Journal Entries
July, 2009 - Heartsick
Heartsick, Adj. 1. heartsick - full of sorrow
brokenhearted, heartbroken, profoundly disappointed,
sorrowful - experiencing or marked by or expressing sorrow especially that associated with irreparable loss; "even in laughter the heart is sorrowful"- Proverbs 14:13
At certain times you feel a need to revisit old favorite books and the characters who once moved you so deeply. I am rereading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, am still moved, probably because the moral dilemmas in this novel set in the 1870s still resonate 135 years later and because I see something of myself in both Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska. Nabokov said that the physical work of a first reading, the process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, stands between the reader and artistic appreciation. I certainly have a better understanding of Ellen's and Newland's devastating, ill-timed attraction, about the universal conflict between passion and responsibility, freedom and tradition, and, really, just the pathetic contortions humans put themselves through in order to keep a safe distance from the hinterlands.
Newland's choice of duty over passion--May over Ellen, a career in law rather than the arts--was his way of maintaining a semblance of order, of using tradition as a bulwark much as modern suburbanites use the gated community. This is evident early on when the narrator gives Newland's reasons for marrying May:
He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.
This steadying, unescapable duty made his decision not altogether an honorable act but merely one of instinct, the reaction of a man genetically programmed to fear chaos.
But it is all biology, isn't it? Who and what and how and why we are who we are. Even one's preference for books with moral complexity. Whenever there is a discussion about what makes great literature, I am quick to quote Faulkner who said the only thing worth writing about is the heart in conflict with itself. The books that deal with this kind of conflict are the books that I remember and, as I get older, the only ones I want to spend time with. I admit the level of narcissism here, gravitating toward the most personal of universal themes because they are seductive, because they are a mirror giving us back ourselves. It makes me wonder if the people who prefer this type of literature aren't to some degree obsessed with their own morality, aren't, perhaps, frequently on the verge of becoming immoral themselves. Reading then, becomes a kind of instructive voyeurism, both delicious and painful but also harmless; and not just harmless but a form of self-absorption that is socially admired.
So I leave Newland and Ellen on the evening of their last time alone together, in the brougham, on the Hudson River ferry, with blowing snow and growing dusk outside the window, fitting metaphors for their end of the possibility of an intimate relationship. It is the turning point in the novel, the end of hope (or innocence) and the beginning of reality, of acceptance of the limits of freedom in both a societal and biological sense.
Newland has shocked himself by alluding to the possibility of Ellen becoming his mistress; Ellen has shocked him by saying the word, a word no woman uses in public. He is desperate and therefore irrational when he says he holds out hope that they will one day be "together in a world where they shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
By now, we know them both too well to conceive of such risk-taking. They are no Karenina and Vronsky, all be damned in pursuit of self-gratification. We know that Newland "is a quiet and self-controlled young man. Conformity to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second nature." Ellen, who has wider experience in relationships and the world, and who has seen the Gorgon, knows what a mistress must sacrifice. She responds to his vision of utopian bliss with the bravest speech in the whole novel, the first time in that world of plots and intrigues and social posturing, of seeming but never truly being, that someone does finally speak the truth:
Oh, my dear--where is that country? Have you ever
been there? . . . I know so many who've tried to
find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at
wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or
Monte Carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the
old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier
and more promiscuous. . . . Ah, believe
me, it's a miserable little country!
Oh, it's sad, wretched, all the torment he suffers--anger that he lacks Ellen's courage, pity that he loses the thing he desired most, and frustration that, really, he made the only choice possible--to remain faithful to his wife--because he is who he is and acting against type would be impossible. And, yet, there must be a small part of him that is relieved. He is, after all, "by nature a contemplative and a dilettante." He is not a man of action but a man of thought. But now, getting out of the carriage to walk home alone, he isn't even aware he is crying until he feels the tears freezing on his eyelashes. Heartsick. Or hearttorn, to be left permanently marked with a bruise, a blue tattoo that never completely fades. Oh, why are most of us like Newland and not like Rick in Casablanca who says, cool as an after-dinner mint, to his great love, a love who just heartsickened him not 24 hrs before: "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
Well, Ellen could have said that. Someday I'll write more about Ellen, one of my favorite characters in literature because she is so honest, not only with others but also honest about herself, which is much more difficult. And so brave and, yet, of course she also suffered; we just don't get to witness it. I wonder if she didn't keep among her keepsakes, her "bits of wreckage" as she called the favorite things she carried with her back and forth across the Atlantic, the brown glove that so many years ago he had unbuttoned in order to kiss her palm.
Oh, stop it!
And that sad ending, and all those years in which a part of him is dead in life. Imagine instead Newland and Ellen with a twentieth century understanding of biology, the certainty that friendship is possible for two people who are strongly attracted to each other if they are only persistent, that the simple fact of continuous exposure will unfasten any fascination. Separation prolongs mystery, and mystery prolongs passion; familiarity dilutes it. Even while married to May, he could have enjoyed a satisfying comradeship with Ellen. We can imagine that, too, the long discussions of books and art. Newland is a reader--his favorite room in the house is his library (he once declined three dinner invitations in favor of a newly arrived box of books from England). He imagined a future of introducing May to great literature. But May was not a reader; she never even found time to read more than the title of Sonnets from the Portuguese that Newland gave her after their engagement. She is an athlete, happiest when riding, sailing, swimming, playing tennis or archery. Biology insured that in the interests of procreation, she would be his opposite. It was Ellen who matched his temperament, who would have been the true comrade.
Ah, but then Wharton could no longer call it the Age of Innocence, and we wouldn't get to wallow in our heartsickness. And it is the ending Newland chose because, in truth, he preferred Ellen in his imagination, not in the real world, because the reality could never have matched the dream. To Newland, we all give up one sort of life for another, and, in the end, imagination is the only freedom. People with rich inner lives can more easily renounce pleasures of the flesh. And however small the consolation, it is only in suffering do we come to know that we have loved.
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