Comedy and Grief at CUNY with Joan Didion and W.S. Merwin
by 400Windmills on April 24, 2006
Last night the CUNY Center for Humanities hosted last year’s National Book Award winners Joan Didion and W.S. Merwin for a talk on “The Writing Life.” I attended the event with Michelle, who posted the event on her website. Fortunately, we arrived early and grabbed good seats in the first few rows in the giant auditorium in the C-level of the CUNY Graduate Center. I tell you ahead of time that I did not snap any pictures of Didion or Merwin even though I very much wanted to because both writers certainly win the award for Most Dignified Human Beings on Planet Earth and I did not want to make a jackass out of myself in their presence. Not that they would have known it was me who infringed on their dignity, but just as one does not blow bubble gum bubbles in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, one does not point digitally recording objects at Joan Didion or W.S. Merwin unless one is--for shame--a member of the press. Those guys and their very large black cameras were front and center not only during the hour-long talk but also during the book-signing. One cameraman stood a few steps from Didion, taping various interviews of Didion-commentators. To her credit, she ignored everyone and everything that was not directly relevant to her purpose that evening. I believe there could have been a belly-dancer doing her thing rather than the press-man, and she would still have remained perfectly composed.
I can’t resist spending a few lines describing both Didion and Merwin, though they are famous enough that I don’t have to. If you saw them, you’d have the same impulse, too, so you’ll have to humor mine. Joan Didion is an incredibly small woman, although she is probably not much shorter than the average American woman. Last night she was wearing a coral pink t-shirt under a boxy black suit, black tights, and black lace-up shoes. She is so small that when she sits with one leg crossed over the other--which seems to be her preferred position--the crossed leg settles over and around the bottom leg as if both limbs are actually quite two-dimensional. I know, this makes her sound as if she is a character out of claymation, and if you had that image in your head, you’re not that far removed from how she looks in life. Her blond hair falls straight to the chin and her skin is a vital white. Her fingers are long and tremulous. There is something about her--probably the combination of her physical frailty and extremely steely comportment--that makes you think that she has a personal preserving atmosphere like a layer of ozone invisibly shielding her from such adjectives as “old,” “wrinkled,” and the like. These words, while factual, are just completely irrelevant.
W.S. Merwin is similarly impressive, although I have to say not nearly so physically memorable as Didion. I was most impressed with him up-close at the book-signing table. His eyes are incredible blue. They are still roaming, as if he is really an animal brought into Manhattan from the wild, and not the winner of a gillion literary awards, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
In fact he discussed his “restlessness,” in his first year of graduate school, which made him leave, vowing that he would not live in situations but rather places. I found that statement very applicable. He also discussed the significance of his book title, Migration.
“I am haunted by migration,” he said. “The migration of animals, birds, prehistoric people. What made them move. Migration is living with contact and loss of contact.”
I could certainly relate to that.
The theme of migration continued for a bit longer as Merwin described the “blubber,” a species of bird on northern Maui, which is apparently the only native species that has remained in the area post-U.S. and British-led waves of tourism. This bird, said Merwin, migrates every year from the northern coast of Maui to Alaska--a distance of 7,000 miles, without a single stop. He avowed that he was quite fascinated with these birds and their migrations, and by the end of his sentence, it seemed the whole audience was similarly rapt with the life of these obscure birds. Until--
“Do we know they don’t stop even once?” broke in Didion in her strong, contralto voice. Everyone, including Merwin, stopped breathing for a second because it was such an unexpected anticlimax. But the comedy spilled out of that moment because it was also clear that she hadn’t meant the question to have that dramatic effect. Or-- rather she didn’t intentionally mean to burst his bubble--but I have to believe she (who wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking “I have always been a writer. Imagining what a character says next comes to me like breathing.") has that quality of anticlimax in her blood. It too comes to her like breathing. The repartee between her anticlimax and Merwin’s constant poetic climaxing-- well, it was pure comedic grief. I have to give the audience credit, because we caught on right away. In the half hour’s discourse, which took place on stage in three chairs around a coffee table, before they actually stood at the podium to read, the event more resembled a low-key play than a literary event. Merwin and Didion talked to each other, not the audience. They seemed almost incapable of addressing the questions put to them by the CUNY professor who was given the task of facilitating the talk. She became increasingly flustered and self-deprecating, while the two guests of honor continued to discuss migrating birds, the irrational nature of human beings, Hiroshima (rather than 9/11, as the CUNY professor had wanted) and various native details of places like Honolulu and Los Angeles-- all in a kind of publicized privacy that made it clear to the audience that these two individuals were not comfortable in front of a crowd but had developed methods, in their long careers, to bypass it by dramatizing-- as how could they not?--particularities that helped them be who they are. I loved it.
What I didn’t know, and what became clear throughout the hour, was that Merwin and Didion have known each other for decades. Apparently they and their families were quite close. At one point it seemed they had even vacationed together, or at least shared their hours of leisure. I wondered why the facilitator did not jump on this but as I say, I think she had imagined quite a different kind of talk than the one that transpired on stage last night.
Didion read first-- a long but effective passage from the middle of The Year of Magical Thinking. Her voice became even lower and more private as she read, though she articulated exactly and was never inaudible. She did not hurry or patronize the audience. She performed the piece that she had written as she had written it so that the material seemed absolutely fresh, as if she had just written it, and this was her first reading. I am sure it was not, but the illusion was almost perfect. Hearing her read, I felt that it did not matter that there were hundreds of people in the auditorium. Everyone’s experience of Joan Didion’s voice would be quite personal.
Merwin read “To the Words,” written a week after September 11, “River of Bees,” which he described to be about his sense of memory and speculation in the 1960s, “Search Party,” which I believe is a vilanelle, where one line repeats throughout the poem, “The Comet Museum,” and “To the Constellations of Philosophy.”
He told the audience “Search Party” was written when a small boy, Maui, was lost. He said he found the words “I do not know where Maui is” repeating in his head, until he realized that the words had formed a rhythmic pattern that is the soul of poetry. I was happy he said that because I agree that it’s the rhythm of words that sometimes makes the sense of things. Actually both Merwin and Didion said this, although she said it in her book and not at the reading last night.
When she was being introduced, Didion moved once, putting her hand to her chin when the commentator described her book as “the year following the death of her husband.” In the end, both Merwin and Didion’s award-winning book is about loss and neither, despite the awkward and laughable staging of the reading, forgot that. As I stood on line to have my copy of “The Year of Magical Thinking” signed, I knew that I was going to ask her to inscribe it “to Rob and Grace” because he is the reason why I picked up her book in the first place. As she said and Merwin agreed, we all engage in more magical thinking than we might think. Loving someone, depending on them, is one of the most powerful forms of magical thinking we are capable of because we know that at some point there will be loss. I don’t think Didion is the kind of author who writes “for others.” I would guess she writes for herself and her family and publishes only for others, and I am grateful to her for it because what she writes about in “Magical Thinking” is something that every human being will experience before we die. I can’t imagine that there is anyone more lucid to guide us through it, if only through the words she was able to find to describe her experience.
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