Extra Innings
A Memoir
Doris Grumbach
As it was, is now, and (let
us hope) ever shall be:
For SHP
September
I am ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
—Winston Churchill,
on his seventy-fifth birthday
Proem
At seventy, I wrote a book about how I felt coming into old age, about the unaccountable yet very real despair that accompanied entering my septennial years. Now I am approaching seventy-five. I think it a good time (for my own sake) that I review my life since those intensely despondent days, to see if the customary acceptance has set in, if my view of the world, of my smaller world, and of the world buried within myself, has changed, for better or for worse. Has my gloom lifted? Or has there been some unavoidable intensification of it?
I have chosen to follow the same journal-jotting procedure I used four years ago. Perhaps, in the process of writing, I may come upon some answers to the insistent questions of old age. Or perhaps I will only succeed in recording, month by month, the minor thoughts and activities in the life of an aging woman. It may be that a commonplace record of insignificant exterior doings and interior musings are my only possible response to the great philosophical questions. What is it that drives us to examine matters of cosmic significance—birth, faith, suffering, injustice, dying, and death—but the intrusion into our daily lives of niggling irritations and petty trifles.
September 15, 1991: A frightening day, when a book one has written comes out, when details about my life and reflections, always before hidden and personal, unexamined by anyone except for me in all these years, are made public. Coming into the End Zone, a memoir, is published today. There is no announcement, no conspicuous coming-out party, no acknowledgment from anyone that this is the day the shrink wrap of privacy is torn away, the protective cocoon bursts, and out comes what one hopes is a butterfly, not a worm.
Today my wicked imagination is at work. I have a vision of hopeful, eager booksellers, before their stores open in midmorning, rushing to fill their shelf space with my freshly minted volume, newspaper book editors making last-minute corrections on reviews to appear next day or, at least, next Sunday, the publishing-house personnel standing on tiptoe (editors and publicists alike) anticipating the rush for praise that can be quoted and books to be sold to ensure the return of their investment.
But, of course, none of this happens. The fragile butterfly is ‘out,’ that is about all. It is making its precarious way to God knows where or to whom or into what unpredictable climate of faint praise or harsh critical notice. In this same week (to change the metaphor to a more contemporary one), my small VW Bug of a book will travel down a six-lane superhighway surrounded, front and back and on two sides, by huge semi-trailers: a 1,328-page novel by Norman Mailer (Harlot’s Ghost); a 690-page tome, Needful Things, by Stephen King; the sequel to Gone with the Wind, called, starkly, Scarlett, and Anne Tyler’s new novel, not itself of mammoth size but in a gargantuan 150,000-copy printing.
And, bearing down hard on me, as a result of twenty-six years of writing and rewriting, of fanfare, publicity, praise, and wonderment before the fact of publication, is The Runaway Soul, Harold Brodkey’s huge novel, 835 pages. Its press release claims that the literate public has been waiting two and a half decades for this book, which, it has also been said by two most reputable critics, Harold Bloom and Denis Donoghue, will establish Brodkey as the greatest writer of this century.
On the other hand, few people besides me are waiting for mine, and I fear it will establish me only as a somewhat cranky elderly person airing her fears, loves, regrets, dislikes, wan hopes, and unaccountable memories.
So there it goes, my all-of-256-page subcompact car, almost a miniature, traveling very cautiously in the slow lane. Its survival out there is perilous. It is outsized, outdistanced, outnumbered, overshadowed in every possible way. Now I require a third simile to explain my feelings: I am like a featherweight fighter sent into the ring to do battle with, let us say (to properly reflect my age and time), Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, the great pugilist of my youth.
We live in an era of the fictional blockbuster, a word that is relatively new in the language. I first heard it about 1940 when it referred to the unscrupulous real estate operator who frightens people into selling their property cheap by threatening racial infiltration into neighborhoods, thus ‘busting the block.’ And my editor Gerry Howard informs me that during World War II, it referred to bombs so powerful they could level a city block.
Now it is applied to large books, as heavy as millstones, as solid as seawalls, as long as tapeworms, which are printed in great numbers because their publishers anticipate that they will be very popular and their sales will be prodigious.
Clearly, a large American audience finds them desirable. They are eminently readable, utterly absorbing. I think it was François Mauriac who observed readers’ affection for the long book they could ‘live in.’ Someone else described them as wraparound books.
But I have no affection for long books. I am not affected by their appeal. If a novel is indeed, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘a cry for help,’ or as Franz Kafka thought, ‘an ax to the frozen sea around us,’ then long books are drawn-out spells of uncontrollable weeping. The definitive force of the sharp ax breaking the fictional ice in one stroke may not be contained within the dogged results of Brodkey’s twenty-six-year-long chopping.
From my shelf I take down the Library of America’s collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s essays and turn to what I seem to remember he thought about the successful short story or poem. Ah yes, here it is. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition,’ Poe writes: “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of expression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”
Of course I recognize that this research of mine is an apologia, intended to explain to myself, to justify, the short, narrow, dwarfish nature of most of the books I choose to read these days, and all the books I have written. Or it may be that today I look up Poe on the subject because I am hoping to garner some notice for my new book, my pygmy among giants, on the virtue of its brevity. Well no, let me be honest: what I hope for is good notice in major places like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even if End Zone is thinner and shorter than its fellow travelers.
After three days of dailiness on the Cove—the return of the eider ducks’ extended family for one last bout of fishing on the mud flats, the slight edging of yellow and brown that has begun to show on the maples (so soon? I am dismayed by the abbreviated summer up here in coastal Maine), the disappearance from their usual mooring places of two small sailboats—I settle down to accept the permanent existence of the book out there in the world. I find it hard to believe in, since the only reality to me was its presence in my notebook, on the pad on my clipboard, and then among the incomprehensible bytes of the computer. In the new life, gone from me, it calls to mind the story of the American who went to Ireland, and asked an Irishman there:
‘Do you believe in leprechauns?’
‘No,’ replied the Irishman. ‘But … they’re out there.’
Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many women writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of the body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinio
n I care about, and those whose views I don’t value but have weight in the world of readers, think of it?
I remember that my second daughter’s birth was facilitated by the use of forceps that left her cheeks badly marked for weeks. To make matters worse, she was born with crossed eyes. Her head was bald, shaped rather like a cobblestone. When visitors asked to see the newborn I would say that the little one was sleeping or being bathed by her father, or something, anything, not to have to display her. (True, she grew up to be a good-looking woman, but there was no way of knowing that would happen from the evidence at first.)
Now I have that same initial feeling. Looking through the first copy of End Zone sent to me, I imagine I can spot flaws, weak sentences, incompletely developed thoughts, omissions, all the undeveloped inclusions that critics (persons whom John Seelye, in his book about a modern, alternate Huck, calls “the crickets”) will surely seize upon. I would, if I were sent it for review. Depression has set in. I have no way of making changes—or hiding the baby from the crickets. Irrevocably, it’s out there.
Writing one memoir, and then taking these notes for another, I am struck by the dubiousness of the whole enterprise of autobiography. The words ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ keep insinuating themselves into every entry I make and into the reviews that have begun to arrive from Gerry Howard. The more I think about what I have written, and about what I am writing now, the clearer becomes what Blanche Boyd once wrote, I think, about Norman Mailer: “Everything is altered by the observer.” At the moment of retrieval, in the process of recall, the initial, observer-limited memory is there, incomplete and biased as it was when first it was stored in the mind. Then it is embroidered and encrusted over time (I think of the Ladies of Llangollen’s eighteenth-century house in Wales that was replaced in the next century with Tudor brown wood and “improved,” thus changing the original cottage forever) until it is like a barnacle-covered shell, with little of the original shape to be seen.
Then I write about it, giving the memory a literary shape. I leave out what no longer pleases my view of myself. I embellish with euphony and decorate the prose with some color. I subordinate, giving less importance to some matters, raising others to the weight of coordination. I modify. During this literary activity that surrounds the ‘germ’ of fact, as Henry James called it, I am moving into, well, style, and away from, well, let’s face it, truth. But I persist, driven by the need to record in readable form what I think about and remember, however unreliable.
La Rochefoucauld (Maxims): ‘We work so consistently to disguise ourselves that we end by being disguised to ourselves.’
This morning I get my two-days-old Sunday New York Times in the mail. When first we moved to Maine three years ago, and it was clear that the nearest available New York Times, which I was persuaded I could not live without, would require a forty-four-mile drive each morning, I decided to subscribe by mail. At first it came the next day, but now, more often than not, the postal service delays it another day. I have begun to think that ‘postal service’ is a perfect oxymoron.
Strange, but now I am hardly aware of the paper’s tardiness. Nor do I care. It does not matter to me on which day this week Will Crutchfield wrote about an odd relation of the soprano to her voice. He quotes Maria Malibran, the soprano, who used to tell her own voice: ‘It is I who will give the orders, and you who will obey.’ Crutchfield remarks that ‘the voice seems a separate entity to the singer, a different person, even at times, a stranger or an enemy.’
Now I see that it is in the Sunday paper I am reading on Tuesday. I think about Crutchfield’s remarks and find them intriguing because it is the same way with writers. They often regard their fingers and the keyboard of the typewriter or computer on which they work, or the pen they hold, as instruments separate from themselves, taking orders from the disguised self, and demanding to be supplied with words even when that secret self has nothing to say.
For this reason, I remember, I once disliked the electric typewriter. It continued to hum ominously, insistently, even when invention failed me, and I could think of nothing to write.
Having the word ‘oxymoron’ in my head, I thought this afternoon of the time, a few years ago, when I used to go to the Tuesday-morning liturgies at St. Alban’s Church in Washington. Twelve or so of us would gather around the altar at seven-thirty. John Danforth was the celebrant, the Senator from Missouri who was ordained an Episcopal priest at the same time that he was graduated from Yale Law School.
One or another of the little congregation usually gave the homily. Once, when it was my turn, and for some reason I cannot now recall, I used the word ‘oxymoron.’ At the breakfast-coffee gathering after the service John Danforth asked me what the word meant. I explained that it was two words used together that contradicted each other. An example? he asked. Thoughtlessly, I gave him the first one that came to mind: ‘government service.’ As I recall, this was followed by a good deal of forced laughter from the little congregation, silence from the Reverend Mr. Danforth.
More reviews begin to come in. Months ago, Publishers Weekly, called the Bible of the book trade (sometimes Job, sometimes Revelations, perhaps Exodus?), gave the book a good notice in a short paragraph, and later followed the review with an interview. It was an honest, uncompromising account of my life and work by the historian of the Group Theatre, Wendy Smith. But still, like every other writer alive, I wait out other opinions in a state of acute anxiety. Like the first olive, one good one is never enough. Today there are two more.
Sybil and I are driving on Deer Isle to find Sven Olsen, known as Seven to the natives. We need his repair services for our ailing VCR. As we travel, I read my mail while she searches for his house. There is a letter from Gerry Howard. Two xeroxes drop out. In a state of pure panic I scan them, fast. One is a review to appear soon in the Sunday New York Times. It’s by Noel Perrin, a New Englander whose book on living in the country, First Person Rural, I reviewed years ago. He appears to have liked my book, but he reproaches me for saying I hate travel, and then writing about three long trips I took in my seventieth year.
I find myself talking back to him. It is a matter of definition. To me, and (I believe) to Webster, travel is a progress. It means to go from one place to another, by whatever means. It is the process I hate: the proud airlines’ contumely, worry about lost luggage and scarce taxis and inclement weather, bad meals and worse airline and train schedules, the race from one plane to its connection two concourses away carrying my luggage because I am afraid to check it for fear I will arrive at an appearance or a speech without the proper clothes, a book to read, or a toothbrush. All of that, I tell Perrin mentally.
Once I arrive, in Paris, in Yucatán, in Key West, in San Francisco, in Columbus, wherever, all is usually well. So I suffer through the unpleasantnesses in order to get there. Then, hours before I am to leave, I sink into a new fit of dread, in anticipation of the ordeal of getting home.
Perrin takes me to task for my ‘cranky old opinions.’ The headline writer took a liking to that word and topped the review with ‘Be Cranky While You Can.’ I am taken aback by the repetition of the word, having always, perhaps, I now see, mistakenly, thought of myself as reasonable and good-tempered about my preferences and dislikes. One learns, occasionally, from reviewers to see what one writes as others hear and read it. It is cautionary and useful. But then, if I hide this curmudgeonly inclination in me, I will fall under La Rochefoucauld’s warning: ‘Our faults are generally more excusable than the means we take to disguise them.’
The other review, in the Washington Post, is curious. The reviewer is Anthony Thwaite, literary editor of the Listener and the New Statesman and now coeditor of Encounter. An accomplished Brit. I smile at this, thinking that Nina King, the scrupulous book editor of that paper, who is a longtime acquaintance, must have felt she could not rely on any reviewer in this country who might turn out to be a friend of mine, an enemy, a former student, or a sympathetic fellow writer.
Nervou
s about this English critic who has been given my offspring to judge, I study his qualifications before I examine the review itself. Then the review. Thwaite confesses that he has never heard of me, has never read ‘or even noticed’ my novels, and, indeed, has heard of none of the persons who appear in the book. He confesses to being, like me, ‘in the later, if not last, stages of life,’ and then, to my immense relief, admits that he likes me and what is better, my book. ‘Whew,’ whistled Hal, ‘That was close,’ as the boy heroes of my youthful reading used to say, stepping back from a precipice just in time.
There is a caveat: Thwaite reproves me for calling Edmund Gosse Henry Gosse, a scriptural error of mine, I’m sure, not caught by the copy editor or proofreader. I am horrified, but what can be done? I am somewhat mollified by hearing from someone that Thwaite’s wife is the editor of Edmund Gosse’s papers, so he, of course, would have noticed what perhaps only a few Americans will. I know Edmund Gosse’s name is not Henry, having encountered the chap many times during my graduate-school grind in a course in nineteenth-century English poetry and criticism.
But then I am consoled. I look Gosse up in the index to The Cambridge History of English Literature, discover he is listed as GOOSE, EDMUND, and am much relieved that I was not responsible for that egregious error.
This morning, a Nicaraguan lady, Ligia, comes to clean house for us. She is an immigrant who taught school in her own country, and then left with her young son when her mother was murdered. I have trouble communicating with her, my Spanish being so rudimentary and her English almost nonexistent. But we get on well, with many smiles and much head-shaking. She has been given succor and sanctuary at St. Brendan’s, the Episcopal church in Stonington, a fine little fishing village at the end of Deer Isle. Now she has her own apartment, which she supports by cleaning the Episcopal church in Blue Hill and the houses of some parishioners of both churches. One of them, a charming Southern lady, Mary Lyall Murray, stopped into Wayward Books (the store Sybil built and runs next door to our house) last spring and told her: ‘It’s good to feel one is doing one’s Christian duty and having one’s house cleaned, all at the same time.’
Extra Innings Page 1
