Extra Innings
Page 24
I would have thought that the opposite would be true, that speaking one’s prose would make it simpler, less prolix, more unadorned. The highly wrought result of his dictation came to be known to critics as James’s ‘later style.’ His biographer, Leon Edel, describes James’s ‘indirections and qualifications, the rhythms and ultimate perfection of his verbal music … his use of colloquialisms and in a more extravagant play of fancy, a greater indulgence in elaborate and figured metaphors, and in great proliferating similes’ brought about by dictation.
All that, from the almost public act of speaking to a typist rather than the customary elaborations that result from the privacy of the pen to paper.
The mail brings a copy of the May Sarton Festschrift, a well-printed volume of tributes to her octogenarian year from her professional friends and acquaintances. Most of them are genuinely admiring paragraphs common to such tributary books. But Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers and now eighty-six years old, defies the genre by contributing an amusing line. One of the things she likes about being old, she writes:
‘We have outlived our opposition.’
The observation reminds me of George Burns’s remark that he liked living into his nineties because ‘I don’t have to worry about peer pressure.’
By mere chance I pull from a shelf a collection of Diane Trilling’s book reviews, written for The Nation in the forties. I had been thinking of gathering together some of my short reviews from the ‘Fine Print’ column of The New Republic and Saturday Review (twenty years ago) and combining them with comments written today. Do I still think highly of this book? Did I overpraise it? Did I neglect other good books of that time to give it space? But after reading Diana Trilling’s trenchant short reviews of fiction, I have serious second thoughts about my own. No one since her time has been able to make an art of this difficult form.
Her talent was to recognize so well the paucity of ideas, the failures of thought, the pretentiousness of books that others were taken in by, and to encapsulate her comments in a few effective words. Here is what she wrote about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead:
[It] is a 754-page orgy of glorification of that sternest of arts, architecture. What Ruth McKenney’s Jake Home [in a novel by the same name] is to the proletarian movement, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark is to public and domestic buildings—a giant among men, ten feet tall and with flaming hair, Genius on a scale that makes the good old Broadway version of art-in-a-beret look like Fra Angelico. And surrounding Howard Roark there is a whole galaxy of lesser monsters—Gail Wynand who is Power, and Peter Keating who is Success, and Dominique who is Woman. When Genius meets Woman, it isn’t the earth that rocks but steel girders. Surely The Fountainhead is the curiosity of the year, and anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper-rationing.
This is the entire review. In four sentences she has summarized the plot, accurately suggested the tone, stated the theme, and made a judgment so sharp, so intelligent, and, as it turns out, so prescient that it deserves to last as a piece of inspired criticism long after that now-cultic, empty volume has gone back to well-deserved dust. Some months later she referred, in a phrase, to the ‘operatic excesses’ of Ayn Rand’s novel.
On the other hand, her praise for the three short, elegant novels of Isabel Bolton (Mary Britten Miller), who wrote her fiction after she was sixty years old, should have raised that now entirely forgotten novelist to serious and permanent notice. She said Bolton was ‘the best woman writer of fiction in this country today,’ and her novel, Do I Wake or Sleep, ‘quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine.’
If Diana Trilling convinced no one else with this extraordinary praise she moved me to find Isabel Bolton’s books, to read them, and then, in the 1982 Writer’s Choice, to recommend them, along with Edmund Wilson and Babette Deutsch, once again, to readers. Now, ten years later, no one, so far as I know, has made a move to reprint the novels. It is hard to see how it is possible for such distinguished work to fall into total oblivion.
Rarely does the New York Times manage to print two stories that, running consecutively, make an interesting point about society’s contrasts. This morning, in its ‘Chronicle’ column, I read first about the star Madonna, who arrived in a tinted-window limousine in front of a restaurant and boutique, Serendipity, on East 60th Street in New York City. The window of the store was full of baseball paraphernalia. Madonna’s companion got out and told the owner that ‘someone in the car wanted everything in the window.’ Everything was duly removed and gift-wrapped: T-shirts, sequined baseball caps, bats.
Then the lady wanted food to be served in her car. After some protest by the owner that he did not provide curb- or carry-out service, Madonna rolled down the window. Overwhelmed by the identity of his customer, the owner promptly brought out what she wanted: foot-long hot dogs with chili and frozen hot chocolate (surely this must be the ultimate food oxymoron).
The second story in the column: Clara McBride Hale, known as Mother Hale and founder of Hale House, the group home for babies born addicted to drugs and alcohol and recently those born HIV-positive, is eighty-seven years old. She has had a series of strokes, and recently fell and broke her collarbone. Still, she visits her beloved little patients every day and is sad because she cannot pick them up ‘for fear of dropping one.’ But her daughter, who runs Hale House, brings her a seven-week-old baby to hold. He nestles in bed with her and she talks to him: ‘I tell him about my past—he is the only one who will listen to me anymore—and about his future.’
Blond Madonna has gift-wrapped baseball bats and frozen hot chocolate brought to her parked limousine. Black Mother Hale has a sick baby brought to her bed to comfort, not gift-wrapped. Two small but significant portraits of the closing years of this century.
At the height of the summer some of the bookstore’s customers are tourists who have visited it before. I am in the store one day when a lady asks me:
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m working on a book.’
‘Oh, really. I thought you were doing that last year.’
This is said to be one of the coldest summer seasons on record. No humid days, and the average temperature, taking the cold nights into account, is about sixty. Only our guests have used our boats: we have not been on or in the water. In August there are still yellow flowers on the vestigial tomato plants and a few tiny green tomatoes. The blackberry bushes seem to have frozen before the fruit matured. We wear sweaters in the early afternoon. We hear rumors of a possible August frost. Sybil wants to know what has become of global warming.
Yesterday we saw, at a distance, what we think were geese flying south. To date there have been three hot days. They may constitute the summer.
A student writer asks me to tell him ‘how I write.’ I take it this means ‘With a pen? a pencil? a computer?’ I answer him. But I would like to have found the courage to tell him the story of the would-be composer who asked Mozart how to compose a symphony. Mozart told him that a symphony was a complex and demanding musical form and that he had better start with something simpler.
The young man: ‘But you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.’
Mozart: ‘I didn’t have to ask how.’
Sybil is reading Terry McMillan’s new novel, Disappearing Acts, and I am finishing Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. We talk about this and decide we chose to read these books because we miss the sight of black faces around us. We live among an unvaryingly white homogeneity. The two novels give us pleasure because, for the time being, we can move into the worlds of persons of color.
At the same time I am reviewing a novel by Susan Straight, I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. Written by a young white woman, it is a remarkable and welcome immersion in the life of a black community, and has a memorable South Carolina Gullah-speaking heroine.
A MEDITATION ON HOME
SEPT
EMBER 15, 1992
Now, as this year of a book (the one I am writing, the one I have written) is ending, I have been thinking about what it means to be home, to have learned that the place where I am is home. Finding it is pure good fortune. Being lucky enough to procure it, settle into it, and the prospect of remaining there for what one hopes may be the rest of one’s life: that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
This spring Marlene Dietrich died in France, where she had lived for many years. According to her wishes, she was buried in Germany, her native country, where she felt she could not return to live after the Nazi regime. But still, it was to be her final home, to which her aged body and extraordinary reputation was returned, at the end.
For some writers—William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Edgar Wideman, William Kennedy, Eudora Welty, Wendell Berry, others—home, the place of their birth, becomes their invariable subject matter. They leave it rarely in their fiction, traveling widely in their native places. Their characters are born there. There, those parochial inventions live out their lives. For such writers, home fires their imaginations and moves their pens.
In Sanskrit, ksemas means safe dwelling and is the word for home. The verb ksi means to dwell secure. Home and safety are part of the same concept. For some childhoods, I suppose, this is true. Some of us have felt safe at home, and unsure, threatened, when we were removed from that secure place. It has been said: Home is where you hang your childhood and later, your hat. For some this will always be true. For others, the home of childhood is a place to escape from, to put behind them, to remove from their memory, even to deny the existence of. For some writers, like Katherine Anne Porter, home is a place so unsatisfactory you have to reinvent it.
The word is the subject of numerous aphorisms. T. S. Eliot’s home is where one starts from. The best country is at home. Thomas Wolfe’s title, you can’t go home again. Huck’s no home like a raft. Robert Frost’s home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Oliver Wendell Holmes thought that where we love is home. The question we have framed and written in calligraphy in the entry to our house is: If I follow you home, will you keep me?
Homelessness is the great social disaster of our time. The homeless are the politically exiled. Those who leave for a better place, only to find they are unwelcome there. Those sent to gulags or concentration camps. The exiled, dwellers on street corners and grates, park benches and in doorways. People dispossessed by earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, volcanos, avalanches, wars. Refugees. Immigrants. Boat people.
For me: At long last, I have overcome my sense of displacement and homelessness, my need to find the one place to which I feel I belong. To which I come with a sense of inevitable return. The place I leave, even for a few hours, with regret. I take pleasure at every vista from these windows: ‘Everywhere you look there is something to see,’ as Ted Nowick once observed. I feel a foolish nostalgia for the sight of the Cove when I go as far away as the post office or the local store. Homesick? Looking out of every window toward the sea, I know where home is.
I remember the Sisters at Saint Rose had a clear idea of its location. One early morning one of them stopped me in the breakfast line to tell me of the death of an elderly nun that night. She smiled as she said: ‘Sister Rosaleen has gone home to God.’
I am now prepared to see my life as a journey to arrive here. It has been a somewhat narrow, constrained, unadventuresome trip to this place where I am, for the time being, home free, for good. Finally, of course, there will be the last expedition when I am ‘called back,’ in Emily Dickinson’s phrase. Shakespeare’s metaphor for death: ‘The latest home.’ Mary Oliver’s image for death: ‘that cottage of darkness.’
English sermons of the fourteenth century speak of death as ‘the long home.’
An elderly acquaintance whose permanent home in her late years has been Brooklin, Maine, said at tea the other day, while reviewing her life: ‘We lived temporarily in Chicago for twenty-five years.’
In games nomenclature, the fourth, final, and scoring base in baseball is home plate; crossing it is a home run.… In hide-and-seek, the place safe from discovery is home. The object of backgammon is to bring the counters round to your own home.
Home for me might have been an apartment, a condominium in a high-rise building, a brownstone looking beyond parked cars and streams of traffic to another brownstone. A ranch house in the suburbs with a manicured lawn indistinguishable from the ones on either side. A room in a boardinghouse, a shelter: in one of these places I might have spent the seventh segment of my life.
But Fortune has provided me with a rocky Cove off a Reach, a meadow, two shallow woods, one great oak and a towering horse chestnut tree, a huge, immovable rock that sits, in Maine fashion, in the middle of a scrabby lawn, a deck (substitute for a ship’s side) that is attached to the house and stretches toward the water.
Together with this parochial gift, it gave me more: an interior landscape made of serenity, isolation, solitude: the flowering desert of the heart, the mountains (and valleys) of mind, the pools of imagination. Perhaps I am truly at home when I am at peace with myself, surrounded by the serenity that comes from the Cove, a quiet so deep I am able to hear the roar of the sea in my inner ear, to see in my mind’s eye absent friends as well as the dead I have loved, to taste on the buds of fantasy the great meals I am no longer able to digest, to restore the scraps of a quiescent past long buried in my memory by an overactive present.
I live in these landscapes. Here I dwell secure, looking inward to learn the ancient, neglected truths about myself, and outward to find God in this small piece of the beautiful world I have been granted, and in my fellow human beings nearby. I celebrate what I have, but sometimes mourn what has been lost in the world. For I take to heart what Robert Finch wrote: A celebrant of nature is now forced to become a ‘writer of epitaphs for moribund places … one who speaks well of the dead or dying … [I] celebrate things that no longer are.…’
I have been lucky. I did not find this place too soon, too early. (For if I had, I might face the danger of losing it and not being able to come home again. I might have been expelled, or transported, or exiled from it.)
Ecclesiastes contains a good metaphor. Worthless, vain ambition is said to be ‘chasing the wind.’ In another translation it is rendered as ‘a striving after wind.’ To be home is to stop chasing the wind. To know thy place.
And knowing it, to learn to sit still. Here. For the time being.
Sargentville, Maine
About the Author
Doris Grumbach, author of many novels and memoirs including Fifty Days of Solitude, Life in a Day, The Ladies, and Chamber Music, has been literary editor of the New Republic, a nonfiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review, a book reviewer for National Public Radio, and a bookseller in Washington, DC, and Maine. She lives in Philadelphia.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
“To Waken an Old Lady” and excerpt from “January Morning” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. I. Copyright © 1938 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpt from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Excerpt from “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from “Sprung Lamb” and “Southern Comfort” by Felicia Lamport from Political Plumlines by Felicia Lamport. Copyright © 1984 by Felicia Lamport. Reprinted by permission of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Copyright © 2000 by Doris Grumbach
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7663-3
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