History of a literary radical, and other essays - Randolph Silliman Bourne

KAREN

Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.

I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay, and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport between us which she was always anticipating—this seemed to make up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth working for. Karen did not think, she felt—in slow, sensuous outlines. You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then you quarreled.

When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education, the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her, that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured. It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support. She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood, and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul, and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.

I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic. She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an “affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared. Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex, her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.

Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen, a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.” They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness. But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.

Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men. She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man’s woman. She spoke of the “human sex,” and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.

When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way, was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not acquired that mystic sense of “loyalty to woman” and did not believe that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity. Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in to be mystically mingled with her circle.

Naturally it is Karen’s married friends who cause her greatest concern. Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine tyranny. In the enemy’s country, under at least the nominal yoke, these married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle, inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they see jealously adoring their wives.