An attempt to preserve life in a state of neutrality and indifference is unreasonable and vain. If by excluding joy we could shut out grief, the scheme would deserve very serious attention. But since, however we may debar ourselves from happiness, misery will find its way at many inlets, and the assaults of pain will force our regard, though we may withhold it from the invitations of pleasure, we may surely endeavour to raise life above the middle point of apathy at one time, since it will be necessary to sink below it at another.
So what constitutes ‘success’ in mourning? The ability to return to concentration and work; the ability to rediscover interest in life, and take pleasure in it, while recognising that present pleasure is far from past joy. The ability to hold the lost love successfully in mind, remembering without distorting. The ability to continue living as he or she would have wanted you to do (though this is a tricky area, where the sorrowful can often end up giving themselves a free pass). And then what? Some form of self-sufficiency which avoids neutrality and indifference? Or a new relationship that will either supplant the lost one or, perhaps, draw strength from it?
There is another strange parallel between The Year of Magical Thinking and A Widow’s Story. By the time each book came out, many readers would know one additional key fact not covered by the text. In Didion’s case, the death of her daughter Quintana (which the author deals with in a subsequent edition); in Oates’s, her remarriage to a neuroscientist, whose existence is hinted at rather coyly on the last page. You could argue that those writing about grief make their own literary terms more than most; but even so, in Oates’s case there is something unhappy in the omission. She is writing about the twelve months that began on 18 February 2008; we know from her own mouth (in an interview with The Times) that she met her second husband in August 2008, they started going on walks and hikes in September, and were married in March 2009. If Didion posed ‘the question of self-pity’ in the first lines of her book, Oates, in a chapter called ‘Taboo’, similarly approaches the difficult heart of the matter:
It’s a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living – we who have survived – understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices. You will not forget me – will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.
But the theme is no sooner announced than set aside; indeed, when Oates comes back to the idea of ‘betraying’ her husband, it is in the much narrower context of disclosing to the reader secrets about Ray Smith’s family and upbringing. But she does this, she explains, because ‘There is no purpose to a memoir, if it isn’t honest. As there is no purpose to a declaration of love, if it isn’t honest.’ Her book ends with a chapter headed ‘The Widow’s Handbook’ which reads in its entirety:
Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
But if she is also thinking ‘I might be getting married in a few weeks’ time’, does this not change the nature of that statement? This isn’t a moral comment: Oates may quote Marianne Moore’s line that ‘the cure for loneliness is solitude’, but many people need to be married, and therefore, at times, remarried. However, some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise. Was not Ray ‘the first man in my life, the last man, the only man’? And what about all those perennials she planted?
When Dr Johnson wrote ‘The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow’ he was not yet widowed. That event was to occur two years later, when he was forty-three. Twenty-eight years afterwards, in a letter of consolation to Dr Thomas Lawrence, whose wife had recently died, Johnson wrote:
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past, or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Original versions of these pieces appeared as follows:
Fitzgerald: Guardian, 26 July 2008.
Clough: Persephone Books, 2009.
Orwell: New York Review of Books, 12 March 2009.
Ford and The Good Soldier: New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997.
Ford in Provence: Guardian, 21 August 2010.
Parade’s End: Penguin Books, 2012.
Kipling’s France: Guardian, 11 November 2003.
France’s Kipling: Guardian, 5 November 2005.
Chamfort: Guardian, 4 October 2003.
Mérimée: Guardian, 7 July 2007.
Fénéon: London Review of Books, 4 October 2007.
Houellebecq: New Yorker, 7 July 2003.
Translating Madame Bovary: London Review of Books, 18 November 2010.
Wharton: Everyman’s Library, 1996.
Hemingway: New Yorker, 4 July 2011.
Moore: New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998.
Updike: New York Review of Books, 11 June 2009; Guardian, 17 October 2009.
Oates: New York Review of Books, 7 April 2011.
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VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) Page 24