writers – Brimmings: up from the well

Elegy for Iris: A Review

“We can only learn to love by loving.” —Iris Murdoch

I’ve just read John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris, his moving memoir of his wife, renowned British novelist Iris Murdoch—26 novels in addition to nonfiction—who succumbed to Alzheimer’s in 1999 at 79.

How does something like this happen? We’re told that we may ward off Alzheimer’s scourge by exercising our brains via mental pursuits like puzzles, word games, picking-up a language, trolling in math, yet here’s this woman of scintillating brilliance, winner of the Booker Prize, working omnivorously at her craft, yet ultimately pummeled by this dread disease. The truth is that the cards were virtually stacked against her, given her mother’s earlier Alzheimer’s.

Lasting forty-three years, their marriage was unconventional. Iris was bi-sexual and had liaisons throughout their marriage. Age or gender didn’t matter. She was attracted to robust intellectuals, not least, her distinguished husband highly regarded for his literary criticism and as an academic at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

But does it matter anyway? That eccentricity often goes hand-in-glove with artistry is a given. Besides, an author’s sexual life ranks in the lower tier when it comes to our reading choices. Think Dickens, George Eliot, Sartre, and others.

For some of us, however, we retain curiosity about the life behind the work when it comes to those who seemingly “hook” us with their artistry. In this, we’re probably no different from those devotees of Hollywood celebs, rampaging People magazine and the like in fervent quest for intimacy. We even have our dedicated websites.

My own practice when I come upon an established writer that I really like is one of saturation. Generally, I’ll read maybe three novels and two biographies. This helps me see writers in context and provides a ground-base for properly appreciating their work. I had just read Murdoch’s Booker Award novel, The Sea, O the Sea (1984).

Bayley received sharp criticism in some quarters for publishing his memoir in 1998. Iris was still alive, yet Bayley proved unsparing in disclosing Murdoch’s private life without her consent or ability for rebuttal. Muriel Spark described the elegy as “sordid.”

On the contrary, Bayley felt that the Elegy honored Iris and the vast majority of readers seem to agree. We learn something about marriage, in this case, an anomaly that worked for Iris and John as opposed to the traditional axiom of not taking your partner for granted. For John and Iris, taking each other for granted took on a quotidian staple, emerging as a refrain in the Elegy.

By this, the couple meant not clinging to one’s partner or controlling, but allowing them independence to embrace the effulgence of their identity: “Apartness in marriage is a state of love and not a function of difference or preference or practicality,” Bayley writes.

As columnist Graeme Archer perceptively observes in the Telegraph (2015), “Only when you know without question that you are wanted, no matter how you behave, no matter what you say; that you’ll be together till death, etc – this is when you know it’s love.”

The Elegy tells of their early romance, their shared living habits, common interests, and writing practices. What sets the book apart is its honest wrestlings in living with someone you love, in this instance, a woman of cerebral brilliance now unable to remember her friends, achievements, and their life experiences as a couple, reduced to minimal articulation, daily angst, and ubiquitous dependence by chronic illness. Bayley fed, clothed, and “hosed her down.”

A forthright narrator, Bayley castigates himself for his sometimes loss of patience and scolding, the Elegy emerging as a testimony of love’s transcendence over the vagaries that time with its contingencies imposes on us mortal creatures, fallible in our humanity, yet graced with the capacity to not merely endure, but to overcome and love steadfastly.

An international best seller, it would provide along with Bayley’s subsequent book, Iris and her friends, the basis for the 2001 film, Iris, garnering three academy award nominations.

Writing in the Providence Sunday Observer, critic Tom D’Evelyn wrote, “Elegy for Iris has already become a classic memoir and a remedy for modern love. Read it and, if you dare, give, it to someone you love.”

—rj

On finding a new booklist quarry

I confess I’m addicted to booklists. No sooner do I finish one book, but I’m into another.

What surprises me is that I can’t remember anyone in my family serving as a role model when I was a child, either reading to me or picking-up a book for themselves, with the exception of the late intervention of my eldest brother, David, recently discharged from the army after WWII and anticipating college under the newly inaugurated GI Bill.

One night before David left for the University of Miami, he gave me my first book, Huckleberry Finn. I still remember the occasion–eight years old, sprawled out on the floor of our Philly tenement, absorbed so fully in this really good book that it muffled the adjacent Front Street el with its interminable trains, dutifully groaning past our rattling windows every fifteen minutes.

Soon I discovered the Montgomery County Library. I didn’t mind walking the two miles, knowing what lay up ahead. It was one of those supreme pleasures like feasting on a well-stacked hoagie or downing a cold strawberry ice cream soda on humid summer Philly nights; maybe I even liked it as much as playing stick ball every day against the factory facades lining our streets.

Books gave me refuge in a home torn apart by alcohol. I became aware of a larger world, where good really did exist, and people could be kind and often courageous. I found heroes like Lincoln, Gandhi, and Gehrig that would become staples in my life. Books transported me to far away places—Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific.

Nearly as important as the library was a humble bookstore on Girard Avenue that I often passed on my way home from Chandler Elementary, filled with used paperbacks. What got my attention were two cardboard boxes piled high with comic books. I gravitated to the one filled with Classic Comics with their graphic renditions and abridged texts of literary fare. The price, five cents, sealed the bargain! I’d “picture” my way through, say, Les Miserables or Treasure Island, then pick-up the hardback version at the library. By the time I was 13, I had read many of the classics, including War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Silas Marner.

As for the many booklists I’ve ransacked through the years to feed my addiction, I’ll just say my favorite has been Brain Pickings, whose cerebral fiber fences it off from the traffic lane of your typical booklist..

For the most part, I shun the New York Times best seller lists, annoyed by their often fad offerings of dubious value other than to entertain or tell how you, too, can cash in and grow healthy, wealthy and wise. A few weeks later, I’d find these books either gone awol or sunk to near oblivion.

Before the Internet opened up our information corridors, I’d reminisce earlier times venturing into a library, losing myself in its stacks, often looking for one book, but emerging with another. Call it serendipity, but the chance encounters I’ve had with library books have often proved fortuitous with surprising consequences.

Take, for instance, one chance venture when I pulled a book off the shelf by an author I’d never heard of. Lucky draw, it turned out to be Thomas Wolfe and his Look Homeward Angel. I was 17 at the time, a homesick GI in Korea resorting to the humble base library to annul slow time. Hooked, in subsequent years I rampaged all of his novels, ultimately enrolling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Pulpit Hill of Look Homeward Angel.

Books often haunt my mind, ghosts of delightful company with motley heroes, or of vistas spinning new threads of excitement, belief, and desire in conspiracy against the old.

But I’ve found that even the Internet can surprise me. Several days ago, for example, I stumbled upon an extended New York Times Style Magazine series, “My 10 Favorite Books,” edited by Aaron Hicklin.

Hicklin edits a magazine called Out and recently opened up a bookstore called One Grand Books in Narrowsburg, NY. In a clever ploy to attract readers, he’s come up with the idea of asking well-regarded people from various walks of life what ten books they’d want to have with them were they marooned on a desert island. Each listing would feature annotated entries explaining their choices or how these books came to shape their lives.

Hicklin doesn’t want just another bookshop, a dubious business venture in this age of online behemoths like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but a resource for discriminating readers to find books of substance readily.

As I write, contributors to “My 10 Favorite Books” include, among many others,

What’s nifty here is how when you select a contributor you get a cascading menu of ten annotated preferences. In short, each menu constitutes a sub-booklist in the series. Amazingly, very little overlap occurs among contributor choices, yet each listing is profoundly discriminating.

Absent from the list are two writers I’m unfamiliar who intrigue me for their choices, since they complement my own interests–artist Terence Koh and author, Brett Easton Ellis–the former for his love of Eastern thought with its subdued nuances in a sound byte world; the latter, in sharing tastebuds with me for writers like Tolstoy and Flaubert.

Hicklin, by the way, keeps an online blog, onegrandbooks, that provides you with an archive of previous contributors and a weekly focus on a current contributor, sparing you the cumbersome difficulty of finding each series individually online. You can even sign-up for his weekly newsletter and have your purchased item shipped conveniently to your doorstep.

I hope Hicklin’s venture succeeds. It’s a brave new world out there

Meanwhile, I’m on safari, exploring panoramas of infinite sweep_better because unanticipated, by way of my new booklist quarry.

–rj

My Best Reads for 2015

John-Williams-Stoner My thirst for good reads continued in 2015, and among them, two stand out for special praise in providing me with pleasure, insight, and continuing reflection. (I’ve reviewed both more fully elsewhere in Brimmings.)

Fiction: John Williams. Stoner (New York Review of Books Classics)

My choice is probably subliminal and inevitable, as not since David Copperfield have I identified with a fictional character so fully as with Stoner, having like him, been a professor of English for several decades, thus familiar with academic intrigue and its pettiness; even more, having, like Stoner, endured a previous incompatible marriage that served neither of us well. But aside from the personal, Stoner has also been the favorite novel of professors across the years, according to a recent article. And why not, since it excels not only for its verisimilitude, but its superlative craft of nuanced, rhythmic sentences replete with stylistic discipline made potent through understatement; in short, easily one of the best written novels I’ve come upon.

Sample Passage:

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that is the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

Sacks Non-Fiction: Oliver Sacks: On the Move: A Life

Sacks, renowned as both a neurologist on the cutting edge and cogent observer of the eccentric manifestations of the brain’s malfunctionings in his many books, wrote this memoir in the final months of his terminal illness from cancer. As such, it startles with its wisdom and bravery; even more, in its honesty about himself in measuring the successes and shortcomings of his life journey, delivered with verbal beauty uncommonly found among scientists.

Sample Passage:

This gave me a feeling of what seemed wrong with American medicine, that it consisted more and more of specialists. There were fewer and fewer primary care physicians, the base of the pyramid. My father and my two older brothers were all general practitioners, and I found myself feeling not like a super-specialist in migraine but like the general practitioner these patients should have seen to begin with.

__rj

Same Sun Here

Dear River,
I cannot tell from your name if you are a boy or girl so I will write to you like you are a human being.

The above comes from a book I’ve been reading for middle grade children, called Same Sun Here, by Silas House and Neela Vaswani.

My wife, a middle school teacher, brought the book home several weeks ago for me to read. She said, “It’s really good and you’ll like it.”

Well, I got hooked. It’s too good to put down. Teeming with prose often approaching poetry and vivid scenarios that can move hearts, it resonates those values that define the better portions of ourselves. I venture it’s one of those books you start missing no sooner you’re done.

Briefly, it’s told through a series of letters exchanged between two 12 year olds: Meena, formerly from India, now living in NYC, and River, who lives in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.

[Mamaw] says that the everyone used to write letters all the time and it’s a lost art form.

Turns out, these two have a lot in common, despite their differences in background and locale:

Both are close to their grandmothers.

Have fathers with out-of-town jobs.

Share an affection for dogs.

Are fond of mountains. (Mountains were part of Meena’s Indian childhood. River lives in the mountains.)

In New York, the buildings are in someways like mountains, but they are only alive because of the people living in them.

Are sensitive to the beauty and wonder of nature.

I usually walk through the woods instead of taking the driveway because it’s a different world there.

Are outliers. (People make fun of their strong accents and origin.)

Like to read.

I like that library books have secret lives. All those hands that have held them. All those eyes that have read them.

The Same Sun Here is primarily about the faulty way we perceive others. River had been told that people who looked like Meena were terrorists. Mina, that people in Kentucky were hillbillies.

Mamaw says that people don’t really care about people here because they think we’re a bunch of stupid hillbillies who are looking for handouts.

Hey, if this old guy likes the book, typically self-conscious young adults will like it even more

Having said this, I think some readers won’t like the book for its seeming political preachments. It’s big on environment (mountain top removal) and waxes enthusiastic over Obama’s election victory. (The story is set in 2008.). A book of several strands, it features the powerless and, thus, exploited and how they may still find a voice.

Climate change challenges us as well, menacing not only our quality of life, but our survival. I cringe with every forest leveled, diminishing resources, declining species, sulfur fumes, unrestrained growth, etc.

I like people who lay their cards face up on the table.

I like a book that advocates awareness of a wider humanity and the folly of stereotyping that walls out our fellows.

Too often, bound by cultural mores, we’ve only a corner perspective.

We need a wider view to forestall our prejudices. Achieving empathy, we’ll discover a surprising commonality–that we’re more alike than we thought.

Sometimes you write things in your letters that I thought nobody had ever thought before except me, but then there it is in your letter.

Or as the title nuances, the same sun here.

–rj

A Poet Reminisces: Essays After Eighty

I have always liked poetry and poets, in particular, because of their sensitivity to human experience.

One poet I like a lot is Donald Hall, a giant among contemporary American poets, although he’s given up the craft, or as he puts it, since “poetry abandoned him.”

Hall is now 85.

Let me assure you, while the tropes may not come as easily as before, his acuity remains vibrant in his newest book, Essays After Eighty, a slim volume of 120 pages, yet filled with reminiscence, keen observation, and sober wisdom.

I first got introduced to Hall by way of his textbook, Writing Well, which I used for a number of years in teaching college composition. The book lived up to its title, emphasizing sentence clarity and how to achieve it, with eloquence added in.

Hall has always been a diligent stylist, whether writing poetry or prose. He confesses that he’s written some individual essay drafts for Essays After Eighty upwards of eighty times to get things said right.

I used to tell my students that the name of the game in all good writing lay in revision, pointing out that scholars have come upon nearly fifty drafts of Yeat’s famed “Second Coming” poem.

I like how Hall says it: “The greatest pleasure in writing is rewriting. My early drafts are always wretched.”

I’ve always held that a good style is etched by its economy, the right words sufficing for empty fillers drowning readers in verbosity; a pleasing rhythm like waves, in and out, upon a sea shore.

Good prose, like poetry, runs lean.

And Hall is the great master.

Let me give you a sampling of Hall’s trademark writing acumen, simple, yet keen with observation, each detail chosen well, verbs especially, accumulating into a verbal, painting, reflecting the ethos of a skilled artisan:

In spring, when the feeder is down, stowed away in the toolshed until October, I watch the fat robins come back, bluejays that harass them, warblers, red-winged blackbirds, thrushes, orioles. Mourning doves crouch in the grass, nibbling seeds. A robin returns each year to refurbish her nest after the wintry ravage. She adds new straw, twigs and lint. Soon enough she lays eggs, sets on them with short excursions for food, then tends to three or four small beaks that open for her scavenging. Before long, the infants stand, spread and clench their wings, peer at their surroundings, and fly away. I cherish them….

Reminiscence weighs heavily upon these essays, not surprising for a writer in his mid-eighties. the ghosts, as it were, looming out of the past–grandparents, Mom and Dad, aunts and uncles, friends; wife Jane Kenyon, the love of his life and fellow poet, succumbing unexpectedly to cancer at age 47.

Even the northern New Hampshire topography has yielded to change, farms giving way to rebirth of forest as the new generation migrates to the prosperous cities of southern New Hampshire.

As I read this moving collection of personal reflections on sundry topics, I made sure to highlight a number of striking passages, and some of them I’ll share with you.

On writing:

As I work on clauses and commas, I understand that rhythm and cadence have little to do with import, but they should carry the reader on a pleasurable journey.

If the essay doesn’t include contraries, however small they be, the essay fails.

Nine-tenths of the poets who win prizes and praises, who are applauded the most, who are treated everywhere like emperors–or like statues of emperors–will go unread in thirty years.

I count it an honor that in 1975 I gave up lifetime tenure, medical expenses, and a pension in exchange for forty joyous years of freelance writing.

I expect my immortality to expire five minutes after my funeral. Literature is a zero-sum game. One poet revives; another gets deader.

On aging:

When I limped into my eighties, my readings altered, as everything did.

In the past I was advised to live in the moment. Now what else can I do.?

On leisure:

Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.

On mortality:

It is sensible of me to realize that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away.

At some time in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. I no longer checked out ages in obituaries.

These days most old people die in profit-making dormitories. Their loving sons and daughters are busy and don’t want to forgo the routine of their lives.

Essays After Eighty has been a wonderful read for me with its acerbic wit, cogent wisdom, delivered in a simple, yet elegant, style, proving again that the best art conceals itself.

And yet there’s a melancholy that haunts these excursions into reminiscence, a sense that the best is over and, now, there’s just the waiting. As Hall confesses, “My problem isn’t death, but old age.”

Hall, of course, is addressing physical decline with its imposed limitations and dreaded dependency; but surely his words resonate still more–the sense of ephemerality that mocks our labors and brings to an end all that we love most dearly.

For Hall, “There are no happy endings, because if things are happy, they have not ended.”

Still, this work, perhaps his last, formulates a testimony to a life lived well.

And, very rarely, do you find such honest telling.

–rj

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