Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY LEONARD MICHAELS

  Time Out of Mind

  A Girl with a Monkey

  To Feel These Things

  Shuffle

  The Men’s Club

  I Would Have Saved Them If I Could

  Going Places

  Sylvia

  Sylvia

  LEONARD MICHAELS

  Introduction by Diane Johnson

  FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  Copyright © 1990, 1992 by Leonard Michaels

  Introduction copyright © 2007 by Diane Johnson

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Originally published in 1992 by Mercury House,

  San Francisco, California

  First Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 2007

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938239

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-27107-7

  ISBN-10: 0-374-27107-0

  Designed by Gretchen Achilles

  www.fsgbooks.com

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  How unattainable life is, it only reveals

  its features in memory

  in nonexistence.

  —ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  INTRODUCTION

  by Diane Johnson

  Leonard Michaels was a presence in my life even before I met him, because I’d inherited his office at the Davis campus of the University of California, where I was a new assistant professor. It was 1968. He had begun teaching on the Berkeley campus, leaving all his graduate school notebooks and papers in the drawers of the Davis filing cabinet, and I would read them during my long, boring office hours when there weren’t any students—notes about his classes on Romanticism and the eighteenth century; about his special interest in Lord Byron—foreshadowing, perhaps, one of his titles to come, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (a quote from Byron upon seeing some people about to be hanged).

  From the doodles in the margins, from his large and strong handwriting, I had the impression of a Byronic character, brilliant, funny, handsome, and desperate. This first impression proved to be true, and also characterized Lenny’s work. Unlike many writers, who surprise by being in person nothing like their books, his personality was inextricable from his work, two manifestations of a unique whole.

  The events chronicled in Sylvia took place from 1960 to 1963. At Davis it was known that Lenny had had a first wife who committed suicide. He had told people only that it had happened. His old friends from graduate school at the University of Michigan added a bit more, but no one, I think, was prepared for the horror and emotional complexity of the account he eventually gives in Sylvia, nearly thirty years later. The shock of reading it is a bit like one’s childhood reading of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca at the moment when the narrator’s husband cries out that she has misunderstood and that he hadn’t loved his first wife, Rebecca; no, he had hated her; and the reader understands that he too has misunderstood everything.

  Rebecca was great storytelling, and so is Sylvia; clearly, in the intervening years, the artist Leonard Michaels had gained perspective enough to bring himself to write about this compelling tragedy, and the short, bitter story—he called it a “memoir in story form”—is still raw and vivid thirty years later. He captures the ambivalence and paralysis of the wretched narrator, but also now sees things the younger self could not have seen; most important of these, the mature artist recognizes, is that the doomed figure of Sylvia Bloch (referred to only by her first name) could not have been saved, though he would have saved her if he could. Yet his feelings of culpability and puzzlement are still vividly alive.

  The narrator and Sylvia are in their twenties; she is an undergraduate and he has dropped out of graduate school. He is obsessed with writing, but has not begun to publish, though by the end of the book a few stories have come out in little magazines. As we know, he will go on to publish the acclaimed stories in Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, and many other works, including the controversial The Men’s Club, a novel (eventually a film) that added to his reputation, but in part for the wrong reasons.

  In it, a group of men, deploring the poverty of men’s emotional lives, decide to meet to talk about things they normally can’t, like love and loneliness. The point is the limitation of or restrictions on men’s emotional expression, but the novel was seen by some, instead, as a clubby, antifeminist book about male bonding. I mention this because in Sylvia, we can see what Lenny’s real attitude toward women was—sometimes baffled, but always supportive and equitable, without a trace of macho reservation; some of his best friends were women, in the phrase, and his collegial helpfulness to his writer friends was endless.

  In marrying Sylvia Bloch, it was his bad luck to have to deal with an unusually disturbed woman, while lacking the experience even to understand the spectrum of normal behavior. He almost thinks it’s normal when she throws his typewriter against the wall, or bites and attacks him. “Another time she pulled all my shirts out of the dresser and threw them on the floor and jumped up and down on them and spit on them . . .” She takes to her bed; she smashes mirrors. He can never understand what it is she wants, nor does she appear to know.

  In hindsight, her mental illness is obvious, but the young husband is emotionally inexperienced, and must learn only slowly and painfully the truth about his situation. His moments of insight are rare at first, as when a friend tells him about his own difficult marriage:

  I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too, even a charming, sophisticated guy like Malcolm. We laughed together. I felt happily irresponsible. Countless men and women, I supposed, all over America, were tearing each other to pieces. How great. I was normal.

  Slowly, finding that nothing can please or satisfy the impossible Sylvia, in self-defense he begins to withdraw:

  I recorded our fights in a secret journal because I was less and less able to remember how they started. There would be an inadvertent insult, then disproportionate anger. I would feel I didn’t know why this was happening. I was the object of terrific fury, but what had I done? What had I said? Sometimes I would have the impression that the anger wasn’t actually directed at me. I’d merely stepped into the line of fire.

  From time to time, he has these crucial illuminations. He doesn’t attempt to excuse himself, and he makes no attempt to psychoanalyze Sylvia or to explain her craziness by way of childhood traumas or abuse—or indeed, ever to call her crazy. The mature artist rigorously tries to avoid the temptations of self-vindication and retrospective understanding. (Whether he entirely succeeds in this will be a matter for the reader to decide. If there is blame, plenty is directed at himself.) He presents her as she presented herself, and as she appeared to the narrator’s panicked but hopeful nature then, as a young man doing the best he could in a deeply unhappy—we would now say dysfunctional—relationship. Above all, this is a chilling portrait of the desperation and delusions of people trapped in situations they can’t see beyond.

  The young couple live in a disgusting tenement, with roaches, rats, and neighbors frightened by their compulsive fighting:

  [The building] exuded odors and made noises. I smelled food cooking, incense burning, and the gases of hashish and roach poison. I heard radios and phonograph players, the old Italian lady who screamed “Bassano” every day, and the boy’s footsteps running in the hall . . .

  Lying in the dark land of the cucarachas, her Latin and Greek grammars thrown into chaos, radio playing softly, my Sylvia waited, seething . . .

  Despite the constant domestic turmoil, the budding writer tries to steal moments for work. The bril
liance of Leonard Michaels’s writing has always included a remarkable descriptive power; here is one of the best descriptions anywhere of the mystical and magical part of the writing process:

  Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

  This intensity and precision is present in all of Leonard Michaels’s writing. Eventually, it would bear fruit with the distinguished works mentioned above. He would go on to receive a Guggenheim grant, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, nominations for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and many other honors. At the time of his early death at the age of seventy, from a lymphoma, he had been publishing a new series of stories in The New Yorker, and had been happily living in Italy for seven years with his wife, Katharine Ogden Michaels. His death was a great shock. His friends will always mourn him. It’s some consolation that this new edition of his works will bring him new readers, and that from this his reputation can only grow.

  Sylvia

  In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berkeley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I’d do, only a desire to write stories. I’d also been to graduate school at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956. All in all, five years of classes in literature. I don’t know how else I might have spent those five years, but I didn’t want to hear more lectures, study for more exams, or see myself growing old in the library. There was an advertisement in the school paper for someone to take a car from Berkeley to New York, expenses paid. I made a phone call. A few days later, I was driving a Cadillac convertible through mountains and prairies, going back home, an over-specialized man, twenty-seven years old, who smoked cigarettes and could give no better account of himself than to say “I love to read.” It doesn’t qualify the essential picture, but I had a lot of friends, got along with my parents, and women liked me. Speeding toward the great city in a big, smooth-flowing car that wasn’t mine, I felt humored by the world.

  My parents’ apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, four rooms and a balcony, was too small for another adult, but I wouldn’t be staying long. Anyhow, my mother let me feel like a child. It seemed natural. “What are you doing?” she said. “Washing dishes? Please, please, go away. Sit down. Have a cup of coffee.”

  My father sighed, shook his head, lit a cigar. Saying nothing, he told me that I hadn’t done much to make him happy.

  From their balcony, fourteen stories high, I looked down into Seward Park. Women sat along the benches, chatting. Their children played in the sandbox. Basketball and stick-ball games, on courts nearby, were in process morning and afternoon. On Sundays, a flea market would be rapidly set up in a corner of the park—cheap, bright, ugly clothing strewn along the benches. In the bushes, you could talk to a man about hot cameras and TV sets. At night, beneath the lush canopy of sycamores and oaks, prostitutes brought customers. Beyond the park, looking north, I saw Delancey Street, the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge eating and disgorging traffic. Further north were the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ever since I was a little kid, I’d thought of them as two very important city people. A few degrees to the right, I saw the complicated steelwork of the 59th Street Bridge. To the west, beyond Chinatown (where Arlene Ng, age ten, my first great love, once lived) and beyond Little Italy (where they shot Joey Gallo in Umberto’s Clam House on Mulberry Street), loomed Wall Street’s financial buildings and the Manhattan Bridge. Trucks, cars, and trains flashed through the grid of cables, crossing the East River to and from Brooklyn. Freighters progressed slowly, as if in a dream, to and from the ocean. In the sky, squadrons of pigeons made grand loops, and soaring gulls made line drawings. There were also streaking sparrows, and airplanes heading toward India and Brazil. All day and night, from every direction, came the hum of the tremendum.

  I talked for hours on the telephone, telling my friends that I was home, and I sat up late at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading, and smoking. Most of the city slept. In the quiet, I heard police sirens as far away as Houston Street. Sometimes, I was awakened around noon or later by the smells of my mother’s cooking which, like sunlight, became more subtle as the hours passed. Days were much alike. I didn’t know Monday from Wednesday until I saw it in the newspaper. I’d forget immediately. After my parents had gone to bed, I’d step out to buy The Times, then stare at the columns of want ads. Among thousands upon thousands of jobs, none said my name. I wanted to do something. I didn’t want something to do. Across the darkened living room, down the hall, in the big bed with my mother, my father lay snoring.

  Whatever my regrets about school—lost years, no Ph.D.—I wasn’t yet damaged by judgment. I hadn’t failed badly at anything—like Francis Gary Powers, for example, whose name I heard every day. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and he’d failed to kill himself before being captured. Instead, he confessed to being a spy. President Eisenhower, who claimed the U-2 was a weather plane, looked like a liar.

  There were few heroes. Malcolm X and Fidel Castro, fantastically courageous, were figures of violent disorder. They had both been in jail. But even in sports, where heroes are simple, they could be the focus of violence. A mob swarmed out of the stands after a ballgame, surrounded the great Mickey Mantle, tore off his hat, clawed his face, and punched him in the jaw so hard they had to take X rays to see if the bone was broken.

  The odor of fresh newsprint, an oily film on my fingertips, mixed with cigarette smoke and the taste of coffee. Pages turned and crackled like fire, or like breaking bones. I read that 367 were killed in traffic accidents during the Memorial Day weekend, and, since the first automobile, over a million had been killed on our roads, more than in all our wars. And look: Two sisters were found dead in their apartment on Gracie Square, in the bathtub, wearing nightgowns. A razor lay in the hand of one of the sisters. Blood wasn’t mentioned. This was old-style journalism, respectfully distanced from personal tragedy. Nothing was said about how the sisters had arranged themselves in the tub. Their life drained away as the crowd vomited out of the stands to worship and mutilate Mickey Mantle. There were really no large meanings, only cries of the phenomena. I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.

  About a week after I arrived, I phoned Naomi Kane, a good pal from the University of Michigan. We’d spent many hours together drinking coffee in the Student Union, center of romantic social life, gossip, and general sloth. Naomi, who had grown up in Detroit, in a big, comfortable house with elm trees all around, lived now in Greenwich Village, on the sixth floor of an old brick tenement on MacDougal Street.

  “Push the street door hard,” she said. “There is no bell and the lock doesn’t work.”

  From my parents’ apartment I walked to the subway, caught the F train, took a seat, and was stunned into insentient passivity. The train shrieked through the rock bowels of Manhattan to the West Fourth Street station. I walked up three flights of stairs in the dingy, resonant cavern, then out into the light of a hot Sunday afternoon.

  Village streets carried slow, turgid crowds of sightseers, especially MacDougal Street, the main drag between Eighth and Bleecker, the famous Eighth Street Bookshop at one end, the famous San Remo bar at the other. I’d walked MacDougal Street innumerable times during my high school days, when my girlfriend lived in the Village, and, later, all through college, when my second girlfriend lived in the Village. But I’d been gone two yea
rs. I hadn’t seen these huge new crowds, and new stores and coffeehouses all along the way. I hadn’t sensed the new apocalyptic atmosphere.

  Around then, Elvis Presley and Allen Ginsberg were kings of feeling, and the word love was like a proclamation with the force of kill. The movie Hiroshima, mon amour, about a woman in love with death, was a big hit. So was Black Orpheus, where death is in loving pursuit of a woman. I noticed a graffito chalked on the wall of the West Fourth Street subway station: FUCK HATE. Another read: Mayor Wagner is a lesbian. Wonderfully stupid, I thought, but then the sense came to me. I remembered a newspaper photo showing the city’s first meter maids, a hundred strong, in slate blue uniforms. They stood in lines, in a military manner, as Mayor Wagner reviewed them. Ergo: a lesbian. Before 1960, could you have had this thought, made this joke? There had been developments in sensibility, a visionary contagion derived maybe from drugs—marijuana, heroin, uppers, downers—the poetry of common conversation. Weird delirium was in the air, and in the sluggish, sensual bodies trudging down MacDougal Street. I pressed among them until I came to the narrow, sooty-faced tenement where Naomi lived.

  I pushed in through the door, into a long hallway painted with greenish enamel, giving the walls a fishy sheen. The hall went straight back through the building to the door of a coffeehouse called The Fat Black Pussy Cat. Urged by the oppressive, sickening green walls, hardly a foot from either shoulder, I walked quickly. Just before the door to The Fat Black Pussy Cat, I came to a stairway with an ironwork banister. I climbed up six flights through the life of the building. A phonograph played blues; an old lady screamed in Italian at a little boy named Bassano; a hall toilet was clattering and flushing, flushing, flushing. At the sixth floor, I turned right and walked down a dark hallway, narrower than the one at street level. No overhead lights burned beyond the landing. There was the glow of a window at the end of the hallway. Brittle waves of old linoleum cracked like eggshells beneath my steps. Naomi’s door, formerly the entrance to an office, had a clouded glass window. I knocked. She opened. With a great hug, she welcomed me into a small kitchen.