On memory and other grievances - Dayna Tortorici in NYRB reviews Vivian Gornick:

‘“From birth to death,” writes Vivian Gornick, in her memoir The Odd Woman and the City, we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions—anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate—yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.
From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we don’t want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. “Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities,” she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.
But then there are times when we feel ourselves whole. We stand at the center of our experience and something inside us “flares into bright life.” Under the influence of “a conviction of inner clarity,” we become eloquent, prolific—what Gornick calls our “expressive selves.” This, we feel, is the meaning of life. This is what it means to be alive.
Gornick has published thirteen books in fifty years, fourteen if you count Woman in Sexist Society, the anthology of feminist writing she coedited with Barbara K. Moran in 1971. Most concern someone whose quest for the “expressive self” rises to the level of an addiction. In a new introduction to The Romance of American Communism, her 1977 book reissued earlier this year, Gornick observes that “there is a certain kind of cultural hero—the artist, the scientist, the thinker—who is often characterized as one who lives for ‘the work.’” This hero is her subject. Why do people devote their lives to causes that deprive them of love and comfort and ordinary happiness, Gornick asks? As a lifelong writer, a woman of blunt manner and deep feeling for whom the effort is agony, she has a personal investment in the answer.’

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‘Gornick was born in 1935 in the Bronx, the second child of working-class immigrant Jews. Her father, she recalls in The Romance of American Communism, was a kind man who “stood upright on the floor of a dress factory on West 35th Street…with a steam iron in his hand for thirty years.” Her mother, a passionate woman with a rougher style of affection, kept house. Both were fellow travelers of the American Communist Party and impressed the political nature of life on their children. Before she knew that she was “Jewish or a girl,” Gornick wrote in the late 1970s, “I knew I was a member of the working class.”’

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‘Gornick was always a reader. When she was “quite small,” Bess introduced her to the local branch of the New York Public Library, and by the time she graduated high school she had “read [her] way around the room.” At seventeen, she started City College, where she met a new world of ideas. Gornick’s sentences grew longer, with words her mother didn’t understand. Bess had hotly defended her daughter’s right to “an education” to her family (“Where is it written that a working-class widow’s daughter should go to college?” one of Gornick’s uncles asked), but this referendum on her own intelligence was not what she’d had in mind. One afternoon, she lay on the couch and asked Gornick what she was reading. “A comparative history of the idea of love over the last three hundred years,” she said. “That’s ridiculous,” Bess replied. “Love is love.” When Gornick shot back, “That’s absolutely not true…. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea,” Bess was off the couch so fast her daughter didn’t see her feet hit the ground. She chased Gornick through the apartment, crying, “I’ll kill you. How dare you talk to me that way?” Gornick reached the bathroom—the only room with a lock—but her mother couldn’t stop in time. Her arm collided with the door. “Blood, screams, shattered glass on both sides of the door,” Gornick writes. “I thought that afternoon, One of us is going to die of this attachment.”’

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‘Feminism gave Gornick many things, but two in particular changed her life: the confidence to forgo romantic love and the chance to find her footing as a writer. Feminism made Gornick expressive: it gave her a voice, a style, a subject. She was prolific in her writings against dogma, which she admitted was a “somewhat obsessive preoccupation” of hers. The exclusion of lesbians in the movement was intolerable to her, but so was militant separatism. She chafed against those who imposed a party line, and took offense at the notion that women’s writing could only be judged by other women. Feminism was about seeing the world with unsparing honesty. What good was it if it replaced one set of received ideas with another? Rigidity and victimhood were, to her, signs of arrested development. In her 1970 article “On the Progress of Feminism,” she compared the new convert to feminism to “the novitiate into psychoanalysis,” who, after “the stunning point of initial conversion,” must face down the “hard, drudging work” of undoing one’s habits of mind. Getting stuck on man-hating was like getting stuck on blaming your parents. It might be justified, but it would not give you your future.’

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‘No writer is without flaws. Gornick’s is repetition. Take, for instance, the range of experiences she describes as having no parallel: there is the joy of writing well (“not an ‘I love you’ in the world could touch it”), the clarity of scientific discovery (“there is not an ‘I love you’ in the world that can touch it”), feminism in the early 1970s (“not an I-love-you in the world could touch it”), the companionship of books (“nothing can match it”), and the inner clarity of the expressive radical (“no reward of life, neither love for fame nor wealth could compete”). More substantial repetitions appear across multiple books, which Gornick has come to acknowledge. In a slightly defensive note at the beginning of Unfinished Business, she warns the reader that some paragraphs, indeed entire pages, may be familiar from previous books, adding, “I sincerely hope the reader will not find this practice off-putting.” I did not want to be the kind of reader who found it off-putting. Encountering the same paragraphs in two, three, or four different books, however, eventually took its toll. Does she think I’m not listening? Have I read this before? Surely I am losing my mind? I cross-checked books, dog-eared pages. Above all I wanted the repetitions to signify. Occasionally, they did.’

Read the complete review here.

‘Why do people devote their lives to causes that deprive them of love and comfort and ordinary happiness, Gornick asks?’

To find meaning, for the feeling of being alive.

In the long run ordinary happiness becomes unbearable and is only supportable because of weeks or even seasons filled with anguish and the absence of almost everything else that gives us pleasure.

The cause, it might even be a lost cause, is the catalyst of small and not so mall occasions of suffering and therefore meaning.

Gornick is right to point out that love is an idea, but ideas at least certain ideas are extremely strong. The grievance is often also an idea. (Some people love to forget that trauma is not the same as grievance.) Certain ideas we are not willing to part with. Certain books. ‘The Odd Woman and the City,’ is besides everything else a collection of ideas I’m not willing to part with.