Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  A biography of Charlotte Mews. I picked it because I did not know who Charlotte Mews was, and wondered why a novelist as skilled as Penelope Fitzgerald wanted to write about so obscure a figure (to me). Turns out it is a superior biography about a fascinating and talented, if now forgotten, poet. I like reviewing books like this, to educate myself, and then my listeners.

  The fourth: a novel by Alice Hoffman, called At Risk. Oh dear God, I thought, when I read the galleys on the train coming back from New York months ago, can I bear to read about an eleven-year-old girl who contracts AIDS from a blood transfusion? Every page hurt to read. But it seemed a good book to review. The moral, unspoken but clear, is the vulnerability of everyone to the terrible scourge, and the inhumanity of those who wish to avoid contact with it, or think they can. The victim is a child gymnast, a fine athlete, which makes the story even more poignant.

  At noon, I will go into the recording studio, wait for the sign to start, give a voice level, and then, in my stumbling way, read the alembic remains of all this reading, like the kitchen midden of a vanished civilization, into a microphone.

  Another hot day. The temperature threatens to go as high as 104 degrees by afternoon. On the deck I find a dead cicada who did not survive the night’s oppression, a beautiful creature even in death, with lacy, iridescent wings and a thick multicolored body. Its bulging eyes are far apart and look like offset stones. I take it to my study to save, a reminder of the summer’s humid destruction.

  For some reason it makes me think of the hundreds of dead horseshoe crabs at Lewes last month, for whom the overly warm water probably proved lethal. They lay in ragged rows just beyond the water line, like dead soldiers, on their backs, their eight legs pulled up and folded inside their huge carapaces as if they had died in pain. Perhaps it was not the heat, but an epidemic of some sort. Or a bad storm at sea which washed them onto the shore and flipped them over, halting any balanced progress back out to sea. Their huge, dark-brown, foot-square shells cannot be overlooked. Even in death they emit the organic smell of the elephant house at the zoo.

  But my dead cicada has no odor and only a short, unprotected body. Furthermore, it seems to have died alone, on the deck, not of an epidemic as human beings are now dying, but of some solitary, private affliction.

  I set the dead insect on the top of a speaker for my radio. It now lies next to the dried body of a huge moth, a piece of driftwood gnarled into an odd beauty by the sea, and a small yellow butterfly, its wings folded rigidly in death.

  I keep such things. Why? They are rarely perfect, whole specimens and I know little or nothing about their life history or the calamity that brought them to their end. Do I put them on my speaker to remind me of the arid end of things? Of our human curiosity about endings? The cruelty of existence that ends in rigidity? As Time magazine in its old, curiously inverted style might have written: knows God.

  Heraclitus: ‘All is flux.’

  Another section of the manuscript of The Habit comes back to me in this morning’s mail. The pain of rejection is heavy and dispiriting. This time the editor, the same one who did such a masterful job of line-editing Chamber Music, writes that the book seems ‘more willed than felt.’ Meaning, I take it, that I needed to write this story without being able to convey the emotion it should contain. Or perhaps, that I had not felt it first, or that it had no emotion to start with. I don’t know what to think. When one’s work is rejected one would prefer to believe the editor is wrongheaded, or blind, or prejudiced, or just plain stupid. But I know none of these are true of Faith Sale, who published my favorite among my novels, The Missing Person, although at the time hardly a soul alive seemed to agree with her estimate, and mine, of the book.

  Willed, not felt? Who can say? Most of us write because we think we have something of pressing importance to say. Conviction comes first, and then the struggle to find the words that bring it to life on the page. In that sense, every fiction is willed. But the feeling, what Henry James called the ‘intensity’ of its projection, ah! there’s the rub.

  I keep wondering if I ought to begin again. There seems to be a ready market for first works of fiction, but sixth? Perhaps it is that the voice is worn out, or has become accustomed and thus unexciting. William Kennedy said bitterly, when he accepted the National Book Critics Circle award for Ironweed, that fourth novels are hard to publish—he had thirteen rejections for his.

  The first-heard voice can make an editor, then the reader, listen carefully, excitedly, for the new tone, the original cadences. I should choose a pseudonym, ALIGNA PARAGRAPH or FLOPPY F. DISK, and submit the novel under it. I rather incline toward Floppy Disk. Biography for the jacket: ‘She is a graduate of Centralia Grade School in Berne, New York, where her family are pig farmers. Her brother sells scrap metal accumulated on their back forty. Her sister married Petunio String, the harmonica player, and lives in Maine. She is interested in needlepoint work, learning to be a better typist, painting by the numbers, canning, and trying her hand at a second novel, if this one sells.’

  Noel Coward: ‘We must try not to be bitter.’

  The telephone rings. It is one of my daughters. I have not heard from her in some time but still, our conversation is light and without recriminations. You are fine? I am fine. Your lover is well? Good. How is your dog? Still has colitis? Poor thing. We talk in this cool vein for a while as though warmth could not make its way over a WATS line. We finish our exchange, she no doubt convinced she has, for now and some time to come, reestablished, via telecommunication, the necessary bond with a parent. And I wonder: How often would children call if they had no access to company or WATS lines?

  I read the food page of an old issue of the New York Times I find in the garage—day before yesterday’s paper—and come upon a new word: argol. It is a crude tartar, the reporter says, deposited in wine against age. I consider this property of argol and wonder what would happen if it were ingested directly into my blood. Would it slow the inexorable aging process? Then I realize that the hope for a fountain of youth never quite dies in the old, even if the deterrent that offers itself is a crude tartar.

  At breakfast this morning, a few days before we will make our trek to Maine to celebrate (the word is not exact) my seventieth birthday in a place we love and with people of whom we are fond, Sybil confesses she is an obsessive counter. She keeps strict track of the number of round slices she gets from a carrot, of how many beans she strings for supper. I realize I now do the same thing. I never climb a flight of stairs without counting the steps. I keep track of the steps it requires to walk to the post office, to the Eastern Market, to the photocopying center. Idiotically, every time I climb my own front stairs I count them. Seventeen. Unvaryingly.

  Why do we do this? Is counting a way of occupying time? Of lending importance to the unsignificant act we are performing? Whatever the reason, it is an entirely useless occupation, because I never remember the result. Did it take 320 steps or 340 to reach the market from home? As many times as I have counted, and noted the result, the total is gone from my head when I begin the same journey again. Clearly I do not store the results but draw a certain obscure satisfaction from achieving them.

  Since seventeen, when I first climbed the partly restored Temple of the Dwarf at Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, I have always noted the steps I go up. Then, I imagined myself a priest, ascending the eerie grey temple to perform some grisly sacrifice in the presence of the uplifted faces of a worshipful populace. To be ‘on top’ was an achievement, a triumph over the faint-hearted friend watching me ‘from the bottom.’ Perhaps it is of no importance whatever to record here that the number of steps leading to the temple atop the Mayan building is 365.

  My early-morning start, at six, usually proceeds in the same way: coffee, the Times crossword puzzle. Puzzles are another addiction I acquired late in life. I think I understand why. A crossword gets the pen moving, and since I write by hand, the flow of ink into small white squares sometimes encourages, even facilit
ates, a further flow of words when I get to my magic clipboard.

  There is a certain pleasure in filling in the squares with neat, block letters. I am careful not to touch the lines, not to obscure the numbers. Deepest satisfaction, of course, comes from knowing enough to leave no blanks, and, best of all, to require no scratch-outs or overwrites of my inked-in guesses. Therein lies a kind of purity.

  Today, the puzzle’s key is the names of the planets in their order from the sun. I have waited fifty years, I realize as I fill them in with ease, to make use of my memorization of that list in college: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. All this time it has been taking up space on the hard disk that is my brain. But today I see its single purpose. To do the Times crossword puzzle rapidly, this morning.

  After I finish speaking on the telephone to a writer friend, who is now well on in years, I find myself thinking about the importance public notice holds for many people. For some writers (Walter Pincus of the Washington Post once said this to me) the appearance of their byline next morning is the daily reassurance they must have to keep their self-esteem high in the world of journalism. A sportswriter told my daughter, who once worked for the sports page of a newspaper: ‘I need to have stories in all the time. I’m afraid I’ll be forgotten.’

  For my friend, lectures, readings, and public appearances are essential. They are his link to the world, they remind him (and he needs to be reminded) that he is admired, even adored, by his readers, that he is a valuable person and a respected writer, a conviction in which, I suspect, he is not otherwise secure. His travels to colleges, bookstores, public auditoriums, have been a necessary part of his life, so important to him that now that he is ailing and unable to travel, he is desolate.

  Fame: why is it so addictive to the writer? I read a biography a few years ago which posed the question: What became of Ernest Hemingway in his later years? The tragic reply was the title of the book: Fame became of him.

  I wonder: What does fame do to the writer seemingly fortunate enough to be burdened with it? Does the work itself come to mean less in itself, and recognition more—everything, in fact? With acclaim established, is the work then affected? Or could it be that fame, like money, is an impetus that stirs the writer to greater and better efforts?

  I know well that the need for recognition is addictive. Oxford University Press sent me recently a brilliant study of the subject called The Frenzy of Renown by Leo Braudy. It begins with Alexander the Great, ‘the first famous person.’ Braudy examines ambition and the desire for fame throughout history. Rome was a society entirely motivated by the urge for fame. His section on Jesus is subtitled ‘The publicity of inner worth,’ the section on Augustine ‘Christianity and the fame of the Spirit.’ The chapter on Dante’s fascination with reputation is superb.

  Braudy continues through history, to the arrival of the book ‘as a prime new place of fame:’ Dante, John Milton, Benjamin Franklin, Jean Jacques Rousseau, James Boswell (who desired fame through Samuel Johnson), Lord Byron, Napoleon, Thomas Chatterton, John Keats. He explores the twentieth century, the century of the press-agented performer, photography, and the seductive, democratic possibility of fame for everyone.

  Here and there are sentences I have marked: ‘Many seek fame because they believe it confers a reality that they lack. Unfortunately, when they become famous themselves, they usually discover that their sense of unreality has only increased.’

  And: ‘Success needs more success to validate itself, and nothing can finally salve the feeling of incompleteness.’

  And: ‘“The urge for fame,” one recent aspirant has said, is “the dirty secret.”’

  An extraordinarily interesting book.

  I’ve noticed this in my writer friend: No amount of recognition is ever enough. William James said: ‘The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated,’ which surely is the step before needing to be famous, known. Many writers need more, and then more. Praise requires constant renewal and expansion. I knew a young novelist whose first book was very well received. His second appeared to no notice whatever. He stopped work on his third, convinced it would be another failure, began to drink heavily, and ended his perturbed life driving his car against a stone wall. An accident, it was called. I often wonder.

  On my shelf somewhere is John Leggett’s biography of two such writers, Ross Lockridge and Tom Heggen, who became famous for their first books, Raintree County and Mister Roberts, tried to write their second, failed. Both were suicides. Both found success so heady that they could not face the prospect of not succeeding in the same way. Despair and death became of them.

  Tonight I relax by rereading Anne Tyler’s Morgan’s Passing, my favorite among her books, for some reason. No one asked me to read it, no one is paying me to reread it. I am enjoying it immensely.

  For so long, because reading has become for me a kind of forced labor, I am required to have an opinion about everything. I never open a book without a pencil and pad at hand, to record what I think as I go along. Now, more and more, I am determined no longer to read in that way, but to reread, slowly. To have a usable, publishable opinion no longer matters to me. Enjoyment was my impetus in learning to read, sixty-seven years ago, in the first place. I expect now to return to that simple spur.

  Another resolution: to leave unfinished any book I do not like. During a long reading life, my rigid puritan instincts have not permitted such an indulgence. Compulsively, I finish everything, thinking, I suppose, that a book is like what parsnips, beets, and oatmeal were in my childhood: I was not allowed to leave the table until I had eaten them.

  When I add up all the literary resolutions of this septuagenarian month—to read more slowly, to reread the books I have loved or at least remember having loved (I will not finish them if it turns out I have been mistaken), and to abandon all books not worth my time as soon as I know their lack of value—I realize I am coming into a new age of self-indulgence.

  So: I put aside the galleys of Tyler’s new book, Breathing Lessons, which have just arrived and decide, under my new dispensation, to reread Celestial Navigation and others of her excellent earlier books. I’ll let the new one ripen, even age a bit on my shelf, before I come to it.

  We start our trip north to celebrate my despised birthday in the cool, green quiet of Maine. Overnight we stay with the Munsons, Sybil’s longtime friends, who have lived in a rambling, comfortable farmhouse outside of Albany for many years. Barbara is English, a handsome, heavyset woman with an easy, constant smile and an abiding love of horses, dogs, cats, flowers, food, children, antiques, the Episcopal Church, and her husband. Paul is from an aristocratic Albany family; he is tall, lean, and equally loving. His talk has a fine, humorous edge to it that modulates his wife’s warm sentimentality.

  They’ve lived a life of almost no money, making do, as we used to say of such conditions. He taught English in high school for years, but gave up that activity as ‘hopeless.’ Now he ‘substitutes’ on occasion. The Munsons raised and educated a daughter, now married and practicing as a nurse, and a charming, lanky son who is a television photographer, lives at home, and has a girl he hopes to marry, the daughter of a nearby farmer. The Munsons’ house rings with lovely jokes and lighthearted reminiscences of the time when Sybil, her husband, and their children lived near them in the city.

  I feel somewhat out of it. Still, there is enough lingering warmth and hospitality to go around. We eat well in their little screened-in gazebo on the lawn, and watch young Paul and his girl rescue rabbits that have escaped their hutch. I drink too much and go to bed feeling blessed to be among such people, within the circle of their undemanding acceptance and goodness. I feel, somehow, larger and better than when I left Washington. The prospect of the day after tomorrow is not so terrible.

  In bed, I think about surroundings. Now that I am old, they seem to have suddenly become of greater importance to me, although I cannot explain why this should be so. Quiet, for e
xample. What one sees, like the sun going down over the Helderbergs tonight, and the head of the old horse eyeing us from the Munsons’ barn.

  When I was young I was hardly aware of where I was. Now I remember far too little of those places. I was immune to San Francisco, Des Moines, Millwood in Putnam County, New York, Clinton Heights in Rensselaer County near Albany, New Baltimore, south of Albany, and Albany itself. Odd, isn’t it, how that once-grimy, undistinguished city was a source of great creative interest and ultimate reward to Bill Kennedy. But not to me. I found nothing there I wanted to record. He found everything and used its landscape and population to feed his imagination and American literature for years to come.

  Why was I so oblivious? I can ascribe it only to one thing: self-absorption. Too many years of my life, I now know, were spent in the arid deserts of my inner self. Like an adolescent, I rarely looked out and about me. Now I do, all the time, having exhausted the unnourishing interiors, and discover to my dismay there is hardly enough time left to take in everything out there.

  Waiting for breakfast this morning, and then in the car as we drove across New York State toward the Vermont hills to pay a call on a friend bedded down with crushed vertebrae as a result of osteoporosis (will much of the rest of my life be spent visiting the sick of my generation? A preferable alternative to being sick myself, I suppose), I read some pages in David Roberts’s life of Jean Stafford. A rather mean-spirited biography, I thought, full of little revelations about her weaknesses (and of course she had many of the more picturesque ones, enough to satisfy the avid reader) but unconcerned, in the main, with the accomplishments of her fine books and stories. A case of imbalance, in which the biographer undervalues her work because of the colorful and tragic life she led.