Intimacies: Entering the World of an Author
Earlier this month I introduced my comments about Megan Marshall’s After Lives: On biography and the mysteries of the human heart by saying that “I came out of the reading with the sense that I know Marshall as I might know someone with whom I have occasional conversations over the course of many years. Her personality and her person emerge both in the stories that she tells and in the way that she tells them.” I suppose that I find myself in relationship with any author whose book I read carefully, but there are some books – and Marshall’s is one of them – that engage me more deeply than others. I was reminded of this earlier this morning, when I read an essay in Vivian Gornick’s The Men in My Life. Gornick begins one essay with an memory of an experience she once shared with her mother. “When she was in her eighties, and living alone, I once gave her a copy of the memoir of an Englishwoman, older than herself, who had written many novels and lived a life as different from hers as any two lives could be. A week later I found her reading the book as though in a trance. ‘How are you liking it?’ I asked. She looked up at me, remained silent for a moment, and then said, ‘I feel as though she’s in the room with me.’ And then she said, ‘When I finish this book I’m going to be lonely’” (pp. 29f). I wouldn’t say that finishing my reading of Marshall’s book left me feeling lonely, but it does leave me with memories of times that I shared with her by way of her writing.
Some might take the title of Gornick’s book — The Men in my Life – to mean that she’s writing about personal relationships she’s had with men – perhaps something about a brother, a father, or an intimate partner. I’ve only just begun to read the book, but in what I’ve read so far, I find that she’s writing instead about men whom she has engaged through their writing. Here I’ll focus on an essay about Loren Eiseley; I feel as though I’ve spent time this morning with Gornick and Eiseley. An unlikely duo, it seems to me. Encountering them together has me remembering my earlier encounters with both.
I was introduced to Loren Eiseley by the father of a woman I once loved. Her father was both a scientist and a humanist, and he impressed on me that I should expand my reading of philosophers and novelists to include that of an anthropologist (who, I would say now, was also a philosopher). Reading Eiseley helped me to understand the way that evolution played out in the natural world; perhaps more improtantly, he encouraged me to see that we humans are a part of that natural world, rather than somehow in opposition to it. Much more recently, I found this beautifully expressed a decade or so earlier by Aldo Leopold. It seems obvious to me now – how could I have thought otherwise? – but profound when I read Eiseley express it so powerfully. In later work, drawing on the philosopher Stephen Toulmin, I came to see how the fundamental theory of evolution might explicate the development of academic disciplines and their related professions.
I’ve met Gornick much more recently, and I’m still sorting out just what it’s like to be in the room with her. She’s one of several women I know first as essayists – Rebecca Solnit, Elisa Gabbert, Zadie Smith, and others. When reading each of them – when sitting with each of them — some of the furniture is familiar. However, Gabbert and the others help me to notice new things, some new to me simply because I haven’t noticed them, and other things they have brought into my room for the first time.
I think that’s the value of reading. I can’t find this quotation now, but I think it was Virginia Woolf — perhaps in her diaries — who said that people who read a book gather in community with all the others of different times and places who have read the book. I agree, but I would say that the community extends to include those who are writing and those about whom a writer is writing, alongside the people who have inhabited the IRL world of the reader. This morning Gornick has reminded me of the richness that can emerge for a reader when different people, from different worlds, come together in my mind.