Swann (3 page)

This house has been sweet to me, and in return I’ve kept it chaste; that is, I haven’t punished it with gaiety. No posters or prayer rugs or art deco glass here, and no humanoid shapes draped in Indonesian cotton. I’ve got tables; I’ve got a more than decent Oriental rug; I’ve got lamps. (Lord, make me Spartan, but not yet.) In my kitchen cupboards I’ve got plates and cups that
match
. In the dining-room, admittedly only nine feet by nine feet, I’ve got—now this is possibly a
little
outré—a piano that used to sit in a bar at the Drake Hotel, and after I finish my paper on Swann for the symposium in January, I intend to take a few piano lessons. Brownie says playing the piano is as calming as meditation and less damaging to the brain cells.

I hope so, because I’ve never been able to see the point of emptying one’s mind of thought. Our thoughts are all we have. I love my thoughts, even when they take me up and
down sour-smelling byways where I’d rather not venture. Whatever flickers on in my head is mine and I want it, all the blinking impulses and inclinations and connections and weirdness, and especially those bright purple flares that come streaming out of nowhere, announcing that you’re at some mystic juncture or turning point and that you’d better pay attention.

Luckily for me, there have been several such indelible moments, moments that have pressed hard on that quirky narrative I like to think of as the story of my life. For example: at age eight, reading
The Wind in the Willows
. Then saying goodbye to my blameless father (bone cancer). At age fourteen, reading Charlotte Brontë—Charlotte, not Emily. Then saying goodbye, but only tentatively as it turned out, to my mother, a woman called Gladys Shockley Maloney. Next, reading Germaine Greer. Then saying goodbye to my virginity. (Goodbye and goodbye and goodbye.) Then reading Mary Swann and discovering how a human life can be silently snuffed out. Next saying goodbye to Olaf and Oak Park and three months of marriage, and then buying my queer toy house downtown, which I fully intended to sell when the market turned. But unsignalled, along came one of those brilliant purple turning points.

It came because of my fame. My mother has never understood the fame that overtook me in my early twenties. She never believed it was really me, that mouth on the book jacket, yammering away. Neither, for that matter, did I. It was like going through an epidemic of measles, except that I was the only one who got sick.

Six months after
The Female Prism
appeared in the bookstores someone decided I should go on a book-promotion tour—as though a book that was number six on the nonfiction bestseller list needed further pumping up. I
started out in Boston, then went to New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, then hopped to Louisville, skipped to Denver and Houston, and ended up one overcast afternoon on a TV talk show in L.A. The woman who interviewed me was lanky and menacing, wore a fur vest and was dangerously framed by lengths of iodine-glazed hair. To quell her I talked about the surrealism of scholarship. The pretensions. The false systems. The arcane lingo. The macho domination. The garrison mentality. The inbred arrogance.

She leaned across and patted me on the knee and said, “You’re not coming from arrogance, sweetie; you’re coming from naked need.”

Ping! My brain shuddered purple. I was revealed, uncloaked, and as soon as possible I crept back to Chicago, back to my ginger-cookie house on the south side, and made up my mind about one thing: that as long as I lived I would stay in this house. (At least for the next five years.) I felt like kissing the walls and throwing my arms around the punky little newel post and burying my face in its vulva-like carving. This was home. And it seemed I was someone who needed a home. I could go into my little house, my awful neediness and I, and close the doors and shut the curtains and stare at my enduring clutter and be absolutely
still
. Like the theoreticians who currently give me a bad case of frenzies, I’d made a discovery: my life was my own, but I needed a place where I could get away from it.

God is dead, peace is dead, the sixties are dead, John Lennon and Simone de Beauvoir are dead, the women’s movement is dozing—checking its inventory, let’s say—so what’s left?

The quotidian is what’s left. Mary Swann understood that, if nothing else.

She spelled it out. The mythic heavings of the universe, so baffling, so incomprehensible, but when squeezed into digestible day-shaped bytes, made swimmingly transparent. Dailiness. The diurnal unit, cloudless and soluble. No wonder the first people on earth worshipped heavenly bodies; between the rising and the setting of the sun their little lives sprouted all manner of shadows and possibilities. Whenever I meet anyone new, I don’t say, “Tell me about your belief system.” I say, “Tell me about your average day.”

Dailiness to be sure has its hard deposits of ennui, but it is also, as Mary Swann suggests, redemptive. I busy my brain with examples.

Every day of his short life, for instance, my father pulled on a pair of cotton socks, and almost every day he turned to my mother and said, “Cotton lets the skin breathe.” He also made daily pronouncements on meat that had been frozen: “Breaks down the cell structure,” he liked to say. “Destroys the nutrients.” In the same way he objected to butter, white bread, sugar—“attacks the blood cells”—garlic (same reason), and anything that had green pepper in it.

He was otherwise a mild man, a math teacher in a west-side high school. His pale red hair, the drift of it over his small ears, his freckled neck and the greenish suits he wore in the classroom—all these things kept him humble. His small recurring judgements on garlic and green pepper were, I’ve come to see, a kind of vanity for him, an appetite
that had to be satisfied, but especially the innocent means by which he was able to root himself in the largeness of time. Always begin a newspaper on the editorial page, he said. Never trust a man who wears sandals or diamond jewellery. These small choices and strictures kept him occupied and anchored while the cancer inched its way along his skeleton.

My mother, too, sighing over her morning cup of coffee and lighting a cigarette, is simply digging in for the short run. And so is my sister, Lena, with her iron pills and coke and nightly shot of Brahms; and Olaf with his shaving ritual, and Brownie with his daily ingestion of flattery and cash. Who can blame them? Who wants to? Habit is the flywheel of society, conserving and preserving and dishing up tidy, edible slices of the cosmos. And there’s much to be said for a steady diet. Those newspaper advice-givers who urge you to put a little vinegar in your life are toying, believe me, with your sanity.

Every day, for instance, I eat a cheese on pita for lunch, then an apple. I see no reason to apologize for this habit. Around two-thirty in the afternoon Lois Lundigan and I share a pot of tea, alternating Prince of Wales, Queen Mary, and Earl Grey. She pours. I wash the cups. Sisterhood. Between three and five, unless it’s my seminar day, I sit in my office at my desk and work on articles or plan my lectures. At five-thirty I stretch, pack up my beautiful briefcase, say good night to Lois and hit the pavement. The sun’s still keyed up, hot and yellow. Every day I walk along the same route, past grimy shrubs and run-down stores and apartment buildings and trees that become leafier as I approach Fifty-seventh Street. About this time I start to feel a small but measurable buzzing in the brain that makes my legs move along in double time. There I am, a determined piece of human matter, but adrift on a busy street that has
suddenly become a conduit—a pipeline possessing the power of suction. Something, a force more than weariness, is drawing me home.

There’s no mystery about this; I know precisely what pulls me along. Not food or sex or rest or succour but the thought of the heap of mail that’s waiting for me just inside my front door.

Among my friends I’m known as the Queen of Correspondence, maintaining, in this day of long-distance phone calls and even longer silences, what is considered to be a
vast
network. This is my corner on quaintness. My crochet work. My apple sauce. Mail comes pouring in, national and international, postcards and air letters and queer stamps crowded together in the corners of bulging envelopes. Letters from old school friends await me or letters from sisters in the movement. Perhaps a scrawl from my six-year-old nephew, Franklin, and my real sister, Lena, in London. My editor in New York is forever showering me with witty, beseeching notes. Virginia Goodchild, my former lawyer, writes frequently from New Orleans where she now has her practice. Olaf, in Tübingen, keeps in touch. So do last year’s batch of graduate students and the year before’s, a sinuous trail of faces and words. There are always, always, letters waiting. A nineteenth-century plenitude. I tear them open, I burn and freeze, I consume them with heathenish joy, smiling as I read, tapping my foot, and planning what I’ll write back, what epics out of my ongoing life I’ll select, touch up, and entrust to the international mails.

Mailless weekends are hell, but Monday’s bounty partially compensates. Every evening I write a letter, sometimes two, while the rest of the world plays Scrabble or watches TV or files its nails or whatever the rest of the world does. I write letters that are graceful and agreeable,
far more graceful and agreeable than I am in my face-to-face encounters. My concern, my well-governed wit, my closet kindness all crowd to the fore, revealing that rouged, wrinkled, Russian-like persona that I like to think is my true self. (Pick up a pen and a second self squirms out.) The maintenance of my persona and the whole getting and sending of letters provide necessary traction to my quotidian existence, give me a kick, a lift, a jolt, a fix, a high, a way of seizing time and keeping it in order.

Today there’s a thick letter from Morton Jimroy in California. A four-pager or I’m an elephant’s eyebrow. I can’t get it open fast enough. There I stand, reading it, still in my coat and hat with my beautiful briefcase thrown down on the floor along with the mutilated envelope.

I read it once, twice, then put it aside. While eating dinner—a boned chicken breast steamed in grapefruit juice and a branch of broccoli
al dente
—I read it a third time. I’ve been writing to Morton Jimroy for almost a year now and find him a teasing correspondent.

Today’s letter is particularly problematic, containing as it does one of Jimroy’s ambushing suggestions. I’ll wait exactly one week before I reply and then—now I’m eating dessert, which is a slice of hazelnut torte from the local bakery—I’ll send him one of my two-draft specials.

It’s a guilty secret of mine that I write two kinds of letters, one-drafters and two-drafters. For old friends I bang out exuberant single-spaced typewritten letters, all the grammar jangled loose with dashes and exclamation points and reckless transitions. Naturally, I trust these old friends to read my letters charitably and overlook the awful girlish breathlessness and say to themselves, “Well, Sarah leads such a busy life, we’re lucky to get
any
kind of letter out of her.”

But in my two-draft letters I mind my manners, sometimes even forsaking my word-processor for the pen. Only yesterday I wrote a double-drafter to Syd Buswell in Ottawa. “Dear Professor Buswell,” I wrote. “On behalf of the Steering Committee of the Swann Symposium, may I say how much we regret that you will not be presenting your paper in January. Nevertheless, we hope you will attend and participate in discussions.” I keep myself humble, am mindful of paragraph coherence, and try for a tincture of charm.

For Morton Jimroy,
the
Morton Jimroy, biographer of Ezra Pound, John Starman, and now Mary Swann, I get out my best paper and linger over my longhand, my lovely springy I’s and e’s, aglide on their invisible blue wires. And I always do a second draft.

Once again—now I’m having coffee, feet up on the coffee table—I read Jimroy’s letter. Though his home is in Winnipeg, Canada, this letter is from California where he’s spending a year putting together his notes on Mary Swann. Today’s letter, like his others, is imbued with a sense of pleading, but for what?—who can tell? His are letters from which the voice has been drained off, and instead there’s a strenuous concentration, each casual phrase propped up by rhetoric and positioned so as to signal candour—but a candour undercut by the pain of deliberate placement. Ring around the rosy. How am I supposed to interpret all this? Painstaking letters are born of pain; I must be generous, I must overlook transparent strategy, stop sniffing for a covert agenda. But there’s something unsettling in the way he’s always wringing a response from me. I am summoned, commanded to comment and comfort and offer gifts of flattery.

He has one rare quality that I suspect is genuine: an urge for confession, or at least intimacy. We’ve never met and
have no claims on each other, and there’s no real reason for him to tell me about the depression he suffered after his book on Starman was published, a long painful depression, which—he told me all this in a previous letter—neither medication nor analysis was able to heal.