Fifty Days of Solitude Page 6

  I learned that there is a softness about being alone in the country, even the frozen, snow-filled country. Solidity, concrete, and bricks do not define one’s surroundings. The edges of my landscape are blurred, made uneven by the action of wind and bending branches. There is a comforting balm in the way the water beyond the white meadow breaks through the ice when the tide comes in and then freezes over in irregular ridges when it goes out.

  The city is a multitude of rigid right angles forced down upon each other. But the country, even in the dead of winter, is composed of the circles and arcs and ovals of blessedly unpopulated, almost empty space.

  Most of Hopper’s canvases are exterior, so it was always a wonder that his pictures suggest to me interior states of heart-stopping loneliness, never serenity or peace. In an unexpected flash of memory, I recalled that, in the early seventies, I saw a painting at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., that haunted me for more than twenty years: Francis Bacon’s Study of Figure in a Landscape. I saw it again when the Hirshhorn Museum housed a large exhibition of Bacon’s work in 1989. The figure appears to be kneeling in a field high with what may be hay. He may be nude—I cannot tell for sure—and his shadow is black against the yellow hay behind him. In the background there are trees, slightly more colored than the foreground, but not much. A patch of ominous blue sky with clouds the color, almost, of the hay and the trees darkens the figure.

  There was something frightening, terrible, about him, perhaps because he crouches down, nude, in a field, while almost every other figure in the exhibition of paintings was indoors. He appears to be at the mercy of his undifferentiated surroundings and, at the same time, to be threatening the spectator. He is more alone than I was now remembering him, and when I found the catalog I could not bear to look at him for long.

  FEELING overwhelmed by what Simone Weil called “interior solitude,” I took a walk along the icy path to the beach, clinging for dear life to my cane in one hand, my pointed stick in the other. The snow was a perilous disguise for the hard crust that covered the grass, the field, and then the pebbled shore, as though the earth had shrunk into its elderly self leaving this skin of ice to protect it. I felt threatened by every step. Wherever I looked there was nothing but hard white surfaces and featureless whitened trees.

  Our small portion of the cove was filled with wrinkled floes, heaped up in layers, the only break in the frozen water. As the tide moved there was the sharp crackling noise of protesting cakes of ice being moved slightly by still-fluid water. No other sound that I could hear, no protesting sea birds, nothing but the cold shell of the earth forbidding all movement, and the deafening silence of being even more alone, in the frozen cove, than I had been in the warm house.

  In those cold days, I noticed that I found it hard to recall the names of persons I had met up here for the first time. I tried to fix names to faces I dimly remembered, and occupations or home towns to names. But they had all faded quickly. I now understood the truth about the elderly: the persons of one’s younger days adhere to one’s memory permanently, but newcomers rarely find a foothold. I could hold onto fictional characters, observations of the world around me, ideas, conjectures, and questions about the quality of my life alone. But recent acquaintances? Not one of them could be retrieved from my failing memory to populate my solitude.

  There was one exception. Four years ago, when I first came to live in Sargentville, I learned that the novelist and editor Helen Yglesias lived eight miles away in Brooklin. I left a message on her answering machine saying I would like to meet her. She called back. We arranged to meet here for tea.

  At once we formed a strong connection, composed of the many parallels in our lives. We were almost the same age and had both grown up in New York, albeit in separate boroughs, she in the Bronx, I in Manhattan. We shared memories of that remarkable city, especially Greenwich Village. In almost the same years we edited the literary sections of magazines. Late in our lives we began to write fiction. By the time we met we had published about the same number of books, written criticism for the same periodicals and newspapers, taught at the same writers’ workshop, and resided at the same writers’ colonies. We both had successful grown children and young grandchildren; we were both divorced.

  Curiously, we had never encountered each other before. She had come to Maine long before I had. But fortunately for me, we were here now, and again fortunately, an unusual occurrence for me, late in life, we had become friends.

  Helen became a tie to the literary world from which, what with age and distance, I had become somewhat disassociated. She knew more people in publishing and kept her connections to them by spending part of each winter in New York. Recently she had lost her best friend, the poet Eve Merriam, to death from cancer and was still mourning her absence. More recently, she had hoped to fill her loneliness up here by having an older sister come to live with her. But it had not worked out. Her sister had gone back to live in Florida, having found Maine too isolated, too cold, too lacking in the amenities of city and in friends of her own age. Shortly after she returned to Miami, she became ill, and Helen went down to care for her.

  Helen and I stayed in touch with each other by mail. She wrote about the artificiality of my experiment, pointing out that, since I knew it would have a certain end, I could not understand what the prospect of unbroken loneliness was. She said she was now more occupied than ever, having learned that another, elder sister, who also lived in Florida, was ill. She was planning to go to see her.

  She said she longed for some solitude. Her plight reminded me of Edith Wharton writing about Lily Barth in The House of Mirth: “She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.”

  TWO AND ONE-HALF weeks into what I began to think of as the winter of my content, I felt the strange stirrings of material. Writers are entirely egocentric. To them, few things in their lives have meaning or importance unless they give promise of serving some creative purpose. They waste nothing they hear or feel or see or are told; nothing is lost on them, as Henry James observed.

  So I began to record, on odd pieces of paper, backs of envelopes, and torn memo-pad sheets, what I was learning about being alone. I felt it was all too insignificant, too scrappy, to put into a bound notebook. But still.… What had at first been enriching and sustaining as I lived it, became, well, subject matter. I found I was living, listening, thinking, watching, in order to have something to write, in much the same way, I had always thought, that Heming way went to wars, fishing, and big-game hunting in order to write novels about them. For me, however, it was a mistake, I decided. This was wrong. What I put down should always come from the rich roil of the past, from the memory and the storage bins of the mind, never from the experiences of the moment. So I stopped writing about being alone, I was alone, and that was enough for the present.

  I went back to writing fiction.

  EVERYWHERE I traveled on a round of chores during the coldest day we had had all winter—the post office, the general store, the gas station, the new-books store, the library to donate review copies, the hardware store to buy melting crystals—I was the only customer there. The only one there! I thought of the crowded city I had left behind, the lines to the check-out, the lines at the movie theater, the people in cities who are not only there but who pushed me from behind, from all sides. I was relieved that I had escaped to this peninsula, even though the temperature when I left the house was twenty below.

  I HAVE never been a saver of things, like Sybil. As quickly as I can I throw away whatever I cannot use at the moment. But small things, reminiscent of places I have visited or lived, cling to me without my noticing them. Until last week when, to my surprise, I found an old matchbox hidden under a wooden candlestick. IOWA HOUSE was printed on its cover, a place I had not stayed in eighteen years. Then, having nothing better to do on an early evening (which started at four in the afternoon), I went through a pen-and-pencil holder in the kitchen and discovered an old, small, red automatic
pencil with ALBANY ACADEMY on its side in gilt. Why had I never noticed it before in the twenty years since I lived in Albany and sent my daughters to the sister school of the academy?

  And in the same week, searching for scrap paper in a stack of old pads I came upon a neat, blue-printed one that read: DEPARTMENT OF STATE and under it, in smaller letters, The Secretary. I must have picked it up twenty years ago to take notes when the editors of the New Republic were invited to an off-the-record lunch with Henry Kissinger. It was, I believe, in March 1974. I can’t remember much of what the Secretary of State said in that State Department dining room. But I still had the pad.

  And, again in the same week: Out of my copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North, which I read when I was in Bellagio fifteen years ago, there fell the Villa Serbelloni bookplate. How did it get there? Why did it choose to show itself in the week in which all the other memorabilia appeared? What were they all saying to me about the insistent role of the past in the life I was now leading? Were they demanding some kind of autobiographical recognition, an acknowledgment in fiction or memoir? Or was it accident, the detrital reminder of times and places, for some reason I wished to forget, the debris of dead matter in a dead season?

  LATE one night—it might have been two in the morning but, being alone, the exact or proper time for doing anything mattered not at all to me—I started a new section of the novel, feeling much inflated and proud of myself to be able to work at an hour I was usually asleep. Henry James called fiction “the balloon of experience,” a wonderful phrase which, that night, described not only the fiction but the fiction writer.

  ON A day of absolute nonproduction, a day as blank inside as the white stretches of covered ground outside my study window, I began to wonder if white was the color of creative drought. I made the trek through the snow to the bookstore to find on the wall a framed quotation from Paul Valéry:

  The truth is that every sheet of blank paper by its very emptiness affirms that nothing is as beautiful as what does not exist. In the magic mirror of its white expanse the soul beholds the setting where signs and lines will bring forth miracles. This presence of absence both spurs on and, at the same time, paralyzes the pen’s commitment …

  This came from his essay “La Feuille Blanche.” Finding it saved the pallid day for me. Imbued with the presence of absence I suddenly felt occupied and productive. I had been paralyzed by a lack of ideas, but now I saw that I did not need to produce anything on the page to feel better, even, somehow, complete. What I did not produce was, to Valéry’s way of thinking, more beautiful than anything I could have written. Nothing was more comforting than to have remembered dimly, and then found, Valéry’s words on the wall of Wayward Books.

  JUDE BARTLETT, the handsome young dancer who died of AIDS this winter, a few miles away in Brooklin, continued to haunt my solitude. Having been so close to his dying, I kept expecting to hear of the sickening and then death of others I knew were afflicted with the same terrible plague.

  I remembered that Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend: “I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls.” This turned out to be prophetic for me. Two days later I had word from Allan Gurganus that an old acquaintance from Yaddo days, the artist David Vereano, had died, at forty-four. I could still see him clearly, seated on a low stool on a hill above Saratoga Springs, wearing his wide Walt Whitman hat, his handsome smile and Egypt-tinted skin shining in the half-sunlight he loved to paint. I remembered how much of his canvases were sky and clouds; I thought of him now as elevated to his beloved empyrean, having risen above the horizon to become another himself. This was as it should be.

  THE radio reported a storm on the way from the south. The weather bureau broadcast a WINTER STORM WATCH. I battened everything down, and waited. Then the announcement was changed to WINTER STORM WARNING. Obediently I watched as it approached, blackening the sky over Deer Isle and then lowering itself, it seemed to me, over my roof, singling me out for its largest delivery of snow. The heavy-flaked snow fell straight down all evening, all night, and the next morning, until the heralded WINTER STORM diminished into flurries and passed on to the north. It had made no noise, no wind created drifts. It left behind a flat, high landscape and a greater silence than I had heard before, a welcome isolation, for the moment, from roads and the desire for outward-bound excursions.

  While listening for reports of the storm’s progress, I heard part of a story about the newly elected president who, it was said, was a saxophone player and a lover of jazz. All I caught was that, as a young boy, he had thought the name of the great jazz pianist Thelonius Monk was The Loneliest Monk.

  “SHARE.” “Sharing.” “I want to share with you.” The fine thing about being alone was that the whole odious concept of sharing completely disappeared. For one, there was no one to share with. Quickly, my desire “to share,” never very strong at best, died away. I found pleasure in storing up, saving what I realized and saw and thought, like a miser, like a squirrel.

  Somewhere else I have put down what I thought about the conversationalist who begins by saying, “Let me share with you my experiences.…” At once, I recoil, knowing that this is to be a long, tedious monologue and not, as the word means, an exchange of something we have in common. What has become of the honest, direct, Old English word “tell” (tellan, to relate)? When someone on the radio, as it happened one morning during my weeks alone, announced she was going to share with me her views on … I cut her off, and went back to the blessedness of the vacant space where there is no need for unburdening.

  WHEN I lived in cities, surrounded on every side by people, served by them constantly, I never knew the names of the person who sold newspapers at the corner, delivered them to the door in the early hours of the morning, collected the garbage, waited on me in the grocery store, delivered UPS packages and the mail. Rarely did I see their faces, or if I did, they were still, somehow, invisible, a part of the anonymous fog of the overpopulation that pushed in upon me from every side.

  Here, now, I knew the names and life histories of everyone who had ever come to the house, to plow after snowstorms, to put up gutters and rototill the garden, to mow down the meadow and to fix the plumbing, the electricity, the telephone, the antenna, and the steps. While I was alone I thought of them as I looked at the work they had done to this old house and for this old person. I felt grateful to the now-invisible community that had provided me with workable systems and support, to everyone out there who would come if I called for help: “Hello, Sven, my antenna has blown down in last night’s wind. Could you …?” Or, as happened one day: “Hello, Mr. Byard. I’m in Sargentville. My car won’t start [it had been twenty-two below the night before]. Could you …?”

  Danny, who bakes our bread, buns, doughnuts, pies, and cakes, lives down the road, does his work behind the general store less than a mile away, and sells from its counter. He is a Beatles devotee and comes by the bookstore in summer to buy whatever books Sybil can find for him. I liked this, this was part of my definition of community: the baker, the Beatles, his bread, all part of it. In this sense I belong to the much-maligned Middle Ages which I studied as a graduate student, to a time when villages were sufficient communities and people knew, served, and relied upon each other.

  I thought about the implications of “community” when I was alone. It is easy to live apart among these known, named persons. Our lives impinge upon each other at tangential points of necessity. Yet it was hard to feel part of a community when I lived in New York or Washington.

  PLANNING: The days grew shorter, until there were only nine hours of light. Boundaries that others usually placed upon my time disappeared, leaving me with edgeless days (though short) and seemingly endless nights. So I found that plans were useless. To plan a day began to mean to start out into it, and then to find myself on many unexpected tangents from the forward progress, the mainstream of the plan. The digressions—what I did that I had no idea I would do—turned out to be more interesting.


  Example: I sat at the computer, resolved to put two manuscript pages of fiction into the machine. By accident my eyes lit on a bookmark from Pomegranate Press that had fallen out of a book by Israel Rosenfield I once started and then left unfinished. The bookmark had a long, startling photograph (from the archives of the Library of Congress) of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a physician and reformer during Civil War years and who, the text of the bookmark informed me, objected to the “stricture” of nineteenth-century women’s clothing.

  So there she was, in tails and rather baggy black trousers, a silk vest, dress shirt, and black tie, holding her high silk hat in her white-gloved hand. An invisible timepiece hung from a gold chain around her neck and was tucked into her vest pocket. A medal was pinned to the left side of her formal jacket. Her gray-white hair was cut short and lay straight down behind her very large, protruding ears. Her face was ordinary, almost androgynous; her slightly sunken smile suggested a possible absence of teeth.

  Dr. Walker was a wondrous sight to behold, especially when I remembered the customary ladies’ crinolines of her day. So I made my way through high snow to the locked-up bookstore. In the tomblike cold I found some reference books and looked up her history. She was born in 1832, studied medicine at Syracuse Medical College, and graduated as a surgeon when she was twenty-three. Ten years later she offered her services to the Union Army as a surgeon but was rejected because of her sex. So she joined as a nurse and served three years before she was finally commissioned an assistant surgeon. Near the end of the war she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor which she wore at all times on her male clothes for the rest of her life. She died in 1919, at the age of eighty-seven.

  There is a biography of Mary Walker, published in 1962. At the end of the morning I called the local library to see if interlibrary loan could produce it for me. The librarian said she would try. I was so full of questions that I thought about her for the rest of the day. What was the effect of her determinedly antifeminine dress upon the people she doctored? Was she too old to serve in the Spanish-American War? World War I? Did she marry? Have children? Was she celibate? Or lesbian? Where did she practice, at what hospital, in what city?