchestra’s PR man. She thought she was being thanked for having been a loyal music lover, but as it turned out she was being wooed as a potential donor who would remember the Philharmonic in her will. When she realized what was up, she said, “Oh, it’s my money you’re after! Okay, I’ll leave you two hundred.”

  The PR man, accustomed to being left thousands, blinked at her. “Two hundred?” he echoed in disbelief.

  “All right,” she replied disgustedly, “five hundred.”

  Seemingly at the same moment, each realized the magnitude of the misunderstanding and both began to guffaw. On the spot, the PR man made my mother a Friend of the Philharmonic and she had received an invitation to the annual benefactors’ luncheon ever since.

  In the dining room at Lincoln Center, the presentation is already under way. This same PR man stands before a blackboard covered with numbers; he has a pointer in his hand and is speaking to the room at large. At small round tables sit men and women in blue suits and silk dresses, nonetheless looking very much like my mother, who is dressed in polyester. Age is the great leveler here.

  My mother sits down in an empty seat, pulls me into the one beside her, and signals the waiter imperiously for her chicken salad.

  “And after your death,” the man at the blackboard is saying, “the Philharmonic can get this money you’ve bestowed on it with these tax breaks I’m now outlining. If you choose plan B, your children may complain that under this plan they’ll be losing forty thousand dollars in IRS costs. But”—he smiles broadly at the company—“you can take care of that complaint easily. Just take out an insurance policy, and leave them an extra forty thousand.”

  My mother looks at me in open amusement; then she snorts, then laughs out loud as the PR man goes on giving instructions on how to leave a clear hundred thousand to the famous orchestra. People turn to look at her, but no matter, she’s enjoying herself hugely. I’ve learned to stay calm at these moments.

  The meal over, she rises quickly and hustles onto the reception line filing past the PR man, whose hand everyone wants to shake. When he sees her, he grasps her hand and calls out, “Hello! How are you?”

  “Do you know who I am?” she asks coyly.

  “Indeed I do,” comes the hearty reply.

  She stands there beaming. He knows who she is. She’s the woman who’s beat the system. She has no money, yet here she is, keeping a gimlet eye on the hoi polloi as they sprinkle some of their ill-gotten gains on culture. It is the high point of the morning, the triumph of the day; after this, all is anticlimax. I tried hard to make my mother a feminist, but this morning I see that for her, nothing in this life will trump class. No matter. In the vitalizing end, one is as good as the other.

  * * *

  On a rainy afternoon in midweek I purchase a ticket for a Broadway revival of Gypsy. Inflation being what it is, I’m still sitting in the balcony. No matter. From the second the score comes surging out of the pit and I hear again its romantic antiromantic sound—the sound, as Leonard used to say, of every musical that was never written—I begin to melt into the delicious warmth of nostalgia, preparing myself for a good wallow. To my surprise I find the pleasure slow in coming, and as the show goes on, something like withdrawal pains begins replacing the expectation of pleasure. I seem to have forgotten how raw Gypsy is, how visceral its resentments and unrelenting its bitter drumbeat. On second
thought, perhaps it’s not that I’ve forgotten; perhaps it is rather that I’m no longer the audience for this piece of theater I’ve always regarded as iconic.

  The first time I saw Gypsy I was in my twenties and Ethel Merman was playing Rose, the most infamous stage mother on record. Merman was one of the great belters of our time, with an acting style to match. In her performance there was no shading, no nuance, no second thoughts. She was a natural force onstage—crude and overwhelming—and I loved it. I loved it with a hard, pressing love that frightened and exhilarated me. The shocking, gutsy, no-holds-barred sound of that vulgar insistence, the sheer drive of it! I knew it well. I’d grown up with it. Rose was a monster—Leonard calls her the Jewish Hedda Gabler—I could see that, anyone could see that: fierce, ignorant, hungry. Yes, yes, yes. Here I was, this college girl barely out of the immigrant ghetto, with a sense of the world belonging to everyone but me, and I’m suffocating on an energy that comes from so far down inside it makes its own laws; provides me with a sense of nature denied that could urge an anarchist to throw a bomb. When “Rose’s Turn” reached the balcony, my head was bursting with a joy of recognition that nothing could diminish or ever make seem unjustified. Rose was a monster? So what. She was my monster. She was up there doing it for me. Years later I sat in a movie theater, watching some black exploitation movie, and as the protagonist on the screen mowed down everyone in sight, and I heard everyone around me scream, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I understood in my bones the murderous glee of the audience. After all, I’d seen Ethel Merman mowing them down and felt the same.

  The brilliance of Gypsy—the story of a celebrated stripper and her outrageous mother—lies in its point of view. It is a point of view that makes you hear Jule Styne’s music “twice,” delighting the first time around in the childish cynicism of “Let Me Entertain You,” cringing the second time at its shocking contempt.

  Rose moves forward blindly, alienating everyone with the speed and power of her need, at the same time dragging them along behind her. No one—including herself—is real to her, yet each goodbye is an intolerable loss. Toward the end, when even the devoted Herbie is finally leaving her, Rose is so confused she cries out, “You’re jealous, like every other man I’ve ever known. Because my girls come first!” This at the moment when she is about to push her daughter Louise onto a burlesque stage, hissing at her, “You’ll promise them everything, and give them nothing.” Within seconds Louise will become the Gypsy Rose Lee who comes out onstage announcing, “My mother got me into this business. She said, ‘Promise them everything and give them nothing.’” Then she looks mockingly at the deranged men salivating in front of her, and tells them, “But I’ll give you everything. Only you have to beg.” Before our eyes an even greater monster is born.

  The moment is stark. We see what the play has been driving toward all along: the human fallout of Rose’s deracinated hunger.

  Now, decades later, I look around me when Gypsy reaches “Rose’s Turn.” There are so many young faces (black as well as white, boys as well as girls) looking as my own had once looked: eyes shining, mouths open, screaming, “Yes, yes, yes!” I feel my own face congealing as theirs grow ever more mobile, and I find myself thinking, There’s no way around this one, there is only the going through it.

  It’s the gene for anarchy, alive in everyone born into the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong sex—only in some it stays quiescent, while in some it makes a holocaust—no one knows this better than me.

  In the 1970s, at a time when social unhappiness seemed to be erupting all over the United States, and thousands in America were adopting the speech and tactics of antisocial rebellion, I joined in the raging intemperateness of exploding radical feminism: “Marriage is an institution of oppression!” “Love is rape!” “Sleeping with the enemy!” When I think back on it, I realize that we, the feminists of the seventies and eighties, had become primitive anarchists. We didn’t want reform, we didn’t even want reparations; what we wanted was to bring down the system, destroy the social arrangement, no matter the consequence. When asked (as we were, repeatedly) “What about the children? What about the family?” we snarled (or roared), “Fuck the children! Fuck the family! This is the moment to declare our grievance, and make others feel it as we do. What comes later is not our concern.”

  Here we were, women of the law-abiding middle class sounding, at this crucial moment of unmediated revolt, like professional insurrectionists, when in reality we were just Rose, demanding our turn.

  Watching Gypsy, the word just leaves me with the taste of ashes in my mouth.

  * * *

  The other day I thought I saw Johnny Dylan sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park. Impossible, of course, as he’s dead, but the moment was so vivid that it put me instantly in mind of what in my life he had come to signify.

  Ten or fifteen years ago, we were forever running into each other somewhere in the neighborhood—either on Greenwich Avenue, or in Sheridan Square, or at the corner of Fifth and Fourteenth—and when we did we’d both come to an instant halt. I’d say hello, he’d bob his head, and for a moment we’d stand there beaming at each other. After that I’d say, “How are ya?” and wait calmly while Johnny’s voice struggled to find a register in which, one by one, the syllables could free themselves to become words no longer strangling in his throat.

  It was John Dylan who taught me how to wait. He was in his sixties then, smaller and much thinner than he’d once been, but his blue eyes were lit with a beautiful kind of gravity and his narrow face imprinted with the wisdom of inflicted patience. Sometimes the quiet trapped in that patience seemed immense, and it would flash through me how much more alone he was than even the rest of us.

  He had had a stroke that had left him aphasic and had effectively ended one of the most impressive acting careers in the New York theater. In the eighties and nineties, the Public Theater had been his territory and Beckett monologues his signature work. Doleful and magisterial, it had been the work of a man in superb control of the material. After the stroke, John pulled himself back from the dead through an act of disciplined will that spoke directly to how art—both in spirit and in body—really gets made; but no one thought ever again to hear the great Irish playwright’s words emerging from that twisted mouth.

  Johnny had lived for years in Westbeth, the Bell Laboratories building in the Village that had been converted in 1970 into subsidized artists’ housing. The place takes up a square block, its backside facing the West Side Highway and the Hudson River—John’s studio apartment had a river view—and it contains a population of painters, dancers, and writers, many of whom would have been on welfare times without number if not for the low Westbeth rent.

  I’ve always thought those river apartments reflect the alternating surges of promise and desolation that the building itself seems to induce. On a Saturday night in spring, with the current moving swiftly in the open windows, boats outlined in lights, high-rises glowing across the water, laughter in the hallways beyond the studio door, these rooms are infused with a sense of New York everlasting; then again, on a Sunday afternoon in winter, with the river gray and frozen, not a human being in sight, and the city an abstraction, the same space fills up with an overpowering solitariness that seems to echo through what now feels like miles of vacant corridors on the other side of the door.

  One day a few years before he died, I received an invitation to a seven o’clock reading by John Dylan to be held in his Westbeth studio apartment. What on earth? I thought, and went. When I arrived I found twenty or thirty people sitting on folding chairs lined up in rows, facing the river. At a space between the windows stood a round wooden table and a chair; on the table, a gooseneck lamp and a sheaf of manuscript. I found a seat in a middle row, one in from the book-lined wall to my right.

  At seven o’clock Johnny came forward and sat down in the chair between the windows. He placed his hands on the manuscript and looked out at us for a moment. The room went dark except for the pool
of light shining down on the table, and John began to read from Beckett’s monologue Texts for Nothing. His voice—unlike the voice I usually heard on the street—was now remarkably steady and did not sound at all like the voice of an actor reading. It sounded, instead, like that of a man speaking directly from the heart.

  “Suddenly, no, at last, long last,” John said quietly, “I couldn’t any more, I couldn’t go on. Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on … How can I go on … It’s simple, I can do nothing any more, that’s what you think. I say to the body, Up with you now, and I can feel it struggling, struggling no more, struggling again, till it gives up. I say to the head, Leave it alone, stay quiet, it stops breathing, then pants on worse than ever … I should turn away from it all, away from the body, away from the head, let them work it out between them, let them cease, I can’t, it’s I would have to cease. Ah yes, we seem to be more than one, all deaf, gathered together for life.”

  We all sat up straighter in our folding chairs, and the many little movements of an audience not yet engaged came to an abrupt halt. Into the expanded silence John spoke again, but, abruptly, his strong start began to lose momentum, and the instability that haunts his speech came creeping back. His voice began to go up when it should have gone down, to crack when it should have stayed firm, rush forward when it should have held back. Yet, surprisingly, on this night the unreliability did not jar, and the performance remained absorbing. Slowly, I realized that this was because John wasn’t fighting the loss of control. It was as if he had known it would be coming and had figured out a survival tactic in advance. He would go with it, ride it, in fact make use of wherever it landed him.