I do, I do, I do.
“You have to have a little faith in people…”
I have spent more than a decade writing a memoir that centers on the role marriage has played in my life. It had all begun as a widow’s memoir after John died, and then it became something else after I met David and then was not a widow anymore.
Recently I was asked to be the subject of a bio presentation, and it was suggested I might like to read from some of my past writings. All right, I said. I began looking. Among other pieces, I found the following. I was surprised to discover how long I had been thinking about the mysteries of long, intimate relationships, and how dimly I seemed to view my parents’ marriage and how I thought it was good to use the word “Geist.”
It was headlined The cyclical corruption of love and written in 1979 for the Ann Arbor News’s fall student supplement. Some will consider it extraordinary for the unwitting manner in which it casts a wondering shadow on Woody Allen and the intimate relationships he would soon choose, the first supremely tragic on several levels with Mia Farrow and then the next, supremely happy with Soon-yi Previn. Perhaps the jaded tone of this column comes from the movie itself, which was released in 1979. As a writer, seeing what you put on the page almost a half-century earlier is a bit unnerving. I would not write this now. I would explain my parents’ marriage and others of their generation in a more subtle and complex way. I would be more measured and hopeful, which is as surprising to me as this piece is.
Here it is:
“At the end of the movie, Manhattan, Woody Allen’s London-bound girlfriend Tracy, trying to reassure him that she will return, says, “Not everyone gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people.”
“It’s no accident that Tracy is just a high school kid. If she were a college student, She’d know that on college campuses everyone gets corrupted by love.
“This is never mentioned on orientation tours, but it happens on the best and the worst of campuses, even though you will never find an administrator from the president on down to the associate assistant’s associate to the assistant associate dean of student affairs who is willing to talk about it. This would scare young men and women away from universities and cause them to consider opening bicycle shops in their hometowns instead of getting college educations, which would thus leave every administrator on campus, from the president on down to the associate assistant’s associate to the assistant associate dean of student affairs with nothing to do.
“The way it works is as follows. One day a sophisticated, but innocent young high school graduate heads for Ann Arbor, Michigan, to get educated. He or she has serious academic goals of one sort or another in mind, and he or she is not thinking about marriage. (A little fooling around perhaps, but not marriage.)
‘If he or she is thinking about marriage, it is along the lines of how not to get into it. The bitter carpngs and vindictive sarcasms that Mom and Dad have best hurling at each other back in Saginaw or Fenton or Mansfield or Pittsburgh over the years are as fresh and biting as ever, and the newly liberated son or daughter of this union of pugilists is not about to try and duplicate experience right away. In the dorm rooms and apartments of Ann Arbor in the wee hours when all these fresh persons are weary of studying but too afraid to go to bed for fear they may have missed the very bit of insignificant esoterica the instructor will choose to have developed into a two-page bluebook essay, they will relieve the tension by talking about the Freudian implications of their parents’ marriages. (Those whose parents are no longer living together will talk about the Freudian implications of their parents’ divorces.) No new insights, or old insights either will come from any of these discussions.
“A year will pass, maybe two. The fresh person will become a sophomore, a junior. He or she will have forgotten about the nasty games Mom and Dad play back home and he or she will, by this time, have been seduced, to some extent, by the powers of his or her own intellect. He or she will, in other words, have begun to think he or she is pretty smart.
“Zap. The corruption of love, which never strikes an honest dummy but only people who think they are smart will indeed strike. Perhaps it is the glue on the textbook bindings. Who knows?
“But two geniuses, put by the generous (they will think) design of the gods on the same midwestern American campus at the same time, will find one another. They will not think of this as “falling in love,” a phrase lacking the afflatus, the Geist, if you will, to to mention the intellectual adroitness of what these two are feeling.
“Ah, the trenchant analysis he did of H.L.Mencken’s short essay on The Comedian. Ah, the ingenious qualitative analysis she did of an unknown sample quite correctly discovered to contain gallium. (She so easily could have veered ever so slightly on the periodic table and fallen for indium.)
“Ah, clearly their mutual brilliance has attracted them to one another. Ah, clearly they were meant for each other, destined to go through the library turnstiles of life together.
“At this point there is no hope for this pair.
“The corruption of love, that wholesale selling of a person’s capacity to reason, in this case, under the very guise of reason, for moonlight, roses and the promise of Chaucer at breakfast Proust at lunch, Milton at dinner…(does it matter?) will triumph again.
“They may live happily ever after.
“It all depends on whether or not Dante and Faust show up for dessert, as they have been known to do, anywhere from moments to decades later.
“In the successful matches, such a academic pair produces a couple of very bright children who grow up and go to college where they talk, in the wee hours, about the Freudian implications of their parents’ marriage.
“In the miserable mismatches, they both leave divorce court wringing their hands and wondering how the glue on a textbook binding can leave a person so bereft of reason and so defenseless, too.
“The truth is nobody knows.”
What is actually most profound about this piece is my mention of Woody Allen, as the writer of the script for the movie, having the young Tracy say, "Not everyone gets corrupted. You have to have a little faith in people." I can remember even now her delivery of those lines, her voice so youthful and so poignant. But now the movie itself seems corrupt, the older man and the young girl. Allen himself, once the embodiment of a certain kind of urban joy, now embodies more and more corruption, most recently in his appearance in the Epstein files. Did he include himself among those who do not get corrupted, as Tracy says? Or did he know then that he was corrupted, corruptible, and wanted to offer a hopeful note that not everyone would join him in the unsavory group to which he belonged? Why did the word leap out to me back then? I think I misused it, that its full meaning was not knowable to me then. Was I just more unknowing, more innocent? Probably. I think the world I inhabited was surely more unknowing, more innocent. I had been born into the profound evils of the Second World War, but post-war hopefulness reigned in the days of my youth.