Crossing to Safety

“In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world’s most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.” 

Larry thinks back to the happiness that he had at the beginning of his professional life, marked by a feeling of arrival and partnership with his wife. He is under the impression that his happiness was built on a feeling that life was finally happening.

“Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser practices.” 

This quote shows both Larry’s former idealism toward his colleagues and the institution of academia at the beginning of his life. It also implies his distance from this view, signaling disillusionment. In this situation, the “Harvard Man” is meant to be larger than life and illustrates how elitism and privilege contributed to Larry’s former idealism toward his profession. 

“I don’t know how English Departments are now, […] [but they] used to look like serene lamaseries where the elect lived in both comfort and grace. Up there, scholars as learned and harmless as Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford moved among books and ideas, eating and drinking well, sleeping soft, having three-month summer vacations during which they had only to cultivate their inclinations and their “fields.” Freed by tenure, by an assured salary, by modest wants, by an inherited competence, or by all four, they were untouched by the scrabbling and scuffling that went on outside the walls, or down in the warrens where we as aspirants worked and hoped.” 

This passage illustrates how Larry understood the elitism and privilege of academic life when he was a young professor. Larry thinks about academic life as “freed” by tenure—an elitism predicated on a release from material perceptions and wants, the “scrabbling and scuffling” that goes on outside of its walls. He uses the term warrens—a name for an animal den—to describe the graduate students. However, the promise that these same graduate students may join this privileged fraternity of academics above illustrates the feeling of redemption that Larry has in Madison. 

“Are writers reports, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.” 

In the above passage, Larry is questioning the motives of the author through tropes and negative perceptions. The essence of the problem is the appeal to posterity and time—this is the appeal to a vindication through the years, purposefully similar to what Larry seeks in his own life. What worries Larry about writers (and himself) is the fear of “articulation expression of a stereotype”—that he will fail to rise above this negative characterization.

“Fairly standard graduate student. Poor, of course, as they all are these days. Poorer than most, to judge by the frayed cuffs of his khaki pants and the blotch on the front of his work shirt as it had been washed with chocolate in the pocket and the stain then ironed in. Fine fair hair. Skin less tanned than it ought to be this far into the summer. Nearsighted, from the way he squinted when he removed his glasses to dry them. Eyes a striking forget-me-not blue. Pleasant square face, a little gaunt. Quick, eager smile.”

These honest, if not callous, observations are part of a story that Larry invents about Charity’s family’s appraisal of Sid. This fictional account represents how Larry feels about the Langs and serves to create context for the future bitterness between Larry and Charity regarding Sid.

“‘You keep out of this,’ Charity said. Her cheeks were pink. She looked aggrieved and misunderstood. ‘All I’m saying,’ she said to Sid alone, ‘is that poetry-making isn’t the basis for a full life unless you’re an absolutely great poet, and forgive me, I don’t think you are, not yet anyway, and won’t be until you find something to do in your life so that the poetry reflects something. It can’t just reflect leisure. In this world you can’t have leisure unless you cheat. Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organizations. You can’t make a life out of nine beanrows. You wouldn’t have anything to write poems about but beans.’” 

This passage is another fictionalized memory. Here, Larry is literally putting words in Charity’s mouth, drawing in her a dim view of poetry, and by implication, a dim view of those who live for it. This is Larry’s way of speculating on where Charity’s skeptical opinion of Sid’s life and passions come from; the idea of poetry as a form of “leisure” as opposed to “work” puts this expectation into focus for later parts of the novel.

“And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives has happened so thoroughly only once.” 

Larry comments on the rareness and unlikeliness of friendship. Though this passage is primarily metaphorical, it carries much of Larry’s philosophical beliefs on the meaning of friendship in addition to sentiment. The role of chance and free will is key in this statement—for Larry, friendship is the freest form of human connection. However, the geographical and emotional convergence of the story ties friendship to fate, which suggests something at work in bringing these four together.

“Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.”

This passage represents a meditation on how Larry has spent his life and has ironic implications, given how Larry believes that he has worked busily and ambitiously many years, but he failed to properly reflect on what it meant and could mean.

“No, Sally was not lonely. Nor were we ever, to my recollection, diverted more than briefly from one another. We loved our life, we never looked up from it except when rallies for the Spanish Loyalists ruffled the waters of the university and upset the state house or when Governor Phil La Follette made some alarmingly fascist-sounding proposal, or when Hitler’s frothing voice over our radio reminded us that we were on a bumpy gangplank leading from world depression to possible world war.” 

This passage illustrates how Larry feels about the historical events happening around them. The question Larry seeks to answer is whether he was indifferent to these world-changing events. Big historical events are understated in this book, but Larry explains how little they affected him and Sally by insisting on how engrossing their life was. In doing so, he implies that these historical adventures can be a diversion from one’s own life.

“Sid and I have a lot in common. He works as hard as I do, and that is a powerful compulsion on my respect. He reads every student theme with the care of a copy editor, he writes comments that are longer than the theme. His house is always open to students, half his women students are in love with him, his office hours stretch on past five o’clock, he prepares for his lectures as if each one were an oral exam. Yet my good luck makes me uneasy around him. Every piece of fortune that enhances me seems to diminish him, though he never fails to warm me with his admiration. He makes me feel bigger and better than I am, and somehow, in the process, manages to lessen himself.”

On the surface, this passage illustrates Larry’s respect for Sid as a professional and as a friend. The virtue of Sid’s work ethic is made clear in how he teaches and mentors his students. However, Larry distinguishes between his own success and Sid’s implicit lack thereof. Sid does not seem to resent Larry but supports him authentically. This is important, as it illustrates Larry’s attempts to put himself higher than Sid, in his own mind, at the expense of their friendship. 

“‘How many stories have you written this year? Three? And sold them all. And the novel, which will make you famous—they’ll be teaching it in this lamentable institution before many years. And at least two articles. And some book reviews. And the textbook. All of it while you were teaching a full load. So they pound your fingers off the gunwale. You know why? You threaten the weak sisters. They don’t want distinction around, it would show them up. Energy and talent like yours are bombs under their beds. Half of the executive committee went to college here, and to graduate school here, before they started to teach and they’ve never taught anywhere but here. They’re ingrown, inbred, lazy, and scared. They don’t dare let people like you into the department.’” 

In this passage, Sid angrily protests Madison’s decision not to renew Larry’s contract. This has extremely dire consequences for Larry’s academic career. Sid lists Larry’s literary achievements, as well as Larry’s hard work at the university. Sid believes that the other professors are lazy and complacent, knowing that people like Larry would upset the hierarchy of the department. However, in this diatribe, Sid reveals much of his own feelings about academia and his life in Madison, apart from just Larry’s professional’s troubles. 

“There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it’s insisted on. But instead of insisting on gratitude, the Langs insisted that their generosity was selfish, so how could we dislike them for it?” 

This passage is significant, as it helps to understand the layers of the dynamic between the Langs and the Morgans. The connection between friendship and gratitude goes back to two other themes in the story: Larry’s ambition to prove his talent and his belief that friendship is ultimately unforced and irrational. For Larry, being in implied-debt with the Langs is a source of deep anxiety, one which generates resentment toward both Sid and Charity. The Langs’ immediate and unmotivated desire to help Larry and Sally in their time of legitimate need is not something Larry can square with his belief in his inherent merit. 

“If I had known it, I was in jail then, my own jail, and only when Sally joined me and made my confinement unsolitary did I become aware of how completely I had shut myself in. Little by little she coaxed me out, but I came cautiously, not to expose my flanks, and my vision of the ideal isolation never changed.” 

The above passage metaphorizes Larry’s approach to the literary life as a kind of “jail”—confinement that is imposed from within versus from outside. The intention revealed in this quote contextualizes Larry’s practiced indifference to world events and all outside influences. Larry throws himself into his work and his literary career, cutting himself off from the world, or even, as an excuse to cut himself off from the world. However, Sally works against this intention and helps Larry become part of the world he is trying to escape. 

“We put Wisconsin and its failure behind us, we forgot to worry about the future. When they asked us what we did, we said I was working on my next book. My next book. What an ego-inflating phrase. it made the future sound not uncertain and scary, but possible, and even, after a slight necessary delay, assured.” 

This passage describes Larry’s internal monologue at a gathering with the Langs. As the University has chosen not to bring him on, Larry understands that he will have to find another line of work. This is a transitional phase for him and Sally, and the above passage describes this moment of decision: The fear of having to rely on his literary talent moves from being presumptuous to something required of him. 

“Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree. But we are sometimes tempted to lie elsewhere, too. I could probably be tempted to lie just here. This is a crucial place for the dropping of hints and the planting of clues, the crucial moment for hiding behind the piano or in the bookcase the revelations that later, to the reader’s gratified satisfaction, I will triumphantly discover. If I am after drama.” 

In this quote, Larry attempts to describe how his life might seem versus what he and the reader might expect. This quote comes from a character in a novel, but it represents an imagined personality who has lived his entire life reading and writing fiction. In short, this quote illustrates some of the novel’s narrative and aesthetic choices in addressing how the realities of lived experience and recollection can frustrate our expectations of tropes, clichés, and drama.

“‘A poet is somebody who has written a poem. He’s written quite a few. Some of them aren’t much good, your mother’s right. He’s too respectful of past poets, his head is full of echoes, the longer he teaches, the more his poems sound like Matthew Arnold. But yes, he’s a poet. I remember one he published in Poetry, years ago. He showed me half a dozen letters he’d got about it. People said they’d been delighted and enriched by this simple little poem about how certain jeweled beetles live and make unnoticed love down among the club moss.’” 

In this passage, Larry is both defending and diagnosing Sid’s struggles to be recognized as a poet. While Larry insists that a poet is simply “somebody who has written a poem,” this is not enough for Sid or Charity. Sid’s problem, Larry speculates, is that he is too focused on comparing himself to the Great Poets that he does not recognize his own gifts and perspective. Sid’s poem about the “jeweled beetles” illustrates this—a poem he does not recognize as “great” or significant, but it is a work of art.

“Without knowing what I was after, I pursued it with the blind singlemindedness of a sperm hunting its target egg—now there is a metaphor I will accept. For a long time it was dark, and all I could do was swim for my life. Union and consummation finally took place in the fourth-floor front room of the Pensione Vespucci, an old palazzo on the Lungarno a little below the American consulate in Florence. There, one September morning, it hit me that things were altogether other than what they had been for a long time. Wherever it was that we were going, we had arrived, or at least come into the clear road.” 

While on a trip to Italy, Larry reflects on the frenetic pace of his former life and its abatement into the present day. Larry realizes that things turned out differently than what he had expected, and the confusion and anxiety of his prior life had to do with a fixed set of expectations. This complicates the idea of the “clear road,” one which is not a simple path but a state of greater confidence and centeredness.

“With my face to the wall and my back to a temptation and distraction, I spend the mornings in New Mexico, a world of mixed recollection and invention where I moved with the freedom of a god. I controlled the climate. I knew every mesa, pueblo, road, street, and house because I had put it there. I knew everyone’s mind, emotions, and history. I could anticipate, even plan, every event, and predict, even dictate, every consequence.” 

In this passage, Larry contrasts with hyperbole his feelings of New Mexico with the tumultuous, hectic life of the Northeast. Throughout his academic and early literary life, Larry was missing the feeling of belonging, of being “at home.” The familiarity with which Larry lives and works in this context contrasts even the company of his dear friends, the Langs. This passage illustrates an aspect of Larry’s life in the background. 

“For me it produced an odd dichotomy. Part of my time I lived in a managed, controlled fictional world, the rest in this world of cultural wonder and discovery to which I was as submissive as cottonwood fluff is submissive to the current of a ditch. Coming out of the morning isolation I had a sense of almost unbearable stimulation, of daily and even hourly growth. In the past I had had periods when I learned and grew very fast—when I came from dusty Albuquerque and my native cow college into graduate school in Berkeley, when we were assaulting the hopeful future in Madison, Wisconsin, when I first stepped inside the door of Phoenix Books on Beacon Street and felt all that challenge of a new profession to be learned, new people to know and work with. But I never felt any such explosion of capacity as I felt shuttling between the Albuquerque of my mornings and the Florence of our afternoons.” 

Amidst these reflections Larry considers how his life has changed, charting the trajectory of his life with entering higher forms of culture and understanding. The dichotomy Larry observes then is between the “Albuquerque” and “Florence” of his life, between his humble beginnings and his entry into culture. This represents one phase of Larry’s values and aspirations toward his literary and professional life, a sharp divide between where he came from and what he wishes to inherit. This recollected view gives some indication of the narrow views of his life and his goals and contributes to the dissatisfaction he feels later in life.

“But I am also aware, even in the violence of his welcome, of the other part of this reunion: Sally floundering forward, all but running on her canes, her controllable iron legs trying to keep up with the crutches; and on the lounge Charity half rising toward their awkward, maimed meeting, her face a thin wedge, and on it that incredible, gleaming, ardent smile, a transfiguration, a bursting to the surface of pure delight, uncomplicated love.” 

The above passage illustrates a tension within the narrative between the power of recollection and judgment versus the experience of the present. This is illustrated in how Larry receives and understands Charity. He has made up his mind to carry his negative opinion of her, yet in this scene we see the present moment taking over and resisting this judgment. Larry sees Charity and Sally for who they are, not who he wants them to be. Charity’s face changes away from the judgment and disapproval he expects internally to a look of love and friendship. Larry is struggling to accept the reality of this intimacy and emotion.

“All her life she has been demanding people’s attention to things she admires and values. She has both prompted and shushed, and pretty imperiously too. But she herself has never needed or accepted prompting in her life, and she is not going to be shushed, not even by cancer. She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe until she falls.”

Larry’s thoughts on Charity’s death, sampled in the above passage, are a harsh, yet honest eulogy. In this image Larry creates, negatives and positives mesh together: Charity lives on her own terms and no one else’s, yet demands that others live by her rules; such is the confidence that she has in who she is and what she believes. What fascinates Larry, in the midst his own wonderings, in Charity’s stubborn desire to compose herself and those around her, even in death, to continue living and orchestrating as she sees fit. Charity does not intend that cancer take away her dignity or dictate how she lives—which to Larry is admirable—but intends to remain callous and imperious—which Larry dislikes. However, he becomes resigned to the fact that these instincts will never be separated in Charity. 

“It was her death. She had a right to handle it her own way. But I felt sorry for Sid, a reluctant stoic, and I dreaded the coming hour or two when I would be alone with him. I was the person he was most likely to confide in, and I feared his confidence and had on tap no word of consolation or comfort. It crossed my mind, while I sat waiting on the lawn above the green and blue view, that down under his anguish and panic he might even look forward to her death as a release. Then I decided not. Charity had mastered him, but she also supported him. She not only ran his life, she was his life.” 

At this moment in the story, Larry is unsure as of how to deal with Charity’s death from the perspective of Sid. Throughout the novel Larry has had a negative view of Charity as overbearing and imperious, but these final moments are causing him to think differently. Although he doesn’t relent that Charity “ran [Sid’s] life,” he knows that Sid does not resent her the way Larry does. This passage illustrates the way that Larry habitually projects his thoughts and feelings onto others.

“What I heard in Charity’s voice, I was sure Sid heard in it too: the exasperation of an assured, competent, organized, supremely confident woman having to deal with a fumbling man. Must I hold you up even now? that sub-voice said. I’ve picked you up after every failure, I’ve kept you from falling more than once, I’ve tried to give you some of my strength, I’ve been loyal, I’ve been a helpmeet. You know you can trust me to do what’s best. Why can’t you now, when it’s all I can do to keep going, just do as I ask, and spare me all this?” 

Larry has internalized what he could not say all these years in such a way that casts negative implications on both Charity and Sid. While the passage seems unduly harsh to Charity, it is actually crueler to Sid, casting him as a “fumbling man” whose life is characterized with failure and uncertainty. For Larry to voice these thoughts, even internally, he must do so through the negative idealization of Charity that he has built up over the years.