Fifty Days of Solitude (9 page)

P
LANNING
: The days grew shorter, until there were only nine hours of light. Boundaries that others usually placed upon my time disappeared, leaving me with edgeless days (though short) and seemingly endless nights. So I found that plans were useless. To plan a day began to mean to start out into it, and then to find myself on many unexpected tangents from the forward progress, the mainstream of the plan. The digressions—what I did that I had no idea I would do—turned out to be more interesting.

Example
: I sat at the computer, resolved to put two manuscript pages of fiction into the machine. By accident my eyes lit on a bookmark from Pomegranate Press that had fallen out of a book by Israel Rosenfield I once started and then left unfinished. The bookmark had a long, startling photograph (from the archives of the Library of Congress) of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, a physician and reformer during Civil War years and who, the text of the bookmark informed me, objected to the “stricture” of nineteenth-century women's clothing.

So there she was, in tails and rather baggy black trousers, a silk vest, dress shirt, and black tie, holding her high silk hat in her white-gloved hand. An invisible timepiece hung from a gold chain around her neck and was tucked into her vest pocket. A medal was pinned to the left side of her formal jacket. Her gray-white hair was cut short and lay straight down behind her very large, protruding ears. Her face was ordinary, almost androgynous; her slightly sunken smile suggested a possible absence of teeth.

Dr. Walker was a wondrous sight to behold, especially when I remembered the customary ladies' crinolines of her day. So I made my way through high snow to the locked-up bookstore. In the tomblike cold I found some reference books and looked up her history. She was born in 1832, studied medicine at Syracuse Medical College, and graduated as a surgeon when she was twenty-three. Ten years later she offered her services to the Union Army as a surgeon but was rejected because of her sex. So she joined as a nurse and served three years before she was finally commissioned an assistant surgeon. Near the end of the war she was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor which she wore at all times on her male clothes for the rest of her life. She died in 1919, at the age of eighty-seven.

There is a biography of Mary Walker, published in 1962. At the end of the morning I called the local library to see if interlibrary loan could produce it for me. The librarian said she would try. I was so full of questions that I thought about her for the rest of the day. What was the effect of her determinedly antifeminine dress upon the people she doctored? Was she too old to serve in the Spanish-American War? World War I? Did she marry? Have children? Was she celibate? Or lesbian? Where did she practice, at what hospital, in what city?

So deep into imaginings and questions that the meander wiped out the mainstream of my plan, I never got back to the computer.

O
NCE
I had a character in a novel who had been a silent-picture star. He grew old living alone, his close friends having died. The film industry had moved into irrevocable, omnipresent sound. But he believed that the art of silence was greater than the ubiquitous spoken word and accompanying music. His loneliness was made more bearable by alcohol and by the imaged presence in his room of a stationary old camera. It sat on three legs, had a crank at the side which turned the loop of film, and a black box housing the lens which could be moved from side to side.

My character, Willis Lord, would place himself before the camera. He imagined it was recording his actions as he cooked, or washed, or prepared for bed. His sense of his status as a star, a person at the center of every action, was thus maintained during his long, solitary days and nights.

In an odd way, when I was alone, this fiction became predictive. At moments when I went through the ordinary acts of daily life, I too imagined the presence of a camera, a more modern, mobile, hand-held one, I suppose, that followed me everywhere. I was not conscious of another person operating the camera, merely the camera moving on its own in a pair of hands, giving a curious significance to my every move.

I had an eerie sense of having been dichotomized, myself split into two, one acting, the other watching and recording for some higher purpose. But what? To make sure I was doing normal things? What I was supposed to be doing? I wondered if we were all always observing ourselves, even as we slept? Or did it happen only when we were alone, or most often in the late years of our lives when we had grown fearful of diminishment? When we were young we knew what we were doing, but now, did we need a witness to record any deviation from our youthful selves?

I had no answers. I knew only that when I raised the shades in the bedroom each morning, the camera was there, watching to see if I succeeded in making them exactly level, if my eye was still accurate, my hand steady, my memory firm. At once, I was one with old Willis Lord and my old self, one and the same, and the camera was the second person singular, judge, censor, arbiter, and critic.

T
HE
month and a half I spent alone was the time of the first days of the Clinton administration. But politics played no part in my thinking. I had no newspaper delivered, the
TV
was down. My source of news was National Public Radio via a Maine station in Bangor to which I listened for twenty minutes at six o'clock in the morning and twenty in the late afternoon.

I turned off all commentators on the air and I talked to no one about the political situation by telephone. These self-imposed conditions may account for my conviction that what was going on out there in the world was, inevitably, unthinkable, and that I ought to preserve my hard-achieved peace of mind by banning even the forty minutes I had hitherto indulged in.

I used to be certain that writers needed to be
au courant
about everything that went on in the world of their time. This is probably good advice for the first fifty or sixty years they live. But later, I decided, I wanted to shield myself from as much of the terrible particulars of modern existence as possible to preserve my shrinking time for, well, let me say it, pompous as it sounds, contemplation of more important questions, of generalities based on a past I have stored away for review in the leisure of an elderly present.

The horrifying details of life in the world today, of rape, wars,
AIDS
, starvation, assassinations, murders, drugs, floods, hurricanes, torture, abuse of women and children, racism, drunkenness, madness, homelessness, political chicanery could not be buried or wished away by an act of will, certainly. But they were held at arm's length for the short period I had devoted to the exploration of solitude.

Without their constant presence, my mind appeared to be a long, low, insensate, featureless plain. It contained no peaks of drama and no deep troughs of despair. It had been leveled by the temporary absence of the world beyond my own integument. In that state I felt somewhat barren but still comfortable, an arboreal intellectual sloth who could think but not feel very much. I was not stirred by indignation or repelled by sanguinity. “In violence we forget who we are,” Mary McCarthy wrote. Without the constant presence of violence in my consciousness I knew who I was. And, for short periods of time, that was enough.

P
AUL
V
ALÉRY
wrote one novel,
Monsieur Teste
. The man of the title is a severely introverted man living alone in a city with his wife. I phrase this last clause deliberately because Madame Teste (or anyone else) plays no part whatever in Teste's consciousness or in his unending search for the contents of his thoughts. He is a man who limits himself and his existence to his mind or, as Valéry writes, “a man regulated by his own powers of thought.” He is friendless except for Valéry who wrote the book from his memory of his own “inward youth” while he was searching “in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.” He had wanted to be able “to extend the duration of certain thoughts.”

Most interesting to me, Valéry in those days put away writing in his solitude because “it seemed to me unworthy to divide my ambition between the desire to produce an effect on others and the passion to know and acknowledge myself as I was, without omission, pretense, or complacency.” Writing, thus, was an act aimed at impressing others, so it ran counter to his efforts to search for himself.

Early in my fifty days I spent one day and one evening with Monsieur Teste, looking for assistance in my time ahead, alone. Most of the novel contains “snapshots” and “thoughts” from his notebook. They are merely sketched in; few are developed. Like a complex mosaic they compose the mind of the man, enough, Valéry may have thought, to make a novel.

What I found in Monsieur Teste's thinking was of some use to me, if not to act upon, then to ponder:

—“The mind must not be occupied with persons;
de personis non curandum
.”

—“What really matters to someone (I mean the kind of someone who in his essence is unique and alone) is precisely that which makes him feel that he is alone.… It is this that comes to him when he is
truly alone
, even when in fact he is with others.”

—“I am not turned toward the world. My face is to the
WALL
. There is not an atom of the wall's surface that is not known to me.”

—“There are individuals who feel their senses separate them from the real, from being. That sense in them infects their other senses.… What I see blinds me. What I hear deafens me. That by which I know makes me ignorant. I am ignorant inasmuch, and insofar, as I know. This light before me is a blindfold and hides either a darkness or a light more.… More what? Here the circle of that strange reversal closes: knowledge as a cloud over being; the bright world as an opaque growth on the eye.… Away from everything, so that I may see.”

—
THE MAN OF GLASS:
“So direct is my vision, so pure my sensation, so clumsily complete my knowledge, and so quick, so clear my reflection, and my understanding so perfect, that I see through myself from the farthest end of the world down to my unspoken word; and from the shapeless
thing
desired on waking, along the known nerve fibers and organized centers, I
follow
and
am myself
, I answer myself, reflect and reverberate myself, I quiver to the infinity of mirrors—I am glass.”

But the best sentence, the one that echoed in my head long after I had put
Monsieur Teste
down: “One must go into himself armed to the teeth.”

So it is, truly, I thought, not only armed to the teeth but also wearing a full plate of armor: helmet, beaver, paultron, breastplate, gauntlet, greave, and all the pieces of metal in between. Even so protected, one is still not safe from assault by the guerrilla forces of painful memories and deeply hidden guilt.

I
FOUND
that when I was alone my hunger grew for opera, live music, ballet, and theater. True, I had a good supply of operas on video and audio tapes and compact discs for music (never the same thing as being at a performance, although at first I thought they would serve). I yearned for the sight of “live” art in galleries and museums.

By good luck, on the day my appetite was greatest, there arrived in the mail a copy of the volume that served as companion to the Barnes Collection exhibition. The handsome book came to Sargentville on the day the exhibition opened in Washington, D.C.I decided to pretend (to what games being alone sometimes drove me!) that I was attending the show, in person, as they say.

Slowly I advanced through the more than three hundred pictures, at least half of them in very good color. I thought I had seen all the Manets, Renoirs, Cézannes, Picassos, Matisses, and Gauguins when I visited the Barnes Museum near Philadelphia many years ago. But I found I had forgotten most of them. Albert Barnes's eccentric decision not to allow his art, in all these years, to be seen away from his museum, made them all seem new to me and wonderfully fresh.

I decided to spend an evening on each painter, to prolong the experience, looking at each picture again and again, thinking about them, and trying to remember them when I came away from the book. My daughter Elizabeth once went to the National Gallery, spent hours in the Impressionist rooms, came back to our house on Capitol Hill, and amazed us by discussing the pictures she had seen
in the order they hung on the walls
.

I made progress until I came to the early Blue Period Picasso. I don't recall ever seeing
L'ascète
before. Its gaunt, melancholy, starving figure became my companion for days. He is a white-haired man seated before an empty plate, with what appears to be a roll or a piece of bread in his bony fingers, the other hand empty, and a curious blue shadow behind him, possibly his own, but it is not certain. He looks ahead, unseeing, like the blind man in the Metropolitan's picture of the same period, called
The Blind Man's Meal
.

The editor's notes for the picture informed me that Picasso may have been depressed by the suicide of a friend during the four years of his Blue Period. He painted starving and suffering figures, sick and emaciated bodies, sunken faces sad to the point of utter despair. I recognized the universality of
The Ascetic
. Painted ninety years ago, it seemed to me to be prophetic, the open-eyed blindness, the cadaverous, decaying body and almost skeletal head of the old man had the inevitable appearance of a person in the last stages of
AIDS
. I realized how close to the condition of starvation were the men I had known in the
AIDS
rooms at Capitol Hill Hospital and my dying friends.

Almost a century ago, under different conditions, Picasso had painted them: the same dire blue-gray skin, the premature aging, the deep-set eyes, and sunken cheeks of the unseeing sufferer, all there, then and now.

F
OR
the fifth time in my life I read George Eliot's
Middlemarch
, the one novel (together with, perhaps, a late novel by Henry James) I would want to reread were I placed in solitary confinement. With the kind of serendipity I have noted before in these days, I came upon an observation of Eliot's that bore upon my present way of life: “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”