Where the Stress Falls (4 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
From Kentucky to New York, to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient—never mind that it is the truth.
The voyaging of the bookish, undoubtedly a source of many keen pleasures, is nevertheless an occasion for irony, as if one’s life had failed to meet an agreed standard of interest. A career of mental traveling, illustrated by a fair bit of real traveling in safety and relative comfort, doesn’t make for a very exciting plot. “It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all”—best to name the formidable constraint unknown to other representatively brilliant first-person narrators—“‘I’” am a woman.”
COMPARED WITH BEGINNINGS
, endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.
, endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.
The Pilgrim Hawk
starts with the Cullens’ arrival and must go on until they leave and stop very soon after they do.
Pictures from an Institution
also draws to a close with a departure, actually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief.
starts with the Cullens’ arrival and must go on until they leave and stop very soon after they do.
Pictures from an Institution
also draws to a close with a departure, actually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief.
The Pilgrim Hawk
signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens’ torment:
signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens’ torment:
“You’ll never marry, dear,” I said, to tease Alex … “You’ll be afraid to, after this fantastic bad luck.”
“What bad luck, if you please?” she inquired, smiling to show that my mockery was welcome.
“Fantastic bad object lessons.”
“You’re no novelist,” she said, to tease me. “I envy the Cullens, didn’t you know?” And I concluded from the look on her face that she herself did not quite know whether she meant it.
For last lines, Wescott’s novel confects a flurry of doubts about what is meant and what is felt, an exchange of teasing untruths: “You’ll never marry.” “You’re no novelist.” To readers who have retained a piece of information dropped into the very first paragraph (Alex will soon meet and marry the narrator’s brother) and to those still gripped by the histrionic misery of the Cullens as parsed by the joyless narrator, the ending may seem light; perhaps too light. Or too neatly
da capo.
da capo.
Pictures from an Institution
finishes as do the great comedies, with a celebration of marriage. It’s the no-name narrator, until now the most revved up of observers, who has the becalmed last scene of the novel all to himself. Summer vacation has started; the campus is deserted; he has been in his office going through books and papers (“I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon: I threw away and threw away and threw away …”). Then he leaves:
finishes as do the great comedies, with a celebration of marriage. It’s the no-name narrator, until now the most revved up of observers, who has the becalmed last scene of the novel all to himself. Summer vacation has started; the campus is deserted; he has been in his office going through books and papers (“I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon: I threw away and threw away and threw away …”). Then he leaves:
When at last I went downstairs everything was hollow and silent; my steps echoed along the corridor, as I walked down it looking at the sunlight in the trees outside. There was nobody in the building—nobody, I felt, in all the buildings of Benton. I stood in the telephone-booth on the first floor, dialed the number of my house, and my wife’s
hello
was small and far-off in the silence; I said, “Can you come get me now, darling?” She answered, “
Of course
I can. I’ll be right over.”
hello
was small and far-off in the silence; I said, “Can you come get me now, darling?” She answered, “
Of course
I can. I’ll be right over.”
For all that we know virtually nothing of the narrator, still less about his entirely notional wife, it seems appropriate that this novel about comic and pathetic (but never tragic) marriages ends as it does, with that italicized
Of course,
which evokes, with exquisite economy, the shelter and rightness of a true marriage.
Of course,
which evokes, with exquisite economy, the shelter and rightness of a true marriage.
And here are the last lines of
Sleepless Nights
, which, having no single story to tell, has no obvious place to end.
The Pilgrim Hawk
and
Pictures from an Institution
move forward in an announced, framed length of time: an afternoon and early evening; a spring semester.
Sleepless Nights
stretches over decades, darting backward and forward in time, its gallantly de-married narrator accumulating solitudes. Best to affirm solitude—writing, the work of memory—while also acknowledging the longing to reach out, to write letters, to telephone.
Sleepless Nights
, which, having no single story to tell, has no obvious place to end.
The Pilgrim Hawk
and
Pictures from an Institution
move forward in an announced, framed length of time: an afternoon and early evening; a spring semester.
Sleepless Nights
stretches over decades, darting backward and forward in time, its gallantly de-married narrator accumulating solitudes. Best to affirm solitude—writing, the work of memory—while also acknowledging the longing to reach out, to write letters, to telephone.
Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory.
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for.
Public assistance,
beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.
Public assistance,
beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.
So Sleepless Nights
ends with a departure, too. It ends by leaving—that is, delicately excluding—the reader (“I love to be known by those I care for”), who is presumed to read intrusively, looking for the concordance of truth about a “real life.”
ends with a departure, too. It ends by leaving—that is, delicately excluding—the reader (“I love to be known by those I care for”), who is presumed to read intrusively, looking for the concordance of truth about a “real life.”
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION
in the guise of a journal (Rilke’s
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge),
a memoir in poet’s prose
(Pasternak’s Safe Conduct
), and a volume of stories (Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
) have all been mentioned by Hardwick as books she found em boldening when she came to write the genre-buster that is
Sleepless Nights.
in the guise of a journal (Rilke’s
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge),
a memoir in poet’s prose
(Pasternak’s Safe Conduct
), and a volume of stories (Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
) have all been mentioned by Hardwick as books she found em boldening when she came to write the genre-buster that is
Sleepless Nights.
To be sure, fiction of all kinds has always fed on writers’ lives. Every detail in a work of fiction was once an observation or a memory or a wish, or is a sincere homage to a reality independent of the self. That both the pretentious novelist and the pretentious women’s college in
Pictures from an Institution
have well-known models illustrates familiar practices of fiction. (In a satire this is the norm: it would be surprising if Jarrell did not have a real novelist, a real college, in mind.) And authors of first-person narratives will often be discovered to have lent to that voice a few stray bio-facts. For instance, it helps explain the end of
The Pilgrim Hawk
to recall having been told that Alex Henry will marry. But that she will marry the narrator’s brother, of whom nothing is ever said in the novel, seems like noodling. It’s not. The great friend who inspired the character Alex, a rich 1920s-era American expatriate with a house near Paris in fashionable Rambouillet (the village renamed Chancellet), did, after returning home, marry Wescott’s brother.
Pictures from an Institution
have well-known models illustrates familiar practices of fiction. (In a satire this is the norm: it would be surprising if Jarrell did not have a real novelist, a real college, in mind.) And authors of first-person narratives will often be discovered to have lent to that voice a few stray bio-facts. For instance, it helps explain the end of
The Pilgrim Hawk
to recall having been told that Alex Henry will marry. But that she will marry the narrator’s brother, of whom nothing is ever said in the novel, seems like noodling. It’s not. The great friend who inspired the character Alex, a rich 1920s-era American expatriate with a house near Paris in fashionable Rambouillet (the village renamed Chancellet), did, after returning home, marry Wescott’s brother.
Many first-person narrators are endowed with enough traits to make a pleasantly self-regarding resemblance to their authors. Others are there-but-for-the-grace-of-God creations, what the author believes (or hopes) he or she has escaped being. Wescott, though not—like Tower—a failed writer, often reproached himself for being a lazy one, and it is odd that someone capable of a book as marvelous as
The Pilgrim Hawk
would only once in a long life write at the top of his form. Hawthorne was always wrestling with the Coverdale in himself. Writing to Sophia Peabody in 1841 from Brook Farm, the model for the cooperative community depicted in
The Blithedale Romance
, Hawthorne blesses his future wife for imparting a sense of life’s “reality” and keeping “a feeling of coldness and strangeness” from creeping into his heart; in other words, for rescuing him from being someone like Coverdale.
The Pilgrim Hawk
would only once in a long life write at the top of his form. Hawthorne was always wrestling with the Coverdale in himself. Writing to Sophia Peabody in 1841 from Brook Farm, the model for the cooperative community depicted in
The Blithedale Romance
, Hawthorne blesses his future wife for imparting a sense of life’s “reality” and keeping “a feeling of coldness and strangeness” from creeping into his heart; in other words, for rescuing him from being someone like Coverdale.
But what about when the “I” and the author bear the same name or have identical life circumstances, as in
Sleepless Nights,
or in V. S. Naipaul’s
The Enigma of Arrival
and W. G. Sebald’s
Vertigo
? How much fact from the author’s life can be sponged up without our becoming reluctant to call the book a novel? Sebald is the writer who plays most daringly with this project now. His narratives of mental haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an emotionally distressed alter ego who presses the claim of solemn factuality to the point of including photographs of himself among the many photographs that annotate his books. Of course, almost everything that would normally be disclosed in an autobiographical work is absent from Sebald’s books.
Sleepless Nights,
or in V. S. Naipaul’s
The Enigma of Arrival
and W. G. Sebald’s
Vertigo
? How much fact from the author’s life can be sponged up without our becoming reluctant to call the book a novel? Sebald is the writer who plays most daringly with this project now. His narratives of mental haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an emotionally distressed alter ego who presses the claim of solemn factuality to the point of including photographs of himself among the many photographs that annotate his books. Of course, almost everything that would normally be disclosed in an autobiographical work is absent from Sebald’s books.
Actually, secretiveness—which might be called reticence, or discretion, or withholding—is essential to keeping these anomalous works of fiction from tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use your life, but only a little, and at an oblique angle. We know the narrator of
Sleepless Nights
draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holiday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M—, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the
West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses—the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.
Sleepless Nights
draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holiday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M—, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the
West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses—the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.
To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified with your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories—fragments of memories, transformed—emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story. And Hardwick’s art of acute compression and decentering is simply too fast-paced to tell only a single story at a time; too fast, sometimes, to relate any story at all, especially where one is expected. For instance, there is much about marriage, notably a long-running soap opera starring the philandering husband in a Dutch couple, friends of the narrator and her then husband when they lived in Holland. Her own marriage is announced thus on the fifth page: “I was then a ‘we’ … Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition.” The ensuing silence about the “we”—a declaration of independence that has to be intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative, questing “I” capable of writing
Sleepless Nights
—lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: “I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, have passed.” Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers
enough.
Sleepless Nights
—lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: “I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, have passed.” Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers
enough.
But it’s not an autobiography, not even of this “Elizabeth,” who is made out of materials harvested from, but not identical with, Elizabeth Hardwick. It’s about what “Elizabeth” saw, what she thought about others. Its power is linked with its refusals, and its distinctive palette of sympathies. Her assessments of long-term sufferers in lousy marriages are pitiless, but she is kind to Main Street, touched by inept wrongdoers and class traitors and self-important failures. Memory conjures up a procession of injured souls: foolish, deceiving, needy men, some briefly lovers, who have been much indulged (by themselves and by women)
and come to no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women in archaic roles who have known only hard times and been indulged by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator’s mother, and several meanderingly sustained,
Melanctha-like
portraits of women who are invoked like muses:
and come to no good end, and humble, courteous, simple women in archaic roles who have known only hard times and been indulged by nobody. There are desperately loving evocations of the narrator’s mother, and several meanderingly sustained,
Melanctha-like
portraits of women who are invoked like muses:
When I think of cleaning women with unfair diseases I think of you, Josette. When I must iron or use a heavy pot for cooking, I think of you, Ida. When I think of deafness, heart disease and languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela. Great washtubs full of sheets remind me of more than one.
The work of memory, this memory, is choosing, most emphatically, to think about women, especially women serving out lives of hard labor, those whom exquisitely written books customarily ignore. Justice requires that they be remembered. Pictured. Summoned to the feast of the imagination and of language.
Of course, you summon ghosts at your peril. The sufferings of others can bleed into your soul. You try to protect yourself. Memory is inventive. Memory is a performance. Memory invites itself, and is hard to turn away. Hence the ravishing insight that gives the book its title: that remembering is intimately connected with insomnia. Memories are what make it hard for you to sleep. Memories procreate. And the uninvited memories always seem to the point. (As in fiction: whatever is included is connected.) The boldness and virtuosity of Hardwick’s associativeness intoxicate.
On the last page, in the peroration with which
Sleepless Nights
concludes, the narrator observes, in a final summative delirium:
Sleepless Nights
concludes, the narrator observes, in a final summative delirium:
Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.
The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.
Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at hay. It’s a matter of adjectives. It’s where the stress falls.
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