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 Click for words events Love, Truly Love On three mournful, magic books
Of course there are thoughts, especially when you're upset, distraught,
that don't find words, ones where you don't seek words. But when someone
can place things so, just so, in simplest terms, the effect is
magical. (Cf., "Jesus wept.")
There are highly stylized American writers whose sentences
sing--Pynchon or DeLillo--or twang--Ford, Hannah--or bash into landscape
and appetite and wounded heart--Jim Harrison--but Joan Didion I have
admired for being spectral while specific, an artist of the social X-ray
who makes of sentences chill transparencies. When I first heard of "The
Year of Magical Thinking," (Vintage, $13.95) the story of her grief and
disorientation after the death of John Gregory Dunne, her husband and
collaborator of almost forty years, alongside the serious illness of
daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, I wanted very much to read what she had
wrought of the most intimate of material, even more impressed on
learning that Quintana had died in the months since the book had been
composed, a fact which Didion considered outside the subject of her
book, which was the death of her husband, the still after what was
shared had ended. I also wanted not to read it, not to glimpse
the diamond of her hurt. But the paperback was twenty percent
off...
Didion writes of the fire she lit in their Manhattan apartment the
night of December 30, 2003, "a Tuesday." She and John will eat in. "I
grew up in California. John and I lived together for twenty-four years,
in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires
even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were
home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the
candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to
him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.
"John was talking, then he wasn't." Page ten and I am ruint. Two
hundred seventeen to go and I am a wreck. The sustenance of moment and
motion, not frozen, active, yet present in the instant of abrupt
absence: "My attention was on mixing the salad."
"Marriage is memory. Marriage is time," Didion sketches. Readers
for decades glimpsed Didion as the clear-eyed neurasthenic, the waif of
iron, the delicate reed that wavers yet sounds. And now she writes truly
of herself and in a voice deeper, farther than, for instance, this
passage in "The White Album": maybe you need to have sat in a lot of
drive-ins yourself, to have gone to school with boys who majored in shop
and worked in gas stations and later held them up," figures "whose
whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never
made."
A similar memoir by an equally exacting writer was published in 2006,
"About Alice," (Random House, $14.95) by Calvin Trillin, with the
immemorial, much-repeated passage from a condolence letter from a young
woman in New York, in which she held Calvin and Alice up against her own
relationship. "But will he love me like Calvin loved Alice?" These are
more than chronicles of simple uxorial devotion. These are the necessary
emotional alliances that society may insist are formed by contract and
codicil, but are in fact formed by fortune, repetition, proximity,
devotion, attention, precision and heart.
A third in this besorrowed genre is Chicagoan Anders Nilsen's
heartbreaking "Don't Go Where I Can't Follow," (D&Q, $17.95) which in
its own brief form hits as hard as Didion's masterful recollection of
loss. It is a collage, a scrapbook, a memoir; a testament, a legacy, a
tragedy, a motley collage and a shattering gem I've returned to several
times. The book came unannounced with several other Drawn & Quarterly
graphic novels, and it was the most modest-looking in the pile. A milky
SX-70 Polaroid on the front--Nilsen putting his cheek up against that of
girlfriend Cheryl Weaver while sitting on a couch--another on the back,
the flash is terrible, they're kissing in a kitchen. Inside, evidence of
travels by the Chicago couple: postcards from Weaver tracking the start
of their romance. A twenty-one-page short story the young Nilsen wrote
to his sister from camp, reproduced from spiral-bound, ruled pages. More
snaps. Stubs of flight passes. Sketchbook jottings. Photos of a shared
trip to France, frames largely unpeopled. Notes and sketches about
Weaver, by now Nilsen's fiancée, entering the hospital after an abrupt
diagnosis. More illustration. Postcards from him to her. Two pages of
handwritten illumination of what we've seen. Grave and glorious, life
affirming and love affirming, "Don't Go" vibrates in its ungainly
form, capturing fleeting time as a shoebox of family pictures might
suggest decades of life, a romance stilled suddenly by the worst of
adversity, mortal illness. Feelings don't go away. Forster wrote that
literature is what happens next. Next is predicated on previous. Raw
emotions are transformed by observance and love, into memory and art.
These three books are about lives that were shared, bonds that were
made, then smashed. Love, and love, truly love. Cycles of memory and the
cordon of routine protect Didion from undue contemplation that year. A
refrain amid her refrains: "I had not sufficiently appreciated it."
Do any of us ever until after?
Also by Ray Pride Monsieur Pignon, I Presume
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The Other Side of the Mountain
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The Mourning After
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