Remembering Lore Segal’s Radical Empathy
Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the final 4 months of her life looking the window. Her world had been shrinking for a while, as a hip substitute, a pacemaker, deteriorating imaginative and prescient, and different encroachments of outdated age had made it tough to depart her New York Metropolis residence, even with the help of the walker she known as “my chariot.” However now, after a minor coronary heart assault in June, she was confined to a hospital mattress at house. There, she may research the rooftops and vintage water tanks of the Higher West Aspect—a parochial imaginative and prescient for some, however not for the Viennese-born Segal, who as soon as described herself as “naturalized not in North America a lot as in Manhattan.”
After all, she was an outdated hand at seeing the universe in a nutshell. It was certainly one of her nice virtues as each a author and an individual, and her affinity for tiny, telling particulars had drawn me to her work lengthy earlier than I grew to become her pal. I additionally cherished her freshness of notion. In Segal’s 1985 novel, Her First American, Ilka Weissnix, newly arrived on this nation, disembarks from a prepare in small-town Nevada and has what have to be one of many only a few epiphanies ever prompted by a glue manufacturing unit. “The low constructing was manufactured from a rosy, luminescent brick,” Segal writes, “and quivered within the blue haze of the oncoming night time—it levitated. The basic home windows and sq. white letters, saying AMERICAN GLUE INC., moved Ilka with a way of magnificence so out of proportion to the item, Ilka acknowledged euphoria.”
To some extent, this euphoria will need to have stemmed from Segal’s personal historical past as an immigrant. She left Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938, then lived in Britain and Santo Domingo earlier than making landfall in the USA in 1951. Her books are full of people that have been dislodged from one place and set down in one other. The challenges of such displacement are apparent. However it may be a present for a author, dropped right into a glittering setting whose each element is, to make use of Segal’s favourite phrase, fascinating.
She additionally possessed extraordinary empathy. Segal was fairly particular about what this meant, and resisted the thought of being seen as a sufferer, even when it got here to her slim escape from the Third Reich’s killing machine. “Sympathy pities one other individual’s expertise,” she as soon as wrote, “whereas empathy experiences that have.” It was getting inside different people who counted, even when our grasp of one other human soul was all the time partial.
Her empathetic impulse accounted for a hilarious remark she as soon as made to me about her television-watching habits: “I don’t like to look at exhibits the place individuals really feel awkward.” As a result of that is the modus operandi of just about each post-Seinfeld TV present, it will need to have actually minimize down Segal’s viewing choices. I feel what bothered her have been eventualities particularly engineered to carry out our helplessness in social or existential conditions. She discovered it onerous to hate different individuals and couldn’t even carry herself to dislike the water bug that lived in her kitchen.
I’m not suggesting that Segal was some type of Pollyanna. She was properly conscious of our capability for cruelty and destruction—it had, in any case, been shoved in her face when she was very younger. However her fascination with human habits on the person stage appeared to insulate her from acquired considering on virtually any subject. “Contradiction was her intuition, her autobiography, her politics,” Segal wrote of her doppelgänger, Ilka, who reappeared in Shakespeare’s Kitchen greater than 20 years after the publication of Her First American. “Point out a truth and Ilka’s thoughts kicked into motion to spherical up the details that disproved it. Specific an opinion and Ilka’s blood was as much as voice an reverse concept.” Every little thing needed to be freshly examined; the whole lot needed to cross the litmus check that’s continuously being staged in a author’s mind.
Segal additionally introduced this strategy to ideological truths, few of which made the grade. It’s fascinating to me {that a} author so allergic to ideology managed to supply one of many nice Holocaust narratives and one of many nice American novels about race—tasks that may now be hobbled by questions of authenticity and appropriation. For Segal, the glut of data, and the moral exhaustion that resulted, turned up to date existence right into a minefield, and politics was no approach out. Decency was, however that took huge work and focus.
“To be good, sane, completely happy is easy provided that you subscribe to the Eden principle of unique goodness, unique sanity, and unique happiness, which humankind subverted into an enchanting rottenness,” she wrote in an essay. “Remark would recommend that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that rightness, like every other accomplishment, is one thing achieved.” In all of her books, in each phrase she wrote, Segal struggled for that very rightness. I might say she achieved it too, with superb frequency.
I can’t take into consideration Lore Segal’s work with out interested by my friendship along with her. For years and years, I learn her books and admired her from a distance. It was solely in 2009 that I lastly met Lore, as I’ll now name her. Her writer was reissuing Lucinella, a madcap 1976 novella that in some way mingles the literary life with Greek mythology: Zeus turns up at Yaddo, the distinguished artists’ colony, in a notably priapic temper. I used to be requested to interview her at a bookshop, and we hit it off without delay.
This small, witty, white-haired individual, whose voice nonetheless bore the inflection of her Viennese childhood, was a pleasure to be round. She laughed lots, and made you snicker. Her marvelous capability to concentrate made you are feeling larger-hearted and slightly extra clever—it was as when you have been borrowing these qualities from her. In her residence, with its grand piano and Maurice Sendak drawings and thoroughly organized collections of nutcrackers and fin de siècle scissors, we spent many hours visiting, speaking, joking, complaining. We bemoaned the slowness and blindness and intransigence of editors (even through the years after I was an editor). We drank the dry white wine I’d purchase on the liquor retailer three blocks away, and Lore all the time pronounced the identical verdict after her first sip: “That is good.”
In time, she started sending me early drafts of the tales that will ultimately make up most of her 2023 assortment, Women’ Lunch. As her imaginative and prescient worsened, the fonts grew bigger—by the top, I might be studying one thing in 48-point Calibri, with just some phrases on every web page. I used to be flattered, after all, to perform as a primary reader for certainly one of my idols. I used to be touched as properly to find that she was nonetheless beset with doubts about her work. “Wouldn’t you suppose that age would possibly confer the knowledge that one is aware of what one is doing?” she lamented in an e-mail a few years in the past. “It doesn’t. It deprives.”
We noticed one another, too, at conferences of our ebook group, which Lore had invited me to hitch in 2010. In newer years, we all the time met at Lore’s, as a result of it had grow to be more durable and more durable for her to bundle herself and her walker right into a taxi. Only some weeks earlier than she died, the group met one final time, at her insistence. She had chosen a beloved favourite, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was not going to be cheated out of the dialog.
We sat round her hospital mattress, along with her oxygen machine giving off its periodic sighs within the background. Lore, peering as soon as extra into the microcosm of James’s novel and discovering the entire world inside it, requested the form of questions she all the time requested.
“Are the characters on this novel distinctive individuals?” she needed to know.
“After all not,” replied one other member of the group. “They’re completely typical individuals of the interval, well-heeled Individuals with out an unique thought of their heads.”
This didn’t fulfill Lore. She felt that Lambert Strether, despatched off to the fleshpots of Paris to retrieve his fiancée’s errant son, had been loaned a few of James’s knowledge and perceptive powers (precisely as I all the time thought I used to be borrowing Lore’s). “Reside all you may,” Strether advises, with very un-Jamesian bluntness. And right here was Lore, dwelling all she may, typically resting her head on the pillow between one pithy commentary and the subsequent. It was the capability to really feel, she argued, that had been woke up within the novel’s protagonist. Empathy, moderately than evaluation, was Lore’s true forex to the very finish.
I visited her just some extra instances. She was fading; the multicolored array of capsules and eye drops on the desk grew greater and extra forbidding; the oxygen machine appeared louder with simply the 2 of us within the room.
“I hope I’ll see you once more,” I stated, the final time I left. These are the type of phrases normally uttered originally of a friendship, not on the conclusion. “However no matter occurs, I’ll be considering of you.”
Out the door I went, and boarded the elevator, in whose creaking inside I shed just a few tears, and as I strolled up a kind of Higher West Aspect streets mounded with the trash luggage that Lore had so eloquently described (“the bloated, inexperienced, big vinyl luggage with their unexplained bellies and elbows”), I discovered myself asking: Why can we cry? How can we address loss? What, exactly, is disappointment? These have been the questions that Lore would ask—the questions she had been asking her whole profession. Her books represent a form of reply, a minimum of a provisional one. I shall be studying them for the remainder of my life and, precisely as I promised Lore on my approach out the door, considering of her.