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Desire and its unsettlements of the soul

By Jeanette Winterson
nytimes

“We are formed by what we desire,” says Billy Dean, the fatherless narrator and chief hero of John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person.”

Irving likes to track his characters over long stretches of time. “In One Person” begins in the mid-1950s, when Billy is 13, and shadows him until he is in his late 60s, in 2010. As a work of fiction, it is true to the way we recall our lives rather than the way we actually live them; we live in linear time — we have no choice — but the curve of our memory is never a straight line. Happenings that lasted an hour can obsess us for years. Years of our lives can be forgotten.

“In One Person” is a story about memory. Inevitably it is also a story about desire, the most unsettling of our memories. And it is a story about reading yourself through the stories of others.

The novel opens with a classic Irving pleasure/pain sequence that makes you laugh out loud even as it awakens your sympathy for the hapless vulnerability of young Billy Dean.

Billy is in the town library of First Sister, Vt., hopelessly infatuated with the librarian, Miss Frost. He is clutching a copy of “Great Expectations.”

“ ‘There are a lot of books by Charles Dickens,’ Miss Frost told me. ‘You should try a different one, William.’ . . .

“Miss Frost’s second reference to me as William had given me an instant erection — though, at 15, I had a small penis. . . . (Suffice it to say, Miss Frost was in no danger ofnoticing that I had an erection.)”

Billy then confesses his pronunciation problems to us; “penis” comes out as “penith,” to rhyme with “zenith.” “I go to great lengths to avoid the plural,” he says.

Miss Frost knows nothing of Billy’s sexual anguish as he tries to check out “Great Expectations” for the second time. Billy knows that only two things matter to him at 15 — to be a writer, and to sleep with Miss Frost — “not necessarily in that order.”

Irving’s characters often want to be writers (T. S. Garp, Ruth Cole), and there are always powerful literary preoccupations running through the novels. “Great Expectations” has long been a core text for Irving’s fascination for children without parents, usually fathers — but the model for “In One Person” is really Shakespeare’s “Tempest.”

First Sister boasts an enthusiastic amateur dramatic society accustomed to staging Agatha Christie mysteries in dreadful wigs. When handsome Richard Abbot is hired at Billy’s school, Favorite River Academy, he decides the best way to teach the boys Shakespeare is to perform it.

As Favorite River is an all-boys school, the female parts are offered through the town, allowing Irving to jumble his worlds and his characters together, just as Prospero does in “The Tempest,” giving plenty of opportunity for comic collision as well as psychological insight.

Miss Frost, banished like a latter-day Caliban to the musty town library, is reintroduced to the boys of Favorite River with interesting consequences. It turns out she was one of them in her younger days: Big Al, undefeated wrestling champion, 6-foot-2 in her socks, now choosing to live as a woman. The grown-ups know, but nobody really wants to know: First Sister is a small town. When Billy finally sleeps with Miss Frost for the first time, he believes she is a woman. When he returns for more, he knows she is a woman with a penis.

Desire and its unsettlements of the soul are as central to John Irving’s work as lost fathers. You could say that our sexual longings are compensatory, and that desire for what is forbidden or taboo is part of the long detective hunt for what we have lost and can never find. Perhaps — but reading Irving, it seems to me that what he is saying about desire outside of the missionary position (a psychic attitude, not a physical preference) is never an apology, nor an explanation.

Desire is democratic; we fall for the wrong people, across age, class, color, gender. Desire is difficult; it messes things up. Desire is defiant; our desires square off against our assumptions, our morality, our conscience and our notion of who we are. There is no doubt that Irving thinks this is a good thing. He is not simplistic, though, not ever. He understands that we don’t always act on or act out our desires. Sometimes we just suffer in silence. Yet he also realizes that the shock to our self-knowledge, or our lack of it, remains the same either way.

Billy’s lumberyard grandpa has been a female impersonator all his life, and although he isn’t interested in becoming a woman, or in sleeping with men who have become women, his straightforward acceptance of who he is gives Billy courage through his own sexual crises and adventures.

Billy is bisexual. He enjoys women, and his best friend, Elaine, is his sometime sexual partner. There’s plenty of discussion in the novel about how hostile either sex can be to bisexuals. Can you trust them? Why can’t they make up their minds? This is painfully described as Billy hits the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Irving isn’t a moralizing writer, but he is a moral one. Billy’s friend Tom lies about his sexuality, thus infecting his wife with H.I.V. and destroying the lives of his children.

The most troubled and baleful character in the novel, desired by all, desiring none, is the schoolboy wrestler Kittredge. Think of Bentley Drummle from “Great Expectations,” on steroids: he’s got the body of a Greek god and the tongue of a viper, and at least in the narrative’s early years, he uses heterosexuality like a weapon.

The truthfulness of Miss Frost and Grandpa Harry set against the dishonesties of Tom and Kittredge, of Billy’s mother and the small minds in the small town suggests that the opposite of right is not wrong; the opposite of right is lying.

In its fierceness and its joyfulness, “In One Person” has the feeling of “The World According to Garp.” (Even the lisp is back — remember Alice in “Garp”?) Miss Frost is analogous not to the earlier book’s resident transsexual, Roberta, but to T. S. Garp’s eccentric self-determining mother, Jenny Fields. The school world is here, the voyage of self-discovery to Europe, the return to the small town, Ulysses-like, after long wanderings.

What’s not here is any biological woman we can get interested in. Elaine is tame. Aunts and mothers are hysterical. Billy’s cousin Gerry is a terrifying lesbian. Kittredge’s mother is a child abuser. The best women are, or were, men.

Ah well. You can’t have everything in one book. “In One Person” gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes. Billy the boy, cast as the ungendered sprite Ariel in “The Tempest,” returns as a man to direct “Romeo and Juliet” — an unswervingly heterosexual play, except of course that in Shakespeare’s day Juliet would have been played by a boy. (A “nymph,” as Kittredge used to call Billy.)

Now Billy turns to Kittredge’s angry, searching son, who accuses Billy at 68 of being not “natural,” not “normal.” Billy’s reply echoes the warning Miss Frost gave him years before: “Don’t make me a category before you get to know me.”

Tolerance, in a John Irving novel, is not about anything goes. It’s what happens when we face our own desires honestly, whether we act on them or not.

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Impertinence

Kafka’s “The Top” is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief “that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.” Disgust follows delight almost at once and he throws down the top, walks away. Yet hope of understanding continues to fill him each time top-spinning preparations begin among the children: “as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated.”

The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

— Anne Carson, Preface to Eros the Bittersweet

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Appropriation

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, must make it one’s own.

— Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel
via toadustyshelfweaspire
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Seeing you again, I can’t shake the feeling

He had the same attitude to his life as a scuptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of the novelist’s inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena’s existence deprived Mirek of his prerogative as an author. Zdena insisted on remaining part of the opening pages of the novel. She refused to be crossed out.

— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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Becoming the first sitting president to support extending the rights and status of marriage to gay couples

President Obama declared for the first time on Wednesday that he supports same-sex marriage, putting the moral power of his presidency behind a social issue that continues to divide the country.

“At a certain point,” Mr. Obama said in an interview in the Cabinet Room at the White House with ABC’s Robin Roberts, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

— nytimes


 

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The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
    Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river’s level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
    For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

.

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
    The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

.

As if out on the end of an event
    Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

.

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
    Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

.

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
    The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

.

Just long enough to settle hats and say
    I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl—and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

.

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
    Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

.

— Philip Larkin
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Sapere aude!

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! . . .

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.

— Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)

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Orphan Thyself

Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an “adult” life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning. The process will be different for every person. I have my own inspirational cast of characters in this regard, a set of willful, heroic self-orphaners, past and present, whom I continue to revere: Mozart, the musical child prodigy who successfully rebelled against his insanely grasping and narcissistic father (Leopold Moz­art), who for years shopped him around the courts of Europe as a sort of family cash cow; Sigmund Freud, who, by way of unflinching self-analysis, discovered that it was possible to love and hate something or someone at one and the same time (mothers and fathers included) and that such painfully “mixed emotion” was also inescapably human; Virginia Woolf, who in spite of childhood loss, mental illness, and an acute sense of the sex-prejudice she saw everywhere around her, not only forged a life as a great modernist writer, but made her life an incorrigibly honest and vulnerable one.

In a journal entry from 1928 collected in A Writer’s Diary, Woolf wrote the following (long after his death) about her brilliant, troubled, well-meaning, tyrannical, depressive, enormously distinguished father—Sir Leslie Stephen, model for Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse and one of the great English “men of letters” of the 19th century:

Father’s birthday. He would have been 96, 96, yes, today; and could have been 96, like other people one had known: but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books—inconceivable. …

The sentimental pathology of the American middle-class family—not to mention the mind-warping digitalization of everyday life—usually militates against such ruthless candor. But what the Life of the Orphan teaches—has taught me at least—is that it is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one’s inheritance, the “making strange” of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one’s parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

— Terry Castle, “Why kids need to separate from their parents“

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Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

— Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings

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The greatest of all American business novels

By Leonard Cassuto
wsj

We remember Theodore Dreiser mainly for his deeply felt tales of have-nots who yearn for much more than the world gives them. In “An American Tragedy,” his 1925 masterpiece, a young man’s longing for money and social standing leads him to the electric chair. But Mr. Dreiser also wrote admiringly of the wealthy, and this year marks the 100th anniversary of “The Financier,” his sweeping and minutely observed story of an enormously successful capitalist.

“The Financier” centers on Frank Algernon Cowperwood, whom the author repeatedly describes as possessing “force.” Cowperwood proves himself both skilled and resilient in the financial marketplace. He also keeps a cool head when he’s discovered sleeping with his business partner’s daughter. Mr. Dreiser so insistently interleaves stock-market intrigue with sex, in fact, that one critic described Cowperwood’s story as a club sandwich of “slices of business alternating with erotic episodes.”

But Cowperwood is no Gordon Gekko. He’s suave, not rapacious. And unlike Gekko, who celebrates greed, Cowperwood asserts simply, “I satisfy myself.”

Mr. Dreiser drew Cowperwood from life—specifically, the life of Charles Tyson Yerkes, one of the more freewheeling Gilded Age robber barons. Mr. Yerkes made his fortune in municipal rapid transit, but before he started buying up cable-car companies he was a stock and bond broker and speculator.

Mr. Dreiser fictionalizes Mr. Yerkes’s personality, but follows his business life closely in the novel. The result is an amazingly intricate description of high-rolling 19th-century finance.

Cowperwood practices a situational morality that “varies with conditions, if not climates.” Invited into shady parley with the Philadelphia city treasurer, he cuts a backroom deal that anoints him an investment banker for the city, allowing him to speculate with the city’s short-term loan issues. Although he does so prudently, investing in local street railways (the rapid transit of the time), he gets caught short when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 triggers a run on his secret holdings before the usual end-of-month settlement. Thus exposed, Cowperwood and the treasurer are convicted of embezzlement and sent to prison.

Mr. Dreiser’s detailed account of these machinations, and of the financier’s imprisonment, are drawn faithfully from the historical record. But the novelist imagines a scene when the young lover of the adulterous Cowperwood comes to visit him in the penitentiary and the chastened financier weeps in her arms.

From this low point, Mr. Dreiser’s hero soon regains his financial and emotional dominance. Pardoned after 13 months, he re-enters the financial fray on a smaller scale. He quickly becomes rich again when he leverages a stake of $75,000 into more than $1 million over a few days. Acting aggressively in a stricken market, he shorts the stocks of companies related to the firm of Jay Cooke, whose spectacular failure to complete a transcontinental railroad led to what became known as the Panic of 1873. Here again, Mr. Dreiser barely fictionalizes the real-life maneuvers of Mr. Yerkes. Mr. Dreiser follows Cowperwood’s further adventures in the Windy City in “The Titan” (1914), the second volume of what would eventually become his “Trilogy of Desire.”

Desire was Mr. Dreiser’s lifelong subject. His fascination with what people want—and what keeps them wanting, and how their social situations shape what they want—forms the through-line that connects all of his books. Cowperwood gets just about everything he wants, but it is Mr. Dreiser’s constant probing of the intertwined needs for money, art, glory, sex and so much else that makes “The Financier” the greatest of all American business novels.

But what makes Cowperwood want? Mr. Dreiser imagines a scene in which young Cowperwood witnesses a lobster and a squid caged together in a fishmonger’s tank. Over several days, he observes the squid getting more and more ragged, with pieces of it “snapped off” until it finally falls prey to the lobster’s relentless pursuit. Critics have made a lot of this spectacle, mostly reading it as a primal scene that answers for Cowperwood a question that Mr. Dreiser never stopped asking: How is life organized? But no one pays attention to what follows the underwater drama. The boy runs home to tell his parents about what he’s seen, but they show no concern. “What makes you take interest in such things?” asks his mother, while his father reacts “indifferently.”

Joining the lobster-squid drama together with its family aftermath allows us to view Cowperwood as a man-child of desire. His insatiable acquisitiveness—which extends to his love life—extends likewise from his understanding that “things lived on each other,” and also from a desire to gain approval from others by demonstrating his prowess on an increasingly grander scale.

It also helps to account for his weeping in prison. Mr. Dreiser portrays Cowperwood, for all of his bland and ruthless competence, as someone who needs sympathy. In this respect he is perhaps not so different from Dreiser characters like the pitiful George Hurstwood of “Sister Carrie” (1900) or the pathetically striving Clyde Griffiths of “An American Tragedy.”

Mr. Dreiser’s novels describe in unparalleled detail the myriad industrial, technological and social changes in the U.S. at the turn of the last century. “The Financier” has aged gracefully not least because Cowperwood’s world remains familiar. Readers will recognize the contours of today’s financial markets in Mr. Dreiser’s story (and a new edition of “The Financier,” from the University of Illinois Press, restores descriptions of Cowperwood’s financial dealings that Mr. Dreiser cut for the novel’s 1927 rerelease). Today’s readers will also spot some familiar tensions: It’s not a far leap from the causes of Cowperwood’s Philadelphia downfall to a discussion of how much transparency should be required in, say, the market for credit-default swaps.

Mr. Yerkes eventually wound down, dying short of his dearest triumph, a planned consolidation of London’s transit system. Perhaps because of this real-life anticlimax, Mr. Dreiser spent many years trying to close Cowperwood’s story. He worked on the final volume of the trilogy, “The Stoic,” until he died in 1945. (The novel was released posthumously in 1947.) “The Financier” hints at no such hesitation. The novel instead unveils one of Mr. Dreiser’s most energetic and accomplished characters in the early stages of his ascent, in a financial arena whose basic rules—and players—have changed but little.