Their Before and After pictures published in the main Surrealist journal. Before they are smooth good girls dressed in white, the pictures of industriousness, innocence. Afterwards they are as cross-eyed as Lucia Joyce, hair wild, dressed only in their kimonos.
This fascination coupled with revulsion once the feminine mask falls off. The Before and After of screen siren Frances Farmer, first golden curled careful locks then later, a defiant, drowned rat.
The actress Frances Farmer arrested for disorderly conduct, who was carried away kicking and screaming bellowing have you ever had a broken heart. She who put down “cocksucker” as her career.
The Surrealists cast as their heroines French girl-criminals like the Papin Sisters as well as the hysterics, like Charcot’s actress Augustine. The girl-criminals’ protest and revolt — they put up a good fight. (And yet Augustine was also often so malleable, spasming so willingly for the cameras, the crowds.)
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément wrangling over Freud’s hysteric, her petite hysterie, in their dialogue in “The Newly Born Woman.” Does Cixous valorize Dora and not appreciate her suffering, as Clément argues? “Dora broke something,” Cixous tells Clément, who is not convinced. “Listen, you love Dora, but to me she never seemed a revolutionary character,” she says. Cixous responds, hilariously, “I don’t give a damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the name of a certain force, who makes the little circus not work anymore.”
Cixous who writes elsewhere: “The hysterics are my sisters.”
What did these women break except themselves? They who were ultimately contained.
Can I read these Sibyls as anything other than a cautionary tale?
Zelda burning her clothes in a bathtub, incensed about Scott’s infatuation for Hollywood ingenue Lois Moran. That scene in Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, the mad wife character, Nicole, throws a “scene” in the bathroom that we can only eavesdrop on (the Lois Moran figure, Rosemary Hoyt, is disturbed by the noise, “louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity”). Control yourself! her husband/psychiatrist Dick is overheard saying to her. (We do not see the monster on the page. She is off-scene, like in much of Jane Eyre.)
Once Viv threw her nightdress out the window in frustration. Lucia Joyce institutionalized for throwing a chair. An empty revolt, says Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. “The boy can become a subject, the girl knows she cannot, she is just doomed to throw things in rage.” Banging around the walls of the cage, not really trying to get out of it. “The girl rebels against her future enslavement through her present powerlessness; and her vain outbursts, far from freeing her from her bonds, often merely restrict her even more.”
The Papin Sisters’ fits of frenzied violence followed by amnesia.
He is sent to sleep on the couch. Me kicking him out. Out. Out. He sleeps it off. I am still spinning, spinning.
After one of our incendiary fights I cannot write anything at all.
“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” Freud tells us. Memory as a form of suffering. When it is easier to forget. Freud titles Dora’s case study “Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.”
I cannot write when I am in such a state of mind, a state only he can catalyze. And then I am a mute-child, I retreat into passivity. It is the poison, the poison that eats at me. He lets me into his arms and forgives me, but I have lost another life.
He will go to his library. He will read books. He will live life surrounded by books. He will live life among old pages and words, words, words. I am ruined from writing.
The obliteration of their feuds. Their quotidian torments. Daily murders.
These domestic storms are now rare, occasional. But still they have the power to destroy. It can take a day of clean-up.
It’s amazing to me that someone who is usually such a supportive, stabilizing presence in my life the majority of the time can occasionally be so destabilizing, so fragmenting.
(He was able to escape their burning building unharmed. She self-immolated.)
I keep on typing the same typo: not obliterate but obliterature.
He too feels guilty afterwards. He is mortified at his training. The role he has been assigned to play in this domestic drama. I erase you, he says. That’s the worst thing I can do, is erase you.
For I must remember, John is not Tom Eliot. John is not Leonard Woolf. We might slip into these roles, we might play these ghosts, but we have become aware of this. Even if we cannot control ourselves at the time. I attempt to use language. I point out his invalidating rhetoric. He tries to listen. We try to learn.
It has been painted, by Eliot’s biographers, that Viv was in fact the vampire who sucked Tom dry. Tom. Poor Tom. Peter Ackroyd: “I believe he went toward her with a kind of child-like trust.” Another biography: “Eliot met the girl who was to plow up, harrow and strip his life to the bone.” The femme fatale, the succubus. The castrating female.
Yet, HE was able to descend upon their marriage like a detached ethnographer. Their marriage produced the state of mind that catalyzed “The Waste Land,” Tom has said. (Her state of mind got her put away.) Not the incandescent state of mind that produces great literature, as Virginia Woolf opines, but one that was able to look down upon the car crash and take notes.
“He was one of those poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch,” wrote Virginia.
“Your job will be to suppress everything suppressible.” This is what Tom said years later to John Hayward, his literary executor, longtime intimate and roommate. Viv was long gone by then. I think of this statement as the ethos of the modernist patriarchs and of New Criticism. Drain her of her life juices, then throw away her exquisite corpse. Don’t let them find the bodies. Take out anything that can be verified or named.
From Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
In the artist and sacrifice, who (or what) is sacrificed?
He fed the flames in which she threw herself full-force. She fed his writing.
Viv too was drained, and afterwards, she had nothing to show for it. No Name. No Nobel Prize. Aren’t vampires the ones who become immortal?
He made use of the “marriage material.” A bedsheet stained with Vivien(ne)’s blood that so horrified him. She bought black satin bedsheets to disguise the blood, black satin pajamas for him and her. She would steal the bedsheets from the hotel and send them back later, laundered.
“In The Sheltering Sky, at a time of acute stress for himself, Paul had been able to make use of the marriage material and to use it artistically as a point of departure for the work. But to him The Sheltering Sky was fiction, not life. What he had written he felt had no real connection between Jane and himself. Jane, however, had taken it as prophecy. She could make no distinction between the life and the work, in that the one predicted the other.”
Jane who became convinced that Paul had indeed written her glorious novel Two Serious Ladies. Thirty years of writer’s block.
Scott too made use of the “marriage material.” Leonard Woolf’s autobiographies. A bedsheet held up to the world.
Sometimes soon after our epic fights I get my period. What a humiliating denouement. Somehow tempering what I feel certain is my justified rage.