The Other Side of You, part three

Part one is here and part two is here.

This was all thrown into sharp relief the next morning, as, in reading Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1865), I came across the following passionate discussion, which runs along similar lines to some of Thomas and Elizabeth's conversations. George Vavasor talks here with his cousin, Alice, to whom he had once been engaged and whom he had treated badly, about her impending marriage to a quiet country farmer:

"Between you and me there can be no necessity for falsehood. We have grown beyond our sugar-toothed ages, and are now men and women. I perfectly understood your breaking away from me. I understood you, and in spite of my sorrow knew that you were right. I am not going to accuse or to defend myself; but I knew that you were right."

"Then let there be no more about it."

"Yes; there must be more about it. I did not understand you when you accepted Mr Grey. Against him I have not a whisper to make. He may be perfect for aught I know. But, knowing you as I thought I did, I could not understand your loving such a man as him. It was as though one who had lived on brandy should take himself suddenly to a milk diet,--and enjoy the change! A milk diet is no doubt the best. But men who have lived on brandy can't make those changes very suddenly. They perish in the attempt."

"Not always, George."

"It may be done with months of agony;--but there was no such agony with you."

"Who can tell?"

"But you will tell me the cure was made. I thought so, and therefore thought that I should find you changed. I thought that you, who had been all fire, would now have turned yourself into soft-flowing milk and honey, and have become fit for the life in store for you. With such a one I might have travelled from Moscow to Malta without danger. The woman fit to be John Grey's wife would certainly do me no harm,--could not touch my happiness. I might have loved her once,--might still love the memory of what she had been; but her, in her new form, after her new birth,--such a one as that, Alice, could be nothing to me. Don't mistake me. I have enough of wisdom in me to know how much better, ay, and happier a woman she might be. It was not that I thought you had descended in the scale; but I gave you credit for virtues which you have not acquired. Alice, that wholesome diet of which I spoke is not your diet. You would starve on it, and perish."

Though I'm only about a third of the way through Can You Forgive Her?, and I suspect that George may not ultimately be entirely trustworthy, I do think that here his speech is sincere. Whereas Thomas's pleadings to Elizabeth all seem rooted in his desire to further his own aims, George's to Alice, though they may have that effect, seem just as strongly rooted in a real desire for truth and an understanding of his cousin. Am I mistaken? Michael Dirda's not the only person, after all, who praised The Other Side of You--could this just be a very personal reaction to a couple of particular characteristics that Vickers has assigned to her character? From what I've provided here, do you see any difference in tone between the men as presented by Vickers and Trollope?

I'll close this too-long post with one last point against those who celebrate their own rudeness as having some inherent, iconoclastic value. I think Stephen Miller was dead-on in his Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (2006) when he wrote:

In popular culture rude people are celebrated as authentic, and those skilled at the art of conversation are often depicted a superficial or effeminate or dishonest (or all three).

The Other Side of You, part two

Part one is here.

The first time they meet, Thomas says,

I find I have to say things aloud so I can listen, because I'm the only person who understands me well.

They fall out of touch for fifteen years, Elizabeth marries and has a family in the London suburbs, and when they meet by chance on a flight to Rome, Thomas says,

"Of course, you're half Italian, aren't you? I've forgotten your name."

She began to say "Eliz-" but he interrupted.

"Don't be absurd, naturally I know you're 'Elizabeth.' The other one."

"It was Bonelli, but it's Cruikshank now."

"So there's a Mr Cruikshank? Who is he?"

"Someone I met soon after we met."

"Tell me all about him." She'd forgotten his trick of putting his head on one side. "Do you know, the Indians believed that the eyes of twin souls are an identical width apart?"

Those bits of dialogue are Thomas in a nutshell. His conversation is a mix of lecture-hall factoids, self-involved pronouncements, and bluntness. He's a blowhard--and, I quickly realized, one of a particular type, the sort that celebrates his own rudeness as some righteous blow struck against convention on behalf of truth. I found him instantly, remarkably, unpleasant. And as the pair embarks on a passionate affair, his claims of being a blunt truth-teller--someone who, as he says, "doesn't fuck about"--are revealed as not just annoying, but deeply pernicious. Thomas isn't actually interested in truth or honesty; rather, he's interested in the leverage that claims of truth can give him, in truth's value as a weapon.

In its simplest manifestation, that takes the form of his criticizing her wardrobe--from her underwear to her coats--as fusty, inauthentic to her free soul, and, ultimately, abominable. At its worst, it becomes an attempt to unmoor Elizabeth's every opinion and conviction in an effort to control her. Here is a portion of a conversation the two have about why she is reluctant to leave her family to be with him:

"For God's sake," said Thomas. "Behaving 'badly,' as you put it. What's that? By Neil's lights you'll be behaving appallingly badly by leaving him for a complete stranger. Anyway, why not behave badly? What's wrong with bad behaviour? Bad behaviour, good behaviour, what's the difference? Do you think you know? Really know? And you do know, don't you, he'll feel better if you behave, as you put it, "badly"? You'll be doing him a kindness if he can say you've behaved like a trollop. Be a trollop. Abandon him. Abandon your principles. They aren't yours, anyway. They're made up. You should stop making yourself up."

"I don't know what you mean," she said. She wasn't quite prepared to cry.

"Look," said Thomas, less fiercely, "it's like this. You aren't the person you've made yourself out to yourself to be. You're another person, quite a different one, maybe not too nice at all. I don't know. I don't care. I don't love you because you're nice. What's nice anyway? They can be "nice." Let them be. I'm not."

And later:

"You are trying. Extremely trying. I've never met anyone so trying. And I'm not being 'like' anyone except myself. I see things you don't see. It was there from the beginning. You didn't wait for me. You went and married him. You didn't wait. I should have seen."

Thomas, in other words, is an asshole. Now, to have created a character who is such an authentic, believable, blowhard asshole is a legitimate accomplishment. But I quickly realized, to my astonishment, that's not the character Vickers thought she was creating. The romance between Thomas and Elizabeth is the heart of the book; Vickers presents both Elizabeth and the psychiatrist as drawing different, life-changing lessons from their story, lessons about faith and the losses inherent in the choices we make. Vickers doesn't think Thomas is a jerk; though she makes some gestures towards acknowledging that he can be difficult (and has him do so, too), she thinks he's essentially right, both in his opinions and as a figure of romance for Elizabeth and of admiration for the psychiatrist. Yet even the most generous reading of his pushy, petulant behavior makes it seem an extremely unlikely foundation for a relationship of equals.

And with that realization, The Other Side of You was ruined for me. After all, trust is at the heart of the compact between reader and writer. I agree to surrender significant amounts of my time because I trust that a writer has interesting thoughts about people and human relationships. If Salley Vickers can't even recognize a horrid blowhard--one she's created--I have to doubt all her other impressions of human nature, too.

More tomorrow.

The Other Side of You, part one

I picked up Salley Vickers's The Other Side of You (2006) because Michael Dirda said that fans of Marilynne Robinson, James Salter, and Penelope Fitzgerald would like it. He wrote,

All these authors reflect, with grace and gravity, on life's moments of sorrowful epiphany, so achingly summarized by the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Heywood:

O God! O God! That it were possible

To undo things done; to call back yesterday. . . .

That was enough for me. But for the second straight time, the usually reliable Dirda has steered me wrong.

In The Other Side of You, a psychiatrist relates the story of a woman named Elizabeth Cruikshank, whom he counseled after a suicide attempt. He tells of their increasingly intimate sessions, of his own fear and uncertainty, and of the ways that the sessions become as much about his own emotional growth as about her coming to terms with the business of living. Slowly she reveals that her suicide attempt was driven by the loss of a great love. Not believing she could be truly loved, she pulled away, and she blamed that faithlessness, in part, for her loss. As Vickers puts it,

It is a hallmark of the damaged that when it comes to their own desire instinctively, ruinously, they tend to court the opposite.

The book is peppered with that sort of aphoristic lines about human nature, some of them almost as sharp as those found in George Eliot. For example, the psychologist, confronted with a pathologically lonely student, thinks,

I'm not sure why there is something shaming about having no one to confide in, but in my view a good deal of aberrant behaviour stems from unbearable isolation and the socially unacceptable sense of being quite alone

Of Eliabeth's attempts at assuaging the loss of her love, Vickers notes,

She was to learn why the commonly advised remedy of "pulling oneself together" is one which is recommended only by those who have been spared the doomed attempts to apply it.

And of his patients, the doctor states,

The people we were treating were not so much looking for a remedy for anxiety or depression, they were looking for a reason to be alive.

From all this, it's clear that Vickers has an interesting mind and is serious in her thinking about emotion, desire, and pain. The problem comes when she has Elizabeth begin describing her lover, Thomas, a free-spirited art historian.

More tomorrow.