Where the Stress Falls (2 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
A poet’s prose is the autobiography of ardor. All of Tsvetaeva’s work is an argument for rapture; and for genius, that is, for hierarchy: a poetics of the Promethean. “Our whole relation to art is an exception in favor of genius,” as Tsvetaeva wrote in her stupendous essay “Art in the Light of Conscience.” To be a poet is a state of being, elevated being: Tsvetaeva speaks of her love for “what is highest.” There is the same quality of emotional soaring in her prose as in her poetry: no modern writer takes one as close to an experience of sublimity. As Tsvetaeva points out, “No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”
[1983]
for P.D.
I
T BEGINS
, this great American novel (let’s not call it “this great American short novel”), with the voice of recollection; that is, the voice of uncertainty:
T BEGINS
, this great American novel (let’s not call it “this great American short novel”), with the voice of recollection; that is, the voice of uncertainty:
The Cullens were Irish; but it was in France that I met them and was able to form an impression of their love and their trouble. They were on their way to a property they had rented in Hungary; and one afternoon they came to Chancellet to see my great friend Alexandra Henry. That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America, and she met my brother and married him.
Needless to say, the twenties were very different from the thirties, and now the forties have begun. In the twenties it was not unusual to meet foreigners in some country as foreign to them as to you, your peregrination just crossing theirs; and you did your best to know them in an afternoon or so; and perhaps you called that little lightning knowledge, friendship. There was a kind of idealistic or optimistic curiosity in the air. And vagaries of character, and the various war and peace that goes on in the psyche, seemed of the greatest interest and even importance.
To cite the decade—the novel was published in 1940, so the forties had barely begun—puts an additional glaze on the story, investing it with the allure of the untimely; supervening World Events, it’s suggested, have wilted the importance of the “war and peace that goes on in the psyche.” This is to be merely some stuff about private lives, digested in record time: “an afternoon or so” is exactly the duration of the story, for the Cullens arrive after lunch, around two-thirty, and bolt just as an elaborate dinner is about to be served. In these few hours—a good deal less than the entire day and evening of
Mrs.
Dalloway
—a storm of feelings will batter the constraints of gentility, and the ferocious indissoluble union of the Cullens, “their love and their trouble,” will have been subjected to a cunningly thorough examination. “Lightning knowledge”—what kind of knowledge is that?
Mrs.
Dalloway
—a storm of feelings will batter the constraints of gentility, and the ferocious indissoluble union of the Cullens, “their love and their trouble,” will have been subjected to a cunningly thorough examination. “Lightning knowledge”—what kind of knowledge is that?
The novel, still neglected, ever astonishing, is
The Pilgrim Hawk
by Glenway Wescott. It belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view. What’s thought to be typically American is brash, broad, and a little simple, even simpleminded, particularly about such venerable subjects of European discernment as marriage, and
The Pilgrim Hawk
is anything but simple about marriage.
The Pilgrim Hawk
by Glenway Wescott. It belongs, in my view, among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature, however untypical are its sleek, subtle vocabulary, the density of its attention to character, its fastidious pessimism, and the clipped worldliness of its point of view. What’s thought to be typically American is brash, broad, and a little simple, even simpleminded, particularly about such venerable subjects of European discernment as marriage, and
The Pilgrim Hawk
is anything but simple about marriage.
Of course, American literature has always provided complex performances of the moral imagination, some of which are dramas of intricate psychic violence as observed and mulled over by a witnessing consciousness. The job of the “I” who narrates
The Pilgrim Hawk
is to watch, to reflect, to understand (which also means to be puzzled by) what is going on. Who are this bluff, fleshy, self-conscious man and this exquisitely dressed woman with a full-grown hooded falcon, or pilgrim hawk, clinging to the rough gauntlet on her wrist? The narrator finds their presence, their derangements, stimulating. He is quick with eloquent summary assessments of their character. These evolve as their turmoil unfolds.
The Pilgrim Hawk
is to watch, to reflect, to understand (which also means to be puzzled by) what is going on. Who are this bluff, fleshy, self-conscious man and this exquisitely dressed woman with a full-grown hooded falcon, or pilgrim hawk, clinging to the rough gauntlet on her wrist? The narrator finds their presence, their derangements, stimulating. He is quick with eloquent summary assessments of their character. These evolve as their turmoil unfolds.
The opening of the novel suggests the uncanny speed at which an
omnivorous observer might form “an impression” of two hitherto-unknown people: “you did your best to know them.” It also proposes a masterly vagueness about when this impression was formed: “That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America …” Why would Wescott choose to make the narrator unsure of the year? It could be to mute the import of 1929, the year of the Crash, for such as his two idle-rich American expats—not Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald rich but seriously rich, as in a Henry James novel about Americans “doing” Europe. Or maybe this vagueness is simply the good manners of someone assigned the all too Jamesian name of Alwyn Tower. And good manners may dictate the narrator’s fits of doubt about his own acuity: an Alwyn Tower would not wish to appear to be merely trying to be clever.
omnivorous observer might form “an impression” of two hitherto-unknown people: “you did your best to know them.” It also proposes a masterly vagueness about when this impression was formed: “That was in May of 1928 or 1929, before we all returned to America …” Why would Wescott choose to make the narrator unsure of the year? It could be to mute the import of 1929, the year of the Crash, for such as his two idle-rich American expats—not Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald rich but seriously rich, as in a Henry James novel about Americans “doing” Europe. Or maybe this vagueness is simply the good manners of someone assigned the all too Jamesian name of Alwyn Tower. And good manners may dictate the narrator’s fits of doubt about his own acuity: an Alwyn Tower would not wish to appear to be merely trying to be clever.
Name follows function. Detached, more than that, disabused, and virtually pastless (we don’t learn what has exiled him from loving and being loved; we don’t even learn his last name until nearly halfway through the book, and to divine his first name we have to know that Alwyn Tower is the central figure in Wescott’s early autobiographical novel,
The
Grandmothers),
the narrator is nevertheless not as mysterious as he might seem. In fact,
The Pilgrim
Hawk’s
“I” is a familiar personage, the shadowy bachelor friend of one or more of the principal characters who, in kindred versions, narrates Hawthorne’s The
Blithedale Romance
, James’s
The Sacred Fount,
and Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.
All these recessive narrators are abashed to some degree by the more reckless or vital or self-destructive people they observe.
The
Grandmothers),
the narrator is nevertheless not as mysterious as he might seem. In fact,
The Pilgrim
Hawk’s
“I” is a familiar personage, the shadowy bachelor friend of one or more of the principal characters who, in kindred versions, narrates Hawthorne’s The
Blithedale Romance
, James’s
The Sacred Fount,
and Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.
All these recessive narrators are abashed to some degree by the more reckless or vital or self-destructive people they observe.
The narrator as spectator is, necessarily, something of a voyeur. Gazing can become snooping, or at least seeing more than one is supposed to see. Coverdale, the creepy narrator of
The Blithedale Romance,
observes his friends from a treetop mirador and also from his post at a hotel room window where he can see into the windows of a house opposite.
The Sacred Fount
is the consummate narrator-at-the-peephole novel. The key revelation in
The Pilgrim Hawk,
Cullen’s hatred of his wife’s creature, comes when Tower happens to look out a window and sees Cullen, stealthily approaching the falcon, who has
been removed to the garden after a bloody meal, pulling out a knife, unhooding her, and then slicing through her leash to set her free.
The Blithedale Romance,
observes his friends from a treetop mirador and also from his post at a hotel room window where he can see into the windows of a house opposite.
The Sacred Fount
is the consummate narrator-at-the-peephole novel. The key revelation in
The Pilgrim Hawk,
Cullen’s hatred of his wife’s creature, comes when Tower happens to look out a window and sees Cullen, stealthily approaching the falcon, who has
been removed to the garden after a bloody meal, pulling out a knife, unhooding her, and then slicing through her leash to set her free.
Marriage is the normative tie in this world of couples that includes not only the Cullens and a stormily mated pair of servants but the pseudo-couple formed by Alex Henry and her opaquely sexed, ruminative friend and houseguest. Maybe Tower’s unease with the working of his own understanding proceeds from his awareness of being outside the deep experiences of coupledom, and alone. “Life is almost all perch. There is no nest; and no one is with you, on exactly the same rock or out on the same limb. The circumstances of passion are all too petty to be companionable.” His is the arid wisdom of a profoundly unmarried consciousness. “Whether or not I finally arrive at a proper understanding of people, I often begin in the way of a vexed, intense superficiality.”
Tower is describing the vagaries of novel writing as much as the pitfalls of understanding. All these valetudinarian narrators are also writers’ self-portraits and exercises in writers’ self-mortification. Coverdale, Hawthorne’s “frosty bachelor,” is a poet. Wescott’s bachelor narrator is still embittered by his failure to become a “literary artist” (“no one warned me that I really did not have talent enough”), which does not stop him from thinking like a novelist, observing like a novelist, flaunting a novelist’s volatility of judgment. “Sometimes I am as sensitive as a woman to others’ temper or temperament; and it is a kind of sensitivity which may turn, almost by chance, for them or against them.”
There is no smugness in Tower’s acknowledgment of a novelist’s ambivalence toward his subject, in contrast to Coverdale’s chilling reflection:
The thought impressed itself upon me, that I had left duties unperformed. With the power, perhaps, to act in the place of destiny, and avert misfortune from my friends, I had resigned them to their fate. That cold tendency, between instinct and intellect, which made me pry with a speculative interest into people’s passions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards unhumanizing my heart.
But a man cannot always decide for himself whether his own heart
is cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little.
is cold or warm. It now impresses me that, if I erred at all in regard to Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, it was through too much sympathy, rather than too little.
Tower is able to make his mixed feelings about the couple he is observing more explicit. He feels repelled. He sympathizes, sometimes with the wife, sometimes with the husband—she so driven and sexually vibrant, he so desperate and dejected. The Cullens themselves seem to dissolve and re-form several times as the balance of power between them alters. (The neurasthenic, fragile wife even appears to change body type, becoming robust, coarse, indomitable.) Sometimes Tower seems in arrears of their ever more interesting natures, sometimes he seems to be imposing more complexity on their story than is plausible, and the narration risks becoming a story about him, his tortuous and self-torturing way of seeing—in the manner of late Henry James. But Wescott does not go that far. He is content to stay with the benefits, for the advancement of the story, of so self-conscious a narrator. A novelist with a painful story to tell will want to furnish it with complex characters who reveal themselves only gradually. What more ingenious, economical method than to make the complexity of a character the result of the instability of a first-person narrator’s perceptions? For this purpose Tower could hardly be better suited. His appetite for discovering and repudiating significances is insatiable.
There is only one way for such a narrator to conclude: with yet another recoil from his own knowingness. After the drunken confidences and weeping and shouting and dangerous flirting, after a large revolver has been brandished (and flung into a pond), after nervous farewells have papered over the abyss and the Cullens and the hawk have spun off into the night in the long dark Daimler, after Tower and Alex have wandered into the garden to muse on all this unruly behavior, Tower recalls to himself the visions of rapacity and inhumanity he has mustered throughout the Cullens’ visit—recalls, that is, the book we have been reading:
… and I blushed. Half the time, I am afraid, my opinion of people is just guessing; cartooning. Again and again I give way to a kind of inexact
and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
and vengeful lyricism; I cannot tell what right I have to be avenged, and I am ashamed of it. Sometimes I entirely doubt my judgment in moral matters; and so long as I propose to be a story-teller, that is the whisper of the devil for me.
Is this frenetic reflectiveness distinctively American? I think so, without being able to prove it. The only English novel I know with something of these tones—the tormented diffidence and the muffled anguish—is one that plainly served Wescott as a partial inspiration for
The Pilgrim Hawk:
Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
(1915). Ford’s novel is also both a story of marital agony breaking through the routines of idleness and a project of recollection undertaken by an American expatriate whiling away his life on the Continent. At the center of the drama is an English couple abroad, friends of a rich American couple. It is the American husband, now a widower—his wife has died since the time of the “sad affair” he is recalling—who tells the story.
The Pilgrim Hawk:
Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
(1915). Ford’s novel is also both a story of marital agony breaking through the routines of idleness and a project of recollection undertaken by an American expatriate whiling away his life on the Continent. At the center of the drama is an English couple abroad, friends of a rich American couple. It is the American husband, now a widower—his wife has died since the time of the “sad affair” he is recalling—who tells the story.
Both in fiction and in autobiography, first-person narrating generally needs a pretext—also known as a justification—to begin. To talk about oneself used to be considered unseemly: the classic autobiographies and the classic novels that pretend to be somebody’s memoir all begin by offering extenuating reasons for doing something so egotistical. Even now, when self-centeredness hardly requires an apology, a book of self-examination, a novel cast as a personal recollection, continues to invite a self-justifying explanation. It’s useful to others. It’s all I know how to do. It’s all that’s left for me to do. There is something I don’t understand, and I want to understand. I’m not really talking about myself but about them.
The Good Soldier
starts with its deracinated narrator explaining that he sits down “today” in order “to puzzle out” what he lamentably did not understand when it was happening. “My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.” Not to know then—by the rules of fiction, where (unlike life) something has to happen—is to know now. The narrator may restate his bewilderment, fret from time to time over his inability to describe properly, worry that
he has not got some fact quite right. There is no way for readers to take these avowals of deficient understanding other than as evidence that he sees—or, rather, allows us to see—the doomed Captain Ashburnham all too well.
starts with its deracinated narrator explaining that he sits down “today” in order “to puzzle out” what he lamentably did not understand when it was happening. “My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.” Not to know then—by the rules of fiction, where (unlike life) something has to happen—is to know now. The narrator may restate his bewilderment, fret from time to time over his inability to describe properly, worry that
he has not got some fact quite right. There is no way for readers to take these avowals of deficient understanding other than as evidence that he sees—or, rather, allows us to see—the doomed Captain Ashburnham all too well.
MARRIAGES ARE CENTRAL MATERIAL
in most great novels and are likely to activate the generalizing impulse. In novels recounted in the third person, a good place to sound the trumpet call of a generalization is right at the beginning.
in most great novels and are likely to activate the generalizing impulse. In novels recounted in the third person, a good place to sound the trumpet call of a generalization is right at the beginning.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Who is saying this? The author, sarcastically. And the denizens of the small world in which Austen sets her story actually think it—which makes this maxim something less than “a truth universally acknowledged.”
And who is saying “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”? Again, the author. Or, if you will, the book. There’s only a touch of irony in the opening line of Tolstoy’s synoptic marriage novel. But does anyone, inside or outside the novel, actually think this? No.
The authority of the renowned first sentences of
Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina
depends on their floating free from any particular speaker, as if it were the nature of wisdom to be impersonal, oracular, anonymous, overbearing. Neither assertion is actually true. Both seem unchallengeably mature and pertinent as impatient observations about the cruelties of the marriage market and the despair of a naïve wife upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. This is a strong hand with which to open a novel, some axiom about human behavior offered preemptively or ironically as an eternal verity. (“It is a truth …” “All happy families
are
…”) Knowingness about human nature, old-style, is always in the present tense.
Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina
depends on their floating free from any particular speaker, as if it were the nature of wisdom to be impersonal, oracular, anonymous, overbearing. Neither assertion is actually true. Both seem unchallengeably mature and pertinent as impatient observations about the cruelties of the marriage market and the despair of a naïve wife upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. This is a strong hand with which to open a novel, some axiom about human behavior offered preemptively or ironically as an eternal verity. (“It is a truth …” “All happy families
are
…”) Knowingness about human nature, old-style, is always in the present tense.
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