How to be Alone. Jonathan Franzen
the bedroom? We all know there’s sex in the cloakrooms of power, sex behind the pomp and circumstance, sex beneath the robes of justice; but can’t we act like grownups and pretend otherwise? Pretend not that “no one is looking” but that everyone is looking?
For two decades now, business leaders and politicians across much of the political spectrum, both Gingrich Republicans and Clinton Democrats, have extolled the virtues of privatizing public institutions. But what better word can there be for Lewinskygate and the ensuing irruption of disclosures (the infidelities of Helen Chenoweth, of Dan Burton, of Henry Hyde) than “privatization”? Anyone who wondered what a privatized presidency might look like may now, courtesy of Mr. Starr, behold one.
IN DENIS JOHNSON’S SHORT STORY “Beverly Home,” the young narrator spends his days working at a nursing home for the hopelessly disabled, where there is a particularly unfortunate patient whom no one visits:
A perpetual spasm forced him to perch sideways on his wheelchair and peer down along his nose at his knotted fingers. This condition had descended on him suddenly. He got no visitors. His wife was divorcing him. He was only thirty-three, I believe he said, but it was hard to guess what he told about himself because he really couldn’t talk anymore, beyond clamping his lips repeatedly around his protruding tongue while groaning.
No more pretending for him! He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.
In a coast-to-coast, shag-carpeted imperial bedroom, we could all just be messes and save ourselves the trouble of pretending. But who wants to live in a pajama-party world? Privacy loses its value unless there’s something it can be defined against. “Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other”—and a good thing, too. The need to put on a public face is as basic as the need for the privacy in which to take it off. We need both a home that’s not like a public space and a public space that’s not like home.
Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft. All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap. All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy. They say things like “Should we have couscous with that?” and “I’m on my way to Blockbuster.” They aren’t breaking any law by broadcasting these breakfast-nook conversations. There’s no PublicityGuard that I can buy, no expensive preserve of public life to which I can flee. Seclusion, whether in a suite at the Plaza or in a cabin in the Catskills, is comparatively effortless to achieve. Privacy is protected as both commodity and right; public forums are protected as neither. Like old-growth forests, they’re few and irreplaceable and should be held in trust by everyone. The work of maintaining them gets only harder as the private sector grows ever more demanding, distracting, and disheartening. Who has the time and energy to stand up for the public sphere? What rhetoric can possibly compete with the American love of “privacy”?
When I return to my apartment after dark, I don’t immediately turn my lights on. Over the years, it’s become a reflexive precaution on my part not to risk spooking exposed neighbors by flooding my living room with light, although the only activity I ever seem to catch them at is watching TV.
My skin-conscious neighbor is home with her husband tonight, and they seem to be dressing for a party. The woman, a vertical strip of whom is visible between the Levelors and the window frame, is wearing a bathrobe and a barrette and sitting in front of a mirror. The man, slickhaired, wearing suit pants and a white T-shirt, stands by the sofa in the other room and watches television in a posture that I recognize as uncommitted. Finally the woman disappears into the bedroom. The man puts on a white shirt and a necktie and perches sidesaddle on the arm of the sofa, still watching television, more involved with it now. The woman returns wearing a strapless yellow dress and looking like a whole different species of being. Happy the transformation! Happy the distance between private and public! I see a rapid back-and-forth involving jewelry, jackets, and a clutch purse, and then the couple, dressed to the nines, ventures out into the world.
[1998]
(The Harper’s Essay)
MY DESPAIR about the American novel began in the winter of 1991, when I fled to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York, to write the last two chapters of my second book. My wife and I had recently separated, and I was leading a life of self-enforced solitude in New York City, working long days in a small white room, packing up ten years’ worth of communal property, and taking nighttime walks on avenues where Russian, Hindi, Korean, and Spanish were spoken in equal measure. Even deep in my Queens neighborhood, however, news could reach me through my TV set and my Times subscription. The country was preparing for war ecstatically, with rhetoric supplied by George Bush: “Vital issues of principle are at stake.” In Bush’s eighty-nine-percent approval rating, as in the near-total absence of public skepticism about the war, the United States seemed to me hopelessly unmoored from reality—dreaming of glory in the massacre of faceless Iraqis, dreaming of infinite oil for hour-long commutes, dreaming of exemption from the rules of history. And so I, too, was dreaming of escape. I wanted to hide from America. But when I got to Yaddo and realized that it was no haven—the Times came there daily, and my fellow colonists kept talking about Patriot missiles and yellow ribbons—I began to think that what I really needed was a monastery.
Then one afternoon, in Yaddo’s little library, I picked up and read Paula Fox’s short novel Desperate Characters. “She was going to get away with everything!” is the hope that seizes the novel’s main character, Sophie Bentwood, a childless Brooklynite who’s unhappily married to a conservative lawyer. Sophie used to translate French novels; now she’s so depressed that she can hardly even read them. Against the advice of the husband, Otto, she has given milk to a homeless cat, and the cat has repaid the kindness by biting her hand. Sophie immediately feels “vitally wounded”—she’s been bitten for “no reason” just as Josef K. is arrested for “no reason” in The Trial—but when the swelling in her hand subsides she becomes giddy with the hope of being spared rabies shots.
The “everything” Sophie wants to get away with, however, is more than her liberal self-indulgence with the cat. She wants to get away with reading Goncourt novels and eating omelettes aux fines herbes on a street where derelicts lie sprawled in their own vomit and in a country that’s fighting a dirty war in Vietnam. She wants to be spared the pain of confronting a future beyond her life with Otto. She wants to keep dreaming. But the novel’s logic won’t let her. She’s compelled, instead, to this equation of the personal and the social:
“God, if I am rabid, I am equal to what is outside,” she said out loud, and felt an extraordinary relief as though, at last, she’d discovered what it was that could create a balance between the quiet, rather vacant progression of the days she spent in this house, and those portents that lit up the dark at the edge of her own existence.
Desperate Characters, which was first published in 1970, ends with an act of prophetic violence. Breaking under the strain of his collapsing marriage, Otto Bentwood grabs a bottle of ink from Sophie’s escritoire and smashes it against their bedroom wall. The ink in which his law books and Sophie’s translations have been printed now forms an unreadable blot. The black lines on the wall are both a mark of doom and the harbinger of an extraordinary relief, the end to a fevered isolation.
With its equation of a crumbling marriage with a crumbling social order, Desperate Characters spoke directly to the ambiguities that I was experiencing that January. Was it a great thing or a horrible thing that my marriage was coming apart? And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society?