*But unnuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It’s the nuance that makes us act like civilized human beings, even when we do not feel like civilized human beings. Do away with nuance and it’s all animal life; in other words, war.* The following passages from Chapter 7 of Vivian Gornick's Unfinished Business shows her evoking and resisting the seductive pull of enemy images. It starts with a description of a character from Pat Barker's Regeneration, Billy Prior, who is filled with class hatred. He knows who the enemy is. She understands the pleasure that comes from this certainty, feels it with an intense nostalgia. Taking a detour through her memories of watching the musical Gypsy, she empathizes with those who draw power from "simple, irreducible clarity", secure in the belief that "they had the truth, they knew the enemy, they felt the justice of their cause: no nuance, no complexity, no second thoughts." But she ends with a realization that those who are gripped by enemy images are condemned to live stunted lives, "hardened steadily around an inner life grown smaller and smaller." With the hindsight of age, she knows "how long and comparatively undamaged a life it took to admit of nuance, take in complexity, welcome second thoughts" and is grateful for "a life that had taken me from that single-mind-bloodlust to the pain and confusion brought on by the gap in myself between practice and theory, the one that forced on me recognition of all the human exceptions to the ideological rule." > All the patients at Craiglockhart are officers of the educated middle and upper classes. Among them, Billy is a social anomaly, an officer who is streetsmart working-class. Possessed of an intelligence built to calculate the winning odds in any situation he confronts, Billy is cunning, sensual, and if need be criminal: sexually wild, infused with class hatred, devoted to survival at all costs. Nonetheless, the war has brought him to a level of alienation even he never imagined himself capable of. Raised in the slums of the urban north, Billy had always considered England’s mean-spirited class system the one true enemy of life. But now, after France and the trenches, he sees all of humanity as an existential horror. The question of how and whether Billy—in all his thrilling misanthropy—will make his way back into the company of the living is the beating heart of the book’s matter. > It’s hard for me to describe how deeply Billy Prior entered into me. He threw me back on a sense of working-class solidarity I had not experienced in fifty years: a sense so joyfully antisocial that for a moment it scared me, but only for a moment. The pleasure I had once taken in the pugnacious certainty aroused by class struggle—you have the truth, you know the enemy, you feel the justice of the cause—it flooded me now, in Billy’s company, with a nostalgia keener than any other I could recall feeling. And then, for the first time in decades, I remembered myself watching Gypsy. > > There’s a history in American theater of the anti-romantic musical. It has an ugly little thing to say, this musical, and it never loses sight of it; therein lies its strength. Gypsy—the story of a celebrated stripper and the most infamous stage mother on record—is one of the great examples of the genre. I know this because the ugly little thing that Gypsy has to say spoke directly to me. > > I was in my twenties the first time I saw Gypsy, and Ethel Merman was playing Rose, the mother. Merman was one of the great belters of all time, with an acting style to match. In her performance there was no nuance, no complexity, no second thoughts. She was like a natural force, crude and overwhelming: fierce, ignorant, a killer. She wanted hers, and nothing, nothing, nothing was gonna get in her way. I loved it. I loved it with a hard pressing love that both frightened and exhilarated me. Here I was, this college girl barely out of the immigrant working-class ghetto, with a sense of the world belonging to everyone but me, yet at a moment in social history when I, and all those like me, suspected that we didn’t have to become our parents: only we’d have to fight to get ours. And there was Rose, up there on that stage doing it for me. The energy this scene induced in me came from so far down inside it seemed as though it could make its own laws. When Merman reached the balcony with “Rose’s Turn,” my head was bursting with a sense of payback that nothing could make seem unjustified. Rose was a monster? So what. She was my monster. > > The next time, years later, that I was in a theater where people in the audience were screaming with joy because some monster up there on the screen was doing it for them, the theater was a movie house and all around me young black men and women were calling out, “Kill him! Kill him!” and laughing “fit to die.” For a moment I was startled, but the moment passed quickly enough. I turned in my seat and saw, in the faces all around me, the simple, irreducible clarity I myself had once felt. They had the truth, they knew the enemy, they felt the justice of their cause: no nuance, no complexity, no second thoughts. I understood. And I went on understanding for a remarkably long time. > And suddenly I knew that this was how Billy Prior would have ended up, had he lived (which he didn’t), because he, like Tom, would have come out of the war also permanently stunted: “You will never make me feel.” The class hatred that fueled his raison d’être would have hardened steadily around an inner life grown smaller and smaller; sleeping with women or upper-class men for “revenge” would become routine; family life would not make a dent in him. Thrown back on a self that, increasingly, wasn’t there he would have continued to have his unchanging truth, know his lockstep enemy, never doubt the justice of his simple cause. I knew this because I had cheered on Rose in Gypsy and cried “Yes! Yes! Yes!” when Billy fucked the upper-class officer, and I knew how long and comparatively undamaged a life it took to admit of nuance, take in complexity, welcome second thoughts. > In service to class struggle (or women’s rights, for that matter) I have experienced many times those deliciously hard-edged feelings Billy had whenever he was ripping off authority, and I know while in their grip one imagines oneself bold, free, liberated. But unnuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It’s the nuance that makes us act like civilized human beings, even when we do not feel like civilized human beings. Do away with nuance and it’s all animal life; in other words, war. > > I was grateful that I’d been allowed a life that had taken me from that single-mind-bloodlust to the pain and confusion brought on by the gap in myself between practice and theory, the one that forced on me recognition of all the human exceptions to the ideological rule. I realized then that because my life had been sufficiently free of catastrophe I remained equipped with a renewable spirit that had often been laid low but never done in.