After finishing Fritz Zorn’s Mars, I’ve started another book in the same vein: Richard Ford’s Be Mine. It’s not cancer-themed like Mars, but specifically ALS-themed, narrated by a father whose 47-year-old son Paul is dying of a faster-acting variant of what I have. That’s what motivated me to mention it to my wife who bought it for me. Mars and Ford’s Be Mine are both very much bound to their time and place, intentionally so for Ford but inadvertently in the case of Zorn. Mars is the work of a young man versed in the classics of European literature and philosophy. He’s a deeply unhappy, embittered young intellectual who sees his Swiss home and family in the manner of Everyman and The Death of Ivan Ilych, that is,as embodiments of a tragic universal truth. Ford highlights and revels in the American early twenty-first-century trivialities of his characters and their milieu. Yet Ford strikes responsive chords in me precisely by invoking the banal markers of my late twentieth-century American existence (which I have always tried to surmount by making European literature and culture my standard of reference and value). Ford holds up a mirror in which I recognize myself. The narrator and I don’t much like what we see. The narrating father exudes contempt for the banal figures of his surroundings.
The seventy-plus-year-old Frank Bascombe and his ALS-afflicted, seemingly autistic son Paul register the random peculiarities of American commercial culture and draw distinctions between its regional variants and exceptional oddities. I have always experienced this same randomness as an expression of our chaotic capitalism where each is out for Number One. That was my way of making sense of it. The Bascombes père et fils aren’t so ideologically judgmental. It is what it is, like it or not. Their acceptance fits with the randomness of Paul’s mortal affliction. Aside from some minor genetic predisposition, there is no known reason why ALS strikes one of us rather than another. Fritz Zorn saw his cancer as intrinsic to his sick society. ALS fits with our desultory randomness. ALS (or as Paul says, Al’s) coheres with our incoherence. It’s one more oddity to be puzzled over. This is more true of Paul. Frank has absorbed enough of a European perspective to view things in Heideggerian terms. In the context of the quirky banalities of an RV sales lot where refitted portapotties sport cute names like “Thrones of Minnesota” and “We’re #2,” the narrator hardly misses a beat in solemnly intoning that, “Only full awareness of death makes one able to appreciate the fullness and mystery of being.” Is it possible that death which forges such unlikely affiliations can also reconcile the solemn with the ludicrous, the banal with the profound? Mortality is in the strictest sense of the word banal.
Literature aside, I can sense it in the air that my wife and daughter are revising their responses to me. It’s not easy for them to take on the roles being thrust upon them. A self-imposed taboo forbids my wife to acknowledge the love that for so many decades filled this now neglected house; but her new gentler tone sounds almost as if nothing had ever come between us. They have inherited the Austrian genius for Freudian repression. Forgetting is bliss. Glücklich ist, wer vergisst, was nicht zu ändern ist. This is a randomness which I’m willing to accept. The guy who advised turning the other cheek was a tough practical thinker after all. I’m curious how my novel ends and how my family life evolves.
I’m not sure that Richard Ford’s Be Mine is a very good novel but it certainly resonates with me, and not only because of its ALS theme. In many ways, Ford is like a smarter, more successful Doppelgänger. Here is another of his sentences that he could have stolen from me. It’s about his “innocent” visit to a young Vietnamese masseuse, but the point is much more general: “I simply felt terrific about whatever it was because all of it felt true to life—something Chekhov could’ve written about and given deep meaning to—the eventful non-event that manages to be everything.” Whatever it was!
Yes, there are eventful non-events and Chekhov masters them. And if lived experience is experienced as being “true to life,” what is life? Is life just a well- or poorly-constructed narrative? Why is Chekhov a touchstone for Ford and myself? You can see how Chekhov accompanied me on my trek across the Russian Federation (in my self-published Night Train to Kaliningrad—Night Flight to Vladivostok), and how he contextualized my return exploration of my native region of “Little Egypt” (Egyptian Darkness and the Diaspora of Light). Why are Chekhov’s images of provincial Russian countrysides so much more expressive than my snapshots of equivalent scenes in my rural home region? Here is a last straw that Ford delivered into my desperate hands just now: “love may be what’s left when everything that’s not love is taken away.” Can any other of Ford’s readers make of this puzzling remark as much as I can? It’s banal and mystical in one, worthy of the gnomic paradoxes of Meister Eckhart.
Today was a good day for me. Today my wife struck a gentler tone—less rigid in skirting any allusion to or acknowledgement of our long-shared existence. On Monday, Terri will arrive to help out for two hours a day from Monday through Friday. She will cook and straighten up a bit. So far, I sense no potential conflict with Veronika. She used to be so jealous about preserving her household hegemony. Today I consulted a personal trainer at the YMCA about simplifying and regulating my daily stretching exercises. Like in Paris, I will begin before I get up in the morning but then undertake a more thorough regime only every other day. Walking against the current in the therapeutic pool counts double. Today I feel good about my family. Less and less often, I feel the pain of knowing that I will die without finding out what destroyed our wonderfully harmonious marriage. Yes, it’s the Austrian genius for repression. Glücklich ist wer vergisst, was nicht zu ändern ist. I’ve seen no evidence of the usual marriage-undermining suspects. They say that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. I went from being loved by my wife to being hated. Even now, with our relationship becoming calmer, I don’t sense indifference on her part. That’s a slender consolation but better than none. I also read in Ford’s novel a reference to “the immense, humming [Mayo] Clinic [which] presides like an ocean liner.” I remember it that way. We were there in the summer of 2016 because of my cancer diagnosis. We drove up, and, as always, made a fun vacation out of it. We were brilliant at that. We could turn Decatur into San Francisco and pathetic little Paena with its oversized basilica into Ravenna. Predawn Galesburg harbored mysteries equal to Paris or Istanbul. My most vivid recollection is not of the Mayo doctors. They hadn’t even looked at the biopsy results I submitted to them in timely fashion when the alpha male of the group, a surgeon, wanted to operate at once. With or without the biopsy, he was in charge. I switched to the University of Chicago instead. What I remember most vividly from the Mayo excursion was the exotic scene we witnessed the evening before my appointment. We happened upon a circular fountain in the courtyard of a commercial complex. Seated all around the wide circumference of the fountain were the black-clad and veiled women from some oil-rich desert land that sent its ailing subjects to Mayo for the reputedly world’s best treatment. They truly knew the charms of flowing splashing water on a hot day. We discretely shared their pleasure. We shared almost everything for a quarter of a century.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 