Then there is the ongoing amazement of their separate personalities. Cat One eats like a pig and lost her shape early: her belly now nearly touches the ground. She is secretive, sullen, and passive-aggressive, but all I have to do is catch her eye and she flips over on her back, paws tucked in, eyes fixed on me, demanding that I caress her belly; which of course I never fail to do. Cat Two remained sleek and slim (a picky eater), and wildly active, regularly racing through the house. She is also remarkably delicate—when she wants me to caress her, she extends a tentative paw in my direction and looks imploringly into my eyes—and a terrible coward as well: no sooner does someone come into the apartment (especially if that someone is a man) than she’s under the bed or up on top of the highest kitchen cabinet. Nevertheless, she rules my affections because when she stretches herself along the wall or the window her body resembles one long exquisite column of grey and black velvet, and invariably the sight of her takes my breath away. I remember thinking, the first I saw her thus elongated, “Now I understand the power of a beautiful woman. One forgives her everything!”
Although it remains the lifelong need of these cats to not accommodate me, neither can they bear for me to long forget their existence. They are always with me. Wherever I am, they are. If I am working, one or the other plops herself down on the desk between me and the computer. If I lie down to read, they are both soon sprawled or curled on the bed beside me. If I’m watching television, then again there they are: curled on the couch or sprawled on a nearby chair. Of course, they do not remain stationary during the many hours we are together. Sooner or later, one or the other runs into the kitchen for a quick bite of dry food, or circles the room as though on the prowl, or sniffs insistently at her sister’s rear end; whereupon the attention is either accepted or rebuffed and both cats instantly fall to licking and purring or hissing and spitting. I don’t think I’ve ever in my life wondered as much about the mercurial motivation of a living creature’s behavior as I have watching the cats. It runs constantly through my mind: Why do we do what we do when we do it? Why does Cat One lick Cat Two madly for a few seconds, then sink her teeth into her sister’s neck, then raise her head looking wildly suspicious, and flounce away as though she’s been attacked? Why indeed. It’s just like sex, I sometimes think. How many times has a man said to me, “Why now, why not an hour ago?” A question for which I have had as good an answer as the cats would have, should it be asked of them.
I still envy the people I know whose cats drowse in their laps and sleep in their beds, but (to quote the famous alley cat Mehitabel) what the hell.
* * *
SOME MONTHS AGO, late on a winter afternoon, for the first time in all these years, I picked up Particularly Cats and this time read it through in a single sitting, hardly able to believe, as I read, that I had once held this book in my hands and not been similarly compelled. Another clear instance of my having had to grow into the reader for whom the book was written, and for whom it had, all this time, been waiting.
Particularly Cats is 126 pages long and was published in 1967 when Lessing was close to fifty. The book begins when she is growing up, in the 1920s, on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and ends with her, some thirty years later, living in a spacious house in a good neighborhood in London—and all the way through there are cats: cats domesticated and wild, cats friendly and dangerous, cats beautiful and ugly, smart and stupid. Cats.
At the start, out on that farm in the middle of the Rhodesian veldt, the natural world has pride of place. Before we are introduced to a human soul, there are birds, snakes, insects, beasts of all sorts that, each in its own way, is a working problem for young Doris and her parents. The most intractable is the one posed by the many cats about the place which are forever getting pregnant and dropping one litter after another. It is Doris’s mother who regularly drowns the kittens from each new litter in order to keep the cat population down to a manageable size. But when Doris is fourteen years old, her mother falls into a depression and stops getting rid of the kittens. In no time there are forty cats on the farm. Now, everyone is depressed. One weekend the mother takes a trip and it is decided that the cats must go: now. Together, Doris and her father herd all but a single favorite into a spare room and, one by one by one, the father shoots all the cats.
As I’m reading, my mouth is opening wider and wider, until I feel it dropping nearly to my chest. Mainly I am shocked because the mature Lessing relates this grisly tale with extraordinary equanimity—not a blink, not a gulp, not a syllable of distress in a single sentence. What we have instead is that cold, clear, unyielding gaze of hers trained on a bit of domestic Grand Guignol as it might be on the most harmless of accidental occurrences, and then reflected upon with almost laughable imperturbability: “I was angry over the holocaust of cats … but I don’t remember grieving.”
Twenty-five years later we are in the house in London, and we are introduced to the cat she calls “grey cat.” As a kitten, this is the most beautiful cat Lessing has ever seen: “grey and cream. But her front and stomach were a smoky-gold … with half bars of black at the neck. Her face was penciled with black—fine dark rings around the eyes, fine dark streaks on her cheeks … an exotically beautiful beast … not at all afraid … stalked around … the house, inspecting every inch of it, climbed up on to my bed, crept under the fold of a sheet, and was at home.” This was Cat with a capital C: “Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jeweled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat…” But just in case you, the reader, might think she’s become uncharacteristically besotted, Lessing quickly adds, “[T] here’s no glossing it, she’s a selfish beast.”
Then into the house comes “black cat,” who, though the incomparable grey cat dominates the household, must be given her due. Grey cat (“selfish beast”) had proven not only an indifferent but a downright hostile mother: she kills the firstborn of her first litter and repeatedly tries to desert the rest. Black cat, on the other hand, comes into her own with motherhood: “When she is nested among her kittens, one slender jet paw stretched over them, protective and tyrannical, eyes half-closed, a purr deep in her throat, she is magnificent, generous—carelessly sure of herself.”
These cats do not bond with each other but they, like mine, are always aware of themselves in relation to one another. Unlike mine, which display a variety of attitudes, Lessing’s cats—somewhat like the principals in many marriages, she seems to imply—engage almost exclusively through the arousal of hissing, spitting jealousy. The uniformity of this behavior, given the delightful volatility of my own cats, began to seem puzzling as the examples mounted up. Finally, it was this passage that made me sit up: “When black cat gives birth and is lying, luxuriant, among her kittens, grey cat, even though she herself loathes motherhood, sits across the room, envious and grudging, and all her body and her face and her ears bent back, saying: ‘I hate her, I hate her.’” Something here felt inauthentic.
Of a sudden, I found myself not trusting Lessing’s account of the relationship between the cats. In it she seemed ever and only to see at work the kind of power struggle that is driven solely by the drama of the negative, never that of the playful or the flirtatious or the harmlessly transgressive. With all the Lessing prose I have absorbed, never before reading Particularly Cats had I seen so clearly what that deadly serious sensibility of hers serves: the willed certainty of a writer who gives no quarter as she stares down her own disappointment with the isness of what is. Behind that certainty lies the self-protectiveness of the born ideologue. I thought then of all the unforgiving portraits of men in The Golden Notebook, as well as in countless short fictions, where all men are cookie-cutter unreliable, their unreliability instrumental to the story being told. Suddenly I was remembering how, reading Lessing for the first time as a young woman, this view of men had made me gleeful (“Yes, yes, yes!”), but the second time around, puzzled (“They can’t all be this bad!”), and then “Waitaminnit, waitaminnit…”
It was the self-pr
otectiveness that had now come into focus for me. It was, I saw, the source of Lessing’s strength as a writer—and her limitation as well. If she’d been able to cut the world a little slack, it now occurred to me, step back on occasion into a bit of comic outrage or even warm exasperation, her view of animal relations—those of man and beast alike—might have expanded to include some nuance. Certainly, her sentences would have given more pleasure.
NINE
I sat down in a chair I’d been sitting in for years, and in a voice made husky by the prospect of revelation, said to the analyst sitting opposite me, “It is only now, for the first time, that I see, really see, how devious I’ve been about my relationships with men.”
The analyst let herself look weary before she replied: “Do you know how many times you have said ‘Now for the first time I see’? When are you going to act on what you now for the first time see?”
I stared at her, she stared at me. What a fate, I thought that day, for the New York analyst condemned to years of listening to analysands like myself, insight manufacturers one and all, who are forever seeing something or other for the first time and, none of us, able to act on what we see. At that moment some juvenile bit of rebelliousness exploded in me. Fuck it, I cried to myself, let me out of here. Let me out of this chair, out of this room, out of this life. I can’t do it, I simply cannot do it.
Some time later I was re-reading Jude the Obscure, and coming up against Sue Bridehead’s miserably inadequate explanation for her own god-awful behavior, recalled this scene in the analyst’s office. I thought then, “She can’t do it either, she, too, just wants out”—and couldn’t decide whether to extend poor Sue my compassion or my contempt. I still can’t.
Throughout my late teens and twenties I ached for the characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels: men and women doomed to endure long years of suffering that end in the most appalling defeat, only because they’ve been born into the wrong class in the wrong place at the wrong time. Among these characters none wrung me out as much as Sue Bridehead, a woman whose story retained mythic power throughout many phases of my own experience as I watched her struggle (so I thought) to achieve something that resembled an integrated life against odds that it pleased me—for the longest time!—to identify with. When I re-read the book recently, I must say that while I still felt as though a stone was pressing down on my chest as I followed the monumental misfortunes of both Jude and Sue, what interested me most was seeing how brilliantly a great Victorian novelist had tracked the resistance to consciousness that afflicts us all through the movements of a character endowed with so much flesh-and-blood reality that she seems, very nearly, a case study.
The action in Jude unfolds late in the nineteenth century between a set of villages in rural England and the fictional university town of Christminster. Jude Fawley, a born reader growing up poor and ignorant in the countryside, longs for a life of learning in far-off Christminster. This longing not only sustains him, it colors his entire waking life. It is the dream upon which his expectations of a realized existence are based; the very fact that Jude has such expectations sets him apart from the people among whom he is growing.
After much early misadventure—including an abandoned but not dissolved marriage—Jude does make his way to the city, only to discover that here, in his imagined heaven on earth, he is an unwanted quantity: a member of the class that is routinely denied admission to the university. And now he undergoes an experience of existential proportion. As a boy dreaming away his years in the countryside, Jude might often have felt hurt or misused but not alienated. Here in Christminster, stripped of the dream of life that had kept him company for so many years, he suddenly sees himself as a creature alone in a hostile universe: “Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality … the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.” It flashes on him that the men and women around him, those walking the streets of Christminster even as he is walking them, and looking very much as he looks, seem as disenfranchised as he feels himself to be. At this moment, Jude becomes an empathic human being. From here on in, struggle as he may to absorb the meaning of what he is living through, he will always see himself as one among the many: those equally cast out of Paradise. This resonance becomes the source of Jude’s great decency, his decency the instrument of illumination that guides his developing experience.
Enter Sue Bridehead, Jude’s cousin, an odd young woman possessed of an unusually freethinking mind who quickly becomes his friend and his mentor, warning him from the start against idealizing Christminster. “It is an ignorant place,” she insists, “except as to the townspeople, artisans, drunkards, and paupers … They see life as it is … but few of the people in the colleges do. You prove it in your own person. You are one of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or opportunities, or friends. But you were elbowed off the pavement by the millionaires’ sons.”
One melodramatic development after another—each a combination of forces beyond their control coupled with their own psychological drawbacks—keeps Jude and Sue from forming a simple, binding connection. For one thing, Jude has never gotten a divorce from Arabella, his first wife, and is therefore never quite done with her. Then Sue herself adds to their difficulties by remaining so ignorant of the demands of contractual love that in a moment of disorienting despair she marries another man—a schoolmaster twice her age—only to be overcome by a physical revulsion strong enough to make her, against every law and custom of the time, flee his house. Now, she and Jude come together as fellow outcasts. Wanting nothing more than to live quietly together, albeit without benefit of marriage, they are nonetheless dogged by social censure, overwhelmed by poverty and illness, and then, at the last, destroyed by tragedy. Sue’s emotional frailty compels her reason to unravel, and she retreats into the most extravagant fit of religious mania in all of English literature. Soon thereafter Jude dies of grief-stricken consumption.
The glory and the heartbreak of the relationship between Sue and Jude—in fact, of the novel itself—is the abiding sense Hardy has of them as soul mates. There are many demonstrations of their temperamental kinship, but one in particular I was repeatedly struck by. Jude’s former wife, Arabella, suddenly reappears and announces that they had had a child together, a boy whom she is now sending to live with him and Sue. At first, Jude, feeling ill-used, balks: he’s not even sure that the child is his. In a short while, however, he begins to imagine the situation as the boy might imagine it, and that educated decency of his kicks in. “What a view of life he must have, mine or not mine!” Jude says to the companion of his heart. “The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.” Whereupon “Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion. ‘Yes—so it is, dearest! And we’ll have him here!’”
These are people who experience the kind of connection of mind and spirit that Jean-Paul Sartre might have called essential rather than contingent. As the author of their being so romantically puts it, they were possessed of a “complete mutual understanding, in which every glance and movement was as effectual as speech for conveying intelligence between them,” almost as though they were “two parts of a single whole.”
Yet this precious gift of spiritual oneness does not, cannot fortify them against those unresolved conflicts that perpetually undermine the universal struggle for self-command. The most painful element of this novel is its stunning demonstration of how limited is the power of shared sensibility to save us from the primeval ooze within our
selves, ever waiting to flood the plain of insufficient self-knowledge. Jude puts up a courageous struggle, but Sue is destined to cave. One would have imagined that intellectual boldness might have insured some degree of fighting strength in her but, as it turns out, her mental bravery is in thrall to spiritual trepidation of a high order: it’s the trepidation that does her in.
By her own lights, Sue is something of a psychological enigma. “My life,” she explains to Jude, “has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me.” Meaning: she is profoundly asexual, a woman with a libido that from earliest childhood has been preparing to go underground. Like a tomboy who remains a tomboy, she has always felt companionate with men but never desirous of them. Having sensed early the danger inherent in erotic connection, she has never been able to free herself of the fear that such connection would mean slavery for her. The marriage ceremony alone—with its demand that she obey as well as love and honor—throws her into a state of terror.
Unfinished Business Page 11
