Twice Born, page 16
Thirteen
How to Read and Write
“Sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, Mark Twain was an entirely deliberate and conscious craftsman; he insisted that the difference between the nearly right word and the right word was the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning; his ear for the rhythms of speech was unsurpassed, and he demanded in dialect and social notation nothing short of perfection. But his larger and structural methods were inspirational and intuitive.”
When the movie Love Story came out in 1970, my father and I went to see it one January afternoon at the Fresh Pond Cinema. We had watched parts of it being filmed in Harvard Yard, and many of the locations were thrillingly familiar to me; Oxford Street, where the doomed lovers lived, was just around the corner from our house. Every seat in the theater was filled, and I was attuned to the humid, weepy air and the growing distress of the audience over the fate of Jenny and Oliver. Next to me, my father ate popcorn and giggled. When it was over, people stayed in their seats to dab their eyes and collect themselves before the lights came fully on, while my father and I marched up the aisle before anyone else, smug and coolly unmoved by what we’d just seen.
My pose of imperviousness to the movie’s high drama clearly meant I had powers of discernment and taste, like my father, and unlike the rest of the audience. It meant I could recognize schlock in an instant and would be immune to manipulation when Jenny, tear-streaked, red-nosed, and shivering on her sagging front steps, says to Oliver, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
“Really, is that not one of the dumbest lines ever written?” my father asked, when we stepped out into the gray afternoon.
(Years later, as general editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, my father, recognizing the line’s cultural weight, included it in the latest edition, to sit among such greats as “It ain’t over till it’s over” (Yogi Berra) and “At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father” (Sigmund Freud) and “To love, cherish, and to obey” (The Book of Common Prayer). When Terry Gross of Fresh Air asked him about the inclusion of the Love Story line, my father said, “It’s so stupid and so meaningless that again it became burned in the American memory.”)
As we drove home from the movie, we wondered if the line even made sense. Didn’t love, in fact, mean you had to say you were sorry? In our family, apology had oversize importance—by offering it, all was set right again supposedly—but with little lasting meaning. My father and I talked about the irony of Oliver’s icy WASP father who arrives too late to be of any use to anyone, blinking under the awning that reads MT. SINAI HOSPITAL AND KLINGENSTEIN PAVILION. I was always on the lookout for a Jewish name, and here were two in an unlikely moment. The cultural clues were leaden, we agreed, or were they just careless? (At eleven, what could I have possibly understood about this?)
We laughed over Jenny’s impassioned speech in the hospital—“Screw Paris, screw music and all those things you think you stole from me”—but I was eager to hear, what did a person say on her deathbed? I had imagined that my father actually knew the answer to this, twice over. It had begun to sleet, and the wipers slapped to keep up. Tell me, I thought, and I’ll never ask you again. Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, the wipers warned. I thought he would shatter if I asked, so I didn’t. The physical sensation of being unable to ask him those questions is still with me, my own esprit d’escalier, and when I began to write fiction, this feeling of having missed my chance was a reminder to me to make my characters do and say all those things I wasn’t brave enough to do or say myself.
Later that summer, months after we’d seen the movie, I met—as much as a child can meet any adult—Erich Segal, author of Love Story, at a cocktail party at the Wellfleet summer home of a Harvard professor. My sisters and I had been unhappily dragged along by my parents, and my presence was so fully inconsequential that I see myself as someone other than me in order to see myself there at all: a goofy-looking girl in glasses, in boy’s jean cutoffs and a Dennis the Menace–style striped T-shirt. Insecurity is written all over me and the way I cross my arms over my chest and won’t make eye contact. What was I doing there inside, the only child, when my sisters were waiting outside? Everyone in the room was successful, it seemed to me, their names preceded by best-selling author, artist, architect, actor, award-winning journalist. The air shimmered with self-importance. That summer, I’d been occupied by a pernicious and worrisome question: If you died unknown, did that mean you’d led a meaningless life? It was starting to seem more and more likely that this was true—and would be true for me.
I watched Segal, the guest-of-honor writer whose posture was receptive to the guests’ attention, almost liquid in his comfort, one elbow propped on a bookcase. Out the window, I saw my sisters sitting on a low wall next to where the dusty old cars were haphazardly parked. There would be a dented bumper or sideswipe before the evening was over; everyone would have had too much to drink, and they would wave away the dings and dents, attesting to how little they cared about material things. My sisters didn’t share my need to be close to the action. I envied what looked like their ease and their lack of preoccupation with themselves, and at the same time hoped some of the noise and light of the party might enter my bloodstream. I was a young masochist, too easily swayed by my mother’s assurances that this kind of thing was good for me if I was going to be a writer. (But I never said I wanted to be a writer, I told her.) My parents were at their very charming social best with the guest of honor—warm, enthusiastic, jokey—my mother in the same long linen dress half the other women were wearing too, topped off with an enameled peace sign on a leather string, my father in a collared shirt and bare feet. Segal said something and my father looked down, noting the melting ice in his glass, ready to leave. He didn’t like being there any more than I did, while my mother laughed, showing the room the underside of her chin.
When I looked again at the writer, I heard the echo of my father saying, Really, is that not one of the dumbest lines ever written?
After the party, the drive took us back through the dimming, single-file dirt roads of the exclusive and private Wellfleet woods. Hand-painted signs at each fork, illuminated by the headlights, announced familiar names and false dead ends, a ploy to keep outsiders out. As my father put the car into reverse to let another car pass, he swore, flustered and swatting at mosquitoes. He hadn’t wanted to go to that fucking party in the first place, with all its smug and self-satisfied guests and its airlessness. What would have been wrong with staying home, having a drink, watching the sun set, and reading a book? My mother, still high from the party fumes, twisted the cord of her necklace.
In his distress, my father had somehow taken a wrong turn, and now we were lost, the silky kettle ponds barely glinting between the scrub pines at that hour. My sisters and I hung over the front seat, collecting our weapons of ridicule, but we knew not to say a word at that moment. Getting lost was a fear of my father’s that spoke to failure, to urgency, and maybe to never being found. (I thought at that moment about the writer who had lived in these woods and died in his house alone. When he was finally found, it was discovered that his dogs, crazed with hunger after weeks, had been nibbling at his corpse.)
The road’s shoulders were dangerously fragile, and sand pinged the car as the tires spun. “If your car was stuck in the soft sand, you were not likely to be rescued (except, in extremity, by the Mobil station’s tow truck),” my father wrote about these Wellfleet woods in an article for Harper’s Magazine in 2011. “Seeing you trying to dig your car out of a treacherous shoulder after it had spun its wheels and sunk even deeper, residents in a passing car might slow down just long enough to remind you to put the sand back where you found it.”
Finally, out of the woods, and out again on Route 6, the mood in the car relaxed and my parents began the party’s postmortem. Writers who made it big by writing what my parents called junk (sometimes synonymous with best-sellers) were obvious targets and Segal was not an exception. He had taught classics at Yale at one point, but now apparently his bellbottom white pants were their own kind of downwind pretension. And all those starstruck guests and their fawning. And what a dopey book! But I was confused. Look how well Segal had done, money, a movie, lots of attention. Was this maybe just envy? When they talked about others, how could my parents remove themselves from the crowd if they were also part of it?
When we stopped at a light, I saw people, some still in bathing suits with soggy towels at their waists, waiting to buy fried clams and soft serve at PJ’s. Their pleasures seemed uncomplicated, their only goals divided under the neon-lit awnings into sweet or salty. The world was full of the extraordinary and the ordinary—though which was which that night, I wasn’t sure then and still am not today—and the passage between the two appeared as mazelike as those roads in the woods and as dangerous as Route 6 with its sun-addled drivers.
On the evening after we’d gone to see Love Story, as my sisters and I ate dinner and my parents had their cocktails, my father disappeared into his study and returned with a book to read to us, as he often did.
“Listen to this,” he said.
If he noticed our eyes rolling, he ignored it. Like Twain, he “read poetry aloud to the ladies.” (Like Twain, he was also “a writer surrounded by women and seeking their approval.”) My mother shushed us, though we were already silent, the kitchen stage prepared for him. He cleared his throat, blushed, never comfortable being the center of attention, even at home, even with just us.
From all the rest I single out you, having a message for you:
You are to die—Let others tell you what they please, I cannot
prevaricate,
I am exact and merciless, but I love you—There is no escape for
you. Softly I lay my right hand upon you—you just feel it,
I do not argue—I bend my head close, and half envelope it,
I sit quietly by—I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself, spiritual, bodily—that is
eternal—
You yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions!
Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence—you smile!
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines—you do not mind the weeping
friends—I am with you,
I exclude others from you—there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate—I congratulate you.
What spurred him to read Whitman’s “To One Shortly to Die” on this particular night he didn’t say, but Whitman was always on his mind those days, even as he was working on a new biography of Lincoln Steffens. (Whitman and I share a birthday. We could have blown out the candles on the cake together.) He lived and breathed Whitman and the “unlovely city of Camden,” Leaves of Grass, burial grounds, and daguerreotypes. For now, though, in the kitchen, my father looked transported by what he’d just read to us and hopeful that we might find it as extraordinary as he did. His eyes were bright, but he’d missed the mark. Whitman wasn’t our world, and poetry was not our language, and we were silent. My sisters had more patience than I did for the awkward moment and less interest in stemming the disappointment creeping over his face. Susanna reached for the sports section of the paper. Polly fed the dog under the table, and I rushed in to ease my father’s hurt.
“What does excrementitious mean?” I asked, already pretty sure I knew what it meant.
“Look it up,” my father said, dejected. (The dictionary, of which there were many within easy reach throughout the house, was a sacred book, and looking up a word was a sacred act accompanied by the suggestion that we might even learn something in the process.) He went back to his study, where I imagined he returned the book to his desk and gave it a commiserating pat.
“You girls are terrible,” my mother said. “So mean.”
I guiltily cleared my plate. I knew that my father was showing us—maybe even showing me alone—something important about writing: what was good and what wasn’t, what was real and what was recycled hot air, but I couldn’t make sense of it. He’d been touched by Whitman’s words but not Love Story’s? What was the difference between him moved in the kitchen and those weepers in the movie theater who had been moved too by the bedside scene? What was the difference between what he’d read us and what they’d heard? My father was showing us that the real culprit was writing that took itself too seriously, claimed unearned gravitas and peddled wholesale shams and “pretentious falsities.” But how was one to tell the truth of experience from the lie if the truth was never talked about? My father could have told us what witnessing the end was like, put it in his own words instead of Whitman’s, or even Segal’s, but he didn’t.
Later in bed, the sleet having turned to heavy snow and the likelihood of a day off from school, I fought the urge to feel what the movie had tempted me with: “Would you do something for me?” Jenny had asked Oliver with her last breath. “Would you please hold me?” Ryan O’Neal was very handsome; it wouldn’t be terrible to be held by him.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions! Strong thoughts fill you, and confidence—you smile!
What would it have been like to have given in to weepiness in the theater or even then in my room alone, dampening my pillow where no one could see, and shed an increasingly suffocating self-consciousness that was my own sham, my own pretentious falsity? To be moved openly by the peddled sentiment seemed dangerous, a gateway drug to ordinariness. I wanted to give in, but I didn’t, and I still don’t, although today, deep into writing this story of my father, I feel myself finally inching toward an understanding that it wasn’t ordinariness I feared, but a depth of feeling I thought might swallow me up.
Maybe for my father, this public hardening—if I see it as a calcification of the heart today, I can be softer with him—had always been a matter of survival. I see him at thirteen in Riverside Park during the mourning period for his father. The Hudson River is in front of him, the city at his back, no mother or father at home anymore to open the door for him when he returns, to call hello from the other room, to use a finger to wipe a crumb from his chin. The sap of mourning rises in him. His fingers twitch, and a fluttering fills his chest. How long will he be alone? He knows he might drown if he takes his eyes off the boat going north, if he feels anything more than pure wonder at the way its prow parts the water.
As a child, my father kept lists of newly discovered words and their definitions in private notebooks. He must have sensed their value already, even if he didn’t know what he would do with them. One day he’d uttered the word hell in seventh grade just to see what power it might have: it got him sent home. He didn’t see anything wrong with the much-maligned opening, “It was a dark and stormy night.” After all, he claimed, it said exactly what it meant.
He was thrilled by a good malapropism and appreciated the beauty of a mangled sentence, but the real assault was sloppiness and imprecision. In his short and uneasy stint teaching in an MFA creative writing program in his seventies, his earlier teaching days at Harvard forgotten, he had called to tell me about a student’s misspelling of T-shirt (or is it tee-shirt or tee shirt?) He bounced between disbelief and dismay, a reaction so overblown that I laughed and said not every writer was as fastidious as he was. After all, I asked, did it really matter that much?
“Getting it right is the only thing that matters,” he said.
“In writing about Mark Twain, you are going to writing school with a very great writer. You’re constantly learning prose from a master. You wish you could do it over again, better,” he told an interviewer. Still, he was not above calling out Twain when he fell short: “The contrasts he used” to describe the ruins of Baalbek, “came too glibly, a mechanical formula for disposing of the past: the blocks were as big as omnibuses or freight cars or streetcars, with none smaller than a carpenter’s chest and some larger than the hull of a steamboat.” I read his prose as carefully as he reads Twain’s, and I am struck by Joe’s use of disposing, instead of considering or even viewing, a word that suggests a too-efficient finality.
As an adult, he still kept lists of words and phrases, thrilled by those he didn’t know, or whose sounds delighted his ears:
Strange attractor
The Great Rann of Kutch
Bluefin—horse mackerel—tuna—thunfish—tunny—thunnus
Scombroid
Salp
Tomography—X-ray plane sections
Copula
Scruff
Scumble
Coppice
Gallybagger
Collop
Sternutatory
Favonian
Hebephrenia
Imbricated
Peplus, etc.
Walking the dog by the Harvard Divinity School one afternoon, he asked me if I knew the difference between coprophage and coprophilia. Take the words apart, he’d instructed. Words were puzzles and treasure chests, capable of making you feel and see. He adored the languages of lives unfamiliar to him; acronyms and expressions of the US Marine Corps, the police, evangelical preachers, small-time bureaucrats, wise-guys, butchers, car repairmen, New Age practitioners, stuffy academics. A medical lexicon was a feast: axillary; exsanguinate; popliteal, Wenckebach, vestibular, coccyx, atresia. He thumbed through the Merck Manual for the names of rare afflictions that he would rattle off when we played Ping-Pong.
