What Good Is Love?
Some stories about life
The Love of Seven Dolls by Paul Gallico and Plain Girl by Arthur Miller
These two books take a somewhat different view of life, a quite different view of love. Paul Gallico’s work was produced many years earlier, so I shall write of it first. It’s in Paris, at an indeterminate time which was, even when Gallico wrote in the late fifties, the far-away past. A place so long ago that anything was possible. Anything could be attributed. A hard age, a poor time. A time when so many went hungry and to lack work was to lack, with a finality approaching permanence, the means of life.
A girl considers suicide, there on the banks of the Seine. She has been thrown out of her former lodging – she has lost her employment at one of the revues, or the folies. Her female employer picks at her like she’s meat. You’re all skin and bone, the girl is told. Who would want to watch you dance? Such a spectacle is only dispiriting, a sad thing to see. It is not the employer. That is what all the other women say.
And so the girl walks slowly through the city, her eyes filled with tears, her ultimate destination in no doubt, and meaning to meander her way towards the river, she wanders past a place where a fair is being held for the children.
In the fair is a booth a little like one which might be used for a Punch and Judy show. And as the girl wanders past, she is spotted by a puppet. This one is a fox. And it has something it wants to tell her. She stops, is a little detained by the doll. Means to move on, to continue her suicide’s progress. But then the fox doll is joined by another, this one a professorial character in the shape of another animal. She knows, knows full well, that there is a man underneath the puppet stage. That this is all a fake, and not an especially clever one.
She knows that, even as other characters appear – each with their own looks, their own voices, their own personalities – that they are not real. They are only dolls. The girl has only one path before her, and it is the path that leads to the river. Yet the dolls seem to notice this. They will not let her go. After some cajoling, some questioning, she decides to follow the puppet theatre and the rest of the fair, to join as it travels through the country. The girl has found a new job. She is to travel with the dolls and the show.
She interacts with the puppets as if they are real; she sings with them, she performs alongside the puppet theatre, as if she were part bystander and part shill. And the audiences love her. It is the naive innocence of her interactions with the dolls. They appear to animate her as much as they are animated themselves by hand. She comes alive only in their company. She laughs at the jokes told by the dolls. She participates in their stories. Together they sing songs of such purity.
And the girl finds that the man beneath the curtain, to adapt a phrase from The Wizard of Oz, is so different it can hardly be believed – a twisted man, filled with hatred – so different from the puppets, the dolls, who have become her companions and her friends.
We, the readers, we know the truth: that this is an illusion. We know it seems fated not to end well. Yet Gallico keeps up the illusion. He maintains the falsehood that the dolls are different people, with their own worries, their own hopes, their own personalities and dreams. When they talk together, it is as if this is a scene in another work where there are separate consciousnesses engaged in dialogue.
The magic is real, even if it is only temporarily suspended disbelief, pure theatre, pure fiction, as soon to depart as the dew on the grass in the morning.
Arthur Miller’s novella, Plain Girl, is by contrast a resolutely realistic, and therefore a resolutely miserable, story. It is the story of another girl who does not look as wish she would. But she lives not in an Olden Time France in which magic might be briefly believed in, but in America during the leaner years of the twentieth century. She is homely; no one loves her much. Her family is small and those that survive are avaricious, empty. She loses her friends; she works, as all of us must; eventually she marries a blind man who loves her, partially, because he cannot see her, and he does so in a way that is pure tragedy.
Gallico’s book is as if the rules of gravity were knowingly suspended. Nothing is true that is said, but it does not need to be true. The girl, destined to be a suicide, finds friends, and though they be made of felt and wood, they are real to her. No matter how badly she is treated by the man beneath the curtain, the dolls are her friends. They love her. What Miller seems to believe by contrast is that love is not enough. That it does not last. That we are not worthy of it, never can be.