The Way We Live Now--The Laundry

It was in Paris, a long time ago.  I was taking a group of students on an exploration of the city.  We were staying in what seemed to be an ancient building with residences on one side and hotel rooms opposite surrounding an air shaft that ran up the center of the four-story, square building.  I could sit on my bed, look out the window, and see into the rooms directly across the air shaft.  Because it was hot and humid that July, everyone had their windows open, curtains fluttering in the light breeze.

One afternoon, taking a break in my room, I saw a ghostly figure in the apartment across from me moving passed her open windows.  She was elderly, maybe in her 70s, and she had a thin rope stretched through her tiny kitchen and into her living room.  She was doing her laundry in the kitchen sink and after wringing out each item of its excess water, she would drape the garment over the white line.

It was to this image that I returned during our national isolation due to COVID-19.  We do not have laundry facilities and our local laundromat did not seem safe enough or sanitary, and the fluff and fold service would mean having to go into the place to drop it off.  So we, like the old woman in Paris, decided to wash it ourselves at home and then hang it to dry throughout every room in the house.  We would try to assist the drying with strategically placed fans.

The process was slow, and took a week to do a few loads, but the soft spring breeze wafting room to room had a sweetness and light to it that made us feel the change of seasons.  There is nothing like the smell of freshly washed laundry.

It is amazing how this dangerous and deadly pandemic has made us rethink the ordinary and mundane.  We are forced to be creative, to return to ways we utilized before the conveniences of modern existence.  We are forced by necessity to return to and reflect on the things we have taken for granted, the commonplace, the daily chores of our lives.

This is a haunted time, of empty streets, closed shops and restaurants, of sirens continually screaming in the distance, the soundtrack of the way we live now.  We cycle through new rituals and new routines, cut off from the world and those we love.  So we seek comfort in the little things, baking, cooking, making art, and in this case, fresh laundry drying in our rooms, scented with the perfume of spring, and floating like shrouds in the gentle air from open windows, beautiful in its simplicity.

When You Walk Through The Fire

This is the main aisle of our chapel on campus taken from the altar looking out

Last week, I had to write something to send to my students who have all vacated the campus to return to their homes and will now be attending class and completing assignments online.  Quite suddenly, I am at a loss for words.  We had so much left to discuss.  The class was not over, yet now I had to figure out a way to continue without seeing them each week.  And the question keeps haunting me:  what is important in the face of this virus?  Class assignments now seem meaningless when we are all trying to stave off illness and death.

For a long while now, writing has not been the refuge it once was for me.  I am lost at sea, floating aimlessly in the doldrums of middle age, scribbling frantically in a notebook/journal to try to figure all of this out.  I want to stay in my darkened rooms and read book after book hoping to find the inspiration to create, the wisdom to know the path forward.  I feel I have lost my anchor of “literature, culture and the life of the mind.”  The mind is too unsettled, the everyday too frightening and panicked.  The wisdom bank has been overdrawn.  Survival dominates everything, and since we are living through this new paradigm, how can I have any insight or wisdom to offer in my work that will help people and avoid sounding simply trivial and flat?  This is living with uncertainty, but I have only one tool in my arsenal to fight back:  words.  I do words for a living.  I do words as I breathe, the pneuma of my existence.

This is us and this is who we are and this is how we live now.  There is no turning back, there is no future yet.  All we have is the now.  I can only hold up a mirror to show what we could be, what the future might hold, what better days may lie ahead.  This is what I wrote to my students:

I hear from students all the time, even when we are not experiencing biblical fires, floods and plague, that they are anxious and stressed.  More and more, students express how this anxiety cripples them and keeps them from reaching their goals, from achieving their dreams.

Other generations experienced wars of a global magnitude, famine, financial collapse, natural disasters.  We are not the first generation to be challenged.  We are continually reminded throughout history that human existence is a journey through space and time, and the threats and assaults we experience along the way are the things that make us stronger and our persistence and perseverance teach those who will come after us how to be warriors of wisdom and faith.

In life, the test never ends, and danger and uncertainty are the given conditions when sailing off into the unknown each morning.  The wisdom we seek to deal with the troubles in our lives comes from our predecessors on this earth.

“If you are going through hell, keep going…” (Winston Churchill)

“Never, never, never give up.”  (Prime Minister Churchill again)

“…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”  (Reinhold Niebuhr)

In life, there is very little we can control.  Mostly, we control our actions and reactions in the face of adversity.  We cannot stop the pain from coming; we cannot avoid what is our destiny to endure.  We must live, and as Churchill says, “keep going.”

What does this mean, exactly?  Well, we control the things we can control and let what we have no control over go.  Right now, we are at home in quarantine.  The city is shut down.  All non-essential services are shuttered.  Our normal is now abnormal.  So we must focus on our classes and finishing the semester strong.  We must keep informed and listen to the news and our governor and mayor.  We must take care of our loved ones and help keep them safe.  We must find a way to live, laugh, comfort and love each other.  And as we encounter challenges, we must use our intellect and courage to meet the situation with clear thinking and perseverance.  This is what it means to be resolute, resourceful, resilient and yes, unstoppable.

We must also look at the larger picture.  It is a beautiful spring with mild days, a fresh breeze, no traffic, less pollution, and even a hint of summer to come.  This reminds us that “this, too, shall pass.”  We will survive.  We just have to seize this moment and really live in it, really embrace it.  The day-to-day grind has been altered, and people are awakening to what family and community really mean.  People are finding creative ways to spend time together and bridge distances through social media so family members living elsewhere are not alone.  Teachers and parents are taking shared responsibility for educating children.  Across the nation, people are finding inspiration to create and express themselves artistically in ways never imagined in our pre-COVID-19 lives.

We must continue to be unselfish and look out for one another.  We must maintain our social distancing but never lose our humanity.  We must, as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, tell us, love our dear neighbor and be the light in the world, even when darkness and difficult circumstance threaten.  It is our mission to stand tall in this difficult time; this is our moment in history to make a difference.

I look forward to helping you finish the semester strong as we anticipate the changing seasons, the rebirth and resurrection of our lives, and the coming of a better day.

And so, here comes spring.

Parisian Lives

Writing biography is a difficult, shoe-leather destroying job.  Sure, a Pulitzer might be the reward, as well as public acclaim if one is a Robert Caro or an A. Scott Berg.  Patience is key, and most labor in years of silence while haunting libraries and dusty archives, confronting and interviewing reticent loved ones and associates.  Once the book is published, the focus shifts to the subject with renewed energy and the author slips into the background again.  Audiences at book signings want to know what else did the writer find out?  They want the dirt and the gossip along with the well-researched fact and the historical connections.  Rarely are they interested in the writer’s journey.

Deirdre Bair has paid her dues as a first-rate biographer.  She has explored the lives of such public figures as Al Capone, Anais Nin, Saul Steinberg, and of course, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, the two major figures referred to in the title of her new book.  Bair has done time in academia, traveled the path of a journalist, and, along the way, has demonstrated resilience and fortitude as she reveals in her most recent book/memoir, Parisian Lives:  Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, (Nan A. Talese, 2019).

The toll her career has taken on Bair herself and her family is made abundantly clear in this book.  Against the backdrop of feminism and cultural reflection, Bair takes us on a journey through her decades of work to uncover details about the importance of Beckett and de Beauvoir across several cultures.  Both are cantankerous characters who reflect, once again, that style is character.  She reveals her struggles and roadblocks to get to the truth of these two writers.  Beckett greets her on “that bitter cold day, November 17, 1971,” when she began her odyssey of research, with the prophetic words:  “So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.”

Of course, Bair tells us that a biographer must continually guard against allowing her own character and presence to limit or obscure the sharp focus on the subject.  She must also be objective and without preconceived notions while allowing the facts and circumstances to reveal the true history and work of the subject.  This is a book about writing biography—how to begin the research, how to develop the revealing details, how to present the subject with both his failings and his positive attributes, and how to craft the story with copious revisions and sculpting to make the subject sing out from the page.  Bair’s is a much more complete and detailed analysis of biography technique than Robert Caro’s recent slim volume, Working, (Knopf, 2019) published earlier this year.  For Bair, writing biography is an art and a science—no stone can be left unturned, no diary page or document left unread.  Letters, court records, friends who want to hijack the process and work themselves into the picture—all must be dealt with and kept in perspective.  For a first time biographer researching Samuel Beckett, Bair nearly falls into some deep wells of animosity, jealousy, and the misleading accounts of craven attention seekers.  She grows with the experience of Beckett’s book and is able to write her second volume about de Beauvoir by learning through experience.

Bair believes the writer must avoid becoming a character in the book.  There is only room for the subject on those pages.  She pulls the curtain back on the process, start to finish.  Her battles with publishers, reluctant subjects who dodge and fail to appear when scheduled, her shifty agent, and of course, the overwhelming machismo that uses her sex as a reason for not taking her work seriously.  She shows us how she did it, and explains in detail the entire journey.  “Biographers are essentially storytellers,” she writes.  “So, then, tell the story, but stay the hell out of it.”

Bair keeps voluminous boxes and folders of notes, transcripts, and clippings as well as her diary, called DD.  So her prodigious research skills and eye for detail are abundantly displayed here based on her review of that material.  She gives us her personal account of writing the Beckett and de Beauvoir books specifically.  In her approach, she sees herself as an “artist under oath.”  In other words, no invented or combined characters as Edmund Morris did with his biography, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (Modern Library, 2000), still one of the most reviled biographies ever written.

It is crucial to her process to be as open-minded and objective as possible.  She paraphrases the French writer, Sainte-Beuve, “who believed that you never understand a writer’s work until you understand her life.”  Although there are instances where the people surrounding Beckett and de Beauvoir want to influence Bair’s work, she holds fast and accepts the criticism, especially vicious from the academics, and completes her work and represents in lectures, presentations, and speaking engagements.  With de Beauvoir, she acknowledges the “family” eccentrics surrounding the writer and Jean-Paul Sartre.  However, she does not delve deeply into some of the sexual peccadilloes the couple engineered.  She focuses instead on de Beauvoir’s volumes of memoir and The Second Sex.  In her discussion of these works, Bair intercuts with the rise of feminism in America and the way she, herself, is treated by her agent and publisher.

Beckett takes up about a two-thirds of the book, mainly because he is her first subject and she is a novice.  Quickly she learns, however.  The last third of the book is with Simone De Beauvoir.  On these pages, Bair is much more canny and insightful, however, this section also deals with her forays into academia to pay the bills. The completion of de Beauvoir’s biography frees Bair from regular teaching.  No more over-enrolled multiple courses of freshmen composition which prohibited and limited the time she could spend on writing.

Deirdre Bair gives us an insightful book about writing—the research, the interviews, the manipulations by both subjects and their hangers-on.  Her account makes the journey real, and deepens the impact of her previous work by explaining the process.  Life itself is a layered affair, and it is the biographer’s job to peel all of that away—the facade and the mendacity and the truth—and show us the real person.  Bair has successfully done that time and again in her work.  This book shows us exactly how she did it.  And that makes it well worth the read.

Tough Love

The political memoir has become de righeur in American culture and political life.  These books seem primarily self-serving, an attempt to portray the writer as playing an important role in history and as having acted in the best interests of his or her constituents.  Often, the memoirist includes explanations for actions they took or accounts of battles they fought during their time in the seat of power.  Some writers, like Samantha Power in her recent memoir, are excellent storytellers.  Others seek to put their own spin on their participation in historical events.

Susan Rice, author of Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (Simon & Schuster, 2019), focuses her book on the major events she was involved in first in the Clinton administration and then the Obama administration where she was the first black U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later, became Obama’s National Security Advisor.  On these pages, she is obstinate, driven, intense, competitive, and direct, making her a figure of controversy at times and an unyielding force when making her case on the world stage.  Hence, she spends a lot of time here explaining her reasoning and actions in the face of controversial crises like the embassy attack in Benghazi, the explosion of Ebola into a major worldwide health problem, the numerous civil wars and tribal conflicts in Africa, and the rising up of the Arab Spring.

Her writing is filled with memorable images.  For instance, she describes staff at the White House changing out Obama’s Oval to redecorate for the soon-to-arrive Donald Trump on Inauguration Day.  The Obama carpet had a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. on its edge:  “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  Little did we know that this was not simply a change of decor but a profound and seemingly unending negation of morals and values reflected by the Trump administration.

She writes movingly of her parents, her role models in everything.  Her mother passed away as President Obama was leaving office, making the end of Rice’s era doubly poignant.  The twin elements of education and service run through her family and influenced her from an early age.  She had to push herself through “whatever pain” she experienced to exceed expectations at “school, university, in [her] work, and as a daughter, wife and mother.”  She tells us she does not like being wrong (who does?) and from early on, she could be abrasive but would characterize herself in the same breath as an optimist.  It is from her parents that she learned never to doubt herself.  Her mother admonished her to never use race as an excuse for anything.

If style is character, we see a lot of Rice’s style and character on these pages.  She singles out today’s media machine, saying that Americans lack a common base of facts and instead, rely on self-selected stories that “reinforce our personal preconceptions.”  Therefore, we lack the skill of discourse, of supporting one’s opinion, and having a broad spectrum of knowledge about issues.  At times in her career, she alienated her own people and was considered “overly directive” and “intimidated others so much” that her staff felt stifled and unable to offer other perspectives.  Through it all, she learned “that leadership is more like conducting a symphony than performing as a virtuoso player of another single instrument,” and that “the most enduring outcomes are not always the swiftest ones.”  In considering her past, she tells us she has learned “that sometimes patience is the best strategy for achieving the purest justice.”

Rice defends herself with the classic line that she was not there to make friends or win a popularity contest.  In one instance, when she brings her baby to a meeting to be able to keep up with her breast feeding, she refuses to apologize for making others uncomfortable.  “My direct style did not endear me to every one of those seasoned diplomats,” she writes.  “What I cared about was that I was granted the respect and cooperation necessary to ‘get shit done.’  And, if I did, I know those many who cared foremost about outcomes might eventually accept me on the merits.”

I must admit, her abrasive style often seems a bit extreme in the situation.  She talks about her marriage to a white journalist from Canada and the undercurrent of race in their relationship.  “Sometimes I joke with Ian,” she writes, “that I am still waiting for that fateful morning when ‘he wakes up and calls me nigger.’”  We need to be more frank and open about race in this country and not be intimidated by language, but the use of that term in that context made me uncomfortable.  Another problematic part of the book is when she discusses her battles with the late Richard Holbrooke.  At one point, he so frustrated her that she raises her middle finger at him from across a table during a meeting.  I found this a little immature.

The last third of the book is powerful and moving:  the end of the Obama era, the death of her parents, leaving government service, and living through the extreme disappointment and trepidation over the incoming Trump fiasco.  The new president actually accused her of criminal behavior, a charge for which she was decidedly not culpable.  The Paris Climate Accords, the Iran Nuclear Deal, and the Affordable Care Act—all of these events and their demise, as she makes clear, are now and continue to be devastating to Americans and the world.  Rice believes Trump has made us less secure as a nation, and created destabilization across the globe.  He worships dictators and strong men, thugs and criminals she made a career out of controlling with sanctions and interventions.  One can feel Rice’s pain over the things the Obama administration worked so hard to bring about only to see them debased and destroyed by Trump.

In her analysis of the current condition of our culture, she writes:  “Civil discourse has suffered further from Americans’ growing penchant to filter out information we prefer not to hear—whether through the issuance of ‘trigger warnings’ in classrooms, efforts to constrain conservatives or pro-Israel groups on college campuses, or the right’s reactionary dismissal of progressive views as ‘un-American’ or ‘socialist’ or identity politics…We can now select what ‘facts’ we want to believe and discount those we do not.”

Susan Rice does defend her positions, her arguments, her actions and opinions on these pages.  Reading Tough Love made me think that we have not heard the last from her.  In an age where we lack moral and ethical leaders, she would be a welcomed voice.