by Wendy Lesser
During these three and a half weeks, I barely had time to realize anything about my friendship with Lenny, difficult or otherwise. Though I had actually known Lenny for a few months longer than I had known Katharine, I now abandoned him for her—or rather, my anxiety for him focused itself entirely on and through her. This was not intentional, and I think it had nothing to do with how I felt about Lenny as a friend. I don't think it had anything to do with motives at all. I saw that Katharine was in unbearable pain, and so I instinctively tried to do whatever I could to distract or soothe her. It was like throwing up your arm to prevent a blow: no thought was involved, just reaction to circumstances. I could do nothing for Lenny, and so I did not even try to ward off that blow. I lent him a few mysteries to read; I sat by his bedside a few times; it was all useless. His physical distress was in the hands of the doctors, and his mental distress—which was excruciating, since he clearly knew, at least at times, that he was going to die—could not be alleviated even by those closest to him, much less by me. Once, in the first week of his illness, I sat at home and read through an essay he had given me to publish (it had not yet appeared in print) and tried to imagine it as the work of an author who was no longer alive. This was too painful, and I did not try it again. The next time I read that essay, he was dead.
I3.
“Writers die twice, first their
bodies, then their works, but they produce book after book, like peacocks
spreading their tales, a gorgeous flare of
color soon shlepped through the dust.”
—Shuffle
Something odd happened at the funeral. I had only been to one other Jewish funeral in my life, one other burial of a body in the ground, and what I remember from that one is the terrible sound of the clods of dirt hitting the coffin. I remember feeling a person was being buried in the ground, and that sensation, that awareness, horrified me in a way I had not expected. So I prepared myself to feel that way at Lenny's funeral. But instead, the opposite happened. As I saw the coffin being lowered into the open grave, I suddenly realized that nothing important was in it. “Lenny is not in that box” is how the thought came to me. It was as if he had removed himself somehow, left by a back door, done a disappearing act. I could not say where he was (nowhere, I would have had to say, if asked), but he was not in that box.
In the first class I ever took with Lenny, which was the occasion of my first meeting him, I did my graduate research methods paper on the poet Randall Jarrell. The class was supposed to involve a lot of bibliographic work, which I managed to evade, but I did read everything I could get my hands on by and about Jarrell, and he became something of a lifelong favorite as a result. He was a good poet, a great essayist, and, at times, a superlative letter-writer. One of the things I remember best from his letters, all these years later, is the comment he made to a friend when he learned that Freud had died. “It was like having a continent disappear,” he wrote.
Lenny was not exactly a continent, and his death was not that kind of public event. It was more as if, say, Randall Jarrell had disappeared. Not the man himself, I mean, who was dead long before I discovered the poetry, but the poet and all his work. What if he had never existed? Or rather, what if I knew he had existed, but one day I woke up and every sign of his existence had disappeared? That is the kind of disorientation I felt at Lenny's funeral.
But, you will say, Lenny's work hasn't disappeared. The writing is still there and always will be. I tried using this consolation on Katharine during the early days of her grief, but it didn't work then, and it's not working on me now. Yes, the writing persists. And yes, everything Lenny wrote had the sound of his voice in it—particularly the essays, which I think are even better than the stories. But there is something antiseptic, something almost too pure, about writing that survives its author. Everything that exists now exists only on the page; there is nothing left over to infiltrate or sully or drag down the abstract words. They are perfect, in a way he never was, and that is what is now unsatisfying about them.
Lenny was always a reader as well as a writer—I was going to say “a voracious reader,” but that is exactly what he was not. He liked the kind of writing you could savor in small bites, without gobbling: poetry, of course, and short stories, but also philosophy (one of the last conversations we ever had was about Spinoza) and unclassifiable works of various kinds, from Kafka's short parables to novella-length essays. He liked things that came in sentence-length thoughts; he particularly loved Montaigne. What he did not like, as he said repeatedly, were novels. Their scale was too crude and bulky for him. He was a slow reader, and most novels did not reward slowness: they pushed you forward with their plots, when he preferred to linger.
I, on the other hand, love novels, as Lenny knew. It was one of our friendly points of disagreement, and we each prided ourselves on the plausibility of our own oft-stated position. The other day I heard some acquaintances of mine talking about how they hated novels; I came up to them as they were talking, and when they saw it was me, they said in a slightly abashed way, “Oh, we shouldn't be saying this in front of you.”
“That's okay,” I said, “some of my best friends hate novels.” They laughed, but as they laughed I realized that this sentence is no longer true. I had one friend who hated novels, and he doesn't exist anymore.
If you have a difficult friend, you will discover that a new and paradoxical kind of difficulty arises at his death. It is the habit of grief to whitewash the past. At first, all you can remember—all anyone wants you to remember—are the good things about the friendship. The loss of those good things is the immediate source of your sorrow, so that is what you focus on. And if your friend was a writer, you will have further evidence of how wonderful he was in the great sentences he left behind. But what the grief and the sentences obscure are the very difficulties that made the friendship what it was. It would not be exactly accurate to say that I miss the difficulties. But without the difficulties, there is no Lenny. Maybe that is why I am trying so hard to hold onto them.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2008
Copyright © 2007 by Wendy Lesser
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Lesser, Wendy
Room for doubt / Wendy Lesser.
p. cm.
1. Lesser, Wendy. 2. Periodical editors—United States—Biography.
3. Critics—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN4874.L3785A3 2007
810.9—dc22
[B] 2006043672
eISBN: 978-0-307-49760-4
Author photograph. ©Sara Krulwich, The New York Times
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