Which brings me to the following suggestion: Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the situation, beginning with a reconsideration of D. H. Lawrence, the high priest of antirationalist, transcendent fornication who went from an image of gross indecency to over-the-top datedness in less than thirty years. Lawrence, of course, is best known for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel characterized by overheated and androgynous insights that led T. S. Eliot to remark of its author that he “seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed.” It seems to me, on the other hand, that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with its mix of wordlessness and sudden dips into hamstrung tenderness on the part of Oliver and expressed vulnerability and fearful excitement on the part of Lady C, speaks with more truth to the original dreams we all have of where sex—or the sensuous experience generally—might take us if the lover in question were responsive enough and the circumstances conducive.
Then again, all of Lawrence’s work was marked by his peculiar, almost oracular sexual candor—“Sex is the fountain head,” he wrote, “where life bubbles up”—beginning with The Rainbow, which was banned in Great Britain shortly after its publication in 1915. He was willing to bet his all on klutzy, breathless passion—is passion ever graceful, except in the movies?—in his writing and his life, where as a young man he went off with someone else’s wife, having fallen in love within minutes of meeting her. Although he’s not taught much these days and probably read even less, Lawrence almost more than any writer I can think of took sex seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it lent him a suspicious air in his time and has rendered him impossibly uncool, almost quaint, in our own. Here is one of his many fraught, decidedly unironic, and resolutely uncasual descriptions of sex, which, even in its opening steps, is viewed as a kind of erotic dance to the death: “She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.” Try a little of that on for size, why don’t you, Lena Dunham and Adam Driver …
The New Yorker
FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Roger Angell has long been associated with The New Yorker. He first began contributing to the magazine in 1944 and joined the staff in 1956 after nearly a decade at Holiday (where the editor was Ted Patrick, later the first president of ASME). For many readers, Angell is perhaps best known for his writing on baseball. Nearly thirty of his finest pieces are collected in Game Time, though any fan of magazine journalism should seek out his earlier baseball books as well as his memoir Let Me Finish. “Over the Wall” is also a memoir, a personal history of loss that records the death of his wife, Carol. The National Magazine Award judges called it a “deeply moving work by one of our most celebrated prose stylists.”
Roger Angell
Over the Wall
My wife, Carol, doesn’t know that President Obama won reelection last Tuesday, carrying Ohio and Pennsylvania and Colorado and compiling more than three hundred electoral votes. She doesn’t know anything about Hurricane Sandy. She doesn’t know that the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, in a sweep over the Tigers. More important, perhaps, she doesn’t know that her granddaughter Clara is really enjoying her first weeks of nursery school and is beginning to make progress with her slight speech impediment. Carol died early last April, and almost the first thing that she wasn’t aware of is that our son, John Henry, who is Clara’s father, after saying goodbye to her about ten hours before her death, which was clearly coming, flew home to Portland, Oregon. Later that same night, perhaps after she’d gone, he had a dream, which he wrote about briefly and beautifully in an e-mail to the family. In the dream, she is hovering close to him, and they are on 110th Street, close to the Harlem Meer, at the northeast corner of Central Park. The park is bursting with spring blossoms. She is walking a dog that might be our fox terrier Andy. Then she falls behind John Henry. He turns to find her, and she has become an almost black shape and appears to be covered with feathers or black-and-dark-gray Post-its. She and the dog lift off the ground and go fluttering past him, and disappear over the low wall of the park.
What the dead don’t know piles up, though we don’t notice it at first. They don’t know how we’re getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don’t know that we don’t want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don’t want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind. But they’re in a hurry, too, or so it seems. Because nothing is happening with them, they are flying away, over that wall, while we are still chained and handcuffed to the weather and the iPhone, to the hurricane and the election and to the couple that’s recently moved in downstairs, in Apartment 2-S, with a young daughter and a new baby girl, and we’re flying off in the opposite direction at a million miles an hour. It would take many days now, just to fill Carol in.
There’s a Kenneth Koch poem, “Proverb,” that begins “Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!”
Later, it continues:
The second after a moth’s death there are one or two hundred other moths
The month after Einstein’s death the earth is inundated with new theories
Biographies are written to cover up the speed with which we go:
No more presence in the bedroom or waiting in the hall
Greeting to say hello with mixed emotions.
Yes, but let’s stay with Carol a little longer. She was seventeen years, nine months, and seventeen days younger than me (we had a different plan about dying), but now that gap is widening. Soon our marriage will look outlandish or scandalous, because of the age difference. I’m getting old, but I’m told almost every day that I’m keeping up, doing OK. What Carol doesn’t know by now is shocking, let’s face it, and I think even her best friends must find themselves thinking about her with a certain new softness or sweetness, as if she were a bit backward. Carol, try to keep up a little, can’t you?
All right, I take that back, and I also feel bad about those moths getting in here. Carol had a serious moth and bat phobia, dating back to childhood. She was a teacher at the Brearley School, an eminent New York academy for girls, and one day one of her students got an urgent telephone call from her in algebra class. “I need you down here right away,” Carol said.
“But, Mrs. Angell, I’m in math class,” the girl said.
“Never mind that,” Carol said. “There’s a moth in my room, and I need you to come down and remove it right now.”
Anecdotes sweep away time, and are there to cheer us up, but just as often they work the other way, I’m finding out. Let’s get to my unstartling theory, which is that it may not be just years that make you old or young but where you stand on the treadmill. Shakespeare possessed an astounding knowledge of history and of his own times, it’s agreed, but missed out on Newton and Napoleon and the Oreo sandwich. Dickens joined the conversations of his day about Darwin, but stayed mum about Freud and Cézanne and Verdun. Lincoln never understood Auden. Verdi just missed Louis Armstrong, leaving the room before the first run-through of “Mahogany Hall Stomp.” Donald Barthelme’s fiction was known for its flashing and ironic references to contemporary names and styles of thought; he died in 1989, however, at the age of fifty-eight, and under the regulations was forbidden ever to mention Michele Bachmann or the Geico lizard. Carol knew Donald well, and loved his writing. She was also a fan of John Donne, an even more sternly handicapped genius, and one evening got us into an extended conversation—I remember almost every word of it—about his poem “Aire and Angells” (note the spelling), which she was unraveling with an eleventh grader.
What do these people have in common: William Shawn, Nancy Stableford, Bill Rigney, Joseph Brodsky?
Well, for one thing, I k
new them all, though Brodsky, the poet and Nobel Laureate, only passingly or socially: he was a fabulous conversationalist. Shawn was my boss, the decades-long editor of The New Yorker; Nancy Stableford was my older sister and a biology teacher; and Bill Rigney—a onetime major-league infielder and then a manager of the Angels, Twins, and Giants—my best friend in baseball. Each of them was a grownup and, in their different ways, vibrantly intelligent. What else did they have in common? Why, all of them died before September 11, 2001, which is to say that all of them, in company with many hundreds of my bygone and deceased schoolmates and office friends and relatives and summer acquaintances, and their parents and my parents, had no inkling of the world we live in today. I think of them often—my seniors, my innocents, my babies—and envy them, and believe that many others my age have had this passing thought as well, and have from time to time felt a flow of protective love for them, and even a bit of pride that we can stand in for them, or stand up for them, that rational and more hopeful old gang of ours, and so put up with this dismal flow of violence and schlock and complicated distant or very near events that makes up our daily and hourly menu. Clara and the baby downstairs in 2-S (her name is Quinn, I’ve learned) are scarcely aware of irony or bad news yet, but they’ll catch up and be OK with it very soon. Thinking about them the other day, I remembered a poem called “Conch,” written by my stepfather, E. B. White, back in the 1940s. He wrote light verse, but took it seriously. Here it is:
Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.
Who can break a baby’s code?
And which is the older—
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?
Quite a lot of time has gone by since Carol died, and though I’ve forgotten many things about her, my fears about that are going away. There will always be enough of her for me to remember, and some of it, to my surprise, comes back with fresh force. I’ve been thinking about her hands, for instance, which are visible, of course, in the hundreds of photographs we have of her, often lightly touching someone else in a family setting. Her hands in repose were strikingly beautiful, their resting or down-angling familiar shape somehow expressing both confidence and a perfect ease that a great ballerina could envy. I go back to look at that again and again.
E. B. White—we called him Andy, and, yes, the dog is named for him—and Carol are close to each other now, in the Brooklin, Maine, cemetery. His and my mother’s graves are side by side, under a tall oak tree that Andy planted there when my mother died, in 1977. Their gravestones are made of bluish gray slate, but Carol’s and mine, though they have the same shape and old-fashioned narrow body, are in white Vermont marble. They carry the same lettering that Mother’s and Andy’s do: a suave contemporary style called Centaur that was recommended to us back then by an art-director friend of mine named Hank Brennan.
My decision to have my gravestone put in at the same time as Carol’s, in early August—it only lacks the final numbers—wasn’t easy, but has turned out to be comforting, not creepy. Brooklin is much too far away just now—I live in New York—but the notion that before long my familiar June trip back there will be for good is only keeping a promise.
I visited Carol’s grave every day during the rest of my summer stay, often in the early morning, when the oblong shadows of my mother’s and Andy’s markers nearly touched hers. There’s more family nearby: my brother Joel White’s gray granite marker (he died in 1997) and that of my daughter Callie, who died two years ago. The two of them had their ashes put into the sea at almost the identical place: an upper sector of Jericho Bay from which you can see the steep mountains of Mount Desert, to the east, and, in the other direction the rise of Isle au Haut. Token cupfuls of their ashes were saved and went into the cemetery later. This is a currently popular option, but Carol and I passed it up. There are ten cemeteries in Brooklin, which is a lot for a population of eight hundred; many are family plots, half-hidden in fields or brush now, and the little Mount Eden Cemetery, on Naskeag Point, is probably the most beautiful. The Brooklin Cemetery is the largest, and lies right in the middle of town: across Route 175 from the Baptist Church and a couple of hundred yards down from the library and the Brooklin General Store, where the road bends.
My visits to Carol didn’t last long. I’d perk up the flowers in the vase we had there, and pick deadheads off a pot of yellow daisies; if there had been rain overnight, I’d pick up any pieces of the sea glass that had fallen and replace them on the gentle curve and small shoulders of her stone. We first thought of this tribute in the family on the day of her burial. Good sea glass is getting scarce, now that everybody has learned not to throw bottles overboard, but Carol’s collections were made long ago, plucked from a stone beach of ours on Eggemoggin Reach and an even better spot, just to the east, that belongs to a neighbor. There are dishes of sea glass in different sizes all over the house. Carol’s favorite pieces (and mine) were small pale mauves and those smoothly rounded gray shapes, probably from old milk bottles, worn to sensual smoothness by the actions of tide and time. In recent years, when she knew that children of friends were coming over to visit us, she’d sometimes grab a small handful and secretly seed the beach in places where she’d bring the kids later.
I often took Andy along on my visits—a violation of cemetery rules, I’m sure, but we almost never saw another soul, and in any case he only wanted to rocket about in the vacant fields, away from the graves and their flags and plantings. On our way home, I sometimes stopped in the oldest part of the cemetery, closest to the road, and left the dog in the car while I walked among the graves there. These are marble or granite headstones, for the most part, but all are worn to an almost identical whiteness. Some of the lettering has been blackened by lichen, and some washed almost to invisibility. These aren’t old graves, as New England cemeteries are measured—there’s nothing before 1800, I believe—but their stories are familiar. Many small stones are in remembrance of infants or children who died at an early age, often three or four in the same family; there are also names of young men or old captains lost at sea. There’s a low gray column bearing lowercase lines of verse in memory of a beloved wife who died in 1822, at the age of twenty-seven. Many of the names—Freethey, Eaton, Bridges, Allen—are still well represented in Brooklin today. What I noticed most, though—the same idea came over me every time—was that time had utterly taken away the histories and attachments and emotions that had once closely wrapped around these dead, leaving nothing but their families and names and dates. It was almost as if they were waiting to be born.
Harper’s
WINNER—FICTION
Harper’s Magazine has been publishing fiction since its founding in 1850 (making it the second-oldest continuously published monthly in the United States, after Scientific American), and in recent years the short story has flourished in its pages, bringing it five National Magazine Awards for Fiction in the last two decades. Stephen King may be best known for his novels (and their various adaptations), but he has written hundreds of short stories. This, in fact, is the second time one of his pieces has earned a National Magazine Award: his story “Rest Stop” won Esquire the award in 2004. The judges this year were especially enthusiastic about “Batman and Robin Have an Altercation,” calling it “a surprising, bittersweet lesson in filial alienation—a story for our times.”
Stephen King
Batman and Robin Have an Altercation
Sanderson sees his father twice a week. On Wednesday evenings, after he closes the jewelry store his parents opened long ago, he drives the three miles to Crackerjack Manor and sees Pop there, usually in the common room. In his “suite,” if Pop is having a bad day. On most Sundays, Sanderson takes him out to lunch. The facility where Pop is living out his final foggy years is actually called the Harvest Hills Special Care Unit, but to Sanderson, Crackerjack Manor seems more accurate.
> Their time together isn’t so bad, and not just because Sanderson no longer has to change the old man’s bed when he pisses in it or get up in the middle of the night when Pop goes wandering around the house, calling for his wife to make him some scrambled eggs or telling Sanderson those damned Fredericks boys are out in the back yard, drinking and hollering at each other. (Dory Sanderson has been dead for fifteen years and the three Fredericks boys, no longer boys, moved away long ago.) There’s an old joke about Alzheimer’s: The good news is that you meet new people every day. Sanderson has discovered the real good news is that the script rarely changes.
Applebee’s, for instance. Although they have been having Sunday lunch at the same one for more than three years now, Pop almost always says the same thing: “This isn’t so bad. We ought to come here again.” He always has chopped steak, done medium rare, and when the bread pudding comes he tells Sanderson that his wife’s is better. Last year, bread pudding was off the menu of the Applebee’s on Commerce Way, so Pop—after having Sanderson read the dessert choices to him four times and thinking it over for an endless two minutes—ordered the apple cobbler. When it came, Pop said that Dory served hers with heavy cream. Then he simply sat, staring out the window at the highway. The next time, he made the same observation but ate the cobbler right down to the china.
He can usually be counted on to remember Sanderson’s name and their relationship, but he sometimes calls him Reggie, who died forty-five years ago. When Sanderson takes his father back to Crackerjack Manor, his father invariably thanks him, and promises that next time he will be feeling better.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 42