by Yiyun Li
Rereading the novella this time, I have forgotten—or refused to remember—what was the music I heard in the first place. I respect the woman for her unyielding belief in memory. How many of us dare to claim that? There are people we long to invite into our memories, people we long to invite us into theirs; people we strive to build memories with for the future. Yet in the end, there is something unbearable in that music. One may catch a few phrases now and then in solitude, one may allow oneself to hear its echo in a story or in a passing conversation, but to share that melodrama with another person or even to acknowledge it fully to oneself requires wisdom and courage.
—
AFTER BREECE D’J Pancake committed suicide, his mother asked James Alan McPherson to write a foreword for his collected stories. Pancake had studied with McPherson at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, and they had become friends. McPherson was my mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Pancake had a habit of giving presents to everyone in his life. “He loved to give but never learned to receive. He never felt worthy of a gift,” his mother wrote in a letter to McPherson. McPherson, too, was generous with presents. One summer he gave every workshop student a toy mouse that sings and does kung fu; another summer he gave everyone a book (Master and Man and Other Stories by Tolstoy); there was a sophisticated clock, palm-sized and ornamented with figures, that he wrapped up unevenly for our elder son before his birth; there was a gift set of Goodnight Moon for our younger son, McPherson’s namesake; there were beautifully sculpted plates and expensive chocolates for our family from Von Maur, a department store in Iowa City where a pianist in a long dress played Chopin in the afternoon to a near-empty store. When McPherson turned sixty, a friend and I arranged to meet a flower farmer, the husband of my former colleague, in a parking lot to buy sixty flowers. It was fall, late in the season, and the farmer was annoyed at the timing. If only you’d asked last week, he said; I had better flowers then. McPherson received the gift as generously as he always gave.
“I always thought that the gifts he gave were a way of keeping people away…of focusing their attention on the persona he had created out of the raw materials of his best traits,” McPherson wrote about Pancake. It is difficult to read that sentence. Pancake’s desire to always give is familiar to me, though I cannot give without questioning my motives. Does giving have to do with generosity, or with the selfish comfort it brings? The self-deception it offers, when the truth is one has little, or nothing, to give? If one keeps giving, will one be good enough to be loved one day?
Unlike the woman in Zweig’s novella, Pancake did not let the melodrama in him transgress. He gave more than he had, more than he ought to, but he did not trap anyone. People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments—Mann’s or anyone’s—on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.
There was a young girl in the hospital, a college student, who cruised the hallway warning of an invasion by some strange technology. Her mind was so brilliant and knowledgeable, her words so full of humor and wisdom, her admonishment as musical as the refrain of a Greek chorus, that I often watched her with admiration. During visiting hours her mother was always there, and once she brought a friend who had grown up with the girl. The mother and daughter walked back and forth in the hallway, and the friend, a step behind, wept soundlessly without wiping away her tears.
In his foreword, McPherson admits to keeping a distance from Pancake at a late point in their friendship. He refused to open a package from Pancake for months, until the news of Pancake’s death reached him. It contained a gift, as McPherson had guessed; it also contained a letter, in which Pancake said he was not waiting for a reply—such a statement always means the opposite. The understanding between two people, and the alienation because of it—the friendship between McPherson and Pancake upsets me. It is one person’s melodrama avoiding another person’s melodrama; it is silence that does not prevail.
Someone asked me why I do not worry about feeling exposed while writing. It should be the most natural question for me, yet it has never occurred to me to ask. To be exposed means that a stranger could learn something about me through reading my words and against my wish. Perhaps he could, and he would come to a conclusion, right or wrong, though what would that do but define me in external terms?
The external has a limited claim on understanding and feeling. I can never say that I understand my characters; I certainly have no right to say that I feel their feelings fully. Though if I know them, however limitedly, it is enough for me to want to know them more. What is a more secretive way to struggle than struggling along with people to whom I remain unknown and unseen? My melodrama would not transgress and cause any damage to the characters. In life I do not have that confidence.
Is there, I wonder, an endpoint to knowing—not that one has known everything, but that one knows enough. This ceaseless effort—I have seen this trait in my friend who argues against herself along with the world—protects one from melodrama, as understanding and feelings do not.
—
EVA ALTMANN STAYED in America until 1943, when she reunited with her parents in England and later became a medical doctor. Had she died crossing the Atlantic, she would have become a footnote in the personal history of the Zweigs and the national history of wartime England. The word affiliation shares an etymology with filial. It is a child’s fortune that she is not merely defined by her affiliation with her parents, her heritage, memory and history that deny her an independent future.
Eva was a small part of the Zweigs’ final years, but reading their letters, I could not avoid the futile question: What if it had been arranged for Eva to live with them? In their letters, they often questioned whether it would be better for her to join them in Brazil, but in almost every letter they tried to convince themselves and Eva’s parents that New York was a more suitable place for a young girl. In his last letter to the Altmanns, written the day before the Zweigs’ suicides (postmarked three days later, it was received, like the letter in Zweig’s novella, after its author’s death), Stefan wrote, “Had Lotte’s health been better and had we could have [sic] Eva with us it would have had sense to continue…” Would a young life around have offered an anchor? Three months earlier the Zweigs had also considered, out of extreme isolation, adopting a puppy—“Only we fear to get attached if one day we should have to move or leave again.”
A writer’s letters and journals grant her a triumphant position, however illusory, against time’s erosion. They also award a reader the flattering feeling of kinship. When Katherine Mansfield claimed in her journal that she loved Chekhov so much she wanted to adopt a Russian baby and name him Anton, her emotional transparency embarrassed me. I felt the urge to laugh because I was terrified to recognize even a residue of myself in her. It occurred to me much later that she was by then dying of tuberculosis, the same disease that led Chekhov to an early death. Our admiration and scrutiny of another person reflect what we love and hate to see in ourselves.
What do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life? But when we read someone’s private words, when we experience her most vulnerable moments with her, and when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings than we are able to, can we still call her a stranger? I have convinced myself that reading letters and journals is a way of having a conversation with those writers, but surely it is as glib as calling perusing the music score of a symphony the same as listening to it. A conversation requires more than scribbling in the margin.
Sometimes I suspect that I am drawn to those who don’t converse with me because I have not outgrown a childish wish that they will teach me how to live. Or, a slightly more complicated version: I wish that they would teach one how to die. But their deaths can only be read in edited versions. Their letters and journa
ls come to an end, artfully and artificially maneuvered by the editors. The last one collected in Hemingway’s letters is to a nine-year-old boy, written three weeks before Hemingway’s suicide, and the boy himself only lived another seven years. Turgenev, on his deathbed, wrote to his estranged friend Tolstoy: “I am really writing you, therefore, to tell you how happy I have been to be your contemporary, and to express to you my final, sincere request. My friend, return to literature!” Mansfield’s last note, from an unfinished story, ends with an observation that only the dying Mansfield would make: “It was an exquisite day. It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.”
All people lie, in their writing as much as in their lives. It frustrates me that I hold on to an unrealistic belief: there is some irrefutable truth in each mind, and the truth is told without concealment or distortion in a letter or in a journal entry. My obligation is to look for that truth; finding it will offer me the certainty I don’t have in me. With that certainty I will find a way to build a solid self. This burden I never take on while reading or writing fiction.
I read the Zweigs’ letters from South America because I wanted to understand how they had descended into the darkest depression. But the story line—if it could be called a story line—of Eva became a counterpoint to that descent. It had moments of laughter, mundanity, even pettiness. The Zweigs’ comments on Eva’s host family were not always kind; her boarding school in upstate New York was looked at with European suspicion; her tardiness in correspondence was blamed on the American influence; there was a fear that her host family would never return her; and again and again there was discussion of arranging for Eva to go to Brazil. As their letters became increasingly melancholy, and as they—especially Stefan Zweig—increasingly refused to believe in any hope for themselves or for mankind, Eva was never included in that despair. This impunity is the same wishful thinking as when parents want to spare their children the difficulties they themselves have had to live through. Yet without that wishfulness, what are the parents doing but letting the melodrama of their own memories dictate the next generation’s fate?
—
ONCE IN A while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. “You may not remember me,” these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten.
Sometimes out of mere mischief I reply with a detailed account of our encounter. People are joyfully surprised when they are remembered, but I have not been honest with them. There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.
Many years ago, a young man from a peasant family in south China left home to study theoretical physics at a university. He was the first one in his village to have graduated high school. His mother could only afford to buy him a pair of socks, and the villagers gathered their limited means to give him a suitcase. He traveled north with a pair of socks in an empty suitcase. When he arrived, the university provided him clothes and bedding, and at once he joined the martial arts team. He was not a physical man, but he would compete for the next four years so that he could have enough food.
Eventually the young man met and married the girl from the courtyard. He became a hoarder of things, she a hoarder of memories. Well, at least, we could say, nothing would be wasted or lost, and indeed nothing has been. I grew up with the dread of seeing piles of old newspapers collect dust and used matches put back into matchboxes. But more than that, I dreaded the memories that were not mine, yet were so adamant to be heard and remembered as the only memories that mattered.
What becomes of someone raised by parents who cannot part with their objects and memories? Tangible objects crystallize memories, too. I wonder if there is a similar melodrama in my father’s clinging to small and used things as in my mother’s unrestrained vulnerability and cruelty. Nothingness—holding on to nothing, retaining nothing—was a shelter from melodrama until it stopped being one.
I was in Iowa City to give a reading, and McPherson asked me to dinner at his house. He had laid out plates, silverware, new napkins, glasses, and wine on a coffee table, and had a friend bring in food from a restaurant. Over dinner he talked a lot about his life, some parts I had known, other parts I had heard from people around him. The conversation could have gone on forever, and I constantly watched the time. Before I left, he asked if I could come again the next day, and I said I couldn’t because I had to fly to Chicago in the early morning.
That was when I saw his tears for the first time. I met McPherson during a phase of his life different from when Pancake had met him, and I had never tried to connect the person I knew to the writer at his prime. Once, when he loaned me a book, I saw on the last blank page scribbling of a conversation with Ralph Ellison. I did not ask him what it was he felt compelled to remember. Over the years I nagged at him about his health, and when he was in good humor he would behave like a chastised yet uncooperative child, yet I felt a distance between us. I used to explain to myself that it was a result of my shyness and his Southern manners—he always addressed me as Ms. Li. But I now suspect that I only pretended there was a distance the same way he refused to open the package from Pancake. I wanted to believe I knew McPherson enough through his work. When one understands another person, perhaps knowing no longer matters, or it matters too much for one to bear.
There was a moment at the dinner when I thought I could see many things that were yet to come: McPherson’s future, the deterioration of his health, his loneliness, and his increasing silence; and my future, too. That McPherson is not widely known and is largely forgotten now is not surprising. He rebelled all his life against what others wanted to make him into—an obedient serf, a political warrior. His refusal would be a futile battle in any era and in any country.
When the future becomes memory prematurely, one feels unbalanced. I ran away that evening because I did not want McPherson to see my panic. The next day I called a friend and asked her how he lived without killing himself. It was a terrible question, but what I could not say at the time was this: How could one stop oneself from seeking solace in the peace brought by death? I had indulged that thought at dinner with McPherson, as I had at various times wished that relief for my father. What is more indefensible, to give up one’s own life, or to give up hoping for one’s loved one’s?
It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents’ memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory’s melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.
“Thing were not supposed to be this way,” Ralph Ellison, wounded by his time, said to McPherson. McPherson must have said that to himself, too. Disappointment like that must have come from the hope to be understood. I have run away from it to my nothingness, my fatalism, and my insistence on being irrelevant. Yet I have not had a moment of hesitation to read Zweig or Mansfield or other writers. One is protected in these cases. Their memories will never become mine.
The inadequacy of writing is similar to that of connecting to another person. It is essential that a story allow its melodrama to meet the reader’s, yet melodrama makes such encounters rare.
“Phil Ochs hanged himself. Breece Pancake shot himself. The rest of us, if we are lucky enough to be incapable of imagining such extreme acts of defiance, manage to endure,” McPherson wrote toward the end of his foreword. Such kindness, one cannot help noticing; such a contrast to Mann’s coldhearted judgment. I never asked McPherson whether the thought of suicide occurred to him. I never asked him how he managed to endure. But it doesn’t matter: I have to live in my own cautionary tale. Some people seek victory in that tale, others escape, yet others peace. I still do not know what I want from mine, but one hopes that to accept not k
nowing, for the time being, is better than to accept nothing.
Two Lives
Until an interviewer asked me if there was a book that I had read too young and thereafter haunted me, I did not realize that I had never used the word haunt, a word I find claustrophobic and insincere. Nor did I know that the word haunt has a connection to home. Etymologically, it is from the Middle English hauten (to reside, inhabit, use, employ), from Old French hanter (to inhabit, frequent, resort to), from Old Norse heimta (to bring home, fetch). When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our old home we’re experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.
I told the interviewer there is a book I may have read too early, though I wouldn’t call it haunting in any way.
A book I read too early: to answer that involves sorting through memories—one does it with a dread of inaccuracies. When I started middle school, my father began jogging early in the morning, leaving home before I left for the bus stop, no more than a few steps ahead of me. It has taken me thirty years of not remembering to understand what I had thought of as his exercise habit as a father’s tact. At six thirty the road between our apartment and the bus stop was not the safest place for a child. He never hovered, but there were days when the bus was early, and he would be at the stop before me, holding the door so that the bus would not leave without me.
Twenty minutes into the ride, I changed route at another stop. Several schoolmates also waited for the bus there—a longer ride that brought us to the outskirts of the city, where our school had been built on the land of the Old Summer Palace, a place of ruin and wilderness at the time. During the first week of middle school, a girl and her father ran for a bus that was just pulling in. We all watched while the father, holding the door for the girl, hurried her on. Why didn’t you take the bus, he asked afterward—none of us had moved. We looked at one another, and finally someone replied that it was the wrong one. Though bearing the same route number, it was the regional line, which would never get the girl to school.