Good morning.
I warn you: This entry is about books and it will meander. Feel free to opt out or unsubscribe now. I won’t hold it against you
I’m always trying to read more books. I’m not terrible at reading books but I’m not as good as I once was. Last month, I listened to Marc Maron interview Paul Giamatti. It was surprisingly a chaotic conversation to listen to. Despite that, at one point Paul Giamatti and Marc Maron talk at length about how they can’t get through a book anymore. As I listened to them talk, it made me feel slightly better about my inability to read books relative to their inability to read books. Those two famous guys seem to be bad at reading books.
Just as I am a serial rewatcher of movies and television, I’m something of a serial rereader of books. I’ve just finished rereading two books I love: Light Years by James Salter and Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. The former is a novel, the latter is something unclassifiable. A self help book? A memoir? A book on the craft of writing? An economic treatise? I’m not quite sure.
This was my third read of Light Years and my second read of Having and Being Had. Light Years is a novel about the Berlands, an upper middle class family living in Westchester in the 1960s through the 1970s. The book is barely 300 pages and covers about twenty years. That’s the point: life passes quickly. This isn’t a mid-century suburban misery novel like Cheever or Yates (I never had a Yates phase like a lot of people I knew did when the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road came out in 2008), it’s something different. Some people might call it lightweight because it focuses on spoiled unserious people, but I think it is full of beautiful writing.
Having and Being Had is ostensibly about coming to terms with your place in a capitalist society. But that makes it sound more serious than it is. It’s also about the difference between work and labor, how some of us are able to earn enough to spend money on certain things which means other people are struggling to even survive, and whether or not practicing art is selfish or worth doing at all.
These two books don’t have a lot of overlap, but in my latest reads, at this stage of my life, I noticed some links between them. Whether I’m forcing those connections together is another story.
Light Years covers the gradual dissolution of a marriage between a man named Viri and a woman named Nedra and the sad but delicate passing of their life as a family as if almost overnight. Viri is an architect. Viri aspires to greatness. He is successful, but not a success. He has a great life but can’t seem to grasp it. His wife, Nedra, is noted primarily for her beauty, sophistication, and her ability to make a house feel like a home. But Nedra aspires to be free and unfettered in her life, which is admirable, but she can’t define what free means. She wants to be completely present in life, but that often results in her being self-centered and selfish.
Reading this novel always feels like a cautionary tale. But several passages stood out to me for different reasons this time around. The first is about midway through the novel. It’s Easter Sunday sometime in the mid or late sixties. At one point, Viri glances at himself in a mirror in his home. “When they began to prepare supper late in the day, [Viri] went upstairs. He looked at himself in the mirror, suddenly without illusion. He was in middle life; he could no longer recognize the man he had been.”
At this point in the book, Viri is in his mid-thirties. He is younger than I am now. His daughters are about to enter their teenage years. Now that I’m thirty-eight, reading about age in this book astounds me. Viri and Nedra feel as if their life is almost over and they are not even thirty-five years old!
Maybe it is because I don’t have children yet but when I look in the mirror now I absolutely recognize the person I’ve always been. I don’t know what that says or what that means. It could be that I have good genes or I’m in denial. But when I read that passage, I think about the age of the soul of man and how your soul’s age and disposition is mutable. And perhaps it’s a good thing I can see myself in the mirror as I’ve always seen myself. Or maybe all that means is that I’m still young enough.
A little later that evening, Viri sits down to read the New York Times. “He sat with the paper, the Sunday edition, immense and sleek, which had lain unopened in the hall. In it were articles, interviews, everything fresh, unimagined; it was like a great ship, its decks filled with passengers, a directory in which was entered everything that had made any difference to the city, the world. A great vessel sailing each day, he longed to be on it, to enter its salons, to stand near the rail.”
Has there ever been a better description of the Sunday edition of the New York Times?! I get a weekend print edition of the Times. (Well, I used to. Somehow the New York Times and their local delivery provider can’t find my address in the center of Austin. It’s a whole thing.) For whatever you feel about the Times, getting the Sunday paper remains one of the unique reading experiences you can have in this world. And it feels just the way Salter describes it. I am a man in his late thirties, older than Viri is at this point in the novel, who wants to stand near the rail of that great vessel sailing out each day. And I still don’t know what that says about me that I want to be a part of it than actually understanding that I am a part of it.
Slightly further in the novel, Viri and Nedra have friends over for dinner (they are always having their fabulous friends over for dinner) as well as the daughter of one of their neighbors. The girl is older than Viri’s daughters—she is of drinking age, she has traveled. Viri goes upstairs for a moment to put his daughters to bed. “He kissed his daughters. Sitting on their beds, he felt the warmth of their rooms, their chambers in which they slept and dreamed, were secure. Their books, their possessions filled him with a sense of accomplishment and peace. On the stairs he heard voices, the sensual chords from below. Kate was sitting near Arnaud. Her teeth had a bluish cast to them…He had a moment of concern for her—no, not concern, he realized, but covetousness. He was like a sick man as he thought of her, stricken and unhappy. The pain he felt was a phantom pain, like that in the toes of a missing leg. It was only desire, which he hoped would leave him, which he prayed it would not.”
Not having children, I can’t really comprehend the sensation one must have seeing the room of their child settling into repose at night. But a passage like that brings the feeling up in me: you are accomplished because your child is alive and safe another day and because of that accomplishment you are at peace.
I more closely understand how, in the next moment, the pull of desire wraps Viri. It is a desire he knows is wrong and that he knows will leave him quickly, because it is the desire of a younger man, and he both wishes it would go and yet does not want it to leave.
Near the end of Having and Being Had, Eula Biss explains how she spent her fortieth birthday digging a hole in the yard of her Chicago home. She then discusses a book called The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly, which one of her friends gave her. Connolly wrote it the year he turned forty, “when he was struggling with the question of what he wanted out of life.”
I don’t know anything about Cyril Connolly, but apparently, he felt a sense of total failure as he approached forty. As Biss explains, “He has spent his life on comforts, traveling and running up debts. He likes soft cheeses and warm baths, but he fears that he is losing himself to pleasure…Pleasure is not necessarily harmful, he writes. But it outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth.’ He wants to be more than he is…He wants to write a great work.”
Viri Berland is in many ways like Cyril Connolly. He hasn’t run up debts per say, but he’s spent his life on comforts, on pursuing youth and beauty, and wishing he were more than what he is. And he has lost himself to life, not lost himself within it.
In the same chapter, Biss quotes Cyril Connolly: “Approaching forty, a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.” She then relays something a neighbor told her: “Time and money…that’s how you know what matters to a person.” Assessing this aphorism, Biss decides: “I think people are what matter to me, but I spent my time on writing and my money on this house…I come to a decision. I will sell a book—this book—to buy myself time.”
Viri spends his time at work, at social events, socializing and hosting friends, and being an attentive father to his daughters. Yet, that isn’t enough for him and it isn’t enough for his wife, Nedra. It’s hard to say which mouth feeds into the other.
In the “Notes” section of Having and Being Had, something of a postscript to the book, Biss explains how as she was working on her book her son asked her to define the word luxury. She tries to define it a few times before landing on the following definition: “It’s like dessert. You don’t need dessert to live, but it's nice to have. It’s a luxury.” She then goes on to quote Kenneth Galbraith (again, who I don’t really know anything about) who says that, “In an affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.”
Biss takes Galbraith’s words further. “All the necessities of my life, my reading and my writing, were luxuries. And every moment I wrote about was a luxury, though the writing itself felt necessary and a luxury, so I struggled with the word. Later, I looked it up: ‘The state of great comfort and extravagant living.’ Maybe I found it difficult to define luxury because I lived in a state of great comfort. This is the state that some people refer to as middle class. And a common euphemism for being upper-middle class or rich is comfortable. Comfortable as I felt in my new house, rich as I felt, I didn’t have time to write. Not at first. I bargained for time, I made trade-offs for time, and I eventually sold this book to buy time.”
A little earlier in the book, Biss says, “Health is the mark of money in our time, when a longer life span can be bought. The rich of this country are living to be older and older now…Life remains the ultimate privilege, the living lording over the dead.”
I’m older than Viri Berland is for most of Light Years. And I’m younger than Eula Biss when she wrote Having and Being Had and Cyril Connolly when he wrote The Unquiet Grave. I’m not a parent like Viri Berland and Eula Biss. I’m not a published writer like Eula Biss and Cyril Connolly. But I work like Viri Berland and wish I were more successful. I want desire to leave and yet remain with me when I come across it. Like both Cyril Connolly and Viri Berland, as I approach forty, I want to be more than I am. Yet, I couldn’t define “more” or “success” the same way Nedra Berland could actually define “free.”
Based on their descriptions in Having and Being Had, my life is a luxury and my life is the ultimate privilege. I am completely middle class and I am completely comfortable. And as much as I want more (to be more than I am, to sell a book to buy time, to be a father and know what it is to put a child to bed and feel accomplishment and peace, to own a home that I feel uneasy about owning), I don’t want it to all go by without me. I don’t want to be there, standing on the bank of a river realizing as Viri does at the end of Light Years that “[i]t happens in an instant. It is all one long day, one endless afternoon, friends leave, we stand on the shore.”
If I can still recognize my face when I look in the mirror, then perhaps I can avoid that fate.