Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes Page B
Authors: Julian Barnes
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towards the end of the fourth volume,
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) Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten’s paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct, and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens’s ancestral home – ‘as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations’. Once, she had watched a fish eagle circling high above a scream of herring gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image. Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses.
Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband? Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher’s very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her.He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view. What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia’s than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. She loathes him – for his gentlemanliness and solemnity, his passiveness, his ‘pompous self-sufficiency’, his ‘brilliance’ and the ‘immorality’ of the views which that brilliant mind emits. When her confessor, Father Consett, suggests that ‘
Tout savoir, c’est tout pardonner
’ she replies that ‘to know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!’ Sylvia is bored by marriage, but even more bored by promiscuity. ‘All men are repulsive,’ she assures her mother. And, ‘man-mad’ though she appears, Sylvia treats her lovers with disdain: they are not even worth properly tormenting. ‘Taking up with a man’, she reflects, ‘was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before.” ’
And this too, in a way, is her husband’s fault. Their relationship is not just about the infliction and the bearing of pain. Key to an understanding of Sylvia are those rare moments when Ford, a profound psychologist, allows us to consider that Sylvia is more than just a vengeful spirit possessed by evil. However infuriating Tietjens might be, however ‘immoral’ his views, he is the only truly mature man she has been with, the only one whose conversation can hold her: ‘As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up.’ So he has spoiled her for all other men, and must be punished for it. The more so because he is the only one who can still move her. In the middle of France, in the middle of war, when a venomous old French duchess seems about to derail a wedding, Tietjens, applying intelligence, practicality and his ‘atrocious’ old-fashioned French, talks the woman down. Sylvia has been watching, and: ‘It almost broke Sylvia’s heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing.’ Two and a halfnovels later, when Tietjens is living with Valentine Wannop and Sylvia has almost reached the bottom of her bag of torments, she imagines confronting her husband’s mistress: ‘But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh, adorable – face of stone.’ That ‘oh, adorable’ says it all. As far as Sylvia can love, she loves Tietjens; and her rage at him is a function of sexual passion. She still desires him, still wants to ‘torment and allure’ him; but one of the Anglican saint’s conditions for her return to the marriage is that he will not sleep with her – a torment in riposte.
As all
Last Post
) Sylvia idly imagined cramming a kitten’s paws into walnut shells; this shows great early skill of a sadic nature. Throughout the novel, she deploys the subtle rumour, the lie direct, and the vicious deed to visit on her husband a series of social, financial and psychological humiliations. Her final act of malignity is the cutting-down of the Great Tree of Groby at Tietjens’s ancestral home – ‘as nasty a blow as the Tietjens had had in generations’. Once, she had watched a fish eagle circling high above a scream of herring gulls, causing havoc by its mere presence; she liked and remembered this as a self-image. Still, for all her apparent viciousness, there is one thing always to be said for Sylvia Tietjens: she is very good with horses.
Why, you may ask, does she persecute her husband? Or, more particularly, why continue, year after year, when she has many admirers, from young bucks to old generals, fawning on her, seeking both her love and her body? Part of the answer lies in Christopher’s very saintliness: the more he fails to respond and suffers without complaint, the more it goads her.He also infuriatingly attempts to see things from her point of view. What could be more enraging to a soul like Sylvia’s than to be understood and forgiven? And so, every time, she returns to the attack on her great meal-sack of a husband. She loathes him – for his gentlemanliness and solemnity, his passiveness, his ‘pompous self-sufficiency’, his ‘brilliance’ and the ‘immorality’ of the views which that brilliant mind emits. When her confessor, Father Consett, suggests that ‘
Tout savoir, c’est tout pardonner
’ she replies that ‘to know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!’ Sylvia is bored by marriage, but even more bored by promiscuity. ‘All men are repulsive,’ she assures her mother. And, ‘man-mad’ though she appears, Sylvia treats her lovers with disdain: they are not even worth properly tormenting. ‘Taking up with a man’, she reflects, ‘was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with a man before you said: “But I’ve read all this before.” ’
And this too, in a way, is her husband’s fault. Their relationship is not just about the infliction and the bearing of pain. Key to an understanding of Sylvia are those rare moments when Ford, a profound psychologist, allows us to consider that Sylvia is more than just a vengeful spirit possessed by evil. However infuriating Tietjens might be, however ‘immoral’ his views, he is the only truly mature man she has been with, the only one whose conversation can hold her: ‘As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up.’ So he has spoiled her for all other men, and must be punished for it. The more so because he is the only one who can still move her. In the middle of France, in the middle of war, when a venomous old French duchess seems about to derail a wedding, Tietjens, applying intelligence, practicality and his ‘atrocious’ old-fashioned French, talks the woman down. Sylvia has been watching, and: ‘It almost broke Sylvia’s heart to see how exactly Christopher did the right thing.’ Two and a halfnovels later, when Tietjens is living with Valentine Wannop and Sylvia has almost reached the bottom of her bag of torments, she imagines confronting her husband’s mistress: ‘But he might come in, mooning in, and suddenly stiffen into a great, clumsy – oh, adorable – face of stone.’ That ‘oh, adorable’ says it all. As far as Sylvia can love, she loves Tietjens; and her rage at him is a function of sexual passion. She still desires him, still wants to ‘torment and allure’ him; but one of the Anglican saint’s conditions for her return to the marriage is that he will not sleep with her – a torment in riposte.
As all
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