On “Multiples of Cohen” by Heidi Julavits

August 22, 2010
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             “God, please let me write like a man.” The infamous Dorothy Parker quip might still be expected to raise feminist hackles, but Ms. Heidi Julavits inhabits the male psyche so successfully in her story “Multiples of Cohen” (Harper’s, August 2010), and this mode drives the fiction home so insightfully, that one can forget such divisions and meditate on the blood that unites us. We wish that gender issues, like racial issues, would finally abate and that we would finally evolve. People still speak of ‘chick flicks,’ so provincial thinking is still an issue. Ms. Julavits writes like a human.

My habit in sucking down the Harper’s each month is to save the fiction for last. In this case, though, my eye fell on the first sentence and I was hooked in. “The important fact about Cohen: he did die.” Like being a young reader again and seeing the words “Scrooge was dead to begin with” on the page, I could not, at that moment, resist satisfying morbid curiosity. I raced through this piece, enchanted by its clever language, amazed by its deft characterizations, its ironic examination of machismo, and feeling the writer’s power to mirror my own mind. I assumed that I was reading the work of a male. It was only when I looked back at the by-line to see what talent had brought this work forth that I realized how wrong I was in this assumption. The name Heidi Julavits did not ring a bell, but this is a writer that can inhabit any gender she chooses. I read the piece again.
            The magic works the second time, and time and time again. Not since Jeanette Winterson’s “Written on the Body” have I enjoyed the frisson of a sexually charged fiction more. Winterson’s book erases reference to her protagonist’s gender. This is no mean trick in a first person love story, and it has the effect of heightening the awareness of love’s transfiguration of all things. The topics are very different in the two works, and Winterson, writing a short novel, has a bigger canvas. Julavits is not writing a love story. Her characters are either dead or existentially at odds with each other. The protagonist is the narrator and his breezy telling of the story with its grammatical subtleties keep the tone cynical and full of wry humor.
            I have only dabbled in feminist theory. By virtue of the fact that I “own the equipment,” I sympathize with the narrator’s point of view. The narrator, like myself, is not an alpha male. His friend Cohen is. Cohen freely brags of his sexual conquests, but worries about the integrity of his health. The narrator plays a dual role in Cohen’s life as both friend and cardiologist. A sub-theme, brought out by a subsidiary character, the doctor’s nanny, involves the disconnect between scientific by-the-numbers medicine and ‘narrative healing.’ The nanny, like so many service workers, is a medical student. Her course of study parodies humanistic academia. The wit of the narrative, that is, Julavits’ fiction, only serves to emphasize this insouciant nanny’s truth.
The argument that Julavits is, by writing with an ear for the shades of the masculine personality, violating any of her prerogatives as a liberated woman is absurd, of course. The opposite is true. Julavits’ narrator is, for all his wit, a sensitive man. Cohen, the defunct nemesis, has apparently bewitched and seduced the narrator’s wife. The wife’s personality could not be a stronger one. Rather than a misogynist, I get the impression that Cohen was tuned in to the feminine psyche. He is shown to weep freely in public when overcome with emotion. The narrator is envious, and the conflict that drives the narrative is his grappling with envy and guilt. He feels that he has missed something in Cohen’s numbers, and allowed him to die. Every character in this work is realized in deft brush strokes of language and none of them are weak. Even the tossed off personae, such as the private school dean, leaning out a window, retains his authoritarian edge by clearing his throat at a bellow of obscenity. The story is populated with self-actualized people.
In the end, the narrator dons Cohen’s wrestling singlet, the symbol of athletic masculinity, apparel worn that final morning when Cohen’s heart “gave integrity a pass.” The doctor comes by this treasure as a gift from Cohen’s widow. The widow is another actualized female, apparently liberated and strengthened by Cohen’s departure. The occasion is Cohen’s ‘grave stone erection.’ The double entendre of this phrase is savored. Here we come to the climax of the piece. (Feel free to count the double entendres in that sentence!) In Cohen’s sweat-scented garb, the narrator’s personality shifts and he becomes a “multiple” of Cohen. He makes an unsubtle pass at his wife, who realizes what her husband is wearing and recoils into grief. At the ceremony, the narrator bolts for the bee canyon, where Cohen had taken his final stroll. In the canyon, the transmigration of souls completes itself. Guilt is acknowledged and dismissed. Julavits’ last two sentences, as beautifully wrought as all those preceding, suggest that the laboriousness of guilt and cuckoldry, not to mention the limits of fear and the liberation of (carnal) knowledge are thoughts that must be buried with us in our mortality. Cohen did die, after all, as we all do.
I’m sorry if I gush. There is one other review of this story that I could find on the web. The writer of the review was less than enthusiastic, saying “he felt he’d been clubbed to death by a cock.” It’s an authentic alternative opinion. (Aaron Riccio, Short-a-day.) Clearly Heidi couldn’t make a Cohen out of this man. As for me, God, let me write like Heidi Julavits.