by Yiyun Li
The source of my difficulty, I had decided before I went to London, was that I had gone astray from my belief. For years Tolstoy ended his journal each day with three letters, initials for the Russian if I live. Every month he began with the note nearer to death. How did I forget to start each and every page of my journal with the reminder that nothing matters?
—
WHEN I WORKED as a researcher in a hospital laboratory, I studied asthma with mice as the animal model. My job was to inject ragweed into the mice over a period of time and measure the effectiveness of a new drug. There was a glass chamber where I put the mice to induce asthma and analyzed their breathing pattern. That and other data informed the progress of their illness, though imperceptible to me was how they felt individually. Suffering alone is not measurable.
The word asthma is from Greek, meaning “panting.” But in ancient Rome, the doctors nicknamed it “rehearsing death.” I took note of this detail while reading Seneca’s letters. Seneca, like Dickens, Proust, Dylan Thomas, E. B. White, Elizabeth Bishop—the list could go on—was afflicted with asthma. (Lotte Zweig’s unalleviated suffering from asthma was given by Stefan Zweig as one reason for her suicide.) Everyone, sooner or later, draws a last breath. Sometimes I think how tiring it is to read about artists with their mental illness. Wouldn’t it be curious to study those who rehearse their deaths?
Elizabeth Bishop, on reading the death notice of Dylan Thomas, wrote to friends: “It must be true, but I still can’t believe it….Thomas’s poetry is so narrow—just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living in between.” During the months bookended by the two hospital stays, in June and in October, I returned to that letter often. A narrow conduit between birth and death—I had always believed in the necessity of treating my life in the same manner. The space deprived oneself is allocated to one’s characters; the excursions one takes with them, distractions and delays, are an antidote to impatience. You’re impatient with yourself, with your work, with others, a friend said to me around this time; you’re the most impatient person in the world.
Impatience is an impulse to alter or impose. Suicide is a kind of impatience people rarely understand, I replied to the friend, and quoted an Elizabeth Bishop letter in defense.
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IN THE LAST year of high school I had the habit of playing truant, not worried about being caught. I was in charge of keeping attendance, trusted by the teachers, once in a while persuaded by my classmates away from accuracy. On one dreary winter afternoon, I skipped classes and walked in the run-down alleys near the school—now these alleys are lined with chic pubs and sophisticated eateries catering to expats and tourists. I was looking for a place I had read about in newspapers—the first and only one of its kind in the city, the article had said. This was before the time of telephones, and I did not have a map. It took me nearly two hours to find the place, a quadrangle among residential quadrangles, with more than ten plaques bearing the names of different organizations by the gate. I entered the courtyard and saw stacks of coal bricks piled up near one wall, several bicycles leaning against another. A woman came out of a door and asked me what I wanted. I’m looking for the Office of Volunteers for the Mental Health of the Next Generation, I said. The woman sighed heavily. I can’t believe it, she said to someone inside; here’s another one of those crazy kids. She then turned to me and said, They are not in today; go back and live your life, don’t ever come here again.
The indifference of strangers is not far from that of characters, yet the latter do not make one feel exposed. They have no interest in interfering with my life; they have neither the time nor the curiosity to ask me questions; they do not preserve me in the amber of their memories. What else does one want from people but that kind of freedom—an existence closest to nonexistence?
The indifferent, though, have their powers. Again and again I let them usurp my dreams, and again and again they evict me from their world, oblivious of any attachment. Now go back to your real life—they dismiss me with the same words I used to end my phone calls to friends with, dismissing myself and masking it with lightheartedness. Do you, a friend asked me years ago, understand that you are in people’s real lives? I remember feeling shocked—at the time, the only real people were my characters. When a book is finished, to mitigate the emptiness of their leave-taking, one kills them in a gentle manner—if there is any violence in imagining the action it is as secretive as a suicidal thought lodged in the corner of one’s mind. Is writing not my way of rehearsing death?
I had gone to London with the thought of erasing a novel from the record, telling people it could not be finished and leaving the draft entombed in my computer. Not a rehearsal of death, but a clean severance. This novel had brought out of me unkindness against others and uncharitableness against myself. It had nearly derailed a friendship. It made me question which life—mine or the book’s—mattered; perhaps neither did. Years earlier my husband had cautioned me that writing would require more than a scientific career. No real madness, no real art, he quoted an old Chinese saying, but I had refused to consider it an obstacle. If I had writing, what was there to fear?
Can one’s life be at the mercy of one’s characters? The possibility seems ludicrous, yet in my unraveling they were no longer my allies, confiscating from me the boundary I had so adamantly maintained between writing and the rest of living, which, I had believed until then, was to live minimally, to live but on the surface, to not live. One cannot sustain that kind of in-between—living and yet not living—forever. For the first time I wanted my life to be as legitimate as my characters’, as solid, as habitable. Make me real, as you are to me—this cry could only be directed toward my characters. They were not meant to see me; why then let the novel live on? I had refused realness to people in my life; why then let myself linger?
How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves.
My muddle, in retrospect, is clear: I had underestimated my aversion to wanting anything; I had overestimated my capacity to want nothing.
—
ONE AFTERNOON IN London I made a call to Trevor. He told me about the spinal pains that had been afflicting him. Don’t waste your sympathy on me, he said; I’m an old man. Then he asked about the novel. It’s near finished, I lied, and he advocated for letting the work go and not lingering.
The next day, I went to the British Museum, always a trustworthy place to lose oneself among the living and the long-gone. Afterward, in a bookshop not far from the museum, I bought a copy of Letters to Monica, a selection of Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, spanning nearly forty years. As with Katherine Mansfield, whose world I had entered with the simple goal of distracting myself when I purchased her notebooks in a secondhand bookstore, I picked up the letters because Larkin and Jones were irrelevant at that moment.
I sat in the bookshop café until closing time. In an early note Larkin compares a scathing letter from Jones to a letter, “charitably left unposted,” from Mansfield to a young man named Frederick Goodyear. It starts with her telling Goodyear that he has misread her as a possible mistress, a few lines later lapses into an intimate and good-humored account of her day in a French villa, and ends with her request that he write again and signed, “With my ‘strictly relative’ love ‘K.M.’ ”
Mansfield’s letter would have been only a footnote to Larkin’s correspondence—one underlines them all the time, thinking of looking them up later yet rarely doing so—except for the odd coincidence that I had read a draft of it the day before in Mansfield’s journal. The language was so vehement that I had written in the margin, What’s going on?! (The letter is also in Mansfield’s Selected Letters
, with no indication whether it was sent. Larkin’s belief that it was charitably unposted is appealing.)
Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.
—
IN THE SAME letter to Jones, in order to prove that he is not trustworthy, Larkin states that, rather than “a favorable image” constructed by her, he is more like “Portia’s Eddie—or even Portia’s father.” Eddie and Portia and her father come from Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Death of the Heart. The reference was startling. The novel I was considering abandoning had been written in conversation with Bowen’s novel. (One of the few fond memories about the ill-fated novel: I was in a basement in Los Angeles, talking with a radio interviewer, his eyes bloodshot from too much reading. I must ask this question before we go into the studio, he said, an old copy of The Death of the Heart in his hand; was this book on your mind when you wrote your novel? He was the only person to make the connection.)
But to call my novel a conversation with Bowen’s book is inaccurate, as the novel was an anticonversation, written in a kind of competition, a kind of antagonism, yet all the time entirely under the spell of The Death of the Heart. To articulate it demands honesty that I am almost unwilling to offer. Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision. (In college and as a young scientist the tasks I had most enjoyed were the peripheral activities: to peel everything away and leave only the neural system intact in an insect; to harvest the bone marrow from a mouse’s femur until the bone became nearly transparent; to carefully flush out a mouse’s lungs. Perhaps my deficiency as a scientist, a lack of ultimate purpose, is why I love writing. Precision gives me more pleasure than the end result.)
On a different trip—much later than the London trip—I ran into Portia at the train station on my way to visit Monet’s garden at Giverny. Displayed on a bulletin board, advertising an exhibition, was The Portrait of Marguerite van Mons by the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe: a black-clad girl, about to open an ornate door, stares out of the painting (or is she closing the door to secure her presence in the room—an entrance rather than an exit?). Thousands of people must have passed through the station that summer, but not many would have recognized Portia—the painting is used as the cover of my paperback edition of The Death of the Heart—exiting a drawing room: “Each movement had a touch of exaggeration, as though some secret power kept springing out. At the same time she looked cautious, aware of the world in which she had to live. She was sixteen, losing her childish majesty.”
Portia, newly orphaned, is sent to live with her half brother, Thomas, and Anna, Thomas’s wife. An orphan is always a melodrama, but Portia is among the most unbearable. Her whole self exposes others’ inability to see in life a seriousness that can match hers. She watches the world with an awkward tenacity. Observation, however, is not understanding; neither is it protection. For Portia, every moment is conclusive and catastrophic, and the distinctions between then and now and later are wiped out by her insistence on making every moment as meaningful and definite as life is often not. I feel an annoying kinship with Portia—I bat at such a thought like batting at a fly. To say nothing matters is to admit that everything matters. Like Portia, I too struggle with a lack of depth perception.
Willful, a friend says of Portia; willfully selfish. Indeed, The Death of the Heart is a study of selfishness, but great fiction is inevitably a study of selfishness. Some selfishness is more commonplace than others, some more respectable, or more destructive, or more cynical. There is Portia’s father, whose timorous selfishness is a contrast to his first wife’s castigating selfishness. (He is exiled by his efficient wife into marrying his mistress when she becomes pregnant with Portia.) There is Eddie, who, in his prideful selfishness, destroys Portia’s life. (Eddie, a cad with wounded innocence as his core, needs someone to prey on more than a heartless one would.) Thomas and Anna seek convenience in their tidy selfishness, and when they find themselves trapped in Portia’s melodrama, even their cold, sensible egos cannot restore their life to being lived on the surface.
Some people, knowing the boundaries of their selves, choose to disregard what is beyond as inconsequential. Such selfishness may not be honorable, though one has to admire the honesty when Anna admits to reading Portia’s diary. “No, it’s not at all odd: it’s the sort of thing I do do,” she says, neither with remorse nor in self-defense.
Portia and Anna, one of Bowen’s lovers surmised in his diary, were “the two halves” of Bowen, one with “the naïvety of childhood—or genius,” the other “as an outside hostile person might see her.” Bowen’s genius is that, by setting the two halves against each other, she makes herself invincible.
Bowen’s cruelty toward her characters cannot be distinguished from her indulgence. Anna sets her heart to eliminate all emotion. Portia wants nothing but for all people to be softened by feelings—hers about them and theirs about her. If Anna were not so merciless in depriving herself of any real connection, we would lose respect for her. If Portia were not so transparent with love—unsought and unearned—we would be protective of her. Bowen manipulates us to feel most for Anna when she is her coldest self, and exposes us when we take the side of the heartless world to deny Portia the dignity of suffering.
Bowen left no diaries or journals. Perhaps none survived, and one wonders what she would have recorded writing strictly to herself. Or perhaps she was not in the habit of writing something so private and revealing—another reason I feel a kind of antagonism toward her. I feel the necessity of confronting her when I write, as though only by matching what she does can I protect myself from her. What innocence Bowen destroys in her novels I want to destroy with equal resolve. What selfishness Bowen indulges I want to indulge. What violence—psychological more than physical—Bowen makes her characters suffer I want my characters to inflict and endure too. Portia is exposed and betrayed at her most vulnerable moments, and Bowen allows no help from others or herself; it is with the same satisfaction that I have little sympathy for my younger self sitting by a lake with deadly thoughts on a winter day. No, I have sided with the young men riding past her on their bicycles and goading her to jump into the water, with the woman stepping into the courtyard and shooing her away, with the mother who watched the clock and informed her exactly how many minutes late she arrived home, exhausted by indecision.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen; but I do know what’s capable of happening,” Seneca wrote in a letter. The terror of that statement is why I write myself into a battle against Bowen—not to converse, which seeks understanding; not to argue, which is intellectual; not to confront, out of artistic disagreement, or misunderstanding, or even jealousy, but to hold on to something essential. “[I am] a writer before I am a woman,” she said of herself. Easily I could assert a more absolute position, being a writer before I am a person, or being a writer and nothing more. Bowen makes me aware of what I am capable of becoming; her characters make me aware of what everyone is capable of becoming. This knowledge is what turns me against her yet brings me back to her work. “The moment one is sad one is ordinary,” she wrote. But that is not enough. The moment one feels anything one feels fatal.
—
WHEN LARKIN, AT twenty-eight, compared himself to Eddie or Portia’s father, it must have been a statement made from both self-loathing and self-defense. What awareness, what resignation, what passive-aggressiveness led him to write the letter.
“My life is so entirely selfish that mirages of unselfishness tormented me,” he wrote to Jones later, again e
xplaining his lack of commitment.
I long to abandon myself entirely to someone else. The peculiarity of my character is that I never feel that there is any mingling—either I don’t “abdicate,” & the other person loses, or I do, and I lose myself. A monstrous infantile shell of egotism inside which I quietly asphyxiate. To read K.M.’s [Katherine Mansfield’s] dreams of a shared life with Murry—this perturbs me greatly….To live quietly and complementarily with another would be extraordinary—almost impossible—I don’t know, it’s only the fact that I do nothing for anybody that promotes these self-searchings.
The opposite of this extreme charge is that a person does everything for others—an exemplary unselfishness familiar to me all my life. It encapsulates my mother’s existence. Before retiring she was a schoolteacher, respected by generations of students and their parents because everything she did, she did for them. My mother is the first person I observed at a close distance, too close perhaps, whose public and private personas have so little in common.
If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. One prefers anyone—a mother, a lover, a friend—who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness.
Twenty-two years after comparing himself to Portia’s Eddie, Larkin was not in any better place.
I’m not so confident about telling the truth as you: not so sure I can, not so sure I want to. I cling to pretence….You see this all right, but, I think, interpret it as deliberate and hostile deceit. It doesn’t seem like that to me, more like making life livable.
This insufferable effort to make life livable, a refrain throughout Larkin’s letters, is the same philosophy that dictates Thomas and Anna’s life in The Death of the Heart. Even if one finds that frustrating, one has to fear for them. They are sabotaged by Portia, whose every effort is to make life unlivable unless it is lived on her terms.