Rereadings Read online

  Doris pondered all sides of the story, the glory of the bold escape from the provinces, the sexual high jinks, the brilliant lyric sensibility, the desperate final mysticism. The circumstances of Mansfield’s death—a final massive hemorrhage at the Gurdjieff community near Fontainebleau, where she had gone to “purify” herself—bespoke both the barely grasped independence of the “new woman” and the dismal fate that awaited her for stepping outside the assigned circle of safety. It was what a later generation of women would call a liberated life. And you got hammered for it. Doris’s fascination with Mansfield had to do with what she revealed about the catastrophic results of attempting to be free. Better to “have written” briefly, sometime in the past, better to sock your talent safely away. Better to stay high in the shadowy apartment on Summit Avenue, keep your hair glamour-bright, accept another drink from your hovering husband.

  Mansfield was the doomed artist for Doris’s generation. Make that the doomed woman artist: the exemplary figure who combined talent, youth, beauty, drive, and early death. Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide at fifty-nine, lived too long to be this kind of figure. The doomed artist must be extinguished before endeavor has fully transmitted itself into achievement. Death is the massive gilt frame that pulls the eye away from the work to the life. But that’s the point: with certain writers it is impossible (and for Doris, undesirable) to separate the two. Doris was mesmerized not by the fire of Mansfield’s talent but by the extinguished flame, the burnt wick.

  Mansfield was her generation’s version of Sylvia Plath. Or, to put it in the proper chronology, Plath was my generation’s version—after another world war and much else (including the development of drugs to cure TB)—of Mansfield. Plath’s suicide was, of course, the opposite of Mansfield’s frantic dash—from French seaside to Swiss alpine chalet, from doctors to quacks and finally to a proto-New Age guru—to save herself. But like Mansfield’s, Plath’s talent and achievement were genuine. Their work would still count even if their lives had not been tragic. Without their early deaths, however, they would not have become exemplary—or cautionary—figures for the women who studied them so fervently.

  In Mansfield, Doris Derman chose a woman on whom the fates descended, but whose pact with life itself not only remained unbroken but was cranked up to an almost excruciating pitch of desire and attachment. In Plath, my generation chose a model of brilliant sourness, a woman whose fury was finally directed at life itself, not at its cruel refusal to admit her and sustain her. Our choice of a suicide may be a gloomy commentary on my generation. But even if Plath was exemplary because she represented what we wished to avoid becoming, she was still the lost woman writer who came to haunt us, as Mansfield haunted Doris Derman. There was this difference, though: Doris, I think, felt companioned by Mansfield. She was, in spite of everything, a benign ghost.

  Like Plath’s, Mansfield’s gifts were augmented by a journal, a voluminous correspondence, and a literary husband-editor. Mansfield’s cool talent and her desperado life were indelibly bonded, if they had not been before, by John Middleton Murry’s publication of the Journal in 1927, just four years after her death. The Letters followed swiftly in 1928. Although Mansfield knew a measure of literary, if not truly popular, fame in her lifetime, her appeal really hit its international stride as a result of Murry’s decision to fashion her personal writing into books that allowed her to take, as he gushingly said, “her rightful place as the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time.”

  In other words, as a disgusted friend remarked at the time, Murry was “boiling Katherine’s bones to make soup.”

  Doris did not see it this way—and of course, neither did I. We believed in books. We spoke of them as of people whose integrity was above reproach, not objects fashioned and formed. We approved, even revered, the final rhapsodic line of the Journal: “All is well.” We took the italics to heart, as if they conveyed a final triumphant testament. All is well.

  Ah! Doris and I said, bowing our heads before the courageous farewell of our heroine. Ah!

  Now, all these years later, I have come with two new friends, an Englishwoman and her Danish husband, to Bandol: Mansfield’s Bandol, as I think of it, a quiet Mediterranean fishing village (in her day), a gleaming tourist town (in ours). I’ve been given an apartment for four months in a nearby town, as part of a writing fellowship—the sort of improbable post-modern perk that would have astonished Mansfield in her fruitless search for a safety net.

  This day trip to Bandol is an unabashed pilgrimage, though my days as a cultist are over. Here, during separate visits, Mansfield wrote “Prelude” and “Bliss” (which I have just reread and have urged on my friends, glad the stories still seem fresh, glad to spread the word, as Doris once passed it to me). I have also reread some of the letters. But their magic has gone dark now. Gone, the old thrill of exalted sensibility, the breathless lyric acuity. Gone, the romantic scrim that saved me from seeing what it was all about: utter terror of the death bearing down on her.

  We are looking for the place where Mansfield wrote “Bliss,” the Hotel Beau-Rivage, a name so evocative it sounds like a hotel in a story rather than a hotel where a story was written. It is a beautiful day, still winter, as people here insist, though as a Minnesotan I know that this is foolishness, that we are deep into spring, trees blossoming, tables set out for lunch, sailboats groaning companionably in their slips.

  We have one of those lunches they write about in magazines. It is timeless and winey. There is crème caramel quivering under its burnt sugar in a fluted glass dish, and little cups of bitter coffee to set you straight at the end of the meal.

  Then we walk up the street to the hotel, a great peachy Belle Epoque business, the grounds parklike and gracious. A very small old man is pruning, with shears far too big for him, an immense wisteria vine that covers an entire wall. The vine’s main branch, espaliered against the stone wall, is as thick as a tree. The scent is overpowering.

  The old man smiles at my request—he has heard this before—and silently leads us through the grounds to the hotel entrance, where we are handed over to a likewise diminutive old woman, either his mate or his colleague. She points to the plaque mounted in the vestibule. In French it says: “Three hours ago I finished my story ‘Bliss.’ Thank God I had great happiness in the writing of it.”

  The small woman nods as the old man did, ready to accommodate: yes, I may go up and see The Room. So up the little ascenseur we go, the little woman, Susan, Steffen, and I. Up to the top (third) floor—and there it is, the door open (all the doors of all the rooms are open, waiting for their nonexistent occupants). It’s now a double room, as it had not been when Mansfield stayed here in 1918. Appliances are lined up along one wall to make a kitchenette. It is not exactly “seedy,” not even “tacky,” just honestly, seriously worn. The place was probably lovely in its day, but it looks as if it was redone in the miserable 1950s and left to pickle in its unhealthy browns and beiges, its sickish greens. Oddly, the very cheapness of the veneers, the “modern” furniture sighing with shabbiness—all of it enshrines the life of hired rooms and not much money: her life.

  The little woman nods—I may step out through the double French doors onto the balcony. I am in the air, looking out—as she must have looked when she rose from her desk, after her three hours of “happiness in the writing”—to the same thrilling sea (more boats, more people, more everything now, but the same blue, the same exalted height). “She took the best room,” the tiny old woman murmurs, as if to say we all know that Katherine would of course take the best.

  My new friend Susan, who has not yet read Mansfield, is wiping away tears. “Thank goodness she had happiness in the writing,” she says. “She had so little happiness.”

  “Katherine has been dead a week,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary after the news came from France:

  At that one feels—what? A shock of relief?—a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blank
ness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine wont read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer … . Still there are things about writing I think of & want to tell Katherine. And I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of.

  It was sometime in the late 1980s that I read this rawly honest passage. Woolf’s diaries were being published, the biographies were coming thick and fast. There was more about Mansfield as well. It turned out, according to a carefully sleuthed biography by Claire Tomalin, that although Mansfield had indeed died of tuberculosis, it was undiagnosed gonorrhea, contracted during her first year of “freedom,” that had weakened her and left her fatally vulnerable.

  So much for freedom. Even the Journal’s “All is well” finale proved to be a bit of stagecraft—John Middleton Murry’s. He had not simply “edited” the Journal; he had orchestrated it, piecing bits together to form a narrative that ended with this apparent triumph of the spirit.

  But I could not tell this to Doris. She was long gone by the time I read the post-cult biographies. My mother, still living in the neighborhood, had reported that people first noticed that the milkman (the milkman!) was showing up later and later on his rounds. Drinking at the Dermans, was the word. Doris was dead drunk at 10:00 a.m., according to the woman at the drugstore. Also: seen wandering on Grand Avenue, alarming blond hair in disarray, wearing bathroom slippers in the snow.

  Then, not seen at all, spending all her time in the dark, the blinds pulled, not even sobering up when her husband came home, the children grown up and well out of it by now. Finally, sprawled on the bathroom floor, “found” by her husband when he came home from work downtown.

  We had read the last line of the Journal as a message to us, almost a directive. All was well Doris and I stayed with Mansfield to the end, past the little pleasures of tea at the Villa Isola Bella in lemon-sunny Menton, where she wrote some of her best late stories. We followed her to the thin air of Sierre, high in the Alps, past her furious disappointment in Murry. Doris had made short work of him. “Obviously a drip,” she said. We stayed with Katherine (as we called her) right to the moment she entered the weird community at Fontainebleau and died her gasping, operatic death after running up a flight of steps. “She was so happy,” Doris had told me. It was as if she were there. “She forgot to be careful.”

  Still, all was well. Katherine had said so. Doris never had reason to disbelieve her testimony Or maybe Doris kept to herself just how well she thought everything really was. Maybe she didn’t wish to disillusion me; maybe she wanted to pass along the literary torch, burning with a “too bright” gleam but, all the same, shedding the only light that mattered to us.

  My mother saw it more simply. “Doris was a fine woman,” she said, as if someone had suggested otherwise. She did not like the gossip about the milkman. “She was a lady. She had talent.” Then she paused, searching for what she really meant, what between us was highest praise: “She was a serious reader.”

  SVEN BIRKERTS

  Love’s Wound, Love’s Salve

  Pan, by Knut Hamsun

  When I was growing up in Michigan, my mother was the great reader in my family, and my father, through deeply creative in his professional life, did not read at all. I worked out a big part of my Oedipal conflict, if that’s what it was, by becoming a reader myself. I found my way to my mother by heeding her signals; I turned to the authors she loved—at least those I could read—and soaked up whatever approval came my way. I imagined I saw my father scowling in the background.

  My mother not only read—daily and with steady fixation—but also spoke with open reverence about writers, relishing the sound of their names and book titles and the bits of lore she gleaned from the biographies she devoured. I knew about Hemingway and Hadley, Isak Dinesen and her coffee plantation, Steinbeck and his dog Charley, long before I’d read any of these writers myself. All the news, however, came to me in the home language, Latvian, so that my own first encounters with my mother’s authors—Wolfe, Maugham, London, and others—always carried a tinge of strangeness laid over the base of familiarity.

  The effect of her devotion and the immersions it compelled—apart from the sheer pleasure of time spent in a vivid elsewhere—was to impress on me the idea that there was nothing finer, nothing worthier, than reading, except, of course, the writing that made reading possible.

  While my mother loved a great many books and writers, she reserved a special reverence—so it seemed to me—for a handful of authors from her youth in Riga, especially those she had first read in her own early years as part of a series called Lielie Ziemelnieki (Great Northerners), all issued, as she described them to me many times, in handsome uniform bindings: Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlöf, but above all others, Knut Hamsun, his Hunger, Mysteries, Victoria, and Pan, those works of desperate lyrical romanticism.

  I offer this as prologue to help explain why my encounter in late adolescence with Pan—to my mind still one of the most heart-wrenching novels ever written—should have seemed so intense, so intended. I was not just reading a novel; I was also somehow making inroads on what I imagined was my mother’s secret inner terrain. I was finding a connection to a world that predated me; in the process, I could feel myself putting down the first frail roots of my own private life.

  People sometimes speak of those rare charged encounters between reader and book when ready tinder is touched by the flame point of a particular vision. The image describes something of my original experience with this most harrowing of Hamsun’s early works. For Pan, published when its author was still in his thirties, is nothing if not the most numbingly pure distillation of a young heart’s passion, of raw emotion unchecked by the rationalizations and deferrals that experience teaches.

  As it happens, I read this little novel in the depths of my own most lovelorn summer. I was sixteen and abjectly in love with K. Tall, blond, dreamily pretty, K. was two classes behind me, very nearly still a girl, though she possessed the disconcerting poise you sometimes find in the truly beautiful, poise that can almost seem like submission to an unsolicited gift.

  I hid my passion. I had to, for it would have chased K. away, and I could not imagine not being able to be near her. K.—this was very clear—saw herself as my friend, my companion in reverie, a fellow seeker. On summer nights, after a long day of working in a candy warehouse, I would drive to the Cranbrook School, where her father was the dean of students, and she and I would walk around the grounds, circling the lake in the growing twilight, me at every second aware of the nearness of her bare shoulder, the sway of her long hair, the little modulations of tone when she laughed at my jokes. I dreamed of my fingers brushing that skin, but I did not dare the slightest inclination in her direction. Later, though, driving home down Lone Pine Road, windows open to the night, or lying on my back in my stark and stuffy little room, I felt I would break apart if something did not happen soon.

  It was in this state that I first read—gulped down—Hamsun’s novel and found myself transported into a sadness from which it seemed there could be no return, that felt, suddenly, like my first earned wisdom, confirmation of the fact that life touched by the genius of love was ultimately not to be endured.

  Hamsun opens with the account—seemingly innocent, contemplative, transparent—of one Lieutenant Glahn, who would have us believe he is passing the time setting down a few recollected episodes from a summer that has already taken on the character of a dream:

  These last few days I have thought and thought of the Nordland summer’s endless day. I sit here and think of it, and of a hut I lived in, and of the forest behind the hut; and I have taken to writing about it, just for my own amusement and to while away the time. Time drags; it does not pass as quickly as I should like, although I have no cares and lead the gayest of lives. I am perfectly content with everything, and thirty is no great age. A few days ago I received a couple of
bird’s feathers from far away, from one who need not have sent them; just two green feathers folded in a sheet of paper with a coronet on it and fastened with a seal. It amused me to see two so fiendishly green feathers. Otherwise there is nothing to trouble me except a touch of arthritis now and then in my left foot, the result of an old shot wound that healed up long ago.

  I remember that time went much faster two years ago, incomparably faster than now; the summer was gone before I realised it. It was two years ago, in 1855—I want to write about it to amuse myself—that something happened to me: or else I dreamt it.

  Glahn would have us believe that he is a man at peace, but even an unsophisticated reader—such as I surely was in that long-ago summer of 1968—must grasp that these are the bravely bitter posturings of a man looking to master his pain. Phrases like “for my own amusement” and “although I have no cares” are, we know, standard-issue denials; but just in case we don’t pick this up, there is the protruding giveaway “Otherwise there is nothing to trouble me,” confirming, lest we doubt it, that the receipt of the two green feathers was not an unalloyed pleasure. The beauty and power of Pan lies in how completely the gradually revealed emotional lacerations come to contradict Glahn’s adopted pose.

  The outer contour of Glahn’s summer, the slight stuff of plot, is easily sketched in. Glahn is, by temperament, one of life’s great romantic solitaries. Taking a break from the larger world, living in a forest hut near a small Norwegian trading village, he passes his summer alone, with only his beloved dog, Aesop, for company. When he is hungry, he hunts. Otherwise, he whiles away the endless hours daydreaming in his hut or wandering about in the forest, communing with nature in fugues of such pantheistic intensity that it seems at times he will simply merge with the great green Other: “Over by the edge of the forest there is fern and monk’s hood, the heather is in bloom and I love its small flowers. I thank God for every heather flower I have ever seen; they have been like tiny roses on my path and I weep for love of them.”