Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (30 page)

A friend of mine, widowed in his sixties, told me, ‘This is a crappy age for it to happen.’ Meaning, I think, that if the catastrophe had happened in his seventies, he could have settled in and waited for death; whereas if it had happened in his fifties, he might have been able to restart his life. But every age is a crappy age for it to happen, and there is no correct answer in that game of would-you-rather? How do you compare the grief of a young parent left with small children to that of an aged person amputated from his or her partner of fifty or sixty years? There is no hierarchy to grief, except in the matter of feeling. Another friend of mine, widowed in a moment after fifty years of marriage – the knot of travellers by a baggage carousel in the arrivals hall turned out to be surrounding her suddenly-dead husband – wrote to me: ‘Nature is very exact in the matter. It hurts just as much as it is worth.’

Joan Didion had been married to John Gregory Dunne for forty years when he died in mid-sentence while on his second pre-dinner whisky in December 2003. Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith had been together for ‘forty-seven years and twenty-five days’ when Smith, in hospital but apparently recovering well from pneumonia, was swept away by a secondary infection in February 2008. Both literary couples were intensely close yet non-competitive, often working in the same space and rarely apart: in the case of Didion–Dunne, for a ‘week or two or three here and there when one of us was doing a piece’; in the case of Oates–Smith, for never more than a day or two. Didion realised after Dunne’s death that ‘I had no letters from John, not one’ (she does not say if he had any from her); while Oates and Smith ‘had no
correspondence. Not once had we written to each other.’ The similarities continue: in each marriage the woman was the star; each of the dead husbands had been a lapsed Catholic; neither wife seems to have imagined in advance her transformation into widow; and each left her husband’s voice on the answering machine for some while after his death. Further, each survivor decided to chronicle her first year of widowhood, and each of their books was completed within those twelve months.

Yet Oates’s
A Widow’s Story
and Didion’s
The Year of Magical Thinking
couldn’t be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is ‘The question of self-pity’) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as ‘the widow’; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Crashaw and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.

That both Didion and Oates limit their books to the first year of their widowhoods is logical. Long-married couples develop a certain rhythm, gravity and coloration to the annual cycle, and so those first twelve months propose at every turn a terrible choice: between doing the same as last year, only this time by yourself, or deliberately not doing the same as last year, and thereby perhaps feeling even more by yourself. That first year contains many stations of the cross. Learning
to return to a silent, empty house. Learning to avoid what Oates calls ‘sinkholes’ – those ‘places fraught with visceral memory’. Learning how to balance necessary solitude and necessary gregariousness. Learning how to react to friends who are mystifyingly unable to mention the name of the lost partner; or colleagues who fail to find the right words, like the ‘Princeton acquaintance’ who greeted Oates ‘with an air of hearty reproach’, and the line, ‘Writing up a storm, eh, Joyce?’ Or like the woman friend who offers her the consolation that grief ‘is neurological. Eventually the neurons are “recircuited”. I would think that, if this is so, you could speed up the process by just
knowing
.’ The intention is kindly; the effect, patronising. Oh, so it’s just a question of waiting for one’s neurons to settle? Then there are practical problems: for instance, the garden your husband lovingly tended, but in which you are less interested; you may enjoy the results, but rarely joined him in visits to the garden centre. So do you faithfully replicate the same work, or do you unfaithfully let the garden look after itself? Here, Oates finds a wise third way: where Smith planted only annuals, she replants with nothing but perennials, asking the nurseryman for ‘Anything that requires a minimum of work and is guaranteed to survive’.

Which is the problem confronting the widow: how to survive that first year, how to turn into a perennial. This involves surmounting fears and anxieties for which there is no training. Previously, Oates rated as ‘the most exquisite of intimacies’ the ability to occupy the same space as Ray for hours, without the need to speak; now, there is a quite different order of silence. ‘What I am’, Oates writes, ‘begins to be revealed now that I am alone. In such revelation is terror.’ At one point she thinks ‘half-seriously of sending an email to friends’ asking if she might hire one of them ‘if you could overcome the scruples of friendship and allow me to pay you in some actual way – to keep me alive for a year, at least?’ She wants to be a ‘good widow’ and asserts that ‘I
will do what Ray would want me to do’, while also – classically – blaming Ray for having put her in this state; she is sleepless and irritable; she envisages her grief and insomnia lasting for a decade, while also doubting that her mourning is ‘real’. She muses on suicide, though more in a theoretical than practical way – while also knowing that ‘thinking seriously of suicide is a deterrent to suicide’. She finds that work comes much harder, noting of a new short story that it ‘will require literally weeks’ (a complaint that will make most other writers chuckle). And, like many of the grief-struck, she fears for her own mental state: ‘Half the time, I think I must be totally out of my mind.’ Oates excellently conveys the disconnect between the inwardly chaotic self and the outwardly functioning person (and she
is
functioning again with remarkable rapidity – correcting proofs and working on a story within a week of Smith’s death, back on the promotional road within three). She is certainly less in control than she seems to outsiders, but probably more in control than she feels to herself. The grief-struck frequently act in ways that could be seen as either half sane or half mad, but rarely give themselves the benefit of the doubt. For instance, the day after Ray’s death, Oates goes to their bedroom closet and throws out not her husband’s clothes, but half of
her own
clothes. She does it as punishment for her vanity, and because these garments speak of a time when she wore them happily with Ray – so now they have no meaning or merit. It is in such moments of rational irrationality that the nature of grief is made plain to us.

Most of the grief-struck suffer – especially in the first months – from a terror of forgetting their lost one. Often the shock of death wipes out the memory of earlier times, and there is a morbid fear that it will never be recovered: that the lost one will now be twice lost, twice killed. Joyce Carol Oates does not appear to have suffered this fear; instead, she suffers a rarer, more interesting and potentially more corrosive one
– that of never having fully known her husband in the first place. Oates and Smith married in January 1961, and her portrait of their first years together – the time when secrets are exchanged, concentration on the other is at its fullest, and the lineaments and rules of the partnership are worked out – is both vivid and touching. It is also a relationship coloured more by the 1950s than the 1960s. Oates was eight years younger than Smith; they were shy of one another, even in marriage; by her own account she never wanted to upset him, let alone argue with him. Thus, for example:

Fortunately, it seems that Smith was only in touch with the ‘macho-hectic’ side of masculinity when lowering a stylus onto vinyl. He comes across as quiet, loyal and domesticated; a cook, a keen gardener and a meticulous editor of the
Ontario Review
. He read most of his wife’s non-fiction but very little of her fiction. It is, of course, a famously large oeuvre (fifty-five novels plus hundreds of short stories); even so, the reader is brought up short when Oates writes: ‘I don’t believe that Ray read my first novel
With Shuddering Fall
.’ Which is the more astonishing: that he didn’t read it, that she isn’t sure whether or not he did, or that she expresses neither annoyance nor disappointment at his omission? But then her opinions on the relationship between the sexes are somewhat unusual:

This sounds like shyness raised to marital principle; and it brings with it the danger that when the wife becomes a widow and goes through her husband’s papers, she will find out things she barely suspected. In Ray Smith’s case: a nervous breakdown, a love affair at a sanitarium, a psychiatrist’s description of him as ‘love-starved’, and further evidence of a difficult, distant relationship with his father. ‘For all that I knew Ray so well,’ she concludes, ‘I didn’t know his
imagination
.’ Nor, perhaps, did he know hers, given that he rarely read her fiction. But he was ‘the first man in my life, the last man, the only man’.

In some ways, autobiographical accounts of grief are un-falsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria. The book is repetitive? So is grief. The book is obsessive? So is grief. The book is at times incoherent? So is grief. Phrases like ‘Friends have been wonderful inviting me to their homes’ are platitudes; but grief is filled with platitudes. The chapter headed ‘Fury!’ opens:

If a creative writing student turned this in as part of a story, the professor might reach for her red pencil; but if that same professor is writing a stream-of-consciousness diary about grief, the paragraph becomes strangely validated. This
is
how it feels, and what is grief at times but a car-crash of cliché? A few pages later, Oates is reflecting on the fact that she now has a private identity as ‘Joyce Smith’ or ‘Mrs Smith’, official widow, and a public identity under her full three-part writing name:

The image of a skiff and a water-crossing is dead and unrevivable, no matter how extended? It doesn’t matter. This sentence may be the first in world literature where the writer imagines you can row to an oasis? But you don’t understand: incoherence of imagery is a fair representation of the acutely distracted and fractured mind. You mean, she didn’t even notice when reading the proofs? Again, it doesn’t matter whether she did or didn’t. You asked for a sense of what it is like:
this
is what it is like.

Grief dislocates both space and time. The grief-struck find themselves in a new geography, where other people’s maps are only ever approximate. Time also ceases to be reliable. C. S. Lewis, in
A Grief Observed
, describes the effect on him of his wife’s death:

And this unreliability of time adds to the confusion in the sorrower’s mind as to whether grief is a state or a process. This is far from a theoretical matter. It is at the heart of the question: Will it always be like this? Will things get better? Why should they? And if so, how will I be able to tell? Lewis admits that when he started writing his book,