Fear of Fifty (37 page)

Passion and poetry were clearly allied for Sand. Bad boys were her muses. Happily, she survived them all, winding up a contented grandmother who never ceased to write. Even in the midst of an affair, even in the midst of travel, she wrote five to eight hours a night. When she locked the door to de Musset to produce her nightly quota of pages, he took up with the dancing girls of the Fenice, Venice's beautiful opera house. This did not stop Sand's writing—though it may have cracked a piece of her heart. Tender and maternal as she was with all her men, she knew that work, not love, kept her alive. She is the first of our modern breed of writer-mother-lovers.

Perhaps Elizabeth Barrett Browning cannot be said to have chosen an archetypal bad boy in Robert Browning, but certainly he was her liberator from home and he became her muse. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” highlights the tradition of women poets carried away by liberating love. The tradition continues in this century with Anna Akhmatova and Edna St. Vincent Millay. And who was Sylvia Plath if not a good girl in love with the archetypal bad boy? She paid with her life for her poet's
Liebestod.

Mary Godwin Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter with William Godwin), the writer who invented that evergreen genre the horror novel, loved a bad boy in Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was a revolutionary, a traitor to his class, a sexual rebel, and that was why, being her mother's daughter, she chose him at the young age of sixteen. He honored her dead mother as she did, so there were thrilling seduction scenes in the cemetery, with her mother's headstone as a sort of magic amulet. (But then dead mothers are rather easier for teenage girls to honor than living ones.)

The Brontes—Emily, Charlotte, and Anne—all had a weakness for bad boys, if only in their fiction and poetry. Heathcliff and Rochester have given birth to thousands of bad-boy heroes in lesser novels and movies (written by people who never even read the Brontës but received the archetype through the osmosis of pop culture). The yearning voice of Emily Brontë's love poems has given birth to the generic voice that still pervades much twentieth-century women's poetry.

Young women want to love in a self-annihilating way “All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee” is a cry we echo in adolescence. It is only mature womanhood that finally teaches the value of intimate female friendships, intellectual friendships, and giving service to lives beyond our own.

At sixteen, we find Heathcliff and Rochester stronger lures than anything. We cannot wait to give up all for love. There must be an evolutionary reason for this. Is it because Heathcliff and Rochester help us sever ties with home and release us to pursue our own life's adventures? Is it because they jolt us out of childhood? Is it because they present a greater force than the passion to stay at home with Mom? I think all are true. Young women dream of romance and passion as men dream of conquest, because those dreams are necessary goads to leaving home and growing up. How else can we make sense of the fact that the fiercest feminists have also been the fiercest lovers?

Even if sexual passion did not ensure the continuation of the human race, it would be necessary to break the bonds of the adolescent girl to her mother so that she could eventually
become
her mother. Passion is a great catalyst for growing up.

Many women who fulfill their artistic and intellectual powers are also father-ridden. Mary Godwin Shelley was a perfect example of this. Her problem was a mythic mother, an all-too-real father. He was brilliant but emotionally weak, so he married a harridan—as emotionally weak men often do. Percy Shelley became mother, father, and escape for Mary. There was no way for her to resist him—particularly when he swore he would take his own life unless he could have her.

The Oedipal taboo demands a stranger (seemingly
unlike
Daddy) who arouses passion that overrides all practical considerations. And the bad boy is perfect for this. He must come across the moors with a burst of furious hoofbeats; he must love one's creative work and carry one away to Italy or England or the moon; he must be a different color, race, nationality, class; he must speak a different language; he must dance to a different drummer. Otherwise the Oedipal pull is too strong to let us leave Daddy and home at all.

Why leave, when our first loves are there? Because
unless
we leave, we cannot come home with the treasures of art.

When we look at the lives of women creators like Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, Sylvia Plath, Colette, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Akhmatova, Mary McCarthy, and so many others, we should perhaps not regret that they chronically loved Mr. Wrong. Loving the wrong man is sometimes the only thing a woman creator can do when she is young and needs to break away from home. Loving a bad boy means loving the bad boy in herself, asserting her freedom, the wildness of her soul. The bad boy is the rebel part of herself that her female upbringing has usually tried to quash. Only when she integrates the bad boy into her
own
personality can she give up his rough love. If she survives it, she is stronger for it. It is her coming of age, her marriage of strength and tenderness, her independence.

After fifty, none of this is necessary. We discover we can
be
the bad boy and the good girl both at once. After fifty, we can assert the bad boy's power, together with our maternal warmth. We no longer need the bad boy at our side to claim our virility. Nor do we need our mothers to be motherly ourselves. We are complete androgynous humans now—fierce and tender both at the same time.

In striving to fulfill our identities as women, it's important not to confound the various passages of life with each other. What we may need in girlhood or adolescence are not the same qualities we need in maturity. The task of adolescence is to leave home. And women in a sexist society have chronically found this hard to do. Our biology has reinforced the very dependence which our minds have been able to fly beyond. Patriarchal practices like arranged marriages, the denial of abortion, and female sexual mutilation have encouraged us to glorify not leaving as a self-protective strategy.

No wonder our creative heroines
had
to find strategies for leaving. Those who were heterosexual devised the strategy of falling for bad boys as a primal means of separation. We make a mistake in thinking they were only victims. They were adventurers first. That they became victims was not their
intent.
Sylvia Plath was not merely a masochist but a bold adventurer who perhaps got more than she bargained for.

As I get older, I come to understand that the seemingly self-destructive obsessions of my various younger lives were not only self-destructive. They were also self-creative. All through the stages of our lives, we go through transformations that may only manifest themselves when they are safely over. The rebels and bad boys I loved were the harbingers of my loving those very qualities in myself. I loved and left the bad boys, but I thank them for helping make me the strong survivor I am today.

The delusion that art and nature were one in Italy irritated Byron, who had been one of the principal victims of it, when he sensed it in others. Thomas Moore tells this revealing story of his meeting his great friend in Venice after a long separation. “We stood out on the balcony in order that, before daylight had quite gone, I might have some glimpse of the scene which the grand canal presented. Happening to remark in looking at the clouds, which were still bright in the west, that ‘what had struck me in Italian sunsets was that peculiar rosy hue'—I had hardly pronounced the word ‘rosy' when Lord Byron, clapping his hand on my mouth, said with a laugh, ‘Come, damn it, Tom, don't be poetical.'”

—Luigi Barzini,
The Italians

Water equals time and provides beauty with its double. Part water, we serve beauty in the same fashion. By rubbing water, this city improves time's looks, beautifies the future.

—Joseph Brodsky,
Watermark

 

 

In the middle of these years of shipwreck, these years of upheaval, I fell in love with a city: Venice,
Venezia, La Serenissima
,
Venise, Venedig.
I thought this magic island would save my life. I believed the literary myths that rose around it like its famous fog. I returned again and again in search of love, in search of myself.

For writers who use the English language, Italy has become more myth than reality.

It's all the fault of a few nineteenth-century poets: first, the Brownings—Mr. and Mrs.—who brought the hordes to Florence in search of Fra Filippo Lippi and transforming love (which gets better after death), only to find car fumes, melting gelato, mobbed museums, cynical leather merchants, and cheating goldsmiths on the Ponte Vecchio; second, Lord Byron, who swam the Grand Canal with his manservant rowing behind him (carrying his romantic cloak and open britches), who ennobled the Palazzo Mocenigo by writing verses of the divine
Don Juan
there, but who was beastly to the women in his life and left his beloved daughter, Allegra, to die in a convent rather than give her to her mother; third, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who left his heart on the beach near Viareggio, to be plucked out of the flames that consumed the rest of him; and last, but in no way least, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, who conceived her manlike monster in the Alps, then came to Italy, only to see her husband drown, fulfilling her novel's prophecy.

Forget, for a moment, George Sand and Alfred de Musset (deceiving each other in Venice), Henry James, John Singer Sargent, John Ruskin, Vita Sackville-West, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Baron Corvo, Igor Stravinsky, Ezra Pound, and all the besotted others. Byron and Browning and the Shelleys
alone
are enough for the touristic blight of ruinously expensive Italy. The poets came and wrote; then came the hordes. Who says that poetry has no economic clout?

The spell these poets cast over sanctified places on this beautiful, but slightly shopworn boot bewitched all who were bewitched by books. We went to Italy seeking love and poetry—and love and poetry were interchangeable to us.

The first time I came to Venice, I was nineteen and arrived alone on the train from Florence (where I was in that summer program, studying Italians). The college program was located in the thirteenth-century Torre di Bellosguardo (now become an atmospheric though somewhat ramshackle country inn overlooking Florence from that same hill to which Vita and Virginia eloped). Everything in Italy is overlaid with sexual-poetic allusion—for Italy is, above all, the country of poetic elopement—at least to the Americans and English. To Italians, it is another country altogether.

I stood at the edge of Santa Lucia Station clutching a small, blue-covered copy of
Don Juan.
The marble steps of the station loomed longer and steeper than they are. I did not see the dead kittens floating, or the empty condoms and Fanta bottles. I saw only poetry and love. Poets are the best publicists of all.

I took the vaporetto to San Marco, marveling at the palaces on the Grand Canal. When I saw a plaque which read “
Qui abitò Lord Byron”
(Lord Byron lived here) on the wall of the Palazzo Mocenigo, I nearly swooned. I was in the presence of Literature—that old fraud, that intellectual gigolo. As Mary Shelley said of her honeymoon flight abroad, “It was romantic beyond romance.”

And so I wandered through teeming San Marco, through the Doges' Palace in this living museum of a city.

A handsome young Chinese doctor (not the one I later married) bought me violets and an ice cream cone and spoke with me of Byron. A coarse American college boy asked me to share his dingy room in a fleabag near the station. A number of Italians pinched my butt. I floated on, protected by poetry.

Nothing altered the spell. I was transfixed, hypnotized. Books were my addictive substance then. I carried them in my heart and head.

I walked into a house with Ruskin's name on the side and was greeted with a torrent of abuse—it was
not
a museum. I ate touristic mini-pizzas and drank sour wine. It was all manna to me.

The crumbling red-tiled roofs, the bells, the seagulls, the golden ball of
La Dogana
(the customs house, which enriched Venice by search and seizure), the green conical hat of the
campanile
of San Giorgio Maggiore, facing the Basin of St. Mark's and its
campanile,
the way the two
campanili
line up in the channel to make a clear marker for sailboats winging into the harbor, the way the cruise ships slide down the Giudecca Canal as if on invisible rails—all this enchanted me, cast a spell that brought me back and back. I went to Venice with women friends, eventually with Allan, with Jon, with Will, and many times alone. I stayed everywhere—from the Ostello della Gioventù, to cheap hotels, to moderate
pensioni,
to the most ludicrously expensive palaces like the Gritti or Cipriani. Later I began to rent houses—as far from the tourists as I could find. I flattered myself that I was, if not a native, then a habitué.

Often I would arrive in Venice and wonder what on earth had brought me back. It was languid; it tended to hold and entrap me; but the
ensorcellement
(as Anaïs Nin calls it) was
not
always pleasant. I felt like a fly trapped in a spider's web, like a sailor dragged down by a fantastic octopus. I was never sure what the city wanted of me.

The blue summer skies and the glittering lagoon can be deceptive. The tourists troop through like bedraggled sunburned beggars, eager to get home and say they've seen it. But when you live in Venice for a while, winter or summer, you discover the city has thousands of secrets and that it lets you in on them only in time.

The summer of 1983, I had been invited to the Soviet Union to attend a conference of writers. It was that lovely man the late Harrison Salisbury who invited me. The company included Studs Terkel, Susan Sontag, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Irving and Jean Stone. Voznesensky was promised, but did not appear. Many apparatchiks did. We went by rail from Moscow to Kiev. I was horrified at the way Gwendolyn Brooks's black face provoked frank stares in Moscow and Kiev. She was my roommate on the train and we stayed up all night, talking poetry and motherhood.