Unfinished Business

by Vivian Gornick

Enough years pass that our narrator lives to see that what goes around comes around—and her wisdom as well as her essay is completed: “Now we are so adult that our adolescent children have already started to look at us with eyes of stone … we are upset by it and we complain about it … even though by now we know how the long chain of human relationships unwinds its long necessary parabola, and though we know all the long road we have to travel down in order to arrive at the point where we have a little compassion.”

  Ah, those eyes of stone! Family Sayings is the memoir Ginzburg wrote at the age of forty-seven when she felt sufficiently in command of her art to do justice to the story she still wanted to tell: from whence come those eyes of stone.

  “When I was a little girl at home,” the memoir begins, “if one of us children upset a glass at table or dropped a knife, my father’s voice bellowed: ‘Behave yourself!’ If we soaked our bread in the gravy, he cried out, ‘Don’t lick the plates, don’t make messes and slops’ … We lived always with the nightmare of our father’s outbursts of fury which exploded unexpectedly and often for the pettiest reason: a pair of shoes that could not be found, a book out of its proper place, a light bulb gone, dinner slightly late…”

  The volatile father, a madly discontented man with a hair-trigger temper, roars through the memoir issuing arbitrary commands—Sit up straight … don’t get into conversations with strangers in a train or in the street … don’t take off your shoes in the sitting room or warm your feet at the stove … don’t complain of thirst, fatigue, or sore feet while walking in the mountains—for no apparent reason other than an almost demented need to exercise power over his beaten-down wife and children. Throughout the book we never see him as anything other than the sum of his disabilities, a domestic despot responsible for an entire group of people wandering through the years, imprisoned within themselves, intent only on surviving the anxiety felt in the father’s presence or, equally, the relief felt in his absence.

  The mother, in her turn, having been driven into childlike dippiness, lives inside a pair of blinders, looking neither to the left nor the right only straight ahead into whatever small pleasure is available to her, most often the one she gets from being with her sons: “‘Isn’t Gino handsome,’ my mother would say. ‘Isn’t Gino nice. My Ginetto! The one thing I really care about is my sons. I only have fun with my sons.’”

  Which leaves Natalia, she of the increasingly stone-faced demeanor, standing in a place within herself not quite alienated, but definitely not grounded. Quite casually she lets us know that she is the one child for whom the mother feels affection but almost no intimacy. “In the early days of [my sister] Paola’s marriage, my mother cried a lot because she no longer had her at home. There was a great bond between them and they always had a great deal to say to each other…” As for herself, she confides, the mother “was not jealous of my friends … did not suffer or cry over my marriage … [n]or did she mind my leaving home, partly because, as she used to say, I never ‘unwound’ with her.”

  Neither it seems did any of her four siblings who remain as opaque to one another—“indifferent and aloof”—in adulthood as they apparently were in childhood. When they meet as grown-ups all they have in common is some grim amusement over the shared past: “We have only to say ‘We did not come to Bergamo for a picnic’ … for us to pick up in a moment our old intimacy and our childhood and youth, linked indissolubly with these words and phrases.”

  With the novels we know that the story is one of ordinary lives caught inside a devastated culture trying to pick up the pieces. With the memoir, the devastated culture is the family itself rather than the time in which it is living. But in both cases the protagonist is seen wandering in an emotional desert that lends the writing its surreal quality. To drive home the point, the memoir is filled with the kind of disjointed paragraphing that marks the modernist novel:

  When [Alberto] came home [from school] for the holidays he told us that when they were at table eating omelettes a bell rang. The headmaster entered the room and said, “I would remind you that one does not cut an omelette with a knife!” Then the bell rang again and the headmaster disappeared. My father no longer went skiing. He said he was too old. My mother had always said: “The mountains! What a hole!” She could not ski, of course, but stayed indoors. But now she was sorry that her husband did not go skiing any more.

  It’s the tone of voice that does it; the tone, the odd place in which the narrator seems to be standing, and the even odder angle of vision from which she views her own psychological development; the one that tells me Ginzburg is writing to let me know that she, too, is a stranger to herself.

  SEVEN

  Some years ago a well-known critic wrote a piece about a book she had just re-read for the first time since it had been published five years earlier. She was amazed, she said, at how good the book was, and appalled at how mercilessly she had trashed it upon publication. “I must have been in a bad mood,” she observed, “certainly an unreceptive one.”

  Ah, receptivity! Otherwise known as readiness. Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader—no less than between people—is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent. How morbidly circumstantial life can seem when we think of the apparent randomness with which we welcome or repel what will turn out to be—or what might have turned out to be—some of the most important relationships of our lives. How often have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, “If I had met you at any other time…” It’s the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.

  * * *

  IN THE LATE 1980S I read a British novel set in the aftermath of the First World War and centered on a returned veteran. The book was small and quiet, and so carefully written it approached poetry. A few years later I read another Great War novel, this one revolving around the patients in a hospital reserved for “shell-shocked” soldiers, and as large and raw as the first had been small and exquisite. The two books in question are J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and Pat Barker’s Regeneration (the first book in her World War I trilogy). The odd thing here is that when I re-read them both recently, I had the uncanny sensation that the large one (Regeneration) was commanding me to give the small one (A Month in the Country) a kind of attention that I had previously denied it: whole rather than partial. Here’s what I mean:

  In a brief foreword to A Month in the Country, its author said that his idea, when he began the book, was to write “an easy-going story,” a “rural idyll” about an event in his life that had taken place half a century earlier. At the end of the foreword, however, he observed that imperceptibly, as he wrote, he saw the tone of voice he’d given the narrator changing and his own original intention somehow “slipping away,” until at last he found himself “looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.” When I read the novel in the 1980s, I ignored these authorial words of warning and for years have remembered only the “rural idyll” part of Carr’s declaration of intent.

  A Month in the Country begins with the narrator recalling the summer of 1920 when, returned from the war, he finds himself standing in the middle of nowhere: broke, unemployed, abandoned by a faithless wife, and without a glimmer of an idea of how to pick up the pieces. He reads an advertisement announcing that in a village in Yorkshire a corner of what is thought to be a medieval mural has been uncovered beneath the whitewashed walls of the church, and a restorer of such paintings is wanted. As it happens, our narrator (Tom Birkin) is trained at this sort of work. His application for the job is accepted, and he travels north. The story the book tells is of that memorable summer.

  Now here again, I remembered the narrator’s elation at getting the job but not the crucial circumstance from which he is being r
escued: “The marvelous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny [the absconded wife] had done to me and begin where I’d left off. This is what I need, I thought—a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.” When I re-read the book I saw that I had forgotten the last phrase of the last sentence: “maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore”; all I remembered was “make a new start.”

  Tom takes up residence in the bell tower of the church, lives on bread and cheese, and spends his time patiently working on the fourteenth-century Day of Judgment mural he is slowly lifting from centuries of whitewash burial. In between his all-absorbing labors, he interacts with the various villagers who troop into the church to take a look at him. First comes his employer, the stiff-necked vicar, Rev. J. G. Keach; then there is Moon, a vet like himself, also being paid to recover something lost to time; after that come the Ellerbecks, a family of hearty locals who welcome Tom into their midst, insisting he share family meals and holidays with them; and finally, there is Keach’s wife, the beautiful, unhappy Alice with whom Tom will fall into a dream of desire that runs parallel to the restorative sense of life that work on the mural is slowly but steadily exerting on him. The promise of the narrative is that these twin developments will drive a wedge between Tom and his overriding sense of being permanently becalmed.

  We know early on that Tom is a survivor of the horrifying battle of Passchendaele, from which he has emerged with a stammer and a twitch, but we also know that he did not come out of the war a nihilist: “when we’d dragged ourselves back from the bloodiness, life had seemed brighter than we’d remembered it.” Unlike Moon, who’s something of a cynical slacker, Tom cannot help taking the work seriously; and because he does, very early the restoration starts to come alive for him: “By the end of the second day a very fine head [of Christ] was revealed … This was no catalogue Christ, insufferably ethereal. This was a wintry hard-liner. Justice, yes there would be justice. But not mercy…” There’s a lack of religious banality in the painting that thrills and surprises him: the virtuous in it are seen as “smug [and] uninteresting,” especially when set beside “the liveliness of their brethren condemned to the torment.”

  The joy Tom feels over every element of the restoration process is palpable. To begin with, there is the pleasure he takes in the materials themselves: “The second magnate’s cloak was a splendid garment—red outside and green lining. A very good red, the best in fact, no expense spared.” And then, day by day, as he becomes more and more engrossed by the work, an ability to look deeply into the life he sees in the painting sets in, and very quickly he foresees its potential benefits. “What I’m really getting at,” he confides in us, “is that … they weren’t us in fancy dress, mouths full of thees and thous, quoths, prithees and zounds. They had no more than a few entertaining distractions to take their minds off death and birth, sleep and work, and their prayers to the almighty father and his stricken son when things got too awful. So, in my job it helps if you can … see or guess at grubby faces staring up at the only picture they’ll see till next time they see it—well, then you put that bit extra into the job, you go at it with emotion as well as diluted hydrochloric.”

  And voilà: by summer’s end the mural stands fully revealed, and Tom feels himself in the presence of a masterpiece: “It was breathtaking … A tremendous waterfall of color, the blues of the apex falling, then seething into a turbulence of red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.” This is Tom’s moment of glory, the only one he allows himself: the privilege of the informed insider standing alone with the painting’s greatness “before the Times art critic catches on and signals that here’s an iconographic wonder for the academic parasites to suck out the magic.”

  While the mural vibrates with human intercourse, his own progress in that direction stagnates. Here, what is wanted is direct action: something we gradually come to see Tom cannot engage with. Alice Keach, herself going under as the vicar’s wife, is as drawn to Tom as he is to her. Repeatedly, he longs to face directly into the impact the attraction is having on both of them; repeatedly, his courage fails him; repeatedly, the tension between them threatens to exhaust itself. One day Alice asks Tom if he believes in hell on earth—he knows she is speaking of her marriage—and he equivocates badly, hemming and hawing about how it all depends, hell is different things for different people. Very quickly she retreats—Oh, I’m sorry, that was a silly question—and he knows that now he has really dropped the ball. This clearly was a moment when “I should have put out a hand and taken her arm and said, ‘Here I am. Ask me. Now. The real question! Tell me. While I’m here. Ask me before it’s too late.’”

  A dreamy kind of sorrowing begins to overtake the narrative. The leak in Tom’s spirit is acquiring existential poignancy. The summer ends, the work is done, Tom is ready to leave the village. Alice comes to say goodbye and for the first time climbs up into the bell tower to stand with him, looking out at the world now about to divide them. Both are nearly expiring from the tension of undeclared feeling. Then Tom, standing behind Alice, turns to point out the exact place where Moon had been working:

  She also turned so that her breasts were pressing against me. And, although we both looked outwards across the meadow, she didn’t draw away as quite easily she could have done, [and I knew that I should have] lifted an arm and taken her shoulder, turned her face and kissed her. It was that kind of day. It was why she’d come. Then everything would have been different. My life, hers. We would have had to speak and say aloud what both of us knew and then, maybe, turned from the window and lain down together on my makeshift bed. Afterwards, we would have gone away, maybe on the next train. My heart was racing. I was breathless. She leaned on me, waiting. And I did nothing and said nothing.

  The heartbreak of all the unlived lives that ever were is inscribed in this passage, the melancholy thick enough to cut with a knife. The glory of the book is that as one takes in its terrible finality, its power is made to feel almost original, there since the beginning of recorded time: humanity, from the start, insufficiently provided with the wherewithal to believe in itself.

  * * *

  AT ONE POINT in Regeneration the poet Wilfred Owen, a character in the novel, observes that the war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, also a character, are very short. “Well,” Sassoon explains, “it doesn’t lend itself to epics, does it?” But later on in the novel Sassoon himself observes, “Sometimes when you’re alone, in the trenches, I mean, at night you get the sense of something ancient. As if the trenches had always been there … It’s as if all other wars had somehow … distilled themselves into this war, and that makes it something you … almost can’t challenge.” Then and there, this war—the Great War, the War to End All Wars—does indeed begin to seem epic.

  The time is 1917, the place is Craiglockhart War Hospital, an institution situated some miles from Edinburgh that the British set up specifically to treat soldiers suffering the mental collapse—then called “shell-shock”—brought on by their participation in the war still raging in France. The characters in the novel are the soldiers themselves—some of them (Owen and Sassoon, for instance), as historically real as Craiglockhart itself, most of them (in particular, one Billy Prior) marvelously imagined. Presiding over the whole of things is W.H.R. Rivers, the (actual) anthropologist doctor who emerged from the war one of the first psychoanalysts to understand that the damaged men who were his patients at Craiglockhart were not cowards or malingerers; they were simply living proof of what can happen to people who survive the experience of one half of the world setting out to murder the other half.

  At Craiglockhart grown men stammered, screamed, hallucinated by the hour; or went mute for months at a time; or sat staring into something only they could see; or trembled
in terror when either a parent or a wife entered the room. Among these deracinated souls is:

  Burns, who shakes violently, refuses to eat, and throws up nightly when awakened from a repetitious nightmare.

  Willard, who is glued to a wheelchair, insisting, against all medical evidence, that he cannot walk.

  Anderson, a doctor who can no longer stand the sight of blood—the thought of returning to medicine makes him shudder—and is discovered one day lying on the floor in a pool of his own urine: his nightmares keep the whole floor awake.

  And then there is the singular Billy Prior, who arrives mute at the hospital and for the longest time replies to any question put to him by writing I DON’T REMEMBER on a notepad.

  The novel turns on the character of William Rivers, the man who is both the most deeply decent of all the characters in the book and at the same time an embodiment of the conventional British need to honor what he sees as his clear-cut duty. Which, in this case, is to rescue these men from the despair in which they are sunk so they can be returned to the trenches. No one knows better than Rivers the bitter irony of the task before him. He has signed on to work at Craiglockhart in order to study mental collapse in people he knows would not have broken down had it not been for the war. So if he “cures” them, only to send them back into the war, what chance is there that they will stay cured, these boy-men who are constantly being told combat will be the making of them. “How misleading,” Rivers knows, “it was to say that the war had ‘matured’ these young men.” In his patients “a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side,” a phenomenon that gave them “a curiously ageless quality, but ‘maturity’ was hardly the word for it.”

  Most of the reviews surrounding the original publication of Regeneration posited the relationship between Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon as central to the novel’s narrative development, but it was never my impression that this is the connection that carries the burden of its author’s intent. The conversations between Rivers and the famous poet are the most intellectually sophisticated in Regeneration, but it is in the relation between Rivers and Billy Prior, and in the characterization of Prior himself, that the real power of the book is to be found.