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The man whose wife died, died just as they were making a new life, setting themselves in order. They had planned to go from the good to the better; they had retired to the loved summer house. With an improvident madness quite unlike their usual way, this couple, not knowing death was in the garden, raced after perfection. I would rather cook looking toward the south, she said, and so the kitchen was moved from the north. He fell in love with porches in the summer and determined that his heart’s wish was to sit on the porch all winter, and so foundations were laid, great glass windows lay glistening on the lawn and were finally set in place, long evenings over catalogues produced a beautiful Swedish stove, and the splendid new porch changed the shape of the old house, making it and the couple new and daring and full of light.
They were not alone. All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor, trees cut down, trees planted. Profoundly difficult renovations undertaken to make life easier. The children’s inheritance was used up, but one day there would be the house, reshaped often out of childhood dreams and wounds of six decades ago.
And then the wife died, just when all was ready and in harmony.
The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch. Bachelors again, in their depopulated settings, like large animals in their cages in the zoo, with the name of their species on the door.
Mason at least knew one pure, perfect joy. That was to go to the polling station near the courthouse and to write in the names of Communist Party candidates on election day.
lmao
Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their look, their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.
Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.
Love affairs with their energy and hope do not arrive again and again, forever. So, you no longer play tennis, no longer move from place to place in the summer, no longer understand what use you can make of the sight of the Andes or the columns of Luxor.
We sat in a dark booth and Madame Z. ordered a martini. An American martini, she said twice. The doctor crumpled and sagged over a beer, a Heineken. Supporting home industries, his wife said.
lol
A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday Times.
amazing line. the american way
The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the bright woman — with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of “heaps of money” — can be a suitable candidate for liberation. No, that role should by rights belong to the depressed, child-less, loveless Mrs. Linde and her lonely drudgery. The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. And Nora never for a moment trusted Helmer. If she had done so she would long ago have told him about her troubles.
The habit is to play Nora too lightly in the beginning and too heavily in the end. The person who has been charming in Acts 1 and 2 puts on a dowdy traveling suit in Act 3 and is suddenly standing before you as a spinster governess. If the play is to make sense, the woman who has decided to leave her husband must be the very same woman we have known before. We may well predict that she will soon be laughing and chattering again and eating her macaroons in peace, telling her friends — she is going back to her hometown — what a stick Helmer turned out to be. Otherwise her freedom is worth nothing. Nora’s liberation is not a transformation, but an acknowledgment of error, of having married the wrong man. Her real problem is money — at the beginning and at the end. What will she live on? What kind of work will she do? Will she get her children back? Who will be her next husband? When the curtain goes down it is only the end of Volume One.
Hedda takes every chance to act badly and to hurt others. Sometimes she does so with a languid pettiness and sometimes with malignant determination. By nature all ice and indifference, she accomplishes her delinquencies without a rush of agitation or beating emotion; and that is why it is hard to remember that throughout Ibsen’s four-act play Hedda does not show a single, decent, generous impulse. We consider her at her best when she shows nothing beyond her style. How is it possible that with all these distressing qualities, Hedda Gabler challenges and pleases and is the most fascinating, humanly interesting of Ibsen’s women. Actresses long to play the role and she has had a steady public since 1890. The blurring, the murkiness of her bad nature are themselves dramatic discoveries. The audience, when it is a woman, knows her own George Tesman; and the male is ever willing to risk his peace with a Hedda.
Zelda was diagnosed abroad by the distinguished Dr. Bleuler as a schizophrenic. She herself thought Dr. Bleuler “a great imbecile,” but we have little reason to imagine other physicians would have been more moderate or hopeful in their predictions. Her mental confusion was sometimes alarming; she suffered, on occasion, disorientation, hallucinations, great fears and depressions, even to the point of a number of suicide attempts. But these low periods could not have been other than transitory because her letters throughout her illness are much too lucid, controlled, alive with feeling and painful awareness. She showed eccentricities, shifts of mood, odd smiles, nightmares, withdrawals, obsessive behavior — at times. At the same time, and much more to the point, is the lucidity, the almost unbearable suffering over her condition and her full recognition of it — and the most important and moving thing, an extraordinary zeal and strenuous effort to get well, be real, to function — above all to work at something. The latter desperate need is an astonishing desire and hope for one who had been a great beauty, who was the wife of a famous man, and who had lived a life of spectacular indulgence, along with feminine expectations of protection and love.