by Anne Fadiman
Behold me then, just as I am! Alone, alone, and for the rest of my life, no doubt.
Alone! Really one might think I was pitying myself for it!
“If you live all alone,” [says a friend,] “it’s because you really want to, isn’t it?”
Certainly I “really” want to, and in fact I want to, quite simply. Only, well … there are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a poison which makes you beat your head against the wall.
How we resonated at twenty-three to this situation—and to think, it was being lived at a time when a new book in one’s hands could remind the reader of coal, trains, and departure! Renée Néré, the astonishingly forthright narrator of The Vagabond and The Shackle, is a woman in her thirties whose fractured identity is central to her existence. She has written books, she has divorced her husband, she has gone on the stage. And now, here she is suffering the consequences of her actions.
Yet Renée’s hold on her newfound independence is transparently shaky (even we could see that). Take, for instance, the curious business of her writing. Although she has published two books, writing is a fugitive longing in Renée. Why? The impulse, quite simply, is not strong enough:
From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe … . The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar … . It takes up too much time to write. And the trouble is, I am no Balzac! The fragile story I am constructing crumbles away when the tradesman rings, or the shoemaker sends in his bill, when the solicitor, or one’s counsel, telephones, or when the theatrical agent summons me to his office.
Hardly the words of one compelled by her talent to make art (again, a situation we understood perfectly). The desire in a woman to be “free” is (we well knew) easily undermined by desire itself. Struggle as she may, a woman is always torn between the longing for independence and the need for love. It is this, really—the Question of Love—that, as we soon saw, commands Renée’s real attention. Love has come, and love has gone. Should it come again, she muses repeatedly, will she give in to the siren song or will she resist with all her might? She knows everything there is to know about the emotional slavery that accompanies desire—the longings, the anxieties, the humiliations. Still, the lure is powerful.
The argument with herself about whether or not to resist love is the remarkably sustained subject of the two novels that Renée Néré narrates. In The Vagabond she will renounce it, in The Shackle she will knuckle under to it. The first gratified us, the second shocked us. Either way, we were in thrall. What carried the day was the significance, in Colette’s hands, of erotic obsession. Love with a capital L, in both books, is the glory and the despair, equally, of a woman’s life. “What torments you’ve thrust me into all over again,” Renée cries to the friend who introduces her to the first lover. “Torments,” she adds reverently, “that I wouldn’t exchange for all the greatest joys.” Love is the divine stigma, the extraordinary mark of a knowing life, upon which Colette’s unique powers of observation were here trained.
Recently, I read these books again for the first time in more than thirty years, and the experience was unsettling. The wholly unexpected occurred: I came away from them with mixed feelings. This time around I found myself thinking, Ah yes! how brilliantly it is all evoked—the endless fantasizing, the pathological insecurity, the emptiness inside the protagonist that opens wide to take in Love with a capital L. Really, the writing is incomparable. But what appalling strangers these people are to one another! Not a speck of reality between them. How preoccupied she is with aging. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? And the aimlessness of them all, women and men alike—especially in The Shackle. No one has anything to do but lie around brooding about love.
Most striking, for me—the single greatest change, in fact, in my feeling about these novels—was the sense I had that everything was taking place in a vacuum. When I had read Colette before, the world seemed to collect around the narrator’s wisdom. Now I saw that Renée’s reflections led back—only and always—into the secret, silent self. She was alone in the world; alone and lonely.
Early in The Vagabond she observes Max, her future lover, and she thinks:
How is it that he, who is in love with me, is not in the least disturbed that he knows me so little? He clearly never gives that a thought … [never] does he show any eagerness to find out what I am like, to question me or read my character, and I notice that he pays more attention to the play of light on my hair than to what I am saying … . How strange all that is! There he sits close to me … [but he] is not there, he is a thousand leagues away! I keep wanting to get up and say to him: “Why are you here? Go away!” And I do nothing of the kind … . Does he think? Does he read? Does he work? I believe he belongs to that large rather commonplace class of persons who are interested in everything and do absolutely nothing. Not a trace of wit, a certain quickness of comprehension, a very adequate vocabulary enhanced by a beautiful rich voice, that readiness to laugh with a childish gaiety that one sees in many men—such is my admirer.
The absence of connection between them is penetrating—and unabating. Four years later, in The Shackle, Renée, now retired from the stage and openly at loose ends, falls into an affair with Jean, a man she could describe much as she did Max, and one with whom the association is even more nakedly chemical—and isolating:
Our honest bodies have clung together with a mutual thrill of delight they will remember the next time they touch, while our souls will withdraw again behind the barrier of the same dishonest but expedient silence … . We had learnt already that … [e]mbracing gives us the illusion of being united and silence makes us believe we are at peace … . I have insulted this lover … by giving him my body and supposing that this was enough. He has returned the insult … for nothing is exchanged in the sexual act … . [O]ur love which had begun in silence and the sexual act was ending in the sexual act and silence.
This is the anxiety of infatuation speaking—Colette at her absolute best—the anxiety of knowing that one is not known, that one is (marvelously, terribly) only a catalyst for another’s desire. This anxiety is the thing Colette knows through and through: the wisdom at the heart of her fame, there, from the beginning, like a smoking gun; the source, inevitably, of her narrator’s obsessive preoccupation with aging.
In the earliest pages of The Vagabond, Renée stares pitilessly into the mirror. She is thirty-three years old, and the dreaded decline is eating at her. If it weren’t for that, she might stay with Max after all, even though she can’t talk to him. But at the end, when he proposes marriage, promising lifelong happiness and security, she breaks off the affair with a letter of explanation that says it all:
I am no longer a young woman … . Imagine me [in a few years’ time], still beautiful but desperate, frantic in my armour of corset and frock, under my make-up and powder … beautiful as a full-blown rose which one must not touch. A glance of yours, resting on a young woman, will be enough to lengthen the sad crease that smiling has engraved on my cheek, but a happy night in your arms will cost my fading beauty dearer still … . What this letter lacks is … all the thoughts I am hiding from you, the thoughts that have been poisoning me for so long … . Ah! How young you are. Your hell is limited to not possessing what you desire, a thing which some people have to put up with all their lives. But to possess what one loves and every minute to feel one’s sole treasure disintegrating, melting, and slipping away like gold dust between one’s fingers! And not to have the dreadful courage to open one’s hand and let the whole treasure go, but to clench one’s fingers ever tighter, and to cry and beg to keep … what? a precious little trace of gold in the hollow of one’s palm.
Who but Colette could have etched this portrait (acid on zinc) of a woman staring into the hell that seems reserved for women alone? And who but Colette could have failed so entirely to unpack it?
When I read Colette in
my twenties, I said to myself, That is exactly the way it is. Now I read her and I find myself thinking, How much smaller this all seems than it once did—cold, brilliant, limited—and silently I am saying to her, Why aren’t you making more sense of things? Yes, I have from you the incomparable feel of an intelligent woman in the grip of romantic obsession, and that is strong stuff. But sexual passion as a driving force doesn’t seem to matter on its own, as it once did. It no longer feels large. Certainly, it no longer feels metaphoric.
Why? I ask myself. Is it that I no longer “identify” with the delicious despair of erotic love? Hardly. I have learned over a long enough life that at any moment anyone who is alive can feel it all—the joy, the panic, the sick excitement—exactly as she did at twenty-five or thirty-five. No, it is a matter not of feeling but of altered sensibility: not only mine but that of the culture as well. The question to ask is, Does a person who is twenty-five today read Colette as I read her at twenty-five? And the answer to that, I’m afraid, is also: hardly. It’s not that I have passed from youth to middle age, it’s that the culture has undergone a sea change. Even though we feel love as we always did, we don’t make of it what we once did.
When The Vagabond was published in 1910, André Gide sent Colette a letter of extravagant admiration: he thought the novel brilliant and powerful. For the next forty years, Colette’s work would be received in the same spirit by every leading literary light throughout Europe and America. She was beloved not only for her mastery of the French language—her famous style—but also because she said things that struck a nerve deep in the culture. Her books persuaded her readers that something fundamental and immutable was being described: naked, unadorned, and irreducibly true. It is impossible to imagine the same response being accorded this work today—not because it is about love (Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Stendhal are also about love), but because it is only about love.
So where does that leave me? Filled with righteous feminist rejection of Colette? Not so easy as that. I walk around these days feeling as though pieces of her writing lie heavy on my chest. Sometimes a sentence lifts itself off the surface, and stands in the air before me … . “Our honest bodies [cling] together with a mutual thrill of delight … while our souls … withdraw again behind the barrier.” Repeatedly, I lean in toward the prose. Then, of course, that which has changed in me shrinks, holds back, stiffens. I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.
MICHAEL UPCHURCH
Stead Made Me Do It
House of All Nations, by Christina Stead
The phone call would come at 3:00 a.m., and the town car would materialize fifteen minutes later: a sleek and murmurous vehicle that was a most unlikely sight on my Brooklyn side street. The backseat was as soft as the bed I had just abandoned, and the route the uniformed driver followed was always the same: through downtown Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, into the financial district.
One night stands out from the rest.
The driver this time was an older man, an Eastern European émigré who spoke hardly any English. As we rounded the corner of Fourth and Atlantic, I saw a trio of figures struggling under a streetlamp. A woman in a bronze minidress and platform heels swung a trapezoid-shaped handbag to fend off two assailants wearing the 1980s equivalent of zoot suits. I was half-dead with sleep and there seemed no way to focus on the sights cordoned off by the window. They demanded response, didn’t they?
But no, they had already floated past.
To the driver I said, “I think she was having trouble.”
He muttered unintelligibly.
“Don’t you have a radio or something—to call the police?”
“No radio.”
We were on the bridge approach by now—and then on the bridge itself. In the near distance was a cliff wall of lights.
Finally, devolving into the narrow backstreets of lower Manhattan, we arrived at our destination: the financial printing firm where I had worked for the previous two years. It was here that I typed in the last-minute edits that lawyers cubbyholed elsewhere in the building made on business documents about to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.
Up the elevator. Into the composition room. Instructions came from my colleague Alba, who had already done four hours of overtime and had a car downstairs waiting to take her home to Queens: “It’s lighter now, but they’re still making changes. You’ll have to watch for page runs.”
A go-between came in with the latest page proofs for a People Express annual report.
Call the police? But that was ten minutes ago, in another dimension.
People Express was not doing well. People Express was selling another airplane in order to meet its interest payments.
There was a particular reason I had taken this job, and it was a literary reason. Nine years earlier, as a bookstore clerk in North Carolina, I had come across a novel on the remainder tables that impressed me with its heft and enticed me with its title: House of All Nations. The author was Christina Stead, an Australian who lived in Paris from 1929 to 1935, working in a bank there.
In 1976, I was twenty-two years old, with a peripatetic childhood behind me (England, Holland, New Jersey) and an admiration for the ironic and the cosmopolitan in fiction, as well as for the lyrical, the gothic, the unhinged. House of All Nations, it turned out, would come through on all counts—but I didn’t know that yet. Instead, it was the gorgeous Gilbert Stone jacket art on the 1972 reissue that initially caught my eye. It showed a shadowy, bowler-hatted banker and, behind him, a somber mausoleum of granite and gold. The novel’s eight hundred closely printed pages also exuded an appeal, making a sumptuous flopping sound as I thumbed through them. And then there were the rambunctious titles of the book’s 104 “scenes” (Stead’s preference over “chapters”): “He Travels Fast But Not Alone,” “Whoopee Party,” “The Man with Cunard-Colored Eyes,” “No Money in Working for a Living.” How could I resist?
I bought the book, took it to the beach, and quickly came to a realization: I lacked the wherewithal to read it. The early specialization of my British high-school and university education meant I had never had the slightest brush with finance, and all the novel’s fiscal wheeling and dealing went way over my head. What, in this context, did “put” and “call” mean, or “long” and “short”? What exactly were “margins” and “options”?
Yet the characters’ money talk was mesmerizing—for even though they all dealt in the same arcane vocabulary, each used it differently, revealing different rhythms of mind, quirks of temperament, degrees of paranoia, frenzies of power hunger. Besides, it wasn’t all business. South American playboys, cynical countesses, quixotic Communists, scheming harridans, and blackmailing drug fiends all played roles, whether major or minor, in this jittery portrait of sleazy Parisian bankers making money off the Crash. Perhaps that was what kept me reading, for I loved fiction with a vivid sense of history—and House of All Nations, set in 1931—32 made you feel you were there, riding the downward spiral of economic collapse, buffeted by billowing war clouds each step of the way.
Other fiction I had read or was soon to read—Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Elsa Morante’s History: A Novel—had given me my sense of a Europe defined by war. But nothing else had zeroed in so closely on between-wars queasiness. Why had I only vaguely heard of Stead? Why was The Man Who Loved Children the one book repeatedly named as her masterpiece? How could anyone relegate House of All Nations—a novel that chews up and spits out the spirit of a whole decade—to ancillary status in the Stead canon?
I was overreacting. House of All Nations is generally ranked a close second to Stead’s best-known novel. Still, when I went on to read The Man Who Loved Children in order to make the comparison for myself, it disappointed me even as I acknowledged its brute force. It seemed merely human, whereas House was d
iabolic. The Man Who Loved Children portrayed familiar territory: family misery. House entered realms and harnessed writerly powers I could only begin to imagine.
And there was this too: Stead, a writer sometimes saddled with the label “feminist,” wrote more knowingly and incisively about businessmen than any other writer, male or female, I had ever encountered.
In 1979, I moved from North Carolina to New York, and in 1980 my first novel was accepted in two weeks flat. That same spring, in the space of three months, I wrote a rough draft for a second book I liked much better, a workplace tale, written under Henry Green’s influence as much as Stead’s. It would take five years to place. Nothing much happened with either novel. I was still working in bookstores.
In 1983, Christina Stead died at age eighty. I had the flu that week, and when I called in sick, one of my fellow clerks, knowing I was a Stead fan, assumed this was just my excuse to stay home and mourn. That was also the year I realized that if I didn’t start making more money soon, I wouldn’t be able to survive the city’s skyrocketing rents.
I took a word-processing course and became, briefly, an “administrative assistant” (in other words, a secretary). Then a typesetting job at R. R. Donnelley’s financial printing division opened up and I took it. I had heard we were living in a speculation-crazed decade, and this seemed my chance to observe it firsthand. I knew I lacked a head for numbers, but I thought that frequent handling of business documents might help me to develop one—whereupon I could write my own novel about finance and become the Christina Stead of the 1980s.