Amor Towles Table for Two Psychology Psychoanalysis Patriarchal Constraint
Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?
Amore Towles is a clever and hardworking craftsman. The short stories and the novella in this
collection of works are as well-crafted as the studiolo he describes at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Towles writes:
…The studiolo … is a rather unusual installation, even for the Met. During the Italian Renaissance, it became quite popular for gentlemen of standing to have a private room in their home into which they could retreat. In order to inspire creative meditation, these rooms were often decorated in a manner that celebrated the arts and sciences…. The Met’s studiolo is not much bigger that…[a] pantry… its walls had been finished with an intricate design of inlaid woods that gave the appearance of cabinets filled with scientific devices, musical instruments, and books. In the creation of this delightful illusion, the artist used over twenty species of trees and all the same tricks of perspective that were employed by the Renaissance painters.
The studiolo is used in this short story as the vehicle for helping
the retired art dealer to change his nephew’s mind about the importance of
sharing a piece of family art with the human community – a shift that will
bring the art dealer a 25% commission. Like
many of the short stories here, and in general, this one hinges on the
character of the art dealer, but also on the character of the nephew and the
nephew’s family. The art dealer, as a man of the world, is disdainful of the nephew’s character and that
of his family. They represent something that
is out of his reach – human connection and even warmth, all while they are teetering
on the edge of financial ruin, because they run their lives on principles that
are “sweet”, but not serving them well.
Towles invites us to join with the crafty art dealer against
the guileless family, all the while feeling that the crafty man is hollow,
empty, and exudes a certain kind of out-of-date cool that we would admire if we
weren’t, ourselves, feeling disdain for the erosion of the world around him and
his own erosion at the center of that world.
The moral tension in this story is played out as a variation
on a theme – in The Bootlegger – where the protagonist – in this case an
Investment Banker (Towles profession before turning (back to) writing) – takes the
moral high ground against a man who turns out to be engaged in a deeply moral –
though illegal – activity.
Spoiler alert: In each of these cases, the hollow shelled
person ends up getting their comeuppance and all is put right in the world –
but the heavy-handed morality that is dealt out – the sense of right and wrong –
is so powerful that my guess about Towle’s former profession was that he was an
attorney.
Before leaving the
short stories, I was surprised by the ending to one in particular. It was a delightfully told story of a high-class
man admiring a warm-hearted individual when they were stuck together when a
snowstorm that shut down LaGuardia. They got
a room in town, started having drinks together, and because of the stranger’s
warmth, there was quickly a group of
people surrounding them in the hotel bar having the best of times.
By getting their cell phones mixed up, the high-class man
started talking with the warm-hearted man’s wife in Chicago who was deeply
concerned about her husband because he was an alcoholic who had been sober for
a year, but clearly had just fallen off the wagon – hard. It turns out that the warm-hearted/ husband/
alcoholic had recently started working in his father-in-law’s company and his
wife was very concerned and instructed the high-class man in a very controlling
way on how to control her out of control husband.
I was expecting, at the end of the story, that the
high-class man (again the narrator) would tell us that it made sense with a
wife that controlling her husband would lose control when he got
a whiff of freedom, but the high-class man expressed envy of the warm-hearted/
husband/ alcoholic for having a wife who cared about him that much.
My objection is not that I’m right and Towles is wrong – it is
that I think we are both right. And I
think that living within the strict guidelines that the wife (and the man’s
alcoholism) dictate is difficult – and will have a good outcome because of her
vigilance, but there will also be a cost.
In a word, the world is not as neat as the studiolo would suggest. It is messy and complicated and there is much
more ambiguity and confusion than the pat answer provides.
Which leads us to the Titular Novella. A lovely compact piece, written in the style
of Dashiell Hammet – a Noir crime thriller – but starring a woman as the mastermind
who untangles the complicated actions of the sordid denizens of Hollywood in
the late 1930s. This piece is a page
turner, not least because it includes Olivia DeHaviland as she prepares for her
role in Gone with the Wind.
In my role as a psychologist, I have worked in forensic
settings, in inpatient settings with hospitalized patients, and have seen many
patients and supervised the work of many clinicians and consulted on cases in a
wide variety of settings, but the most unusual individual that I have met was a
friend of a friend. The friend was in town
for the weekend and I joined her when she called on her friend, an artist. The artist and her husband ran the local art
film house. We went up to the apartment
the artist shared with her husband. It
was actually two apartments that had been put together – and it had two
kitchens – a regular kitchen and her poison kitchen where she was baking her
current art.
She was a feminist who was interested in the history of
women’s rights and she discovered that, when women could not divorce or if they
could divorce, they would be forced to live without adequate support, their
recourse was often the use of poison. To
publicize this sad state of affairs, she would bake arsenic cakes and publicly
display them. When asked if I wanted anything
to eat or drink, I politely begged off.
The strong woman – Evelyn – at the center of the story Table
for Two, is both self-possessed and unmoored. Having called off a marriage (again, this is
the 1930s) in New York, she travels back home to Chicago, but at the last
minute decides to continue on the train to LA.
Along the way she meets an ex-cop who teaches her how to use a Mickey. She uses this weapon twice to protect Olivia
DeHavilland (and the second time, herself), and she supports both herself
and DeHavilland becoming as free as they are able to be in a patriarchal
society.
Evelyn/ Eve’s struggles are, I think, a version of Towles’
struggles. On his website, Towle states
that he was recognized for his writing ability when he was an undergraduate at Stanford,
and pursued a Master’s in writing at Yale, but became an Investment Banker at
his father’s insistence. After he became “fabulously
wealthy”, he returned to the writing craft.
Towles writes of the wealthy and of Eve’s wish to visit
monuments, but then points out, “True, the men who had built these monuments
(or, rather caused them to be built) were gone…. For the world to have any sense of justice, a
team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and their paintbrushes
and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.”
Towles should have added pens to his list of tools that the
artisans would wield. What is
interesting about him as an artist, I think, is that he would deconstruct the
world that he has inherited, but he is very ambivalent about his role in doing
that. His identification is with the
very world he would deconstruct – not just because he is a member of the monied
class, but because he believes that the world should be an orderly place. He states that he labors over his stories,
writing detailed outlines of them so that they are as tight as a drum. I imagine that, on some level, he is threatened
by the possibility that someone would find his stories to anything less than
extremely well crafted. In a word, I
wonder if he is afraid to be vulnerable.
I am not criticizing him for this. In fact, I empathize with his position. I blog anonymously for many reasons, but one
of them, surely, is that I am uncomfortable with how others might critically appraise
my criticism. I, like Towles, am a
member of the patriarchy. If we are to
unmake the palaces of the proud – if we are to create an inclusive world in
which the contributions of all are recognized – and recognize that the efforts of all are
necessary for us to create the monuments of which we can all be proud, we need
to figure out how to unmake and remake ourselves.
This is a complicated task.
It might be the work of our mature selves rather than our younger selves. We may need to spend the better part of our
lives reinventing ourselves – and support the next generation's efforts to do
that as well. What we venerate, what we
hold dear, are the very things that we need to question. And it is not so much the products that we
need to remake, but the way we make the products, and that is a scary
proposition, because it means leaving behind what we know will work and moving
towards doing things in ways that are novel and uncomfortable. We need to support each other as we do this –
both by acknowledging that we are turning the ship – as I think Towles is doing
– and by pointing out that there is a lot more turning to be done for Towles and for all of us.
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