The Hem and Haw of Hope

Joan Didion, Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, Billie Holiday and a Dead Woman I'd Never Heard of Until This Morning

(Above: Joan Didion photographed by Brigitte Lacombe. 1996.)

I began the day doing some research for this column. I was honestly going to retrofit something I had earlier written for another outlet of mine back in 2018 about the need to be kind and decent in the face of the ornery vulgarity and deeper obfuscating obduracy of Trump’s brand of fascism that was continuing to take root in the country having been planted there from the personal and political orangery of the man and his fruitless preening presence, its greedy attempt to seed within us his own cynicism and grubbing bigotry. I had alluded to Carson McCullers’s “we of me” quote from The Member of the Wedding in that earlier column but wanted, now that Trump is still traversing the political and cultural landscape, to use the larger context of it within her narrative from the novel or the play she had adapted from it. So I Googled her trying to find it which then led me unexpectedly to The Paris Review’s “The Art of Fiction” interview with Joan Didion in 1978 which had a McCullers reference embedded in it, a seeding itself of sisterhood that led me to the word “resistance.”

An except:

INTERVIEWER

Did any writer influence you more than others?

DIDION

I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve called Henry James an influence.

DIDION

He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could drown in them. I wouldn’t dare to write one. I’m not even sure I’d dare to read James again. I loved those novels so much that I was paralyzed by them for a long time. All those possibilities. All that perfectly reconciled style. It made me afraid to put words down.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder if some of your nonfiction pieces aren’t shaped as a single Jamesian sentence.

DIDION

That would be the ideal, wouldn’t it. An entire piece—eight, ten, twenty pages—strung on a single sentence. Actually, the sentences in my nonfiction are far more complicated than the sentences in my fiction. More clauses. More semicolons. I don’t seem to hear that many clauses when I’m writing a novel.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that once you have your first sentence you’ve got your piece. That’s what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.

DIDION

What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

INTERVIEWER

The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

DIDION

Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities. Unless you’re Henry James.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder if your ethic—what you call your “harsh Protestant ethic”—doesn’t close things up for you, doesn’t hinder your struggle to keep all the possibilities open.

DIDION

I suppose that’s part of the dynamic. I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

INTERVIEWER

Have any women writers been strong influences?

DIDION

I think only in the sense of being models for a life, not for a style. I think that the Brontës probably encouraged my own delusions of theatricality. Something about George Eliot attracted me a great deal. I think I was not temperamentally attuned to either Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf.

INTERVIEWER

What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?

DIDION

When I was starting to write—in the late fifties, early sixties—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O’Connor, of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. I’m not sure this is so true anymore, but it certainly was at the time, and I didn’t much like it. I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.

INTERVIEWER

Advantages?

DIDION

The advantages would probably be precisely the same as the disadvantages. A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.

#####

I had never heard of The Paris Review interviewer who died before the Didion piece was published and about whom Didion wrote with such care and precise regard in an opening paragraph as an introduction to her own interview. The interviewer's name was Linda Kuehl. I then began to research her a bit as well. She died at the age of 38 in 1978 and was found on a sidewalk in Washington, D.C., after attending a Count Basie concert. It might have been a suicidal jump from a hotel window - or a murder after having been pushed. It was never quite clear. At the time of her death she had been planning to write a biography of Billie Holiday and had spent years doing research and conducting hundreds of interviews contained on 125 audio tapes that have since been used by other Holiday biographers and documentarians.

I pulled up a video on Youtube of Count Basie - Didion: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” - from a 1965 BBC concert with his orchestra and put in my AirPods to listen to it as I wrote by ear this column

I thought of Billie and her pet boxer she named Mister and the love she felt for him that made her feel perhaps less damaged because she felt it.

I found a quote by Henry James in one of Leon Edel’s chapters in his five-volume biography of James. Edel was interviewing James’s nephew Billy who remembered his uncle as "a short, rotund man, with a quick sensibility and a boundless capacity for affection. What he carried away from his elderly uncle was the memory of hearing him say, ‘Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’”

In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes this exchange between the WW I ambulance driver Passini and Lt. Frederic Henry:

“‘It could not be worse,' Passini said respectfully. ‘There is nothing worse than war.’

“‘Defeat is worse.’

“‘I do not believe it,’ Passini said still respectfully. ‘What is defeat? You go home.’”

Reading that I had another kind of understanding - god no: empathy? - for Trump’s refusal to admit his own defeat. He has no home to go to - just properties.

I have learned already during this first year of this spiritual and cultural pilgrimage I am on, that I carry my own home within the stillness that stays inside me as I travel forth. Frankie in The Member of the Wedding felt both homeless and too embedded in her own hometown - both loose and caught, in McCullers’s telling of it. I never dug up the larger context of the “we of me” reference but I did find this: “So she knew she ought to leave the town and go to some place far away. For the late spring, that year, was lazy and too sweet. The long afternoons flowered and lasted and the green sweetness sickened her. The town began to hurt Frankie. Sad and terrible happenings had never made Frankie cry, but this season many things made Frankie suddenly wish to cry. Very early in the morning she would sometimes go out into the yard and stand for a long time looking at the sunrise sky. And it was as though a question came into her heart, and the sky did not answer.”

And this from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: “With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

(Above: Linda Kuehl photographed by her sister, Myra Luftman.)

This morning I woke up thinking about Carson McCullers which led me to read the The Paris Review interview with Joan Didion which then caused me to read about Linda Kuehl and kindness and the cruel hope embedded in an approaching Parisian spring and young people who die for no reason and yet also about the marked march of seasons which continues with no need for our contemplation of it, or them. I even more deeply contemplated - I am not a season even though I have taken up the march ever onward - about my waking up this morning to remember someone I had never heard about before and to type her name here because she did not want to be forgotten. She found her way back to this realm through me - maybe Joan was even holding her hand and leading her here once it was suggested by Ernest Hemingway and Henry James who have been dating over there to the side where they all are living now simultaneously with this very sentence being written. Oh, wow. Really? The wonder of it. The wondrous wander. They are now all dancing to Billie Holiday singing “All of Me” with Count Basie and his band as she did - as she does - in 1954 at Carnegie Hall with that hem and haw of hope that could find somehow a way to harmonize with her pain, real and performative. She was the first female singer Basie hired to perform with him in 1937. She, not missing a note, just tapped me on the shoulder to make sure I added that. “Fuck Trump …” Hemingway just whispered to me with James on his breath, “… don’t use me to conjure empathy for him.” James: “Just dance.” Linda and Joan: “We are not invalids. Don’t use us to validate yourself.” The first sentence up there was my Hemingway one, Joan. The second jutting out was my Jamesian attempt for attention, Linda. Mister musters a rhythmic bark. I hem. I haw. I hope.