Nan’s Grooms
By NAN GOLDBERG
Because I am female (albeit not as young a female as I used to be), when June comes around I get to invoke that prerogative of girls everywhere and fantasize about weddings. Well, not really weddings; I was never that big into weddings. But I do fantasize about grooms.
This is despite the fact that I’ve already been a bride and had both a groom and a wedding (and a divorce). That doesn’t stop me. I doubt that stops anyone.
But my prospective grooms are always deeply flawed – dimensionally flawed. They aren’t flesh and blood; they’re mere literary heartthrobs. Still, should any of them ever rise off the page and become a living, breathing human male instead of a virtual living, breathing human male, I would marry him in a flash.
Reading as much as I do, I naturally have a long list of prospective grooms, but out of curiosity I asked a few other women for their personal choices. At a dinner party in Delray Beach, Florida, a group of women comprising mostly “snowbirds” from Long Island (including my mother, Eleanor Greenblatt, a retired interior designer) came up with two. The first was Ari Ben Canaan, the courageous, seemingly impervious but secretly passionate warrior/lover hero of Leon Uris’s Exodus which dramatized the historic struggle to establish the Jewish state of Israel just after World War II. Ari led the team that obtained a ship, renamed it the Exodus illegally loaded it with Holocaust survivors from a refugee camp on the island of Cyprus, and took off for what was then the British mandate called Palestine.
Several of the dinner guests also thought they might have fallen hard for Rhett Butler, who loved and eventually married (and eventually abandoned – but for good reason — Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. But others thought they remembered that he was a cad, so there was some disagreement there. (In fact, he was both, like most complex human beings, fully dimensional or not.) They all agreed he was hot, though.
Lauren Klein, an attorney and picture framer in Westchester, decided on Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee) – “because he is kind, gentle, patient, good, intelligent, well-meaning and courageous.” Atticus is the small-town lawyer who goes up against nearly the entire population of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, when he defends a black man charged with raping a white woman.
As it happens, all of the above novels were made into Hollywood movies, so it’s not unlikely that the women’s choices were somewhat influenced by the hunks who played them: Paul Newman as Ari ben Canaan, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. As Ms. Klein put it, “I may be kind of cheating, because no doubt I fell in love as much with the actor as with the character himself.”
But for the purists out there, here are some that (as far as I know, anyway) have not been personified in movies. Fran Wood, who writes op-ed pieces as well as a column on popular fiction for the Star-Ledger newspaper, in Newark, chose the heroes of two series of historical romances with whom and which I am unfamiliar, so I will quote her reply to my question in its entirety:
“Almost any of the heroes in Stephanie Laurens’s Regency-era Bar Cynster or Bastion Club series. Every one is handsome, dashing, predatory, fearless, possessive – and positively fixated from the moment he recognizes an independent, strong-willed, seemingly indifferent spitfire of a woman as the love of his life. Hard to pick a favorite – possibly Charles St. Austel, Earl of Lostwithiel (A Lady of His Own). But it would be a pity to marry any of these paragons in a flash, as that would take the reader to the final few pages of Laurens’s novels, thus bypassing the thrilling, exasperating, captivating, often hilarious flirtation and courtship that are the essence of the author’s captivating storytelling.”
Deborah Coward, a real-estate agent in Portland, Maine, who was born and raised in England, fittingly chose the heroes of some hugely popular English mystery series.
“Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective in Gaudy Night, among other books) or, indeed, Adam Dalgliesh (P.D. James’s poet sleuth, particularly in Cover Her Face) would both have been ideal partners for me. Both of them have immense respect for their partners’ abilities and intellect and are not in any way threatened by being around a bright woman! Each would encourage his partner to be as successful as she might be in her field and would support her 100 percent of the way. And both are well mannered and well read. What could be better?”
Now for my guys: Nathan Zuckerman (the protagonist and/or narrator of many of Philip Roth’s novels); Lee, the Chinese servant in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden; Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen); Yossarian (Catch-22, by Joseph Heller); Hank Reardon (Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand); David Axelrod (Endless Love, by Scott Spencer); and Pierre (of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace).
These are very different sorts of men, one from other – radically different – whose combined personalities might provide a fairly accurate psychological blueprint of who I am, or want to be, anyway. There’s no doubt in my mind that each has had a strong influence on my character, and that my admiration for their diverse virtues has guided my ethics and decisions.
Leaving Zuckerman aside for the moment (for reasons I’ll get to), I’ll start with Lee, the Trask family’s Chinese-immigrant servant. He is an important character in East of Eden, but you would never mistake him for the hero. Nevertheless, it is Lee who quietly carries the misshapen, traumatized Trask family on his shoulders from the moment Adam Trask’s young, heartless wife gives birth to twin boys and flees the house, not hesitating to shoot Adam when he tries to stop her. Cathy, who renames herself Kate and becomes a whorehouse madam, was a sociopath before the word sociopath was even invented, and the overwhelming burden she leaves for Adam and the twins, Cal and Aron, is: How will the ugly half of their genetic heritage affect them? Are they doomed to become conscienceless villains themselves, or are their mother’s character flaws of little consequence?
Adam, a gentle and ingenuous soul, never really recovers from his failure to comprehend the woman he married, so it is Lee who studies the problem, ponders it, researches it, and finally answers the question the Trasks have been asking, consciously or unconsciously, for many years. Lee is the epitome of quiet strength and wisdom and loyalty and love, and to tell you the truth he might drive me crazy with all that wise quietude. But hey, a fantasy is a fantasy.
There aren’t many other intrinsically wise men on my list, although many of them attain a kind of wisdom – usually painfully. I’d put Darcy in that category. I’m told that in the recent Hollywood remake of Pride and Prejudice, Darcy, far from being appealing, is “a stick” – arrogant, stiff, prideful, and totally uninteresting. That’s too bad, because although he starts out that way in Jane Austen’s novel – way too much of a snob to see the beauty and virtue of Elizabeth, Austen’s heroine – he does in the end realize his enormous error and basically begs for her forgiveness (and her hand in marriage). What’s sexy about Darcy is that when he falls, he falls hard. And who wouldn’t want to feel her own power humble that nearly untouchable arrogance, combined with looks, health, energy, and enormous wealth? Not to mention he was once played by Lawrence Olivier.
Darcy has one trait in common with Hank Reardon, Yossarian, and Zuckerman: they are all angry. Darcy is a superior angry man – easily offended by what is improper or beneath him. Yossarian is a bewildered angry man, caught in a situation (a war) he wants no part of, and equally trapped by the military and bureaucratic logic that not only makes no sense to him but may very well get him killed. I love Yossarian’s stubborn logic and accompanying bewilderment at the state of affairs he finds himself in. I sympathize completely. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by when I don’t marvel at the regularity with which life gives you the finger just when you think you’ve got it all under control.
Hank Reardon is another bewildered soul, just as bewildered as Yossarian, though perhaps less consciously angry. Reardon is a powerful industrialist in Ayn Rand’s classic novel, and what bewilders him is the forces around him that appear to be deliberately, even gleefully impeding him from getting his work done, his inventions invented, even his life lived. Nobody makes sense to Hank, who nevertheless takes it for granted that the majority view must be right and thus he is a low creature indeed to want to invent superior metals, achieve as much as he possibly can, and make lots of money. That’s until he meets Dagny, Rand’s heroine (if I were a man I’d want to marry Dagny), who teaches him that his instincts are correct, and then engages him in a very steamy love affair.
Hank isn’t the hero of Atlas Shrugged; that role is reserved for a philospher/scientist named John Galt. But Galt never appealed to me. He had what impressed me as an almost inhuman lack of flaws. Perfect as he was, why would he need me, or anyone else for that matter? In contrast, Hank’s bewilderment cries out for some extreme tutoring, and when he doesn’t end up with the heroine (Galt does), I wish I could step into the picture and make him happy.
Now, Zuckerman isn’t a superior angry man, particularly, or a bewildered angry man; he is an outraged angry man – outraged at the same outstanding mess that bewilders and angers Yossarian – the outstanding mess that perfectly sane, logically planned lives can add up to – and outraged, as well, at the inevitably disastrous results of the attempts of human beings to know one another. Especially in the ’90s trilogy American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, Zuckerman, who is much less an actor in these stories than a narrator, rails at both the horror of incomprehension and the horror of the incomprehensible – what he calls “the American berserk,” the antithesis of the “American pastoral” that Americans blithely expect to enjoy in return for virtue and hard work – in a way that brings to mind the terrified, terrifying creature in Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream.”
But here is why I hesitated about naming Zuckerman: because his life so mirrors Roth’s – the Newark childhood in the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic; the older brother; the modest parents and home; the marriages; the bestselling breakout book about sex, which made him simultaneously famous and infamous; the feuds with certain literary critics; the accusations against him of “Jewish anti-Semitism”; and most of all, the passion and the restless anger – that sometimes I feel that Zuckerman is, indeed, a flesh and blood person rather than a literary invention. It’s hard to tell the difference between Zuckerman’s personality and obsessions and Roth’s. So I guess I’d marry Roth in a flash too; I’d find him irresistible even though he’s 73 years old with some health problems and has in recent years become a complete hermit. (So, Philip: Call me.)
David Axelrod (Endless Love) is as passionate as Zuckerman, though Zuckerman is passionate about everything and David is only passionate about love. David loves Jade Butterfield, and he never stops loving Jade, regardless of the unrelenting nightmare this creates for him, for her, for her family and even his own family. David is unstoppable. David is obsessed. I don’t think I’d mind being the object of a love like that, not at all. (By the way, Endless Love was made into such a bad movie that the book’s reputation has suffered. In fact, it is a masterpiece, and if you haven’t read it, you should.)
Who’s left? Why, Pierre, of course, Tolstoy’s blundering, totally clueless young man, the illegitimate son of a rich count, who slowly, throughout that long, brilliant book, attains a wisdom and maturity not to be rivaled by any other man in literature. When we meet Pierre, he is so socially awkward that he embarrasses everyone at the soiree where he is being introduced to Russian society; and so physically awkward that he keeps stumbling or breaking things, or both. He is so naïve that he is coerced into marrying Helene, a cold, manipulative (though beautiful) woman bent on controlling Pierre’s huge inheritance.
Pierre’s maturation comes slowly, punctuated by plenty of loony missteps and foolish choices. And yet, the adult Pierre whom Tolstoy portrays at the end of the book (also the end of the War of 1812), is, in Tom Wolfe’s vivid phrase, “a man in full”: wise, intelligent, but having somehow retained his original sweetness and ingenuousness, allowing him to love a woman (Natasha) with every bit of his gigantic heart. Pierre, were I forced to choose only one, would be my guy.
If you’ve got a serious crush on some literary character, please write us about it at editor@nycplus.com. Name the character, the book and author, and, of course, what it is about him or her, exactly, that stole your heart.
FICTION:
TRIANGLE, by Katharine Weber; Farrar Straus Giroux, 244 pp., $23: In Weber’s wonderfully imaginative novel, the last survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, Esther Gottesfeld, dies, leaving her granddaughter, Rebecca, and her partner, George, trying to resolve the inconsistencies in Esther’s many versions of her story. Since I don’t have room here to praise it the way I’d like to, suffice it to say it’s the best novel I’ve read in a long time.
THE WHISTLING SEASON, by Ivan Doig; Harcourt, 346 pp., $25: In this charming, idiosyncratic story, a widower with three sons in rural Montana at the beginning of the 20th century hires a housekeeper whose ad – “Can’t cook but doesn’t bite” – he finds in a local newspaper.
THE PALE BLUE EYE, by Louis Bayard; Harpercollins, 415 pp., $24.95: In this fascinating historical/literary mystery, a retired New York City detective agrees to help solve a series of horrific murders at West Point Academy in its earliest days – on the condition that he is allowed to enlist one of West Point’s cadets, 20-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, to assist him.
NON-FICTION:
UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate, by Jane Juska; Villard, 272 pp., $23.95: In 2003, retired teacher Jane Juska placed a personal ad in the New York Review of Books that read: “Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Her book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, was a memoir of her experiences with the many men who responded. The fascinating, mostly unaccompanied women she also met, and how her life has changed permanently since her book was published (not least by her notoriety) is the subject of this appealing sequel.
THE DIN IN THE HEAD: ESSAYS, by Cynthia Ozick; Houghton Mifflin, 244 pp., $24: This master of both fiction and essay delivers a tribute to the pleasures of great literature, examining, among others, Tolstoy, Updike, Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow, and Henry James.
HORACE GREELEY: Champion of American Freedom, by Robert C. Williams; NYU Press, 414 pp., $34.95: The founder of the New York Tribune, Greeley (1811-1872) was a key actor in 19th-century politics and social debates around the meaning of freedom, even running for President against General Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Although Greeley lost that campaign, his life as an editor, reformer, advocate, social gadfly and public intellectual perfectly mirrors the issues and progress of his century.
THE HOPE DIAMOND: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem, by Richard Kurin; Smithsonian Books, 388 pp., $24.95: Discovered in 17th-century India and weighing more than 45 carats, the Hope Diamond’s history and myths are linked to the French Revolution, the political maneuvers of England’s King George IV, the Gilded Age in America, and the famous jewelers Pierre Cartier and Harry Winston. Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, traces the diamond’s history from its discovery to its current home at the Smithsonian Institution, where approximately six million people view it each year.
