The Journal I Did Not Keep Read online

  And so nothing is to be settled on the sisters. John proposes that his father’s request would be amply answered by the settlement upon his mother-in-law of a hundred-pound annuity. “His wife hesitated…‘To be sure, it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years, we shall be completely taken in.’” And annuities are such disagreeable things! Mrs. John recalls that her mother’s income was “clogged” with annuities to three superannuated servants. “It comes over and over every year…there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it. Her income was not her own, she said.” Mrs. Dashwood advises her husband not to tie himself down. “I believe you are right, my love,” says John, when his wife points out that to pay out a hundred could be “very inconvenient.”

  No annuity, then, is settled on Mrs. Henry Dashwood. John has been made to understand that his father never intended him to give the widow and her daughters money. He meant John to send an occasional present of food, to offer a helping hand, to advise them, perhaps, in the search for some inexpensive house they could afford to move into.

  * * *

  —

  These two opening chapters are exemplary in setting the scene, introducing the two lead characters, Elinor and Marianne, and, by tracing the means that impoverished them, setting in motion an enviable number of strands of the plot. That’s the writer’s business: the reader only knows she has been settled into nineteenth-century comfort. The past that precedes every beginning has been mastered; the reader cozies in for the pleasures of story.

  But the character we call the “reader” has experienced certain additional pleasures: One is the moral satisfaction or—something spicier—the moral glee of seeing the cover of respectability lifted from these early nineteenth-century rich folk to expose their essential brutality, which they hasten to cover up with arguments sounding dreadfully familiar to the reader of the 1990s. Jane Austen has drawn a profile of the conservative argument, with which the fortunate John Dashwood can rely on his lady to argue him into the conservation of his money inside his own pocket.

  It’s a truism: to be parted from one’s money is disagreeable. We know this as we know that water wets, from experience. Presidential candidate Mr. Mondale forgot it. We watched candidate Bush’s lips remembering; when he became president, he forgot. I was shopping in one of Manhattan’s outdoor markets and stopped to listen to a woman—an Upper West Side liberal—persuading an elderly farmer that deep in his heart he was willing to pay more in taxes if it meant the little children would be healthier, the old people better cared for. No, the farmer assured her, he did not want to pay more taxes. What he wanted, he said, was to pay less.

  Mrs. John Dashwood expressed the farmer’s intuitive experience when she said, “The question is, what you can afford to do.” I had a relative, a woman, who, when I was young and poor, looked old to me, and rich. She, for her part, looking about her at her richer friends, experienced herself as being too poor to pay her cook what was then the legal minimum wage. She said—I am sure she felt—that she could not afford it. I badgered her long and self-righteously until she finally agreed to give her cook a raise the very week, as her luck would have it, when President Nixon announced his price freeze. My relative argued that to raise her cook’s wages was now illegal.

  This truism—that human beings will not pay anything they can get out of—sheds light on some ancient and modern truths: that wealth fails to trickle down; that the rising tide sinks the little boats it was supposed to have raised; that to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath. Who, on getting a raise, goes promptly home and gives a raise to the cleaning woman? Do you?

  * * *

  —

  What is it that prevents John Dashwood from promptly and cheerfully acting on our truism? Why doesn’t he go home and announce: “I don’t feel like giving money legally mine to my sisters and their mother; I shall keep it”?

  John Dashwood, says his creator, “was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold-hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed…Had he married a more amiable woman, he might have been made still more respectable…for he was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife.” John needs to think of himself as a respectable man, one who “would not wish to do anything mean.” He feels obligated by his father’s last request and bound by the promise he has made him. It is not only that the “prospect of four thousand a year, in addition to his present income…warmed his heart and made him feel capable of generosity”; the feeling of being generous warms his heart and makes him feel a very good fellow. (We misconstrue the bad guys in our lives when we forget that they feel themselves to be the good guys. They think we are the ones who are not only wrong but rotten.) What John Dashwood wants is to conserve his money inside his own pocket and to feel good doing it. The conservative argument argues itself permission to do the first by producing the feeling of the latter.

  Observe how Mrs. John goes about it: She begins by arguing that to not give the in-laws enough money to live on is a family value. It is a failure of duty to “your own child,” she tells John. There is something hysterical in the progression: How can you think to “rob your own child” by “giving away half your fortune?” Why are you to “ruin” yourself by giving away “all” your money to your “half” sisters? The emphases are mine. The words are the workings of the heart of Mrs. John.

  She goes on to prove that those to whom you don’t give anything don’t need it. The argument depends on an experience that is not confined to the young Dashwoods—the radical difference between your own wants, which you feel, and the wants of others, which by definition you don’t. Consider two small wisdoms, one pronounced by a friend of my undergraduate days. She asked: “How many other people’s headaches do you actually mind?” which puts me in mind of my grandmother’s dictum: “If someone tells you that they have a headache, believe them.” Mrs. John Dashwood does not mind, because she does not experience—does not, to all intents and purposes believe—Mrs. Henry Dashwood’s poverty, whereas she suffers the pain of every smallest sum potentially subtracted from what is hers, her husband’s, and her child’s. Her motto must be: Only don’t connect.

  Finally, the young Dashwoods demonstrate that the money they keep in their own pocket would have proved detrimental to those to whom they have decided not to give it. The panhandler would have used my quarter to get drunk. Money is the ruin of the welfare mother. The annuity John will not give his step-family would have caused them to “enlarge their style of living” and tempt them to habits of extravagance. “A present of fifty pounds, now and then” would be better for them in tending to keep their life style modest. Only think of all the things that people who don’t have anything are better off doing without! That panhandler has no car and therefore no worry about garaging it. The homeless are not frazzled by our round of rents and rates and mortgages. “Do but consider, my dear Mr. Dashwood,” so Mrs. John wraps it up for him, “how excessively comfortable your mother-in-law and her daughters may live…they will pay their mother for their board…and what on earth can four women want for more than that? They will live so cheap! Their housekeeping will be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses…they will keep no company…Five hundred a year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give you something.”

  The widow Dashwood, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret have been declared to be perfectly comfortable. Mr. and Mrs. John can keep their inheritance all to themselves and feel righteous doing so. And the reader gets to enjoy yet another pleasure—the sense of cleverness, of his penetration, the thrill of intellectual and moral kinship with the writer. If Jane Austen were around I would catch her eye to let her know that I “get” it
.

  Or is it that Jane Austen is getting me—giving it to me? I’m having that well-documented experience of approaching a person who looks unpleasantly familiar, someone of whom I feel I don’t entirely approve in the moment before I recognize it is a mirror I am walking toward. Jane Austen is holding the mirror up to my nature. Story has the power to prevent my natural tendency to cover myself from my own observation.

  How familiar, the last time I paid my taxes, was the experience that it was inconvenient, my regret that so large a sum was to be parted with, my irritation at the trouble of getting it to them, the realization that money once parted with never can return, and the feeling that this happening over and over every year made my income not my own.

  Wait. I have an inheritance story too.

  My parents-in-law’s aging aunt—call her Minnie—must not have read her King Lear for she gave away her summer house on a New England lake to her children, a chilly son and his beautiful wife. The following summer the young people invited their mother to spend a weekend at the lake; then they sent her home to broil in New York. When Minnie became a nuisance they put her in a nursing home. My husband’s parents went secretly, took their aunt out, and brought her home with them. Minnie disinherited her son and daughter-in-law, settled everything on the niece and nephew, and died. Her children were advised against seeking legal redress, there being no legal leg to stand on. By year’s end both of my parents-in-law had died as well. Minnie’s children may not have deserved the inheritance, but neither did I or mine. I had thought the old woman a nuisance; my children had refused to kiss her. Did it occur to me to pass the inheritance back to the blood relatives? Briefly, in a world of speculation only. I was by then widowed with two little children. The chilly son and the beautiful wife were better off than I. Would I, had they been worse off, have given them what was legally my children’s? Would you?

  Oh, Mrs. John Dashwood! Notre semblable!

  PASSING TIME: A REVIEW OF NOG BY RUDOLPH WURLITZER

  Rudolph Wurlitzer did not discover the vein in which he works. Time pointed him in its general direction and like a good writer he reinvented it in his own image.

  Though the “new” novel is getting on in years, the fight over it, in America at any rate, is younger. We can hardly see a book of this kind through the feathers flying in The New York Times, or discuss it on its merits until we have tidied up.

  There is something puzzling about the passionate anger raised by this purely aesthetic controversy, and by Wurlitzer’s book, unless we see that the passion is not aesthetic; at least it is not pure. If I get excited and say, Look at this beautiful X, and you look where I am pointing and you not only see nothing beautiful but see Nothing, you have to deduce that you are blind or that I am a charlatan. No wonder you are virulent in trying to prove there is no X. (If you happen to be a novelist yourself—that is the turn of the screw: will you be viewed by this new light, which you don’t even see! Will you have to learn to look and to write all over again?) If it terrifies you not to see what I see it scares me to see what you don’t, because what separates us is not opinion but perception: across that abyss we lose sight and sound of one another altogether and there is anxiety in my missionary zeal to show you the X.

  What is new is, by definition, that which has not been isolated before and therefore has no name and is hard to think about. Where are all the familiar elements we used to hold on to? There are two ways of dealing with this situation: mine is to not want to be caught napping if X turns out to be a Good Thing. Yours is to not want to be caught out if it doesn’t. I submit that my stance is no more foolish than yours and a deal more useful: it is no worse to be predisposed toward what is puzzling than to be set against it, unless we assume that what is new is a mere fashion and what is familiar is the way things really are. It is embarrassing to spell it out again: the new is one way of putting it and the old another, with infinite possibilities pointing backwards and forwards.

  Your position commits you to not seeing X, though it gives you the advantage of making an amazing lot of noise. My undertaking the defense forces me to refer back to what I’m quietly talking about until I am familiar with it and no longer remember what used to puzzle me. Now I really can tell if X is beautiful or if it is a hoax. My prejudice has made an honest woman out of me at last. Why are you still so angry?

  * * *

  —

  But about Nog. Read it as a “how to” book: how to write the life of a character in a novel when you are minus assumptions about life and about novels. Remember the Saul Steinberg man who draws himself into existence, draws himself a chair to sit on and a table to draw at? Now imagine that the pencil he has drawn himself with has an eraser at one end so that he can keep rubbing bits out and drawing them over.

  Nog is to the “I” of the book what the “I” is to the writer—his invention. For our convenience we may even call this nameless protagonist “Nog.” Some of the characters, some of the time, make the same identification, and that’s true too, as the fool said to Lear. This is not the old stillborn issue of the search for identity: if you are waiting to find out who Nog really is, you are waiting for tomorrow to arrive.

  Imagine that we shared (without the reservation of a doubt) “Nog’s” assumption that not only will tomorrow not arrive, but when it does it will be a dead ringer for yesterday and we will be the same person we are today. What would we do? Wouldn’t we cancel the analyst and beauty parlor appointments; throw out our French grammar? And what would we do instead? Here’s what we find “Nog” doing on page one: “I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful, for once, to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in…” when a girl walks by. “It was her feet actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant.” And so he is catapulted into motion and keeps moving. “I took four more steps. Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens when I take four more steps. I took five fast steps and stopped…” “One must be involved in gliding straight ahead,” he says. Why must one? So as to keep that delicate balance between falling too far into life and falling out of it altogether. We have already seen the havoc wreaked by the pain of seeing the sudden beauty in a pair of feet when one is unprepared: “I don’t want to look too suddenly at the sky.” And it is dangerous too, to peek into the kitchen sink: “Is that where the anguish lies, caked near the stopper?” Or into the future, “I don’t trust the dim hint of light at the end of the long tunnels, promises of events to come,” and certainly not into the past, “where memories threaten to become moldy…oozing hope and lies.” In fact, don’t look: “Your eyes will get used to the gloom: keep them half closed like you’re peering down a gun barrel.” On the last page he is still putting one foot before the other, down another “alleyway and gangplank…”

  “As for events, they come and go.” So does food, sleep, persons. And girls. The cock rises and falls. There is a powerful nuttiness, something gallant and appealing about this picaresque anti-hero guarding himself against one nonadventure after another: he is not getting himself from place to place so much as getting through the time and the space in which he finds himself.

  Time: he keeps checking where it’s at. “It is morning. The sun took care of that.” He tests it for speed: “I must be getting fast with myself…(My mind has become blessedly slower).” It is a matter of maneuvering through it; “I swung my feet out enough to face the sink. That was an hour ago. I…stole into an alleyway. I am crouched there now.”

  He is connoisseur of the subtle qualities of space; there is “a friendly detached space in front of a meat counter.” And he knows its treacherousness: “It is too overwhelming to climb out of the back seat into an open space or lack of space. You can never be too careful…” “I need a more restful space I can strangle and tame long enough to hang on to.”

  Hanging on is the trick: he keeps checking his vital signs to find out how he is and if and to what degree: “I am not cold or warm. I might be approaching both.” “I am warm
. Or I was warm.” And, “I stumbled to the Pacific to be at a new edge of land. I thought it would help my breathing.” He keeps looking for an excuse for himself: “I need a direction, the hint of a discernible habit, a movement of some kind. A place to stand but at the same time to appear busy…”

  The question (which renders precisely the dilemma of the reader of the “new” novel) is how to stand when the floor has been pulled from under your feet along with the rug. Wurlitzer’s answer is to invent something to stand on: “I could invent another room”; invent a temporary focus: “I could manage a story. A story might set a course”; and a bearable past: “memories, if they intrude, invent them. Three is sufficient.” And a personality: “Nog is not quite clear enough. I have to invent more.” “Nog…is not cruel enough. I’ve known that for the last few hours. He must loosen up. He must become more perverse.” Saul Steinberg’s man uses his pencil. Wurlitzer’s protagonist makes himself with words, inspects himself for truth and beauty and finding himself inadequate, keeps forever working away. When Wurlitzer writes “It is the next word that matters” that is literally what he means.

  I liked this book so much I read it anxiously in case it should disappoint me, and it does, in passing. Wurlitzer sometimes nudges me when I’ve already understood what he means, and he has a few ticks (like repeating in a general statement what he has just stated in the particular: “The stars are no help. The stars are never any help”). At worst he is willfully surprising: that octopus is too bulky a symbol; try as he will Nog cannot rid the book of it. More characteristic of Wurlitzer are the Cocteau-like themes, the sun, the stars, the Stetson hat, and the black bag that used to be a doctor’s, a tendency to make up lists (of beaches, mountains, ports, but not parks). These are capable of continued variations and genuine surprises. Wurlitzer’s writing is full of crazy, beautiful invention, and the kind of wit you can’t lift off the page because it just barely raises itself out of the context and cocks a delicate snook at the sentence that went before.