20 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
burning point. As a young woman, Gor
nick loved D. H. Lawrence and Colette,
those bards of the flesh. She was in col
lege when she encountered “Sons and
Lovers,” the first book she examines in
“Unfinished Business,” and instantly
took it as a “biblical text.” She identified
with Miriam, the timid young lover of
Paul Morel, Lawrence’s hero, a woman
whose “primary need is to know that she
is desired, and for herself alone.” On her
second reading, she felt closer to Clara,
Paul’s other lover, erotically knowledge
able and free, but still grasping. When
Gornick read the book for the third time,
in her thirties, the women’s movement
was in full swing, she had left her sec
ond husband, and she identified with
Paul—who, not incidentally, also strug
gles to break from a dissatisfied, suffocat
ing mother: “preoccupied with desiring
rather than being desired, I gloried in
giving myself up to the shocking plea
sure of sexual experience itself—rich,
full, transporting—imagining myself
now, like Paul at the end of the novel,
the hero of my own life.”
This is definitive, triumphant. But
now, in her fourth time through, Gor
nick sees that Paul’s quest to free himself
through passion only seems like liber
ation. It’s a trap, just like the stultify
ing family life that preceded it. Reading
Gornick on Lawrence—and Gornick
on Gornick on Lawrence—is exciting.
She builds real heat. She admires him
for pushing, hard, against the bourgeois
order that told him and everyone else to
sit down and button up—“like an aboli
tionist among antislavery liberals who say
yes, slavery is terrible, but in time it will
die out, be patient, while the abolitionist
says fuck that, now or never, and goes to
war.” Sensual experience was Lawrence’s
path to freedom and his metaphor for it.
But, she goes on,
if Lawrence were alive today, this metaphor
would not be available to him because today all
have had long experience of the sexual freedom
once denied, and have discovered firsthand that
the making of a self from the inside out is not
to be achieved through the senses alone. Not
only does sexual ecstasy not deliver us to our-
selves, one must have a self already in place to
know what to do with it, should it come.
This observation is at the core of an
earlier critical book of Gornick’s, “The
End of the Novel of Love,” which was
first published in 1997 and will be reis
sued next month. Sex has been drained
of its figurative power, Gornick argues,
because people now know it for what
it is. It has been demystified, destigma
tized, made mundane. The stocking has
been rolled all the way down, and now
that we can see everything there’s noth
ing to see. Returning, in “Unfinished
Business,” to Colette’s early novels,
which captivated her as a young woman,
Gornick finds her dated and nar
rowminded, and when, in our conver
sation, I offhandedly called Colette a
feminist—after all, hadn’t she made her
way in the world by her pen, writing
about women’s experience?—Gornick
shut me down. “It’s all in service of erotic
passion as the central experience of a
life. I can’t go with that,” she said. (Still,
she liked the Keira Knightley biopic
from 2018 as much as I did.) “Why, I
found myself saying to her, have you
not made larger sense of things?” she
writes of Colette, in “Unfinished Busi
ness.” “Yes, I have from you the incom
parable feel of an intelligent woman in
the grip of romantic obsession, and that
is strong stuff. But today sexual passion
alone is only a situation, not a meta
phor; as a story that begins and ends
with itself, it no longer signifies.”
At the same time, “Unfinished Busi
ness,” like all her memoirs, is a sexy
book. Erotic experience may no longer
work for her in metaphorical terms, but
it is very much at the center of the story
of her own life. In a chapter that touches
on the novelist Elizabeth Bowen’s help
less, masochistic love for an indifferent
man, Gornick tells us about Daniel, aman she met when she was eighteen
and he was ten years older and “to whom
I remained in thrall for decades” even
though he swiftly proved himself to be
a cheat and a pathological liar. Years
later, he shows up at her door to ask
what she got from the affair. She leaves
the question hanging. At the time, she
may not have known how to respond,but now she does: he gave her material,
and it is she who will tell the tale.
Gornick’s second, connected critical
revelation is that at the heart of great
literature is the internal struggle that a
character, pulled in different directions
by competing urges, undergoes to unify
himself or herself—the fight against
“the perniciousness of the human self
divide,” she calls it. This is what she
thinks makes great writers write, and it
is what they write about. Gornick’s ideal
of the quest for the unified self is in
herently psychoanalytic; she sees writ
ers attempting to reach on the page
what many people spend years search
ing for in their therapist’s office. For
tunately for therapists, most patients
are never fully cured. Fortunately for
readers, neither are writers.G
ornick has a tendency to rework
her material, a fact that she men
tioned sheepishly to me. (There is a
slightly defensive note at the start of
“Unfinished Business” alerting the
reader to her habit.) A bit of drama at
a longago dinner party; a story about
a consequential love affair; a humiliat
ing episode when her mother cut a patch
off the front of her party dress, accus
ing her of heartlessness: all reappear in
different books, with subtly different
emphases. Sooner or later in the Gor
nick corpus, you will come across a fa
vorite motto by Anton Chekhov: “Oth
ers made me a slave, but I must squeeze
the slave out of myself, drop by drop.”
That is what it means, to Gornick, to
be an artist. To have a politics is to try
to squeeze the slave out of others, too.
In the late sixties, after finishing grad
uate school, Gornick started writing for
the Village Voice. The paper formed her
in two big ways. The first was that it got
her writing regularly. (Gornick has fre
quently suffered from writer’s block, and
she has written beautifully about that
agony.) “It was really like kindergarten.
There was no constraint of any sort,”
she told me. “It taught me the meaning
of a point of view.” The second thing
the Voice did was send Gornick to cover
a women’slib gathering on Bleecker
Street in 1970. She came back a convert
to the cause. Suddenly, she had a frame
work to explain the whole world. The
culture told men to take their brains se
riously while dismissing women’s, and