#2: If I have some important thing to say / I hope I live here long enough / To say it gracefully
Dear Readers,
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the second one.
Boredom: There was an article last week by Ron Charles in The Washington Post, about the best final sentences in all of fiction, that stunned me with its dullness. I don't even understand what he was getting at--the endings he chose were largely from canonical American novels, and every one of them was utterly of the book it came from. Not that the books he included aren't great (except for The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides), and I do love seeing Richard Ford on a list of literary heavyweights, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God does have a wonderful ending... But these are regular endings--conclusion via some elevated or deliberately unelevated language. As a group, these aren't even particularly good examples of those kinds of endings; they're just good books.
What I want in an ending is a single sentence that cracks the entire book like pulling a head off a flower. The Death of Sweet Mister, by Daniel Woodrell, does this immaculately. Micheal Garriga reminded me of the greatness of this freaky novel & its final sentence at a reading we did for Lit Cleveland. That last sentence still shocks me to remember it, years later. Or Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, a book that I've read several times, like talking to someone you know on the phone--you wouldn't just leave it because you read with it once; that first time is just the beginning...there's so much more to know. And the end of Billy Lynn is just the beginning, because it opens up into the world. It's an ending that, like Sweet Mister, says to the reader, you fool--what were you looking for in here? but it says that beautifully.
Horror: William Gass's keyword is penis. He'll say penis in a one-page book review about the history of the French Alps. He'll slip it into a philosophical tract. Reading him is like seeing a naked man through a window, and you say, "whoops!" and look away, but something catches your eye: he's looking at you...he wants you to see...
I only have print copies of his books, and I didn't want to wade through all the penises by hand, so, just as an experiment, I checked out a bunch of ebooks of his from the library, and there wasn't one that didn't test positive for penis, and nearly every one had many penises.
This is insane! I hate the way, in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country," he says, "I'm sitting here writing this and my penis is just sitting in my pants" (something like that--truthfully, I don't have the patience to look up what he actually says). Where else would it be?!...oh, right, inside his eulogy for John Gardner...
Glory: Lucie Brock-Broido was the first poet whose poems I understood without understanding. And to understand that way is what made me love poetry. In a poetry workshop I took in college, we got a Xeroxed copy of A Hunger, because it was out of print. It came back into print eventually, and I got the "real" version of the book, but I still have the Xeroxed copy. I've held onto it for nearly two decades now, because it has my notes in it, and it has my love in it. The long titles of the poems from A Hunger are like the names of people I went to grade school with--I recognize them in me, even when I don't exactly remember them."Jessica, from the Well," "A Little Piece of Everlasting Life." "Magnum Mysterium" (which I memorized and still say to myself all the time); "The Future as a Cow," "Ten Years Apprenticeship in Fantasy," "Lucie & Her Sisters."
Even her ampersands are gorgeous. "Autobiography": It is only three o'clock & already I'm alone / Listening to the lovers next door / Like Patsy Cline & her Man / Throwing barebacked wooden furniture / Like the real life bicker of true love...
"Dire Wolf": Now that you have gotten these things off / Your barrel chest, it is time for you to merge into the sobbing // Rain, like a one-room scene in Appalachia, smeared / By fog. I adored you as much as an aluminum // Bucket of storm after / A great unlovely silvered thirst...
Anything that she can modify, augment, alter, make more tragic, romantic, beautiful, she does. Now that you have gotten these things off you barrel chest; merge, not emerge, into the sobbing rain,... the sobbing rain--like a one-room scene in Appalachia--smeared by fog!
I forgot to say she died recently. I almost can't type it, or admit it to myself. I thought she'd be around, still writing, for as long as I wanted or needed.
She has this poem in A Hunger, "Ohio & Beyond," that begins, "Towns pass like pretty girls you wish / you'd left behind, lifting their skirts gentle / against their legs--Ravenna, Elyria, Vandalia." I've loved that line since I first read it. And now, almost unimaginably, those are my towns.
That's where I live.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: Lucie Brock-Broido books: A Hunger, The Master Letters, Trouble in Mind, Stay, Illusion; The Death of Sweet Mister, by Daniel Woodrell; Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain; Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Unrecommended: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; William Gass's penis, In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams (this is a holdover from last month...details of my strong opinion pending...)