The Difficulty of Being Earnest

“Love,” by William Maxwell. The 1983 New Yorker short story makes no bones about its topic. “He’s not afraid to write emotionally about emotions,” said writer Tony Earley, in discussing the story, which he had chosen to read aloud on The New Yorker fiction podcast. He and The New Yorker fiction editor were trying to figure out how the story managed to take on its topic and honor its title without being too sentimental—cheesy, rosy, or unrealistically sweet.

“Sentimentality doesn’t scare [Maxwell].” the editor suggested.

“Well sentiment doesn’t scare him. I don’t think one can make a case that this is sentimental. At least in writing workshops, the ones I teach, anyway…” said Earley.
“It’s a dirty word,” the editor finished for him.

“It’s a pejorative.”

 “Love” portrays a boy’s childhood affection for a kind elementary-school teacher, Miss Brown. Her eyes are brown and her voice is “gentle.” “She reminded me of pansies,” the narrator says. This was not romantic love but the hand-holding feeling that children have for caring adults. The children in the story adore their teacher, and the story says so directly: “We meant to have her for our teacher forever. We meant to pass right up through the sixth, seventh and eighth grades and on into high school taking her with us.”

I thought of “Love,” when reading a piece in another genre on another, much less accessible topic: Virginia Woolf’s essay about why Greek literature can be difficult to understand on an emotional level, language barrier aside. “On Not Knowing Greek,” one of the essays in Woolf’s book of literary criticism, The Common Reader (1925), describes how Greek literature is difficult for modern people to understand in part because it addresses emotions directly, without evasion. English poets, Woolf says, cannot “be direct without being clumsy” or “speak simply of emotion without being sentimental.” The Greeks, on the other hand, could “step into the thick of emotions which blind and bewilder an age like our own.” Rather than looking at them directly, the writers of Woolf’s time, she says, look at emotions “aslant.” This description of the modern poets does not sound so different from Earley’s comment, on the fiction podcast, about writers today who “either bury [emotion] between the lines,” or “write about it ironically, so that if a critic says, ‘this seems awfully emotional to me,’ the ironic writer can say, ‘oh, I was only kidding.’”

Why is it hard to look at emotions directly, the same way that it’s hard, indeed, dangerous, to stare into the sun? Woolf invokes the differences between the ancient Greek world with its sunny, “out-of-doors” vibrancy, with people shouting at each other in marketplaces, and the English moderns at their desks watching the rain on the windowpanes. Nowadays, even out-of-doors, people are composing into their cell phones, so if one believes the argument that modern isolation breeds indirect speech, no wonder people stay away from blinding sentiments nearly a century after Woolf wrote her essay.  

It may be the climate. It may be that straight emotions make us uncomfortable; that we would rather take them in cocktail form. But I would like to propose another explanation, or another way of explaining our discomfort with emotions. Perhaps it’s not that we can’t face distilled emotions; it’s that we don’t quite believe, or want to believe, that they exist, that is, at least not in the pure form that words like “love” and “remorse” and “jealousy” would imply.

I think the literary version of this idea is that sentimental writing—saying things like, “he was in the depths of despair,” or “I adored her,” or describing warm, fuzzy moments in life without pairing them with harsh ones—fails to capture the complexity of sentiments like love. It is wrong, the argument would go, to write simply about love because love is not simple; rather, it is a lazy term for something much more complicated, a whole range of behaviors and feelings. Those complicated feelings would better captured by “showing” (as in the exhortation to “use showing not telling details”), or describing what people do, than by simply “telling” the reader directly how they feel. This may be just another way of describing how people can't quite stomach straight emotions. 

There’s a term for the opposite of a philosophy that mistrusts abstractions: it’s Platonism, the idea that abstractions exist apart from their manifestations. For a Platonist, abstractions like “the Good,” and love are real things, invisible though they are, that incite the confusing emotions and behaviors writers, suspicious of sentimentality, would “show” their readers. So it makes sense that the Greeks, particularly those in Plato’s circle, would write directly about emotions, as Woolf says they did. Why beat around the bush when you could describe the bush directly? On the other hand, if you believe that the bush is just a non-existent abstraction that refers to the behaviors of people beating around it, then describing people’s actions would make sense.

It’s ironic that Woolf should be the one pointing out the directness of the Greeks, since she beat so beautifully around the bushes of emotions in her novels; and even in her essays, to me it seems that her thesis is not something laid out at the beginning but, rather, the ringing left in the air after the music of her story has finished. (I hope it's obvious that I approve.) As critic James Wood puts it: “In her novels, thought radiates outward, as a medieval town radiates outward—from a beautifully neglected center.”  

Part of the modern fear of saying things directly probably derives from the tendency, in literary criticism, to interpret texts based on what they don’t say, based on what lies between the lines. It would be to one’s advantage not to directly say what one means in this system; if a writer speaks of love, this sort of deconstructionist critic would assume the piece was really about something else left unsaid. If a writer wants to talk about love and be taken seriously, the last thing he should do is mention the ‘l’ word. Though trying  to communicate anything to such a critic would probably be a lost cause, since, from what I read, that sort of critic may not even trust what’s between the lines if he thinks the writer consciously put it there.

Of all the sentiments I could discuss, I keep coming back to love. It is an easy choice. It is the title of the story I'm talking about. Yet it also reminds me of an unspoken point about sentimentality: it more often refers to happy or warm fuzzy feelings than to unpleasant ones. People can be corny when talking about unhappy things; they can “bleed on the page” or be melodramatic. But sentimental, I think, usually implies being too rosy.

I don’t particularly trust simple, happy stories, either. I want more complexity. “There must be more to it!” But people are less hasty to question misery, to ask why things aren’t simpler or happier. I think people believe Murphy’s law and consider good fortune to be a suspicious anomaly.

One last reason not to be sentimental is a rather sweet one: the fear of having one's happiness made fun of or called names. Criticize my misery all you want, but don't make me feel embarrassed for my love. That's a writer's reason not to talk about sentiment directly; not because she doesn't like it but because she loves it too much to put it at risk.  

The William Maxwell story, “Love,” ends with a woman placing flowers on a grave. The beloved teacher gets sick and is replaced by a substitute. The children go to visit Miss Brown, expecting to sort of save the day or at least make their teacher happy for a moment: “We wouldn’t have been surprised if she had come to the door herself and thrown up her hands in astonishment when she saw who it was.” The reality was different: “Instead a much older woman opened the door and said, ‘What do you want?’” The story describes the teacher on her deathbed, using familiar expressions, not complicated, unique ones. “Her arms were like sticks,” and her eyes “had dark circles around them and were enormous.” These could even be called clichés, but I would call them frank expression of the universal. The narrator sums up the sadness: “She didn’t belong to us anymore.  She belonged to her illness.”

The story is told in the voice of a child, and I suspect that explains some of the story’s frankness. Growing up is learning about life’s complexities and learning that “love” is not as simple, as obviously happy, as it may seem at first. The story may be more childish than Greek. Perhaps if Maxwell had written the story about the love of an older man, it would have been more complex.

But I doubt it. Those stories people tell that end with the expression “from the mouths of babes” are the ones where a child expresses a simple truth that cuts to the center of something that adults are—consciously or unconsciously—avoiding. I think Maxwell, the writer, meant exactly what he said. 

And the narrator, speaking in the voice of a child, may be older than we think. Earley thinks the narrator is an old man remembering his youth and contemplating his own death. The story is ageless and timeless. There is no irony or eye rolling. It is earnest, and courageously so.