The central event of the PEN /Faulkner Award ceremonies. Again we ‘dress up,’ although I long to wear my comfortable L. L. Bean clothes, and walk to the Folger. The judges and the winners sit on the platform, I explain to the audience how we came to choose the five books. Then, with the example of Allan’s story clearly in mind, I interrupt what I am saying to protest the censorship of grants to so-called sexually offensive art by the NEA’s acting director.… We give the winners their prizes; I am openly very pleased to give Allan his. We hug a long time in full view of all the assembled notables.
At seven next morning we rescue our overladen van from the garage and leave the city. In the late afternoon we stop for coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts shop just inside the Maine border. Two old men, one black, are talking to each other about the work they do on their computers. I cannot resist joining the PC fraternity, asking about their instruments. As we leave, we hear one man tell the other: ‘We’ll be home all weekend. The grands are coming over.’ Now we know we are close to home.
In Saco we stop for a late supper. There is a place to eat that Sybil remembers vaguely. We are fortunate to find it, since the entrance and parking are far off the road. There is an obscure sign that says ‘Kerryman’s PUB.’ We enter through a dilapidated door into what resembles a back alley. Inside the pub is fine, a large room with booths, artificial flowers and plastic decorations, and food so plentiful that one portion would feed two heavy eaters. Most of the patrons are middle-aged Mainer locals dressed in the familiar L. L. Bean uniforms: jeans, heavy sweaters, sneakers. Add peaked caps for the men who have driven their wives here in their pickup trucks, and you will recognize the people we have dinner with.
We are even closer to home. We share a beer and talk about the contrast between this comfortable, poorly lit, unpretentious place and the lavish houses and expensive restaurants we have been frequenting in the past few days. I think of the elaborate, pretentious food catered for the PEN/Faulkner event, expected to be served by the people who pay a goodly sum to attend. Much of the money collected will go to pay for the awards and the judges, the hosteling and feeding of these persons, and the lady who arranges the affair they are attending, a kind of incestuous and circular round of finance and events.
I fantasize: What would happen if we called it all off one year, gathered in a publike place somewhere in an ordinary section of the city, wore our easy old clothes (especially the shoes!), had beers and the $5.95 blue plate special, and gave all the money collected for the affair to the homeless who live on the cold corners and grates of Capitol Hill.
Aha! My feelings about the elaborate affairs accompanying fund-raising at Washington’s PEN/Faulkner have been satisfyingly echoed by the Hospice of Hancock County, the county that encompasses Sargentville. A nicely offset invitation arrives this morning announcing that there will be no gathering this year. It requests the pleasure of my company at an Imaginary Candlelight Dinner to benefit Hospice patients and their families. ‘The dinner will not be held anywhere at any time so you need not attend,’ it reads. I am relieved of buying a ‘new outfit for the dinner,’ ‘I don’t have to eat another chicken dinner,’ ‘I won’t need a sitter,’ and ‘I won’t have to go to the hairdresser.’ For each of these savings a contribution is suggested. ‘I am pleased to accept your invitation to stay home.’ With pleasure I check that box, and write a check.
Early next morning we are home. This time it is permanent. We make a walkabout, inspecting everything we have left, and find nothing out of order. My unlocked car sits placidly in its place where it has been waiting for us for two weeks. I say nothing to Sybil, because her joy in being here is somewhat less than mine. But I think about what I heard at the gala on our last evening in Washington: The morning after Friday night’s party at the Stegalls’ on East Capitol Street, they left their house to do some errands. No car. It had been stolen.
The quiet of the Cove swept over me this morning, the absence of people, the feeling that I was in sole possession of sky, water, meadow, and woods at our end of the peninsula. Two days ago, making our way north through the state, we thought we might stop for lunch at Barnacle Billy’s in Perkins Cove to have a first taste of lobster. But it was not to be: Ogunquit has turned into a clone of Provincetown, Lake George, Taos, Carmel, the Hamptons, and other such overcrowded and overbuilt tourist places. We make a slow, ten-mile-an-hour trip through the main street, down the road, and into Perkins Cove. But stop? Park? Impossible.
Inexorably we make the loop because we cannot get out of it, catching a quick glimpse of the sea on our way. We are shocked by the number of people on the street and in the fancy, shoulder-to-shoulder shops. This is mid-May, and already the Cove and the town are fashionably crowded with tourists. I remember what this town was like when we summered at Moody Beach, the extemporaneous excursions to Barnacle Billy’s for a lobster.…
Standing on our sun-filled deck this morning, within sight of no one, the silent, calm sea spread out before us, I wonder:
How long before creeping tourism moves up the coast and reaches us? How long before we too become ‘fashionable’?
I am reading Julia Blackburn’s account of the last years of Napoleon’s life on St. Helena. My ignorance of the subject is so abysmal that I thought Napoleon died on Elba. Not at all. He returned from his exile there, was defeated at Waterloo, and was sent into a second exile by the British to its island, St. Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean.
The little general led a curious life there, isolated from everything and everyone but a group of sycophantic French aristocrats and army officers. Once, from France, a friend sent him a crate of books. Blackburn writes: ‘He is so eager that in the middle of the night he cracks the lid off with a chisel and reads without pause for several days until he is exhausted.’
A letter from a man who has read End Zone. He made a list of the books I talk about reading and having read, and intends to pursue them systematically. It is strange, but I have noticed that some people feel more secure about their reading if they do not do the choosing themselves. The same preference characterizes people who belong to book clubs that, figuratively, chew the cud of book choice for their members.
A large moose has been seen crossing a field near us by our neighbors Ken Grindle and the Parkers. I have never seen a moose and wish I had spent more time watching the edges of our woods and less at the too-often-unproductive clipboard. We did see a brown bear crossing the road into Blue Hill last year, drivers slowing down to watch his/her dignified progress. When Elizabeth was here she thought she saw a fox, although I thought it might have been a raccoon, and Grace and Martie are sure what they saw near the edge of their clearing was a mountain lion. Deer, leaving clear hoofmarks, regularly visit our rudimentary vegetable garden and nibble the lettuce, the cabbage, the beans. We have seen signs of beaver in the pond at the side of our woods.
Can it be that the recession and overpopulation have affected the wild creatures in our area, so that they are coming closer to cultivated places for free sustenance? Like the gulls feasting at McDonald’s waste heap?
Deer Isle folk are insular, if that is not tautological. Families have lived there since the eighteenth century, rarely leaving it until the bridge to the mainland was built fifty years ago. A story told to us in the bookstore recently: A teacher in the Deer Isle grade school assigned each member of her third-grade class a United States President on whom to write a report. This, in toto, was what the little boy who wrote on George Washington read to the class:
‘George Washington was born off island.’
The Davieses’ Friendship sloop was put into the water yesterday while I was not looking. So the seascape has changed subtly. The handsome, handmade wooden boat, which took six years to build in John Davies’s garage, has provided me with a new focus, a new place for my eyes to rest as they move toward the sea from shore to boat to the Point to Eggemoggin Reach to Deer Isle, a series of restful coulisses stretching toward the horizon. In such an arrangement th
ere is the variety and interest that a view of the ocean’s horizon lacks. Perhaps I am justifying to myself the absence here of surf and rolling sea, or, more likely, I am finding contentment where I am.
I learn today that John Updike’s first published poem, thirty-eight years ago in The New Yorker, was titled ‘Duet, with Muffled Brake Drum.’ That’s what we should have done on that last, sad journey of the Queen Mary to the bike shop: muffled its brake drum.
Living near us are two friends, who have been together for many years. Now they have decided to ‘split up,’ as it is now termed. They had bought a house together, worked in the same place, shared a car. So established were they as a couple in the community that they seem unable, together or singly, to tell anyone about what has happened. One will appear at a party to which both (as was always the custom) have been invited and, when asked about the other, will say, ‘She is away for the weekend,’ or ‘She is traveling.’
Although they are of the same sex, they were never timid about being regarded as having a permanent alliance. Once, one told me that theirs had been a case of ‘true love’ at first sight. The years had confirmed how right the initial glance had been. Now that they are no longer together, and so have achieved the respectable status of single persons in the world’s eyes, ironically, each one appears shy, reserved, more closeted than they ever were together. Yesterday at the post office I met one of them and asked how the other was.
‘I have no idea,’ she said coolly.
I decided to be brave. ‘Is it all … er, over?’
‘Is what over?’
I thought it better not to define my terms or to inquire further. I had embarrassed her into denial. I should have buried their long history as she seemed to wish me to do. Driving home I thought how alike all human relationships are, of whatever origin, duration, or sex. I have grown suspicious of the reality of ‘true love,’ believing it is a state of mind that exists only in adolescence, fiction, and romantic poetry.
‘True love is like a ghost,’ La Rochefoucauld said. ‘Everyone talks of it, but few have met it face to face.’
Miscellany: I read back over what I have been thinking and writing this month and see that, slowly, I seem to to be sinking back into the slough of despond. Why? I wonder. Is it the insidious approach of another birthday in two months, another signpost on the last mile? I do absurdly despairing things like pick up in the bookstore to read something called The Raft Book, sixty-four pages of instructions for using seabirds, fish, insects, winds, and waves as directional aids when you are lost at sea. The first sentence in this essential guide: ‘Upon abandoning ship you may have to be your own navigator.’ Abandoning ship: a good metaphoric title for a novel? For a memoir? For the end of life?
I put out money for Don Hale who comes by on Monday to collect our trash. He fails to arrive. It rains. I forget to take it in until Friday, when he does come. I mention to him that the bill is probably sodden. He says, “That’s okay. I will think of it as laundered money.”
The Lord is my shepherd.
Hallowed be thy name.
Behold the lamb of God.
Are these truly beautiful sentences, or do they seem so because they have worn a groove on my tongue, so comfortably familiar that they have been elevated into poetry?
I hear of a new used-book store that has opened on Deer Isle. The proprietor is an elderly man with a long beard who has refused to reenter our store since the time Sybil denied him the discount he thought he deserved. (At the time he was not an active dealer.) It is a clean, well-lighted place with moderately interesting books. We buy a few. He gives us a small discount. We thank him.
He tells me that the area around Stonington, the town at the end of Deer Isle, has a very high ozone level. I question how that can be on this seemingly pure peninsula.
‘Oh yes, it’s true. If you had known that, would you have called your book Coming into the Ozone?’
Agnes de Mille, still actively at work every day at the age of eighty-six, talked to a New York Times reporter this week about the mystery of creativity:
The best things I’ve done come from way below thought. You have to wait and wait, like teasing a wild animal, get yourself ready. You do bad work, you throw it away. And suddenly it’s there. It’s a surprise, always. I don’t have it happen often.
She has been choreographing for sixty years. I wonder if ‘it’ happens more often in her old age or less frequently. She doesn’t say. My suspicion is that the richer the compost heap that is the mind of the old person, the greater the hoard of examined experiences, tag-ends of ideas, conversations, stories heard and overheard, dreams, memories, places seen and lived in, persons known, loved and unloved, the more chance there is for something useful to be there when it is needed.
In the bookstore, we sell what are called ‘remainders,’ books consigned at wholesale rates to dealers by publishers who have given up on the effort to sell them as new books. This is a last-ditch effort to make a little profit out of a now profitless enterprise. That mental compost heap I have been talking about is full of remainders. When one writes, or composes or choreographs, or whatever small creative things one happens to do late in life, it is out of these absorbed, roiling remainders that ideas come, from ‘way below thought,’ in de Mille’s words.
The first poem in Brad Leithauser’s book The Mail from Anywhere contains a useful epigraph by Paul Gauguin: ‘Could you ever have as much light as nature, as much heat as the sun? And you speak of exaggeration, but how could you exaggerate when you always fall short of nature?’
I think of the Holocaust, of the terrible twentieth-century wars, of the plague years of AIDS, of mass starvation in Africa, mass slaughter in Central and South America, of genocide in South Africa and on the streets of North American cities, of millions of homeless persons and refugees on this earth, and I think: What can one write about in fiction that could possibly seem exaggerated?
Summer
Driving a carload of baseball players to their next game, he said: ‘We may be lost, but we’re making good time.’
—Yogi Berra
A little after two in the afternoon: The sun clouds over. It has been visible for an hour so, a brief visit by a very shy guest, typical of the manner in which the sun comes and goes up here. The water is still; the mast of the Davieses’ sloop stands perpendicular to it. A sea breeze arrives at the deck, the little wind I always expect about this time. It dries the sweat on my neck and forehead (I’ve been weeding in the rock garden). Tiny brown tree sparrows leave the ugly dying-brush pile in the meadow to sample the seed in the feeder. We are waiting to burn the brush, but Don Hale, who gives out the permits, says it is too dry to have a fire.
For the first time all day, the leaves on the horse chestnut, somnolent and heavy in the warm air, move quietly, unlike those of the scrubby poplars and maples, which are stirred to noisy chatter by the least wind. An abbreviated family of eider ducks make its daily advance across the Cove. In late spring there is an extended family of them, but now only three or four, a nuclear group. Black butterflies leave one fireweed spire for another some distance away. Two minuscule white sails are on the Reach, from this distance looking like toy boats on the pond in Central Park.
The end of the day is signaled by this activity: the breeze from the sea, the retirement of the sun, and the finches, young jays, the doves, recovered from their siestas, at the feeder having their early supper.
A woman dying of cancer (not of the lungs, strangely, although she is a chain smoker) calls Sybil to say she has books to sell. She lives in a low-cost housing project on Deer Isle. I read in the van while Sybil goes in. When she returns, half an hour later, she tells me I am lucky: the apartment is so full of smoke that it is hard to breathe in it. The books she carries out smell of smoke; she wonders if sun and air will ever remove the odor. With the bags of books loaded in the back, the van now reeks.
But the books are interesting, mostly art history, because the seller was a teac
her of the subject at Harvard. She is ridding herself of her books, for she is not well enough to read. She is now alone; her daughter is in Boston, hard at work on her law degree. A visiting nurse comes by once a week and her neighbors are good about bringing food, but her appetite is gone and she does not think about eating. She smokes (‘What difference can it make now?’) and sits in her small apartment and waits.
The end of life is too often like this, mean, without the grace in which a woman like this must have lived. A woman of learning and sensitivity, who has been a wife, a mother, a teacher, is letting her possessions go, lessening her hold on life in a colorless and lonely small space. Without family nearby, without close friends, without hope of recovery.
In the van we talk about going to visit her but realize we would be repelled by the air in the apartment. Her solitude is ensured by her smoking. Perhaps it is her wish, to be left in peace behind a smoke screen. But I doubt it. There is no justice in such a coda, only a sense of tragic waste, a good and useful life come to so little, the disappearance forever of what Schopenhauer observed about persons who die: ‘There is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.’
Summer neighbors, David and Loni Hayman, are back in their newly built house on Deer Isle, having spent part of June in Ireland. He is a Joyce scholar who teaches in Wisconsin. It is only to be expected that he would go abroad to celebrate Bloomsday, but he reports that he found the occasion less interesting than usual.… The fine thing about living in this area is that sooner or later, and especially in good weather, my far-flung acquaintances who are writers, scholars, artists, bookmakers, editors, and even one college president come by to enrich my rural life with good ‘away’ talk.
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