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.

William and Dean and Mark and Joey (Part 2)

I don't really know Joey's feelings about William Faulkner, but I suspect that he liked him. I suspect this because Joey liked to challenge himself with difficult books, and Faulkner wrote many difficult books. Joey also liked male American writers from the first half of the nineteenth century, and Faulkner qualifies on that score, too. I imagine he read lots of Faulkner at UVA, where I further imagine Faulkner is the closest thing to a religious faith that more than a few UVA English professors profess (this is total conjecture, but it is not, I think, groundless). I also know that Joey had at least read As I Lay Dying in high school, because I read it in high school five years before he did, and the reading list didn't change much in that period. I remember liking the book but not getting it. Actually, I remember really liking the parts that I did get - the parts that were narrated by reasonably coherent narrators, the parts that were like finding a rich mineral vein in a particularly stingy mine - and being bemused by, but not hostile toward, the parts that I didn't get.

As a matter of fact, I'm almost certain Joey and I discussed Faulkner at least once - when we passed through Oxford together on that road trip whose purpose and destination I can't seem to remember. By that time I may also have read The Sound and the Fury, but that almost certainly would not have added to the interestingness of anything I might have had to say on the topic of William Faulkner. I simply cannot remember what might have transpired in that conversation, though, or even if it happened.

All this is to say that when I read Absalom, Absalom! recently, I wasn't really trying to read it for Joey's sake, as I had done with Don Quixote, which I knew he hadn't read and which I therefore felt I needed to read for him. I read this one for my sake but with him in mind - always in mind - and because I knew Faulkner was working on it when his own brother died. So I was also half-looking for that moment in the text when Faulkner would have heard the news, rushed out to identify the body, made the funeral arrangements, chosen the inscription, and then returned to his study and his typewriter to resume the tale. I didn't actually expect to find this place, this moment of rupture, this space between words or sentences or letters when the thread broke and he found himself more loosely tethered to the earth than he had once been. I know that writers revise, that Faulkner may well have wadded up his first draft after the funeral and started again. I know that he outlined his stories beforehand and may simply have edited the outline. It is possible that he may have gotten no further than the first few words ("From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon") when he got the call about his brother, and yet I still kept one eye open for that moment. I also know that Faulkner's style makes it virtually impossible to notice any sort of rupture in the writer's process at all, not because it is all polished smooth, but because it is so anarchic that it might as well have been written in a whirlwind.

The subject of Absalom, Absalom! is the Sutpen family, whose story, told by several people to a young man named Quentin as well as by Quentin himself (this is the Quentin of The Sound and The Fury, who ends up drowning himself in the Charles River of Boston at the age of 19), is symbolic of the South itself. Faulkner's method is to uncover the tale of the family's ascent and demise slowly, passing over the same episodes repeatedly, revealing a little more each time - like wipers on a dirty windshield, slowly providing more clarity with each pass - and it requires quite a bit of patience to allow things to unfold. (It also requires quite a bit of silence. If I heard so much as a cat meowing in the next room, I'd have to back up and start again - I have rarely read a book with more concentration.) Slowly, then, you learn about Thomas Sutpen, who comes to northern Mississippi with a team of Haitian slaves and begins building a house and then a family for himself. Having come from nothing (an impoverished hillside in western Virginia), he is determined, in classic American-dream style, not just to prosper but also to found a family, a dynasty, that will last. But then the war comes (the Civil War - this is all in the nineteenth century), and Sutpen's past catches up with him, and one of his sons kills the other son - kills his brother, that is - and so Sutpen's dreams are shattered and, long after his death, and just to drive home the point, his house burns down.

I'm ruthlessly simplifying what is, of course, a very complex story, with all sorts of biblical and racial and historical and epic things going on, but I want to get to the part about Sutpen's sons. We learn very early on that Sutpen's son Henry killed a man who was about to marry his (Henry's) sister, a man named Charles Bon. Only later do we learn that Charles Bon was also Sutpen's son, making him Henry's brother - a fact of which Henry, it seems, was aware, and which would also mean that Charles Bon had been about to marry his own (Charles Bon's) sister. Still with me? I have actually spoiled the plot a little bit, for which I apologize, but I need to make a point.

So one fictional brother kills the other. The real Faulkner felt guilty about his own brother's death. Is there a connection there? Did Faulkner decide that this was how his novel would develop after Dean had his plane crash? I don't know, but I imagine some Faulkner scholar somewhere has sorted this out. I do know that Faulkner knew a lot about mortality and grief - knew about it from the death of his infant daughter Alabama 

and from the sudden, haunting death of his brother Dean - and he wrote that knowledge into the story of these two brothers. Here is what Rosa, Henry's aunt (though younger than Henry), says about learning of Charles Bon's death, the death of a man she'd never met but nevertheless loved:

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass - occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish, are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless, fixed, until we can die.

Has there ever been a better description of the weird unreality of grief? Of the way it pulls you out of the world and into some other sphere that you're trapped inside of but won't - can't - accept? And that penultimate word, "can," right there before die: it captures, exactly, the yearning for release that comes with this sort of thing.

A little earlier Rosa says a similar thing, calling her grief, "that dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you can not believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith," and I think that also catches it perfectly. The man who wrote these things knew what it felt like to lose someone suddenly and horribly.

There's quite a bit of this  Absalom, Absalom!, as well as with lots of dark brooding about fate and destiny and the large, unseen forces that shape a man's (or a family's) life, and over which men (and women) have no control. I confess to feeling at times that my own family was living under a sort of Faulknerian curse - the tragedies that my parents and I have endured since the carefree days of my childhood sometimes seem as if they can only have been devised by some gang of sinister gods - but that idea is usually fleeting. More frequently, I feel luckier than I have any right to feel, and more in control of my life than I ought to, and so I don't worry too much about the epic tragedy that Faulkner would make of my family story. Besides, I'm not sure we're Southern enough.

But then there's this. I think it's right to assume that Faulkner dealt with his grief by writing. For someone who talked frequently about the unstoppable flood of words that he simply had to get out of him, for someone who wrote as if he were channeling words from some other realm, and, finally, for someone who frequently wrote while drunk (and was frequently drunk), writing would have been the most natural (maybe the only) way through his sorrow. And there is a hint in this book about the importance he gave to the endeavor. Writing was not therapy for Faulkner, nor was it simply a way to organize his thoughts, nor was it a way to share a story with others in order to alleviate some of their pain. It was a way to achieve immortality, that immortality that the deceased, perhaps, was unable to achieve for himself.

One of the characters, Judith, decides to give a letter to a slight acquaintance, who subsequently tells the story. It is her only letter from her dead beau (and brother) Henry Bon, and she explains her decision in the following way:

Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug, and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

(Remember that Faulkner chose the inscription for his brother's grave.)

And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something - a scrap of paper - something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish...

We're mortal, and so we write, but the medium on which we write is also transitory. So we need to give what we write to another mortal, even if what we write is never read, just so that what we write will be something that will have happened to someone. In that way, what we write will be alive in the way that a tombstone is not.

That, anyway, is what I make of this passage. And it's as good a justification as any for what I'm trying to here. Faulkner, as far as I know, didn't write explicitly about his brother - he didn't write a memoir about him, certainly didn't write a blog - but he wrote through him, through his loss, and in so doing, he defied death. It's really not a bad way of looking at things.

William and Dean and Mark and Joey (Part 1)

I spent much of our recent trip to Oxford and Memphis reading the latest issue of the Oxford American, a magazine to which Kate subscribed shortly after we moved here - during the Southern Festival of Books, in fact, which we visited with my father and Joey - but which I hadn't been reading that often. The OA (which is published in Conway, AR) is often called the South's New Yorker, and I can see why - it has a mix of long-form nonfiction and fiction pieces written by prominent Southern writers, mostly of very high quality - but somehow I never found much in it to interest me. I think it's because I want magazines to give me the sort of in-depth reporting that you don't get in a newspaper, and the OA is more a collection of short stories and essays than a magazine of journalism.

So it was unusual for me to be reading the OA at all, and even more unusual for me to be reading this particular issue since, as Kate subsequently pointed out, our subscription had run out some time ago. When she mentioned this after I described to her the story that I'm about to describe to you, I began to think that I was being led - by whom or what I don't care to speculate (this is why I'm using the passive voice) - specifically to this story.

The story is "Dean's Crash: A Short History of the Flying Faulkners," by Joshua Clark. It's not online, so I'm unable to link you to the article, but if you hurry you might be able to find the issue still at your local newsstand (provided they still have local newsstands by the time you read this). It's about William Faulkner and his brother Dean, younger by ten years, who admired and emulated his famous older brother and occasionally flew airplanes with him (William had trained with the Royal Air Force in Canada during WWI and always afterward claimed, falsely, that he had flown missions in Europe). William paid for Dean's flying lessons and sold him his first monoplane. In air shows they were known as the "Flying Faulkners," and, as William's writing career blossomed, Dean became the better pilot and began flying on his own. In 1935, just before an air show in Pontotoc, MS, Dean's plane crashed with four people aboard; one of the passengers survived, but it wasn't Dean.

William Faulkner's brother died at the age of 28. He took it hard, blaming himself for selling Dean the plane and for not being in the plane with him. He also blamed himself, more broadly, for stimulating his brother's interest in flying, for leading him into the kind of lifestyle that had brought about his death. He had nightmares for years afterwards, once telling Dean's wife, years later, that he dreamed about the crash every night.

He (William) dealt with the pain by drinking (he dealt with many things, including the onset of evening, by drinking) and by writing. When the crash occurred, he was working on Absalom, Absalom!, a novel whose central mystery (as Clark points out) concerns one brother killing another. He also dealt with it by raising Dean's daughter, not yet born at the time of the crash, as his own. Her name was also Dean.

William chose the epitaph for Dean's grave. It is:

    I Bare Him on Eagles'
    Wings and Brought Him
    Unto Me.

It's the same inscription he had used for the titular character in his 1929 novel Sartoris, and it comes from Exodus.


When I read this story, sitting in a pungent hotel room in Tupelo, preparing the next day to travel to Faulkner's home in Oxford, I knew there were two things I needed to do. I needed to visit the cemetery where Dean and William are buried, and I needed to buy and read Absalom, Absalom!. 


The article describes the cemetery in some detail, mentioning that William is buried at some distance from the rest of the Falkner family (Falkner is the correct spelling - William added the u when he went to Canada to join the RAF, because he thought it made him sound more British - he also adopted a British accent), whose plot sits atop a hill, while William's is at the bottom. Kate and I asked the docent at the Faulkner house (a Jamaican kid from Ole Miss who's hoping to study public history at my university someday) to point us to the cemetery, and we had little trouble finding the place, but it took some time to find the Falkner/Faulkner plots. It was a raw and windy early-March day in northern Mississippi, we were both improperly bundled, and many of the old marble tombstones had been worn smooth to illegibility, but after some alert wandering across the damp, spongy grass we managed to locate the Falkner plot and Dean's grave.

Also buried here is William's daughter Alabama, who died in infancy while William and Dean were traveling to Memphis to get an incubator for her. It's the smallest grave in the family plot.

At the bottom of the hill is William's grave. It's is better-marked, with flowers and empty Jack Daniels bottles on it. William died at the age of 64, early on the morning of July 6, 1962, shortly after he finished his final book, The Reivers. His death was a result of complications from a fall from a horse several years earlier. Neither brother died a natural death.

I can't say I had any great epiphany at the cemetery in Oxford, but I can't say that I was expecting any, either. What initially struck me when I read the story were the parallels between Dean's death and Joey's: they were the same age, they both died in accidents, they were both younger brothers of writers (of a sort). William's feelings of responsibility for his brother's death seem to have been much more tormenting than my own. I have, of course, thought about how my own choices helped to enable Joey's - how my leaving Oklahoma for college probably encouraged him to do the same (or at least made such a thing thinkable for him), how my lust for travel fed and fed upon his own, how the examples I set and the things I've done might have served as a challenge and a provocation and a template for his own life - but I don't believe he was living in my shadow, nor that he was trying to emulate or ape me, and I don't feel especially responsible for creating the circumstances in which his death happened, as William felt about Dean's. Still, I can imagine many decisions of my own which, had I made them differently, might indirectly have led to Joey's being somewhere else in the early morning of July 4, 2010. I imagine everybody connected to him could say the same thing.

It's in the way that he dealt with Dean's death that William Faulkner might have something to tell me. I'm not talking about the drinking (that's not going to be a problem of mine, I don't think); I'm talking about the writing. William's impulse after Dean's death was to write. First, he turned to one of his own books to find an appropriate epitaph for his brother's grave. Then, he returned to Absalom, Absalom! and produced what many believe to be his masterpiece. I don't have time to talk about Absalom, Absalom! today, but I will do that soon (I finished reading it last night). Like the grave, the book didn't provide any real epiphanies, but it did give me some hints about how I might go on from here.

Another parallel between the William/Dean story and the Mark/Joey story - the detail, indeed, that compelled me to seek out Dean's grave - lies in the fact that I also chose the inscription for my brother's grave. It's not biblical, as Dean's is, and it suggests a downward trajectory instead of the upward course of Dean's eagles, but it is literary and stirring and has provided one of the images that I most frequently conjure when I think about Joey's life. It's from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Death":

    O Shooting Star
    That fell into my eyes and through my body --:
    Not to forget you. To endure.

This image of a shooting star reminds me of a song I recently heard, which, in some wondrous future when we're able to embed multimedia elements into our tombstones, I will add to Joey's grave. It's by Lucinda Williams, and it's named after a city I visited (for the first and, probably, only time) with Joey and Tina several years ago. It's called "Copenhagen," and it has nothing at all to do with Faulkner but everything in the world to do with my brother. I hope you'll find time to listen to it.

On Filling in the Blanks

Last weekend Kate and I went on a short road trip that we'd been planning for a while: Nashville to Northern Mississippi to Memphis. I forgot to pack the Snoopy doll that we've been bringing along on such trips lately (the one I received several years ago for Christmas and lent/gave to Joey to keep him safe on his drive back to Virginia that year), but that didn't matter too much, because the whole trip was full of Joey things.

Road trips are, and always will be, Joey things, but this one was especially so. To wit:

a) One of our early stops was Florence, AL, where we had dinner at a mediocre but high-priced restaurant in what looked like the newly trendy part of town. Afterwards we drove through Muscle Shoals, which has a famous recording studio where legendary albums like the Stones' "Sticky Fingers" and Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" (his Christian album) were recorded. We'd done a bit of research beforehand and determined that the studio is still standing, and so as we drove into town we played Paul Simon's "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" (the only album on our iPods that was recorded there) and did a late-night drive-by. Or two. This was a very Joey thing to have done.

b) We stayed the first night in Tupelo, MS, a town I first visited with Joey several years ago (when we saw, but did not tour, Elvis's birthplace), and it is also a town Kate and I visited last July on our trip down to New Orleans the weekend of Joey's accident. We didn't linger in Tupelo this time.

c) Then we went to Oxford, MS, a town that I also first visited with Joey, possibly on the same trip that brought us to Tupelo. It must have been a Sunday when Joey and I were there, because I remember walking around a deserted town square, posing for a picture with the Faulkner statue seated on a bench, and having an unremarkable meal at a dark restaurant just off the square. Somehow we missed the enormous bookstore on the square (maybe it was closed?), didn't bother to search out Faulkner's house, Rowan Oak, and didn't even take a spin around Ole Miss. This was most unlike us - we must have been in a hurry - but Kate and I made up for it this time by spending gobs of time in the bookstore (a perfect example of how a good bookstore can foster and sustain a literary community), touring Faulkner's house (which was pleasantly spartan and ramshackle, a nice contrast to the lurid excess that we'd see at Graceland a few days later), and having an excellent brunch/lunch/midafternoon repast at a place called Big Bad Breakfast, on the recommendation of Joey's friend Nick, who'd recently been to Oxford. Kate had an omelet, and, after much hemming and hawing, I ordered a sandwich called The Elvis, which was peanut butter, banana, bacon, and mayonnaise on wheat toast, served with a side of fruit (I chose the wheat and fruit over white and fries, figuring that this would help to forestall any permanent artery damage, whatever Elvis might think of it). I initially wasn't going to order the Elvis - I've become almost entirely vegetarian lately, and this means, among other things, that my tummy doesn't appreciate being forced to digest pork, whether it's surrounded by peanut butter and mayonnaise or not - but then I remembered my journey through the Upper Midwest with Joey a couple of summers ago, when the guiding principle was to seek out and consume the most ridiculous things we could find (pie shakes, butter burgers, fried cheese curds, etc.), and then I decided that The Elvis was not only firmly within that tradition but also had the potential to expand the parameters of that tradition considerably. So I went for it. And it was very good. It tasted overwhelmingly of bacon and peanut butter, which is not an unpleasant combination, and you could hardly taste the mayo, which, I suspect, was primarily there for texture.

It looked like this:

d) After Oxford we drove to Memphis, deliberately taking the long way, driving west to Highway 61 and then taking that north, through the delta flatlands, to Memphis. On that trip through the Upper Midwest, Joey and I had taken Highway 61 south through Minnesota for a while, choosing the obvious musical accompaniment, Bob Dylan's "Highway 61, Revisited." Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta looks a lot different than it does in Minnesota - fewer dramatic, towering bluffs, more limitless horizons and dangerous-looking agrochemical plants - but Dylan is Dylan wherever you play his music, and so play it we did, as we zoomed down the road to Memphis.

e) I had also been to Memphis with Joey, of course, most recently in October 2009, when Kate, Joey, and I drove there from Nashville to pick up my father, who'd been stranded by a storm on his way to visit us. On that trip we'd visited Sun Studios (where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and others recorded), walked around downtown, ate Thai food, and poked around outside the National Civil Rights Museum, on the site of the (partially preserved) Lorraine Motel, where MLK was assassinated. On this trip we toured the inside of the Civil Rights Museum, walked around downtown (eating lunch at a place called The Little Tea Shop, a place dating to 1918 that Joey would have enjoyed, if only because it's listed in the Roadfood guides and serves a ridiculous-sounding (but quite tasty) dessert called a Pecan Ball), and saw a lot more of Memphis than we'd done before, driving around some of the cool old neighborhoods (and many of the uncool old neighborhoods), popping into bookshops and record stores, and, yes, eating Thai food.

f) We also went to Graceland, fulfilling an intention that Joey and I had long had. We frequently passed through Memphis on our journeys to and from Oklahoma, and we frequently considered stopping to see Graceland, but always either the time was too short or the cost was too high, and we never did. But Kate and I did, and it was great. The cost, I think, has gone down - it's still not cheap, but we were able to get the "Platinum Tour" for about $35 apiece, which is about $20 less than what I remember it being when Joey and I looked into it - and it helped that we went in the morning, before the hordes of drooling tourists converged on the place. There are no tour guides at Graceland - just people standing around marshaling you from spot to spot and making sure you don't nick any silverware - and you're forced to acquire one of those headset audio guide things that Joey hated (he could never manage to go in time to where his headset was telling him to go), but that's okay, because the absence of a human guide means you can dilly-dally a bit, provided you can figure out how to pause your headset. And it is a place worth dilly-dallying, a fabulous example of what happens when someone who is not accustomed to having wealth suddenly comes upon more money, more quickly, than anyone since the days of the Robber Barons. The furnishings are by turns exuberant, vulgar, and downright suburban - Elvis's kitchen was especially remarkable for just how banal and comfortable it seemed - and to linger there is to get a much better sense of who this guy really was than almost anything else I can imagine. I think, apart from the audioguide, Joey would have enjoyed the place immensely. There was much that would have earned some of his whispering snickers, and I regret that I'll never get to hear the jokes - no doubt many of them excruciating, Elvis-themed puns - that he would have made about Elvis's cars and planes and gift shops.

After we visited Graceland, we drove around listening to another Paul Simon album. You'll never guess which one.

Doing all this made me feel better than I've felt for a long time - partly because it took me out of my usual environment, partly because trips like this are among my principal reasons for living, partly because it was a way to keep propelling my brother's spirit through the world, and partly because I was with my wife, with whom I would go anywhere and do anything and have 500x more fun than ought to be possible. Traveling with Kate is a way not just of remembering past adventures but of anticipating future ones, and that makes me excited and hopeful, and that is a good way to be.

There's one more story that I need to tell you about William Faulkner, Oxford, Joey, and me, but it'll have to wait a few days. Check back soon, though: it is very, very important.

Princeton(ish)

A few weeks ago I went to Princeton, NJ, to interview for a one-year fellowship at a place that I thought was Princeton University but that turned out to be the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent institution that is merely Princeton-adjacent, although it is where Einstein spent his final years. I took to calling Fake Princeton.

I have since been informed that I did not win the fellowship (I've been wait-listed, and I'm not holding my breath), but it was a good trip nonetheless, largely because I had plenty of unscheduled time to wander and think. I'd never to Princeton, but I know Joey went there at least once (I forget the occasion) and really liked it. It's not hard to see why. Ever since he left Oklahoma, and especially in the last couple of years, Joey had been developing rather patrician tastes. I think the University of Virginia, with its neoclassical columns and southern aristocratic ethos, deserves some credit for instilling these tastes, but I also think it simply triggered tendencies that were always latent in his personality. From a very young age he had very high standards in lodgings, for example, standards that were rather unusual for a boy of, say, eight, and together we would circumnavigate every hotel and motel we visited on our family trips to ensure that the place was suitable. I went along on these excursions mostly because I like exploring new places and need to get my bearings in any new situation, but the stakes were much higher for Joey, who had an internal checklist against which he judged each and every Comfort Inn and Super 8 we slept in, and who was not afraid to make his displeasure known if he became, well, displeased. What started with accommodations slowly spread to clothing, wine, restaurants, literature, music, and modes of transport. I don't want to suggest that he was picky or impossible to please - certainly, as he got older, he became less likely to fall into a martyrous funk every time he didn't get his way - but he believed that if he was going to eat something, or drink something, or watch something, or read something, then it should be the best that thing that was within one's means to obtain. Life was too short to settle for second-rate crap when a little bit of effort and ingenuity could get you something better.

And so his tastes became patrician, partly, as I say, because of his time at UVA, and partly, I suspect, because of his time, post-college, with all those high-living lawyers  in Washington, DC. There was no chance of him ever fully joining them - I can no more picture Joey speeding down the Beltway in a late-model BMW sedan, blaring orders into his top-of-the-line smartphone at a slow-witted underling than I can picture him driving an ice-cream truck - but he would undoubtedly have ensured that whatever life he built around himself contained nothing but what he judged to be classy, tasteful, and refined. This was a side of him of which I only caught glimpses in later years, for when we saw one another we were usually on the road or in Oklahoma, not in our everyday worlds, but there were glimpses: Joey ironing his pants before our cousin Jake's wedding in Philadelphia (Joey could iron? Joey wore nice pants?); Joey finding some trendy boutique hotel in Berlin or Nashville or New York through his wizardry with Priceline's Name-Your-Own-Price feature; Joey knowing all about the wine we were drinking and comparing it to wine he'd had at some newly opened Washington bistro where the Obamas were rumored to have dined; and so on. I admit to some feelings of inadequacy on these occasions - I was always a bit more of a class-warrior than he, and, more significantly, a lot less willing to part with my money (my Priceline bids typically landed us in sprawling motels in suburban Minneapolis, not boutique hotels in SoHo) - but I liked to speculate about how our paths would slowly diverge, but always reconnect, as we got older: you know, the tousle-headed professor in second-hand corduroys and his impeccably dressed lawyer brother fighting over the check in some newly opened gastropub in Buenos Aires or Osaka. I would probably have let him win.

Princeton, then, is just Joey's kind of place. Intellectual, east-coast-establishment, preppy but liberal, quaint, old-money, tasteful. It is stuffed with eclectic and (I imagine) stellar restaurants, gourmet ice cream parlors, wonderful bookshops, and a grubby second-hand music store in which I ended up spending quite some time. My interview lasted all of half an hour (I don't know why they didn't just do it over the phone), and so I had most of an evening (outside of a delightful dinner with Kate's cousin Lydia, a Junior at (real) Princeton, and her boyfriend, Dave) and the following morning to wander through the snowy streets on my own, listening to the new Iron & Wine album (which Joey would have loved) and reflecting on all the things I've just been writing about. My lodgings would certainly have earned his approval: a guest house owned by Fake Princeton that was once an early nineteenth-century mansion, with an elegant staircase, a bulging library, and hardcover Everyman editions of the classics of world literature in each room. Oh, and free breakfast.

Being around all this made me feel, if I may indulge in cliché, very close to him.

There's another episode from my Princeton trip that also brought me near him, but I'll have to save that for another day. The morning is getting on, and I have promises left to keep.