Dreaming A Narcissist 1

Over the years, I’ve received several letters from psychoanalysts remarking on the overlaps in the work we do. I’m sure many writers have received similar letters, because members of both professions routinely devote themselves to tracking and interpreting interior lives. Sometimes my correspondents single out my clear and ongoing interest in character as it changes (or doesn’t change) over long periods of time. That preoccupation of mine is evident in my 2003 novel The Wife. While the book is told from the point of view of the title character, a woman in her 60s named Joan Castleman, she provides the reader with perhaps an even closer grained view of her husband, Joseph Castleman, a world-famous novelist, and, as it would happen, a world-class narcissist.

The novel opens as the Castlemans are on their way to Finland, where Joe will accept the Helsinki Prize for Literature, an award (invented by me) that is described as “one step down from the Nobel,” and which the couple has long hoped Joe would win. Joan recounts the beginning of their relationship—how they first met when she was his student in a writing class at Smith College in the 1950s—and how, over time, she put aside her own literary ambitions and became known as the supportive wife of a prominent writer.

Once various scenes and small details—all from Joan’s point of view—began to accrue during the first draft, and once I had developed a good sense of who Joe was, I realized that what I had created was a narcissist, and a dedicated one at that, so I tried to deepen the portrayal with this quality in mind. The term narcissism has been bandied about so much in the culture in recent years that in general usage it’s become uncoupled from exact meaning, and instead is left blurry and vague, a kind of “I know it when I see it” term, à la Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 line about obscenity. Many of us have become armchair analysts, diagnosing degrees and stripes of narcissism. Talking to a novelist friend recently, she told me that someone had mentioned to her in passing “the thin-skinned type of narcissist.” To which my friend responded that the phrase accurately described most of the people in her life.

I don’t think Joe Castleman is “the thin-skinned type of narcissist,” the type that is always counting the house at a public event or checking his Amazon numbers. Instead, Joe is something different—more appealing and therefore maybe more pernicious. But how did he and his narcissism come into being?

I’ve been trying to track the creation of my character within the world of my novel, which has led me to think more generally about the creation of fictional characters within the world of any novel. It’s always been my sense that novels are like advent calendars; there are different doors that a writer can open and enter, and whichever door is chosen ends up crucially shaping and forming the novel itself. To extrapolate from this idea, maybe all characters are themselves in a way like advent calendars, in that there are various doors that writers might open and enter in order to create and understand them, and it’s part of the writer’s job to decide which door will be the most relevant, exciting, and ultimately useful.

When I created Joe Castleman, I didn’t enter through the narcissism door. By which I mean, I didn’t think of his narcissism front and center; and that’s because I’ve never started developing a character through any one attribute, but instead through a collection of hunches that together begin to create what Henry James called “felt life.” There’s a bit of a conundrum at work here. How can a writer flesh out the specifics of a character if he or she doesn’t know the character’s personality? And how can he or she come to know that personality if the specifics haven’t yet been identified?

I’m a writer who tends to think that a fictional character’s essence can often be revealed most deeply when he or she is shown in conversation with other characters. If I place two (or more) people in a scene, even ones I don’t yet know or entirely understand, and allow their conversation to go wherever it will, I start to get more of a sense of who they are. A friend who was once hospitalized said that he could see who people really were when they came to visit him during his stay. While most visitors were respectful of his needs and boundaries, he said that a narcissist who visited him one day plopped himself down on the end of the bed, actually on the hospitalized person’s feet, and spent the visit talking about himself. I suppose my friend’s awareness is analogous to how a therapist might begin to understand patients through their behaviors in the sessions: Do they show up late, or take a phone call midsession? Do they leave crumpled tissues behind when they leave? My own observations of my characters always need to extend to their conversations and their actions, even the small, incidental ones, while I try to intrude as little as possible.

Novels that are character focused tend to lend themselves well to film, and in 2017, 14 years after The Wife was published, the film version was released, starring Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce. While in the novel Joan Castleman tells her own story, in the film Glenn Close’s marvelous performance relies a lot on her facial expressions, and for much of the running time Joan withholds her sharpest words from her husband and from the audience. Tonally, the book and the film (the latter has Joe win the Nobel Prize, not the Helsinki Prize) are different works, and they employ different strategies to get to the same place, which is the end of a marriage and the revelation of its hard truths. Joan is openly angry from the start of the novel. As a narrator, she is “in your face,” both pissed off and very funny. Right away she is the one who tells us—and the one who helped showed me—that Joe is the narcissist he is.

All I knew for sure when I began writing The Wife was that there was going to be a female character “of a certain age,” who has subjugated herself to her outsized husband and finally come to resent it. The names—Joan Castleman and Joe Castleman—rose up for me as if in a dream; I liked the short, similar, bookended first names and the shared fortress-of-power last name, with its winking “man” at the end. Her resentment builds until it is no longer tenable, at which point the terms of the “contract” buried at the heart of their marriage—and I suspect most marriages have their own version of a contract—are conveyed to the reader.

For me, this idea came straight from the culture, and from the idea of men being given greater voice than women, and freely taking it, not worrying about whether they’re taking too much, or whether anyone else is getting less because of how much they’re getting. I set the novel in the world of writers because it was a universe I knew well. I’m the daughter of novelist and short-story writer Hilma Wolitzer, who began publishing stories in her 30s and published a story collection ² 3 years ago at the age of 91. When I was a teenager I accompanied my mother in the summer to a writers’ conference, where she was on the faculty. I proudly watched her come into her own as a writer, teacher, and public speaker. But I couldn’t help but notice the way some of the far more well-known writers, almost always men, held court, hogging public speaking time and conversation.

As I grew older and became a writer myself, I continued to take in the ways in which men in the arts (not to mention elsewhere) were given enormous amounts of attention. I saw how they were sometimes given license to behave in self-centered and loud-voiced and even destructive ways. Everyone knew that Norman Mailer had stabbed his wife in 1960, yet he continued to be considered a literary lion. In fact, when The Wife was published and I gave my first reading from it, a woman on the signing line told me that she was Adele Mailer, the wife he’d stabbed. I believe the review in the New York Times had come out shortly before the reading, and perhaps she’d seen it and felt a kinship with Joan. At the time, I didn’t think to ask her, though I wish I had.

During the writing of the book, a connection began forming in my mind between men who are allowed free rein and a certain recognizable personality type. Here is how I have Joan, the novel’s narrator, describe her husband as the two of them are headed on the airplane to Finland:

He was Joseph Castleman, one of those men who own the world. You know the type I mean: those advertisements for themselves, those sleepwalking giants, roaming the earth and knocking over other men, women, furniture, villages. Why should they care? They own everything, the seas and mountains, the quivering volcanoes, the dainty, ruffling rivers. There are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who loved to consume runny cheeses and whiskey and wine, all of which he used as a vessel to carry the pills that kept his blood lipids from congealing like yesterday’s pan drippings, who was as entertaining as anyone I have ever known, who had no idea of how to take care of himself or anyone else, and who derived much of his style from The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.

When my book appeared in translation in Sweden, years after its initial American publication, I learned that there was a recently coined, relevant term: the “kulturman,” which The Guardian describes as

usually a 50- or 60-year-old man with an (inflated) sense of importance within the Swedish culture scene. A Man Of Culture, if you will. . . . A kulturman enjoys relaying his experience or knowledge, often to women or younger people, and usually in public.

For a long time Joan wanted the kind of marriage and life she had, and felt there was no other way she could have lived. It’s only on the plane to Finland that she finally realizes that what she’s accepted are essentially the “pan drippings” of her husband’s career. Still, at one point in the film (not the novel, though I do like this line a lot) she says, “Don’t paint me as a victim. I’m much more interesting than that.”

The film’s screenwriter, Jane Anderson, has spoken publicly about how the movie took many years to get made, in part because none of the male actors who were initially approached wanted to play a part like that, particularly in a film called The Wife. But Jonathan Pryce (not an American actor, interestingly) clearly didn’t feel that way, and he played the part with subtlety, charm, and wit. Joe Castleman—both in the novel and as depicted by Pryce—probably knows that he’s a narcissist, but thinks it’s a no harm/no foul situation, because in his view everyone around him can benefit from his self-regard. Yet as long as Joe is always at the center of his own vision, how can he ever see or know or have compassion for his wife?

Joe’s narcissism, while not my advent-calendar door into the novel, eventually provided guidance as I wrote the book. I could lampoon him, as Joan frequently does (and it was important to me that Joan’s voice be as funny as it is angry), but the friability of Joe’s ego eventually had to become clear to the reader, along with the damage he has caused. Narcissism may be funny to write about, but I am sure it’s not at all funny to see in one’s clinical practice, and I am also sure it’s often tragic within the context of a long marriage. Something has to give, and in the case of the Castlemans’ marriage, it eventually does.

Near the end of the novel and the film, after Joan tells Joe she is going to leave him, he dies of a heart attack—essentially leaving her before she can leave him. Also in both the novel and the film, Joan rebuffs his snooping biographer, and we get a sense that she will finally have a chance to tell her own story. In the film she takes out a journal and opens it to an empty page. And in the novel, she declares,

Talent, I knew, didn’t just disappear from the earth, didn’t fly up into separate particles and evaporate. It had a long half-life; maybe I could use it eventually. I could use parts of what I’d seen and done and had with him, making something vicious or beautiful or loving or regretful out of it . . . .

But even as Joan seems to get the last word, the pull toward her marriage and the allure and safety of the status quo remain in evidence. Surely Joe would have enjoyed listening in as his wife tells his biographer, in the final lines of the novel, “Joe was a wonderful writer. . . . And I will always miss him.”