did not. Instead, I told her she was improving. There must have been something in my voice, however, because she gave me a startled, enquiring look. There was a silence between us; then she broke into a sudden, almost capricious, utterly feminine smile. She is, after all, a very young woman who doesn’t seem to comb her hair, and wears blue jeans. But when I speak to her, she seems to understand. Her receptivity is almost disturbing. It is a form of innocence, but also of knowing. She seems to take everything in through her senses, and to absorb it like some heliotropic plant. I wonder if she has the strength to become an artist. The terrible, ruthless dedication. She would need to unwoman herself, to become harder. I wonder if anyone should wish such a fate on her.
Unwoman … What a strange word. Lying back against the fluffy pillow in her hotel room, she sees Wolfe’s gaunt figure striding across the Retreat, his sensitive face with deeply set grey eyes, his chest receding into a concave arc in some ineffable act of withdrawal. They called him the Great Refuser, the snarky young who came each summer, secretly to worship him, and among themselves, to mock him. No late-night carousing, no joking, no drink, seemingly no sex. Practically no possessions, as far as anyone could see. So much refusal, in greedy prosperous counter-cultural America, was practically exotic; and it added to his cult status, his austere glamour. He was an enigma, in the face of which they tried to maintain their ironic cool. And anyway, how could they guess what he was refusing; where his steely rigors came from. She could not, herself … Very little was known about him, except the rumors: that he had been an almost MajorFigure in his native Germany; and that he left, in some obscure act of flight. Perhaps he had committed a crime, or was running away from a broken love affair … Although none of them could imagine Wolfe in love. She sees him striding into his whitewashed cottage at the end of the day, and into his complete, his uncompromising solitude. A riddling icon, incongruous in the pristine Appalachian setting, like some Easter Island statue found improbably in a South American jungle. She wishes she could have come up to him at the end of that lesson and put her hand on his shoulder, looked directly into his eyes … That she could have broken through his solitude. But that was what he chose: the art monk, art sacrifice. Unwomaned, entirely. Was he right to wonder if she had the kidney for it, the necessary strength.
She sighs. Sometimes she feels like a half-blind creature, groping her way through the maze of her own self … She checks the next day’s schedule, gets ready for bed. The Bulgarian women’s singing comes back to her, with its raw erotic calls; desire without shame, asserted as fiercest strength.
Next morning, she practices Chopin’s Second Scherzo, which she hasn’t played for a while. The enigmatic opening rolls out from under her fingers elastically, followed by the grand proud chords, which leap into the shape of a martial mazurka, as if they were always within her hand. She feels an uninhibited, almost wild joy as the piece opens out into its expansive melody, emerging from her fingers with a fluent, lyrical motion. Like the movement of fleeting thought … Then the alteration to another mini-mazurka, ineffable in its melancholy … The miraculous capriciousness of Chopin’s motifs, turned into a miraculous necessity. How does this happen, she wonders yet again, how did he convert his mercurial fancies into seeming absoluteness? She thinks of Chopin’s house which she’d seen once in Warsaw, andthe romantic park with sloping lawns and low dreamy horizon, a dark pond and weeping willows, and the puffy clouds moving overhead with a fluent motion of their own. All of it in the music … Chopin standing outside peasant cottages in the evenings, listening to raw, wistful songs. In the music too, transformed it into
Unwoman … What a strange word. Lying back against the fluffy pillow in her hotel room, she sees Wolfe’s gaunt figure striding across the Retreat, his sensitive face with deeply set grey eyes, his chest receding into a concave arc in some ineffable act of withdrawal. They called him the Great Refuser, the snarky young who came each summer, secretly to worship him, and among themselves, to mock him. No late-night carousing, no joking, no drink, seemingly no sex. Practically no possessions, as far as anyone could see. So much refusal, in greedy prosperous counter-cultural America, was practically exotic; and it added to his cult status, his austere glamour. He was an enigma, in the face of which they tried to maintain their ironic cool. And anyway, how could they guess what he was refusing; where his steely rigors came from. She could not, herself … Very little was known about him, except the rumors: that he had been an almost MajorFigure in his native Germany; and that he left, in some obscure act of flight. Perhaps he had committed a crime, or was running away from a broken love affair … Although none of them could imagine Wolfe in love. She sees him striding into his whitewashed cottage at the end of the day, and into his complete, his uncompromising solitude. A riddling icon, incongruous in the pristine Appalachian setting, like some Easter Island statue found improbably in a South American jungle. She wishes she could have come up to him at the end of that lesson and put her hand on his shoulder, looked directly into his eyes … That she could have broken through his solitude. But that was what he chose: the art monk, art sacrifice. Unwomaned, entirely. Was he right to wonder if she had the kidney for it, the necessary strength.
She sighs. Sometimes she feels like a half-blind creature, groping her way through the maze of her own self … She checks the next day’s schedule, gets ready for bed. The Bulgarian women’s singing comes back to her, with its raw erotic calls; desire without shame, asserted as fiercest strength.
Next morning, she practices Chopin’s Second Scherzo, which she hasn’t played for a while. The enigmatic opening rolls out from under her fingers elastically, followed by the grand proud chords, which leap into the shape of a martial mazurka, as if they were always within her hand. She feels an uninhibited, almost wild joy as the piece opens out into its expansive melody, emerging from her fingers with a fluent, lyrical motion. Like the movement of fleeting thought … Then the alteration to another mini-mazurka, ineffable in its melancholy … The miraculous capriciousness of Chopin’s motifs, turned into a miraculous necessity. How does this happen, she wonders yet again, how did he convert his mercurial fancies into seeming absoluteness? She thinks of Chopin’s house which she’d seen once in Warsaw, andthe romantic park with sloping lawns and low dreamy horizon, a dark pond and weeping willows, and the puffy clouds moving overhead with a fluent motion of their own. All of it in the music … Chopin standing outside peasant cottages in the evenings, listening to raw, wistful songs. In the music too, transformed it into
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