Extra Innings

Extra Innings

A Memoir

Doris Grumbach

As it was, is now, and (let
us hope) ever shall be:
For SHP

September

I am ready to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter
.

—
Winston Churchill,
on his seventy-fifth birthday

Proem

At seventy, I wrote a book about how I felt coming into old age, about the unaccountable yet very real despair that accompanied entering my septennial years. Now I am approaching seventy-five. I think it a good time (for my own sake) that I review my life since those intensely despondent days, to see if the customary acceptance has set in, if my view of the world, of my smaller world, and of the world buried within myself, has changed, for better or for worse. Has my gloom lifted? Or has there been some unavoidable intensification of it?

I have chosen to follow the same journal-jotting procedure I used four years ago. Perhaps, in the process of writing, I may come upon some answers to the insistent questions of old age. Or perhaps I will only succeed in recording, month by month, the minor thoughts and activities in the life of an aging woman. It may be that a commonplace record of insignificant exterior doings and interior musings
are
my only possible response to the great philosophical questions. What is it that drives us to examine matters of cosmic significance—birth, faith, suffering, injustice, dying, and death—but the intrusion into our daily lives of niggling irritations and petty trifles.

September 15, 1991: A frightening day, when a book one has written comes out, when details about my life and reflections, always before hidden and personal, unexamined by anyone except for me in all these years, are made public.
Coming into the End Zone
, a memoir, is published today. There is no announcement, no conspicuous coming-out party, no acknowledgment from anyone that this is the day the shrink wrap of privacy is torn away, the protective cocoon bursts, and out comes what one hopes is a butterfly, not a worm.

Today my wicked imagination is at work. I have a vision of hopeful, eager booksellers, before their stores open in midmorning, rushing to fill their shelf space with my freshly minted volume, newspaper book editors making last-minute corrections on reviews to appear next day or, at least, next Sunday, the publishing-house personnel standing on tiptoe (editors and publicists alike) anticipating the rush for praise that can be quoted and books to be sold to ensure the return of their investment.

But, of course, none of this happens. The fragile butterfly is ‘out,' that is about all. It is making its precarious way to God knows where or to whom or into what unpredictable climate of faint praise or harsh critical notice. In this same week (to change the metaphor to a more contemporary one), my small VW Bug of a book will travel down a six-lane superhighway surrounded, front and back and on two sides, by huge semi-trailers: a 1,328-page novel by Norman Mailer (
Harlot's Ghost
); a 690-page tome,
Needful Things
, by Stephen King; the sequel to
Gone with the Wind
, called, starkly,
Scarlett
, and Anne Tyler's new novel, not itself of mammoth size but in a gargantuan 150,000-copy printing.

And, bearing down hard on me, as a result of twenty-six years of writing and rewriting, of fanfare, publicity, praise, and wonderment before the fact of publication, is
The Runaway Soul
, Harold Brodkey's huge novel, 835 pages. Its press release claims that the literate public has been waiting two and a half decades for this book, which, it has also been said by two most reputable critics, Harold Bloom and Denis Donoghue, will establish Brodkey as the greatest writer of this century.

On the other hand, few people besides me are waiting for mine, and I fear it will establish me only as a somewhat cranky elderly person airing her fears, loves, regrets, dislikes, wan hopes, and unaccountable memories.

So there it goes, my all-of-256-page subcompact car, almost a miniature, traveling very cautiously in the slow lane. Its survival out there is perilous. It is outsized, outdistanced, outnumbered, overshadowed in every possible way. Now I require a third simile to explain my feelings: I am like a featherweight fighter sent into the ring to do battle with, let us say (to properly reflect my age and time), Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, the great pugilist of my youth.

We live in an era of the fictional blockbuster, a word that is relatively new in the language. I first heard it about 1940 when it referred to the unscrupulous real estate operator who frightens people into selling their property cheap by threatening racial infiltration into neighborhoods, thus ‘busting the block.' And my editor Gerry Howard informs me that during World War II, it referred to bombs so powerful they could level a city block.

Now it is applied to large books, as heavy as millstones, as solid as seawalls, as long as tapeworms, which are printed in great numbers because their publishers anticipate that they will be very popular and their sales will be prodigious.

Clearly, a large American audience finds them desirable. They are eminently readable, utterly absorbing. I think it was François Mauriac who observed readers' affection for the long book they could ‘live in.' Someone else described them as wraparound books.

But I have no affection for long books. I am not affected by their appeal. If a novel is indeed, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘a cry for help,' or as Franz Kafka thought, ‘an ax to the frozen sea around us,' then long books are drawn-out spells of uncontrollable weeping. The definitive force of the sharp ax breaking the fictional ice in one stroke may not be contained within the dogged results of Brodkey's twenty-six-year-long chopping.

From my shelf I take down the Library of America's collection of Edgar Allan Poe's essays and turn to what I seem to remember he thought about the successful short story or poem. Ah yes, here it is. In ‘The Philosophy of Composition,' Poe writes: “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of expression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.”

Of course I recognize that this research of mine is an
apologia
, intended to explain to myself, to justify, the short, narrow, dwarfish nature of most of the books I choose to read these days, and all the books I have written. Or it may be that today I look up Poe on the subject because I am hoping to garner some notice for my new book, my pygmy among giants, on the virtue of its brevity. Well no, let me be honest: what I hope for is
good
notice in major places like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
. Even if
End Zone
is thinner and shorter than its fellow travelers.

After three days of dailiness on the Cove—the return of the eider ducks' extended family for one last bout of fishing on the mud flats, the slight edging of yellow and brown that has begun to show on the maples (so
soon
? I am dismayed by the abbreviated summer up here in coastal Maine), the disappearance from their usual mooring places of two small sailboats—I settle down to accept the permanent existence of the book out there in the world. I find it hard to believe in, since the only reality to me was its presence in my notebook, on the pad on my clipboard, and then among the incomprehensible bytes of the computer. In the new life, gone from me, it calls to mind the story of the American who went to Ireland, and asked an Irishman there:

‘Do you believe in leprechauns?'

‘No,' replied the Irishman. ‘But … they're out there.'

Having a book is somewhat like having a baby, as many women writers have observed before me: the conception, the long preparation, the wait, the growing heaviness (not of the body in this case but of the spirit and the manuscript) toward the end, the initial delight at the sight of the product, fully formed and seemingly perfect, and then the usual postpartum depression. What will people whose opinion I care about, and those whose views I don't value but have weight in the world of readers,
think
of it?

I remember that my second daughter's birth was facilitated by the use of forceps that left her cheeks badly marked for weeks. To make matters worse, she was born with crossed eyes. Her head was bald, shaped rather like a cobblestone. When visitors asked to see the newborn I would say that the little one was sleeping or being bathed by her father, or
something
, anything, not to have to display her. (True, she grew up to be a good-looking woman, but there was no way of knowing that would happen from the evidence at first.)

Now I have that same initial feeling. Looking through the first copy of
End Zone
sent to me, I imagine I can spot flaws, weak sentences, incompletely developed thoughts, omissions, all the undeveloped inclusions that critics (persons whom John Seelye, in his book about a modern, alternate Huck, calls “the crickets”) will surely seize upon.
I
would, if I were sent it for review. Depression has set in. I have no way of making changes—or hiding the baby from the crickets. Irrevocably, it's out there.

Writing one memoir, and then taking these notes for another, I am struck by the dubiousness of the whole enterprise of autobiography. The words ‘truth' and ‘fact' keep insinuating themselves into every entry I make and into the reviews that have begun to arrive from Gerry Howard. The more I think about what I have written, and about what I am writing now, the clearer becomes what Blanche Boyd once wrote, I think, about Norman Mailer: “Everything is altered by the observer.” At the moment of retrieval, in the process of recall, the initial, observer-limited memory is there, incomplete and biased as it was when first it was stored in the mind. Then it is embroidered and encrusted over time (I think of the Ladies of Llangollen's eighteenth-century house in Wales that was replaced in the next century with Tudor brown wood and “improved,” thus changing the original cottage forever) until it is like a barnacle-covered shell, with little of the original shape to be seen.

Then I write about it, giving the memory a literary shape. I leave out what no longer pleases my view of myself. I embellish with euphony and decorate the prose with some color. I subordinate, giving less importance to some matters, raising others to the weight of coordination. I modify. During this literary activity that surrounds the ‘germ' of fact, as Henry James called it, I am moving into, well,
style
, and away from, well, let's face it, truth. But I persist, driven by the need to record in readable form what I think about and remember, however unreliable.

La Rochefoucauld (
Maxims
): ‘We work so consistently to disguise ourselves that we end by being disguised to ourselves.'

This morning I get my two-days-old Sunday
New York Times
in the mail. When first we moved to Maine three years ago, and it was clear that the nearest available
New York Times
, which I was persuaded I could not live without, would require a forty-four-mile drive each morning, I decided to subscribe by mail. At first it came the next day, but now, more often than not, the postal service delays it another day. I have begun to think that ‘postal service' is a perfect oxymoron.

Strange, but now I am hardly aware of the paper's tardiness. Nor do I care. It does not matter to me on which day this week Will Crutchfield wrote about an odd relation of the soprano to her voice. He quotes Maria Malibran, the soprano, who used to tell her own voice: ‘It is I who will give the orders, and you who will obey.' Crutchfield remarks that ‘the voice seems a separate entity to the singer, a different person, even at times, a stranger or an enemy.'

Now I see that it is in the Sunday paper I am reading on Tuesday. I think about Crutchfield's remarks and find them intriguing because it is the same way with writers. They often regard their fingers and the keyboard of the typewriter or computer on which they work, or the pen they hold, as instruments separate from themselves, taking orders from the disguised self, and demanding to be supplied with words even when that secret self has nothing to say.