How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  The failure of the author to provide an authentic voice and personality for his creature presages much more serious failings—failings not of tone or characterization, but of comprehension of the issues underlying the primary subject matter of the novel itself. It’s probably safe to say that a novel whose main character—whose narrator—is someone who’s lived as both a female and a male has to justify itself by providing some kind of rare or remarkable insight into sex and gender. Eugenides himself acknowledges as much when he has Callie observe that “latent inside me…was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both.” And yet that special stereoscopic vision is not in evidence here—or rather, the privileged information you get from Callie and Cal never strikes you as being that special. There is, if anything, something cliché about the insights into gender that the author comes up with. Indeed, whatever claims the novel may make to exploring subversively a “middle sex,” it everywhere proclaims the unthinking assumptions of a quite conventional male heterosexual. When Callie finds she likes reading the Iliad, she wonders whether it’s the male hormones “manifesting themselves silently inside me”; so too when she finds herself falling in love with (as she thinks) another girl. Similarly, when she sees through a plan by a couple of boys to get her and the Obscure Object to take a walk to an abandoned cabin in the woods, she wonders whether she does so because she’s really a boy herself.

  But such characterizations—not least, of all boys as inherently oversexed and violence-loving, traits that Callie, as she becomes a teenager, finds she shares, and that appear meant to justify her feeling that she is “really” a boy—are hardly nuanced; if anything, they’re the product of what you could safely call cultural monovision. To declare that “desire [for a girl] made me cross over to the other side”—i.e., to being a boy—seems awfully naive in this day and age, positing a kind of essentialism about sexuality and erotic affect that is equally unsubtle. (Why is it the case that Callie’s attraction to girls “means” she’s a boy? What if she’s just a gay girl?) We may not know much about Callie by the end of this book, but we certainly get a glimpse into how Eugenides thinks. “Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level,” the adult Cal boasts, a claim that will surely come as a surprise to Eugenides’ gay male readers who (it seems safe to say) have as much testosterone as the next fella.

  I suspect that Eugenides has fallen back on such unthinking clichés for the same reason that Callie and Cal remain so unformed: in the end, he hasn’t really figured out what might go on inside the head of someone who’s had Callie’s experiences. This vacuum at the very center of his book accounts for a general sense of deflation toward the end, when some weighty climactic aperçus start racking up. But do you really read a 529-page novel that sets out to explore the most profound realm of human experience merely to find out, in its closing pages, that “normality wasn’t normal” or that “what really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death”?

  And so, in the end, Middlesex fails because its author doesn’t really believe in the premise to which his title so cleverly alludes—in the rich possibilities afforded by being truly in, and of, the “middle.” After the fateful automobile accident that results in the revelation of Callie’s special nature (she runs into the street while escaping the embraces of the O.O.’s amorous brother, and is rushed to the ER, where an astute doctor diagnoses her condition), the fourteen-year-old is taken by her confused and incredulous parents to a sex disorders clinic at a New York hospital. Here, she is interviewed by a renowned sex researcher, who slants the results of his research into her case in order to bolster his own view that nurture, rather than nature (i.e., genetics), determines a child’s gender.

  When Callie sneaks a look at his report, which recommends reconstructive surgery on the (genetically male) teenager’s abbreviated organ in order to preserve her female identity, she runs away from the clinic, from New York, and from her—now his—parents, because he’s decided that, as he writes in a farewell note to his parents, “I am not a girl! I’m a boy.” (Like his grandparents before him, he deals with his terrible secret by going west: cutting his hair, donning boy’s clothes, he hitches his way to—inevitably—San Francisco, where he works as a freak in a sex show for a while before the novel’s final, and least plausible, bit of overplotting—a frantic car chase involving Milt, a fake kidnapping, and ransom money, the sole purpose of which is to bring the wayward Callie back home for a climactic funeral and reconciliation.) The author may think he’s writing about the unique double viewpoint, the stereoscopic sensibility, the sense of special access to two worlds at once, but the novel he’s written is, finally, about the far less interesting search for who Callie “really” is—which is to say, one thing rather than another, instead of both things at once. It pretends to be about being in the middle, only to end up suggesting that you have to choose either end.

  The unpersuasive, approximate quality of Eugenides’ handling of the hermaphrodite material and the questions it raises, in contrast to the verve and authenticity of its Greek family saga, suggests that, with Middlesex, we are indeed in the presence of a strange hybrid; it’s just not the one Eugenides was aiming to create. There’s no way to prove it, but I have a feeling that Middlesex began its life as two novels: a Greek immigrant story, based to whatever extent (one hopes not too great) on the author’s family history; and a novel about the alluring subject of bimorphic sexuality (based, perhaps, on the sensational case, much publicized a few years ago, of a Midwestern girl who turned out, like Callie, to be genetically male). At some point, I suspect, the author had, or was given, the intriguing idea of fusing the two. And why not? Like some other recent sprawling novels—Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, to pick two outstanding examples that took the form of personal and family epics that doubled as epics of American life, too—Eugenides’ Middlesex clearly wants to graft the political onto the personal, the abstract onto the particular, a nation’s saga onto a family’s.

  But the graft didn’t take. They may inhabit the same narrative body, but when you think about it, the immigrants and the hermaphrodite inhabiting this book really have nothing to do with one another. There’s nothing about Greekness per se that helps you understand this hermaphrodite, and there’s nothing about hermaphroditism that helps you understand these particular Greeks. Indeed, the thematic potential that’s implicit in the figure of the hermaphrodite—bimorphisms, dual identities, deep divisions within the self—is never fully realized: the author doesn’t provide enough about the immigrant dilemma of divided identity to make Callie’s condition a cogent metaphor for her family’s status, and because the sections in which the Stephanides clan interacts with its black neighbors in Detroit feel merely dutiful, constructed rather than organic, the connections that Eugenides seems to want to make in those scenes—between his hermaphrodite protagonist and, say, America’s divided self—don’t persuade. The only reason that this particular hermaphrodite is Greek is that Eugenides happens to have a Greek story to tell as well as a hermaphrodite’s story.

  And so, in the end, Middlesex itself is stranded in the middle, somewhere between either of the two books it might have been. Or, perhaps, it has extremes but no “real” middle, no place where the two parts connect. Like that statue in the Uffizi, it has a surfeit of distinct characteristics that, properly speaking, belong to different realms. Eugenides’ ambitious but malformed novel may not end up shedding much light on what it means to be in that middle, but there’s no question that it’s a bit of a hermaphrodite itself.

  —The New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002

  PART THREE

  Closets

  The Passion of Henry James

  For a while, during the Gay Nineties of their respective centuries, the American writer Henry James and the Irish writer Colm Tóibín—whose remarkable new novel is
about James—were faced with the same embarrassing problem. It was a problem that touched both their personal and professional lives; to both writers, it seemed to be a problem that fiction alone could solve.

  Early in 1895, James had been asked by his friend Mrs. Daniel Sargent Curtis, a great American hostess who lived in a great Venetian palazzo, to write an appreciation of the writer John Addington Symonds, the aesthete, Italophile, and early crusader for the rights of homosexuals, who had died a couple of years before. Mrs. Curtis had appealed to James not out of any awareness (or, at least, any conscious awareness) of his own deeply submerged sexuality, but rather because James and Symonds famously had another passion in common: Italy. (More than a decade earlier, James had sent to Symonds a copy of an essay he’d written about Venice, with a note declaring—the phrasing strikes you now as almost comically suggestive—that “it seemed to me that the victim of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.”) In his reply to Mrs. Curtis, James was careful to distance himself from that other, unmentionable, passion, what he called Symonds’s “strangely morbid and hysterical nature,” even as he acknowledged that to write about the dead author without referring to it would be “an affectation; and yet to deal with it either ironically or explicitly would be a Problem—a problem beyond me.”

  All the more interesting, then, that the subject matter that was an insoluble problem for James the critic and essayist had already proved to be a godsend to James the master of fiction. In his notebook entry for March 26, 1884, James, who was fascinated by gossip about Symonds’s unhappy marriage to a prim woman who detested his writings, wrote down the framework of a short story about a similarly unhappy couple: “the narrow, cold, Calvinistic wife, a rigid moralist, and the husband impregnated—even to morbidness—with the spirit of Italy, the love of Beauty, of art, the aesthetic view of life.” A few months later, James published the short story “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” a small masterpiece of delicate luridness in which the conflict between the aesthete (whose book, like Symonds’s essay in defense of homosexuality, had provoked a scandal) and his disapproving wife for possession of their small, “extraordinarily beautiful” son ends with the mother allowing the boy to die rather than belong to his father.

  Almost exactly a century after James, acting out of a profound discomfort at the possibility of self-exposure, turned down the occasion to write explicitly about homosexuality, the Irish journalist and novelist Colm Tóibín did more or less the same thing, for more or less the same reasons. In the preface to the British edition of his 2001 collection of essays about gay writers and artists, Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, Tóibín describes how he recoiled after being invited in 1993 by an editor at The London Review of Books to write about his homosexuality. “I told him instantly that I couldn’t do that,” Tóibín recalls. “My sexuality…was something about which part of me remained uneasy, timid and melancholy…. I told him I couldn’t do it. I had nothing polemical and personal, or even long and serious to say on the subject.” Not to be discouraged, the editor simply resorted to another method of—the language is suggestive—“enticing” Tóibín: he started sending him books by or about gay writers, some of which Tóibín found “too interesting to resist.” Because of his own timidity and melancholy, he goes on to say, the figures to whom he was attracted were not contemporary authors like Edmund White and Jeanette Winterson, “whose novels had done so much to clear the air and make things easier for gay people,” but rather “other figures from an earlier time, whose legacy was ambiguous, who had suffered for their homosexuality.”

  And yet the writer from an earlier time whose legacy is, famously, perhaps the most ambiguous of all with respect to the vexed issue of secret sexuality, of how “silence and fear” can affect an artist’s life and work, is the one artist whom Tóibín chose not to include in his collection. This is not to say that Henry James isn’t present in Love in a Dark Time: a large part of the introductory chapter is, in fact, devoted to James. But for Tóibín, James stands as the negative example—a figure who, because of his self-repression, not only didn’t have a “gay life,” but had no life at all. At the end of a discussion of James’s great story “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), which is about a man who spends his life convinced that some “rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible” destiny awaits him, only to realize that he’s missed what life has had to offer while he’s been waiting, Tóibín argues that the story “becomes much darker when you know about James’s life…. You realize that the catastrophe the story led you to expect was in fact the very life that James chose to live, or was forced to live…. In ‘The Beast in the Jungle,’ James’s solitary existence is shown in its most frightening manifestation: a life of pure coldness.”

  For Tóibín, this coldness, this evasiveness, cripples rather than enhances notoriously ambiguous works like “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” whose coded implications of unnamed moral dangers he finds frustrating rather than (as with many readers and critics) tantalizing. James, he writes, “left himself with no opportunity to dramatize the scene he imagined since he could not even make it clear.” This failure to be clear seems to have frustrated Tóibín when he was preparing Love in a Dark Time, and so he didn’t include James in the collection itself. For him, it would seem, James as both a man and an artist was something prodigious and terrible—something, in a word, of “a Problem.”

  It now appears that the problem Tóibín couldn’t solve in nonfiction prose is one that he, like James, has labored to resolve in a work of fiction: The Master. (The title refers to the nickname that the rather overpoweringly impressive and oracular James acquired from a reverential younger generation; it should be said at the outset that Tóibín’s novel, with its crisp, almost tactile scene-setting, is anything but overpowering or heavy in the way many people think James’s work is.) As with James in “Beltraffio” and, indeed, “The Beast in the Jungle,” Tóibín in The Master has grafted a novelist’s imaginative sympathy and human insight onto the armature of real-life events. As with James, the result is both aesthetically and psychologically potent—and weakened only, perhaps, by certain limitations that tell us more about the author than they do about his ostensible subject, which in this case is, in fact, the “pure coldness” that for Tóibín was James’s life.

  Whatever Tóibín’s literary-critical and ideological interest in James, The Master is unquestionably the work of a first-rate novelist—one who has for the past decade been writing excellent novels about people cut off from their feelings, or families, or both. Of these, The Blackwater Lightship—a finalist for the Booker Prize that was made into a film for television early in 2004—is the best known, although The Heather Blazing (1992), whose protagonist is an emotionally remote Irish judge, has, until now, best expressed Tóibín’s preoccupation with the theme of tragic lack of self-awareness.

  Like some of the earlier novels, The Master seeks to build its portrait of an emotionally hobbled person by moving back and forth between a crisis in the character’s present to illuminating episodes from his past. In the new novel, the present consists of the “treacherous years” in England (so described by Leon Edel, James’s greatest biographer): which is to say, from January 1895, the month when Guy Domville, the historical drama in which James had placed his hopes for commercial success, resoundingly flopped, to October 1899, when James’s competitive older brother, the philosopher William James, came with his family for an extended visit that is meant to provide a final, poignant illumination of the “coldness” at the heart of James’s writing. In each of the novel’s eleven chapters, some incident triggers a memory in Henry (as Tóibín refers to James throughout); this oscillation between past and present allows the author to paint a detailed portrait not only of the claustrophobic anxiety of the late 1890s (not least the paranoia engendered by the trial of Oscar Wilde) but also the whole of James’s life, from his supremely privileged Yankee childhood to his Atlantic-hopping y
oung manhood right up until his late middle age, a period of crisis that turned out to be the threshold of his richest, densest work: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.

  Tóibín, of course, has more on his mind than just painting a novelistic portrait of Henry James. What he seeks to illuminate is the opacity, the failure of passion, that he sees at the core of James’s work, as well as of his life. In each chapter, the present-day incidents and the memories they evoke are linked ingeniously to the genesis of Henry’s art. There is, for instance, a scene that takes place early on in The Master in which Henry listens attentively to a remark made by the archbishop of Canterbury’s son, about a pair of children he’d once heard of, abandoned on an old estate; this was, in fact, the real-life genesis of The Turn of the Screw. Tóibín faithfully re-creates this scene, but also makes it the stimulus to a flashback about Henry’s early life, his invalid sister Alice, and their childhood seesawing between Europe and America. For Tóibín, this was the beginning of James’s “coldness” as well as of Alice’s hysterical hypochondria. “Both of them,” Tóibín’s Henry muses, “had somehow been abandoned as their family toured Europe and returned, often for no reason, to America. They had never been fully included in the passion of events and places, becoming watchers and nonparticipants.” And yet even as Henry realizes he failed Alice, now dead, he starts to toy with the idea of how she might become part of the story he has begun thinking about: “Now, as he began to imagine a little girl, it was his sister’s unquiet ghost which came to him.”