The next three books inspired an essay called “Three Authors in Search of a Life.” You can find it at Tapping on the Wall.

The Friend – Sigrid Nunez
I knew this novel won the National Book Award, but I had to check whether it was for fiction (it was). My doubts arose because there’s hardly any plot and only one human character – the nameless female first person narrator. There are two friends in the book. One (shown on the front cover) is a Great Dane named Apollo. The dog was passed on to the narrator when another friend committed suicide. We learn about the difficulties of having such a huge animal in New York. Apollo isn’t an endearing creature; he’s old and despondent. Eventually he warms up to his new “owner” (she doesn’t like that word), and she to him. But the bulk of the book isn’t about Apollo. The narrator, who’s in her sixties and has had a long career as a writer and teacher of creative writing (all of which is true of Nunez), devotes the most space to her thoughts on the literary life. Also of concern to her is the subject of suicide; that word – “suicide” – may set a record for appearance in a short novel. This centering on how Nunez (through her character) feels and perceives things made the book seem like a memoir. Her deceased friend (also a writer/teacher, though with the status of a Nobel candidate) was a womanizer who had affairs with his students (long ago she had been one of them and they had sex – only once, after which a close platonic relationship developed). Though he’s the “You” the “I” addresses throughout the book, Nunez sticks in a scene that raises the question of whether he exists as he’s been presented. She has a “woman” visit a man who failed in his suicide attempt and who has a small mutt she cared for briefly. After a long conversation the woman tells this diminished version of the famous author that she has written a story about him. Whatever Nunez is up to in this very personal book, I can’t see its appeal for the general public. I’m a literary soul, so I found her observations to be interesting, and I liked the clarity and precision of her prose. I even found the ending to be moving. But people who want a heart-warming story of bonding between human and animal will have to plow through a whole lot of other stuff, much of it depressing.

Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961 – edited by Carlos Baker
If you’re interested in Hemingway, this is the book for you. Because of the uninhibited nature of these letters, they’re very revealing as to what the man was like. The book is huge – over 900 pages – and I skimmed much of it (such as the parts about hunting and fishing and bullfighting and wartime exploits). What I paid attention to was his emotional life and how he felt about the people he interacted with. I came away with some sympathy for him, but the overriding feeling he evoked in me was disapproval – and sometimes disgust. But I won’t go into why I responded the way I did. Since the man is revealed in these letters, you can reach your own conclusions. I wonder how many care. In his heyday, in the 1950s, he was a Bigger-Than-Life figure on the American scene. Papa was the epitome of a new type of writer – the two-fisted brawler, the hard-drinking adventurer. His safaris, his marriages (four in all), and his feuds made the news; his face was on the cover of every major magazine. Hemingway wanted to be a great writer, right up there with the likes of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and when he received the Nobel Prize his status with the giants was confirmed. But is he still held in esteem? I think not. For me his characters are artificial and his prose is over-worked, self-conscious and, well, precious. If he were alive today and read that last word, he would challenge me to duke it out with him, so he could knock my teeth down my throat. (Which he would also do if he read my review of To Have and Have Not, which is a crummy novel.) I think, as a writer, he shines the brightest in these letters. A few are formal in nature, but most are spontaneous, full of misspelling and grammatical errors. Obviously there was no revision. But he avoids those qualities I found fault with in his fiction – they’re lively, inventive and often funny. He comes across in all his shifting moods: loving and spiteful, happy and depressed, generous and brutish. Also on display is a virulent racism and an anger that’s truly chilling. He didn’t curb his words; these letters weren’t meant for public consumption. In his will he wrote that “none of the letters I wrote in my lifetime are to be published.” His wife, Mary, was executrix of his estate, and for fifteen years after his suicide (a blast to his forehead from a double-barreled Boss shotgun) she abided by his wishes and sought to prevent their publication. But she relented, for whatever reason, and thus Carlos Baker has given us this volume. The letters are “selected,” and we get none of the ones Hemingway received. Oddly enough, this isn’t a problem. What we have is a journey through a life, from age eighteen to sixty-two (the last letter, which was written less than three weeks before he ended his life, closes with these words: “Am feeling fine and very cheerful about things and hope to see you all soon”). I should note, in closing, that success did not bring Hemingway happiness. In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoir about the time when he was married to his first wife Hadley and was just setting out on his writing career, he closes with these elegiac words: “But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

That Time of Year – Joyce Horner
This is a journal Joyce Horner kept during the three years (1975 to 1977) she spent in a nursing home (she became wheelchair-bound at age seventy-one). She had been a professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and had written two novels; her poetry had appeared in leading magazines. In the journal’s last entry she’s about to leave the nursing home to go to Boston for an operation (which was to prove unsuccessful). Three years later she died. I learned these scanty facts from Robert Tucker’s Introduction (I could find almost nothing about her on the internet). Mr. Tucker – who states that he never met Joyce Horner – was clearly moved by the person who wrote this journal – and so was I. In presenting a matter-of-fact chronicle of her daily life a distinct personality emerges. The beginning: “Everyone wants to go home. Perhaps that says too much. Everyone ‘wants out.’ Or there may be some who are beyond wanting as much as that. But the woman who calls ‘Martha’ over and over, the woman who calls ‘Eileen,’ want what they used to have and sometimes think they can get it if they call loud enough.” Unlike many, Joyce has resources to fall back on: literature and classical music (provided by her trusty radio). Nature is also precious to her, and she loves to sit out in the sun, to smell the new-mown grass and the pine. She keeps up with the politics of the time and continues to write poetry. Visits and letters from friends give her pleasure, and sometimes she’s able to go for a few days to her home, which she shares with her friend Elizabeth. Joyce never married, though in one entry she writes “I suppose nostalgia takes the place of fantasy in age. (Heaven knows, I had fantasies enough, including the recurring one of meeting the completely desirable husband – I never set foot on an Atlantic liner without hoping for that.)” She’s also nostalgic about her active days, when she could take a long trek with a backpack or explore the streets of a foreign city. This journal was meant to be read by others; it’s too carefully worked to be a purely personal undertaking. But the act of writing it also serves a purpose for its author. By observing, and by conveying her observations and thoughts through language, Joyce is trying to keep her intellect sharp. It is sharp, but the fear behind this effort is that her mind will deteriorate (as has happened to so many of those around her). She’s remarkably tolerant of what she experiences – the world of the nursing home isn’t a nightmare world for her; there’s kindness and humor to be found, and she appreciates the nurses who do a difficult and underpaid job and still retain their spirit. Though it wasn’t Joyce’s nature to be depressed or negative, with passing time her down moments become more persistent. She worries that she’ll be deprived of people with whom she can exchange ideas; she doesn’t want “to be visited as good work,” but she feels that she’s losing the energy to be interesting to others. Tiredness and resignation must be setting in, and the entries become more widely spaced. But that’s just part of the experience I shared with Joyce Horner. This is a rich and valuable book, and I thank the University of Massachusetts Press for allowing her to live for me. For Joyce that would mean something. *