“Quite possibly the most
underappreciated American writer of the second half of the 20th
century.”
Thus proclaimed the subject line of
the Fictionaut
forum discussion last month that introduced me to the late Leonard
Michaels. Embarrassed to admit I'd not heard of him, and admiring
Chris Okum, the writer who opened the subject, I downloaded
Michaels's Collected Essays. I read them almost as fast as I read
crime novels.
This surprised me. Michaels was a brilliant man. His
essays challenged my mind in a way that ordinarily requires
deliberation at the plodding tempo of a dirge. What made the
difference, what kept me clipping along through the subtleties of his
thinking, enabling me to absorb intuitively the more difficult
abstractions, was, simply, his storytelling genius.
And maybe coming up with the right
title is part of that genius. The lead-off essay in this collection,
for example, the title of which won my devotion at first glance, is
What's a Story?
His essays are not long. They're not argumentative, dry, tightassed
theses aimed at academic review. Humor leavens them. They entice in a
voice that reaches with simplicity. They seduce with analysis dressed
in narrative.
Michaels makes his points in What's
a Story? citing
from the masters—Valéry, St. Augustine, Hemingway, Chekhov, Gogol,
Flannery O'Connor and even Mother Goose. He caps these examples with
a single sentence from Kafka: A
cage went in search of a bird. These
eight words, he says, comprise “the best story I know that contains
all I’ve been trying to say.”
I
started with the essays after Googling Michaels and learning his
fiction is considered dark. While not yet at the “clean and
well-lighted room” stage, I've come to that time in life when
“dark” loses much of the allure it holds in salad days. I liked
the essays so much I decided to chance the obviously dark
fictionalized memoir Michaels named for his first wife, Sylvia Bloch.
I say obviously dark because Okum, in recommending Sylvia,
described it as “simply one of the best books ever written about
the disintegration of a relationship and the helplessness one feels
when watching someone they love slip into madness.”
I would agree, although I must quibble with Okum's
assessment of Sylvia's “slip” into madness. Seemed clear to me
she was bonkers from the get-go, although enraptured by the pompatus
of love it did take Michaels awhile to see it. Brilliant, mysterious,
beautiful, and lustful with an apparently insatiable sexual appetite,
Sylvia struck me early on as pathologically narcissistic. I sensed
her captivating weirdness when she enters the story. Here's how
Michaels described their meeting one afternoon at a friend's New York
apartment:
She stood barefoot in the kitchen dragging a
hairbrush down through her long, black, wet Asian hair. Minutes ago,
apparently, she had stepped out of the shower, which was a high metal
stall in the kitchen, set on a platform beside the sink. A plastic
curtain kept water from splashing onto the kitchen floor. She said
hello but didn’t look at me. Too much engaged, tipping her head
right and left, tossing the heavy black weight of hair like a shining
sash. The brush swept down and ripped free until, abruptly, she quit
brushing, stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch,
leaned back against the brick wall, and went totally limp. Then, from
behind long black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question
of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years.
Michaels was coming off five years of post-grad school
in literature, without a Ph.D., with no plan for the future other
than “to write stories.” It was 1960. Sylvia was nineteen. They
became lovers that same afternoon, and stayed together, as Michaels
knew they would. He followed her to Harvard, where she enrolled in
summer school. He started writing, with little success, tearing up,
he said, every story he wrote. That's about the time their overt
fighting started.
She responded with rage at his suggestion she didn't
have to bloody her foot walking on a nail that had jabbed through the
sole of her sandal.
There was something impatient in my voice. She seemed
shocked. Her smile went from wan to screwy, perturbed, injured. I
couldn’t call back the impatience in my voice, couldn’t undo its
effect. For days thereafter, Sylvia walked about Cambridge pressing
the ball of her foot onto the nail, bleeding. She refused to wear
other shoes. I pleaded, I argued with her. Finally, she let me take
the sandal to be repaired. I was grateful. She was not grateful. I
was not forgiven.
Her hypersensitivity had created a pattern by the time
her classes ended and they moved back to New York.
Fighting every day, we’d become
ferociously intimate. Like a kid having a tantrum, she would get
caught up in the sound of her own screaming. Screaming because she
was screaming, screaming, screaming, as if building a little chamber
of rage, herself at the center. It was all hers. She was boss. I
wasn’t allowed inside. Her eyes and teeth were bright blacks and
whites, everything exaggerated and contorted, like the maelstrom
within. There was nothing erotic in this picture, and yet we
sometimes went from fighting to sex. No passport was required. There
wasn’t even a border. Time was fractured, there was no cause and
effect, and one thing didn’t even lead toward another. As in a
metaphor, one thing was
another. Raging, hating, I wanted to fuck, and she did, too.
Eventually her tantrums become violent, smashing things,
throwing things. On one occasion, apparently furious that he was
spending time writing instead of with her, she hurls his typewriter
against the wall. Returning home from an occasional brief visit to
his parents, he'd find she had cut her wrists, just enough to draw
blood to emphasize her displeasure.
The strife between these two lovebirds—they do love
each other, even when they hate each other—accelerates in momentum
and complexity, and horror, with no respite, until the inevitable
conclusion. Michaels doesn't seem to know why it's happening or what
to do. His apparent naivete is infuriating. Even I wanted to scream
at him and hurl his typewriter at the wall.
Were
Sylvia
written by a lesser talent I might have given up long before the
finish. On Michaels, not the book. My reading would have become an
appalling voyeurism, watching a man's soul being dismembered by a
harridan. It would have been wretchedly irresistible, and I might
have left this sort of comment as a customer
review on
Amazon:
Read this if you're into two
thoroughly unlikable people ruining each others' lives and having
sex. I bought it because I read that it was the inspiration for The
Antlers' phenomenal Hospice album, but I find it hard to believe
something so beautiful and moving could have come from this. Worth
reading for the part where Sylvia throws spaghetti at Leonard and he
cries about it, however.
Evidently the spaghetti-throwing scene is what earned
that “review” two stars.
Michaels never achieved
commercial success, despite winning literary awards for his work and
having a movie made of his first novel, The
Men's Club.
It seems paradoxical that while his writing is marvelously accessible
he wrote for literary people, especially other writers. He was a
perfectionist, spending exhaustive attention to his sentences and
even individual words to get them just right. This meant conveying
as best he could the world he found in his heart. The result is a
deceptive simplicity, writing condensed and compressed as if it were
carbon being pressed into diamonds. Trouble is, his diamonds never
made it to Tiffany's.
He alluded to this
problem in a journal entry as cited by his friend, David
Bezmozgis:
My writing feels warm until I revise,
make it better, and then it gets cold. I should revise further, mess
up my sentences, make them warm, make money.
As with many serious writers who don't gain wide
recognition while they're alive, Michaels made his living teaching.
Most of his books were out of print when he died in 2003. He was 70.
A revival of interest in him began in 2007 when Sylvia
was reissued as a Farrar, Straus and Giroux Classic. The
Men's Club was added the following year. The
Essays and The
Collected Stories are also available on
Kindle.
No comments:
Post a Comment