Sadness

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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I knew that for her, as for all us prodigals, those pieces of gold were not true-ringing specie marked with the head of a Caesar, but a magic substance, a personal currency stamped with the effigy of a chimera and the likeness of the dancer Bathyllus. I had ceased to exist for her; she was alone. Almost plain for the moment, and puckering her brow with delightful indifference to her own beauty, like a pouting schoolboy she counted and recounted upon her fingers those difficult additions. To my eyes she was never more charming. The news of the Sarmatian incursions reached Rome during the celebration of Trajan's Dacian triumph. These long-delayed festivities lasted eight days. It had taken nearly a year to bring from Africa and from Asia wild animals destined for slaughter in the arena; the massacre of twelve thousand such beasts and the systematic destruction of ten thousand gladiators turned Rome into an evil resort of death. On that particular evening I was on the roof of Attianus' house, with Marcius Turbo and our host. The illuminated city was hideous with riotous rejoicing: that bitter war, to which Marcius and I had devoted four years of our youth, served the populace only as pretext for drunken festival, a brutal, vicarious triumph. It was not the time to announce publicly that these much vaunted victories were not final, and that a new enemy was at our frontiers. The emperor, already absorbed in his projects for Asia, took less and less interest in the situation to the northeast, which he preferred to consider as settled once and for all. That first Sarmatian war was represented as a simple punitive expedition. I was sent out to it with the title of governor of Pannonia, and with full military powers. The war lasted eleven months, and was atrocious. I still believe the annihilation of the Dacians to have been almost justified; no chief of state can willingly assent to the presence of an organized enemy established at his very gates. But the collapse of the kingdom of Decebalus had created a void in those regions upon which the Sarmatians swooped down; bands starting up from no one knew where infested a country already devastated by years of war and burned time and again by us, thus affording no base for our troops, whose numbers were in any case inadequate; new enemies teemed like worms in the corpse of our Dacian victories.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong has been done, and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, for you know that you also have a Master in heaven. (Col. 3:22–4:1) Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free. And, masters, do the same to them. Stop threatening them, for you know that both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with him there is no partiality. (Eph. 6:5–9) You will notice, by the way, that the ratio of advice for slaves to advice for owners is four to one. With regard to the Christian community envisioned by the radical Paul, those texts are contradictory, conservative, and regressive. They are not just post-Pauline; they are anti-Pauline. With regard to the norms of Roman society, they might even be too liberal. First of all, they advocate reciprocal duties for slaves and owners—even granted that four-to-one ratio. Second, Paul directly addresses slaves as well as owners, and Roman slave owners would never accept that interference with their property. THE REACTIONARY PAUL ON SLAVERY Even the residual vestige of what Roman slave owners might find too liberal rather than appropriately conservative in Colossians and Ephesians is completely eliminated in the letter to Titus: Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior. (2:9) There is nothing there about any mutuality of obligations for slaves and masters. And there is nothing addressed directly to slaves. There is but a single verse, and it begins, “Tell slaves.” SLAVERY AND PATRIARCHY You can now see clearly—in the test case of slavery—how the radical Paul of the certainly Pauline letters is transmuted first into the conservative Paul of the probably not, or disputed, Pauline letters and finally into the reactionary Paul of the certainly not Pauline letters. How sad, how terribly, terribly sad.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In later years, Mamaw sometimes spoke of a daughter who died in infancy, and she led us all to believe that the daughter was born sometime after Uncle Jimmy, Mamaw and Papaw’s eldest child. Mamaw suffered eight miscarriages in the decade between Uncle Jimmy’s birth and my mother’s. But recently my sister discovered a birth certificate for “Infant” Vance, the aunt I never knew, who died so young that her birth certificate also lists her date of death. The baby who brought my grandparents to Ohio didn’t survive her first week. On that birth certificate, the baby’s brokenhearted mother lied about her age: Only fourteen at the time and with a seventeen-year-old husband, she couldn’t tell the truth, lest they ship her back to Jackson or send Papaw to jail. Mamaw’s first foray into adulthood ended in tragedy. Today I often wonder: Without the baby, would she ever have left Jackson? Would she have run off with Jim Vance to foreign territory? Mamaw’s entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days. Whatever mix of economic opportunity and family necessity catapulted my grandparents to Ohio, they were there, and there was no going back. So Papaw found a job at Armco, a large steel company that aggressively recruited in eastern Kentucky coal country. Armco representatives would descend on towns like Jackson and promise (truthfully) a better life for those willing to move north and work in the mills. A special policy encouraged wholesale migration: Applicants with a family member working at Armco would move to the top of the employment list. Armco didn’t just hire the young men of Appalachian Kentucky; they actively encouraged those men to bring their extended families. A number of industrial firms employed a similar strategy, and it appears to have worked. During that era, there were many Jacksons and many Middletowns. Researchers have documented two major waves of migration from Appalachia to the industrial powerhouse economies in the Midwest. The first happened after World War I, when returning veterans found it nearly impossible to find work in the not-yet-industrialized mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. It ended as the Great Depression hit Northern economies hard.4 My grandparents were part of the second wave, composed of returning veterans and the rapidly rising number of young adults in 1940s and ’50s Appalachia.5 As the economies of Kentucky and West Virginia lagged behind those of their neighbors, the mountains had only two products that the industrial economies of the North needed: coal and hill people. And Appalachia exported a lot of both. Precise numbers are tough to pin down because studies typically measure “net out-migration”—as in the total number of people who left minus the number of people who came in. Many families constantly traveled back and forth, which skews the data.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It’s easy even for residents to miss it because the change has been gradual—more erosion than mudslide. But it’s obvious if you know where to look, and a common refrain for those of us who return intermittently is “Geez, Middletown is not looking good.” In the 1980s, Middletown had a proud, almost idyllic downtown: a bustling shopping center, restaurants that had operated since before World War II, and a few bars where men like Papaw would gather and have a beer (or many) after a hard day at the steel mill. My favorite store was the local Kmart, which was the main attraction in a strip mall, near a branch of Dillman’s—a local grocer with three or four locations. Now the strip mall is mostly bare: Kmart stands empty, and the Dillman family closed that big store and all the rest, too. The last I checked, there was only an Arby’s, a discount grocery store, and a Chinese buffet in what was once a Middletown center of commerce. The scene at that strip mall is hardly uncommon. Few Middletown businesses are doing well, and many have ceased operating altogether. Twenty years ago, there were two local malls. Now one of those malls is a parking lot, and the other serves as a walking course for the elderly (though it still has a few stores). Today downtown Middletown is little more than a relic of American industrial glory. Abandoned shops with broken windows line the heart of downtown, where Central Avenue and Main Street meet. Richie’s pawnshop has long since closed, though a hideous yellow and green sign still marks the site, so far as I know. Richie’s isn’t far from an old pharmacy that, in its heyday, had a soda bar and served root beer floats. Across the street is a building that looks like a theater, with one of those giant triangular signs that reads “ST___L” because the letters in the middle were shattered and never replaced. If you need a payday lender or a cash-for-gold store, downtown Middletown is the place to be. Not far from the main drag of empty shops and boarded-up windows is the Sorg Mansion. The Sorgs, a powerful and wealthy industrial family dating back to the nineteenth century, operated a large paper mill in Middletown. They donated enough money to put their names on the local opera house and helped build Middletown into a respectable enough city to attract Armco. Their mansion, a gigantic manor home, sits near a formerly proud Middletown country club. Despite its beauty, a Maryland couple recently purchased the mansion for $225,000, or about half of what a decent multi-room apartment sets you back in Washington, D.C. Located quite literally on Main Street, the Sorg Mansion is just up the road from a number of opulent homes that housed Middletown’s wealthy in their heyday. Most have fallen into disrepair. Those that haven’t have been subdivided into small apartments for Middletown’s poorest residents.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty. But it was a strong sense of duty, so Mom and I went to Mamaw’s for the night. I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after Mom and I escaped Ken’s to Mamaw’s for the night. Maybe I had a test that I wasn’t able to study for. Maybe I had a homework assignment due that I never had the time to complete. What I do know is that I was a sophomore in high school, and I was miserable. The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget—this, and not my subpar public school, was the real barrier to opportunity. I didn’t know it, but I was close to the precipice. I had nearly failed out of my freshmen year of high school, earning a 2.1 GPA. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t study, and my attendance was abysmal. Some days I’d fake an illness, and others I’d just refuse to go. When I did go, I did so only to avoid a repeat of the letters the school had sent home a few years earlier—the ones that said if I didn’t go to school, the administration would be forced to refer my case to county social services. Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation—nothing hard, just what alcohol I could get my hands on and a stash of weed that Ken’s son and I found. Final proof, I suppose, that I did know the difference between a tomato plant and marijuana. For the first time in my life, I felt detached from Lindsay. She’d been married well over a year and had a toddler. There was something heroic about Lindsay’s marriage—that after everything she’d witnessed, she’d ended up with someone who treated her well and had a decent job. Lindsay seemed genuinely happy. She was a good mom who doted on her young son. She had a little house not far from Mamaw’s and seemed to be finding her way.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’ ‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment. At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus. ‘I know —well, that’s what she said.’ ‘But have you seen her since?’ ‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’ ‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’ It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’—as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’ ‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion. ‘What, the blonde, you mean—no, she’s been there a while.’ ‘ No , not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’ ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’ It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort. When I finally got a chance at the bench I realised I felt strangely weary, and going in a rotation with three other guys I slightly knew, cut my ration each time from ten to eight lifts. After a couple of turns I saw that Bill was watching me. ‘I only made that eight, Will,’ he said, with a worried look. ‘Hi, Bill. Yes, I’m doing them in eights now.’ I watched him thinking and deciding not to censure what he obviously saw as an absurd infringement of tradition. ‘Well, everything going okay, Will? Too many people here, I think. Too many people.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Sundays were usually happy, though Mom did angrily chide us during one visit because our relationship with Mamaw had grown too close. “I’m your mother, not her,” she told us. I realized that Mom had begun to regret the seeds she’d sown with Lindsay and me. When Mom came home a few months later, she brought a new vocabulary along with her. She regularly recited the Serenity Prayer, a staple of addiction circles in which the faithful ask God for the “serenity to accept the things [they] cannot change.” Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it’s probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free. I didn’t believe in any of the slogans or sentiments, but I did believe she was trying. Addiction treatment seemed to give Mom a sense of purpose, and it gave us something to bond over. I read what I could on her “disease” and even made a habit of attending some of her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which proceeded precisely as you’d expect: a depressing conference room, a dozen or so chairs, and a bunch of strangers sitting in a circle, introducing themselves as “Bob, and I’m an addict.” I thought that if I participated, she might actually get better. At one meeting a man walked in a few minutes late, smelling like a garbage can. His matted hair and dirty clothes evidenced a life on the streets, a truth he confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth. “My kids won’t speak to me; no one will,” he told us. “I scrounge together what money I can and spend it on smack. Tonight I couldn’t find any money or any smack, so I came in here because it looked warm.” The organizer asked if he’d be willing to try giving up the drugs for more than one night, and the man answered with admirable candor: “I could say yes, but honestly, probably not. I’ll probably be back at it tomorrow night.” I never saw that man again. Before he left, someone did ask him where he was from. “Well, I’ve lived here in Hamilton for most of my life. But I was born down in eastern Kentucky, Owsley County.” At the time, I didn’t know enough about Kentucky geography to tell the man that he had been born no more than twenty miles from my grandparents’ childhood home.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  And if things got out of hand, the police would come and take someone’s drunk dad or unhinged mom down to the city building. That building housed the tax collector, the public utilities, and even a small museum, but all the kids in my neighborhood knew it as the home of Middletown’s short-term jail. I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged , struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support. Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground , another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state. Though insightful, neither of these books fully answered the questions that plagued me: Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing—hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction. Another neighbor lived alone in a big pink house.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I thought about the officers who had strapped him into the chair. I kept thinking that no one could actually believe this was a good thing to do or even a necessary thing to do. The next day there were articles in the press about the execution. Some state officials expressed happiness and excitement that an execution had taken place, but I knew that none of them had actually dealt with the details of killing Herbert. In debates about the death penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves. I went back to my office the next day with renewed energy. I picked up my other case files and made updated plans for how to assist each client to maximize the chance of avoiding an execution. Eventually, I recognized that all my fresh resolve didn’t change much—I was really only trying to reconcile myself to the realities of Herbert’s death. I was comforted by the exercise just the same. I felt more determined to recruit staff and obtain resources to meet the growing challenges of providing legal assistance to condemned people. Eva and I talked about a few people who had expressed interest in joining our staff. There was some new financial support possible from a foundation, and that afternoon we finally received the office equipment we had ordered. By the end of the day, I was persuaded things would improve, even while I felt newly burdened by the weight of it all. Chapter Five Of the Coming of John “ I t would have been so much easier if he had been out in the woods hunting by himself when that girl was killed.” Armelia Hand, Walter McMillian’s older sister, paused while the crowd in the small trailer called out in affirmation. I sat on a couch and looked out at the nearly two dozen family members who were staring at me as Armelia spoke. “At least then we could understand how it might be possible for him to have done this.” She paused and looked down at the floor of the room where we had gathered. “But because we were standing next to him that whole morning…We know where he was….We know what he was doing!” People hummed in agreement as her voice grew louder and more distraught.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  A meticulous account, something he had worked out for himself rather than something half-forgotten he had been told. He said, "I call it The Fall of the house of Altidore." I was so flattered and sympathetic that I found it quite hard to concentrate. His great-grandfather Guillaume, apparently, had created a little publishing firm in the 1890s, and produced small and luxurious printings of belles-lettres and poetry—part of Maeterlinck's work on bees, collections of verse and essays on Flemish art by Verhaeren with beautiful brown plates. I hadn't realised how wealthy and grand the Altidores had been: the publishing was just a jeu d'esprit of Guillaume, who presided at the family's modern apogee, and was a great collector too. Now the original Editions Altidore were worth thousands of pounds, but the mercantile empire that had financed them had dwindled away. Luc's grandfather had been a gambler, with little interest in shipping and copper. He liked to travel and have house-parties, and had built himself a house to have them in, a little frescoed château in woodland near the coast and the casinos. He lost a fortune in the Congo; and a good deal more in the Depression. The only thing he made money on was publishing, and he broadened the list to include many of the more popular writers of the day. Ten years ago Luc's father had inherited a moribund business but one with a long backlist, dull in the main but studded with steady sellers. He had poured in a lot of his rich older wife's money and in the boom of the early eighties things picked up. He had visions, said Luc, of their regaining something of their turn-of-the-century grandeur. Workmen had been sent to repair the roof of the little château. Then things turned down again, and Editions Altidore, like so many others, was bought up by a huge conglomerate. Luc's father kept some decorative, pretend position there, was enormously rich again from the buy-out, and over the course of a year or so of irregular commuting removed himself from his home and his family and lived a fashionable life in Brussels instead. He had never sought a divorce, in the four years since he went, though Luc knew that he lived with an actress—virtually a teenager, he said with disgust—and his mother had been difficult ever since. I was struck by his unfriendly strength of feeling as he told me all this, and dismayed by the high-principled severity of the young, that was a focusing perhaps of other fears and doubts. I felt quite abashed, sitting there holding his father's book, as if I were somehow involved or to blame; like when a friend recounts to you an argument he had and enters into it again with such vehemence that you start to feel you are yourself the butt of his remembered anger. I smiled.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I am very well disposed towards my mother," Luc said solemnly. "I don't want you to think I am not. I get annoyed when she is making so much fuss about him and imagines he will come back, when it is obvious that he won't. Most of the time I can look after her, but when my father is corning there is not too much I can do." How poignant and humbling suddenly to see Luc as the watchful support of this woman I had always thought of as absurd, and now began to picture as the heart-broken dupe of a husband far younger than herself. "Already", he said, "I know enough about love to understand why she does it. But still . . ." I stared at him for an agonised few seconds, then blurted out optimistically, "So you do get on with your father?" "I do, of course. And you see, he is very amusing and full of life and so forth." He looked down at his two squared fists, which he was knocking nervily together. "I used to think it was possible he did not want to have a child. Now I am not sure—I think we are better friends now that we never see each other." I didn't know how to follow so muted and painful a statement. I think he was as surprised as I was at everything that had come out. I leant forward, I might easily have stroked his hand and coaxed the fist into a grateful clasp. "Have you met the . . . actress?" "Yes, once at a party with both my parents. It was a long time ago, I think before this love affair began." He looked round, as if he might stretch out on the bed, but then thought better of it. "But how can we tell?" I don't think he expected an answer. "Oh, we can't tell." "She was in a film on the television which was in two or three parts, which I could watch if my mother was not in the house." Again the thoughtfulness mixed with mischief. "I must say that she is very beautiful, even if she is a very bad actress. You might fall in love with her yourself if you saw her, Edward." "I wonder." "I think I am right that she was only seventeen when he met her." I couldn't tell if he was looking at me pensively, abstracted by his picturing of the girl, or if he was speaking with deadpan cheek. "Anyway, he told me once that it was love like a blow of lightning for him, though not for her, which took much more time." All this talk of love from him suddenly, it was as if he had just learnt the word: he used it lightly and consciously like a new swearword packed with untried power and provocation.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Maybe it was a bright spring morning, waiting to dazzle, full of things to be done, unaware of the tragedy welling at the day's end. I looked at the familiar panel of Jane. Real shadow here, it was a dream of beauty, glimmering silk, folded angels, throughs of velvety dusk. Then I pictured her splayed successor, the plunge from reverence to cruelty. I assumed that, after once being robbed of what he loved, Orst had needed to chain his girl down (Marthe she was called), to insist on his power while he could, with a kind of futile force—it was like watching the anger of bereavement hugely delayed. I met the face in the dark oval of the mirror, and caught my breath as much at my own stupidity as at the halting gaze of chrysanthemum eyes. Chapter 14 Rough common is a common and also a small town, south of London. The town was nothing much until the 1790s, when its principal inn gained importance as a posthouse on the way to fashionable south-coast resorts. A watercolour by David Cox, done in 1812, shows the white weatherboarded cottages with spindly verandahs that run along the common's edge; and in the brief broad progress of Fore Street, with its pollarded limes and Wednesday market, there is still a hint of the Regency sense that a good time might be had there. The post-road itself is now swept off into a chasmal by-pass, crossed by high footbridges that lead to new, remote parts of the town. I'd been there at night sometimes with people I'd picked up. The cars thrurnrning past below added a certain desolate glamour to my vertigo. The old part of town is all the quieter, as if its hubbub were subsiding to the wind-gusted calm of the common itself. The common has always been there, in its modest, unstinting way, rising beyond low railings at the end of Fore Street to rabbit-pitted sandy heights and thicketed folds. At the top it is suddenly steep—a scribble of path, a concrete bench and the blunt monument of a trig-point against the sky. From here, you look over a large pond, sandy-edged but black-hearted, and the beginnings of a wood that runs in a long dense belt to the common's further end.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Then you prefer it here?" "I suppose I must do," I said, thinking how I had been sick to return, and how odd these personal questions were from him, who had never shown so much curiosity before. But he turned aside again to a bleak comment of his own. "I would prefer to be there. I am looking forward to going to the University of Dorset, if I can get permission." "I'm sure you will do very well. I'll be able to come and visit you and take you for drives to Maiden Castle and Cerne Abbas," I said, recouping something of my earlier exeat fantasy, and only then seeing the Freudian gaffe of my choice. "Cerne Abbas is the man with the giant prick?" "That's right," I said briskly, through a broiling blush, "it's a late Roman chalk figure, probably of Hercules . . ." "I'd like to see that," he said firmly, though the implication was that he could do so under his own steam. The sad ghost of the couple of Dorset visits I'd made when Dawn was there drifted like rain across my image of vast grassy hillsides. It was obscurely moving, like a dream sighting of a lost friend, that Luc was set on going there too. Then I remembered the wind-swept walkways of the campus and the lethal loose cladding and the sticky carpet of the students' bar. "The friend whose funeral I've just been to was at Dorset, that's why I know about it." For once I regretted the invitation to intimacy; he looked at me levelly, in a way that slightly frightened me—boys don't want death around, spoiling everything, they haven't felt it if they're lucky, like Luc. Or perhaps his stare was one of capable sympathy, narrowed and hooded by his cold. "I'm sorry," he said flatly. "Why did he die? Or she . . ." "He. He was killed in a car-crash. It was very sad. He was very ill anyway, he had AIDS; but he probably had a few more months to live." A snatch of the funeral's heightened sorrow made me turn my head aside. When I glanced up again Luc seemed shaken himself. He had the hunch of new responsibility that team-mates have when the ambulance trundles from the pitch and they jog back to their positions, one man down, amid instinctive brief applause. Something had touched him. He started talking about car-accidents.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I shouldn’t wonder if there was some mental thing. The mother was quite barmy, of course. Whole lot of them were pretty odd. ’ ‘The previous Lord Nantwich, Charles’s father, was a gifted poet,’ Staines reassured me formally, dispensing the Pimm’s in little dribbles and sploshes as the fruity garnish fell in. ‘He wrote plays in verse for his servants to perform. My grandmother used to know him—which is how I came to meet Charles, you see. He dandled me I think would be the word—longer ago than even I can remember.’ ‘Where did the family come from?’ ‘Oh, they still lived in Shropshire. They had a house in town, but they never came down. I don’t think the old man appeared in the House of Lords once. They were madly out of touch with the modern world—no telephones or anything—and I suppose that’s why they became a bit queer. Charles was devoted to his mother; they wrote to each other every single day. And there was Franky, of course. Has Charles told you about him?’ ‘Charles has told me almost nothing.’ (Should I be writing this down? The ‘Nantwich’ notebook still had nothing in it, except for some scribbles on the back page where I had tried to get a biro to work.) ‘Well some time I’ll recount that sad, sad tale. Suffice it to say, William, that Franky was Charles’s big brother, and would have come into the title in the normal course of events. He was a nymphomaniac, if a man can be. They used to say the farmworkers at Polesden sewed up their fly-buttons. He was always getting them in a corner and making them do things. And of course in those days you could —I may be embroidering a little but I think I’m right in saying that virtually any, you know, working-class lads could be had for … not more than ten shillings. They needed the money, dear. It’s too amusing really, or was until one of Franky’s boys got nasty and simply smashed him to pieces. That was what finally turned their poor mother’s mind, I should think.’ ‘And the uncle,’ Bobby prompted impatiently. ‘Oh, the uncle —yes, Charles had this heavenly uncle who everyone thought was a terrific lady’s man, and carried on very chivalrously and was seen a lot with the great beauties of the day and all that. But really, of course, he was nothing of the kind; and used to tool about with guards—on the train, I mean; well, the other sort, too, I dare say. So there was really a lot of that sort of thing going on there. Compared with the rest, Charles was quite the white sheep of the family.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He called something to the barman, who was slow to respond, and gave the impression Cherif was not his favourite customer as he handed over a newspaper that had been stowed behind the till. It was the Flemish Post, a few days old, folded, slightly browned already, with the brittle texture of newsprint that has got damp and been dried out. Cherif set it in front ofme, pointed to a short article, and then watched me as I read it. I knew his grasp of the language was poor and he seemed to take the piece in again by following my reactions to it. "Hm," I said, pushing the paper back towards him. "We had the police in here talking to everybody." "Oh." I looked towards the article again. It said how the body of a young man had been found in the sea-canal; Pieter who-was-it . . . "It's Rose," said Cherif, "the one you called Rose." A moment of uncomfortable recall—his big twitching fist with the girl's name pricked in blue across the knuckles, his pin-point pupils and nervy patter and crude attempt to hustle that older man. The barman came past and took the paper away again. "I threw him out," he said. "Dangerous sort. Drugs. A week or two back. Not queer of course," he explained. "Either a waste of time or it means trouble." He turned with a single firm shake of the head. "So what have they found out?" I asked Cherif. "I don't know." Well of course he wouldn't, but I'd hoped for a little more. "He was mad, perhaps." "He talked a lot of sense to me." But Cherif was melancholy about it. "You didn't know him, did you?" "I met him in here, that's all. You sound like a policeman." "Sorry, darling." I drank, and looked down the half-empty room. It was a doldrums hour, the juke-box silent, the TV hectic but noiseless, one or two bores in uncontested command. I stroked the back of his hand. "No, it is a horrible thing, someone just being taken out, so to speak." I had my own grief and was alternately resentful and full of sympathetic intuitions. "It doesn't matter," he said. But he came back to it later, as we lay in the dark: the jingling of bed-springs was over, I was just asleep, looking for my bunk in the workers' hostel Cherif was staying in, such a confusion of doors and unlit stairways. . . Something about "Rose," out in the cold canal, I think he only called up the image and let it palely float, nothing more to say about it—a kind of dread, though, underneath. Then I lay awake in my turn, as his breathing slowed, his mouth squashed open against me, the tiny stirring of his moustache hairs on my shoulder. It seemed to have been dumbly agreed that we were back together again.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  She felt very keenly that Charlie's wife had stolen him away from her, that she had set out deliberately to break the mother's bond with her son . . . They were married within a year of my father's death, so grief and joy were followed again by grief when Lisanne ("Always a calculating cow," said Edie) abruptly cancelled visits, in due course kept the children from their grandma and finally persuaded Charlie (who was an electronics boffin) to go for a job almost as far away as it was possible to go. My mother pined for him and the two little girls terribly; they were twelve and fourteen now, they wouldn't recognise her, she said. Charlie promised they would fly her out for a lovely long visit. Then Lisanne had written to say they couldn't afford it this year, Charlie wasn't doing so well . . . "Charlie's so weak," my mother said, and gripped my forearm as we started on the steep top path to the trig-point. She seemed somehow grateful that I at least would not get married, and so would spare her this particular pain. I remembered how at five or six I had said that I only wanted to marry her. We reached the top and turned briskly to look in each direction, as was the habit, saying "Yes. . . Yes,. . . Yes" as we checked off the different views. The church-tower was clad in grey polythene. The nearby belt of trees, referred to as Condom Copse in a recent letter to the Knowledge, was almost leafless, its secret underwoods laid bare. "Fall, Winter, fall," I said flatly, not really wanting my mother to hear. "You won't have any hills like this where you are," she said. "No," I said, and breathed in heartily. "You've made some friends, though?"—as if the two might be obscurely related. "Masses!" The thought of them was too agitating, a flare that made me clench my face for a second. "Paul Echevin, who I work for at the Museum some days, is frightfully nice, he's rather taken care of me and had me round for meals." For a moment I just wanted to tell her I was in love with Luc, give her the whole stupid thing and watch her grasp it. There had been spells of candour before, and she rose to them pluckily; but I knew she would rather not know. "The loop?" I nodded. This was the basic family walk, followed times out of number, that avoided the far end of the common, and brought one gently down through patches of alder and thorn towards Blewits, before turning back sharply and running home parallel with the road. I said, "I rang Dawn's parents this morning." "I ought to. I don't really know them."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But today the tallboys and chairs, the card-tables and clocks and dressers laden with Coalport huddled in the natural gloom, too much furniture, cluttered together as if somebody were moving house. I looked abstractedly at the figurines of musicians in the window, their price-tags demurely averted. I didn't know Colin well, hadn't much liked him, couldn't see why Dawn should have liked him—loved him—either. He popped into the back bar of the George sometimes, forty-fiveish, lean, straight-looking, in honey-coloured cords with turn-ups, suede brogues, striped shirts. He was plausible, unamusing, a genuine connoisseur of English furniture. Dawn more than hinted that he was no thrill in bed, but had the sweetest nature; he was certainly an angel to him in his first big scare, when he thought he was going to die. But he was not a terminus I could ever have predicted to the line of lovers in which I was the first and over which I kept a futile, regretful watch. Dawn was at ease in the shop. The last time I talked to him he was pottering around there, and we sat among the merchandise, me in a snug little Windsor chair with a £700 price-tag, him in the carver of an eight-piece Regency dining suite which crowded vacantly behind him and was marked at six thousand. At one point I watched him nearly persuade an American couple to buy a commode, and smiled at the dumb camp with which he pulled out the drawer with the china po still in situ. Later we stood in front of a time-foxed mirror, and I hugged him loosely, beefily, from behind. He was thin, seemed breakable, like something priceless he was selling. The mirror was meant for a mantelpiece, we should have been toasting ourselves at a big log fire. Our talk had been blandly constructive, but it faltered rather as we held each other's gaze in the spotted depths where everything was reversed. I thought, he is looking at his death. He slipped free and started talking antiques. He knew a lot by now; and if the journey of his heart was inscrutable to me I could follow the steps of his career more confidently. Perhaps it had all been a slow winding down towards this precious shop, its still, polish-scented air, caught in the tradeless doldrums of a deep recession. But for a long time it had seemed a different progress. He didn't work hard enough for his degree at Dorset; he got muddled up doing French and Film Theory and Vernacular Handcrafts and came out with a Third that caused considerable tension at home.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We drove home in silence after Mamaw explained that if Mom lost her temper again, Mamaw would shoot her in the face. That night we stayed at Mamaw’s house. I’ll never forget Lindsay’s face as she marched upstairs to bed. It wore the pain of a defeat known by only a person who experiences the highest high and the lowest low in a matter of minutes. She had been on the cusp of achieving a childhood dream; now she was just another teenage girl with a broken heart. Mamaw turned to retire to her couch, where she would watch Law & Order , read the Bible, and fall asleep. I stood in the narrow walkway that separated the living room from the dining room and asked Mamaw a question that had been on my mind since she ordered Mom to drive us home safely. I knew what she’d say, but I guess I just wanted reassurance. “Mamaw, does God love us?” She hung her head, gave me a hug, and began to cry. The question wounded Mamaw because the Christian faith stood at the center of our lives, especially hers. We never went to church, except on rare occasions in Kentucky or when Mom decided that what we needed in our lives was religion. Nevertheless, Mamaw’s was a deeply personal (albeit quirky) faith. She couldn’t say “organized religion” without contempt. She saw churches as breeding grounds for perverts and money changers. And she hated what she called “the loud and proud”—people who wore their faith on their sleeve, always ready to let you know how pious they were. Still, she sent much of her spare income to churches in Jackson, Kentucky, especially those controlled by Reverend Donald Ison, an older man who bore a striking resemblance to the priest from The Exorcist . By Mamaw’s reckoning, God never left our side. He celebrated with us when times were good and comforted us when they weren’t. During one of our many trips to Kentucky, Mamaw was trying to merge onto the highway after a brief stop for gas. She didn’t pay attention to the signs, so we found ourselves headed the wrong way on a one-way exit ramp with angry motorists swerving out of our way. I was screaming in terror, but after a U-turn on a three-lane interstate, the only thing Mamaw said about the incident was “We’re fine, goddammit. Don’t you know Jesus rides in the car with me?” The theology she taught was unsophisticated, but it provided a message I needed to hear. To coast through life was to squander my God-given talent, so I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan. Mamaw often told a parable: A young man was sitting at home when a terrible rainstorm began.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Andrews tells me you can have a wonderful whirl at Victoria these days with all the tommies & tars; he picked up a couple of the latter there some time last week & had the night of his life, if he is to be believed. I wandered down towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might get a bus, but the sunset came on & I was suddenly flooded with misery again & just gave it all up & went back to the Club for a chop & a glass of beer & was wretchedly rude to anybody who approached me. ——— It was with a mind worried by the gloom and misfortune of my friends and with my appearance newly toughened, Marine-style, by Mr Bandini that I went that evening to the view of Ronald Staines’s little exhibition. Normally I would have kept away, but James’s news made me realise I must put in an appearance. I had had to go through the rubbish bin to find the invitation again, a purple card with, scrawled on the back in white ink, the note ‘Sorry to lose you so soon the other evening—Ronnie’. I could quite happily have remained lost, but I needed to keep in with him and to secure from him those moody but surely incriminating photographs of Colin. The exhibition was called Martyrs , and was hung at the Sigma Gallery in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a home, or at least a stopping place, for many ‘alternative’ figures. Founded in the Thirties by Rycote Prideaux, it had catered in its earlier days for left-wing artists, and Prideaux’s Sigma Pamphlets had been launched there with readings and exhibitions. In my lifetime, though, it had been run by Prideaux’s much younger friend Simon Sims, who had diluted his late mentor’s style, showed a lot of banal mystical art interspersed with often embarrassing gay and ethnic shows, and opened an austere vegan café, with harpsichord music and wooden plates, in the basement. The whole establishment was tinged with a mood of high-principled disappointment. Through the front window I saw the few early arrivals, clutching wine glasses, frowning selfconsciously at the pictures. To one side Staines, dressed in black and white, was talking to a man with a notebook. He had that look of insincere good behaviour that people have when they are working on their own public relations. As I came in the coppery clack of the shop-bell had all heads turning—it was like the showers at the Corry—and Staines twisted round to smile at me and give me a presumptuous wink before carrying on with his interview. I signed the book and made for the drinks table. I wasn’t warmly disposed towards the pictures, but knowing about their background I felt a slight anxiety on their behalf, as I do when I see a friend on stage. I hoped that their tawdry Smithfield muses would be sufficiently glamorised by Staines’s lens and the finery of the studio.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Mostly I’m concerned about finding a constituency of adults who would rally behind an idea that has so many pitfalls. But I’m also convinced that doing nothing—leaving young people alone in their struggles—is more dangerous. We should not give up without a try. For the Children EXCEPT FOR THOSE raised in divorced families, few people realize the many ways that divorce shapes not only the child’s life but also the child. As we have seen in many homes, parenting erodes almost inevitably at the breakup and does not get restored for years, if ever. The changes in parenting and in the structure of the family place greater responsibilities on the child to take care of herself. And she, in turn, becomes a different person as she adjusts to the new needs and wishes of her parents and stepparents. All of the children I have described in this book took on new roles in direct response to changes that occurred during the postdivorce years. Many were acutely aware of their parents’ distress and tried to rescue them. Others remained angry at their parents’ diminished attention and judged them harshly. Others longed for the family they had lost and tried to reverse the divorce decision. And still others took responsibility for keeping the peace and walked on eggs throughout their childhoods. These children took many paths, but all changed significantly in the wake of divorce. And because the children’s character and conscience were still being formed during the postdivorce years, the new roles they assumed in the family had profound effects on who they became and on the relationships they established when they reached adulthood. As an adult child of divorce reading this book, I hope you have gained a better understanding of who you are today and how you got here. I hope you realize that you have millions of peers who share your worries about relationships and who understand the seriousness of your predicament. Your fears and feelings were forged in the crucible of your parents’ divorce years ago and strengthened over the years that followed. These emotions, which are often hidden from consciousness, have the power to affect your marriage, your parenting, indeed the quality of your entire life. An important task for your generation is to achieve better relationships. But how to go about it? You still wonder what motivated your parents’ decision to divorce. Some people find that it helps to sit down and talk candidly with their parents. You may not believe or like the answers, but the exercise can provide new and useful perspectives. Not everyone can do this, nor should they, since it may cause both parent and child unnecessary suffering.