Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

  • Home
  • My Books
  • Essays
  • Contact
  • About Me

John Ruskin: A Mind As Bright as Fireflies

By Anita Mathias

John Ruskin: The Most Remarkable Englishman of All Time:
 A Mind as Bright and Eccentric as Fireflies!


I spent a happy couple of hours in the Ashmolean’s exhibtion of the Pre-Raphaelites in Italy  http://wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com/2010/11/pre-raphaelites-in-italy-ashmolean.html  and realized again what a seminal and remarkable figure John Ruskin was in the history of England, the history of art, the history of economics, the history of literature, and any number of disciplines.


Ruskin, an only child of doting parents, inherited money. Not a major fortune–his father was a wine-dealer–but enough so that he could afford to buy art (an absolute necessity and addiction for him) and beautiful objects, books, furniture, fossils, marble, houses such as Brantwood–and never need to work.


But work, he did. With furious passion! The Complete Works of Ruskin stretches to 38 volumes–books on flowers and rocks and Florence; on economics and Venice and Amiens, on art and architecture and painting. He knew everything, was interested in everything. He was a man of passion, who lived intensely with intense pleasure. His autobiography, Praeterita, written behind the back of his controlling young cousin and caretaker, who opposed his writing, is a treasure–for what it reveals of Ruskin’s life, mind and thinking, his tumultous life–ten lives in one!!–and Victorian thought. 


Though in his last years, he fell into the power of foolish people, Joan and Arthur Severn, who took over his house and abused him while ostensibly caring for him, let us not mourn overmuch, for his intense power of intellectual enjoyment added much joy to his life. 


Let me close as Ruskin closes his autobiography, written with a herculean effort even as his last and final breakdown closed in on him, written in despair, summoning up his last efforts of concentration,
“Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening in the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the thunderous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,’ and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”


And how Ruskin’s writing still shines, mixed with fireflies and lightning, and more intense than the stars!


See also http://theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com/2011/02/quest-for-joy-3-fireflies.html

Wikio

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

Andrea Barrett

By Anita Mathias

Andrea Barrett’s “The Littoral Zone” is one of my very favourite short stories. I was intrigued by this Paris Review interview with her.

Andrea Barrett, The Art of Fiction No. 180

Interviewed by Elizabeth Gaffney
PRINT|TWITTER|FACEBOOK|MORE|View a manuscript page

When Andrea Barrett won the National Book Award in 1996 for her fifth book and first story collection, Ship Fever, she was not widely known or read. After four critically acclaimed novels that had never budged from the midlist, her then-publisher had declinedShip Fever. And yet it was this collection that became Barrett’s breakout book. Initially, the stories in Ship Fever, which feature scientists as characters and are largely set in past centuries, seemed a radical break with Barrett’s first four novels, Lucid Stars (1988), Secret Harmonies (1989), The Middle Kingdom (1991), and Forms of Water (1993), all of which are set in contemporary times and were noted by critics for their deft handling of family relationships.
   Since Ship Fever, Barrett has written a fifth novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998), a tale of Arctic explorers and the families they leave behind, and another collection,Servants of the Map (2002), in which many characters from both Ship Fever and Narwhalrecur. Science has remained a focal point, but the apparent rift between the themes and settings of her early and later work dwindles with each new book. Not only do the scientific themes of the late books have precursors in the early ones—including passages that obsess on invertebrate organisms, aquarium fish, constellations, Chinese medicine, reproductive biology, and ecosystems—but the later books are not half so much about science as they might seem from the jacket copy and reviews. In fact, the web of family relations that interconnects the characters of the first four books is, if anything, denser in the later ones, which have grown together into a kind of extended narrative through their shared characters. Barrett does have a scientist’s fascination for the natural world, but her primary concern is always human character and community. (Her scientists are invariably members of dysfunctional families, too, after all.)
   Barrett has received several major prizes and grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2001, she was awarded the coveted five-year MacArthur fellowship. In early September of that same year, she arrived in New York City to begin a nine-month stay as a fellow at the New York Public Library’s prestigious Center for Scholars and Writers. Barrett described to me her first encounter with the library’s famous Reading Room; she was sixteen and it was her very first trip to New York City: “I immediately loved the messy, dark rays of brown sunlight slanting in—it was cool. There was that palpable sense of books.” It was to some version of this quiet and profoundly bookish environment that she had planned to return to when she took the fellowship. A few days after her arrival, the Twin Towers were leveled. It turned out to be a terrible and intense year for anyone to be in New York, and not a time when Barrett felt she could sequester herself in a private study and devote herself to researching and writing. She put her novel-in-progress aside for some months.
   It was in the context of this personal and general upheaval that we first met, in the spring of 2002, in her sunny sublet loft on the far-West Side of Manhattan. She answered a few follow-up questions by mail, and we met for a second session, almost a year later, in Rochester, New York, where Barrett lives in a two-story red painted house with her husband, Barry Goldstein, a brindled dog, and two cats, one of whom, the stunningly fat and affectionate Spike, purred volubly on the coffee table throughout our conversation. Her house is filled with books and curious objects: a series of antique anatomical prints depicting the human musculature and other body systems, an old-fashioned wooden and brass scientific scale that sits under a glass case in juxtaposition to a green solder-studded motherboard from an old computer hard drive. Her office is upstairs, its walls lined with wooden bookshelves and framed historical prints. The top of her massive oaken desk is actually an operating-room door, salvaged when the hospital where her husband works was upgrading its physical plant for fire-code compliance. But it turns out that that her home office isn’t where Barrett does most of her writing. Her studio is located in an old Rochester post office building, the upper stories of which have been converted into artists’ lofts. She took me by it in her car, pulling into the parking lot and pointing up at a huge, multipaned window. She doesn’t let anyone visit the space, which she referred to as her “sole private sanctum,” now that the success of her books has brought constant telephone calls and requests for her to give readings and teach classes. She was willing to describe it, though: it’s nine hundred square feet and has no telephone or other amenities—not even a computer, though she brings her laptop sometimes—just those great windows, some shelves for books, a chair, and two large wooden tables she got for a song when a nearby university library was replacing its furniture.
INTERVIEWER
What was your family like, growing up?
ANDREA BARRETT
A standard suburban family, pretty much—my father was a real-estate broker who worked in Boston while we lived in Natick and then on Cape Cod. My mother was largely a housewife, until she and my father were divorced. No one in the family read for pleasure—it was a very unintellectual household—but my mother did read to us when we were little, and that’s how I started to read. I read a lot, very passionately, from the time I was very young, but it was a constant battle; my mother would more or less let me be, but with my father I was always searching for a place where he wouldn’t find me. Whenever he saw me reading, he would tell me to put the book down and go outside, act like a normal person. Go play, go fish, go swim, go do something—why are you reading all the time? It was hard for them to understand what drew me to reading so much.
INTERVIEWER
So how do you think you became what you are? Do you think it was innate?
BARRETT
That’s a big question: what is learned versus what is inherited. Nobody in my family does what I do, so who would I have inherited it from? On the other hand, no one taught me to love reading and writing when I was young, so how could I have learned it? Reading feels like something I was born loving. When we lived in Natick, before we moved to the Cape, the Bookmobile would visit our street once a week. I would be starved for that visit all week long, and I’d strip the shelves when it arrived. One driver allowed the children to take books from whatever shelves they could reach, and since I’ve always been tall, I could reach the highest shelf, where all the adult books were, at a pretty young age. That worked well for me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember what some of the early books you loved were?
BARRETT
Children’s books at first—Island of the Blue Dolphins and Ramona, the old Helen Hunt Jackson book. Swiss Family Robinson. I loved the editions with the N. C. Wyeth paintings—those glowing frontispieces, and then more illustrations scattered throughout. I readRobinson Crusoe when I was small, of course, and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, though neither of those are really children’s books. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I was into more grown-up books.
INTERVIEWER
Did that love of reading mean that you were a strong English student?
BARRETT
No, unfortunately. I got into a lot of trouble as an adolescent, and part of the way that manifested itself was that I skipped school more often than I went to it. By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That’s actually when I started writing, although I didn’t think of it, then, as something I might someday do. Mrs. Williams’s way of teaching was to give us an extensive list of really good books to read, and then to have us write, as homework, about the books we chose in a little notebook. We were supposed to do a couple of these a month, but I was doing a half a dozen a week, and she put up with me. Amazing woman—she had her own life and other students, but she’d read whatever I wrote the same night I left it on her desk, and she’d respond in writing, so each notebook became a kind of dual book: a conversation on writing, one passage in my hand and then one in hers, another in mine, another in hers . . .
INTERVIEWER
Did you remain close to her after that class?
BARRETT
For a while, but to my great shame, I lost touch with her after I left the Cape. I didn’t actually finish high school—I went off to college young. I was in such a panic to get away that I went home very seldom for about twenty years, and as a result, I didn’t see her either. But Mrs. Williams was important to me in ways that I didn’t understand for years.
INTERVIEWER
What were some of the other books you read with her?
BARRETT
Lots of Dostoyevsky; lots of Tolstoy, including Anna Karenina. Way too much Kafka, not necessarily a good thing when you’re fifteen, but very seductive. She was very attached to Emerson and Thoreau. So good chunks of them; also some Margaret Fuller, because of the Emerson. Emily Dickinson, Steinbeck, a bit of Kant, more of Montaigne and Rousseau, but almost no English writers. I hardly even knew who the Brontë sisters or Jane Austen were. I had to catch up with all the English writers later, although she did give me a lot of utopian and dystopian literature—everything from Thomas More to Animal Farm and 1984. None of it really stuck, of course. I was too young.
INTERVIEWER
I think it did stick.
BARRETT
Well, I suppose it did, in a miasmatic way.
INTERVIEWER
How did you manage to get into college early, if you were such a bad student, and what was it like?
BARRETT
Despite my bad grades, I had good SATs. And also it was 1970 when I was applying, the tail end of the Hampshire College–Summerhill free-education movement, and everything was still fulminating. People could believe then, in a way they probably wouldn’t now, that maybe I was just doing badly because school was too confining and I wasn’t being properly nourished. Partly, that was true—my school was awful—but it wasn’t just the school. I was also crazy and rebellious. Somehow I got the idea to apply to a couple of colleges in my junior year. Union College very fortunately took me, so I went there. I was able to do about half my coursework there as independent study, which was great, because the only way I really learn is to take a topic and head into a library alone. Retrospectively, I can see that nothing could have been better training for a writer. The downside of that is that I have a spotty education. I know some things that no one would expect me to know, but then I don’t know incredibly obvious things that anyone would expect a writer, or even just a person interested in literature, to know because I never took any English courses. I can’t read a single foreign language comfortably, nor can I speak one, which is embarrassing and annoying. I’m still catching up with my reading. I read Paradise Lost for the first time maybe seven years ago. My Shakespeare is very spotty. Every year I try to read five or six books that I know I should have read in my twenties. There’s some pleasure in reading those now, at this late date. They’re fresh for me, and the experience can be dazzling. It’s an amazing pleasure, it turns out, to read Paradise Lost for the first time at age thirty-eight.
INTERVIEWER
You applied to Union because you wanted to do science.
BARRETT
Yes. They were best known for their engineering and science departments, and I thought I was going to be a biologist. Even though I liked English and biology equally well, I was under the misapprehension that I could learn literature on my own. I knew it would be hard to study biology on my own, but I was unaware of what someone might have been able to teach me about, say, Shakespeare. I had great teachers at Union, and it was fun, but I was in the second class of women—it had been an all-male college—and did feel a little out of place there. I always do.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think this feeling of not being at home is part of what made you into a writer?
BARRETT
Sure. I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can penetrate it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible. If I had ever found the place where I was perfectly at home, who knows what I would have done? Maybe I would have been a biologist after all. No great loss if that had been the case, but it didn’t work out that way.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first start reading contemporary fiction?
BARRETT
Not until late. I had hardly read any before the first time I went to Bread Loaf in 1984.
INTERVIEWER
How did you ever get yourself to Bread Loaf?
BARRETT
I saw an ad in a magazine. I had been wrestling with a novel for five or six years, and after a zillion drafts, I knew it still sucked. I didn’t actually know there were such things as MFA programs, but when I saw an ad for this writer’s conference, I thought, Well, maybe someone there will teach me. So I went to Vermont and discovered all these other people who were also writing. Maybe even more importantly, I met living writers who’d published books, some of whom were women. It was all news to me. I probably couldn’t have named a single contemporary writer when I went there. If you’d asked me who Alice Hoffmann was, or Alice Munro or Richard Bausch, I wouldn’t have been able to place them as to country or century.
INTERVIEWER
Was Bread Loaf a turning point then?
BARRETT
Oh yes, I was incredibly lucky. I had two great teachers that first year, and I made some good friends too. The teachers were Nicholas Delbanco and Thomas Gavin, who were co-teaching a workshop and were both very kind to me. Tom introduced me to Wendy Weil, who’s my agent now. She didn’t take me on right then—I didn’t have anything to show her at the time—but she said, If you finish your book someday, send it to me. Eventually I did, and she’s been my agent ever since.
INTERVIEWER
Was the book you took to Bread Loaf your first published novel?
BARRETT
No, I threw that one out, and the next as well. The other really important thing that happened to me there was something Nick Delbanco said. After my story was workshopped, Nick asked if I had written anything else. Like everyone else up there, I had a novel stuck in my purse, and he read it overnight. It didn’t seem so startling to me at the time, but now that I teach, I know what it’s like at a conference and how inundated one can be. The idea that he sat down and read some idiot girl’s manuscript overnight just flabbergasts me. But he did, and then he sat down with me the next day. He asked me how long I’d been working on it, and I told him six years and a zillion drafts, the whole story. He told me that the workshop story I had written was good and that I had some talent and could probably be a writer if I wanted, but that I had to throw that novel out. He said, You learned to write on it, and it can’t be fixed. He was perfectly right about that. There was no life in it. When I started it, I hadn’t even written any short stories and I quite literally didn’t know where the quotation marks should go, what a paragraph should be, what a sentence was. I didn’t know anything. I give Nick high marks for his bravery and his gentleness and gracefulness in telling me that. Afterwards, I cried for a couple days, and then I threw that novel out. I tried for a while to work on another novel that had all the same problems, and I threw that out too. And then, finally, I was able to write Lucid Stars. I sometimes think I would still be working on that first novel, if not for going to Bread Loaf.
INTERVIEWER
Given your isolation from contemporary writing, how did you ever come up with the idea of beginning a novel yourself?
BARRETT
I don’t know how I got the idea. I just did. And once I started, it seemed really interesting to me. Didn’t all writers do this, until the last thirty years or so? Until MFA programs became so common, people learned by imitation and by reading. If they were lucky, they also learned by conversation with fellow writers, but lots of people didn’t have that at first, either.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if it isn’t better training to do it the way you did: to read everything except the books that were written last month or last year. Do you remember what exactly you were reading when you decided to begin that first novel?
BARRETT
I was very drawn to E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford, and I read a ton of Virginia Woolf, perhaps too much, but I love her. Rebecca West’s novel The Fountain Overflowstaught me a lot. It’s often out of print, but I recently wrote an introduction to a new reprint of it. I also read Elizabeth Bowen, who was especially useful when I was working on more family-oriented material. She’s wicked—and wicked useful. I was explicitly trying to read women writers then, having finally noticed that all the writers I’d been reading were men. It occurred to me only very late that this could be important, that it might make a difference to what I wrote, that I wasn’t a man. Writers seemed neuter to me in some sense. The work was just the work, and it didn’t seem gendered at all: it was just a big sea of words, a sea of stories. I knew nothing about how the stories got made or who was making them or what it would cost to make them, what you would need to do it.
INTERVIEWER
At what point did you give up the idea of becoming a biologist?
BARRETT
I graduated from college in 1974, which with the exception of right now was probably the worst time in the last forty years to be a young person looking for a job. I had been a biology major, and I went very briefly to graduate school in zoology, but then I quit, and after that for a lot of years I was just trying to find anything—any kind of a job. I didn’t have any training. I worked in a biological supply company. I worked in a box factory. I did a zillion other things. Eventually, when I moved to Rochester for the first time, which was in 1978, I settled into medical secretarial work, which seemed like the only plausible choice at the time. I could spell, and I recognized the medical words. If someone dictated humerus, I knew they were talking about a bone. My first job in Rochester was with an Iraqi biochemist who hired me because I could spell the word vacuum. It wasn’t a very good job, and it didn’t pay very well. A big part of it was cleaning up the language in his grant applications. In between, I did the thing that all young people who are trying to be writers do: if I had five minutes free, I’d slip a sheet of paper into the typewriter and try to write a novel.
INTERVIEWER
So you did know at that time that you wanted to be a writer?
BARRETT
Even then—1978, 1979—it still wasn’t clear to me. Certainly I was trying to write, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I knew so little about the world of writing, and I had such a feeble conception of myself and what I was meant to do or be that I don’t think I could have thought, I want to be a writer. It would have seemed too powerful. What I could say was, I want to write this book.
INTERVIEWER
What had you been thinking when you dropped out of graduate school? Did you have a plan?
BARRETT
Does a nervous breakdown count as a plan? Really everything I did during those first years after college was the result of an inadvertent crash and burn, not of a reasoned decision. Panic, terror, depression, hysteria. I left graduate school because I just couldn’t do the work. UMass Amherst is a big state school, and part of being a first-year zoology graduate student there was teaching three sections of freshman zoology lab. Each lab was three hours long and contained twenty-five students, some of whom were Vietnam vets on the GI Bill. Most of the students were older than I was, and they all knew more than I did. I couldn’t make myself stand in front of them and pretend to teach. I’m still bad about speaking in front of people, but at that time it was out of the question. I was so frightened by that, and by the science itself, that I quit. I didn’t even finish my first semester.
INTERVIEWER
Did you go home?
BARRETT
No, I got a job. My first job was working at the biological supply company. My take-home pay was about sixty dollars a week for forty hours. I plated out bacteria onto petri dishes and grew lichens and fed cockroaches and helped prepare skeletons, eventually, which was very cool. Someone collected specimens from the woods—natural death and road kill—but also I think there was some trapping: lizards, salamanders, snakes, things like that. After the cadavers were rough-cleaned and dried, the remains went into big Plexiglas boxes inhabited by large colonies of dermestid beetles, which are scavengers. If the bugs are kept warm and the colony is large enough, they’ll strip a carcass down to clean bone.
INTERVIEWER
That’s fascinating.
BARRETT
It’s fascinating, and it’s really disgusting too. You can’t put a whole dead animal in there or it rots and gets really ugly and smelly, but a rough-cleaned carcass doesn’t have enough fat on it to keep the bugs vigorous, so you also have to put in chunks of suet. The whole arrangement is pretty grotesque. After that, I worked at the box factory. I’ve been trying to write about some of that recently, but it’s really hard.
INTERVIEWER
Is it going into your next book?
BARRETT
Not the beetles. I don’t tend to write very autobiographically anyway, but those couple of years were very intense. I talk about them often, but until now I’ve never written about them. For the last year or so, though, I’ve been trying to see if I could use any of the box-factory material in a story.
INTERVIEWER
But the beetles do pop up, as a potent metaphor, in the Marburg sisters stories. And Henry from The Forms of Water works in a box factory.
BARRETT
That’s true, I touched on that there.
INTERVIEWER
What did you do at the box factory?
BARRETT
I did different things. I started out as the receptionist, working at one of those old, predigital switchboards with the cords you have to plug in and pull out. Then I made my way into what they called sales-service support. Every salesman on the road had a girl—we were always called girls—who took care of his orders. One would call in to say that Anheuser-Busch needed forty thousand boxes with such and such dimensions and printing in certain colors. And with neatly colored pens and perfectly filled out forms, the “girl” wrote up the order. I worked briefly in the factory itself later, which paid a lot better.
INTERVIEWER
Which was worse?
BARRETT
Hard to say. They were bad in different ways. The work was lighter in the office, but it was degrading—the shit we took on the phone, the expected banter, the whole “girl” thing. But factory work is never a picnic either. It was very nineteenth century in some ways—we got turkeys for our bonuses at Christmas. A trailer truck would roll up to the loading dock and two guys would stand on the end of it with frozen Butterballs, tossing them to the milling hoards so we could feed our families for the holiday. I wasn’t writing then, but I wish I had been.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever think you would end up using that experience to get someplace you wanted to be, or were you just surviving?
BARRETT
That distinction was actually what I was trying to think about when I began writing a story using some of this as material. Most writers I know have done shit work for varying lengths of time, usually when they were writing their first books, but many also knew by then that they were writers, or were going to be writers. There’s a big divide in your life between what you do before you think you’re going to be a writer and what you do afterwards. The work may be the same, but the attitude is different. I lived through those jobs in Massachusetts with no sense that there might ever be anything different or that I might someday be able to “use” the experience. I would get up in the morning and go to the box factory and simply know something was horribly, amazingly wrong. Every day I would say to myself, This is how people live, you have to find a way to make an accommodation to it. Maybe if you work in the factory and not in the office, it’ll be better. You’ll have more money, a better apartment, maybe that’ll be better. I thought that was my life, and I had no sense it was going to change. I did understand that something in me was making it hard to fit in; in ten years, I had about thirteen jobs.
INTERVIEWER
You said you didn’t go home much for twenty years. Your books contain quite a few lost parents, separated siblings, adoptions. Does any of that derive from your own life story?
BARRETT
Writers tend to guard themselves from perceiving that kind of thing, but even I can see those themes in my work. But it’s not autobiography; it’s metaphor. I’m not adopted. Nobody in my family that I’m aware of was adopted, and my family is actually large, blended, and complicated. But that longing and that sense of absence and fragmentation are perhaps other ways of expressing the actualities of my family. Different facts, same emotions.
INTERVIEWER
Does anyone read your early drafts?
BARRETT
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I’ve been really lucky to know her. She’s a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer. I’m also friends with Thomas Mallon, and sometimes he reads drafts for me as well.
INTERVIEWER
The early feedback doesn’t hamper your creative process?
BARRETT
I trust Margot absolutely. Not only does she not hamper the work, there’s a sense in which I think I write to her or for her. When I feel stuck, I think, Well, if I can just finish the draft, I can show it to Margot and she’ll tell me something. It helps me rather than hinders to know that there’s one person who will read the work with attention and interest. I’m truly fortunate in that. Margot and I are very different writers, not just in our subject matter but in the way we structure novels and stories, the way we think about things. Perhaps the fact that we don’t tend to tread on the same territory has helped us to avoid a sense of rivalry or jealousy. We have different tasks, which means that she reads what I do incredibly clearly. Her strengths tend to be my weaknesses. And sometimes I can bring a different kind of perspective to her work too.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think are the weaknesses in those early drafts of yours?
BARRETT
My early drafts are staggeringly bad. I’m not being falsely modest here, it’s just the way I work, and I’ve had to accept this about myself. The drafts are palimpsests that get deeper and bigger and broader each time I return to them, as the layers accrete. Some of the layers stay and some of them go in the end, but the first drafts are awful, unbelievable. I don’t know how to explain it, except that they have no movement, they don’t go anywhere, there’s no dialogue, nothing happens, they’re shallow, they’re trite. It’s all some kind of strange, wafty cerebration, and I don’t understand where I’m going.
INTERVIEWER
What do you start with? The arc of the story, a character?
BARRETT
If I’m lucky, it’s a character, but it’s usually not. It’s been all different things. It’s usually something much more amorphous than that: a strange, misty pull toward some set of material or a particular place or time or something like a landscape. Sometimes the instigator is both abstract and tiny. The story “Theories of Rain,” for example, came out of reading something about dew and how dew gets formed. That might not seed a story for someone else, but for me, it did.
INTERVIEWER
But wait—how did you get so interested in dew?
BARRETT
Well, I don’t know. Same reason you might be interested in it: because I hike a lot in cold places like the Adirondacks, and if you hike and camp in the mountains, dew is part of life. Even in the summer, it can be ninety degrees in the daytime but forty degrees at night, and when you wake up in the morning, everything’s saturated, soaked, drenched, dripping with cold water. It’s just the dew point in the high mountains. It’s really a sensory thing.
INTERVIEWER
So that sensory experience led you to go read historical writings on dew, which led you to write this story?
BARRETT
The story was shaped as well by coming across the characters of John and William Bartram, early on in my reading about dew. Although the story is fairly short, and there are just a few pages about the Bartrams at the end, in writing it, I probably read as much about those two men as anyone who’s not a Bartram specialist. William Bartram shows up, mentions some frogs, speaks about his pet crow, and then he’s gone—that’s it. So why did I need to read everything that both these naturalists wrote, and why did I need to go visit their house in Philadelphia, and why did I need to go look at all those paintings, and why did I need to read not just their correspondence with each other but with another naturalist named Peter Collinson, and then his correspondence with all sorts of other people? Why do I do that? I don’t know. Not much of it’s in the story, but somehow amid that swirl, the story grows. I can’t really explain it.
INTERVIEWER
Did you do all that research while you were writing the story, explicitly for the story, or was it an interest that preceded and later gave rise to the story?
BARRETT
Most of it was while I was writing. Fairly early on I thought, Oh it would be interesting to do something with all this material on dew and rain, and maybe the Bartrams could be in it. Eventually, the character Lavinia began to surface. She’s the mother of Erasmus Wells, fromThe Voyage of the Narwhal, and I realized that she would have been a young woman when William Bartram was an old man, and that they lived in the same area. There were also huge pauses in the midst of the twenty-odd drafts I wrote when I would just read and read about the Bartrams and then not use any of it. Maybe it’s a delaying tactic, I don’t know. My writing process is mysterious, even to me. It’s slow and inefficient.
INTERVIEWER
You went to the Arctic while you were writing the Narwhal. Was that sort of hands-on research inspirational in the same way?
BARRETT
That happened differently: I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I spent the money going to the Arctic, hoping to experience for myself the sensory world I’d been reading about for so long. But I would say I was already between my seventh and eighth drafts of the novel by the time we went.
INTERVIEWER
Had you written the scenes in the Arctic before you went?
BARRETT
Seven times over.
INTERVIEWER
Did you change them extensively after you went?
BARRETT
Not too much, but I made a great many small changes, and these had a large effect, cumulatively. I had avoided going for a long time because I was aware that I couldn’t travel in the Arctic today the same way my characters had, back then. I couldn’t get a wooden sailing ship and sail it through the northwest channel. People go there all the time, now, but they do it with motorboats and helicopters and Zodiacs and so much stuff. I thought if I saw it that way, it might make it impossible to visualize what the journals and letters of the explorers described. I can’t know if the book would have been better if I’d gone earlier, but even going as late as I did was a help.
INTERVIEWER
What gave you the idea to write about a polar expedition in the first place?
BARRETT
It started when I was writing “Ship Fever.” I bumped into a lot of material about the Arctic when I was researching that book because the time it was set in—1847—was pretty much the height of polar exploration. Immigrant ships were coming to North America from Ireland at the same time that fancy English admiralty ships were setting off for the Arctic. I did a lot of reading about the St. Lawrence Seaway for the novella, and as I was researching Grosse Isle, where the quarantine station in “Ship Fever” is located, I came across a mention of the wreck of a ship that had been hit by an iceberg on its return from a polar expedition. I thought, Oh, I should write a story about a polar expedition and put Ned on the ship. For a long time I thought I would pick a real expedition and write about it, but every expedition was wrong for some reason, and after a while I thought it would be best to make one up. At first I thought that this would be a companion novella to “Ship Fever.”
INTERVIEWER
So you don’t always know whether you’re working on a story or a novel when you embark on this sort of elaborate research?
BARRETT
Usually, I do, but sometimes I’m wrong. I never thought The Voyage of the Narwhalwas just a short story, but I thought maybe eighty pages, at first. With the story “Two Rivers,” people told me they thought it should be a novel, but I never agreed.
INTERVIEWER
How long is that one?
BARRETT
Forty-five pages or so. I don’t think of it as a novella, even, but a long story. There probably is too much material in that story, too many pulls in too many directions, too many characters. Writing it was a kind of giant cosmic joke. I spent years running around, looking at fossils, going to museums, learning paleontology, but that’s not actually what the story’s about. Something in me needs to do that.
INTERVIEWER
You’re driven to learn everything you can about the entire world in which a story takes place before you can write it?
BARRETT
Something approaching that, I think. I wouldn’t advocate this as a theory or method of writing, but for me it’s true. I can’t write a character unless I know not just her world and its superficial details but also what she and the other characters are thinking, what they’re reading, what the texture of their interior life is. Sometimes I think that historical fiction goes awry—when it’s not good and you have that faint flavor of cheesiness—because the writer has spent a lot of time learning just the exterior of the world and trying to transmit that to the reader: So and so walked down the street and saw the gaslights of Broadway. They convey all the things that a person of the period could see—and that’s not a bad thing. But it’s not always convincing if you don’t also understand what the person would be thinking about what they were seeing and what they could and couldn’t have known or felt.
INTERVIEWER
Narwhal is about polar exploration, of course, but it’s really crucial to the story and the structure of the book that half of the action takes place back home. It’s not an adventure story, exactly.
BARRETT
I don’t want to go as far as saying that there’s no point in writing a novel that’s just about the exploration—some of those books are very good—but for me there was no point in doing a novel that simply replicated the shape of an expedition. What seemed really interesting was that other half of the story. I wanted to tell a story that contained both the journey and the critique of the journey, the journey and the shadow side of the journey, the men going out and the women back home. For people who don’t like the book, that’s the main thing they complain about. Some Arctic history buffs who were drawn to the book because of its subject really didn’t like the part of the story that takes place back home. They thought it started too slowly and wished I’d left out all the stuff about the women.
INTERVIEWER
In “Servants of the Map,” too, the men go out and travel and the women stay home. Have you ever traveled to India or the Himalaya, where that novella is set?
BARRETT
No, never even close. I’d like to go there, but I probably never will. I get altitude sickness very low, at about eleven thousand feet.
INTERVIEWER
So how did you arrive at the idea for that story?
BARRETT
That goes back to my reading the letters of the Bartrams and Peter Collinson. Through a long chain of references, I found my way to reading about Joseph Dalton Hooker, a botanist who comes up as a character in “Servants of the Map.” He really went to the Himalaya, though he was working on the other side of the range from where my main character, Max, is. In the story, Max writes to Hooker for advice. Hooker actually discovered rhododendrons for the West. He brought boatloads of Himalayan plants back and cultivated them. But I didn’t want to write directly about Hooker or the part of the Himalaya where he was, mostly for political reasons, but also because I wanted to write about the other end of the range, where it meets up with the Karakorum, an area I had always wanted to visit myself. I was very pleased when I first saw the cover of the paperback of Servants of the Map, because the flowers on the jacket were rhododendrons. What I didn’t realize at first was that the art designer had actually dug up an image of Hooker’s rhododendrons—the variety he classified. For me, finding a story is always the result of something bumping into something bumping into something else. This sort of thing is entirely characteristic of me, but there’s no logic behind it. I read a lot. I look at pictures and paintings and the world itself and connections get made and lead to other things.
INTERVIEWER
Right now, it feels like your published work can be divided into two phases: Lucid Stars,Secret Harmonies, The Middle Kingdom, and The Forms of Water—all of which have pretty contemporary settings—and then Ship Fever, The Voyage of the Narwhal, and Servants of the Map. Do you agree?
BARRETT
So many people have asked me that question that I know it must look that way—but to me it doesn’t really feel that way. What it feels like is that slowly, over time—a bit more with each book—I trusted my ability to bring alive characters from other times and places, who were interested and involved in things beyond the narrow confines of my life experience. Even in Lucid Stars and Secret Harmonies, I was relying for metaphor, and for the interests and work experiences of my characters, on things I initially knew little about—astronomy, astrology, music. In The Middle Kingdom I drew on the twentieth-century history of a country I knew essentially nothing about, beyond what I had seen on a three-week visit, and what I could learn from talking to Chinese students once I returned home. The Forms of Water is an extreme example of this—what experiences do I share with an eighty-year-old ex-monk? As little, really, as I do with Linnaeas, who is a character in one of the stories inShip Fever. Well, Brendan, the ex-monk from The Forms of Water, had to be invented in exactly the same way as Linnaeas. But because those earlier books take place at least partly within my own lifetime, and contain some characters who are contemporary women, they look different to readers. Really, the thing that has changed the most, and that does mark a real division between the two groups of books, as you divided them, is that I have had readers for the second group, after having had very few for the first. A result, very largely, of the enormous good fortune of receiving the National Book Award for Ship Fever. The difference is so marked that many people assumed then that Ship Fever was my first book. People sometimes still ask me what it felt like to win such a prize for my very first try.
INTERVIEWER
Looking at the most recent three books, Ship Fever, Narwhal, and Servants of the Map, together, one discovers that so many of the characters are related to each other. The world you study for one story seems to continue on and run over into others. Had you planned that when you first began the stories for Ship Fever?
BARRETT
No, that happened later.
INTERVIEWER
It didn’t seem to me, at the time I first read Ship Fever, that there were links between the stories. Now I realize I missed something.
BARRETT
It only seems that way now, when you look back retrospectively. I made the links later. Since I conceived of The Voyage of the Narwhal as a companion novella to “Ship Fever,” I thought I would carry the character of Ned over. That was the first link, which got built quite accidentally. After that, though, the linkage started to seem interesting. It’s not so uncommon a device, you know, but it is interesting for me as a generator of material. It’s a way for me to keep enlarging my imagined world, to keep knitting this giant mesh together and trying to stretch it out over several centuries. It’s a very good stimulus for writing.
INTERVIEWER
I began to try to draw up a genealogy of your characters, the other night—a map. I realized there were even more connections than I’d thought. I couldn’t keep them straight in my head.
BARRETT
That’s funny—when I first read J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and then Franny and Zooey, I had that same impulse. Somewhere on an inside cover of my tattered paperback copies of those books, there are attempts at an overall genealogy. I had great fun doing that. But let me show you something.
INTERVIEWER
What, do you have one of your own?
BARRETT
Nobody’s seen this but my editor and my agent. It’s not completely done yet. [She extracts from a poster tube and unrolls a large sheet of paper with an extensive genealogy chart.] Some of it already exists and some still has to be worked out. It’s a kind of madness. But really it doesn’t matter if anyone else ever sees this or does the sort of map that you made. It’s just important for me.
INTERVIEWER
With the material being shared by so many stories, do you ever find yourself losing track of what the reader of any given story knows?
BARRETT
Yes, it gets very complicated. I also have a file in my computer documenting a kind of über chronology, which starts in 1728 and goes to 2002. It has a few world events, public events—things like the birth of Darwin or the publication of On the Origin of Species—but not many. Mostly it has entries like: Sarah of Rare Bird writes to so-and-so; they leave for Philadelphia; Caleb born; Miriam born—all the way through to crucial events in the lives of Bianca and Rose Marburg. I can’t always keep track of who’s dead or alive in a particular story or novel without it. There are other files I use to remind myself of certain details: Don’t forget that the last time you wrote about Rose, you left her in Hammondsport. I fuck it up too. I make mistakes, contradict myself. If I keep doing this, it’s just going to get worse.
INTERVIEWER
I’m understanding this as a kind of unified field theory, or at least a universe, in which all your fictions would be ultimately related.
BARRETT
They are always related in some sense, because we as authors make those nets of words, those fictions. In an even broader sense, everything that gets written in a certain time and place is related: we’re all alive, we talk to each other, we read each other, things are in the air. For writers like me, who read a lot of older fiction, there are webs and nets that connect the old and the new. So for me to make that explicit through these linked characters is only to take what’s already there and make it more obvious to those reading it. It was there all the time.
INTERVIEWER
Many writers have sustained characters across books or created links between books, but not that many have done what you’re up to. This is not a case of a series.
BARRETT
Yes, you have genre series, you have characters carried over time, you have settings maintained . . .
INTERVIEWER
You have multigenerational sagas.
BARRETT
Right.
INTERVIEWER
But that’s not what you’re doing. For one thing, it crosses over the genres of short fiction and novels, and contemporary and historical settings. Then, too, it’s so subtle. This interconnectedness is never the main issue within any given work, but cumulatively, you are making a point.
BARRETT
I’m trying to make a very quiet point. I’m trying to make the reader feel the effects of genetic linkage, feel the molecules of DNA tumbling across time and space and continents, combining and recombining. Families and people from different cultures marry and have children, who move to other places and marry yet other people; I want to convey a palpable sense of those relationships over time. I want to bring that very lightly to the surface without having it dominate. When this works, it creates a feeling of life that’s hard to imitate any other way. It’s related to the pleasure of a really long book. There is no other way to experience Proust and to have the distinct pleasure of making the connections across time, except to read the whole thing. You have to read it all to get that. The things you feel when reading a long novel are different from what you feel with a shorter work. Maybe that’s also true about the quiet linkages in these books of mine. Ideally, if the connections work, there should be the pleasure of the story or novel alone—seeing that resolved—and then also a faint chime or echo as it ties into other pieces. An additional pleasure that’s available only to someone who’s slogged through everything. If I made the links too overt, though, then the pleasure would be gone.
INTERVIEWER
Are you limited by the parameters of this universe you’ve invented?
BARRETT
Only psychologically. Sometimes I’m tempted to go outside it, but when I get an idea, I very disturbingly find that the next day I have transmuted it so that somehow, however peripherally, it fits into the world I’ve already made. The central character has turned into somebody’s friend or an aunt or an aunt by marriage or a cousin of the friend who was somebody’s aunt. I’ve worried that sooner or later I’m going to box myself into a corner, but I’m not confined by genre, I’m not confined by country, I’m not confined to a century, I’m not confined to a family—so where exactly would the limits of that world be? There’s nothing I can’t make fit in. I’m tracing backward and forward in time all the connections that go into the Marburg sisters’ family—and their friends and various adopted relatives count, too. Well, it does leave me a lot of room. There’s no sense of confinement. The universe is bigger than I can understand, bigger than I can write about, so I don’t feel boxed in yet. Or at most by my own inability to understand it all, to keep it clear in my head all the time, but never by the size of the box.
INTERVIEWER
Can you say which characters from your previous books are recurring in your new one? Is there a lot of science?
BARRETT
There are some characters that are new, but the main character that you would have some knowledge of is Bianca and Rose Marburg’s grandfather, Leo. He’s one of the central characters. There’s also another important person that you’ve met, though only in the most glancing way: the granddaughter that Nora from “Ship Fever” and “The Cure” doesn’t live to see. At the end of “The Cure,” as Elizabeth goes to visit her sister and brother-in-law, there’s a moment where the kids sweep by—there are five of them—and the youngest is Eudora, who is part of the new novel. The present-time action takes place in 1916 and 1917 at a public sanatorium in the Adirondacks.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a working title?
BARRETT
Right now, it’s called “The Experiment.”
INTERVIEWER
Given the existence of this whole fictional universe and its timeline, do you already know what happens at the end?
BARRETT
I know how it ends.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever have trouble keeping your own interest alive without the suspense of not knowing?
BARRETT
No, because that’s not the sort of thing I’m doing when I write. I’m not trying to find out who will get married to whom. A lot of the suspense in writing is structural, formal, the surprise of the characters’ inner lives. I think most readers are also looking for these other surprises. We know someone will die or get married; what intrigues us is how we’ll get there. What’s the path? Writing is suspenseful for me because I have to figure out the path. But the kind of suspense that has to do with plotting has never driven me. I’m a feeble plotter—you can look at my books and see that they’re not about that. I’m a fairly good student in certain ways, but I haven’t been able to learn how to plot. In a sense, I’d say I haven’t yet learned how to write, either. I may solve the problems presented by one book, but then I find that the next book is totally different, and I have to start all over again. With the book I’m working on now, I’ve felt this very sharply. I was interrupted in my work by a year-long stay in New York, which was dominated by the events of 9/11. Now that I’m back to it, I feel like a beginner all over again. Sometimes that’s excruciating, but it’s also fun. I simply can’t learn how to do it. It seems impossible that after seven books I wouldn’t have learned how, but I haven’t.
INTERVIEWER
But what would it mean to have learned to write in this sense? Your first draft would also be your final draft?
BARRETT
I guess. I always imagine that. I also imagine that there’s some secret to writing, and no one will tell me what it is. I know it’s not true, but still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the years of working on my books, part of me does still feel that if I ever really learned how to do this, I would stop writing such crazy material, such bad first drafts, and get it right the first time.
INTERVIEWER
That would be channeling a muse. That would be Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. That kind of writing is exceedingly rare.
BARRETT
I know it’s not realistic. It’s the dream of paradise. The dream of waking up and without effort being able to produce perfection.
INTERVIEWER
It might actually be boring. Weren’t you just saying you write because the process of doing it is so satisfying in itself?
BARRETT
Yes, probably I’d be miserable if the dream ever happened. Often I don’t enjoy the struggle, but at the same time part of the reason I like doing it is the difficulty. There’s some evidence that I actually make it harder for myself—for example, by tying so many things together or doing much more research than I need to do. It’s as if when I don’t feel the going is hard enough, I create another set of constraints. One of the ways that this new book seemed to go wrong for me in the beginning was that I started to write it pretty much like I wrote The Voyage of the Narwahl—it had an omniscient narrator and moved through four or five central consciousnesses. The problem was, I got bored. I don’t think it was the right voice for this material, in the end, but I was also bored because I already knew how to do that. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not as well as I might wish, but I had done it a couple of times already, and I felt I could do it with some ease.
INTERVIEWER
Paradise got too close.
BARRETT
Apparently.
INTERVIEWER
You told me earlier that the voice of the new book is very quirky. Can you say more?
BARRETT
I hardly know how to describe it right now. It’s a collective first-person narrator that also fragments into some individual voices, including an X-ray technician, a doctor, and certain patients in the sanatorium who are involved in the experiment of the title.
INTERVIEWER
I’m trying to think of other books that have taken on this first-person-plural point of view. There’s the fairly recent example of Jeff Eugenides . . .
BARRETT
He did it beautifully in The Virgin Suicides. In so far as I remember, he was working after the model of Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Which is to say the group of people functions as a collective witness, in some sense. There’s also During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase. I haven’t read it in years, but it’s a beautiful book. I did a little bit of this in my story “The Marburg Sisters.” I don’t know if what I’m doing with the voice in the new book is going to work yet, but I can do certain things with it that I can’t do any other way. I can really give a sense of what it’s like to be in an institution—not just one person’s experience but everybody’s. But it’s daunting. The voice is very natural for the things that happen inside that sanatorium, but there are going to be some huge events that have to happen outside that voice.
INTERVIEWER
So are you doing any reading to get ideas for the collective first-person plural voice?
BARRETT
No. I don’t know of anyone who’s done quite what I want to do, and I’m afraid to look at too many examples. I love what Jeff Eugenides does in The Virgin Suicides, and at some point, I will go back and look at it, but it’s not what I want to do in my book.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the experiment referred to by the title?
BARRETT
It’s a little communal school or self-educational gathering, people getting together to tell each other what they know and give lectures to each other.
INTERVIEWER
I had imagined a medical experiment, what with the X-ray technician and your penchant for scientists as characters.
BARRETT
No, it’s more of a utopian social experiment, at least at first.
INTERVIEWER
Do titles come easily for you?
BARRETT
I always love to see a fabulous nine-word title—a big, descriptive, mysterious title likeWhy the Tree Loves the Axe. I often try them out for myself, but then I realize my own are wafty and pretentious. I know the Narwhal went through many lofty titles. At some point I was calling it “The Cave Beyond the Winds.”
INTERVIEWER
Do you usually have the title early?
BARRETT
It depends. Sometimes I do; sometimes I haven’t found it till the last moment. WithServants of the Map, I always had the title for the story, but I never thought of it as the title for the whole collection, and then one day it suddenly seemed abundantly obvious—not just because that was the name of a long story in the book, but because it spoke to so many issues in the other stories. The Voyage of the Narwhal came late, too, but it was clear, once the book within the book, which is also called The Voyage of the Narwhal, came up.
INTERVIEWER
What about Ship Fever?
BARRETT
I always loved that phrase—it’s another name for typhus—but I didn’t know it was the title of the book for a long time.
INTERVIEWER
“The Mysteries of Ubiquitin” is a great title.
BARRETT
That one came out of a conversation with a friend of mine who studies ubiquitin, which is a protein, and who taught me everything about it that’s in that story. We were sitting around nattering one day, and one of us said laughingly to the other, Oh, the mysteries of ubiquitin.
INTERVIEWER
What’s your writing day like?
BARRETT
It depends. If things are lined up and I’m ahead of myself in terms of research, I’ll write in the morning, and then sort of gather stuff together in the afternoon. Say if I’m going to write about rhododendrons, I’ll get together all the stuff about rhododendrons in the house. And then I read it over in the afternoon or evening and try to write the passage the following morning. But sometimes, when I’m stuck, a scene will get to the point where I can’t write the next sentence because I don’t know something. What I just described is how I wrote Voyageand Servants of the Map and a few stories before that. My days are not as rigidly planned out now as they used to be. I travel too much. I’m always going off to give readings or to teach. I’m trying to get back to being more flexible—the way I was when I was younger, because I had to be. That little stretch of years when I was home enough and quiet enough that I could be quite firm about my schedule seems to be over, unfortunately. I don’t have that luxury right now, but I didn’t have it when I was working on my first books, and they still got written.
INTERVIEWER
Do you start out in longhand or on a computer?
BARRETT
I often compose on the computer, but I still work longhand as well. I print out a lot—it’s very tree destructive. I type my horrible early drafts and print them out and write all over them. Once they’re covered with handwriting to the point I can’t read them, I type the changes in and print again, and then I work on the pages again. The computer has saved me some time in terms of moving chunks around. Very often I move material between chapters. I never get the chapters right—they’re always in the wrong order and I have to swap things around. Sometimes I retype from scratch, or I may even hand write from scratch. I read the pages aloud when I’m stuck in a certain way, which is part of why I have the writing studio. When Barry’s home, I can’t work in my office upstairs. I’m sorry I wouldn’t show the studio to you, but I feel I need to keep a physical as well as a psychic space that can’t be violated.
INTERVIEWER
Has your choice of historical settings and characters for your later books spared you some of the curiosity of the reading public?
BARRETT
Sure. In general, I would say that writing about the past provides a considerable defense against the confusion of autobiography and fiction. Any time someone writes a contemporary novel, no matter how different the author is from the characters, that question comes up. The only time people get close to asking me if my work is autobiographical is with the Marburg sisters. They’ll say, Are you more like Rose or Bianca? But people never ask me if I’m more like Linnaeas or Mendel.
INTERVIEWER
All right, which are you more like, Linnaeas or Mendel?
BARRETT
Oh—Mendel.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
BARRETT
He was very solitary, and not very willful. He had enough will to do his work but he didn’t have the confidence to push his work out into the world.
INTERVIEWER
You have written about many characters engaged in various sorts of Linnaean classification, scientists, and otherwise, and yet it’s not really the way you think, as a writer, not the way you organize the world.
BARRETT
That’s true. My own mental processes are far more intuitive than logical, more chaotic than linear. It’s far easier for me to put things together—to synthesize, to make patterns—than to analyze. I think part of the reason I’m so fascinated by characters who think very clearly, perhaps to the exclusion of other aspects of their lives, is that I don’t think clearly at all myself. Not properly speaking, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think people are interested in whether fiction is autobiographical?
BARRETT
I don’t know. I have to accept that they are, because I run into it everywhere. Writing is so personal. There’s so much of us in our fiction, whether we draw on the facts of our lives or not. Our hearts and spirits are in there—everything that’s important—it seems like this should be enough, but apparently it’s not.
INTERVIEWER
Are you ever curious about other writers’ lives and books in that way?
BARRETT
Yes, which is another reason I understand it. There are writers I love so much that I want to know anything I can about them. Then I’m forced to examine that impulse. I think about all the reading I did as a girl and as a young woman—I never had to know what George Eliot and Tolstoy had for lunch. I didn’t care. So why do I want to know these things now? Why are people curious about these things? I don’t know, though I’m as subject to that impulse as anyone else. In my own case, I can say with certainty that I’m much less interesting than my work is. I know there are writers who are themselves wonderfully interesting people. But there’s a sense in which I’m just the tunnel through which this stuff passes. There’s nothing very interesting about a clay tube.
INTERVIEWER
Except before you were saying how much work it is.
BARRETT
Even so, what I do remains as opaque to me as it does to you. Stuff goes in at one end, and both you and I can see what emerges at the other end of the process. I’m aware that somewhere in this bloody darkness in between, something goes on, but I am not hugely more in touch with the process than you are. It takes up all my time—it has eaten my whole life—and it’s endlessly interesting to me, but I can’t explain it. It’s just what I do.
INTERVIEWER
Is it fun?
BARRETT
When a plant grows, is it fun for the plant? Fun isn’t really the right word for it. Is grass having fun? There’s a seed, you put it in dirt, water it, and shoots unfold. If it happened really fast, like with bamboo, it might be fun to watch, but is it fun for the bamboo? It’s the wrong question. Is it essential? Absolutely. Can I live without doing it? Apparently not.
INTERVIEWER
What are you reading now?
BARRETT
I’m reading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, which I’d never read before, though I loveThe Good Soldier. The first volume is fabulous, if hard to get into. I’d tried to read it a couple times in the past and hated it. That’s a great example of how you can come to a book at a certain time in your life and it actively repels you, but then one day you’re old enough or it’s the right weather, and it’s completely transparent. I just finished One of Ours by Willa Cather. It’s not her best book—it wasn’t transfiguring, the way some Cather is—but you know, even bad Willa Cather is better than almost anybody else. I’m also reading Sebald’sThe Rings of Saturn for the third time, for a technical reason—I want to see how he’s jiggling the transitions between the layers of story. He does this thing where he’s walking along, talking to someone who’s telling him a story, and then in that story, we meet someone else who tells another story. I wanted to see how he shuttled between them. The first two times I read it, I was so happy to be reading it that I couldn’t pay attention to that sort of thing. I also recently reread Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, which I was interested in for a similar reason. Then there’s The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth. I was looking at the first chapter, which covers thirty years in eighteen pages, very gracefully, for a class at Warren Wilson. Once I’d dipped in, I had to reread the whole book. Most of what I’m reading now has to do actively or peripherally with World War I—it’s either set in or was written around that time, since that’s the period I’m working with now.
INTERVIEWER
Your formal education wasn’t in literature or writing, but it served you well. What do you think about the extent to which writing can be taught?
BARRETT
I think sometimes people misperceive me as a self-taught writer, but that’s true only in the bluntest sense. I’ve learned a great deal from teaching at Bread Loaf and Warren Wilson and from all the friends I’ve made at both places.
INTERVIEWER
I can grant that you might have learned a lot from teaching, but you’d written four books before that, not to mention the two you threw out.
BARRETT
That’s certainly the case, but I wouldn’t have been able to write the stories in Ship Feveror Servants of the Map if I hadn’t been at Warren Wilson. I heard such interesting craft lectures there from the other teachers and learned a lot from my students, too—from their fiction and their critical work. Then there’s everything that I was desperately reading just to keep a half an hour ahead of them, and everything I was reading to be able to teach a good craft class there—one hour that takes me six months of preparation. The stories in Ship Fever are rooted not just in their subject matter but in certain technical challenges that I explored at Warren Wilson.
INTERVIEWER
So teaching and hearing other writers teach has taught you what the available repertoire of tricks is—that you could do an arabesque?
BARRETT
I don’t think it’s so much taught me how to do an arabesque but that there was such a thing. If I’d been doing one before, I hadn’t known the name for it or how to refine it. Once I discovered there was this thing called an arabesque, I could also think, But this story would be much better if I could do a triple! I became much more conscious of the technical aspects of writing. There’s a good deal you can do unconsciously, without really knowing what it is or how you’re doing it, and I had learned much of that before I began to teach. But teaching forced me to articulate back to people what I was doing, and in the process to grow clearer about it myself. For someone not naturally a clear thinker, this is quite useful.
INTERVIEWER
What about the workshop experience—do you think writing students get anything out of it?
BARRETT
Well, a bunch of my students have been published, so something must have worked for them. Was it the workshop? I’m not sure. For some writers, it’s definitely helpful. Sometimes I think drawing up a really good reading list is the best thing that I can do for a writer. If you know a writer’s work well enough to provide the right reading suggestions, and they take those seriously and do the reading, that will work. Anyone who’s going to be any good will learn from that. It’s the one thing you can give other writers that’s universally helpful. Once they learn to see what other writers have done and how, they realize they can steal those techniques. I tell them, Yeah, steal that. Go there, and make it yours.

Wikio

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

By Anita Mathias

Today’s Guardian Review of a novel which mesmerized me when I first read it to the exclusion of everything else.  I must re-read it.
   

Rereading: Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak knew that Doctor Zhivago was explosive. But a new translation to mark the 50th anniversary of the author’s death loses much of its force, argues Ann Pasternak Slater
  • Share54
  • Reddit
  • Buzz up
  • Comments (3)
  • Ann Pasternak Slater
  • The Guardian, Saturday 6 November 2010
  • Article history

Boris Pasternak outside his home in 1958
Boris Pasternak outside his home in Peredelkino in 1958. Photograph: Jerry Cooke/© Jerry Cooke/CORBIS

The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once said that Boris Pasternaklooked like an Arab and his horse. In the 30s a Soviet cartoon turned him into a long-jawed sphinx, paws curled over a lectern. As a public speaker he was incomprehensible. His work is notoriously hard to translate.
  1. Doctor Zhivago
  2. by Boris Pasternak, translated by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear
  3. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

In his increasingly difficult times, it also became safer not to be easily understood. When Stalin startled the life out of him with a “friendly” midnight phone-call – Well? What can you say about that poem of Mandelstam’s? – Pasternak replied with a deflective discussion of what was, for him, the fundamental issue of human right over life and death. Questioning a homicidal despot’s power to his face carries some risks. Fortunately, Stalin was too impatient to understand, and cut off the call. This time, the sentence for Mandelstam’s anti-Stalinist poem was a mild form of exile – but in the great purge of 1937 he was one of the 44,000 liquidated. Beside Pasternak’s name, Stalin reputedly scribbled the instruction “Don’t touch this cloud-dweller”.
Pasternak’s work is also difficult because his mind-set is unpredictably complex, evocatively associative, synaesthetic and polysemous. His vocabulary is exceptionally wide, and his intellect has a pronounced metaphysical cast. In an uncollected letter to TS Eliot, Pasternak explores their shared aesthetic in ambitiously faulty English. Eliot’s art, he writes, like his own, is “a casually broken off fragment of the density of being itself; of the hylomorphic matter of existence . . .” Pasternak became much more accessible in his later work. Doctor Zhivago was suicidally vivid and forthright. The poems that accompany it are translucent.
From his schooldays, Pasternak tells us, Yury Zhivago had dreamed of writing “a book of impressions of life in which he would conceal, like sticks of dynamite, the most striking things he had so far seen”. Doctor Zhivagowas that book. It was packed with dynamite and, as Pasternak expected, it blew up in his face.
Pasternak was the first writer of the Soviet regime who dared convey the truth about Russia’s recent history. In the space of 40 years the Russians of his generation suffered two world wars; three revolutions; civil war and famine; the disasters of collectivisation and famine; the purges of the intelligentsia, the military, the Soviet political elite and the kulaks. Starvation, cannibalism, murder, reprisals, legitimised slaughter – nothing is glossed over in the novel’s unflinching particularity. It ends with Khruschev’s Thaw, tentatively celebrating “a new freedom of spirit” embodied in the book Zhivago wrote before his death.
Pasternak’s hopes were denied when the forthcoming Russian edition ofZhivago was withdrawn from the Soviet press. In 1958 its publication in the west coincided with the Nobel prize, awarded for Pasternak’s poetic achievements and his work “in the great Russian epic tradition”, clearly linking Doctor Zhivago to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The Soviet response was to denounce Pasternak as a traitor. He was expelled from the writers’ union, robbed of his livelihood and vilified in the press. He refused to seek exile in the west, and declined the Nobel prize. Within two years he was dead.
Fifty years have passed. Now we have the opportunity to reread – and r
Doctor Zhivago was first translated, at great speed, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari in 1958. I remember Max saying he would read a page in Russian, and then write it down in English, without looking back. This sounds incredible – even though a page of the large-faced Russian typescript they worked from is roughly equivalent to only half a page of their Collins text. I can, though, readily believe that he did this with paragraphs and sentences. Of course both translators then cross-checked and agreed their combined version against the original. Nevertheless, it’s perfectly true that there are negligible omissions which are made good in the Volokhonsky-Pevear translation. This comes at a price.
Max Hayward’s provocatively described practice is actually a difficult and necessary discipline. The translator needs distance. His main pitfall is to drift unconsciously into the linguistic aura of his original – in this case, to write a kind of Russified English. 

Wikio

Delicious Bookmark this on Deliciou

Filed Under: books_blog, Novels, Writers

Alice Munro–Consummate Short Story Writer

By Anita Mathias

Alice Munro


My favourite short story writer, hands down, is Alice Munro. I love her jewelly miniaturist’s art, her contorted sentences, the elegaic tone which pervades her work, her sharp eye, her sense of hard-won wisdom, the sadness and beauty which breathes through her work.


Her work is restful, rejuvenating, a tonic for me. I love it!

I could not find my favourite Munro stories online, but here’s one from the New Yorker.




The Bear Came Over the Mountain

by Alice Munro

Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an absent-minded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
Just before they left their house Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheap black house shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.
“I thought they’d quit doing that,” she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.
She remarked that she’d never have to do this again, since she wasn’t taking those shoes with her.
“I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time,” she said. “Or semi-dressed up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”
She rinsed out the rag she’d been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her golden-brown, fur-collared ski jacket, over a white turtleneck sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles, and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair that was as light as milkweed fluff had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant’s noticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done. (That was the thing that had alarmed Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor’s receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona’s mother, even more than the state of the house, had told her all she needed to know about attitudes and politics.) But otherwise Fiona, with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes, was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth, which she emphasized now with red lipstick—usually the last thing she did before she left the house.
  • from the issue
  • cartoon bank
  • e-mail this
She looked just like herself on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.
Over a year ago, Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house. That was not entirely new. Fiona had always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she got done that day. Even her morning schedule was written down. He found it mystifying and touching in its precision: “7 a.m. yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45– 8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and breakfast.”
The new notes were different. Stuck onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn’t she just open the drawers and see what was inside?
Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned Grant from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her usual walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line—a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.
It was hard to figure out. She’d said that about fences as if it were a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”
He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.
“If I am I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant. “I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”
Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker. She asked Grant when they’d moved to this house.
“Was it last year or the year before?”
“It was twelve years ago,” he said.
“That’s shocking.”
“She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. He tried without success to explain how Fiona’s surprise and apologies now seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some unexpected adventure. Or begun playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to.
“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”
In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had his back turned. A policeman picked her up as she was walking down the middle of the road, blocks away. He asked her name and she answered readily. Then he asked her the name of the Prime Minister.
“If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job.”
He laughed. But then she made the mistake of asking if he’d seen Boris and Natasha. These were the now dead Russian wolfhounds she had adopted many years ago, as a favor to a friend, then devoted herself to for the rest of their lives. Her taking them over might have coincided with the discovery that she was not likely to have children. Something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus. Or it might have been after her mother died. The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks. And Grant himself, in those days, landing his first job at the university (his father-in-law’s money welcome there in spite of the political taint), might have seemed to some people to have been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored—though, fortunately, he didn’t understand this until much later.
There was a rule that nobody could be admitted to Meadowlake during the month of December. The holiday season had so many emotional pitfalls. So they made the twenty-minute drive in January. Before they reached the highway the country road dipped through a swampy hollow now completely frozen over.
Fiona said, “Oh, remember.”
Grant said, “I was thinking about that, too.”
“Only it was in the moonlight,” she said.
She was talking about the time that they had gone out skiing at night under the full moon and over the black-striped snow, in this place that you could get into only in the depths of winter. They had heard the branches cracking in the cold.
If she could remember that, so vividly and correctly, could there really be so much the matter with her? It was all he could do not to turn around and drive home.
There was another rule that the supervisor explained to him. New residents were not to be visited during the first thirty days. Most people needed that time to get settled in. Before the rule had been put in place, there had been pleas and tears and tantrums, even from those who had come in willingly. Around the third or fourth day they would start lamenting and begging to be taken home. And some relatives could be susceptible to that, so you would have people being carted home who would not get on there any better than they had before. Six months or sometimes only a few weeks later, the whole upsetting hassle would have to be gone through again.
“Whereas we find,” the supervisor said, “we find that if they’re left on their own the first month they usually end up happy as clams.”
They had in fact gone over to Meadowlake a few times several years ago to visit Mr. Farquhar, the old bachelor farmer who had been their neighbor. He had lived by himself in a drafty brick house unaltered since the early years of the century, except for the addition of a refrigerator and a television set. Now, just as Mr. Farquhar’s house was gone, replaced by a gimcrack sort of castle that was the weekend home of some people from Toronto, the old Meadowlake was gone, though it had dated only from the fifties. The new building was a spacious, vaulted place, whose air was faintly, pleasantly pine-scented. Profuse and genuine greenery sprouted out of giant crocks in the hallways.
Nevertheless, it was the old Meadowlake that Grant found himself picturing Fiona in, during the long month he had to get through without seeing her. He phoned every day and hoped to get the nurse whose name was Kristy. She seemed a little amused at his constancy, but she would give him a fuller report than any other nurse he got stuck with.
Fiona had caught a cold the first week, she said, but that was not unusual for newcomers. “Like when your kids start school,” Kristy said. “There’s a whole bunch of new germs they’re exposed to and for a while they just catch everything.”
Then the cold got better. She was off the antibiotics and she didn’t seem as confused as she had been when she came in. (This was the first Grant had heard about either the antibiotics or the confusion.) Her appetite was pretty good and she seemed to enjoy sitting in the sunroom. And she was making some friends, Kristy said.
If anybody phoned, he let the machine pick up. The people they saw socially, occasionally, were not close neighbors but people who lived around the country, who were retired, as they were, and who often went away without notice. They would imagine that he and Fiona were away on some such trip at present.
Grant skied for exercise. He skied around and around in the field behind the house as the sun went down and left the sky pink over a countryside that seemed to be bound by waves of blue-edged ice. Then he came back to the darkening house, turning the television news on while he made his supper. They had usually prepared supper together. One of them made the drinks and the other the fire, and they talked about his work (he was writing a study of legendary Norse wolves and particularly of the great wolf Fenrir, which swallows up Odin at the end of the world) and about whatever Fiona was reading and what they had been thinking during their close but separate day. This was their time of liveliest intimacy, though there was also, of course, the five or ten minutes of physical sweetness just after they got into bed— something that did not often end in sex but reassured them that sex was not over yet.
In a dream he showed a letter to one of his colleagues. The letter was from the roommate of a girl he had not thought of for a while and was sanctimonious and hostile, threatening in a whining way. The girl herself was someone he had parted from decently and it seemed unlikely that she would want to make a fuss, let alone try to kill herself, which was what the letter was elaborately trying to tell him she had done.
He had thought of the colleague as a friend. He was one of those husbands who had been among the first to throw away their neckties and leave home to spend every night on a floor mattress with a bewitching young mistress—coming to their offices, their classes, bedraggled and smelling of dope and incense. But now he took a dim view.

“I wouldn’t laugh,” he said to Grant—who did not think he had been laughing. “And if I were you I’d try to prepare Fiona.”

So Grant went off to find Fiona in Meadowlake—the old Meadowlake—and got into a lecture hall instead. Everybody was waiting there for him to teach his class. And sitting in the last, highest row was a flock of cold-eyed young women all in black robes, all in mourning, who never took their bitter stares off him, and pointedly did not write down, or care about, anything he was saying.
Fiona was in the first row, untroubled. “Oh phooey,” she said. “Girls that age are always going around talking about how they’ll kill themselves.”
He hauled himself out of the dream, took pills, and set about separating what was real from what was not.
There had been a letter, and the word “rat” had appeared in black paint on his office door, and Fiona, on being told that a girl had suffered from a bad crush on him, had said pretty much what she said in the dream. The colleague hadn’t come into it, and nobody had committed suicide. Grant hadn’t been disgraced. In fact, he had got off easy when you thought of what might have happened just a couple of years later. But word got around. Cold shoulders became conspicuous. They had few Christmas invitations and spent New Year’s Eve alone. Grant got drunk, and without its being required of him—also, thank God, without making the error of a confession—he promised Fiona a new life.
Nowhere had there been any acknowledgment that the life of a philanderer (if that was what Grant had to call himself—he who had not had half as many conquests as the man who had reproached him in his dream) involved acts of generosity, and even sacrifice. Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fragility, by offering more affection—or a rougher passion—than anything he really felt. All so that he could now find himself accused of wounding and exploiting and destroying self-esteem. And of deceiving Fiona—as, of course, he had. But would it have been better if he had done as others had done with their wives, and left her? He had never thought of such a thing. He had never stopped making love to Fiona. He had not stayed away from her for a single night. No making up elaborate stories in order to spend a weekend in San Francisco or in a tent on Manitoulin Island. He had gone easy on the dope and the drink, and he had continued to publish papers, serve on committees, make progress in his career. He had never had any intention of throwing over work and marriage and taking to the country to practice carpentry or keep bees.
But something like that had happened, after all. He had taken early retirement with a reduced pension. Fiona’s father had died, after some bewildered and stoical time alone in the big house, and Fiona had inherited both that property and the farmhouse where her father had grown up, in the country near Georgian Bay.
It was a new life. He and Fiona worked on the house. They got cross-country skis. They were not very sociable but they gradually made some friends. There were no more hectic flirtations. No bare female toes creeping up under a man’s pants leg at a dinner party. No more loose wives.
Just in time, Grant was able to think, when the sense of injustice had worn down. The feminists and perhaps the sad silly girl herself and his cowardly so-called friends had pushed him out just in time. Out of a life that was in fact getting to be more trouble than it was worth. And that might eventually have cost him Fiona.
On the morning of the day when he was to go back to Meadowlake, for the first visit, Grant woke early. He was full of a solemn tingling, as in the old days on the morning of his first planned meeting with a new woman. The feeling was not precisely sexual. (Later, when the meetings had become routine, that was all it was.) There was an expectation of discovery, almost a spiritual expansion. Also timidity, humility, alarm.
There had been a thaw. Plenty of snow was left, but the dazzling hard landscape of earlier winter had crumbled. These pocked heaps under a gray sky looked like refuse in the fields. In the town near Meadowlake he found a florist’s shop and bought a large bouquet. He had never presented flowers to Fiona before. Or to anyone else. He entered the building feeling like a hopeless lover or a guilty husband in a cartoon.
“Wow. Narcissus this early,” Kristy said. “You must’ve spent a fortune.” She went along the hall ahead of him and snapped on the light in a sort of pantry, where she searched for a vase. She was a heavy young woman who looked as if she had given up on her looks in every department except her hair. That was blond and voluminous. All the puffed-up luxury of a cocktail waitress’s style, or a stripper’s, on top of such a workaday face and body.
“There now,” she said, and nodded him down the hall. “Name’s right on the door.”
So it was, on a nameplate decorated with bluebirds. He wondered whether to knock, and did, then opened the door and called her name.
She wasn’t there. The closet door was closed, the bed smoothed. Nothing on the bedside table, except a box of Kleenex and a glass of water. Not a single photograph or picture of any kind, not a book or a magazine. Perhaps you had to keep those in a cupboard.
He went back to the nurses’ station. Kristy said, “No?” with a surprise that he thought perfunctory. He hesitated, holding the flowers. She said, “O.K., O.K.—let’s set the bouquet down here.” Sighing, as if he were a backward child on his first day at school, she led him down the hall toward a large central space with skylights which seemed to be a general meeting area. Some people were sitting along the walls, in easy chairs, others at tables in the middle of the carpeted floor. None of them looked too bad. Old—some of them incapacitated enough to need wheelchairs—but decent. There had been some unnerving sights when he and Fiona visited Mr. Farquhar. Whiskers on old women’s chins, somebody with a bulged-out eye like a rotted plum. Dribblers, head wagglers, mad chatterers. Now it looked as if there’d been some weeding out of the worst cases.
“See?” said Kristy in a softer voice. “You just go up and say hello and try not to startle her. Just go ahead.”
He saw Fiona in profile, sitting close up to one of the card tables, but not playing. She looked a little puffy in the face, the flab on one cheek hiding the corner of her mouth, in a way it hadn’t done before. She was watching the play of the man she sat closest to. He held his cards tilted so that she could see them. When Grant got near the table she looked up. They all looked up—all the players at the table looked up, with displeasure. Then they immediately looked down at their cards, as if to ward off any intrusion.
But Fiona smiled her lopsided, abashed, sly, and charming smile and pushed back her chair and came round to him, putting her fingers to her mouth.
“Bridge,” she whispered. “Deadly serious. They’re quite rabid about it.” She drew him toward the coffee table, chatting. “I can remember being like that for a while at college. My friends and I would cut class and sit in the common room and smoke and play like cutthroats. Can I get you anything? A cup of tea? I’m afraid the coffee isn’t up to much here.”
Grant never drank tea.
He could not throw his arms around her. Something about her voice and smile, familiar as they were, something about the way she seemed to be guarding the players from him—as well as him from their displeasure—made that impossible.
“I brought you some flowers,” he said. “I thought they’d do to brighten up your room. I went to your room but you weren’t there.”
“Well, no,” she said. “I’m here.” She glanced back at the table.
Grant said, “You’ve made a new friend.” He nodded toward the man she’d been sitting next to. At this moment that man looked up at Fiona and she turned, either because of what Grant had said or because she felt the look at her back.
“It’s just Aubrey,” she said. “The funny thing is I knew him years and years ago. He worked in the store. The hardware store where my grandpa used to shop. He and I were always kidding around and he couldn’t get up the nerve to ask me out. Till the very last weekend and he took me to a ballgame. But when it was over my grandpa showed up to drive me home. I was up visiting for the summer. Visiting my grandparents—they lived on a farm.”
“Fiona. I know where your grandparents lived. It’s where we live. Lived.”
“Really?” she said, not paying her full attention because the cardplayer was sending her his look, which was one not of supplication but of command. He was a man of about Grant’s age, or a little older. Thick coarse white hair fell over his forehead and his skin was leathery but pale, yellowish-white like an old wrinkled-up kid glove. His long face was dignified and melancholy and he had something of the beauty of a powerful, discouraged, elderly horse. But where Fiona was concerned he was not discouraged.
“I better go back,” Fiona said, a blush spotting her newly fattened face. “He thinks he can’t play without me sitting there. It’s silly, I hardly know the game anymore. If I leave you now, you can entertain yourself? It must all seem strange to you but you’ll be surprised how soon you get used to it. You’ll get to know who everybody is. Except that some of them are pretty well off in the clouds, you know—you can’t expect them all to get to know who you are.”
She slipped back into her chair and said something into Aubrey’s ear. She tapped her fingers across the back of his hand.
Grant went in search of Kristy and met her in the hall. She was pushing a cart with pitchers of apple juice and grape juice.
“Well?” she said.
Grant said, “Does she even know who I am?” He could not decide. She could have been playing a joke. It would not be unlike her. She had given herself away by that little pretense at the end, talking to him as if she thought perhaps he was a new resident. If it was a pretense.
Kristy said, “You just caught her at sort of a bad moment. Involved in the game.”
“She’s not even playing,” he said.
“Well, but her friend’s playing. Aubrey.”
“So who is Aubrey?”
“That’s who he is. Aubrey. Her friend. Would you like a juice?”
Grant shook his head.
“Oh look,” said Kristy. “They get these attachments. That takes over for a while. Best buddy sort of thing. It’s kind of a phase.”
“You mean she really might not know who I am?”
“She might not. Not today. Then tomorrow—you never know, do you? You’ll see the way it is, once you’ve been coming here for a while. You’ll learn not to take it all so serious. Learn to take it day by day.”
Day by day. But things really didn’t change back and forth and he didn’t get used to the way they were. Fiona was the one who seemed to get used to him, but only as some persistent visitor who took a special interest in her. Or perhaps even as a nuisance who must be prevented, according to her old rules of courtesy, from realizing that he was one. She treated him with a distracted, social sort of kindness that was successful in keeping him from asking the most obvious, the most necessary question: did she remember him as her husband of nearly fifty years? He got the impression that she would be embarrassed by such a question—embarrassed not for herself but for him.
Kristy told him that Aubrey had been the local representative of a company that sold weed killer “and all that kind of stuff” to farmers. And then when he was not very old or even retired, she said, he had suffered some unusual kind of damage.
“His wife is the one takes care of him, usually at home. She just put him in here on temporary care so she could get a break. Her sister wanted her to go to Florida. See, she’s had a hard time, you wouldn’t ever have expected a man like him—they just went on a holiday somewhere and he got something, like some bug that gave him a terrible high fever? And it put him in a coma and left him like he is now.”
Most afternoons the pair could be found at the card table. Aubrey had large, thick-fingered hands. It was difficult for him to manage his cards. Fiona shuffled and dealt for him and sometimes moved quickly to straighten a card that seemed to be slipping from his grasp. Grant would watch from across the room her darting move and quick laughing apology. He could see Aubrey’s husbandly frown as a wisp of her hair touched his cheek. Aubrey preferred to ignore her, as long as she stayed close.
But let her smile her greeting at Grant, let her push back her chair and get up to offer him tea—showing that she had accepted his right to be there—and Aubrey’s face took on its look of sombre consternation. He would let the cards slide from his fingers and fall on the floor to spoil the game. And Fiona then had to get busy and put things right.
If Fiona and Aubrey weren’t at the bridge table they might be walking along the halls, Aubrey hanging on to the railing with one hand and clutching Fiona’s arm or shoulder with the other. The nurses thought that it was a marvel, the way she had got him out of his wheelchair. Though for longer trips—to the conservatory at one end of the building or the television room at the other—the wheelchair was called for.
In the conservatory, the pair would find themselves a seat among the most lush and thick and tropical-looking plants—a bower, if you liked. Grant stood nearby, on occasion, on the other side of the greenery, listening. Mixed in with the rustle of the leaves and the sound of plashing water was Fiona’s soft talk and her laughter. Then some sort of chortle. Aubrey could talk, though his voice probably didn’t sound as it used to. He seemed to say something now—a couple of thick syllables.
Take care. He’s here. My love.
Grant made an effort, and cut his visits down to Wednesdays and Saturdays. Saturdays had a holiday bustle and tension. Families arrived in clusters. Mothers were usually in charge; they were the ones who kept the conversation afloat. Men seemed cowed, teen-agers affronted. No children or grandchildren appeared to visit Aubrey, and since they could not play cards—the tables being taken over for ice-cream parties—he and Fiona stayed clear of the Saturday parade. The conservatory was far too popular then for any of their intimate conversations. Those might be going on, of course, behind Fiona’s closed door. Grant could not manage to knock when he found it closed, though he stood there for some time staring at the Disney-style nameplate with an intense, a truly malignant dislike.
Or they might be in Aubrey’s room. But he did not know where that was. The more he explored this place the more corridors and seating spaces and ramps he discovered, and in his wanderings he was still apt to get lost. One Saturday he looked out a window and saw Fiona—it had to be her—wheeling Aubrey along one of the paved paths now cleared of snow and ice. She was wearing a silly wool hat and a jacket with swirls of blue and purple, the sort of thing he had seen on local women at the supermarket. It must be that they didn’t bother to sort out the wardrobes of the women who were roughly the same size and counted on the women not to recognize their own clothes anyway. They had cut her hair, too. They had cut away her angelic halo.
On a Wednesday, when everything was more normal and card games were going on again and the women in the Crafts Room were making silk flowers or costumed dolls—and when Aubrey and Fiona were again in evidence, so that it was possible for Grant to have one of his brief and friendly and maddening conversations with his wife—he said to her, “Why did they chop off your hair?”
Fiona put her hands up to her head, to check.
“Why—I never missed it,” she said.
When Grant had first started teaching Anglo-Saxon and Nordic literature he got the regular sort of students in his classes. But after a few years he noticed a change. Married women had started going back to school. Not with the idea of qualifying for a better job, or for any job, but simply to give themselves something more interesting to think about than their usual housework and hobbies. To enrich their lives. And perhaps it followed naturally that the men who taught them these things became part of the enrichment, that these men seemed to these women more mysterious and desirable than the men they still cooked for and slept with.
Those who signed up for Grant’s courses might have a Scandinavian background or they might have learned something about Norse mythology from Wagner or historical novels. There were also a few who thought he was teaching a Celtic language and for whom everything Celtic had a mystic allure. He spoke to such aspirants fairly roughly from his side of the desk.
“If you want to learn a pretty language go and learn Spanish. Then you can use it if you go to Mexico.”
Some took his warning and drifted away. Others seemed to be moved in a personal way by his demanding tone. They worked with a will and brought into his office, into his regulated satisfactory life, the great surprising bloom of their mature female compliance, their tremulous hope of approval.
He chose a woman named Jacqui Adams. She was the opposite of Fiona—short, cushiony, dark-eyed, effusive. A stranger to irony. The affair lasted for a year, until her husband was transferred. When they were saying goodbye in her car, she began to shake uncontrollably. It was as if she had hypothermia. She wrote to him a few times, but he found the tone of her letters overwrought and could not decide how to answer. He let the time for answering slip away while he became magically and unexpectedly involved with a girl who was young enough to be Jacqui’s daughter.
For another and more dizzying development had taken place while he was busy with Jacqui. Young girls with long hair and sandalled feet were coming into his office and all but declaring themselves ready for sex. The cautious approaches, the tender intimations of feeling required with Jacqui were out the window. A whirlwind hit him, as it did many others. Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals; there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men. Academic parties, which used to be so predictable, became a minefield. An epidemic had broken out, it was spreading like the Spanish flu. Only this time people ran after contagion, and few between sixteen and sixty seemed willing to be left out.
That was exaggeration, of course. Fiona was quite willing. And Grant himself did not go overboard. What he felt was mainly a gigantic increase in well-being. A tendency to pudginess which he had had since he was twelve years old disappeared. He ran up steps two at a time. He appreciated as never before a pageant of torn clouds and winter sunsets seen from his office window, the charm of antique lamps glowing between his neighbors’ living-room curtains, the cries of children in the park, at dusk, unwilling to leave the hill where they’d been tobogganing. Come summer, he learned the names of flowers. In his classroom, after being coached by his nearly voiceless mother-in-law (her affliction was cancer in the throat), he risked reciting the majestic and gory Icelandic ode, the Höfudlausn, composed to honor King Erik Blood-axe by the skald whom that king had condemned to death.
Fiona had never learned Icelandic and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved—the stories that Grant had taught and written about. She referred to their heroes as “old Njal” or “old Snorri.” But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris’s trip, and Auden’s. She didn’t really plan to travel there. She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.
Nonetheless, the next time he went to Meadowlake, Grant brought Fiona a book he’d found of nineteenth-century watercolors made by a lady traveller to Iceland. It was a Wednesday. He went looking for her at the card tables but didn’t see her. A woman called out to him, “She’s not here. She’s sick.”
Her voice sounded self-important and excited—pleased with herself for having recognized him when he knew nothing about her. Perhaps also pleased with all she knew about Fiona, about Fiona’s life here, thinking it was maybe more than he knew.
“He’s not here, either,” she added.
Grant went to find Kristy, who didn’t have much time for him. She was talking to a weepy woman who looked like a first-time visitor.
“Nothing really,” she said, when he asked what was the matter with Fiona. “She’s just having a day in bed today, just a bit of an upset.”
Fiona was sitting straight up in the bed. He hadn’t noticed, the few times that he had been in this room, that this was a hospital bed and could be cranked up in such a way. She was wearing one of her high-necked maidenly gowns, and her face had a pallor that was like flour paste.
Aubrey was beside her in his wheelchair, pushed as close to the bed as he could get. Instead of the nondescript open-necked shirts he usually wore, he was wearing a jacket and tie. His natty-looking tweed hat was resting on the bed. He looked as if he had been out on important business.
Whatever he’d been doing, he looked worn out by it. He, too, was gray in the face.
They both looked up at Grant with a stony grief-ridden apprehension that turned to relief, if not to welcome, when they saw who he was. Not who they thought he’d be. They were hanging on to each other’s hands and they did not let go.
The hat on the bed. The jacket and tie.
It wasn’t that Aubrey had been out. It wasn’t a question of where he’d been or whom he’d been to see. It was where he was going.
Grant set the book down on the bed beside Fiona’s free hand.
“It’s about Iceland,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d like to look at it.”
“Why, thank you,” said Fiona. She didn’t look at the book.
“Iceland,” he said.
She said, “Ice-land.” The first syllable managed to hold a tinkle of interest, but the second fell flat. Anyway, it was necessary for her to turn her attention back to Aubrey, who was pulling his great thick hand out of hers.
“What is it?” she said. “What is it, dear heart?”
Grant had never heard her use this flowery expression before.
“Oh all right,” she said. “Oh here.” And she pulled a handful of tissues from the box beside her bed. Aubrey had begun to weep.
“Here. Here,” she said, and he got hold of the Kleenex as well as he could and made a few awkward but lucky swipes at his face. While he was occupied, Fiona turned to Grant.
“Do you by any chance have any influence around here?” she said in a whisper. “I’ve seen you talking to them…”
Aubrey made a noise of protest or weariness or disgust. Then his upper body pitched forward as if he wanted to throw himself against her. She scrambled half out of bed and caught him and held on to him. It seemed improper for Grant to help her.
“Hush,” Fiona was saying. “Oh, honey. Hush. We’ll get to see each other. We’ll have to. I’ll go and see you. You’ll come and see me.”
Aubrey made the same sound again with his face in her chest and there was nothing Grant could decently do but get out of the room.
“I just wish his wife would hurry up and get here,” Kristy said when he ran into her. “I wish she’d get him out of here and cut the agony short. We’ve got to start serving supper before long and how are we supposed to get her to swallow anything with him still hanging around?”
Grant said, “Should I stay?”
“What for? She’s not sick, you know.”
“To keep her company,” he said.
Kristy shook her head.
“They have to get over these things on their own. They’ve got short memories, usually. That’s not always so bad.”
Grant left without going back to Fiona’s room. He noticed that the wind was actually warm and the crows were making an uproar. In the parking lot a woman wearing a tartan pants suit was getting a folded-up wheelchair out of the trunk of her car.
Fiona did not get over her sorrow. She didn’t eat at mealtimes, though she pretended to, hiding food in her napkin. She was being given a supplementary drink twice a day—someone stayed and watched while she swallowed it down. She got out of bed and dressed herself, but all she wanted to do then was sit in her room. She wouldn’t have had any exercise at all if Kristy, or Grant during visiting hours, hadn’t walked her up and down in the corridors or taken her outside. Weeping had left her eyes raw-edged and dim. Her cardigan—if it was hers—would be buttoned crookedly. She had not got to the stage of leaving her hair unbrushed or her nails uncleaned, but that might come soon. Kristy said that her muscles were deteriorating, and that if she didn’t improve they would put her on a walker.
“But, you know, once they get a walker they start to depend on it and they never walk much anymore, just get wherever it is they have to go,” she said to Grant. “You’ll have to work at her harder. Try to encourage her.”
But Grant had no luck at that. Fiona seemed to have taken a dislike to him, though she tried to cover it up. Perhaps she was reminded, every time she saw him, of her last minutes with Aubrey, when she had asked him for help and he hadn’t helped her.
He didn’t see much point in mentioning their marriage now.
The supervisor called him in to her office. She said that Fiona’s weight was going down even with the supplement.
“The thing is, I’m sure you know, we don’t do any prolonged bed care on the first floor. We do it temporarily if someone isn’t feeling well, but if they get too weak to move around and be responsible we have to consider upstairs.”
He said he didn’t think that Fiona had been in bed that often.
“No. But if she can’t keep up her strength she will be. Right now she’s borderline.”
Grant said that he had thought the second floor was for people whose minds were disturbed.
“That, too,” she said.
The street Grant found himself driving down was called Blackhawks Lane. The houses all looked to have been built around the same time, perhaps thirty or forty years ago. The street was wide and curving and there were no sidewalks. Friends of Grant and Fiona’s had moved to places something like this when they began to have their children, and young families still lived here. There were basketball hoops over garage doors and tricycles in the driveways. Some of the houses had gone downhill. The yards were marked by tire tracks, the windows plastered with tinfoil or hung with faded flags. But a few seemed to have been kept up as well as possible by the people who had moved into them when they were new—people who hadn’t had the money or perhaps hadn’t felt the need to move on to some place better.
The house that was listed in the phone book as belonging to Aubrey and his wife was one of these. The front walk was paved with flagstones and bordered by hyacinths that stood as stiff as china flowers, alternately pink and blue.
He hadn’t remembered anything about Aubrey’s wife except the tartan suit he had seen her wearing in the parking lot. The tails of the jacket had flared open as she bent into the trunk of the car. He had got the impression of a trim waist and wide buttocks.
She was not wearing the tartan suit today. Brown belted slacks and a pink sweater. He was right about the waist—the tight belt showed she made a point of it. It might have been better if she didn’t, since she bulged out considerably above and below.
She could be ten or twelve years younger than her husband. Her hair was short, curly, artificially reddened. She had blue eyes—a lighter blue than Fiona’s—a flat robin’s-egg or turquoise blue, slanted by a slight puffiness. And a good many wrinkles, made more noticeable by a walnut-stain makeup. Or perhaps that was her Florida tan.
He said that he didn’t quite know how to introduce himself.
“I used to see your husband at Meadowlake. I’m a regular visitor there myself.”
“Yes,” said Aubrey’s wife, with an aggressive movement of her chin.
“How is your husband doing?”
The “doing” was added on at the last moment.
“He’s O.K.,” she said.
“My wife and he struck up quite a close friendship.”
“I heard about that.”
“I wanted to talk to you about something if you had a minute.”
“My husband did not try to start anything with your wife if that’s what you’re getting at,” she said. “He did not molest her. He isn’t capable of it and he wouldn’t anyway. From what I heard it was the other way round.”
Grant said, “No. That isn’t it at all. I didn’t come here with any complaints about anything.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry. I thought you did. You better come in then. It’s blowing cold in through the door. It’s not as warm out today as it looks.”
So it was something of a victory for him even to get inside.
She took him past the living room, saying, “We’ll have to sit in the kitchen, where I can hear Aubrey.”
Grant caught sight of two layers of front-window curtains, both blue, one sheer and one silky, a matching blue sofa and a daunting pale carpet, various bright mirrors and ornaments. Fiona had a word for those sort of swooping curtains—she said it like a joke, though the women she’d picked it up from used it seriously. Any room that Fiona fixed up was bare and bright. She would have deplored the crowding of all this fancy stuff into such a small space. From a room off the kitchen—a sort of sunroom, though the blinds were drawn against the afternoon brightness—he could hear the sounds of television.
The answer to Fiona’s prayers sat a few feet away, watching what sounded like a ballgame. His wife looked in at him.
She said, “You O.K.?” and partly closed the door.
“You might as well have a cup of coffee,” she said to Grant. “My son got him on the sports channel a year ago Christmas. I don’t know what we’d do without it.”
On the kitchen counters there were all sorts of contrivances and appliances—coffeemaker, food processor, knife sharpener, and some things Grant didn’t know the names or uses of. All looked new and expensive, as if they had just been taken out of their wrappings, or were polished daily.
He thought it might be a good idea to admire things. He admired the coffeemaker she was using and said that he and Fiona had always meant to get one. This was absolutely untrue—Fiona had been devoted to a European contraption that made only two cups at a time.
“They gave us that,” she said. “Our son and his wife. They live in Kamloops. B.C. They send us more stuff than we can handle. It wouldn’t hurt if they would spend the money to come and see us instead.”
Grant said philosophically, “I suppose they’re busy with their own lives.”
“They weren’t too busy to go to Hawaii last winter. You could understand it if we had somebody else in the family, closer at hand. But he’s the only one.”
She poured the coffee into two brown-and-green ceramic mugs that she took from the amputated branches of a ceramic tree trunk that sat on the table.
“People do get lonely,” Grant said. He thought he saw his chance now. “If they’re deprived of seeing somebody they care about, they do feel sad. Fiona, for instance. My wife.”
“I thought you said you went and visited her.”
“I do,” he said. “That’s not it.”
Then he took the plunge, going on to make the request he’d come to make. Could she consider taking Aubrey back to Meadowlake, maybe just one day a week, for a visit? It was only a drive of a few miles. Or if she’d like to take the time off—Grant hadn’t thought of this before and was rather dismayed to hear himself suggest it—then he himself could take Aubrey out there, he wouldn’t mind at all. He was sure he could manage it. While he talked she moved her closed lips and her hidden tongue as if she were trying to identify some dubious flavor. She brought milk for his coffee and a plate of ginger cookies.
“Homemade,” she said as she set the plate down. There was challenge rather than hospitality in her tone. She said nothing more until she had sat down, poured milk into her coffee, and stirred it.
Then she said no.
“No. I can’t do that. And the reason is, I’m not going to upset him.”
“Would it upset him?” Grant said earnestly.
“Yes, it would. It would. That’s no way to do. Bringing him home and taking him back. That would just confuse him.”
“But wouldn’t he understand that it was just a visit? Wouldn’t he get into the pattern of it?”
“He understands everything all right.” She said this as if he had offered an insult to Aubrey. “But it’s still an interruption. And then I’ve got to get him all ready and get him into the car, and he’s a big man, he’s not so easy to manage as you might think. I’ve got to maneuver him into the car and pack his chair and all that and what for? If I go to all that trouble I’d prefer to take him someplace that was more fun.”
“But even if I agreed to do it?” Grant said, keeping his tone hopeful and reasonable. “It’s true, you shouldn’t have the trouble.”
“You couldn’t,” she said flatly. “You don’t know him. You couldn’t handle him. He wouldn’t stand for you doing for him. All that bother and what would he get out of it?”
Grant didn’t think he should mention Fiona again.
“It’d make more sense to take him to the mall,” she said. “Or now the lake boats are starting to run again, he might get a charge out of going and watching that.”
She got up and fetched her cigarettes and lighter from the window above the sink.
“You smoke?” she said.
He said no, thanks, though he didn’t know if a cigarette was being offered.
“Did you never? Or did you quit?”
“Quit,” he said.
“How long ago was that?”
He thought about it.
“Thirty years. No—more.”
He had decided to quit around the time he started up with Jacqui. But he couldn’t remember whether he quit first, and thought a big reward was coming to him for quitting, or thought that the time had come to quit, now that he had such a powerful diversion.
“I’ve quit quitting,” she said, lighting up. “Just made a resolution to quit quitting, that’s all.”
Maybe that was the reason for the wrinkles. Somebody—a woman—had told him that women who smoked developed a special set of fine facial wrinkles. But it could have been from the sun, or just the nature of her skin—her neck was noticeably wrinkled as well. Wrinkled neck, youthfully full and uptilted breasts. Women of her age usually had these contradictions. The bad and good points, the genetic luck or lack of it, all mixed up together. Very few kept their beauty whole, though shadowy, as Fiona had done. And perhaps that wasn’t even true. Perhaps he only thought that because he’d known Fiona when she was young. When Aubrey looked at his wife did he see a high-school girl full of scorn and sass, with a tilt to her blue eyes, pursing her fruity lips around a forbidden cigarette?
“So your wife’s depressed?” Aubrey’s wife said. “What’s your wife’s name? I forget.”
“It’s Fiona.”
“Fiona. And what’s yours? I don’t think I was ever told that.”
Grant said, “It’s Grant.”
She stuck her hand out unexpectedly across the table.
“Hello, Grant. I’m Marian.”
“So now we know each other’s names,” she said, “there’s no point in not telling you straight out what I think. I don’t know if he’s still so stuck on seeing your—on seeing Fiona. Or not. I don’t ask him and he’s not telling me. Maybe just a passing fancy. But I don’t feel like taking him back there in case it turns out to be more than that. I can’t afford to risk it. I don’t want him upset and carrying on. I’ve got my hands full with him as it is. I don’t have any help. It’s just me here. I’m it.”
“Did you ever consider—I’m sure it’s very hard for you—” Grant said. “Did you ever consider his going in there for good?”
He had lowered his voice almost to a whisper but she did not seem to feel a need to lower hers.
“No,” she said. “I’m keeping him right here.”
Grant said, “Well. That’s very good and noble of you.” He hoped the word “noble” had not sounded sarcastic. He had not meant it to be.
“You think so?” she said. “Noble is not what I’m thinking about.”
“Still. It’s not easy.”
“No, it isn’t. But the way I am, I don’t have much choice. I don’t have the money to put him in there unless I sell the house. The house is what we own outright. Otherwise I don’t have anything in the way of resources. Next year I’ll have his pension and my pension, but even so I couldn’t afford to keep him there and hang on to the house. And it means a lot to me, my house does.”
“It’s very nice,” said Grant.
“Well, it’s all right. I put a lot into it. Fixing it up and keeping it up. I don’t want to lose it.”
“No. I see your point.”
“The company left us high and dry,” she said. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of it but basically he got shoved out. It ended up with them saying he owed them money and when I tried to find out what was what he just went on saying it’s none of my business. What I think is he did something pretty stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask so I shut up. You’ve been married. You are married. You know how it is. And in the middle of me finding out about this we’re supposed to go on this trip and can’t get out of it. And on the trip he takes sick from this virus you never heard of and goes into a coma. So that pretty well gets him off the hook.”
Grant said, “Bad luck.”
“I don’t mean he got sick on purpose. It just happened. He’s not mad at me anymore and I’m not mad at him. It’s just life. You can’t beat life.”
She flicked her tongue in a cat’s businesslike way across her top lip, getting the cookie crumbs. “I sound like I’m quite the philosopher, don’t I? They told me out there you used to be a university professor.”
“Quite a while ago,” Grant said.
“I bet I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking there’s a mercenary type of a person.”
“I’m not making judgments of that sort. It’s your life.”
“You bet it is.”
He thought they should end on a more neutral note. So he asked her if her husband had worked in a hardware store in the summers, when he was going to school.
“I never heard about it,” she said. “I wasn’t raised here.”
Grant realized he’d failed with Aubrey’s wife. Marian. He had thought that what he’d have to contend with would be a woman’s natural sexual jealousy—or her resentment, the stubborn remains of sexual jealousy. He had not had any idea of the way she might be looking at things. And yet in some depressing way the conversation had not been unfamiliar to him. That was because it reminded him of conversations he’d had with people in his own family. His relatives, probably even his mother, had thought the way Marian thought. Money first. They had believed that when other people did not think that way it was because they had lost touch with reality. That was how Marian would see him, certainly. A silly person, full of boring knowledge and protected by some fluke from the truth about life. A person who didn’t have to worry about holding on to his house and could go around dreaming up the fine generous schemes that he believed would make another person happy. What a jerk, she would be thinking now.
Being up against a person like that made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate. Why? Because he couldn’t be sure of holding on to himself, against people like that? Because he was afraid that in the end they were right? Yet he might have married her. Or some girl like that. If he’d stayed back where he belonged. She’d have been appetizing enough. Probably a flirt. The fussy way she had of shifting her buttocks on the kitchen chair, her pursed mouth, a slightly contrived air of menace—that was what was left of the more or less innocent vulgarity of a small-town flirt.
She must have had some hopes when she picked Aubrey. His good looks, his salesman’s job, his white-collar expectations. She must have believed that she would end up better off than she was now. And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonably expected. No doubt it seemed unfair.
In the kitchen the first thing he saw was the light blinking on his answering machine. He thought the same thing he always thought now. Fiona. He pressed the button before he took his coat off.
“Hello, Grant. I hope I got the right person. I just thought of something. There is a dance here in town at the Legion supposed to be for singles on Saturday night and I am on the lunch committee, which means I can bring a free guest. So I wondered whether you would happen to be interested in that? Call me back when you get a chance.”
A woman’s voice gave a local number. Then there was a beep and the same voice started talking again.
“I just realized I’d forgotten to say who it was. Well, you probably recognized the voice. It’s Marian. I’m still not so used to these machines. And I wanted to say I realize you’re not a single and I don’t mean it that way. I’m not either, but it doesn’t hurt to get out once in a while. If you are interested you can call me and if you are not you don’t need to bother. I just thought you might like the chance to get out. It’s Marian speaking. I guess I already said that. O.K. then. Goodbye.”
Her voice on the machine was different from the voice he’d heard a short time ago in her house. Just a little different in the first message, more so in the second. A tremor of nerves there, an affected nonchalance, a hurry to get through and a reluctance to let go.
Something had happened to her. But when had it happened? If it had been immediate, she had concealed it very successfully all the time he was with her. More likely it came on her gradually, maybe after he’d gone away. Not necessarily as a blow of attraction. Just the realization that he was a possibility, a man on his own. More or less on his own. A possibility that she might as well try to follow up.
But she’d had the jitters when she made the first move. She had put herself at risk. How much of herself he could not yet tell. Generally a woman’s vulnerability increased as time went on, as things progressed. All you could tell at the start was that if there was an edge of it then, there’d be more later. It gave him a satisfaction—why deny it?—to have brought that out in her. To have roused something like a shimmer, a blurring, on the surface of her personality. To have heard in her testy broad vowels this faint plea.
He set out the eggs and mushrooms to make himself an omelette. Then he thought he might as well pour a drink.
Anything was possible. Was that true—was anything possible? For instance, if he wanted to, would he be able to break her down, get her to the point where she might listen to him about taking Aubrey back to Fiona? And not just for visits but for the rest of Aubrey’s life. And what would become of him and Marian after he’d delivered Aubrey to Fiona?
Marian would be sitting in her house now, waiting for him to call. Or probably not sitting. Doing things to keep herself busy. She might have fed Aubrey while Grant was buying the mushrooms and driving home. She might now be preparing him for bed. But all the time she would be conscious of the phone, of the silence of the phone. Maybe she would have calculated how long it would take Grant to drive home. His address in the phone book would have given her a rough idea of where he lived. She would calculate how long, then add to that the time it might take him to shop for supper (figuring that a man alone would shop every day). Then a certain amount of time for him to get around to listening to his messages. And as the silence persisted she’d think of other things. Other errands he might have had to do before he got home. Or perhaps a dinner out, a meeting that meant he would not get home at suppertime at all.
What conceit on his part. She was above all things a sensible woman. She would go to bed at her regular time thinking that he didn’t look as if he’d be a decent dancer anyway. Too stiff, too professorial.
He stayed near the phone, looking at magazines, but he didn’t pick it up when it rang again.
“Grant. This is Marian. I was down in the basement putting the wash in the dryer and I heard the phone and when I got upstairs whoever it was had hung up. So I just thought I ought to say I was here. If it was you and if you are even home. Because I don’t have a machine, obviously, so you couldn’t leave a message. So I just wanted. To let you know.” The time was now twenty-five after ten.
“Bye.”
He would say that he’d just got home. There was no point in bringing to her mind the picture of his sitting here weighing the pros and cons.
Drapes. That would be her word for the blue curtains—drapes. And why not? He thought of the ginger cookies so perfectly round that she had to announce they were homemade, the ceramic coffee mugs on their ceramic tree, a plastic runner, he was sure, protecting the hall carpet. A high-gloss exactness and practicality that his mother had never achieved but would have admired—was that why he could feel this twinge of bizarre and unreliable affection? Or was it because he’d had two more drinks after the first?
The walnut-stain tan—he believed now that it was a tan—of her face and neck would most likely continue into her cleavage, which would be deep, crêpey-skinned, odorous and hot. He had that to think of as he dialled the number that he had already written down. That and the practical sensuality of her cat’s tongue. Her gemstone eyes.
Fiona was in her room but not in bed. She was sitting by the open window, wearing a seasonable but oddly short and bright dress. Through the window came a heady warm blast of lilacs in bloom and the spring manure spread over the fields.
She had a book open in her lap.
She said, “Look at this beautiful book I found. It’s about Iceland. You wouldn’t think they’d leave valuable books lying around in the rooms. But I think they’ve got the clothes mixed up—I never wear yellow.”
“Fiona,” he said.
“Are we all checked out now?” she said. He thought the brightness of her voice was wavering a little. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
“Fiona, I’ve brought a surprise for you. Do you remember Aubrey?”
She stared at Grant for a moment, as if waves of wind had come beating into her face. Into her face, into her head, pulling everything to rags. All rags and loose threads.
“Names elude me,” she said harshly.
Then the look passed away as she retrieved, with an effort, some bantering grace. She set the book down carefully and stood up and lifted her arms to put them around him. Her skin or her breath gave off a faint new smell, a smell that seemed to Grant like green stems in rank water.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said, both sweetly and formally. She pinched his earlobes, hard.
“You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”
He kept his face against her white hair, her pink scalp, her sweetly shaped skull.
He said, “Not a chance.” ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/12/27/1999_12_27_110_TNY_LIBRY_000019900?currentPage=all#ixzz13bHLeUpp

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/12/27/1999_12_27_110_TNY_LIBRY_000019900?currentPage=all#ixzz13bH7aXiu

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

The Eastern Europe of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kafka and Elie Wiesel

By Anita Mathias

The Eastern Europe of Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kafka and Elie Wiesel

We spent this morning in Prague’s old Ghetto and Jewish quarter. 

Jewish people have lived in Prague for a millennium—subjected to a variety of petty restrictions: for a while the only trades open to them were the rag trade and the usury. They had to wear distinctive hats and ruffs and badges, which exposed them to persecution, they were regarded as the personal property of the King under the Statuta Judaeorum, subjected to pogroms and extortion.
The Spanish Synagogue was modelled on the Alhambra in Granada. It was a privilege to be inside a synagogue, and to walk up to the place where the Torah was stored for instance, well beyond the balcony reserved for women. I do not remember going to a synagogue before, though Roy says I must have.
 As is appropriate in a baroque city, it was entirely too much. Absolutely gorgeous, but too much. Ornate, colourful, gold and ruby and sapphire in fantastical geometrical patterns. Absolutely lavish. I felt as I did in the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. There was so much, such a profusion of loveliness that I did not know what to focus on or to take in first.
The places humans devise to worship God are very interesting. Some like the Puritans wanted simplicity and purity. I am with them. Some, like Archbishop Suger, who designed Saint-Denys in Paris, and who is credited with introducing stained glass in cathedrals, and with the invention of Gothic itself, wanted “More Light” as Suger said, coloured light.
If I had to devise a place of worship, it would be a simple Gothic cathedral, maybe not as high-roofed as Amiens, but still immense, with long lancet windows, with alternately stained glass and natural green views outside. It would be set in a place of natural loveliness, in the kind of surroundings the Cistercians chose in Riveaux for instance.

The reverence for the Torah was moving—massive bejewelled Torah crowns, Torah shields, Torah pointers, finials, covers.  These had been gathered here from all over Eastern Europe by Hitler who wished to construct a Museum to an Extinct Race. What wickedness—wanting the destruction of an entire race.
Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews, the immense amount of time, organization, energy and resources he devoted towards his Final Solution was irrational—and one of the factors in his speedy downfall, most historians agree.  However, as we observed the historical evidences of anti-semitism in the museum, it was clear that Hitler was not acting in a vacuum. Part of his demonizing of the Jewish people was shrewd political calculation.  Jews were conjured up as the enemy to distract the populace from the miseries of hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and the crippling burden of reparations. And the holocaust would never have occurred without the tacit consent, encouragement, delight and collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. I found the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. unbearably painful and did not go through the whole thing. One of the documentaries I remember is the gloating faces in the crowd watching Jews clear the rubble after Kristallnacht or Allied bombing raids, and the sheer exhaustion on the faces of the suited victims who had their businesses trashed, and then had to clear the wreckage.


The Pinkasova Synagogue had a chilling list, every inch of wall space covered of the names, dates of birth, and dates of death or transportation to the death camps of 80,000 Jews.  It is the longest epitaph in the world, though of course, it only represents a fraction of those who died in the camps.
Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, academics, psychologists, doctors—what an immeasurable loss of individuals who had lived, and learned and suffered and thought before they could transmit their learning and life experience to the next generation.  What a loss too of ordinary men and women, repositories of a wonderful oral tradition before it could be transmitted to succeeding generations.
Hitler’s Final Solution was to render the Jewish race extinct. He did not succeed in this, of course. Though, he did partially succeed in his diabolical purpose. The vivid, quirky, eccentric, Eastern Jewish life of the ghettos and shetls celebrated in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer or the paintings of Max Chagall no longer exists.  And the world is the poorer for it.

Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto, though since his father was upwardly mobile he left it. However, the destruction of the old ghetto to make room for lavish five storey mansions on prime real estate left profound scars on his psyche. As a German speaker among Czechs who hated Germans, as a Jew among German speakers who hated Jews, and as an agnostic among believers, Kafka lived in a constant state of fear, the angst he describes.
The list of writers, playwrights, painters, musicians, academics, and scientists who either perished under or fled from Hitler is immense. What an vast amount of Jewish talent!! The victims of pogroms, fines, forced migrations, extortion of much of their history in Europe, European Jews tended to invest in the intangible–in scholarship, learning, culture, song, family ties, tradition, scripture. One would think that with all this Jewish talent amassed in Israel, we would have seen an unparalled flowering of culture, literature, and the arts. But we haven’t really. 
Perhaps standing outside the party, your nose pressed against the window, is what gives you the clearest view. Being an outsider helps you see the inside most clearly. While the psychological advantages of being an insider are considerable, you no longer have the vantage point of the outsider with which to view the party, the perspective of distance, the artistic tool of defamiliarization which helps you and your reader see things more clearly. 


 My husband Roy’s post-doctoral advisor at Stanford University, a old worldly Jew called Gene Golub told me that before the second World War, the Jewish culture of the shetls and ghettos was described as yiddishkeit, which I understood as an Old Worldly gentleness, sweetness, courtliness, courtesy, even unworldliness. I have sometimes encountered it, and it is charming. After the trauma of the Holocaust, Golub told me, the Jewish psyche and culture changed. Their watchword became “Never Again.”  What a dreadful psychological burden to live under!! The Israelis describe themselves as Sabras, prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside.
Not long after my conversation with Golub, Roy and I took a flight from JFK to Israel, where Roy was speaking at a Conference around the time of Succoth. The plane was full of Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn going to Israel for the festival—black clad, black hatted, ringlets to die for on either side of their faces, tassels, scrolls on their forehead, the works. At the correct time, they all stood up in unison, whipped out their prayer books, and proceeded to chant in unison, with synchronized bowing.
We hit turbulence. They continued unperturbed, though their swaying now owed something to atmospheric disturbance.  They steadfastly ignored all pleas to sit down by the increasingly agitated stewardess. Their chanting and bowing and swaying continued unabated. Finally, she announced over the intercom, “Could any Hebrew speaker here ask these guys to sit down?” knowing full well that they were New York Jews and understood every word she said as well as she did!!
Never again. What an enormous psychological burden to grow up with!! It is just the opposite of the philosophy taught by the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua or Jesus—though where his philosophy led him to in the short run is a matter of historical record.
Interestingly, Gandhi who achieved one of the most amazing Velvet Revolutions in the history of mankind by following the Nazarene’s principles of non-violence (and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience) counselled the Jews of Europe not to resist Hitler. I wonder what would have happened if they had resisted him even less than they did? 
* *  *

At the end of this day full of thought and emotion, we walked through the Old Jewish Cemetery, Beit Hayyim, House of Life, full of massive gravestones. The same half acre or so has been used as a graveyard for a millennium. It was massively overcrowded as the ghettos were in life, people were buried twelve deep. Pretty much all the ground was taken up by a pell-mell assortment of gravestones, large, small, intricately carved in Hebrew. Masses of them.
Irene asked as we walked home, “Will the Jews ever forgive Hitler? Will the Jews ever forgive the Germans.”
Interestingly, that was the question Elie Wiesel asks in the Sunflower. As I remember it: A German commando, dying in pain, tells Wiesel how the SS crowded a village of Jews into a house, doused it with petrol, set it alight. He sees a man and a woman hold a child out of a window, put their hands over his eyes, and then jump. He shoots. Dying, in pain, he asks for a Jew, any Jew, to ask for forgiveness. Wiesel, seeing him blinded, dying, in immense pain, walks away, silently. The German dies, unforgiven.
Should he have forgiven him? Wiesel asks a panel of thinkers. Most said No.

And what did I answer Irene, aged 11, who asked me if the Jews and Israel would ever forgive the Germans. I said, “Yes. They will. They have to. They cannot go through life bearing the psychological burden of the wrong done to their families. They cannot be Atlas bearing the weight of all that evil on their shoulders. They have to toss that wrong into the dustbin of history. They have to forgive. They need not forget, but they have to forgive. For their own sakes. For the sake of their children. For the sake of their children yet unborn.
Because, in an irony of history I do not understand, those who cannot forgive or forget a wrong done to them WILL REPEAT THAT WRONG. It is an inexorable law. The bullied becomes a bully. The abused become abusers. Those who cannot forget the Nazis may repeat their conduct when they hold the reins of power.
We saw moving exhibitions today of anti-semitism through the millennia. We left convinced that the Jews undoubtedly need a homeland of their own, and why not the homeland promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a homeland to which they are perhaps physiologically and psychologically adapted? But please, Israel, treat the Palestinian people who also love the land, as you would have wished to be treated in the long centuries of your exile, when by the rivers of the Vlatva, or Don or Danube, you sat down and wept as you remembered Zion, and wistfully said, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

.Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

C.S Lewis, “Prisoner of Narnia” by Adam Gopnik,

By Anita Mathias

Here’s an interesting article!!

PRISONER OF NARNIA

How C. S. Lewis escaped.

by Adam GopnikNOVEMBER 21, 2005

TEXT SIZE:
SMALL TEXT
MEDIUM TEXT
LARGE TEXT
PRINT E-MAIL FEEDS

KEYWORDS
Lewis, C. S.;

 

“;

 

The Narnian”;
(HarperSanFrancisco, $25.95);

 

Jacobs, Alan;
Biographies;

 

“
he British literary scholar, Christian apologist, and children’s-book author C. S. Lewis is one of two figures—Churchill is the other—whose reputation in Britain is so different from their reputation in America that we might as well be talking about two (or is that four?) different men. A god to the right in America, Churchill is admired in England but hardly beatified—more often thought of as a willful man of sporadic accomplishment who was at last called upon to do the one thing in life that he was capable of doing supremely well. In America, Lewis is a figure who has been incised on stained glass—truly: there’s a stained-glass window with Lewis in it in a church in Monrovia, California—and remains, for the more intellectual and literate reaches of conservative religiosity, a saint revered and revealed, particularly in such books as “The Problem of Pain” and “The Screwtape Letters.” In England, he is commonly regarded as a slightly embarrassing polemicist, who made joke-vicar broadcasts on the BBC, but who also happened to write a few very good books about late-medieval poetry and inspire several good students. (A former Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, “couldn’t stand” Lewis, because of his bullying brand of religiosity, though John Paul II was said to be an admirer.) 
The British, of course, are capable of being embarrassed by anybody, and that they are embarrassed by Lewis does not prove that he is embarrassing. But the double vision of the man creates something of a transatlantic misunderstanding. If in England he is subject to condescension, his admirers here have made him hostage to a cult. “The Narnian” (HarperSanFrancisco; $25.95), a new life of Lewis by his disciple Alan Jacobs, is an instance of that sectarian enthusiasm. Lewis is defended, analyzed, protected, but always in the end vindicated, while his detractors are mocked at length: a kind of admiration not so different in its effects from derision. Praise a good writer too single-mindedly for too obviously ideological reasons for too long, and pretty soon you have him all to yourself. The same thing has happened to G. K. Chesterton: the enthusiasts are so busy chortling and snickering as their man throws another right hook at the rationalist that they don’t notice that the rationalist isn’t actually down on the canvas; he and his friends have long since left the building.
In England, the more representative biography of Lewis is the acidic though generally admiring life that A. N. Wilson published some fifteen years ago. It gives Lewis his due without forcing stained-glass spectacles on the reader. (Wilson is quite clear, for instance, about Lewis’s weird and complicated sex life.) While William Nicholson’s “Shadowlands,” in all its play, movie, and television versions, shows the priggish Lewis finally humanized by sex with an American Jewish matron, it actually reflects the British, rather than the American, view: Lewis as a prig to be saved from priggishness, rather than as a saint who saved others from their sins.
  • FROM THE ISSUE
  • CARTOON BANK
  • E-MAIL THIS
None of this would matter much if it weren’t for Narnia. The seven tales of the English children who cross over, through a wardrobe, into a land where animals speak and lions rule, which Lewis began in the late nineteen-forties, are classics in the only sense that matters—books that are read a full generation after their author is gone. They have become, to be sure, highly controversial classics: the wonderful British fantasist Philip Pullman has excoriated their racism (the ogres are dark-skinned and almond-eyed), their nasty little-Englandness, and their narrow-hearted religiosity. But they are part of the common imagination of childhood, and, with the release of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” as the first of a series of film adaptations, they are likely—if the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is any indication—to become still more deeply implanted.
The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.
he early, appealing part of Lewis’s life is extremely well told in his own 1955 memoir, “Surprised by Joy.” He was born in 1898, into a rough and ready but pious Ulster Protestant family in Belfast; his father was dense and eccentric—a man with “more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever met,” his exasperated son wrote much later—and his mother, who died before Lewis turned ten, was warm and loving and simple. The key relation in his life was with his older brother, Warnie, with whom he shared a taste for reading and even a private language and mythology, and to whom he remained close throughout Warnie’s long, unhappy, and, later, alcoholic life.
Above all, the young Lewis, often in company with his brother, read and walked. He was the sort of kid who is moved to tears every day by poems and trees. He loved landscape and twilight, myth and fairy tale, particularly the Irish landscape near their suburban home, and the stories of George MacDonald. Now too easily overlooked in the history of fantasy, MacDonald’s stories (“At the Back of the North Wind,” “The Princess and the Goblin,” and, most of all, “Phantastes”) evoked in Lewis an emotion bigger than mere pleasure—a kind of shining sense of goodness and romance and light. Lewis called this emotion, simply, the “Joy.” With it came the feeling that both the world and the words were trying to tell him something—not just that there is something good out there but that there is something big out there. The young Lewis found this magic in things as different as Beatrix Potter and Longfellow, “Paradise Lost” and Norse myth. “They taught me longing,” he said, and made him a “votary of the Blue Flower,” after a story by the German poet Novalis, in which a youth dreams of a blue flower and spends his life searching for it. The Christianity he knew in childhood, by contrast, seemed the opposite of magic and joy: dull sermons and dry moral equations to be solved.
This loving and mother-deprived boy was sent to a series of nightmarish English boarding schools, where he was beaten and bullied and traumatized beyond even the normal expectations of English adolescence. Lewis’s own words about the places are practically Leninist. (One headmaster raced down the length of a room with his cane to beat a lower-middle-class boy, enraged by his social pretensions.) Lewis writes about his last school, Malvern, at such length, and with such horror—with far more intensity than he writes even about serving on the Western Front—that it’s clear that the trauma, coming at a time of sexual awakening, was deep and lasting. It seems to have had the usual result: Lewis developed and craved what even his Christian biographer, Jacobs, calls “mildly sadomasochistic fantasies”; in letters to a (homosexual) friend, he named the women he’d like to spank, and for a time signed his private letters “Philomastix”—“whip-lover.”
A bright and sensitive British boy turned by public-school sadism into a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert. It sounds like the usual story. What was special about Lewis was that, throughout it all, he kept an inner life. Joy kept him alive—and it is possible that the absence of happiness allowed an access of joy. When he served on the Western Front, in 1917, he got what every soldier wanted—an honest wound honestly come by but bad enough to send him home. Still, he saw the trenches as they really were, and though he chose largely to forget, and tried to deprecate the importance of “the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles,” he admitted, in later years, that he had had nightmares about it for the rest of his life.
Oxford always seemed like joy to escapees from public schools; add the Western Front, and it must have seemed like something close to paradise. After Lewis’s first long residence there, upon his departure from the Army, in 1918, he never left Oxford again, except, at the end, for Cambridge. He took a first in classics, and then made a decision, slightly daring in those days, when teaching English literature seemed as swinging as teaching media studies does now, to become a tutor in English; he soon became a fellow in English at Magdalen College. (He also took up with a much older married woman, with whom he had a long affair that may have had a sadomasochistic tinge.)
Jacobs is a bit touristy about Magdalen’s charms; Wilson is much better, tartly and accurately describing how the system of tutorials, seemingly so seductive—an essay delivered each week by the pupil, and analyzed and critiqued by the tutor—helps turn the tutors, from sheer exhaustion and self-protection, into caricatures of themselves, rather as the girls in a lap-dance club take on exotic names and characters. Lewis, the sensitive and soft-spoken young hiker, took on the part of a bluff, hearty Irishman, all tweed and pipe. It is this Lewis who became an Oxford legend, smoking in darkened rooms and holding “Beer and Beowulf” evenings in his rooms. He held to the narrow anti-modern curriculum then in place at Oxford, and befriended a young philologist named J. R. R. Tolkien, whose views on teaching English were even more severe than Lewis’s: Tolkien thought that literature ended at 1100.
Lewis had a reputation as a tough but inspiring teacher, and, reading his letters, one can see why. His literary judgments are full of discovery; his allegiance to a dry, historical approach in the university didn’t keep him from having bracingly clear critical opinions about modern books, all of them independent and most of them right. He got the greatness of Wodehouse long before it was fashionable to do so, appreciated Trollope over Thackeray, and could admire even writers as seemingly unsympathetic to him as Woolf and Kafka. He was a partisan without being a bigot.
It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. Tolkien was a genuinely eccentric character—in college, the inventor of Lothlorien played the part of the humorless pedant—who had been ready to convert Lewis for several years. Lewis was certainly ripe to be converted. The liberal humanism in which he had been raised as a thinker had come to seem far too narrowly Philistine and materialist to account for the intimations of transcendence that came to him on country walks and in pages of poetry. Tolkien, seizing on this vulnerability, said that the obvious-seeming distinction that Lewis made between myth and fact—between intimations of timeless joy and belief in a historically based religion—was a false one. Language, and the consciousness it reflected, was intrinsically magical. One had to become religious to save the magic, not to be saved from it. (It was, ironically, the same spirit in which the children of the nineteen-sixties felt that the liberal humanism in which they had been raised failed to account for the intensities of another kind of trip—and that led them, too, to magic, and to Lewis and Tolkien.) All existence, Tolkien insisted on that night ramble, was intrinsically mythical; the stars were the fires of gods if you chose to see them that way, just as the world was the stories you made up from it. If you were drawn to myth at all, as Lewis was, then you ought to accept the Christian myth just as you accepted the lovely Northern ones. By the end of the walk, Lewis was, or was about to become, a churchgoer.
This was a new turn in the history of religious conversion. Where for millennia the cutting edge of faith had been the difference between pagan myth and Christian revelation, Lewis was drawn in by the likeness of the Christian revelation to pagan myth. Even Victorian conversions came, in the classic Augustinian manner, out of an overwhelming sense of sin. Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
It seemed like an odd kind of conversion to other people then, and it still does. It is perfectly possible, after all, to have a rich romantic and imaginative view of existence—to believe that the world is not exhausted by our physical descriptions of it, that the stories we make up about the world are an important part of the life of that world—without becoming an Anglican. In fact, it seems much easier to believe in the power of the Romantic numinous if you do not take a controversial incident in Jewish religious history as the pivot point of all existence, and a still more controversial one in British royal history as the pivot point of your daily practice. Converted to faith as the means of joy, however, Lewis never stops to ask very hard why this faith rather than some other. His favorite argument for the truth of Christianity is that either Jesus had to be crazy to say the things he did or what he said must be true, and since he doesn’t sound like someone who is crazy, he must be right. (He liked this argument so much that he repeats it in allegorical form in the Narnia books; either Lucy is lying about Narnia, or mad, or she must have seen what she claimed to see.) Lewis insists that the Anglican creed isn’t one spiritual path among others but the single cosmic truth that extends from the farthest reach of the universe to the house next door. He is never troubled by the funny coincidence that this one staggering cosmic truth also happens to be the established religion of his own tribe, supported by every institution of the state, and reinforced by the university he works in, the “God-fearing and God-sustaining University of Oxford,” as Gladstone called it. But perhaps his leap from myth to Christian faith wasn’t a leap at all, more of a standing hop in place. Many of the elements that make Christianity numinous for Lewis are the pagan mythological elements that it long ago absorbed from its pre-Christian sources. His Christianity is local, English and Irish and Northern. Even Roman Catholicism remained alien to him, a fact that Tolkien much resented.
f believing shut Lewis off from writing well about belief, it did get him to write inspired scholarship, and then inspired fairy tales. The two sides of his mind started working at the same time and together. His first important book, and his best, is “The Allegory of Love,” a study of epic poetry that Lewis began writing soon after his conversion. It is full of enthusiasm for and appreciation of the allegorical epics of Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, et al.—but it also makes a profound historical argument about the literary imagination. Until the time of Tasso and Ariosto, he points out, writers had two worlds available to them: the actual world of experience and the world of their religion. Only since the Renaissance had writers had a third world, of the marvellous, of free mythological invention, which is serious but in which the author does not really believe or make an article of faith. In Ariosto, Lewis found the beginnings of that “free creation of the marvelous,” slipping in under the guise of allegory:


The probable, the marvelous-taken-as-fact, the marvelous-known-to-fiction—such is the triple equipment of the post-Renaissance poet. Such were the three worlds which Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were born to. . . . But this triple heritage is a late conquest. Go back to the beginnings of any literature and you will not find it. At the beginning the only marvels are the marvels which are taken for fact. . . . The old gods, when they ceased to be taken as gods, might so easily have been suppressed as devils. . . . Only their allegorical use, prepared by slow developments within paganism itself, saved them, as in a temporary tomb, for the day when they could wake again in the beauty of acknowledged myth and thus provide modern Europe with its “third world” of romantic imagining. . . . The gods must be, as it were, disinfected of belief; the last taint of the sacrifice, and of the urgent practical interest, the selfish prayer, must be washed away from them, before that other divinity can come to light in the imagination. For poetry to spread its wings fully, there must be, besides the believed religion, a marvelous that knows itself as myth. 

When we sit down to write a romance, then, we make up elves and ghosts and wraiths and wizards, in whom we don’t believe but in whom we enclose our most urgent feelings, and we demand that the world they inhabit be consistent and serious.
Yet, if these words are a declaration of faith, they are also a document of bad conscience. For, throughout his own imaginative writing, Lewis is always trying to stuff the marvellous back into the allegorical—his conscience as a writer lets him see that the marvellous should be there for its own marvellous sake, just as imaginative myth, but his Christian duty insists that the marvellous must (to use his own giveaway language) be reinfected with belief. He is always trying to inoculate metaphor with allegory, or, at least, drug it, so that it walks around hollow-eyed, saying just what it’s supposed to say.
Marvellous writing in our culture has two homes, children’s literature and science fiction, and in his forties Lewis began to work in both. His first effort, the trilogy that begins with “Out of the Silent Planet,” is essentially science fiction written against science. What is really out there is not more machines but bigger mysteries. But these books are lacking in vitality, and seem worked out rather than lived in. They are filled with a kind of easy Blimpish polemics—the bad scientists are fat and smelly, or atheists. It was only in the late forties, when he began to write, quickly and almost carelessly, about the magic world of Narnia, that he began to find a deeper vein of feeling.
What is so moving about the Narnia stories is that, though Lewis began with a number of haunted images—a street lamp in the snow, the magic wardrobe itself, the gentle intelligent faun who meets Lucy—he never wrote down to, or even for, children, except to use them as characters, and to make his sentences one shade simpler than usual. He never tries to engineer an entertainment for kids. He writes, instead, as real writers must, a real book for a circle of readers large and small, and the result is a fairy tale that includes, encyclopedically, everything he feels most passionate about: the nature of redemption, the problem of pain, the Passion and the Resurrection, all set in his favored mystical English winter-and-spring landscape. Had he tried for less, the books would not have lasted so long. The trouble was that though he could encompass his obsessions, he could not entirely surrender to his imagination. The emotional power of the book, as every sensitive child has known, diminishes as the religious part intensifies. The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure.
When “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (magical title!) opens, four children who have been sent to the countryside discover an enchanted land on the other side of an old wardrobe; this is Narnia, and it has been enslaved by a White Witch, who has turned the country to eternal winter. The talking animals who live in Narnia wait desperately for the return of Aslan, the lion-king, who might restore their freedom. At last, Aslan returns. Beautiful and brave and instantly attractive, he has a deep voice and a commanding presence, obviously kingly. The White Witch conspires to have him killed, and succeeds, in part because of the children’s errors. Miraculously, he returns to life, liberates Narnia, and returns the land to spring.
Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
Tolkien hated the Narnia books, despite Lewis’s avid sponsorship of Tolkien’s own mythology, because he hated to see an imagination constrained by the allegorical impulse. Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory. The Blessed Land across the sea is a retreat for the already immortal, not, except for Frodo, a reward for the afflicted; dead is dead. The pathos of Aragorn and Arwen’s marriage is that, after Aragorn’s death, they will never meet again, in Valinor or elsewhere. It is the modernity of the existential arrangement, in tension with the archaicism of the material culture, that makes Tolkien’s myth haunting. In the final Narnia book, “The Last Battle,” the effort to key the fantasy to the Biblical themes of the Apocalypse is genuinely creepy, with an Aslan Antichrist. The best of the books are the ones, like “The Horse and His Boy,” where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.
startling thing in Lewis’s letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes—the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn’t really a belief but a very strong desire to believe. In his extended essay “The Problem of Pain,” which appeared, propitiously, in 1940, and in his novel “The Screwtape Letters,” two years later—these are written to a younger devil by an older one—Lewis takes as his presumed opponent a naïve materialist who believes in progress and in the realm of common sense and the factual and verifiable, and who relegates imagination and myth and ritual to a doomy past. Lewis has an easy time showing that progress is dubious, that evil persists, that imagination has a crucial role to play in life, that life without a shared ritual and some kind of sacred myth is hardly worth living. But, trying to explain why God makes good people suffer, Lewis can answer only that God doesn’t, bad people do, and God gave bad people free will to be bad because a world in which people could only be good would be a world peopled by robots. Anyway, God never gives people pain that isn’t good for them in the long run. This kind of apologetic is better at explaining colic than cancer, let alone concentration camps.
An old Oxford tradition claims that Bertrand Russell, on being asked why his concerns had turned so dramatically away from academic philosophy, replied, with great dignity, “Because I discovered fucking.” So did Lewis, only he was older. The story of how Lewis came to be seduced by a married woman named—for fate is a cornier screenwriter than even man is—Joy is so well told in the “Shadowlands” film that one is almost inclined to imagine it overdrawn. But, indeed, the real Joy Davidman, a spirited Jewish matron from Westchester who had been impressed by Lewis’s books, was not delicate and transcendent but foulmouthed, passionate, a little embarrassing. She drove away his more bearishly single-minded Oxford friends, including Tolkien. Fierce and independent-minded (she was played by Debra Winger in the movie but seems more Barbra Streisand in life), Davidman was a Christian convert who never lost her native oomph. After she Yokoishly insinuated herself into Lewis’s life, in the early fifties, she also brought him passion. They “feasted on love,” Lewis wrote. “No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.” That’s a lot of crannies for a middle-aged don to be satisfying, but it had a happy effect on his mind and on his prose.
It is tempting to say that Lewis, in the dramatic retellings of this story, becomes hostage to another kind of cult, the American cult of salvation through love and sex and the warmth of parenting. (She had two kids for him to help take care of.) Yet this is exactly what seems to have happened. Lewis, to the dismay of his friends, went from being a private prig and common-room hearty to being a mensch—a C. of E. mensch, but a mensch. When Joy died, of bone cancer, a few years later, he was abject with sadness, and it produced “A Grief Portrayed,” one of the finest books written about mourning. Lewis, without abandoning his God, begins to treat him as something other than a dispenser of vacuous bromides. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think,” he wrote, and his faith becomes less joblike and more Job-like: questioning, unsure—a dangerous quest rather than a querulous dogma. Lewis ended up in a state of uncertain personal faith that seems to the unbeliever comfortingly like doubt.
“Everything began with images,” Lewis wrote, admitting that he saw his faun before he got his message. He came to Bethlehem by way of Narnia, not the other way around. Whatever we think of the allegories it contains, the imaginary world that Lewis created is what matters. We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery, and particularly for inexplicable sublime imagery that involves the collision of the urban and the natural, the city and the sea. The image of the street lamp in the snow in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”; the flock of crying white birds and the sleeping Narnian lords at the world’s end in “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”; the underground abode of the surviving Narnian animals in “Prince Caspian,” part “Wind in the Willows” badger hole and part French Resistance cellar; even the exiled horse’s description of his lost Northern home in “The Horse and His Boy,” called Narnia but so clearly a British composite (“Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, of the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests”)—these are why Lewis will be remembered.
For poetry and fantasy aren’t stimulants to a deeper spiritual appetite; they are what we have to fill the appetite. The experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual, is . . . an experience of magic conveyed by poetry, landscape, light, and ritual. To hope that the conveyance will turn out to bring another message, beyond itself, is the futile hope of the mystic. Fairy stories are not rich because they are true, and they lose none of their light because someone lit the candle. It is here that the atheist and the believer meet, exactly in the realm of made-up magic. Atheists need ghosts and kings and magical uncles and strange coincidences, living fairies and thriving Lilliputians, just as much as the believers do, to register their understanding that a narrow material world, unlit by imagination, is inadequate to our experience, much less to our hopes.
The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images—the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse—are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/21/051121crat_atlarge?currentPage=all#ixzz11akQMzso
Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

Genius Grows with Experience. I believe it.

By Anita Mathias

Genius grows with experience

As the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for young writers reaches 65, Derwent May argues that the best writing comes with the seasoning of old age

Poets are usually thought of as youthful figures, inspired by the first, joyous discovery of love and sex. It is not always so, however. Two of the outstanding poets of the past 100 years were inspired to write some of their greatest poems not by pretty sweetings, but by the memory of long-dead wives.
Thomas Hardy wrote some good lyrical poems when he was young, but the most moving poems of all the thousands he produced were a little batch that appeared in his Satires of Circumstance when he was 72. Suddenly, it seems, memories of the youthful sweetheart who became his first wife welled up in him, with an overpowering surge of happiness and grief. And the facility with words that he had mastered over the years, almost to the point of banality, came to his aid.
“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me” one of them begins, and ends with the wonderful image of “Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,/ And the woman calling”. Another begins in opposite vein – “Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost… Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you”, and ends with the memory of “when/ Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers”. There are few more powerful poems in English.
And in our own time, we have Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters. Again, of course, there were many fine earlier poems. But in this volume, where Hughes finally confronted the reality of his life with Sylvia Plath, and of her death, he found a directness and eloquence that make it the most moving of all his books. Christopher Reid, in his introduction to his edition of Hughes’s letters, suggests that all his voluminous letter-writing over the years helped him to shape these final “letters”.

Related Links

  • Write while the iron is hot
  • Straight to the top
  • Youth vs age: top authors have their say

The other great poet of old age is W. B. Yeats. As he grew old he found an ever-increasing happiness in the challenge of creating art that would endure, and in a marvellous poem that he too wrote at the age of 72, Lapis Lazuli, he draws a picture of three aged Chinamen sitting on a mountainside making music. He says “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/ Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.”
Many novelists have also written their greatest works at the end of a long career. Dickens’s genius flashed out in all directions, but what many people regard as his finest novel, in which all his gifts came together, is Great Expectations, which came almost at the end of his life. George Eliot started with sentimentality and social comedy in her Scenes of Clerical Life, worked her way through more heavily moral and intellectual novels, and found the right note for all these in her penultimate novel and masterpiece, Middlemarch. E.M. Forster’s novels show a similar progress, from the deft and tender comedy of Where Angels Fear to Tread to the wisdom and humanity of A Passage to India.
Among more recent writers, Evelyn Waugh is remarkable in this respect. Who could have predicted that the author of such exuberant mad comedy as Vile Bodies would have ended up writing one of the great books about the Second World War, his Sword of Honour trilogy?
There is a similar trajectory in the novels of Philip Roth, in my view the greatest novelist alive today. He burst on the world with his outrageous comedy of masturbation, Portnoy’s Complaint — but has ended up (or perhaps not yet ended) with another superb trilogy, reflecting with a perfect touch so many aspects of American life since the war — the trio of novels, I Married a Communist, American Pastoral, and finest of all The Human Stain.
Youthful excitement may produce remarkable books. But in many writers, the slow, steady practice of their art, combining with a great burst of vitality towards the end of their life, can lead to extraordinary achievements. They might observe, with Deuteronomy, “As thy days, so shall thy strength be”. Or they might prefer to say, as Joel Chandler Harris, the creator of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, did: “I am in the prime of senility!”
———————

And here is the poem quoted,

151. The Voice
 
By Thomas Hardy
 

 
WOMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
 
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,         5
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
 
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,         10
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
 
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward         15
And the woman calling.
 

Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

Charming, charming Annie Dillard.

By Anita Mathias

I love the writing of Annie Dillard. I suppose it is possible not to, but it is not possible for me not to–she is such a kindred spirit.


Here is the second line on her website
Now I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.


And here’s a charming biography written by her husband

My husband Bob (Robert Richardson) is the biographer of Thoreau, Emerson, and William James.    He doesn’t write what Sontag called “pathographies.”    When Contemporary Authors needed an update in its account of me, he wanted to write it, and did.  Either the agent or the editors there gagged on all this praise and sent it back. 
Bob is 76 and has had 2 open-heart surgeries and 2 pacemakers.  He wants to see this piece of work “out there,” and requested I put it on the website, so sure
     Annie Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Her reputation has increased steadily if bumpily since then. Scholars and critics have recognized her scope’s widening from the natural world to history, metaphysics, ever –more narratives, and theology until  Paul Roberts could say in the Toronto Globe and Mail that the 1999 publication ofFor the Time Being, “places Dillard more firmly than ever among the very greatest of American writers.”
     Dillard has written a novel, some essays, poetry, and a memoir; her most characteristic books, however, are imaginative non-fiction narratives-—witnessings or accounts, stories and speculations–- that resist classification. Her distinctive, and distinctively American, prose style has been widely recognized and openly imitated. She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket- maker; her works’ prose structures and aims, however, are all her own. “We have less time than we knew,” she writes in Holy the Firm, “and that time buoyant, cloven, lucent, missile, and wild.”
     Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak on Apr 30, 1945, into a  Pittsburgh family with Scotch-Irish, French,  and German roots. Her father, Frank Doak, worked for some years as a  minor corporate executive, but his passions were for Dixieland jazz, for taking his boat down the Mississippi, for dancing, and above all for telling jokes. Frank Doak self-published a memoir, Something Like a Hoagie, in 1994. Dillard has written –in An AmericanChildhood— about him and about her spirited mother, Pam (Lambert) Doak, who loved dancing and had a sort of wild transgressive genius for practical joking. If the phone rang and it was a wrong number, Dillard’s mother would hand it to the nearest person; “Here, take this, your name is Cecile.”  
     Meta Ann, called Annie, was the oldest of three sisters; Amy was three years younger and Molly was ten years younger. They all grew up in Pittsburgh; the family moved from house to house in the general neighborhood of Frick Park. Summers she spent with her grandparents on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Dillard went to the Presbyterian church and to the Ellis School in Pittsburgh, and she spent four summers at Presbyterian camp; “We sang Baptist songs and had a great time,” she recalls. “It gave me a taste for abstract thought.” As a child she rode her bike all over Pittsburgh, ran flying down sidewalks with arms spread wide, and broke her nose two mornings in a row sledding belly-down and headfirst and going too fast. She threw a baseball at a strike zone drawn in red on a garage door. Ballplaying became a lifelong passion; she played second base until 1999, once making an unassisted triple play. In school she played varsity field hockey and bastketball
     She was an avid collector of both rocks and insects. She had a chemistry set and a microscope with which she found a single-celled world full of  wonders. She played “The Poet and Peasant Overture” and boogie-woogie on the piano.
     Her inner world was, if anything, more active than her outer one She took drawing and painting classes, and sat in her room for hours drawing detailed studies of remembered faces, of her left hand, of candles, of shoes, of her baseball glove. Drawing and painting were two more lifelong passions. Above all she was a reader. She read “zillions” of novels about World War II, and other novels old and new. She read field guides. Ann Haven Morgan’s A Field Guide to Ponds and Streams was a stunner. She read everything: R.L. Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations. She read  Desiree, Moby- Dick, The Mill on the Floss, and Mad Magazine. She read S.I. Hayakawa The Story of Language and several volumes of Freud. She read the German expressionist and French symbolist poets extensively and repeatedly. She read Rilke and Rimbaud and a fictionalized biography of Rimbaud called The Day on Fire. She read Henry Miller,  John O’Hara, Helen Keller, Hemingway, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, John Updike, By Love Possessed, Emerson’s Essays, The UglyAmerican, The Hidden Persuaders and The Status Seekers, and a biography of Fitzgerald.. She read C.S. Lewis’s broadcast talks on theology. Her teachers had little idea what was going on inside her. By the time she was 15-17, what they did know they didn’t care for. One said, according to An American Childhood,  “Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century.”
     Dillard did everything with voracious intensity and reckless avidity. There had always been boys. Soon there were boyfriends. She bought bongo drums and hung around fancy Shadyside bars in silent solidarity with the Beat poets who were setting about the systematic derangement of their senses. She won a Charleston contest. There was rock and roll—still her favorite music—to add to her father’s Dixieland. She was suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. One day she accepted an invitation from some boys to go drag racing; she was in the front seat when the car slammed into the brick wall. She has been racing, mostly in other ways, ever since.
     The headmistress of her school, Marian Hamilton, and her parents,  wanted Dillard to go to college in the South to smooth off her rough edges. But, as she says in An American Childhood, “I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface and exit through it.” She cut her way out of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh society when she left home and went to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. She made the decision to go there, rather than to Randolph-Macon Women’s College, after a dream about the beauty of the little creek, called Carvin’s Creek, that runs behind the old library at Hollins.
     Dillard’s teachers at Hollins included the seventeenth -century scholar John Moore, Louis Rubin, the godfather of Southern Literature, George Gordh, who has studied theology, and Richard Dillard, poet, experimental fiction writer and later director of Hollins’ famous Creative Writing program. Lee Smith was a classmate and friend. Dillard actively pursued  theology, literature, and writing. By Christmas of sophomore year she was engaged to Richard Dillard; they were married on June 5, 1964. At twenty she was a faculty wife; she finished her BA and an MA,  played softball and pinochle, and taught herself to read topographical maps. She hiked and camped on the Appalachian trail and along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Mostly, however, she read, and lesserly wrote poetry. She and her husband lived in a quiet suburban development in Roanoke, their back yard sloping sharply to an unremarkable stream, perhaps seventeen feet wide at its widest, called Tinker Creek.
     In 1974 Dillard published a book of poems, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, which was praised by both its reviewers for its lyrical brilliance, theological questioning and formal clarity. Dillard’s distinctive voice is already audible. “We feather our nests/ with froth: the rivers roll,/ the screens of mercy part.”
     During the late 60s and early 70s Dillard was writing prose as well. She understood, as she said in an 1989 interview with Katherine Weber in Publisher’s Weekly, that the essence of poetry “is not its pretty language, but the fact that it has the capacity for deep internal structures of meaning.” For Dillard, prose was a step up from poetry. “Poetry was a flute,” she told Weber, “and prose was the whole orchestra.” What she aimed to do in her prose was to build it on poetic structures so it could carry the same—or even a greater—burden of meaning as poetry could carry. One day in the early 1970s, Dillard was disappointed in a book she was reading. She found herself thinking ‘I can do better than this.’ A year later, while Tickets for a Prayer Wheel was in press, Dillard had a manuscript and a title;  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in 1974 about two months after Tickets. One afternoon in the middle of a softball game, Harper’s Magazine called.  Dillard came in from playing second base and answered the phone to find herself “famous,” nationally published. In excitement, she ate an apple, really fast.
     In 2000, Bobby Tichenor of the Oregonian recalled that Pilgrim “stopped me in my tracks….she lures you into joining her…wonderful and stimulating company. I dip into it every few months [for 26 years!] and always find new ideas and amusements.” By the time Pilgrim appeared in 1974, New York’s publicity machine had already raised as enormous and loud a fuss as is possible with a writer who declines televised appearances. Harper’sMagazine had printed two of Pilgrim’s chapters as articles, and named her a contributing editor; Atlantic Monthly printed another chapter, and Sports Illustrated another. Kirkus Reviews bombed it while it was still in galleys. Loren Eisely bombed it, Wendell Berry said it proposed no land-use ethic whatever, C.P. Snow was appalled. Eudora Welty wrote a long piece for the New York Times Book Review faulting the book for its undeveloped characters, its abstractions, and its bookishness. Quoting the passage that begins “The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. The terms are clear; if you want to live, you have to die…” “I honestly do not know what she is talking about about at such times,” wrote Welty.” Pilgrim barely sold in hardback. Paperbound, it has over the years found its way into the advanced curriculum of every college in the country. Twenty-seven years after its publication, it had appeared on many “best book” lists, including Philip Zaleski’s “Best Spiritual Essays of the Twentieth Century,” and the New York Times “Best 100 Non-fiction Books of the Twentieth Century.”
     Because magazines published many chapters from Pilgrim before the book appeared, Dillard has been labelled an essayist and Pilgrim a book of essays. In fact, she has written only one volume of essays, Teaching a Stoneto Talk. Her nonfiction books are almost invariably narratives, and Pilgrim is a strictly unified and tightly structured narrative. Her energetic prose is by turns –sometimes by quick turns–  grave, splendid, slang-shot, and hilarious. One critic called her “a stand-up ecstatic.” “The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind,” she writes. “Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.” Later, of the temptation to “sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage,” she says “I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we sould be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus,”
     Dillard builds a vision of the way things are. Often as not she builds “the world perceived” by narrative testimony and not by analysis, by narrative symbol and not by argument.
            About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from
            the roof-gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous
            as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
                 The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were
            still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not
            falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air.
            Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his
            wings with exact deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of  white, spread his
            elegant white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a
            corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight.
            The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree
            that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are
            performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be
            there.
     The structure of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is  complex and  multi-dimensional.  It is, first of all, a narrative account of her wandering and reading life, of what she spends her days doing. It is at the same time a “meteorological journal of the mind,” a phrase she takes from Thoreau. Further, it is a supercharged and scientific account of the natural world. It is also a  “radiant” theodicy, a grave, outraged, outrageous inquiry into how it comes that a good creator has created a world of cruelty and violence.  Structurally  the book has a solid bilateral symmetry based on medieval Christian theology describing the soul’s approach to God. The first eight chapters present a modern via positiva. Chapter nine, the flood, is the pivot, and the last seven chapters present the via negativa. On the via positiva a person actively attempts to come closer to God through good works, loving God and God’s works.A soul on the via positiva climbs a ladder of good towards God. A soul on the via negativa, as Dillard describes it, approaches God by denying anything that can be said about God; “All propositions about God are untrue. Language deceives; the world deceives. God is not perfectly good, perfectly powerful, perfectly loving; these words apply to beings, and God is not a being.”
     The soul on the via negativa rejects everything that is not God; in the darkness of unknowing the soul can only hope God finds it, outside the senses and outside reason. In the first half of the book a growing sense of the rich plenitude of the world dominates. In the latter part, too much wasted creation sates the soul and the mind quarrels with death; realms of greater and greater emptiness emerge. The soul is emptying in readiness for the possible incursion of God.
     This is all done through brilliant impassioned writing that can stand comparison with Thoreau and Melville, writing that is vigorous, surprising and irreverent, habitually over the top and plunging like a roller-coaster, always in the senses, relentlessly in  the active voice, and always in narrative mode. In the last paragraph of the book Dillard invokes Emerson’s dream in which he saw the earth, spinning, far off, and an angel came  and said to him ‘this thou must eat.’ And he ate the world. “All of it.”
     Partly to avoid the press and the public after winning the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, Dillard left Virginia and moved to an island near Puget sound, not far from Bellingham, Washington. Boston’s Michael J. Gross has observed that “by refusing to build a public image…Dillard has crafted a writing life of uncommon integrity.” While in Washington, she met her second husband, Gary Clevidence, a writer and anthropologist with whom she lived for twelve years. They spent long stretches of time on a remote and primitive island which had never reliquished the nineteenth century. While living in Washington and teaching part time as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Western Washington State University, she wrote the long short story called “The Living” which she would later expand into a novel. There, too, she wrote the book she likes best, Holy the Firm.
     The second in what would eventually be a trilogy of books asking why natural evil exists, Holy the Firm takes the form of a personal narrative. ‘Form’ is the important word here, not ‘personal.’ Dillard recounts events, taking what looks like a personal narrative, but reshaping it, investing or reclothing it with images and ideas from her wide reading, into a symbolic, existential excursion. It is the process by which Melville made Moby Dickout of his tale about a poor old whale-hunter. Critic Barbara Lounsberry has observed how commentators first compared Dillard’s work with that of Thoreau and Emerson, but, over time, came increasingly to compare it with that of Hawthorne and Melville.
     Holy the Firm began when Dillard took a line from a letter of Emerson’s to Margaret Fuller, “No one suspects the days to be gods,” and decided to make the next three days a test case. On the second day, an islander’s plane crashed nearby. In the book, facial burns disfigure  a young girl, Julie Norwich, whom Dillard had met making cider. What can we say of  the gods of these three days? the book asks. The first god is a pagan divinity, inhabiting all creation, inspiriting the mountains, a small naked manlike god tangled in the writer’s hair. The second day, “God’s Tooth,” is indifferent to the cruelty of physical accident—is absent. The third day’s god, revealed through a knapsack as light shines through skeletal ribs, is the holy God of mystery. The book ends with a return to the burned girl, rededication to vocation and a revealed vision of the baptism of Christ.
     The structure of the book is a complex as a late Beethoven Quartet. Holy the Firm has three parts: creation, fall, redemption. The first part is anchored in the senses, presents the new-born island world as vivid with spirit, and presents pantheism. Part two depends on mind. It proceeds –outraged—to examine the fall, the crash of the second day,  by means of  reason, which can make no sense of needless suffering. Part three is anchored in spirit, moving through ecstasy to enlightment.  The writing teeters on the limit of what can be felt and said. All of this, it cannot be too much emphasized, is accomplished through narrative, the things of this world, the island, farm, girl, books, boy. It is narrative heightened, freighted, wrought into symbol, and narrative first and last.
     The opening event illuminates the whole story, and sets out themes: a monk or artist’s life of sacrificial dedication to ego-less emptiness, fire, terror, beauty. Dillard was camped alone and reading a novel about the young French Poet, drunken Arthur Rimbaud, “that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen. I was hoping it would do it again.” One night a moth flies into her candle. “A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing….When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs….All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax—a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.
     And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a safron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk….
     She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud burned out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.
     In 1979, Dillard and Clevidence moved East, making home in Middletown, Connecticut, where Dillard again held a teaching position, this time as Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University. “I came to Connecticut because, in the course of my wanderings, it was time to come back east—back to that hardwood forest where the multiple trees and soft plants have their distinctive seasons” she said in a 1984 Esquire article “Why I Live Where I Live.” Their daughter, Cody Rose, was born in Connecticut in 1984. The family spent summers in South Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where two girls from Clevidence’s earlier marriage, Carin and Shelly, continued to play a large part in Dillard’s life, as they had since 1976. In 1982 Dillard published the comparatively minor Living by Fiction, and a crucial volume, Teaching a Stone to Talk.
     Living by Fiction is “metaphysics in a teacup.” Critics liked it. Contemporary modernist fiction (Borges, Coover, Nabokov) is an art of flat surfaces, like abstract expressionism. Meaning resides inside the art work’s relationships. Ultimately more compelling is traditional fiction in depth, using rounded characters, like perspective-using easel painting, because it alone can address our demand for meaning in events.
     Teaching a Stone to Talk, subtitled Expeditions and Encounters is, according to the author’s introductory note, “not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.” The book begins with “Total Eclipse,” one of Dillard’s finest short pieces, chosen by Joyce Carol Oates as among the twentieth century’s 100 best essays. On the surface, “Total Eclipse” is a narrative of Dillard’s trip with her husband east across the Cascade Mountains to Yakima, Washington, to see a solar eclipse. But the real story is the eclipse of more than the sun. It is the eclipse of reason, daylight faith, and the conscious mind.  An avalanche had blocked the road through the Cascades, and Dillard plunges into an avalanche tunnel bulldozed out by highway crews. In the story this entrance is the entrance to the irrational, wild, subconscious underworld. Dillard stops in a hotel, where a surreal irrationality abounds in the lobby. Reflecting on the eclipse itself-the blackness at midday—she probes what humans find in “the deeps” –violence and terror. “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether that buoys the rest, that gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil.” Everything depends though, on human’s being awake. Dillard’s literary role has been, and continues to be, one of dragging her readers to wakefulness. “Total Eclipse” is a brilliant description of a real eclipse, with its dark onrushing shadow of the planet, the silent and scientific watchers on the hills with their telescopes, the screams. It is also a descent into the cold nightmare world of the unconscious, a sharp probe at the hidden axis of the mind.
     “An Expedition to the Pole” consists of two cross-cut stories, a narrative of noble and ill-advised polar explorations, particularly those by Scott and Franklin, and the clumsy events of everyday church services. Its tone is both distant and hilarious; the method prefigues For the Time Being. Its subject, dignity’s obstruction of holiness, is a recurrent theme.
     In “Living like Weasels,”another Dillard story widely preserved in anthological pickle,  Dillard recalls a story Ernest Thompson Seton told about a man who “shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is,” Dillard says, “that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won.” The piece is about commitment, about holding on, about dying aloft like any artist, perhaps. “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure,” she concludes, “to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
     “The Deer at Providencia,” first published in 1975, and central to Teaching a Stone to Talk, takes place in the Ecuador jungle. Dillard sees a trapped, roped, injured deer, waiting in terrible pain for death. The city men in the party watch Dillard for her woman’s reaction. It is tougher than theirs. The story concludes with the parallel story of Alan McDonald who blew himself up by accident with gasoline, then healed and got exploded on again. “Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity, to the deer at Providencia in his dignity, what is going on?”
     The last piece in the book is a carefully structured story in which a thirty-five- year- old narrator and an unnamed young girl go off for a weekend.  Time accelerates as playing cards flap in a bike wheel’s spokes as it starts down the hill. A country weekend is a metaphor for a lifetime. The essay ends in contemplation of death as she faces the arrival of autumn in a gust of wind that “blackens the water where it passes, like a finger closing slats.”
     In 1984 Dillard published Encounters with Chinese Writers, a work of  (hilarious) journalism about her trip to China with a group of American writers and her helping to host a delegation of Chinese writers to the U.S. The book is as remarkable for its ironic insight into Chinese literary life under communism as it is for its portrayal of Allen Ginsberg and the Chinese writers at Disneyland.
     In 1987 Dillard published An American Childhood. Ostensibly a book about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood is not really a memoir in the usual sense. It is not about Dillard herself; it is about parents, sisters, the neighborhood, the world she experienced while growing up. The real subject of the book is coming to consciousness. “Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along,” she writes. “Like any child I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips in the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection, wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.” It is a book of intelligence and charm; the writing seems effortless; the prose, like the childhood, is utterly American. The San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle said the book “helps cement Annie Dillard’s reputation as one of our major writers.” It is very funny, and it has moments of great beauty that catch a reader by the throat. She makes an exploratory pinch of her mothers’ skin and sees how older people’s “hands are loose inside their skins like bones in bags.” She listens to her father hone the edge of a joke; “frog goes into a bar.” She sees a powerline downed by a tornado “loosing a fireball of sparks that melted the asphalt….I stood and watched the thick billion bolts swarm in the street. The cable was as full as a waterfall, never depleted; it dug itself a pit in which the yellow sparks spilled like water. I stayed at the busy Penn Avenue curb all day staring, until, late in the afternoon, someone somewhere turned off the juice.”
     One winter evening during the second week of the big snow of 1950, a neighbor girl named Jo Ann Sheehy ice skated alone under the street light outside the dining room window. “Once, the skater left the light. She winged into the blackness beyond the streetlight and sped down the street; only her white skates showed, and the white snow. She emerged again under another streetlight, in the continuing silence….Inside that second cone of light she circled backward and leaning. Then she reversed herself in an abrupt half turn—as if she had skated backward into herself, absorbed her own motion’s impetus, and rebounded from it; she shot forward into the dark street and appeared again becalmed in the first streetlight’s cone. I exhaled. I looked up. Distant over the street, the night sky was moonless and foreign, a frail, bottomless black, and the cold stars speckled it without moving.”
     By such bladed turns back into her own mind, this live wire tells about waking to baseball, boys, books, science, and snowballs. To be alive, she says, is to stand under a waterfall. “You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it….Can you breathe here?” Yes, she answers, “you can breathe even here.” You could learn to live this way, to live under the rush.
     In 1988 Dillard and Clevidence divorced, and Dillard married Robert  Richardson, a professor, scholar, and author of well-received biographies of Thoreau (1986) and Emerson (1995). In 1989 she published The WritingLife, a book she repudiates except for the last chapter, the true story of stunt pilot Dave Rahm. The piece spirals and dives in a narrative flight that is both heart-stopping and metaphorical; any good writer is a stunt pilot. The reviewer for the New York Times liked the part about the stunt pilot, commented that there were many such bits, then concluded, “unfortunately, the bits do not add up to a book.”
     In 1992, Dillard published her first novel, The Living. An earlier version, a long short story of the same title, appeared in Harper’s in 1978. She rewrote it as a novel. Then, in  1994 she rewrote the original story for TheAnnie Dillard Reader. Set in the Pacific Northwest in the later half of the nineteenth century, The Living is about the lives of three generations of pioneers and settlers of the region around Bellingham Bay. Reviewing the book for the New York Times, Thomas Keneally noted Dillard’s “tremendous gift for writing in a genuinely epic mode.” The book’s vast canvas takes in the sea-coast, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the Indians, the farms, the logging, the Chinese, the coming of the railroads, the boom times, the growing towns, and  the  labor troubles.
     The first settlers come by ship in 1855 “to the rough edge of the world, where the trees came smack down to the stones….as if the corner of the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened.” The reader follows the lives of a group of settlers and their children from 1855 to 1897. Some survive everything the wilderness can throw at them, while others die arbitrary, hard, and sudden deaths.
     Dillard wrote The Living during the boom times of the 1990s. The main action of the novel takes place in 1893, during those earlier boom times. The dominant figure –one much praised by critics– is the antagonist, Beal Obenchain, a dark, original character driven by unfathomable malignity. Obenchain is a crazed, cruel man, a swollen distended intellectual who draws up poison from books. He lives alone inside the stump of what had been a huge Douglas fir. The protagonist is Clare Fishburn, whose name suggests ‘clear Christ aflame,’ a young man of enormous decency who was once a teacher of Obenchain’s. Obenchain decides to threaten to kill Fishburn. His idea is not actually to kill the man, but to watch how Fishburn lives under the threat of imminent death. Obenchain is widely known to be both crazy and lethal. He once tied a Chinese man to a piling at low tide, leaving him with a lighted lamp by which to watch the rising of the tide that would drown him. Walking on the mudflats by Bellingham Bay, Obenchain enjoys the interesting possibilities of not killing, but threatening to kill, Fishburn. “You tell a man his life is in your hands, and, miraculously, his life is in your hands. You own him insofar as he believes you. You own him as God owns a man, to the degree of his faith.”
     Fishburn is a family man who would do a favor for anyone; he hates anything fussy; “he enjoyed enjoyment, he sought deeds and found tasks, he was a giant in joy, racing and thoughtless, suggestible, a bountiful child.” Readers follow this man and his wife,– since Fishburn confides in her that he is going to be killed—living in the face of death. This contrast of Fishburn’s life and imminent death creates a gripping narrative focussed on the natural world and on Fishburn’s loved ones. Because Fishburn expects death, he each day observes the natural world with a sense that it will be his last vision of the place. The result of living this way is for Fishburn an awakened life.
     Fishburn constantly chooses life in the face of death, and Obenchain grows more angry and hateful toward this man “in his control.” Ultimately Obenchain exerts his “control” one more time. He arranges to meet Fishburn and tell him he is NOT going to be killed. Clare, crossing a trestle to meet Obenchain, expects his death and sees his life “burrowing in the light upstream.” Even as the earth is plowing men and horses under, no generation sees it happening, and the broken fields grow up forgetting. Fishburn’s response is the climactic realization of life in death. He rejects Obenchain’s reprieve. Of course he is going to die. That is what it means to be among the living, Fishburn now knows. Nothing, certainly not Obenchain, can take this treasure from him. “All the living were breasting into the crest of the present together. All men and women and children ran up a field as wide as earth, opening time like a path in the grass, and he was borne along with them. No, he said, peeling the light back, walking in the sky toward home; no.”
      Obenchain meets a gruesome, satisfying end. At the close of The Living, it is the next generation, Hugh Honer and his sweetheart Vinnie, who are the nephew and niece of  Clare Fishburn and his wife , who carry on the living, who work, sail, study medicine, build fires on the beach, hear about the Yukon gold strike, and go for a midnight swim. Hugh Honer climbs many rungs up an old fir tree to a platform high above a pond. A huge old thick rope hangs higher up yet and serves as a swing. The platform is crowded with dark forms, the pond is invisible below. Hugh grabs the rope and launches out. “As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.”
    The Living demonstrates Dillard’s ability to use the physical scientific perspective of the nature writer and the visionary eye of the Romantic writer to convey the consummate human journey “toward the light upstream.” Fishburn, like the narrator of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, faces upstream to the unknown future where the “wave explodes over my head…the live water and light” from “undisclosed sources” bringing renewed “world without end.”
     The critic Barbara Lounsberry has observed that “the majority of reviewers agreed with Clif Mason, who, in Western American Literature (Spring 1993) called the novel the intellectual and stylistic culmination of Dillard’s career.” Both New York Times critics praised her characters as did Booklist, Newsweek, Publisher’s Weekly, the Antioch Review and the Nation. But Louise Sweeney for the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall StreetJournal, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic found them flat. David Plante in the Yale Review found its plot wrecked its second half; other readers found only the second half alive. The Living continues to have a following in  Canada and France as well as the USA who regard it as a major contribution to the literature of North America.
      In 1994, Dillard published The Annie Dillard Reader, in which she made some minor changes to “Living Like Weasels,” rewrote the short story “The Living” into a novella, made very slight alterations to Holy the Firm, and first published some of the found poems that would later appear in the volume titled Mornings Like This, which was published the following year, 1995. The Reader was also the first and only Dillard volume to collect her piece “The Book of Luke.” In 1998 and 1999 Dillard issued, under the imprint HarperPerennial, new and slightly revised editions of several of her books. To The Living she added a cast of characters with birth and death dates, and she shortened the opening. She made changes to The Writing Life. She altered Holy the Firm slightly, changing the three part’s subheads to to clarify her intentions.
     In the late 1990s Dillard taught less and less; she and her husband spent more and more time in Key West, Florida. They still spent summers on Cape Cod, but they also spent more time in the South, some of it in North Carolina, but most of it in Key West.. Dillard left Wesleyan in 1998 after 21 years. That same year she published For the Time Being.  Critic Ira Levin of the Toronto Globe and Mail was the first to notice that Pilgrim atTinker Creek, Holy the Firm, and For the Time Being form a trilogy of narratives about natural evil.
     For the Time Being shows a wild mix of things: a visit to Israel, the life of a French paleontologist in the Gobi Desert, a series of Hasidic thinkers, science, gags, and journalism – which, as a reader progresses through seven short chapters, depict a single broad view of who we, as individuals are, and where. Its form, which grows organically from its material, is not comparable to any previous book of hers.  From these disparate  materials Dillard has welded an austere, funny, intellectually compelling book. Other writers consider it her best book. It is made up of a storm of mostly nonfiction narratives, like notes found in bottles washed up on the last beach of the twentieth century. For The Time Being sounds, in different places, like Ecclesiastes, like the Bal Shem Tov, like Simone Weils’ notebooks, like a space age version of Wind, Sand, and Stars, like a modernist Upanishad or a post-modern Anatomy of Melancholy. Dillard’s knife cuts close, following bone. “We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. You and I  will likely die of heart disease.”  Another bit begins “Los Angeles airport has twenty-five thousand parking spaces. This is about one space for every person who died in 1985 in Colombia when a volcano erupted. This is one space each for two years worth of accidental killings from land mines left over from recent wars. At five to a car, almost all the Inuit in the world could park at LAX.” Ira Levin praised Dillard’s “sharing her expansive mind, with all its tomes and texts and memories and thoughts, and sharing her capacious heart.” Boston’s Michael Gross noted the book’s “balance of love and horror” and, like many other critics, noted her fearlessness.
     Dillard binds this book together by her ambition to write a book about the human condition. What propels it from one page to the next is the prose Dillard has been perfecting for thirty years. She uses as high a proportion of verbs as any writer in English, as many as Samuel Johnson — a full twenty percent. She almost never uses the passive voice. Finding a few passive constructions in An American Childhood, she forbade herself their use entirely after that book. She has said that what she looks for in student writing is any two words together she has never seen together. Her own readers must be able to get from Meister Eckhardt to LAX without a map. Her sentences stay relentlessly in the senses, avoiding abstraction and “theory”as one avoids cholera. When someone asked her if he could “be a writer,” she replied “Do you like sentences?”
     In For The Time Being Dillard throws everything, including a hospital sink, into her own paleontological  search. “”Spiritual path” is the hilarious popular term for these night -blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope, for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute. They discover others spread under the stars and encamped here and there by watch fires, in groups or alone, in the open landscape. They stop for a sleep, or for several years, and move along without knowing toward what or why….They don’t quit. They stick with it. Year after year they find themselves still feeling with their fingers for lumps in the dark.”  The reviewer for theNew York Times confessed to being uninterested in both religion and nature and, naturally, panned the book. Other reviewers found it “intense and humane” and “a dazzling triumph.” At the very beginning of the book, Dillard quotes Evan S. Connell, Jr. “The legend of the Traveller appears in every civilization, perpetually assuming new forms, afflictions, powers and symbols.” Once driving with a companion through Connecticut, Dillard drove under an old stone railroad bridge. On one side was painted “Jesus is Lord.” On the other side was painted “Rock till you drop.” She said, “my philosophy in a nutshell.”
     All of Annie Dillard’s books have been in print without a break since they were first published. Most have been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. They have been published in England. Three of her works appear on four different lists of the twentieth century’s best American books. They have, at this writing, won the Pulitzer Prize (1975, general nonfiction), twice the Coindreau (a French prize for the best book translated into French), an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. Her work has been set to music in a dozen different forms; it has been interpreted in plays, operas, and in innumerable paintings and sculptures. She has never appeared on television or allowed herself or her work to be filmed. Her books, she says, are literature or they are nothing. Buckminster Fuller said some time ago that her writing “archingly transcends all other writers of our day in all the simple intimate and beautiful ways of the natural master.”  Almost thirty years after Pilgrim atTinker Creek her reputation has grown to the point where a permanent place in the front rank of American literature seems assured.



Delicious Bookmark this on Delicious

Filed Under: books_blog, Writers

Sign Up and Get a Free eBook!

Sign up to be emailed my blog posts (one a week) and get the ebook of "Holy Ground," my account of working with Mother Teresa.

Join 636 Other Readers

Follow me on Twitter

Follow @anitamathias1

Anita Mathias: About Me

Anita Mathias

Read my blog on Facebook

My Books

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India

Wandering Between Two Worlds - Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art

Wandering Between Two Worlds - Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much

Francesco, Artist of Florence - Amazom.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

The Story of Dirk Willems

The Story of Dirk Willems - Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk
Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
Runner Up Christian Media Awards 2014 - Tweeter of the year

Recent Posts

  • “Rosaries at the Grotto” A Chapter from my newly-published memoir, “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India.”
  • An Infallible Secret of Joy
  • Thoughts on Writing my Just-published Memoir, & the Prologue to “Rosaries, Reading, Secrets”
  • Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India. My new memoir
  •  On Not Wasting a Desert Experience
  • A Mind of Life and Peace in the Middle of a Global Pandemic
  • On Yoga and Following Jesus
  • Silver and Gold Linings in the Storm Clouds of Coronavirus
  • Trust: A Message of Christmas
  • Life- Changing Journaling: A Gratitude Journal, and Habit-Tracker, with Food and Exercise Logs, Time Sheets, a Bullet Journal, Goal Sheets and a Planner

Categories

What I’m Reading

Country Girl
Edna O'Brien

Country Girl  - Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Confessions
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau --  Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Mere Christianity
C S Lewis

Mere Christianity --  Amazon.com
Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Archive by month

INSTAGRAM

anita.mathias

If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of th If you'll forgive me for adding to the noise of the world on Black Friday, my memoir ,Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India, is on sale on Kindle all over the world for a few days. 
Carolyn Weber (who has written "Surprised by Oxford," an amazing memoir about coming to faith in Oxford https://amzn.to/3XyIftO )  has written a lovely endorsement of my memoir:
"Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story - so will you."
The memoir is available on sale on Amazon.co.uk at https://amzn.to/3u0Ib8o and on Amazon.com at https://amzn.to/3u0IBvu and is reduced on the other Amazon sites too.
Thank you, and please let me know if you read and enjoy it!! #memoir #indianchildhood #india
Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping! So i Second birthday party. Determinedly escaping!
So it’s a beautiful November here in Oxford, and the trees are blazing. We will soon be celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary…and are hoping for at least 33 more!! 
And here’s a chapter from my memoir of growing up Catholic in India… rosaries at the grotto, potlucks, the Catholic Family Movement, American missionary Jesuits, Mangaloreans, Goans, and food, food food…
https://anitamathias.com/2022/11/07/rosaries-at-the-grotto-a-chapter-from-my-newly-published-memoir-rosaries-reading-steel-a-catholic-childhood-in-india/
Available on Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3Apjt5r and on Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3gcVboa and wherever Amazon sells books, as well as at most online retailers.
#birthdayparty #memoir #jamshedpur #India #rosariesreadingsecrets
Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but Friends, it’s been a while since I blogged, but it’s time to resume, and so I have. Here’s a blog on an absolutely infallible secret of joy, https://anitamathias.com/2022/10/28/an-infallible-secret-of-joy/
Jenny Lewis, whose Gilgamesh Retold https://amzn.to/3zsYfCX is an amazing new translation of the epic, has kindly endorsed my memoir. She writes, “With Rosaries, Reading and Secrets, Anita Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels. She is a natural and gifted storyteller who weaves history and biography together in a magical mix. Erudite and literary, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail, Rosaries is alive with glowing, vivid details, bringing to life an era and culture that is unforgettable. A beautifully written, important and addictive book.”
I would, of course, be delighted if you read it. Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/3gThsr4 and Amazon.com https://amzn.to/3WdCBwk #joy #amwriting #amblogging #icecreamjoy
Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photograph Wandering around Oxford with my camera, photographing ancient colleges! Enjoy.
And just a note that Amazon is offering a temporary discount on my memoir, Rosaries, Reading, Steel https://amzn.to/3UQN28z . It’s £7.41.
Here’s an endorsement from my friend, Francesca Kay, author of the beautiful novel, “An Equal Stillness.” This is a beautifully written account of a childhood, so evocative, so vivid. The textures, colours and, above all, the tastes of a particular world are lyrically but also precisely evoked and there was much in it that brought back very clear memories of my own. Northern India in the 60s, as well as Bandra of course – dust and mercurochrome, Marie biscuits, the chatter of adult voices, the prayers, the fruit trees, dogs…. But, although you rightly celebrate the richness of that world, you weave through this magical remembrance of things past a skein of sadness that makes it haunting too. It’s lovely!” #oxford #beauty
So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promis So, I am not going to become a book-bore, I promise, but just to let you know that my memoir "Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India," is now available in India in paperback. https://www.amazon.in/s?k=rosaries+reading+secrets&crid=3TLDQASCY0WTH&sprefix=rosaries+r%2Caps%2C72&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_1_10My endorsements say it is evocative, well-written, magical, haunting, and funny, so I'd be thrilled if you bought a copy on any of the Amazon sites. 
Endorsements 
A beautifully written account. Woven through this magical remembrance of things past is a skein of sadness that makes it haunting. Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness. 
A dazzling vibrant tale of childhood in post-colonial India. Mathias conjures 1960s India and her family in uproarious and heart-breaking detail. Erin Hart, Haunted Ground 
Mathias invites us into a wonderfully absorbing and thrilling world of past and present marvels… generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail. A beautifully written, important, and addictive book. Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold 
Tormented, passionate and often sad, Mathias’s beautiful childhood memoir is immensely readable. Trevor Mostyn, Coming of Age in The Middle East.
A beautifully told and powerful story. Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard-earned wisdom. Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford 
A remarkable account. A treasure chest…full of food (always food), books (always books), a family with all its alliances and divisions. A feat of memory and remembrance. Philip Gooden, The Story of English
Anita’s pluck and charm shine through every page of this beautifully crafted, comprehensive and erudite memoir. 
Ray Foulk, Picasso’s Revenge
Mathias’s prose is lively and evocative. An enjoyable and accessible book. Sylvia Vetta, Sculpting the Elephant
Anita Mathias is an is an accomplished writer. Merryn Williams, Six Women Novelists
Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the pa Writing a memoir awakens fierce memories of the past. For the past is not dead; it’s not even past, as William Faulkner observed. So what does one do with this undead past? Forgive. Forgive, huh? Forgive. Let it go. Again and again.
Some thoughts on writing a memoir, and the prologue to my memoir
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/08/thoughts-on-writing-a-memoir-the-prologue-to-rosaries-reading-secrets/ 
#memoir #amwriting #forgiveness https://amzn.to/3B82CDo
Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing t Six months ago, Roy and I decided that finishing the memoir was to be like “the treasure in the field,” that Jesus talks about in the Gospels, which you sacrifice everything to buy. (Though of course, he talks about an intimate relationship with God, not finishing a book!!) Anyway, I’ve stayed off social media for months… but I’ve always greatly enjoyed social media (in great moderation) and it’s lovely to be back with the book now done  https://amzn.to/3eoRMRN  So, our family news: Our daughter Zoe is training for ministry as a priest in the Church of England, at Ridley Hall, Cambridge. She is “an ordinand.” In her second year. However, she has recently been one of the 30 ordinands accepted to work on an M.Phil programme (fully funded by the Church of England.) She will be comparing churches which are involved in community organizing with churches which are not, and will trace the impact of community organizing on the faith of congregants.  She’ll be ordained in ’24, God willing.
Irene is in her final year of Medicine at Oxford University; she will be going to Toronto for her elective clinical work experience, and will graduate as a doctor in June ‘23, God willing.
And we had a wonderful family holiday in Ireland in July, though that already feels like a long time ago!
https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-readi https://anitamathias.com/2022/09/01/rosaries-reading-secrets-a-catholic-childhood-in-india-my-new-memoir/
Friends, some stellar reviews from distinguished writers, and a detailed description here!!
https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3 Friends, I’ve written a https://amzn.to/3wMiSJ3  Friends, I’ve written a memoir of my turbulent Catholic childhood in India. I would be grateful for your support!
Load More… Follow on Instagram

© 2022 Dreaming Beneath the Spires · All Rights Reserved. · Cookie Policy · Privacy Policy