It’s a story republished by the Gospel editions, in a revised translation by Céline Leroy: the tumultuous relationship between the author and his first wife Sylvia Bloch in 1960s New York bohemia. A narrative that concentrates on various forms, various motifs: the chronicle of a countercultural America where you come across Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, and Miles Davis. The portrayal of a woman shattered by mental illness, but also a way to revisit the grand romantic form, to reconfigure the big things such as love, death, and madness.
Leonard Michaels begins by writing about who he was at twenty: a young idler, full of desires, notably the desire to write, not too concerned about his future and still largely dependent on his parents, a couple of Brooklyn employees. One day he meets a young woman at friends’ house, her strange beauty – she is like him of Jewish origin but has something Asian – immediately attracts him. As they find themselves alone in a park by chance, abandoned by their hosts, they walk side by side for a long time without saying a word, then spend the night together and make love. Time passes and they settle down. Leonard introduces Sylvia to his parents, they get married, live a meager life in an apartment at the top of a building without an elevator full of rats and cockroaches. She studies classical literature at the university – she is brilliant. He, who we understand has not yet completed his doctorate, tries to write, without much success.
But what mainly marks their increasingly complicated, increasingly painful life together are their disputes. Daily outbursts, of growing intensity, often starting with a vexation that Sylvia undergoes or believes she undergoes, develop into shouting, threats, tears, broken mirrors, thrown objects, and end in tense sexual encounters or deep sleep for the young woman. Faced with this madness that the young man never really manages to understand if it is his, Sylvia’s or theirs, he remains perplexed, unreflective. It is this very specific posture that gives the text all its beauty. A cruel beauty, full of ambiguity.
Here’s a portrait of a woman portrayed as mad by a man who could only be stacked among the thousand narratives, thousand fictions, and theoretical essays exercised by men as tools of control over the alleged madness of women. Except Leonard Michaels does not reduce anything, precisely. Until the end, tragic, he proves that Sylvia’s madness was not a fantasy or a feminine whim, but an illness. The male narrator finds himself totally powerless, unsupported, and full of shame. Witness, this passage where he finally admits after many hesitations to a friend that he constantly argues with Sylvia, a sign that among men, and even in a milieu of artists and people with largely alternative lifestyles, one did not speak more about these things.
Sylvia is a strange and serious book, a thousand leagues from the glorious and carefree representations of New York beatnik. Leonard Michaels writes with a dry, fragile pen. His narrative, written thirty years after the events, includes passages from his journal at the time, like fragments of an illness never truly healed. He was working on romantic literature – particularly Byron – at the time, and I thought while reading the book of Gérard de Nerval, from whom Sylvia could well be a contraction of two of the most famous books in French romantic literature: Sylvie and Aurélia. Leonard Michaels idolizes the typical feminine idol, places her in reality, examines the nightmare with new tools, but without giving up the lyricism of the ancients, still not understanding how she works or what can be done for her.
