In Time

by C K Williams

  My best friend was two years older than I was; he knew remarkably more about the world than I did and it was he to whom the work had been vouchsafed. I was sleeping over at his house; he must have said, “Look at this,” and there it was: from the first half page I knew exactly what it was, knew how much, violently, without knowing I had, needed it, for so many now immediately self-evident reasons.

  Here is the book: two women meet and are astounded to realize that they are perfect duplicates of one another, same features, same hair, exactly the same figure. (One, later in the story, will turn out to have a mole, on the underside—the underside! amazing—of one breast, which ultimately will add welcome complexities to their adventures.) Their names are Ruth and Louise. They go to one of their homes, undress, examine each other, caress one another, very complicatedly, even poignantly, it seems to me now, and soon conspire to change places in their lives; each of these secret sharers is married, one, as I recall, has a lover.

  The story evolves. I really can’t recall a single word of it because it doesn’t come to me word by word; I don’t know now if it was the kind of crude pornography that would be mass-produced in the sixties and seventies when the censorship laws were loosened, or if it was a less vulgar Victorian excretion—though is any of that really less vulgar? That’s not the point: none of anything like that matters at all. It was the reading of those marvelously semitranslucent pages that remains so preciously vivid. Nostalgically, I can think of the innocent I was and of how many complexities of sexual mechanics were explicated by the text, but even that seems incidental. What still sears is the way the words came into me, with such astonishing force. As I remember it, I had nothing but the most blurred, uncertain image of anything actual; I suppose more precise images must have flowed now that I was reading the text, but they seemed to come after the words: the words were being etched, chiseled, into my . . . what? My mind, my brain, my emotions? No, something previous to all that; there was some bond that seemed to be being forged between the very core of my corporeal and intellectual existence and the act of taking experience into myself through the word. The sensuousness of the event, and there was so much, it seems, at least now—I can’t care anymore what it was then—to have been divided between the erotics it flamingly evoked and my absorption of them. It was as though, as I would learn later, poets say, I wasn’t reading, but being read.

  Of course poetry has to come into it somewhere, because poetry, too, seems now to have always been there. Perhaps it was poetry, then, that existed previous to the rest—that indelible attachment to the double existence of life and art in life: act and reflection; mind and desire; passion, poem.

  Literary Models of Adolescence

  1

  One evening in 1957, in March, when I was twenty years old, I took the night train from Saint Sebastian, on the French border of Spain, to Madrid. A few months before, I’d left, or fled, my junior year of college. It would still be difficult for me to explain exactly why: a general sense of unease, discontent, and what I’d probably call now depression; a feeling I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live; a more general suspicion that everything I did lacked meaning and resonance. I felt to myself like an empty set of manners and gestures, and I moved among other people who, no matter how much I needed them, seemed to be as inauthentic, false, and somehow illegitimated as I was. When I decided I was going to do something about all of this, namely, leave school to go back to Europe where the previous summer I’d made the standard tour with a friend, my plan was simply to go, to disappear, to present my parents and everyone else with a fait accompli. I would be an exile, an expatriate, my roots cut, my presence defined by wherever I was and whatever I was doing rather than by any demeaning connection to institution or family. But my roommate dissuaded me from so radical a cutting adrift; he convinced me to tell my parents. I did, and they, though concerned and I’m sure puzzled, gave their hesitant blessings.

  I spent a wrackingly lonely few months in Paris and, finally, hooked up with a woman I’d met on the ship from New York. She was older than I was, too much so, I thought, to be a lover, but she was a good companion, and we started off South on a motor scooter. The weather in France was terrible that year, and we ended up selling the scooter in Bordeaux, took the train to Saint Sebastian, and boarded the Spanish local bound for Madrid. It was then that the most remarkable thing occurred: I felt as though, for the first time in my life, something real was happening to me.

  Spain in those days was still very poor and seemed barely Westernized. The people were exotic: they dressed oddly, many spoke with a strange lisp, and they even, I fancied, held their bodies in an unfamiliar way, with a sort of haughtiness, despite their often evident poverty. The train itself was battered and ramshackle, and the aisle alongside the seating compartments was filled with people leaning out the windows, chatting or brooding into the warm, unfamiliarly scented night.

  Everything was exotic, and marvelous. I ate a splendid dinner with my friend—I still remember: a potato omelet; a “tortilla” it was called—then we came back to our car where we struck up acquaintance with some Spaniards. Someone brought a bottle of wine from the dining car, and before long, a party was underway, a fiesta. We drank more wine, then, after the dining car closed, every time the slowly moving train stopped at some godforsaken station, one of the Spaniards would run out into the night to come back with a wineskin of what must have been cheap, harsh wine, but which I loved. I can’t imagine how we got along so well with the Spaniards—none of them spoke English and neither my friend nor I had any Spanish—but we were drinking, singing, gabbing, arms around one another, and I was in a state of pure bliss, ecstatic. How can I explain it? In the simplest terms, I felt as though I had encountered reality at long last: I was finally living, in the real sense of the word. It was as though my consciousness hadn’t only been heightened by all the wine and companionability: I felt like I’d just been born. I believed that I was at a turning point in my life, that a crucial initiation was being offered to me. “My god,” I remember thinking to myself, “this is Hemingway.” That realization wasn’t in any sense a diminution of what was happening but, on the contrary, was a certification of it. This was Hemingway, this was authenticity, genuineness, the conquest of something, the overcoming and shedding of something else. For those hours in the Spanish night, I was a new person. Then I think I must have passed out.

  2

  When I was teaching a sophomore literature course some years ago, I decided to have my students read the Hemingway book I believed I had in my mind that long ago rapturous night, The Sun Also Rises. I know I’d read it again sometime soon after, as I’d read Hemingway’s stories and the rest of his novels, but now I wanted to try to teach the book from the point of view I’m discussing it here, as a model of adolescent behavior and values. Whatever I was after, though, my students would have none of it: the book had simply no relation to any belief system they held or could conceive of holding; they found it mystifying and in certain ways even repugnant, and, much to my surprise, so did I.

  The adventure that Hemingway’s invented people had in Spain was for the most part empty and artificial, as far as my students and I were concerned. The characters were all rather unattractive—rich wastrels, alcoholics, sexual misfits—and the one character who was actually rather close to what I myself had been during my adventure, the brooding, romantic, oversensitive Jew, Robert Cohn, was despised by the rest. The others all conceived of themselves as somehow more authentic and more sophisticated than the Jewish nouveau arriviste. And they weren’t even as young as I’d remembered them; they were moving into their late twenties and early thirties, although they certainly acted, morally anyway, like arrested adolescents. What was most distressing of all, I think, was that they all seemed as uncertain of themselves, as self-conscious of participating in an adventure that held a heightened reality, while really being hardly more than tourists, as I had been. To my surprise and chagrin, I realized I’d been more of a H
emingway character than I’d realized.

  I taught the book rather half-heartedly, trying to overcome that chilling contemptuous skepticism sophomores are so able to communicate, but it wasn’t until I read some of the most apparently innocuous passages aloud that I realized of what the real virtue and the real insights about adolescence consisted in Hemingway’s early works. At first I’d thought it was probably the intense sense the characters had of themselves as a little nation unto themselves; the way they defined themselves as being in an ultimate we-they situation, with our side, we and our peers, determining not only their own values but the values of a generation and in fact of a world. I had long felt it must have been this which was so touched my late adolescent needs and wants, but during that class I realized the issue was more complicated, and strangely more technical. It wasn’t the characters or the lives they led that had so excited my identification with them but the way in which they’d been written about. It wasn’t their mild adventuring or their self-congratulatory relations with each other that had drawn me so desperately along in their wake, but the language in which they were depicted: more than anything else, what defined them was Hemingway’s prose style.

  For example, at the beginning of chapter 4, the narrator, Jake Barnes, is in a taxi with the great love of his life, Lady Brett. They have been partying with a group of expatriate friends and chums of friends in Paris and now have slipped off by themselves.

  The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then leveled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett’s hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue des Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett’s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Please don’t touch me.”

  What exactly is happening here? The passage is very typically Hemingway, in its terseness, directness, simplicity, its purity of grammar and construction. The sentences are nearly all declarative, and most of them are either simple sentences or compound sentences formed of straightforward simple phrases. Jake perceives things offhandedly, with no untoward fuss or excitement, but with a terrific sensitivity. There’s a quiet drama in the flash of the lights and darks that seems to add an extra layer of makeup to Lady Brett’s beauty. On another level, the place the characters move through, Paris, that always exotic, always erotically promising city, is described with absolute familiarity and objectivity. Jake doesn’t say: “Wow, look at me here, in Paris, France: midnight, a beautiful woman, that church, I wonder what they call it . . . ?” On the contrary, despite the poignancy of his circumstances, his manner of speaking is entirely collected: he is an acute, dispassionate observer not only of the mysterious city around him but also of his own actions and, by implication, his feelings.

  In truth, what Jake is enacting is a sort of anti-adolescence. Although, like the ordinary adolescent, he is a stranger in an alien place, a stranger with an apparently supersensitive consciousness, suffering from vague inner anguish, he manifests none of the hectic despair young people ordinarily do, and neither does he seem to feel any. He is the adolescent protagonist to the nth degree, who has nearby and apparently available to him the beautiful, seductive girl, but who isn’t capable of coping with her sexually. Jake, we discover now, is impotent; he has been wounded in the war. His love for Brett and hers for him have become tragic, their longings for one another painful, their ultimate destinations chaotic and unpredictable. But through it all, unlike the young people most of us were, Jake never loses his inner composure. Hemingway has put his hero into the most extreme possible situation: Jake is a veritable apotheosis of the adolescent struggle to make sense of and deal with the difficult barriers the world presents to emotional fulfillment. But Hemingway’s hero, the apparently categorical failure, becomes instead the triumph of, to use a term from another generation of adolescent stand-ins, the “cool.”

  Another arresting passage takes place in chapter 5, the next morning. The last sentence of the previous chapter has Jake, after Brett has left, going to bed, thinking, “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” Chapter 5 begins:

  In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the Rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on an S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the back platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opera, and up to my office. I passed the man with the jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to avoid walking into the thread with which his assistant manipulated the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded hands. The man was urging two tourists to buy. Three more tourists had stopped and were watching. I walked on behind a man who was pushing a roller that printed the name cinzano on the sidewalk in damp letters. All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.

  Again, declarative sentences: the world consists of facts, details, splendid in their isolation and clarity. There is no need to interpret reality, to find meaning in it; it is a given, that which is offered to us to delight in, to savor its declarations to us. Jake has suffered the terrible trauma of sexual failure, but he has absolutely overcome it. He is back in his world, with his coffee and cake: it is a world of definite articles, “the” papers—not, notice, “a” paper, which would assume a choice, a possible wavering, an uncertainty. Jake is again in the alien city but utterly composed and at home there. He passes the man with the jumping frogs, and the man with the boxers. He even knows the secret trick of the huckster: unlike the tourists who are to be gulled, who believe in the illusion before them, Jake is an insider, an initiate, almost even part of the conspiracy. He doesn’t merely experience reality, he possesses it. Despite his heroically repressed agony, he is serene, or at least his prose, the connections between his perceptions and his language, is serene, unclouded, in fact brilliant. “It was a fine morning . . . It felt pleasant to be going to work.” Reading Hemingway’s prose, it becomes easier for me to understand how several generations of late adolescents could find our model for our struggle in his fictions.

  3

  In 1774, the young German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe published a short novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was a book about a young man, highly refined, terribly sensitive, frighteningly intelligent, who suffers various sadnesses—an unfortunate love affair, some career uncertainties—and who is torn mostly by a sort of metaphysical uncertainty, a philosophical despair so intense that he finally commits suicide. The book became immensely popular: it was widely read and discussed, brought instant fame to Goethe, and apparently set off a plague of suicides among young people all across Europe. The actual dimensions of this contagion of suicides is hard to know, but their legend endured, regarded usually as a curious quirk in cultural history. I think, though, it was much more than that; I think that what Werther was enacting was the invention of
adolescence.

  This seems an odd notion. We have become so accustomed to regarding adolescence not only as one of the natural states of human development but also, in some ways, as its most interesting and most crucial that the idea of a pattern of maturation without it seems absurd. As Philippe Aries points out, though, in his historical study on the development of the family, Centuries of Childhood, the family doesn’t participate in what he calls an “immobility of . . . species,” and neither does the individual. “It is not so much the family,” he says, “as a reality that is our subject . . . [so much as] the family as an idea.”

  It was one of Aries’s theses that, before the eighteenth century, “People had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time in taking shape.” Aries found compelling evidence of the development of adolescence in various historical records and memoirs, but there is just as much or more in literature. Until Werther, or at least perhaps until Rousseau’s Confessions, there is really no example in literature of an attitude that distinguished the adolescent in any essential way from the adult. Rather, there is childhood (which Aries points out is itself a more flexible concept than we usually think), then a relatively brief puberty, which is generally considered the last phase of childhood, upon which the individual moves into the adult world, with adult responsibilities, privileges, and presumably appropriate intellectual and moral attitudes.

  The turmoil we would typify as particularly adolescent is neither exalted nor excused. The Bible has its teenaged kings, but the worth and greatness of a king have nothing to do with his age, only with the quality of his actions. Similarly, in the Iliad, Achilleus before Troy is a desperately young man. The sulk he perpetrates because he feels he has been slighted by the politically more powerful Agamemnon, which a modern novel would unquestionably be put down to his “immaturity,” his adolescent touchiness, is never considered as such by Homer, who had no narrative interest whatsoever in allowing Achilleus’s fateful pique to be forgiven because of his callowness. It is his character that is flawed; his age has nothing to do with it. In Euripides’s Bacchae, the young king Pentheus brings about his own hideous death because he can’t suppress the overwhelming curiosity he feels about the sexual orgies he fancies are being perpetrated by the Bacchae—who include his aunt and mother and all the other women of his kingdom. Our first response to such a clear expression of puerile, uncertain sexuality would be understanding, compassion, forgiveness; but the Greeks will have none of this: Pentheus’s curiosity, his petulance and impatience, are his tragic flaws; he is destroyed by them.