Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 177 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  At eighteen, she moves to London ostensibly to attend a dance academy, but also to get away from her unusual family. Her mother and father are still together but live apart on separate continents, tethered by their children and what sounds like an open marriage. Her older sister lives on a commune and keeps popping out babies. “Here is Mother with her Planned Parenthood meetings. And there is Paula with the six kids… living in the kind of cheerful squalor I had only read about in books,” Krii says. She describes herself as “the silent, clinging, frightened one. I always knew, from the time that I had any thoughts on the subject, that I would never marry and never have children.” Yet Krii’s offbeat, enigmatic vibe proves irresistible to Jonathan, a handsome redheaded choreographer. She loses her virginity to him soon after they start dating—she’s not burning with desire for him exactly, but she’s definitely curious about sex. She’s also aware she has anxiety about intercourse and wants to get past it. “I was afraid of the potential for failure and humiliation,” she tells the reader. “At least with masturbation you can’t disappoint anyone.” She gives her body to Jonathan and then is miffed when it seems as if he wants access to her inner life, too. “Where are you when we make love?” he asks her one morning. Krii is offended. “What am I guilty of? It’s true I don’t shriek out four-letter words when I come. I probably move tentatively and slowly. I don’t have to be wiped off the ceiling afterward.” Despite Jonathan’s attempts to crack her open, Krii won’t—or can’t—climb out of her shell. They break up and Jonathan quickly marries her outgoing classmate, seemingly on a whim. Krii is hurt but she has trouble expressing that, too. “People say: Take off your mask,” Krii explains. “But beneath that mask is another mask and beneath that another. They want to think it can be done by one simple gesture of abandon, but I’m afraid that in my case that won’t work.” Hiding isn’t an upbeat novel, but it is truthful. The ending implies that Krii is making peace with her mother and father and might let herself open up after all. “I think she wanted to take the pleasure of girls seriously,” Fleissner said of Klein. “I think she also just felt that usually the exploration of sex by young people was a kind of fumbling, awkward, complicated scenario and just wanted to show it to people, warts and all, as just sort of a part of human life.” Klein explained that mission in a 1977 article called “Growing Up Human: The Case for Sexuality in Children’s Books.” Published in the journal Children’s Literature in Education , the first-person essay argues against the popular belief that kids are not ready to read about certain topics, such as sex. Klein begins by sharing that in her personal life, she’s as conventional as they come.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  like it was just another day. “It looks good. Like always.” “Lulu and I are the only freaks here. We didn’t have polio, and we don’t have cerebral palsy. What’s happening at school?” Wait—what do you mean freaks? Miri wanted to ask. Instead she said, “School...you know...the usual, except I was almost expelled.” “You, Goody Two-Shoes? What’d you do?” “Wrote a story for the paper Mr. Royer didn’t like, so I handed it out on my own.” And I’m not Goody Two-Shoes, she wanted to add, but didn’t. “The chorus is practicing for graduation. We’re singing ‘Younger Than Springtime.’ ” “I hate that song.” “It’s pretty sappy.” “What about you...are you still in love with Mason?” “We’re still the same.” “Why won’t you admit you’re in love?” Miri didn’t answer. Didn’t say she was afraid to call it love, although it was love, and not puppy love, either. It was something much deeper now. Last week, in Irene’s basement, she took his hand and placed it on her breast. It bothered her that he never tried to get to second base, never mind third. Why didn’t he want to go any further with her? As an experiment she pulled her sweater over her head. His hands on her naked back were almost more than she could stand. But she didn’t stop there. She reached around and unhooked her bra, showing him her breasts. Neither one of them spoke for the longest time. Then he said, “What are you doing?” “I want you to touch me.” She took his hands and placed them on her perfect A-cup breasts. She could hear his breath quicken as he ran his hands over them. And she felt something, too, something down there, the way she did at night in her bed when she touched herself. “It’s not a good idea,” he said. “Why?” she asked, kissing him. “Suppose I can’t stop?” “I’ll stop you.” “You don’t understand.” “I just wanted to make sure...”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt Clare’s place? He would, indeedie. I settled the bill and roused Lo from her chair. She read to the car. Still reading, she was driven to a so-called coffee shop a few blocks south. Oh, she ate all right. She even laid aside her magazine to eat, but a queer dullness had replaced her usual cheerfulness. I knew little Lo could be very nasty, so I braced myself and grinned, and waited for a squall. I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle. I did not like the way my little mistress shrugged her shoulders and distended her nostrils when I attempted casual small talk. Had Phyllis been in the know before she joined her parents in Maine? I asked with a smile. “Look,” said Lo making a weeping grimace, “let us get off the subject.” I then tried—also unsuccessfully, no matter how I smacked my lips—to interest her in the road map. Our destination was, let me remind my patient reader whose meek temper Lo ought to have copied, the gay town of Lepingville, somewhere near a hypothetical hospital. That destination was in itself a perfectly arbitrary one (as, alas, so many were to be), and I shook in my shoes as I wondered how to keep the whole arrangement plausible, and what other plausible objectives to invent after we had taken in all the movies in Lepingville. More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  On the whole she seemed to me better adapted to her surroundings than I had hoped she would be when considering my spoiled slave-child and the bangles of demeanor she naïvely affected the winter before in California. Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry. As I lay on my narrow studio bed after a session of adoration and despair in Lolita’s cold bedroom, I used to review the concluded day by checking my own image as it prowled rather than passed before the mind’s red eye. I watched dark-and-handsome, not un-Celtic, probably high-church, possibly very high-church, Dr. Humbert see his daughter off to school. I watched him greet with his slow smile and pleasantly arched thick black ad-eyebrows good Mrs. Holigan, who smelled of the plague (and would head, I knew, for master’s gin at the first opportunity). With Mr. West, retired executioner or writer of religious tracts—who cared?—I saw neighbor what’s his name, I think they are French or Swiss, meditate in his frank-windowed study over a typewriter, rather gaunt-profiled, an almost Hitlerian cowlick on his pale brow. Weekends, wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Professor H. might be seen with his daughter strolling to Walton Inn (famous for its violet-ribboned china bunnies and chocolate boxes among which you sit and wait for a “table for two” still filthy with your predecessor’s crumbs). Seen on weekdays, around one P.M., saluting with dignity Arguseyed East while maneuvering the car out of the garage and around the damned evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Raising a cold eye from book to clock in the positively sultry Beardsley College library, among bulky young women caught and petrified in the overflow of human knowledge. Walking across the campus with the college clergyman, the Rev. Rigger (who also taught Bible in Beardsley School). “Somebody told me her mother was a celebrated actress killed in an airplane accident. Oh? My mistake, I presume. Is that so? I see. How sad.” (Sublimating her mother, eh?) Slowly pushing my little pram through the labyrinth of the supermarket, in the wake of Professor W., also a slow-moving and gentle widower with the eyes of a goat. Shoveling the snow in my shirt-sleeves, a voluminous black and white muffler around my neck. Following with no show of rapacious haste (even taking time to wipe my feet on the mat) my schoolgirl daughter into the house. Taking Dolly to the dentist—pretty nurse beaming at her—old magazines—ne montrez pas vos zhambes. At dinner with Dolly in town, Mr. Edgar H. Humbert was seen eating his steak in the continental knife-and-fork manner. Enjoying, in duplicate, a concert: two marble-faced, becalmed Frenchmen sitting side by side, with Monsieur H. H.’s musical little girl on her father’s right, and the musical little boy of Professor W. (father spending a hygienic evening in Providence) on Monsieur G. G.’s left. Opening the garage, a square of light that engulfs the car and is extinguished. Brightly pajamaed, jerking down the window shade in Dolly’s bedroom. Saturday morning, unseen, solemnly weighing the winter-bleached lassie in the bathroom. Seen and heard Sunday morning, no churchgoer after all, saying don’t be too late, to Dolly who is bound for the covered court. Letting in a queerly observant schoolmate of Dolly’s: “First time I’ve seen a man wearing a smoking jacket, sir—except in movies, of course.”

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  After years of avoiding eye contact with “Old Lady Murray,” the hunchbacked woman who sells magazines on the street corner, Deenie tries talking to her. Old Lady Murray isn’t terribly interested in conversation and it doesn’t go well. But Deenie is facing up to the fact that she and the “crazy” town peddler now have something in common: kyphosis, or a rounded upper back. Deenie’s diagnosis also encourages her to reconsider Gena Courtney, a neighbor and schoolmate who was hit by a delivery truck when she was in first grade. The accident cost Gena her eyesight in one eye and she has to wear braces on both legs. Early in the novel, Deenie admits that she’s never known how to treat Gena since then. “I always feel funny when I pass her house—like I should stop and say hello—but then I think I better not, because I wouldn’t know how to act or anything,” she says. By the end of book, Deenie sees her through fresh eyes, too. “I wonder if she thinks of herself as a handicapped person or just a regular girl, like me,” Deenie thinks. After getting used to her back brace, Deenie’s ability to still see herself as a regular girl has to do with her baseline temperament—her admirable pluck—and the kindness of her friends at school, who, after getting their questions out of the way, treat her exactly the same. Even Buddy Brader, the boy she’s been flirting with, is still interested in Deenie. Just before their second kiss, at a party in her friend’s basement, Buddy asks if she can remove the brace. Deenie, despite having packed a change of clothes for just that reason, holds her ground in the moment. “I have to wear it all the time,” she tells him. “Oh well,” Buddy says, all but unaffected. These flashes of acceptance buoy Deenie, who begins to trust that scoliosis won’t ruin her life. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Thelma. Thelma is devastated by Deenie’s diagnosis. If part of a parent’s job is modeling strength for one’s children, she fails at this almost immediately. To be fair, neither Deenie’s mother nor her father reacts well to the news that she has scoliosis that requires aggressive intervention. “You’re not telling us Deenie’s going to be deformed, are you?” Frank asks the doctor who identifies Deenie’s condition. Meanwhile, Thelma panics. “Ma started whispering, ‘Oh my God,’ over and over again,” Deenie says. On the drive home from the doctor’s office, the adult Fenners bicker about which side of the family Deenie inherited her scoliosis from. They’re not at all attuned to their daughter, who herself is emotionally free-falling in the backseat of the car. “I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home… Instead, he and Ma argued about whose fault it was that I have something wrong with my spine until we pulled into our driveway.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Good for sex. Good for listening to music. Come on down next Wednesday to the music room and we’ll blow some weed.” He snapped his fingers with a hard snap. But this was precisely the invitation to a lifelong addiction I’d always heard about, a fate so dire no one actually had ever had to warn me against it. Not that I’d met an addict, but I had seen movies in which a handsome musician—exactly!—sweated in a hotel room and vomited and pleaded with his girl friend to put him back on the needle or weed or whatever, but she refused him for his own sake, despite his hallucinations and writhings on the floor. Why had Mr. Beattie come to Eton? Perhaps he was so addicted to marijuana he could no longer afford to maintain his habit unless—that’s it—unless he also became a dealer to bored teens. In those days all drugs except alcohol, tobacco and diet pills and sedatives were unknown to conventional Americans. I wasn’t sure what I should do. I wanted to do the right thing. Chuck and the other guys in the Butt Club seemed hopeless to me. They would succumb to any temptation, I knew, but not if the temptation was removed. They valued nothing. One of them had lost an eye in a fight, but all he could say was, “So what? I’ve still got one left.” During my next session with Dr. O’Reilly I asked him for advice. He didn’t want to discuss my problems. He was telling me about his daughter’s latest escapade. While he had been addressing a parents’ group, she had gone into the best restaurant in town, been careful to identify herself as his daughter and then tried to set the place on fire. When I brought O’Reilly back to the subject, he snapped, “I can’t tell you what to do, you know that.” “Then give me some information. Is marijuana dangerous?” “Can be.” He was picking his nose in an elaborate way, examining his handkerchief for portents. “How?” “It can cause a psychotic break.” He had just received a shipment of Polynesian carvings, statues with real human hair and giant phalluses; three of these totems stood behind his chair, lending force to his opinions. “What’s a psychotic—” “Craziness.” “And does marijuana always lead to heroin?” “It can, if only because you start living in the drug world and you think you might as well try everything.” “What does it do, marijuana, to ordinary people?” “Makes them paranoid.” I thought I knew how my father must feel all the time: lonely and responsible. No one looked to my father for amusement. He was dull. He wasn’t fashionable. He was deliberate, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. He could always be counted on to do the right thing.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  A few nights later I woke up with a fever. My throat was so sore I couldn’t swallow. My sheets were wet and cold with sweat. Even when I lay still I could feel the blood running through my veins; a metronome was ticking loudly within me and with each tick an oar of sensation cut into the water and pulled against it. No, now I could detect a line of divers jumping off the prow to the right, the left, right, left—the columns of marching boys advanced across the floor of the chlorinated pool. I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat pluck a string in the harp of my chest. Was the night really so cold? I had to get help; the infirmary; otherwise pneumonia. My roommate was propped up on his elbow speaking giddy nonsense to me (“I like, I like, I like the Lackawanna”) until I opened my eyes and saw him serenely asleep, his face the cutting edge of the prow as it parted a sea of liquid mercury. The flow, clinging to itself, boiling but cold, had swept me overboard with a chipmunk who was singing snatches from the Top Ten through the painful red hole in his neck—I sat up. I could barely swallow. I whispered my roommate’s name. When he didn’t respond I put on my regulation cotton robe and regulation black slippers and walked up and down the raw clay roads between the rows of tents. Was that the first streak of dawn or the lights of a town? Should I wait till reveille? Or should I wake our captain up now? I walked and walked and watched the night sky phosphoresce like plankton in the August sea. Gold would glimmer at the horizon and then feed its way up through delicate glass circuits into the main switchboard, where it would short out in a white explosion that would settle into a fine jeweler’s rouge. Were those bats overhead? I’d heard that bats lived in the school towers. Here they were: blind, carnivorous and getting closer, lacing their way from eye to eye up the tongue.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Two weeks after my first conversation with Herbert Richardson, I was frantically trying to get a stay of execution. Even though it was very late in the process, I was hoping that we might win a stay when I saw some of the compelling issues in Herbert’s case. While his guilt wasn’t really in question, there were persuasive reasons why this case should not have been a capital murder case, above and beyond the absence of a specific intent to kill. And even if you disregard that part of it, there was strong evidence that the death penalty should not be imposed because of Herbert’s trauma, military service, and childhood difficulties. None of this compelling mitigating evidence was presented at trial, and it should have been. The death penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might not be the appropriate sentence, and that didn’t happen in Herbert’s case. I was increasingly becoming convinced that Herbert was facing execution because he had been an easy target. He was unaided and easily condemned by a system that was inattentive to the precise legal requirements of capital punishment. I was deeply distressed that, had he gotten the right help at the right time, Herbert would not be on death row with an execution date in less than two weeks. I asked several courts to stay Herbert’s execution because of his ineffective lawyer, racial bias during the trial, the inflammatory comments made by the prosecutor, and the lack of mitigation evidence presented. Each court said, “Too late.” We got a hastily scheduled hearing in the trial court in Dothan, where I tried to present evidence that the bomb Herbert had constructed was designed to go off at a certain time. I found an expert to testify that the bomb was a timed device and not intended to kill on contact. I knew that the court would probably conclude that this evidence should have been presented at trial or in prior proceedings, but I hoped that the judge could be persuaded. Herbert was in court with me, and we both immediately recognized the lack of interest on the judge’s face. This heightened Herbert’s anxiety. He began a whispered dialogue with me, imploring me to get the testifying expert to say things about his intent that were really outside the expert’s knowledge. He became contentious and started making comments that were audible to the judge. Meanwhile, the judge kept stressing that the evidence wasn’t newly discovered and should have been presented at trial, so it couldn’t create a basis for a stay of execution. I asked for a brief recess to try and calm Herbert down. “He’s not saying what I need him to say!” His breathing was panicked. He held his head and told me he had a severe headache. “I didn’t intend to kill anybody and he has to explain that!” he cried.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxviii. 2) In this way then He raised their spirits; for there is nothing for which mankind so long, as the knowledge of the future. He relieves them from all anxiety on this account, by shewing that dangers would not fall upon them unawares. Then to shew that He could have told them all the truth into which the Holy Spirit would lead them, He adds, He shall glorify Me. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. c) By pouring love into the hearts of believers, and making them spiritual, and so able to see that the Son Whom they had known before only according to the flesh, and thought a man like themselves, was equal to the Father. Or certainly because that love filling them with boldness, and casting out fear, they proclaimed Christ to men, and so spread His fame throughout the whole world. For what they were going to do in the power of the Holy Ghost, this the Holy Ghost says He does Himself. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxviii. 2) And because He had said, Ye have one Master, even Christ, (Mat. 23:8) that they might not be prevented by this from admitting the Holy Ghost as well, He adds, For He shall receive of Mine, and shall shew it unto you. DIDYMUS. (Didym. de Spir. Sanct. ut sup.) To receive must be taken here in a sense agreeable to the Divine Nature. As the Son in giving is not deprived of what He gives, nor imparts to others with any loss of His own, so too the Holy Ghost does not receive what before He had not; for if He received what before He had not, the gift being transferred to another, the giver would be thereby a loser. We must understand then that the Holy Ghost receives from the Son that which belonged to His nature, and that there are not two substances implied, one giving, and the other receiving, but one substance only. In like manner the Son too is said to receive from the Father that wherein He Himself Subsists. For neither is the Son any thing but what is given Him by the Father, nor the Holy Ghost any substance but that which is given Him by the Son. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. c) But it is not true, as some heretics have thought, that because the Son receives from the Father, the Holy Ghost from the Son, as if by gradation, that therefore the Holy Ghost is inferior to the Son. He Himself solves this difficulty, and explains His own words: All things that the Father hath are Mine: therefore said I, that He shall take of Mine, and shall shew it unto you.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I think the book REPORT FROM OCCUPIED TERRITORY 7 31 is an extraordinary moral achievement, in the great American tradition ofTom Paine and Frederick Douglass, but I will not be so dishonest as to pretend that I am writing a book review. No, I am writing a report, which is also a plea for the rec ognition of our common humanity. Without this recognition, our common humanity will be proved in unutterable ways. My report is also based on what I myself know, for I was born in Harlem and raised there. Neither I, nor my family, can be said ever really to have left; we arc-perhaps-no longer as totally at the mercy of the cops and the landlords as once we were: in any case, our roots, our friends, our deepest associ ations arc there, and "there" is only about fifteen blocks away. This means that I also know, in my own flesh, and know, which is worse, in the scars borne by many of those dearest to me, the thunder and fire of the billy club, the paralyzing shock of spittle in the face; and I know what it is to find oneself blinded, on one's hands and knees, at the bottom of the flight of steps down which one has just been hurled. I know something else: these young men have been in jail for two years now. Even if the attempts being put forth to free them should succeed, what has happened to them in these two years? People arc destroyed very easily. Where is the civ ilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many? There was a game played for some time between certain highly placed people in Washington and myself before the ad ministration changed and the Great Society reached the plan ning stage. The game went something like this: around April or May, that is as the weather began to be warmer, my phone would ring. I would pick it up and find that Washington was on the line. Washington: What arc you doing for lunch-oh, say, to morrow, Jim? Jim: Oh-why-I guess I'm free. Washington: Why don't you take the shuttle down? We'll send a car to the airport. One o'clock all right? Jim: Sure. I'll be there. Washington: Good. Be glad to sec you. So there I would be the next day, like a good little soldier, 7 32 OTHER ESSAYS seated (along with other good little soldiers) around a lun cheon table in Washington . The first move was not mine to make, but I knew very well why I had been asked to be there. Finally, someone would say-we would probably have ar rived at the salad-"say, Jim. What's going to happen this summer?" This question, translated, meant: Do you think that any of those unemployed, unemployable Negroes who are going to be on the streets all summer will cause us any trouble? What do you think we should do about it?

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The motions are almost never granted, but every now and then an appellate court finds that the atmosphere in a county had been so prejudicial that the trial should have been moved. In Alabama, asking to change venue was an essentially futile act. Alabama courts had almost never reversed a conviction because the trial judge had refused to change venue. When the court scheduled a hearing in October 1987 on pretrial motions in Walter’s case, Chestnut and Boynton showed up with no expectation that any of their motions would be granted. They were more focused on preparing for trial, which was scheduled to begin in February 1988. The pretrial motion hearing was a formality. Chestnut and Boynton presented their change-of-venue motion. Pearson stood up and said that due to the extraordinary pretrial coverage of the Morrison murder, he agreed that the trial should be moved. Judge Key nodded sympathetically; Chestnut, who knew his way around the Alabama courts, was sure something bad was about to happen. He was also certain the judge and the DA had already conspired. “The defendant’s motion to change venue is granted,” the judge ruled. When the judge suggested that it be moved to a neighboring county so that witnesses wouldn’t have far to travel, Chestnut remained hopeful. Almost all of the bordering counties had fairly large African American populations: Wilcox County was 72 percent black; Conecuh was 46 percent black; Clarke County was 45 percent black; Butler 42 percent; Escambia was 32 percent black. Only affluent Baldwin County to the south, with its beautiful Gulf of Mexico beaches, was atypical, with an African American population of just 9 percent. The judge took very little time deciding where the trial should be moved. “We’ll go to Baldwin County.” Chestnut and Boynton immediately complained, but the judge reminded them it was their motion. When they sought to withdraw the motion, the judge said he couldn’t authorize a trial in a community where so many people had formed opinions about the accused. The case would be tried in Bay Minette, the seat of Baldwin County. The change of venue was disastrous for Walter. Chestnut and Boynton knew there would be very few, if any, black jurors. They also understood that while jurors from Baldwin County might be less personally connected to Ronda Morrison and her family, it was an extremely conservative county that had made even less progress leaving behind the racial politics of Jim Crow than its neighbors. Given what he’d heard from other death row prisoners about all-white juries, Walter worried about the venue change as well. But he still put his faith in this fact: No one could hear the evidence and believe that he committed this crime. He just didn’t believe that a jury, black or white, could convict him on the nonsensical story told by Ralph Myers—not when he had an unquestionable alibi with close to a dozen witnesses. The February trial was postponed.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She had not noticed, for example, the fact that philosophy graduate number two was involved in a study of her chest, out on messy display this evening in an unreliable gypsy top. So it was Zora whom Howard sent to the door when the bell went; Zora who opened the door to the family Kipps. The penny did not drop immediately. Here was a tall, imperious black man, in his late fifties, with a pug dog’s distended eyes. To his right, his taller, equally dignified son; on the other side, his gallingly pretty daughter. Before conversation, Zora waded around in the visual information: the  On Beauty strangely Victorian get-up of the older man – the waistcoat, the pocket-handkerchief – and again that searing glimpse of the girl, the instantaneous recognition (on both sides) of her physical superiority. Now they moved in a triangle behind Zora through the hallway as she babbled about coats and drinks and her own parents, neither of whom, for the moment, could be found. Howard had vanished. ‘God, he was right here. God . He’s around here some place . . . God, where is he?’ It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly. The three guests stood patiently around her, watching Zora’s fireworks of anxiety. Monique passed by and Zora lunged at her, but her tray was empty and she hadn’t seen Howard since he’d been looking for Zora, a fact that took a tediously long time to explain. ‘Levi in the pool – Jerome upstairs,’ offered Monique in sulky mitigation. ‘He says him not coming down.’ This was an unfortunate reference. ‘This is Victoria,’ said Mr Kipps, with the measured dignity of a man taking control of a silly situation. ‘And Michael. Of course, they already know your brother, the elder brother.’ His Trinidadian basso profundo sailed effortlessly through the sea of shame here, pressing forward into new waters. ‘Yeah, they totally already met,’ said Zora, neither lightly nor seriously, and so falling somewhere unsettling in between. ‘They were all chums in London and now you will all be chums here,’ said Monty Kipps, looking out impatiently over her head, like a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him. ‘I really should say hello to your parents. Otherwise it is rather like being smuggled in the wooden horse, and I come as a guest, you see, bearing no dubious gifts. Not tonight, at least.’ His politician’s laugh left his eyes unaffected by the action. ‘Oh, sure . . .’ said Zora, laughing along blandly, joining him in the fruitless stationary staring. ‘I just don’t know where . . . So are you all . . . I mean, have you all moved here, or?’  kipps and belsey ‘Not me,’ said Michael. ‘This is purely holiday for me. Back to London Tuesday. Work calls, sadly.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Levi, I can give you a lift into town if you like, if you can wait a minute,’ said Howard. ‘Zoor – aren’t you late?’ Zora didn’t move. ‘ I’m dressed, Howard,’ she said, pointing to her summer wait-ress’s uniform of black skirt and white shirt. ‘It’s your big day. And you’re the one with no pants on.’ This much was true. Howard picked Murdoch up – although the dog had barely tasted the meat put in front of him – and took him upstairs to the bedroom. Here Howard stood before his closet and considered how smart he could possibly look given the humidity. In the closet, from which all the real clothes – all the colourful silk and cashmere and satin – had been removed, a solitary suit hung, swinging above a jumble of jeans and shirts and shorts. He reached  On Beauty out for the suit. He put it back. If they were going to take him, they could take him as he truly was. He pulled out black jeans, dark blue short-sleeved shirt, sandals. Today, supposedly, there would be people from Pomona in the audience, and from Columbia University and from the Courtauld. Smith was excited about all these possibilities, and now Howard did his best to be too. This is the big one , read Smith’s e-mail of this morning, Howard, it’s time for tenure. If Wellington can’t give you that, you move on. This is how it’s supposed to be. See you at ten thirty! Smith was right. Ten years in one place, without tenure, was a long time. His children were grown. They would soon leave. And then the house, if it were to stay as it was, without Kiki, would be intolerable. It was in a university that he must now put all his remaining hope. Universities had been a home for him for over thirty years. He only needed one more: the final, generous institution to take him in his dotage and protect him. Howard pulled a baseball cap on to his head and hurried downstairs, Murdoch struggling behind him. In the kitchen, his children were hooking their various bags and knapsacks round their shoulders. ‘Wait – ’ said Howard, padding his hand around the empty sideboard. ‘Where’re my car keys?’ ‘No idea, Howard,’ said Zora callously. ‘Jerome? Car keys!’ ‘ Calm down .’ ‘I’m not going to calm down – no one’s leaving until I find them.’ In this way, Howard made everybody late. It’s strange how children, even grown children, will accept the instruction of a parent. Obediently they tore up the kitchen hunting for what Howard needed. They looked everywhere likely and then in stupid unlikely places because Howard went ballistic if anyone, for a moment, appeared to have ceased looking. The keys were nowhere.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Pia and I parted company shortly after that. I went on to visit Randy in Beirut and she went on to Spain, where, having no diaphragm, she had to content herself with fellatio for the rest of the summer. About blowing and being blown she had no guilt whatsoever. It seems ridiculous somehow, but I understand the feeling well. After all, we were good girls of the fifties. FOURTEENArabs & Other Animals I’m the sheik of Araby. Your love belongs to me. At night when you’re asleep Into your tent I’ll creep…. —from “The Shiek of Araby,” by Ted Snyder, Francis Wheeler, and Harry B. Smith From Florence I took the rapido to Rome and there caught an Alitalia flight to Beirut. I was pretty panicky, as I recall—about everything: the flight, of course, and whether there’d be letters from Charlie waiting at Randy’s house in Beirut, and whether the Arabs would discover I was Jewish (even though the word “Unitarian” was carefully block-lettered on my visa). Of course, if they knew what that meant I’m not sure they wouldn’t find it more objectionable than Jewish—since half the population of Lebanon is Catholic. Still I was terrified of being unmasked as a fraud, and despite my utter ignorance of Judaism, I despised lying about my religion. I was sure I had forfeited whatever protection Jehovah usually gave me (not much—admittedly) by my terrible act of deception. I was also certain I’d caught the clap from all those uncircumcised Florentines. Oh, I have phobias about practically everything you can think of: plane crashes, clap, swallowing ground glass, botulism, Arabs, breast cancer, leukemia, Nazis, melanoma…. The thing about my clap phobia is that it doesn’t matter at all how well I feel, or how free of sores and lesions my cunt actually is. I look and look and look, and no matter how little I find, I’m still sure I have some silent asymptomatic form of the clap. Secretly, I know my Fallopian tubes are probably healing over with scar tissue and my ovaries are drying up like old seed pods. I imagine this in great visual detail. All my unborn babies drying up! Withering on the vine, as it were. The worst thing about being female is the hiddenness of your own body. You spend your whole adolescence arched over backward in the bathroom mirror, trying to look up your own cunt. And what do you see? The frizzy halo of pubic hair, the purple labia, the pink alarm button of the clitoris—but never enough! The most important part is invisible. An unexplored canyon, an underground cave, and all sorts of hidden dangers lurking within.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  As soon as the seat-belt sign goes off and people begin moving about the cabin, I glance around nervously to see who’s on board. There’s a big-breasted mama-analyst named Rose Schwamm-Lipkin with whom I recently had a consultation about whether or not I should leave my current analyst (who isn’t, mercifully, in evidence). There’s Dr. Thomas Frommer, the harshly Teutonic expert on Anorexia Nervosa, who was my husband’s first analyst. There’s kindly, rotund Dr. Arthur Feet, Jr., who was the third (and last) analyst of my friend Pia. There’s compulsive little Dr. Raymond Schrift who is hailing a blond stewardess (named “Nanci”) as if she were a taxi. (I saw Dr. Schrift for one memorable year when I was fourteen and starving myself to death in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ living-room couch. He kept insisting that the horse I was dreaming about was my father and that my periods would return if only I would “ackzept being a vohman.”) There’s smiling, bald Dr. Harvey Smucker whom I saw in consultation when my first husband decided he was Jesus Christ and began threatening to walk on the water in Central Park Lake. There’s foppish, hand-tailored Dr. Ernest Klumpner, the supposedly “brilliant theoretician” whose latest book is a psychoanalytic study of John Knox. There’s black-bearded Dr. Stanton Rappoport-Rosen who recently gained notoriety in New York analytic circles when he moved to Denver and branched out into something called “Cross-Country Group Ski-Therapy.” There’s Dr. Arnold Aaronson pretending to play chess on a magnetic board with his new wife (who was his patient until last year), the singer Judy Rose. Both of them are surreptitiously looking around to see who is looking at them—and for one moment, my eyes and Judy Rose’s meet. Judy Rose became famous in the fifties for recording a series of satirical ballads about pseudointellectual life in New York. In a whiny and deliberately unmusical voice, she sang the saga of a Jewish girl who takes courses at the New School, reads the Bible for its prose, discusses Martin Buber in bed, and falls in love with her analyst. She has now become one with the role she created.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Besides the analysts, their wives, the crew, and a few poor outnumbered laymen, there were some children of analysts who’d come along for the ride. Their sons were mostly sullen-faced adolescents in bell bottoms and shoulder-length hair who looked at their parents with a degree of cynicism and scorn which was almost palpable. I remembered myself traveling abroad with my parents as a teenager and always trying to pretend they weren’t with me. I tried to lose them in the Louvre! To avoid them in the Uffizi! To moon alone over a Coke in a Paris café and pretend that those loud people at the next table were not—though clearly they were—my parents. (I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away.) And here I was back in my own past, or in a bad dream or a bad movie: Analyst and Son of Analyst. A planeload of shrinks and my adolescence all around me. Stranded in midair over the Atlantic with 117 analysts many of whom had heard my long, sad story and none of whom remembered it. An ideal beginning for the nightmare the trip was going to become. We were bound for Vienna and the occasion was historic. Centuries ago, wars ago, in 1938, Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family. During the years of the Third Reich any mention of his name was banned in Germany, and analysts were expelled (if they were lucky) or gassed (if they were not). Now, with great ceremony, Vienna was welcoming the analysts back. They were even opening a museum to Freud in his old consulting room. The mayor of Vienna was going to greet them and a reception was to be held in Vienna’s pseudo-Gothic Rathaus. The enticements included free food, free Schnaps, cruises on the Danube, excursions to vineyards, singing, dancing, shenanigans, learned papers and speeches and a tax-deductible trip to Europe. Most of all, there was to be lots of good old Austrian Gemültlichkeit. The people who invented schmaltz (and crematoria) were going to show the analysts how welcome back they were. Welcome back! Welcome back! At least those of you who survived Auschwitz, Belsen, the London Blitz and the co-optation of America. Willkommen! Austrians are nothing if not charming. Holding the Congress in Vienna had been a hotly debated issue for years, and many of the analysts had come only reluctantly. Anti-Semitism was part of the problem, but there was also the possibility that radical students at the University of Vienna would decide to stage demonstrations. Psychoanalysis was out of favor with New Left members for being “too individualistic.” It did nothing, they said, to further “the worldwide struggle toward communism.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Back to that miniskirted young poet who taught poetry at the 92nd Street Y, read her work at colleges, high schools and coffee shops and was still wondering whether to finish her Ph.D. so as to have “something to fall back on.” Her publisher wanted a novel from her, but she was so fearful of showing her fiction that she submitted a second book of poems. And just to show you how different publishing was then, her publisher accepted it. (The book became Half-Lives, 1973, published just six months before Fear of Flying.) But now her publisher started to get impatient. “Where’s that novel you’re working on?” he kept asking. “You’ll see it soon,” I kept saying. Yet I was nervous about showing The Man Who Murdered Poets because I knew in my heart it was an evasion of the book I had to write. Eventually I gathered the courage to reveal that partial manuscript to Aaron Asher. He read it quickly and pronounced: “It’s publishable, but I won’t publish it and someday you’ll thank me. Why don’t you go home and write a novel in the female voice of your poems?” Talk about the right words at the right time. I had just received permission to write Fear of Flying. (Why I needed male permission is another story.) Aaron had edited gods of my literary pantheon, like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, so his judgment seemed beyond dispute. I will always be grateful to him for rejecting my first novel and giving me the kick in the pants I needed to start Fear of Flying. I wrote with a combination of exuberance and panic. As I scrawled the scenes on yellow legal pads, I promised myself I would never show the manuscript to anyone. That self-deception was the only way I could continue. It’s a stratagem I still recommend to young writers. Knock that critical parent off your shoulder! Write for your own eyes only. If you think about the public, any public, you’re likely to be blocked. I still have occasion to remind myself of that whenever I start a new book. Fear of Flying was published in hardcover in November 1973. Contrary to popular belief, it was not an instantaneous blockbuster. Thought to be a literary first novel by a poet, it was given an arty cover and printed in a rather small edition. If it had not been for the enthusiasm of the paperback editor—Elaine Koster, now a literary agent—who fell in love with the novel and bought it to reprint the following year, it might not have been given more than a token hardcover printing.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Bennett grinned throughout this part of the paper. I sulked. Dante and Beatrice. Scott and Zelda. Humbert and Lolita. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. King Kong and Faye Wray. Yeats and Maud Gonne. Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare and Mr. W.H. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Sylvia Plath and the Grim Reaper. Keats and Fanny Brawne. Byron and Augusta. Dodgson and Alice. D. H. Lawrence and Frieda. Aschenbach and Tadzio. Robert Graves and the White Goddess. Schumann and Clara. Chopin and George Sand. Auden and Kallmann. Hopkins and the Holy Ghost. Borges and his mother. Me and Adrian? At four o’clock that afternoon, my idealized object reappeared to chair a meeting in another one of the baroque meeting rooms. This was to be the final event before the end. The next morning Anna Freud and her Band of Renown would have another go at the lecture podium to sum it all up for the press, the participants, the weak, the halt, and the blind. Then the Congress would be over and we’d leave. But who would leave with whom? Bennett with me? Adrian with me? Or all three together? Rub-a-dub-dub—Three analysands in a tub? Adrian’s meeting concerned proposals for the next Congress and it was mainly a bore. But I wasn’t even trying to listen. I was looking at Bennett and looking at Adrian and trying to choose. I was in such a state of agitation that after ten minutes I had to get up and leave to pace the halls by myself. Fate of fates, I ran into my German analyst, Dr. Happe. He was embracing Erik Erikson after what appeared to be a friendly chat. He greeted me and asked me if I wanted to talk for a little while. I did. Professor Dr. med. Gunther Happe is a tall, slim, beaked-nosed man with masses of wavy white hair. He is something of a celebrity in Germany where he appears on television frequently, writes articles for popular magazines, and is known as a fierce enemy of neo-Nazism. He is one of those radical, guilt-ridden Germans who spent the Nazi period in exile in London but returned later to try to salvage Germany from total bestiality. He is the sort of German you never hear about: humorous, modest, critical of Germany. He reads The New Yorker and sends money to the Viet Cong. He pronounces think “sink” and business “busyness,” but still, he is not a comic-book German.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  When I started going to his high-ceilinged, badly heated office in Heidelberg and lying on the couch four times a week, I was twenty-four and totally panicked. I was afraid of riding on streetcars, afraid of writing letters, afraid of putting words on paper. I could scarcely believe that I had published some poems and gotten a B.A. and M.A. with all sorts of honors. Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything. I used to search all the closets before I stayed alone at night. And even then couldn’t sleep. I used to lie awake nights wondering if I was driving my second husband crazy too—or if it just seemed that way. One of my most ingenious little self-tortures was the way I wrote letters. Or rather, failed to write them, especially letters concerning my work. If (as happened once or twice) some editor or agent wrote me asking to see some of my poems, my response was utter despair. What would I say? How could I answer such a difficult request? How could I phrase the letter? One of these requests sat in a drawer for two years while I deliberated. I tried writing various drafts. “Dear Mrs. Jones,” I began. But was that too presumptuous? Perhaps I should say “Mrs. Jones”; the “Dear” might be seen to be currying favor. How about no heading? Just launch into the letter? No. That was too stern. If I had this much trouble with the greeting, you can imagine what agonies I went through with the text. Thank you for your kind letter asking me to submit material. However… All wrong! It was too servile. Her letter wasn’t “kind” and why should I toady to her by thanking her? Better be self-confident and assertive: I have just received your letter asking me to submit poems for consideration… Too egotistical! (I crumpled up another sheet of paper.) Never, I once read, begin a letter with the personal pronoun. Besides, how could I say I had “just received” her letter when I had been holding it for a year? Try again. Your letter of November 12, 1967, has been on my mind for a long time. I am sorry to be such a poor correspondent but… Too personal. Does she want you to cry on her shoulder about your neurotic letter-writing problems? Does she care?

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And yet his silences did not guarantee that he was altogether without thought or feeling. At unexpected moments he’d blush or stutter or in mid-sentence his mouth would go dry—and I could never figure out what had prompted these symptoms of anxiety. One night, after our captain had lingered longer than usual in his cloud of Scotch and then passed on to the next tent, I asked my rommate why the captain always stayed longer beside him than me. “I don’t know. He rubs me.” “What do you mean?” “Doesn’t he rub you?” the boy whispered. “Sometimes,” I lied. “All over?” “Like how?” I asked. “Like all”—his voice went dry—“down your front?” “That’s not right,” I said. “He shouldn’t do that. He shouldn’t. It’s abnormal. I’ve read about it.” A few nights later I woke up with a fever. My throat was so sore I couldn’t swallow. My sheets were wet and cold with sweat. Even when I lay still I could feel the blood running through my veins; a metronome was ticking loudly within me and with each tick an oar of sensation cut into the water and pulled against it. No, now I could detect a line of divers jumping off the prow to the right, the left, right, left—the columns of marching boys advanced across the floor of the chlorinated pool. I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat pluck a string in the harp of my chest. Was the night really so cold? I had to get help; the infirmary; otherwise pneumonia. My roommate was propped up on his elbow speaking giddy nonsense to me (“I like, I like, I like the Lackawanna”) until I opened my eyes and saw him serenely asleep, his face the cutting edge of the prow as it parted a sea of liquid mercury. The flow, clinging to itself, boiling but cold, had swept me overboard with a chipmunk who was singing snatches from the Top Ten through the painful red hole in his neck—I sat up. I could barely swallow. I whispered my roommate’s name. When he didn’t respond I put on my regulation cotton robe and regulation black slippers and walked up and down the raw clay roads between the rows of tents. Was that the first streak of dawn or the lights of a town? Should I wait till reveille? Or should I wake our captain up now? I walked and walked and watched the night sky phosphoresce like plankton in the August sea. Gold would glimmer at the horizon and then feed its way up through delicate glass circuits into the main switchboard, where it would short out in a white explosion that would settle into a fine jeweler’s rouge. Were those bats overhead? I’d heard that bats lived in the school towers.