Fifty Days of Solitude

by Doris Grumbach

  Marshall McLuhan: “If the temperature of the bath rises one degree every ten minutes, how will the bather know when to scream?”

  But I am far from contact with all these terrible, “normal” characteristics of modern society. So I have tended to magnify their importance, to dwell on them with pity and terror. In solitude, they occupy far more of my time than I wish. I would have to go back to living among them, as I once did, to have them become normal to me.

  A reluctant interview with the painter ninety-year-old Esteban Vincente, in the New Yorker: “My paintings talk, and I don’t have anything else to say. I’m still trying to find out what painting is, and the only way to do that is to be alone. The loneliness has to do with what you do.”

  OFTEN in the late night I dreamed of Jude Bartlett, the young man who died this winter of AIDS in nearby Brooklin. He inhabited my dreams in odd ways, sometimes on his toes in a ballet I could not identify, sometimes holding my hand, once laughing at something I had said. He had been dead some months, but he was often present in my quiet house when I slept, out of his bed and once, curiously, lying beside me in mine.

  Jean Hylan, his sister, brought Jude by ambulance from his apartment in New York City to the house she had rented around the corner from where she lived with her husband and five-year-old daughter, Kate. Before she decided to do this, her mother had said to her: “Why don’t you put him in a hospital and let professionals take care of him?”

  Jean thought otherwise. She organized the community to help with his care. Some people came to sit with him and provide for his almost constant needs, others cooked or shopped. Still others stayed the night to spare Jean the cost of too many health-care professionals. A nurse came on occasion to change his IVs and dress his sores. But most of the ordinary work was done by people who had never before had contact with a gay man suffering the last terrible afflictions of AIDS.

  Jude was a gentle, sweet fellow who had been a dancer with the Martha Graham troupe and then a chef. He was still concerned about his appearance and disturbed about his decaying and fallen-out teeth. Although Jean was aware that he had very little time left, she had a dentist visit him to fit him with a bridge. By the time it was made he was too sick to wear it, but he knew it was there in the kitchen. It may have made him think that someday he would be able to put it in.

  Jean confessed that she hesitated at first to ask for volunteers from the community for fear of homophobia and revulsion against the disease, especially for fear that her young daughter in school might be affected. Nothing of this sort happened, or at least was ever expressed by anyone. The volunteers were faithful and efficient. All of them became very fond of the dying man.

  Jude’s tastes were fun to cater to. When I offered him a pear for dessert he asked shyly if he might have a bit of Stilton with it. In the refrigerator I could find only sliced and packaged Kraft cheese which he seemed to accept but, with his chef’s delicacy still intact even if his teeth were not, he did not eat any of it.

  My contribution to his entertainment was a few videos of Balanchine dances. He watched them once but did not want to see them again. Others brought tapes of classical music. But as he grew sicker and unable to leave his bed he lost interest in things beyond himself. His mind seemed to be on his body, the places where sores developed, his spinal abscess, the brittle tenderness in his bones. He studied his feet which still bore the unmistakable calluses of a dancer.

  “You have lovely feet,” I said to him once while I rubbed his fleshless body with lotion.

  He smiled, his charming boy’s smile. “Yes, I do,” he said.

  Late in the afternoon on which he died, “just gave out,” one of his caretakers said, some of us had gone to a meeting to be instructed in the changes in his care for what was expected to be his last days. Seated there and waiting, we were informed of his death. A great sadness, a deep silence settled over us. We stayed, seated around the table thinking about what we had done, and what Jude, the suffering, prematurely aged young man, had taught us about gentle mortality.

  We spoke of our experiences with him. Most of the narrators were young, heterosexual couples, boat builders like Jean’s husband, and a few single women and men of various sexual persuasions. One of them, a gay man who had often stayed the night with Jude, told us quietly that once, when Jude was restless, he asked if there was something he might do for him.

  “Yes,” he said. “You could come in bed with me and cuddle.”

  They lay together, “cuddling,” for about an hour.

  After this report there was silence. Then the wife of the boat builder who lives down the road from us in Sargentville said: “Yes. I know. Everybody needs to be cuddled sometimes.”

  It was a fine moment.

  After the fever of Jude’s life had cooled into death just before Thanksgiving last year, those of us who had known him had trouble adjusting to his absence from our schedules. Later, in the days and nights I was alone, he was back, not only in dreams but also present to me awake, his sweet voice asking for the herb tea he was too weak to drink and the exotic foods he remembered but could no longer eat.

  Fran Lebowitz denied there was “such a thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death,” she wrote. I thought not. Despite the outer turmoil created by the world (the nervousness), if one turns one’s back on it there are moments of inner peace.

  IF I have learned anything in these days, it is that the proper conditions for productive solitude are old age and the outside presence of a small portion of the beauty of the world. Given these, and the drive to explore and understand an inner territory, solitude can be an enlivening, even exhilarating experience. But when I was young, and eager to make my way in the world, I remember how painfully it turned into debilitating loneliness. For me, and for many others like me.

  For the young: To be left alone with themselves when they are too unsure to respect the self they have been persuaded by the world’s opinion to dislike, those who feel unworthy in the eyes of their families, what a terrible condition that is. The dismayingly high number of suicides among young persons attests to the consequences of such destructive isolation, that is, to their insurmountable loneliness.

  Years ago, for a semester during the temporary absence of its director, I was left in charge of a writers’ workshop at a university in the middle west. The heartland, as it was proudly termed by its poet-founder, was considered (by him) to be the perfect place to write. It was far from the fevered, distracting coasts, it gave the young writer space, time, and unlimited solitude in which to do good work.

  I found the assignment trying, not so much the fiction workshop which was crammed with ambitious, productive, talented, often vain young writers, but the need to deal with their personal troubles and the problems they made me privy to. Being myself driven by an ineluctable desire to write at every possible moment, I resented their interruptions of my time and the psychic energy it required to tend to these demanding, creative souls. I had my own recalcitrant work to worry about.

  One morning in my office, halfway through the semester, I listened to the complaints of a faculty member. One of his students, a man he said was “from Alaska, would you believe it?” (why he thought that should have strained my credibility more than his being from Grand Forks, North Dakota, or Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, I was not sure) rarely attended the workshop and, on the few occasions he did, never said a word, “made no contribution,” was the way he expressed it. He had never “put up,” in the workshop jargon, any work for consideration and judgment by the others.

  I said I would try to find out what was wrong with Eric Hunter (I will call him here). When he appeared in the office, I recognized him as the confused young man I had registered on the day before the semester began, the one who had not been able to find a place to live, indeed could not locate the office down the hall where such information was available. He was a strange-looking fellow, shorter than average, thin, and curiously pale for someone from the rugged north. His
sandy hair was long and hung straight to his shoulders obscuring his ears and, if he bent forward, his pale eyes. His nose was oversized, very red, and hooked so that it seemed almost to touch his rosebud chin. Thus sadly endowed, he resembled no one so much as the buffoon in a Punch-and-Judy show.

  In the interview he told me that, yes, he was not happy here; yes, it was true, he was working badly or not at all. He attributed his failure to his loneliness; he had made no friends. He laughed once, when I asked him if he might be homesick. “God, no,” he said. Had he a girl he had left in Nome? I asked. No, neither there nor, for that matter, here. That was the trouble: he had never been able to capture the interest of women whose affection he desperately wanted. He said the women students here were too smart, too sophisticated, egotistical, and loftily scornful of him.

  I could think of no words of comfort or advice except to urge him to work hard on his poems. Friends, I said, sometimes followed recognition of talent and accomplishment in this place, try for that. He said nothing except to thank me for my time. I never saw him again until, at three o’clock in the morning, halfway through the semester, someone in the emergency room of Mercy Hospital called to tell me Eric Hunter had been admitted to a ward there.

  I went at once. When I was allowed to see him, he lay on his back, stretched out so flat that he looked like a cartoon character over which a steam roller had passed. He was unconscious, and his face was almost completely covered with bandages. Blood dripped into a vein in his arm; there was a tube in his mouth. I was told that he had driven himself to the hospital, had passed out from loss of blood in the parking lot, and was found by an intern leaving after his eighteen-hour stint. The nurse told me, with a shake of her head, that it appeared to the fellows in the emergency ward that Eric had been trying to cut off his face.

  When his wounds had healed somewhat, and the danger of infection was passed, he was transferred to the mental ward of the hospital.

  I called his parents in Nome. His father, mother, and two brothers came the next week. The three solidly built, bearded men in wool-flannel, plaid jackets and high leather boots had, to my eyes, no use for the poet Eric. His mother seemed always to be standing a little behind them when we talked and said nothing in defense of her son. She was small and bird-boned, much like Eric. Her skin was leathered and deeply wrinkled.

  One brother, who laughed after every sentence he spoke, as if overcome with his own wit, described Eric’s life at home. In the course of his description of Eric’s failures and inadequacies he twice referred to him as a “faggot.” His classmates in high school had nicknamed him “‘the purple flamingo,’ so that gives you some idea of what we had to put up with,” he said, and laughed. When I protested the faggot designation, telling his brother that Eric liked women and was troubled that they did not respond to him, his brother laughed and said: “Says who?”

  I told Eric that his family wished to take him home with them. He was aghast. “I won’t go. I want to stay and finish the year here.” And then he added, rather pathetically, I thought: “It’s all paid up.” When I said that did not matter, he could reapply next summer and it would still be paid for, he said, almost as a plea of last resort: “I’m better. I promise, I won’t do it again.”

  The doctor warned me that if he stayed I would be responsible for his welfare because, in his opinion, Eric was suicidal. It was then that I said the words, selfish, cowardly, and self-serving words for which, in recurring memory, I suffer profound guilt. I said I could not be responsible for him.

  He went home. My assistant drove him and his family to the airport and reported to me that he had not said a word during the hour’s ride.

  The coda to this small saga of one short, beleaguered, and lonely life is this: Mrs. Hunter wrote to the poet-teacher of the workshop that, before the summer arrived in the north country, Eric Hunter shot himself in the head with one of his brother’s guns. He died instantly and was buried in the Unitarian Church in Nome. After a private service, she had found some poems of Eric’s with the name of his professor clipped to them. She enclosed them. One was titled “The Lonely Flamingo.”

  By this time I was settled back in the east, comfortable in my old study, safe in the wooden rocking chair I used for reading and note-taking, free (I thought) of all concern for anyone else. But of course I was not safe, would never be safe from the sight of his sad, unfortunate face. I will never be free of a sense of terrible inadequacy. I sent a lonely and desperate poet home alone to his cold country, in order to protect my warm self and my private concerns. Failing at first to deface himself, Eric Hunter ended his long loneliness by obliterating the rest of himself.

  WHILE the world outside was dead with winter and ice, I kept alive on the kitchen table a small plant called oxalis. The leaves were blood red and wing-shaped or perhaps heart-shaped, even cloverlike, I couldn’t tell which, and the flowers, five pale cups to a spindly stalk, grew directly from the soil, appearing to have no connection to the leaves.

  But both shared one extraordinary trait. As darkness fell, they slowly folded in upon themselves. When it was entirely dark, they seemed to be one-dimensional, shy, retiring, private personages who had closed themselves off for the night.

  In the morning, just as the first rays of the red sun appeared over the cove, I tried to observe them opening. But so gradual was the process of their unfolding I could never catch them at it. When the sky brightened, they were in full, opened session. I had missed the movement completely.

  Since Tiny Alice, the name I gave the oxalis, was the only flowering plant in the house, my attachment to her was strong. I took very good care of her. I decided that she operated exactly the way my mind does, shutting down without notice to hide its contents from me at the very moment of need, and then expanding, revealing something to me I had not expected.

  ODD: Yesterday, after an unexpected thaw, I felt myself literally growing larger, taller, even deeper when I looked out my study window at the wild world before me—the unplowed meadow full of frozen remnants, stumps, wild blackberry brambles, vestigial azalea bushes, granite stones, blackened fern stalks, dead weeds of every variety.

  My small wilderness reminded me of places I had been, far from cities, where I was surrounded by untamed landscape. I thought of the edges of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, so rough with undergrowth that the mountains seem to be rising up directly from one’s tangled foot. I thought of the junglelike growths in Yucatan I had tried to plow through, each elevated place a mysterious, dense covering for broken stones that once may have been part of great temples. I remembered a deserted headland on Cape Breton where the fierce, uncontrollable sea assaulted the ancient rocks from every direction.…

  Why did I feel this expansion of myself at the sight of wildness? I was not sure. But I did understand why crowded cities had the contrary effect on me. On those jammed streets, in high-rise offices and apartments, theaters, buses, restaurants, even museums (the throngs of people pushing at each other to get closer to Tutankhamen’s gold-laden tomb, Matisse’s great art), I felt shrunken, diminished. I closed down as Tiny Alice did when the shadows lengthened and the evening came.

  Perhaps it was age. We shrink enough as we grow old. We do not need the hordes of civilization to intensify the process.

  ODD TOO: Submerged in the ideal climate for creating fiction, I found it absorbed me less than the remarks I was putting down about the climate itself. I borrowed an interesting book from the bookstore by Henri Nouwen called Clowning in Rome written fifteen years ago. He is reflecting on life as it is lived by members of religious communities, but what he says is true of life lived in the world. He observes that it is only in solitude, away from the persons with whom we ordinarily spend our time, that “we enter into a deeper intimacy with each other. It is a fallacy to think that we grow closer to each other when we talk, play, or work together.… In solitude our intimacy with each other is deepened.”

  I found this to be true. What others regard as retreat f
rom them or rejection of them is not those things at all but instead a breeding ground for greater friendship, a culture for deeper involvement, eventually, with them. What I learned in solitude may make community with my friends and family possible, indeed fertile, whereas constant society was full of fruitless questions about their relation to me, my service to them, my value in the world.

  In another book on the same subject (Out of Solitude) that I came upon later in the winter, Nouwen cites Mark’s Gospel. The apostle reports that “in the morning, long before dawn, he [Jesus] got up and left the house and went off to a lonely place and prayed there.” Nouwen reflects on the human need for such a “lonely place,” without which “our lives are in danger.”

  Most meaningful to me were the effects he describes of a lack of solitude and silence in our fevered lives: “Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning [these are my italics], that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure … without a lonely place our actions quickly become empty gestures.”

  IN these harsh days of winter, when the distance between my cove and Deer Isle was one white, frozen stretch of land and water, I dressed in what up here we call “layers.” I put on five pieces of clothing, beginning with underwear that covers the entire body and ending with wool sweaters and heavy, lined jeans. To go out I added another layer, a down jacket.

  In this way, metaphorically, I now needed to live, with the top layer of my person known to the outside world and displayed for social purposes. But, close to the bone, there had to be an inner stratum, formed and cultivated in solitude, where the essence of what I was, am now, and will be, perhaps, to the end of my days, hides itself and waits to be found by the lasting silence.