The Odd Woman and the City

by Vivian Gornick

  * * *

  At ten in the morning, as I am standing on line in my branch library, waiting to check out a book, a frail-looking woman about my own age suddenly grasps the edge of the checkout desk and remains standing there. I lean forward from my place in the line and call out to her, “Is everything all right?” She glances wanly in my direction, then screams at me, “Why the hell are you asking me if everything is all right?”

  At noon, waiting on the corner for the light to change, I look down and see a pair of shoes I think beautiful but complicated. “Are those shoes comfortable?” I inquire of the young woman wearing them. She backs off, looks at me with suspicion in her eyes, and in an alarmed voice says, “Why are you asking me that?”

  At three in the afternoon, I pass a man who is yelling into the air, “Help me! Help me! I’ve got four uncurable diseases! Help me!” I tap him on the shoulder and cheerfully confide, “The word is incurable.” Without missing a beat, he replies, “Who the fuck asked you.”

  The randomness of life being what it is, a few days later I have another “who the fuck asked you” day.

  I’m sitting in an aisle seat on a crosstown bus. A man—black, somewhere in his forties, dressed in jeans and an oversize yellow T-shirt—is standing beside me, speaking very loudly into a cell phone.

  I catch his eye and make a motion with my hand that means, “Lower your voice.” He looks amazed.

  “Lower my voice?” he says incredulously. “No, madam, I will not lower my voice. I paid my fare, I’ll do what I damned please.”

  “Your fare entitles you to ride the bus,” I reply. “It does not entitle you to hold the passengers hostage.”

  “Why, you bitch,” the man cries.

  I leave my seat and go up to the driver. “Did you hear what that man just said to me?”

  “Yes, lady,” the driver says wearily. “I heard him.”

  “Are you going to do anything about it?” I demand.

  “What do you want me to do? Call the police?”

  “You bitch, you white bitch,” the man on the cell phone howls.

  “Yes,” I say, “call the police.”

  The bus grinds to a halt.

  “Everybody off the bus,” the driver calls out.

  A woman in the back wails, “I’m late for my therapist!”

  When the cops show up, they laugh at me.

  I go home, write up the incident, and e-mail it to the Times.

  Two days later, my phone rings and a man from the paper says, “You want us to publish this?”

  * * *

  She was born Mary Britton Miller in New London, Connecticut, in 1883, into a wealthy Protestant family and grew up to become one of the Odd Women. Who can say why. Her childhood was marked by humdrum melodrama—by the age of three she’d been orphaned, at fourteen her twin sister drowned, by eighteen (it’s been speculated) she might have borne an illegitimate baby. What, however, can actually account for a sensibility destined to be shaped by one set of experiences rather than another; or, for that matter, explain why one set of events rather than another becomes experience. What is certain, however, is that inevitably one ends up deeply surprised—“This is not what I had in mind!”—at how it has all turned out; and just as inevitably, the surprise becomes one’s raw material.

  Whatever the truth of her inner circumstance, in 1911, at the age of twenty-eight, Mary Miller settled in New York City, where she worked and lived, quite alone, for the rest of her long life. When she died in 1975, it was in the Greenwich Village apartment she had occupied for more than forty years. She was never married, and she seems not to have had a lover anyone ever knew. What she did have was friends, some of whom described her as witty and mean, entertainingly haughty, and impressively self-educated.

  For years, Mary B. Miller wrote conventional poems and stories that got published but went unnoticed. Then, between 1946 and 1952, between the ages of sixty-three and sixty-nine, under the name of Isabel Bolton, she produced three short modernist novels that, at the time of publication, earned her a significant amount of literary attention. Edmund Wilson praised her work in The New Yorker, as did Diana Trilling in The Nation. Both critics thought they had discovered a major new talent.

  These novels are all voice, hardly any plot at all. The reader is inside the mind of a woman—essentially it’s the same woman in all the books—going through a day (or a few days) in New York, musing, thinking, reminiscing, trying to puzzle out her life in prose that mimics interiority: free, flashing, reverie-bound. The action is always at a remove; it is the reverie that counts. In the first novel the year is 1939, the woman is in her forties, and she’s named Millicent. In the second it’s 1945, she’s in her fifties and named Hilly. In the third it’s 1950, she’s in her eighties, and she’s Margaret. A life dotted with smart, knowing New Yorkers is sketched in, characters are scattered about, and always there is a young man to whom the protagonist is oddly attached; but really she is alone, and has been alone forever. In each story, however, the woman is able to cut a deal with life because she has the city to love. And how she loves it:

  What a strange, what a fantastic city … there was something here that one experienced nowhere else on earth. Something one loved intensely. What was it? Crossing the streets—standing on the street corners with the crowds: what was it that induced this special climate of the nerves … a peculiar sense of intimacy, friendliness, being here with all these people and in this strange place … They touched your heart with tenderness and you felt yourself a part of the real flight and flutter—searching their faces, speculating about their dooms and destinies.

  This relation between the self and the city is Bolton’s true subject, the modernist part of her enterprise:

  You ran about in motor cars, you boarded ocean liners, crossed the continent in Chiefs and Super Chiefs … the present moment so filled with terror and tenderness, and experiencing every day such a queer intensity. Wondering so often who you were and what you were and who it might be necessary for you to be the next moment … and the heart so hungry for heaven knew just what, so unassuaged, so void … [But then] almost anything might happen to you in New York … the fabulous city like a great Christmas tree, so brilliantly lighted, with so many glittering gifts perpetually being handed out … You wouldn’t call it the natural climate of your soul … Longing as you were for some display of natural warmth and friendliness [that seemed] to have dissolved in gossip, analysis—sophistication … There was hunger, there was immense curiosity, there was solitude … Yet there were these sudden, these unaccountable moments—being overtaken by love—everywhere—on top of buses, in crowded concert halls—sometimes on winter evenings with the skyscrapers floating, flickering above you … merging with the crowds, examining the faces. This sense of brotherhood. You buried your loneliness in it.

  This was the loneliness that told Bolton she was “the most solitary … individual that ever at any moment in the march of mad events had trod upon the earth.”

  Then the paradox of her situation hits her: “Christ, how we loved our own aloneness … We were incapable of giving because there was so much within our reach to grab and snatch and gather for our own, our solitary souls.”

  Bolton was nearly seventy when she wrote these words. She had lived long enough to see that modern life, with its unspeakable freedoms mirrored in the gorgeous disconnect of the crowded city, has revealed us to ourselves as has the culture of no other age. She sees what Freud saw—that our loneliness is anguishing and yet, inexplicably, we are loath to give it up. At no period in psychological time are we free of the contradiction: it is the conflict of conflicts. This was Bolton’s wisdom, her only wisdom. When she wrote it in the late 1940s it sounded profound to her most literate readers.

  * * *

  The two greatest writers of the urban crowd in the nineteenth century were Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. Each, in his own way, had grasped whole the meaning of these metropolitan masses rapidly developing in London and i
n Paris. Dickens especially understood its significance. To see a swiftly moving man or woman out of the side of your eye—to feel his or her presence at an angle of vision that allowed one to register only half a face, part of an expression, a piece of a gesture; and then to have to decide quickly how to react to this flood of human partialness—this was creating a radical change in social history.

  Victor Hugo, along with many other nineteenth-century writers, saw the same thing and understood, as Walter Benjamin put it, that there was no subject more entitled to his attention than the crowd. It was Hugo’s shrewdness, Benjamin wrote, that made him see the crowd “was getting ready to take shape as a public … who had acquired facility in reading” and was becoming the kind of purchaser of books that “wished to find itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the paintings of the Middle Ages.”

  These remarks of Benjamin’s on Victor Hugo occur in a famous essay he wrote on Baudelaire, the writer who meant the most to him. It was in Baudelaire that the idea of the flaneur developed: that is, the person who strolls aimlessly through the streets of the big cities in studied contrast with the hurried, purposeful activity of the crowd. It was the flaneur, Baudelaire thought, who would morph into the writer of the future. “Who among us,” he wrote, “has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose … [that would] adapt itself to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the wave motions of dreaming, the shocks of consciousness. This ideal … will grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities and the web of their numberless interconnecting relationships.” This crowd, Benjamin wrote, of whose existence Baudelaire is always aware, “has not served as the model for any of his works, but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure.”

  I’m walking up Fifth Avenue at noon straight into the cold hard sunlight of a morning in November. Mobs of people are coming at me. Once the dominating color of this crowd was white, now it is black and brown. Once it wore blue and white collars, now it is in mufti. Once it was law-abiding, now it is not. The idiom has changed, but the character remains stable. Every now and then I see a face and a figure mixed in among the regulation jeans and parkas—something narrow faced and creamy skinned in glossy furs (Paris, 1938); something swarthy and dangerous in island Spanish (Cuba, 1952); something sloe-eyed and timeless (Egypt, 4000 B.C.)—and I am reminded of the enduring nature of the crowd. New York belongs to me as much as it does to them: but no more so. We are all here on Fifth Avenue for the same reason and by virtue of the same right. We have all been walking the streets of world capitals forever: actors, clerks, criminals; dissidents, runaways, illegals; Nebraska gays, Polish intellectuals, women on the edge of time. Half of these people will be lost to glitter and crime—disappearing into Wall Street, hiding out in Queens—but half of them will become me: a walker in the city; here to feed the never-ending stream of the never-ending crowd that is certainly imprinting on someone’s creativity.

  * * *

  Leonard and I are passing a bookstore. In its window we see a display of a book on cosmetic surgery written by a woman I know.

  “She’s only forty-two,” I say. “Why is she writing about cosmetic surgery?”

  “Maybe she’s seventy,” Leonard says. “What do you know?”

  * * *

  A writer of my acquaintance (I’ll call her Alice) was felled at eighty-five by infirmity. Arthritis had attacked her from head to toe and left her so crippled that she had herself admitted to an assisted living facility in upper Manhattan. Composed of about a hundred studio apartments, a complete set of common rooms, a bright and airy dining room, the facility was both comfortable and attractive. Equipped (as it was) with excellent care, the place at first seemed a dream come true: a worthy woman laid low was being admirably attended to in her hour of need. But this facility was run by a development company heavily supported by federal moneys: which meant that differences in class, wealth, and education were reduced to accommodate a culture of the lowest common denominator. Therein lay the tale of a dream gone bad.

  Alice, who was some twenty years older than me, had been a writer of reputation thirty years before the time I knew her. When I was in college my friends and I read her novels with interest and admiration. She was also glamorous. A slender woman with marvelous hair and great taste in clothes, she had a handsome husband, a house in the Hamptons, and an apartment in the Dakota. I didn’t get to know her until she was nearly eighty, by which time her fortunes had reversed themselves. Her books were no longer being published, her husband had left her, and she was living in a residence for women.

  Ours was one of those peculiar friendships based not on shared sensibility, but on the complications of emotional need. Shortly after Alice and I met I found that I actually didn’t like her. Her mind was alert, her mental energy intact, and her desire for conversation as alive as it had ever been. It was her manner (haughty), her politics (conservative), her literary taste (middlebrow) that put me off. We were both hot-tempered, so our conversations often dissolved in a wrangle of irritated disagreement, and more often than not I went home feeling both guilty and ashamed. Nonetheless, we continued to call ourselves friends. She badly needed an interlocutor who knew who she was, I badly needed to go on paying tribute to a writer who’d once meant a great deal to me.

  I went to visit Alice two weeks after she entered the assisted living facility. The lobby, painted a soft yellow and furnished with brightly colored sofas and love seats, did have a few slack-faced women and men sitting listlessly about—Not a good omen, passed through my head—but the studio apartment that Alice had been given was lovely. Flooded with light and furnished in excellent taste, it seemed perfect: everything close to hand and good to look at. Alice herself seemed as well as a woman in constant pain could be. I asked how she was, and in ten minutes she told me. Then she said, “Enough of that,” and she meant it. In no time we were talking as we always had about books, people we knew, that day’s headlines. At five thirty she said, “Time for dinner.” I helped her out of her chair and handed her her cane; as we left the apartment, I remember thinking that she—tall, dignified, well dressed—was looking particularly alert.

  The door to the dining room opened, and I nearly went into shock. The room was a forest of wheelchairs, walkers, and canes, most of the people attached to them looking as slack-jawed as those I’d seen in the lobby. As cheerfully painted and furnished as the room itself was, a look of dereliction—even destitution—suffused the place. It was the destitution of people who had been flung together simply because they were old and physically incapacitated.

  Without a word, Alice guided me to two empty chairs at a table for six. The other four chairs were occupied by two men and two women, all of whom were silent. When we sat down their faces brightened and one of the men said, “Ah, here’s Alice. She’ll tell us what the right and the wrong of the matter is.”

  The matter turned out to concern an appetizer that had been wrongly delivered to Monica, the ninety-year-old redhead dressed in purple print polyester, when it should have gone to Minna, whose mouth trembled and whose blue eyes were awash in anxiety. It seemed that when Minna had asked the waitress to bring another appetizer for her, she was told that Monica was eating the last one. Here Minna had gone into free fall and had been insisting repeatedly that the dish should have come to her, not to Monica, it wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t fair. Alice instantly soothed Minna by telling her that it definitely was not fair, but that life itself was not fair, so experiencing this lack of fairness once again was proof that she was still alive; that alone should make her grateful. Minna’s face broke into an enchanting smile, and the crisis was over.

  A few weeks later I was again in the dining room with Alice, and again I witnessed people turning to her to adjudicate a dispute similar to the one that had involved Minna and Monica. This time it was an argument over a movie that had sent the whole table into a spin. “It’s so interesting, don’t you think?” Alice said to me as we le
ft the room. I nodded silently. “The extraordinary things one learns about human behavior in a place like this,” she said.

  Possessed now of a stoic character I had never before seen in action, Alice was becoming a beloved figure in the facility. She had decided to take an interest in her surroundings, and her novelist’s delight in the oddities of humanity at large had come to her aid. As a result, her old above-the-fray manner now came across as Solomonic. For the volatile residents of this place, the gravity of Alice’s manner endowed her with a wisdom they instinctively felt they could trust. What’s more, she was a genuine lady, wasn’t she, the kind who honored the essential humanity of every person who crossed her field of vision. When Alice entered the dining room, people she didn’t know smiled and nodded at her as she passed.

  But the essential humanity of Alice herself was not being served. Each time I came to visit, she looked exponentially more weary than the time before. She was of course now well over eighty-five and living on painkillers; the weariness, however, was, in the main, of the spirit not the body. After some months in the facility, I’d find her slumped in her chair, looking so exhausted that it would scare me. Nevertheless, I’d sit down on a chair facing hers and, without even asking how she was, start talking. Within minutes of hearing my voice, her face, her body, the movement of her hands, began coming back to life. Soon we were conversing about books and headlines and people we knew as animatedly as we ever did, minus the wrangling. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that miraculous conversion. To see the engagement of a talented mind bring a half-dead person back to living liveliness was to witness a transformation that never felt less than magical.

  “Is there no one here with whom you can have a conversation?” I once asked.

  “No, dear,” Alice replied. “Chatter, yes. I get plenty of that. But conversation? No. Certainly not conversation like the one we are having.”