by Susan Sontag
When the commenting, summing-up observer is impervious to doubts, the register inevitably shifts to the comic. Take that most assured of fictional people-watchers, the “I” voice of Randall Jarrell’s awesomely witty Pictures from an Institution (1914). It starts by being unidentified, although, as cultural conventions would have it, a voice that is so attractively superior—reflective, learned, cheeky—would be assumed to be that of a man. All we do come to know is that he (and it is a he) is on the faculty of Benton College, a “progressive” college for women not far from New York City, where the famous novelist Gertrude Johnson has arrived to teach for a semester, and that he is married.
It’s even a while before we realize there is a first-person narrator, someone with a small role in the story. Recounting matters that only an omniscient narrator could know, the novel’s first seven pages point irrefutably in the other direction. Then, speeding through a hilarious riff on the vanity and presumption of his writer-monster, Jarrell delivers a little surprise:
Gertrude thought Europe overrated, too; she voyaged there, voyaged back, and told her friends; they listened, awed, uneasy somehow. She had a wonderful theory that Europeans are mere children to us Americans, who are the oldest of men—why I once knew: because our political institutions are older, or because Europeans skipped some stage of their development, or because Gertrude was an American—I forget.
Who is this “I” who once knew, who forgets? Not someone worried about his memory lapses. Though the first-person voice of Pictures from an Institution pipes up belatedly, it is in canonical fashion, with an avowal of incertitude. But this is a mock avowal, surely, by a nimble and self-possessed mind. We wouldn’t expect the narrator to recall every one of Gertrude’s glib pronouncements; to have forgotten some is rather to his credit. In the world of Jarrell’s novel, genuinely doubt-ridden narrators need not apply.
Only the tragic—or the bleak—can accommodate, even promote, incertitude. Comedy depends on certitude, the certitude about what is foolish and what is not, and on characters who are “characters,” that is, types. In Pictures from an Institution they come in pairs (for this, too, is a marriage novel): Gertrude and her husband; the composer, the sociologist, the college’s professionally boyish president, and their amusingly discontented or complacent spouses—all in residence at this school of fools and apt targets, all, for the narrator’s genial, inspired mockery. To poke fun at everyone might have made Jarrell seem churlish. He obviously preferred to risk being sentimental, and added to the mix a paragon of sincerity and niceness by the name of Constance. No bashfulness about showing himself to be feverishly erudite, proteanly intelligent, terminally droll, and a wizard phrase-maker. On the contrary (autre temps, autres mœurs), these were clearly glorious assets. But perhaps there was a shade of anxiety about being, or being thought to be, too mordant. An adorable, tenderhearted young woman who is first glimpsed working in the office of the president, Constance sees generously what the narrator sees fiercely. Her indulgence allows him to go on.
The true plot of Jarrell’s novel, such as it is, consists of the flow of coruscating descriptions of characters—above all, the inexhaustibly fascinating, appalling Gertrude. Characters need to be described over and over, not because they ever act “out of character” and so surprise us, or because the narrator, like Tower in The Pilgrim Hawk, changes his mind about them. (The characters in Wescott’s novel can’t be types:
it’s precisely the function of the narrator’s attention to them to make them ever more complicated.) In Pictures from an Institution, the “I” keeps on describing his characters because he continues to devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever more hyperbolic phrases to sum them up. They keep on being foolish, and he—the narrative voice—keeps on being inventive. His restlessness is lexical, or rhetorical, not psychological or ethical. Is there yet one more way to pin these follies down verbally? Forward!
HOW TO CIRCUMSCRIBE and refine a story and how to open up a story are two sides of the same task.
To explain, to inform, to amplify, to connect, to color in—think of the essayistic digressions in Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain. Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb “to encyclopedize”? There has to be.
To condense, to pare away, to speed up, pile up, to be ready to renounce, to distill, to leap ahead, to conclude (even if one intends to conclude again and again)—think of the aphoristic glitter of The Pilgrim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights. Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel’s weight and length down drastically. Novels driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short, and often not novels at all in the conventional sense. Occasionally, they will go after the deadpan, mock smoothness of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father. Is there a verb “to angularize”? Or “to ellipsify”? There ought to be.
Compressed first-person narrations don’t tell any kind of story; they tend to project a few distinctive moods. A surfeit of experiences that bring worldly wisdom (and, usually, disenchantment) is often intimated. It’s hard to imagine a naïve narrator with a penchant for trenchant summary. Such moods color the whole span of the narration, which can darken but does not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions narrated by a resident observer the end lies much closer to the beginning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not just because the novel is shorter but because the look is retrospective and the tale one whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can’t help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflating variant on the beginning.
Stories kept lean by ellipsis and refined judgments rather than fattened by essayistic expansiveness may look like a quicker read. They’re not. Even with sentences that are fired like bullets, attention can wander. Every exquisite linguistic moment (or incisive insight) is a moment of stasis, a potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward momentum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences. Sleepless Nights —a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins and ends.
A first-person voice devoted to looking and reflecting is likely to be drawn to reporting its displacements, as if that were mainly what a solitary consciousness does with its time. These fictions with melancholy or frankly superior narrators are often travelers’ tales, stories of a wandering of some sort, or a halt in that wandering. The Pilgrim Hawk takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid academic village depicted in Pictures from an Institution is full of successful professionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books.
Many displacements are recorded in Sleepless Nights, none unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin:
From Kentucky to New York, to Boston to Maine, to Europe, carried along on a river of paragraphs and chapters, of blank verse, of little books translated from the Polish, large books from the Russian—all consumed in a sedentary sleeplessness. Is that sufficient—never mind that it is the truth.
The voyaging of the bookish, undoubtedly a source of many keen pleasures, is nevertheless an occasion for irony, as if one’s life had failed to meet an agreed standard of interest. A career of mental traveling, illustrated by a fair bit of real traveling in safety and relative comfort, doesn’t make for a very exciting plot. “It certainly hasn’t the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frig
ate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all”—best to name the formidable constraint unknown to other representatively brilliant first-person narrators—“‘I’” am a woman.”
COMPARED WITH BEGINNINGS, endings of novels are less likely to resound, to have an aphoristic snap. What they convey is the permission for tensions to subside. They are more like an effect than a statement.
The Pilgrim Hawk starts with the Cullens’ arrival and must go on until they leave and stop very soon after they do. Pictures from an Institution also draws to a close with a departure, actually two departures. To the joy of all, Gertrude and her husband are on the train back to New York City the moment the spring term ends. Then we learn that the narrator himself, having accepted the offer of a better job at another college, will be leaving Benton soon, with some regret and more than a little relief.
The Pilgrim Hawk signs off with an ambiguous reflection about marriage. Tower claims to be worrying about the effect on Alex of the spectacle of the Cullens’ torment:
“You’ll never marry, dear,” I said, to tease Alex … “You’ll be afraid to, after this fantastic bad luck.”
“What bad luck, if you please?” she inquired, smiling to show that my mockery was welcome.
“Fantastic bad object lessons.”
“You’re no novelist,” she said, to tease me. “I envy the Cullens, didn’t you know?” And I concluded from the look on her face that she herself did not quite know whether she meant it.
For last lines, Wescott’s novel confects a flurry of doubts about what is meant and what is felt, an exchange of teasing untruths: “You’ll never marry.” “You’re no novelist.” To readers who have retained a piece of information dropped into the very first paragraph (Alex will soon meet and marry the narrator’s brother) and to those still gripped by the histrionic misery of the Cullens as parsed by the joyless narrator, the ending may seem light; perhaps too light. Or too neatly da capo.
Pictures from an Institution finishes as do the great comedies, with a celebration of marriage. It’s the no-name narrator, until now the most revved up of observers, who has the becalmed last scene of the novel all to himself. Summer vacation has started; the campus is deserted; he has been in his office going through books and papers (“I worked hard for the rest of the afternoon: I threw away and threw away and threw away …”). Then he leaves:
When at last I went downstairs everything was hollow and silent; my steps echoed along the corridor, as I walked down it looking at the sunlight in the trees outside. There was nobody in the building—nobody, I felt, in all the buildings of Benton. I stood in the telephone-booth on the first floor, dialed the number of my house, and my wife’s hello was small and far-off in the silence; I said, “Can you come get me now, darling?” She answered, “Of course I can. I’ll be right over.”
For all that we know virtually nothing of the narrator, still less about his entirely notional wife, it seems appropriate that this novel about comic and pathetic (but never tragic) marriages ends as it does, with that italicized Of course, which evokes, with exquisite economy, the shelter and rightness of a true marriage.
And here are the last lines of Sleepless Nights, which, having no single story to tell, has no obvious place to end. The Pilgrim Hawk and Pictures from an Institution move forward in an announced, framed length of time: an afternoon and early evening; a spring semester. Sleepless Nights stretches over decades, darting backward and forward in time, its gallantly de-married narrator accumulating solitudes. Best to affirm solitude—writing, the work of memory—while also acknowledging the longing to reach out, to write letters, to telephone.
Sometimes I resent the glossary, the concordance of truth, many have about my real life, have like an extra pair of spectacles. I mean that such fact is to me a hindrance to memory.
Otherwise I love to be known by those I care for. Public assistance, beautiful phrase. Thus, I am always on the phone, always writing letters, always waking up to address myself to B. and D. and C.—those whom I dare not ring up until morning and yet must talk to throughout the night.
So Sleepless Nights ends with a departure, too. It ends by leaving—that is, delicately excluding—the reader (“I love to be known by those I care for”), who is presumed to read intrusively, looking for the concordance of truth about a “real life.”
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION in the guise of a journal (Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), a memoir in poet’s prose (Pasternak’s Safe Conduct), and a volume of stories (Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) have all been mentioned by Hardwick as books she found em boldening when she came to write the genre-buster that is Sleepless Nights.
To be sure, fiction of all kinds has always fed on writers’ lives. Every detail in a work of fiction was once an observation or a memory or a wish, or is a sincere homage to a reality independent of the self. That both the pretentious novelist and the pretentious women’s college in Pictures from an Institution have well-known models illustrates familiar practices of fiction. (In a satire this is the norm: it would be surprising if Jarrell did not have a real novelist, a real college, in mind.) And authors of first-person narratives will often be discovered to have lent to that voice a few stray bio-facts. For instance, it helps explain the end of The Pilgrim Hawk to recall having been told that Alex Henry will marry. But that she will marry the narrator’s brother, of whom nothing is ever said in the novel, seems like noodling. It’s not. The great friend who inspired the character Alex, a rich 1920s-era American expatriate with a house near Paris in fashionable Rambouillet (the village renamed Chancellet), did, after returning home, marry Wescott’s brother.
Many first-person narrators are endowed with enough traits to make a pleasantly self-regarding resemblance to their authors. Others are there-but-for-the-grace-of-God creations, what the author believes (or hopes) he or she has escaped being. Wescott, though not—like Tower—a failed writer, often reproached himself for being a lazy one, and it is odd that someone capable of a book as marvelous as The Pilgrim Hawk would only once in a long life write at the top of his form. Hawthorne was always wrestling with the Coverdale in himself. Writing to Sophia Peabody in 1841 from Brook Farm, the model for the cooperative community depicted in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne blesses his future wife for imparting a sense of life’s “reality” and keeping “a feeling of coldness and strangeness” from creeping into his heart; in other words, for rescuing him from being someone like Coverdale.
But what about when the “I” and the author bear the same name or have identical life circumstances, as in Sleepless Nights, or in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo? How much fact from the author’s life can be sponged up without our becoming reluctant to call the book a novel? Sebald is the writer who plays most daringly with this project now. His narratives of mental haunting, which he wants to be regarded as fiction, are related by an emotionally distressed alter ego who presses the claim of solemn factuality to the point of including photographs of himself among the many photographs that annotate his books. Of course, almost everything that would normally be disclosed in an autobiographical work is absent from Sebald’s books.
Actually, secretiveness—which might be called reticence, or discretion, or withholding—is essential to keeping these anomalous works of fiction from tipping over into autobiography or memoir. You can use your life, but only a little, and at an oblique angle. We know the narrator of Sleepless Nights draws on a real life. Kentucky is the birthplace of the writer named Elizabeth Hardwick, who did meet Billie Holiday soon after coming to live in Manhattan in the 1940s, did spend a year in Holland in the early 1950s, did have a great friend named M—, did live in Boston, has had a house in Maine, has lived for many years on the West Side of Manhattan, and so on. All this figures in her novel, as glimpses—the telling designed as much to conceal, to put readers off the track, as to reveal.
To edit your life is to save it, for fiction, for yourself. Being identified wit
h your life as others see it may mean that you come eventually to see it that way, too. This can only be a hindrance to memory (and, presumably, to invention).
There is more freedom to be elliptical and to abridge when the memories are not set down in chronological order. The memories—fragments of memories, transformed—emerge as chains of luxuriant notations that wind around, and conceal, the kernel of story. And Hardwick’s art of acute compression and decentering is simply too fast-paced to tell only a single story at a time; too fast, sometimes, to relate any story at all, especially where one is expected. For instance, there is much about marriage, notably a long-running soap opera starring the philandering husband in a Dutch couple, friends of the narrator and her then husband when they lived in Holland. Her own marriage is announced thus on the fifth page: “I was then a ‘we’ … Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition.” The ensuing silence about the “we”—a declaration of independence that has to be intrinsic to the fashioning of the authoritative, questing “I” capable of writing Sleepless Nights—lasts until a sentence some fifty pages later: “I am alone here in New York, no longer a we. Years, decades even, have passed.” Maybe books devoted to exalted standards of prose will always be reproached for not telling readers enough.
