Death = Love

Pierre Bonnard, The Breakfast Room, 1930-31.

A long time ago, back when the only thing that mattered was whether or not I might be able to persuade him to love me, M. showed me a book of essays by the New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling. The introduction to the collection was by the mid-twentieth-century novelist James Salter, and M. said that he found Salter's writing so pretentious and gratuitous that he had cut the pages out of the book with a razor (which was, now that I recall it, very much an M. thing to do).

I found a Salter novel, Light Years, being thrown away by the library a few years ago, and, though I remembered M.'s caveat, I picked it out of the discard box because it had on its cover my favorite painting of all time, Pierre Bonnard's The Breakfast Room, which hangs at the Museum of Modern Art. I've always loved this painting, and when I was a very young woman and could get into the MoMA for free with my student i.d., I used to visit it frequently. Bonnard, an artist who contended with his fair share of suffering, has nevertheless painted an image of a world in which all is well: there is breakfast, with a loaf and a teapot, on the table; there is the window open to the park, and the buttery light of morning falling on the clean white tablecloth. Bonnard's world seems suffused with goodness, a place in which, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote, "Somebody loves us all." The only note of darkness in this abundant canvas is the figure of a woman half-hidden in the shadows on the left, her eyes downcast, holding a cup in one hand while the other hangs listlessly at her side.

So I read the book I had fished out of the bin. I found it so disturbing that, while I didn't take a razor to it, I threw it away when I was done. On a recent trip back to New York City, however, I was seized with the desire to read it again. The Kindle book was four dollars on Amazon, so I downloaded it for the journey home and tried again. I'm almost done with this second go-round, and I see the book in a different light now. It's less disturbing to me now than it is mildly bewildering, and, while at first reading I found the preciousness of Salter's prose maddening, I now see much of value in it.

Salter's style is both glorious and risible, lapidary and sophomoric at the same time. Light Years reads as if it were written by a man grown wise through longsuffering, detached from the passions of everyday life, able to see things in the luminous light of their true meaning, who's decided to collaborate with a precocious teenager whose primary literary output is confiding in her diary. It's hard to even tell what the book is about: is it about a marriage? Is it about a family? Is it about failure? Or is it about the surfaces of things, the way things look, the beauty of everyday things that can never really be penetrated or grasped? Salter's prose seduces and baffles at once.

He writes in the voice of a distant narrator who nevertheless seems to be intimately familiar with the interior lives of his characters, the pretentiously-named Viri and Nedra Berland, wealthy bohemians who live in one of the more artsy suburbs of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. Spoiler alert: they have affairs, they get divorced, their friends suffer various tragedies, their daughters grow up, and Nedra dies young. However, there's no real plot, just intricately described snapshots of various points in their lives. Salter's dialogue-writing is laughable; here for instance, is just a fragment of a longer speech:

You are cold . . . I will warm you . . . you are not used to winter, not these winters. These are something new. They can be cold, more cold than you can imagine. In your nice English shoes everyone thinks you are warm and content. Look, how nice your shoes are, they say, such fine shoes. Yes, they think you are warm because you look nice; they think you are happy. But happiness is not so easy to find, is it? It's very difficult to find. It's like money. It comes only once. If you're lucky, it comes once, and the worst part is there's nothing you can do. You can hope, you can search, anger, prayers. Nothing. How frightening to be without it, to wait for happiness, to be patient, to be ready, to have your face upturned and luminous like girls at communion. Yes, you are saying to yourself, me, me, I am ready.

While the character who delivers this and many other tedious monologues is not a native English speaker, everyone in the book talks this way. Everyone is wise, and peppers their conversation with poetic observations and witty bons mots. Everyone knows how to cook, dress, and drink. A whole chapter is devoted to Viri ordering custom-made shirts from a tailor. When disasters happen, the beloved friends to whom they befall fade from the narrative, and, one presumes, from Viri's and Nedra's thoughts as well. Viri and Nedra are at first admirable, enviable, but throughout the course of the novel Salter destroys them bit by bit.

And yet Salter describes the drive home from New York to the suburbs like this:

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

It is really Salter's beautiful descriptive writing, his devout attention to the surfaces of things, that make the book compelling. In a sense, Light Years is not really about Viri and Nedra; it has little in the way of narrative, or even of cohesive plot. It's a book, instead, about things, objects, what they look like and what they reveal. Salter pulls no punches when it comes to his intentions, informing the reader from the outset about Nedra:

I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in which the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law’s, apricot, rough and tan, rugs which though worn seemed to drink the sun, to collect its warmth; books, potpourris, cushions in colors of Matisse, objects glistening like evidence, many which might had they been possessed by ancient people, have been placed in the tombs for another life: clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.

It is the things that matter, the things that tell us the story, the attention to the things which makes it occasionally hard to tell whether Salter loves or despises his characters, who, for all their beauty and wit, are selfish, cruel, and self-deluded, just as it is the things in Bonnard's painting that convey the sense of an entire world -- a world whose surface shimmers with goodness, but whose ambience of contentment is undermined by the shadowy figure in the corner. Things speak, they tell stories, but, Bonnard and Salter both seem to suggest, the stories they tell may be untrue: if we heed those stories, if we let the beauty of this world guide us, we are in danger of being led astray. Things are beautiful, but they are unreliable narrators.

I think this is what prompted me to throw Light Years away the first time I read it. My own life -- my old life -- had been outlined and limned with a devotion to things, with the way things looked and seemed, with what I thought they meant and conveyed. The ugliness of the world around me, the inadequacy, the injustice, was nevertheless suffused with beauty for me. In my old life, I would have given up, given away, thrown away, a great deal for a pearl of great price; the problem was that I mistook artificial pearls for real. The selfishness of Salter's characters cut me to my core, convicted me.

As I finish Light Years for the second time, however, I'm also reading Sister Wendy's Spiritual Letters, in which she evinces her own early devotion to the thingliness of this world, the beauty of it, in the art that so moves her. She writes to a friend who is in physical pain, about to undergo a feared operation:

I can't feel anxious [for you]. It seems so clear to me that this is pure Love giving Himself in a way you must learn to accept Him in. Either you say: "Come my Love, anyway. You choose." Or you make it impossible for him to come at all . . . Love can't take hold under these restrictions . . . Didn't your insight into Duccio's Annunciation tell you that death equals love?

Duccio, Annunciation, 1308-11

The first time I read Light Years, Salter's metaphor for death unsettled me:

The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.

But now, reading it in tandem with Sister Wendy's book, I feel differently. Salter's gorgeous descriptions of the thingly world are ultimately devastating, for things cannot save one. Sister Wendy, however, posits the things of this world -- especially the beautiful things that make the heart leap for joy --  as a kind of orthodox exegesis of God's unfailing goodness.

Death equals love. We must go down to that dark place, the dark earth, the underground river, and know that descent to be lit up by Love Himself.

The Red Flower

When I was a child, my next-door neighbors had a poster on the wall, a stark image that showed a swathe of black earth silhouetted against a white sky. A single fiery-red flower pushed up out of the black soil. I told the mother of this family that I thought the poster was beautiful, but she, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees, told me that she found it disturbing herself. To her, the lone red flower seemed to be blooming out of troubled soil, in earth that had perhaps been ravaged by war and watered with blood.

If you go to school in New York State, you learn New York State history in third grade, and this was a subject that I particularly loved. It confirmed my suspicion that the ground beneath my feet was not inert, but was, rather, alive, fertilized by the hopes and prayers of hearts that had not long since ceased beating. It also brought home the truth that the soil of the city had itself been watered with blood. I lived across the street from the very spot where Peter Minuit bought Manhattan island from the Lenape Indians; later, I lived on Fort Washington Avenue, which had been a Revolutionary War fort, as had Fort Tryon Park up the street and Fort Lee across the Hudson River in New Jersey. The blood of soldiers watered that ground; the lordly Hudson once bristled with warships. The infamous Draft Riots of 1863 added the blood of lynched black New Yorkers to the soil around what is now Grand Central Station. In school we learned, too, about the digging of the Erie Canal, which opened the American West and joined it to New York and to the rest of the world, and about the Underground Railroad, which branched out through upstate New York to places like Elmira, Ithaca, and Rochester, where Frederick Douglass published his newspaper, The North Star. We learned about the great waves of immigration, about peoples exiled and displaced, fleeing from danger and persecution. And we learned about the men who had died digging the subways, building the bridges, and connecting the reservoirs of upstate Delaware and Sullivan Counties to the municipal water lines of New York City. While New York cannot, without some hyperbole, be called a war-torn land, there’s no denying that all kinds of blood flows figuratively through its history.

I started thinking about the the red flower growing in barren soil at Sunday Mass when the Gospel about Christ going into the desert was read. I felt sharply my painful absence from that place, watered with blood, that is my temporal Not-Exile, and I imagined what the Israelites might have felt, wandering around and around in an unfamiliar wasteland, on the way to something promised but as yet unknown and unrevealed. Compared with my beautiful land of Not-Exile, the place where I now live is a kind of epistemological desert, too.  When I moved from Manhattan to the Bronx, an old friend of mine observed that he didn’t know that anyone ever moved there willingly, except to be buried; when I told him, later, I was moving here, he was stumped for a reply. 

And it must be admitted that it’s a strange feeling to go from a place where, among other advantages, things function smoothly on a massive scale – a place where things work – to a place that is a relative desert. Not only is my new town dogged by social dysfunction -- a dearth of jobs, an aging population, and a disappearing middle-class -- it also has few consolations to offer in the way of culture, comfort, or aesthetic niceties, and I suppose this is no paradox. The commercial functionality of life in New York is so well–oiled that, if you’re sick in bed and can’t drag yourself to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled, they will deliver; if you’re hungry or thirsty at 3 AM and facing a bare refrigerator, you can go down the corner to an all-night diner or a Korean deli/salad bar and eat your fill. This kind of high-functioning service economy assumes, of course, that you have cash (or credit) in pocket to pay for it. There’s no sense of “come, all you who have no money, and eat your fill”; even the neo-back-to-the-landers who have marched on the borough of Brooklyn, establishing indie slaughterhouses and artisanal pickle-fermenting joints there, put out product that only people with a certain amount of disposable income can afford to buy. A service economy designed for those who can afford it is one of the reasons there’s been an underground exodus of the urban poor from New York to towns like mine in northern Appalachia, where the assumption is, correctly, that here you can get more for less. 

Fortunately, I can drive now; I don’t need the drugstore to deliver. But it took me a long time after we moved here to shake the sinking feeling that would come over me in the middle of the day, when I was either stuck at home with my preschooler or hitting a wall in one of the wide-ranging editing or translating projects I’ve worked on in the past year, and I would realize that I couldn’t just get up and stroll out for a cup of coffee.  To be able to do that is just, for want of a better word, nice. It’s something that makes an appreciable difference in the flow of one’s quotidian life, something that truly adds, to use an overused phrase, to the quality of that life. For one thing, it brings you into contact with other people, which doesn't often happen here, nor, I suspect, in a lot of other semi-suburban communities.

In New York, everything has already been done for you. Someone else opened the twenty-four hour drugstore; someone else, either a neo-back-to-the-lander Brooklynite or Starbucks, roasted that coffee and put it in a cup for you, provided a soft chair for you to sit and drink it in, and even set out a few well-worn kids’ books to keep your little ones amused while you snatch some private time in a public place. And this snatching of private time in public is, itself, a really special thing, which I didn’t realize until I moved to a place where people stay in their houses and shop in suburban shopping malls. The shared and public aspects of urban life help to forge and bond a community.

Yes, in New York, to quote Elizabeth Bishop, “somebody loves us all.” In my new home town, no one loves nobody. Though not, as far as I know, by blood, my own little place here has been well-watered with my tears.  Here, I understand nothing; I don't speak the language; I don't know which way to go. I feel as if I'm in a place without maps. The days are long and bleak. Nonetheless, as difficult, frustrating, and ego-bashing as my own small exile is, I believe quite strongly that it is necessary; as lonely and opaque as this place is to me, I believe that God wants me to be here, and I pray that I will be able to bring forth some sort of blossom out of this rocky earth. In fact, I believe that's what I have to do. Perhaps removing me from my home and chipping away at my loves and attachments is actually a demonstration, somehow, of God's mercy.