The unexamined life is not worth living, as the saying goes. Does it follow that the unexamined marriage is not worth preserving? These are two of the questions posed in K. Arnold Price’s brilliant, heartbreakingly obscure novel, a brief, dense, incredibly moving portrait of the silent crises facing a woman who finds herself, in the wake of her younger son’s marriage, with the rest of her life ahead of her—a prospect which grows all the more dreadful as time passes and it becomes tragically clear how little she and her husband really know each other, even after 26 years together.
Price was a poet, and it shows in the careful weight she gives each line, in the ruthless focus with which she tells the story in 85 fat-free pages, and the magnificent language which fills them. I won’t go so far as to say it’s one of the finest novels ever written, but I have to wonder how many novels are both this good and this little-known. I included it in my list of most-wanted books, but as I was preparing that list I found a copy online for an absurdly low price and bought it immediately. I do not regret that decision.
Spoilers, though unless the book is reprinted, this is as close as you’re likely to get to reading it.
From the opening lines, Price underlines one of the central themes of the story:
Comfort…no, not comfort but ease. I slump, settling my head, sinking it between my shoulders like a tortoise…and the environment known so that I don’t have to watch or peer—not even see. (3)
In one sense, this is but Pattie’s POV as she and her husband Cormac return home from the wedding of their younger son, Bob. But in another sense, which I didn’t fully appreciate until much later in the book, it’s an immediate tip-off as to how Pattie responds to life and the world around her. But no matter; soon she and Cormac arrive home, a home now occupied only by the two of them, and she finds it wanting:
…I remain, standing in the middle of the living room, looking at it and disowning it. It humiliates me. The polished surfaces shine with an uneasy brightness, the arm-chairs sprawl unashamed, throwing out their arms and exposing the sagging seats that bear the impress of Cormac’s bottom and mine throughout twenty-six years. The settee looks debauched. The room has a dowdy smell. If this is the environment we have made for ourselves—and of course it is—then what have we been all this time? (5)
I quote the text at length, not only to provide context, but to emphasize how good the writing is and how fully the book gripped me from the very start. Indeed, the first of the book’s three sections, about the first 15 pages, is so entirely invigorating to read that I almost couldn’t believe it. I would happily quote the entire first section if space and time permitted, but I’ll limit myself to one additional excerpt before we move on. Okay, two; one because it’s just awesome, and one because it lays some vital thematic groundwork:
What checks and chills me is that I come home unsuspectingly, and suddenly it is not home, it is an unlikeable house stamped with mediocrity and choked with trivia. I have lived in it for years, perhaps not complacently but easily. What is happening now: every object that I see strikes me—assaults would be a better word. I seem to have no choice about this. (10)
…I have had some fun observing the flux of fashion in novel writing, in literary criticism and advertisement, in journalism. I felt superior, I think. Other people seemed to be at times simply mobile bodies directed hither and thither by a zeitgeist no better than a poltergeist.
But now, my reaction to this house: is it any better, that is, more real, more sensitive, more perceptive than my brash acceptance of other people’s values when I furnished? Am I, or my ‘taste’ any more than a series of unrelated impulses? Like an amoeba? (15)
“stamped with mediocrity and choked with trivia.” What a great line. The first section of the book is, indeed, frequently quite funny, and so much fun to read by virtue of its sheer skill that the pleasure cannot quite be sustained – and, to be sure, the second and third sections of the book lose just the tiniest bit of steam, for reasons I’ll get to in a second.
In any case, Pattie and Cormac have lived in this house – Number Twelve – for many years, and are ready for something new. And in the second section of the book (which takes up about half of its total length), they get it, in the form of a house which Cormac has been trying to sell (he is a housing agent and runs an auction house with his cousin; Pattie is a librarian), a house on Addison Road. They move into the house, a choice described characteristically:
They linger in the dismal, dark green hall looking peacefully about them. They have decided, as usual, without discussion, that they are going to live here. (21)
At this point Price, who has been telling the story entirely in Pattie’s first-person voice, begins alternating between the first and third person, albeit sticking with Pattie’s POV. It’s a choice which initially disappointed me, because the third-person narration lacks the vivid wit of Pattie’s own voice, but it serves its own purpose in helping to illustrate, with a more objective eye, the gradually developing fissures in Pattie and Cormac’s marriage.
As they remodel and furnish the new home according to their own tastes, Pattie becomes uncomfortably aware of Cormac’s detached restlessness and her own self-alienation:
At this low ebb I know I have no virtu—that is, no skills, no talents, no flair, have never learned any technique. There seem to be a lot of negatives in my life…
My wrists ache from using the clippers. My right thumb is sore. It comforts me a bit. I am not stupid or unhealthy, but I think I am blind and deaf. My senses have never been trained. If they had been good senses they might have trained themselves. A queer thought comes…Contentment has deformed me. The narrow pound of happiness with Cormac has kept me sightless, tasteless, handless…. (25)
Meanwhile, Cormac, preoccupied with tweaking the house, begins bit by bit to pull away from Pattie’s invitations to cuddle by the fireside (31-32) and to have breakfast on their new patio (39). But he has not turned away from Pattie, per se, so much as he has turned toward his own interests, which leads to his unexpected purchase of a violin – this when Pattie had no idea he had ever played, or had any special interest in music. He reveals he had given up the instrument when he had to take over his father’s business as a young man, but missed it “terribly” – an admission which leads Pattie to a quietly harrowing realization:
When has Cormac ever admitted to missing anything? To being disappointed? Depressed? Frustrated?
Never.
And yet a silent renunciation for thirty years.
Nearly all those years he was with me. This is what shakes me.
I don’t know him. I don’t know my husband. (47)
As Pattie struggles with the revelation and the existential crises it prompts, Cormac becomes increasingly involved in his new hobby, practicing every day and playing (privately) once a week with Mario Busato, a local instrument-maker, which means he and Pattie spend less and less time together; “When at home in the evening he sometimes goes to bed after practising without coming down to the kitchen for the customary cup of tea.” (53)
Then, when Busato wants to introduce Miriam Colman, a local harpsichordist, into their little ensemble, Cormac asks Pattie to help arrange an evening where the three musicians can play together while Pattie and Miriam’s husband Tim can, presumably, entertain each other (we learn they were once lovers). It doesn’t go so well:
Uncomfortable, awkward, embarrassing!…
I understood then (with fury) that I had been asked to come ‘too’.
Tim, poor Tim, would have to talk to me all the evening.
And I would have to talk to him. (60)
This prompts Pattie to wonder at the difference between her own marriage and the Colmans’:
Is it their hiding place? Did they give up hope long ago? Miriam’s eyes are full of disillusionment.
Did Tim go to ground, take cover in that very private house, with its soothing, almost smothering suggestion of letting the world go by?…
Are most of our actions prompted by fear? No, I find that silly. I haven’t often felt fear. My life has been mainly lusty and lustful. (61)
But Pattie is not much reassured about the fundamental happiness (as opposed to the absence of unhappiness) in her own life, even if there are still high points in their marriage – a trip to Corsica and shared breakfasts on the patio especially. But the violin draws more true passion from Cormac than does their marriage, and after one breakfast he makes a quietly fateful statement:
It’s given me a new perspective, he says. (67)
The third part of the book (quite brief, like the first) sees Cormac and Pattie taking a drive out to Stringers Lodge, a country home which has piqued Cormac’s interest. Cormac’s obvious delight in the house as they explore it raises Pattie’s suspicions, and they are justified:
Cormac, she says faintly, You haven’t…you don’t mean…
Yes, says Cormac. I’ve bought it. Nothing signed, but there will be no trouble. (75)
Cormac’s thoughtlessness only deepens Pattie’s silent despair:
I used to think that we were special, Cormac and I.
I thought we had something that others had not.
I think now that Cormac is special and I am not…
…When I look back through that narrowing perspective it seems that I was always running; running after comrades, crying Wait for me!—or running ahead calling Come on!…
A hasty girl. An unreflecting woman scratching the surface of the soil like a busy hen. (77)
And so Price lays heartbreakingly bare the theme she has teased from the first lines of the book. Pattie, in failing to dig beneath the surface of her own life, in living as smooth and conventionally agreeable a life as possible, has incurred her own spiritual desolation. The tragedy is that she is more than wise enough to realize it.
She makes one last attempt to involve herself in Cormac’s musical ensemble (soon to be a full-blown chamber orchestra, for which purpose he is buying Stringers – the drawing room will become a music room); she will personally pay for the harpsichord the orchestra requires. But when she proposes the idea, Cormac shoots it down with shattering nonchalance:
But he straightened up and turned round and said very pleasantly (but looking down at something in his palm): Not at all, I wouldn’t let you do it. You must spend your money on yourself.
I walked up to him and seized him by the lapels.
But I want to do it, Cormac! I’d like to do it! It would give me a feeling I had a part in it—
No, no, you don’t get any pleasure out of it. And when we begin to play at Stringers you’ll have the chore of getting supper for us. (81)
It was a stupid idea.
Nevertheless I feel battered. Cold. Chilled by reasonableness. (82)
Here, arguably, is the closest Price comes to giving her work an overtly feminist message. Elsewhere, there is little if any hint that Cormac is coming from a place of patriarchy, but it’s certainly hard to read his dismissal of Pattie’s offer – as far as I can recall, the only time in the book he out-and-out tells her no – as not being at least a little paternalistic. Elsewhere, Price shows Pattie as taking the blame for her ultimate desolation largely upon herself (though this does not erase the potential specter of internalized misogyny):
…I brought up the boys, nearly bursting myself to be true mother and Cormac’s girl, as well as keeping myself fresh (not merely efficient) in my profession. The strain, the consciousness of the triple life was always there…
I don’t know that those years have left anything.
Am I ennobled by motherhood? Of course not.
Did I ever address Cormac as Daddy? Of course not.
But for twenty-eight years I foolishly, oh, naively believed that Cormac loved me very much because he fucked me very often. (84)
In any case, Pattie realizes that the dynamic between herself and Cormac is shifting, and she must adjust accordingly, but the thought unnerves her, bringing her to another existential precipice:
…I need not be useful; that is doing.
I must try being.
It will be difficult.
How can I know what being is?
Shall I be an empty vessel, filling gradually with rubbish that will deaden all vibration? (83)
Praise all living, said Sappho or someone. Praise all living, the light and the dark.
I am not big enough for that. (84)
If I have quoted the book at great length, it is not only because it is so full of first-rate writing, but because it is so dense, so free of extraneous detail, that you can scarcely leave out so much as the content of a page in summarizing it, lest you distort the precise flow of its narrative. In any case, it is so hard to find (as of this writing, there don’t appear to be any copies available on AbeBooks, and just one used copy on Amazon…for $250) that I don’t mind sharing as much of it as possible.
Price was not a prolific writer; apparently she published poems and short stories throughout the 20th century, but aside from the short-story collection The Captain’s Paramours, published five years after The New Perspective (at which point Price would’ve been in her early 90s) and her poem “Death at Teatime,” her work is all but impossible to trace. It’s worth noting The Captain’s Paramours is, at the moment, not too hard to get ahold of. Perhaps I should do so.
It’s almost fitting that this incredible little book about the suffocation of an unfulfilling life should have emerged from so little-known a figure, and should remain so obscure itself. And, however often I return to it (I am loath to part with my copy, at least permanently), I do believe the quiet tragedy of Pattie will haunt me, especially those final lines which, in context, are some of the saddest closing lines of a book I can think of:
I am very healthy. I may live a long time.
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