In Rough Country (28 page)

Of course Sophia Kovalevsky lives in a yet more provincial and restrictive world than rural southwestern Ontario, at least when she resides in her native Russia where unmarried women are not allowed to travel out of the country without permission from their families. In the cause of female emancipation Sophia marries a young radical-minded man without loving him, in order to leave the country to study abroad; after his death, by suicide, she is left with their young daughter, and the challenge of establishing a career. In 1888, Sophia wins first prize in an international mathematics competition in which entries are blind and genderless. At the swanky reception for the Bordin Prize in Paris

No more would the gentlemen-mathematicians who so honor Sophia give her a university position than they would employ a “learned chimpanzee.” Like the smug, self-righteous women of provincial Ontario the wives of the great scientists “preferred not to meet her, or invite her into their homes.” Most painful of all, Sophia loses—at least provisionally—the man who is the great love of her life, a professor of sociology and law, a Liberal forbidden to hold an academic post in Russia, named Max
sim Maxsimovich Kovalevsky. (It's a coincidence that their last names are identical—Sophia's first husband was a distant cousin of Maxsim.)

Sophia's adoration of Maxsim both illuminates her life as a woman and endangers it. The reader senses, beyond the young woman's fantasies of domestic life with this most unusual man—“He weighs 285 pounds, distributed over a large frame, and being Russian, he is often referred to as a bear, also as a Cossack”—that Maxsim isn't nearly so infatuated with Sophia as she is with him. Both are forty years old, but Sophia is the more mature of the two, as she is the more vulnerable emotionally. Maxsim can't seem to forgive Sophia for being at least as brilliant as he is, if not, with her “freaky glittery fame” more of a prodigy. Where Sophia writes of Maxsim with girlish adoration—

Maxsim includes in his love letters “terrible” sentences:

It would seem that Sophia's fortunes take a turn for the better when she's offered a position to teach in Sweden—“the only people in Europe willing to hire a female mathematician
for their new university.” But to travel by herself from Berlin to Stockholm in the winter, at a time when Copenhagan is under quarantine with an outbreak of smallpox, is a dangerous, if not foolhardy undertaking: “Would Maxsim ever in his life board such a train as this?” By the time Sophia finally arrives in Stockholm she is ravaged by pneumonia and never regains consciousness. Speaking at her funeral, Maxsim refers to her “rather as if she had been a professor of his acquaintance” and not his lover. It's a melancholy end to this vibrant and accomplished “emancipated” woman who lived before her time, bravely and without the protection of men.

“Too Much Happiness” gathers considerable narrative momentum in its final pages, which chart poor Sophia's fatal train to the only country in Europe—if not the world—that will hire her as a university professor. Like those long, elaborately researched and documented stories of Andrea Barrett that chronicle the lives of nineteenth-century scientists—see
Ship Fever
(1996) and
Servants of the Map
(2002)—“Too Much Happiness” contains enough densely packed material for several novels and is burdened at times by expository material presented in undramatic and somewhat improbable passages, as if the author were eager to establish her subject as
real
,
historical
and not merely imagined:

In her acknowledgments Munro notes that parts of “Too Much Happiness” are derived from translated Russian texts including excerpts from Sophia's diaries, letters, and other writings, and that her primary source is Nina and Don H. Kennedy's biography
Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky
(1983), a work that “enthralled” her. Sophia Kovalevsky is indeed an enthralling figure, the single most interesting individual Munro has written about to date. It's appropriate that Munro prefaces “Too Much Happiness” with a remark by the historic Sophia Kovalevsky:

“A
lmost pathetically serious”—so it was said of the thirty-two-year-old novelist whose photograph appeared in
Vogue
's “People Are Talking About” feature for September 1970. The caption writer went on to note that the writer whose third novel
them
had received the National Book Award for 1970 was “tentative, hush-voiced, with the fixed brown eyes of a sleepwalker” and that “daydreaming” had given to her writing a “peculiarly floating quality” somewhat at odds with the violence of her subject. I was quoted, with enigmatic brevity: “What an artist has to resist and turn to his advantage is violence.” This replica of my face of 1970, so strangely without expression, mask-like and dreamy and “serene” was, ironically, no indication of the maelstrom of emotions I was feeling at the time: excitement, wonderment, stress, a kind of chronic ontological anxiety. (“Ontological anxiety”: the doubt that one exists as merely
one
, and the doubt that one can know the identity of this
one
, in any case. “Ontological anxiety” is an invaluable stimulus for creative endeavor since, in such endeavors, though we may have grave doubts about our own existence, we are
likely to throw ourselves passionately into the construction of artworks with which to bond with others.)

Photographed for
Vogue
! The most elegant, as it was the most daunting and mysterious of the glossy magazines my grandmother, herself a somewhat mysterious woman, brought to our farmhouse in Millersport, New York, while I was growing up in the 1950s. Other magazines were the more populist, practical-minded
Redbook
,
Ladies' Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
; the career-girl
Mademoiselle
(where, in 1959, my first published story would appear as a co-winner of that magazine's short story competition); and
The New Yorker
, most prized in our household for its cartoons, often as perplexing as they were funny, and inhabited by fey, epicene individuals we assumed were New York sophisticates. By far, it was
Vogue
that evoked the most fascination to a girl living on a small, not-very-prosperous farm in the upstate New York region known as the Snow Belt. Here was a treasure trove of the mystical, magically empowered Feminine, distinct from the merely utilitarian Female (on a farm, female creatures have their specific uses, none of which is romantic in the slightest):
Vogue
was, among other things, a shrine honoring sheer, nonutilitarian Beauty, most of which happened to be Feminine. It would be decades before I encountered Sigmund Freud's remark in his late, melancholy
Civilization and Its Discontents
: “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.” Yet I was, in early adolescence, an astute observer of worlds so foreign to my own, images of beauty so remote from my experience, I might have been contemplating photographs of men
and women from a species other than my own captured by the camera lenses of such legendary photographers as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. No more than I might have fantasized looking like any of these celebrities, socialites and models, wearing such extraordinary clothes, jewelry, makeup, could I have imagined seeing myself one day in
Vogue
, or the image of one identified in a caption as “Joyce Carol Oates.” As my childhood heroine Alice, of
Alice in Wonderland
, exclaimed: “Curiouser and curiouser!”

On the evening of March 4, I'd received the 1970 National Book Award for my novel
them
at a gala celebration; this photograph was taken by the distinguished photographer Jack Robinson on the morning of March 6, nearing 9:30
A.M
. Amid a flurry of interviews and photography sessions during my brief but distressingly crowded visit to New York this image is the single one to remain dramatically imprinted in my memory. What is evoked in the portrait for me is a perverse sort of nostalgia: the recollection of an era of peril, beginning with the tragic assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and continuing through a dazed, near-anarchic decade of assassinations (Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968) and “race” riots in American cities (as in Detroit, in July 1967, when we were living in that beleaguered city) through the end of the bloody, protracted and exhausting Vietnam War in 1973. It is an era difficult to describe to those who didn't live through it when paranoia flourished, and with justification; drug use became as promiscuous and commonplace as smoking cigarettes; and isolated acts of terrorism, bombs on college campuses, for instance, or detonated at the Pentagon, were purely homegrown,
“American-revolutionary-radical” and not foreign. For that morning, after a night of fitful sleep on a very hard (horse-hair?) mattress in a guest room in a distinguished old Central Park West apartment building listening to the nighttime sounds of the great city (if sirens were neon-red traceries in the sky, how like a cat's cradle the sky above New York City would look!), as I sat stiff and self-conscious, trying not to blink in the glaring lights, trying, as the photographer gently urged me, to “relax,” there came suddenly, from somewhere close by, a deafening explosion. Windows rattled, the floor, walls, ceiling of the studio shook.

Abruptly, the photography session ended.

Perhaps at the instant this image was “captured” on film: the instant when the private and inward is waylaid, appropriated and redefined by an act of violence.

In that instant, you feel a sick, animal fear. As we'd felt, over a period of hours, even days, at the time of the “civil unrest” in Detroit, arson fires, looting, street violence and gunfire less than three blocks from our house in a residential neighborhood near the University of Detroit, where I taught at the time. At such moments of peril you think
This can't be happening! This can't be happening to me
. And if you are lucky, it isn't.

We staggered out of the photographer's studio, out of the brownstone in the West Village and onto the sidewalk where already the air was smoky and gritty. We were dazed, panicky. With such stunning abruptness the intimate moment of art had ended and had been replaced by this brute and utterly perplexing reality. Around us were frightened pedestrians, stalled traffic, a cacophony of horns and sirens. No one had
any idea what had happened: an exploding boiler? Gas line? A
bomb
?

A block or so away, flames shot upward from what appeared to be a brownstone town house. It would turn out to be an elegant nineteenth-century house with a Greek-revival facade, the boyhood home of the poet James Merrill.

Later, it would be revealed that the terrible explosion had been inadvertently caused by an amateur bombmaker who'd triggered a timer on a homemade “antipersonnel” bomb being assembled in the basement of the house at 18 West Eleventh Street, by two zealot members of the radical antiwar group Weatherman, with the intention of setting off the bomb at a dance at the Fort Dix, New Jersey, army base. (“Antipersonnel” is a particularly nasty kind of bomb, tightly packed with screws and nails, intended to dismember human targets.) The bomb fortuitously detonated that morning killed three individuals, two men and a woman named Diana Oughton, a former debutante and Bryn Mawr graduate, whose body was grotesquely dismembered in the blast; fleeing from the burning house, naked, on foot were two female Weathermen, one of them Kathy Boudin, later to acquire notoriety of her own.

That season of peril. The sour, sick dregs of 1960s counterculture idealism. In such rocky soil the seeds of nostalgia yet grow.

We left New York the next day. We returned to Windsor, Ontario. We lived there in a white-brick house with plate glass walls overlooking the Detroit River. Living in Ontario during the ongoing crisis of the Vietnam War, in a foreign country with the advantage of hardly seeming foreign, in a city that is,
by a geographical quirk, south of Detroit, I would stare out the window of my study at the fast-flowing, choppy and often leaden-colored river and would remember, with a pang of loss, how curious and fleeting is the intimacy between photographer and “subject,” how abruptly it can end; and the image that remains can be both timeless and time-bound, a memory of nightmare crystallized in art.