Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (FSG Classics)

by Vivian Gornick

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”

Henri Rousseau’s paintings remind me of the way I felt about the park. I would glimpse the wild and the primeval in a landscaped piece of world carefully remade to resemble the original tangle, and there I’d be, flat against it, a little Jewish girl on a bike unable to imagine herself other than talking.

She knew of no other way to make herself feel better than to make people want her. She knew that when she swayed her hips, raised her eyelids slowly, brushed her hand languorously through her red hair, promise stirred in the groin. She knew this. It was all she knew. She thought this knowledge gave her power. She thought her own heartlessness was power. “You will feel and I will not feel,”

That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.

She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can she know this? She doesn’t even know I’m there. Were I to tell her that it’s death to me, her not knowing I’m there, she would stare at me out of her eyes crowding up with puzzled desolation, this young girl of seventy-seven, and she would cry angrily, “You don’t understand! You have never understood!”

Mama and Nettie quarreled, and I entered City College. In feeling memory these events carry equal weight. Both inaugurated open conflict, both drove a wedge between me and the unknowing self, both were experienced as subversive and warlike in character.

It did more violence to the emotions than either Mama or Nettie could have dreamed possible, divided me from them both, provoked and nourished an unshared life inside the head that became a piece of treason. I lived among my people, but I was no longer one of them.

We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.

most of us had been reading in bottled-up silence from the age of six on and City College was our great release. It

City College made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.

When she discovered at my graduation that I wasn’t a teacher she acted as though she’d been swindled. In her mind a girl child went in one door marked college and came out another marked teacher. “You mean you’re not a teacher?” she said to me, eyes widening as her two strong hands held my diploma down on the kitchen table. “No,” I said. “What have you been doing there all these years?” she asked quietly. “Reading novels,” I replied.

Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spoken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy. Her face began to take on a look of animal cunning when I started a sentence that could not possibly be concluded before three clauses had hit the air. Cunning sparked anger, anger flamed into rage. “What are you talking about?” she would shout at me. “What are you talking about? Speak English, please! We all understand English in this house. Speak it!”

“Love is love. It’s the same everywhere, all the time. What’s to compare?” “That’s absolutely not true,” I shot back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea. You think it’s a function of the mysterious immutable being, but it’s not! There is, in fact, no such thing as the mysterious immutable being …” Her legs were off the couch so fast I didn’t see them go down.

One of us is going to die of this attachment.

Once, when she was positive I’d slept with the boy I’d gone out with, she pinched my arm until my eyes crossed in pain. “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you,” she said, her voice flat with accusation and defeat. That was her favorite euphemism for intercourse: “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you.” The phrase never failed to shock. I felt it in my nerve endings. The melodrama of repression, the malice of passivity, the rage over an absence of power, all of it packed into those words and I knew it from the first time I heard them.

It went without saying that if I became the hottest number on the block I’d be running the risk of rape and pregnancy, but those were the rules of the game, weren’t they? A girl had to be sensible. Knowing

Wasn’t my mother as good as saying with every breath she drew, “Life without a man is unlivable”? And wasn’t Nettie actually saying, “Men are scum but you gotta have one”?

We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

was a given that the more uncertain we were, the more self-righteous we would become. It was necessary for each of us to feel special, different, destined for a superior end. Divided against ourselves, we withheld sympathy from one another. Secretly,

The quarrel between Nettie and Mama, when it broke out, moved with the speed of brush-fire. Released from subterranean heat, it burned so hot, so fast, within seconds it had achieved scorched earth: on this ground nothing would grow again.

Suddenly I felt uneasy. What were we talking about? I mean, what were we really talking about? She had always felt constrained to temper her judgment of Nettie.

That’s right, I thought, she’d hate to see me in this dress, she’d consider it a betrayal.

Again anxiety floated into the room, and again I felt threatened. Something sad and hopeless stirred in the air. It etherized me, this sad thing. I felt the energy evaporating in my body.

She slept with my father, I thought,

“Why can’t you find a nice man to be happy with?” my mother is saying. “Someone simple and good. Not an intellectual or a philosopher.” We are walking down Ninth Avenue after a noon-hour concert at Lincoln Center. She places one hand palm up in the air. “Why do you pick one shlemiel after another? Tell me. Do you do this to make me miserable? What is it?”

The world is a framed space filled in by obsession.

“Your mother idealized a whole marriage, and when it left her … You can fill in the blank yourself.”

Failing to get what she wanted from life, what she thought she needed, felt was her due, my mother disappeared under a cloud of unhappiness.

Secretly she considered her depressed state a mark of sensitivity, of stronger feeling, finer spirit. She would not take in the idea that her behavior affected others adversely, and the notion that a certain level of social exchange is required below which no one has the right to fall was foreign to her. She could not see that her insistent unhappiness was an accusation and a judgment.

“You’re not the right one. You cannot deliver up comfort, pleasure, amelioration. But you are my dearest of dears. Your appointed task is to understand, your destiny to live with the daily knowledge that you are insufficient to cure my life of its deprivation.”

To be one half of an ordinary human exchange taking place in the unbounded open seemed, during the hours I hung out the window, unthinkable. That is, unimaginable.

uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression.

It seemed to me in later years the deep nerveless passivity of that time together had become the design burned into my skin while the cloth of my own experience melted away.

one: I talked better than he did and I used words like a weapon. That knocked us hopelessly off balance. I opened my mouth and power was mine: I could slice, cut, and pin; thrust, batter, and storm. He was helpless before the amazing siege. To the very largest degree that must have been how I wanted it, although certainly I could not then see this simple reality driving me on in all my attachments to men.

could neither make a proper marriage nor walk away from marriage altogether.

The English department at Berkeley was itself a model for human relations in the world. There were those in power: the brilliant, famous, full professors, and those seeking power: the brilliant young men ready to become the disciple, the protégé, the son and intellectual companion. Together, professor and protégé formed the interlocking links in the chain of civilized cronyism that ensured the ongoingness of the enterprise being served: English literature in the university.

one. The men were able to retreat from anxiety into a ready-made identity. They got their Ph.D.’s, married Joan, and went off to walk the carefully prepared road that had been assigned them. The women had no such luck. Who were they to identify with? Where were they to go? At Berkeley I know where they went. They fell into affairs with married professors, black activists, antisocial mathematicians; or they hung out at the bars on the other side of Shattuck Avenue (Berkeley’s social divider), where one met adventurers rather than graduate students: bartenders, painters, poetic drifters, fishermen down from Alaska, pot growers in from Oregon. Their lives were fractured. By day they were absorbed by Renaissance poetry and the life of the English department; by night they slept with men who crossed Shattuck Avenue on a twenty-four-hour visa. Sexual adventure was an event that only rarely converted into experience. In some important way these women remained as innocent of life, of their own lives, as did Mark and Joan whiling the years away in one remote university town or another.

To sleep with a man was to start drowning in need. An equalizer was an absolute, not a relative an absolute necessity.

And he? What did he want from me? The same, the very same. I, apparently, fitted perfectly into the landscape of his imagined life. I was a graduate student in literature: that was good. I was a fierce moralizing Jewess: that was better. I worshipped at the shrine of Art: that was best. We told each other that with the stability of a life together we would each do the large work we knew we were meant to do. It was a marriage born of spiritual fantasizing. We did not want each other, chemically or romantically. The misery that had to be lived out before that simple knowledge was ours.

But each day at noon I was overcome by a wave of nausea, and chaos beat inside my head. What was I doing? Why was I getting married? Why was I marrying him? Who was he? I was going to stand up before a judge and swear, call this man husband, take his name … I felt myself plunging … Don’t think about it, it’s too late now, all too late. If she wins this one you are lost.

In principle we agreed on everything, but in the dailiness of life we never seemed to want the same thing at the same time. We each came to think of ourselves as always making do or giving in. Invariably, one of us felt pushed out of shape. All I want is a normal life! I cried to myself. Why is everything so hard? Why are we always angry or intense? in hurt disagreement over this, that, or the other?

(this quarrel was my first demonstration of the psychological distribution of shared space).

I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal. Not an “I love you” in the world could touch it. Inside that joy I was safe and erotic, excited and at peace, beyond threat or influence. I understood everything I needed to understand in order that I might act, live, be.

The knowledge that work is patient, sustained labor—no more, no less—was not a wisdom he had as yet taken in very much better than I had.

“Love me!” he whispered. I pressed myself against him, held him close. “I do, I do,” I whispered back. And it was true: as true as I could make it. I did love him, I did. But only down to a certain point. Beyond that point, something opaque in me, there was no give. I could see the opacity.

These delights of the mind never seemed to go anywhere, or to be seriously related in a way that mattered. His intelligence was like a piece of railroad track severed at either end from the main connection, with a single train car riding it back and forth between stations, imitating motion and journey.

I sat at the desk and I struggled to think. That’s how I liked to put it. For years I said, “I’m struggling to think.” Just as my mother said she was struggling to live. Mama thought she deserved a medal for swinging her legs over the side of the bed in the morning, and I guess I did, too, just for sitting at the desk.

In this respect we were wonderfully matched. I had been uncertain all my life about how to act, but I, too, could not live a minute an hour a day except in a state of indiscriminate verbal responsiveness: I had a position on everything. What’s more, my anxiety over an absence of response in others was monumental. In the face of silence I talked rapidly and at overwhelming length to fill what I experienced as the void, exhausting myself and those who had brought down on me the punishing need to speak words, words, words. With Joe it was heaven. We had a built-in mechanism for release and replenishment. We talked ourselves to a frenzy, then made fierce and dreamy love, then uncoupled and went on talking.

We paid no real attention to the fact that we quarreled continuously. We laughed about what a social cliché we were: the feminist and the leftist locked together in erotic battle. We thought because we were always talking we were connecting. In truth, we connected only in bed. On our feet we defended positions. Given such tumult, it seems remarkable now that the surprises kept coming.

Then a day came when I also saw that learning to live without a future is a sterile exercise: what looks like life within a walled garden is really life inside a renovated prison yard. Joe’s wife remained an abstraction, but Joe’s marriage became a stunning confinement.