As soon as I got back to my mother’s friend’s house I called Laura. I knew she’d be patient enough to indulge my nostalgia for what had been for both of us an unhappy time. But the more we reminisced about our trip, the less unhappy it became, and I found myself wondering if I’d miscast it all these years in light of subsequent sadnesses. Remember that high school talent show we went to? Remember the bike ride down the Natchez Trace? Remember when we “accidentally” broke into that houseboat and spent the afternoon drinking bourbon on deck? Such memories, which should have heightened my nostalgia, instead threatened to dissolve it—I didn’t want this memory to be unsettled; what if I had gotten it all wrong?—and maybe it was my dawning awareness of this that Laura detected when she asked if I had a cold; I told her I didn’t think so, no. She said my voice sounded strange, a little off.
I changed the subject: “How’s your yoga-class boyfriend?”
Laura sighed and said with heartfelt sadness she’d just discovered he was a coder.
“Oh no,” I said. She had a thing about coders.
“I know. So—back to the drawing board I guess.”
“Any prospects?”
“I don’t know. I think I need to make some changes. I think my new haircut makes me look like a lesbian; suddenly I have to be careful about my outfits. And I’m going gray.”
When I tried to picture Laura with short gray hair, all I could see was her mother: I almost laughed.
“Listen,” said Laura, “I have some advice. Actually it’s from my sister but I’ve found it super helpful. It’s four things to do when you’re feeling down.”
“Sounds like an article for Real Simple.”
“And they really work. They’re like scientifically proven. Your brain lights up, serotonin or whatever. You don’t have to do all four, necessarily, but the more you do the better you’ll feel. Ready?”
“But I’m not feeling down,” I lied.
“In case you ever do, then. Ready?”
One was go for a run. Two was masturbate. Three was take a shower. Four was drink a cup of coffee. Dark chocolate would also work in a pinch. And that was it. Four things. Easy, right? It was best if you did them in the order she’d listed. And she added a fifth item to the list, a sort of bonus, which she liked to do after all the others, though this one was strictly unofficial: listen to the Alec Baldwin interview podcast.
I hoped I conveyed the skepticism I felt when I said I’d keep her list in mind.
“I really think it could help, my dear.”
“I’ve always thought gray hair was sexy,” I said.
Half an hour later I was on the living-room floor, listening to the Alec Baldwin podcast. I’d considered running but hadn’t run for months and convinced myself the icy sidewalks were unsafe. I wasn’t in the mood to masturbate. I rarely drank coffee in the afternoon. And so, after a few minutes of disingenuous internal debate, I’d walked to the Kum & Go and bought a chocolate chocolate chip muffin, which I was eating as Alec Baldwin interviewed, in his husky seductive almost-whisper, a film director I’d never heard of. “Loss is my great theme,” the director was saying. “If you watch my movies carefully, you’ll see that, at heart, what they’re all about is loss.” No shit, I thought. Every movie is about loss. Every work of art ever made is about loss. Loss of innocence, loss of illusions, loss of identity, loss of loved ones. Laura had been right after all, I decided: the performer’s role should be simply to set Bach’s music into motion, as though turning over an hourglass or pulling back and releasing a pendulum, and not to urge it forward with extraneous feeling.
The podcast ended and I found myself standing by the windows I was drawn to all winter long. Sometimes as I stood there I saw signs of human life—dog walkers dressed in defiantly bright outerwear; salt-stained cars spinning tires in the snow; garage doors opening and closing like mouths; Amy Sampson emerging from the house across the street and, instead of stopping at her car in the driveway, continuing toward my driveway, my front door, as I so often imagined her doing when I was a teenager before she moved with her family to California, never to return until now, unchanged, fifteen or sixteen years old, quick gait, tight jeans, long blond shoulder-length curls, small breasts, narrow shoulders, thin lips, soft lips—but more often the world outside seemed deserted. The houses across the street seemed to welcome the snow that blanketed their roofs and hedges. They seemed to want to recede into the whiteness. Ghost robins hopped and pecked in their white yards. Ghost families lived behind their walls. Above them hovered clouds of impossible vagueness, emanations without edge or contour—winter clouds, breaths, abstractions of abstractions; or they gathered into a single gray solidity, dark roof; or it snowed, white disappearing into white; or the sky was clear but suffused with gold, sourceless light glowing within the blue; or the sun set the snow-covered world to flame, yellow-white dazzling my eyes.
* * *
—
If you concentrate hard enough on a UPS truck, you can will it to stop in front of your house. The question of who might be sending me something, among the few people who knew I was there, flickered at the edge of my mind, dimly, as I watched the truck lumber down the street to a faint accompaniment of a Bach keyboard invention. As it drew closer it seemed to slow down and my hope became edged with desperation, almost panic, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them the truck was out of sight. I feigned disappointment (to whom?) but was relieved. Then I heard the insistent beeps that meant the truck was backing up, and as in a dream it reappeared behind the windows, moving as if in super-slow-motion rewind, and I watched as it stopped in front of the house and ejected a woman dressed in the same chocolate brown as the paint that covered the truck’s surface. The woman walk-ran up the driveway toward the door, and then she was too close to the house for me to see. Her three knocks shouldn’t have startled me, did, and I retreated on tiptoe into the family room, where the Bach was playing from my open laptop. I stood with one hand on the couch, my mind a blank, until I heard the sound of the truck starting up, and—after an interminable pause—retreating up the street. Then I went to the front door, pulled it open, and jumped back slightly when a large yellow envelope fell across the metal threshold. It must be something for my mother’s friend, I thought, as I picked it up and saw it was for me, from Maria.
I sat down on the living-room floor and tore open the envelope and pulled out a book, a biography of John Berryman. The package I’d sent hadn’t made it to Maria. No, it was a different Berryman biography. The photo on the cover was almost identical to the photo on the cover of the one I’d read: here, a young Berryman sat with crossed legs on what looked like a low stone wall or pile of sacks, holding a cigarette between forefinger and thumb, the collar of his jacket flipped raffishly up. As on the other cover his expression was ambiguous and his lips were slightly parted as if to speak, but now he looked out from beneath a short-brimmed hat and his defiance was softened by what appeared to be knowing amusement. The author of the biography was Stephen Crane, which was impossible, and then I saw that Crane wasn’t author but subject, the handsome man looking out from the cover who so resembled Berryman, who was the author. I opened the book and something slid out, three sheets of paper covered on both sides with small, neat handwriting in bright green ink. I scanned the letter for I had no idea what, a thesis statement, a place to hide, a sentence that laid a hand on my shoulder. I went to the family room and turned off the Bach and returned to my position on the living-room floor. Then I read the letter from the beginning.
Maria started by thanking me for sending her the biography, as if I hadn’t taken it from her in the first place; Berryman was one of her favorite poets and she was glad for the excuse to return to him. She understood the pity I felt toward him but didn’t understand the anger, she wrote. It seemed to her Berryman did the best he could under very difficult circumstances. Could you imagine if your father shot himsel
f when you were eleven? And your mother remarried a few months later? And you took the name of your mother’s new husband so that your father’s suicide got mixed up in your identity in such a way that you’d never be able to ignore it, much less “get over it”? (Was she quoting me?) Maria couldn’t imagine, she wrote, but she knew it wouldn’t make life any easier. That Berryman was able, in spite of this tragedy, to not only lead a long and meaningful life but to convert it into infinitely tender and funny and sad and challenging works of art in which others might find or create meaning for themselves: this was truly extraordinary, and spoke to a courage and generosity of spirit beyond the normal human range.
In our culture, Maria went on, when someone kills himself we are all quick to call him a coward. It was a way of congratulating ourselves—wasn’t it?—for continuing to eat and breathe and sleep. But suicide could be a courageous act, or just a necessary one. Of course it’s sad. It’s beyond sad. But everyone’s life was sad in a million different ways, no matter how it happened to end. All Maria knew was that Berryman’s poems—the Dream Songs especially but also Bradstreet and parts of Love & Fame, not to mention a handful of short stories and one or two critical essays, plus the letters—had given her a lot of pleasure and companionship and solace over the years. They’d given her back to herself, she wrote, they’d returned her to life. How could you feel anything but gratitude toward someone who’d done that?
Our anger should be directed not at Berryman but at his awful biographer, Maria continued. She hadn’t remembered how bad he was, how incompetent, how disingenuous. Most literary biographies were bad, of course, but this one was even worse than most. It was all He was undoubtedly feeling and He must have sensed and We can easily imagine. Maybe we can, but should we? Is it right to? Does it actually reveal something interesting about the subject? Or does it reveal that old urge to master, that eagerness to patch together our lives out of scraps of other people’s (those of the voiceless, if at all possible, those of the dispossessed)? Not to mention the writing was abominable. Even if his heart made life hell for him, Berryman knew, he could not live without it. Can you imagine writing that sentence and letting it stand? Or: The act of evaluating one’s world responsibly was damned hard, Berryman knew, but there was no way of avoiding that responsibility if civilization was to survive. Huh? That insane pretension to omniscience, that sham authority—it was just so reductive and presumptuous and invasive. It was like a combination of a Dan Brown novel and a History Channel voice-over. Every other sentence started with After all. I hate after all, Maria wrote. There is no after all. And not once did the biographer have the grace to point out how little he was actually working from, how Berryman’s life was in fact much larger than the letters and drafts and notebooks and journals he’d pillaged in the name of research. Not once did he acknowledge the gaping void on the other side of the historical record, all the parts of a person’s life that aren’t recorded anywhere, by anyone, ever, all the thoughts, half thoughts, feelings, dreams, everything said but not written down, everything written down but thrown away, every sensation and memory. Even when the biographer quoted Berryman himself, he failed to note the provisional and contingent nature of whatever passage he quoted, Maria wrote, as if a single sentence from a journal entry, for example, could be an uncomplicated revelation of a person’s most authentic longings and fears. Biography! The genre was rotten to the core (a good example of the sort of cliché that characterizes it, she wrote). It reduced once-living beings to the level of facts, to the level of information. Life is experience, Maria grandly asserted, and experience is the opposite of information. You felt this disparity in literary biographies more strongly than in any other kind, because the richness and ambiguity of literature—of the subject’s poems or novels or whatever, the literary output that presumably made this person worthy of a biography in the first place—contrasted so starkly with the unimaginativeness of even the best biographies, scummed as they almost couldn’t help but be by strained elisions, knee-jerk generalizations, and dubious-at-best causality. Why were biographers so clueless and smug? Couldn’t I just imagine Berryman’s biographer hanging out with his biographer buddies, chomping cigars and drinking port and complaining about their wives? Portly men drinking port. Hunting fox. Berryman’s world was even more interior than Wallace Stevens’s. What does that even mean? Or this: Meantime the larger world outside went on. Meantime the larger world outside went on!
As for Berryman’s relationship with fame, Maria continued, it was surely more complicated than I’d pretended in my note. Berryman writes all about it in the Crane biography, which, she wrote, you’ll see if you read it (no pressure). No doubt things got confusing for Berryman. No doubt a part of him just wanted to be loved. (Maria: Who doesn’t want to be loved?) And, as you allude to in your note, he came of age along with TV and advertising and PR and all that stuff. We can imagine that it must have been getting harder and harder to distinguish fame from celebrity. But that only makes Berryman’s grappling with fame all the more necessary and poignant for us, living as everyone readily admits we do in an age in which image and spectacle and role-playing overwhelm reality at every turn. Berryman was way ahead of his time, Maria wrote. In fact, she considered him a sort of prophet.
The letter—unexpected, expansive, proud, challenging, righteous, mildly chastising, vulnerable—pulsed through me the rest of the afternoon and evening: as I backed my mother’s friend’s car down the driveway (very slowly) and onto Cortez Drive; as I passed the Kum & Go, Lawnwood Elementary, the Muslim Cultural Center, the veterans’ hospital; as I drove down and up the Thirtieth Street ravine; as I parked and took a deep breath and entered the dry cleaners and Jess greeted me like a long lost friend (it had only been a few days since we met), and we talked for a while about things I don’t remember before she admitted to having Googled me and discovered who, to the world, I was; as Jess’s grandmother appeared from behind a curtain, caught sight of me, smiled, retreated behind the curtain; as Jess suggested we meet up sometime soon and asked for my number and typed it into her phone and texted me, Let’s hang out. Up for anything; as I drove back through the streets of Des Moines with my newly altered shirt. I was moved by Maria’s defense of Berryman, and I was persuaded so fully by her case against his biographer that it seemed as though I had made it myself, the vague objections I’d felt as I read the biography expanding in memory into full-throated rebellion.
Back home, if home is what it was, I remembered an essay by Virginia Woolf that I had read several years ago, a review of a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning that when I discovered a PDF of it on the Internet turned out to be a review of a biography of Christina Rossetti: “Here is the past and all its inhabitants,” writes Woolf,
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