An Invitation

One of my great worries is that I'll forget what it was like to be around Joey. For a few days after his death, as I sleep-walked my way through the endless procession of visitors and condolences and funeral arrangements, my brain, blurred with shock and sleeplessness, kept grasping at a few persistent thoughts: there was my wedding, forthcoming in two months, at which he was to be the best man; there was the mystery of the circumstances of his death, something that still troubles me; there was the wellbeing of his loved ones, my parents and Tina especially; and there was the concern that, over time, he would inevitably be reduced in my memory to a handful of images and gestures, recalled fitfully and in fragments. This anxiety - not that we'll forget the dead, but that, as the years pass, they will become two-dimensional caricatures of their real selves - is a central part of any grief, and I suspect that it gets worse the closer you are to the deceased. C.S. Lewis wrote about it movingly, with respect to his wife, in A Grief Observed (which I'm now reading), and Francisco Goldman has discussed it in interviews about his new book, Say Her Name, which he wrote after the sudden death of his young wife. Goldman (whom I heard recently on the NY Times Book Review podcast) says that he wrote the book, a sort of memoir-novel hybrid about his wife and their relationship, pretty soon after her death, while living in a borrowed apartment in Berlin, precisely because he was worried that he would forget her. He saw the book as a gift to his future self: as he grows older and his memory fades, he'll always be able to return to the book and revive her.

I've been noticing that my own writing recently has been more about myself and my mourning than it has been about Joey. This is fine - I need to tell the story of my own grief if I'm ever going to learn to live with it (I almost said "work my way through it") - but I'd like to work a little harder to recall Joey's life, if only so that I (we) can have some old stories for future reference.

This is actually more difficult for me than you might think. For all of our closeness, Joey and I actually didn't spend much time together as adults. I would have said that we saw each other pretty frequently - more frequently, indeed, than we saw our parents - but we lived in different parts of the country, so "frequently" here means something like four or five times a year, for a few days at a time. I imagine it added up to no more than a few weeks a year, which is a lot less time that I spend with our cats, say, or with my students, even if the quality of our interactions was rather higher than in either of those examples.

Some of my strongest memories are of the moments when we first met in whatever city or airport we happened to be meeting in. I have a vivid memory of standing in the Nashville airport waiting for him to deplane, looking over the heads of the approaching streams of people for a tall guy who looked a bit like me but always turned out to be much blonder than I remembered. I recall dragging my suitcase through an airport in Berlin doing the same thing, only this time I was the one who was arriving and he was the one who was meeting me. Often - as, I believe, on this occasion - he would be wearing a t-shirt that I had given him (in recent years I had taken to giving him witty t-shirts, and he always made a point of wearing them when we were together, although neither of us ever mentioned that that's what he was doing), but sometimes he would be coming from work and it would take me a moment to recognize the tall, smartly-dressed man heading toward me in loafers and a suit jacket as my brother (this happened when I met him at a train station outside Philadelphia before our cousin's wedding, a moment which, thankfully, I captured with a photo). Sometimes these meetings would be unnecessarily drawn out, either because he couldn't find me (as when he drove up to Boston from Virginia and struggled to follow my directions to my new Somerville apartment) or because I couldn't find him (as in Asheville, the last place we saw each other, when Kate and I wandered around for a good long while in that not-so-big city, and I became increasingly annoyed with his laconic, rather unhelpful [and constantly shifting] descriptions of just where in the hell he and Tina were shopping).

We never worked out any solid protocol for greeting one another: we didn't hug, and we didn't shake hands. This was mildly embarrassing for both of us, especially when we had girlfriends whom the other would hug (thus highlighting the lack of contact between the two brothers), and I think it stemmed from an earlier time in our relationship when we didn't always get along and avoided any open signs of affection. It was something that one of us was one day going to have to address, probably by wrapping the other in an unexpected hug, but neither of us ever made that leap.

Departures I remember less well, though I do remember them. Frequently it would be one of us dropping the other at the airport, usually the Oklahoma City airport, again without a handshake or a hug, but often with an admonition to "call your mother" to let her know we got home safely. I may also have encouraged him, once or twice, not to "take any shit" from the people in the airport or on the plane, but he probably knew to do this already. Our last departure was not at an airport but on the rainy streets of Asheville, as he climbed into his CRV and I stooped into Kate's Saturn. I don't remember what we said to each other, but it's likely that we talked about when next we'd meet (in Nashville, in July) and warned each other to be careful on the road.

This is the part where I come to the point of today's post:

I'm going to work on pinning down other memories, but over the next few months I'll be traveling and might not get a chance to write many of them on this blog, so I'd like to invite guest contributors to take over the blog for a few months. I can give you permission to post on the blog if you send me your email address (a facebook message would be the best way to do that), which will allow me to send you an email that ought to give you posting access. I'd like to limit it to people close to Joey who might have a story or two that they feel like telling. You don't need to talk about your own grief or anything like that (unless you want to), and it doesn't have to be too fancy - mostly I'm hoping to compile a sort of database of Joey stories that we can all return to from time to time as a way to fend off the inevitable erosion of memory. Feel free to write on any topic, although you should know that my grandmother does occasionally read this stuff, and I'll post each new entry to facebook so that my own friends and family will know there's something new to read. I may sneak in a post or two of my own along the way.

This can start as soon as you'd like it to: I'm leaving for the UK on May 8 and will be traveling more or less continuously (UK, Ireland, Brazil) until early July, so there's plenty of time to join in if you don't feel up to it right now. Anna has already agreed to take a crack at this, and I really hope several others will feel similarly inclined. I learn a lot from listening to stories from people who knew him in a different way than I did - Joey, more than most people, very carefully regulated who got to see his different sides - and I think that the more of him we can evoke, the better we can resist our own failing memories.

On Teaching and Writing

The semester is almost at an end, and it can't come soon enough. I recently listened to a story on the Moth podcast by Anthony Griffith, a comedian whose big break - a series of appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show - came just as his two-year-old daughter was dying of cancer. When he wasn't rushing around to hospitals and going crazy with fear and rage, he was standing on the stage having to be funny. The audience couldn't know what he was going through, or the whole thing would fall apart - nobody wants to see a sad clown, as he put it - and they didn't. He made them laugh, launched his career, and went home to make funeral arrangements for his daughter.

I've been feeling a bit like that since the school year started in August. My livelihood doesn't depend on my ability to be funny (though I do rely pretty heavily on humor to keep the students engaged), but in some ways it's even more difficult to do what I do while grieving than it would be if I were a comedian. My classes, both from necessity and as a result of my own scholarly interests, focus pretty heavily on death - usually death of the earth-shaking, genocidal kind, but there are plenty of individual stories of trauma and loss that come up in readings, films, and discussions. I've taught and read about these topics (the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Irish famine, etc.) enough that I'm usually able to put a little intellectual distance between myself and the raw horror of these events, but it is a pretty unpleasant experience to be discussing a book on, say, Russian attitudes toward death (a book I had ordered for last fall's graduate seminar well before Joey's accident) or a film about the Irish Civil War in which one brother ends up killing another (the film was The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which I had seen years ago and about which I had forgotten a few crucial details) with an unsuspecting group of students. It's also difficult, sometimes, to muster the necessary enthusiasm that it takes to hold the interest of roomfuls of students for several hours a day, although I suppose it can also be a welcome distraction: invariably, eventually, I manage to get wrapped up in the material enough that the steady buzz of sorrow and disbelief that's been with me since July quiets to a whisper.

Still, it's exhausting.

Another reason that I'm looking forward to the end of the semester is that the summer will bring more time to write. You may have noticed that these blog posts have become rather infrequent - this is not because I'm running out of things to say, but simply because I haven't often had the time or energy to say them. Starting in early May, I'll be traveling to Oxford, Dublin, and Belfast for a little over a month, working on an academic research project by day and (hopefully) writing in a bit more focused way about Joey by night. I'm toying with traveling to some remote spot in Ireland or Scotland for a week or so to work on both projects, drawn by the idea of embracing my solitude (Kate will be visiting me for a weekend, but otherwise I'll be on my own) and seeing what sorts of words it enables me to string together. I gather that Evelyn Waugh sought solitude for every book he wrote, even if it just meant going across town to stay in a hotel. I like that.

Death is something people have been writing about for as long as there have been people who write - in fact, death may be the most common topic of all creative activity produced in any media whatever, written or otherwise - and I've been thinking a lot about why that is. Obviously, it springs from a desire to control and contain death, to fit it into some sort of structured narrative. It also is an effort to wring some sort of meaning from death, but I think that search for meaning is more of a motivating force for readers than for writers. For the person who writes about death, the act of writing is itself a form of meditation - it's a way of carving out a chunk of time in which to focus exclusively on death, as well as an exercise in molding a swirl of inchoate thoughts into individual words and sentences to be looked upon, turned over, and peered at from all sides. Yes, writing is therapy, in a way, but not so much because it enables us to communicate our thoughts to others as because the act of writing itself forces us into a particular mental and emotional state.

For some reason - probably just because I'm more alert for these sorts of things - I've recently been stumbling upon lots of articles specifically about the act of writing about grief. Most have been prompted by a new book by Meghan O'Rourke about her mother's recent death and another one by Joyce Carol Oates about the death of her husband. O'Rourke had an article in the New Yorker recently (here) on the topic, and she and Oates had a recent exchange (here) on the topic. Both books have received very good reviews, and a couple of the reviews themselves (I haven't yet read the books) have offered really insightful comments on the impulse to write about death. Deborah Jerome's review of O'Rourke's book (here) is brief and insightful, and she puts it as well as anyone when she says "Writing is a path out of the maze of one's aching head." Julian Barnes wrote a long, excellent review of Oates's book (here), which I'd strongly recommend. It reminded me that Barnes himself has a memoir about death, called Nothing to be Frightened Of, which I'd been meaning to read (Joey was a fan of Julian Barnes - one of the first books I ever bought him was England, England), and so I picked up a copy of it when we were in Austin. Several of these articles mention C.S. Lewis's memoir of his wife's death, A Grief Observed, as the gold-standard of grief memoirs, so I've picked up a copy of that, too.

I'm very much looking forward to the time, just a couple of weeks from now, when I can focus a bit more fully on all these things.

A Funny Thing Happened

Last weekend I was in Austin, Texas, when something unexpected happened.

I was attending a conference for British historians at the University of Texas. Most of the attendees were graduate students locked into the tractor beams of the school's several prominent British historians, whose specialties are the diplomatic and economic history of the British Empire, and so most of the papers were hard-nosed empirical studies of political relations amongst Britain's various dominions, colonies, and dependencies, though there were a few squishier papers (and I say this fondly) about the cultural and literary history of the British Empire. I didn't manage to attend much of the conference - teaching obligations kept me away for the first two days - but I was present on the final day, when I delivered my paper and attended some other talks, including the closing lecture by an eminent historian of British political thought.

The title of this lecture, as printed on the program, was something like, "History, Politics, and Thought in Britain," which is the sort of title that you give to a conference organizer if you haven't decided what you want to talk about yet. So as we gathered in the smallish seminar room overlooking the sunny campus, none of us, I believe, quite knew what to expect.

Now, I have been to many, many such talks in my life, and few of them have been memorable, or even especially enjoyable. They are usually rather dry and technical, especially when academics are the only audience, and they are rarely very funny. (The humorless nature of academic history writing is a serious problem that I've been pondering a lot lately. Not only do historians rarely write about their subjects with wit or humor, they also very rarely write about funny things that happened in the past, when there are, in fact, many quite funny things happening all the time. This is especially true of the British Empire.) So when this eminent historian began talking about how we might use novels to shed light on the prevailing assumptions and prejudices of a historical period, I began to slump a little in my seat. But then she said the name Evelyn Waugh, and I perked up a bit. And then she kept right on saying Waugh's name for the next hour and more, until, by the end, she had delivered a whole lecture - a funny, funny lecture - on the man who was my brother's favorite author.

Anybody who knew Joey and has read Waugh will immediately recognize the affinity between the two. Waugh was a satirist whose books eviscerated, with mordant humor, the smug and the self-congratulatory. He was a man of many prejudices, which he flourished freely and remorselessly, but usually in such a way that you knew not to take them too seriously, for prejudices are funnier when their arbitrariness and irrationality are made clear. He was an elitist who detested the vulgarity of modern life but had few nice things to say about the elite themselves (or about anyone else, for that matter). He was a romantic whose principal critique of his own society was that there wasn't enough nobility or beauty in it, but he was also a wanderer who traveled the world looking for, but rarely finding, beauty and nobility elsewhere (usually he simply found more things to mock). If Waugh's books were not books but were, instead, facial expressions, they would be one continuous series of smirks, with perhaps a trace of wistful nostalgia about the eyes in the case of Brideshead Revisited.

The smirk, of course, was Joey's own most practiced expression.

I don't want to suggest an exact equivalence between Evelyn Waugh and my brother. By most accounts, Waugh could be a most unpleasant person, given to misogyny and anti-Semitism, a poor father, a bully, and a snob. Joey was much gentler than Waugh, and he wore his own prejudices (against things like Baptists, woman novelists, Applebees, and the campus of the University of Notre Dame) much more lightly and employed them more consistently for comic effect, not out of deep conviction. But it's easy to see what he liked about Waugh. In addition to being a fellow smirker, Joey was a great Anglophile, and there are few authors more Anglo than Waugh. He also liked the old-fashioned, sophisticated-sounding expressions that Waugh's characters used, especially the phrase "hard cheese," which means something like "tough going" and is in the title of chapter three of A Handful of Dust ("Hard Cheese on Tony"). This phrase was part of Joey's repertoire of Joey-only phrases and sayings, which he peppered into conversations to make people feel that they were in on some kind of joke, even if they didn't quite get it themselves. This was a skill that Joey and Waugh shared: the ability to draw other people into complicity with their smirking world-view.

The lecture in Austin, as any lecture about Waugh should do, drew many laughs, and in most cases it was Waugh himself - his characters, his plots, his words - who earned the laughter. As I sat there, surrounded by strangers (Kate had come to Austin with me, but she was off exploring the city on her own), I noticed that the only empty chair in the room was the one beside me. And as I listened and laughed along - and, when not laughing, smirked - I felt closer to my brother than I had since I last saw him alive, nearly a year ago now.

During the discussion after the lecture, someone asked the speaker what drew her toward this topic, which is not, after all, within her usual bailiwick. She replied that she liked reading novels, and so she wanted to write about them. This is a sentiment with which many historians can identify: we get drawn into the profession because we like to read, but then we become obliged to read dense, academic histories instead of the things that we enjoy reading. I've struggled with this dilemma for years, and lately I've been feeling not only that life is too short not to read what you want to read (which is a sentiment with which my law-student brother, voracious reader of novels and avoider of law books, would wholly sympathize), but also that I want to write what I want to write. This doesn't mean abandoning academic writing, but it does mean a) writing something else, something more literary and less technical, on the side, and/or b) working in a different, less technical vein in my academic writing. If you're reading this, then you know that I'm already doing a). As for b), well, I did win an award at the conference - for the best paper presented - so I'm taking that as an endorsement of the current path that I'm on with the academic stuff. My aspiration in that latter respect is to become a storyteller rather than a technician, which is what so many in my profession are. It is also to try to find a way to write about something funny that once happened, or at least to tell about something serious that once happened, but to tell it with a half-smile.