Sylvia

‘Every page reveals the mark of an extraordinarily original and gifted talent.’ William Styron

‘A novel that has the power and the rawness of memoir.’ New York Times

‘I know of no better, more honest account of a doomed, tumultuous love.’ David Bezmozgis

‘The writing isn’t merely stylish; it’s vital … the ending is as shocking as that of any thriller.’ Sarah Manguso

SYLVIA

LEONARD MICHAELS

With a foreword by

DAVID LODGE

DAUNT BOOKS

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Dedication

About the Author

Also by Leonard Michaels

Copyright

Foreword

What would modern American literature be like without its Jewish writers? Greatly impoverished, one has to say. Salinger, Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Malamud, Heller … these are the first names that spring to mind in response to that question, but there are many others who have brought a distinctively Jewish sensibility, intelligence and wit to bear on American experience and enhanced the American vernacular as a literary medium. Among those who are less well known than they should be in this country is Leonard Michaels, who was born in New York City in 1933 and died in 2003. I doubt if I would have become acquainted with his work if I hadn’t had the good fortune to meet him in 1969 when I was a visiting associate professor at Berkeley, where he taught creative writing and Romantic literature. We remained friends and correspondents until his death, and it feels natural to me to refer to him as ‘Lenny’.

His first books, Going Places (1969) and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975), were highly praised in America by writers such as William Styron and Susan Sontag, but attracted little interest when they were published in Britain. This was partly because of the resistance of British readers to collections of short stories, and partly because Lenny’s concentrated, genre-busting stories were so challengingly unfamiliar in content and form, written with an intensity that demanded a corresponding effort from the reader. Even in the USA he never achieved the high-profile success that might have been predicted from the reception of his first book, which was nominated for the National Book Award. This was partly because he worked slowly, continually rewriting and refining the same material, and never attempted anything resembling the Great American Novel. At the time of his death obituaries described his career as disappointing, but when his publishers began reissuing his early work a few years later it was ‘rediscovered’ and his reputation in America was soon higher than ever, an irony that would not be lost on Lenny if his spirit survives somewhere.

Interest in his work on this side of the Atlantic should be stimulated by the publication for the first time here of the novel Sylvia, a riveting account of his first marriage. The text has an interesting history. It first appeared in the US in 1990 as the final item in a book called Shuffle, described by his publishers as a collection of ‘autobiographical fiction in the form of confession, memoir, journal, essay and short story’. ‘Sylvia’ was a blend of all these genres, but essentially a short-story-length memoir. Two years later the author revised and extended the text, and it was reissued as ‘an autobiographical novel’. Lenny had perceived that his passionate, stormy and finally tragic relationship with this woman was symptomatic of the seismic upheaval in American culture and society that happened in the sixties, beginning in New York. Much of the new writing in this version, as well as tracing in more detail his involvement with Sylvia, registers the changes in manners and morals that the writer observed when, after several years spent in the Midwest and California, he returned to New York in 1960 with two uncompleted PhD programmes behind him and a lot of unpublished short stories in his baggage. Though it is his own story, he is never actually identified in the text as Leonard Michaels, but referred to only as ‘I’, or by others as ‘you’.

As the novel opens, he is living idly with his indulgent mother and disapproving father in the Lower East Side of Manhattan – a Jewish couple evoked with typical economy.

My mother let me feel like a child. It seemed natural. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Washing dishes? Please, please, go away. Sit down. Have a cup of coffee.’ My father sighed, shook his head, lit a cigar. Saying nothing, he told me that I hadn’t done much to make him happy.

Then one fateful day he goes to visit an old friend, Naomi, who is living on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, an area he knows well.

But I’d been gone two years … I hadn’t sensed the new apocalyptic atmosphere … There had been developments in sensibility, a visionary contagion derived maybe from drugs – marijuana, heroin, uppers, downers … Weird delirium was in the air …

Naomi is sharing her squalid apartment with a young woman called Sylvia Bloch, who has just stepped out of the makeshift shower in the kitchen and is brushing her long, wet, black hair when he arrives.

She said hello but didn’t look at me. Too much engaged, tipping her head right and left, tossing the heavy black weight of hair like a shining sash … Then, from behind long, black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years.

They go for a walk with Naomi and a friend, but peel off and return to the apartment having exchanged hardly a word, ‘like a couple doomed to a sacrificial assignation … We made love until afternoon became twilight and twilight became black night.’

There follows a sequence that combines serious emotion with comedy in a way that is distinctively Lenny’s, and also demonstrates his mastery of both the short declarative sentence and the long lyrical sentence, and how to combine them. As they lie naked on the couch, Sylvia disconcertingly mentions that she has a boyfriend – and that he is coming to the apartment that evening to collect a swimsuit. She finds the garment in the dark, hangs it by the jockstrap on the apartment’s doorknob, and returns to the couch.

We lay in the balmy darkness, waiting for him. I wanted to get dressed, but I didn’t move. After a while we heard a slow trudge coming up the stairway. It was a man. He seemed to heave himself up from step to step, wearily. We heard him on the linoleum in the hallway. From the weight of his steps, I figured he knew Sylvia had been unfaithful. He was big. He could break my head. His steps ended at the door, ten feet from where we lay. He didn’t knock. He’d seen his swimsuit and was contemplating it, reading its message … He said, ‘Sylvia?’ … We lay very still, hardly breathing, bodies without mass or contour, dissolving, becoming the darkness. Then … he went away, stomping down the hall, down the stairs. I felt sorry for him … Would it happen to me, too? Of course it would, but she lay beside me now and the cruel uncertainty of love was only an idea, a moody flavour, a pleasing sorrow of the summer night. We turned to each other, renewed by the drama of betrayal, and made love again.

Infidelity is in fact the least hurtful of the many things Sylvia does to him, and it happens very late in a relationship that has already gone far beyond the ordinary conflicts that divide couples who are cohabiting or married. Sylvia, whose parents are dead and has no other visible family, turns out to be a deeply disturbed young woman, subject to sudden, violent mood swings, and prone to self-harming.

She calls him at his parents’ apartment to say she has slit her wrists and he dashes back to MacDougal Street only to find that the cuts are superficial. ‘Having done it before, she was good at it.’ She sends him out to buy Tampax for her, relishing his embarrassment. ‘I decided never to do it again. As if she’d read my mind, she stopped asking.’ Sylvia delights in teasing, tormenting and humiliating her lover, who is anxious and miserable most of the time, but unable to tear himself away. Physically they are bound together by sex, but it is of a joyless, compulsive, angry kind. ‘We sometimes went from fighting to sex … As in a metaphor, one thing was another. Raging, hating, I wanted to fuck, and she did too.’ His decent, conventional parents encourage him to support this orphaned Jewish girl, but what really keeps him in thrall to her are the brief, fleeting interludes when she is charming and tender, and a delusion that ‘her hysteria and her accusations were not revolting and contemptible but a highly moral thing … They were fiery illuminations, moments of perverse grace. Not the manifestations of lunacy.’ He reminds us that ‘in those days R. D. Laing and others sang praises to the condition of being nuts’. The drug culture which was spreading like an epidemic at this time provided a kind of anaesthetic to the violence and pain of their lives together and of other damaged lives with which they came into contact. Leonard Michaels’ view of society’s liberation from repressive constraints in the sixties is a dark one, at some distance from the stereotypes of flower power, peace and love.

After a year or so – the event is not located precisely in time, or described – they marry. Of course marriage only makes his situation worse, giving Sylvia more opportunities to complain and manipulate, fight and scream. Eventually he realises that ‘Even if, somehow, I loved her and would always love her, our life together was hell, and could never be otherwise.’ He takes steps to distance himself from her and their chaotic married life. I will leave readers to discover how the story plays out to its inevitable end.

Lenny’s academic field was Romanticism, and Sylvia belongs to a literary tradition of the femme fatale represented by such figures as Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Geraldine in Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, and the mad first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. It had its roots in the sorceresses and witches of older literature (there is a hint of this in Sylvia’s black cat, with a broken tail ‘like a flattened Z, or a lightning bolt’) and continued in many portrayals of seductive and transgressive women in late Romantic and modern writing. Lenny’s treatment of this archetype belongs to