Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The anchor department stores distribute access to the big retailers of shoes and women’s clothing that flank them. The anchors create foot traffic for the specialty stores that fill the spaces in between. Too few anchors, too far apart, and the chain stores and specialty stores fail. Anchor department stores get favorable leases. The major chain stores make less attractive deals. Specialty retailers pay a premium to keep their place. They often pay a higher percentage of gross sales in lease payments and common-area fees. Specialty stores in shopping malls frequently fail. They are expected to. The owners of the mall calculate at least a ten percent turnover in leases every year. The turnover is designed to keep shoppers interested. [image "Image" file=Image00011.jpg] 152 The letters on top of the May Co. did not conform to the city’s sign ordinance, which requires that signs name something. The letters were removed in 1982, the year my father died. The letters were the only graceful part of the building. 153 My father often said that he was a simple man. I do not believe my father was, but I admired his claim. I admired my father’s grace as well, which made him angry. 154 There were some graces my father rejected. He accepted the ones that let him live his life here. 155 The master plan for the subdivision specified an ornamental tree in front of each house in the city’s right-of-way. Each house was provided with a small fifteen-gallon tree in the space between the sidewalk and the curb. Every block had its own variety of tree. The trees were chosen for their low cost and quick growth. When they were newly planted, the trees were too small to hide the May Co. building or the capital Ms that were its emblem. The trees have now reached their full height. Many have begun to die. The roots of the most aggressive trees buckle sidewalks and break up curbs. Residents complain, mostly about the ponding water that tree roots trap on the city’s flat streets. The city will remove many of its thirty thousand street trees in the next twenty years. Removal and replanting will cost the city more than two million dollars. You rarely notice the May Co. building. It’s hidden by the crowns of mature trees in every direction. 156 On Memorial Day in 1967, the city dedicated a plaque to its men killed in Vietnam. The new plaque, bolted to the Skynight ’s concrete pylon, had two names on it. There was room, however, to fit thirty-eight more, on six-inch strips of cast bronze. For the next five years, the city ordered new names for Memorial Day. The names were taken from newspaper obituaries and at the request of parents or grandparents. A city worker attached the new bronze strips to the plaque with aluminum rivets. The sons of the veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War came of age together. I was one of them.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  1. The parents of Victor Hugo separated shortly after the novelist was born, in 1802. Hugo's mother, Sophie, had been carrying on an affair with her husband's superior officer, a general. She took the three Hugo boys away from their father and went off to Paris to raise them on her own. Now the boys led a tumultuous life, featuring bouts of poverty, frequent moves, and their mother's continued affair with the general. Of all the boys, Victor was the most attached to his mother, adopting all her ideas and pet peeves, particularly her hatred of his father. But with all the turmoil in his childhood he never felt he got enough love and attention from the mother he adored. When she died, in 1821, poor and debt-ridden, he was devastated. The following year Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle, who physically resembled his mother. It was a happy marriage for a while, but soon Adèle came to resemble his mother in more ways than one: in 1832, he discovered that she was having an affair with the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who also happened to be Hugo's best friend at the Effect a Regression • 339 time. Hugo was a celebrated writer by now, but he was not the calculating type. He generally wore his heart on his sleeve. Yet he could not confide in anyone about Adèle's affair; it was too humiliating. His only solution was to have affairs of his own, with actresses, courtesans, married women. Hugo had a prodigious appetite, sometimes visiting three different women in the same day. Near the end of 1832, production began on one of Hugo's plays, and he was to supervise the casting. A twenty-six-year-old actress named Juliette Drouet auditioned for one of the smaller roles. Normally quite adroit with the ladies, Hugo found himself stuttering in Juliette's presence. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and this and her composed manner intimidated him. Naturally, Juliette won the part. He found himself thinking about her all the time. She always seemed to be surrounded by a group of adoring men. Clearly she was not interested in him, or so he thought. One evening, though, after a performance of the play, he followed her home, to find that she was neither angry nor surprised— indeed she invited him up to her apartment. He spent the night, and soon he was spending almost every night there.

• From Querelle (1953)

  "I'm telling you, you better stay put. I'll talk to my buddies and see what we can do for you. I'll come and see you as often as I'm able. I'll even give your little buddy here some coins so he can buy you some stuff to eat and some smokes." "That's damn white of you. Thanks." But the moment before, in order to lose himself, to concentrate himself into his stare and disperse it among the shadows, Gil had used up too much of his energy to be able to express his gratitude with the fuii warmth of his being. He was tired. An immense sadness had crept over his face, dragging down the comers of the mouth Querelle recalled seeing in a different state-a little moist, gay, open in song. His body was sagging on the comer of the crate, and his entire gestalt was that of someone who thinks : "What the fucking hell am I going to do 173 I QUERELLE now?" He was on the verge of grief, not despair, but the grief of a child, abandoned, if only for an instant, when night is coming on. Strength and conviction were ebbing away. He was not a true murderer. He was afraid. "You think it's all over for me, if they catch me?" "\Vho knows. It's a lottery. But don't start worrying now. They won't get you." .. You're a real buddy. What's your first nan1e?" "] o." ••You're a buddy, J o. I'll never forget it." At last his soul was filled with joy at the encounter with Querelle who was on his way out and back to normal life, and who was strong, with the strength of a hundred million people.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  And so I started with something, and by saying what I was starting with: Rosalie’s favorite image. I knew the book was about images, and starting with hers connected me to her. I knew I had to get from my feelings about her to she and I sharing the same space—an ethereal or spiritual space. I had to start with her, not me. Her and her imagination. And every time I hit a wall, I would start a new section. I would go back to my list of ideas, dreams, and essays, or go back to the present moment or to the recent past—back and forth, through these three tracks, until a sort of overture was done, and the past events caught up with the present events and the book took on a new urgency, roughly seventy pages in. At that point, I think I shared what I had, both by printing them up and by posting it online. Positive comments from friends kept me going as I moved forward. I wrote a note above my desk, “Nothing matters except you have to tell this story.” And so that’s what got me going. Working on it, and letting people see it in process. The cover of the first self-published photocopied mini-comic. TAKING A TEST RUN As I said, I had no difficulty in starting this project; it kept me sane in a time of anguish. But some specific things helped me. One help was my early use of shading film. It’s very trance-inducing, and also helped ritualize the process of working, and deepen the physicality of it, too. But what was more important, like Art Spiegelman and Carol Tyler (whose stories appear later in this book), I made a story before the story. This one was in response to a call for homage stories to the Japanese alternative anthology Garo. I have always been inspired by Garo, and looking over my shelves of them, I thought I would do something I’ve always wanted to do: Take a story I can’t read and create my own words for it. I first found a story whose style I felt comfortable mimicking. Choosing it supposedly for its visual simplicity, I was stunned later that the story had such resonant imagery. The piece follows a old man’s younger self as he recounts losing a girl he meets in a village. I don’t know more than that. My version became a hymn to my daughter, and a preparation for getting into the mindset I needed for the bigger book. I have no idea what this story is really about, so I turned it into my own. Starting DO THIS All of these assignments are designed to get you started. Let’s just get moving and break past that blank page.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  I was ten or eleven years old. I already knew my father had been in the Navy in the war, because I had seen his officer’s uniform in a suitcase in the attic. The episode of Victory at Sea was about the invasion of Okinawa. We looked at the black-and-white images of ships in formation before the battle. He said we might see the Bradford , the ship he had been on. We saw Japanese fighters and torpedo planes attack the ships. We saw the air around the ships fill with the small, black-and-white explosions of antiaircraft shells. We saw kamikaze planes burst into flames—in the air, as some struck the water, and when one hit an American ship. We didn’t see the Bradford . 247 My city doesn’t have a cemetery. Louis Boyar didn’t include one in his plan. It won’t ever have one. There’s not enough empty space left to lay a cemetery out. Most of the Catholic dead of my city lie in All Souls Cemetery. The cemetery is in Long Beach, on the other side of the railroad line that William A. Clark bought. The Catholic cemetery isn’t very big. It’s a rectangle of land between a neighborhood shopping center and a former milk processing plant. The cemetery grounds are level. There are no monuments on the expanse of lawn. There aren’t many trees. The layout of the cemetery’s streets is a simple grid of connected ovals. A hundred feet beyond the last row of graves at All Souls Cemetery, across the railroad tracks to the east, are the backyards of houses in my city. The row of house roofs makes a dark, irregular pattern, punctuated by the crowns of mature trees. It once was traditional in Christian burials that the dead lie east to west in their graves. The dead faced east. It is from the east, from Jerusalem, that Christ is expected to come to raise the dead. Not all the graves in All Souls Cemetery are oriented this way. The graves of my parents, by chance, face east, toward the city in which I live. 248 In 1951, Emmett Gossett suffocated when a mound of sand collapsed on him. Gossett was nine years old. He had gone with a friend to play near the equipment that pulverized river gravel into the sand used for the stucco walls of the new houses the three developers were putting up. The boys began playing at the base of a hopper, where a partial load of sand had been taken away. The remaining sand, slightly damp, formed a wall higher than a grown man. Gossett dug into its base and the wall of unstable sand collapsed. The efforts of the other boy to free Gossett caused even more sand to cover him. Workmen at the cement plant, and county fire fighters when they arrived, failed to resuscitate the boy. He was buried at All Souls Cemetery.

• From Querelle (1953)

  It broke Querelle's heart to see Gil pocket the money. That pang of pain would serve to justify the double-cross he was preparing for Gil. Jt wasn't the money he had pretended to steal from a house he well knew to be uninhabited-it would only take him a couple of days to get back a hundred times as much-but it did give him a pain to see Gil go for it hook, line and sinker. Then, every day, Querelle brought him some items of clothing. \Vithin three days he had outfitted Gil in sailor's bells, jersey, peacoat and beret. Roger helped haul each bundle over the sea wall, by the same method employed in getting the opium past customs. One evening Querelle gave him his briefing. "It's all set. You're not backing out, are you? You better tell me, if you get cold feet at the last moment . . ." "You can trust me." Gil was to walk into Brest in broad daylight. The uniform would render him invisible. The police would hardly expect the murderer to take a stroll in the city disguised as a sailor. "You sure that Lieutenant's an easy one?" "I told you, he's a little old lady. He looks military and all that, but he ain't no fighter." The sailor's outfit transformed Gil and gave him a new, strange personality. He didn't recognize himself. In the dark, all by himself, he dressed with the greatest of care. Striving for elegance, he put on the beret, then pushed it back a little, most coquettishly. The charming and forceful soul of the most elegant branch of the armed services entered into him. He became a member of that fighting Navy whose purpose is to grace the shores of France rather than to defend them : it embroiders and strings out a festive garland along the seaboard, from Dunkirk to. Villefranche, with here and there a couple of thicker knots in it to mark the naval ports. The Navy is a wonderfully constructed organization consisting of young men who are given an entire education in how to make themselves appear desirable. 'When he was still working at his trade, Gil .us I JEAN GENET

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  6 Moral choice does not enter his thinking. He believes, however, that each of us is crucified. His own crucifixion is the humiliation of living the life he has made for himself. 7 You and I grew up in these neighborhoods when they were an interleaving of houses and fields that were soon to be filled with more houses. A particular sound marked the boundary of the neighborhood. It was the barking of dogs near full dark in summer. Do you remember it? The flat barking skipped from block to block, unhinged from causes, not necessarily your neighbors’ dog, but their dog too. That sound became the whole neighborhood clearing its throat before going to bed and sleep. 8 At some point in your story grief presents itself. Now, for the first time, your room is empty, not merely unoccupied. 9 Before they put a grid over it, and restrained the ground from indifference, any place was as good as any other. 10 There were only a few trees here, eighty years ago. They were eucalyptus trees near some farm buildings, deliberately planted for shade. Men waited under them before their work began. The men’s faces were brown on the jaw and chin, and pale above. In the fields, only the upper part of a man’s face is shaded by his hat, salt-stained along the base of the crown. Work began for the men when each man pulled himself to a high wooden seat above a harvester’s moving rack of teeth. This contraption was pulled by twenty mules, straining as the men joked. 11 The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities. 12 In 1949, three developers bought 3,500 acres of Southern California farmland. They planned to build something that was not exactly a city. In 1950, before the work of roughing the foundations and pouring concrete began, the three men hired a young photographer with a single-engine plane to document their achievement from the air. The photographer flew when the foundations of the first houses were poured. He flew again when the framing was done and later, when the roofers were nearly finished. He flew over the shell of the shopping center that explains this and many other California suburbs. The three developers were pleased with the results. The black-and-white photographs show immense abstractions on ground the color of the full moon. Some of the photographs appeared in Fortune and other magazines. The developers bound enlargements in a handsome presentation book. I have several pages from one of the copies. The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as an unearthed bone. Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible. [image "Image" file=Image00002.jpg] 13 Four of the young man’s photographs became the definition of this suburb, and then of suburbs generally. The photographs look down before the moving vans arrived, and before you and I learned to play hide-and-seek beneath the poisonous oleander trees.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  A guard, either drunk or too much muffled up in the bitter frost, had not heard the train moving back, and had been crushed. Before Vronsky and Oblonsky came back the ladies heard the facts from the butler. Oblonsky and Vronsky had both seen the mutilated corpse. Oblonsky was evidently upset. He frowned and seemed ready to cry. “Ah, how awful! Ah, Anna, if you had seen it! Ah, how awful!” he said. Vronsky did not speak; his handsome face was serious, but perfectly composed. “Oh, if you had seen it, countess,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “And his wife was there.... It was awful to see her!... She flung herself on the body. They say he was the only support of an immense family. How awful!” “Couldn’t one do anything for her?” said Madame Karenina in an agitated whisper. Vronsky glanced at her, and immediately got out of the carriage. “I’ll be back directly, maman,” he remarked, turning round in the doorway. When he came back a few minutes later, Stepan Arkadyevitch was already in conversation with the countess about the new singer, while the countess was impatiently looking towards the door, waiting for her son. “Now let us be off,” said Vronsky, coming in. They went out together. Vronsky was in front with his mother. Behind walked Madame Karenina with her brother. Just as they were going out of the station the station-master overtook Vronsky. “You gave my assistant two hundred roubles. Would you kindly explain for whose benefit you intend them?” “For the widow,” said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. “I should have thought there was no need to ask.” “You gave that?” cried Oblonsky, behind, and, pressing his sister’s hand, he added: “Very nice, very nice! Isn’t he a splendid fellow? Good-bye, countess.” And he and his sister stood still, looking for her maid. When they went out the Vronsky’s carriage had already driven away. People coming in were still talking of what happened. “What a horrible death!” said a gentleman, passing by. “They say he was cut in two pieces.” “On the contrary, I think it’s the easiest—instantaneous,” observed another. “How is it they don’t take proper precautions?” said a third. Madame Karenina seated herself in the carriage, and Stepan Arkadyevitch saw with surprise that her lips were quivering, and she was with difficulty restraining her tears. “What is it, Anna?” he asked, when they had driven a few hundred yards. “It’s an omen of evil,” she said. “What nonsense!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch. “You’ve come, that’s the chief thing. You can’t conceive how I’m resting my hopes on you.” “Have you known Vronsky long?” she asked. “Yes. You know we’re hoping he will marry Kitty.” “Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added, tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I am.” “Yes, all my hopes are in you,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch.

• From Querelle (1953)

  However, the friendship linking him to the victim-turning the latter into an extension of the murderer's own personalitygives rise to a magical phenomenon we'll try to express in the following terms : I have just been engaged in an enterprise that involved a part of myself ( my affection for the victim ) . Now I know how to enter into a kind of (nonverbal ) pact with the Devil in which I do not give Him my soul, or an arm; but something equally precious : I give him a friend of mine. The death of this friend sanctifies my thieving. It is not a matter of formal arrangement (there are reasons stronger than the provi· sions of any law, inherent in tears, grief, death, blood, in gestures, objects, matter itself) , but an act of true magic that makes me the only true possessor of the object for which a friend has been voluntarily bartered. I say voluntarily because my victim, in being a friend, was (and my grief confirms this ) a greening leaf somewhere close to the tip of one of my branches, nourished by my own sap. Querelle knew that no one on this earth, without committing a sacrilege Querelle himself would try to prevent by fighting against it to his very last breath, would ever succeed in taking certain stolen jewels away from him, as his accomplice (and friend ) whom he had delivered into the hands of the police in order to escape more quickly himself, had been sentenced to five years' solitary confinement. It did not exactly cause him grief to find himself the true owner of those stolen goods, but he regarded them with a feeling we have to call more noble, and not in the least tainted by affec· tion, a kind of manly faithfulness to a wounded companion. Not that our hero had the idea that he was holding the booty for his accomplice, in order to share it with him later; the main thing, for him, was to keep the loot intact and out of reach of human justice. Every time he stole or robbed again, Querelle immediately felt the need to establish a mystical connection between the stolen objects and · himself. "The right of con· quest" became a phrase that meant something. Querelle meta· 241 I QUERELLE morphosed his friends into bracelets, necklaces, gold watches, earrings. Thus turning one of his feelings-friendship-into cash with some success, he put himself without the pale of any man's judgment. That transmutation concerned only himself. Anyone who tried to make him "cough up the stuff again" would commit an act of grave-desecration. Thus Gil's arrest caused Querelle considerable grief, but at the same time he was keenly aware of becoming almost physically encrusted with all the imaginary jewels and gold that symbolized the money acquired with Gil's help. It is our contention that the mechanism we have just described is a very common one in our time.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At the table, sitting sideways in a low chair, was Vronsky, his face hidden in his hands, weeping. He jumped up at the doctor’s voice, took his hands from his face, and saw Alexey Alexandrovitch. Seeing the husband, he was so overwhelmed that he sat down again, drawing his head down to his shoulders, as if he wanted to disappear; but he made an effort over himself, got up and said: “She is dying. The doctors say there is no hope. I am entirely in your power, only let me be here ... though I am at your disposal. I....” Alexey Alexandrovitch, seeing Vronsky’s tears, felt a rush of that nervous emotion always produced in him by the sight of other people’s suffering, and turning away his face, he moved hurriedly to the door, without hearing the rest of his words. From the bedroom came the sound of Anna’s voice saying something. Her voice was lively, eager, with exceedingly distinct intonations. Alexey Alexandrovitch went into the bedroom, and went up to the bed. She was lying turned with her face towards him. Her cheeks were flushed crimson, her eyes glittered, her little white hands thrust out from the sleeves of her dressing gown were playing with the quilt, twisting it about. It seemed as though she were not only well and blooming, but in the happiest frame of mind. She was talking rapidly, musically, and with exceptionally correct articulation and expressive intonation. “For Alexey—I am speaking of Alexey Alexandrovitch (what a strange and awful thing that both are Alexey, isn’t it?)—Alexey would not refuse me. I should forget, he would forgive.... But why doesn’t he come? He’s so good he doesn’t know himself how good he is. Ah, my God, what agony! Give me some water, quick! Oh, that will be bad for her, my little girl! Oh, very well then, give her to a nurse. Yes, I agree, it’s better in fact. He’ll be coming; it will hurt him to see her. Give her to the nurse.” “Anna Arkadyevna, he has come. Here he is!” said the midwife, trying to attract her attention to Alexey Alexandrovitch. “Oh, what nonsense!” Anna went on, not seeing her husband. “No, give her to me; give me my little one! He has not come yet. You say he won’t forgive me, because you don’t know him. No one knows him. I’m the only one, and it was hard for me even. His eyes I ought to know—Seryozha has just the same eyes—and I can’t bear to see them because of it. Has Seryozha had his dinner? I know everyone will forget him. He would not forget. Seryozha must be moved into the corner room, and Mariette must be asked to sleep with him.” All of a sudden she shrank back, was silent; and in terror, as though expecting a blow, as though to defend herself, she raised her hands to her face. She had seen her husband.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  172 The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives. I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger. 173 Mrs. R and her husband lived across the street. They had a daughter, born a few months before my brother. They were Episcopalians. My mother and Mrs. R were friends. They spent afternoons in each other’s houses, while my mother waited through her first pregnancy. One afternoon, Mrs. R’s baby stopped breathing. Mrs. R came to my mother’s front door in tears, helpless. Neither Mrs. R nor my mother had a car. Neither could drive. Few women in the neighborhood could. It was 1946. Neither house had a telephone. My mother, heavy with her baby, ran across the street into Mrs. R’s house. She picked up Mrs. R’s daughter. She walked into the kitchen and turned on the faucet. She cradled the dead baby in her arm against the curve of her stomach, and cupped her hand into the stream of water. With a little of the water, she baptized the baby. It was all she could do. 174 I saw my father cry only once before my mother’s death. I was nine or ten. It seemed to me that my parents were arguing about my father’s health. I don’t think they were. Something else had unfolded in their life together. The argument stopped. My father came into the middle bedroom, where I had gone to be as far from them as I could. In this house, the greatest distance is fifteen or twenty feet. My father sat on the end of the small bed that took the place of a couch in the middle room. The room was crowded with a desk, bookshelves my father built, the bed, and a black-and-white television set. We sat a short distance from each other. My father cried. The middle room became my bedroom when I entered college. I slept there on weekends when I went to graduate school in Orange County. It was my room when I left school and began a part-time teaching job. After my mother died in 1979, my father suggested I take the larger, back bedroom. I said no. 175 The greatest loss in living deliberately alone is in not having anyone to forgive. 176 My father brought his suitcase down from the attic after my mother’s death, emptied it, and burned the letters he sent her during the war. He kept the letters my mother sent him. He also kept the notebook he’d written in during his years as a member of a Catholic religious order. I kept his notebook. I have not read it. 177 My father, although he did not prepare to become a priest, was a member of the Blessed Sacrament religious order from 1936 to early 1941.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Kitty danced in the first couple, and luckily for her she had not to talk, because Korsunsky was all the time running about directing the figure. Vronsky and Anna sat almost opposite her. She saw them with her long-sighted eyes, and saw them, too, close by, when they met in the figures, and the more she saw of them the more convinced was she that her unhappiness was complete. She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And on Vronsky’s face, always so firm and independent, she saw that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong. Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty’s eyes to Anna’s face. She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination. Kitty admired her more than ever, and more and more acute was her suffering. Kitty felt overwhelmed, and her face showed it. When Vronsky saw her, coming across her in the mazurka, he did not at once recognize her, she was so changed. “Delightful ball!” he said to her, for the sake of saying something. “Yes,” she answered. In the middle of the mazurka, repeating a complicated figure, newly invented by Korsunsky, Anna came forward into the center of the circle, chose two gentlemen, and summoned a lady and Kitty. Kitty gazed at her in dismay as she went up. Anna looked at her with drooping eyelids, and smiled, pressing her hand. But, noticing that Kitty only responded to her smile by a look of despair and amazement, she turned away from her, and began gaily talking to the other lady. “Yes, there is something uncanny, devilish and fascinating in her,” Kitty said to herself. Anna did not mean to stay to supper, but the master of the house began to press her to do so. “Nonsense, Anna Arkadyevna,” said Korsunsky, drawing her bare arm under the sleeve of his dress coat, “I’ve such an idea for a _cotillion! Un bijou!_” And he moved gradually on, trying to draw her along with him. Their host smiled approvingly. “No, I am not going to stay,” answered Anna, smiling, but in spite of her smile, both Korsunsky and the master of the house saw from her resolute tone that she would not stay. “No; why, as it is, I have danced more at your ball in Moscow than I have all the winter in Petersburg,” said Anna, looking round at Vronsky, who stood near her. “I must rest a little before my journey.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Before Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), the most respected and influential anthropologist of his day, declared the issue settled, there was plenty of debate over whether or not the mother-father-child triad was, in fact, the universal atomic unit of human social organization. Malinowski scoffed at Morgan’s notion that societies could ever have been organized along nonnuclear lines, writing: These actors are obviously three in number at the beginning—the two parents and their offspring…. This unquestionably correct principle has become…the starting point for a new interpretation of Morgan’s hypothesis of a primitive communal marriage. [They are] fully aware that group-marriage implies group-parenthood. Yet group-parenthood [is] an almost unthinkable hypothesis…. This conclusion has led to such capital howlers as that “the clan marries the clan and begets the clan” and that “the clan, like the family, is a reproductive group” [emphasis added].12 “Unquestioningly correct principle?” “Unthinkable hypothesis?” “Capital howlers?” Malinowski seems to have been personally offended that Morgan had dared to doubt the universality and naturalness of the sanctified nuclear family structure. Meanwhile, within a few blocks of the London classrooms where he lectured, untold numbers of infants whose existence threatened to expose the colossal error at the heart of Malinowski’s “unquestioningly correct principle” were being sacrificed, quite literally, in foundling hospitals. The situation was no less horrific in the United States. In 1915, a doctor named Henry Chapin visited ten foundling hospitals and found that in nine of them, every child died before the age of two. Every child.13 This dark fate awaited inconvenient children born throughout Europe. In her memoir of middle-class life in early twentieth–century Germany, for instance, Doris Drucker describes the village “Angelmaker,” who received babies from unwed mothers and “starved the little children in her care to death,” while the unwed, now childless mother was hired out as a wet nurse to upper-class families.14 How efficient. Horrifying as it is to contemplate, widespread infanticide was not limited to Malinowski’s day. For centuries, millions of European children had been passed through discreet revolving boxes set into the walls of foundling hospitals. These boxes were designed to protect the anonymity of the person leaving the child, but they offered scant protection to the infant. The survival rate in those institutions was little better than if the revolving boxes had opened directly into a crematorium’s furnace. Far from being places of healing, these were government-and church-approved slaughterhouses where children whose existence might have raised inconvenient questions about the “naturalness” of the nuclear family were disposed of in a form of industrialized infanticide.15 In his book Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, historian Robert S. McElvaine gets off a few “capital howlers” of his own, writing, “the general trend in human evolution is undeniably toward pair bonding and lasting families. Pair bonding (albeit often with some backsliding, especially by men) and the family are,” he insists, “the exceptions notwithstanding, among the traits that characterize the human species [emphasis added].”16

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  The anchor department stores distribute access to the big retailers of shoes and women’s clothing that flank them. The anchors create foot traffic for the specialty stores that fill the spaces in between. Too few anchors, too far apart, and the chain stores and specialty stores fail. Anchor department stores get favorable leases. The major chain stores make less attractive deals. Specialty retailers pay a premium to keep their place. They often pay a higher percentage of gross sales in lease payments and common-area fees. Specialty stores in shopping malls frequently fail. They are expected to. The owners of the mall calculate at least a ten percent turnover in leases every year. The turnover is designed to keep shoppers interested. [image "Image" file=Image00011.jpg] 152 The letters on top of the May Co. did not conform to the city’s sign ordinance, which requires that signs name something. The letters were removed in 1982, the year my father died. The letters were the only graceful part of the building. 153 My father often said that he was a simple man. I do not believe my father was, but I admired his claim. I admired my father’s grace as well, which made him angry. 154 There were some graces my father rejected. He accepted the ones that let him live his life here. 155 The master plan for the subdivision specified an ornamental tree in front of each house in the city’s right-of-way. Each house was provided with a small fifteen-gallon tree in the space between the sidewalk and the curb. Every block had its own variety of tree. The trees were chosen for their low cost and quick growth. When they were newly planted, the trees were too small to hide the May Co. building or the capital Ms that were its emblem. The trees have now reached their full height. Many have begun to die. The roots of the most aggressive trees buckle sidewalks and break up curbs. Residents complain, mostly about the ponding water that tree roots trap on the city’s flat streets. The city will remove many of its thirty thousand street trees in the next twenty years. Removal and replanting will cost the city more than two million dollars. You rarely notice the May Co. building. It’s hidden by the crowns of mature trees in every direction. 156 On Memorial Day in 1967, the city dedicated a plaque to its men killed in Vietnam. The new plaque, bolted to the Skynight ’s concrete pylon, had two names on it. There was room, however, to fit thirty-eight more, on six-inch strips of cast bronze. For the next five years, the city ordered new names for Memorial Day. The names were taken from newspaper obituaries and at the request of parents or grandparents. A city worker attached the new bronze strips to the plaque with aluminum rivets. The sons of the veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War came of age together. I was one of them.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? “You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?” “No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect). “You’re crazy,” she said, her features working. “Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps—well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your … trousseau .” “No kidding?” asked Dolly. I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more . Gingerly, uncertainly, she received mon petit cadeau; and then her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us four thousand bucks? ” I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist. “I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.” “No,” she said. “No, honey, no.” She had never called me honey before. “No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean—” She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“ He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”). “I think,” she went on—“oops”—the envelope skidded to the floor—she picked it up—“I think it’s oh utterly grand of you to give us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.” I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the cadeau . She exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave in a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of conversation. For some reason, I kept seeing—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The starling that had learned only those “four simple words” is most important because it partakes of Lolita ’s origin, and its lament is at the book’s center. Lolita ’s initial inspiration, writes Nabokov, was “prompted by a newspaper story about an ape [in the Paris zoo] who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage” (p. 311). H.H., the “aging ape” writing from prison, whose impossible love metaphorically connects him with that imprisoned animal, learns the language, in his fashion, and records his “imprisonment.” His narrative is the “picture” of the bars of the poor creature’s cage—and an orchestration of the starling’s four simple words. vair : gray; the pale color of miniver fur. Soleil Vert : French; Green Sun. L’autre soir … de ta vie? : “The other night, a cold air [italics mine—A.A.] from the opera forced me to take to my bed; / Broken note—he who puts his trust in it is quite foolish! / It is snowing, the decor collapses, Lolita! / Lolita, what have I done with your life?” The four lines are a splendid parody and pastiche of various kinds of French verse. The alexandrine verse of line one (see Ne manque … Qu’il t’y ) scans perfectly in French. The air froid is an untranslatable pun ( air : melody; draft or wind). Line two is a traditional saying, originating with Virgil, though it is in fact drawn here from Le Roi s’amuse (1832), a play by Victor Hugo: Souvent femme varie , Bien fol est qui s’y fie! Une femme souvent N’est qu’une plume au vent. These lines are sung by the King, first in Act IV, scene ii, in a cabaret. The first two lines are repeated from off stage in Act V, scene iii, which informs Triboulet (or Rigoletto) that the King is still alive (he had planned to murder the King, but kills his daughter instead). The play was performed only once before being banned by royal decree. It is the source of Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851); Piave adapted the words and Verdi was responsible only for the music. The French version, which H.H. undoubtedly knows, is Rigoletto, ou Le Buffon du prince. Rigoletto is appropriate, since, figuratively speaking, H.H. is in his own right a grotesque clown. For Hugo, see Don Quixote . Line three of H.H.’s pastiche is overly sonorous, but the burlesqued entreaty of line four manages to express both the “truth and a caricature of it” (the artistic intention of Fyodor in The Gift , p.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Darya Alexandrovna,” he said dryly, “I appreciate your confidence in me; I believe you are making a mistake. But whether I am right or wrong, that pride you so despise makes any thought of Katerina Alexandrovna out of the question for me,—you understand, utterly out of the question.” “I will only say one thing more: you know that I am speaking of my sister, whom I love as I love my own children. I don’t say she cared for you, all I meant to say is that her refusal at that moment proves nothing.” “I don’t know!” said Levin, jumping up. “If you only knew how you are hurting me. It’s just as if a child of yours were dead, and they were to say to you: He would have been like this and like that, and he might have lived, and how happy you would have been in him. But he’s dead, dead, dead!...” “How absurd you are!” said Darya Alexandrovna, looking with mournful tenderness at Levin’s excitement. “Yes, I see it all more and more clearly,” she went on musingly. “So you won’t come to see us, then, when Kitty’s here?” “No, I shan’t come. Of course I won’t avoid meeting Katerina Alexandrovna, but as far as I can, I will try to save her the annoyance of my presence.” “You are very, very absurd,” repeated Darya Alexandrovna, looking with tenderness into his face. “Very well then, let it be as though we had not spoken of this. What have you come for, Tanya?” she said in French to the little girl who had come in. “Where’s my spade, mamma?” “I speak French, and you must too.” The little girl tried to say it in French, but could not remember the French for spade; the mother prompted her, and then told her in French where to look for the spade. And this made a disagreeable impression on Levin. Everything in Darya Alexandrovna’s house and children struck him now as by no means so charming as a little while before. “And what does she talk French with the children for?” he thought; “how unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it so: Learning French and unlearning sincerity,” he thought to himself, unaware that Darya Alexandrovna had thought all that over twenty times already, and yet, even at the cost of some loss of sincerity, believed it necessary to teach her children French in that way. “But why are you going? Do stay a little.” Levin stayed to tea; but his good-humor had vanished, and he felt ill at ease.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  172 The critics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives. I agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger. 173 Mrs. R and her husband lived across the street. They had a daughter, born a few months before my brother. They were Episcopalians. My mother and Mrs. R were friends. They spent afternoons in each other’s houses, while my mother waited through her first pregnancy. One afternoon, Mrs. R’s baby stopped breathing. Mrs. R came to my mother’s front door in tears, helpless. Neither Mrs. R nor my mother had a car. Neither could drive. Few women in the neighborhood could. It was 1946. Neither house had a telephone. My mother, heavy with her baby, ran across the street into Mrs. R’s house. She picked up Mrs. R’s daughter. She walked into the kitchen and turned on the faucet. She cradled the dead baby in her arm against the curve of her stomach, and cupped her hand into the stream of water. With a little of the water, she baptized the baby. It was all she could do. 174 I saw my father cry only once before my mother’s death. I was nine or ten. It seemed to me that my parents were arguing about my father’s health. I don’t think they were. Something else had unfolded in their life together. The argument stopped. My father came into the middle bedroom, where I had gone to be as far from them as I could. In this house, the greatest distance is fifteen or twenty feet. My father sat on the end of the small bed that took the place of a couch in the middle room. The room was crowded with a desk, bookshelves my father built, the bed, and a black-and-white television set. We sat a short distance from each other. My father cried. The middle room became my bedroom when I entered college. I slept there on weekends when I went to graduate school in Orange County. It was my room when I left school and began a part-time teaching job. After my mother died in 1979, my father suggested I take the larger, back bedroom. I said no. 175 The greatest loss in living deliberately alone is in not having anyone to forgive. 176 My father brought his suitcase down from the attic after my mother’s death, emptied it, and burned the letters he sent her during the war. He kept the letters my mother sent him. He also kept the notebook he’d written in during his years as a member of a Catholic religious order. I kept his notebook. I have not read it. 177 My father, although he did not prepare to become a priest, was a member of the Blessed Sacrament religious order from 1936 to early 1941.

• From The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life (2018)

  Though I’ve always loved drawing, the act of creating my book reminded me that in my case, the writing comes first. I did tons and tons of preparatory writing. And then I drew through those written notes, the process of which became a way to revisit the experience while applying my more reflective and alert brain to it. A PHYSICAL ACT One of the ways of drawing that I turned to was the use of shading film—little mechanical dots on transparent sheets of sticky film. I turned to this partially because it was how I first learned and longed for the familiarity of it, but also because it caused me to draw with a knife. The tragedy of losing my daughter left me so raw and enraged that carving into film and into the paper was cathartic. Drawing for me needed to be a more solid, three-dimensional process. EXAMINING THE CRAFT I too have a profound love of drawing, but in fact it’s often quite difficult for me. Drawing things “right” is usually a battle (though one that I enjoy engaging in, like a sport). Even while drawing silly cartoons, which is most of what I did for twenty years before my memoir, I had to fight to get body language, anatomy, and expressions right. But in the case of Rosalie’s book, I had a much more difficult series of challenges. I had to tell the story, engage with the material, and express something dark and sometimes scary. Not the usual thing I drew. Early on in the book, I came upon this image by Jack Davis from an old 1950s EC The Vault of Horror comic (right). I was never a fan of genre comics, but this picture captivated me. I could identify with this horrific imagery for the first time in my life. But I realized that I also liked looking at the craft of it. So to draw the difficult parts of this book, I started there, with these horror comics. I examined the brushy way Johnny Craig built up the layers of ink to create this muddy pit (right), and carved away at it to create rain, and also the way Davis used ink to create the sticky, murky goo above. I used these techniques as guides toward the type of representation I was aiming for. FAMILY AS CHARACTERS Tom by Tom Leela by Tom Rosalie by Tom One thing I especially needed to do in order to understand and relate to this ordeal was turn my wife and myself into cartoon characters. Because I have drawn so many cartoon characters for so long, it seemed I had to develop versions of my family in this same language. At this cartooned distance, I was able to see us as travelers in a journey. And there was something moving to me about rendering my wife and myself in cartoon form.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Dolly!” he repeated, with a quiver in his voice. “Anna is coming today.” “Well, what is that to me? I can’t see her!” she cried. “But you must, really, Dolly....” “Go away, go away, go away!” she shrieked, not looking at him, as though this shriek were called up by physical pain. Stepan Arkadyevitch could be calm when he thought of his wife, he could hope that she would _come round_, as Matvey expressed it, and could quietly go on reading his paper and drinking his coffee; but when he saw her tortured, suffering face, heard the tone of her voice, submissive to fate and full of despair, there was a catch in his breath and a lump in his throat, and his eyes began to shine with tears. “My God! what have I done? Dolly! For God’s sake!... You know....” He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat. She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him. “Dolly, what can I say?... One thing: forgive.... Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant....” She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently. “—instant of passion?” he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked. “Go away, go out of the room!” she shrieked still more shrilly, “and don’t talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness.” She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself. His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears. “Dolly!” he said, sobbing now; “for mercy’s sake, think of the children; they are not to blame! I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault. Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything! I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame! But, Dolly, forgive me!” She sat down. He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her. She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not. He waited. “You remember the children, Stiva, to play with them; but I remember them, and know that this means their ruin,” she said—obviously one of the phrases she had more than once repeated to herself in the course of the last few days. She had called him “Stiva,” and he glanced at her with gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.