Home: Leila Rosen—English Teacher and
Aesthetic Realism Associate
Aesthetic Realism explains
that when we’re determined to have our way through contempt, we’ll work to
justify feeling things are against us. I often acted hurt by something or
someone; I never got the breaks, as I saw it; I felt left out, and that no one
saw my value. Yet with all my pain, secretly I enjoyed feeling slighted, because then I felt I was right in keeping
to myself.
“Once
you are looking for disappointment,” said Mr. Siegel, “you can be a
super-FBI.” I was! I was adept at
turning any situation into an
affront. If someone pulled out a chair for me, it was because he thought I was
incapable of doing it myself. I reduced people, with whole lives and deep
feelings, into beings whose sole purpose was to lessen me. I didn’t see how
unkind, and also how self-defeating this was, stopping me from feeling close to
anyone.
This
was especially true with men. I yearned for love, for someone to tell me I was
wonderful. Meanwhile, I acted as if no man suited me, and thought: “Who needs
them, anyway?” They got the message! “The problem that a girl has,” writes Mr.
Siegel in his essay “Medusa Is a Nice Girl”:
is
whether self-maintenance is negation or inclusiveness....There is something in
everyone making “Don’t come closer” or “Don’t touch me” seem the wisest and
most representative thing of that person.
I began
to understand this fight in myself when I was asked in a consultation if the
way I went after my father’s praise while scorning him had made me unsure of
myself as to men. I saw that what I’d been looking for from a man—to have him
make me regal while I reserved the right to dismiss him—was like what I’d gone
after with my father, Barney Rosen. As I changed my purpose with him, and
really wanted to know how he saw himself, his past, his work, and more—I came
to have a new respect for men. Meanwhile, there was more I needed to see. I
still felt what I was missing was a man who saw my good qualities and would
praise me in just the right, sensitive way, and I wasn’t hopeful about love. In
a class some years ago, Ellen Reiss asked me:
“What would you rather do, say there's more for you to see, or despair?”
I said, “I’ve preferred despair,” and she continued:
It's a wonderful way of
not having to see any more. ‘I know no one is going to care for me. Other women
may be able to speak to a man a certain way, but I know I’ll never have the
chance.’ It's the same as putting a crown on your head.
This was true, and I love Ms.
Reiss for showing that my insistence on despair was insincere, a form of
contempt, and such a waste of time! Through this and other discussions I felt
much more hopeful. Now, I am proud to say I am deeply in love with a man—
I speak now about a moving
short story of 1907 by the American writer William Sydney
Porter—better known by his penname, O. Henry: “The Last Leaf.” My high school students love this story, in
its compassionate criticism of a young woman’s determination to retreat from
the world, and its showing of her friends’ kindness in being determined that
she not!
In a lecture, Eli Siegel said, “A few
[of O. Henry’s] stories show he belongs to American literature.” I believe this
is one of them. It tells of two young painters sharing a studio in the artists’
colony described as “quaint old
The
doctor gives her a one-in-ten chance—but only if she wants to live, and he tells Sue “she has made up her mind that
she's not going to get well.” We can ask: what had Johnsy used to come to this
decision? Did she, a struggling artist, feel humiliated having to do work that
was less than grand in order, as the author says, to “pave [her] way to Art”?
Might she have felt in some way what I had: that she hadn’t got the breaks, and
did she take
O.
Henry is keen in saying that Johnsy will be stronger if she shows an active
interest in the world. The doctor asks, “Has she anything on her
mind?" and he continues,
Whenever
my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract
50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask
one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a
one-in-five chance for her, instead of one-in-ten.
Sue goes to Johnsy’s bedside when she hears her
murmuring: “‘Twelve,’ ...and a little later ‘eleven’; and [then] ‘eight’ and
‘seven,’ almost together.” “What was there to count?...There was only
a...dreary yard [and an] old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots,
[which] climbed half way up the brick wall.” Johnsy says weakly:
“They're
falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head
ache to count them. But now it's easy....There are only five left now.” "Five
what, dear?” “Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go, too.
I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?"
Sue
is distraught, and Johnsy says,
“I
want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go, too. I’m tired
of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything,
and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor tired leaves.”
When
Johnsy says, “I’m tired of thinking,” she is showing very wrong kind of
determination, which is also very common.
I
don’t want to minimize for a second how terrifying it is for a person to have a
life-threatening illness. Yet I have seen that even when a person is in great
distress, about oneself or a loved one, it is urgent to have a determination on
behalf of life. “Is this true,” asked Eli Siegel, in this vital question:
No
matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its
disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like
it, or one will weaken oneself?
This is centrally about the
fight between the two opposing kinds of determination in a person’s mind. This
story, with its pathos, its careful use of words, and, as we’ll see, the irony
that is O. Henry’s trademark, shows the answer is “YES!”
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