The Odd Woman and the City E-Book

Vivian Gornick

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 217

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.' Set in New York, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman. Running through the book is Vivian Gornick's animated exchange of more than twenty years with her best friend Leonard, as well as interactions with grocers, doormen, people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. A narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, in this memoir we encounter Gornick's rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

Leseprobe

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‘She is as good a writer about friendship as we have.’ New York Times

‘Typically lucid … startling.’ Guardian

‘A series of sharply observed vignettes.’ New Yorker

‘Among the supreme essayists of the past fifty years.’ New Statesman

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The Odd Woman and the City

A Memoir

vivian gornick

With a foreword by Amy Key

DAUNT BOOKSiii

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Contents

Title PageAuthor’s Note The Odd Woman and the City Permissions Acknowledgements Daunt BooksAbout the AuthorAlso by Vivian GornickCopyright

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The first time I read Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City I was desperate for fellowship. I wanted to read an account of a life lived alone, specifically the life of a woman older than me. I hoped that it would recast my own experience of living alone – largely without romantic love – and the potential for its ongoingness, as a desirable, even honourable way of life. I assumed I’d be able to enlist myself as one of the ‘Odd Women’ Gornick sees herself as.

But I’ve come to believe that if you read Gornick in search of such fellowship you will be reading her wrong. Early in the book Gornick says to her friend Leonard (a man ‘sophisticated about his own unhappiness’) ‘I’m not the right person for this life’ and this confusion and shock viof being at odds with how she thought her life would turn out suffuses the text. Some years ago, as my contemporaries eagerly shared and wrote essays, books and poems about early motherhood, motherhood and madness, motherhood and creativity, marriage and divorce and the trials of heteronormative traditions, I was left wondering what there was for me – no partner, no kids, approaching middle age. Where was the literature that would help me feel seen? Where could I find the intellectual engagement with my situation and my story, that might enliven it? I freighted The Odd Woman and the City with my concerns of loneliness and alienation, and because I so desperately wanted to find the canon of literature about women ‘like me’ I didn’t appreciate I’d inadvertently narrowed the scope of The Odd Woman and the City’s interests.

As someone who writes about how to make a life alone, a life where romantic love is not at the centre of my plan-making, I’ve occasionally worried I might make a reputation for myself as a patron saint of singledom. It occurs to me that despite myself I’ve made Gornick one. Take this passage:

As the years went on, I saw that romantic love was injected like dye into the nervous system of my emotions, laced through the entire fabric of longing, fantasy, and sentiment.

It haunted the psyche, was an ache in the bones; so deeply embedded in the makeup of the spirit, it hurt viithe eyes to look directly into its influence. It would be a cause of pain and conflict for the rest of my life. I prize my hardened heart – I have prized it all these years – but the loss of romantic love can still tear at it.

Romantic love tore at me too, and it still does. How profoundly to heart I took her words: it wasn’t just me! I found a strange courage in Gornick’s disclosure. I needed the absence of romantic love to be a serious subject, worthy of discussion, and for a life without it to be deemed worthy. If someone as acclaimed, as intelligent and (crucially!) as old as Gornick could write about it, surely I could overcome my reticence to ‘come out’ as someone whose life has been marked by prolonged romantic lovelessness. I didn’t have to pretend I was OK with it, force myself into a position of either the hungry pursuit of love or absolute rejection of it. Gornick would allow me my grievance, allow the soft longing inside my brittle defences; I was suddenly able to engage directly with my conflict. In an essay for BOOKFORUM on the legacy of the 1970s women’s movement Gornick wrote of her contemporaries: ‘in our pain and anger at having been denied … freedom, we often turned recklessly on these conventional wisdoms … No equality in love? We’ll do without!’ But she now understands the ‘no man’s land’ between rhetoric and desire, recalling that ‘every one of us became a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which we were viiito find ourselves time and again’. My heart isn’t hardened, but she helped me to understand that I can value my life as it is, alongside letting myself be vulnerable to the influence of romantic love on my nervous system. I can prize a sense of ‘useful solitude’ where I keep ‘myself imaginative company, breathing life into the silence, filling the room with proof of my own sentient being’.

One of my greatest fears is that without romantic love in my life, I might never be truly known or seen. In time I’ve come to realise this is not and will not be the case, but I did want to appreciate more the way in which being unpartnered, being an Odd Woman, could be valuable as a status that promotes a solitude with the potential for richness of inner life. Gornick writes of the unmet desire for romantic love so powerfully that on first reading I left the book with only certain refrains in my head. I misremembered it as a book about ‘capital L Love’. I’ve re-read The Odd Woman and the City several times since and with each reading new insights – and affinities – are revealed to me. In her book Taking a Long Look, Gornick writes about a memoir-reading group she belonged to: ‘Every book has its poetic respondent among us, the one for whom the book, whatever its shortcomings or eccentricities, delivers an inner clarity that resonates in that part of the expressive self where intelligence serves sensibility.’ I am one of The Odd Woman and the City’s multitude of poetic respondents.ix

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Gornick sees The Odd Woman and the City as having ‘three strands of concern’: friendship (a specific one with Leonard, but also friendship more generally), New York City, and ‘an attempt to account’ for herself ‘as a late twentieth-century feminist’. Of the three it is New York City that she sees as most important; the city outguns both friendship and Gornick’s desire to account for herself, much like how, for her, it was radical feminism not class that ultimately gave her the point of view from which she writes, and in finding that point of view she was able to make her name as a writer of ‘personal criticism’. She had ‘a great desire’ to add herself ‘to the literature of the urban’. Gornick writes that ‘you’ve got to love the movement’ of the streets in New York City. The streets have a rhythm, with a storyline that moves fast, one she was born to keep up with. The text – with its fragments, dialogues, shifts in time and location – has the rapidity of a city that is always changing, that is raucous and populous, alive with noise, jokes, grief, embraces, stinks, sweet scents, violent changes in weather and misunderstandings. Her narrative constantly elbows forward, and we are encouraged to match its sudden shifts in pace: we come to an abrupt halt on the street, we rest on a bench in a park, we stand in line at the library and pharmacy, we’re xat the theatre or dinner or on the train or the bus or striding through rush hour or strolling in the early evening. As we move through the book and the streets, we encounter scenes at odds with New York’s fabled glory, we confront Gornick’s New York, one of ‘melancholy … where none of us are going anywhere, we, the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvellous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eyes of the stranger’.

Spending a June evening in Washington Square Garden, Gornick reflects on all that has changed since she was young. She thinks back to the beauty she found on those ‘sweet summer evenings’. Now everything she knows is ‘etched’ on her face, she sees the square as it is, not as it once was. She describes herself as being ‘at one’ with the city, nostalgia for its past no longer has ‘authority’ over her. ‘I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York’ she writes. I had that line in my head when I recently returned to a part of London I’ve avoided for two decades. As I sat on a bus that took me up a hill and then down into a small, moneyed neighbourhood where I worked in my early twenties, a place mentally tethered to a doomed love affair that I have never quite abandoned, I felt the anxiety of renewed engagement with a fantasy, but after some hours there this feeling was neutralised. I thought that perhaps I’d meet myself again, the me of my youth, and absorb some of her boundless, aching hope. Not xifinding myself there beyond the first fleeting moments of remembrance felt sad, but I was able to leave the fantasy behind and allow only the place to remain.

Born in 1935 in New York to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Gornick went on to become a journalist at the Village Voice reporting from ‘the barricades of radical feminism’, an influential critic and the writer of several books of criticism and essays, including two astonishing memoirs. Her first, Fierce Attachments, about her relationship with her mother and the shocking realisation that she had ‘become’ her mother, was published in 1987 and in 2019 the New York Times named it the best memoir of the past fifty years. The Odd Woman and the City, published in 2015, was her second. Gornick describes the book as a collage; it is a story she composed from over thirty years of notes and essays to create a text that feels as though the events described in it happened to her yesterday. Gornick can come across as irascible, mischievous, impatient. Her friendship with Leonard in particular, one that makes her feel ‘coherent’, is founded on the shared interests of ‘the politics of damage’: grievances, negative judgement and irony. She needs a week to recover from their outings, which leave ‘nothing serious, just surface damage – a thousand tiny pinpricks’. In writing about friendship through xiithe lens of Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth, she says ‘Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another’s company … It is the greatest illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are.’

It is this energetic, deliberate thinking about her days and her relationships that makes Gornick’s writing so engaging. Occasionally what she shares in The Odd Woman and the City has such an affinity with ideas I have about myself, or things that I’ve felt, I read her words accompanied by a hot, searing emotion. I find myself in a place beyond comprehension. Describing one encounter with an artwork, which arouses her to ‘engulfing emotion’, Gornick writes of feeling ‘language buried deep within … If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.’ This conversion of emotion into thought however, is what makes Gornick stand out. We see through her eyes and feel what she feels. I recently listened to her talk about her new audience, particularly among young women, and her surprise and irritation at being asked questions she feels are outdated such as ‘does a woman need to live alone to write?’, which she takes as evidence of how slowly feminist thought has progressed since the 1970s. When she writes in The Odd Woman and the City that ‘No one is more surprised than me that I turned out to be who I am’ I believe her; page after page I land on an insight that xiiihas me scrabbling for a pen or my phone to capture it so I can tell someone about it. In a 2021 interview with the Yale Review, Gornick said ‘I often think that realisation – that one’s whole struggle in life is to become oneself – is central to my work as a writer. One way or another, I think I am always circling back on some new sense of where that effort takes us.’ It is the way in which Gornick has made a project of the ‘struggle to be oneself’ that captivates and invigorates me when I read her, bewilderment and rancour giving way and then sharpening into clarity and revelation. We get to experience her mind at work on the task of herself and others – personal relationships and those she encounters through her twin passions of the city and literature. The results are exhilarating.

It’s sixteen years since I was last in New York. On my thirtieth birthday I woke up in a super king size bed that I was sharing with my sister. We were staying in an apartment on Spring Street. On our first day there, we walked from SoHo up through Manhattan to Central Park – we had no agenda, we just followed advice that the best way to experience New York City was to walk it. At that time I was longing for someone who wouldn’t commit to me; I thought myself in capital L love. Over the years the failure of this romance bled into how I remembered New York, a place I felt at xivonce at home in and enthralled by, but that also made me nostalgic for someone I wasn’t even there with. I hadn’t yet learned the pleasure of being alone. I thought romantic love was the one true proof of ‘my own sentient being’.

Yesterday morning, back in the city for the first time since that trip, I woke up on the Lower East Side. I left my hotel early and walked down Spring Street looking for the place my sister and I had stayed. The weather was beautiful, so I just continued to walk with no destination, no demands. I felt free.

Walking towards Greenwich Village today, I tune into bits of passing conversation. Behind me, a woman walks with a man. She is bemoaning how many of her students try to hit on her, there was another one last night and she’s literally a child! Well not a child, but you know, basically a child! I turn my head, curious, how old is she, how hot? She is slim, dark haired, dressed in workout gear, her age indeterminable. The man is lanky and young. As I wait to cross a road another man tries to discreetly piss into a bin on the corner, but his urine leaks through the bottom of the bag and begins to pool on the pavement. I spin my attention away as fast as I turn on my heel. I walk to Washington Square Park and try to get a measure of the place that no longer exerts such a pull of nostalgia on Gornick. The alliums are tall and abundant. There are dogs and legions of buggies and a group of older women dancing to music xvin what looks like an exercise class. Several young people are dressed in purple graduation robes; they pose for photographs. There are saxophones and guitars and tulip beds and men drunk and asleep in the morning sun. Couples and friends and several women sit alone with a cup of coffee each, looking at their phones. I see the ‘gesture and expression’ that captivated Gornick everywhere and I too feel surprised that I have turned out how I have, happy to be alone in New York.

Amy Key, New York, 2024

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author’s note

Reader beware: All names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Certain events have been reordered and some characters and scenes are composites.

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The Odd Woman and the City

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Leonard and I are having coffee at a restaurant in midtown.

‘So,’ I begin. ‘How does your life feel to you these days?’

‘Like a chicken bone stuck in my craw,’ he says. ‘I can’t swallow it and I can’t cough it up. Right now I’m trying to just not choke on it.’

My friend Leonard is a witty, intelligent gay man, sophisticated about his own unhappiness. The sophistication is energising. Once, a group of us read George Kennan’s memoir and met to discuss the book.

‘A civilised and poetic man,’ said one.

‘A cold warrior riddled with nostalgia,’ said another.

‘Weak passions, strong ambitions, and a continual sense of himself in the world,’ said a third.

4‘This is the man who has humiliated me my entire life,’ said Leonard.

Leonard’s take on Kennan renewed in me the thrill of revisionist history – the domesticated drama of seeing the world each day anew through the eyes of the aggrieved – and reminded me of why we are friends.

We share the politics of damage, Leonard and I. An impassioned sense of having been born into preordained social inequity burns brightly in each of us. Our subject is the unlived life. The question for each of us: Would we have manufactured the inequity had one not been there, ready-made – he is gay, I am the Odd Woman – for our grievances to make use of? To this question our friendship is devoted. The question, in fact, defines the friendship – gives it its character and its idiom – and has shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy I have known.

For more than twenty years now Leonard and I have met once a week for a walk, dinner, and a movie, either in his neighbourhood or mine. Except for the two hours in the movie, we hardly ever do anything else but talk. One of us is always saying, Let’s get tickets for a play, a concert, a reading, but neither of us ever seems able to arrange an evening in advance of the time we are to meet. The fact is, ours is the most satisfying conversation either of us has, and we can’t bear to give it up even for one week. It’s the way 5we feel about ourselves when we are talking that draws us so strongly to each other. I once had my picture taken by two photographers on the same day. Each likeness was me, definitely me, but to my eyes the face in one photograph looked broken and faceted, the one in the other of a piece. It’s the same with me and Leonard. The self-image each of us projects to the other is the one we carry around in our heads: the one that makes us feel coherent.

Why, then, one might ask, do we not meet more often than once a week, take in more of the world together, extend each other the comfort of the daily chat? The problem is, we both have a penchant for the negative. Whatever the circumstance, for each of us the glass is perpetually half-empty. Either he is registering loss, failure, defeat – or I am. We cannot help ourselves. We would like it to be otherwise, but it is the way life feels to each of us: and the way life feels is inevitably the way life is lived.

One night at a party I fell into a disagreement with a friend of ours who is famous for his debating skills. At first, I responded nervously to his every challenge, but soon I found my sea legs and then I stood my ground more successfully than he did. People crowded round me. That was wonderful, they said, wonderful. I turned eagerly to Leonard. ‘You were nervous,’ he said.

Another time, I went to Florence with my niece. How was it? Leonard asked. ‘The city was lovely,’ I said, ‘my niece 6is great. You know, it’s hard to be with someone twenty-four hours a day for eight days, but we travelled well together, walked miles along the Arno, that river is beautiful.’ ‘That is sad,’ Leonard said. ‘That you found it irritating to be so much with your niece.’

A third time I went to the beach for the weekend. It rained one day, was sunny another. Again, Leonard asked how it had been. ‘Refreshing,’ I said. ‘The rain didn’t daunt you,’ he said.

I remind myself of what my voice can sound like. My voice, forever edged in judgement, that also never stops registering the flaw, the absence, the incompleteness. My voice that so often causes Leonard’s eyes to flicker and his mouth to tighten.

At the end of an evening together, one or the other of us will impulsively suggest that we meet again during the week, but only rarely does the impulse live long enough to be acted upon. We mean it, of course, when we are saying goodbye – want nothing more than to renew the contact immediately – but going up in the elevator to my apartment, I start to feel on my skin the sensory effect of an evening full of irony and negative judgement. Nothing serious, just surface damage – a thousand tiny pinpricks dotting arms, neck, chest – but somewhere within me, in a place I cannot even name, I begin to shrink from the prospect of feeling it again soon.

7A day passes. Then another. I must call Leonard, I say to myself, but repeatedly the hand about to reach for the phone fails to move. He, of course, must be feeling the same, as he doesn’t call either. The un-acted-upon impulse accumulates into a failure of nerve. Failure of nerve hardens into ennui. When the cycle of mixed feeling, failed nerve, and paralysed will has run its course, the longing to meet again acquires urgency, and the hand reaching for the phone will complete the action. Leonard and I consider ourselves intimates because our cycle takes only a week to complete.

Yesterday, I came out of the supermarket at the end of my block and, from the side of my eye, registered the beggar who regularly occupies the space in front of the store: a small white guy with a hand perpetually outstretched and a face full of broken blood vessels. ‘I need something to eat,’ he was whining as usual, ‘that’s all I want, something to eat, anything you can spare, just something to eat.’ As I passed him I heard a voice directly behind me say, ‘Here, bro. You want something to eat? Here’s something to eat.’ I turned back and saw a short beggar, a slice of pizza in his outstretched hand. ‘Aw, man,’ the beggar pleaded, ‘you know what I …’ The man’s voice went as cold as his eyes. ‘You say you want something to eat. Here’s something to eat,’ he repeated. ‘I bought this for you. Eat it!’ The beggar 8recoiled visibly. The man standing in front of him turned away and, in a motion of deep disgust, threw the pizza into a wastebasket.

When I got to my building I couldn’t help stopping to tell Jose, the doorman – I had to tell someone – what had just happened. Jose’s eyes widened. When I finished he said, ‘Oh, Miss Gornick, I know just what y’mean. My father once gave me such a slap for exactly the same thing.’ Now it was my eyes that widened. ‘We was at a ball game, and a bum asked me for something to eat. So I bought a hot dog and gave it to him. My dad, he whacked me across the face. “If you’re gonna do a thing,” he said, “do it right. You don’t buy someone a hot dog without you also buying him a soda!”’

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In 1938, when he was just months from dying, Thomas Wolfe wrote to Maxwell Perkins, ‘I had this “hunch”, and wanted to write you and tell you … I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that Fourth of July three years ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out to the café on the river and had a drink and after went on top of the tall building, and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below.’

9The city, of course, was New York – the city of Whitman and Crane – that fabled context for the creation myth of the young man of genius arriving in the world capital, as in a secular tableau of annunciation, with the city waiting for him and him alone to cross the bridge, stride the boulevard, climb to the top of the tallest building, where he will at last be recognised for the heroic figure he knows himself to be.

Not my city at all. Mine is the city of the melancholy Brits – Dickens, Gissing, Johnson, especially Johnson – the one in which we are none of us going anywhere, we’re there already, we, the eternal groundlings who wander these mean and marvellous streets in search of a self reflected back in the eye of the stranger.

In the 1740s, Samuel Johnson walked the streets of London to cure himself of chronic depression. The London that Johnson walked was a city of pestilence: open sewers, disease, poverty; destitution; lit by smoking torches; men cutting each other’s throats in deserted alleys at midnight. It was of this city that Johnson said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’

For Johnson the city was always the means of coming up from down under, the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, revived in him his native generosity, gave him back the warmth of his own intellect. On the street Johnson made 10