Frisch's "Montauk"



Finished with Frisch (for now). Moving on to another favorite: Buchner's Lenz. I took just a few "clips." I always love Montauk.

*

Lynn will not get to know what his vice is. There will not be time for that. It needs a marriage, a long one, to reveal it . . . I did not turn her into a maidservant (I occasionally washed the dishes, carried out the trash cans, did the shopping, etc.) and I have never struck the woman I love. Her complaint is a different one, and it is deserved. It took me a year to see it. At first I thought her verdict grotesque: it was that in ten years I had done nothing to help her develop her potentialities. I lavished every attention on her: the easiest way of treating a woman, and the worst. I can see that. Her reproach strikes home, but not in the way she meant it. Obviously, I have been acting from the very start as if I were God Almighty, or at least Adam, from whose rib Woman was made: COME, FOLLOW, AND I WILL LEAD! This woman is not ungrateful, but desperate. What I had imagined to be our years of happiness suddenly seem like lost years. My vice: MALE CHAUVINISM. What else but my attitude, maintained day after day from the very beginning, could have made a sensible woman believe that the development of her potentialities was a matter for her husband—for men at all? 
* 
They know too little and at the same time too much about each other just to chat superficially. He does not even know yet in what area Lynn is vulnerable and what would lead to their first quarrel. Lynn does not seem in fact to be thinking about it at all. Once in a while does no harm. You need a marriage, a long one, to become a monster. 
*
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN GOOD FAITH, READER 
and what does it keep concealed? And why?
 

 


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