First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow
the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to
the newest.
Inspiration for these essays arrives conventionally. Shortly
after turning a book’s final page, my emotional center checks itself, measuring
my autonomic response on a purely binary scale: Did I like it, or not? (such
triviality being both unimportant and universal). I then unwillingly fall to
mental meanderings, loosely coupled but largely incoherent thoughts that go
nowhere and give nothing. It’s rather akin to drinking a Bud Lite and then
wondering why.
Then, usually a day or two later, comes the coalition of
sense, idea, and semantics: I begin to compose. Unfortunately this nearly always
occurs while I’m in the shower, where the only real option would be to write
with my finger in the foggy residue that clings to the tiled enclosure, an
obvious exercise in futility. I’m forced, instead, to repeat certain key
phrases over and over again in my head, hoping (despite history) that I can
shift one or two word-strings from short- to long-term memory. It rarely
happens. Yet I know that when I write like that—completely in my head—I’m at my
most brilliant. At least I think so. Needless to say, the words I imagine are
always more crisply wrought than anything that finally ends up on the page. (A
good example, for example, is the unneeded “needless to say” which, as any good
editor will tell you, simply doesn’t require saying, needlessly or otherwise.
It’s something I never do when
composing while wet.)
So it was with an odd sort of quivering that I realized I
wanted to write something about the book I’ve just begun rather than the books
I’ve recently finished. Unasked, composition began too early and wouldn’t quite
let me be. Why this should be so seemed at first unclear, but that fog now
wordlessly lifts, and since I’m not so foolish as to fight inspiration, I’m
going with it.
The Stone Diaries,
Carol Shields’ 1995 contribution to the list, gives us the story of Daisy, told
by Daisy from shortly before her Birth through to (and possibly beyond, if
symmetry is to hold) Death. Throughout Shields provides, in words not always
perfect but nearly always lyrical, the histories of two families across
generations, across oceans, across cultures. From the naïve and rural to the
sophisticated and urban (and onward, somehow, one assumes), the book reminds me
of how rich and rewarding family history can be.
And how little I know of my own.
The family story I shared earlier is rich and custardy. But
then, it’s fiction. There was no shadowed flight from coming pogroms, nor any
surreptitious falsity of name and religion. But if asked how things really
went, why and when my uprooted ancestors left their homes for America, I
couldn’t tell you. In fact, if I go back
just a couple of generations, I can only provide a few hints here and there of
anything true. I know, for example, that my patrilineal great-grandfather owned
a sweets shop in Jersey City, and that he made his own chocolate. At one point
he was offered partnership from another local chocolatier, but my
great-grandfather opted to decline Mr. Hershey’s offer.
It’s a great story (if bittersweet), but it’s the only one I
know. The only one. I could not even
tell you my great-grandfather’s name. Nor if he had any siblings. Nor when he
arrived or exactly where he came from. Whom he married. I do know he had at
least three children—my grandfather, Harry, my Uncle Bill, and my Aunt Elsie,
but I know nothing else. Not a single tale.
Perhaps knowing so little three generations back can be
excused. But moving forward in time helps me very little. Of my grandfather I
know little before I was born, except that he was a musician during the Big
Band era, and spent time in Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra when the vocalist out front
was a young crooner named Frank. I know that he and my grandmother stayed close
with the Sinatras right up until the Blue Eyes closed.
But I don’t know how my grandfather met my grandmother, nor
how they courted. I don’t know if he was in the military. I don’t know if he
graduated high school (though he was inarguably intelligent—scarily so), and I
know less of my grandmother (though she tended toward the intentionally
mysterious; none of us were even sure of her age.)
My father started high school in New Jersey and finished in
California, so I know roughly when they abandoned the east for a snowless
lifestyle, though I’ve not a clue as to why they made that decision. Neither do
I know how my mother and father met, nor what they found so attractive in each
other. I know why they divorced, but not why they remarried. I know why they
divorced again, this second time when I was five. That is the point where a family
history first feels like my family history, something that informs me. But
there is a place of emptiness behind that feeling, an almost-consciousness
telling me that earlier, much earlier, is where the true information lies, the
mortar between the building blocks; for me, mostly, that is mere space.
One of the reasons I find myself so taken with The Stone Diaries lies in the way that
Shields often echoes my own sense of the missing, moving from one deftly drawn
memory to another through gaps archeologically wide, just the way our real
memories travel. In the following two paragraphs, note how the narrative jumps
from her getting off the train to visit an older man, a friend she hasn’t seen
in many years, to the inevitability of the chapter’s title, “Love”:
Her knees are shaky
after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances
her, and she can think of nothing to say.
“Daisy?” he murmurs
across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He
forgets what he said next.
And then there’s a break, whitespace on the page, followed
by this:
At his age he could
not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a full-scale wedding, and so they
were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers.
How many of us remember our own histories in just that way:
the preface, the dénouement, yet little in between? Shields tell us that
“biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that
connect like a tangle of underground streams.”
And with waters too quickly displaced, yet filled with currents on which
we continually float.
It’s too late for me to find out much of what I wish to
know, and I’ve resigned myself to that fact. Family history has always seemed
to me irrelevantly important, something that should be known, yet without purpose.
But then the things that touch us most are often seemingly without purpose; we
don’t really know for sure until that touch comes. Or doesn’t.
Read since last post:
- American Pastoral, Phillip Roth (1998)
- Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson (1978)
Currently reading:
- The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
Count: 35 read, 52 to go.
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