Day 20: Lydia Davis, Claire Keegan, Elizabeth Hardwick
TODAY the theme is gender and relationships. I wont complicate things. The texts primarily concern the classic divide of men and women. We'll go from there.
Poem: Lydia Davis - A House Besieged (1986)
If there is a writer who inspires me more than any other, it is Lydia Davis, who writes very short blocks of writing, always perfect in form. She calls them all stories, even if they are just a handful of words. Sometimes I see them as stories, but often I see them as prose poems. Here is a simple one I chose for its thematic similarity to the other texts:
In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.
I read this eleven years ago, and it still stays with me- I can't explain why. It is simple, atmospheric and haunting. It is also kind of funny.
It reminds me of this wonderful quote from Christina Stead's Man Who Loved Children:
He called a spade a predecessor to modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig: they had no words between them intelligible.
Story: Claire Keegan - So Late in the Day (2022)
I very much enjoyed listening to this story on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, read by both George Saunders and Keegan herself. Read / listen first, as there are spoilers.
The story is about a young man and woman moving in together, a week before their wedding. By the end of the story, the marriage is called off and the man is left trying to understand what he might have done wrong. He seems to know, but doesn't want to admit it. Rather, he feels that the woman is at fault for overreacting and now humiliating him.
I was impressed with both how subtle, and how furious, the story is. The situations all feel so familiar: a man never cooking but paying for takeout; a man getting upset about hidden extra costs for an engagement ring; a man getting overwhelmed when his girlfriend moves in with an excessive amount of stuff. The man comes off as a bit clueless and tightfisted, but not so different from any mildly neurotic man. I am guilty of all the behaviours in this story, and so are most of the guys I know.
Yet Keegan does an amazing thing by making clear the subtle actions of disrespect and entitlement in all the character's behaviours- not intentionally malitious, but reflecting a default ideology of chauvinism — a world-view unlikely to change, as his subtle behaviours are not-really-that-bad, and so ubiquitous.
Yes he is not-that-bad compared to actual bad guys but should his fiancee, who has suddenly had this epiphany, spend the rest of a shitty life with him? Nah.
Here is the interchange I have been thinking of for a couple years now:
‘You know what is at the heart of misogyny? When it comes down to it?’
‘So I’m a misogynist now?’
‘It’s simply about not giving,’ she said. ‘Whether it’s believing you should not give us the vote or not give help with the dishes – it’s all clitched onto the same wagon.’
I know both men and women have their problems, which I will fault more to nurture than nature (society produces the individual yadda yadda), but here is my big 2 cents:
I see people going on date after date, or getting dumped after 6 months and "getting back in the ring" straight away, because they need a partner, because thats what people do, and I really want to ask them: What makes you assume you will make anyone happy? What makes you think you have the right to be endured? I never ask these questions, because it would be rude, but I ask it to myself.
Love is tolerance of faults, sure, I guess, but how much should one tolerate in the name of love.
I try to learn, to combat the bad assumptions and behaviours I grew up knowing, but I know I am a selfish person at the heart of it. I know that I am not the sort of person to bring anyone any longlasting happiness. I want to exist as cameo appearance only.
Essay: Elizabeth Hardwick - A Doll's House (1974)
(spoilers of Ibsen's most famous play here)
The plot of Ibsen's A Dolls House resembles the previous Claire Keegan story in a lot of ways. Both are about stingy yet very ordinary men who find themselves unexpectedly abandoned by their spouses following their first ever argument. The decision to leave comes when the women realise that misogyny does not have to take the form of violence or crassness to be misogyny.
While the ending in Keegan's story feels perfectly natural, the shock ending in Ibsen's play is so sudden, so out of the naive heroine's character, that it feels didactic and forced - as if the real ending had been cut and rewritten by a humourless tumblrite in 2017. But it is the real ending we are reading, and even if this ending still felt as radical today as it did in 1879, it still feels unnatural in character. I am glad Elizabeth Hardwick felt the same about the play:
The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the First acts, the bright woman— with her children, her presence, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of "heaps of money"—can be a suitable candidate for liberation.
Hardwick spends the last few pages of the essay defending the ending, making a case that it is us readers (and actors and directors) who have misread Nora's character as naive and ditzy, and so have caused the sudden transformation at the end to feel inconsistent.
This essay is great proof of how a play can be read so differently among interpreters. Hardwick gives a convincing cipher to the text, yet I still do not hold A Doll's House as a very thought-provoking or enjoyable play compared to say, Hedda Gabler or An Enemy of the People.
Still, I recommend reading or listening to all of Ibsens work. Currently the three afformentioned plays are free on Audible Plus with an immersive sound that feels like you are right there in the room- a bit overacted, but still really good.
Thanks for reading and I'm sorry if you did.