Quarrel & Quandary (21 page)

Yet the aim of Campion’s film is surely not a literal faithfulness to the crowded, chesslike movements of the original. A film strives to be, so to speak, a condensed
second
original, which means that it will fail if it strays from or perverts the discriminations of its source. Campion sets out to alter and coarsen those discriminations. Ralph Touchett on his deathbed is hurled, in Campion’s hands, from deeply held cousinly love (“Oh my brother!” James has Isabel cry in her grief) to driven lover’s love, in wholesale repudiation of James. It is as if he is not to be trusted to tell the truth about men and women, and about the justice of willed reticence. And if James’s Isabel is generously and earnestly outward-turning, Campion’s Isabel is just the opposite—fastened, as that mischievously anachronistic prologue warns, on the inner chamber of the sensual kiss.

James’s Isabel, in the hope of freedom, looks to the broadening
world. Campion’s Isabel, all too programmatically, looks to the limits of self. That is why the novel is a tragedy—it enacts the defeat of freedom. And that is why the movie, through its governing credo, adds up to little more than a beautifully embroidered anecdote of a bad marriage.

What crudity compared to what the novelist saw!

What is the difference between a literary icon and an ordinary writer? The writer is sometimes read, the icon almost never; a symbol is independent of readers. The writer transfigured into symbol leaves behind such earthbound circumstances as reputation, controversy, acclaim, fame—including the highest degree of fame. All these are swallowed up in the Representation of an Era. Consider those nineteen-sixties luminaries (they are all male) who have come to personify—indelibly and incontrovertibly—one liberating scenario after another: the mystical vagabond, the Whitman-like bard, the macho rebel, the generational clown, the soused ex-prodigy. They are like medieval “humors,” confined to the narrowest temper of their noisiest time. They have transcended their own labors: they denote, they delineate, they typify. They stand for an age. Of their celebrated passions, only a handful of stray phrases and shockworthy gestures survive. They have ascended—or fallen—into legend. Though alive, they are no longer urgent. They are animate statues.

Literary women are less likely to suffer such wholesale deportations into the straits of American personification. Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Susan Sontag go on being newly and hotly read: they speak in the language of life, not of monument. Not that we are altogether without female
monuments. The poet Emma Lazarus is mostly indistinguishable from her inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Julia Ward Howe, of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is thumpingly memorialized by those ungodly grapes of wrath (unless John Steinbeck has stolen them away). “So you’re the little woman who started this big war,” President Lincoln is said to have declared to Harriet Beecher Stowe, as if she were Helen of Troy. Yet not even the emblematic author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
could fully embody the bleeding psychological wilderness of the Civil War. And neither she nor Howe nor Lazarus ever became the goddess of an age.

One woman did, and she did it by abandoning America and settling in Paris. She became the goddess of her age; she became the incarnation of that age; she became its legend; she became its symbol. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she announced. And another time: “Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me.” But we do not remember Gertrude Stein for saying any of these outrageous things. As a writer she is defined for us by four quotations only—egoless catchphrases, her logo and trademark: “Pigeons on the grass alas.” “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” (Four roses: heavier brew than the three commonly cited.) To Ernest Hemingway, after the First World War: “You are all a lost generation.” On her deathbed: “What is the question?”

She intended to seize and personify modernism itself, and she succeeded. Consequently we cannot imagine Gertrude Stein without Picasso. Like him, she wanted to invent Cubism—not in oils but in words, where refraction produces not abstraction but subtraction. She worked to subtract plain meaning from English prose. Whether she was a charlatan or a philosopher, it is even now hard to say. William James, with whom she studied psychology at Radcliffe, sent her on to Johns Hopkins to do research on automatic writing. (She earned an M.D. while she was at it.)
Certainly there appears to be more than a little of the subconscious in many of her sentences, but mainly they are mindful, calculated, striven after, arranged. “Think well of the difference between thinking with what they are thinking”—is this nonsense, or is it an idea too gossamer to capture? She was deliberately, extravagantly, ferociously extreme, and as concentrated and imperial as Picasso himself, who painted Stein just the way her companion Alice Toklas described her: a woman with the head of a Roman emperor.

No one now reads Gertrude Stein, though a few of her titles have a life of their own:
Four Saints in Three Acts
, which Virgil Thomson made into an opera;
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, written by Gertrude Stein about Gertrude Stein. Those who valiantly read her in her heyday often gave up. Clifton Fadiman’s view was that her prose “puts you at once in the condition resembling the early stages of grippe—the eyes and legs heavy, the top of the skull wandering around in an uncertain and independent manner, the heart ponderously, tiredly beating.” “A cold, black suet-pudding,” Wyndham Lewis concluded. “All fat, without nerve.”

And still the modernist pantheon came to sit at her feet. The visitors who passed through the bohemian dazzle of her Paris apartment—Picasso and Matisse on the walls—were nearly all illustrious; she knew what she was after, and so did they. Hemingway said that he and Stein were “just like brothers.” Juan Gris, Sherwood Anderson, Clive Bell, Wyndham Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, André Gide, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Jo Davidson, and the geniuses on her walls, Picasso and Matisse—all these paraded by her witty tongue, while squat Alice Toklas looked loyally on. During the German occupation of Paris, when Jews were being hunted by the thousands in every neighborhood, these two Jewish women of Montparnasse were somehow left unmolested. And when Gertrude
Stein died in 1946, at seventy-two, her name was a household word (or quip), her mannish head an avant-garde image; and she had become one with the movement she touted.

At the close of its century of brilliance and triumph, modernism begins now to look a little old-fashioned, even a bit stale or exhausted, and certainly conventional—but what is fresher, and sassier, and more enchantingly silly, than “Rose is a rose is a rose …”? This endearing, enduring, durable and derisible chant of a copycat Cubist is almost all that is left of Gertrude Stein. It signifies what was once a mammoth revolution in literature and art. Gertrude Stein was modernism’s outermost manifestation and prophet; and so she remains.

Readers often ask—and writers ask themselves—where a work of fiction “comes from.” A captivating question: it implies that stories don’t always originate in the writer’s mind, but in some outside source or force, like the sting of a passing insect. Henry James, in fact, concocted a germ theory to account for the sudden recognition that a tale is already
there
, at least in embryo. The “germ,” in James’s view, was the smallest fructifying hint, no bigger than a seed, out of which a story might grow. He collected these useful germs at dinner parties, listening to anecdotes and gossip—but he turned away, on principle, as the teller moved on to the story’s real-life outcome.

What gripped James was not what had actually happened, but what
might
happen, what lay implicit in any overheard circumstance—the intimation, the possibility, the initiating spore. His notebooks swarm with such germs. “Mrs. F.F. mentioned to me,” he would write, “a little local fact that strikes me as a good small ‘short-story’ … The man had engaged himself to a young woman, but afterward had thought better of it,” etc. James’s elaborations would soon massively depart from the original “little local fact”—but this, the germ of the narrative, was indispensable to his imagination.

Writers’ inspiration tends to divide itself between memory and observation—or call it between the self and ideas about the
world. For writers on the memory side, it is autobiography that engenders story—or if not autobiography literally, then the matrix where psychology and personality and social surroundings meet. Memory-writers begin with character and situation, as James does. For writers magnetized by ideas—think of Hawthorne or Kafka—it is idea that precedes character. But of course no writer is purely on one side or the other; every novel is a complex partnership of both memory and idea, with one finally outweighing the other, as on a seesaw.

The act of reading, too, has a stake in this divide. Readers ride the seesaw along with the writer, but may weigh in against the writer’s proclivity. E. M. Forster’s early novel,
The Longest Journey
(a novel I reread obsessively in my twenties and thirties), is mainly—possibly exclusively—a memory work, rooted in autobiography, and far more dedicated to the exposition of character than to idea in the “philosophical” sense. But what I have taken away from it, over decades, is an idea about the nature of the moral life. (Readers discover their own “germs.”) The idea—an insight into vice—resides in a single sentence in Chapter Eight. Agnes and Rickie have just announced that they will marry. Ansell, Rickie’s blunt friend, asks when the marriage will take place. “Not for years, as far as we can see,” Agnes replies.

Whereupon Ansell, who knows Rickie’s heart, condemns Agnes as a liar—because, he explains, “she said ‘we see’ instead of ‘I see.’ ”

A moment like this in a novel is equal to a dozen chapters of Kant. In one small shrewd scene, Forster penetrates into the peril of “I” speaking for “we”—untruth; arrogance; demagoguery.

Unlike James, Forster left no written record of how he came upon the germ for this youthful fiction. And the writer’s germ, that crucial instant of revelation, may not be the reader’s. For me, the germ of this novel—what is most germane to a reading
life in its youth—is the tiny horror (it will later become an enormity) of hearing Agnes say “we.”

Now it may be objected that Rickie and Agnes do not exist—that, as people go, they are only imaginary. All the same, imaginary people can, often enough, claim a reality greater than, for instance, our relatives. I may find Mrs. Dalloway a bit cloudy, but I believe absolutely in Mrs. Ramsay. Bellow’s Einhorn, Forster’s Aziz, Flaubert’s Emma, A. B. Yehoshua’s Abulafia, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth, George Eliot’s Dorothea, Chaim Grade’s Hersh Rasseyner, Philip Roth’s Swede, and on and on and on: these lives are more lasting than our own. We, whatever our current station on the span of three-score-and-ten, are ephemeral. Only make-believe people can endure for long; and some, like Hamlet, are permanent—at least until the sun burns out.

It is the curious identity of books in general that history and philosophy, invaluable though they are, cannot, by their very nature, contain novels; yet novels can contain history and philosophy. We need not quarrel about which genre is superior; all are essential to human striving. But somehow it is enchanting to think that the magic sack of make-believe, if one wills it so, can always be fuller and fatter than anything the historians and philosophers can supply. Make-believe, with its uselessness and triviality, with all its falseness, is nevertheless frequently praised for telling the truth via lies. Such an observation seems plainly not to the point. History seeks truth; philosophy seeks truth. They may get at it far better than novels can. Novels are made for another purpose. They are made to allow us to live, for a little time, another life; a life different from the one we were ineluctably born into. Truth, if we can lay our hands on it, may or may not confer freedom. Make-believe always does.

I came late to the ladle. For years it lay in a kitchen drawer, its wooden handle split—from age, not use. A practical friend’s practical gift, for which I felt no gratitude. The truth is I have no affinity for pans and colanders and other culinary devices; my friendliest utensils have always been a trustworthy can opener screwed to the wall and a certain ancient red-handled wrench designed to twist the covers off recalcitrant grocery jars. The ladle, I believed, was a serious instrument for serious cooks, an accessory to the fact of real soups and real stews. I saw no need for it.

Yet the first time I dipped the ladle into a stew-laden pot (a real stew, finally, but by then my hair had turned white), I knew its value. The ladle, though made of commonplace stainless steel, was pure gold. I had all along been feebly spooning things out; but in the depth of a true stew a spoon is an inept, lazy, shallow fellow, poor kin to a ladle. Your spoon will bring up a pair of peas in a mild flat puddle—a spoon is nearly as feckless as a sieve. But your ladle is a powerful radar-equipped submarine churning into the wild deeps of an undertow, capable of trawling the seafloor, a driving authentic vessel that will raise a rich authentic freight.

A spoon is an effete and timid little mouth, good enough for teacups and sweet puddings. A ladle is a great guzzling inebriate,
given to gargantuan draughts; a swiller of oceanic wassail; a diver into densest abysses.

It is no surprise, then, to look up to the sea of stars—the well of infinity that is the sky at night—and find there two ladles, one Big, one Little. The Big Dipper’s seven stars are hitched to the nearby constellations of Draco and Leo; the hollow of its ladle has been transformed into a kind of Cinderella-coach driven not by mice but by a dragon and a lion. The Little Dipper, in contrast, is the perfected form of the purified, unmetaphoricized ladle; it is the very incarnation of a Platonic notion of a ladle. (That the ancients should have seen it as Ursa Minor, a small bear, is no credit to them. But of course eyeglasses, never mind the telescope, hadn’t yet been invented, so let it pass.)