inspo/finding-courage

“Writing a Novel,” the short story Elizabeth published in the New York Review in 1973, opens the same way the novel does: “It is June. This is what I am going to do with my life.” Among the many fascinations of this piece is her notion of “a short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, local voices mixing with the mysterious cadence of a stranger. Truth should be heightened and falsity adorned, dressed up to look like sociable fact.” She quotes Pasternak: “To live a life is not to cross a field”—life is no easy stroll.131 Memoirs were beset by “troubles large and small,” as a result of writers’ “defamed and libeled” self-portrayal. There was also the problem of a woman’s memoir, “because there isn’t enough sex, not even enough longing for consummation.” (She was apparently referring to potential negative opinions of the book she would write.) “In love,” she wrote, what really matters “is to discover whether we have experienced conquest or surrender—or neither. Courage under ill-treatment is a woman’s theme.” Of course, it is very much her theme.

When I arrived at the address she’d given I found nothing but an empty lot. I checked the note again—I was in the right place. I waited a few minutes; then, as I turned to leave, I noticed a rope ladder swaying from the abandoned elevated track that ran above Tenth Avenue. One bare arm waved at the top, then slid out of sight, and even now, all these years later, I do not understand how I had the nerve to climb that ladder. It was the first time since childhood that I discovered I was capable of more than I’d previously believed, an expanding sense of possibility that defined my years with her—a stark contrast to the smallness I felt in Henry’s home. Once I reached the top of the tracks she helped me over the edge—her hands on my arms and back. I stood and looked out over an impossible sight—a long, narrow meadow running through the city, overgrown with vines and tall grass.

[...] If Marion remarked on the sheepskin coat, made the mildest insinuation, he would blast her with the news that Perry was a pot smoker. Even better, he would tell her about Ambrose. For three years, she’d been maligning Rick, reinforcing Russ’s grudge against him, and when she learned that Russ had forgiven him, unilaterally, without consulting her, she was bound to feel betrayed. No doubt she’d imagined she was being a loyal wife. But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago. Frances had restored him to his courage, his edge, by believing he was capable of more.

The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how little of it I’ve had to endure. I think of my CAE students and the way I cheerfully rip into their precious work. I could try to learn a lesson from their humility. I agree to rewrite.

11/3/66

In the most terrible and terrifying moments of my life (ten, perhaps, in a lifetime) Mozart, not a sedative, is the hope—though not the healing power. There is no healing power. But Mozart knew all that. I, or we, suffer here and now, and he often wrote his music during the worst. It is this that I admire, and only this spirit that gives me courage to go on also. It is (apparently!) impossible for me to convey the joy I felt one miserable Saturday morning, listening to the 24th piano concerto on a transistor radio in the bathroom. I had been wretched a moment before. But with Mozart’s courage, I could face lions. Bach for minor crises. Mozart for major ones.

I never miss a day of the exercises. I take the kids to school. I make dinner. I clean the kitchen. I try to do many of the errands David has done for the last few years, running to grocery stores, getting things fixed. I write. I socialize. When my children ask me to play, I say yes, no matter what, no matter how raucous the game. I write a screenplay. I sign on to direct a few episodes of a web series, keeping in mind the advice that I won’t get better until I do my job again, but mindful that I have a baby who I am not yet ready to leave for a longer project. I go everywhere I am invited, usually with the baby in tow. I’m in a kind of manic haze. It hurts like hell, I feel nauseous, and especially in those first weeks, I get the beginnings of what used to turn into crushing migraines. But when I feel those beginnings, instead of going to bed, I go for a fast walk on busy sidewalks or do an intense dynamic workout. By the time I am done, the headache has usually faded substantially. I learn to push through, and to have faith that I will feel better when I do so. In short, I learn to stop listening so attentively to my body. A friend who is cheerleading my recovery says to me, almost every day, over text or the phone, “This is hard, but you can do hard things.”

At this time, a friend wrote me a letter. He addressed me with the word “Dearest.” But however often I looked at the word “Dearest” and my name, I could not keep the two words together, because they did not seem related. He closed the letter by telling me to “have courage,” and I found, to my surprise, that if I simply looked at the words “have courage” there on the page, I had courage that I had not had a moment before.