We’ve already seen hints of Heloise.
In the first part, we heard a bit of her imagined voice in Abelard’s poem.
In the second, we saw Abelard’s unburdening himself to her — which culminates in a declaration of what she is for him and what he wants of her:1
From S. Charney, H. Leivick: 1888-1948
But Heloise is on stage as much as Abelard in Abelard and Heloise, even if we don’t hear her properly until the end of the first act. In fact, she’s the one wearing the trousers here. Or, rather, the beard.2 Because she’s in Abelard’s monastery, disguised as a deaf-mute monk. Suddenly, those poems about her coming to Abelard disguised as a man make far more sense. It is, of course, the rough plot of those poems from Abelard to Heloise from Lider fun Gan Eyden.
But Heloise remains a bit of a cypher to us. There aren’t any poems from Heloise to Abelard. Though she’s on stage the whole time, we aren’t made privy to her intimate thoughts as we are to Abelard’s. We know what she is in Abelard’s conception — she is mother, sister, wife. She is the person who completes him, repairs his fragmentation. She is the tikkun for his world. Possible the whole of the world.
To go off on a tangent, here’s where my quibble with Gilman mentioned in Part One comes in: When he writes about the contemporaneous ‘Spinoza’ sequence, he spends a bit of time talking about the word for ‘limb’ — eyver — highlighting that, just like in English, it can also mean the male member and the reader would have understood it to mean so. I would argue that if Leivick meant that (and this is a big if) it would have more obscured, even to the point of absence, if we recall how he spoke about Abelard’s castration: he essentially didn’t. And that the inclusion of the word in a verse suggesting close bodily contact, limb to limb, in particular wouldn’t have been done with a double meaning intended. Why? Because Leivick himself tells us he doesn’t like innuendo and because of the deep discomfort with the sexual act in evidence here in Abelard and Heloise, work of the same period.3
The image, in fact, of lying to face, limb to limb, even mouth to mouth, is one Leivick associates with creation and the divine, not solely the sexual — it’s frequently God that someone lies face to face with. That’s the case with the Spinoza sequence. It’s also the case in ‘Clouds Behind the Woods,’ where God lies face to face with the speaker ‘like a woman’ but proves to be a mother. In another version, in essay, it’s Leivick himself lying face to face with the dead/dreaming Golem like this, breathing life back into him.4
To get back to Heloise, Abelard and Heloise are closer than ever before to being one after his castration (the literal point of absence, here), not before. It allows the mother and sister angle to freely join that of lover/wife with no restraint.
Significantly, for a work by Leivick, she is the one who wears the physical chains, and does so of her own free will. She wears them because she wishes to feel the mortification of the body that Abelard experiences, she wants to share in his suffering. As far as Leivick is concerned, that’s the ne plus ultra — the embodiment of ideal radical empathy. J. Opatoshu writes of Leivick’s work that he sees ‘the road to eternity is hunger for love, which leads through pain and suffering.’ 5
You can see this particular thread, wanting to take on the suffering of another out of love, of joining completely with them, wending its way through so many of his works, it’s probably easier to list those where it doesn’t appear.
While Levi Shalit compares Heloise and Redemption Comedy’s Dvorel, she’s as much the hardline union organiser Mina (from Shop) and the Bundist women of Hirsh Lekert. In her wearing of chains to share in Abelard’s fate, she also owes something to the biblical figure of the prophet Jeremiah, wearing chains and a yoke of his own making. Abelard is horrified, and in an echo of Leivick himself justifying the blood in his own poems and the critiques of those who would label him a masochist, tells Heloise that people will start to get the idea they like being tortured. And here S. Charney, presenting Abelard as rebel (he is, after all, writing books the Church itself wants to burn), gives us Heloise’s response.
If Abelard is a rebel, then Heloise is the most revolutionary of all.
When Heloise finally does speak at length — after her first act silence and her second act largely subservient to Abelard and still in male guise — only then do we really see her strength, both mental and physical. And her power. It far outstrips that of both Abelard and his superior, Father Gregory.
In the end, she does dispose of her nun’s clothes in a more metaphorical way.
Heloise and Abelard are, of course, caught mid-escape by Father Gregory. She returns to her convent, Abelard goes back to his monastery. But the two of them, particularly Heloise, are altered — or perhaps it is just our perception of them. She becomes the instrument of the divine upon the earth. In other words, not just nun, but a prophet.
A prophet and a revolutionary are certainly not contradictory concepts for Leivick.
In a rather lovely essay about attending synagogue for Rosh Hashanah in 1947, he writes about his horror at realising that the man who has gone up to open the ark is chewing gum. He then extends his symbol — the man who chews gum when he should be acting as though he stands before God — to all walks of life, to all Jewish experiences. Everyone acts as though they do not stand before God. The labour leader, the school activist, the man on the bimah, they all chew gum. They go through the motions.
Heloise is the revolutionary who demands accounting for human suffering from those in control. She is prophet who serves a God with none of those false trappings and hierarchies, with no church or nun’s habit, only sky, trees, sun and moon.6 Bodies are disposed of. There is only ideal and pure faith. I’ll turn you over again to S. Charney:
No gum-chewer, Heloise, and woe to those who are.
This going into the earth is another one of Leivick’s recurring poetic themes, and one which appears quite frequently in Lider fun Gan Eyden, the volume most relevant to Abelard and Heloise. Sometimes it’s a very straightforward burial, and sometimes it’s the idea of totally merging with the physical, natural world and everything around, becoming a blade of grass, a leaf on an (apple) tree...
You could probably make something of the fact that she spends the first two acts wearing a beard, dressed as a man. I won’t. But you probably could. Incidentally, I’ve written before about the male tenderness that sometimes pops up in Leivick — and it does here, too, with one of the monks acting as go-between for Abelard and Heloise and aiding and abetting their escape out of the goodness of his heart.
Also, conversely, there’s other stuff there that’s far more plainly erotically charged, including that scene of Abelard’s discomfort with his parents’ sexuality. You don’t really have to look for subtext when there’s text, as far as I’m concerned.
Originally, I believe, in a little book printed in Kharkiv called At the Edge of the Beginning. But I’ve never seen a copy and don’t know who even has one. Good think Leivick happily quotes himself:
‘…Brother mine, where are you? — I want to go up to you in the attic and fall with my mouth to your lips ———
…I will breathe upon you with my breath. I will awaken you from your sorrowful sleep ———
…I will say: Stand up, and you will stand up ———’
I’ve probably said it before, but while Charney says there’s no life and love in Leivick’s early work and if there is, it’s under snow and ice…both Opatoshu and Glanz-Leyeles, both much closer friends, as Leivick speaks elsewhere about the reserve between him and Charney as critique and writer despite their friendship, see it there rather plainly and specifically make mention of it. I would agree that it’s probably the major theme in Leivick’s work, in all its multiple varieties. Sure, there’s suffering, but why? Because of love for something or someone.
Here, I am reminded of ‘The Stable,’ one of the long ‘pogrom poems’ at the close of 1923’s In Keynem’s Land. The beasts of the desecrated shul’s painted ceiling escape to the woods to find the sole true believer amongst the brothers who have fled the town. There are quite a lot of instances of divine or supernatural things and enlightenment happening in the forest in Leivick’s work, and the parting of Abelard and Heloise in the third act certainly fits into this.