Edgar Doctorow - Drinks Before Dinner

JOAN I should explain that Edgar hasn’t begun to speak frankly of his feelings and his lusts only now when they’re obsolete; he has always broadcast the state of his feelings. He has always shared his feelings, whatever they were, with me as with his previous wives, and in fact has been generous enough to assign us a share of responsibility for those feelings. I notice now the young women to whom he is not married have come in for their share of responsibility. I find that interesting.

CLAUDETTE Joel, perhaps someone wants another drink?

JOAN But in Edgar’s life of changing feelings one thing remains the same and it is that women are creatures upon whom he makes his choices. We may be wives or passionate young women repetitious of other passionate young women, but we are here for him to do with as he chooses, to be fucked or not to be fucked, because we exist solely for the sake of his choosing, so that he may resolve his changing definitions of himself and make his aesthetic distinctions, and carry on the progress of his moral life.

EDGAR Maybe it is chauvinist to mourn the failure of love or the death of the presumption of love. But you seem capable, without any grant from me, of making your own moral distinctions and carrying on the progress of your own moral life. You don’t need permission from me. Surely what women have been saying in the past few years is that marriage proves nothing and sustains no one. Why do you fight it? What small damp hankie of domestic hope do you carry balled in your fist? How many friends of yours were separated last week? How many divorced? We need a calculator to keep track of these things. Here is a husband with his vasectomy discovering the diaphragm in his wife’s purse. Here is a wife turning off the downstairs lights at dawn. Here they are arguing about what one of them said to the other. Here they are arguing about how much one of them drinks. Or how much one of them spends. Or here they are arguing about nothing at all, talking about nothing at all, in no apparent conflict at all. Here she is running to the bank with the passbooks. Here he is shouting at his lawyer. Marriages are bombed, machine-gunned, they fall away screaming with their arms thrown up.

ANDREA Oh, that is too frightening to talk about. It is true. And you always wonder when you are next, when your death of love is next, because the war is all around you.

EDGAR We’re all changing. None of us is exempt. It is happening to us all. How can I be a chauvinist if my personality no longer supports me, if it has failed, if my concept of the person has failed, if our reasons for the person are failing, and that all of us now in this country, fucking or being fucked, are persons whose being as persons has failed.

JOEL Is that all it is? For a moment I thought it was serious.

CLAUDETTE Tell me, Edgar, don’t you enjoy anything? Is nothing right? Is nothing good? Doesn’t anything give you pleasure? Perhaps these things you’re saying give you pleasure, perhaps you like to distinguish yourself by saying these things. But to me it’s like juggling or standing on your head — it’s impressive and distinctive, but of no demonstrable importance.

EDGAR But everyone knows what I’m saying. I can’t distinguish myself by saying these things. We are all saying them. Our novelists in books, our crooners in Las Vegas, our social workers and church spokesmen, our killers in saloons and our maniacs in wards — who is not saying these things? We reward people who say these things in the right way. This is the culture of saying things, this is the society in which these things are supposed to be said. The very fact of our saying these things is part of what these things are. So what you see when you walk the streets are people rushing along like this with radios to their ears. They are listening to the radios as they walk. They watch television when they get home and turn on the record players while the television sets are going; they are trying to keep up. They are reading papers as they walk along listening to radios. They are stopping in front of appliance stores to watch the banks of TV sets while they listen to their radios with their newspapers tucked under their arms. They don’t know how to keep up. They are reading reviews of movies based on plays taken from novels. They are going to school to study the novels upon which films they have seen are based. They remember the films about the lives of the authors of the novels they study upon which the lectures are based. They are trying to keep up.

JOEL Well, if I understand Edgar correctly, he’s saying our culture consumes us. But didn’t people say that too in the eighteenth century when novels began to be published? He also says that passion does not last, but I am not sure it should. Can you imagine the effect of a constant lifelong passion on one’s prostate? He says our relationships are easily duplicated. But that’s what it means to have been evicted from Eden. So where’s the news in any of this? It has undoubtedly been true before our time that it appeared to somebody or other that nothing seemed to be worth doing. So it is tiresome to wring one’s hands over this. Perhaps something crucial has happened and we are becoming depleted persons in some way. But I look around and see so much unregenerate ego in human beings that I would welcome a loss of person for all of us, across the board. In fact, it is hugely funny to me that Edgar, with his formidable ego and a mind given over to its own inimitable hysteria, should worry over his loss of character. It is enormously funny. A doctor learns early in his career, that most illnesses are imaginary. It is a form of narcissism, of course. People love themselves more in the fear of death.

ANDREA But he is talking of how we are compromised, and I understand that. I really understand that. The way we all duplicate each other. I really do understand that and feel that when I walk in the street and see other girls not only wearing my clothes but walking my walk. Oh, how I understand that. Life is becoming unclear. The lines are disappearing. I see women who are men and men who are women. I suppose I should say my idea of life is no longer clear. I see in old movies dead people who are still alive. They live in states of high drama. They have more life than I have.

CLAUDETTE Good, Andrea dear. Let it be that way. Drama is to be avoided. I want to live my life as undramatically as possible. I want to live quietly and watch my children grow and keep my family fed and clean and enjoy beautiful things, and not be hurt by anyone. Besides which, whatever we know about our lives, we go on living them. Isn’t that right? Even you, Andrea. Even Edgar. No matter what we say of it, life requires us to go on living it. It is the custom of life to go on with itself no matter what we say or what we feel. It has that aspect of requiring us to go on with it. Life is so totally careless of what we feel or what we know, or think we feel or think we know, that all our emotions and thoughts are continuously superseded by other emotions and other thoughts because life pushes on and forces us to continue living it. So that even if we are blissfully happy, it pushes on until we are not; even if we are in love, it pushes on until we are not; and even if we discover something marvelous or do something that makes us famous, it pushes on. It just goes through a whole lifetime of our feelings, careless of all of them, not giving a damn for any of them, except I suppose our last feeling before we die. When we have got life to stop to accommodate our feeling, we die. And what we said about it and felt about it is gone, and what we thought is gone, and our anger is gone, and the expression of our eyes and the character of our smiles, that’s all gone. And if we knew how to embroider or sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” that’s gone too.