by
Cathy Curtis
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Joking to the Clarks that she figured The New Yorker had bought her two stories “merely as an income tax deduction,” she was pleased that one was about to be published.108 “A Season’s Romance” is about Adele, an earnest and impecunious art history graduate student who is swept off her feet by Matt, a brassy, middle-aged, twice-divorced American ad man who treats her to the luxe life in Europe. Back in New York, she feels disconnected from her friends and unable to continue her studies, but she can’t marry her lover because his office is moving him to Texas. Elizabeth mined her own experience as an impoverished graduate student with increasing distaste for her studies coupled with a desperate need to remain in New York. Once again the story features a man in a “cheap bachelor apartment,” but no lovemaking takes place there. (In contrast to Mary McCarthy’s graphic stories about young women’s involvements with older men, Elizabeth always avoided describing the mechanics of sex.) “A Season’s Romance” is curiously bloodless, more like a sociological case study than a persuasive narrative. During these years, Elizabeth seemed wedded to a detached, observational approach. Katharine White queried her about several aspects of the initial draft, including a certain peculiarity about “the romance itself.” It struck her that Matt “behaves with so much respect and tenderness, as if he were merely a suitor.” While the couple seemed to have been living together in Europe, they didn’t appear to be intimate in New York, “where only nightclubs and taxis are mentioned.”109 The published version has Matt telling Adele that he feels uncomfortable having such a well-bred woman as his mistress: riddle solved. And yet the reader is hard put to discover a true connection between the couple, perhaps because we see the affair only from Adele’s point of view.
oooo
In December, she received a “first reading agreement” from The New Yorker; the magazine would have first refusal rights for her submissions, which would be paid by the word, plus an extra 25 percent and an annual cost-of-living increase. Money was always on Elizabeth’s mind. Although she regretted having bought a “monstrous” TV on sale—she and Cal were now ignoring it in favor of their classical FM radio station and phonograph records—she felt “a sort of nagging obligation to the beastly TV [sic], merely because I paid money for it.”117 To friends (who would have understood the implicit comparison with radio), she explained that the problem with TV was that “it involved a surrender of one’s sight. . . . the total self goes into a TV program; and they are grotesquely bad. . . . Worst of all . . . no matter how big your house is, one TV set ruins its charm, just as if you had a built in odor of some kind.”118
wow wish those still existed
But she did summon energy for entertaining luminaries of the literary world. Recalling a visit to the Lowells, the playwright and poet William Alfred said, “I’d never talked to people who cared that much about words. It was absolutely electric.”15 Edmund Wilson often dropped by when visiting his dentist in Boston. “A drink seems to dry his tears and his blood,” Elizabeth remarked. “He is . . . of inexhaustible interest to us because his interest in things seems inexhaustible.” Adrienne Rich often visited on Sundays with her husband and children. Elizabeth would remember her as “so alert, so intelligent, so witty.”16 Sixty-nine-year-old T. S. Eliot, now married to a woman less than half his age, was supposed to be the guest of honor at the Lowells’ dinner for eight in May, but a night of dancing with her gave him heart palpitations. He did come to dinner the following autumn, gracing a table of other major literary figures that included Wilson and his wife, Elena, and the critic I. A. Richards—a wearying evening for Elizabeth as hostess.
lmao
Barely two weeks later, in October, Cal wrote to Elizabeth that he felt “torn apart,” but that state was preferable to being obliged to make a decision.14 “After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet?” He didn’t think so. He could not “weigh the dear, troubled past . . . in which you saved everything” against a future with Caroline. And yet, he wrote, “allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind.” He planned to visit New York at Christmas with his new love, comparing his feeling for her to his feeling for Elizabeth when they were at Yaddo. She wrote to Blair that she didn’t believe Caroline would come with him (“This is his fantasy”), and that he was probably afraid to leave without her, because “she might not be there when he got back.”15 He did not seem to realize that he would never see Elizabeth again after this visit, when he needed to “settle up things, make arrangements and then leave forever.” (In a phone conversation, Elizabeth had told Blair that if Caroline accompanied Cal on this trip, she planned to leave town.) But maybe he wouldn’t come after all. “In all the months he has been gone,” she confided, “I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything . . . except himself.” What especially irritated her, she told Mary, was “that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life, and also of his own.”16 She described him as “such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more.”17
robert lowell might actually be the perfect exemplar of my theory about men putting more energy into immortalizing their moral conundrums in their art than in fixing them in real life
The essay Elizabeth published in Vogue in the summer of 1971 was unusually personal. “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” begins with a confession about her ever-present anxieties and tendency to worry about all sorts of things.20 As a young woman, she wrote, her worries were centered on “disgrace,” the potential results of her involvements with men (at a time—as she did not feel the need to explain here—when the taint of promiscuity or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy could destroy a woman’s good name). Even marriage to the wrong man could mean not living “the life you wanted.” Then, as a married woman, the birth of her child temporarily made her reluctant to travel. Working on her writing involved “an almost puritanical pressure,” but it was important to pay attention to housework as well, “if that makes someone else happier.” (In reality, as soon as Elizabeth could afford it, she hired other women to do the cleaning.) This shadowy “someone” takes on a greater presence in succeeding paragraphs, where she invokes a poem by Sylvia Plath about children whom “an educated, sophisticated man” has left behind “when he changed his mind.” The woman doesn’t become accustomed to the absence of this man. She is forced into self-reliance, but not by women’s liberation. “The brevity of love must be acknowledged,” Elizabeth concluded. Her self-revelation is heartbreaking.
A long article Elizabeth wrote during this fraught period offers a window into her state of mind. In “When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go,” she likens the “pinching shoe, the single glove” that women often hang on to despite their uselessness to “the longings, the clingings” of women’s inner lives.113 She writes of “painful memories . . . enshrining resentments and long, futile angers” that only forgiveness would allow women to relive “without desperation.” In her view, “the inclination to repeat our grievances, to insist that payment is always due us . . . is an indulgence that everyone must sooner or later give up.” Elizabeth concludes that by throwing away “one-sided love,” women can attain “a true condition of ‘loving’ someone who has long ago treated us badly. Then affection is not a weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning.” This extraordinary essay suggests an answer to those who wonder how she could have loved and stayed with Cal all those years: “To think about a troubled person is to ask . . . where does he hurt and how can it be changed? . . . Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.” Elizabeth’s ultimate loyalty was to an ethical ideal: “Always what is most important in one’s personal life is to forgive the unforgivable.”
wow
Elizabeth “loomed large . . . almost as though she was a character in a novel,” the novelist Anna Quindlen said. “That combination of charm and brilliance, and manners, and steel-trap mind.”40 Students felt there was something formidable about Elizabeth. “You didn’t feel like you were going to be pals with her,” Minot said. In a class full of young people in casual attire, her presence was memorable: a chain-smoker with curled hair, wearing eyeliner and bright lipstick. Her skirts were full, her blouses were neatly pressed, and her shoes were low heels or elegant flats. The novelist Mona Simpson thought Elizabeth’s style gave the impression that she was “too busy to care how she looked but just happened to look great.”41 While some students were put off by her Southern-ness and her critical edge, others found her fascinating. Frances Connell fondly recalled the way Elizabeth would gesture “as if there were an imaginary audience over her shoulder.”42 Sigrid Nunez was surely not alone in being curious about “how she lived, what she ate, and what she did when she wasn’t with us.”43 Because of the fracas around The Dolphin, Elizabeth’s private life had become all too public. In Benedict’s view, this “taught us about the messiness of adulthood and the consolations of literature in the midst of it.”44
:)
Turning to the teaching of writing, Elizabeth said that rather than help students revise their work, she preferred “to stimulate a whole questioning of the process, how you go about it, and what’s worth writing, and what’s being written.” She looked for students who read all the time, discussed books, and thought about literature “as a philosophical and moral question.” She lacked sympathy with students who “think short stories are written out of sensation and feelings,” which are, she said, among “the most difficult things to make real in literature.”
cool
“Writing a Novel,” the short story Elizabeth published in the New York Review in 1973, opens the same way the novel does: “It is June. This is what I am going to do with my life.” Among the many fascinations of this piece is her notion of “a short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious cadence of a stranger. Truth should be heightened and falsity adorned, dressed up to look like sociable fact.” She quotes Pasternak: “To live a life is not to cross a field”—life is no easy stroll.131 Memoirs were beset by “troubles large and small,” as a result of writers’ “defamed and libeled” self-portrayal. There was also the problem of a woman’s memoir, “because there isn’t enough sex, not even enough longing for consummation.” (She was apparently referring to potential negative opinions of the book she would write.) “In love,” she wrote, what really matters “is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme.” Of course, it is very much her theme.
ayyyy
Elizabeth’s talk on this occasion was about reading and readers—specifically, “the readers a writer has in mind when he writes.”68 Many of her observations are still timely. She distinguished between readers who understood the difference between “the wish to write a book, which every citizen seems to have, and the wish to make a contribution to literature.” She noted that, although reading appears to be passive, it is actually “violently active” because of the imaginative work involved “to create in [the reader’s] own mind a sort of moving pageant of action . . . and emotion.” She rued the fact that the time-saving aspects of modern life did not result in an accumulation of time for reading; on the contrary, “people with time on their hands are an object of pity.” Information overload was to blame for novels that no longer served to inform readers about life in other places and other times. The current vogue for first-person fiction seemed to be based on the premise that the author was unable to say “anything new about the larger world.”
love her