in love and war

This morning I am grateful for the dream state of writing. The quiet darkness in which I begin my day, these sacred hours. I have reached a point, I think, where I no longer doubt that I will finish this book. I make no predictions about what it will be, can be, but it is at least now something I know I will see through to its end. There is pleasure and relief in that knowing.

It’s an odd trio of books that have accompanied me these last days. I dip in and out of them, copy down passages, mull over an idea, or try to mimic a particular syntax. Or capture some grandness of a gesture.

The first, Renata Adler’s Speedboat:

Our ambitions were, nonetheless, what those of any sensible group of women at that time, perhaps at any modern time, ought to have been: to become safe and successful; to marry someone safe and successful; to have for our children some sort of worldly safety and success. From time to time, however, there is something, I don’t know, wistful, about how it has turned out. Not just Brecht’s great ship of the eight sails and the fifty cannon. The other ships. Perhaps the tall ships, the fleet, the craft, the other ships that don’t come in.

The second, James Salter’s Light Years:

One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love. Soon after they were married, perhaps an hour after, even Viri longed for this. His possession of her became sanctified; at the same time something in her changed. She became his closest relative. She committed herself to his interests and embarked on her own. The desperate, unbearable attention vanished, and in its place was a young woman of twenty condemned to live with him. He could not define it. She had escaped. Perhaps it was more; the mistake she knew she would have to make was made at last. Her face radiated knowledge. A colorless vein like a scar ran vertically down the center of her forehead. She had accepted the limitations of her life. It was this anguish, this contentment which created her grace.

How certain a novelist must be. How bold in assertions, how piercing. I find myself making proclamations I would never dare to in life. What a gift, this playground, this sandbox.

It is true perhaps that every story is a love story of a sort, but I might say it is also true that every story is a story of war. The third book is The Name of War, by Jill Lepore, on King Philip’s War and its written histories, its collective public memory.

War twice cultivates language: it requires justification, it demands description.

By telling about the war, and most especially by writing about it, the colonists could reclaim civility, could clothe their naked war with words. The writing itself would “dress” the English back up; it would undo the damage of the war by making it clear once again who was English and who was Indian, and what made a massacre and what a victory.

If there is only one story we ever tell, I suppose this is mine. It is of the lives of women, in love and in war, at times indistinguishable.