Love Is Not a Pie / Carver

My old teacher’s new book is coming out on February 13! 

It imagines the love affair of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, an actual person who seems actually to have had an entanglement with Eleanor. Amy Bloom (the author, my old teacher) has written novels set in the past--"Away” and “Lucky Us”--but this upcoming work, “White Houses,” is the first time (as far as I know) she will write at length from the perspective of an actual person who really existed. I admire her for pushing herself. The historical novels were a bold leap--fifteen-ish years ago. She had made her name by writing contemporary short stories. Entering the terrain of biography-via-novel: That’s yet another big step.

Bloom has said we all have limited time; it makes sense to work, work, work. She seems to live by this precept.

In honor of the upcoming book, and to make public my quiet obsession, I’ll quote from one of Bloom’s early stories, “Love Is Not a Pie,” where she knocked it out of the park:

In the middle of the eulogy at my mother’s boring and heartbreaking funeral, I began to think about calling off the wedding. August 21 did not seem like a good date, John Wescott did not seem like a good person to marry, and I couldn’t see myself in the long white silk gown Mrs. Wescott had offered me. We had gotten engaged at Christmas, while my mother was starting to die; she died in May, earlier than we had expected. When the minister said, “She was a rare spirit, full of the kind of bravery and joy which inspires others,” I stared at the pale blue ceiling and thought, “My mother would not have wanted me to spend my life with this man.” He had asked me if I wanted him to come to the funeral from Boston, and I said no. And so he didn’t, respecting my autonomy and so forth. I think he should have known that I was just being considerate.

After the funeral, we took the little box of ashes back to the house and entertained everybody who came by to pay their respects. Lots of my father’s law school colleagues, a few of his former students, my uncle Steve and his new wife, my cousins (whom my sister Lizzie and I always referred to as Thing One and Thing Two), friends from the old neighborhood, before my mother’s sculpture started selling, her art world friends, her sisters, some of my friends from high school, some people I used to baby-sit for, my best friend from college, some friends of Lizzie’s, a lot of people I didn’t recognize. I’d been living away from home for a long time, first at college, now at law school.

My sister, my father, and I worked the room. And everyone who came in my father embraced. It didn’t matter whether they started to pat him on the back or shake his hand, he pulled them to him and hugged them so hard I saw people’s feet lift right off the floor. Lizzie and I took the more passive route, letting people do whatever they wanted to us, patting, stroking, embracing, cupping our faces in their hands.

And a few things here. To be both boring and heartbreaking: It’s possible, and it’s a telling observation from Bloom, who loves ambivalence and gray areas. (Later in her career, she’ll write at length about a woman reasonably happy with a gay man, and semi-secretly fucking the gay man’s not-gay father.) Bloom is a subversive writer, and there’s something subversive about sitting through your mother’s funeral, privately worrying about your unintelligent marital engagement. And then: the gap between speech and thought. This is a favorite fixation of Bloom’s, and you see it in the narrator telling her partner, “Don’t come to the funeral,” while actually telegraphing: “Please see through me. Recognize that I’m just being (falsely) considerate.”

Bloom is a great fan of lists--particularly Alice Munro’s lists--and you see a bit of Munro in: “Uncle Steve and his new wife, my cousins (whom my sister and I call Thing One and Thing Two), friends from the old neighborhood, before my mother’s sculpture started selling, her art world friends, her sisters, some of my friends from high school, some people I used to baby-sit for, my best friend from college, a lot of people I didn’t recognize…” You get a snapshot of the mother’s life in that list (“before the sculpture started selling”), you get a sense of the speaker’s tart humor, and you also get a sense of the speaker’s evolution (family, high school, college and law school). All in one sentence, which is, on its surface, simply a list.

Then the contrast between the sisters and the father. The inferences you can make from a person’s style of greeting. The sisters are passive and allow themselves to be handled, embraced. The father, on the other hand, will “hug you so hard your feet lift off the floor.” You sense that the father has seen more life, knows a bit more than his young daughters about engagement and risk. And you have a setup: This will be a story about a woman reassessing her betrothal (in the present) while reliving mysterious bits of her mother’s own life (bits from the past). AB pays close attention and writes with humor and heart. Her characters are alive, and they make mistakes because of their big desires. Hold your breath for February 13!

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And: dessert. One perfect paragraph from Raymond Carver. Here, Carver imagines an outing involving Chekhov and Chekhov’s friend, Suvorin:

Naturally, they went to the best restaurant in the city, a former town house called the Hermitage--a place where it could take hours, half the night even, to get through a ten-course meal that would, of course, include several wines, liqueurs, and coffee. Chekhov was impeccably dressed, as always--a dark suit and waistcoat, his usual pince-nez. He looked that night very much as he looks in the photographs taken of him during this period. He was relaxed, jovial. He shook hands with the maitre d’, and with a glance took in the large dining room. It was brilliantly illuminated by ornate chandeliers, the tables occupied by elegantly dressed men and women. Waiters come and went ceaselessly. He had just been seated across the table from Suvorin when suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth. Suvorin and two waiters helped him to the gentlemen’s room and tried to stanch the flow of blood with ice packs. Suvorin saw him back to his own hotel and had a bed prepared for Chekhov in one of the rooms of the suite. Later, after another hemorrhage, Chekhov allowed himself to be moved to a clinic that specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and related respiratory infections. When Suvorin visited him there, Chekhov apologized for the “scandal”at the restaurant three nights earlier but continued to insist there was nothing seriously wrong. “He laughed and jested as usual,” Suvorin noted in his diary, “while spitting blood into a large vessel.”

What makes this paragraph so memorable? It’s a story unto itself. Chekhov starts in his Ordinary World: a fabulous restaurant, a pince-nez, some chandeliers, some liqueurs. (Part of the fun is that we relate to Chekhov; we, too, go to restaurants; but, also, there’s an alien quality; we probably don’t take out a pince-nez all that often). The arrival of the Enchanted World is startling, as it so often is in life: “Suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth.”

How will Chekhov remove himself from this brutal Enchanted World? Through denial. He becomes a Divided Self. He uses some hyperbole; surely, it’s not a “scandal” to become ill when the illness is out of your control. (Carver likes paying attention to dialogue, to the way choices of words can reveal character. When the wife in “So Much Water” says, “What, was I staring?” she means something other than, “What, was I staring?”) Chekhov becomes something like two people: One person insists that nothing is wrong, while another, a *corporeal* person, “spits blood into a large vessel.” So painful! But that’s how Chekhov’s protagonists are; a man pretends not to feel threatened by a male visitor, while privately seething; another man wills himself to endure a visit with Mom, while feeling something like five years old on the inside. “He sees eye to eye with every one of us.”

More later!