by Lorrie Moore
“The High Road” recounts Duncan’s story as a two-time loser in love. First he falls for Andre, an African-American trumpeter, elegantly dressed courtesy of a day job in a men’s clothing store in midtown. After sabotaging that relationship, Duncan falls for a grieving young tenor who has just lost his boyfriend to AIDS. “Love has made me live in ceaseless fire,” sings the tenor, with a sorrowful yearning appealing to Duncan.
The tenor’s favorite drink is Campari, his favorite poet Gaspara Stampa, whose sonnets are “a 1500s version of the blues.” Hopeless passion, notes Duncan, “was still in high style in certain corners of the gay world.” His infatuation with this tenor involves rituals of cooking, whimpering restraint, and reveries spiked with scheming. “I had underestimated the depth of the enterprise, the large and moving drama involved.” He cannot win the tenor’s love—he imagines that to the young tenor he must seem like “some evil old elf,” untempting even for a minute. The “high road” becomes in this piece celibacy itself, a Buddhist-style renunciation of passion until it becomes not gone but at least reduced to “a hum,” though a “hum that was always in my ears.”
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Thus begin the two angles on romantic desire worked simultaneously in Ideas of Heaven: romance as a condition of unsatisfied yearning that must be transformed to a tantric discipline versus romance as an ennobling comedy of sexual humiliation, here and there rewarding with love. Oh, the drama of small semantic differences.
The third story (they must be read in sequence), narrated in the now-familiar voice of Alice-Duncan, is told by none other than the sixteenth-century poet Gaspara Stampa (author of the tenor’s pining lyrics); that her very American-sounding voice will not remind you at all of a sixteenth-century Venetian deters the intrepid Joan Silber not a whit. Gaspara begins her artistic life “full of yearning for an unknown agony.” She soon finds the ostensible objective correlative for this craving in a tall, handsome blond named Collaltino di Collalto. “Plenty of first sons were given this kind of repeating name,” she informs us defensively.
Gaspara becomes, as Silber would need her to, “sick with attraction,” hoping to slake a “sacred thirst.” Like Duncan, she is not afraid to suffer openly, and although her premodern times won’t allow her to resort to heavy breathing into a telephone during anonymous late-night calls (surely she would if she could—as does Duncan), she suffers the piercing, binding, pressing of the heart that honors her model, Petrarch, in his eternally unrealized love for Laura. What Gaspara sings in public is “what any lover knows: you’ll be sorry later, I hope you feel one thousandth of the pain I feel, why are you so cruel…”
She notes, “People liked best the most mournful and complaining of my songs.” When her lover at long last returns from war, “I asked how everything had gone in France, and then he began to tell me at length, which was not what I wanted.”
The openly American diction and vernacular rhythms restaged in sixteenth-century Venice may seem an old gag, reminiscent of loopy send-ups of Shakespeare, but in this context, which is also earnest and of a piece with the book’s synoptic look at desire’s mischief and heat, it forms comedic moments that are a delight against the backdrop of the premature death we know is coming in a story titled “Gaspara Stampa (1523–54).”
He got up very early the next day to hunt for boar, and he had me get up with him, to breakfast downstairs before it was fully light. Why a man would come home from war to chase a wild animal with a spear was not something I could understand.
When, of course, things end badly, “we were all smiling, as if love’s wreckage were a shared joke, which I suppose it was.”
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Many of Silber’s fictional couples have screaming fights in public places, and Peggy and Tom in “Ashes of Love,” the book’s fourth story, are among them. They are connected to Gaspara Stampa, too, through Rilke, whose poetry Tom continues to read on and off throughout his life, Rilke invoking Stampa herself as a figure to admire, as she exhausted herself so intriguingly in “objectless love.” “I was interested,” says Tom, in what is, again, the book’s sole narrative voice, “in what Rilke said about lovers (he was always citing them as a distinct class of people), because I was one half of a fiercely attached couple.”
Tom’s life with Peggy initially involves a lot of travel—Yugoslavia, Turkey, and finally Thailand, where Silber’s motif of Buddhism first presents itself to Tom. After he has returned to the States, has a son with Peggy, and is then abandoned by her for another man, he begins where he left off in Thailand, pursuing serenity in a Buddhist meditation group. “Ashes of Love” follows Tom straight through another marriage up to the faraway death of Peggy. He has never been able to love anyone the way he did her, and his new wife, Mattina, feels Tom’s psychic distances, accusing him of using Buddhism (his own noise- and passion-management system) to learn not to feel what he isn’t feeling anyway.
All this yuppie Buddhism might be easy for a reader to deride, but the sweet stubbornness with which it is continually inserted in Silber’s book wins over even a recalcitrant skeptic. Perhaps religion has always been a kind of hospital. And in this story, too, as in the final one, we feel it as perhaps one of the few decent refuges for the lover whose one great love in life has already occurred. The comings and goings of love, as they are often dramatized by Silber, are a complex exchange of one kind of loneliness for another.
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The fifth and title story is in some ways the most anomalous and fascinating, if risky and not entirely successful. Narrated in the Alice-Duncan-Gaspara-Tom voice by a Christian missionary’s wife in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the story has the narrator killed at the end—a narrative device that sets up an impossible point from which to tell the story, a point seldom seen outside Faulkner or the film Sunset Boulevard, although Susanna Moore relied on it in her novel In the Cut, and others have tried. “Ideas of Heaven” is connected to “Ashes of Love” through the presence of an heirloom Chinese comb sent home to a relative and handed down through generations to Tom’s new wife, Mattina. It also has in common with the book’s other stories the project of fitting an entire life into a short space and shares with them, too, despite its Victorian time period, a narrator whose loving enjoyment of sex is articulated with elegance and happiness. “He was as much a novice to the act as I was,” the missionary’s wife says of her new husband, “and we rowed through these new waters together….I saw why a man and wife must never leave one another, having been to these places in each other’s company.”
“Ideas of Heaven” is connected to the final story, “The Same Ground,” through this story’s narrator, a Parisian named, interestingly enough, Giles, whose great-great-uncle was a Benedictine priest and survivor of the siege of Peking.
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It is in this sixth and concluding story, “The Same Ground,” that all the book’s themes, and all of Silber’s skills, come together most orchestrally and touchingly. “The Same Ground” even serves as a kind of curtain call of missing persons from earlier in the book: Andre the trumpet player makes a brief appearance as a now-successful musician in Paris; Peggy makes an appearance as an angry American whom Giles once picked up hitchhiking; Alice, from the inaugural story, “My Shape,” turns up in a yoga class to become Giles’s second wife. Marco Polo, September 11, and race relations all have a poeticized presence here in this already thrice-told tale of grievous romantic loss—loss that haunts and frees and enlarges and scars the now newly spiritualized loser. In another link to China, Giles is married to the North African historian Sylvie, who in seeking permission for research in China is killed in a terrorist bombing on the steps of the Chinese embassy in Paris. Says Sylvie’s mourning mother, “The whole world’s going to blow up. That’s what they want. It’s going to be nothing.” Says Giles after the shocking mortal consumption
of his wife,
I was doing my best not to think about anything beyond what to make for supper….I didn’t want to hear about someone else’s bloody outrage over some murderous stupidity in the past….This was an odd state of mind for someone who taught history for a living and went forth every day to explain to sixteen-year-olds why they should care about the Hundred Years War.
Once, when the class is discussing the Baader-Meinhof Gang, one of the students says, “I admire the beauty of their convictions and to blow people up is not the worst evil,” and then there is a sudden silence. Giles is “the only person in the room who was free of wretched embarrassment.”
The loss of Giles’s wife is sandwiched between two love affairs. The first, while Giles is still married to Sylvie, is with a goatherdess named Edmée—again, Silber knows no fear. The depictions of Giles as adulterer are gentle and searching. “I was becoming wily and hollow from pretense,” he admits to himself. “And no one said anything, so perhaps I was good at it.” He feels even years later that perhaps he “could not be at close quarters with a woman I loved without staining myself with lies.” When he finally leaves his mistress,
it was a terrible, sentimental conversation. Both of our voices broke the whole time. I praised her loveliness and her fineness, and everything I said sounded false, though it was true. We had to stop talking so that words could mean something again in our mouths.
He returns to his wife, with desire and devotion, but when she dies, Paris becomes “enraging to walk in.”
Giles’s second love affair is as a widower, with the aforementioned Alice, who welds this ring of stories by returning at the end as an expatriate yogin, a kind of cheerful—that is, American—Brigitte Bardot, but with “something smudged and sad about her.” And yet the dead Sylvie remains forever like an inner skin within Giles. That one life contains many; that these lives overlap and end without being complete; that the soul’s quest often runs parallel with the heart’s, not meeting; that for better or worse, in sickness and in health, the story of love-addled Romeo and his sexually purposeful Juliet remains one of humanity’s truest narratives, imprinted over and over again in our actions and fates; that we are more alike than different in our desires and voices and connected in the largest and smallest and most astonishingly random of ways are a few of the points and opinions that converge by the close of this book and help release its emotion unexpectedly but profoundly.
Everything ends in tears, says this book—as does this book—to the extent that it ends at all, for like life the narrative curls back around and starts over again. Or sort of. Silber’s ending is emotionally shattering, despite its tender wisdom and resignation. It is difficult to discern how it manages this powerful effect, except that emotion has been building throughout then carefully set aside for subsequent, artful triggering—an effect I’ve experienced at the end of only a few other novels, Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, say, or J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
A novel-in-stories, Silber’s book proves, is not a cheat: done right it is a kind of double major, accomplishing two difficult things simultaneously—singing an aria while building a house. Human existence is not tragic—both these activities proclaim—but it is fragmented, improvisational, dangerous, accidental, maddening, and funny. Despite the tears, it is a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon of desire and its object. It is a Buddhist comedy of the self attempting to remove the self. The core of life, as Silber demonstrates throughout her work and states explicitly in her very first book, is “tyrannically physical.” The mind has a few nifty tricks for forgetting pain, as does the body, while it simultaneously attempts to learn from history, its own and others’—if this is at all possible. Is it? Silber swims through and past all of these heavenly ideas, a graceful swimmer on a leisurely swim, though her brisk, radiant prose chops the water like a sprite.
(2005)
Eudora Welty
Sixteen years ago I was in Jackson, Mississippi, and the owner of the bed-and-breakfast at which I was staying gave me Eudora Welty’s address at 1119 Pinehurst Street, across from Bellhaven College. Miss Welty loves visitors, I was told, and I should feel free and welcome to go knock on her door. I was surprised that Welty was being openly offered up this way as a public site to a casual tourist fresh from Faulkner’s Rowan Oak. For a minute I saw Welty as perhaps a kind of political prisoner, held hostage by southern graciousness—perhaps even the Jackson Chamber of Commerce—for I knew that no writer in her writer’s heart welcomes impromptu visits from people she doesn’t know. But a writer’s heart is often dressed up in the local protective coloring of her address. And no writer is entirely a writer—she is also many other things. But the writer part—the accident of mind that prompts the private secreting away of phrases and ideas—is never understood the way a neighborhood might imagine, because it is never really glimpsed, though this is seldom acknowledged.
I was once also in Baltimore the year Anne Tyler won the Pulitzer Prize. Tyler was a Welty devotee and the first to interview her at length in The New York Times. Two journalists recounted that they had knocked on Tyler’s front door to get her response to winning the prize and that, unlike Welty, she had sent them away with a brusque “I’m sorry. I’m working right now.” I expressed amazement that Tyler had opened her door at all: surely that was the southern part of her, hospitably opening it. But the midwestern part—the Midwest, erroneously known for its friendliness, is natively skeptical of open arms and excellent manners—had declined a visit. Personally, living in the Midwest, if I saw strangers approaching my door, I would probably phone 911. Despite two southern grandfathers and a childhood during which I was told I was “half-southern,” it is quite possible I do not have a southern bone in my body.
Nonetheless, sixteen years ago, clutching directions, I did scout out Welty’s house, and though I would never have been so lowdown as to have gotten out of the car, like the most craven sort of paparazzi I stopped long enough to lean out the window and take a picture of the house—a spacious faux Tudor, set back from the curb, on a long, cared-for lawn—and then I rolled away, wondering if I’d seen the front curtains move. When I returned from my trip, I pasted the photo in a scrapbook.
That Welty had charismatic friendliness in abundance—her combination of shyness and gregariousness won over everyone—was never in her lifetime in doubt. She was a natural storyteller, a wit, and a clown. “If this sofa could talk,” she said once to Reynolds Price, looking at the bedraggled plastic furnishings of the only rental room Price could find for them in Tuscaloosa, “we would have to burn it.” All of Welty’s endearing qualities are underscored by Suzanne Marrs’s recent biography of her, the only one ever authorized by Welty. An unauthorized one appeared in 1998, Eudora: A Writer’s Life, by Ann Waldron (who without Welty’s approval began to feel shunned by Welty’s fiercely protective friends and a bit sorry for herself, perceiving that she was rather literally disapproved of, the perennially “uninvited guest”). Welty at the time of Waldron’s completed book was eighty-nine and unable to read for long spells. (Thank goodness, suggests Jacksonian Marrs, the anointed biographer.) Still, despite the biblical saying, a prophet is not often without honor in her own country: Welty was a goddess in Jackson. What a prophet is often without is privacy, peace, and any real depth of comprehension among her fellow citizens. And although this is not the task or accomplishment of literary biography, that Suzanne Marrs has waited until after Welty’s death to publish Eudora Welty is certainly a beginning to all three.
It is also a work of love, as biographies often have to be just to get written. But of course, unlike with a work of disinterested investigation, there can be problems: a work of love may suddenly turn, in exhaustion, upon its subject; it may never look hard in certain corners out of fear of risking itself; it can grow defensive or caressing. Still, literary biography has its practitioners and even more so its readers—some looking for instruction, some lo
oking for secrets, some simply curious to discover how a life can be lived one way on the outside and yet another way on the inside without derailing and tumbling into madness; some wanting to see if that contradiction is, as Flaubert, another writer who lived with his mother, famously suggested, the very thing that keeps sanity in place. Or if the safe living that ensures the daring art is also what keeps the grown-up a child, or a community pet, or unhappy, or drunk.
The element that is most often looked for by both biographer and reader, however, is how the life is revealed in the work, and so the work is read backward—as a source for the life—and the misstep of biographical overreading begins to mar, so to speak, the discussion of the work. I’m afraid this is sometimes done so blithely in Suzanne Marrs’s book that, leaving no room for the beautiful deformities of invention, she actually refers to one character—Courtney in an early story of Welty’s—as “aka Eudora,” as if a fictional character were an alias, or someone the author is doing business as. Oh, well: it is a hazard of literary biography that few have avoided. Still, the phrase “aka Eudora,” it seems to me, sets a new rhetorical standard for refusal even to try.
This aside, Marrs’s biography, with its access to documents, friends, and the subject herself, inevitably proves an interesting and engaging addition to our understanding of Welty and to a lesser extent Welty’s great ear for the voices and stories of southern life, whether it be a poor black woman shooing animals from her path at Christmastime or a white murderer mired in folksy hate. It is also an explicit and sharp retort to Waldron’s earlier biography and to the criticisms leveled by Claudia Roth Pierpont in a 1999 New Yorker article. The former work, though sympathetic and vividly written, is scattered with gossipy quotes, several about Welty’s supposed physical unattractiveness. The latter took Welty to task for politely turning her back on the subject of race in Mississippi, allegedly to ingratiate herself socially with Jackson insiders. Marrs’s book takes on a defensive tone as she attempts to offer correctives. To counter the latter, she leans heavily on a quote by Toni Morrison that Welty wrote “about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about,” and offers up Welty’s few friendships with African-Americans, most of whom were her caretakers in her old age. To counter the former, Marrs offers descriptions of Welty’s large and luminous eyes.
