American Pastoral - first edition cover 1997
American Pastoral is Philip Roth’s twentieth work of fiction. In this work Roth introduced Nathan Zuckerman as a narrator and it continued for two other other novels in a trilogy; previously Zuckerman was himself a character in novels, with a marked similarity to Roth.
Group with Priya at back carrying grand-daughter, Anusha
The novel intends to portray the fulfilment of the American dream of having a perfect family, a house in the suburbs, prosperity, and a feeling of patriotic pride in America. The chief character, Swede Levov, has fought in WWII, returned to work in his father's business of glove-making and prospered, treating his workers fairly. He acquired a beauty queen as wife along the way.
KumKum, Devika, Geetha, Gopa
The novel is all about the shattering of the dream. Their only daughter, Merry, becomes caught up in the protest movement of the sixties against America's murderous involvement in the Vietnam War. She takes the extreme step of bombing a peaceful neighbourhood and killing an innocent doctor, and then following up with two more bombings.
Priya & Thommo having cake and sandwiches
Zakia smiling
The father-daughter relationship is severely tested. It spans several decades but if feels as though such things could happen in today's world too, racked with violence as it is, and unjustifiable wars by the powerful against the weak. In the latter half of the novel Swede, patient and understanding as a father, finds he is out of his league in the disorder and mayhem of sixties America.
Zakia, KumKum, Devika
All this is compounded with a dash of Jainism and Sallekhana (voluntary fasting to death) as Merry lives in squalor, while suburban adultery infects Arcadian America. All of it leaves Swede Levov unmoored from the staid rules he has followed throughout his life. How to make sense and cope.
Joe, Devika, Geetha, Shoba, Gopa, KumKum, Zakia, Thommo at the end - missing are Priya, Arundhaty, guest Papri, and Pamela who had to leave early
Philip Roth, Connecticut, 1979
Philip Roth – American Pastoral
Full Account and Record of Reading on Mar 29, 2019
Present: Geetha, KumKum, Zakia, Joe, Thommo, Devika, Gopa, Priya, Pamela, Shoba, Arundhaty (did not read)
Guest: Papri (sister of Arundhaty)
Missing: Sunil, Kavita (bereavment), Hemjit (unwell)
The next reading is on Fri April 12, 2019 – A Shakespeare Celebration (readings from plays and poems). Ex-members, Indira and Talitha, have confirmed they will attend.
Birthday Cake & Sandwiches for Rachel
We celebrated the birthday of Rachel, daughter of KumKum and Joe, who is always up for a feast, and knowing we’d meet in March on her birthday funded a celebration when she was here for the Manto session. The treat was Chocolate Cake from Coconut Tree and egg & cheese sandwiches made by KumKum, and wrapped by Joe.
Introduction to American Pastoral
Casting around for a book Geetha and Kavita arrived at a suggestion that a novel by Philip Roth would be apt; he was the prolific and prized American author who died last year in May. And so American Pastoral was chosen. Geetha wrote the following brief on his life and work.
Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, to Bess and Herman Roth, both Jewish immigrants. He died May 22, 2018, at age 85 of congestive heart failure.
Roth went to the same high school as Swede Levov in American Pastoral, Weequahic High. The School Year Book describes Roth as “a boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense.” He was known as a comedian during his time at school.
He later served two years in the United States Army, an experience which is reflected in American Pastoral. He married Margaret Martinson in 1959, but they separated in 1963. She died in a car crash in 1968. Her death left a lasting mark on Roth’s literary output. Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth’s novels.
He married the well-known English actress, Claire Bloom, in 1990, who had been his long term companion since 1976. In 1994/5 they divorced.
In 1996 he published a memoir Leaving a Doll’s House. Some parallels have been drawn between Bloom and his female character Eve in the novel, I Married a Communist.
His fiction is known for drawing upon autobiographical details and fictionalising them. The distinction between reality and imagination is blurred in his fiction, known for its sensual descriptions and for provocative exploration of American identity. Roth was an intensely private man, and shied away from fame. His engagement with the outside world was just enough for the publisher’s advertising needs and no more.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, says Philip Roth was one of America’s leading novelists. In a career spanning 50 years he has often been the subject of controversy, but above all he has been acclaimed for the boldness of his stories and the richn tapestry of his writing. Much of Roth’s works have come out of his Jewish-American upbringing in Newark, New Jersey where he was born in 1933. With the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969, Roth became a household name for the audacious novel that centred on the masturbatory fantasies of a young Jewish boy.
In over 20 novels Roth has called upon the services of three fictional writers to narrate his stories: Nathan Zuckerman, David Kaffish and even a character called Philip Roth. All seemed to share characteristics of the real Roth, but he has been rigidly guarded about where fact ends and fiction begins.
Roth was one of the most acclaimed authors of his generation and over the last fifty years he has immersed himself in exploring the American condition.
Ali MacGraw in the 1969 film Goodbye Columbus
His very first book Goodbye Columbus published in 1959 won him the US National Award for Fiction and it was made into a successful film starring Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin. He received this award a second time for his book Sabbath’s Theatre.
These are some other awards Roth received:
• PEN/Faulkner Award
• W H Smith Literary Award for his novel Human Stain
• Franz Kafka Prize in 2001 in Prague
• Pulitzer Award for American Pastoral
• International Man Booker Prize
Salman Rushdie states that the period which gives Roth his greatness was in the last third of his life when he stopped doing all these reflexive, ludic, post-modern, introverted self-interested things and says, ‘OK, I’m going to look at my country, from everything that I’ve done, with the experience of everything I’ve done. I’m going to turn the beam away from myself and out at America.’ The run of novels starting with Sabbath’s Theatre and going through the trilogy American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and Human Stain, is the most extraordinary piece of work that anybody has done in a very long time, says Salman Rushdie.
Ewan McGregor as Swede Levov and Dakota Fanning as daughter Merry in the 2016 film
Blake Balley, the critic, says Roth is patriotic but he has his idea of what America should be: liberal, tolerant and in the spirit of FDR’s America, a place of fairness, and economic opportunity. Also a place where people of various races and religious backgrounds are treated equally. Roth is incisive and engaged with what it means to be an American and what it means to become an American.
Jennifer Connelly as Dawn Levov and Ewan McGregor as Swede Levov in the 2016 film
When Bruce Springsteen, the singer, was asked if he had a current cultural hero, someone whose work continues to evolve in a way that he’d like to see his own work evolve, he answered:
“I’ll tell ya, those three recent books by Philip Roth – American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, the Human Stain, just knocked me on my ass. To be in his sixties and still making work that is so strong, and so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that’s the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain…..”
Quotes from American Pastoral:
... getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.
He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense
... alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that.
There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.
With the help of your daughter you're as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shit. America amok! America amuck!
And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, de-religionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, … It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.
1. Geetha
Throughout the novel the inexplicability of Merry's extreme action in bombing and killing an innocent person at a postal station in their community recurs. It perplexes Swede Levov who can find nothing in the pastoral farm surroundings in which Merry grew up, tending cows under the tutelage of her mother, Dawn, that could lead to such an outburst of pre-planned violence.
Anti-war Protests at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969
Joe remarked that Swede Levov never finds out the reason and the process by which Merry morphs into a violent revolutionary.
2. Gopa
For Swede Levov, the responsibility of the school hero follows him through life. Nathan Zuckerman briefly enters the narrative to record that he did not guess what was troubling the Swede when he was asked to meet him. Swede Levov had remade himself with a second marriage, becoming once again the traditional devoted husband and father, pledging allegiance all over again to the standard rules and regulations that are at the heart of family order. Yet, the obsessive love for the lost daughter never leaves him.
3. Priya
The second is the obvious reference to William Shakespeare's father, a glover by trade, and the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo says,
See! how she leans her cheek upon her hand:
O! that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek.
The story is attributed to Al Haberman, the erudite glove-maker in Lou Levov's workshop; but, of course, it is Philip Roth alone who could have conjured two literary references to glove-making in a single novel.
4. Thommo
Shoba said the parents were too soft with her, allowing her to stay where she wanted as a teenager, out on the town in New York city. What control do parents have over teenage daughters in America? KumKum said the times during the Vietnam War protests were special; the children were in the vanguard of protests on campuses of universities. The adults were often powerless spectators, who knew something was wrong, but could not take effective action.
Thommo said Merry's stuttering was to get attention. Gopa said it is clear from the book that Merry could have stopped stuttering any time she wanted to. Thommo referred to the Stockholm syndrome, a condition which causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy during captivity. That could excuse Patty Hearst, as KumKum said, but not Merry who was not kidnapped or held hostage; she did what she did of her own volition.
Devika said in the 2016 film of the novel, the blowing up of the Hamlin’s store is the opening scene.
5. Joe
#1 Bail Out
“You want to bail out? That's all right too. Anybody else would have bailed out a long time ago. Go ahead, bail out. Admit her contempt for your life and bail out. Admit that there is something very personal about you that she hates and bail the fuck out and never see the bitch again. Admit that she's a monster, Seymour.”
#2 Kidnap her back
“... for Christ's sake go in there and get her. I'll go in and get her. How about that? Last chance. Last offer. You want me to come, I'll clear out the office and get on a plane and I'll come. And I'll go in there, and, I assure you, I'll get her off the McCarter Highway, the little shit, the selfish little fucking shit, ...
But Swede cannot do one, or the other.
6. Pamela
Noam Chomsky of MIT, third from left, marches with others including author Norman Mailer, poet Robert Lowell, Sidney Lens, Dagmar Wilson and Dr. Benjamin Spock to the Pentagon in a Vietnam War protest on Oct 21, 1967
In desperation he says: “You happen to be right. This family is one hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don't have to rebel against your family because your family is not in disagreement with you. You are not the only person around here against this war.”
But nothing Lou Levov told the president ended the war, nor did anything he told Merry nip the catastrophe in the bud. The grandfather had seen it coming, that something was going haywire with his grand-daughter. And how it did.
7. Shoba
“They'll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life!”
The novel does not end ... it peters out, said Joe. The desiccant chaos marking the end would be an impossible ending for a film of the novel. Devika said you have to make up your own conclusion, for the author has just abandoned the scene. Gopa wanted to know about the second wife, but the focus of the novel is the daughter whom Swede Levov can't forget even after re-marrying.
8. Zakia
The wife of emergency room doctor who was killed by the bombing forgives Swede and does not hold him responsible. She says
“I feel badly for you and your family, Mr. Levov. I have lost a husband, my children have lost a father. But you have lost something even greater. You are parents who have lost a child. There is not a day that goes by that you won't be in my thoughts and in my prayers.”
9. KumKum
KumKum noted that they keep on harping on family life, family life, but it is subject to the vagaries of fate; terrible circumstances can unmake family life. Thommo said the problem Swede Levov has is to continue acting as a hero and pretend, even when his daughter has dealt him such a blow for life.
10. Devika
Swede suggests she stay with his friends, the Umanoffs, if it gets late. But Merry finds them stuffy compared to her friends who “feel responsible when America is b-blowing little b-babies to b-b-b-b-bits. B-but you don't, and neither does Mother. You don't care enough to let it upset a single day of yours. You don't care enough to make you spend another night somewhere. You don't stay up at night worrying about it. You don't really care, Daddy, one way or the other.”
Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on Oct 15, 1969 was a massive demonstration and teach-in across the country against US involvement in the Vietnam War
And so the conversation goes on. But ultimately the real issues is, as Merry says, “I don't want to be understood—I want to be f-f-f-free!”
She does break free, and all hell breaks loose for Swede Levov.
Readings
1. Geetha
The idyllic surroundings in which daughter Merry grew up, turns into an inexplicable alienation from her parents based on revolutionary politics.
p. 202 to 206
It wasn't this house she hated anyway; what she hated were memories she couldn't shake loose from, all of them associated with the house, memories that of course he shared. Merry as a grade school kid lying on the floor of the study next to Dawn's desk, drawing pictures of Count while Dawn did the accounts for the farm. Merry emulating her mother's concentration, enjoying working with the same discipline, silently delighting to feel an equal in a common pursuit, and in some preliminary way offering them a glimpse of herself as the adult—yes, of the adult friend to them that she would someday be. Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time—the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines—memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm.
The early mornings in the bathroom shaving while Dawn went to wake Merry up—he could not imagine a better start to the morning than catching a glimpse of that ritual. There was never an alarm clock in Merry's life—Dawn was her alarm clock. Before six o'clock Dawn was already out in the barn, but at promptly six-thirty she stopped tending the herd, came back in the house, and went up to the child's room, where, as she sat at the edge of the bed, daybreak's comforting observance began. Without a word it began—Dawn simply stroking Merry's sleeping head, a pantomime that could go on for two full minutes. Next, almost singing the whispered words, Dawn lightly inquired, "A sign of life?" Merry responded not by opening her eyes but by moving a little finger. "Another sign, please?" On the game went—Merry playing along by wrinkling her nose, by moistening her lips, by sighing just audibly— till eventually she was up out of bed ready to go. It was a game embodying a loss, for Merry the state of being completely protected, for Dawn the project of completely protecting what once had seemed completely protectable. Waking The Baby: it continued until the baby was nearly twelve, the one rite of infancy that Dawn could not resist indulging, that neither one of them ever appeared eager to outgrow.
How he loved to sight them doing together what mothers and daughters do. To a father's eye, one seemed to amplify the other. In bathing suits rushing out of the surf together and racing each other to the towels—the wife now a little past her robust moment and the daughter edging up to the beginning of hers. A delineation of life's cyclical nature that left him feeling afterward as though he had a spacious understanding of the whole female sex. Merry, with her growing curiosity about the trappings of womanhood, putting on Dawn's jewelry while, beside her at the mirror, Dawn helped her preen. Merry confiding in Dawn about her fears of ostracism—of other kids ignoring her, of her girlfriends ganging up on her. In those quiet moments from which he was excluded (daughter relying on mother, Dawn and Merry emotionally one inside the other like those Russian dolls), Merry appeared more poignantly than ever not a small replica of his wife, or of himself, but an independent little being—something similar, a version of them, yet distinctive and new—for which he had the most passionate affinity.
It wasn't the house Dawn hated—what she hated, he knew, was that the motive for having the house (for making the beds, for setting the table, for laundering the curtains, for organizing the holidays, for apportioning her energies and differentiating her duties by the day of the week) had been destroyed right along with Hamlin's store; the tangible daily fullness, the smooth regularity that was once the underpinning of all of their lives survived in her only as an illusion, as a mockingly inaccessible, bigger-than-life-size fantasy, real for every last Old Rimrock family but hers. He knew this not just because of the million memories but also because in the top drawer of his office desk he still kept handy a ten-year-old copy of a local weekly, the Denville-Randolph Courier, featuring on the first page the article about Dawn and her cattle business. She had consented to be interviewed only if the journalist promised not to mention her having been Miss New Jersey of 1949. The journalist agreed and the piece was titled "Old Rimrock Woman Feels Lucky to Love What She's Doing," and concluded with a paragraph that, simple as it was, made him proud of her whenever he went back to read it: "'People are lucky if they get to do what they love and are good at it,' Mrs. Levov declared."
The Courier story testified just how much she had loved the house, as well as everything else about their lives. Beneath a photograph of her standing before the pewter plates lined up on the fireplace mantel—in her white turtleneck shirt and cream-colored blazer, with her hair styled in a pageboy and her two delicate hands in front of her, the fingers decorously intertwined, looking sweet though a bit plain—the caption read, "Mrs. Levov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949, loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the values of her family." When Dawn called the paper in a fury about mentioning Miss New Jersey, the journalist answered that he had kept to his promise not to mention it in the article; it was the editor who had put it in the caption.
No, she had not hated the house, of course she hadn't—and that didn't matter anyway. All that mattered now was the restoration of her wellbeing; the foolish remarks she might make to this one or that one were of no consequence beside the recovery taking hold. Maybe what was agitating him was that the self-adjustments on which she was building a recovery were not regenerative for him or entirely admirable to him, were even something of an affront to him. He could not tell people—certainly couldn't convince himself— that he hated the things he'd loved.. ..
He was back to it. But he couldn't help it, not when he remembered how at seven Merry would eat herself sick with the raw batter while baking two dozen tollhouse cookies, and a week later they'd still be finding batter all over the place, even up on top of the refrigerator. So how could he hate the refrigerator? How could he let his emotions be reshaped, imagine himself being rescued, as Dawn did, by their leaving it behind for an all-but-silent new IceTemp, the Rolls-Royce of refrigerators? He for one could not say he hated the kitchen in which Merry used to bake her cookies and melt her cheese sandwiches and make her baked ziti, even if the cupboards weren't stainless steel or the counters Italian marble. He could not say he hated the cellar where she used to go to play hide-and-seek with her screaming friends, even if sometimes it spooked even him a little to be down there in the wintertime with those scuttling mice. He could not say he hated the massive fireplace adorned with the antique iron kettle that was all at once insufferably corny in Dawn's estimation, not when he remembered how, early every January, he would chop up the Christmas tree and set it afire there, the whole thing in one go, so that the explosive blaze of the bone-dry branches, the great whoosh and the loud crackling and the dancing shadows, cavorting devils climbing to the ceiling from the four walls, would transport Merry into a delirium of terrified delight. He could not say he hated the ball-and-claw-foot bathtub where he used to give her baths, just because decades of indelible mineral stains from the well water streaked . the enamel and encircled the drain. He could not even hate the toilet whose handle required all that jiggling to get the thing to stop gushing, not when he remembered her kneeling beside it and throwing up while he knelt next to her, holding her sick little forehead.
Nor could he say he hated his daughter for what she had done— if he could! If only, instead of living chaotically in the world where she wasn't and in the world where she once was and in the world where she might now be, he could come to hate her enough not to care anything about her world, then or now. If only he could be back thinking like everybody else, once again the totally natural man instead of this riven charlatan of sincerity, an artless outer Swede and a tormented inner Swede, a visible stable Swede and a concealed beleaguered Swede, an easygoing, smiling sham Swede enshrouding the Swede buried alive. If only he could even faintly reconstitute the undivided oneness of existence that had made for his straightforward physical confidence and freedom before he became the father of an alleged murderer. If only he could be as unknowing as some people perceived him to be—if only he could be as perfectly simple as the legend of Swede Levov concocted by the hero-worshiping kids of his day. If only he could say, "I hate this house!" and be Weequahic's Swede Levov again. If he could say, "I hate that child! I never want to see her again!" and then go ahead, disown her, forevermore despise and reject her and the vision for which she was willing, if not to kill, then to cruelly abandon her own family, a vision having nothing whatsoever to do with "ideals" but with dishonesty, criminality, megalomania, and insanity. Blind antagonism and an infantile desire to menace— those were her ideals. In search always of something to hate. Yes, it went way, way beyond her stuttering. That violent hatred of America was a disease unto itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American. But back then he hadn't dared begin to explain to her why he did, for fear of unleashing the demon, insult. They lived in dread of Merry's stuttering tongue. And by then he had no influence anyway. Dawn had no influence. His parents had no influence. In what way was she "his" any longer if she hadn't even been his then, certainly not his if to drive her into her frightening blitzkrieg mentality it required no more than for her own father to begin to explain why his affections happened to be for the country where he'd been born and raised. Stuttering, sputtering little bitch! Who the fuck did she think she was?
2. Gopa
Nathan Zuckerman briefly enters the narrative to record that he did not guess what was troubling the Swede when he wanted to meet him. Even after a second marriage, to restore family order, the obsessive love for the lost daughter never deserted him.
p.79 to 81.
Earlier, looking at Alan Meisner I was looking at his father, and looking now at Joy I was looking at her mother, the stout seamstress with her stockings rolled down to her knees in the back room of Grossman's Dress Shop on Chancellor Avenue. . . . But who I was thinking of was the Swede, the Swede and the tyranny that his body held over him, the powerful, the gorgeous, the lonely Swede, whom life had never made shrewd, who did not want to pass through life as a beautiful boy and a stellar first baseman, who wanted instead to be a serious person for whom others came before himself and not a baby for whose needs alone the wide, wide world of satisfactions had been organized. He wanted to have been born something more than a physical wonder. As if for one person that gift isn't enough. The Swede wanted what he took to be a higher calling, and his bad luck was to have found one. The responsibility of the school hero follows him through life. Noblesse oblige. You're the hero, so then you have to behave in a certain way—there is a prescription for it. You have to be modest, you have to be forbearing, you have to be deferential, you have to be understanding. And it all began—this heroically idealistic maneuver, this strategic, strange spiritual desire to be a bulwark of duty and ethical obligation—because of the war, because of all the terrible uncertainties bred by the war, because of how strongly an emotional death had been drawn to a be able to catch anything Swede—as what doesn't?—in community whose beloved sons were far away facing death and had been drawn to a lean and muscular, austere boy whose talent it was to catch anything anybody threw anywhere near him. It all began for the Swede —as what doesn't? — in a circumstantial absurdity.
And ended in another one. A bomb.
When we'd met at Vincent's, perhaps he insisted on how well his three boys had turned out because he assumed I knew about the bomb, about the daughter, the Rimrock Bomber, and had judged him harshly, as some people must have. Such a sensational thing, in his life certainly—even twenty-seven years later, how could anybody not know or have forgotten? Maybe that explains why he couldn't stop himself, even had he wanted to, from going interminably on and on to me about the myriad nonviolent accomplishments of Chris, Steve, and Kent. Maybe that explains what he had wanted to talk about in the first place. "The shocks" that had befallen his father's loved ones was the daughter—she was "the shocks" that had befallen them all. This was what he had summoned me to talk about—had wanted me to help him write about. And I missed it—I, whose vanity is that he is never naive, was more naive by far than the guy I was talking to. Sitting there at Vincent's getting the shallowest bead I could on the Swede when the story he had to tell me was this one, the revelation of the interior life that was unknown and unknowable, the story that is tragic and awful and impossible to ignore, the ultimate reunion story, and I missed it entirely.
The father was the cover. The burning subject was the daughter. How much of that was he aware of? All of it. He was aware of everything—I had that wrong too. The unconscious one was me. He knew he was dying, and this terrible thing that had happened to him—that over the years he'd been partially able to bury, that somewhere along the way he had somewhat overcome—came back at him worse than ever. He'd put it aside as best he could, new wife, new kids—the three terrific boys; he sure seemed to me to have put it aside the night in 1985 I saw him at Shea Stadium with young Chris. The Swede had got up off the ground and he'd done it—a second marriage, a second shot at a unified life controlled by good sense and the classic restraints, once again convention shaping everything, large and small, and serving as barrier against the improbabilities—a second shot at being the traditional devoted husband and father, pledging allegiance all over again to the standard rules and regulations that are the heart of family order. He had the talent for it, had what it took to avoid anything disjointed, anything special, anything improper, anything difficult to assess or understand. And yet not even the Swede, blessed with all the attributes of a monumental ordinariness, could shed that girl the way Jerry the Ripper had told him to, could go all the way and shed completely the frantic possessiveness, the paternal assertiveness, the obsessive love for the lost daughter, shed every trace of that girl and that past and shake off forever the hysteria of "my child." If only he could have just let her fade away. But not even the Swede was that great.
3. Priya
Lou Levov talks about the history of gloves and glove-making at the dinner party and how one could earn a good living at the trade as a worker.
p. 348-350
Let me tell you about Al Haberman. You want to talk about the old-style world and what used to be, let's talk about Al. A wonderful fella, Al, a handsome fella. Got rich cutting gloves. You could in those days. A husband and a wife who had any ambition could get a few skins and make some gloves. Ended up in a small room, two men cutting, a couple of women sewing, they could make the gloves, they could press them and ship them. They made money, they were their own bosses, they could work sixty hours a week. Way, way back when Henry Ford was paying the unheard-of sum of a dollar a day, a fine table cutter would make five dollars a day. But look, in those days it was nothing for an ordinary woman to own twenty, twenty-five pair of gloves. Quite common. A woman used to have a glove wardrobe, different gloves for every outfit—different colors, different styles, different lengths. A woman wouldn't go outside without a pair in any weather. In those days it wasn't unusual for a woman to spend two, three hours at the glove counter and try on thirty pair of gloves, and the lady behind the desk had a sink and she would wash her hands between each color. In a fine ladies' glove, we had quarter sizes into the fours and up to eight and a half. Glove cutting is a wonderful trade—was, anyway. Everything now is 'was.' A cutter like Al always had a shirt and a tie on. In those days a cutter never worked without a shirt and a tie. You could work at seventy-five and eighty years old too. They could start in the way Al did, at fifteen, or even younger, and they could go to eighty. Seventy was a spring chicken. And they could work at their leisure, Saturday and Sunday. These people could work constantly. Money to send their kids to school. Money to fix up their homes nicely. Al could take a piece of leather, say to me, for a gag, 'What do you want, Lou, eight and nine-sixteenths?' And just snip it off without a ruler, measuring it perfectly with just his eye. The cutter was the prima donna. But all that pride of craftsmanship is gone, of course. Of the actual table cutters who could cut a sixteen-button white glove, I think Al Haberman may have been the last guy in America who could do it. The long glove, of course, vanished. Another 'was.' There was the eight-button glove which became very popular, silklined, but that was gone by '65. We were already taking gloves that were longer, chopping off the tops, making shorties, and using the top to make another glove. From this point where the thumb seam is, every inch on out they used to put a button, so we still talk, in terms of length, of buttons. Thank God in i960 Jackie Kennedy walked out there with a little glove to the wrist, and a glove to the elbow, and a glove above the elbow, and a pillbox hat, and all of a sudden gloves were in style again. First Lady of the glove industry. Wore a size six and a half. People in the glove industry were praying to that lady. She herself stocked up in Paris, but so what? That woman put the ladies' fine leather glove back on the map. But when they assassinated Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, that and the miniskirt was the end of the ladies' fashion glove. The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the arrival of the miniskirt, and together that was the death knell for the ladies' dress glove. Till then it was a twelve-month, year-round business. There was a time when a woman would not go out unless she wore a pair of gloves, even in the spring and the summer. Now the glove is for cold weather or for driving or for sports—"
"Lou," his wife said, "nobody is talking about—"
"Let me finish, please. Don't interrupt me, please. Al Haberman was a great reader. No schooling but he loved to read. His favorite author was Sir Walter Scott. And Sir Walter Scott, in one of his classic books, gets an argument going between the glovemaker and the shoemaker about who is the better craftsman, and the glove-maker wins the argument. You know what he says? 'All you do,' he tells the shoemaker, 'is make a mitten for the foot. You don't have to articulate around each toe.' But Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover, so it makes sense he would win the argument. You didn't know Sir Walter Scott was the son of a glover? You know who else, aside from Sir Walter and my two sons? William Shakespeare. Father was a glover who couldn't read and write his own name. You know what Romeo says to Juliet when she's up on the balcony? Everybody knows 'Romeo, Romeo, where are you, Romeo'—that she says. But what does Romeo say? I started in a tannery when I was thirteen, but I can answer for you because of my friend Al Haberman, who since has passed away, unfortunately. Seventy-three years old, he came out of his house, slipped on the ice, and broke his neck. Terrible. He told me this. Romeo says, 'See the way she leans her cheek on her hand? I only wish I was the glove on that hand so that I could touch that cheek.' Shakespeare. Most famous author in history."
4. Thommo
Swede Levov encounters Rita Cohen, the mediator with Merry, who pours contempt on the upbringing of Merry. She claims Swede's wife Dawn hated Marry for not being made in her own image.
p. 135 - 138
"Merry never wants to see you again. Or that mother."
"You don't know anything about Merry's mother."
"Lady Dawn? Lady Dawn of the Manor? I know all there is to know about Lady Dawn. So ashamed of her class origins she has to make her daughter into a debutante."
"Merry shoveled cowshit from the time she was six. You don't know what you're talking about. Merry was in the 4-H Club. Merry rode tractors. Merry—"
"Fake. All fake. The daughter of the beauty queen and the captain of the football team—what kind of nightmare is that for a girl with a soul? The little shirtwaist dresses, the little shoes, the little this and the little that. Always playing with her hair. You think she wanted to fix Merry's hair because she loved her and the way she looked or because she was disgusted with her, disgusted she couldn't have a baby beauty queen that could grow up in her own image to become Miss Rimrock? Merry has to have dancing lessons. Merry has to have tennis lessons. I'm surprised she didn't get a nose job."
"You don't know what you are talking about."
"Why do you think Merry had the hots for Audrey Hepburn? Because she thought that was the best chance she had with that vain little mother of hers. Miss Vanity of 1949. Hard to believe you could fit so much vanity into that cutesy figure. Oh, but it does, it fits, all right. Just doesn't leave much room for Merry, does it?"
"You don't know what you're saying."
"No imagination for somebody who isn't beautiful and lovable and desirable. None. The frivolous, trivial beauty-queen mentality and no imagination for her own daughter. 'I don't want to see anything messy, I don't want to see anything dark.' But the world isn't like that, Dawnie dear—it is messy, it is dark. It's hideous!"
"Merry's mother works a farm all day. She works with animals all day, she works with farm machinery all day, she works from six a.m. to—
"Fake. Fake. Fake. She works a farm like a fucking upper-class—"
"You don't know anything about any of this. Where is my daughter? Where is she? The conversation is pointless. Where is Merry?"
"You don't remember the 'Now You Are a Woman Party'? To celebrate her first menstruation."
"We're not talking about any party. What party?"
"We're talking about the humiliation of a daughter by her beauty-queen mother. We're talking about a mother who completely colonized her daughter's self-image. We're talking about a mother who didn't have an inch of feeling for her daughter—who has about as much depth as those gloves you make. A whole family and all you really fucking care about is skin. Ectoderm. Surface. But what's underneath, you don't have a clue. You think that was real affection she had for that stuttering girl? She tolerated that stuttering girl, but you can't tell the difference between affection and tolerance because you're too stupid yourself. Another one of your fucking fairy tales. A menstruation party. A party for it! Jesus!"
"You mean—no, that wasn't that. The party? You mean when she took all her friends to Whitehouse for dinner? That was her twelfth birthday. What is this 'Now You Are a Woman' crap? It was a birthday party. Nothing to do with menstruating. Nothing. Who told you this? Merry didn't tell you this. I remember that party. She remembers that party. It was a simple birthday party. We took all those girls down to that restaurant in Whitehouse. They had a wonderful time. We had ten twelve-year-old girls. This is all cracked. Somebody is dead. My daughter is being accused of murder."
Rita was laughing. "Mr. Law-abiding New Jersey Fucking Citizen, a little bit of fake affection looks just like love to him."
"But what you are describing never happened. What you are saying never happened. It wouldn't have mattered if it did, but it did not."
"Don't you know what's made Merry Merry? Sixteen years of living in a household where she was hated by that mother."
"For what? Tell me. Hated her for what?"
"Because she was everything Lady Dawn wasn't. Her mother hated her, Swede. It's a shame you're so late in finding out. Hated her for not being petite, for not being able to have her hair pulled back in that oh-so-spiffy country way. Merry was hated with that hatred that seeps into you like toxin. Lady Dawn couldn't have done a better job if she'd slipped poison into her a meal at a time. Lady Dawn would look at her with that look of hatred and Merry was turned into a piece of shit."
"There was no look of hatred. Something may have gone wrong . . . but that wasn't it. That wasn't hatred. I know what she's talking about. What you're calling hatred was her mother's anxiety. I know the look. But it was about the stuttering. My God, it wasn't hatred. It was the opposite. It was concern. It was distress. It was helplessness."
"Still protecting that wife of yours," said Rita, laughing at him again. "Incredible incomprehension. Simply incredible. You know why else she hated her? She hated her because she's your daughter. It's all fine and well for Miss New Jersey to marry a Jew. But to raise a Jew? That's a whole other bag of tricks. You have a shiksa wife, Swede, but you didn't get a shiksa daughter. Miss New Jersey is a bitch, Swede. Merry would have been better off sucking the cows if she wanted a little milk and nurturance. At least the cows have maternal feelings."
5. Joe
Jerry berates his brother Seymour over the phone about acting to recover Merry
p.280 to p. 281
"If what you are telling me is what I was . . ." he begins, ". . . wasn't, wasn't enough, then, then . . . I'm telling you— I'm telling you that what anybody is is not enough."
"You got it! Exactly! We are not enough. We are none of us enough! Including even the man who does everything right! Doing things right," Jerry says with disgust, "going around in this world doing things right. Look, are you going to break with appearances and pit your will against your daughter's or aren't you? Out on the field you did it. That's how you scored, remember? You pitted your will against the other guy's and you scored. Pretend it's a game if that helps. It doesn't help. For the typical male activity you're there, the man of action, but this isn't the typical male activity. Okay. Can't see yourself doing that. Can only see yourself playing ball and making gloves and marrying Miss America. Out there with Miss America, dumbing down and dulling out. Out there playing at being Wasps, a little Mick girl from the Elizabeth docks and a Jewboy from Weequahic High. The cows. Cow society. Colonial old America. And you thought all that facade was going to come without cost. Genteel and innocent. But that costs, too, Seymour. I would have thrown a bomb. I would become a Jain and live in Newark. That Wasp bullshit! I didn't know just how entirely muffled you were internally. But this is how muffled you are. Our old man really swaddled you but good. What do you want, Seymour? You want to bail out? That's all right too. Anybody else would have bailed out a long time ago. Go ahead, bail out. Admit her contempt for your life and bail out. Admit that there is something very personal about you that she hates and bail the fuck out and never see the bitch again. Admit that she's a monster, Seymour. Even a monster has to be from somewhere—even a monster needs parents. But parents don't need monsters. Bail out! But if you are not going to bail out, if that is what you are calling to tell me, then for Christ's sake go in there and get her. I'll go in and get her. How about that? Last chance. Last offer. You want me to come, I'll clear out the office and get on a plane and I'll come. And I'll go in there, and, I assure you, I'll get her off the McCarter Highway, the little shit, the selfish little fucking shit, playing her fucking games with you! She won't play them with me, I assure you. Do you want that or not?"
"I don't want that."
6. Pamela
Grandpa Lou Levov's impressions of Merry
p.287 to 291.
It was during the Vietnam War that Lou Levov had begun mailing Merry copies of the letters he sent to President Johnson, letters that he had written to influence Merry's behavior more than the president's. Seeing his teenage granddaughter as enraged with the war as he could get when things started to go too wrong with the business, the old man became so distressed that he would take his son aside and say, "Why does she care? Where does she even get this stuff? Who feeds it to her? What's the difference to her anyway? Does she carry on like this at school? She can't do this at school, she could harm her chances at school. She can harm her chances for college. In public people won't put up with it, they'll chop her head off, she's only a child. . . ." To control, if he could, not so much Merry's opinions as the ferocity with which she sputtered them out, he would ostentatiously ally himself with her by sending articles clipped from the Florida papers and inscribed in the margins with his own antiwar slogans. When he was visiting he would read aloud to her from the portfolio of his Johnson letters that he carried around the house under his arm—in his effort to save her from herself, tagging after the child as though he were the child. "We've got to nip this in the bud," he confided to his son. "This won't do, not at all."
"Well," he'd say—after reading to Merry yet another plea to the president reminding him what a great country America was, what a great president FDR had been, how much his own family owed to this country and what a personal disappointment it was to him and his loved ones that American boys were halfway around the world fighting somebody else's battle when they ought to be at home with their loved ones—"well, what do you think of your grandfather?"
"J-j-Johnson's a war criminal," she'd say. "He's not going to s-s-s-stop the ww-war, Grandpa, because you tell him to."
"He's also a man trying to do his job, you know."
"He's an imperialist dog."
"Well, that is one opinion."
"There's no d-d-d-difference between him and Hitler."
"You're exaggerating, sweetheart. I don't say Johnson didn't let us down. But you forget what Hitler did to the Jews, Merry dear. You weren't born then, so you don't remember."
"He did nothing that Johnson isn't doing to the Vietnamese."
"The Vietnamese aren't being put into concentration camps."
"Vietnam is one b-b-big camp! The 'American boys' aren't the issue. That's like saying, 'Get the storm troopers out of Auschwitz in time for Chris-chris-christmas.'"
"I gotta be political with the guy, sweetheart. I can't write the guy and call him a murderer and expect that he's going to listen. Right, Seymour?"
"I don't think that would help," the Swede said. "Merry, we all feel the way you do," her grandfather told her. "Do you understand that? Believe me, I know what it is to read the newspaper and start to go nuts. Father Coughlin, that son of a bitch. The hero Charles Lindbergh— pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler, and a so-called national hero in this country. Mr. Gerald L. K. Smith. The great Senator Bilbo. Sure we have bastards in this country— homegrown and plenty of 'em. Nobody denies that. Mr. Rankin. Mr. Dies. Mr. Dies and his committee. Mr. J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. Isolationist, bigoted, know-nothing fascists right there in the U.S. Congress, crooks like J. Parnell Thomas, crooks who wound up in jail and their salaries were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer. Awful people. The worst. Mr. McCarran. Mr. Jenner. Mr. Mundt. The Goebbels from Wisconsin, the Honorable Mr. McCarthy, may he burn in hell. His sidekick Mr. Cohn. A disgrace. A Jew and a disgrace! There have always been sons of bitches here just like there are in every country, and they have been voted into office by all those geniuses out there who have the right to vote. And what about the newspapers? Mr. Hearst. Mr. McCormick. Mr. Westbrook Pegler. Real fascist, reactionary dogs. And I have hated their guts. Ask your father. Haven't I, Seymour—hated them?"
"You have."
"Honey, we live in a democracy. Thank God for that. You don't have to go around getting angry with your family. You can write letters. You can vote. You can get up on a soapbox and make a speech. Christ, you can do what your father did—you can join the marines."
"Oh, Grandpa—the marines are the prob-prob-prob—"
"Then damn it, Merry, join the other side," he said, momentarily losing his grip. "How's that? You can join their marines if you want to. It's been done. That's true. Look at history. When you're old enough you can go over and fight for the other army if you want it. I don't recommend it. People don't like it, and I think you're smart enough to understand why they don't. 'Traitor' isn't a pleasant thing to be called. But it's been done. It's an option. Look at Benedict Arnold. Look at him. He did it. He went over to the other side, as far as I remember. From school. And I suppose I respect him. He had guts. He stood up for what he believed in. He risked his own life for what he believed in. But he happened to be wrong, Merry, in my estimation. He went over to the other side in the Revolutionary War and, as far as I'm concerned, the man was dead wrong. Now you don't happen to be wrong. You happen to be right. This family is one hundred percent against this goddamn Vietnam thing. You don't have to rebel against your family because your family is not in disagreement with you. You are not the only person around here against this war. We are against it. Bobby Kennedy is against it—"
"Now," said Merry, with disgust.
"Okay, now. Now is better than not now, isn't it? Be realistic, Merry—it doesn't help anything not to be. Bobby Kennedy is against it. Senator Eugene McCarthy is against it. Senator Javits is against it, and he's a Republican. Senator Frank Church is against it. Senator Wayne Morse is against it. And how he is. I admire that man. I've written him to tell him and I have gotten the courtesy of a handsigned reply. Senator Fulbright, of course, is against it. It's Fulbright who, admittedly, introduced the Tonkin Gulf resolu—"
"F-f-f-ful—"
"Nobody is saying—"
"Dad," said the Swede, "let Merry finish."
"I'm sorry, honey," said Lou Levov. "Finish."
"Ful-ful-fulbright is a racist."
"Is he? What are you talking about? Senator William Fulbright from Arkansas? Come on with that stuff. I think there's where you've got your facts wrong, my friend." She had slandered one of his heroes who'd stood up to Joe McCarthy, and to prevent himself from lashing out at her about Fulbright took a supreme effort of will. "But now just let me finish what I was saying. What was I saying? Where was I? Where the hell was I, Seymour?"
"Your point," the Swede said, acting evenhandedly as the moderator for these two dynamos, a role he preferred to being the adversary of either, "is that both of you are against the war and want it to stop. There's no reason for you to argue
on that issue—I believe that's your point. Merry feels it's all gone beyond writing letters to the president. She feels that's futile. You feel that, futile or not, it's something within your power to do and you're going to do it, at least to continue to put yourself on record."
"Exactly!" the old man cried. "Here, listen to what I tell him here. 'I am a lifetime Democrat.' Merry, listen—'I am a lifetime Demo-crat—
But nothing he told the president ended the war, nor did anything he told Merry nip the catastrophe in the bud. Yet alone in the family he had seen it coming. "I saw it coming. I saw it clear as day. I saw it. I knew it. I sensed it. I fought it. She was out of control. Something was wrong. I could smell it. I told you. 'Something has to be done about that child. Something is going wrong with that child.' And it went in one ear and out the other. I got, 'Dad, take it easy.' I got, 'Dad, don't exaggerate. Dad, it's a phase. Lou, leave her alone, don't argue with her.' 'No, I will not leave her alone. This is my granddaughter. I refuse to leave her alone. I refuse to lose a granddaughter by leaving her alone. Something is haywire with that child.' And you looked at me like I was nuts. All of you. Only I wasn't nuts. I was right. With a vengeance I was right!"
7. Shoba
Final reflection on the frailty of society.
p. 422 to the end of the book.
It turned out she'd missed it by no more than an inch. "Not bad," Marcia said to everyone in the kitchen, "for somebody as drunk as this babe is." Meanwhile Orcutt, appalled by a scene exceeding any previously contrived by his wife to humiliate her civic-minded, adulterous mate, who looked not at all invincible, not at all important to himself or anyone else, who looked just as silly as he had the morning the Swede had dumped him in the midst of their friendly football game—Orcutt tenderly lifted Jessie up from the chair and to her feet. She showed no remorse, none, seemed to have been stripped of all receptors and all transmitters, without a single cell to notify her that she had overstepped a boundary fundamental to civilized life.
"One drink less," Marcia was saying to the Swede's father, whose wife was already dabbing at the tiny wounds in his face with a damp napkin, "and you'd be blind, Lou." And then this large, unimpeded social critic in a caftan could not help herself. Marcia sank into Jessie's empty chair, in front of the brimming glass of milk, and with her face in her hands, she began to laugh at their obtuseness to the flimsiness of the whole contraption, to laugh and laugh and laugh at them all, pillars of a society that, much to her delight, was going rapidly under—to laugh and to relish, as some people, historically, always seem to do, how far the rampant disorder had spread, enjoying enormously the assailability, the frailty, the enfeeblement of supposedly robust things.
Yes, the breach had been pounded in their fortification, even out here in secure Old Rimrock, and now that it was opened it would not be closed again. They'll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life!
And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?
8. Zakia
Swede Levov goes to the Hamlin's house to express grief at the bombing of their store-cum-post office station, but finds himself condemned when they imply his family won't survive, but theirs will.
p.215 to 216
Dawn was under sedation and couldn't see anyone, but the Swede had gone to Russ and Mary Hamlin's house and expressed his sympathy about the store, told the Hamlins how much the store had meant to Dawn and him, how it was no less a part of their lives than it was of everyone else's in the community; then he went to the wake—in the coffin Conlon looked fine, fit, just as affable as ever—and the following week, with their doctor already arranging for Dawn's hospitalization, the Swede went alone to visit Conlon's widow. How he managed to get to that woman's house for tea is another story—another book—but he did it, he did it, and heroically she served him tea while he extended his family's condolences in the words that he had revised in his mind five hundred times but that, when spoken, were still no good, even more hollow than those he'd uttered to Russ and Mary Hamlin: "deep and sincere regrets . . . the agony of your family . . . my wife would like you to know. . .." After listening to everything he had to say, Mrs. Conlon quietly replied, displaying an outlook so calm and kind and compassionate that the Swede wanted to disappear, to hide like a child, while at the same time the urge was nearly overpowering to throw himself at her feet and to remain there forever, begging for her forgiveness. "You are good parents and you raised your daughter the way you thought best," she said to him. "It was not your fault and I don't hold anything against you. You didn't go out and buy the dynamite. You didn't make the bomb. You didn't plant the bomb. You had nothing to do with the bomb. If, as it appears, your daughter turns out to be the one who is responsible, I will hold no one responsible but her. I feel badly for you and your family, Mr. Levov. I have lost a husband, my children have lost a father. But you have lost something even greater. You are parents who have lost a child. There is not a day that goes by that you won't be in my thoughts and in my prayers." The Swede had known Fred Conlon only slightly, from cocktail parties and charity events where they found themselves equally bored. Mainly he knew him by reputation, a man who cared about his family and the hospital with the same devotion—a hard worker, a good guy. Under him, the hospital had begun to plan a building program, the first since its construction, and in addition to the new coronary care unit, during his stewardship there had been a long-overdue modernization of emergency room facilities. But who gives a shit about the emergency room of a community hospital out in the sticks? Who gives a shit about a rural general store whose owner has been running it since 1921? We're talking about humanity! When has there ever been progress for humanity without a few small mishaps and mistakes? The people are angry and they have spoken! Violence will be met by violence, regardless of consequences, until the people are liberated! Fascist America down one post office, facility completely destroyed.
Except, as it happened, Hamlin's was not an official U.S. post office nor were the Hamlins U.S. postal employees—theirs was merely a postal station contracted, for x number of dollars, to handle a little postal business on the side. Hamlin's was no more a government installation than the office where your accountant makes out your tax forms. But that is a mere technicality to world revolutionaries. Facility destroyed! Eleven hundred Old Rimrock residents forced, for a full year and a half, to drive five miles to buy their stamps and to get packages weighed and to send anything registered or special delivery. That'll show Lyndon Johnson who's boss.
They were laughing at him. Life was laughing at him.
Mrs. Conlon had said, "You are as much the victims of this tragedy as we are. The difference is that for us, though recovery will take time, we will survive as a family. We will survive as a loving family. We will survive with our memories intact and with our memories to sustain us. It will not be any easier for us than it will be for you to make sense of something so senseless. But we are the same family we were when Fred was here, and we will survive."
The clarity and force with which she implied that the Swede and his family would not survive made him wonder, in the weeks that followed, if her kindness and her compassion were so all-encompassing as he had wanted at first to believe.
He never went to see her again.
9. KumKum
Shelly Salzman, the kindly doctor, reassures Swede Levov that it would do good for his wife Dawn to have a face-lift, and the Swiss plastic surgeon checks out.
p.351 - 353
When Dawn had first proposed going for a face-lift to the clinic of a Geneva doctor she had read about in Vogue—a doctor they didn't know, a procedure they knew nothing about—the Swede had quietly contacted Shelly Salzman and went off to see him alone in his office. Their own family doctor was a man the Swede respected, a cautious and thorough elderly man who would have counseled the Swede and answered his questions and tried, on the Swede's behalf, to dissuade Dawn from the idea, but instead the Swede had called Shelly and asked if he might come over to talk about a family problem. Only when he got to Shelly's office did he understand that he had gone there to confess, four years after the fact, to having had the affair with Sheila in the aftermath of Merry's disappearance. When Shelly smiled and asked, "How can I help you?" the Swede found himself on the brink of saying, "By forgiving me." Throughout the conversation, every time the Swede spoke he had to quash the impulse to tell Shelly everything, to say, "I'm not here because of the facelift. I'm here because I did what I should never have done. I betrayed my wife, I betrayed you, I betrayed myself." But saying this would be a betrayal of Sheila, would it not? He could no more justify his taking it solely upon himself to confess to her husband than he could had she taken it upon herself to confess to his wife. However much he might yearn to be rid of a secret that stained and oppressed him, and imagine that a confession might unburden him, did he have the right to free himself at Sheila's expense? At Shelly's expense? At Dawn's expense? No, there was such a thing as ethical stability. No, he could not be so ruthlessly self-regarding. A cheap stunt, a treacherous stunt, and one that probably wouldn't pay off in long-term relief—yet each time the Swede opened his mouth to speak, he needed desperately to say to this kindly man, "I was the lover of your wife," to seek from Shelly Salzman the magical restitution of equilibrium that Dawn must be hoping she'd find in Geneva. But instead he only told Shelly how against the face-lift he was, only enumerated his reasons against it, and then, to his surprise, listened to Shelly telling him that Dawn had perhaps begun to entertain a potentially promising idea. "If she thinks this will help her start over again," Shelly said, "why not give her the opportunity? Why not give this woman every opportunity? There's nothing wrong with it, Seymour. This is life— not a life sentence but life. Nothing immoral about having a facelift. Nothing frivolous about a woman wanting one. She found the idea in Vogue magazine? That shouldn't throw you off. She only found what she was looking for. You don't know how many women come to me who've been through a terrible trauma and they want to talk about something or other, and what turns out to be on their mind is just this, plastic surgery. And without Vogue magazine. The emotional and psychological implications can turn out to be something. The relief they get, those that get relief, is not to be minimized. I can't say I know how it happens, I'm not saying it always happens, but I've seen it happen again and again, women who've lost their husbands, who've been seriously ill... You don't look like you believe me." But the Swede knew what he looked like: like a man with "Sheila" written all over his face. "I know," said Shelly, "it seems like a purely physical way of dealing with something profoundly emotional, but for many people it's a wonderful survival strategy. And Dawn may be one of them. I don't think you want to be puritanical about this. If Dawn feels strongly about a face-lift, and if you were to go along with her, if you were to support her ..." Later that same day Shelly phoned the Swede at the factory—he'd made some inquiries about Dr. LaPlante. "We've got people as good as him here, I'm sure, but if you want to go to Switzerland and get away and let her recuperate there, why not? This LaPlante is tops." "Shelly, thanks, it's awfully kind of you," said the Swede, disliking himself more than ever in the light of Shelly's generosity... and yet this was the same guy who, with his co-conspirator wife, had provided Merry a hiding place not only from the FBI but from her father and mother. A fact about as fantastic as a fact could be. What kind of mask is everyone wearing? I thought these people were on my side. But the mask is all that's on my side—that's it! For four months I wore the mask myself, with him, with my wife, and I could not stand it. I went there to tell him that. I went to tell him that I had betrayed him, and only didn't so as not to compound the betrayal, and never once did he let on how cruelly he'd betrayed me.
10. Devika
Swede Levov's difficult conversations with his daughter when she goes off to New York city and stays overnight at random friends' places.
p. 104 Conversations about New York.
Conversation #1 about New York. "What do you do when you go to New York? Who do you see in New York?" "What do I do? I go see New York. That's what I do." "What do you do, Merry?" "I do what everyone else does. I window-shop. What else would a girl do?" "You're involved with political people in New York." "I don't know what you're talking about. Everything is political. Brushing your teeth is political." "You're involved with people who are against the war in Vietnam. Isn't that who you go to see? Yes or no?" "They're people, yes. They're people with ideas, and some of them don't b-b-b-believe in the war. Most of them don't b-b-b-believe in the war." "Well, I don't happen to believe in the war myself." "So what's your problem?" "Who are these people? How old are they? What do they do for a living? Are they students?" "Why do you want to know?" "Because I'd like to know what you're doing. You're alone in New York on Saturdays. Not everyone's parents would allow a sixteen-year-old girl to go that far." "I go in ... I, you know, there are people and dogs and streets ..." "You come home with all this Communist material. You come home with all these books and pamphlets and magazines." "I'm trying to learn. You taught me to learn, didn't you? Not just to study, but to learn. C-c-c-communist . . ." "It is Communist. It says on the page that it's Communist." "C-c-c-communists have ideas that aren't always about C-commu-nism." "For instance." "About poverty. About war. About injustice. They have all kinds of ideas. Just b-b-because you're Jewish doesn't mean you just have ideas about Judaism. Well, the same holds for C-c-communism."
Conversation #18 about New York, after she fails to return home on a Saturday night. "You're never to do that again. You're never to stay over with people who we don't know. Who are these people?" "Never say never." "Who are the people you stayed with?" "They're friends of Sh-sherry's. From the music school." "I don't believe you." "Why? You can't b-b-b-believe that I might have friends? That people might like me—you don't b-b-b-believe that? That people might put me up for the night—you don't b-b-b-believe that? What do you b-b-b-b-b-b-b-believe in?" "You're sixteen years old. You're to come home. You cannot stay over in New York City." "Stop reminding me of how old I am. We all have an age." "When you went off yesterday we expected you back at six o'clock. At seven o'clock at night you phoned to say you're staying over. We said you weren't. You insisted. You said you had a place to stay. So I let you do it." "You let me. Sure." "But you can't do it again. If you do it again, you will never be allowed to go into New York by yourself." "Says who?" "Your father." "We'll see." "I'll make a deal with you." "What's the deal, Father?" "If you ever go into New York again and you find it's getting late and you have to stay somewhere, you stay with the Umanoffs." "The Umanoffs?" "They like you, you like them, they've known you all your life. They have a very nice apartment." "Well, the people I stayed with have a very nice apartment too." "Who are they?" "I told you, they're Shsherry's friends." "Who are they?" "Bill and Melissa." "And who are Bill and Melissa?" "They're p-p-p-people. Like everyone else." "What do they do for a living? How old are they?" "Melissa's twenty-two. And Bill is nineteen." "Are they students?" "They were students. Now they organize people for the betterment of the Vietnamese." "Where do they live?" "What are you going to do, come and get me?" "I'd like to know where they live. There are all sorts of neighborhoods in New York. Some are good, some aren't." "They live in a perfectly fine neighborhood and a perfectly fine b-b-b-b-building." "Where?" "They live up in Morningside Heights." "Are they Columbia students?" "They were." "How many people stay in this apartment?" "I don't see why I have to answer all these questions." "Because you're my daughter and you are sixteen years old." "So for the rest of my life, because I'm your daughter—" "No, when you are eighteen and graduate high school, you can do whatever you want." "So the difference we're talking about here is two years." "That's right." "And what's the b-big thing that's going to happen in two years?" "You will be an independent person who can support herself." "I can support myself now if I w-w-w-w-wanted to." "I don't want you to stay with Bill and Melissa." "W-w-w-why?" "It's my responsibility to look after you. I want you to stay with the Umanoffs. If you can agree to do that, then you can go to New York and stay over. Otherwise you won't be permitted to go there at all. The choice is yours." "I'm in there to stay with the people I want to stay with." "Then you're not going to New York." "We'll see." "There is no 'we'll see.' You're not going and that's the end of it." "I'd like to see you stop me." "Think about it. If you can't agree to stay with the Umanoffs, then you can't go to New York." "What about the war—" "My responsibility is to you and not to the war." "Oh, I know your responsibility is not to the war—that's why I have to go to New York. B-b-b-because people there do feel responsible. They feel responsible when America b-blows up Vietnamese villages. They feel responsible when America is b-blowing little b-babies to b-b-b-b-bits. B-but you don't, and neither does Mother. You don't care enough to let it upset a single day of yours. You don't care enough to make you spend another night somewhere. You don't stay up at night worrying about it. You don't really care, Daddy, one way or the other."
Conversations #24, 25, and 26 about New York. "I can't have these conversations, Daddy. I won't! I refuse to! Who talks to their parents like this!" "If you are underage and you go away for the day and don't come home at night, then you damn well talk to your parents like this." "B-b-but you drive me c-c-c-crazy, this kind of sensible parent, trying to be understanding! I don't want to be understood—I want to be f-f-f-free!" "Would you like it better if I were a senseless parent trying not to understand you?" "I would! I think I would! Why don't you fucking t-t-try it for a change and let me fucking see!"
Conversation #29 about New York. "No, you can't disrupt our family life until you are of age. Then do whatever you want. So long as you're under eighteen—" "All you can think about, all you can talk about, all you c-c-care about is the
well-being of this f-fucking 1-1-little f-f-family!" "Isn't that all you think about? Isn't that what you are angry about?" "N-n-no! N-n-never!" "Yes, Merry. You are angry about the families in Vietnam. You are angry about their being destroyed. Those are families too. Those are families just like ours that would like to have the right to have lives like our family has. Isn't that what you yourself want for them? What Bill and Melissa want for them? That they might be able to have secure and peaceful lives like ours?" "To have to live out here in the privileged middle of nowhere? No, I don't think that's what B-b-bill and Melissa want for them. It's not what I want for them." "Don't you? Then think again. I think that to have this privileged middle-of-no-where kind of life would make them quite content, frankly." "They just want to go to b-bed at night, in their own country, leading their own lives, and without thinking they're going to get b-b-blown to b-b-b-b-b-bits in their sleep. B-b-blown to b-b-b-b-bits all for the sake of the privileged people of New Jersey leading their p-p-peaceful, s-ssecure, acquisitive, meaningless 1-1-1-little bloodsucking lives!"
Thank you Joe for a superbly put together commentary as usual. The author and the book gave rise to some meaty discussion which led to a better understanding of the book,various aspects of human psyche and life itself, the American one at that with it's history of wars and turmoil and it's impact on it's people. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteThe Kochi Reading Group looks very elegant in formal clothes!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the book, KRG's discussion on it, the food that day and now, your blog, with beautiful pictures.
Thank you, dear Joe.
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