Extra Innings (31 page)

(Footnote on Committee on Committees: It reminds me of another foolishness that took place during a faculty meeting at the College of Saint Rose. After four fruitless hours of debate on some subject I can no longer remember, we took a vote on whether to take a vote. On
that
vote, one member of the faculty, famous for his timidity in the presence of the nuns, voted to abstain.)

All the things I most disliked about academic meetings in the old days were present at this one: the fraudulent surface of civility, the undercurrent of prearranged and determined agendas, the rude disregard of a woman chairman by male members of the executive committee accustomed to dominating every occasion of their privileged lives, their loud (or contrivedly too-soft) and always obtrusive voices carrying every question and insisting on every answer. My humiture was intense. I came away feeling sick, tired, discouraged, and angry at myself for spending four days of my diminishing supply of time in this absurd way.

On the plane I decided to resign.

But there was one saving grace to the trip. I learned that Alice Walker would be at a midtown store signing books. I left the offices of PBK, heated almost to exploding, and calmed down, cooled down, when she and I had a short, warm reunion. She is an old acquaintance from MacDowell days. I have always admired her talent and her person. A long line of admirers buying her new book and waiting for her to sign it stretched out the door of Vertigo, a bookstore devoted in large part to black writers.

The queue was composed of black and white readers, a good sign that the best black writers have a mixed following, as it should be. Soon there will be no need for separate courses in black fiction. I noticed, last Sunday, that three black women are on the
Times
best-seller list: Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

May Sarton comes for a short, overnight visit, with her friend Susan Sherman. Susan is young (by our standards), energetic, and devoted to May. May tells me she has been feeling better since the Westbrook College gathering to which more than three hundred persons came to read papers about her work and hear her read her own new poems written for her eightieth birthday.

But the days she was here she was not well. She was constantly in bad pain (she told me later in a letter), and yet her determined spirit made her hide it from us. She talked of her delight in the recognition (‘at last,' she said) by the academic community, and of her new journal, which had to be spoken into a dictaphone because she was not up to long spells of writing by hand or typewriter. It is to be called
Encore
, and will appear for her eighty-first birthday, another achievement by a gallant writer whose job, she has always believed, is to write,
quand même
.

I thought of Henry James. In the midst of writing
What Maisie Knew
he developed a rheumatic right wrist. He abandoned writing his novels and letters by hand and began to dictate them to a typist. When he saw his typed letters he said they suffered from ‘a fierce legibility.' He grew fond of the sound of the typewriter, and said his prose came to the page ‘through an embroidered veil of sound.' The odd thing was, the longer he dictated the more complex grew his writing.

I would have thought that the opposite would be true, that speaking one's prose would make it simpler, less prolix, more unadorned. The highly wrought result of his dictation came to be known to critics as James's ‘later style.' His biographer, Leon Edel, describes James's ‘indirections and qualifications, the rhythms and ultimate perfection of his verbal music … his use of colloquialisms and in a more extravagant play of fancy, a greater indulgence in elaborate and figured metaphors, and in great proliferating similes' brought about by dictation.

All that, from the almost public act of speaking to a typist rather than the customary elaborations that result from the privacy of the pen to paper.

The mail brings a copy of the May Sarton
Festschrift
, a well-printed volume of tributes to her octogenarian year from her professional friends and acquaintances. Most of them are genuinely admiring paragraphs common to such tributary books. But Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers and now eighty-six years old, defies the genre by contributing an amusing line. One of the things she likes about being old, she writes:

‘We have outlived our opposition.'

The observation reminds me of George Burns's remark that he liked living into his nineties because ‘I don't have to worry about peer pressure.'

By mere chance I pull from a shelf a collection of Diane Trilling's book reviews, written for
The Nation
in the forties. I had been thinking of gathering together some of my short reviews from the ‘Fine Print' column of
The New Republic
and
Saturday Review
(twenty years ago) and combining them with comments written today. Do I still think highly of this book? Did I overpraise it? Did I neglect other good books of that time to give it space? But after reading Diana Trilling's trenchant short reviews of fiction, I have serious second thoughts about my own. No one since her time has been able to make an art of this difficult form.

Her talent was to recognize so well the paucity of ideas, the failures of thought, the pretentiousness of books that others were taken in by, and to encapsulate her comments in a few effective words. Here is what she wrote about Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead:

[It] is a 754-page orgy of glorification of that sternest of arts, architecture. What Ruth McKenney's Jake Home [in a novel by the same name] is to the proletarian movement, Ayn Rand's Howard Roark is to public and domestic buildings—a giant among men, ten feet tall and with flaming hair, Genius on a scale that makes the good old Broadway version of art-in-a-beret look like Fra Angelico. And surrounding Howard Roark there is a whole galaxy of lesser monsters—Gail Wynand who is Power, and Peter Keating who is Success, and Dominique who is Woman. When Genius meets Woman, it isn't the earth that rocks but steel girders. Surely
The Fountainhead
is the curiosity of the year, and anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper-rationing.

This is the entire review. In four sentences she has summarized the plot, accurately suggested the tone, stated the theme, and made a judgment so sharp, so intelligent, and, as it turns out, so prescient that it deserves to last as a piece of inspired criticism long after that now-cultic, empty volume has gone back to well-deserved dust. Some months later she referred, in a phrase, to the ‘operatic excesses' of Ayn Rand's novel.

On the other hand, her praise for the three short, elegant novels of Isabel Bolton (Mary Britten Miller), who wrote her fiction after she was sixty years old, should have raised that now entirely forgotten novelist to serious and permanent notice. She said Bolton was ‘the best woman writer of fiction in this country today,' and her novel,
Do I Wake or Sleep
, ‘quite the best novel that has come my way in the four years I have been reviewing new fiction for this magazine.'

If Diana Trilling convinced no one else with this extraordinary praise she moved me to find Isabel Bolton's books, to read them, and then, in the 1982
Writer's Choice
, to recommend them, along with Edmund Wilson and Babette Deutsch, once again, to readers. Now, ten years later, no one, so far as I know, has made a move to reprint the novels. It is hard to see how it is possible for such distinguished work to fall into total oblivion.

Rarely does the
New York Times
manage to print two stories that, running consecutively, make an interesting point about society's contrasts. This morning, in its ‘Chronicle' column, I read first about the star Madonna, who arrived in a tinted-window limousine in front of a restaurant and boutique, Serendipity, on East 60th Street in New York City. The window of the store was full of baseball paraphernalia. Madonna's companion got out and told the owner that ‘someone in the car wanted everything in the window.' Everything was duly removed and gift-wrapped: T-shirts, sequined baseball caps, bats.

Then the lady wanted food to be served in her car. After some protest by the owner that he did not provide curb- or carry-out service, Madonna rolled down the window. Overwhelmed by the identity of his customer, the owner promptly brought out what she wanted: foot-long hot dogs with chili and frozen hot chocolate (surely this must be the ultimate food oxymoron).

The second story in the column: Clara McBride Hale, known as Mother Hale and founder of Hale House, the group home for babies born addicted to drugs and alcohol and recently those born HIV-positive, is eighty-seven years old. She has had a series of strokes, and recently fell and broke her collarbone. Still, she visits her beloved little patients every day and is sad because she cannot pick them up ‘for fear of dropping one.' But her daughter, who runs Hale House, brings her a seven-week-old baby to hold. He nestles in bed with her and she talks to him: ‘I tell him about my past—he is the only one who will listen to me anymore—and about his future.'

Blond Madonna has gift-wrapped baseball bats and frozen hot chocolate brought to her parked limousine. Black Mother Hale has a sick baby brought to her bed to comfort, not gift-wrapped. Two small but significant portraits of the closing years of this century.

At the height of the summer some of the bookstore's customers are tourists who have visited it before. I am in the store one day when a lady asks me:

‘What are you doing now?'

‘I'm working on a book.'

‘Oh, really. I thought you were doing that
last
year.'

This is said to be one of the coldest summer seasons on record. No humid days, and the average temperature, taking the cold nights into account, is about sixty. Only our guests have used our boats: we have not been on or in the water. In August there are still yellow flowers on the vestigial tomato plants and a few tiny green tomatoes. The blackberry bushes seem to have frozen before the fruit matured. We wear sweaters in the early afternoon. We hear rumors of a possible August frost. Sybil wants to know what has become of global warming.

Yesterday we saw, at a distance, what we think were geese flying south. To date there have been three hot days. They may constitute the summer.

A student writer asks me to tell him ‘how I write.' I take it this means ‘With a pen? a pencil? a computer?' I answer him. But I would like to have found the courage to tell him the story of the would-be composer who asked Mozart how to compose a symphony. Mozart told him that a symphony was a complex and demanding musical form and that he had better start with something simpler.

The young man: ‘But you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.'

Mozart: ‘I didn't have to ask how.'

Sybil is reading Terry McMillan's new novel,
Disappearing Acts
, and I am finishing Alice Walker's
Possessing the Secret of Joy
. We talk about this and decide we chose to read these books because we miss the sight of black faces around us. We live among an unvaryingly white homogeneity. The two novels give us pleasure because, for the time being, we can move into the worlds of persons of color.

At the same time I am reviewing a novel by Susan Straight,
I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
. Written by a young white woman, it is a remarkable and welcome immersion in the life of a black community, and has a memorable South Carolina Gullah-speaking heroine.

A MEDITATION ON HOME

SEPTEMBER 15, 1992

Now, as this year of a book (the one I am writing, the one I have written) is ending, I have been thinking about what it means to be home, to have learned that the place where I am
is
home. Finding it is pure good fortune. Being lucky enough to procure it, settle into it, and the prospect of remaining there for what one hopes may be the rest of one's life: that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

This spring Marlene Dietrich died in France, where she had lived for many years. According to her wishes, she was buried in Germany, her native country, where she felt she could not return to live after the Nazi regime. But still, it was to be her final home, to which her aged body and extraordinary reputation was returned, at the end.

For some writers—William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, John Edgar Wideman, William Kennedy, Eudora Welty, Wendell Berry, others—home, the place of their birth, becomes their invariable subject matter. They leave it rarely in their fiction, traveling widely in their native places. Their characters are born there. There, those parochial inventions live out their lives. For such writers, home fires their imaginations and moves their pens.

In Sanskrit,
ksemas
means safe dwelling and is the word for home. The verb
ksi
means to dwell secure. Home and safety are part of the same concept. For some childhoods, I suppose, this is true. Some of us have felt safe at home, and unsure, threatened, when we were removed from that secure place. It has been said: Home is where you hang your childhood and later, your hat. For some this will always be true. For others, the home of childhood is a place to escape from, to put behind them, to remove from their memory, even to deny the existence of. For some writers, like Katherine Anne Porter, home is a place so unsatisfactory you have to reinvent it.

The word is the subject of numerous aphorisms. T. S. Eliot's home is where one starts from. The best country is at home. Thomas Wolfe's title, you can't go home again. Huck's no home like a raft. Robert Frost's home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Oliver Wendell Holmes thought that where we love is home. The question we have framed and written in calligraphy in the entry to our house is: If I follow you home, will you keep me?

Homelessness is the great social disaster of our time. The homeless are the politically exiled. Those who leave for a better place, only to find they are unwelcome there. Those sent to gulags or concentration camps. The exiled, dwellers on street corners and grates, park benches and in doorways. People dispossessed by earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, volcanos, avalanches, wars. Refugees. Immigrants. Boat people.