by Lore Segal
COLUMNS
FROM THE NEW
YORK TIMES’
“HERS” COLUMN
Thursday was the day for The New York Times’ weekly “Hers” column for women writers. It offered me six Thursdays on which to write about whatever I was thinking. These are three of those columns.
ON GOODNESS
I want to put in a good word for goodness, which has been getting a bad press lately—is it a new wave of the old romance with darkness, badness, madness, misery?
In “Keep Your Compassion, Give Me Your Madness,” a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review, Anatole Broyard calls for more hell and damnation. Compassion and integrity, he argues, are “namby pamby.” He says they are too simple. Another essayist, Mordecai Richler, makes fun of Will Rogers’s famous assertion that he never met a man he didn’t like, and cries “Bravo!” to one of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant meannesses.
Yes, we know our writers are talking tropes. We understand that what they’re against is the facile and self-congratulatory self-advertisement of sweetness and light. They are congratulating themselves on the complexity of their own interestingly dark and bitter style of thought. They subscribe to the common understanding that the dark is more complex and truer than the light, which is too simple by half.
It’s not a bad notion, once in a while, to check your tropes against your realities: How long-lived is your fascination with your alcoholic, depressive, megalomaniac friend—I mean the one you have to live with? Tolstoy said in the opening of Anna Karenina that all happy families are happy in the same way, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
Is that so? Haven’t you found a sameness in the acrimonious spats between your married acquaintances? How interesting are their complaints against each other after the divorce? Are all happy families happy the same way? If you can’t recall a happy family, remember any one happy trait of any family you know. Do you find it easy to explain to yourself how that particular success has been made to work? Are you sure that it was simple?
To be good, sane, happy is simple only if you subscribe to the Eden theory of original goodness, original sanity, and original happiness, which humankind subverted into a fascinating rottenness. Observation would suggest that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that rightness, like any other accomplishment, is something achieved.
If I’m being self-congratulatory I hope it’s for the style of thought not of Pollyanna but of John Bunyan: his complex, blow-by-blow allegory describes the process of the writing of a book as accurately as the pilgrim’s progress toward virtue. And don’t let that word embarrass you: if you think it’s namby-pamby and too simple, remember Prince Mishkin. It is goodness, said Dostoyevsky, that is nuts, sick, falls into fits.
I was born a Jewish child in Vienna and don’t have a lot of use for more calls for more madness, hell, and damnation, nor a lot of interest in studies of the organizations, of governments, of the Pope, who failed to undertake a rescue. People like you and like me also failed, and we know why.
I know the modus operandi of my own adult life, and doubt if I would have taken the child I used to be into my inmost household for very long. My compassion is eager to come running to some sudden need some afternoon—not mornings; mornings is when I write my books. I’ll return the next afternoon and the one after that, only better not need me more than a week and a half, which is when I’ll be needing to get back to the complications of my own life. Or dump your kid on me. I’ll be good natured. I’ll entertain him overnight, but, please, not on my weekends!
I was 10 years old when I was sent to England and lived the next eight years in other people’s houses. I lived with five different families. They were not particularly warm or imaginative or sympathetic. I did not love them and they did not love me. I was a frightened, prickly, critical, and not particularly lovable child. They took me in and they kept me, out of their goodness. I know no other name for it, and this seems remarkable to me, and interesting.
From my 12th to my 18th year I lived with Miss E. in a grand Victorian house called Belcaro in an ancient Surrey market town. Her companion, Miss W., was a member of the Guildford refugee committee. Miss W. paid for my piano lessons. Miss E. bought me a green silk dress to wear evenings in the elegant drawing room. Here is a tableau: Miss W., whose girlhood was spent in Heidelberg, Germany, studying voice, sits at the piano giving us a little uneven Schubert until the 9 o’clock news. We cheer the number of Germans our boys have downed that day; Stalingrad is holding out. We sit reflected and miniaturized in the circular convex mirror that hangs over the fireplace—the two elderly Church of England spinsters in long velvet gowns, and the 13-year-old in skimpy green silk.
We don’t read—not in the evenings; it would be unsociable. Miss W. holds the old gray cat, Caro, on her gentle lap and embroiders hollyhocks along the border of a white linen bedspread.
Miss E. is a harsh, aristocratic old woman, with a lump the size of a teaspoon on her scalp under the thin white hair. She looks like a female impersonator. She hires maids with illegitimate babies and plays with the babies and underpays the maids. Miss E. has sent me for her sewing box. She is cutting an old linen sheet into squares into which she stitches wads of cotton wool. Miss E. is sewing the Jewish refugee from Vienna a first set of sanitary napkins.
ON ARGUMENT
A new friend has asked me why my oldest friends are also my political adversaries.
I recall a recent argument on a suburban porch in which I urged the Palestinian cause to my friends on the right, who were refusing to imagine it. Next night, on a Manhattan rooftop, I argued the Israeli case, which my leftist friends were failing to include in their discussion.
Each set of friends thinks I belong to the wrong side, and believes that side to be not only mistaken but…vicious is a word that comes readily to each about the other’s arguments. Sooner or later each always says the other is like the Nazis, and then I always say, “That’s what they say about you,” and they say, “Yes, but they really are like the Nazis,” and then I say, “That’s what they say about you.”
Vicious is a functional word. If the other side is vicious, like the Nazis, you certainly wouldn’t want to listen to what they are saying. It relieves you of the complication of distinguishing between those of their arguments that are true, those that are mistaken or merely self-serving (instead of serving your side), and the arguments that might really be vicious. What’s more, if the other is the vicious side, it follows that your side must be virtuous and nothing you say can be mistaken or self-serving.
So why am I sitting on that porch in the first place? What am I doing on that roof?
I sit on both because I love both sets of my friends, and what I’m doing is arguing. Miss W., one of the two elderly English ladies in whose house I lived for six years in my refugee childhood, used to sigh and say, “That child will argue the hind legs off a donkey!” I leap to argue against any opinion. If none is expressed, I’ll express one.
I’m an argument causer. If there happens to occur a moment’s quiet, I will quote my leftist friends to my friends on the right, or vice versa, and we’re off. If there are no friends to argue with, I argue with myself in a maneuver that resembles a game of solo tennis: I’ll serve myself an opinion, leap over the net to answer it, leap back to answer the answer, and back again and again.
This position, characterized by an absence of position, is not at all original. We’re a type, and the language has names for us: We belong to the genus fence sitter. We are of the party of the trimmers, whom Dante relegates to a moral position below the lowest circle inside hell, where he places those who betray their cause. Those so passionless that they commit themselves to no cause he condemns to a circle eternally out in the cold. Heaven, Dante is saying, spews us out; hell cannot stomach us.
Didn’t Dante ever meet up with some of us passionately committed trimmers, whose cause is opposition? We, too, are ideologues. Conviction is the enemy. All causes se
em to us vicious, like the Nazis, which relieves us of the complication of hearing what it is that either is saying and having to distinguish between those arguments that are true, those that are mistaken or self-serving, and the ones that really are vicious.
We are obsessed, unhinged. We suspect a certitude behind every bush. We flush it out and sit it down on porches and rooftops and argue the opposite position. Like Oliver Cromwell, we cry to everyone at large, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!”
But don’t we also serve, who only argue and argue and argue? Probably not. I am not aware of ever having opened a single mind, or changed so much as a single tenet of a single opinion. (If I did, I would leap over the net and get on the other side of it.) I know that I have argued my opposition into the farthest corner of its court, and painted myself, mixed metaphorically speaking, into the extremest corner of my own argument.
Politics is autobiography, says a friend. She is no relativist. She believes that opinion is based on logic based on fact and that there is a right and a wrong side, and that hers is right and the other is vicious.
She says that our lives determine the facts with which we are going to argue which side. I want to argue that in our era, roof, porch, and trimmer have the same autobiography, and that it is our heart’s logic that determines our response to a shared trauma.
The porch responds with the necessity of Israel, the roof with the griefs of Palestine, and I respond by sitting squarely on the fence—alternately leaping from one side to the other. I suspect it’s my heart and bowels that have sought out those friends who are each other’s adversaries, in order to argue them into the primal dream of the Peaceable Kingdom, the never-never place where right and left will find a space in the argument and lie down, each with the other. And I will be out of business.
ON COURTESY
My son and I were having one of our rare quarrels. Jacob is a formidable person and our difference was on a matter of substance—modern manners versus the old courtesies. Signor Giuseppe, an elderly neighbor from the Old World, had complained that Jacob didn’t say good morning when he got on the elevator and that he answered Signor Giuseppe’s questions reluctantly.
My son said Signor Giuseppe’s questions were phonies. Signor Giuseppe did not give a hoot about how many inches my son had grown and couldn’t care less what subjects he was taking in school. My son said these were questions that didn’t deserve answers.
I argued that it is the business of courtesy to cover up the terrible truth that we don’t give a hoot about the other person in the elevator.
“Why is that terrible and why cover it up?” my son asked sensibly.
Jacob belongs to the generation that says “Me and Joe are going out,” and whichever walks through the door first trusts the other to take care its back swing doesn’t catch him in the head. My generation says “Signor Giuseppe and I are going out,” and Signor Giuseppe opens the door and holds it for me.
Jacob said: “Why? You can open it for yourself.”
This is true. It is also true that “me and Joe” is the formulation that corresponds to my experience. It’s my own passage through the door that occupies my mind. It’s because Signor Giuseppe might, in the press of the things on his mind, forget that I’m coming behind, that courtesy tells him to let me go ahead. Courtesy makes me pass him the cookies, keeping me artificially aware of his hunger, which I don’t experience. My own appetite can be trusted to take care of my cookies.
I went to school in the south of England. We ate our World War II lunches at long trestle tables with a teacher at one end and a prefect at the other. The rules said you made sure you had passed everything to the people sitting on either side of you—potatoes, veggies, bread, salt, pepper, water—before you could start eating the food on your own plate, which your neighbors on either side had made sure to pass you so they could get started on theirs.
We are not talking of the protocols on which World War I began to pull the plug, and which our own 1960s finally flushed down the drain. Once in a while you see an attempt at a comeback. I heard about a school that teaches very young ladies and gentlemen how to unfold their serviettes, how to lay them across their laps, and how to parallel their knives and forks across their plates when they have finished. It made an item on the 6 o’clock news. I know a young English couple who want the old times back, and have taught their little daughter to curtsy. A modern visitor, who hadn’t been taught what to do about the hand the charming child stretched toward him, hung his hat on it.
Signor Giuseppe and I reach the corner. His anachronistic hand under my forearm presumes that a lady cannot step off the curb without a supporting gentleman—a presumption for which modern men have been hit across the head with umbrellas. That is why my graduate student, who chats amusingly as we walk down the corridor, does not open the door for me. “Why should he?” Jacob asked. “Because I’m carrying two packages in my right hand, my books in my left, and my handbag and umbrella under my armpit,” I said.
If my son or my graduate student were boors, we would not be addressing this matter. A boor is a boor and was always a boor. But I can tell that the muscles of my graduate student’s back are readying to bend and pick up the book and umbrella I have dropped. He struggles between his natural courtesy and the learned inhibition that I have taught him: My being a woman is no reason for him to pick my things up for me. I crawl on the floor retrieving my property. He remains standing.
My son is not only formidable, he is a person of good will. He said: “That’s stupid! If you see someone is in trouble you go and help them out. What’s it got to do with courtesy?”
This is what it has to do with it: Having thrown out the old, dead, hypocritical rules about napkins, knives, and how to address the ladies, it is Jacob’s and it is my graduate student’s business to recover the essential baby that went down the drain as well. They must invent their own rules for eating so they don’t look and sound nasty, and my student must count my packages to see if I need his help. When Jacob enters the elevator, he is required to perform a complex act of the imagination: Is Signor Giuseppe a plain pain in the neck or does he have trouble?
“His trouble is he’s a pain in the neck,” Jacob said.
“And your business is to keep him from finding it out.” “Why?” Jacob shouted. “Because once Signor Giuseppe understands that he’s too great a pain to chat with for the time the elevator takes to descend from the 12th to the ground floor, he will understand that he will die alone.”
My son guffawed. He is not required to join me in this leap: The old courtesy was in the essential business of the cover-up. It was the contract by which I agreed to pretend to find your concerns of paramount interest, in return for which you took care not to let on that you did not care a hoot about mine.
Jacob said he still thought one should say what one meant and talk to the people one liked. But he said next time he got in the elevator with Signor Giuseppe, he was going to tell him good morning.
FROM THE FORWARD
COLUMN ON THE WEEKLY
BIBLE PORTION
There was a period beginning in the late eighties when it seemed a good idea to ask Hebraists and biblical scholars to make room for the common reader—particularly the woman reader—of the Bible. It was awesome to be invited to approach this grandest of literatures. I was thrilled to meet lives lived so long ago, in such a different clime and circumstance, and come across types of ourselves.
These are three of my columns responding to the Portion, the weekly Sabbath reading from the Five Books of Moses. They were published in the Jewish Forward.
WHAT DID ADAM KNOW AND WHEN DID HE KNOW IT?
We breathe in Genesis with the air. If we had never opened a Bible we would know the order in which creation made light and dark, land, sea and heaven, the animals, the vegetables, and the seasons. There follows, right away, the beautiful idea that these things are Good and the corollary flip side that there must
therefore be things that are Bad, followed in turn by the question whose fault it is. Who remembers the movie in which the fat Hungarian, Cuddles Szakáll, keeps saying, “I didn’t did! I didn’t did it!”? The story of Adam and Eve says that one of our first human instincts is to claim it was somebody else.
Adam says Eve did it, Eve says the serpent made her do it; the serpent has the grace to keep silent. God punishes all three of them—man, woman, and the beast. Christianity will come along and blame all sin on all of Eve’s yet unborn children.
Male and female have different styles of blaming and being blamed. We understand Eve to have sinned as a woman, whereas Adam sinned as a representative of the human. The woman was the root of all evil until women suggested that it was the men. How does the story of Adam and Eve distribute the degree of blame for that original sin?
It’s interesting to check our participation in filling what Auerbach has called “the background”—the spaces which the Bible’s lean narrative leaves blank. Where does our imagination locate the man while the beast was suborning the woman? What was Adam doing—where was he—before the moment when he enters the scene to be given his bite of the apple? The Hebrew text places Adam next to Eve. It says—I checked it out with my friend Rabbi Jules Harlow—that Adam was “immah” meaning “with her” or “beside her.” The King James Bible tells us that Eve, persuaded by the serpent’s representation of the benefits of the forbidden tree, “took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her” (emphasis mine).
