Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (11 page)

This isn't twenty-first-century Manhattan; it's Vienna in 1933. And this isn't a self-help show, it's one of the most politically and emotionally fraught meeting of minds in intellectual history. It's beyond me why the playwright didn't use H.D.'s own words—Doolittle wrote beautiful, poetic volumes about her analysis with Freud.

I resist the temptation to look at George. Let him draw his own conclusions without my interference.

Freud says, “The female is of course defined and limited by her biology.”

Yolanda turns downstage and eyes Bill. Then she faces the audience. “Despite his views of women I knew he was
brilliant.
” She hits the word like a pothole.

“She came to me because she was incapable of understanding her life,” Freud intones. “Hysteria lurked in her shadows.”

The two continue in this vein, immobile on the stage, long past the point where one would expect this prologue to end and some sort of scene begin. The audience begins to shift in the theater's narrow seats.

I stop paying attention to the words. I've read Yolanda's script and know what's coming: the muddily sketched analysis, a prurient attention to the details of H.D.'s engagement to Ezra Pound, a précis of her failed marriage to Richard Aldington and later the family she shaped with Bryher—all related in dialogue that reduces two passionate human beings to ideological caricatures. In reality, Freud's work with H.D. was hardly the pure misogynist trap this play is about to make it out to be. Freud was of course sexist, but he also thought H.D. was extraordinary. She in turn felt, despite their disagreements, that he'd saved her—and repaid the favor by helping him escape from Vienna before Hitler could seal his fate.

This playwright, though, uses the story of H.D.'s analysis as a vehicle for demonstrating yet again what a disaster Freud was for the entirety of womankind—an axe I'd thought had been thoroughly ground by the time I was in graduate school, leaving feminist scholars free to acknowledge that there may be one or two things to learn from Freud regardless. The playwright has also, ad-libbing off H.D.'s actual poetry, included a scene in which H.D. is transformed, through an onstage costume change, into Helen of Troy, while a double-entendre-spouting Freud narrates her wartime torments against a backdrop of battle sound effects. None of which is as bad as the play's penultimate scene, in which the two share a demeaning and completely ahistorical kiss . . . which would have been at least more plausible between the real Freud and H.D., who actually seemed to respect each other, than between the two speechifying figures of this overwrought play.

I glance at George, who wears a slightly pained expression. He may not know the extent to which history is being abused. But it's clear he knows a bad play when he sees it.

I force myself to focus on Yolanda's voice, which rises and falls with increasingly convincing hysteria and a certain brittle eloquence. And to Bill's smug commentary emerging from the cigar smoke. By intermission H.D. looks like she hates Freud's guts.

Ten minutes until act 2. Yolanda has insisted on a visit during intermission—she doesn't care how colossally unprofessional it looks, let Bill see she's got a social life too. George follows me backstage, where Yolanda grabs my arm and leads us into the single cramped bathroom-dressing room. She locks the door behind us. “That asshole is stepping all over my lines,” she says. “He can't bear to listen to me.”

George extends a hand. “I'm George.”

“Hi,” says Yolanda emptily, shaking it. She turns back to me. “Did you see
her?
She was the one changing my costume for the Helen of Troy sequence. I don't want her touching me. Next time I'll do the goddamn buttons myself. Next time I'll punch her in the head.”

“I'm so sorry,” I say. I squeeze her shoulder. “But you're powerful up there. You're completely convincing as Hilda.” It's true: Yolanda as H.D. carries herself with an undeniable, desperate majesty. Despite the script.

“I second that,” says George.

“I just wish”—Yolanda shakes out her hands, then her arms, loosening tension so vigorously that George and I step back against the wall—“that he would treat me with goddamn respect.”

“I told George the Bill story,” I offer.

Yolanda rounds on George. “
You're
a guy. You explain Bill to me.” She picks up a program and slaps it down on the vanity. “What an asshole.”

“I can't,” George says, “though I have a suggestion.”

“What?” The hostility in her voice makes me cringe.

But George appears unfazed. “You have to change how you say it,” he tells her. “Don't say, ‘I wish he would treat me with respect.' It's ‘I wish he were the
kind
of guy who'd treat me with respect.' But he's not. So you better go find that other guy.”

There's a long silence. Then Yolanda sighs out more air than I would have thought human lungs could hold. She says to George, “Come back to see the show again tomorrow. Make that every night.” To me, she says, “Marry him.”

There is a single, loud, knuckle rap on the door. It's Freud. “Some of us have to empty our bladders before act two,” he calls.

Yolanda fumbles with the lock. “I wish he were the
kind of guy
who'd drop dead.” She yanks open the door. We follow as she exits with a haughty glance at Bill, who hardly seems to notice.

The play's final scene, set seven years after Freud's death, depicts the moment of H.D.'s psychotic break. The script, unsurprisingly, implies the culprit is Freud, rather than the two world wars and the personal upheavals H.D. had already lived through. But the scene is brightened by Yolanda's closing recitation of an actual poem by H.D. After, there is sustained applause—more than I expected, even from a friend-and-family-filled opening-night house. The applause crests for Yolanda's bow. George and I don't speak. Neither of us, I think, wants to say a word about the play until we're outside.

We wait until the theater is practically empty, then go backstage to find Yolanda. Taking my arm, a flushed and now grinning Yolanda walks us over to the playwright—a diminutive, elated Jewish woman of about thirty who sets to telling Yolanda how fabulous she was.

When Yolanda can get in a word, she says, “Tracy is the literature professor I was telling you about. I've wanted you two to meet forever.”

The playwright turns to me.

“You've done a real service,” I manage. “It's about time someone wrote about Hilda Doolittle. It's long overdue.”

The playwright thanks me politely and then waits, apparently expecting more. I struggle to formulate some further compliment that's not a lie.

George looks at me for only a second. Then he turns to the playwright and pumps her hand. “Now
that,
” he enunciates, “was a play.”

She beams.

As I walk out of the elevator, a daytime TV announcer's voice greets me. Eileen is at her desk, mini-television blaring. She glances up at the sound of the elevator opening, sees me, and turns back to her screen, irritated by the interruption. The announcer's excited tones waft through the reception area. “In a dramatic incident at this Hollywood mansion . . .”

Gossip is not Eileen's hobby. It is the food of her soul, marrow
of life, milk of paradise. Eileen is a chatty fortyish double divorcée with wavy brown hair, wide brown eyes, and powder pink candied-looking lipstick. She's been the department's administrative assistant since well before I arrived as a graduate student. From her desk she commands the elevator and the stairwell, and, craning her neck, extends her purview to the faculty lounge. When this doesn't provide sufficient data she wheels her cart around the perimeter of the department, trolling for information, slowing flagrantly outside the copy room or anywhere else she might find two faculty members in conversation. Eileen is the Switzerland of the department, accepting deposits from all comers, taking no sides because any alliance might block information supplies from an opposing camp. In her world we faculty are arrested in a submature stage of development, playing smarter-than-thou games while the real matters of adult life go unattended.
You people have your priorities completely screwed up. You don't know anything if it's not in a book.
Despite Eileen's open disdain for our ignorance, or perhaps because of it, a certain segment of the faculty jockeys daily to praise her. My colleagues—most of them trusty straight-arrow sorts, with pale spouses and children with the strangled, overwise look of junior Manhattan literati—admire Eileen's clothing effusively and ask her, with cloying smiles, for the latest tabloid news. They're convinced, as only a group of Ph.D.s can be, that they're charming the sole non-college graduate among them. They think Eileen doesn't notice the smirk behind their questions, the way they use her as a source of see-how-open-minded-I-am points in some intradepartmental tournament. I find it insulting, and suspect she does too; perhaps that's why she grinds her superiority into our faces. When Eileen is particularly irritated, the mini-television comes out of the supply closet. Junior faculty's meek requests for silence and the offended glares of grad students make no difference; on those days the TV prattles uninterrupted on her desk for hours. I once heard Eileen, preening for a handsome new graduate student, say she was the only person in the department who knew how to stand up for what mattered. In truth I've never seen her stick out her little finger, let alone her neck, for anyone. The false heroism of the bored.

As I approach her desk Eileen greets me warily.

As cheerfully as I can, I return the greeting. “By the way,” I say, “any chance you've got that photocopying ready?”

She crunches a sucking candy. “Check again later,” she says, eyes drifting back toward the screen.

“I'll be in until three. I'll check then.”

She shrugs: The fates will decree as they choose. If the photocopying is ready, so be it. As I turn away, Eileen mutters, “
She's
got a lot of nerve, asking me to schedule extra meetings during drop/add week.”

And I've got better things to do than stand here figuring out which of my colleagues ticked Eileen off this time by requesting simple administrative assistance. Turning down the long fluorescent-lit hall, I head to my office. I unlock my door, rereading out of habit and for the thousandth time its single adornment—a one-panel cartoon depicting the tower of Babel under construction, each laborer depicted as a subspecialized academic. I flip on the lights, set my briefcase on the floor below my office's only other decoration—a framed photograph of Zora Neale Hurston—and grab the coffee mug off my stacked desk. As I'm shutting the door I spy Elizabeth, drifting along the wall of the corridor as though forced there by a swift current. The pile of books she's embracing reaches nearly to her chin. She starts when I greet her.

“I didn't see you.” Every word an apology.

“How goes it?”

“Fine,” she breathes. “Lots of work.”

“I can see.” I point to the books. “That stack's a spine-bender. You're checking on a new idea?”

“Joanne thought I should do some reading on nineteenth-century English prosody. To put Dickinson in better context. She did a little research for me and suggested these titles.”

“Really? To me that seems unnecessary. Do you think Joanne knows your dissertation area well enough to know what you need? She's a sixteenth-century specialist, not an Americanist.”

Elizabeth stops walking. Her struggle to formulate an apology looks like a Medieval portrait of agony.

“Don't worry.” I give her my most reassuring adviserly smile. “Your dissertation is in great shape. If you just stay on the course we discussed, I think it will be fine. But go ahead and read whatever you think will help.”

“Okay,” she says. “Thanks.”

I glance at the title on top of the stack:
Promethean Poesie.
This doesn't strike me as okay at all—it strikes me as a colossal waste of energy. Elizabeth will read each obscure tome cover to cover just to be sure she hasn't missed something. Then long after I've forgotten about this conversation she'll still be trying to mollify me by implying she did the extra work only to humor Joanne . . . or that the books
were
useful, though not at all in the way Joanne suggested. I don't have time for Elizabeth's curtseys and bows, yet I've already set them in motion by challenging Joanne's advice. Feeling like a jerk, I step into the faculty lounge.

“This is completely absurd,” Jeff greets me. He waves a half-empty cheese-pretzel bag in my direction. “Steven left these here. Have you seen the ingredients? I don't know how any intelligent person can eat this crap.”

I take the bag and scan the ingredients. “He's British. Maybe he eats it ironically. What's new?”

Jeff half shutters his eyes: his
have I got one for you
expression. “Victoria was finishing her coffee when I got here. She waited until everyone else had left, then asked for a moment of my time. Apparently Paleozoic asked her this morning if I was
courting
Elizabeth.”

“You're serious? Did Victoria tell him you were gay?”

“Victoria's too Brahmin to divulge anyone else's business, and too stiff to say the word ‘gay' unless it's in a sonnet. All she said to Paleozoic was that she doubted it. But it seemed to her”—here Jeff adopts Victoria's measured New England cadence—“that it would be prudent for me to be aware there are rumors circulating about Elizabeth and myself among the senior staff.”

“How could she even keep a straight face?”

“She doesn't have any other kind.”

“She
does
know you're gay?”

“Of course. She knew before anyone, including you. The first week I was here she suggested, in a completely uncharacteristic non sequitur, that I stop by and introduce myself to Frank Chanville in Classics. And when I met Frank it turned out he'd just organized the university gay forum. Underneath the granite, Victoria's pretty savvy—unlike Paleozoic, who wouldn't know gay-as-a-goose if it came up to him and—” Jeff makes an obscene gesture.