Leonard Michaels: Sylvia

Leonard Michaels was a presence in my life even before I met him, because I’d inherited his office at the Davis campus of the University of California, where I was a new assistant professor. It was 1968. He had begun teaching on the Berkeley campus, leaving all his graduate school notebooks and papers in the drawers of the Davis filing cabinet, and I would read them during my long, boring office hours when there weren’t any students — notes about his classes on Romanticism and the eighteenth century; about his special interest in Lord Byron — foreshadowing, perhaps, one of his titles to come, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (a quote from Byron upon seeing some people about to be hanged).

From the doodles in the margins, from his large and strong handwriting, I had the impression of a Byronic character, brilliant, funny, handsome, and desperate. This first impression proved to be true, and also characterized Lenny’s work. Unlike many writers, who surprise by being in person nothing like their books, his personality was inextricable from his work, two manifestations of a unique whole.

The events chronicled in Sylvia took place from 1960 to 1963. At Davis it was known that Lenny had had a first wife who committed suicide. He had told people only that it had happened. His old friends from graduate school at the University of Michigan added a bit more, but no one, I think, was prepared for the horror and emotional complexity of the account he eventually gives in Sylvia , nearly thirty years later. The shock of reading it is a bit like one’s childhood reading of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca at the moment when the narrator’s husband cries out that she has misunderstood and that he hadn’t loved his first wife, Rebecca; no, he had hated her; and the reader understands that he too has misunderstood everything.

Rebecca was great storytelling, and so is Sylvia ; clearly, in the intervening years, the artist Leonard Michaels had gained perspective enough to bring himself to write about this compelling tragedy, and the short, bitter story — he called it a “memoir in story form”—is still raw and vivid thirty years later. He captures the ambivalence and paralysis of the wretched narrator, but also now sees things the younger self could not have seen; most important of these, the mature artist recognizes, is that the doomed figure of Sylvia Bloch (referred to only by her first name) could not have been saved, though he would have saved her if he could. Yet his feelings of culpability and puzzlement are still vividly alive.

The narrator and Sylvia are in their twenties; she is an undergraduate and he has dropped out of graduate school. He is obsessed with writing, but has not begun to publish, though by the end of the book a few stories have come out in little magazines. As we know, he will go on to publish the acclaimed stories in Going Places and I Would Have Saved Them if I Could , and many other works, including the controversial The Men’s Club , a novel (eventually a film) that added to his reputation, but in part for the wrong reasons.

In it, a group of men, deploring the poverty of men’s emotional lives, decide to meet to talk about things they normally can’t, like love and loneliness. The point is the limitation of or restrictions on men’s emotional expression, but the novel was seen by some, instead, as a clubby, antifeminist book about male bonding. I mention this because in Sylvia , we can see what Lenny’s real attitude toward women was — sometimes baffled, but always supportive and equitable, without a trace of macho reservation; some of his best friends were women, in the phrase, and his collegial helpfulness to his writer friends was endless.

In marrying Sylvia Bloch, it was his bad luck to have to deal with an unusually disturbed woman, while lacking the experience even to understand the spectrum of normal behavior. He almost thinks it’s normal when she throws his typewriter against the wall, or bites and attacks him. “Another time she pulled all my shirts out of the dresser and threw them on the floor and jumped up and down on them and spit on them. .” She takes to her bed; she smashes mirrors. He can never understand what it is she wants, nor does she appear to know.

In hindsight, her mental illness is obvious, but the young husband is emotionally inexperienced, and must learn only slowly and painfully the truth about his situation. His moments of insight are rare at first, as when a friend tells him about his own difficult marriage:

I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too, even a charming, sophisticated guy like Malcolm. We laughed together. I felt happily irresponsible. Countless men and women, I supposed, all over America, were tearing each other to pieces. How great. I was normal.

Slowly, finding that nothing can please or satisfy the impossible Sylvia, in self-defense he begins to withdraw:

I recorded our fights in a secret journal because I was less and less able to remember how they started. There would be an inadvertent insult, then disproportionate anger. I would feel I didn’t know why this was happening. I was the object of terrific fury, but what had I done? What had I said? Sometimes I would have the impression that the anger wasn’t actually directed at me. I’d merely stepped into the line of fire.

From time to time, he has these crucial illuminations. He doesn’t attempt to excuse himself, and he makes no attempt to psychoanalyze Sylvia or to explain her craziness by way of childhood traumas or abuse — or indeed, ever to call her crazy. The mature artist rigorously tries to avoid the temptations of self-vindication and retrospective understanding. (Whether he entirely succeeds in this will be a matter for the reader to decide. If there is blame, plenty is directed at himself.) He presents her as she presented herself, and as she appeared to the narrator’s panicked but hopeful nature then, as a young man doing the best he could in a deeply unhappy — we would now say dysfunctional — relationship. Above all, this is a chilling portrait of the desperation and delusions of people trapped in situations they can’t see beyond.

The young couple live in a disgusting tenement, with roaches, rats, and neighbors frightened by their compulsive fighting:

[The building] exuded odors and made noises. I smelled food cooking, incense burning, and the gases of hashish and roach poison. I heard radios and phonograph players, the old Italian lady who screamed “Bassano” every day, and the boy’s footsteps running in the hall. .

Lying in the dark land of the cucarachas, her Latin and Greek grammars thrown into chaos, radio playing softly, my Sylvia waited, seething. .

Despite the constant domestic turmoil, the budding writer tries to steal moments for work. The brilliance of Leonard Michaels’s writing has always included a remarkable descriptive power; here is one of the best descriptions anywhere of the mystical and magical part of the writing process:

Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.