Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends was so good I read it twice before I had to return it to the library’s waiting list where it was already famous. It had the same fame as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises that was said to be about his generation like her book about hers, and I was struck by how much more they had in common.
Both were in their twenties with a narrator telling a story about friends on vacation in southern Europe while each had a sexual wound, his from the battlefield and hers from endometriosis, and though they were as opposite as yin and yang, they were in the same sphere of storytelling with a special voice that made me want to write about them.
I was fourteen when I fell in love with Hemingway’s voice in his story called In Another Country where his first sentence was In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore, and though I was too young to notice the rhyme of war and more, it was like a music I was not aware of until then, and I found in the library his other stories and bought a little drugstore paperback of For Whom the Bell Tolls that all had the same rhythm I would imitate like a child following a father to this very day when I am old enough to have been his own father who was only 61 when he killed himself.
He killed himself in the summer of 1961 when I was turning twenty-one and started a story about him and my father as if they were friends. He was born in 1899 and my father in 1893, and they shared the same century as if…as if what, what was my story really about?
I had by then read all his work except what he didn’t want published while he was alive, since unlike Thomas Wolfe, who was another of my father figures and the same age, he was his own editor and honed his lines as if they were poems I would read with the same love as for metered verse, as in the opening of his story Now I Lay Me:
That night we lay on the floor in the room and I listened to the silkworms eating. The silkworms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.
I read these lines again when he shot himself. I was working as a shipping clerk in the basement of the Rutgers University Press that was in an old clapboard house where the office of the director William Sloane was in the attic, and one day he came down to the basement for some reason and stopped to chat with my foreman Norm Fruchter and me and told us of when he was a young editor in the Twenties and a writer brought a manuscript that was “Four feet high!”
“So I grabbed a handful to read,” he said, “and it was powerful, but I couldn’t see myself editing four feet of it, and he took it across the street to Charles Scribner’s where Maxwell Perkins turned it into Look Homeward, Angel.”
Hemingway also wrote stacks of pages four feet high, and about eight hundred of them were in a manuscript he titled The Garden of Eden that he began in 1946 and worked on until his suicide, but only a small part was published after his death, and though it was not of his best work it had the start of a story I would save about a son and his father and the killing of an old elephant.
Most of the chapters were about the main character and his wife and a younger woman who slept with each of them, and the androgyny led me to Hemingway’s mother dressing him as a girl and how his super masculinity was the other half of his feminine tenderness. It’s not easy to be a man, he wrote somewhere I can’t find now, and his sexual ambivalence surfaced painfully when one of his sons, a super macho like himself, became a transsexual with whom he fought so bitterly they never spoke again in the more than ten years he was writing The Garden of Eden, which might have been his most important work were he not so sick by then.
He loved his son and his son loved him like he loved his own father who had killed himself who was like the father in The Garden of Eden when the son was eight years old and the old elephant was like a vision, and when the father shot the elephant the boy’s guilt was as if he had betrayed his vision while the writing of the story was part of the plot except it was unfinished and the eight hundred pages would never be truly edited and the old elephant was all the animals he loved and killed when the photos of him holding the horns of a great buffalo and rhino were scattered at his shrine with the shotgun that shattered his own skull.
He loved animals like he loved life and he killed them in the same ambivalence as in the word Freud had coined with the Latin valentia from valere, “to be strong” that was the other side of the coin in Freud’s life against death in Civilization and Its Discontent. All of Hemingway’s writing was about life against death and yet his writing was his salvation until he could write no more and held the barrels of his shotgun in his mouth.
Or maybe it was because he inherited suicide? “How can anyone kill himself,” my mother once said, “when their soul is so sweet?” But she used the Armenian word seerd for heart and not hokee for soul, and the difference in my mistranslation was like the lines of the silkworms eating when his soul went out of his body, though it was not his soul but his self and suicide was the killing of the self and no one knows if there is a soul or not, as in one of his greatest stories that was really a poem called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place about an old man who failed to hang himself and a waiter’s dialogue of a self and a soul that didn’t exist:
What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada , nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada and nada our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.
And yet he was a romantic writer who wrote beautiful romances about heroes in love with young women and sang of courage and le coeur, the heart, until his sickness overcame him and he could sing no more. He needed to be strong and was strong until he was crippled by his sickness that was not only from alcohol but what had haunted him since his mother dressed him as a girl when he fought so hard to be a man while deep inside him was an eternal boy, or am I writing now as an old man pushing myself up the trail of my own eight hundred pages like a Sisyphus who keeps failing to find his soul as if it were a girl in a white rose of paradise?
I imagined Sally Rooney as the girl of my soul when I fell in love with her writing, not the young author in the YouTubes of her interviews, but the granddaughter I never had, as in Anabasis by St. John Perse translated by T.S. Eliot:
”Mon Ame, grand fille, vous aviez vos facons que ne sont pas les notres. My soul, great girl, you had your ways which are not ours.”
She too was a romantic writer whose persona was in love with her lesbian girlfriend and her married boyfriend while she endured her menstrual disorder and wrote a story that was part of the plot like Hemingway’s elephant was part of The Garden of Eden; then in her second book Normal People that was as good as her first, she left her bisexual theme and wrote in the third person yet her romance continued with the young lovers like brother and sister and the writing of a story was again part of the plot, and it was her genius for plot and dialogue that she had in common with Hemingway though their lives were the opposite.
His books were ignored by some women in the women’s movement because of his macho image, and in a YouTube interview she said she too was a feminist, but all genius in art is androgynous.
Love genius, said Blake, it is the face of God, which meant the same as Van Gogh saying he could do without God in his life but not the power to create, which was how I became a writer after my father died when there was no need to pray for him anymore, though my writing would be like a prayer over the candles to the void behind the alter, until here now with Sally Rooney like the girl of the soul I lost and Hemingway my father figure whose sickness was unto death.
She too wanted to believe in the soul when her persona read the Gospel of St. Mark, but she couldn’t except in the same genius of Blake’s Prophecies and Van Gogh’s devotion to paint. To create a plot with a dialogue or a pattern in a vanishing point was finding the girl Psyche who married the God of Love and became eternal, like when I drew a freshman boy while I was subbing in a high school in East Oakland.
He was sitting quietly near my desk watching the others run amok on the other side of the room, though he kept moving the angle of his profile and I had to wait for him to pause before I could catch how his cupid’s bow curved into his philtrum as beautiful as a girl’s as if I were kissing a joy as it flew into the point of eternity that would vanish with the bell.
It was a beautiful drawing that my power to create had made with my life of drawing lines like an old Ingres had said to a young Degas, “Draw lines, my boy, keep drawing lines,” and I asked the boy if he wanted it.
“Yes,” he said, “I want to give it to my mother.”
He loved his mother who was devoted to him, and he would love her until long after she was gone in his old age, yet there was no girl in my drawings who wanted to give one to a father, and wondering about a girl’s love for a father I thought of my mother who lost her father when she was the same age as when I lost mine.
It was when they had come to Damascus that she called Sham in Turkish where he buried her baby brother by a church who had been born on the march and he too would be buried there. He was a church going man who she remembered taking her to church when they left their vineyard and moved to Adana during the winter rains and she said it was fitting that he was buried by a church.
She had told me only that he got sick and died and I didn’t learn what sick meant until the end of her life when I was changing her diaper after her thighs were smeared with diarrhea as she looked up at me through her knees and said: “This was how my father died.”
It must have been from a disease like typhus when he tried to flee to Aleppo that she called Haleb where he had relatives and they were forced from the train into the death march where her mother gave birth on the road, and after the baby and her father were buried in Sham, she and her mother and older brother were prodded toward Jerusalem until a Turkish soldier put her on a train with other children to the hills above Beirut and she never saw her mother and brother again.
But what I would ask did she eat in those six months on the road and all she would say was weeds as if she didn’t want to remember and it would all blur in the death march of history and the anabasis of civilization where Haleb and Sham would be bombed into rubble in the Syrian civil war like the Spanish Civil war in Hemingway’s telegram that was his most moving poesy, Old Man at the Bridge, where the old man worried about what would happen to the animals he had to leave behind. “I was taking care of animals,” he said. “I was only taking care of animals.”
There would always be what was left behind with wars and poesy, and in the meantime a young Sally Rooney would keep writing like the girl of my soul that was my need to finish my mother’s story after her mother and brother disappeared into the bones in desert, and she too would be only skin and bones when the nurse’s aide found she had died in the middle of the night, and when my brother called to tell me I remembered her memory of the petals of the mulberry blossoms falling on her face as she woke.
It didn’t rain in the vineyard from spring to autumn and they slept in the open on a deck where I imagined their donkey slept under them, or maybe the donkey really did sleep there, but she was gone and I couldn’t ask her anymore, nor had I ever seen a mulberry tree or knew if it had any silkworms eating with a dropping sound in the leaves or if she had a soul or not. Yet my mother’s childhood in the vineyard was my Garden of Eden where her memories would blossom into the story I would be writing for the rest of my life.
“Tell us a story,” said one of the kids where I was subbing last week.
“You tell me a story,” I said. “Tell me about your grandmother who was my age.”
She didn’t know her, she said. Her mother was a baby when they fled from the massacre by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and in the class were the others whose grandparents fled from the massacres in El Salvador and Somalia and all the gardens left behind like Massacio’s mural in the Brancacci Chapel of Eve and Adam leaving Eden with her arm hiding her breasts and his face buried in his hands, the brushstrokes in the fresco like lines of poesy that would turn the horror into a song with Massacio dying at twenty-seven and becoming the father of Michelangelo who continued the story in the mural of The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel where souls would climb from hell to heaven too high to see looking up from behind the altar.
My mother remembered her older brother drew pictures for the church when they lived in town during the winter. He was always drawing, she said, even in the vineyard, but she couldn’t remember his face that had always been a blur after he was left behind on the march, until one morning when I was writing on her kitchen table she came in from her bedroom and said:
“I dreamt of my brother, my son, and I saw his face!”
It had been a blur for eighty years but now in the dream was suddenly as clear as a vision.
“What did he look like?” I said.
“How can I tell you?” she said. And he disappeared again in the anabasis to the desert, my little uncle who was like Massacio and Michelangelo.
Maybe he didn’t die after he was left behind. Maybe an Arab saved him and made him a slave while she went to America where he came to her in a dream like Blake’s vision of Jerusalem who was the feminine half of the masculine Albion in the Eden of eternity, maybe my little uncle was my imagination incarnate.
The Arab was a nomad who dragged him across the desert and saw him one day drawing with a pebble on a rock and sold him and the rock to a peddler who took him beyond the desert to where I couldn’t imagine his survival anymore and my mother never dreamt of him again.
One day in the year before she died I watched her looking out the window of her room in the nursing home as I sat at her side drawing her face. There were three beds in the room and her bed had been by the door at first but I had asked to have her moved by the window after what was her name had died, more for myself than her who was beyond caring where she lay while her mind was slowly sailing over the years like a mission to outer space whose beeps grew fainter and fainter.
And yet she could still be coherent, and as she looked out the window the blossoms of the little plum tree were dropping their petals in the breeze and she asked with the Armenian word qarun, “Is it spring?”
And my pencil followed the wrinkles of her eyes as if I were tracing the map of her life from when she woke under the mulberry blossoms dropping their petals on her face to her survival across the century.
“I have to go now, Ma?” I said. “Where?” she said. “To your house,” I said. “My house?” she said. “Can you remember your house?” I said.
But it was like a dream and the nurse had come to pull the curtain around the bed to change her diaper.
Outside the red sky was turning into the purples of the sundown, and after sleeping in the little house she had bought with her life savings, I drove across the valley leaving her behind.