Loyality to Self or Person We Love

Ann Packer’s first novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier presents a timeless moral dilemma. Carrie Bell, a recent college graduate in Madison, Wisconsin finds that her love for the man she is engaged to marry is “untangling.”

“A slow draining away of my feelings for him, a trickle I hardly noticed at first until the level was so low it was all I could notice, until what remained was dark and murky and it seemed that in no time at all I’d be bone-dry.”

To try to awaken her feelings, her fiancé, Mike Mayer, tries to impress her by jumping into a lake from a pier. Tragically, he breaks his neck and is paralyzed for the rest of his life.

What does Carrie owe Mike? What obligations does an individual have to the person they love or once loved when love is precisely what they need? Should she stay in Madison or strike out on her own? She struggles with this question for months. (She has a difficult time making up her mind about everything and that’s why I found the novel very slow going at times.) Finally, Carrie leaves Madison without saying a word to any of her friends or Mike who remains paralyzed in the hospital.

"What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike—that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make.”

She goes to New York, falls in love again, succumbs to the joys and temptations of being there and finally enrolls in the Parson School of Design to pursue the talent she has for designing and sewing dresses.

Then one day her lifelong female friend from Madison calls to ask her to return to help her through a crisis. Again she vacillates—on and on--but after doing that for far too many pages, she decides to remain in New York.

Eventually, she realizes she has made a mistake, and returns to Madison for a while. However, once she gets back, her friend will no longer speak to her. She resolves to stay until she does, meanwhile spending most of her time with her paralyzed former boy friend, lover and fiancé.

It takes weeks and then months—and again, many pages--before her friend forgives her but by then she has given up on New York, her lover there, and the new path she had begun to carve out for herself.

How disappointing, I thought at first. How much I wanted her to remain in New York and create that new life for herself. But she couldn’t. Loyalty, responsibility and devotion to friends and family came to take hold of her. History exerts a powerful constraint on the future.

And so the novel presents that ever present issue, one that is never resolved without regret one way or another. The mystery of how the moral question is resolved maintained my interest in the novel. What are we to do when we are faced with this kind of a dilemma? Do we abandon our lover who is no longer the person he once was? Or do we abandon our self, what we know we must do when a person we love stands in need? By the time the book is over, Ms. Packer has provided an answer. Is it the one you would have made?

Unreal Loyalties

Loyalty was not one of the central themes of my Commonplace Book. In the informal study of the collected passages I had assembled through July of 2005, the most common topics were Literature, Romance, Change, Writing and Age. In contrast, I mentioned the concept Loyalty only nine times, all of which were from one document. The End of Loyalty by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The New Yorker, March 9, 1998.

In his essay Gates considers the concept of loyalty in the context of the Clinton Administration political scandals and his relationship with a White House intern. But Gates’ essay goes far beyond those matters. It is a moral analysis of the general principle of loyalty, especially when it is pitted against an equally valued principle, such as honesty. For example, what is an individual to do when telling the truth conflicts with one’s loyalty to another person?

Gates argues we have forgotten about the simple virtue of loyalty, the “endangered trait of loyalty” as he put it. It is considered old fashioned now, a fairly primitive moral concept. Gates quotes commentators who refer to it as a “character flaw,” “phony,” “pre-modern virtue,” “anachronistic,” etc. He writes:

“Like all values the value of loyalty has its limits…Often loyalty must give way to “principle”—this we know—but aren’t there times, too, when principle must give way to loyalty?”

Like so many others these were some of my thoughts throughout the long, catastrophic period between 2001-2009. I began asking myself questions about the boundaries of loyalty, especially loyalty one has for the country of their birth. At times, I thought I would flee this country. What had happened to it? How could its people, my people, have voted for the leader of our country then? How could they allow him to take our nation down the path he was leading it to?

I remembered Virginia Woolf’s response in 1939 when asked what kind of freedom would advance the fight against fascism. She replied:

“Freedom from unreal loyalties. You must rid yourself of pride and those unreal loyalties…You must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them.”

What are the limits to loyalty? Is there a limit, for example, to the bond of loyalty we have toward family? Diana Athill has argued that loyalty to family “…can become foolishness if betrayed by its object. If your brother turns out to be a murderer…standing by him through thick and thin seems to me mindless.”

In July of 2007 Howard Zinn wrote “On this July 4th, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledge of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed…..We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history….We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.”

At about the same time, in an essay, Rethinking Patriotism, Lucinda Marshall wrote: “As July 4th approaches, it may well be time to consider whether patriotism and the defense of national borders is in fact and outmoded concept. Instead of Independence Day, perhaps it is time to declare an Interdependence Day and to pledge allegiance as global citizens to build our strength by nurturing our resources rather than plundering them, by nurturing all the world’s citizens, especially the young. Most of all, it is time to pledge to end the wanton destruction of the planet and the politics of hatred and greed that divide us.”

Is this a time now when we can begin to examine more closely the nature of loyalty? The national mood has flipped flopped. A person who clearly loves his country leads us. He is also a person who has not lost his sense of proportion and can readily acknowledge we are no different than or superior to any other country.