May 2, 2006
Rochelle Gurstein, "Mourning in America"
Leon Wieseltier has lately commissioned several articles that seem destined to be talked about, among them James Wood's May 1 New Republic cover story, "What Harold Bloom Can Teach God," and Rochelle Gurstein's "Mourning in America," a review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Donald Hall's The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon published in the same issue.
Gurstein's essay begins straightforwardly enough, noting that "at the time of our most desperate need, we find ourselves abandoned to our own devices," and goes on to discuss C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, the thread that stitches together her discussion of the two newer books. She notes that the "scarcity of memoirs of grief raises the possibility that even in our society of manic self-exposure, there still remains a taboo surrounding deaths that are not caused by natural disasters or human violence, the kinds of hideous things we routinely see in photographs in the media." There is truth to this, and a wide body of literature discussing the same topic. What is interesting to me is that Gurstein finds significant flaws in the approaches both contemporary authors took to their accounts (which "could not be more different"), and her criticisms seem to leave little room for writers of death-focused memoirs working today.
After noting that the "static quality of Didion's matter-of-fact style serves her well in capturing the tedium of the hospital routine," Gurstein goes on to say:
[Didion observes] her every move from the outside . . . . This same spectatorial habit of mind is at work when Didion reports that the night her husband died she appeared so completely self-possessed that a social worker described her to the attending doctor as "a pretty cool customer" . . . . There is a difference between the distance that provides understanding and the distance that yields irony and an effect of superiority.Didion's minimal style runs into difficulty when it approaches anything having to do with the interior dimensions of things.
Hall's book, in which "every detail is heartbreakingly immediate and particular," nonetheless "all too easily becomes overly familiar, even intrustive," raising "vexing questions about which kinds of things can be disclosed in public and which should remain unsaid."
The question of what can appear in public is even more pressing when it comes to descriptions of physical suffering and death . . . . There can be no doubt that these poems [in Without, Hall's 1998 collection] testify to the depth and the tenderness of the couple's love for each other; but their very delicacy raises the question of whether anyone should be privy to such intimate moments. How, one wonders, can such intimate moments maintain their character if outsiders are looking over their shoulders? [ . . . ] I suspect that even the heartbreaking beauty of Hall's rendering of the moment of his wife's death . . . does not in the end save it from the charge of invading Jane Kenyon's privacy and his own.
Apart from the absurdity of charging a writer invading his own privacy, how does Gurstein reconcile this assertion with what seems like disappointment that this mini-genre's landscape is so sparsely populated? If the writer's response should not be clinical, self-aware, synoptic, and it should also not be intimate, precise, unsparing, what should it be?
While Gurstein is generous to Without, and especially to its titular poem, she is less so toward The Best Day the Worst Day, and so it seems that the answer is A Grief Observed. The "aesthetic amplitude" featured in Hall's poems matches the "spiritual reach" of Lewis's meditation. But must a prose writer working today rely on religion (or some other external bulwark)? I should hope not.