Last book of 2020 and first book of 2021
The last book I completed in 2020 was Susan Taubes’ Divorcing, which was published in 1969 shortly before its author’s suicide, fell into obscurity, and is now being rediscovered in a new edition from the New York Review of Books. Taubes was a close friend of Susan Sontag and the introduction, written by Sontag’s son David Reiff, makes me wonder if Reiff is personally championing its revival. He makes the case for it as follows: This is a novel that bleeds.
As the introduction and the reviews acknowledge, Divorcing is often brilliant, always deeply felt, but as a whole uneven. The author seems to be trying to get her anguish down on the page in all its aspects: her marriage to a cruel and overbearing man; a fleeting wisp of a love affair with a man who lives far away; the pain of emigrating to America as a child; complicated relationships with her parents, themselves divorced. Not all of the fragments are interesting, not all of them fit, and the novel trails off at the end with a series of disjoint childhood recollections.
But for all that it has many wonderful passages, a couple of which I’ll put for you to read here.
Who among us has not known this particular kind of fight:
Ezra began with a very small point. So small that Sophie didn’t realize at all that he was starting a quarrel. A little thing that can be settled in a minute, she thought; or a little thing there’s nothing to be done about that can be dismissed in a minute. Then as Ezra went on developing his point for an immoderately long time, it dawned on Sophie that the issue wasn’t simply a particular tie he couldn’t locate and blamed her for failing to pack, or her having failed to pack other items on other occasions, or her disregard for his appearance, or his own appearance—her disregard for appearances in general. The issue was really all the consequences this had on their lives and would continue to accumulate. The issue was enormous.
Sophie reflects on the items lost when traveling:
Lost objects wanted to be mourned. Ah, yes, you could never grieve enough for those earrings bought in some back street of Genoa. But it was against Sophie’s principles to suffer the loss of anything more than once. How could Ezra take the side of things? Not that Sophie was absolutely sure. In fact she was haunted by those lost things in spite of her principles and it didn’t help to say: Good riddance, I wouldn’t be seen dead in those earrings today! They sent their ghostly eidolon: on the dresser of some hotel room. It was in the nature of things to do this, Sophie concluded, and in her nature as a woman of principles to resist. If that thing still haunts me, Sophie considered, it must be because I did not suffer its loss as truly, profoundly, as I should. But in that case there is nothing to be done. I have missed my moment; or the thing has missed its moment; that is why it keeps coming back.
And a few other lines:
A child writing its name on a class copybook marks the beginning of a struggle, not of coming into consciousness.
*
Perhaps Sophie still saw her mother as a beautiful woman walking through a city whose charm was enhanced by bombing, made more beautiful by disaster.
*
How fast our little props wear out their charm. These Italian sunglasses carried her through the week; but now it’s time for a new purchase.
She has a de-Beauvoirian fatalistic view of womanhood: to her, the lot of Woman is to be in a perpetual state of self-annihilation, to both desire and abhor the state of wife-and-motherhood; these things, along with with sexual desire, are tied up in the relinquishment of one’s own will. Far fewer women feel like that now, a testament to the advances of feminism — our ideas of what womanhood consists of have vastly expanded — yet the ghosts of this flavor of feminine experience still haunt us.
I have only just begun my first read of 2021, which is nonfiction: The Love Affair as a Work of Art, by Dan Hofstadter. Its subject is the great love affairs of 19th century France — at least those that have survived in letters. The first section concerns the romance between Benjamin Constant, the author of the novel Adolphe, and the legendary Napoleonic-era intellect and personality Madame de Staël. She’s rich, passionate, and a little domineering; he’s sensitive, witty, conflict-averse and aimless, and the result is a passionate romance of two years followed by a decade where Benjamin dreams of extricating himself but can’t quite bring himself to do it, not least because he’s aware that their lifestyle of travel, chateaux, hobnobbing with the famous, and so on is something he won’t have access to on his own.
One delicious tidbit is that he developed in his journals a numerical code for various feelings and plans, partially to conceal his thinking if de Staël should find his diary, and partially for efficiency’s sake:
1 indicates physical pleasure; 2 the desire to break my eternal bond, of which there is so often question; 3 the bond renewed on account of memories or some fleeting charm; 4 work; 5 discussions with my father; 6 feelings of tenderness toward my father; 7 travel plans; 8 marriage projects; 9 weary of Mme Lindsay; 10 sweet memories and upsurge of love for Mme Lindsay; 11 hesitation about my marriage plans with Charlotte; 12 love for Charlotte; 13 uncertainty about everything; 14 plans to settle at Dôle in order to break with Germaine; 15 plans to settle at Lausanne with the same goal; 16 plans for overseas travel; 17 desire to patch up relations with several enemies.
I was struck by this description by Hofstadter about how romances go wrong, according to Adolphe, which Constant based partially on his unhappy attachment:
First comes a quarrel in which “irreparable words” are spoken, causing incurable wounds; though the pair may never repeat those words, they also cannot forget them. Next a habit of dissimulation appears: one frightful thought haunts both the man and the woman, but they are so afraid to give voice to it that instead they talk of their love, thereby cheapening it. It is inevitable that the woman will eventually air this secret that the man is trying to ignore, which is that he, though wishing to love her, really only pities her; and this thought, precisely for being expressed, for making her appear sexually diminished and pathetic to them both, becomes a reality.
Although Constant was wrong about the roles of the man and woman being immutable, versions of this story still play out in a multiplicity of gender configurations, more or less like this, and in the same order.
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