Unfinished Business by Vivian Gornick

Author:Vivian Gornick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The circle is composed of a group of self-styled intellectuals in their late twenties, early thirties, who, trapped by the Depression into occupational stasis, meet every Saturday evening in Laura’s apartment to lick their wounds; otherwise known as discussing art, literature, and philosophy. Among them are an unemployed wannabe philosopher; an unemployed (also wannabe) journalist; two grade school teachers; and the owner of a business agency—all Jewish, all possessed of literary ambition. Laura, a buyer in a department store, is the only one making money. Bitter because she can’t find a husband, she drinks in the kitchen while preparing the midnight supper for the group, calling out wildly every now and then, somewhat like a demented Greek chorus, that life is unfair. For all of them, Rudyard’s refusal to become a teacher and earn a living represents a noble rejection of the crass world where all that people do is make a living. As Rudyard himself puts it, “For us … it is not so much what we accept as what we reject that is important.” This credo alone persuades them that their Saturday night meetings are a testament to inborn superiority.

Worship of literary talent and philosophical intelligence dominates the members of the circle, along with the ever-rising anxiety that others may have more of it than they do. This anxiety induces the absurd imperiousness with which they all speak, and allows social behavior of the crudest order to pass for normal.

One by one, the psyche of each member of the circle is dissected in the mind of another of the story’s characters fully enough for the reader to see that each is preoccupied with separating himself, if only in his own mind, from the others, as each has no means of defining himself except against those he most resembles. Jacob Cohen, for instance, the most generous-spirited of the group, walks the streets of the city during the week, thinking about his friends as though “borne forward by the feeling that through them he might know his own fate, because of their likeness, difference, and variety.” So what is Jacob thinking?

Francis French is a stiff-necked homosexual who is destroying himself with his obsessive pursuit of sex; Edmund Kish cannot argue a point without letting his interlocutor know that he considers him a fool; likewise, Ferdinand writes stories whose “essential motive … was the disdain and superiority he felt” about the members of his parents’ generation. Then there is Marcus Gross, an insensitive oaf who, when Rudyard praises the philosophical genius of his own plays (which he does regularly), tells him that his plays don’t get produced because they’re not about anything; whereupon Rudyard tells him he is a Philistine, and everyone starts talking at once. Soon enough, one of them complains that in all the evenings he’s been coming here he has yet to utter a complete sentence, and Laura shouts from the kitchen, “I have not uttered a complete sentence since 1928.” Ah, Laura! When she complains that Rudyard,

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