Resentment

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.

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• From Querelle (1953)

  She couldn't go on. T\1adame Lysiane sat up, switched on the light again. Robert looked at her, surprised. "Listen, I don't care what you say, man . . . ( Robert's awkwardness, his basic indifference toward women had prevented him from acquiring an even minimally courteous way of addressing them. To speak tenderly to a woman, to acknowledge her femininity, woul3 have made Robert look ridiculous to himself) . . . you're just being difficult. Jo and me, we're the way we are because that's the way we are, goddammit. Right from the start . . ." "But it does bother me. And I have no reason to keep it a secret." She was the boss lady. For a long time now that resemblance had tortured and persecuted her lovely flesh. She was the patronne. The brothel was a great piece of property. If Robert was a handsome male-one •'who could afford to"-she herself was a strong female, strong by virtue of her money, her authority over the girls, and the solidity of her prose. 441t exhausts me! it exhausts me, to think about how alike you are." She suddenly heard herself, plaintive as any weak little woman. "Now you just stop that, do you hear me. I'm telling you, there ain't nothing one can do about it." Robert sounded angry. At the beginning of the scene he had thought, mistakenly, that his mistress was alluding to some very tenuous sentiments that only a woman as distinguished as herse1f was able to experience, but as she kept on about it, he became annoyed . .. I can't help it, how could I. Back when we were little kids they couldn't tell us apart." l\.1adame Lysiane drew a deep breath, as if preparing for her very last sigh. Before he opened his mouth and while he was saying what he had just said, Robert knew, although vaguely, that it would hurt her terribly, but while he didn't really want to do that, maliciously, with a clean yet obviously dim conscience, he 184 I JEAN GENET

• From Querelle (1953)

  brought up new details in order to make his mistress suffer while at the same time he strengthened his own position and cut himself off from the world to be with Querelle, whom he became profoundly aware of within himself, for the second time in his life. Madame Lysiane both refused to hear and provoked those further revelations. She waited for them. She wanted them to become ever more monstrous. Together (without being fully aware of it) , the two lovers knew that a return to health would only be possible once they had managed to ex_tract all the venom, all the pus. Then Robert came up with a terrifying phrase that contained the notion of his and his brother's being merely one: ". . . yeah, even when we were little kids, they always mistook us, one for the other. We used to wear the same duds, same pants, same shirts. Had the same little mugs. No way of getting around that." He detested his brother-or thought he did-but now he put a great deal of effort into identifying with him, strengthening their relationship-a relationship stretching so far back in time that the mental image was of a blob of molasses, as it were, containing and confusing their two bodies. At the same time Robert was afraid of having Madame Lysiane discover what he, Robert, regarded as his brother's vice : this made him exaggerate the nature of their relationship-make it appear, while retaining the straightest of faces, like a rather demoniacal affair. "I have it up to here, Roberti I don't want to hear any- more about your filthy doings!" "What filthy doings? There weren't any. We're brothers , Madame Lysiane was surprised, herself, at having brougJ-tt up the notion of "filth." Obviously, there was nothing wrong (the way one says "wrong" when meaning "that's not right" ) in the mere fact that two brothers looked alike; the true evil consisted of that quicker-than-the-eye trick by which two beings were turned into one (a trick th_at is called love, when it involves two disparate beings) , or which, by the magic of a single love, tss I QUERELLE divided a single being into two. Her love-and Madame Lysiane's feelings balked at the word "for" : her love for Robert -or for Querelle? For_ a second, she became confused : "Yes, your filth. Exactly that, I'm telling you : your filth. You think I was born yesterday? I haven't been running a maison all these years for nothing. I'm fed up, that's all." She directed her final remark to God and even beyond, to life itself, so cruel1y hurting the warmth and whiteness of her flesh and soul that had been reared on the milk of human kindness.

• From Querelle (1953)

  No doubt the Lieutenant cracked a joke now and again, but with a restraint that indicated the timidity or the haughtiness behind which Querelle guessed at the existence of a violent, unadmitted desire. Querelle knew himself to be the lighthearted and audacious half of the relationship. Even if the officer had not shown any timidity, the crewman would have openly despised him. First because he knew the officer's love placed him at his mercy, and secondly because the officer wanted that love to remain hidden. In Quereile's case, cynicism was possible. But Gil was defenseless, faced with the cynicism of Theo, who spoke the mason's jargon, liked heavy practical jokes, was unafraid of proclaiming his interest in buggery and did not have to fear being given the sack because of it. Though Thea had decided to pay for a drink now and again, Gil sensed very clearly that he would never sheii out a sou for his favors. What finally reinforced the mason's power over him was that friendship-however casual-which had developed during the first month. The more clearly he realized that the friendship was not leading anywhere, and that it would never lead to the goal he had envisaged, the more venomous Theo became. He refused to believe that he had been wasting his time and trouble and consoled himself by trying to believe that he had in fact created the association with the very intention of bringing about those tortures Gil was now undergoing. He hated Gil, hated him all the more because he could see no reason for hating him, only reasons for making him suffer. Gil hated Theo for having gained such a strong upper hand. One evening when, on coming out of the bistro, Thea had offhandedly patted his ass, Gil had restrained himself from punching him. "Well, he just bought me a drink,'' he thought. He was content to merely push Theo's hand away, but with a 106 I JEAN GENET smile, as if it had been a joke. Over the next few days, almost unconsciously, feeling the mason's desire thickening around him, he let himself go to the extent of some coquettish gestures. He simply exaggerated his natural allure. He was stroliing about the yards bared to the waist, he thrust out his chest, he pushed his cap a bit farther back on his head to let more of his hair show, and when he then saw Thea's eyes devouring each one of these pointed routines-he smiled. Not long after, Thea repeated his advances. Without appearing visibly annoyed Gil declared that he did not go for that sort of thing . .. I'd like us to be buddies, for sure. But I won't put up with any of that other shit."

• From Querelle (1953)

  ((Gil, Gilbert Turko, that's me, and I'm all alone. In order to be the real Gilbert Turko, I have to be all alone, and to be aU alone, I have to be all alone. And that means, out in the cold. Goddamn ! The old folks, well, they make me pukel What the fuck do I care about the old folks? They're dirty bastards! My old man shot his wad into that great fat cunt of my mother, and nine months later I crawled out of it. What the hell's that got to do with me? He just took it out too late, that's all, and there 176 I JEAN GENET it was, I had to be born. They can go to hell for all I care, they're just a couple of old shitheads." He tried to stay as long as possible in this state of sacrilegious fury, as it provided him with an armor of pride and rebellion, made him throw back his shoulders, raise his chin. He hoped it would become his habitual condition : to hate and despise his parents, so as not to be overwhelmed by sorrow in grieving for them. When he first entered into this experience, he allowed himself a few minutes of daydreaming in which he curled up, chin on his chest and hugging himself, to become the obedient and adored child of his parents again. Thus he undid the murder, fantasizing about a loving and simple life that did not include his crime. And then it was time to get back to the demolition job again. "I wiped him out, and that was the right thing to do. If it had to be done again, I'd do it again.'' He made a great effort, killed (or wanted to kill ) all feelings of compassion that were still menacing him. "Poor guy. He's a big bruiser, he's strong, but what has he ever done? Nothing. Goddamn greenhorn," he thought about Querelle. He was able to poke fun at him verbally, but there was a deep and inchoate feeling in him that caused him to respect the young salt whose calm manner, age, and standing in the "milieu" as well as his intact position in society served Gil as a kind of life-saver that held his head a little above the waves of despair. From his second visit on, Querelle had shown himself in a more relaxed mood. He had cracke� jokes about death, and Gil had gained the impression that the death of a man was of little importance to this sailor. "So you don't really think it was such a horrible thing to do, to snuff that sonofabitch?" ('When Roger wasn't there, Gil could let himself go a little. He didn't have to play the role of the man . ) "What, me? Listen, buddy, that's not the kind of thing I lose any sie·ep over. Just think of it. He was bullying you. He was 177 I QUERELLE

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Unnatural!” She suddenly recalled the word that had stung her most of all, not so much the word itself as the intent to wound her with which it was said. “I know what he meant; he meant—unnatural, not loving my own daughter, to love another person’s child. What does he know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha, whom I’ve sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so.” And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had been round so often before, and had come back to her former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself. “Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control myself?” she said to herself, and began again from the beginning. “He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we will go away tomorrow.” And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be brought up for packing their things for the country. At ten o’clock Vronsky came in. Chapter 24 “Well, was it nice?” she asked, coming out to meet him with a penitent and meek expression. “Just as usual,” he answered, seeing at a glance that she was in one of her good moods. He was used by now to these transitions, and he was particularly glad to see it today, as he was in a specially good humor himself. “What do I see? Come, that’s good!” he said, pointing to the boxes in the passage. “Yes, we must go. I went out for a drive, and it was so fine I longed to be in the country. There’s nothing to keep you, is there?” “It’s the one thing I desire. I’ll be back directly, and we’ll talk it over; I only want to change my coat. Order some tea.” And he went into his room. There was something mortifying in the way he had said “Come, that’s good,” as one says to a child when it leaves off being naughty, and still more mortifying was the contrast between her penitent and his self-confident tone; and for one instant she felt the lust of strife rising up in her again, but making an effort she conquered it, and met Vronsky as good-humoredly as before. When he came in she told him, partly repeating phrases she had prepared beforehand, how she had spent the day, and her plans for going away.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Do you know, I’ve been thinking about you,” said Sergey Ivanovitch. “It’s beyond everything what’s being done in the district, according to what this doctor tells me. He’s a very intelligent fellow. And as I’ve told you before, I tell you again: it’s not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business. If decent people won’t go into it, of course it’s bound to go all wrong. We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores—nothing.” “Well, I did try, you know,” Levin said slowly and unwillingly. “I can’t! and so there’s no help for it.” “But why can’t you? I must own I can’t make it out. Indifference, incapacity—I won’t admit; surely it’s not simply laziness?” “None of those things. I’ve tried, and I see I can do nothing,” said Levin. He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying. Looking towards the plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback. “Why is it you can do nothing? You made an attempt and didn’t succeed, as you think, and you give in. How can you have so little self-respect?” “Self-respect!” said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother’s words; “I don’t understand. If they’d told me at college that other people understood the integral calculus, and I didn’t, then pride would have come in. But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that all this business is of great importance.” “What! do you mean to say it’s not of importance?” said Sergey Ivanovitch, stung to the quick too at his brother’s considering anything of no importance that interested him, and still more at his obviously paying little attention to what he was saying. “I don’t think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can’t help it,” answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed land. They were turning the plough over. “Can they have finished ploughing?” he wondered. “Come, really though,” said the elder brother, with a frown on his handsome, clever face, “there’s a limit to everything. It’s very well to be original and genuine, and to dislike everything conventional—I know all about that; but really, what you’re saying either has no meaning, or it has a very wrong meaning. How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert....” “I never did assert it,” thought Konstantin Levin.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  At the request of the Army, Clark Bonner had sold Donald Douglas the land for the aircraft plant the year before. The Douglas workers assembling B-17 bombers for the War Department needed places to live. Bonner turned over 650 acres of lima bean fields to John Griffith and Herbert Legg. Their real estate company subdivided some of the acreage into fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots. Shortly after the Douglas plant opened in 1941, the company distributed a sales brochure for the new houses it was putting up. One side of the brochure is a map. It shows the subdivision’s convenient location, on a main highway between Los Angeles and Long Beach. The guide describes the country club and tells potential buyers that it’s open to all residents of the new subdivision. The other side of the brochure is a list of “one hundred reasons why you should live here.” Reason eleven is “churches of all denominations.” Number seventeen is “Good Humor Man.” Number twenty-two is “telephones.” Number forty-nine is “good radio reception.” Number sixty is “healthy soil.” Sixty-one is “deep rock well water.” 284 The sales brochure lists the last of the reasons to live here under the heading “100% American Family Community.” These reasons are arranged as answers to a series of questions. The first question is “race restrictions?” The answer is yes. The second question is “residential restrictions?” The answer is yes. The fourteenth question is “carefully planned home on each lot?” The answer is yes. The eighteenth question asks if the new subdivision is the “white spot” of Long Beach. The answer is yes. 285 Herbert Legg left the real estate development company and ran for office. He became a county supervisor. 286 In 1940, Long Beach had 164,271 residents. It had a black population of 2,000. Jobs at defense plants, desegregated by presidential order during the war, brought the number of black residents to 15,000 in 1950. By 1960, the number had dwindled to 9,500. In 1947, city officials in Long Beach had demolished part of the federal housing built for war workers. The city tore down the part segregated for Negroes and left standing the part reserved for whites. That had eliminated 190 families. Real estate agents steered black families away from May-fair and the newer subdivisions to neighborhoods in Compton and Willowbrook. The war-surplus beacon on the steel derrick that identified the suburb Boyar, Taper, and Weingart were building attracted tens of thousands of potential buyers every week. If they were black, they didn’t stay long. The Federal Housing Authority made it possible to build the houses and offer them to men who sometimes made less than a hundred dollars a week. Still, the sales staff refused to accept applications from Negro families. In 1960, six years after residents of my suburb voted for incorporation, the city was still 98.5 percent white. The Census that year counted seven people—in a population of 67,125—who admitted they were black.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  The external relations of Alexey Alexandrovitch and his wife had remained unchanged. The sole difference lay in the fact that he was more busily occupied than ever. As in former years, at the beginning of the spring he had gone to a foreign watering-place for the sake of his health, deranged by the winter’s work that every year grew heavier. And just as always he returned in July and at once fell to work as usual with increased energy. As usual, too, his wife had moved for the summer to a villa out of town, while he remained in Petersburg. From the date of their conversation after the party at Princess Tverskaya’s he had never spoken again to Anna of his suspicions and his jealousies, and that habitual tone of his bantering mimicry was the most convenient tone possible for his present attitude to his wife. He was a little colder to his wife. He simply seemed to be slightly displeased with her for that first midnight conversation, which she had repelled. In his attitude to her there was a shade of vexation, but nothing more. “You would not be open with me,” he seemed to say, mentally addressing her; “so much the worse for you. Now you may beg as you please, but I won’t be open with you. So much the worse for you!” he said mentally, like a man who, after vainly attempting to extinguish a fire, should fly in a rage with his vain efforts and say, “Oh, very well then! you shall burn for this!” This man, so subtle and astute in official life, did not realize all the senselessness of such an attitude to his wife. He did not realize it, because it was too terrible to him to realize his actual position, and he shut down and locked and sealed up in his heart that secret place where lay hid his feelings towards his family, that is, his wife and son. He who had been such a careful father, had from the end of that winter become peculiarly frigid to his son, and adopted to him just the same bantering tone he used with his wife. “Aha, young man!” was the greeting with which he met him.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Still, that’s not the point,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning. He disliked contradiction, and still more, arguments that were continually skipping from one thing to another, introducing new and disconnected points, so that there was no knowing to which to reply. “Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?” “Yes, I admit it,” said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think. He felt that if he admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish. How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the proofs. The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected. “If you admit that it is a benefit,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “then, as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with the movement, and so wishing to work for it.” “But I still do not admit this movement to be just,” said Konstantin Levin, reddening a little. “What! But you said just now....” “That’s to say, I don’t admit it’s being either good or possible.” “That you can’t tell without making the trial.” “Well, supposing that’s so,” said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, “supposing that is so, still I don’t see, all the same, what I’m to worry myself about it for.” “How so?” “No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,” said Levin. “I can’t see where philosophy comes in,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother’s right to talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin. “I’ll tell you, then,” he said with heat, “I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the local institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity, and the roads are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are no use to me. An arbitrator of disputes is no use to me. I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no inducement.” “Excuse me,” Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, “self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something. Hearing her husband’s steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression. She felt she was afraid of him, and afraid of the coming interview. She was just attempting to do what she had attempted to do ten times already in these last three days—to sort out the children’s things and her own, so as to take them to her mother’s—and again she could not bring herself to do this; but now again, as each time before, she kept saying to herself, “that things cannot go on like this, that she must take some step” to punish him, put him to shame, avenge on him some little part at least of the suffering he had caused her. She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him. Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all. As it was, even in the course of these three days, the youngest was unwell from being given unwholesome soup, and the others had almost gone without their dinner the day before. She was conscious that it was impossible to go away; but, cheating herself, she went on all the same sorting out her things and pretending she was going. Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her. But her face, to which she tried to give a severe and resolute expression, betrayed bewilderment and suffering. “Dolly!” he said in a subdued and timid voice. He bent his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and health. In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed with health and freshness. “Yes, he is happy and content!” she thought; “while I.... And that disgusting good nature, which everyone likes him for and praises—I hate that good nature of his,” she thought. Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face. “What do you want?” she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She had by now got her household matters so satisfactorily arranged, thanks to Marya Philimonovna, that she was disinclined to make any change in them; besides, she had no faith in Levin’s knowledge of farming. General principles, as to the cow being a machine for the production of milk, she looked on with suspicion. It seemed to her that such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management. It all seemed to her a far simpler matter: all that was needed, as Marya Philimonovna had explained, was to give Brindle and Whitebreast more food and drink, and not to let the cook carry all the kitchen slops to the laundry maid’s cow. That was clear. But general propositions as to feeding on meal and on grass were doubtful and obscure. And, what was most important, she wanted to talk about Kitty. Chapter 10 “Kitty writes to me that there’s nothing she longs for so much as quiet and solitude,” Dolly said after the silence that had followed. “And how is she—better?” Levin asked in agitation. “Thank God, she’s quite well again. I never believed her lungs were affected.” “Oh, I’m very glad!” said Levin, and Dolly fancied she saw something touching, helpless, in his face as he said this and looked silently into her face. “Let me ask you, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said Darya Alexandrovna, smiling her kindly and rather mocking smile, “why is it you are angry with Kitty?” “I? I’m not angry with her,” said Levin. “Yes, you are angry. Why was it you did not come to see us nor them when you were in Moscow?” “Darya Alexandrovna,” he said, blushing up to the roots of his hair, “I wonder really that with your kind heart you don’t feel this. How it is you feel no pity for me, if nothing else, when you know....” “What do I know?” “You know I made an offer and that I was refused,” said Levin, and all the tenderness he had been feeling for Kitty a minute before was replaced by a feeling of anger for the slight he had suffered. “What makes you suppose I know?” “Because everybody knows it....” “That’s just where you are mistaken; I did not know it, though I had guessed it was so.” “Well, now you know it.” “All I knew was that something had happened that made her dreadfully miserable, and that she begged me never to speak of it. And if she would not tell me, she would certainly not speak of it to anyone else. But what did pass between you? Tell me.” “I have told you.” “When was it?” “When I was at their house the last time.” “Do you know that,” said Darya Alexandrovna, “I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. You suffer only from pride....” “Perhaps so,” said Levin, “but....” She interrupted him. “But she, poor girl ... I am awfully, awfully sorry for her. Now I see it all.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Alexey Alexandrovitch’s departure made a great sensation, the more so as just before he started he officially returned the posting-fares allowed him for twelve horses, to drive to his destination. “I think it very noble,” Betsy said about this to the Princess Myakaya. “Why take money for posting-horses when everyone knows that there are railways everywhere now?” But Princess Myakaya did not agree, and the Princess Tverskaya’s opinion annoyed her indeed. “It’s all very well for you to talk,” said she, “when you have I don’t know how many millions; but I am very glad when my husband goes on a revising tour in the summer. It’s very good for him and pleasant traveling about, and it’s a settled arrangement for me to keep a carriage and coachman on the money.” On his way to the remote provinces Alexey Alexandrovitch stopped for three days at Moscow. The day after his arrival he was driving back from calling on the governor-general. At the crossroads by Gazetoy Place, where there are always crowds of carriages and sledges, Alexey Alexandrovitch suddenly heard his name called out in such a loud and cheerful voice that he could not help looking round. At the corner of the pavement, in a short, stylish overcoat and a low-crowned fashionable hat, jauntily askew, with a smile that showed a gleam of white teeth and red lips, stood Stepan Arkadyevitch, radiant, young, and beaming. He called him vigorously and urgently, and insisted on his stopping. He had one arm on the window of a carriage that was stopping at the corner, and out of the window were thrust the heads of a lady in a velvet hat, and two children. Stepan Arkadyevitch was smiling and beckoning to his brother-in-law. The lady smiled a kindly smile too, and she too waved her hand to Alexey Alexandrovitch. It was Dolly with her children. Alexey Alexandrovitch did not want to see anyone in Moscow, and least of all his wife’s brother. He raised his hat and would have driven on, but Stepan Arkadyevitch told his coachman to stop, and ran across the snow to him. “Well, what a shame not to have let us know! Been here long? I was at Dussots’ yesterday and saw ‘Karenin’ on the visitors’ list, but it never entered my head that it was you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, sticking his head in at the window of the carriage, “or I should have looked you up. I am glad to see you!” he said, knocking one foot against the other to shake the snow off. “What a shame of you not to let us know!” he repeated. “I had no time; I am very busy,” Alexey Alexandrovitch responded dryly. “Come to my wife, she does so want to see you.” Alexey Alexandrovitch unfolded the rug in which his frozen feet were wrapped, and getting out of his carriage made his way over the snow to Darya Alexandrovna.

• From Querelle (1953)

  tss I QUERELLE divided a single being into two. Her love-and Madame Lysiane's feelings balked at the word "for": her love for Robert -or for Querelle? For_ a second, she became confused: "Yes, your filth. Exactly that, I'm telling you: your filth. You think I was born yesterday? I haven't been running a maison all these years for nothing. I'm fed up, th at's all." She directed her final remark to God and even beyond, to life itself, so cruel1y hurting the warmth and whiteness of her flesh and soul that had been reared on th e milk of human kindness. Now she was sure the brothers loved each other so greatly that they had deemed it necessary to find a third person to disengage th em and to provide a diversion. She was overcome by shame at seeing herself as this person, although she did not believe it for a second. At the end of her little speech, her voice turned both accusing and plaintive. She was really praying. "You only have eyes for one another. I don't exist any more. I just don't exist! \Vhat does that make me, tell me? And how could I ever get between you two? Tell me, now, tell me! \Ve ll?'' Sh e was weeping. It pained her to be shouting so loudly, yet no t loudly enough . Her voice had risen to an ever sharper pitch, without turning shrill. Robert lay smiling at her . .. Yo u think that's funny? You, dear sir, you live only in the eyes of that brother of y ours. Your Jo. That's his name, isn't it? Jo? That's where your heart is, sir: in your brother." "Come on, Lysiane, take it easy. That ain't the kind of stuff you wa nt to see in print." She flung the covers aside and disembarked. Robert became aware of the room, its sweetness and its snarl. All its treasures converged to come to her aid, but then they retreated again, very quickly, as if washed away by a wave of distress. Pale and upright i\1adame Lysiane stood in the midst of her dwindling meubles. Fury lit a glimmer of true intelligence in Robert's head. He searched for and found its causes: his mistress was hateful and ridiculous. "You finished bitching?"

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I can well imagine the thrill that you, a healthy American gal, must experience at crossing the Atlantic on the same ocean liner with Lady Bumble—or Sam Bumble, the Frozen Meat King, or a Hollywood harlot. And I doubt not that you and I would make a pretty ad for the Traveling Agency when portrayed looking—you, frankly starry-eyed, I, controlling my envious admiration—at the Palace Sentries, or Scarlet Guards, or Beaver Eaters, or whatever they are called. But I happen to be allergic to Europe, including merry old England. As you well know, I have nothing but very sad associations with the Old and rotting World. No colored ads in your magazines will change the situation.” “My darling,” said Charlotte. “I really—” “No, wait a minute. The present matter is only incidental. I am concerned with a general trend. When you wanted me to spend my afternoons sunbathing on the Lake instead of doing my work, I gladly gave in and became a bronzed glamor boy for your sake, instead of remaining a scholar and, well, an educator. When you lead me to bridge and bourbon with the charming Farlows, I meekly follow. No, please, wait. When you decorate your home, I do not interfere with your schemes. When you decide—when you decide all kinds of matters, I may be in complete, or in partial, let us say, disagreement—but I say nothing. I ignore the particular. I cannot ignore the general. I love being bossed by you, but every game has its rules. I am not cross. I am not cross at all. Don’t do that. But I am one half of this household, and have a small but distinct voice.” She had come to my side and had fallen on her knees and was slowly, but very vehemently, shaking her head and clawing at my trousers. She said she had never realized. She said I was her ruler and her god. She said Louise had gone, and let us make love right away. She said I must forgive her or she would die. This little incident filled me with considerable elation. I told her quietly that it was a matter not of asking forgiveness, but of changing one’s ways; and I resolved to press my advantage and spend a good deal of time, aloof and moody, working at my book—or at least pretending to work. The “studio bed” in my former room had long been converted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into a regular “writer’s den.” A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “...dies without help? The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don’t help them because to your mind it’s of no importance.” And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can’t see all that you can do, or you won’t sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it. Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good. And this mortified him and hurt his feelings. “It’s both,” he said resolutely: “I don’t see that it was possible....” “What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to provide medical aid?” “Impossible, as it seems to me.... For the three thousand square miles of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in the fields, I don’t see how it is possible to provide medical aid all over. And besides, I don’t believe in medicine.” “Oh, well, that’s unfair ... I can quote to you thousands of instances.... But the schools, anyway.” “Why have schools?” “What do you mean? Can there be two opinions of the advantage of education? If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone.” Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indifference to public business. “Perhaps it may all be very good; but why should I worry myself about establishing dispensaries which I shall never make use of, and schools to which I shall never send my children, to which even the peasants don’t want to send their children, and to which I’ve no very firm faith that they ought to send them?” said he. Sergey Ivanovitch was for a minute surprised at this unexpected view of the subject; but he promptly made a new plan of attack. He was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his brother smiling. “Come, now.... In the first place, the dispensary is needed. We ourselves sent for the district doctor for Agafea Mihalovna.” “Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again.” “That remains to be proved.... Next, the peasant who can read and write is as a workman of more use and value to you.” “No, you can ask anyone you like,” Konstantin Levin answered with decision, “the man that can read and write is much inferior as a workman. And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they’re stolen.”

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  If they were black, they didn’t stay long. The Federal Housing Authority made it possible to build the houses and offer them to men who sometimes made less than a hundred dollars a week. Still, the sales staff refused to accept applications from Negro families. In 1960, six years after residents of my suburb voted for incorporation, the city was still 98.5 percent white. The Census that year counted seven people—in a population of 67,125—who admitted they were black. 287 In 1953, the Levittown on Long Island had a population of nearly 70,000. It was the largest community in the nation with no Negroes at all. 288 When I was a boy, about a third of my neighbors came from the border South. That meant that they, or their parents, had come to California from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, or Kansas. Some were the children of real Dust Bowl Okies. In the mid-1930s, their fathers had worked as migrant farm laborers in the San Joaquin Valley. The fathers of luckier ones had occasional jobs in the Kern County oil fields. Those who had come to Los Angeles tried to find work as mechanics’ helpers or in construction. It often took a month or more to find any sort of job, even picking oranges or working in a packing shed for three dollars a day. It took a year to establish California residency and qualify for public assistance. If a family’s money ran out, as it often did, state agencies offered assistance only if the family agreed to leave California and return home. Very few families accepted. If a man could string out a year of intermittent jobs, he would be eligible for a state relief check or a federal job from the Works Progress Administration. If he got a WPA job, he could plant trees or pour concrete for new sidewalks. 289 When the war began, the Okies were ready for work. Ten percent of wartime federal spending went to California. Southern California aircraft plants produced 40 percent of the planes flown by the Navy and Army Air Corps. In 1942, between 30 and 50 percent of new employees at Southern California aircraft plants came originally from the states of the border South. At the Douglas plant in Long Beach, 87 percent of them were women. They made sixty cents an hour. By the end of the war, 600,000 border Southerners had migrated to Southern California to work in defense industries. Ernie Pyle called them Aviation Okies. Pyle said the new migrants were already filling the cities of Torrance and El Monte, as well as Bell Gardens, one of several low-cost, blue-collar communities between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. By 1950, the Aviation Okies began buying houses in my suburb with the money they had saved working at Douglas Aircraft, North American Aviation, or the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. 290

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Also they hadn’t objected to sons, brothers, and sons-in-law using family connections and political names to further careers—say, the Bushes or the Rockefellers or the Kennedys—yet they objected to Hillary doing the same. The more they talked, the more it was clear that their own husbands hadn’t shared power with them. If Hillary had a husband who regarded her as an equal—who had always said this country got “two presidents for the price of one”—it only dramatized their own lack of power and respect. After one long night and a lot of wine, one woman told me that Hillary’s marriage made her aware of just how unequal hers was. In San Francisco and Seattle, I listened to self-identified Hillary Haters condemn her for staying with her husband, despite his well-publicized affairs. It turned out that many of them had suffered a faithless husband, too, but lacked the ability or the will to leave. They wanted Hillary to punish a powerful man in public on their behalf. I reminded them that presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy had affairs, but the haters identified with those First Ladies and assumed they couldn’t leave. It was Hillary’s very strength and independence that made them blame her. When I tried describing the public condemnation Hillary would have suffered had she abandoned her duties in the White House for such a personal reason, this changed the minds of some—but not many. Finally, I resorted to explaining my own reasons for thinking the Clintons just might be, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the marriage of true minds.” I had seen them together for a long afternoon during a White House ceremony for recipients of the Medal of Freedom. One medalist was my friend Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation. She and I were both struck by the obvious connection between the Clintons as they walked from one group of awardees and their families to the next, talking to guests and each other. In a roomful of interesting people, they seemed just as interested in listening and talking to each other. What they were sharing, I don’t know, but what was clear was their intimacy and pleasure in each other’s company. Of how many long-married couples could that be said? Yet when I brought this up, some Hillary Haters became even angrier. Many were longtime wives and others were new wives replacing older ones, but the fact that Bill valued Hillary as an equal partner—and vice versa—seemed to make them more aware that their own marriages were different. It dawned on me that if a sexual connection is the only bond between a husband and wife, an affair can make her feel replaceable—and perhaps cause her to be replaced. This was not only emotionally painful but devastating when it also meant losing social identity and economic security as well. I began to understand that Hillary represented the very public, in-your-face opposite of the precarious and unequal lives that some women were living.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  They killed three of the best calves by letting them into the clover aftermath without care as to their drinking, and nothing would make the men believe that they had been blown out by the clover, but they told him, by way of consolation, that one of his neighbors had lost a hundred and twelve head of cattle in three days. All this happened, not because anyone felt ill-will to Levin or his farm; on the contrary, he knew that they liked him, thought him a simple gentleman (their highest praise); but it happened simply because all they wanted was to work merrily and carelessly, and his interests were not only remote and incomprehensible to them, but fatally opposed to their most just claims. Long before, Levin had felt dissatisfaction with his own position in regard to the land. He saw where his boat leaked, but he did not look for the leak, perhaps purposely deceiving himself. (Nothing would be left him if he lost faith in it.) But now he could deceive himself no longer. The farming of the land, as he was managing it, had become not merely unattractive but revolting to him, and he could take no further interest in it. To this now was joined the presence, only twenty-five miles off, of Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, whom he longed to see and could not see. Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya had invited him, when he was over there, to come; to come with the object of renewing his offer to her sister, who would, so she gave him to understand, accept him now. Levin himself had felt on seeing Kitty Shtcherbatskaya that he had never ceased to love her; but he could not go over to the Oblonskys’, knowing she was there. The fact that he had made her an offer, and she had refused him, had placed an insuperable barrier between her and him. “I can’t ask her to be my wife merely because she can’t be the wife of the man she wanted to marry,” he said to himself. The thought of this made him cold and hostile to her. “I should not be able to speak to her without a feeling of reproach; I could not look at her without resentment; and she will only hate me all the more, as she’s bound to. And besides, how can I now, after what Darya Alexandrovna told me, go to see them? Can I help showing that I know what she told me? And me to go magnanimously to forgive her, and have pity on her! Me go through a performance before her of forgiving, and deigning to bestow my love on her!... What induced Darya Alexandrovna to tell me that? By chance I might have seen her, then everything would have happened of itself; but, as it is, it’s out of the question, out of the question!”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  on beauty and being wrong cobbler, apple crumble, candied apples, chocolate apples, fruit salads . . . Howard had surprised himself. There was nothing now that he didn’t know about making food from apples. He had an apple dish for every day of the week. But it just didn’t make as much difference as he’d hoped. Still they kept falling. Worms spent their days passing through them. When they turned black and lost their shape, the ants came crawling. It was now about time for the squirrel to make its first appearance of the day. Howard leaned against the doorframe and waited. And here he came, scuttling along the fence, intent on destruction. He stopped halfway along and made the acrobatic leap over to the bird feeder, which Howard had spent yesterday afternoon reinforcing with chicken wire to protect it from this very predator. He watched with interest as the squirrel now set about methodically tearing his defences apart. He would be more prepared tomorrow. Howard’s forced sabbatical had brought with it a new knowledge of the life cycles of his house. He now noticed which flowers closed themselves when the sun set; he knew the corner of the garden that attracted ladybugs and how many times a day Murdoch needed to relieve himself; he had identified precisely the tree in which the bastard squirrel lived and had considered cutting it down. He knew what sound the pool made when the filter needed changing, or when the air-conditioning unit needed a thump to its side to quieten it down. He knew, without looking, which of his children was passing through a room – from their intimate noises, their treads. Now he reached out for Levi, who he correctly sensed was right behind him. ‘You. You need your allowance. Don’t you?’ Levi, in his shades, was giving nothing away. He was taking a girl out to brunch and a movie, but Howard didn’t need to know that. ‘If you’re giving it,’ he said carefully. ‘Well, did your mother already give you some?’ ‘Just give him the money, Dad,’ called Jerome. Howard came back into the kitchen. ‘Jerome, I am merely interested in how your mother manages to pay for the secret ‘‘bachelor pad’’ and go out with her girlfriends  On Beauty every night and fund a court case and provide Levi with twenty dollars every other day. Is that all out of the money she’s siphoning off me? I’m simply interested in how that works.’ ‘Just give him the money,’ repeated Jerome. Howard tightened the cord of his bathrobe indignantly. ‘But then of course Linda – she’s the lesbian one, isn’t she?’ asked Howard, knowing the answer. ‘Yes, the lesbian one – she’s still squeezing half of Mark’s money out of him, five years later, which seems a bit rich, really, what with their children being grown, Linda a lesbian . . . marriage having been just a small blip in her lesbian career.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  signing? What he did most Saturdays wasn’t all that different from standing on a street corner with an arrow sign, directing people to an army surplus store. And, although the dusty light sifted delicately through the high windows, and the spirit of studious contemplation lingered on in the phoney Tudor-style panelling of the walls and the carved roses and tulips that decorated the many balconies, no one in here was genuinely seeking enlightenment. And that was a shame, for Levi loved rap music; its beauty, ingenuity and humanity were neither obscure nor unlikely to him, and he could argue a case for its equal greatness against any of the artistic products of  On Beauty the human species. Half an hour of a customer’s time spent with Levi expressing this enthusiasm would be like listening to Harold Bloom wax lyrical about Falstaff – but the opportunity never arose. Instead he spent his days directing people to novelty rap records from hit movies. Consequently, Levi did not get paid enough or enjoy his time here sufficiently even to contemplate working the Christmas weekend. It just wasn’t going down like that. ‘Candy! Yo, Candy!’ Thirty feet away from Levi, and not sure, initially, who it was shouting at her, Candy turned from the customer she was dealing with and gave Levi a sign to leave her alone. Levi waited for her customer to move on. Then he jogged up to Candy in the Alt. Rock / Heavy Metal section and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, already sighing. She had a new piercing. A bolt that went through the skin on her chin, just beneath her bottom lip. That was the thing about working here: you met the kind of people you would never ever meet in any other circumstances. ‘Candy – I need to talk to you.’ ‘Look . . . I’ve been here since seven stocking and I’m going to lunch now so don’t even ask .’ ‘No, man – I just got here, I’m taking my break at twelve. Did you hear about Christmas Day?’ Candy groaned and rubbed her eyes vigorously. Levi noted the grubbiness of her fingers, the torn cuticles, the little translucent wart on her thumb. When she’d finished her face was purple and blotchy and clashed with the pink-black stripes of her hair. ‘Yeah, I heard about it.’ ‘They’re tripping if they think they gonna see me on that weekend. I am not working Christmas, it ain’t happening.’ ‘So, what – you going to quit or something?’ ‘Now, why would I do that? That’s plain dumb.’ ‘Well, you can complain, but . . .’ Candy cracked her knuckles. ‘Bailey really doesn’t give a fuck.’ ‘That’s why I’m not gonna complain to Bailey, I’m gonna do something, man – I’m gonna take some . . . like some direct action .’ Candy blinked slowly at him. ‘Oh, right. Good luck with that.’  the anatomy lesson