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The first time I heard about Edouard Levé was when a piece of his was published in the Spring 2011 issue of The Paris Review. It was called “When I look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue.” Here is how the strange — and strangely compelling — piece begins:
When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean.
The piece continues from there, a random sampling of statements with no apparent relationship to one another other than to build up our sense of who this person is. It’s short, and you can read the whole thing on The Paris Review website (click here). I wasn’t sure what to expect when opening up Suicide (2008; tr. from the French by Jan Steyn, 2011), which was recently placed on the Best Translated Book Award longlist.
Review copy courtesy of Dalkey Archive.
In brief, what I got was more of the same style, a kind of random sampling of details to give a sense of someone’s life. Only in Suicide, the subject is not the narrator. Rather, the narrator is listing details about a friend (whom he addresses directly throughout) who committed suicide some twenty years before, when they were each in their mid-twenties. The narrator describes his style best: “My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.” And we can expect, amidst the narrative that contemplates suicide, a great deal of random marbles that, somehow, add up to — I’ll say it again — a strangely compelling piece.
Suicide begins by setting up the act:
One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house. You go back to look for it, but instead of making your way toward the cupboard in the entryway where you normally keep it, you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this. She says outside. The weather is fine. She’s making the most of the sun. A few moments later she hears a gunshot.
Because there was no apparent tragedy that drove his friend to suicide — he was, we assume, happily married and still had a lot of life ahead of him — the narrator forces himself to consider the invisible motives. Depression seems to have played a large part: “You used to believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.”
While it is all interesting, I was particularly drawn into the narrator’s relationship with his friend, which has become much more meaningful after the suicide. In life, he and this man were friends, but they were not particularly close. There were each closer to others, but the narrator doesn’t feel that way now:
Your silence has become a form of eloquence. But they, who can still speak, remain silent. I no longer think of them, those with whom I was formerly so close. But you, who used to be so far-off, distant, mysterious, now seem quite close to me. When I am in doubt, I solicit your advice.
It’s this “belief in your eternity” — a “lunacy” born because the friend’s “disappearance is so unacceptable” — that is so striking to me. The narrator is perhaps a lot like Levé who, in his piece in The Paris Review, says, “I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath.” This friend remains alive, somehow more alive, today, though two decades ago he took his own life.
The book’s structure — that grabbing a marble out of a bag — is effective but also, for me, was a bit hard to sink into. At times it felt like a collection of aphorisms rather than a series of statements about a life, now gone though somehow more present. That said, the book is growing on me more and more, particularly after rereading “When I Look at a Strawberry, . . .” Levé ends that piece on a tragic note:
I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.
As sad and tragic as that ending note was when Levé wrote it in 2002, it and especially the very book Suicide are drastically transformed when we learn that Levé himself took his life in 2007 at the age of 42. In fact, he killed himself just one week after delivering the transcript of Suicide to his editor. I left this detail out until now because I wanted to attempt to look at the book as its own world and not as a kind of suicide note — which is impossible to do, because I knew the back-story before I started the book. Furthermore, it’s hard not to suspect that this is just what Levé wanted.
So since I finished the book, I’ve been trying to understand why it was interesting to me. In other words, would I have accepted it and its random structure had I not been looking at it as a kind of personal reflection on Levé’s own impending suicide? I’m still not sure. That said, it is an interesting and emotional book in which the confines of life seem to crack at the seams, allowing someone to become something more in death, which could be what Levé was after when he put the final punctuation on this book with his own death: “Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.” And (sadly? I’m not sure) that is the most interesting thing about this book.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Rivka Galchen’s “Appreciation” was originally published in the March 19, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Click for a larger image.
I have read little by Rivka Galchen, but didn’t really enjoy the last piece she published in The New Yorker, “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire,” which was part of the “20 Under 40″ (now nearly two years ago!). This is a short one, but, you guessed it, I haven’t been able to read it yet. I’m still hung up on the fact I haven’t read Munro’s latest, so how can I move on until then? I do have the goal — I promise — to catch up completely and be more timely. In the meantime, I’m enjoying your comments!
I’m officially underway in my effort to read most (probably not all) of this year’s Best Translated Book Award longlist (it’s a very long list, at 25 titles) (the complete list here). I now have 18 of the titles and have finished reading five with Juan José Saer’s startling Scars (Cicatrices, 1969; tr. from the Spanish by Steve Dolph, 2011).
Review copy courtesy of Open Letter.
I say “startling” not only because of the central event in the book — a husband and wife walk out of a bar and he turns and shoots her twice in the face with a shotgun — but also because of the book’s strange structure . . . well, and the fact that Saer goes into detail about billiard strategies and punto banco baccarat rules and succeeds in keeping the book interesting while using these tangents to build upon the book’s strange structure.
Scars is laid out in four parts, each narrated by a man, each laid out around the aforementioned murder. The first part covers a large span of months and its narrative continues into the time beyond the crime; the second, shorter, part covers a smaller period of time; the third, even shorter and smaller; until we get to the fourth, which is the shortest and is a narrative of just one day — the day of the murder – from the perspective of the murder. The fact that the book has such an overt geometrical structure that gives the reader a bit of whiplash reminded me plenty of Roberto Bolaño, though I’d certainly say that Scars is a bit more straightforward (you don’t actually have to draw a diagram to see the geometry, though it would be interesting nonetheless).
Our first narrator is Ángel, an 18 year old just making his way in the field of journalism. His first job is to cover the weather. He has no idea how to read the instruments, so most days the weather simply reads, “No change in sight” – and the weather is always terrible.
Ángel still lives with his 36-year-old mother. It’s a tenuous and charged relationship to say the least. Ángel’s only connection to the murderer is thanks to a judge who lets him sit in on the murderer’s deposition. Surprising everybody, one moment the murder is in his seat for the deposition and, after the sound of breaking glass, the murderer’s chair is empty — he’s jumped to his death.
Ángel spends most of his days talking to the same people, trying to seduce some girl, fighting with his mother. We readers are pulled into the repetition until that glass breaks. The chapter ends, beautifully, with Ángel walking down a street, running into his double, someone who may be living out the same life Ángel is, but what kind of life is that? That last bit is not meant to be a moral question; we only sense Ángel through the doldrums of his fairly vapid life — the breaking glass feels like the only time we’re dealing with someone partially awake. It worked well, for me.
The second section is narrated by a washed-up prosecutor named Sergio. He once knew the murderer, but they’ve been out of touch for some time. But instead of focusing on that time, Sergio’s section focuses on Sergio’s deep addiction to baccarat, which he plays nightly (and which we play with him nightly). He asks for money from others. Quite upfront, he lets them know that the only reason he’s asking for the money is so he can gamble, that he’s pretty sure he will lose it all, and that it will be very difficult for him to pay them back. One person who gives to him freely (she’s been saving) is his fourteen-year-old maid. Though in this section Sergio spends a great deal of time explaining the rules and strategy behind baccarat, further distancing the narrator from his reader, it never became dull to me. After all, punto banco baccarat is a game of chance, so any explanation of strategy actually says much more about the speaker than about the game itself.
The third section is told from the point of view of Ernesto, the judge in the murder case. It’s he who allows Ángel to come to the deposition, due to a little crush as it turns out. Not quite as engaging to me as the minutia about baccarat, I still found the judge and his character compelling. Here’s a man who essentially despises everyone. As he drives around the city (and, again, we are treated to the minute details of the journey), he looks around and simply sees gorillas going about their lives (again, if you can call it life).
It’s only in the last section that we actually hone in on the crime itself. We finally meet and hear from the man who killed his wife. Luis Fiore is a man in his upper-thirties, and he, his wife, and their daughter have gone out hunting. We already know how this day is going to turn out, and we cringe each time a bottle of gin is lifted up, more so when the sexual energy is heightened.
She goes on reading. I sit down next to her, on the running board, and wrap my arm around her shoulder. She doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s an arm around her shoulders. I start to exert pressure, pulling her heavy body against mine.
– Come here, next to me, I say.
– Come on, Gringuita, I say.
– Stop, she says.
– I said stop it, she says.
– Are you going to stop or not? she says.
But then she relaxes and falls into my shoulder. There’s the meadow ahead of us, extending toward the lake. It’s empty. My arm slides from her shoulder to her smooth, white neck. Her open mouth presses against my hard jaw. I can feel the dampness of her soft lips against my jaw. Difficult to erase.
In a low voice she says, I’m going to keep you up late tonight.
Since we know where this is going, the point is not what happened. The book also fails completely to tell us why — and that’s, at least partly, the point. None of the first three narrators knows why the murder happened — they barely breathe above their own repetitious lives. Worse, though the tale of the murder (from multiple sources, including a batch of witnesses) is repeated several times throughout Scars, it doesn’t seem that Fiore, whose section is told in the present tense, knows how to make sense of all that’s going on around him. Yes, this reminded me of Bolaño, too.
Such a strange book, it gives a lot to think about as nothing is resolved. I appreciated that immensely, though that and the repetition will surely turn off some readers. That said, thank goodness that, after over forty years, this book has finally made its way into English.
Tonight the NBCC Award winners were announced.
- Fiction: Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, by Edith Pearlman
- Nonfiction: Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War, by Maya Jasanoff
- Biography: George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis
- Poetry: Space, in Chains, by Laura Kasischke
- Autobiography: The Memory Palace: A Memoir, by Mira Bartók
- Criticism: Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, by Geoff Dyer
I have read about five of the stories in Binocular Vision and can only say that I hope this win gets Edith Pearlman read more — it’s excellent.
Yesterday the longlist for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction was announced:
- Island of Wings, by Karin Altenberg
- On the Floor, by Aifric Campbell
- The Grief of Others, by Leah Hager Cohen
- The Sealed Letter, by Emma Donoghue
- Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan (my review here)
- The Forgotten Waltz, by Anne Enright
- The Flying Man, by Roopa Farooki
- Lord of Misrule, by Jaimy Gordon (my review here)
- Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding
- Gillespie and I, by Jane Harris
- The Translation of the Bones, by Francesca Kay
- The Blue Book, by A.L. Kennedy
- The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
- The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
- Foreign Bodies, by Cynthia Ozick (my review here)
- State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (my review here)
- There but for the, by Ali Smith
- The Pink Hotel, by Anna Stothard
- Tides of War, by Stella Tillyard
- The Submission, by Amy Waldman
I have read only four of them (links to the reviews above), and would rank those as follows: (1) Foreign Bodies (this is Ozick, so I am obligated to love it — and I did), (2) Lord of Misrule (I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book about horse racing — or, rather, about the unfortunates crowding around the horse races), (3) Half-Blood Blues (I liked this one much more than I was expecting and wouldn’t have been upset had it won the Booker last year), and then State of Wonder (this one was also better than I thought but was much less to my taste — the story comes before the development of any interesting ideas here).
My positive response to the four I read means I might like many more on this list. My focus over the next few months will be on the Best Translated Book Award longlist (the list here), but I’ve been meaning to slip in Gillespie and I and The Forgotten Walz (after all, I need to have read some of the books written in Great Britain and Ireland as they put together the prize!).
The shortlist will be announced on April 17 and the winner on May 30.
As thrilled as I am about this years’ Best Translated Book Award longlist – and I am very thrilled — I was surprised that nothing from NYRB Classics showed up. After all, last year they published the winning book. Then again, in 2010, Melville House published the winning book and was not on the list in 2011. I’m certainly not suggesting any trend, and I say the more publishers recognized for publishing quality literature in translation the better. But, in its absence, I thought I’d look at another book that NYRB Classics published a couple of years ago: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (Sommarboken, 1972; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 1974). Last year’s BTBA winning book was, by the way, Tove Jannson’s The True Deceiver, which was also translated by Thomas Teal (my review here).
This is perhaps one of the most serene books I have ever read, which is a bit strange since there is so much turbulence under the surface. The book takes place during one particular summer where each day may be slow but is also filled with life. The young child Sophia is spending the summer with her grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Sophia is just young enough that this is one of the first summers during which she is awake.
I’d say it’s the perfect primer for spring if you, like me, get antsy for warm weather at this time of year. As Sophia and her grandmother explore the island and enjoy watching the evening approach, followed by night, I couldn’t help but recall such peaceful days. The community, though dispersed across the island, is relatively close knit. They go through the seasons and the storms together.
Despite this, anyone else, including Sophia’s nearly absent father, feel like outsiders when they interact with Sophia and her grandmother. There is one episode in the book where a poor girl comes to visit, and she’s neither from the island nor part of Sophia and Grandmother’s circle. Jansson reminds us, “An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside.” There’s genuine darkness to this episode, but Jansson lightens it a little bit:
On the third day, Sophia came into the guest room and said, “Well, that does it. She’s impossible. I got her to dive, but it didn’t help.”
“Did she really dive?” Grandmother asked.
“Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.”
“Oh,” Grandmother said. “And then what?”
“Her hair can’t take salt water,” explained Sophia sadly. “It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.”
Burried even deeper in the book is lurking death. Sophia is just waking up to life, but her grandmother is descending, more and more without caring, to death, and Sophia just about comprehends this. This is accentuated once in the book when, in a passage so brief you just might miss it, Sophia wakes up and remembers “she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.” The absence of her mother, the presence of death, pervade even the most peaceful passages, giving everything multiple tones and textures, most often conveyed in passages of seemingly simple dialogue, like this one (though this one is not nearly as subtle as the rest of the book — the outburst by the grandmother is a moment of vulnerability that most often is covered up):
“I couldn’t sleep,” Grandmother said, “and I got to thinking about sad things.” She sat up in bed and reached for her cigarettes. Sophia handed her the matches automatically, but she was thinking about other things.
“You’ve got two blankets, don’t you?” Sophia said.
“I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away,” Grandmother said. “And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? At least you ought to be able to talk about it.”
Sophia was getting cold again. They had let her sleep in a tent, even though she was too little to sleep in a tent. None of them knew what it was like, and they had just let her sleep in the ravine all by herself. “Oh is that so?” she said angrily. “What do you mean it’s no fun?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Grandmother said. “All I said was that when you’re as old as I am, there are a lot of things you can’t do any more . . .”
“That’s not true! You do everything. You do the same things I do!”
“Wait a minute!” Grandmother said. She was very upset. “I’m not through! I know I do everything. I’ve been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I’ve seen and lived as hard as I could, and it’s been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything’s gliding away from me, and I don’t remember, and I don’t care, and yet now is right when I need it!”
“What don’t you remember?” asked Sophia anxiously.
“What it was like to sleep in a tent!” her Grandmother shouted.
The memories that Sophia is in the process of making this summer are ones that the grandmother is already losing, at once not caring and yet worrying deeply about her apathy.
I’ve now read the three Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published. I hope there are more in the works because as short as they are they contain a lot of life and are three of my favorite books.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Donald Antrim’s “Ever Since” was originally published in the March 12, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Click for a larger image.
My inability to read these short stories is getting frustrating — as frustrating as these posts excusing myself! At any rate, I have enjoyed Donald Antrim’s work in the past and look forward to this one, but I just have to read the Munro story first. In the meantime, though, please feel free to comment below.
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Alice Munro’s “Haven” was originally published in the March 5, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Click for a larger image.
I’m late getting this posted because I kept hoping to have a moment to read the story this week, and then just post here when that was done. As you can see, that time has yet to materialize. I can’t wait to read this, though, as it’s always an event when we get a new Munro story (which, these days, are coming rather frequently, despite her saying a few years ago that she was done).
This is exciting news! I’ve been waiting for this list for over a month since last year the longlist was announced at the end of January. Click here for the official announcement on the Three Percent blog. And here is the list of 25 titles — if this isn’t the most exciting list of books I’ve seen in a while . . . well, there’s no “if”: this is the most exciting list of titles I’ve seen in a long while.
- Leeches, by David Albahari, tr. from the Serbian by Ellen Elias-Bursac (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- My Two Worlds, by Sergio Chejfec, tr. from the Spanish by Margaret B. Carson (Open Letter)
- Demolishing Nisard, by Eric Chevillard, tr. from the French by Jordan Stump (Dalkey Archive)
- Private Property, by Paule Constant, tr. from the French by Margot Miller and France Grenaudier-Klijn (University of Nebraska Press)
- Lightning, by Jean Echenoz, tr. from the French by Linda Coverdale (New Press)
- Zone, by Mathias Énard, tr. from the French by Charlotte Mandell (Open Letter)
- Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, by Johan Harstad, tr. from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin (Seven Stories)
- Upstaged, by Jacques Jouet, tr. from the French by Leland de la Durantaye (Dalkey Archive)
- Fiasco, by Imre Kertész, tr. from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (Melville House)
- Montecore, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, tr. from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Knopf)
- Kornél Esti, by Dezsö Kosztolányi, tr. from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams (New Directions)
- I Am a Japanese Writer, by Dany Laferrière, tr. from the French by David Hormel (Douglas & MacIntyre)
- Suicide, by Edouard Levé, tr. from the French by Jan Steyn (Dalkey Archive)
- New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani, tr. from the Italian by Judith Landry (Dedalus)
- Purgatory, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, tr. from the Spanish by Frank Wynne (Bloomsbury)
- Stone Upon Stone, by Wieslaw Mysliwski, tr. from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)
- Scenes from Village Life, by Amos Oz, tr. from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
- The Shadow-Boxing Woman, by Inka Parei, tr. from the German by Katy Derbyshire (Seagull Books)
- Funeral for a Dog, by Thomas Pletzinger, tr. from the German by Ross Benjamin (W.W. Norton)
- Scars, by Juan José Saer, tr. from the Spanish by Steve Dolph (Open Letter)
- Kafka’s Leopards, by Moacyr Scliar, tr. from the Portuguese by Thomas O. Beebee (Texas Tech University Press)
- Seven Years, by Peter Stamm, tr. from the German by Michael Hofmann (Other Press)
- The Truth About Mary, by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint, tr. from the French by Matthew B. Smith (Dalkey Archive)
- In Red, by Magdelena Tulli, tr. from the Polish by Bill Johnston (Archipelago Books)
- Never Any End to Paris, tr. from the Enrique Vila-Matas (New Directions)
I have read only four of these and have four more on the shelf waiting for me. I can’t wait to learn more about the ones I’m unfamiliar with and hope to get through a number of these before the ten finalists are announced on April 10. The winner will be announed as part of the PEN World Voices Festival later in the spring.
Some statistics.
Run down by language: French (8), Spanish (4), German (3), Hungarian (2), Polish (2), Serbian (1), Norwegian (1), Swedish (1), Italian (1), Hebrew (1), Portuguese (1).
This list comes from 17 publishers! I’m sad that NYRB Classics was shut out, though I don’t know how many eligible titles they published this year (I would have voted for Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club (my review here)). However, a few other favorites have strong representation: Dalkey Archive (4), Open Letter (3), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2), New Directions (2), and Archipelago Books (2). All have catalogs worth following.
Here are links to my reviews of what I’ve read so far:
With a list this good, I don’t know where to turn next.
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Here are links to the reviews of some of the books that I’ve read subsequent to posting this:
When I read Henry James, I always come away feeling somehow haunted. Ghosts of dreams and passion run through the pages, and physical death, at times, seems almost redundant. Consequently, Jean Strouse’s marvelous Alice James: A Biography (1980) struck me as particularly Jamesian.
Review copy courtesy of NYRB Classics.
Alice James was the youngest child of Henry James, Sr. and Mary Walsh James. She had four older brothers, the two oldest being William and Henry, commonly (and rightly) considered two of the greatest minds in American history. In learning about William and Henry I’d heard of Alice, but really I knew nothing about her. I am extremely happy to say that I enjoyed learning about her from Strouse as much (well, almost) as learning anything from William and Henry.
Strouse opens the biography with the control of and insight into the material we soon realize we will find on each page:
“When I am gone,” Alice James wrote to her brother William as she was dying, “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.”
By neurotic science she meant the science of nervous disorders, since her existence had long been dominated by mysterious illnesses for which no organic cause could be discovered and no cure found. Her prescient plea to William insisted that her life be judged on its own terms, without apology or excuse. At the same time, it recognized the temptation her friends and posterity would feel to explain her somehow, to imagine what she might have been. And in recognizing that temptation, Alice acknowledged that her life appeared to have been a failure.
This sense of failure due to sickness (though not the plea to be judged on her own terms) immediately brought to mind the character Mrs. Costello in Henry James’ ”Daisy Miller”: “Mrs. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick-headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time” (my review of “Daisy Miller” — which includes the quote — here). Indeed, Alice James had a brilliant mind which she applied to culture and politics, though her mental and physical capacity couldn’t support it. Of course, we’re talking about society at the end of the nineteenth century: the odds of Alice making use of her brilliant mind, regardless of physical problems, were never going to be good, something Henry James picked up on early.
The James family had the money to chase education wherever they thought they’d find it (and Henry James, Sr. spent his time trying to figure out the best way to parent and educate children), so the James children enjoyed “a sensuous education” from American and Europe. But as much as Alice was encouraged to partake, she was still expected to remain at home, waiting to get married (she never did get married — no signs she ever had any love interest). As much as she loved her father and as much as he supported the development of her intellect, years later, in her now famous diary, “[s]he could not turn the towering rage that comes through in her writing even twenty years after the experience itself against the kind father who had so blithely stimulated and thwarted her.”
While Strouse makes it clear that Alice was highly intelligent (something her two oldest brothers, especially Henry, saw and seemed to appreciate) and was thwarted by her father, this biography doesn’t go so far as to definitively blame her fragile mental state on anyone. Though the relationship caused strain, Alice was obviously close to her father, even going so far as to discuss her suicidal thoughts with him, receiving, in the process, his permission to commit suicide as long as it was truly the best option and she did it in a way that wouldn’t upset everyone. She thanked him for his permission (and he effectively took away her opportunity to rebel against him by committing suicide, since he now permitted it, which seems to have been his intent all along). Alice was also very close to William, and he seemed at times to be strangely flirtatious with her. Strouse downplays the potential connections, but it was in the summer of 1878 when she had the first, and maybe her worst, major breakdown, just before William was married.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Alice and William had anything untoward in their relationship. Alice’s breakdown seemed to coincide with times when someone’s affections threatened to be focused elsewhere, whether it was William or, later, Alice’s dearest friend Katherine Peabody Loring (another relationship where Strouse emphasizes that there is no real evidence that there was anything other than strong mutual, unsexual affection on both sides). Strouse presents Alice’s infirmity as a means to get people to focus on her, however intentional or not it may have been. Late in her relatively short life (she lived from 1848 and died of breast cancer in 1892), she was too sick to go anywhere and was tended closely by her brother Henry and Katherine Loring. She was simply waiting for death:
“The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of ’78 when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace; that now it’s only the shrivelling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed.”
It was also late in her life that Alice started her diary, which in large part she dictated to Katherine Loring. This is her literary legacy, and it has been said to be the equal of anything Henry or William wrote (I’ve never read the diary and find this hard to believe, but she certainly shows a sensitivity to the nuances in the world around her and an ability to look coldly inward that we might expect in William and Henry’s writing). William and Henry found out about the diary only after Alice died. Their responses to it are fascinating. Henry’s in particular shows just how insightful that man was as he seems to get Alice’s predicament perfectly:
The diary, he wrote, had impressed him immensely, “but it also puts before me what I was tremendously conscious of in her lifetime — that the extraordinary intensity of her will and personality really would have made the equal, the reciprocal life of a ‘well’ person — in the usual world — almost impossible to her — so that her disastrous, her tragic health was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life — as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity, etc.”
As a final note, though Strouse keeps the focus on Alice throughout, this book is also a great look at the entire James family. It doesn’t overlook the two middle brothers, Wilki and Rob, and some of the best portions are spent looking at potential ways Alice’s life affected William and Henry’s work (Strouse later brings up the potential connection between Alice and Mrs. Costello). I enjoyed each page and highly recommend it.
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