Two Gatsbys but not THAT one

No, I have not seen the movie. The fact that it’s a box office cash-a-thon neck in neck with “Iron Man 3” is warning enough that maybe it’s not the masterpiece in its purest form.  That suspicion was confirmed at dinner last night when our friends Terry and Todd told us they had seen a terrible movie over the weekend. (We thought at first they meant the vapid mess we saw, “Something in the Air.") So maybe I won’t see this Gatsby incarnation.  No matter. I’ve got two great Gatsbys.

 First and last and always is the book. How many times have I read it? Who knows. From the first time racing through to see “what happens” to reading at a smartish pace for an exam....I’m certainly read it just for itself at some point, but not in a long time. 

Gentle readers, this is The Book. Stunning in the beauty, economy, and power of its language and in its deft sounding of the human heart, this remains a satisfying gem.  I am nowhere near finishing because this time through I am savoring each word, swirling it in my mouth like the fine vintage it is. I am hoping to talk Dr. D. into reading it with me, both for the pleasure of sharing it and to puzzle together through some of the delicate layers. What sad irony that F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking this story he wrote in 1925 was a failure. 

In addition to reading the book, on Sunday Dr. D. and I saw Emmanuel Music’s concert production of “The Great Gatsby,” John Harbison’s stunning opera. The opera is faithful to the book, using Fitzgerald’s perfect words. And then there is this other dimension. From jagged undercurrents to smooth oiling over of hollowness, the music provides a new way to take in the story. Although I’m not at all knowledgable about music, this gave me the sense of not hearing the story retold so much as told in a fuller voice. Does that make sense? 

You know how you read about a fictional character and try to picture him or her. Unlike the transformation of Daniel Day Lewis into Lincoln--it takes place totally in your imagination. What does Mr. Darcy look like? (Well, ok, we’re fine with Colin Firth there.) Anna Karenina? And the crowd from Gatsby--do you picture Daisy looking and sounding like Carey Mulligan? Mia Farrow? What would a voice “full of money” sound like? And Gatsby’s voice?

Like that kind of mental filling-in, Harbison’s “Gatsby,” adds something you might not have thought was missing from the story. Another layer of color to the green light, the blue (!) lawn. The story and more. What a pleasure to have had the chance to hear the opera just when I was reading the book. 

Harbison’s opera will be presented this summer at Tanglewood. You’ve got time to order tickets and, in the time it takes to watch the movie, you can read the book again.

It's starting to get ugly

Is Boston’s finest hour over? All our neighbors who lost life and limb, those who dug deep into themselves and performed heroically without a second thought, those who courageously kept a community safe--has the honor of those moments come down to this: a shabby anti-tug-of-war over the body of the dead bomber?  You take him--no, you take him.  As if the ground isn’t big enough--hasn’t always been big enough--to hold both saints and sinners. 

Does it take one bit of honor away from the injured, the first responders, the newly dead to find within ourselves the common decency to allocate a scrap of land in which to lay this body? Does  burying him condone in the slightest way his despicable actions?  Is this puny villain the worst history has ever produced that there should be no earth that could receive him?  Doesn’t the earth cover equally those whose memories are blessed and those who are reviled?

Is the gentleness, the kindness we had for one another three weeks ago now doomed to be replaced by free-floating hostility and suspicion.  Does this cruelty do anything to help anyone heal? Is it going to help our city? If hatred and meanness become the legacy of our experience, all the flowers and the teddy bears left and the tears shed at Copley Square will mock us.  

Boston, I am sad to say you are looking a little less strong. 

Read these books!

My friend Lora looked at my bookshelves and said, “So many old friends...Laurie Colwin, Penelope Lively....” So I knew I could trust any book recommendation she would make.  She suggested, “When We Were the Kennedys,” and I got it immediately and, dear reader, now I recommend it to you.

“When We Were the Kennedys” is Monica Wood’s memoir of childhood, specifically 1963, when she was 9 and her father died suddenly and her family’s life was upended. And, as the title suggests, it takes in the events of November of that year, when another little girl lost her father suddenly, unsettling the life of a nation. 

It is beautifully written, filled with tenderness for Wood’s child-self trying to figure out her new “Dadless” life and for the people around her. She is forgiving of flaws, whether in people or in Mexico, Maine, the town where she grows up with its dominating paper mill--”the Oxford”--and its way of life about to vanish. She forgives the Norkuses, the landlords who complain of “too much stairs,” terrorize visiting friends, and snoop through the family’s garbage. She forgives the missteps of her adored uncle. She forgives her mother’s desperate turning to the oblivion of sleep. Although it’s possible she may have come to this only later, she gives her younger self the ability to see huge generosity around her: an older sister who comes home to run the household, the younger sisters who don’t hold it against her that she often abandons them for her friend Denise, Denise’s parents who wrap her into the wholeness of their family.  

Yes, the book begins with death, but it is about life: that’s what I’m saying as I urge it on  people. Actually, that’s what I said about Will Schwalbe’s luminous “End of Your Life Book Club,” too. And about “Last Friends,” the third novel in Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” trilogy. Yes, I realize I’m pressing these books on people with the disclaimer that “it’s about death, but it’s really about life.”  (Even as I drive a friend to a radiation appointment, I’m touting one of these books. Really?) 

Maybe it’s some confluence of beautifully-written books that seem to have this common element. Maybe it’s my age and the fact that each new day seems to bring new worries for friends. Maybe right now it’s the fact that it is two sunny spring Mondays past Patriot’s Day in Boston and you never do know, do you? But maybe, too, it’s a  recognition that that’s what life is. 

Passing understanding

To say the week has been eventful here in Boston is quite the understatement. When you think of last Saturday, with its preparations for the Marathon still underway and all the people still alive and well...The events have been horrifying, frightening, enraging. And most of all, baffling, at least to me. The things I don’t understand pile up: What kind of person methodically plans for the greatest possible harm to the greatest number of people and then casually walks away? How many of the daily small insults life hands all of us add up to wanting to maim and kill everyone in sight, people you’ve never met, people of all ages gathered in celebration? How angry does someone have to be to want to rain down thoughtless destruction?

During the day of lockdown, I thought about how frightening it felt to be a few miles away from where the main action was going on and how much more so it must have been in the immediate area and I wondered how were parents explaining this to their children in a calming and helpful way.

Last night, after the capture of “suspect #2,” I understood the outpouring of relief and people pilling out into a mild spring evening that suddenly felt safe. But after the first few minutes of the televised jubilant outpouring, I was baffled once again. The shouts of “USA,” which at first felt like shout-outs to all the police and other responders who had handled the crisis with professional efficiency, admirable openness, and great courage began to feel like something else, something ugly.  And I thought about a Facebook post in which a group of people held up a hand-lettered sign offering sympathy to the people of Boston and noting that this is what life is like every day in Syria. I thought about the courage it must take to wear a hijab or an Arabic-sounding name in 21st- century America.

Among the acts of generosity that came out of these days was an e-mail I received from my temple.  Temple Israel had cancelled sabbath services because of the lockdown and the clergy had created a cyber-service we could attend wherever we were. There were some words that helped balance my sense of bewilderment. 

This Shabbat was one of the few during the year in which two Torah portions are read. They are Acharei Mot (my daughter Deborah’s bat mitzvah portion) and Kedusha. As our senior rabbi, Ronne Friedman, explained, there is a lesson in simply knowing the translation of the names: Acharei mot--“after the deaths,” (referring to the incomprehensible deaths of Aaron’s two sons) and Kedusha--”be holy.” One of our other rabbis, Elaine Zecher, talked about how when what we think and know reaches our hearts and moves us to do what we know is right, we can “make our lives a blessing.” 

There is still so much I don’t understand about the past five days, and I’m know I’m not alone in that. But these three phrases are tools to build today with: Make our lives a blessing. After the deaths, be holy.

Waking up this morning in Boston

The day after the marathon in Boston is usually a little exhilarating, a little morning-after. The race winners are the kings and queens of the city. And anyone, in fact, who’s limping a little, wearing their BAA jackets, or simply came here from out of town to watch is treated like company. Where I used to live, two blocks from the finish line, it was easy to get cynical about all the ectomorphs crowding the neighborhood and the police barricades that made crossing the street even on foot a challenge and the helicopters whap-whap-whapping overhead all race day. 

But marathon day is Boston’s day to shine. It’s a huge city-wide party. The schools are closed--it’s a legal holiday, Patriots’ Day--and the mood is festive. Nearly every inch of the 26.2 marathon route is lined with spectators. The Sox play an early game that finishes right around the time the first runners are heading into Fenway territory and the fans, uplifted or disgruntled, pour out into nearby Kenmore Square to cheer them. 

But today, of course, is different. Today “Boston” has become the same kind of code word as “Newtown” and “Columbine” and, even earlier “Dallas.” All the facts of the city drop away and what remains in the name is a single ugly moment. The Internet is filled with symbols of solidarity with and prayers and wishes for that Boston.  In time the city and even the marathon will recover and reclaim its identity, adding this to its history and going on, But right now, this morning, “Boston” stands for only one thing and it will be a long, hard convalescence.

The poetry reading I was supposed to be part of tonight has been cancelled: its location is now a crime scene. Dr. D. said this morning, though, that maybe the poets should go and read our work on street corners. Strangely, I was part of a reading two nights after 9/11, and the room then was packed with people who clearly felt the need to hear poetry.  Because after all glass and gore is cleaned up from the streets and after the wounded have been tended to and the dead begun to be mourned, after the investigation has unearthed whatever clues and answers are to be found, what, finally, can offer an answer? Maybe only poetry has answers for us at a time like this. Poetry, which tells us nothing really, that we didn’t know already at some deep level, yet which we devour for its important secret message. Who knows why people make careful plans to maim and kill? Who knows why this keeps happening with sickening frequency?  

For today, a poem by Yehuda Amichai: 

The Diameter of the Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range – about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometres away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

(Translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai and Ted Hughes.)

In praise of old poets

I was just reading David Ferry’s new collection, “Bewilderment,” winner of this year’s National Book Award. He is a wonderful poet who has had much well-deserved recognition in his career. Now in his late 80s, he is writing heartbreaking and brave poems about mortality. No, with a nod to Elizabeth Bishop and her command to write it: he is writing about death. The deaths of friends, of his wife, of Eurydice and the warriors returning from Troy. And in the not-very-distant future, his own. Considered unflinchingly. The book is astounding. 

I have felt stunned like this reading late poems by Galway Kinnell, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan, and a few treasured others. What grabs me is the wisdom, the clear-eyed ability to just write it.--to write about our inevitable end, to mourn our lives during our lives, to be sad to miss what we will miss.  This is the great subject, what Henry James called, “the distinguished thing.” 

Reading this work feels like stepping into a sacred place where nothing need be left unsaid. There is sadness here, regret. But it feels as if these autumnal poems hold a hand out to all of us companions in finite time. 

The every day of your life book club

When I gave my friend Carol this book for her birthday I had to cover the title with a little note that said, “The Living with Books Book Club,” because I didn’t want her to think that 60 was anywhere near “The End of (her) Life.” But that worry aside, I knew she would love this book. In fact, I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who loves books, which is just about everyone I know, fortunately for me.

Will Schwalbe’s “End of Your Life Book Club” is a exhilarating book. Yes, it’s about death, but it’s so much more about life, about an extraordinary woman, and about the pleasures of time lived in the company of books.  “What are you reading?” Schwalbe asks his mother as they wait for her first chemotherapy appointment for her newly-diagnosed pancreatic cancer. The ensuring conversation lasts the rest of her life. Really, though, it had been going on ever since Will Schwalbe learned to read.  

From the minute we pick up the book we know one part of the ending, which is appropriate since Schwalbe’s mother always reads the last page first. 

(I was happy to know that, since I am always tempted to do that--get the “what happens at the end” out of the way so to concentrate on what the book is really “about.” I’ve felt guilty about that impulse, but now, seeing that Mary Anne Schwalbe, a person I would respect on many levels, did that, maybe it’s okay for me to do that, too.)

There is a lot of discussion about what we learn from books about living and about people. And there is a sense, too, of the great pleasure of being immersed in an engaging book, doing the kind of reading that blocks out everything around you, the kind of book you put down or even finish only with great reluctance. And those pleasures are magnified by the intimacy of sharing a book’s ideas with someone you care about. Or even someone you hardly know but come to care about because you share them. What is a better vehicle that this for creating connection?

The book includes an indirect ongoing discussion of the experience of reading print versus screen. Mary Anne reads only hard copy; Will switches back and forth between the two.  I do that, myself, and have little patience for seeing an either-or argument. But when Mary Anne finished a book, she often handed it off to someone else or left it somewhere to be picked up by an unknown next reader--a generous impulse consistent with the way she lived her life. Late in the book comes a quietly powerful argument in favor of paper. Will looks at Mary Anne as she is days from death and sees her surrounded by books they have discussed, books she has loved, books yet to be read. And he looks at his slim e-reader, giving up no clues about who has read it, who has dog-eared pages, slid in bookmarks, even underlined. It show no mark of the hands it has passed through. There are no inscriptions from gift-givers or signatures of authors. And he notices that there is a kind of soul that a print book carries that an e-reader does not.  Don’t get me wrong; I will continue to flip back and forth between formats. I will not again lug vacation suitcases filled with books when I could carry them all and more in a few ounces. But I will certainly never stop reading printed books, noticing the tactile pleasure of paper, and introducing a newly-read book to its alphabetical neighbors on the shelf. Plus, of course, there’s the problem that it’s a little harder to turn to the last page first when you’re reading onscreen.

“The End of Your Life Book Club” doesn’t really end with Mary Anne’s death. It ends with more living: a list of the books they talked about. Page after page of them, some old favorites of mine, some I’d never before heard of. I added a lot of them to my own “to read” list. The world, after all, is filled with wonderful books. Reading them and talking about them could last until the end of your life.