Abelard and Heloise, Part 2
Emasculated Men
I left off Part One asking how we get to Abelard and Heloise as Leivick’s only explicitly non-Jewish/non-Biblical protagonists — Jews aren’t even mentioned in the text, making it something of an oddity in his corpus.
The answer to that is a fairly simple one. There are, in fact, Jews. Or, rather, there are non-Christians. I’ll explain. Amelia Glaser, in Songs in Dark Times, writes that Leivick affords a sort of honorary Judaism to figures he likes or admires in some way — the example given in Glaser’s text being the executed Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, in his ‘A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.’
Leivick doesn’t go quite as far as extending Abelard and Heloise a provisional Judaism, but in the first few pages of the play, one of Abelard’s fellow monks delivers what he deems a damning judgement — that Abelard is no Christian at all. Which, of course, is actually very high praise from Leivick!1
This and all other excerpts, unless noted, from H. Leivick, Abelard and Heloise, 1935.
If you need any more convincing of Abelard’s Jewish-adjacency, his books have just been burned in the middle of the town. With Abelard and Heloise published in 1935, there’s definitely something happening on the world stage which this might recall. Book burning shows up again in 1944’s Maharam of Rothenburg, where the allusion to Nazi Germany is even harder to ignore, taking place, as it does, partly in Dachau.
There’s something else going on with Abelard, too, which is maybe a bit difficult to pick out of Leivick’s rather reserved summary of their love-story. No surprise there, as Leivick tells us himself at a few junctures that he is a bit prudish when it comes to language, evading slang and profanity; in his introduction to the play reproduced last time, he rather neatly talks around what the ‘shameful operation’ was which was carried out on poor Abelard: castration.
While Leivick might dance around the word, the concept of emasculation is far from a new one in his work by this point. We see traces of it in Rags, with the conflict between old world and new world masculinities within Mordecai Maze and in the relationship with his American-born son and it reappears in a slightly altered form in the struggling Yiddish poet and mostly out of work sweatshop-employee Maxim Thornfeld in The Poet Went Blind and his relationship with his American son and Hebraist brother.
Most clearly, though, and closest to Abelard’s own physically mutilated and traumatised state, the ‘unmanned’ man shows up in Different (1922), where Marcus has come back from the war unable to look at his wife undressed, unable to imagine touching her in the intimate manner she desires, because of the violence he has seen done to the human body during the war. As far as the audience knows, whatever physical injury he has sustained in the army, his inability is solely a mental or emotional impediment.
And so, in fact, is Abelard’s.
Long before meets his cruel fate at the hands of the man who has now become the head of his monastery, Father Gregory, we are introduced to the idea of an Abelard who does not wish to — or cannot — function as a man in the way that society around him demands. There is perhaps a line to be drawn here between Abelard’s rejection of broader societal expectation and the image of the ‘feminine’ Jewish (and chronically sick) man.2 He is certain of his mind, but not his body.
His rejection of society as a young man is a very interesting thing indeed, partly in the details of the description of his childhood home, which forms the core of what he rejects. The closeness and poverty of the family and the surroundings, including the seeming one room set apart for the parents while the rest of the space is shared, echoes Leivick’s descriptions of his own childhood home growing up.
The young Abelard flees as far as he can from these circumstances. From the physicality of the body. Leivick also fled from them as a young man, first ideologically, then physically. You can also see how he might have wanted to escape the bodily entirely when unwell. Everyone’s life, after all, is painful. The mind is certain, the body — less so.
Intriguingly, this is precisely the passage — Abelard’s monologue to Heloise and encountering his parents presumably in the act — that Leivick himself reads in a recording.
But where is Heloise in all this?
To Be Continued…
There’s an absolutely blistering article where he says (and I’ll quote my translation of it): ‘I think that if detonating it now, I would take an atom bomb and throw it into human history — I would throw it backwards and would, in the blink of an eye, blow up these couple thousand years — the couple of yesterdays of human civilisation — and would in this manner erase the lies of all the art, all the crosses, all the bells, which supposedly told the tale of love and are, in truth, no more than a mask which concealed the primal hatred on the faces of people toward ‘Thou shalt not kill.’’ Not a big fan of the Church.
The men of Leivick’s realist dramas are just as likely to sit at a sewing machine as their wives and sisters-in-law are. Drawn, no doubt, a bit from his own experience of working as a cutter and doing haberdashery piecework. Even Wedding at Foehrenwald (1949) changes the maker of the wedding dress in the DP camp from the women’s dressmaking workshop (as it was in reality) to a male sewist.