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Meredith's great forgotten novel brings these thoughts into focus. The language is of another century as is the social circumstance, but the central interest in Diana's headlong plunge toward herself is of a remarkable immediacy. When Diana's love affair goes on the rocks, we are not at all awash in regret, so absorbing are the real events of her inner life -- the excitement of her false independence, the swiftness with which she spins out of control, the ugliness when she feels threatened -- and so moving the intelligence with which she tries to take in the meaning of what she has lived. It is the drama of the self we are witnessing -- that astonishing effort to climb up out of original shame -- and the awful, implicit knowledge that love, contrary to all sentimental insistence, cannot do the job for us. For better and for worse, that effort is a solitary one, more akin to the act of making art than of making family. It acknowledges, even courts, loneliness. Love, on the other hand, fears loneliness, turns sharply away from it.
All these men -- a diplomat, a historian, a paid wanderer -- struggled mightily with demons they could not master. But every day, throughout their lives, each one went out to do battle with the world; doing battle with the world allowed them to do battle with themselves; doing battle with themselves they brought their miseries under enough control to achieve sufficient detachment; achieving detachment they did the work that gives human existence its meaning.
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Clover had no similar relief: nothing was expected of her. She ran the salon, she socialized skillfully, she exercised a wit that as time passed yielded less pleasure, less energy, less meaning. In short: she had no work. No work meant inner drift. The men in her circle were each compelled by inner necessity to convert disability to virtue -- especially Henry whose genius it was to make of his own self-doubt an instrument of historic interpretation -- but Clover remained an intelligent woman who feared being thought a blue, condemned to back off from the only kind of struggle that would have sufficiently freed her from the same conviction of inner worthlessness that dogged the men around her. With no useful way to vent themselves, her anxieties went underground where they increasingly transformed into postures of spiritual inertness, hesitating thought, demoralized will. In time she became that which women were accused of being by nature.
Certainly, she had read Esther, but what had she made of it? Nowhere, in any of her letters, does she say. We know only that now, in the winter of 1883, she had become dangerously bored. Everything and everyone was tiresome to her. Besieged by arrivistes, she had come to hate her own five o'clocks. ("Life is like a prolonged circus here now," she wrote her father.) People still came to dinner, but she no longer cared to go out. Ladies' luncheons were "a style of killing time which I detest"; diplomatic dinners were attended by people with brains "attenuated to a startling degree"; large parties were "hot rooms and crowds" that "take so much more from one than they give." She preferred to stay home and read.
How could it have been otherwise? In any life, the doubts, the depressions, the absence of self-belief -- if not engaged with --progressively worsen, moving ineluctably from occasional ailment to recurrent episode to chronic condition. The condition occupies space, eats up air, consumes energy. Energy that should have fed experience now feeds the unlived life. The unlived life is not a quiescent beast. The unlived life is a little animal in a great rage, barely permitting of survival. And sometimes not even that. Sometimes, it ends an assassin.
She had discovered something else as well: that under the best of circumstances marriage was an opposition of wills. One or the other of the married couple was always being gently, subtly, lovingly pushed out of shape; dominated; made to do the bidding of the other. Usually -- but this was not her theme -- it was the woman because it was the woman who came to married life the least experienced, untried and unknowing.
Women, more often than men, awakened from the long dream of adolescence to find themselves bound in perpetuity into their lives without any realization of how they had gotten there. Men suffered, too, from the condition -- she could see that -- but when all was said and done, after the awakening men knew better how to make use of the baptism by fire. Women were left staring into the fire.
But against the fear and the anxiety, the drive was gathering. Slowly, there accumulated in her the compulsion to write out of the experience of her inner life. To discover for herself what it was she knew about human beings, really knew, and to spend her life exploring that territory. What would her true subject be? What would make the words come alive under her pen? What did she know on the surface of things, and what did she know down to the bone? To think about what she felt: that would be her life's work.
In 1912 she left McClure's for good (she had tried a number of times before but could not manage it), settled into an apartment on Bank Street with her friend Edith Lewis (a copyeditor at the magazine), and began to live the remarkably quiet life that produced an unbroken flow of novels, stories, and essays over the next thirty years. Greenwich Village in the twenties and thirties was exploding with Freud, Marx, and Emma Goldman, but for Cather it was all happening at a great distance. In the country of her life these were border disturbances. By 1918 she had written O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. From the beginning, her books brought recognition and money. She spent the winter in New York, the summer in Nebraska and New Mexico. In the fall or spring she often went to New Hampshire. A number of times she traveled to Europe. Music remained a passion, and many of her friends were musical. She grew handsome as she grew older but, essentially, remained the large smiling plain-faced woman she had always been, wearing schoolgirl middy blouses into her fifties, unfashionable and immature until it was safe, in her famous sixties, to put on the beautiful silk dresses she did know how to wear.
not the life i want to live but i love this for her
Still later, Fred Ottenburg, the rich man who loves her but, like all the men in this book, wants Thea to have her life, says to her,
Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? . . . A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learned the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. . . . You are not that sort of person. . . . You will always break through into the realities.
It is from passages like these -- vivid, sustained, dominating -- that The Song of the Lark draws its power. Cather makes a great romance of the loneliness of the artist's vocation, into which she pours her own defiant necessity, but that is not her subject at all. Her subject is the conviction that in pursuit of the deepest self there is glory, and in the absence of that pursuit there is emptiness.
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In 1925 Woolf and Rhys seemed sophisticated, Cather an American provincial. When Jean Rhys wrote "he left me all smashed up," she meant, "life and history inevitably leave one all smashed up." Cather, on the other hand, wrote as one who saw herself pitted against the elements in a fair fight, and there was no question but that the fight was worthy. Not only worthy, obligatory. At all times one's life is worth having.
What it comes down to is this. If you don't understand your feelings, you're pulled around by them all your life. If you understand but are unable to integrate them, you're destined for years of pain. If you deny and despise their power, you are lost. This is what the great characters in Hardy and Ibsen are about: women and men in the very grip. In Hardy they struggle unsuccessfully, and come to sorrow. In Ibsen they repress and deny, and they are doomed.
The story of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger belongs to the dramatists, not the critics. It is a tale of emotional connection made early, never fully grasped, then buried alive in feeling the protagonists kept hidden from themselves. Such feeling is like a weed pushing up through concrete. When the hurricane is over, and the world is littered with destruction, it is still waving in the wind.
i wouldnt say im fully convinced by this argument but i do love her aplomb
She told herself that she would not contact him, that February in 1950, but the minute she reached Freiburg she picked up the phone. Within hours he was at the hotel. Two days later she wrote to him,
When the waiter announced your name it was as though time had stopped. Then, in a flash, I became aware -- I have never before admitted it, not to myself and not to you and not to anyone else -- that the force of my impulse [to get in touch] has mercifully saved me from committing the only truly unforgivable disloyalty, from mishandling my life. But you must know one thing . . . that had I done so, it would have been out of pride only -- that is, out of pure, plain, crazy stupidity. Not for any reason.
Three months later Heidegger sent her four letters in quick succession to say that her return to his life had brought him joy; that she alone was close to him when he was thinking; that he dreamed of her living nearby and of running his fingers through her hair. He sounded like a man newly charged, filled with hope and longing, excited and immensely glad to be alive.
man