The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  Sarah became that final Tenant two years later, December 9, 1831, age seventy-six. She must have composed the scant words on her own side of the pediment, unable to keep Eleanor entirely separate over on her side, giving her Beloved pride of place on her own plaque: “She did not long survive her beloved companion LADY ELEANOR BUTLER with whom she had lived in this valley for more than half a century of uninterrupted friendship—but they shall no more return to their House neither shall their place know them any more.” As if they had eloped again, absconding yet deeper into their romantic retirement.

  I wished I’d thought to get a flower to leave on the ground for all three of them. I considered taking one of the lilies I’d bought for Carol at the Cornerstone, but that would mean breaking the seal on the wrapping paper. I had nothing to leave as a token or salute, so I just stood, and then walked around the stone and its overwrought sentiment several times. My sneakers were damp from the wet grass, and there was nothing more to do here.

  I went over to the Cornerstone before retrieving my roller bag at the Falls. Once again, when I knocked, Carol was there, opening the door in a flash, as if she had been waiting for me.

  I wanted to thank her, I said, for taking me in yesterday. I handed over the bundle of wrapped lilies.

  How kind, how good of you!

  She unfurled the paper, and the lilies flopped out, withered, wilted. Obviously dead. They looked as if I’d rescued them from a trash bin.

  We both looked at them for a lost moment. They were much worse than when I’d bought them—weren’t they? They were like a patient who has been ailing but is not expected to die, and then just gives up the ghost when the family turns away for a moment.

  I was mortified. They’d been fresh an hour before, I heard myself muttering. I didn’t know what had happened. And so on, twisting in the wind there on the Cornerstone doorstep.

  Carol looked at the lilies with an indulgent, even fond expression, and then up at me with an entirely accepting face, and said, Well, but it’s always the thought that counts, isn’t it? That’s what I say, it’s the thought counts.

  * * *

  —

  Friend was the word the Ladies insisted on, the relation they claimed from the start to the end of their long life together. Not “lover,” or “spouse,” not “mate,” certainly not “partner,” though they referred to each other in their journals, even in letters to friends, as my Beloved, so frequent a term that Sarah often shortened it to “my B.” The word in their time and place had the breezy social affection of our “darling,” fond but casual. It was the endearment Dorothy and William Wordsworth, also living the cottage life of retirement and poetry in the Lake District at that time, used for one another.

  The Ladies’ romantic friendship, that “once flourishing but now lost relationship.” Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again. An extinct relationship.

  The reason for this “loss,” of course, is that it is almost impossible for the contemporary mind to read a passion like theirs (my Beloved!) as anything but erotic, and therefore homoerotic. They were lesbians—good for them, we say. What their biographer calls lost, most modern, self-congratulating “liberated” minds (heterosexual or otherwise) see as more fully found. They were out, we say. And then think we understand, as Colette assumed she did, even if they didn’t themselves, what they were up to.

  They were aware of the possibility. They were appalled by the notion. Even more, they cared about the life they had so carefully chosen and crafted, the meaning they had given to living a retired life. The System. But before long they were treated to gossip—they were lovers, their elopement the result of an unnatural passion. In July 1791, three years after their settling in Llangollen, an article in the General Evening Post so offended the Ladies that Eleanor immediately wrote to cancel their subscription “for Essential reasons.”

  One reason really: under the headline “Extraordinary Female Affection,” the unsigned reporter described in broad if sometimes inaccurate detail the story of their flight from Ireland and their life together as “the Ladies of a certain Welsh Vale.” The implication was clear: they were Sapphists.

  The Ladies sought out no less a friend than Edmund Burke for redress to this grievance against their life, their System, and the nature of the love they practiced.

  Burke took up their cause, saying he too had responded to the article “with the indignation felt by every worthy mind.” What would he have said, I wondered, jumping centuries again, to Colette’s grease-monkey Eleanor and the amputated breasts?

  In the event, he was the soul of gallantry. But he had to advise them, as prudent lawyers often must, that filing suit for libel was a game hardly worth the candle. “Your consolation,” he said, “must be that you suffer only by the baseness of the age you live in.”

  They were suffering for their “virtues,” he reminded them, qualities that earned them the highest regard among those who “esteem honour, friendship, principle, and dignity of thinking.”

  Let it go, as people say in our own whatever age.

  And, amazingly, given the high horse Lady Eleanor so often rode, they did just that. They let it go. In the next day’s journal, as if no feather had been ruffled, no insult absorbed, Eleanor was able to report (as she routinely did, day by day, year after year, summing up the preceding twenty-four hours) that she and Sarah had once again gloried in “a day of delightful retirement.”

  In the unrivaled world of private life and in the journal, that book whose publication is confined to heart and hearth, there is no higher court. Life lived, life described, the bits and pieces of the day collected, vignette by vignette. And thus, life affirmed. More than enough.

  Send the visitors off to the Hand, light the candles in the dressing room, curl up for a bit of Rousseau, Mary Carryll having made up the fire, all so snug. The System is the thing as, arm in arm, the two of them walk the Home Circuit, pausing to consider the placement of the carnations, the question of an addition to the Shrubbery, the utter impossibility that fifty years have passed—already!—in the succession of these Celestial glorious days, these heavenly evenings.

  * * *

  Winter now, back in St. Paul, the Ladies tucked away in my notebooks as they were cold nights in their dressing room, curtains drawn, the fire glowing—their fire in the eighteenth century, mine here in the twenty-first.

  I’m still reading Montaigne. I seem to feel I have to prepare to visit his tower—I can’t just show up in Bordeaux as I did in Llangollen. Bulk up on the Essais, marginal notes in the Donald M. Frame biography. More notes on the recent books by other people writing about Montaigne.

  One of the oddities—or inevitabilities—of the reading life is that, like every aspect of human habit (food, clothes, design), it has its fashions. During the latter-day American belle epoque, the era of our prideful assurance over having “won the Cold War,” the self-regarding age when Donald Trump’s “little hands” began shellacking so much real estate with gold—it seemed everyone was reading (or intending to read) Proust. I was—intending to. Books about reading Proust became popular in the 1980s and 1990s—How Proust Can Save Your Life, The Year of Reading Proust. The jeweled canvas of the earlier belle epoque was the mirror of our own garish surface. One world winking at another.

  This period of Proustaphilia coincided with our own entre deux guerres. How shockingly brief that Pax Americana was—from the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 to the fall of the Twin Towers in September 2001. We had the heady illusion of winning, being on top, running the show. The end of history? That idea floated around for a while in the absurd arrogance of the age.

  The end of history came to its own shattering end, of course. The pause between the world wars (1918 to 1939) when Proust’s m
asterpiece was composed and published was a period considerably longer than our own age of glee or indifference (or was it just self-indulgence?)—their twenty-one years to our twelve. Whether it was 9/11 or, later, the economic meltdown and recession, suddenly (it seemed sudden), with the crash of our illusions, stylish readers were swapping out Proust for Montaigne, and books about reading the Essais began to take the place of those about reading In Search of Lost Time.

  Why Montaigne? Why now? I asked you that when I started all this. You were still here to ask, across the yellow kitchen table. Not that you believed in answering such questions.

  That’s why you’re writing this—to find out.

  You were the real reader, pitch-perfect ear, cunning combination of humility and boldness, responding to the page before you. Starkly independent mind. A gallant reader, I’d say now. Leaving clippings on my desk, sending me links on email. Pursuing any question or curiosity I mentioned at the yellow kitchen table. My research fellow. Your Post-it note on the clipping from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague: Drst: What about how leisure might fit in with the Cold War? A connection? Discuss!

  Maybe Montaigne appeals to this age because he “retired”—that word again. You thought I might have a point there. He had left the world of power and command, sequestered himself in his tower to investigate the furnishings of his mind. Individual consciousness was his subject, not the sweep of his tumultuous era. Yet his was an age of terror and cruelty, crying out for explanation, for a big-picture narrative of its seismic divisions. Whereas Proust’s world floated on the airless steadiness of the cork-lined room where in shadow he spun his vast magnificence.

  In times of peace the age itself is the story, leisurely with intrigue, gossip, affairs of state, affairs of love—busy, busy, busy with its social self, making massive formal shapes. In times of terror like Montaigne’s, like ours, we (we readers) seek instead the sane singular voice, alone with its thoughts, maybe to assure ourselves that sanity does exist somewhere, and the self, the littleness of personhood is somewhere alive, taking its notes. And that this matters. We know the awful part, the sweep of history’s cruelties. We want the singular voice, abiding. This is why a little girl keeping a diary in an Amsterdam attic is “the voice of the Holocaust.”

  Details, tossed into the shoebox of the mind, fragments. Not a regal “story” riding its narrative arc. Just a bunch of snapshots, never amounting to a shape, but too tender to be tossed.

  Something like that, darling?

  In this age of terror and the terror of terror, I’ve joined the ranks of those reading Montaigne, the sane man in his insane world. A man alone in a room with words, not sorting out his “world.” Sorting his mind.

  My reading isn’t scholarship—just picking up a scent in the air, following it. An attempt to find, across the maw of our distant centuries, some kind of explanation for the kinship I feel. Not just kinship. Some kind of help. Call it solace.

  Montaigne was a reader himself, that’s one thing. His Essais are studded with quotations—especially when he first started his project. He intended to follow the Stoic model, doing philosophy to learn how to die. Over the kitchen table, you said that was when he was just fooling around, showing off, trying to be a writer. That was when he was something of a pedant. You can’t learn to die, you said. You just die.

  Tough reader you always were.

  * * *

  —

  So what’s the difference between writing the big picture (Proust) and collecting small takes (Montaigne)? A question we batted back and forth across the yellow kitchen table, the coffee getting cold. The novel is committed to design. On this we agreed, you with your reverence for Joyce’s Ulysses (your annual Bloomsday party, everyone invited to read a passage), me with my impatience over his fussiness, my claims for Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald! You’re comparing Fitzgerald to Joyce? We let that one lie on the table.

  Oh yes, we fought, and not just over literature. But we could never seem, afterward, to remember what our furies were about. You would walk out of the room. I would hector—Come back here! You coward! I fretted over our fights—I wanted a “perfect relationship.” No! you said. Fights are good! They let you have these sweet reconciliations.

  Even a short novel has a trajectory—my point, and why you can compare Gatsby to Ulysses.

  Do you always have to get the last word?

  * * *

  —

  What I was trying to explain: the final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don’t love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape. This shapeliness isn’t “closure,” a modern comfort word too airlessly psychological for the deep gratifications storytelling provides. The great carapace of the novel puts a bridle on the stampede of detail.

  And yet the great unsorted pile of detail—that’s what a life is. Not the organization of details into shape (that’s the novel), but the recognition of the welter of life—notetaking, James’s ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy . . . to take them . . . as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.

  You understood—I think you did—that I didn’t think of notetaking as material, bricks for the great architecture of a book, even if Henry James did. I was taking them for themselves. Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoebox.

  We all have these snippets rolling around, not stories we tell, just photos that refuse to fade entirely away. These are the framed moments that decide a life and are lost to art because they aren’t complete, have no resolution. They’re nothing much. Essais, vignettes, memoirs—the French words our stalwart form-seeking Anglophone mind must borrow to articulate our formlessness.

  Deep winter as I sit here in our drafty old St. Paul house, the lunar white surface of the deepest season inviting vignettes into the mind, the ice-cold of memory. These memory shards can even predate us. My earliest is more legacy than memory: Uncle Frankie, my father’s older brother, adored hero son of the Czech granny, a blacksmith (such an antique profession), making his way as a semipro welterweight prizefighter. Frankie of the dashing good looks, the idealism, promising his twin sister Lillian (my favorite aunt) a diamond ring if she would stay in high school and graduate while he—this is the Depression—gets a job. Frankie, killed in that terrible industrial accident in 1936. He’d been given a pickup job at Schmidt Brewery (he’d lost his railroad job in the layoffs of the Depression) and was repairing a valve when someone (who?) turned on the boiling water, and it gushed in, sweeping him into the scalding whirlwind. He survived three weeks, conscious, knowing it was the end.

  I’ve put him in every book I’ve written, managed to wedge him in somehow or other, the lost hero, the good guy I never met. Did I make it up or is it true that he somehow grabbed hold of the ladder up and out of the giant copper vat, but slipped and splashed fatally back into the cauldron? I see it—I’ve always seen it. It was part of being in our family. I was given to believe that “after the War” he would have been saved because of all the burn treatments developed then. So war was good in its way. We had to drop the bomb, darling. It saved lives.

  Frankie was gone—and therefore (even as a child it felt like “therefore”) he was more present than anyone. The terrible, decisive accident. “I lost that diamond ring,” Aunt Lillian said. “I lost it.” And you knew what she meant
. The ring of relationship gone. From book to book there always seemed to be a little something left over I had not described, so I pulled him in again with the new detail. The diamond ring, for example: I’ve never mentioned that till now. Maybe I’d forgotten it. But there it always was, and with it my aunt’s face, not just sad but remorseful, as if losing the ring had been part of the accident.

  A man called me after my first book was published, someone from the old Czech neighborhood. He had known Frankie, worked with him. He wanted to meet me, talk to me. “I read your book,” he said, giving the sense that this had taken considerable effort. We met in an old art deco bar, one now gentrified, but then, in the 1980s, fading into itself from the era he and Frankie had shared as young men.

  I want to tell you something, he said.

  He fussed around, ordered a beer, showed me some newspaper clippings—I can’t remember what they were about. I was—God help me—bored. He was old, of course, something of a gasbag. I wasn’t sure he had actually read my book after all. He said “all of West Seventh” (the main street of the Czech neighborhood by the brewery where my family lived, where I’d been born) was lined four deep from Schmidt’s to St. Stan’s where the funeral was. Men with their hats off, women weeping. Crying right there on the street.

  Another detail I’ve never mentioned until now—the crowds on the street, mourning the workingman hero, the handsome prizefighter.