Essays

WRITERS ON WRITING;
When Inspiration Stared Stoically From an Old Photograph

By KATHRYN HARRISON for THE NEW YORK TIMES

Thirty-five years ago, in suburban Los Angeles, my grandfather showed me a photograph he had taken in Alaska in 1915. It was a picture of a native woman smoking a pipe. He said her name was Six-Mile Mary, and she stood alone in a bleak landscape, somewhere outside the new town of Anchorage. There was no house behind her, no man or child beside her, no dog, no horse, no campsite, no tree.

Her black hair was parted from forehead to crown with a line so exact it struck me as cartographic, necessary and absolute as a division of longitude. Looking at the photograph, I knew that Six-Mile Mary had neither ancestors nor kin but had invented herself, too powerful to consider beauty, and so her beauty surpassed any I had encountered before. Lingerie, lipsticks, bottles of perfume, curlers and talcum powder and Dippity-do: under her gaze the alchemy of my mother's dressing room would collapse into ash.

"Why did she smoke a pipe?" I asked my grandfather, whose rules for women prohibited the comparatively mild sins of whistling and drinking beer.

"She just did," he said.

"How did you know her?"

"I knew her, that's all."

"What were the six miles?"

He shrugged.

"She was your friend?"

"No, not a friend."

Of course not. Friendship is a human measure; Six-Mile Mary was, I already suspected, an immortal. Years away from the work that would one day consume me -- decades away from a novel I titled "The Seal Wife" -- I had seen a muse.

During the time that intervened, Six-Mile Mary appeared, often in disguise, but I recognized her. On a bench in a La Jolla, Calif., park, a blond woman sat smoking a pipe. Twelve years old, I sat next to her. When she got up, I stood, too, and followed her along the path that overlooked the beach, through the picnic area and into the dank public restroom. "Do I know you?" she demanded, and I fled.

In my life as a writer I often remind myself -- comfort myself -- with what William Faulkner said about "The Sound and The Fury." The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl's muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this tiny, grubby moment?

I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable -- always there, on the periphery of consciousness -- that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, the novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.

Afflicted with wanderlust, my grandfather, who was born in London in 1890, drifted west and north across the Atlantic, across Canada, until the land gave out and he reached the coast of Alaska. The stories he told me of living on the frozen frontier helped me to assemble, stick by stick, a town in which to put Six-Mile Mary, whose face I can no longer see. The photographs my grandfather took in the north were lost in a move.

When I consider what survived the journey from one to another neighborhood in Los Angeles: chipped china, worn rugs, mismatched sheets -- all of these unpacked and then discarded in the critical light of freshly painted rooms -- it seems impossible, and inevitable, that the album was mislaid.

Bound in creased, dry leather that left crumbs on my hands, its luminous content was hidden by a shabby disguise and remained, like the magic of fairy tales, outside mortal agendas. Even when I was a child and the image of Six-Mile Mary was in front of me, she eluded perception, an apparition caught by my grandfather's camera, one among others: The silver mirror of an arctic lake, reflecting both moon and sun. My grandfather as a young man with a full head of blond hair, jodhpurs and shotgun. A white cloud stitched to a black sky with needles of ice.

The pictures I remembered, so fragile and so necessary, fragments of a life I could not stand to lose, demanded that I imbed them in a narrative that would ensure their survival. All the corollary and not inconsiderable work of creating characters and plot, as well as a plausible place and time in which to put them, I undertook as the only means I had of preserving my connection to my grandfather. So it is all the more paradoxical, if not exactly surprising, that Six-Mile Mary still seems to me self-created, without human attachment: without the vulnerability, the need for connection, that enslaves me to writing novels.

Bigelow, the main character of "The Seal Wife," the narrative trap I set for Six-Mile Mary, is a scientist. Sent by the weather bureau to establish a meteorological observatory in the frontier town of Anchorage in 1915, he's obsessed with finding a formula that will let him understand and predict the weather. What Bigelow wants is not just to penetrate the heavens but the mind of God, or whatever force it is that throws us together in families and tears us apart.

Seduced by an Aleut woman who refuses to speak to him, seduced because she won't speak to him, whenever Bigelow is with the Aleut he searches her face for emotion. She is the only woman who has allowed him to watch her as intently, as much and as long as he wants, and the reason for this comes to him one night. She is self-possessed. There is nothing he can take from her by looking.

At the thought, he gets up from the bed and goes to the window; he rests his forehead on its cold pane. She possesses herself. How much more this makes him want her.

He is myself, of course, with the photograph of Six-Mile Mary in my hands. I made him a scientist, but like a writer he loves a woman who is more muse than mortal, so grand and self-sufficient, so complete unto herself that she would never labor over words and commas, tenses and metaphors. Six-Mile Mary's silence, and her solitude, her body that casts no shadow onto the ground: the gods take human form, but something always gives them away.

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Sin Boldly

For the first time in my writing life, I have a character for whom I want to plot a return. Naturally, this is Jennifer, the one character in Envy whose sole purpose, her raison d’etre, is to wreak havoc in the lives of the others. She is, indisputably, a Bad Girl. Even better, she is a Bad Girl who doesn’t get her comeuppance. What’s more, her arena is sex. She determines her victim, plots his seduction, effortlessly ruins his life. She suffers no guilt, at least not any her author or audience can perceive, and moves on to the next object of her fleeting attention.

“But why?” an early reader asked me, almost wringing her hands over the turbulence Jennifer left in her wake. “Why is she doing this?”

“Because,” I said. Because she can. Because she does. Because that’s who she is.

The reader nodded; then she stopped frowning; then she smiled. “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

Maybe this is a way of thumbing my nose at the patriarchy, feminism with a sense of humor. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Maybe it’s the irresistible lure of the forbidden.

More likely, it has a lot to do with the fact that my life, filled as it is with gratification, lacks excitement. A few years a go, a friend of mine embarked on an affair and destroyed her marriage to a man who was – in her estimation, anyway – decent and law-abiding to a fault. She was a Catholic, and just the previous year she’d been going to mass every day, tallying up her minor sins and little penances in a last ditch effort to reign in temptation. But once she succumbed, she was flagrantly indiscreet. Still, her decent, earnest spouse was, typically, the last to know. It was my husband who, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, took the man out for a drink and told him his wife was cheating on him.

“He used the word ‘cuckold,’” my friend told me later, both relieved and stricken when she reported that she and her soon-to-be-ex-husband had finally had it out. My freind looked at me, rather pointedly, I thought. “Don’t you think that’s weird?” she asked me. “I mean, he’s never used that word before. I was surprised he even knew it.” I shrugged, looked away, out the window, anywhere but into her eyes. It was only after the fact that I found out about my husband’s telling hers what was going on, and I’d kept the secret. An attorney and an academic, her husband used a lot of words my husband didn’t, but the literary, slightly fey and anachronistic “cuckold” wasn’t one of them.

“I just don’t understand why she’s doing this,” I said a few weeks later, to a mutual friend.

“Of course you do.”
I shook my head. “No I don’t,” I said.
“She’s bored.”
“Still.”
“Come on,” our friend said. “Look at the stuff you dabble in every day.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Shoplifting. Adultery. Murder. Weird sex.”
“Yes, but that’s on the page.”
The friend shrugged. “She doesn’t have that. You don’t know what it’s like not to be able to act out. You can do whatever you want, whatever you can think of.”
“But it isn’t real.”
“It is to you.”

She was right. Everything on the page is real to me. What’s more, my characters, over which you might imagine I have control, arrive without warning and behave as they want, without my conscious direction. They steal things, break things, eclipse the people I thought I was writing about, rearrange my plot. They torment others, they hurt themselves, they break the law – all without my permission. Often, their exits – the suicide of my favorite character in “The Binding Chair,” for example – are as unexpected as their arrivals, and leave me bereft. It sounds absurd, but for weeks after that suicide, I dragged around in shock, thinking the sorts of things one thinks under those circumstances: I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. I should have seen it coming. I knew she was depressed. And it was true. Once I examined her actions, all that the departed character had done and said in the months preceding her death had predicted that she would take her life. And yet, I hadn’t known. I loved her, and couldn’t imagine the world – the world in which I was immersed – without her.

The cast of each of my novels contains at least one female character (invariably female) that I never intended to be part of the story. Often – in Poison, The Binding Chair, and The Seal Wife – this character is the heroine, and when she popped into the story I did all I could to discourage her. After all she wasn’t part of the book I thought I was writing. But over the years I’ve grown more comfortable with the peculiarities of my job. This time, when Jennifer walked into Envy, I was delighted. Finally, here was the person who was going to take this story in hand, and push it places I couldn’t go by myself.

The book is new, but already I’ve heard back from readers who know me personally. Wow, the say. Where did she come from? Or: Imagine that person being part of you. Because, of course, she is me, or at least mine. One of the women I hold within myself, one of the ones that evens things up in this unequal world. Mostly suppressed, certainly silenced in polite company. But not entirely repressed, because I have a job that requires input from my Id.

As a reader, my interest in sequels has been limited to children’s books – by C.S. Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder, J.R. Tolkien, Enid Blyton – my devotion inspired by the transgressive characters, the ones who misbehave, mostly not out of a desire to wreak havoc so much as an expression of their personalities. It was Laura whom I loved in the Little House books; I never could care for Mary, who didn’t disobey or get her dresses torn and dirty. Some people aren’t cut out for following the rules. Some people only need hear of a rule to want to break it. I am one of these.

When I was five or six, I was told never to write on walls, a thing I hadn’t considered up until that moment. As soon as I had the opportunity to work uninterrupted I pushed aside the very heavy dresser in my room, with the strength born of desire, and with my mother’s red lipstick (compounding the crime, as I had been forbidden to touch her cosmetics) I wrote and drew all over the pastel wallpaper that had been hidden by the big piece of furniture. Then I pushed the dresser back into its place and, after doing my best to reshape the worn down point of the lipstick, put it away as well. It wasn’t until we moved out of that house, when I was ten, that the trespass was discovered, a surprise for me as much as anyone else, as I had forgotten what I’d done. This is only one example of my attraction to what is held out of reach. I don’t think I’d have lasted a day in Bluebeard’s castle. I’d never have been able to wait until he went out of town to see what the key unlocked. It was caller ID, not adulthood, that put an end to my prank phone call career.

So, I want Jennifer to come back. I miss her – not for the power she wields as much as for the exuberance with which she breaks the rules. “Sin boldly,” Martin Luther is said to have counseled. In other words, why go to hell for petty crimes? It’s Jennifer’s boldness and swagger that I like, the fact that not only does she not disguise her bad deeds, she brags about them. I wish she’d return and turn another story upside down, but it doesn’t feel within my power. Given the fact that she has a mind of her own – or at least her own piece of mine – she’ll do what she wants.

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The Mysterious Narrative of Marriage
Published in Harper’s Magazine

Discussed in this essay:

Elegy for Iris, by John Bayley
Birthday Letters, by Ted Hughes.
Intimacy, by Hanif Kureishi
Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, by Phyllis Rose.
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff.

So marriage has persisted, now, for yet another thousand years, shedding its skins, dowries giving way to prenups, vows to wishes, virginity to "virginity." Even as our nation's First Marriage apparently foundered, gay men and women lobbied for the privilege of betrothal, the legal binding of two souls together into what is still termed a sacrament but is more often understood as a lifestyle option. What is this marriage? What drives it? Love? Pragmatism? Or simply a failure of imagination?

If marriage is "a narrative construct," as Phyllis Rose defines it in her introduction to Parallel Lives--an analysis of five literary marriages, including those of Dickens and George Eliot--a "subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent," then it is necessarily influenced by a narrative tradition, the only pertinent one being the romance. Boy loves girl; girl loves boy; boy and girl transcend obstacles to that love. "The plots we choose to impose on our own lives are limited and limiting. And in no area are they so banal and sterile as in this of love and marriage. Nothing else being available to our imaginations, we will filter our experience through the romantic cliches ... a betrayal of our inner richness and complexity ..."

But is this universally true? If we have any inner richness, any complexity, aren't we capable of using such plots rather than being used by them--understanding that the romance bears as little resemblance to our own stories as do the plastic bride and groom on a wedding cake? After all, the romance is a form that, like the fairy tale, tends to draw a "happily ever after" curtain of privacy at the altar. The marriage plot (its most recent, and recently vilified, popular exemplar being Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary) contains all that happens up until the wedding and nothing after. And although many novels and movies unravel a marriage by means of adultery or disaffection, what precedes the breakdown goes unreported, secure inside the inviolate words "happily ever after."

How we met, what we wore, the movie we saw, the meal we ate--all these are part of a myth manufactured for our children, our parents, our friends. They don't betray the rich and complex truth but protect it from scrutiny. They are the mask that allows us privacy.

The courtship between Vladimir Nabokov and Vera Slonim, exhaustively examined in Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), by Stacy Schiff, began in 1923 on a spring night in Berlin, on a bridge. A young woman appeared, wearing a black satin mask. This may not have been to disguise, however, but to identify herself as the woman who wore it to a masquerade ball Vladimir had recently attended. Or, Schiff wonders, could Vera have studied the young poet's work so closely to have known to choose the one accessory Vladimir might find irresistible? "You are my mask," Vladimir wrote to Vera eight months later.

For biographers the Nabokovs have long presented a conspicuously tempting story. It is impossible to consider one Nabokov without the other: the mask she embodied was always held firmly before the face of their marriage, obscuring its real features from all who might want to map a symbiosis so apparently complete that the borders between husband and wife remain blurred, even--readers may suspect--for the Nabokovs themselves. To reporters, fans, biographers--to all the curious--Vera presented herself as not only the artist's mate but as his secretary, agent, and interpreter. Although she denied any substantive contribution, she was often assumed to have at least edited his prose. It has become the one great question of Nabokov scholars: Just where did she leave off and he begin? Now that both husband and wife have retreated into the assured privacy of death, those who admire his genius rake through manuscripts and correspondence in order to be sure that the genius was really his, all his. Unless it was--was it? hers as well. And yet, what cunning people they could be, and how inclined to obfuscations. Could this image of perfect union be just that: a cocktail intended to satisfy our vulgar romantic fantasy of a love so profound that identity is giddily lost?

Nabokov's novels became the country in which the two displaced Russians traveled. Whether in America or Switzerland, they lived as collaborators in a sophisticated land where sentiment, especially romantic feeling, is punished. Consider Lolita's poor Mrs. Haze. Literally blinded by emotion, she runs into the path of a car, leaving her daughter for Humbert.

Narrative is made from the rubble of experience, a necessarily retrospective process of assembling those details that contribute to the chosen story, discarding others, equally true, that might resolve into another picture. As the controller of information about her marriage, Vera Nabokov deliberately disseminated certain details. She conceived the narrative (outlined it, anyway); the grunt work of assemblage she left to biographers, some more inclined than others to succumb to the romance. As Rose warns, "Easy stories drive out hard ones. Simple paradigms prevail over complicated ones."

Romance: We learn and relearn its catechism from novels such as The Bridges of Madison County, movies such as The English Patient--stories in which Love outlives lovers, its divinity proved by immortality. Consider the couples we cherish. Think, for example, of Vronsky and Anna, Gable and Lombard, Orpheus and Eurydice, Lancelot and Guinevere, JFK and Jackie, Tristan and Isolde, Heathcliff and Cathy, Pinkerton and Madame Butterfly, Tracy and Hepburn, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet. Married or not, happy or not, faithful or not, still, in our conception, our myth-making, these pairs are eternally bound. The narratives we collectively invent for historical figures ignore the lawful claims of a spouse, the distraction of adultery, the right and obligation of kings. As storytellers, we make life incidental to Love.

One of the lovers must die, either completely or in significant measure, because the consummation of romantic Love isn't marriage, it's death. How unsatisfying it would be if Anna never jumped in front of the train, if Edward VIII hadn't died as a king to be reborn as a commoner, if any of these loves had cooled and become reasonable.

To confuse romance with marriage, to take the mask for the face, is to betray not an inner richness but an infantile wish for total immersion into the other, for escape from adulthood by means of a backward journey whose ultimate destination is the womb and hence nothingness, pre-life. Romance sets its face toward the past, toward a non-being quite opposite from the kind of nothingness we anticipate in reality. Marriage is a far more complex collaboration than that of romance; a great portion of the burden of marriage is a forward-looking consciousness, the contemplation of death and of its partner, existential aloneness.

John Bayley's Elegy for Iris, a memoir justly praised for its wisdom and gentility, is a calm rumination on the "sympathy in apartness" Bayley found with Iris Murdoch, his wife of more than forty years. What might at first seem the author's dispassionate resignation to mortal disappointment unfolds to reveal an evolved consciousness. Reminiscing about his honeymoon, Bayley describes a leisurely afternoon in an Italian cafe, the newlyweds' table attended by a man they privately named Kafka, both for his physical resemblance to the writer and for the tragic cast of his features. Their waiter's apparent misery, the sadness of "an unknown life," disturbed Bayley, who turned to consider the woman to whom he had pledged himself:

Iris seemed to be in a reverie, too. I took her hand and it pressed mine.
What was she thinking? I had no idea, any more than I had in the case of
Kafka, and I knew very well there was no way to find out. But this
realization reassured me deeply: it made me as happy as the hypothetical
woes of Kafka had made me feel sad. Such ignorance, such solitude! They
suddenly seemed the best part of love and marriage. We were together
because we were comforted and reassured by the solitariness each saw and
was aware of in the other.
"So married life began," Bayley tells us ...
And the joys of solitude. No contradiction was involved. The one went
perfectly with the other. To feel one-self held and cherished and
accompanied, and yet to be alone. To be closely and physically entwined,
and yet feel solitude's friendly presence, as warm and undesolating as
contiguity itself.
Such ignorance, such solitude ... the best part of love and marriage.

Before an audience of potential lovers and partners, whether conventional or not, heterosexual or not, to invoke ignorance and solitude as the better part of love seems less subversive than opaque. But if not the best part of marriage then certainly a part of the best marriages, the ignorance Bayley invokes is what saves us from the knowledge that destroys one partner's integrity, from the knowledge that refuses to allow boundaries to exist between lovers. Of course a husband cannot know his wife's private, secret self, nor she his. If, like one of Bluebeard's wives, she insists upon breaking into the secret room of his soul, she will be dismembered by the primal rage and appetite she finds there.
Which. is not to say that a wife's core is less dark and bestial. Consider one of the poems from Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, a collection that might have been titled Elegy for Sylvia:

THE MINOTAUR

The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard--
Mapped with the scars of my whole
life.

That came under the hammer.
The high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.

"Marvelous!" I shouted, "Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of
your poems!"
And later, considered and calmer,

"Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away." Deep in the cave
of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?

The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth,

Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father--
And your own corpse in it.

Hughes, himself vilified as a kind of Bluebeard for pushing Plath into her oedipal dungeon, picks, like John Bayley, through memories of traveling with his new wife in the late 1950s; but Hughes cannot afford any leisurely, contented retrospective. He is searching everywhere for significance, for the sign he missed: the one that might have warned him of Plath's suicide and the long tragedy of his life. Could it have been the sculpture of her head that they discarded, or the bat that bit him on the Boston Common? How should they have interpreted the "giant elk [that] detached itself abruptly/ From the conifer black, wheeled its rigging/Right above the bonnet and vanished, like a sign/From some place of omens ..."?

Wherever they go--France, Spain, America--Hughes and Plath are always turned inward and backward, exploring Plath's interior landscape, both of them falling and drowning in her dark obsessions. Here is the inverse of synergy: the brutal economy of romance, in which one person's doom becomes two people's destinations. And take note: it isn't Plath's identity that is compromised by the journey. Seduced by his wife's fixation on her dead father, once Hughes has penetrated the secret Plath, it is he who disappears.

So I had no idea I had stepped
Into the telescopic sights
Of the paparazzo sniper
Nested in your brown iris.
Perhaps you had no idea either,
So far off, half a mile maybe,
Looking towards me. Watching me
Pin the sea's edge down.
No idea
How that double image,
our eye's inbuilt double exposure
Which was the projection
Of your two-way heart's diplopic
error,
The body of the ghost and me the
blurred see-through
Came into single focus,
Sharp-edged, stark as a target,
Set up like a decoy
Against that freezing sea
From which your dead father had just
crawled.
I did not feel
How, as your lenses tightened,
He slid into me.

Reading this, the terrifying evocation of rape--He slid into me--and obliteration, it is difficult to believe in Hughes's alleged villainy, his victimization of Plath. It is equally difficult to remain enamored of any love that must pin down the loved one's inner sea. If Ted Hughes didn't entirely bridge the gap, still he never recovered from what he saw from shore. The poems that make up Birthday Letters range from frightening to deeply sad; it is a compelling, irresistibly readable collection. And yet how much of its ability to move us depends on the collaboration that all its audience knows? How much rests on the ghost of another poet, Plath herself?

Were Emma Bovary to live now and take the opportunity to recount her own tragedy, she might speak in a voice like that of the narrator of Hanif Kureishi's autobiographical novel, Intimacy, polluted by notions of romance, driven into adultery's indifferent arms by bad novels and worse movies. A man's explanation, on the eve of his departure, of the disappointments and disaffection that allow (ordain?) his abandonment of two young sons and their mother, Intimacy holds the fascination of a car wreck, the sickening promise of voyeurism. Can the author possibly realize just how much he betrays of his life, his psyche? The content of the "novel" is so clearly and completely drawn from the author's experience that although Intimacy was published as fiction it was received, venomously, as fact. The book's cynical, worldly pose, its ennui, disguises a desperate faith in old-fashioned biblical knowing, in which physical intercourse implies a thorough penetration of mind and soul, the kind of knowing opposed by Bayley's ignorance: ignorance as a state of self-sufficiency, a capacity to stand alone, without needing to crash the boundaries of another personality, to experience all that might be inside it.

Self-obsessed, miserable, Jay, the book's narrator, has taken psychic refuge in the idea of a perfect mate, in what symbiosis with such a creature would offer, to the point that he self-protectively ridicules the very kind of union that has become his unattainable grail. Speaking of a friend he names Asif, the emblematic steadfast and loyal spouse: "I recall him describing how much he enjoys sucking her cunt. Apparently he's grunting and slurping down there for hours, after all this time, and wonders whether his soul will only emerge through her ears." Jay's tone is dismissive and mocking, but this ugliness is a defense. What agony to admit that boring and conventional Asif might have found his way to a communion the artistic Jay glorifies.

Trying to explain his own chronic unfaithfulness, Jay describes a woman's skirt as

a transitional object; both a thing in itself and a means of getting
somewhere else. This became my paradigm of important knowledge. The world
is a skirt I want to lift up.

Later, I imagined that with each woman I could start afresh. There was no
past. I could be a different person, if not a new one, for a time. Also I
used women to protect me from other people. Wherever I might be, if I were
huddled up with a whispering woman who wanted me, I could keep the world
outside my skin. I could stop wanting other women. At the same time I liked
to keep my options open; desiring other women kept me from the exposure and
susceptibility of loving just the one. There are perils in deep knowledge.

What a frightened and childish voice this is. Yes, the skirt is a transitional object, and the transition is backward and inward, evoking the first skirt that kept the world at bay: the primal Ur-skirt of Mother. Interestingly, the entire conceit of Intimacy implies the protection of a huge mother's clothing: the identities of Jay and Hanif Kureishi are so blurred that the copy line "a novel" is the book's only pure fiction. To read it is to picture a child who turns his face into his tall mother's skirts (skirts as limitless and encompassing as a world) and assumes he is hidden, while half-knowing, really, that he can't be. Intimacy is distressing not so much for the familiar story of family rupture as for its sobering close-up of the vicious Moebius-strip logic that threatens to consume all that's left of Jay's life. Approaching middle age, cataloging the deterioration of his flesh, he insists on his fantasy of arrested time, of "no past," and thus no responsibility, no future, no death. "I am not ready for the wisdom of misery," he says. "I have had that with Mother," the one woman he cannot escape.

What we've all had with Mother are undrawn boundaries, individuality that is, as yet, unrealized. We began not knowing where we left off and the loved one began; our flesh was one, and this absolute togetherness still has the power both to compel and to terrify. How we value our separateness, our distinct identity, our integrity, and yet how we long to cast it off. Remembering an Eden of quickly gratified desire and no responsibility, we worship unattainable, self-annihilating love, a union that makes one flesh of two.

In Sex on the Brain, the Biological Differences between Men and Women, Deborah Blum tells us that "early gene transfer essentially involved bacteria melting into each other, with one sucking up the other ... the union of two different genetic packages: the theoretical beginning of sex." To put it another way, with respect to interpersonal relationships there is no more primitive paradigm than two nuclei slopping into each other. Losing oneself in another may be romance, but it isn't love, nor is it fully human. Beyond the loneliness of higher life forms, the point Shakespeare makes in one after another love sonnet is that a rose can only smell so achingly sweet to those who know that someday they will die to that smell, to it and to every other joy and sorrow. The essay "An Exile's Psalm" by the poet Mark Doty examines a new relationship even as it recalls the death of his longtime companion:

Setting up housekeeping together, I get so tired that I wonder if I can
possibly get it together to pick out towels or napkins; aren't I too old
for this? Meaning, of course, not in years but in attitude. Aren't the
domestic trappings, the daily ephemera, an elaborate defense against the
void, a set of frills placed in opposition to the ineluctable fact of
death?

In Iris and Her Friends, the unnecessary sequel to Elegy for Iris, Bayley reports on the last car ride he shared with his wife, traveling to the nursing home where, he knew, she would soon die. "But it feels more as if we had just got married, or as if we were just going to get married and were going in the taxi together to the registrar, holding hands." Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together--to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential.

What is identity if not the integrity of a personality, its separateness, whatever might be held inside the moat that divides one soul's territory from the limitless landscapes of other psyches? Would there be anyone with whom to fall in love if there weren't the moat and what it protects? Bayley says of Iris Murdoch that "the question of identity had always puzzled her. She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was. I said that she must know what it was like to be oneself, even to revel in the consciousness of oneself, as a secret and separate person--a person unknown to any other." The words "unknown to any other" frighten us, because just as humans deny death, they turn their faces from their essential and unavoidable aloneness. We invent a love that cannot die and place ourselves inside it. Was that what Hughes imagined in the beginning, when "we knew we'd live forever"--a marriage immaculate as a time capsule, blind and uterine, perfect mates the twins it holds? Later, he pictured something far different:

... Alone
Either of us might have met with a
life.
Siamese-twinned, each of us festering
A unique soul-sepsis for the other,
Each of us was the stake
Impaling the other ...

It's hard to imagine that Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, author of such fierce and intellectual books, each unmistakably her own, might have lacked a sense of identity. And in fact Bayley doesn't believe she did. Her pose is belied by the report that "the ghastliest moment of what was for her an extremely gruesome occasion"--marriage in a registrar's office, sealed with a pawn-shop ring--was when she found herself "lumped among a lot of Mrs. Bayleys." A person without attachment to the notion of identity wouldn't take such exception to the commonplace of sharing a surname with mother- and sisters-in-law.

In her own words, from the novel The Book and the Brotherhood, which casts a shrewd, skeptical eye on the conceit of romance:

... I hereby give myself. I love you. You are the only being whom I can
love absolutely with my complete self, with all my flesh and mind and
heart. You are my mate, my perfect partner, and I am yours... As we look
at each other we verify, we know, the perfection of our love, we recognize
each other. Here is my life, here if need be is my death. It's life and
death ...

So even when serving up the myth of love, represented by the inherently juvenile passion of Jean and Crimond, Murdoch doesn't lose sight of identity, of complete self--for without it, how is recognition possible?

One or the other half of a marriage is more apt to recall the eerie sense of recognizing a mate than they are any gooey lovesick symptoms. Recognition is impossible, strictly speaking, if the person you behold is one you've never met. But this particular recognition is of the profile of an identity that dovetails with your own so absolutely that it suggests your own familiar outline --analogous to finding the jigsaw piece whose color and contour lock snugly into yours. This isn't loss but confirmation of self--I know you, you are the one who was made for me--and the excitement is of that self-affirming discovery, different from the short-lived euphoria of conjuring what Kureishi describes as the satisfaction of desire: "No wonder everyone wants it--as if they have known such love before and can barely remember it, yet are compelled ever after to seek it as the single thing worth living for." The words "compelled to seek" betray entrapment; they evoke the misery of bewitchments, of receding mirages, pots of fairy gold.

Marriage is work, sometimes drudgery, the same as required to build any lasting structure, but the burden of effort is small compared with the anguish of having failed the ideal of marriage, of having perhaps killed it. Hughes laments,

Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned
back
To you, with that armful of fox--

If I had grasped that whatever comes
with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a
marriage--
I would not have failed the test.
Would you have failed it?

But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

Strange to picture Ted and Sylvia in a marriage counselor's office, although were they alive today they might fight before a paid referee, hoping for a diagnosis, a prescription, or at least a way to divvy up the weight of guilt. Intimacy's Jay and Susan see a therapist:

The woman, who presumably believed in the ungovernable desire of the
unconscious, appeared, nonetheless, to be some kind of rationalist. She
replied patiently that relationships did become less passionate. This was
to be expected. Enthusiasm would be replaced by other consolations.

Consolations! Mad to learn what they were, I could have kissed those
Consolations from her lips!
"Yes?" I said.
"Contentment," she murmured. I leaned forward once more. "Sorry?"
She repeated it: contentment.
She was all for maturity and acceptance. Yes!
Sobbing Susan was nodding.
How I wished I were nodding--with my face between Nina's legs, my hands
holding her arse up like a dish I am hungry for, my tongue in all her holes
at once--tears, dribble, cunt juice ...

No accident that it is on cunnilingus that Jay dwells, to fantasies of the oral that he returns, as if he might talk his way back to the place he remembers, his glib ability to articulate a return ticket to the womb's wet entrance. Nina this time, then someone else, any woman, all women: Mother.

"My children hunt through their toy boxes, chucking aside the once-cherished... Can we do this with people? That would be considered shallow. We must treat people as if they were real. But are they?" Not if we can't see them. Not if they disappear into infantile need. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, describes Jay's plight, one of narcissism: "Real is only what is within; what is outside is real only in terms of my needs...."

If only Jay were stupid, but his misfortune is an agile mind that guesses what a primitive heart won't allow.

I know love is dark work; you have to get your hands dirty. If you hold
back, nothing interesting happens. At the same time, you have to find the
right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you; too far
and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

Thus the dilemma of childhood, how to establish distance from a powerful parent, is mistaken for the dilemma of marriage, how to stand together in consciousness of human mortality. There is an intuitive logic, and beauty, in the scene Stacy Schiff paints of the Nabokovs' meeting, a prescription, if you will: Two lovers on a bridge. A mask---a story--that allows vision while protecting privacy. On one bank is the past, on the other the future. Those truly wed will walk life's span together, not as one but as two.