Same Song, Different Verse: A Letter to Caitlin Flanagan

That’s enough Caitlin Flanagan.

As a friend of mine said recently, about a declarative with the same structure (though about a different personality*), that sentence works with or without the comma.

Caitlin, you really bug people. I would say Google yourself to see why, but you already know why, don’t you? You’re a good writer, and I covet your job, and, depending on my mood, I usually read your articles. But I can almost always count on you to offend me with some broad, sweeping claim that makes — truly — no sense. You’ve done it before. And now this, from your article “The Autumn of Joan Didion: the Writer’s Work is a Triumph — and a Disaster” in this month’s Atlantic: “to really love Joan Didion — to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase — you have to be female.”

Dear Caitlin, why is it always about love that you write? And why are you such a fan of prescribing the boundaries of love so that you invariably leave people out? Alienate people? Is that just your thing? Does it make you feel good? Tell me, Caitlin, how did you get so good at loving? Because clearly you’ve got something other people don’t. We know, we know: you’re a woman. You’re a mother. Only you can understand what real love is. A few paragraphs later you write, “Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer.” Replace Didion with Flanagan and I think we’re getting somewhere.

Do you ever re-read your pieces before you send them off to be published? Do you hesitate for a moment, for just a second try to imagine what you sound like to others? There is always the possibility that you actually believe what you write — there is something to be said for that, but in this case I’m not sure what it is. “Not remembering what Joan wore in the Haight,” you write, this your indictment of a man who couldn’t possibly love Joan Didion the way you do, “(a skirt with a leotard and stockings) is like not remembering what Ahab was trying to kill in Moby-Dick.”

Ugh.

As I remarked the last time you upset me, there are many things I don’t understand, like “what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she [Didion] explored in a way no one else ever has.” Good writing, and great literature, invites people in to a common (though distinct) shared experience — which is something you, somewhere deep inside, do understand, because it happened to you with Didion and, I dare say, it has happened to you with other writers as well. The problem is you don’t want to share it. You want it all for yourself. You seem to get a kick out of classifying these shared experiences (not a bad thing in itself), placing sweeping value judgments on each division (less admirable or understandable), and then (this is where I really start to lose you) deriding everyone who isn’t in a category that looks exactly like yours (and let’s face it, if you had your way you’d be the only one in your category). This is what you do in your review.

Except it isn’t actually a review, is it? The best parts of your essay are when you’re talking about the writing. Unfortunately, that’s not what you wanted to tell us about. No, it wasn’t really ever about the writing at all. “I just wanted to tell you about the young woman who came to dinner at my house so long ago.” And there we have it, folks. Joan Didion came to dinner at Caitlin’s house one time, and she didn’t come to yours.

What I am left thinking about is why I feel so possessive of Joan? This is something we have in common, I think, because clearly you feel it too. Possessive is likely not the right word for what I feel, though, but something else — affection, devotion, gratitude, epiphany, these come closer. And it’s because of the language that I love her, because of passages like “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table.”

I’ve read Slouching Towards Bethlehem, too. And I’m not you, Caitlin, I’m not a woman and I didn’t grow up in the sixties and I can’t ever claim certain things (especially that Joan Didion came to my house when I was a young teenager and that that experience left me with an exaggerated sense of entitlement toward the woman and her work), but it still grabbed me and pulled me in and moved me in ways I find difficult to describe and inspired me to write this letter that very few people will ever read because, Caitlin, I loved it too. It was a different kind of love, sure. Where you found something to respond to viscerally, to feel deeply, something to which you related and probably aspired, I found something approaching an artifact — of a bygone place and time that had been rendered in language so crisp and clear and precise that she took me there with her. And unlike that dinner from long ago, thankfully you were not there. So I could read it and love it as much as I cared or wanted to, without being made to feel like I didn’t have the right stuff for it, or that I was wrong. As I’ve said before, it may be a different kind of love from yours but that makes it no less valid, no less intense and, certainly, no less real.

So please, Caitlin. Please, please. Stop writing about love. Go be better than the rest of us at something else for a while.

*It was Zooey Deschanel.

Downton Abbey Returns

I don’t normally do recaps or reviews, and this is neither, but I am talking about a television show because a) I’m in love with Masterpiece Classics’ Downton Abbey and b) someone asked me what I thought about last night’s season 2 premier, and once I’d thought about an answer I figured I would burp it out into the zeitgeist. (Wouldn’t Violet find the Internet so common? I would love to hear her hold forth.)

Despite the warnings from the future, I tuned in to last night’s season 2 premier and I enjoyed it. They said I probably would. Although there is something damn tough about sitting in one’s own living room for an hour and fifty minutes without a pause button (a very upstairs thing for me to stay, I know). I was not prepared. I had to scamper off once in the first hour to pee and once in the second hour to fix a whiskey cider.

Otherwise, a few thoughts:

• Edith is hideous and I laugh every time she gets her heart broken or has shit spilled on her at dinner.

• As soon as Anna said she had never been happier I could practically hear Maria Doyle Kennedy (who until just this instant I apparently thought was the same person as Mary McDonnell from Dances With Wolves, whoops) clopping up the driveway dressed as Catherine of Aragon and plotting into her sleeve. I still have high hopes for Anna and Batesie, though.

• Odious O’Brien — couldn’t have put it better. Her bang curls look like cartoon dog poop.

• They tried really hard last night to make Thomas a sympathetic character, and it almost worked. Almost.

• Those baby blues get me every time.

• Maggie Smith can do no wrong; she absolutely rules every scene she is in. Case in point:

On the whole, none of it was quite as exciting as I’d hoped, and it has been predicted that I’ll grow bored or frustrated with the story lines, but I’m still glad it’s back and, for now, I’m all in. Although I may end up watching it online, so I can have my pause and rewind buttons back.

Which character are you?

There are two online quizes to determine your character from Downton Abbey. Think you’re the same character twice? I wasn’t. In the WETA character quiz, I scored Sybil.

Lady Sybil Crawley

You are Lady Sybil Crawley. The youngest daughter of Lord Grantham, you’re compassionate, strong, and really concerned about social justice. You’d also like to be able to vote. The bravest and most idealistic member of your family, you’re the most likely to end up at a political rally, try and help a servant to a better job, or scandalize your sisters by wearing pants to a party.

I like Sybil, but I was kinda hoping for downstairs. So imagine my delight when I discovered the Guardian character quiz. With my second chance for downstairs on the line, not only did I rate upstairs again, but I was arguably the most upstairs of all, the Dowager Countess!

You are the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith). You do not suffer fools gladly. In fact you do not suffer anything at all because you refuse to entertain any form of discomfort in your life whatsoever.

Happy 2012

 

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Subtitled: Christmas Eve 2010, the Sacred and the Profane.

First we went to church.

Then we had a dance party.

Merry Christmas, wherever you find yourself this year.

Before the waters of Christmas close over me

I’ve been anticipating Christmas, some might say dreading it, since last summer. And now, almost suddenly despite its protracted inevitability (as J’s dad writes in his annual holiday masterpiece, “We are just shy of Thanksgiving, but as usual the holiday letter innuendos began with the first Christmas sale commercials back in April and have mounted steadily since”), it is here. This is rarely a good time of year for the blog, for any writing. It’s a time of year that calls for other creative pursuits, like mixing holiday cocktails and tree trimming.

So we spruced the place up, arranged the flowers, lit the lights, poured the drinks, and threw a small party to trim the tree.

For the past three years I’ve gotten our tree from the local Lions Club tree lot near campus; here is this years in its stand, watered and lit, with the ornaments set out.

(I hung the token first ornament, and placed the star on top.)

Then we boozed up the guests and they set to work (and I forgot to take pictures). But the results are wonderful, and we’ve been exceedingly grateful every day since.

And a couple from the morning after.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year, and big love for 2012.

Mr. Maxwell

A year or so ago a friend turned me on to Sarah Waters, and I was totally taken in by her fiction. She’s contemporary, so I read her with the conscious anticipation of what’s next, knowing — figuring — that no matter if I devour everything she’s written thus far, there’s always going to be something else, at some point, new. I read The Night Watch, Fingersmith, and The Little Stranger. She has two previous novels I haven’t read yet, so in addition to any imagined future works, the excitement lingers.

It’s different with someone who is discovered after they have died. Their work may not be finished making its way through the world; who knows at what point it will resurface on someone’s desk, as it has done mine, or in someone’s imagination. But no matter the possible influence or trajectory, the work itself is done. With the author gone, it becomes another kind of reading experience. The sense of anticipation is different. That’s how I feel about William Maxwell’s work — unlike Eudora Welty, I had never even heard of him before I read What There Is to Say We Have Said. I spent parts of the summer rereading Welty’s fiction — several of her short stories and much of her longer work, including The Ponder Heart and The Optimist’s Daughter, and I remain halfway through reading, for the first time, Losing Battles, which, like her when she wrote it, I’ll finish one day. But Maxwell is an unknown. Or was, until I recently finished The Château (1961), the end of which I would file under the category of things I wish I’d written myself but didn’t:

Harold and Barbara Rhodes are departing Paris. Their peculiar friend, Mme Strauss, has come to see them off. “They leaned down and touched her hands, as the train began to move. For reasons that there was now no chance of their knowing, she clung to them, calling good-by. When she could no longer find them among the other heads and waving arms they could see her, still waving her crumpled handkerchief, old, forsaken, left in her own sad city, where the people she knew did not know her, and her stories were not believed even when they were true.”

What a glorious ending, I thought. Just like the rest of the book, so exquisite and complex even in its simplicity. Except it wasn’t the end. Apparently Maxwell couldn’t leave it there. I’m certain he had his reasons, though to me they are as mysterious and bizarre as some of Mme Strauss’s behavior. (I would love to know what his editor thought, or his reading friends. Did no one object?) But who knows. It went on, for another forty something pages, an odd dialogue between two people who are never identified, never explained, in which most all of the loose ends are tied up. A neat little bow on a book that didn’t need one. It was beautiful, its economic prose giving us just what we needed for there to be a solid, moving story with questions, everywhere questions, an imitation of life, a window into post-war France where everyone was still shell shocked, where certain foods were still rationed or altogether unavailable, and where Americans were still heros. There was beautiful language in the post script, but it was tedious, unnecessary; it felt more like an unfortunate growth than an epilogue, and it took away more than it added.

And yet, I loved the book, and am looking forward to reading more of his books very soon. There are a couple sitting on my desk now, waiting: They Came Like Swallows (1937) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980, winner of the Howells Medal and the National Book Award for Fiction). In the category of gifts that keep on giving, I now count What There Is To Say We Have Said. I didn’t want it to end, and this is my attempt, as Maxwell said in one of his letters, to take the wish for the fact.

The rest of Maxwell’s fiction awaits, books that, as Donna Tartt writes, “exude a quiet calm and charm which is peculiarly their own; almost no other author of the twentieth century presents such passionate emotional depth married to such sublety [sic] and artfulness of expression, such exquisite renderings of the texture of life.” I’ve stumbled upon one of the most delightful volumes of essays I have read in a while — a tribute called A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations. In her essay, “Mr. Maxwell,” Tartt remembers an evening she spent with Maxwell, “One wanted to pour out one’s very heart to him, so that my overriding memory of the evening is of trying to restrain myself from doing just that.”

I discovered from these essays that, in the last year of his life, he reread War and Peace. He read it aloud to Emmy, his wife. As his eyesight waned and he became too frail to hold the heavy book, Annabel Davis-Goff came by and read it to them. She recounts these memories in her essay, “Reading War and Peace to William Maxwell.” They finished the book two days before Emmy died, and ten days before Bill did. Although it makes me sad to think about them in that room, both deteriorating and succumbing together, the image also makes me smile. From the very little I know about them and their marriage, but from everything that I am learning, it seems fitting. I also feel overwhelmed with wonder about something that I have never thought about before: what would I want the last novel I ever [re]read to be? What a weighty thing to consider. I wonder if he just knew, whether he could see time and tell it was short, and so reached out his hand like it were the most natural thing in the world, and grabbed hold of War and Peace? Were there other options to consider? Did he waver? As I’ve said, I know very little about this man, but somehow I doubt that he did. Somehow I imagine he felt sure. (From Shirley Hazzard’s essay, “Bill Maxwell said that he did not fear death but that he would miss reading novels.”)

I love what Michael Collier says about his experience corresponding with Maxwell. “I was to learn,” Collier writes, “that what one should live for more than anything else are small moments of overwhelming astonishment.” Similarly, in Richard Bausch’s tribute entitled “Grace,” he talks about striking up a correspondence with Maxwell. “His letters to me were always brief, but filled with details and lovely phrases about what he liked, what he was at present appreciating about the life around him, and the reading he was doing …”

… details and lovely phrases about what he liked, what he was at present appreciating about the life around him …

These are the details that make life interesting, that make it special, that inspire creativity, these small moments, these lovely phrases, these experiences that stand out sometimes for no apparent reason, and latch hold. That is Maxwell for me, in this moment. But it’s not so much about the experiences, the turns of phrase, the moments in and of themselves, as it is about what we do with them, how we observe them, what we learn from them, how we choose to acknowledge and remember them. From these short essays I have met a man who offers a template for a creative, compassionate, observant, kind, active life — a man who exhibits generosity toward and engagement with the minor details, patiently observed.

These are my minor details, here on this blog, the lovely phrases that I am appreciating at present, the small moments of overwhelming astonishment.

Lost in translation

On the RER B line headed to l’aéroport Roissy-Charles de Gaulle.

Astonishment in the Head

For six months I have been working my way through my college professor Suzanne Marrs’s new book, What There Is to Say We Have Said: the Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell.  At the end of Approaching Eye Level, Vivian Gornick has a chapter called “On Letter Writing,” which she concludes by saying, “Letter writing is not the noble enterprise. Remaining fully expressive is the noble enterprise.” About remaining fully expressive, I think Patti Smith would agree. Having spent six months with them, I think Welty and Maxwell would too.

What There Is to Say We Have Said is an edited collection of the correspondence between Eudora Welty and her New Yorker editor, fiction writer and friend, William Maxwell (along with Maxwell’s wife, Emily). I have been seriously caught up in these letters that span more than fifty years of friendship, notes between editor and writer, between friends, talking about their own writing, their gardens, things they’ve read in the newspaper, trips they’ve taken, upcoming visits together in New York. We follow the long arc of their two storied careers, stepping behind the curtain, so to speak, into the intimate space between close friends where children are born, siblings and parents die, stories are started and (usually) completed, novels written and celebrated, honors bestowed … and the space, too, where old age creeps in, where distance grows, where time passes.

Reading the letters I’ve been overcome by the idea that we — as a culture, as creative people, as souls — have lost something valuable in our [in]ability to communicate with one another. In fact (and people would argue with me here) I’m not even sure text messages or tweets or status updates are communicating. There is great convenience in texting; I send text messages every day. But I’m not sure what they are. If we saved every single one (as the Library of Congress is saving tweets), what would someone be able to learn from them, looking back fifty years from now? What will the vast archive of tweets reveal about us to future generations? Maybe it’s about different mediums for different needs, different times; maybe it’s about advancement, and moving on. There are many who would argue, and rightly so, the merits of Twitter. Perhaps I should be more focused on remaining fully expressive, as Gornick insists. But what gets lost in the hurry — that’s what I think about and wonder.

The entire time I’ve been reading the book I’ve thought about something else Vivian Gornick said in Approaching Eye Level. “I am hungry for the sentence structure in their heads,” she wrote. And I was. Part of me never wanted to finish the book, wanted it (selfishly) to go on and on forever. And in a way, through the letters and the stories, through all the beautiful language they’ve left behind, it will. As Maxwell says at one point, citing William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and John Galsworthy as examples, “good writers do not die, they simply pass into their works and go right on living. In short, they last.”

Here are some of the ways they will last for me. There is no way I could possibly capture them all, but these are some of my favorite lines, some of the passages, hilarious descriptions, and vivid images I enjoyed the most:

*Maxwell: “In this weather one needs astonishment in the head to keep the heat out.”

*Maxwell on roses: “glowing like the windows of Chartres.”

*And Welty, “The rose bushes were still dormant (I hope just that) and the air was like a Shakespearean song.”

*Welty, talking about her character Edna Earle from The Ponder Heart, “She’s essentially a lady of dashes, I think, with lots of afterthoughts and sudden additions to what she’s saying, and not a lady of the considered semicolon …” I love how, at the end of this particular letter, Welty writes, “Must dash down to mail this –” She, too, a lady of dashes.

*William Maxwell on Christmas: “Before the waters of Christmas close over me …”

*Emily Maxwell on Christmas, “And it was good to have something from your hands. I only like the parts of Christmas that people make.”

*Welty on Christmas: “I love Christmas this year! Things seem better here, & we get along fine — Friends are beginning to get home — In Jackson I belong to a bunch of old friends, half of us are old maids & old bachelors off teaching school or something, that have been spending Christmas together since early childhood, & all still get back for it — We have eggnog Christmas morning here — It’s always warm, usually raining by nightfall, & we’re still talking –”

*And Welty on another Christmas, finishing a sentence that began “You were” and then broke off. “You were and are, but Christmas came into the middle of that sentence. Did you all have a wonderful day?”

*Maxwell about an upcoming visit, “I am grateful, because if someone you long to see says I am coming, then for days you think about their coming, and them, and in effect have a visit from them that not even their not coming can take away.”

*Maxwell, who had grown up in Lincoln, Nebraska, “I wish, in short, that Jackson was Lincoln, and that we had played together when we were little, and I know that because you are you, you will take the wish for the fact –”

*Welty on an evening she’d spent with Bill and Emily, “You know how happy it made me to see you — All such times seem snatched up like jewels to run out of a burning house with, somehow, except that sounds funny because while evenings would be the first thing I’d snatch up, jewels would be probably the last.”

*Welty to Bill, “You appeared in a dream here Friday night with the words, `But the dress rehearsal is at 7:30 and it’s ten after now!’ We didn’t make it. I hope I didn’t miss out on something marvelous?”

*Maxwell, “How dreamlike to open a telegram containing an invitation to a dinner you have already eaten.”

*Welty, “I was in with flu but in full possession of my pleasure faculties –”

*Welty on the publication in the New Yorker of The Ponder Heart, “I don’t read it, but I pick it up and feel the weight of it …”

*Maxwell writing about his daughter, “Kate has been mildly valetudinarian (heavens, the thing slipped out), but fortunately she didn’t know it …”

*Welty talking about a cake, “it’s not original, just a sort of anthology, from ladies — but it’s a kind of child’s play cake after that subtle one, and its virtue comes of living where the nuts come from –”

*Welty on Maxwell’s daughter, “that little shuttle of happiness.”

*Welty on summer, “Not much goes on among human beings either — now and then a few of us go up to a little country hotel and sit on the upstairs porch and rock awhile quietly, having drinks in the shade and country stillness, or we sit in the dark in somebody’s Jackson porch to talk & play records.”

*Welty, “Knowing about a good story you haven’t read is like watching for a comet.”

*Bill to Eudora, “Oh do come and bring picnic weather.”

I was fundamentally predisposed to love this book, seeing as it begins with near constant references (on both sides) to the Maxwell’s cat named, yes, Floribunda.

There’s more, so much more I could say. Like with Julia Child’s My Life in France, I was so drawn in by the language of these two, by their turns of phrase, by the intelligence and kindness and curiosity and gentle encouragement each for the other. Something I managed to never pick up on when I read her in college was that Eudora Welty is hilarious, as she is in these pages, and that she drew fascinating people into her company.

I wrote to a friend a month or so ago, long before I finished the book, “I cannot tell you what a treat you are in for (though you already know it). I would say that I’m jealous of you, because you have the whole thing waiting for you like an unopened gift, but I’m not because I still have half the book left to read myself. I’m jealous of the universe that had these two human beings in it, even though I know I was part of that universe for a while — I did live around the corner from Welty the entire time I was in college, after all (we even had the same house number, what a kick! http://g.co/maps/efmuq). I remember when she died, ten years ago this summer. I had just started working in the literature department at the public library and we put up a grand display for her. I spent time reading her fiction this summer, too, and wished that I had gone to college in my mid- thirties rather than at eighteen. To think that Suzanne Marrs was my teacher, Welty was my neighbor, and what did I want to do? Get an A. Gap years between high school and college should be required by law.

“I know what happens, but I also already know that these two are going to break my heart.”

And they have. They did. But first they made it soar.

What’s this?

It’s the side of the Louvre no one ever sees.

Here are a few shots of the better known facades, from our stroll through the cours (Carrée, Napoléon).

And the Institut de France from the Louvre.

Among Paris

One of the things I’ll remember most about my time in Paris is the people. Although difficult to describe, what I loved about this trip was the nearness – to the sights and sounds and smells of Paris, yes, but mostly to the people, and to the language. Not only is it not something I’m sure I can describe, it’s also not something I realized I missed.

I’ll never be an insider in France — not even if I lived there twenty years, I don’t think. It’s something not just about being foreign, but about being American. Even with my outsider status, though, I felt among Paris, among its people. It’s difficult not to; they live in the city, on it, all over it — on the sidewalks, in the cafés on every corner, in and around the magnificent parks and public spaces, walking, always talking, drinking espresso and eating a snack or resting for a moment in a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Tuileries, reading a magazine, taking a nap. I found a quote from Mark Twain, who wrote that Paris street life is “so frisky, so affable, so fearfully and wonderfully Frenchy! … Two hundred people sat at little tables on the sidewalk, sipping wine and coffee; the streets were thronged with light vehicles and joyous pleasure-seekers; there was music in the air, life and action all about us.”*

As an outsider it is easy to mingle with Parisians, because Parisians are everywhere. But I am likewise everywhere noticing them, which simultaneously puts me both intimately within and forever beyond their ordinary life.

in the Luxembourg Gardens

along the Bd. Saint-Germain

in the Jardin des Tuileries

*Jill Jonnes quotes Twain on p. 41 of her book, Eiffel’s Tower: the thrilling story behind Paris’s beloved monument and the extraordinary world’s fair that introduced it.