Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  Then finally one day everything I had imagined for these characters while I was at Friday’s was down on paper. I wrote the last sentence of The Patron Saint of Liars in early April and stumbled out of my apartment and into the beautiful spring feeling panicked and amazed. There is no single experience in my life as a writer to match that moment, the blue of the sky and the breeze drifting in from the bay. I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if proved to be terrible, it was mine. I found Elizabeth and we both printed out our books and stood on them to see how much taller they had made us. Then we went down to the Governor Bradford to celebrate the day.

  LUCY HAD GONE back to her life in Aberdeen after the New Year, but this time there was an ending, a light. The surgeries, which could have gone on more or less forever, would finish up in June. Yaddo had granted her the month of August for the second year in a row and this time she was going to take it. She was turned down again for a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, but before she even had the chance to feel badly about it, her good luck rounded the corner like a race-horse and she was awarded a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe. She would start just after Yaddo. She would have an office, a community of fellows, a stipend of $23,000, full privileges at Harvard, and no responsibilities other than to give one reading. If one could think that there was any order in life, then Lucy was about to step out of the darkness. She was going to be rewarded for her years of valiant effort.

  I finished the final revisions for my novel at the end of April and on the first of May said good-bye to dear Elizabeth and Eli and drove my book to New York. I cried all the way to the Sagamore Bridge. I had once again made all the usual rounds of applications—Wisconsin, Bunting, Exeter—but hadn’t wound up with anything for the next year. I was planning on going back to Nashville and resuming my life as a waitress. I was completely out of money. When I got to the city, I went first to Seventeen, where I had published a few stories and articles. My editor there, Adrian LeBlanc, had become a friend and said she would let me use the enormous Xerox machines in the office to make copies of my book. Adrian and I were both twenty-seven. She spent her days at Seventeen and her nights in the South Bronx writing stories for the Village Voice about teenage prostitutes and drug dealers. Once I was there in the mecca of fruit-flavored Lip Smackers, I realized the last fifteen pages of my book had somehow gotten lost in transit, though it still seems impossible that such a thing could happen. I sat in Adrian’s office and typed them up from memory on her IBM Selectric. I had signed with an agent years before, after publishing a story in the Paris Review when I was twenty-one, so when I’d finished up at Seventeen, I drove the whole thing over to her office, dropped it off, and turned the car south again to Tennessee.

  I took an extra day to drive in big loops around the Shenandoah Valley. It was the midway point between where I had been and where I was going and it was beautiful, placid cows and long grass in the shadow of mountains. I thought as long as I was there, both parts of the trip would stay suspended: Provincetown wasn’t really over; I wasn’t headed home again.

  When I finally gave in and turned to Nashville, I got there quickly. My mother met me in the driveway and threw her arms around my neck as if I were a soldier come home from the wars. She wanted to know where I had been, what could have taken me so long. She told me to call Lisa Bankoff, my agent. In the time it had taken me to drive home, the book had miraculously sold. I called Elizabeth and Lucy first to tell them the news because what good is news without girlfriends? They were thrilled.

  Dear Angora,

  I’ve received many hand written letters from you (this in response to the opening line of your last letter).

  I got out of the hospital yesterday and look like I’ve had a good right cross to the chin and lip. I had some fat from my hip grafted into my lower lip, so now I’ve got what will hopefully be a bridget bardot lip, though it’s doubtful it will last more than a few months, meaning I’ll have to decide then if I want to do it again. It makes a difference: I can close my mouth now and can kiss, which I find very exciting. It was sort of nostalgic, having my very last operation on old ward 39 (did I tell you Mr. Fenton is moving down south this September?). I think now I can honestly say that I am happy with the way I look and will only be having maybe a few minor operations from here on in; providing of course that nothing terrible happens. I still need lower teeth, but that will come in a few months time. My eye is still bothering me, but I’ve got a new camouflage coiffure and hide it behind my bangs. Everyday I have to fight the urge to cut all my hair off, but that’s another story. I’ve been writing a page a day of an autobiographical story, but other than that it’s zilch.

  Lucy came back to the States in late July to start her residency at Yaddo. She had given up on her novel and was back to poetry full-time. I went to Kentucky in the fall, where, with my new book contract, I had landed a last-minute job teaching literature and fiction writing, filling in temporarily for someone who had taken an unexpected leave of absence. Lucy and I both had a place to be, and we had won that place on the strength of our work. I believed there had never been such luck in all the world.

  Chapter Seven

  FOR MUCH OF HER LIFE LUCY WAS ABLE TO USE THE historical atrocities of humankind to keep her own despair in perspective and, therefore, slightly more manageable. She decided to make herself a student of suffering, but it had to be the right kind of suffering to capture her imagination. She wasn’t interested in forces of nature. Towns wiped out by hurricanes and earthquakes were useless for her purposes. People buried under rubble were sad, but they offered her no strength. She was sensitive to hunger; because of the difficulty she had with eating, she was often hungry herself, but it had to be a famine brought on by war and not a simple lack of rain. She wasn’t particularly moved by illness either; in fact, at times she could get a bit competitive on the subject. “People talk about having chemotherapy,” she said. “They don’t even know what chemotherapy is.” What she meant was back in the days when she went in for treatment, they burned you alive. Now that the whole business was so civilized by comparison, she thought it only fair that they should come up with another name for it altogether. Lucy assessed the pain of the body by the standards of her own experience and found that just about everyone else came up short, especially those on whom the ravages of illness could not be seen. She once became terribly jealous of a beautiful woman who had ovarian cancer because to Lucy the disease had done nothing but increase the woman’s glamour. “I wish I had ovarian cancer,” she said sullenly.

  Where Lucy found her courage and camaraderie was in persecution, the kind of systematic cruelty where absolutely nothing is left to chance. Stories in which people are destroyed because someone else chose to destroy them were the ones that lit a fire under her. She read the chapters of Butler’s Lives of the Saints as bedtime stories. In her heart she climbed onto Catherine wheels and crucifixes with her heroes. She loved Christ for His suffering, for what they had in common. With all His strength, even Christ had asked if this burden could be lifted from Him. The idea that pain was not a random thing but a punishment of the evil upon the good, the powerful upon the weak, gave her something to rage against. After all, what is the point of being angry at nature when nature could care less? If you cried against barbarism, then at least you were standing up to a consciousness that could, hypothetically, be shaped.

  When Lucy believed that there were actually things in the world that were worse than what had happened to her, she could pull herself up on this knowledge like a rope. When she lost sight of it, she sank.

  I’m about to finish Primo Levi’s Auschwitz book. I don’t know if I discussed this with you on the phone, but rereading it now is an intense experience for me because of my relationship to that book as a child. I was so miserable then and all around me were people complaining about their lives, and I would look at them and wonder how they could be so ungrateful, if only I had what they had, etc.
, etc. I’m not sure how I was able to turn this around to myself, but one day I realized maybe my accusations of ingratitude could be pointed at me. That was when I became obsessed with the Holocaust, with the Vietnam War, and the various famines going on then. I would walk around for days pretending I was in a concentration camp, or that I was going to trip a landmine at any moment. I know it sounds morbid, but it helped me enormously: everything, everything seemed suddenly important to me. I think those years really shaped me, possibly even began poetry for me. Now, rereading Levi’s book has reminded me of myself. I’m a different person now; possibly in the way Levi was a different person when he was older. It scares me a little: Levi did kill himself after all, but it interests me greatly precisely because I am at a total loss to describe how I am different, how what I know now differs from what I knew then. This is a language problem: the disparity between the two selves, between the two sets of truths, is very real and clear to me, yet my ability to control this knowledge in any sort of narrative or verbal way veers off constantly. Like the dreams where you suddenly realize you don’t speak the language, or the other dreams of driving some car, some wonderful car but when you sit behind the wheel you have no idea where you are. Maybe it’s self-obsessive, but I’m quite fascinated by it. It’s stirred me into thinking that maybe it is time to start something non-fiction about it all. Right now I’m almost finished with a semi-autobiographical short story: I’ll see how I feel about it when I get through that.

  When I read Survival in Auschwitz, I tried to imagine a girl sick with radiation and chemotherapy, as bald as anyone in a concentration camp, probably as thin. I imagined Lucy balancing the weight of such epic suffering on her shoulders in order to press her own suffering down. It isn’t possible to use the death of six million to make oneself feel lucky, because after a while the enormity of that pain simply replaces your own, making it different and in no way better. “It is lucky that it is not windy today,” Levi writes. “Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy.”

  Dear Ann,

  An important thing happened to me a few days ago in Prague, though I haven’t yet reached a point in time at which I can know how it was important. The background begins several months ago, when I bought a book of very contemporary American and German paintings. There were a lot of names (painter’s names) in the book I recognized, having tangentially heard them over the past few years, Fischel, Clemente, Schnabel, Basquait, but with whose work I wasn’t actually acquainted. I’ve always had a hard time with so many contemporary painters—I’ve never been able to be really moved by the work—it always seems somehow exclusionary & even snobbish to me. But I liked this book: looking at the paintings in it I felt for the first time that maybe there is something to all these new points after all. Basquiat’s (and I’m spelling his name from memory, I may have it totally wrong) work, however, I didn’t like, and even felt a strong aversion to. His paintings consist mostly of thin line drawings of a number of small objects, scribbled onto a background of paint. The objects he draws vary from scrawled tables to jawbones, and often there is indecipherable writing accompanying them, sometimes achieving the effect of some kind of diagram and/or uninterpretable instructions. There’s usually a very disturbed, manic quality to them. But as I said, the paintings never worked for me—I want to say they seemed posed, but perhaps I’m only reaching that conclusion in retrospect. But to continue; several weeks ago I happened by chance, perhaps only because the title was in English, to pick up a book of drawings in a bookstore here in Berlin. They were exactly the same as his paintings, only without the paint: the same frantically drawn thin lines, the same bizarrely juxtaposed subjects. To my great surprise I found that I liked them as drawings. Really liked them. Mostly, though, I liked them in retrospect: they were the sort of things that changed with memory, and the more I thought about them in my head the more valuable they became to me. And of course they were no longer in front of me: I didn’t really have much desire to return to them physically again and again and again, which somehow came to be the point for me, that they were intensely mental acts, not physical. Added to this (though I used to think this (“this” = the history of any artist’s life) shouldn’t matter: now, after what’s happened, I have to rethink this) is the content of Basquiat’s life: he died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty something a few years ago. I felt very affected by the drawings, and moreover, I felt very excited by my excitement itself: I’m such a cynic most of the time and here, for the first time, I felt genuinely affected and moved by work that had seemed impervious to me earlier: I felt as if I’d made some sort of breakthrough. Then last week I was in Prague. It’s a stupendously beautiful city, but it was packed w/ tourists & just as I was walking around thinking it was all a bit too much like Disneyland, I came across a museum in the old Jewish Ghetto which housed the drawings of Terezin. Terezin was a children’s concentration camp, and the drawings were done by children there, while they were there. The first floor (it’s a very small place) houses pictures of the children’s memories & hopes for the future: six year old’s versions of dogs and giant flowers and school and landscapes where the sky is a thick blue line at the top of the page. Apart from the occasional appearance of a jewish star on a coat or armband, they could have been done by any children, and it’s the viewer’s knowledge of what became of the children which makes them almost unendurably heartbreaking. I was very moved & upset by them, but I kept my composure & went to the second floor. There, I found drawings about the more immediate surroundings of the children. A nine year old’s version of a beating by a man with a club & a swastika. A hanging, drawn exactly as we used to draw the word-game of “hangman” when we were children. A long line of people, circles for heads, triangle bodies for the women, waiting on a long line at the end of which is a rectangle shaped figure with a dog drawn as circles, and beyond that two tall thin rectangles with curls of smoke coming out of them. I started to cry, and even now as I write this, remembering them, I have to keep stopping and trying to compose myself, as I’m writing this in a public place. The most terrible of them all was still to come though: it was very very simply drawn, the child couldn’t have been much more than 7 or 8. First on the left was just a sort of free-floating head, rather comically and ineptly drawn: a sort of rectangle with a funny blob for a nose. Next to that was another head, lower down, obviously a cartoon version of a fishbone: they were the person’s ribs. And standing over that was another figure, the head drawn like this: , and then another awful terrible body of ribs. It had arms also, and one bone in the arm was drawn much differently than the rest of the drawing: very carefully, and heavier: the drawer obviously spent most of his or her time on this detail, and I could even imagine they were proud of it. It was a bone, drawn in cartoon-understanding of armbones: . The rest of the arm was only a scrawl, and you could just barely see it was holding a sickle, or scythe: . It was a child’s version of death. I am never ever ever going to get that drawing out of my head. But there was something else about the drawing too: the oddness, the carelessness w/one careful but random detail sticking out—it was exactly the sort of drawing Basquiat would do. I was so shattered by the drawing that I felt an extreme amount of anger at Basquiat: he seemed like such a fraud to me. And more than that, I felt thrown back into my previous distaste & dislike for most contemporary art, but worse, because in my previous distaste I had my cynicism, which is rarely more than a symptom of inflated ego anyway, to keep me company. Now—it’s not even dislike I feel, I could deal w/that because it would be a polemic which would, by its very existence, mean that there was an alternate state of acceptance & “like”. Now I don’t even have that: I feel so empty about art right now—I feel it is a genuine crisis. I haven’t lost hope though. In fact, I feel that once I have worked my way through this that I will know something I didn’t
know before. But what? And why should I think it will be of any value to me? I’m going to have to digest this for a long time.

  Later the same day now, which also happens to be my birthday. 28. Ugh. How did this happen? No matter how aware I try to be of time’s passing, it just seems to slip away. I remember the first time I ever got the idea that perhaps poets were interesting people was in high school english, reading Our Town; the bit about how only poets are able to really sense the passing of time.

  I have been musing some more about what I’ve said in this letter. My whole concept of art has taken a serious shaking, and I am beginning to see what I can get from this, which has something to do with a better understanding of…. christ, I don’t know. I did know for a minute there, but then I had a coughing fit and now I’ve forgotten. That is one thing I’ve learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it’s pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

  It is a beautiful day, I bought myself a fruit torte and three chocolate truffles to celebrate my age oldness. Soon I will finish this letter and go and sit in the sun and read the paper and eat my truffles. Life really is pretty good most of the time, so long as I remember to keep looking at it that way. I got a letter from Shelia which bummed me out a little about a certain romantic prospect I had in mind: he’s living with someone else now. I have also heard through the grapevine that Miriam Kuznets will be at yaddo this August as well (she is the one sigman was seeing), so maybe I will be able to find out, hopefully, what happened to him. I’ll be back in the states so soon—it frightens me a bit. I’ve even bought luggage and everything. I will call you the very first thing when I fly in. I called my twin sister to wish her a happy birthday and she said she and “Bob” will pick me up at the airport. I’ve never met “Bob,” yet I always have this strange compulsion to put his name in quotation marks.