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Interrupted
I know I’ve been silent awhile. I was waiting for someone to start a rumor about my going silent at the same time Maureen Dowd did. But I see she’s back now so I might as well pick up the keyboard again.
We’ve had much good signal and noise in the air here about The Pirate’s Daughter, rising electric from the combination of Errol Flynn, the island of Jamaica, and prose that is beautiful enough to grant the taste and breath of the islands. There will be news of that novel in the next few days.
But my heart and mind turn again and again these days to another title on our list. I’ve written here about editing Every Past Thing, about being carried on Pamela Thompson’s voice, about my falling for the novel’s protagonist, Mary Jane Elmer, about how the book seems to me in the lineage of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Henry James. For reasons I’d love to discuss soundly with the entire National Book Critics Circle, I believe the discussion should be wide of this astounding literary accomplishment, this assured debut novel, this rare story of a woman in New York in 1899 who rebuilds her heart when she realizes that she has lost a sense of where her love lies among all the men who have moved her.
I want every reader of serious fiction to know of this masterful novel, copies of which I carry with me everywhere these days. Of course I have no idea how many of those readers ever arrive at this site, but let me turn a leaf of Pamela’s prose here for those who do:
from Every Past Thing:
She fishes in her bag for the maroon pebbles she picked up on the street and drops one into her saucer. One, he loves me. Two, he loves me not. If Jimmy Roberts walked in the door, would he recognize her? He who promised, I will remember you all my days.What did any promise mean, if one were false? She examines her own. To collect nail clippings, stones, dates, newspaper notices; to fill the green book with what she knows of life. To find her own Method. Yet she does not put away the pebbles and takes the cap off her pen . . . . under Thing(s):
As little as I know of Natural History, I know enough to see that rocks are nothing living. If some are formed in Fire, most are the children of Monotony: the wind that brushes by again and again, the water that tumbles down along a course whose variety only Years reveal. Their slow Settling—that is not a story human patience can stand.
She is not so steady as all that, so perhaps it is ill-conceived to think of the stories she might write as stones, for that makes their author water (and she is not so free). Something hard is in her, and needs to find a corresponding hardness in the world. Would that her products were so elegant as the oyster’s. She feels kinship with that repetitive mollusk, who makes such a production of injury and intruders, wrapping the innocent grain. The guilt of the oyster is hers.
The end of the sand, and the start of the pearl. Jimmy Roberts entered her world, and she has ever after been embroidering him with her own substance. If he knew what worlds were made of his words—
If, what?
That is what she has come to find out. She can imagine the end of the story. She has lived nearly four decades, and watched all the while. The mollusk makes something else altogether of a grain of sand, and the pearl never again rests on the beach, a grain among grains. The man never again a man among fellows. Yes, she knows that this wrapping of her own substance around this foreign body, Jimmy Roberts—no one hers, no one she has any claim to touch or hold or keep—is a long violence, the wrapping a killing, her words a winding-sheet about one who lives. She hopes he lives. But it has been years since his last letter.
. . .
One—(she moves a pebble into her saucer) we are in New York because Edwin was admitted to the National Academy of Design.
Two—(she moves another) we are in New York because Jimmy Roberts came here first, and I conspired to follow.
“Another?” the red-haired giant asks her.
She should not. But before he takes her cup, she scoops the two maroon pebbles she has been moving in and out of the saucer and places them in her beaded purse.
He mistakes it for a show of poverty.
“It’s on the house, liebchen.”
“How can I refuse?”
It would be easy to say that the cider frees her, but it is not that. There is, after all, a gap between the offer and the delivery, and then again between the delivery and the heat’s slow coursing through her, its limbering of fingers, loosening of tongues. It is the words How can I refuse? It is the idea that refusal is impossible, here. She accepts. Nothing refuse. She leaves the pebbles in her purse. Under Strange, she writes:
We are in New York because I wanted to come, I simply Wanted to Come, because I’d left the eight square miles of my birthplace only once (when we eloped), and that was only just over the border in Vermont, where they are more lenient about Rules and Licenses but not much different in scenery than my own dear Home.
I am sitting in Justus Schwab’s saloon because Jimmy Roberts wrote a kind letter to a—I nearly called myself a Widow? (Edwin, forgive me.) Why is there no name for a mother who has lost a child? (Would that Nature avoided what Words abstain.)
Because he wrote a kind letter after Effie’s death, telling me of his life since I had last seen him in my garden, and the children he struggled to save as one of the ghetto’s Summer Doctors. Because he said to me, Such suffering is everywhere, when everyone else said, This will pass. All I knew of him was this address—51 First Avenue. Where else was I to come after Edwin set off for the Academy?
What we love, we lose. [She] is at first not sure if she’ heard or imagined these words. . . .
They turn toward her, and one man answers as if she had always been part of their conversation, as if they’d all ducked out of the rain and into Schwab’s together, laughing and shaking off their coats, standing in the center of the room, long enough for everyone to look up, note their arrival, make space for them.
“You disagree?” the man smiles. A student, she thinks. With that self-satisfied look Edwin had found so grating in Jimmy Roberts. His hair tousled, his clothes unpressed, as though he had not time for society’s requirements.
“What’s to disagree? But you talk—as though it’s a game, something you undergraduates debate in class while the rest of us . . . Oh, curse it.”
“No, you’re right. We are a pompous lot,” he agrees. “But tell me, What were you going to say about the rest of—the rest of whom, exactly?”
She looks straight into his blue eyes. They are not unlike Samuel’s. He could pin her to the wall.
“Fine. I’ll speak for myself. We lose what we love. But maybe we find—” She stops midsentence. Damn! We—what we is she talking about? She grabs her coat and umbrella.
“I’m sorry I interrupted,” she says. “Forgive me.”
posted by Fred Ramey
9/20/07
Comment
<<< Kaloo Kalay
>>> Ink on a pin / underneath the skin
We have never met, Fred. I happen to be among the privileged who have already read this beautiful book, albeit before you have put your own mind and heart to perfecting it. (I live across the ocean, and am waiting for the pleasure of the published version.)
I wanted to thank you for selecting this section of all others. as we both know, as any reader worth her salt can see, with writing this masterful, the section is not unique in its beauty or power. there is more where that came from. but for me too, this moment you chose is a pivot. is it because here mary begins to write, because the consciousness we have been immersed in here plunges, turns life into the written word, revealing another layer of self-awareness (the ‘hardness,’ what in her is unflinching) within her lyricism? is it something about those stones, their physicality and their recurrence? she writes. we read. for as long as we can stay so bonded, we ourselves feel like a grain of sand turning into a pearl. something is growing and being refined in us, and it is luminescent. we have been with mary for a while now, but we are plunged a little deeper into the transformative quality of her mind, a place we know we will be expelled from, but yearn never to leave.
— e. bat-ilan · 09/26/07 12:49 AM · #
Thank you for this comment, e. bat-ilan. In this novel of a woman remaking herself around the wound that is her love, this is the moment at which two things happen (and this is why I chose the passage). You have, I think, beautifully identified them. The first is, as you say, that she begins here a taxonomy of her own heart—and there is brilliance in that. The second and more personal facet, I think, is that here the sand of Mary’s life ceases to slip through her fingers. She captures it for the first time and begins to heal around it. The intensity of the writing throughout the novel, I find enveloping . . . .
— Fred · 09/26/07 08:09 AM · #