by Yiyun Li
Larkin’s continuous self-accusation and his continuous effort to excuse himself lead me to think he lived an emotionally honest life and bore the pains well. But this impression must have come from reading years of his letters in a few months. Of course he lived through time, endured it even: lone bicycle rides in the rain, unaccompanied evenings of cooking inedible food, long nights of waiting for the broadcast of Handel’s music, trouble with friends and family and lovers, quarreling in letters and on the phone with Jones, breakdowns, hurtful silence.
I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I “do” anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on “time”—it doesn’t of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not….Perhaps you take more naturally to doing nothing than I do.
I envied Larkin when I read this passage after another hospital stay. My life was on hold. There were diagnoses to grapple with, medications and protocols to implement, hospital staff to report to, but they were there only to eliminate an option. What was to replace it I could not see, but it was not within anyone’s capacity to answer. It is easier to take something away than to give. Giving requires understanding and imagination; taking away requires only resolution and action.
Is the wish to escape suffering selfish? It is considered so with suicide. But even less extreme escapes leave wounds in others’ lives. The Death of the Heart is not only a study of selfishness, but also a study of the struggle to escape suffering. To whom the damage is done no one wants to ask.
This is the question that unsettles me more: Is suffering selfish?
For as long as I can remember my mother has spoken of me as a selfish person. If I were religious, I would kneel nightly for salvation from this sin. There is no measure to quantify selfishness: how much of oneself is devoted to others, or even which part of life is to be lived and which part given up. All my life I have failed to prove myself unselfish.
Once, when I implored my mother to imagine how my sister must have felt as a child, being made known to be the less pretty, less smart, and thus less favored daughter, my mother started to cry. When she was four, I bought a new blouse for her for the new year even though I didn’t feel well enough to go to the store, she said. How can you say I mistreated her? After my children were born, my mother told me several times that she had never tended us at night when we were infants. Your father had to get up and feed you because he knew my sleep should not be disturbed, she said with such genuine pride that I wonder if everything she has done should be looked at again with more understanding. She may be one of the very few indisputably innocent people I have encountered in life.
Can innocence be called selfish? “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” Graham Greene writes of Alden Pyle in The Quiet American. Only the innocent, I now realize, have the right to denounce selfishness, as the innocent do not have a sense where their selves end and others’ start. In fact, their selves do not end. They have one world, complete and consistent. When we enter that world we are intruders; when we exit we are abandoners; when we don’t abide by the ruling of innocence, we are betrayers.
(Is Marianne Moore’s mother not another figure of innocence? And Turgenev’s mother? All mothers are innocent when they accuse their children of selfishness.)
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A REAL PERSON, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly. No character rebels against this demand more than Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure.
Like Larkin, I’m obsessed with Thomas Hardy, particularly his last novel (“like a street accident,” Larkin said of Jude). Sue is so incoherent that she raises in my mind the question of believability. Not that I don’t believe her as a character—a complaint one sometimes hears as criticism of a less successful character—but I don’t believe a character can achieve inexplicability as she has. “Really too irritating not to have been a real person” was Larkin’s conclusion, and some biographers have suggested Hardy’s first wife as a model.
To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life’s necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character—depending on the charity of memory.
When characters forgo realness—their unknowability—they become real and known to a reader. Sue—I worry that this statement will cause confusion or misunderstanding—is too murkily real to be a character. She starts unknowable and ends so, too. Yet despite my frustration with her, she may be the only character in fiction I would go any length to defend.
There is an episode in Sue’s life that recalls an episode in Mansfield’s life. As a teenager, Mansfield shifted her romantic interest between two brothers. When she was made pregnant by one of them, she hastily married a singer eleven years her senior, but left him the same evening before the marriage was consummated. After a miscarriage and convalescence, she met John Middleton Murry. The two began a relationship, then broke up twice before her previous marriage was legally dissolved and they married.
Sue, a generation before Mansfield, is living with a university student in a platonic relationship before she meets Jude. Her attitude toward Jude, “all this no-you-mustn’t-love-me-well-perhaps-if-you-like-you-may stuff” as Larkin impatiently put it, is read by many, including V. S. Pritchett and Larkin, as coquetry. Still, I find her actions more elusive: her hasty choice to enter a marriage with an older man despite her distaste for him and sex in general; her childish insistence that Jude walk down the church aisle with her, like a married couple, right before her wedding; her impulsive decision to leave her husband for Jude on the condition that they maintain a relationship without any physical contact (and later leaving Jude to remarry her first husband); her acquiescence, eventually, to becoming Jude’s lover while refusing to accept marriage. This “colossal inconstancy,” one suspects, is what Hardy intends as the essence of her character. “Sue’s logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were wrong in practice.”
A good drama could be made of a bohemian Mansfield. She is one of those who tirelessly create contexts for themselves. Nothing—her misjudgments, her unpredictability, the suffering she caused others and herself—would affect our understanding and perhaps even love of her as a character. There are telling details from her journals—passing thoughts, gnawing pains, brilliant sentences that would later find places in her stories. My favorites are the expense lists: mostly entries for daily food, but unfailingly there are envelopes, letter paper, stamps, and sometimes telegrams, altogether more costly than food. Other small expenses I like to read about, too—curtains, boot polish, hair pin, “bill with sewing woman,” “safety pin for Jack,” and “laundry(!).” (In the diaries of Virginia Woolf—her friend and rival—one reads about teas and lunches, rarely the expenses.)
Sue remains incomprehensible. “I wonder what he was doing exactly,” Larkin puzzled over Hardy’s design for her. He could have made her a credible character who fascinates and frustrates with her indecision and ambivalence. He treats other characters—even the least sympathetic—with the more thoughtful touch of a novelist.
For instance, Arabella, Jude’s first wife. If Hardy intends for readers to feel repelled by her vulgarity, dishonesty, and coldness, he also grants her unmistakable vitality. There is no ambivalen
ce but her strong desire to make something out of a life that doesn’t offer much. We see Arabella as a young woman, practicing sucking in her cheeks to make dimples. Later in the novel, during an encounter with Sue, Arabella, lying with her back to the door and thinking that the person entering the room is Jude, takes her time to remake her seducing dimples, only to recognize the futility when Sue speaks.
The preface to the first edition ends with this preemptive statement: “Jude the Obscure is simply an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the questions of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being regarded as not of the first moment.” The seemings really only come with Sue. What makes Hardy deprive her of the shape and coherence that he grants other characters?
At the end of the novel, by Jude’s graveside, Arabella speaks about Sue with vengeful truth: “She’s never found peace since she left his arms, and never will till she is as he is now!” A writer’s cruelty is to exile a real person to fiction. She is forced to give up her unknowability. When she defies that fate she is defenseless against the readers, who deem her an unsuccessful character.
But when I question Hardy’s unfairness, am I not making the common mistake of conflating a character with the writer or someone in his life? One can examine a writer’s work and biography with a detective’s eye for convincing and alluring details. Ernest Hemingway’s defense of his infidelity in a letter to his father: “You are fortunate enough to have only been in love with one woman in your life”; Virginia Woolf’s jealousy of Mansfield during the latter’s life and after her death in her diary: “Do people always get what they deserve, & did K.M. do something to deserve this cheap posthumous life? & am I jealous even now?” It is no surprise we continue to see writers become characters: Hemingway, Woolf, and even Larkin, with his love life dramatized for the screen. Stripped of realness, their fame and idiosyncrasy, their expeditions internal and external all heighten their characterness and make engaging stories. A reader’s cruelty is to return writers to characters. And reading their journals and letters is the reliable first step.
In a letter Larkin contemplated Tryphena Sparks, Hardy’s cousin, proposed by some as the real model for Sue. (There was the conjecture that Tryphena was an early lover of Hardy’s; perhaps there was a child born, too.) “But it would be disappointing to me if it were true—first, because I’ve always thought TH a non bastard, & secondly I should hate him to have some reason for being gloomy—I thought he & he alone saw the inherent misery of life.”
Why does Sue Bridehead matter so much? I wished I could have this conversation with Larkin. I wished I could ask Hardy this question, too. I reread other Hardy novels, and the letters of Hardy’s two wives. I spent my days reading novels whose characters crossed paths only in my mind; I was reading writers’ diaries and biographies connected by footnotes. I did not see people outside the household often; I did not talk with anyone but one friend by phone. Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.
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I ALMOST LOST Larkin’s letters once. My bag was stolen, and for half a day I was distraught. After paying a ransom, I reunited with Larkin’s letters, a thick volume by Kierkegaard, and my journal. A computer, a wallet, and a handful of pens became other people’s possessions.
A violation of privacy, someone said about my stolen journal, sympathizing. Yet that was not my concern. The thief, to whom my journal was a material opportunity, could not invade my privacy—the arguments recorded in it would only be repetitions of a cuckoo clock to an outsider. But this interruption exposed the illusion in which my life was lived. To lose the journal was to lose continuity from one day to the next. To lose the books—my copies—was to lose the conversations. And conversations are my evidence of time. I seal up journals and shelve books, but they still are my permanency. Unlike human lives and feelings, they are not written in vanishing ink.
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MANSFIELD IS ONE of the most frequently mentioned authors in Larkin’s letters. In analyzing her life and love affairs, Larkin is talking about himself. Reading them at the same time, I was constantly offering my own interpretation, defending Mansfield or disagreeing with Larkin’s defense of her. More acutely, I was aware that my obsession with them reflected what I resent in myself: seclusion, self-deception, and above all the need—the neediness—to find shelter from one’s uncertain self in other lives. For Mansfield, it was Chekhov; for Larkin, it was Mansfield and Hardy. It is characteristic of both that Mansfield chose someone she aspired to be, and Larkin, those who would condone his weaknesses.
When Larkin sent Jones an advance copy of The Whitsun Weddings, without warning her that it included a love poem to another woman, Jones was incredulous. Larkin replied in his typical dodging, thus telling, manner:
My excuse—or if it isn’t an excuse, my answer—is, as you might expect, a complete forgetfulness: I didn’t hesitate a moment about including it, because I didn’t think it wd bother you, and it seemed good enough….I’m sorry about Broadcast, and I’m sure my distress was real. I suppose I don’t really equate poems with real-life as most people do—I mean they are true in a way, but very much dolled up & censored.
I do not equate writing with real life either—if cornered I would agree with Larkin, but I am unable to articulate what real life is. “If no one ever read me, would I write? Perhaps not; but I would not be able to stop writing in my head,” V. S. Pritchett said in a letter to Elizabeth Bowen. Of course writing is essential for a writer, and being read, too—halfheartedly I repeat his conviction to others and myself. But the truth is I did not connect those necessities to a writer’s life until I read Pritchett’s letter. Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.
Saying these words aloud puts me in fear that I am again getting things wrong—not that others will disagree or misread me, but that the nearer I get to what I want to say, the further I deviate from it. Any word is the wrong word when it is too close to the unspeakable.
I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence. Still, I am greedy for what I am deprived: I have a friend who erases many sentences before putting down one; another friend keeps her thoughts to herself. Yet I believe that there is a truth that is truer in the unexpressed; having spoken, I am apprehensive that I no longer have a claim to that truth.
Why then write to trap oneself? Innocence—the kind Bowen describes in The Death of the Heart—is the answer I can provide:
Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly—through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty.
It seems wise, in life, to shun the innocent. But in truth innocence grows on one. I have been thinking about Sue and Portia. I have been thinking abo
ut my mother, too. It is easier to live among characters—others’ and my own. Even those real people whose lives passed become characters in reading. They would never detect my innocence. And it is out of innocence that I write.
I left London without a decision about the novel. When I returned home I looked up an earlier letter from Trevor, with a query about another novel. How is the novel? One asks that as one does about an ill person, and a novel that’s not yet finished is rather like that. You reach the end and the thing is either dead or in much better shape. The dead should be left in peace.
To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture
In a dream the other night I was back in Beijing, at the entrance of our apartment complex, where a public telephone, a black rotary, had once been guarded by the old women from the neighborhood association. They used to listen without hiding their disdain or curiosity while I was on the phone with friends; when I finished, they would complain about the length of the conversation before logging it into their book and calculating the charge. In those days I gathered many chores before I went to use the telephone lest my parents noticed my extended absence. My allowance—which was what I could scrimp and save from my lunch money—was spent on phone calls and stamps and envelopes. Like a Victorian character I checked our mail before my parents did and intercepted letters meant for me. To think that eager person—not wanting to miss a connection with the world—would grow up into the recluse I prefer to think of myself as today: there must be a part of everyone’s youth that later one avoids looking at too closely.