In New York City the old, the very old have become victims of the very young. Poor, crippled people, eighty-two years old or even in one case one hundred and three years old, are beaten, killed for two dollars, ninety-five cents, for nothing. The age of the victims, the paltriness of the “take,” the youth of the criminals, the bizarre equality of poverty between the robbed and the robber, outrages every sense of reason, even criminal reason, and makes one look beyond the act. Part of the choice of victim is that his weakness is immediately evident and is itself a sort of affront. An old and enfeebled, poverty-worn person is, apparently, to the battered children of the slums an object that is contemptible and finally not quite real, for to imagine old age one has to imagine life as a long flow, something protected by nature and therefore meaningful in its orderly progress from one stage to another.
Part of the preying upon each other comes from the familiarity of neighborhood, the known turf, known for its vulnerability, its exposure to every injury and insult. Middle-class neighborhoods in the city are places of warm beauty, utterly beguiling behind the curtained, plant-filled windows. The nice streets are a shimmer of light and power, taxis and doormen, smiles and golden belief—an obstacle in their foreignness, their dreamy protection and unassailability. Great sophistication, vigilance, imagination are needed to storm these heights, and the very young, poor criminals do not possess that felonious experience. The clever criminals of the old school are like figures in a film comedy. They drive up to expensive hotels in limousines, dressed in dinner jackets, in order to plunder the safes filled with diamonds; their actions are swift and efficient, and above all, mannerly, out of consideration for the quality of the loot.
Here in the city the worst thing that can happen to a nation has happened: we are a people afraid of its youth. One’s own memory—the memory of a girl—was of turning about on a dark street at night, fearful of footsteps coming closer, turning and saying, Oh, it is only a boy. Relief. Now for a young man to be in his twenties or thirties, out of jail, is in some way a guarantee of accommodation to society—at least in the mass, if not of course in particular cases.
For the sick and dangerous young, the idea of “treatment” is a cliché, the joke of a psychiatry which does not know how to treat such devastating deviations, such appalling dislocations, such violence that baffles by its fecklessness. There is no will to undertake reconstruction of society. Not only is the imagination lacking just now, but the very terms of the reconstruction, the extent of it, freeze speculative thought and reasonable recommendation.
Revolutionary societies destroy or brutally “reeducate.” Some countries like India have long ago learned to look upward and inward as they step around filth and hunger. The torpor of the Indian millions is a blessing for the prosperous. In America among the poor, there is a political accommodation, or at least no symptom of organized revolt. Instead there is random crime. Random—a felicitous phrase that gives no substance to the devastation.
The wild growth of dangerous criminal insanity in the cities is a comment on the meek young with their ashrams in old brownstones, on Moonies in costly hotels and country estates, on clean-cut groups quietly meditating. Poverty and its abuses to children have their transforming power. Young persons stab and kill, throw each other off the roof, beat each other to death on the playing ground, rape, mutilate, set buildings on fire. To allow the facts to enter the mind is a guilty act, as if one were recording the scene of a porn film with a suspicious degree of imagination. And from the public pathetic screams for protection, when there is no protection. In the cities there has been a profound derangement of whole generations of the urban poor.
We cannot take it in. All we had planned on was Appalachia and the sweet, toothless smiles, the pale, white faces, ragged dresses, bare feet, hungry glances. No matter—a vibrant, ferocious, active, heartbreaking insanity is as much a part of the seventies as intimacy, retreat to the private.
It is always a relief to return to the middle classes, to ponder the way culture, economics, fashions work upon these citizens who are a mirror, returning what society puts before them.
To think of our domestic life is to ask what sort of person is actually needed by society. What parents, what children, young adults, workers. What makes sense—the tough and practical, the unsure and idealistic? The inner-directed and the outer-directed, to use David Riesman’s terms, seem merely private, accidentally characterological, as one may be stingy or generous. The work ethic describes one who lives in a society that invests work with great spiritual and historical necessity, seeing in toil, advancement, tenacity, a virtue beyond material reward—the definition of self. All must work, but how hard and at what and with what motivation beyond dollars? In the late sixties many young people answered the question of dollars by casual work quite unrelated to their advancement, their interests, and their future: driving cabs, working as waiters, making jewelry, teaching transcendental meditation, walking dogs, playing the guitar. Marginal occupations are suitable to prosperous times and have little reality in inflationary, unstable periods.
“I love long life better than figs,” Charmian, Cleopatra’s attendant, says in Shakespeare’s play. If things go on as we reasonably expect, young people will experience long life as an unruly challenge to morals, possibilities, fantasies. They will, in huge numbers, live way up into their seventies and that means they will have three lives, with each one perhaps wiping out the one before as though it had never been. Who can easily imagine a young son or daughter marrying and living with the same person for close to fifty years? Or with two for twenty-five years each? This is not the way of hearts in love with the shifting demands of the ego, with painful pressures for new experience, second and third chances, lost hopes that are an accusation to self-esteem.
In a long life in which little can be taken for granted, it is not reasonable to project a fearful clinging to the known on the part of the contemporary sensibility—so far removed from the peasant-like stasis of times past. Instead, a nomadic search for the new waters and pastures of each period of life leads one on, running from the dryness of the past. Hell is no exit—and without social, moral insistence many would not wish to honor the contract of youth.
It is no wonder that with parents authority seems to have become a burden. Part of it is the peculiar melding of parents and young adults in the way they look and dress, in their common reverence for sexual experience, which they have been told need never end for the good and the healthy. Custom is shattered by the parents’ fear of age and the children’s disaffection about age’s wisdom, difference, and virtue, by the vacation spirit of a people who are not sure that society needs its work, by the blurred future of the species—on and on. Coolness rather than domination is the complaint of children against parents, neglectful confusion rather than insistent assertion. Those who imagine that this can be reversed by the will, by mere opinion, are not credible because the will to rule has itself collapsed along with the painful recognition of limits everywhere of every kind.
The women’s movement has crystallized in domestic life changes that have been going on for decades. Historically, the political and social expression of the themes of women’s liberation coincides with the needs of a world in which there are almost as many divorces as marriages, with smaller families, longer lives, the economic expansion desired by the average household for which two incomes are required, education of women, diminishment of the need for heavy muscular work, which meant that the lives of men and women—talking on the phone, sitting at the desk, managing—became more and more alike.
The inner changes within women can scarcely be exaggerated. Ambition is natural to new groups freed, or demanding to be free and equal. No group demands equality for nothing, as a simple adornment of status. The arrival of women’s ambition, transforming as it does private life, inner feeling, and public life is not at all simple but instead resembles the subtle shiftings of human thought and life brought about by enormously challenging ideas
such as evolution and Freudianism. Many hang back; just as many would stand on the literal truth of Genesis; but no matter what the ideological reluctance may be, every life is an inchoate but genuine reflection of the change. We begin to act upon new assumptions without even being aware of the changes.
Society does not want women to lead a long life in the home. It is not prepared to support them and cannot give the old style true sanction. Children do not want their parents’ lives to be given to them forever. Husbands cannot take the responsibilities for wives as an immutable duty, ordained by nature. Women’s liberation suits society much more than society itself is prepared to admit. The wife economy is as obsolete as the slave economy.
But more than dollars are at stake. Power, the most insidious of the passions, is also the most cunning. The women’s movement is in some respects a group like many others, organized against discrimination, economic and social inequities, legal impediments: against the structural defects of accumulated history. Perhaps it is that part of the movement the times will more or less accommodate in the interest of reality. The other challenges are more devastating to custom, uprooting as they do the large and the small, the evident and the hidden. The women’s movement is above all a critique. And almost nothing, it turns out, will remain outside its relevance. It is the disorienting extension of the intrinsic meaning of women’s liberation, much of it unexpected, that sets the movement apart. It is a psychic and social migration, leaving behind an altered landscape.
In the 1970s the insecurity of life, the rapid using up of resources, the alienating complexity of every problem from nuclear proliferation to falling reading scores, can scarcely fail to bewilder and lacerate relations between people in the family, in the streets, among the classes. When one tries to think of “domestic manners”—all of the rules and customs and habits which people have assumed as a group—one cannot imagine just who is sure enough of his ground to pass on the beliefs that grow out of reasonable certainty. And to whom are they offered, these beliefs and customs? The life of the young is far more complicated and murky than the life of those older. One thing looms out of the shadows: the reluctance of so many promising young people to have children.
1978
WIVES AND MISTRESSES
For who are we, and where from,
If after all these years
Gossip alone still lives on
While we no longer live?
—PASTERNAK, Zhivago Poems
I
THE FAMOUS carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives. Footnotes worry a lot. They, loved or unloved, seem to feel the winds of the future always at their back. The graves of the greatly known ones are a challenge to private history; the silence is filled with riddles and arcane messages.
These “attendants” are real people: mistresses and wives, sometimes but not often husbands; friends and enemies, partners in sudden assignations. Some have been the inspiration for poems or have seen themselves expropriated for the transformations of fiction. They have written and received letters, been lied to, embezzled, abandoned, honored, or slandered. But there they are, entering history with them, with the celebrated artists, generals, prime ministers, presidents, tycoons.
The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing. It can uncover secrets that impugn experience. Children in old age struggle to remember games on the lawn, agreeable picnics once shared with the infamous old tyrant whose photograph keeps appearing in the newspapers as yet another drudge of information and interpretation offers the assertive intimacy of long study in a tone that would surpass all life acquaintance.
The maligned see their quarrels with the famed one as a battle which can have no ending, see themselves squirming in an eternity of calumny which they would contest with document, affidavit, witness—right up to their own death. The determination of footnotes cries to Heaven. Lady Byron vindicated!
“On his marriage-night, Byron suddenly started out of his sleep; a paper, which burned in the room, was casting a ruddy glare through the crimson curtains of the bed; and he could not help exclaiming, in a voice so loud it wakened Lady B., ‘Good God, I am surely in hell!’ ”
Where are all my years, my thirteen confinements, my seven copyings of War and Peace, Sofia Behrs Tolstoy asked again and again. Forty-eight years and, of course, one quarrel will be the last and all is too late. She is kept away from the bedside in the stationmaster’s house. Distraught, accused, excluded beyond endurance, the Countess wanders about begging for reassurance, repeating, explaining her devotion, her understanding, her care. The young Pasternak, rushing with his father to the amazing, outstanding death scene, wrote in I Remember: “Good Lord, I thought, to what state can a human being be reduced, and a wife of Tolstoy at that!”
The Tolstoys knew all there was to be known about marriage and therefore all to be known about each other. More indeed than one is put on earth to understand. More than could be endured but certainly not more than could be recorded by one or the other. “Immense happiness . . . It is impossible that this should end except with life itself.”[1] And soon, quarrels, and he will be found writing: “I arrive in the morning, full of joy and gladness, and I find the Countess in a tantrum. . . . She will wake up absolutely convinced that I am wrong and she is the most unfortunate woman alive!” She writes: “How can one love a fly that will not stop tormenting one?”
How real the Countess and her inflamed nerves are. There is no question of authenticity and she cannot maneuver with any more design than a trapped bat. With her mangled intelligence, her operatic, intolerable frenzies of distress, she comes forth still with an almost menacing aliveness, saying it all like a bell always on the alert. Years and years, threats of suicide, collapse, hysterias, and the swiftest remorse as defeat hits her at the most passionate moment of declaration. Weeping reunions: “The bonds uniting me to him are so close! . . . He is a weak child, delicate, and so sweet-tempered.” Again jealousies and plots. He feels a horrible “disgust and outrage” as he finds her creeping into his room when she imagines him asleep. She is looking for the will, or for the diary; always looking for herself in history, the self the pious, pedantic Tolstoyans would disinherit and deny, looking, too, to find the way to remain the inspiration, the adviser, the considered one whom the hated disciple, Chertkov, would supplant.
Problems of life and often the distorting, defacing mirror of his work, which sent forth its scarred images of home into the public view: when The Kreutzer Sonata was published with its murderous rages against carnal passion and marriage—“two convicts serving a life sentence of hard labor welded to the same chain”—the Countess felt herself mocked all over Russia, pitied even by the Emperor, gossiped about in the street.
She recorded her feelings: “I always felt the book was directed against me, mutilated and humiliated me in the eyes of the whole world, and was destroying everything we had preserved of love for one another. And yet never once in my marriage have I made a single gesture or given a single glance for which I need feel guilty toward my husband.”
Also after the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata there were comic consequences for him, who had after all “stigmatized all fornicators.” Suppose his wife were to become pregnant again? “How ashamed I would be. . . .” he wrote. “They will compare the date of conception with the date of publication.”
It was, of course, impossible for the Countess to bring her will, her great temperament, and her devotion to Tolstoy into a harmony that could survive more than a few sundowns. The overwhelming scene, the tremendous importance of the union and its dismaying, squalid complications of feeling, Yasnaya Polyana, the children, the novels, the opinions. The programs for transcendence and her thought: “This vegetarian diet means that two menus have to be prepared instead of one, which adds to the cost and makes twice as much work.”
It is not quite clear how they found the time for the record—the fascinating, violently expressive rec
ord, like some strange oral history which catches the rises and falls of the voice, the impatience, the motive, the love itself heard in a sigh as sleep comes down—when it mercifully sometimes does. Every quarrel, every remorse, moments of calm and hope and memory. Diaries, rightly called voluminous, letters, great in number, sent back and forth. Longing for peace and the provocation of discord. “Until five in the morning he sighed, wept, and inveighed against his wife, while she, exhausted, momentarily contemplated suicide.” Momentarily.
The cross the Countess hung upon was not inadequacy or even that crucifixion of mismating, common enough in all conditions of life. It may be said of her that one cannot imagine anyone else as the wife of Tolstoy. Their struggles always have about them the character of fate. He is as vehemently occupied with her as she is with him. The record alone, each in so great a hurry to say what the day had brought, indicates a peculiar obsession, one of those obsessions often punitive and yet inescapable. She had energy and mind of an extraordinary sort and so she moved back and forth one can only say naturally, calling upon the word so often used to describe the greatness of Tolstoy’s art. She lived out a penalizing contradiction, devoted one minute, embattled the next. An adjutant, wracked by drama, brilliant in her arias; and then awakening to uncertainty, shame.
The Countess Tolstoy herself is a character in a great Russian novel, perhaps one by Dostoevsky rather than Tolstoy. Tatyana Tolstoy in her recently translated memoir, Tolstoy Remembered, writes about the more or less “serene” survival of her mother for nine years after Tolstoy’s death. Serene, perhaps, “but she retained one weakness: she was still afraid of what people would say and write about her when she had gone, she feared for her reputation. As a result she never let slip the slightest opportunity for justifying her words and actions. There was no weapon she would not use in her campaign of self-defense. . . .”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 32