A Romantic Weekend

22/02/2024

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 If Ann Beattie brought a new sensibility to chaos, finding a form to incorporate the messiness of people’s lives in the 70s, without quite allowing the story to lose its parameters, and Jayne Anne Phillips then came along at the end of the decade and brought in added sexual desire to this drift, Mary Gaitskill in the late eighties added a high level of perversity to the mix. Her story collection, Bad Behavior, seemed all about casual but boring prostitution, wayward encounters ready to turn sadomasochistic, and grown-ups getting spanked over spelling errors. 

      It would be a stretch to say Gaitskill was the writer of her time as Beattie was the writer of hers, even if Tim Adams could claim: “she did for the New York short story back then something comparable to what Debbie Harry had done a few years earlier for the New York popular song: invested it with stark attitude and jagged lived emotion.” (Guardian) But we can say that reading her work it feels like someone pushing more boundaries, testing more spaces and more frivolous about the taboos getting broken, as though aware that so much of morality is a question of fashion, like so much of literature. “What's considered good is changeable," she says. "During a period of time, book X is just not what people want to hear, and then for some reason, there is a shift in perception, or a shift in what people expect or want, and then it's "Oh my God, X. It's wonderful." (Mississippi Review) If Beattie could talk about divorce, infidelities and children left adrift, then one still felt a residual sense of sadness that lives were so broken. In Gaitskill’s stories, there is a peppy acceptance that obviously people are weird, ambitious, money-oriented, and out for themselves. The sort of communal dreams that lived on through the seventies were probably finally put to rest with the Jonestown massacre, where 900 people in an alternative community took their lives or were forced to under the auspices of cult leader Jim Jones. Communal living didn’t look so good after that, and Gaitskill is an eighties writer showing people looking after number one even if the frequent S&M narratives complicate this notion. People might be seeking a good time, but they are looking to have it in odd ways that might make control look like subservience and vice versa. If people in Beattie are often screwed up, those in Gaitskill are fucked up. It is a demotic distinction that might offend - but there we have it.

        In the opening lines of 'A Romantic Weekend', we read that the central character is meeting a married man for the weekend of the title. The illicit affair would in itself almost be passe (we are two generations along from Updike), but there are other reasons for Beth’s anxiety — he has told her his wife is “the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant”, and a psychic has told her that a relationship with this man “would cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life.” The psychic might have a point, especially when the man says “don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” This comes after Beth telling him that “I had a relationship like that when I was in college… Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” And here she is now going off on a weekend with a man who can say of his ex that “although it gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion.” 

   Gaitskill wrote that most reviewers of the collection while praising it noted how harsh the narration seemed to be, but she found the most useful criticism came from James Walcott. “Other critics kept talking about how dark, hard, and cruel the collection was. Even Maggie Nelson has written a book in which she devoted a lot of time to explaining how mean I am… Walcott, on the other hand, called me too sweet, or goody-goody, and I thought, Busted. It’s true—I did not agree with his review overall, but I did with that part—the book is not always saying things that are sweet, but its point of view is somehow that of a person who wants everything to be nice, and it’s not.” (Paris Review)

    Perhaps we would replace sweetness with buoyancy — that for all the cruelty, cynicism and despair, Gaitskill’s prose bounces the stories along. It is a matter of style, or a certain relationship with it. Speaking of a person she met in a bookstore that impacted on her when she was younger, Gaitskill says, “he was the first person to reinforce my intuition that style was a valid thing to care about, that it’s not simply for decoration—it’s how your story is given shape, how you allow the clarity and force of your ideas to come through and draw out the deepest possible meaning.” (Paris Review)

   Writing on Gaistkill’s work, Alexandra Schwartz asks: “Is any sin greater, in the parishes of literary fiction, than sentimentality? Novelists pride themselves on using artifice to get at the truth, but sentimentality is all falseness, emotion over-boiled by grandiosity of expression and served up rank and limp.” (New Yorker) She also notes that “by reputation, Mary Gaitskill is a writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse.” (New Yorker) Gaitskill’s work in Bad Behavior insists on a style that runs contrary to the content and this is partly why many will see the stories as caustic. The situations the characters find themselves in are often doleful and their roles submissive, but the narrative voice is assertive, confident. Gaitskill’s sentences are rarely hesitant, tentative or recursive, as Beattie’s and Phillips’ can be, and her style is frequently diegetic rather than mimetic: confidently telling us what is going on rather than letting the scene unfold. “They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs.” The diegetic can generate distance that the mimetic would seem to counter: the difference between the event and its recollection. But this depends on how it is done — there are beautiful diegetic stories like 'Janus' by Beattie and 'Hard to Learn' by Paul Bowles which needn’t undermine affect (and the last story in Bad Behavior, Heaven, has something of this quality). Gaitskill’s narration however often ‘unsentimentalises’ the events she offers, and narrative imposition appears vital to doing so. 

   What matters is getting the tone right, and Gaitskill frequently uses adverbs and intensifiers to keep the prose fluid and facetious, lively and assertive: “incredulous affection” ('Daisy’s Valentine'), “pedestrian conversation”, “ghastly anxiety” ('A Romantic Weekend'), “placidly expectant” ('Trying to Be'), "severely bobbed" '(An Affair Edited'), “brainlessly confident” ('Secretary'). Gaistkill also goes in for what we might call the misanthropic frequentative — where she describes in a few words a large chunk of time, all the better to register a person’s abject failure. “Leisha had taken the same acting course repeatedly for three years until her teacher told her she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had one showcase, a string of auditions and then the next few years wringing her hands, seeing therapists and going into debt on her charge cards.” ('Connection') Gaitskill shows vast periods pass in obvious misery, and there can be something flippant about covering so much despair in less than a paragraph. 

      This needn’t make the narrative voices cynical, and it might be better to look at them as self-protective: that a hard outlook might just be what characters need to fortify themselves from the softest of centres. It is an important aspect in 'A Romantic Weekend', with even the sadist date thinking: “I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.” By the same reckoning, Gaitskill is a writer who is ambivalent about her desire to show her characters’ vulnerabilities and the narrative’s need to rein in feeling all the better to play up the jaundiced. More than any other story in Bad Behavior, 'A Romantic Weekend' works this paradox. The title is ironic but that doesn’t mean Beth wouldn’t wish for a bit of romance. It is more that in the brutal 1980s New York nobody is going to get very far by expecting love and kindness; better to brace yourself for cruelty and abuse. If anything positive comes out of the experience, then that is more than you could have hoped for and might be regarded as a successful encounter. Near the end of the story, Beth says “with me it’s more a matter of love. She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl.” She is trying to explain that masochism for her isn’t S&M but more a submission that is “…like the purest form of love.” He finds “this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way.”

   When Lidija Haas asks if she is romantic, she says: “I was. I probably still am. If you’re born that way you stay that way, no matter how rudely life tries to disabuse you of the idea.”  (Paris Review) Yet this isn’t the voice that comes through in the stories, but neither is it one totally submerged, as we have just noted. It was there but not immediately apparent, just as her characters offer cynicism but can’t live up to it. A good example comes at the end of 'Other Factors'. Connie is a writer who has been treated badly in the past by her then-social circle. She is now in a happy, loving lesbian relationship but gets reminded of her traumatic time when she meets Franklin, who tells her that Alice would love to hear from her. Alice was the close friend who wasn’t so close when she said to Connie “nobody wants to be around somebody who’s unhappy”, recommended a therapist and never called Connie again. “She didn’t return my calls either.” Nevertheless, Connie goes to a party Franklin invites her to and where Alice will be, and they talk. As Alice leaves she gives Connie her card eagerly, and Connie wonders what she will do with it. “She started to throw it away and then changed her mind…one day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years.” 

       Connie wants to be a tougher person than her nature demands, and while Gaitskill is resistant to critics seeing her as a toughie, her work would be less nuanced if it didn’t explore the ambivalences and singularities in emotion and argument. As she says, reviewing Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in Book Forum: “There is nothing here but “that guy” or “that girl,” and that means nothing, period” - homogenised feelings and standardised emotion however perverse the behaviour. When speaking of thought, she says “I get very disturbed when I feel something is being presented in an overly broad way. I have a nuanced mind, for better and worse. For a writer, it’s generally good. For a person who has to sit on a school board or judge a court case, it probably isn’t.” (Guardian) It was no surprise when she wrote a brief book that refused to see the MeToo movement as simply a positive. This is Pleasure looks at the narrative from two perspectives: a provocative editor who has unusual, emotionally committed relationships with numerous young women, and his friend for many years, a woman also in publishing, who is unwilling to condemn her friend but can understand why women might see him as abusive. Anybody who makes her reputation on the intricacies of sexual power is likely to have something useful to say about sexual politics in an era when these things create media storms, but do so often without the interrogatory force of a Ronan Farrow. 

   Gaitskill's work suggests a writer who is interested in finding a style but is resistant to cementing a persona, as if the apparent assertiveness and occasional cruelty aren't the defining ways to read her fiction, but an aspect of character that must be contained by it. In other words, though people can read her as someone who understands the complications of desire, she is more interested in creating characters who are constantly wondering what desire happens to be. She often shows us people who are disagreeable or in disarray, and the prose is usually wryly aware of the incompetency and inhumanity often to be found in New York at a given time, and amongst certain social groups. If it is unfair to regard Gaitskill merely as a writer of her moment, that doesn’t mean Bad Behaviour didn’t astutely capture it. Works like This is Pleasure indicate the range is much broader than that. 

 

 

     

    

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

A Romantic Weekend

 If Ann Beattie brought a new sensibility to chaos, finding a form to incorporate the messiness of people’s lives in the 70s, without quite allowing the story to lose its parameters, and Jayne Anne Phillips then came along at the end of the decade and brought in added sexual desire to this drift, Mary Gaitskill in the late eighties added a high level of perversity to the mix. Her story collection, Bad Behavior, seemed all about casual but boring prostitution, wayward encounters ready to turn sadomasochistic, and grown-ups getting spanked over spelling errors. 

      It would be a stretch to say Gaitskill was the writer of her time as Beattie was the writer of hers, even if Tim Adams could claim: “she did for the New York short story back then something comparable to what Debbie Harry had done a few years earlier for the New York popular song: invested it with stark attitude and jagged lived emotion.” (Guardian) But we can say that reading her work it feels like someone pushing more boundaries, testing more spaces and more frivolous about the taboos getting broken, as though aware that so much of morality is a question of fashion, like so much of literature. “What's considered good is changeable," she says. "During a period of time, book X is just not what people want to hear, and then for some reason, there is a shift in perception, or a shift in what people expect or want, and then it's "Oh my God, X. It's wonderful." (Mississippi Review) If Beattie could talk about divorce, infidelities and children left adrift, then one still felt a residual sense of sadness that lives were so broken. In Gaitskill’s stories, there is a peppy acceptance that obviously people are weird, ambitious, money-oriented, and out for themselves. The sort of communal dreams that lived on through the seventies were probably finally put to rest with the Jonestown massacre, where 900 people in an alternative community took their lives or were forced to under the auspices of cult leader Jim Jones. Communal living didn’t look so good after that, and Gaitskill is an eighties writer showing people looking after number one even if the frequent S&M narratives complicate this notion. People might be seeking a good time, but they are looking to have it in odd ways that might make control look like subservience and vice versa. If people in Beattie are often screwed up, those in Gaitskill are fucked up. It is a demotic distinction that might offend - but there we have it.

        In the opening lines of 'A Romantic Weekend', we read that the central character is meeting a married man for the weekend of the title. The illicit affair would in itself almost be passe (we are two generations along from Updike), but there are other reasons for Beth’s anxiety — he has told her his wife is “the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant”, and a psychic has told her that a relationship with this man “would cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life.” The psychic might have a point, especially when the man says “don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” This comes after Beth telling him that “I had a relationship like that when I was in college… Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” And here she is now going off on a weekend with a man who can say of his ex that “although it gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion.” 

   Gaitskill wrote that most reviewers of the collection while praising it noted how harsh the narration seemed to be, but she found the most useful criticism came from James Walcott. “Other critics kept talking about how dark, hard, and cruel the collection was. Even Maggie Nelson has written a book in which she devoted a lot of time to explaining how mean I am… Walcott, on the other hand, called me too sweet, or goody-goody, and I thought, Busted. It’s true—I did not agree with his review overall, but I did with that part—the book is not always saying things that are sweet, but its point of view is somehow that of a person who wants everything to be nice, and it’s not.” (Paris Review)

    Perhaps we would replace sweetness with buoyancy — that for all the cruelty, cynicism and despair, Gaitskill’s prose bounces the stories along. It is a matter of style, or a certain relationship with it. Speaking of a person she met in a bookstore that impacted on her when she was younger, Gaitskill says, “he was the first person to reinforce my intuition that style was a valid thing to care about, that it’s not simply for decoration—it’s how your story is given shape, how you allow the clarity and force of your ideas to come through and draw out the deepest possible meaning.” (Paris Review)

   Writing on Gaistkill’s work, Alexandra Schwartz asks: “Is any sin greater, in the parishes of literary fiction, than sentimentality? Novelists pride themselves on using artifice to get at the truth, but sentimentality is all falseness, emotion over-boiled by grandiosity of expression and served up rank and limp.” (New Yorker) She also notes that “by reputation, Mary Gaitskill is a writer not only immune to sentiment but actively engaged in deep, witchy communion with the perverse.” (New Yorker) Gaitskill’s work in Bad Behavior insists on a style that runs contrary to the content and this is partly why many will see the stories as caustic. The situations the characters find themselves in are often doleful and their roles submissive, but the narrative voice is assertive, confident. Gaitskill’s sentences are rarely hesitant, tentative or recursive, as Beattie’s and Phillips’ can be, and her style is frequently diegetic rather than mimetic: confidently telling us what is going on rather than letting the scene unfold. “They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs.” The diegetic can generate distance that the mimetic would seem to counter: the difference between the event and its recollection. But this depends on how it is done — there are beautiful diegetic stories like 'Janus' by Beattie and 'Hard to Learn' by Paul Bowles which needn’t undermine affect (and the last story in Bad Behavior, Heaven, has something of this quality). Gaitskill’s narration however often ‘unsentimentalises’ the events she offers, and narrative imposition appears vital to doing so. 

   What matters is getting the tone right, and Gaitskill frequently uses adverbs and intensifiers to keep the prose fluid and facetious, lively and assertive: “incredulous affection” ('Daisy’s Valentine'), “pedestrian conversation”, “ghastly anxiety” ('A Romantic Weekend'), “placidly expectant” ('Trying to Be'), "severely bobbed" '(An Affair Edited'), “brainlessly confident” ('Secretary'). Gaistkill also goes in for what we might call the misanthropic frequentative — where she describes in a few words a large chunk of time, all the better to register a person’s abject failure. “Leisha had taken the same acting course repeatedly for three years until her teacher told her she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had one showcase, a string of auditions and then the next few years wringing her hands, seeing therapists and going into debt on her charge cards.” ('Connection') Gaitskill shows vast periods pass in obvious misery, and there can be something flippant about covering so much despair in less than a paragraph. 

      This needn’t make the narrative voices cynical, and it might be better to look at them as self-protective: that a hard outlook might just be what characters need to fortify themselves from the softest of centres. It is an important aspect in 'A Romantic Weekend', with even the sadist date thinking: “I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.” By the same reckoning, Gaitskill is a writer who is ambivalent about her desire to show her characters’ vulnerabilities and the narrative’s need to rein in feeling all the better to play up the jaundiced. More than any other story in Bad Behavior, 'A Romantic Weekend' works this paradox. The title is ironic but that doesn’t mean Beth wouldn’t wish for a bit of romance. It is more that in the brutal 1980s New York nobody is going to get very far by expecting love and kindness; better to brace yourself for cruelty and abuse. If anything positive comes out of the experience, then that is more than you could have hoped for and might be regarded as a successful encounter. Near the end of the story, Beth says “with me it’s more a matter of love. She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl.” She is trying to explain that masochism for her isn’t S&M but more a submission that is “…like the purest form of love.” He finds “this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way.”

   When Lidija Haas asks if she is romantic, she says: “I was. I probably still am. If you’re born that way you stay that way, no matter how rudely life tries to disabuse you of the idea.”  (Paris Review) Yet this isn’t the voice that comes through in the stories, but neither is it one totally submerged, as we have just noted. It was there but not immediately apparent, just as her characters offer cynicism but can’t live up to it. A good example comes at the end of 'Other Factors'. Connie is a writer who has been treated badly in the past by her then-social circle. She is now in a happy, loving lesbian relationship but gets reminded of her traumatic time when she meets Franklin, who tells her that Alice would love to hear from her. Alice was the close friend who wasn’t so close when she said to Connie “nobody wants to be around somebody who’s unhappy”, recommended a therapist and never called Connie again. “She didn’t return my calls either.” Nevertheless, Connie goes to a party Franklin invites her to and where Alice will be, and they talk. As Alice leaves she gives Connie her card eagerly, and Connie wonders what she will do with it. “She started to throw it away and then changed her mind…one day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years.” 

       Connie wants to be a tougher person than her nature demands, and while Gaitskill is resistant to critics seeing her as a toughie, her work would be less nuanced if it didn’t explore the ambivalences and singularities in emotion and argument. As she says, reviewing Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in Book Forum: “There is nothing here but “that guy” or “that girl,” and that means nothing, period” - homogenised feelings and standardised emotion however perverse the behaviour. When speaking of thought, she says “I get very disturbed when I feel something is being presented in an overly broad way. I have a nuanced mind, for better and worse. For a writer, it’s generally good. For a person who has to sit on a school board or judge a court case, it probably isn’t.” (Guardian) It was no surprise when she wrote a brief book that refused to see the MeToo movement as simply a positive. This is Pleasure looks at the narrative from two perspectives: a provocative editor who has unusual, emotionally committed relationships with numerous young women, and his friend for many years, a woman also in publishing, who is unwilling to condemn her friend but can understand why women might see him as abusive. Anybody who makes her reputation on the intricacies of sexual power is likely to have something useful to say about sexual politics in an era when these things create media storms, but do so often without the interrogatory force of a Ronan Farrow. 

   Gaitskill's work suggests a writer who is interested in finding a style but is resistant to cementing a persona, as if the apparent assertiveness and occasional cruelty aren't the defining ways to read her fiction, but an aspect of character that must be contained by it. In other words, though people can read her as someone who understands the complications of desire, she is more interested in creating characters who are constantly wondering what desire happens to be. She often shows us people who are disagreeable or in disarray, and the prose is usually wryly aware of the incompetency and inhumanity often to be found in New York at a given time, and amongst certain social groups. If it is unfair to regard Gaitskill merely as a writer of her moment, that doesn’t mean Bad Behaviour didn’t astutely capture it. Works like This is Pleasure indicate the range is much broader than that. 

 

 

     

    

 


© Tony McKibbin