Poison

In the first chapter of Susan Fromberg  Schaeffer's Poison (2007), a father, Peter, tells his two children a fairy tale about a giant and a mysterious "curse."  Because of this curse, says Peter, "women had a bad habit of falling in love with him" (10); even worse, he admits, the curse makes some of  them "come to the giant's house to stop living" (11).  Nevertheless, Peter tells his daughter, Sophie, "it's hard to know" if the giant himself is to blame.  As far as the giant was concerned, he "didn't think it was his fault" (11)--even though both of the giant's wives "stopped living."   Not surprisingly, Peter soon confesses to the analogy: he "believe[s]" (13) that he has been cursed, and admits that just like the giant, both of his wives have "stopped living" (along with a baby daughter).  After the story is over, Peter's sister Sigrid, dryly noting that he needs to pay more attention to his third wife, Meena, asks in some irritation "Who's throwing herself at you now?" (17). 

Peter's decision to craft in fairy-tale terms what turns out to be a very unpleasant family history seems appropriate to the youthful nature of his audience.  And yet, the magical nature of the "curse," which has been mysteriously cast upon him, pointedly removes all agency from the "giant"--that is, Peter himself, who has won the Nobel Prize for his poetry (and is, therefore, a kind of artistic giant).  The "curse"--fame? mysteriousness? extreme erotic attraction?--somehow propels all these women to his door, just as this same curse prompts his first two wives to commit suicide in the same way (one taking their child along with her).  Sigrid's sour query pinpoints Peter's desire to turn himself into the passive object rather than the active subject: he presumes that his third wife can handle herself just fine, and he isn't pursuing the woman "throwing herself" in his general direction.  In the world of Peter's fairy tale, magical curses let destruction run rampant, while freeing the ostensible agent from any share of the actual blame.   

This turn to the fairy tale is an act of storytelling that seeks to cast its own "spell" of protection over the storyteller, and in fact, fairy tale analogies prove dangerous elsewhere--most notably in the case of the third wife, Meena Church, variously associated with such dangerous archetypes as the evil stepmother and the wicked witch.  In fact, Peter's retroactive fairy tale finds its parallel in Meena's own life story, which is an attempt to project and micromanage her ideal self.  Meena comes from an ancient and once-wealthy Indian family, the Chandrasekharas; her father, Asad, decides upon emigrating to England that the family will reinvent itself on good English terms, beginning with their last name.  According to Meena's cousin, Julian, Asad insisted that "'I will make them forget I came from India, I will make them admire me,'" and it is Asad who is overjoyed by Meena's marriage to Peter, since "after that, people would know his family was better than people here liked to think" (287-88).  Unlike his wife, who remains aloof from Asad's schemes and perceives that Peter will be a wretched husband, Asad believes in the possibility of radical self-reinvention through the public eye: the family's historical significance, forever lost in India, now gives way to a frenetically performed ideal of "English" respectability.  Meena, who in some ways resists her father--she refuses to take an English first name--fervently reshapes herself and her environment according to conventional notions of taste and respectability, redoing the house after purchasing "magazine after magazine" (87) and refusing to "let anyone besmirch her image as Peter's perfect wife, and now, Peter's perfect widow" (109).   Unlike Peter, Meena is associated with obstinate agency ("I have chosen my path" [134]); and unlike Peter and many of the novel's other characters, her actions seem to have nothing to do with intellectual or artistic work.   Indeed, whenever she writes (by post, an e-mail), her intentions go wildly astray.  Meena's obsession with her public image makes her appear to be the paradigmatic character of surfaces, not so much agent as actress.  And yet, as her psychological deterioration progresses, it becomes clear that she is not, after all, so different from the "giant's" first two wives, both of whom share Meena's intensity and emotional volatility (and the first of whom, Evelyn, is probably manic-depressive).  Moreover, Meena's public image, no matter how superficial, clearly is a creative act--but one not recognized as such in the context of this particular family.  Storytelling works very well in reverse, it seems, but not in forward. 

In a sense, the entire novel works in reverse, although not in a Time's Arrow sort of way.  The basic plot owes something to such classics of the "oh, no, it's a biographer out to get the papers" genre as Henry James' The Aspern Papers, as well as to that realist motif, the fight over a will.  Peter Grosvenor wills his property to Meena, but adds a "List of Wish" that specifies that she is to divide it among herself, his sister Sigrid, and his two surviving children, Andrew and Sophie.  Meena, however, decides to contest the List of Wish, the better to protect herself from the public revelation that Peter had been having an affair at the end of his wife, and would have left her for another woman, Clare, if he could.  However, not only do the children balk at Meena's demands, but also an old family acquaintance, Rose, has been commissioned to write Peter's biography (something which horrifies Sigrid as much as it does Meena, albeit for different reasons).  By the end of the novel's 600+ pages, however, the plot has advanced only incrementally; we still don't know what will happen with the property, what will happen to Meena, or, indeed, what will happen with the biography.  Every movement "forward" promptly throws the characters "backwards" into one of the free-flowing internal monologues that dominate the narrative, and which almost always revolve around memories of the long-distant past.  In some cases, characters now dead enter the narrative through diary entries or letters, their written remains turning them into textual ghosts.  Both the reader and the characters are trapped in an ongoing flashback. 

How to move beyond this oppressive past, looming over and threatening to subsume the present, preoccupies most of our protagonists, but the novel pushes this problem further into the realm of imaginative creation.  If fairy tales prove to have troubling results, so too does the public's lionization of the tragic artist--in this case, the deadly marriage of Peter and his first wife Evelyn, another poet.  Peter's decision to publish Evelyn's last book, which results in her posthumous fame, turns her into a cross between the undead and the superhuman: "But Evelyn's presence keeps growing.  I had a letter from Adrienne in the States.  She said that there's no point in even trying to speak sensibly of Evelyn.  She is already a myth" (17).  Evelyn's mythic stature energizes one form of wildly adulatory narrative while ruling out any more searching questions about her life and death; moreover, because we never see any examples of Evelyn's poetry, we cannot be quite sure if the myth has not already swamped the art.  "Evelyn" is alive, but is Evelyn's poetry itself alive?  Indeed, nobody in this novel seems especially concerned about either Peter's or Evelyn's art; it's hard to make much of an aesthetic case for the one poem by Peter that we do get to read, even if we want to discount Meena's blunt opinion of it (423).  As the narrative unravels the (perhaps) happy marriage preserved in the famous photograph that haunts the novel, it becomes more and more clear that Peter and, to a lesser extent, Evelyn are both acting out the public's expectation of what a Romantic Genius ought to be: hungry for experience (Evelyn literally devours everything in sight), sexually voracious, sensitive, exceptionally passionate, and ultimately self-destructive.  They become myths because they are stereotypical, not because they are original; missing from the public narrative, for example, is their financial desperation, which threatens to undo the discrepancy between the Pure Artist and a Hack like Rose.    Near the novel's end, Rose thinks to herself that she no longer believes in Peter's "mythic" stature, "[a]lthough it is true that other people regard him as already a myth.  At least some people in England believe it.  What do I think? I have a contract.  Why did they ask me to write Peter's biography? And an even better question: why did I agree?" (594)  Peter's and Evelyn's ongoing mythic stature is not a force of great artistic achievement; it's ultimately a question of cash.   There's a market for myths.  Which, perhaps, answers Rose's question about why an unoriginal, second- or third-rate popular biographer and translator like herself has been asked to write Peter's first real biography.

But note another problem: this novel depends on a myth.  Most readers (as the reviewers already have) will recognize the seeds of Peter and Evelyn in Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.   In all probability, the novel would not work without Hughes and Plath, since their by-now mythical woes provide, in an ironic twist, the grounds of the plot's plausibility.   Given that the novel represents myth-making as a fraught and even somewhat dishonest procedure, what are we to make of its own appropriation of another literary-historical myth? Is realism the alternative to myth, or something else entirely? When Rose encounters one of Peter's distant cousins, who runs a shop, she comes across an entirely different philosophy of life: "'People round here in Morvah, we get ourselves born, we find things to do until it's time to die.  Meanwhile, we do the best we can and if it's hard, when death stops by, we're not unhappy.  We knew it was coming'" (583).  While that may or may not be the "right" alternative to the death mystique that obsesses many of the characters, it doesn't quite address the issue of taking on Hughes-Plath.  Certainly, the novel tries to undo the myth of the Tortured Romantic Artist, whether by reminding us that Pure Artists can be as cash-obsessed as the next Hack, or by offering alternative models of the artist's life.  Thus, both Clare, who builds fascinating chandeliers, and the Grosvenors' family friend Julia, an American novelist, are calm, generous, sensible (albeit imperfect) people, relatively free of illusions about the Grosvenors and themselves.  I couldn't help feeling, however, that while the narrative demonstrated some self-reflexive awareness about what it was doing, it never quite managed to resolve this contradiction between wanting to undo myths and, at the same time, perpetuating them in the act of revision.  Or, perhaps, there simply wasn't--or isn't--a solution?