Scenario: One sits at a bar, young, alone, say, unprepared and unexpecting. One looks up and sees in the doorway of the place the man one is to love, in this way, for the rest of one’s life. One may marry another, even happily, live a long, contented, connubial life, see the object of this first passion only occasionally over half a century. And yet, its force is never diminished. I believe that in the long run, as they say, one’s marriage may be saved by this parallel existence, by the endurance of an underlying passion never entirely laid aside.
For marriage is a condition that is severely tried by duration. Cemented by sacrament and official decree, more often than not it wears thin, its first, fine affection attenuated, much like raw cotton spun into fine thread.… On the other hand, first love endures over time, because, if it is not tried by marriage, it is never subjected to the stresses of daily life. It thrives on absence, and on the distance which is said ‘to lend enchantment to the view.’
Or consider marital love itself. It is not very different from any alliance of long duration, between members of the opposite or the same sex who are engaged in the endurance contest of diurnalness. It takes the form of a right triangle standing on its base with the left side high, a side of decline, the right angle at the bottom. Hope and expectancy are the peak, but blind to reality, as justice is said to be, and rose-colored as optimism.
Time and the strains of family life tend to erode connubial love. It is changed by custom, and rushes down the declining slope of the triangle. A lasting marriage is often held together by the glue of inertia, usage, consuetude. In the view of those who wish to maintain the shape of society as we know it, marriage is a necessity, determined not by the passionate needs of the human spirit and body but by preservative and reproductive instincts that are stronger than desire. Theocratic notions rule our lives; marriage is their ineluctable decree.
And then we come to amour propre, self-love, the basis of all the other kinds of love. At our core we are beings whose seamless skin contains all the machinery for generating self-love. We may feel great sparks of passion, but they will move out of us only so far and then, halted subcutaneously, they return to our center to warm us, to act as selfish fuel for the fires of our inner being. Self-love is the hidden cistern that waters us from within, a kind of secret stream which attracts us to others. We say we love them, or admire them, as the result of the overflow of those egocentric waters. But oh, how conservative we are, how seldom we open the dike of ourselves to quench the thirst of another.
There is the love we feel for the dead, for those who have gone from our lives. It begins at the moment ‘the distinguished thing’ (Henry James’s designation for his own approaching death) appears. Its first moments are full of show, an outward display of sorrow so powerful it is often said by others that ‘he will never get over it,’ or the widow’s declaration: ‘I will love him until I die.’ But time is an effective analgesic, a consummate painkiller. You may think this a cynical view, and of course it is. Certainly it has its notable exceptions. But few people die of love for the dead. Most survive to make a complete recovery, to experience another ‘love,’ to marry again.
After the spectacle of grief is finished, postmortal behavior often turns into sentimental memories, verbal tags, and clichés, memorial tablets and services, anniversary notices in the newspapers. The dead we once believed we loved so ardently sometimes disappear from our real world to become conversation pieces, touchingly recalled at an appropriate time. Very often, sadly, that is all there is to it.
And then of course there is the kind of love that is usually accompanied by the awkward adverb ‘arguably’: sex, arguably a form of love. The intense, unique, private enjoyment of it, unlike the more respectable and public acts in our lives, causes prigs and puritans to think of it as noisome, messy, illicit, offensive, and disgusting. Some say it is not love at all but lust, a word they use with a sneer; others (I incline to this view, looking back over more than fifty years of pleasurably engaging in it) regard it as the main event, the Ding an sich, one of the few moments of light and heat at the end of torpid, humdrum days. When sex fails to animate the body, it leaves behind only scorched earth.
Doubtless there are fifty-one other varieties. These are the six I can testify to, either from close observation or from experience, whichever came first.
I come upon the name Thomas Higginson attached to a sage reflection on women. Is this the same Higginson to whom Emily Dickinson sent a few of her poems and enigmatic descriptions of herself in letters? No, I think this Higginson was an editor, and the one whose sentence I admire was clearly a clergyman. He wrote: ‘I never performed the marriage ceremony without a renewed sense of the iniquity of a system by which man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.’
At the Library of Congress I look them up and discover, to my delight, that they are one. Thomas Higginson was a Unitarian minister, an abolitionist, the colonel of the first black regiment in the Civil War (about which he wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment in 1870), author of a novel and three biographies (of Margaret Fuller, Whittier, Longfellow), and the correspondent of the then-obscure American poet. After her death he edited, with her niece, two volumes of her poetry. And in addition to all this he was responsible for that perspicacious piece of feminist wisdom.
I sit at my improvised desk, a slab of heavy black plastic mounted on two metal legs in an alcove of the living room (probably in the floor plan for the apartment it was called the dining room), and remember that Helen Yglesias told me her friend Lisa Baskin possessed Virginia Woolf’s writing desk. Can this be? And if it is so, is Mrs. Baskin able to write at it? Would it not be so formidable, so awe-inspiring, that a letter composed on it would seem frivolous, a laundry list an insult, a book review a desecration? Would not a kind of sclerosis of the creative impulse take place in the presence of that redoubtable ghost seated beside you, or looking over your shoulder?
There is an advantage to having as companion a bookseller who is also a constant and attentive reader. In the fall, Sybil showed me another of her ‘finds,’ a thick, beautifully bound, gold-stamped, gilt-edged (on three sides) volume called Our Home by Charles E. Sargent, M.A. Two ministers assisted him in putting down these chapters of advice on influencing children ‘from the hearth.’ The book was published by subscription only, and proclaims with some pride, I thought, that it was not for sale in anything so ordinary as a bookstore.
Why not? I wondered. It is full of fine advice to parents and should have been widely available. Most notable are the pages headed ‘The Education of our Girls:’
We are pained when an eminent writer gives weight to expressions like ‘the great vocation of woman is wifehood and motherhood.’ Would the author object to a slight change in the latter part of the phraseology so as to make the expression applicable to man? [thus]: ‘The great vocation of man is husband and fatherhood.’
Another laudable (and unexpected) sentiment:
We hope the world has heard the last of that sickly sentiment concerning ‘woman’s sphere,’ ‘the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,’ etc. If the hand were permitted to take hold of the world a little more directly, it would not at all interfere with its ability to rock the cradle.
Contemporary, radical feminist propaganda? Not at all. The book was published in 1900.
Today I start my rounds of what is now called one’s support system, an image conjuring up the outmoded, sagging physical structure that I have become. Internist, gynecologist, otologist (and hearing-aids supplier), but first of all, dentist. For a tooth is about to fall out and needs costly replacement, and I require the services of his accompanist, the tooth cleaner.
Driving up to 19th and N from the Hill, I remember a recent dental experience in Maine. Like most people, I have been going to a dentist since I was twenty, and taken to one by my mother, against my wishes, since I was about eight. In the last thirty years the entrepreneurial dentist has taken to himself one or more assistants who do his
dirty work, that is, clean teeth. She (somehow it always seems to be a ‘she’) is called, euphemistically, a dental hygienist. What she is, actually, is a kind of spelunker, a scaler of mountains, a mine excavator.
On Deer Isle, the new operator (an accurate designation) began by addressing me, in every sentence, by my first name, a practice I am notorious for disliking on first acquaintance, especially by a young woman at least forty years my junior. She then proceeded to dig. It turned out she has the curious habit of grunting as she passes each badly tartared place, with disgust or satisfaction I could not tell. During one interruption to the operation, I had to make a general confession to her: I had let the process go for six months, instead of the usual four. She grunted. After one unusually hard spell of gouging, she said, ‘Okay.’
Now, I am well acquainted with all these teeth. As she advances around the gaping cavity of my mouth, I anticipate her approach to the one I expect will hurt when she probes: I think it may have a hole in it. I try hard not to give any sign of pain in hopes she will not notice my weakness and say ‘Aha,’ proclaiming the need for something radical to be done.
What I dread most is the announcement which has come from every hygienist I have ever encountered: ‘You need to have deep, periodontal scraping done,’ she says. I tell her, to prevent her from inflicting even more damage than she has already done, that my gums have bled for more than fifty years. Four times I have been dispatched to periodontists. Each time I have been informed that if I did not submit to violent, surgical treatment (‘one quadrant of your mouth per visit’), I would certainly lose all my teeth. Each time I preferred not to, as Bartleby phrased it in Melville’s story. I opted to ignore the first prognosis when the dire warning was issued, and I went on doing so for thirty-five years.
(I have a clear memory that when my former husband came out of the Army after World War II, he was told by an early practitioner of the art of deep delving that he too would lose his teeth unless … He too refused. He is now almost eighty and, as far as I know, has a sufficient number of his own teeth for all practical purposes.)
That day in Maine the hygienist was in the by-now-familiar tradition. As I sat down she informed of her intention to apply Novocain and do some deep scraping. It was the first I had heard of this plan. I disabused her of her purpose and instructed her to proceed normally, to clean my teeth. She grunted, but she did it. In half an hour the ordeal was over. I was discharged, a new, soft toothbrush in hand, and my gums bleeding a little as a result of her retributive ministrations, I believed. Once again, into the breech, I have saved my teeth from the Visigoths of dental hygiene and periodontia.
While I waited in the dentist’s office on Deer Isle, I read Woodworking, a slick, glossy magazine on fine carpentry. (In Maine you find a publication like this in the reception room; in Washington, D.C., it is more likely to be People or Fortune.) From its subject matter one might expect something less coated, more homespun-looking and workmanlike, with a brown paper cover perhaps. But no matter. In its pages I learn a new meaning for the word ‘distressed’: wood purposely blemished or marred to give it an old look. ‘Country furniture is enhanced by physical distressing,’ the article says. Last week in the hospital, having watched Jane suffer extreme distress in the accustomed sense of the word, I have decided that only varieties of country furniture, not human beings, are enhanced in this way.
Maya’s second birthday: Sybil and I drive to Columbia (a manufactured community south of Baltimore) to be present at her party, an elaborate affair, with a live Mickey Mouse, a Mickey Mouse cake baked in the morning by her mother, games, a mound of presents, and an assortment of friends and relatives, all centered around the little curly-haired, blue-eyed moppet.
She was admirable in her composure, in her solemn demeanor during all the hoopla and photography. So camera-conscious is she that she has a special, fake smile she produces whenever she sees one. But I see her genuine smile of delight when she catches sight of Mickey, when he (actually her mother’s best friend, Martha) picks her up and she touches his huge ears.
‘Mickey,’ she says fondly. ‘Hello, Mickey.’
I have never understood the appeal of Mickey Mouse to young children. Every child at the party displayed the same fascination for the homely, grinning rodent. Maya delighted in having ‘Mickey’ carry her about, while she firmly resisted the efforts of infatuated adults (like me) to hold her.
The city is united over the success of its football team, the Redskins. Today they won the National Football League championship. Black and white, natives and transients, young and old, everyone here seems to care about winning the Superbowl. The Skins are the only thing that holds this disparate population together. Right now it is violently divided by the sad saga of its black former mayor, who is in jail for cocaine possession. His supporters among blacks believe he was set up and railroaded by the media and the white community. Marion Barry himself is firm in this opinion. He has had stationery printed for his letters from prison. It is headed: MARION BARRY. POLITICAL PRISONER.
I try not to think about the view of the Cove as I sit in my abbreviated apartment study. No, that is not honest. I do think about it, every time I look up from the keyboard. On the wall over the display there hangs an enlarged colored photograph of the meadow and the Cove: green lawn, blue water, dark shadows of elm and horse chestnut trees. I am still overcome by knowing that I have that scrap of land and water and sky to go home to.
Waiting for me among the apartment mail, amid galleys, book catalogues, and publicity releases, I find a biography by Judith A. Roman that interests me. It is about Annie Fields, the wife of publisher James Fields (of Ticknor & Fields), and the great and good friend of regional writer Sarah Orne Jewett. I have come upon Fields before while studying the life of Willa Cather, who visited her in her apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston.
But what fascinates me is the care, almost what one might call the scrupulous avoidance, with which the biographer explores the ‘partnership’ (as she calls it) of the widowed Mrs. Fields and Jewett. Admitting that Jewett was inclined to love women, that her important friends were women, and that ‘the conventional destiny of heterosexual marriage was not suited to her,’ the biographer still avoids any conclusion about the nature of the relationship between the two women. It is termed a ‘romantic friendship,’ a ‘Boston marriage.’
Jewett was a sophisticated stylist. But to Annie Fields she wrote daily letters when she was in residence in Maine and Fields was in Boston, using pet names like Fuffy and Pinnie, and baby talk that is often embarrassing to read. Jewett said she had no intention of marrying; further, she must have been one of the first women to declare that she ‘had more need of a wife than a husband.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson (‘Spiritual Laws’): ‘Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees.’ To me, the terms of this aphorism should be reversed. Later, in ‘Self-Reliance,’ and following the famous definition of consistency, he says: ‘If you would be a man [or a woman, is it not proper now to add?] speak today what you think today in words as hard as cannonballs, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.’
Today, Sunday, I went back to St. James, the Anglo-Catholic church I like so much. On Eighth Street off Massachusetts Avenue, in the heart of a diverse Capitol Hill population, it is a small congregation of whites and blacks, heterosexuals and homosexuals, single persons, couples, and families, all of whom must enjoy, as I do, the whole panoply of religious rite that the Anglican Church offers. The grounds are beautiful, the church is a model of small, grey-stone English architecture sitting in the midst of flowers, trees, and bushes maintained by a devoted parishioner.
There, I pray for Jane’s complete recovery, at noonday Masses, and Saturday and Sunday. I pray that Kate will carry her second child, a daughter, to full term in April and have a safe delivery.… And suddenly, my mind wanders away from the Prayers for the People. I think of Dorothy Day (exact
ly why I don’t know, unless it is that religious rites and concern for others always brings her to mind), the acquaintance of my youth, and the only saint I’ve ever known. She’s been dead about ten years, I believe. Yet for me she is often present when I worship.
Dorothy Day was a convert to Catholicism from the Episcopal Church. Before her conversion, she led a free, bohemian life, never married the father of her daughter Tamar, and was a dedicated socialist whose social views came close to anarchism in her mature years. She was a passive war resister who opposed the authority of the state on every matter of social justice and treatment of the poor, the homeless, the hungry, but was a complete conservative when it came to the rites and practices of the Catholic Church. Still, she was deeply aware of the Church’s shortcomings, of ‘the scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility to the poor.’
She took a private vow of poverty and chastity, but never became a religious. She lived the rest of her life with the poor, believing that the Sermon on the Mount was a law to be lived, not ‘an ideal to honor.’ At every point, except ritual and the sacraments, she ran counter to the American Catholic Church, believing with Romano Guardini that ‘the Church is a cross on which Christ was crucified.’
Words as hard as cannonballs.
Louise Nevelson’s sculpture comes close to serving as a graphic equivalent of fiction. Yesterday I looked through a book of her work, Dawns and Dusks, in which she talks to Diana MacKown about what it is she does. Like the fiction writer who is humanity’s magpie, she uses materials she scavenges’ for her sculpture: ‘You’re taking a discarded, beat-up piece that was no use to anyone and you place it in a position where it goes to beautiful places: museums, libraries, universities, big private houses.’
Extra Innings Page 13
