In Rough Country Page 26

  In the Cut is advertised by its publisher as an “erotic thriller,” which seems harshly reductive for a work of serious literary ambition. (“Erotic horror” seems to me the more accurate, more inclusive category, if categorizing is required.) On the whole, however, it’s a fair assessment, given the exigencies of plot and the sketchiness of X’s character. In genre works of this kind, essentially cinematic in outline, plot is the engine that relentlessly drives character, as in literary fiction character is usually the engine that drives plot. Everything must move swiftly forward along action/suspense lines to a dramatic denouement that should both surprise the reader and explain, if not resolve, the mystery. Probability in the Hawthornian sense—“the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience”—is sacrificed in servitude to plot. Would a seasoned veteran like Jimmy Malloy really allow himself to be handcuffed to a chair by his skittish lover? (This curious scene replicates an equally curious scene in The Whiteness of Bones, when Mamie handcuffs herself to a chair out of what seems to be masochistic whimsy. She can only be freed from her self-imposed bondage by a man.) Equally improbable is the total lack of awareness of AIDS among X’s well-educated, sexually promiscuous New York friends. And would even a closet-psychotic homicide detective leave his victims’ bodies in his own jurisdiction? Nor is the clichéd cinematic scene avoided in which the (male) stalker accosts the (female) victim as she walks alone, at night, on West Broadway:

  Clothed not in the black suit of an undertaker, not even black-skinned, but in some black and shiny material like plastic, or, more terrifying, rubber, an arm wrapped casually, easily around my neck. My head was yanked back, my neck pulled taut, a hand over my gaping mouth.

  He wore a black stocking mask, black holes for eyes. There was a strange odor on his gloves, like glue or acetone. Formaldehyde.

  For all that In the Cut is clearly a lesser literary achievement by a fine writer, it is also powerful, shameless (or fearless) in its depiction of female passivity in the face of ubiquitous male aggression. Here is a repudiation in a sense not merely of mature womanhood but of personhood itself, with its obligations of personal responsibility and integrity. To allow others, of the category “male,” to identify one in terms of one’s genitalia, is to invite death. X, no surprise to the reader, is X’d out. It seems to have been her deepest, not quite secret wish, like that of the enthralled heroine of Story of O, whose final request is for extinction and whose final happiness is her lover’s fulfillment of that request.

  “IT DOESN’T FEEL PERSONAL”: THE POETRY OF SHARON OLDS

  If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm it I know that is poetry. If I feel physically that the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way.

  These ardent words of Emily Dickinson, written in a letter to an editor and “romantic friend” Thomas Higginson, might have been coined to describe Sharon Olds’s poetry. There are many poems in our literature that inspire admiration, even awe for their technical virtuosity; but there are not so many poems that make us feel anything so immediate, visceral and overwhelming. In her astonishing books—the aptly titled Satan Says (1990), The Dead and the Living (1983), The Gold Cell (1987), The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1996), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Unswept Room (2002), Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004)—Sharon Olds has cultivated an inimitable voice that is both fearless and heartrending, wise—and wounded—with experience yet childlike with yearning. Her original and startling images of domestic life—the “erotics of family love and pain” as Alicia Ostriker has noted—her willingness to speak from the heart, at times of subjects so extreme (the excruciating details of her alcoholic father’s death from cancer, for instance, as well as the trauma of having been abused by her mother, as a child “tied to a chair,” the vicissitudes of sexual love)—have made her a lightning rod of a kind, a beacon of admirable audacity in the eyes of some—Billy Collins has called her a “poet of sex and psyche…infamous for her subject matter alone”—Michael Ondaatje has called her poetry “pure fire in the hands”—and a threatening and disturbing breaker of taboos in the eyes of others—like Helen Vendler who has called her poetry “pornographic”—(probably the best endorsement the prissy Harvard critic has ever given).

  Like William Blake, as well as Dickinson, Sharon Olds has consciously cultivated a perspective of radical innocence. Her characteristic tone is seemingly simply, artless—the voice so ostensibly neutral, we are pulled into it, as in a recollection of childhood nightmare mis-recalled as something very different that might be called “family fun”—

  In the evenings, during the cocktail hour,

  My mother’s new husband would sometimes inspect

  the troops. Your mother has the best damn fanny

  in the house, he would say to my sister and me—in our

  teens, then twenties, thirties, forties. Turn around! He’d cry out, Turn

  around! We wouldn’t

  turn around…And when I’d pass him next,

  he’d bear-hug me, as if to say

  no hard feelings, and hit me hard

  on the rear and laugh very loud, and his eyes seemed to

  shine as I otherwise never saw them shine,

  like eyes of devils and fascists in horror

  comic books. [“Paterfamilias”]

  There is something subversive, even mutinous in the poet’s unflinching child-eye; we sense a kinship with the unflinchingness of Emily Dickinson as with Sharon Olds’s older contemporaries Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—the quintessential Confessional poets of mid-century American poetry. Like these numinous sister-poets, Sharon Olds is a natural mythographer—all that falls within her scrutiny, all that she sees with her finely wrought poet-eye is myth, fairy tale, legend even as, for Olds, it is utterly domestic, ordinary. Unlike her tormented predecessors, particularly Sylvia Plath who cultivated an air of grievance and discontent with the very fabric of the universe, Sharon Olds is fundamentally a celebrant of what is.

  “I want to be able to write about any subject…

  I’m just interested in human stuff like hate, love,

  sexual love and sex. I don’t see why not.”

  —SHARON OLDS

  “It became the deep spring of my life, this love for men,/I don’t know if it is a sickness or a gift”—these are the opening lines of “The Wellspring,” a poem of intense openness and intimacy that begins as a lyric rhapsody to erotic love—“it is all I want, to meet men/fully, as a twin, unborn, half-gelled,/frontal in the dark, nothing between us but our/bodies, naked, and when those melt/nothing between us—as if I want to die with them.” Suddenly the poem shifts and takes on another tone, acquires another subject, the poignancy of raw unspeakable need. The conclusion:

  For a moment,

  after we wake, sometimes we are without desire—

  five, ten, twenty seconds of pure calm, as if each one of us is whole

  One Secret Thing completes the cycle of scrupulously wrought family poems she has been writing through much of her career. The book focuses upon conflict—the outward, political conflict of war endured from numerous—anonymous—perspectives and the inward, scarring conflict of strife within a family. The book begins with an elegy—“Most of us are never conceived./ Many of us are never born…And some who are born live only for minutes,/others for two, or for three, summers,/ or four, and when they go, everything/ goes—the earth, the firmament…” [“Everything”] By degrees a double portrait emerges of the poet—the entranced child’s eye—and the poet’s mysteriously driven, essentially unfathomable mother: “When I think of people who kill and eat people/ I think of how lonely my mother was./ She would come to me for comfort, in the night,/ she’d lie down on me and pray. And I could say/ she fattened me, until it was time/ to cook me, but she did not know,/ she’d been robbed of a moral sense that way.” [“Freezer”] In “The Dead” a calm thought intrudes—“For a moment I see that it might not be entirely bad if my mother d
ied.”

  With the candor and delicately nuanced emotional ambivalence with which Sharon Olds wrote about her dying father, in earlier poems, now in the concluding poems of One Secret Thing she speaks of the terrible blood-kinship of mother-daughter—“I do not want her/ to die. This feels like a new not-want,/ a shalt-not-want not-want…Now if she goes/ when she goes/ to me it is like the departure of a/ whole small species of singing bird from the earth.” [“Little End Ode”]

  It has been charged against Sharon Olds—as it was, in an earlier era, charged against poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman as well as Sexton and Plath—that she has exploited her personal life in her poetry; that she writes of “sensational” subjects. But poetry has always been fueled upon the obsessions of poets, and what subject of lasting significance isn’t, in some way, “sensational”? Though Sharon Olds writes with intensity and passion of the personal life it should be clarified that she perceives her work as written—undergoing many revisions and transformations until it emerges as a text. For the poet, as for most artists, personal life is but the raw material that requires shaping into an artwork, in this case a highly stylized text. In an interview the poet says:

  It doesn’t feel personal. It feels like art—a made thing—the “I” in it is not myself anymore but, I hope, some pronoun that a reader or hearer could slip into.

  Born in San Francisco and raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”—as the evidence of her poems suggests—Sharon Olds has a B.A. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Columbia in American literature. For many years she has been an immensely popular and influential presence in the contemporary poetry scene: she has taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU since 1983; in 1984 she founded and continues to run a poetry workshop at Goldwater Hospital for the severely disabled. Though she didn’t publish her first book until the age of thirty-seven—“That sure seemed old then, and it sure seems young to me now”—Satan Says attracted much admiring attention and was awarded the San Francisco Poetry Prize. Her second book The Dead and the Living won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received numerous awards including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and her books are poetry best sellers. In 2005, one of very few poets invited by Laura Bush to participate in the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., Sharon Olds wrote a letter to the President’s wife that was subsequently published in The Nation. The letter is a model of tact and integrity:

  So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, D.C. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country—with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain—did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism—the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to…

  But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush administration…So many Americans who felt pride in their country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds, and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

  In her early twenties when she was a graduate student at Columbia, Sharon Olds “made a vow to Satan to write her own poetry”—on the steps of Low Library: “Give me my own poems and I’ll give up everything that I’ve learned. It doesn’t have to be any good, just as long as it’s mine.”

  TOO MUCH HAPPINESS: THE STORIES OF ALICE MUNRO

  Of writers who have made the short story their métier, and whose accumulated work constitutes entire fictional worlds—William Trevor, Edna O’Brien, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor come most notably to mind—Alice Munro is the most consistent in style, manner, content, vision. From the first, in such aptly titled collections as Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) and Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Munro exhibited a remarkable gift for transforming the seemingly artless—“anecdotal”—into art; like the short-story writers named above, Munro concentrated upon provincial, even back-country lives, in tales of domestic tragicomedy that seemed to open up, as if by magic, into wider, deeper, vaster dimensions—

  So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all sorts of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine. [“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” from Dance of the Happy Shades]

  Though Munro has set stories elsewhere—Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh and the Ettrick Valley of Scotland, even, in this new volume, Russia and Scandinavia—her favored setting is rural/small-town southwestern Ontario. This region of Canada, settled by Scotch Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists from the north of England, is characterized by frugality, rigidly “moral” principles, and Christian piety of the most severe, judgmental sort; a dour sort of Protestantism that has inspired what has been called Southern Ontario Gothic—a heterogeneous category of writers that includes Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Jane Urquhart, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy, in addition to Alice Munro. Like the American rural south; where Protestantism has flourished out of very different roots, the strait-laced xenophobic Anglo-Canadian culture nonetheless throws up all sorts of “queer streaks” and “fits”—lesions in the carapace of uniformity that provide the writer with the most extraordinary material: Munro’s “A Queer Streak” charts the consequences of a fourteen-year-old’s bizarre threatening letters written to her own family; “Fits” charts the consequences of a murder-suicide within the family of the wife and mother who discovered the corpses. How to explain such a domestic tragedy, in the house next door?

  “What this is like…it’s like an earthquake or a volcano. It’s that kind of happening. It’s a kind of fit. People can take a fit like the earth takes a fit. But it only happens once in a long while. It’s a freak occurrence.” [“Fits,” The Progress of Love, 1986]

  Possibly not, Munro suggests. Possibly not a “freak” occurrence at all.

  In her new, thirteenth collection of short fiction, Too Much Happiness—a title both cuttingly ironic and passionately sincere, as the reader will discover—Munro explores themes, settings, and situations that have come to seem familiar in her work, seen now from a startling perspective of time. Her use of language has scarcely changed over the decades, as her concept of the short story remains unchanged; Munro is a descendent of the lyric realism of Chekhov and Joyce for whom the taut stark dialogue-driven fiction of Hemingway holds little interest and the ostentatious writerly hauteur of Nabokov is altogether foreign, like “experimentation” of any sort. (One is inclined to suspect that Munro would agree with Flannery O’Connor’s dismissal of experimental literature—“If it looks funny on the page, I don’t read it.”) Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, even unadorned, but it is in fact an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly ruminative, analytic, and assessing voice comes to seem utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own voice:

  The thing she was ashamed of…was that she might have been paying attention to the wrong things, reporting antics, when there was something further, a tone, a depth, a light, that she couldn’t get
and wouldn’t get…. Everything she had done could sometimes be seen as a mistake…. She was enough of a child of her time to wonder if what she felt…was simply sexual warmth, sexual curiosity; she did not think it was. There seemed to be feelings which could only be spoken of in translation; perhaps they could only be acted on in translation; not speaking of them and not acting on them is the right course to take because translation is dubious. Dangerous as well. [“Who Do You Think You Are?,” The Beggar Maid, 1978]

  The Beggar Maid has the intimate, confiding tone of memoirist fiction, leading the reader to assume that Rose’s voice is not distinct from Alice Munro’s voice; in “Child’s Play,” from Too Much Happiness, this voice recurs scarcely altered though the narrator is much older than Rose, and her recollection of the past isn’t tempered by the sort of ironic-wistful yearning for what she has lost that has brought Rose—a “career” woman now living in a large city—back to her grim little hometown of Hanratty, Ontario. In “Child’s Play” the narrator Charlene undertakes an entirely different sort of self-exploration, or self-incrimination: