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‘Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says on her answering machine, ‘could cope with much more than you. You’re a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen,’ he says. ‘What I have done is nothing compared to what Victor Andreasen did to Tove Ditlevsen.’ The Danish author Tove Ditlevsen and Victor Andreasen, the editor-in-chief of Ekstra Bladet, stayed together their whole lives, almost, no matter what one did to the other. Because they loved each other. ‘We love each other, Ida! You know that!’
Tove Ditlevsen, she answers in their imagined conversations, ended up killing herself. Tove Ditlevsen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and Victor Andreasen couldn’t take any more and left her, she reminds herself. Perhaps Tove Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner. Then she might not have ended up in a psychiatric hospital, she might not have killed herself, who knows. Tove Ditlevsen planned to write a book about her life with Victor Andreasen, whom she referred to as a highly intelligent psychopath, did you know that, the title of which would be The Woman Who Put Up With Everything, a bittersweet title, if you ask me, as if she might well have many regrets and would have done things differently had she had the chance, she tells herself quietly in their imagined conversations.
omg lol
He tries letters, but he writes the way he speaks and she can’t answer him. It would take a novel to explain to him what it was like for her, a completely different story to the one he would have written, she can feel it the few times she talks to him on the phone, before she gives up. He gets irritated, he says that she is wrong, that if she had changed then they could have made it work, whereas she believes that he was the one who had to change, but she no longer believes in change, she has lost her faith.
i get it
‘You never listened,’ he says on her answering machine. ‘You never took on board the things I struggled with in our relationship, which I tried to discuss with you repeatedly, but you just carried on doing what you always did.’
Does he mean that she should have stopped travelling, stopped spending time with other people because he had told her how anxious it made him feel? Should she have called him more often, done fewer of the many things he didn’t like her doing, would that have been to listen to him, to follow his prescriptions, put herself in a cage so that he would feel safer? Assume his contempt for everything he despised, his enemies and his points of view because not doing so would lead to sanctions and pain? She reads his letters and argues with them in the evenings, lies awake at night and argues with them, there is so much she wants to say, but even thinking about it is exhausting.
boundaries!!! lol
Whenever you felt uncomfortable, you let your discomfort rain down on me in the form of aggression and recriminations, you poured it over me rather than hold back, as if every uncomfortable feeling which my behaviour produced in you was my fault and my problem, never yours. And I let it happen, that was my fault, our tragedy. I love you, but we can’t be together because nothing is going to change, and everything that has happened, the things we did to take revenge, to survive, which bought us temporary relief, will tear us apart if we were to meet and talk, so it is the end, it really is over. I’m trying to understand it, not to be angry – not to hate you because you ruined it – you ruined it!
HE: You were bored in a way that makes men want to know a woman.
lol
SHE (softly, as if in an aside): What is your wife like?
HE (purposefully): Beautiful. I'm a man who's happy with his wife.
(Pause.)
SHE: So am I. I'm a woman who's happy with her husband.
(This exchange charged with real emotion, which the ensuing moment covers.)
oof
(The proprietress of the bar turns out a light. The record stops playing. They're in semi-darkness. The late but eluctable hour when the cafes close is fast approaching. They both close their eyes, as if seized by a feeling of modesty. The well-ordered world has thrown them out, for their adventure has no place in it. No use fighting. She suddenly understands this. When they raise their eyes again, they literally smile "in order not to cry". She gets up. He does nothing to restrain her. They are outside, in the night, in front of the cafe. She stands facing him.)
SHE: It's sometimes necessary to keep from thinking about these difficulties the world makes. If we didn't we'd suffocate.
He's not really a dandy, but neither is he careless about his appearance. He is not a libertine. He has a wife he loves, and two children. And yet he likes women. But he's never made a career as a "lady's man." He believes that that sort of career is a career of contemptible "substitution" and most suspect. That anyone who has never known the love of a single woman has never really known what it is to love, has perhaps never even attained real manhood.
It's for this very reason that his affair with the young French woman is a real love affair, even though it's a chance adventure. It's because he doesn't believe in the virtue of chance affairs that he can live this one with such sincerity, with such violence.
from the portrait of the Japanese