Madame Bovary

I

Facts: Avesnes-sur-Helpe is a town in the north of France, a little west of the Ardennes, and only fourteen kilometers from the Belgian border. The river Helpe Majeure, a tributary of the Sambre, flows through the town. Because of its strategic location on the road running from Brussels to Paris, Avesnes was chosen as the German headquarters for the Western Front and it was from here that Wilhelm II and Hindenburg directed the last German offensive in 1918. A century earlier, Napoleon had delivered his own final directives, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, from the rectory of Saint-Nicolas, the town’s fourteenth-century church. And more than a century before that, during the wars of expansion of Louis XIV, Avesnes was one of several cities in the region fortified by Vauban; in a footnote the guidebook adds that beneath its skies that same Louis had first enjoyed the favors of Montespan.

These were some of the things we learned during the brief year we spent in Avesnes, teaching English at the Institut Ste.-Thérèse, a pensionnat where the daughters of prosperous farmers and tradespeople came to finish their schooling or prepare for the baccalaureate. Our two years in Nigeria at Igbobi College had passed too quickly and we had left Africa sorrowfully, vowing to return. We had only vague plans for the future but were sure we didn’t want to plunge back into life at home. At twenty-five, we thought it too soon to put an end to our travels. We had two little girls now, one a year and a half old and the other an infant; we referred to them as “the babies” and didn’t see why they shouldn’t begin seeing the world in their infancy, as we had not. And there may have been another reason: the war in Vietnam was heating up and, although we wouldn’t have put it this way, we may have thought we could escape national responsibility by staying out of the country. A flurry of applications for teaching positions in France had produced nothing and it seemed we’d have to return after all. When, at the last minute, the Institut Ste.-Thérèse offered jobs beginning in the fall of 1965, we jumped to accept. We knew nothing of this region of France—or any other region for that matter—and in preparation began reading novels by French writers, thinking that would at least be something.

The convent to which the Institut was attached gave us a stone farmhouse to live in that belonged to one of its sisters, Soeur Marie Joliette. The house was located two miles out from Avesnes, on the route de Landrecies, and parts of it were already occupied by M and Mme Druet, who looked after the farm and its twenty cows. Two rooms were made available to us: one upstairs where we all slept, one down. The salon upstairs with its chairs covered in red velvet and the bedroom furnished with bamboo furniture were off-limits. Built flush up against the Route de Landrecies, the house had a pebbled margin in front just wide enough for the van that brought Mme Druet’s baguettes on Sunday to sweep through and out. Across the road, sloping down and away, rich pastures descended to the village of Saint-Hilaire, where a steeple was visible on clear days from the room upstairs. Clear days, though, were the exception: on the first day of November the cows drifted across the road and into the barn, where they remained for a winter of drizzle and fog.

At the side of the house, down a few scant steps from the kitchen, spread a neglected garden of yellow chrysanthemums, scrappy in the September sun, Michaelmas daisies, and something called joli bois that edged the path leading down to the coal bin. Sitting on the steps in the early afternoon, I could watch the flies make their heavy way back and forth from flower to kitchen, droning in the heat, pausing to alight on a wedge of Maroilles cheese abandoned on a plate beside the shallow sink, or hovering a moment above the fading leaves of the strawberry patch. This patch, when in bloom the following spring, would provoke a warning: the fruit, we were told by Soeur Marie Joliette—who had been a child in this house, whose father had died only the year before in a room upstairs—was intended for the convent. It was Soeur Marie Joliette who on the day of our arrival had pronounced our little girl sauvage, even as I held her in my arms while introductions were being made. Wild! The poor child was clearly taken aback by this woman she’d never met who seemed so self-assured. It was only later on that evening, looking up the word in the little dictionary we carried everywhere, I understood that “sauvage” in French means timid. And immediately thought of a deer startling away.

In the evenings, as the autumn wore on, M and Mme Druet sometimes invited us into their kitchen in back for a tasse de café, a cup holding a potent blend of chicory made from the roots of the blue meadow flower that at twilight closes to a pale lavender. This would be after the babies were settled for the night, the door left ajar so we could listen for them. Next to the entry leading out to the barn where the cows breathed into the chilly air, M Druet’s wooden sabots stood side by side with Pierre’s, muddy from the damp soil and manure of the courtyard. Pierre was the elder son who had returned from the Algerian war and was for the moment helping his father. He was usually watching television in a room off the kitchen when we entered but always stood tall and lean in the doorway a minute or two and wished us a good evening. M Druet, sitting there at the table in silence, lifting his cup to his lips and setting it down, wore gray felt slippers exactly like the ones we’d found upstairs in the armoire, left behind by the dead man, Soeur Marie Joliette’s father.

It was Madame, having taken off her blue smock for company and hung it on a hook by the door, who did the talking. No, they’d never made the three hours’ journey to Paris; the cows, we must know, had to be milked, morning and night. The farthest away either of them had been from Avesnes, where they’d both been born, was Verdun, where Monsieur had fought in 1916. He’d been scarcely older at the time than their younger son Patrick, fifteen years old, who sat with us at the table and whose massive shoulders shook now and then with suppressed laughter at something his mother said. As for herself, she continued, raising a hand, pursing her lips, well, this had been her life. After all, they hadn’t needed to go anywhere to see the Germans march by twice on the route de Landrecies, at an interval of twenty-five years. Of course they hadn’t lived in the house at that time, it wasn’t till afterwards. But Soeur Marie Joliette’s father, poor man, who had been born within these walls, had been forced to leave for some months: the house had been conscripted by a German general, who slept in the bed upstairs.

That would be our bed, the one that sloped in at the middle, where the German general’s weight had sagged, and where we now woke to the bells of Saint-Hilaire if the babies hadn’t woken us earlier. While the general snored, his leather boots may have stood side by side in the armoire. It was empty now except for the abandoned slippers and what looked like a copper vase, burnished and tall, standing upright in a corner. That was un obus, Soeur Marie Joliette had told us, a shell casing that had once contained explosives and been turned up by a plow in the outlying fields. These could be found all over the neighborhood, shined up, and put to use in summer to hold Queen Anne’s lace, cornflowers, and daisies.

It was the storeroom below that was crowded with objects. In a corner of the dining room that served also as sitting room—and where, on the mantel, a large bust of Christ presided that looked as if it had been modeled on Bernini’s Louis Quatorze—two steps led up to a door that opened onto a shadowy alcove dim with cobwebs and looming confusion. Too low to stand up in, this little storeroom bulged with things once chosen by men and women now dead: a shovel, tongs, and bellows black from use in the fireplace presently occupied by a porcelain stove, a poêle, which we fed with coal; little shades for candles; a traveling trunk with an iron hasp; a tin bathing tub with a tall back to lean against; a bouquet of dried flowers tied with a ribbon; a milky shaving glass; gilt candlesticks; carved wooden eggcups; and a bandbox empty of collars.

Whose were these and where had they come from? Soeur Marie Joliette’s father had not lived far away enough in time. And the German general didn’t enter into it; these were not the objects he had handled and lived among. Or if he had, they would only reluctantly have been touched by his fingers. They had given themselves to someone else entirely. My head was already full of the books I’d been reading as a preparation for this stay in France so it didn’t take a minute to think of Emma Bovary. These objects might well have belonged to her, to Yonville-l’Abbaye, the scene of her torment. Here in the dim storeroom were things that might have soothed her hungry senses, the mirror her eyes had looked into, the footstool covered in red satin on which she had rested her feet before the fire, the tub where she had sat naked and despaired that the exaltations of her spirit would ever find a lover worthy of them.

Of course this was Avesnes-sur-Helpe, sous-prefecture of le Nord, closer to the Ardennes than to Normandy. But a market town, all the same, like Yonville, where farmers set up stalls in the Place du General Leclerc at the foot of Saint-Nicolas to sell cheeses, wines, rabbits and pheasants, farm gear and seed, dresses and sweaters and shoes. A place like that at Yonville, where the agricultural show had been punctuated by Rodolphe’s seduction of Emma, where she had looked at him as at a voyager who has traveled in many lands, catching on his beard the scent of vanilla and citron. And a countryside all around of pastures and orchards and woods where it was easy to imagine Emma riding out by Rodolphe’s side one smoky afternoon in October or running through the meadows before dawn to enter her sleeping lover’s room with dewdrops hanging in her black hair.

In fact, there was nothing strange—on that first glimpse into the cluttered depths of the storeroom—in having thought right away of Emma Bovary. As we left Paris one afternoon in early September and drove north along the Route nationale that gave us a glimpse from below of stone oxen looking out from the towers of the hilltop cathedral of Laon, it had been Emma who had begun to stir somewhere on the edges of consciousness. Three hours was the time we had set aside to drive the 200 kilometers to Avesnes. But as the twilight deepened, our spirits faltered. The towns looked more and more dreary, their streets deserted. In Nigeria, just outside the Igbobi compound, on the Ikorodu Road, there had always been people in the streets, moving from one place to another, women carrying babies on their backs, calling out greetings as they passed, stopping to talk or to buy a mango or papaya. Young men strolling out in freshly creased trousers, little girls in school uniforms. In the evenings the streets were lit by oil lanterns beaming hospitably from roadside stands selling cigarettes, cones of salt wrapped in blue paper, scented bars of soap.

In the towns we were passing through now the doors of the houses lining the main streets were shut and the windows hung with lace curtains. There was almost always a memorial to those lost in the First World War in the form of a cross with the names of the dead engraved on it. Then there was the pharmacie with its green cross, the charcuterie, the boucherie chevaline with the signature head of a horse hanging in front of it. In the window of every café a sign advertised the beer of the region: Stella Artois. The only people out and about seemed to be an occasional woman hurrying home with a baguette sticking up from a net bag or a boy disappearing around a corner on his bicycle. Once or twice we saw some old men wearing berets playing boules in a ring of dust. Even the poplars retreating down the side streets looked lonely. How would we fare in a town like one of these? I thought of Emma and her futile efforts to find peace, a release from ennui, the harrowing sense that life was escaping her.

Throughout the year in Avesnes, the storeroom never failed to summon the disturbing presence of Emma. It was like a little museum of Yonville confirming that the world Emma had lived in was close enough to touch, the little traveling trunk with the hasp, for instance, probably much like the one she’d ordered from Lheureux when she’d been rapturously dreaming of an elopement with Rodolphe. And there were odd moments, now and then, when suddenly and unexpectedly Emma’s plight came vividly alive.

As we had done at Igbobi, after the birth of the babies, C. and I taught alternately during the year in Avesnes, each taking a turn at home. He taught in the mornings, I in the afternoons. Although we had been warned on every side that our lives would become more complex, more demanding after the birth of children, we had found that the presence of the babies set us right. We struggled less about who decided what and discovered common cause in our new purpose. And perhaps our isolation, our sense of estrangement from the place we found ourselves, led us to rely more deeply on each other. We were the sole English speakers in Avesnes, we discovered, and because our French was at first so halting, our only real conversations were with each other. I had never been more grateful for C.’s enlivening energy, the imagination that had carried us to Africa. Now here in Avesnes he proposed outings: that we drive up to Brussels for a Sunday afternoon and eat moules and frites in a café, that we travel to Antwerp to visit some friends he’d made on a train when he was backpacking in Europe the summer before we’d met. We had an unspoken pact that we would not invoke the babies regretfully as a reason for not doing something, a pact surprisingly easy to keep, once we got the hang of it; a weekend by ourselves in Paris was clearly impossible but we avoided saying isn’t it too bad we can’t visit the city alone. On the other hand, we planned excursions with the babies we might not have if someone else had been there to look after them.

But there were times when—perhaps because I was nursing our little one, perhaps because in Nigeria C. had handled this kind of thing more than I—he was the one to undertake some common business that involved hours of waiting around an office to fulfill a bureaucratic requirement while I stayed at home alone with the babies. It was during those long housebound days, when the hours seemed to spin endlessly and I felt the bitter loss of friends and our Nigerian students, that I looked around and remembered Emma.

One rainy morning in late October when there was a biting chill in the air and the newly lighted coal stove in the room downstairs gave off more smoke than heat, her presence became frighteningly vivid. Taking advantage of a school holiday, C. had set off early for Lille, prefecture du Nord, to secure our cartes d’identité. Every day we washed the dirty clothes and diapers in a bucket just as Ben had done—the nearest laundromat was in Mons, across the border in Belgium—and hung them to dry on two lines nailed to solid beams in the attic. This room at the top had sloping wooden ceilings and a low window on one side that looked below onto the route de Landrecies. Today, reluctant as always to leave the babies alone downstairs, I made my laborious way with them and the laundry up the two flights of stairs, stopping on each step. Once in the attic, hastily flinging the wet clothes over the lines, fearful in this shadowy space that the babies might fall down the stairs or tumble into a corner that hid a rusty nail, I took note of the dim dirty light of a rainy day coming in through the window. It fell on the wooden planks of the floor, illuminating a handful of dust, scrappings of mice, a floating cobweb. Immediately I remembered Emma’s desperate flight to the top of the house in an attic like this one where she could finally be alone to read Rodolphe’s letter of farewell. I remembered with a shiver how she’d looked down into the square below and how the sunlight glinting on the flags had seemed to invite her to leap, to surrender herself to the open blue spaces, and how she’d almost fainted with terror afterwards when she realized how narrowly she’d escaped death.

We made our slow, careful way back down the stairs and ate a lunch of petits suisses and hot carrots and potatoes, mashed with butter and salt. Then, while the babies briefly napped, I threw open the windows to clear the room of smoke and ran outside with the scuttle to carry in more coal to feed the fire. Cold rain was falling on the fields and thick hedges, on three black and white cows standing patiently beneath a tree. Across the road in the direction of Saint-Hilaire white smoke drifted across the shiny slate roofs of cottages almost buried in deep grass. Inside again, I sat down at the table and considered correcting student homework, or devoirs, as I’d learned to call it. The fire wouldn’t quite catch, even with the help of the bellows, and I wanted to rescue the day. Time was spilling, losing itself like water in sand, vanishing in one chore after another. All with an end to keeping us in clean clothes and fed. And more or less warm. Soon it would be time to think of dinner: I’d have to come up with something. The year had barely begun and already I was wishing that anything, anything at all, might happen to break the monotony of the days. This was not at all the life I’d had in mind when we talked about “a year in France.” I’d imagined a stone village in Provence, fields of lavender scenting the air, or a cottage in the Loire valley not far from Paris where Miss Hughes had been tempted to despair on the Pont des Arts and where Mozart’s Requiem had been played at Chopin’s funeral in the Madeleine. I thought of people even now in Paris living unknown and adventurous lives, perhaps behind closed shutters, in a room like the one in À bout de souffle where Jean Paul Belmondo sat on a bed and traced his upper lip with his thumb.

Then the babies were awake again. After I’d changed them and we all were downstairs I sat on the floor as they played about, the baby teething and wailing into the damp air, the toddler restless from being confined. I gave the baby a wooden spoon to chew on, then sent a big red ball spinning along the floor to our little girl, back and forth between us. Afterward I sang them the songs I was learning in French, Le petit lapin a du chagrin; il ne saute plus dans le jardin. Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse. Each song had hand gestures to go with it, and for a time they were amused. Then, when I’d exhausted my repertory, I made up stories to go with the pictures in a little book bought in Lagos, in Kingsway, about the adventures of Downy Duckling, who falls into an icy pond and who, to the amazement of all the other animals, comes spluttering up at the end.

But nothing, really, was of any use. It was I who was distracted, at odds. C. would not be back for some time and I was wondering how I’d get through the long hours ahead. I found myself sharply resenting his absence. I wondered why it should happen that he was out and about while I was stuck in this smoky room with our crying children. I knew we’d agreed that he would set off alone—one of us had to go—and that I would stay with the babies today, but now I couldn’t understand why things should be this way. Was it because I was the woman and nursing? Was it because I was secretly intimidated by the job at hand, that I feared not quite catching something said to me, some essential requirement in France, and so would be unable to secure the IDs and the child benefits that came with them? C. was less hesitant to speak French than I. He plunged ahead, unafraid of making mistakes, asking people to correct him as he went. For the most part he expected to understand, and did. He regarded a new language as an opportunity rather than a barrier. He would represent us better than I could.

Tomorrow, I knew, I’d be in the classroom again and our ordinary life would resume and this day would have safely taken its place in the past. But the next time there was an errand of this kind, I determined, we’d all go together. I feared we were taking on the traditional roles that up till now we’d avoided. It might happen, little by little, that we’d find ourselves swallowed up, separated in lives that had little to do with each other.

Thinking to distract the babies, to distract myself, I flicked on the button of the old-fashioned radio that sat on a ledge beside the door. C. and I sometimes tried to listen in the evenings, but most of the time we weren’t able to follow the rapid idiomatic French and I ended up wanting to turn it off. C. argued that we were becoming accustomed to the rhythms of the language even if we couldn’t make out much more than individual words. I found it easier when face-to-face with someone, like Mme Druet, who spoke slowly and carefully so that we would understand. We knew her French would be called patois by many, but her kindly eyes made it easy to confess not having understood, and she would patiently begin again, apparently not minding at all. “C’en fait rien du tout!” she’d exclaim, making nothing of our difficulties.

This time, though, with the turn of the button on the radio, into the room swept the sound of Paul McCartney’s voice singing “Michelle, ma belle.” The song was new and I listened raptly, my thoughts returning to Paris. I dreamt of bistros where people sat in the soft twilight drinking the new autumn Beaujolais, singing the words I quickly learned and now sang aloud: Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble.

Out of nowhere, then, in what seemed an answer to prayer, there came a knock at the door. It was Patrick. He stood shyly in the doorway, silent. I waited a moment, holding the baby on my hip, and asked if he’d like to come in. He answered no, he wouldn’t be able to. Again he was silent. Then he said he’d come to ask if it would amuse me to join them, they were about to kill the pig. I looked at him incredulously, wondering if I had understood. How could he have imagined I’d want to witness such a thing! At last I mumbled something about not being able to leave the babies and he’d gone sadly away.

Half an hour later, slicing mushrooms to put in a soup for dinner, I surprised myself by suddenly snorting with laughter. What an extraordinary moment! Who would have imagined!

And yet that night, falling asleep beside a sleeping C.—after his return from Lille with lively stories of the day, after my relating the story of Patrick’s invitation and my fear I’d hurt his feelings, after C.’s reassurance that tomorrow we’d make a point of asking him in for coffee—I still worried a little. Patrick had meant only to be kind. Would his offer have seemed less bleak, less desperate, if I had not already been thinking that day of Emma Bovary, if I had not learned to see and feel things at moments like these as Flaubert determined that Emma must? And so shut out the rest of the world? Her isolation had been terrible!

In the end Emma made only chance appearances in Avesnes. “It was the fault of fate,” Charles pronounces, after her death, speaking to Rodolphe, unknowingly using the same phrase Rodolphe himself had cynically thrown in when he was composing his goodbye letter to Emma. And so it would have seemed. She didn’t exist except as a creature driven by wandering desires that would lead to her own self-destruction. Fate had placed her in Yonville, she belonged to it. She was not passing through. And no one knew this better than Emma, herself, whose own impassioned reading had supplied her with visions of exotic foreign lands she would never visit: Walter Scott’s moors and ruins, the little seaside bamboo house of Paul et Virginie, the ruddy sunsets and minarets described in the books of her school days. The closest she ever came to translating her dreams into an address, perhaps, was in her fevered fantasies of the aborted elopement with Rodolphe: the gondolas and hammocks, the guitars and fountains, and finally the fishing village where they would live always beneath wide starry skies.

I was not of Avesnes as Emma was of Yonville. My own imagined foreign land had disappointingly been transformed into a town something like her own inescapable home. For the moment, however, my fate had to be worked out in a place that reminded me of hers. And as Emma was destined to be a woman whose struggles had never yielded the least chance against the forces of destruction, who was devastatingly alone, unconnected by ties of affection to a single child or school friend or husband or neighbor, she seemed less and less a guest I wished to entertain. For hadn’t Patrick been meaning—perhaps at the urgings of his mother, who was aware I was alone—to spare my solitude? I did not choose to be one of those Bovarys whom Flaubert had remarked were suffering and crying at that very instant in twenty villages in France. I did not! As the months went by Emma came to seem not so much a living presence as a tender memory: poised, on her own arrival at Yonville, before the chimney at the Lion d’Or, the tips of her fingers catching her dress at the knee, her foot in its black boot held out to the fire, a red glow passing over her skin as the wind blew in through the half-open door.

II

If Emma introduced herself even before we reached Avesnes, there was another figure who remained elusive, who for a long while stayed hidden behind a question. But even the question seemed more a kind of inner prompting, a restless effort to recall, than a question I could formulate with any precision. What was it, sitting on the steps above the chrysanthemums during those first weeks in Avesnes, homesick for Africa, homesick for I scarcely knew what, that made me think I’d known it all before, this brooding midday, the flies adrift around this lump of sugar dunked in coffee? As if this were my earliest place, this house, these rooms at my back with their lace curtains, as if my oldest memories had sprung from this wall of old stones warmed by the sun, this soft haze of lavender daisies? As if long ago I had lived and died in this spot and were now being called back, urgently but silently, to a self that, unrestored, I must mourn forever.

There would be other times, too, when it seemed some forgotten past stirred within, a sensation that the present was only a cover for a moment infinitely nearer and more profound. This might happen, for example, during the first period after lunch in a classroom at the Institut Ste.-Thérèse when, its windows open to the steeple of Saint-Nicolas rising close beside us in the place outside, the carillon’s shower of bells suddenly filled the room—a moment prolonged while the girls sitting at their desks kept silent, as if by solemn agreement, waiting for the wheeze that like a long indrawn breath prepared us for the single great bong announcing the hour.

But it wasn’t until one Thursday afternoon in mid-November, when we’d taken advantage of the half holiday to drive to Amiens in order to visit the cathedral—to give us all a change of scene: our little girl the chance to run unhindered up and down the long aisles while we took turns holding the little one, inhaling her downy head, her baby fragrance—that some associations began to gather and hold. The day had begun with fog swirling up against the windowpanes, with C. teaching early morning classes. By the time he’d returned, the sun had begun to come out, the babies were fed. Unpacking the items he’d bought in the market—a baguette, a wedge of Port-Salut, some pâté de campagne, petits suisses, some brussels sprouts—he made a proposal. We’d eat the baguette and paté right away, then put the babies in the back of the car hoping they’d nap on the drive over to Amiens.

They were both asleep by the time we’d driven thirty-two kilometers west along the route de Landrecies, passing through the village of Maroilles and then Landrecies itself to Le Cateau. It was in this gray city, we’d learned, that Matisse had been born and it was from here he had set out on a journey that would take him to Ajaccio, Morocco, and Tahiti before bringing him finally to windows open on an azure sea where in a pool of light a goldfish circled a bowl. I was thinking of all this, of the strangeness of beginnings, when, in the center of Le Cateau, at a crossroads, we passed a sign marked for Cambrai: twenty-two kilometers. I said the name aloud, but tentatively, uncertain about the pronunciation of vowels, when suddenly, rising it seemed from nowhere, an unbidden air of delight seemed to hang in the afternoon. But it was only later—after I’d had time to look around at the slender springing columns that held aloft the vast cathedral, felt the initial surge of joy lift and soar between gleaming walls of light, the promise of eternity float in the high dim spaces—that I finally understood. The murmur of Proust’s novel, the long cadences of its lines, had, from our first moments in Paris, without my even knowing it, been running like a current through all my days and nights: Combray.

In the weeks following that day at Amiens, I was less and less frequently visited by those premonitions of a reality hovering just beyond reach, on the sunlit brink of discovery. Was it because habit, both bane and blessing, that great anesthetizer, as the narrator of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu calls it, was already making familiar and invisible a world that so short a time ago had seemed to promise a life deeply awaited and longed for? Or was it rather that, if I had ever hoped, however unknowingly, to enter Proust’s world by coming to live in France, to step live into the landscape he had summoned word by word with so much patience, my expectations were bound to be disappointed? Like the boy in Combray—on a hot summer day stretched on his bed reading while the flies droned about him, inspired by his book with a longing for a land of mountains and rivers, of currents heavy with watercress—I had not understood that the self lost in the pages of a book is the same self we take with us on our travels; that we invest a place, like a person, with a spiritual glamour that is bound eventually to be shown for what it is: a product of our own illusions.

It is only those journeys undertaken from within, the inspired attention to the urgings of our own lost selves, that the narrator of the novel, after long years of disappointed excursions in the world, counts as travel. Even our experience of books, he comes to believe, even of paintings, as the example of Swann makes plain, can end in sterility if they do not spark explorations of our own. And yet, for all that, I came to believe that the sharp surge of joy when I had first heard the word Cambrai pronounced aloud—so like the anticipatory joy that had flooded the narrator when a scent or sound or taste signaled the presence of a past self trembling toward recovery—could only mean that the narrator’s world had entered the sphere of my own past, that his memories had become my own, and that the world of the book must certainly draw me back, at last, into the distant reaches of myself.

And so it was, finally, as a beneficent spirit presiding like a watchful patron saint over my stay in his native land that Proust’s narrator assumed a presence in Avesnes. I scarcely gave him a thought—but that was because there was no need to. His was the voice, once heard, that continued to murmur whether I was listening or not. But if the world went quiet for a moment, there it was, with its astonishing convictions. However terrible our discouragements and griefs, however lengthy our journey toward understanding, the selves we had considered lost forever or, worse, have never even missed, may be restored if we are patiently attentive to our own inner promptings. His was the voice of possibility, of hope.

Diary of a Country Priest

La lecture est au seuil de la vie spirituelle; elle peut nous y introduire; elle ne la constitue pas.

(Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.)

Sur la lecture, Marcel Proust

I

One drizzly Saturday afternoon in early December when the white fog at the windows was already being swallowed by darkness at three o’clock in the afternoon, when the cold moist air of Avesnes had begun to settle in our bones, the comforting notion of a leek and potato soup thickened with crème fraîche carried me up the steps and into the little storeroom where I remembered having seen a copper pot. In the half-light, I stumbled over a pile of books I’d examined on my first visit to this room and had dismissed as without interest at a moment when my thoughts were all with Emma. They had seemed to be devotional books from the turn of the century, of a piece with the baroque bust of Christ that long ago we’d removed from the mantel and hidden away here among the old mirrors and fans. There had been one, I remembered, Journal d’un curé de campagne by Georges Bernanos, that had made me think of Emma’s desperate attempt to speak to the priest at Yonville, had brought sharply to mind his soup-stained cassock and terrifying banalities. But on this December afternoon, perhaps because I had been thinking of starting a journal—had remembered my promise to myself made on the balcony of our lost home at Igbobi, the trumpet flowers gleaming in the dusk, the shuffle of C.’s sandals on the stairs; or perhaps had remembered a girl named Catherine Earnshaw who in distress had dipped her pen in ink one cold rainy Sunday on the edge of the moors and written her story in the margin of a book—the title of this unknown book caused me to pick it up and put it in the bottom of the pot.

The whisper on the first page of Journal d’un curé de campagne of someone talking to himself from the depths of his own loneliness: “When I first sat down before this child’s copy-book I tried to concentrate, to withdraw into myself as though I were examining my conscience before confession. And yet my real conscience was not revealed by that inner light—usually so dispassionate and penetrating, passing over details, showing up the whole. It seemed to skim the surface of another consciousness, previously unknown to me, a cloudy mirror in which I feared that a face might suddenly appear. Whose face? Mine, perhaps. A forgotten, rediscovered face. . . .

“When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears. . . .”

Were these the words that leapt from the first pages of the book that night when—following our dinner of soup and endives and Camembert, after the babies were asleep—I sat down by the stove with a piece of dark chocolate to begin reading? Or were the words those of the opening: “My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it. Like so many others! We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can’t do anything about it. Some day perhaps we shall catch it ourselves—become aware of the cancerous growth within us. You can keep going a long time with that in you.”

It may have been either, or both, but beginning to read the book is confused in memory with a tap on the door, Mme Druet come to tell us that a man, a miner who worked in the quarry down the road, had died an hour earlier almost within view of the house on the route de Landrecies. She stood in the doorway in her blue smock, hands raised in commiseration and alarm, cheeks mottled with the cold. A neighbor had stopped just now to tell them. He worked in the quarry, this man, and had been walking back to Saint-Hilaire, where he lived. He hadn’t been hit by a car, that was the wonder of it. There wasn’t a mark on him. A crise de coeur? The headlights of a car had discovered him, lying by the side of the road in the rain.

She had gone sadly away, shaking her head, but when I sat down again to resume reading, although the words seemed to stick flat against the page, floating beneath was a figure lying on its back, each part of him—fingers, stubbled chin, thighs, penis, knees—soaking up the rain. And then gradually, as I read on, other figures joined him, heads lolling, faces slippery with mud and blood, bodies flung across a field like the ones stretching away from the route de Landrecies, or sitting bolt upright in a trench, headless. The names of towns mentioned in the book—Lille, Arras, Amiens—were the ones we heard every day in the streets of Avesnes, towns we’d visited ourselves. I looked in the front of the book to see when it was first published: 1936. Three years before the outbreak of the Second World War: and within its pages scarcely any mention of the war on whose savaged ground we walked as did the young man keeping the journal, who seemed to be about the same age as ourselves.

And yet here, apparently, was the story of someone who was dying and who both knew it and did not. The voice seemed to be saying all it knew, confessing, in the manner of a journal, what could be said nowhere else: all the humiliations and embarrassments and disappointments, the passing moments of hope, that made up the round of his days, confessions that recalled me to my own disappointments, my own baffled hopes. And yet this voice seemed to be speaking into a silence so profound that the only worthy response would have been that of death. Like Emma, like those lying broken on the battlefields of northern France, the priest was someone destined to die young.

That was it: he had only a brief moment in which to work out his destiny. And while I still believed I would live a long, long time, it was in Avesnes, walking at noon one day into the foyer we shared with the Druets and turning to hang up my coat on a standing rack that had a mirror poised above it, that I caught sight of a line etched beneath my eye. The first, I thought. Here it begins. In Avesnes.

I’d woken that night with a pounding heart. I’d nursed the baby, felt the bones in her lovely head, kissed the nape of her neck, her apricot cheeks, but when she was in her cot again, I’d fallen back on the pillow staring into the dark. C. was asleep beside me. What now? Our lives were slipping away in this blood-soaked country where the earth was crowded with skeletons of the young. In this bed, where the German general had slept, our lovemaking went on unabated. What could this mean? There was something I couldn’t see, couldn’t make sense of. It wasn’t about C. and myself, our story together. It was about my own life, separate, still waiting in the shadows, unexplored.

The mirror told me the tape was running out, how quickly I didn’t know, and for the first time the specter of my own end rose to meet me. My life in hiding, I thought, was my life in death, seen in dark relief, as against a backdrop. If time allowed, my face would fall into ruin. My greatest certainty was that I would die. My greatest uncertainty, when.

Up until now I’d spent the time in Avesnes in a state of barely disguised regret. This was not my life, not this little town with its war memorial and courthouse and mairie flying its sad tricolor, its houses of gray stone and bricks waiting mutely beneath a somber sky. It was a parenthesis, an aberration. I’d struck an awkward peace with these buildings clustered around a church on the edge of the lowlands, had in some complicated way come to resign myself to the idea that my life here was on hold. It would resume after we’d left Avesnes behind. Following the long day alone with the babies, I’d tried to take myself in hand, was determined to banish the ghost of Emma, not to complain. I was loftily prepared to make the most of it. No, I wouldn’t concede defeat. But I still felt my life was on hold.

But if my life was on hold, where was I and what was I doing? It seemed there was no room to ask. Never had I lived as I was living now. Every minute was used up in caring for the babies, in preparing classes or teaching them, in keeping us all in clean clothes and fed, keeping us warm. All of which work C. wholeheartedly shared. At last in bed at night, I struggled to stay awake, to read a page or two of a novel—the morning would come in a flash, the daily round begin all over again—but the book fell from my hands, sleep swiftly advancing like a tide. I was almost never alone. Sometimes, desperate, I snatched up the scuttle and ran out to the coal bin in back, pausing a moment between shovelfuls to gaze out on pastures sunk in early morning mist or mute beneath the afternoon rain. Breathing in the air, I thought of nothing. I was alive, that was all.

The other moment I could be alone, or at least silent, was on Sunday mornings when I went to Mass at Saint-Nicolas, leaving the babies behind with C. Here I hoped to find something of what I had sought in novels, a story, a world that opened out beyond my own inner walls, a place for contemplation, eternity in an hour. Had it been the same for my great-grandmother who’d come from Ireland with all her children during the Famine? Who, after her husband’s death that followed quickly on her own arrival, had by herself worked a little farm in the Mohawk Valley? She’d owned a few cows, and it occurred to me that her life in many ways must have resembled M and Mme Druet’s: there would have been no time for reading a novel, certainly, which I now understood to be the privilege of the wealthy, the leisured. No, her prayer book, the gospels, would have been her only reading. Inside her church—perhaps called St. Brigid’s, where a Celtic cross had been carved into the altar and the mass said in Irish—she may have savored a brief moment of reflection, have tried to make sense of where she’d come from and where she was going.

And yet, on entering Saint-Nicolas I realized I’d been hoping for something that would not be delivered for the asking. Even in these September days, the chill was penetrating and a stale odor of incense and dank mustiness seeped from its stone walls. This church seemed strikingly foreign. I was familiar with St. Dominic’s, in Yaba, where people sat on benches in long rows; and the church I’d known from childhood had pews. But here there were chairs with cane seats that could be moved around as you liked, little leather kneelers folding down in back. Nor had I ever been in a church with so many side altars, so many painted wooden saints perched on pedestals, looking down from walls and columns. In one side chapel the space above the altar was entirely filled by a large painting depicting a seated St. Anne teaching her little daughter Mary to read, bending down to her with a scroll. In another chapel, another painting, this time of Mary greeting Elizabeth, two pregnant women embracing. Looking more closely at the golden plaques beneath, I saw these were the work of Louis Watteau of Lille. Episodes in Mary’s life were familiar subjects, but I didn’t know much about the painted French saints, who they were or when they’d lived: Saint Louis in a high golden crown, gathering up with one hand a sky-blue mantel adorned with gilded fleur-de-lys; Sainte Germaine wearing a peasant’s blouse, roses caught in her red apron, a lamb at her feet. And then, of course, Jeanne d’Arc, another girl of the countryside, La Pucelle, as she called herself, but portrayed here in a cuirass, clutching a sword.

There was also a stone tomb containing the bones of a husband and wife who must have been familiar with the story of Jeanne d’Arc, a legend in her own time: a couple who were themselves breathing still when she was burned at the stake in 1431. Atop the tomb, effigies presented them side by side—he dead in 1433, she in 1467—both with hands pressed piously together at their breasts: a full-length Olivier de Blois in complicated armor, his genitals protected by a separate shield that cast its own faint shadow, a gauntlet at his feet; his wife, another Jeanne, in a gown that lapped at her toes, a gown any French woman might have worn in any era. When Olivier was interred here, the church of Saint-Nicolas was already old, two hundred years or more, and it may have been that the widowed Jeanne herself was present, standing beside the stone—precisely where I was standing now—into which the date of her own death would be chiseled thirty-four years later. There they were, this couple, lying side by side, just as C. and I lay every night in our bed. But Olivier and Jean were dust and we were not.

I looked around at the parishioners as they assembled, and although most were the people we passed every day in the town and knew nothing about, I did recognize some of them: there up near the front was one of my students, Chantal, and her father, who was the butcher on the place and with his cleaver struck off a chop. In his boucherie a recording announced: “La Maison, vous presente . . . ,” words I sometimes repeated as I placed on the table a slice of pâté, a bit of sausage. I saw other students as well, recognized the boy who earlier that morning had jumped from the van in front of our house with the baguettes for Mme Druet. And an old woman bent double I’d seen more than once in the place tapping her way with a stick. There was a couple, too, directly in front of me, he with dark hair, she with light, and two children a little older than ours. I’d seen them before, I thought, but couldn’t remember from where.

I found I could follow the Mass because I knew the prayers already, most of them. When the gospel was read I recognized the words Lazarus and homme riche and knew it was the story of the rich man dressed in purple and fine linens and the beggar Lazarus, who lay outside the rich man’s gate, starving for the crumbs that fell from his table, so wretched the dogs came and licked his sores. But when Lazarus died, the story goes, the angels carried him straight to Abraham’s breast. The rich man, on the other hand, found himself in fiery torment. He called out to Father Abraham, begging that Lazarus dip his finger in cool water and drop it on his burning tongue. Only a drop! But no, Abraham answered, the chasm was now too great between the two, there was no passing between. During his life the rich man had been well satisfied but now it was Lazarus who was finding consolation for his many sufferings.

Maybe because I was hearing the story in a language not my own, I seemed to be hearing it for the first time. Then the priest was speaking. Was he saying, as I thought he was, that it was the rich man who needed the poor man all along? That though it was true the poor needed bread, the rich were more needy than the poor? I looked to see if I could learn anything from the faces around me. But I couldn’t read them, they reflected nothing back to me. And so it was that week after week we would gather to listen to another story: the prodigal son, the Good Samaritan, the woman taken in adultery. You could say we were sharing something intimate, these stories of tender compassion and hope. But then, I wondered, why did we all seem so detached from each other? What was it we felt?

Until I picked up Bernanos’s novel that Saturday evening in December I had no name for it. But with the first sentences everything became clear: “My parish is bored stiff. No other word for it.” Boredom, that was the word, exactly. Boredom, it occurred to me, is suffering taken for granted: a disguise for hopelessness. And I wondered if that was the expression they saw on my own face, a nagging discontent that never quite broke through into sorrow.

II

From the first moment, when Mme Druet had tapped on the door and admitted Avesnes into the room where a new voice was breaking the silence, this town of which I knew so little instructed my reading of Diary of a Country Priest. This was not a question of an already familiar presence—Emma or the narrator of Proust’s novel—coming forward out of the mist to shimmer for a moment before beating a graceful retreat because the place, the moment, didn’t extend a welcome. In the case of this new book it was the region itself, all the suffering that lay both above and below its soil, the griefs of the ages, that invited and opened the way for an emerging shape. Avesnes seemed to peer through the print on the page, as if its hidden face were that of the priest bent over the copybook in which he was writing, as if it were impossible to perceive one without the other.

The old world: that was where we were, the reason we’d come. As far back as the seventh century, an abbey had existed at Le Maroilles whose records made explicit a period of three months—from the feast of St. John on June 24 until the first of October, feast of Saint Remy—as the time required to turn milk into the wheels of cheese we bought in the Place du General Leclerc on Friday mornings. And as for M Druet herding the cows from the pastures on the first day of November to the warmth of the barn: that didn’t have to do at all with the feast of All Saints, as I’d imagined, but with a custom that predated the arrival of Christianity. It wasn’t, of course, that people had suffered any longer on this ground than any other: it was just that it was possible to look into faces—whether in the classroom, or the boulangerie, or in the Druets’ kitchen—and know that beneath this same sky, surrounded by these same fields, sheltered by these same stones, faces resembling these in cut and expression had for long centuries been young and grown old.

To be young here was to be everywhere surrounded by evidence of the not-so-young-anymore, of the long dead. This I knew. As for the young country priest—the “I” bearing no other name—who both knows he’s harboring a fatal illness and does not, his journal reflects the urgent need to weigh despair against hope, doubt against faith, to see and feel and act while there is still time.

A child of the poor, he is in hidden sympathy with those who are, in whatever way, on the outside looking in, those who have inherited the bitter isolation of want from their earliest days. While he was still a child, his aunt took him in. “She kept a little pub just outside Lens, a horrible wooden shanty where they sold gin to miners who were too poor to go anywhere else. The nearest school was a couple of miles away, and I used to do my homework squatting behind the bar on the floor—that is to say a few rotting boards. The dank reek of earth came up between them, earth which was always wet, the reek of mud. On pay-nights our customers didn’t even go outside to relieve themselves; they would pass water where they stood, and I was so terrified, crouching behind the bar, that in the end I’d fall asleep. But the teacher was kind to me, lending me books. It was there I read the childhood memories of Maxim Gorki.”

And then: “The first realization of misery is fierce indeed. Blessed be he who has saved a child’s heart from despair! It is a thing most people know so little about, or forget because it would frighten them too much. Amongst the poor as amongst the rich, a little boy is all alone, as lonely as a king’s son. At all events in our part of the world, distress is not shared, each creature is alone in his distress; it belongs only to him, like his face and his hands.”

But who were the poor in Avesnes and where did they live? They seemed to be nowhere in sight. As far as I could see, there were the well-to-do landowners like Soeur Marie Joliette’s father, and then, like M and Mme Druet, the ones hired to live on his land and care for it. There were those, too, who lived in the large brick houses in town whose lighted windows we passed in winter returning from the Institut, where through lace curtains we could catch a glimpse of chairs covered in red velvet like the ones in the unused salon upstairs. We thought that the people who lived in these large houses in town must be those we’d heard called la bourgeoisie. Some, we knew, had property elsewhere; one kept an apartment on the Côte d’Azur. Of course, too, there were laborers working in the street, servants, miners who worked in the quarry. But where they lived we didn’t know, nor whether they might be called “the poor.” We had seen men, too, with an arm or a leg missing, blind men with badly scarred faces, but these we knew had been in a war: quite another thing. I thought of the miners Van Gogh had painted in a region of Belgium that was only a stone’s throw across the border from Avesnes and wondered if in fact I’d seen poverty and failed to recognize it.

Then one evening, perhaps a month after the drizzly night when the man had died on the route de Landrecies, I absent-mindedly turned left instead of right leaving the Institut Ste-Thérèse after a reunion and found myself walking in the dark down a steep narrow passage that descended in a series of broad stone slabs arranged at intervals to make steps. This was the passage we had been told about but had never seen that connected the upper town with its place and shops and schools to the lower town where Vauban’s fortifications stood their ground. Again it was raining, with a chill in the air that settled in the marrow of the bones, and I wondered if I should turn back or see where the steps would lead. It was only gradually that I became aware of dwellings opening onto the steps, some with doors ajar. In one I saw the bright glow of a lantern on a dirt floor and then by its light, scampering up the steps, a child wearing a man’s jacket, his feet wrapped in rags. His blue eyes met mine for only an instant as he ran past me on the glistening stone.

I immediately turned around where I was and went back up the steps again until I was in the place. I was in a mild panic. I felt as if I’d violated someone’s secret, had stepped uninvited into a space where I had no business. But no, even as I found my way past the boulangerie where flayed rabbits hung in the lighted window, past the elegant mairie, shivering myself now, I knew that wasn’t it at all. It was shock I felt and like Avesnes I’d resolutely turned my back on the boy with the blazing eyes just as the rich man had on Lazarus. Avesnes preferred not to see him at all. And neither did I. I already knew of secrets one kept from oneself. But now that I had seen the boy I knew it was impossible to return to innocence.

In the following days, the child seemed to appear everywhere. I couldn’t turn a corner, enter a classroom, without catching a glimpse of a small figure that disappeared as soon as I looked again. He was the vanishing guarantor, the signature attached to the words I was reading. Because here, running in and out of the pages of the book, was an oblique record of the ongoing struggle not to lose all hope in a world where injustice is the order of the day and the poor accused of their sufferings. Where God, even to the priest desperately trying to pray, remains silent. And where the struggle, as often as not, takes the form of modern self-doubt and fear—dread of one’s own incapacities; the wincing away from what one knows is ridiculous in oneself, absurd; the constant sense that one has mismanaged things. “Fool that I am! I know nothing of my people. I never shall! I can’t profit by my mistakes: they upset me too much. I must be one of those weak, miserable creatures, always so full of the best intentions, whose whole lives oscillate between ignorance and despair.”

If I’d complained of the cold, of the struggle to survive loneliness in this place, the riveting exchange of glances with the boy on the steps now stopped my tongue. I read the book slowly, a few pages a day throughout the winter months and on into the spring. This was only in part because my French still didn’t allow for more, especially at night when I had trouble keeping my eyes open and wanted nothing more than to collapse into English. It was also because, however long I lived in Avesnes, I wanted to live within the covers of this book. It was in its pages alone there seemed space enough for a burgeoning sorrow. We had recently heard about the outbreak of the war in Biafra, in the Igboland that Achebe had described in Things Fall Apart. In my imagination the shattered bodies flung over the tops of trenches had been joined by others. We were, of course, writing letters back and forth to Ben, who had been our most constant Igbo companion. But it was unbearable to think that bodies of the schoolboys we’d taught—schoolboys so beloved we had scarcely any room within us for the French girls who sat before us—were even now soaking the rain forests of eastern Nigeria with their blood.

We were ignorant of the poor of Avesnes, but what did we know of anyone else? What about the butchers and bakers and the stationmaster? The doctors and lawyers? Their children were our students, the ones we met every day in the classroom. From the first I’d recognized uneasily that my tentative approach to the girls was lacking the quick warmth that had come so easily at Igbobi. Their names—Marie-Claude or Marie-Pierre or Marie-Françoise—were more difficult for me to remember than Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa names. The girls wore uniforms, white blouses and navy blue skirts, navy knee socks, just as the boys at Igbobi had worn khaki. But these were schoolgirls, not boys, and my own adolescence was still too recent, too threatening, to regard any version of it at all without dismay.

Just a few years ago, a schoolgirl myself, I’d read out of desperation, read straight through entire days, weekends, holidays. Was this a novel in which I would recognize myself, I asked of each one? Would it help me survive, tell me how to live? I read Jane Eyre breathlessly; here was an outsider who after many struggles would be chosen, adored, in compensation for her lonely days. And yet, perhaps because I’d read Wuthering Heights earlier, the story of Jane Eyre seemed to me not quite trustworthy. It was seductive, but I feared took me further away from what I was looking for. I was wary of stories that ended too well, that ended—after whatever soul-changing conflicts—in perfect contentment. They seemed to me some version of the “happily ever after” story that Miss Hughes had taught us to mistrust. Art would be our consolation, our hope, but life would continue to exact a stern price.

I knew there were girls like myself among our students, isolated, living in books, but I wasn’t sure how to recognize them. Besides, I felt a growing despair about my teaching. What was it that was lacking in myself that had been abundantly present at Igbobi, however inept and awkward I’d been? In class we spoke a stilted, earnest English that never quite broke through into self-revelation. I blamed my lack of connection with my students on language, not wanting to name the more important thing in myself that was missing. The novels some of the girls read and reread, the poetry, were written in a language that I was only now learning. Outside of class, one or another of my students sometimes seemed to search me out. She’d start by speaking in cautious English, but the moment passion carried her into rapid French was the moment I was no longer certain I understood. She might have been saying one thing, but I was afraid to respond for fear she’d said the exact opposite, that I hadn’t picked up a hidden, swallowed negative that changed the meaning of everything.

Sometimes we had reunions with the other teachers when one by one each girl was discussed. “Bonne famille” was sometimes pronounced approvingly of one of them, designating some social standing we didn’t know how to gauge. But we did know these were the people who invited us for a midday dinner Sunday after Sunday, the parents of our students, people who gave us their attention while we spoke haltingly of our trip to visit the cathedral at Amiens, whom we tried to turn into teachers of French, stopping them in the middle of a sentence to ask the meaning of a word. They were endlessly kind, seemed never to give up on us. C. one day tried out the expression he’d learned from one of his vocabulary books, “un brin de causette,” thinking it was slang for “a chat.” Our student’s father for a moment looked blank, then hesitantly, with great courtesy, that explained that particular expression had probably not been used since the eighteenth century. Afterward, between ourselves, we employed it tirelessly, working it into every possible context.

The student of the family we were visiting would very often help amuse the babies during the long meal, play with them, sometimes afterward show us her own room, where a poster might be pinned to the wall of Françoise Hardy, her long dark hair and bangs, her lonely eyes. We’d heard Hardy on the radio, knew the song that was everywhere, Tous les garçons et les filles, a song about love hunger, about wandering alone while everyone else of the same age walks the streets two by two, holding hands, looking into each other’s eyes, happily falling in love without any fear of tomorrow. A song I intimately understood from my own days as a teenager.

We were grateful for people’s efforts to relieve our isolation and vowed to each other we would never forget the untiring welcome given to us in France. When we’d thank our hosts as we finally said goodbye, they’d answer that it was all tout à fait normal, the most ordinary thing in the world, but to us it seemed as if they’d gone to an extraordinary amount of trouble. It also seemed they knew more about us than we did about them, forgetting that in fact we said very little about our own lives and that in their eyes it was we who were the foreigners, only briefly passing through.

Then one evening the older sister of one of our students, whose family had invited us several times, stopped by in her car to meet us; she’d been studying in New York, was just back in Avesnes and wanted to speak English. As the night wore on and we opened a second bottle of wine, she told us about her father, how one day she’d encountered him on a street in Lille with a woman who was certainly younger than herself, how it had always been like this, by now she had nothing for him but contempt. That her mother was beyond noticing, was too proud to speak of it, but that she herself felt betrayed—did he have no respect for her either, they’d been close when she was a little girl—and since her return to Avesnes was struggling with a spirit of profound hopelessness. We had listened, wondering if we should stop her, but too breathlessly intrigued by news of lives we knew so little about to interrupt or change the subject. After that night, the Sunday meals took on a different character. Somewhere beneath the fitful conversations that carried us from crudités to potage to rôti to salade to Maroilles to dessert, the voice of the journal spoke more insistently. Who was I to dismiss the struggle with boredom and despair, the hidden sorrows, of those at whose tables we were sitting? And what did it mean that I continued to hold myself aloof from these lives? Was it pride of a kind I couldn’t recognize?

It wasn’t until early April that I reached the great scene that stands at the center of the Diary of a Country Priest, the moment when the priest visits the château in order to speak to the countess of his fear that her daughter is in danger of killing herself. It was impossible to picture a château—not something like Blois or Amboise or Chenonceaux—but a château of the kind where this encounter might have taken place, a little château that might have housed a foolish father, a daughter outraged by his casual infidelities not so much to her mother as to herself: in fact, a ménage startlingly like the one described to us by our visitor. Picturing the château wouldn’t have mattered so much, except that having stumbled on the child running up the steps it seemed important to have some idea of the place to which the priest eventually came. And then one April evening, exulting in the lengthening days, we found ourselves driving at twilight along country roads that were new to us. On either side stretched pastures of deepening green, broken only by the old gray stone of farmhouses and barns. We were commenting on how much of the countryside we had still to explore when suddenly, in the glimmering light, it was there, unmistakably: a stately house set back from the road, a pair of high steps leading up with a flourish to the door, long windows upstairs and down. Narrow brick chimneys rose from the slated roof and beneath, from the mansard, looked out those strange round eyes found in houses of substance, les yeux du boeuf. There was no one inside, everything was closed tight, so we got out of the car and looked through a pair of wrought-iron gates that had crests worked into their tracery. In the bright new grass we could see yellow jonquils, an abundance of them, gleaming in the dusk. It was these jonquils that gave the château its air of melancholy, of having been abandoned. The long windows were dark and shadowless, the jonquils blooming for the open sky.

So it was here, then, it might have taken place, the encounter I had been trying to imagine, again the struggle with despair, not on a battlefield, but in a place like this one. Here the proud countess might have countered the priest’s concern by saying her daughter was horribly afraid of death, afraid of a sore throat, afraid of everything, and here he might have answered that those are the very ones who kill themselves; those who don’t dare look into the void throw themselves in for fear of falling. And here she might have asked if he himself was one of those, like her daughter, afraid to die, and heard him answer that he was; heard him say later on that hell was nothing else but that state where we are no longer able to love, no longer able to recognize those dearest to us. And here later on that night, the transformed countess—a rich woman given hope by a poor priest, I thought, remembering the homily about the rich man and Lazarus, the beggar—might have died very suddenly, at peace.

As the days grew longer and the cows were brought back out of the barns and into the pastures where, after milking, they passed the short hours of darkness, I read more and more slowly, sometimes rereading lines from earlier sections. The strawberries ripened, the flies returned. A paragraph a day, approaching the end, and then a few sentences: “Oh miracle—thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shriveling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I thought lost in me forever was given back to her.”

It would have been impossible to have spent a night in the bed where the German general had slept without knowing that in the morning the book would be waiting. The book took account of the world’s injustice, its inclination toward unspeakable depravity. But each sentence of the priest’s diary was filled with the clear light of an intelligence informed by love. In a few short weeks we would be leaving Avesnes. Paris beckoned as seductively as ever, and afterwards we’d go on to Provence, but now my delight in our departure seemed suspect: why should I be so glad to leave a place where I’d spent a year? There would be no wrenching goodbyes.

The priest’s diary had struck into visibility the burning lives of those around me, but it seemed I’d missed something essential, I wasn’t sure what. The book had provided a diagram of a place, a guide to the region, the town. Here you will find the poor, here the little château where the Countess surrendered her pride at last and was released to joy. But nowhere in the town had I recognized the young priest’s face, the living face of compassion. I must have encountered it, but unknowingly. It came to me that throughout our time in Avesnes I’d looked at the town and its people, the people gathered for mass at Saint-Nicolas, through the lens of fear. And nowhere had this reserve been more striking than with my students. There had been a failure of imagination, of love.

The unlived life looked out at me from the here and now. It was the life I’d turned away from. I thought of the shivering boy on the wet steps and it occurred to me that my reluctance to see what was there constituted an act of despair all its own. So it had been with that other boy, Norman de Carteret. So it had been in Badagry. I had only to think of the country priest. He’d hated to die but had spent himself lavishly, had spent everything he had. In losing his life he’d found it. In holding onto my own, I’d forfeited what might have been. To live, I considered, was to choose what was given. Now the time was gone.

During the final days, crating our belongings so that we could travel lightly to the south, waving away the flies that had returned with the first heat, I followed the approach of the summer solstice as the keeper of the journal followed his own slow course toward the end. In the shadow of a dripping hedge, the cows lowing just beyond, he passes out, is discovered by a child who brings water and washes his face. He makes a friend, realizing “that friendship can break out between two people, with that sudden violence which generally is only attributed to the revelation of love.” His new friend Olivier takes him for a ride on the back of his silver motorcycle and he very briefly tastes the heady joys of youth, riding at full speed, hair streaming, over roads he’s walked step by weary step, a taste only long enough to acquaint him with all he’s leaving behind.

He visits a doctor in Lille, a doctor who is his double, suffering with the help of morphine from a fatal illness like his own. It is there in Lille—facing the death that will overtake him the next morning on a camp bed in his friend’s apartment—that he writes that human agony is, above all, an act of love. I wasn’t sure I understood but felt this was a profound intuition I might grasp in time.

On the final Saturday we were to spend in Avesnes, we visited the market, knowing this would be the last time. Our classes now concluded, we’d decided to take a break from packing by going to town to buy a baguette, some strawberries, a last Maroilles. We were standing on the old stones of the place, watching the farmer from whom we always bought cheese wrap our purchase in a page from La Voix du Nord, when the carillon in the steeple of Saint-Nicolas, high above our heads, suddenly threw off a shower of chimes. Once again it wheezed, as if taking breath, before solemnly delivering twelve bongs, one after another, at intervals that allowed the reverberations to ripple out in the mild clear air. On the final stroke a young woman with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders appeared with a little girl at her side and introduced herself. She was Geneviève Delavoy and had seen us in town, had been told we were in Avesnes for a year. And this was Anne, she said, looking down at her child: she had a birthday next week, would be six years old. Anne held up one hand, fingers wide apart, and the index finger of the other. The next moment Geneviève’s husband had joined us and introduced himself as Pierre. With him was a boy who looked about three or four. He had dark hair, like Pierre, the same dark eyes, and yet the slightly bedazzled look of Geneviève.

We explained we were just about to leave Avesnes, that we were even now saying goodbye to the market. Are you free later on, Geneviève asked. Why didn’t we come by about six. We’d feed the children first so they could play while we seized the chance for at least one visit. And where did they live? In the rue d’Aulnoy, down behind the hospital, we’d easily find it, a brick house with a flight of stairs in front. And so it was we heard the bells of Saint-Nicolas strike eight that night from somewhere far above as we sat round a table in the ville-bas, eating ragout, sipping wine, eagerly talking with another young couple about our lives. In our desire to understand one another the barrier of language fell away: it seemed our French had become serviceable. They’d met as students in Paris—Pierre at Science Polytechnique, Geneviève at Université de Paris, Vincennes—and had come to live in Avesnes after they’d married. It was here that Pierre had grown up, in a house nearby where his parents still lived and his grandparents before them. Now he managed the family business in heavy farm machinery and dairy equipment. He looked at us from behind glittering lenses, his gaze intelligent, restless. And Geneviève? She was from Bretagne and taught French literature at the lycée. Her mother had died when she was a little girl, and in the summers they visited her father—had we seen much of France?—in the village she’d known as a child, fields of grass threaded with daisies running down to the sea. The children loved it. And ourselves? Who were we? Where did we come from? We told them about Africa, how we happened to be in Avesnes. They listened with keen interest, wanted to know about Nigeria, about the places where we’d been born. And what about our year in Avesnes? Had we been all right here?

A knock at the door and Pierre brought in an old man wearing a beret and a coat with holes at the elbows. His shoes were tied together with string. Geneviève pulled out a chair at the table, set before him a bowl of soup, half a baguette. Pierre poured a glass of wine. The old man raised his glass very slightly to the company, made a little flourish in the air, before taking a first sip. He said nothing and, when finished eating, stood up, bowed to Geneviève, and went his way. When he was gone I asked, hesitantly, if he came often. “Ça arrive,” Genevieve answered matter-of-factly, shrugging her shoulder, smiling at me a little. And with a blaze of recognition I knew I was looking into the face of compassion that had eluded me until now.

We found it hard to take our leave, but when we at last gathered up the babies, Geneviève and Pierre said what a pity, to have met like this at the last minute, just as we were leaving Avesnes. They’d have been glad to have kept the children while we’d had a weekend alone in Paris. But now we were already friends. Who knew what life would bring? They stood together at the doorway as we went down the front brick steps in a state resembling jubilation.

A full moon was rising above the town. As we drove home through the streets in a state of hushed and grateful silence, then out onto the route de Landrecies, a milky light flooded the road and pastures, bringing into vivid relief the shadow of a barn, a solitary tree, a telephone pole: things were at last declaring themselves, the unseen giving itself away. Three cows, heads together, stood in silent conference. The sheen on white daisies and buttercups shimmered across the fields, like silk. On this one evening what I hadn’t thought to ask for had risen to meet me. I’d received just enough taste of it to know what I’d missed.

A few days later, on the evening before we were to leave Avesnes, everything at last packed and ready for departure, we stood outside the house with M and Mme Druet watching Patrick drive the milked cows back across the route de Landrecies and into the pastures. It would be the shortest night of the year. With the moment so quickly approaching when we would no longer see each other, when on either side our lives would once again sink into the mysterious unknown, an uneasy shyness seemed to overtake us all. When Patrick joined us at last he stood with his arms loose at his sides, not saying a word. And although Mme Druet did her best—now we had two little walking children, how quickly they’d grown!—we finally took leave of each other with an obscure sense of shame, as if perhaps we had never known each other in the least, had allowed what was most important of all to go unsaid.

We went inside, telling each other that tomorrow we’d say goodbye. The windows were open to let in the night, and there was still just enough daylight to allow a glimpse from the room upstairs of the steeple at Saint-Hilaire—the name, I suddenly remembered, of the church in Combray, the steeple that the narrator’s grandmother had said if it could play the piano she was sure would really play. I had reserved the next-to-last page of the journal for tonight and then had planned for the morning the last of all, an italicized page, written in the form, I could see, of a letter. But I felt too much unquiet, at first, to read. I could think only of the anxiety and boredom in which my days had been spent, the hours by the smoking stove struggling to keep the babies warm, the fog at the windows, the slow drizzle that had fallen on the trenches. Why could I not, at the very least, have responded with some show of gratitude to Patrick’s invitation to come watch them kill the pig? His shy offer had been inspired by motives I had not even tried to imagine. Now, at the point of departure, I could at last forgive Emma her vanities, but could less easily forgive my own. There had been many, like Patrick, who’d recognized our loneliness and tried to console the outsider, Lazarus at the gate. And yet I hadn’t been able to see myself, as they had, as one of the poor, in need of a crumb. So it was that, sitting at the window, I finally picked up the book and read the last words of the journal: “How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity—as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.”

The sky, tomorrow night, would be the same sky, spreading over Avesnes and Paris alike. But by then Avesnes for us would already have become a place containing a completed year of our past. Paris was all ahead, but for Avesnes it was now too late. I thought how, no matter in what simplicity I might try to accept my failures of generosity both towards myself and the people of Avesnes, I would always regret that here on this spot of earth I’d kept myself apart.

And so, not waiting for morning, I read the friend in Lille’s account of the priest’s death, of his last words: “But what does it matter? Grace is everywhere.”

À la Recherche du Temps Perdue

I

We read in the front room of the ground-floor apartment, looking out on Claremont Avenue. The chairs were wide and deep, lamps ready on the table next to the sofa where Diana Trilling sat in her accustomed place and beside the chair where I had finally come to settle across the room. A double row of etchings hung in their frames above the sofa, and sometimes, when Diana was out of the room for a moment, I would set one straight that had been knocked askew. In a little elevated bookcase set in one wall, leaning against each other, were books recognizable from Lionel’s essays: Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud, the letters of Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth’s collected poems. And lying broadside, a picture book on Marcel Proust that Lionel had given Diana one Valentine’s Day.

It was in this room, for ten years, that I read aloud to Diana Trilling every week. Her eyesight, by 1987, had badly deteriorated and she had trouble making out the printed page. Some years we met on Mondays, others on Wednesdays or Thursdays. If something interfered so that one of us couldn’t arrange to be free that day, we tried to find another time in the same week. We were dedicated to our readings, and although she might occasionally be ill, or I might be away for a month or more, we always resumed with a sense of relief. If there had been a long hiatus, or if one of us had something pressing to talk about, we might not read at all that day. But the book was always waiting, and when I arrived at her apartment at four in the afternoon, after the working day was over, we settled to the comfort of the unwinding story with a sense of arriving home.

A ginkgo tree stood on the sidewalk outside the window. In late May its leaves cast a green light in the room and, in the fall, as the afternoons grew short, the fan leaves flickered gold in the twilight. By November they would be lying at the base of the trunk like drifted snow and the branches in the window would be stark and bare. One afternoon in April 1996, six months before Diana died, I arrived to tell her that finally, after a long and punishing winter, a green mist was hanging in the trees on Riverside Drive and there, too, in the ginkgo just outside the window. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she cried. “It’s an illusion of spring.” Then, a moment later, “That would make a good title for a novel, wouldn’t it?”

I had watched the tree grow from a sapling since the afternoon I first came to visit Diana in the fall of 1975, having met her by chance that summer in Venice. C. and I, with our three young children, had been spending the summer in the former Zaire on Lake Kivu, in Bukavu, working for the Peace Corps, and I had come ahead early to spend some days in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale. I was writing a dissertation on Proust and wanted to look at the manuscripts. But the city that the narrator of Proust’s novel had visited with his mother was on my way and it would cost no more to stop there. It was Venice, the charmed city of his imagination, which he had seen resolve into a commonplace pile of stones when he was faced with the prospect of staying on alone after her departure. And it was Venice, I remembered, that Thomas Mann had chosen for his story of death and love.

One morning in late August, two days after my arrival, I found my way to the Scuola de San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, one of the city’s confraternity houses, to look at the Car-paccios. The day was all white heat, but the interior of the Scuola was shadowy and cool. After a few minutes, when the dazzle of light had yielded to the startling particularity of the large canvases that lined the walls, I became aware of a man and a woman looking at one of them. The woman was describing aloud the monks streaming away in fright from Saint Jerome’s lion, robes flying, bold streaks of black on white. She pointed out the book dropped in a tuft of grass, its center pages standing upright from its spine, the slippered foot of the frightened reader pushing off for greater speed. The man was silent, his head inclined toward hers. I knew they were the Trillings because my father, like Lionel and Langston Hughes and Lou Gehrig, had been a member of Columbia’s class of 1925, and when I was a child I had sometimes accompanied him to Dean’s Day to hear Lionel lecture. But I don’t think I had ever seen Diana. I had spoken to no one since arriving in Venice, and so decided to leave the chapel at the same moment they did. On the steps, standing in the glare of noon, I asked if they were the Trillings. They looked at me in astonishment. We spoke for a few moments about the Carpaccios, and when there seemed little else to say, they asked would I like to join them for lunch.

We had ham sandwiches and frosty glasses of beer at a table under an awning. They told me they had been at Oxford for the past year and were on their way back to New York. I told them I lived on Morningside Drive, also in the neighborhood of Columbia, where my husband taught an African language: Hausa. Yes, it was spoken in northern Nigeria and in Niger, as well as throughout West Africa as a trading language. A little like Swahili in East Africa. Then we spoke of Gabriel García Márquez, of the new wave of South American writers, and later the Ca’ Rozzonico we had all happened on, where Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had lived. Diana said she was looking for the Danieli Hotel because she had stayed there when she had come as a young woman to Venice with her father. She couldn’t remember where it was but would like to find it. I told her I thought that when Proust had visited Venice with his mother he, too, had stayed at the Danieli. We spoke of whether we should order more sandwiches. “But Li,” Diana said, “you haven’t eaten half enough!” And when we were gathering our things to leave, Diana, who had been concerned to hear I was traveling alone, told me that I must certainly stop by their hotel when I felt like it—wouldn’t I do that?—and if I needed anything at all I must not hesitate to ask.

I thanked them for the lunch and we parted. I already knew that I would not stop by their hotel; it would be awkward suddenly appearing and finding them resting or engaged with other people. But I still had two more days in Venice and the next morning turned a corner to find the Danieli Hotel with its balconied windows looking out, past the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore, to the horizon where the low dunes of the Lido floated in the hazy light. That afternoon I took the boat out to the Lido and walked up and down trying to find the spot where Aschenbach had grown sick with love. There was the far reach of the sea, the beach with its bathing houses, but I could find no hotel that fit the picture fixed in my imagination. At last, climbing the steps of a shabby building in need of paint, I glimpsed above its broad front entrance a faded sign stamped with the words I had been looking for: HOTELS DES BAINS.

On my last afternoon in Venice, sitting in the piazza on the steps of one of the three massive flagpoles that rise in front of San Marco, I spotted the Trillings sitting with friends at a table in front of one of the cafés. But some shyness, some fear of intruding, kept me from approaching. The pigeons were swirling overhead, the violins sobbing, the gold of San Marco was on fire, I had already visited the baptistery of the basilica where the sensation of uneven stones beneath his feet, revived years later, had given the narrator of Proust’s novel his first intimations of the recovery of lost time. The sun was warm on the stones where I sat. I could see Diana and Lionel leaning back in their chairs facing the great sinking glitter of San Marco, could see the giants on the digital clock lifting their hammers to strike the hour. In one of those moments when anguish and joy seem indistinguishable—like those our music teacher, Miss Hughes, had long ago instructed us to watch for—I saw that here was a moment in time never to be recovered, that it was all sliding away as we sat in stillness, all vanishing with the shadow that imperceptibly, moment by moment, was quenching the facade of San Marco.

The next morning, on the way to the vaporetto that would take me to the station, I stopped in a coffee bar. I had passed enough days wandering the city alone and was not sorry to leave. Standing at the counter, I glimpsed Diana and Lionel sitting in the back against a wall. This was my farewell to Venice, and it might as well be my farewell to them. But why, I asked myself, hoisting my bag to my shoulder, is there always this reticence, this shrinking away, before drawing near another person? I greeted them and told Diana that I had found the Danieli. She had as well, yes, yes, it was right there, looking out over the sea, but of course it didn’t look as she had remembered. I said I was just on my way to catch a train, was on my way out. “Call me,” Diana said. “Call me, when we’re all back in the city and we’ll have tea.”

And so our friendship began. Rushing along the street that September on my way to visit her for the first time, I thought to remember the number 35 Claremont by adding two to my age: thirty-three. I would leave her apartment knowing that Diana had turned sixty-eight that summer, was Jewish, and that she had a son named Jim who was in his mid-twenties; she would know that I was Catholic and had three young daughters. We would have agreed that parenthood bestowed a delight so intense that people without children must be protected from knowing what they were missing. And I would have privately decided, an opinion never to be reversed, that her outrageous sense of the ludicrous made her one of the funniest people I had ever met.

But what was remarkable about that first visit was the sense of wonder and relief I felt in being able to talk to an older woman not my mother about matters C. and I and all our friends endlessly discussed without much light. Because over the years our conversations had changed. In the fall of 1966 we’d returned after three years away to find ourselves strangers in a country we’d referred to as “home.” At the University of Wisconsin in Madison where C. would study Hausa and other African languages, we were astonished to find young men in John Lennon glasses and hair down their backs walking around in long velvet jackets. The campus was alight with demonstrations against Dow Chemical, with antiwar protests. Soon C. was letting his hair grow and I was wearing miniskirts and dangling earrings. We made friends and before long were going to parties unlike any we’d known. We listened to Dylan, danced to “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” tirelessly talked politics: Vietnam, Baldwin’s essays, women’s rights. A friend who was reading Sylvia Plath gave me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Our third daughter was born and C. and I returned to Africa for a year, this time to Niger, north of Nigeria, where Hausa was widely spoken: we hadn’t forgotten our trip from Igbobi up to Kano during the harmattan, sand moving forward in waves, the pull of the desert. It was in Niger, that year, I turned thirty. By the time we were back in Madison and C. was writing his dissertation on Hausa proverbs, I’d determined to read Proust and write a dissertation of my own. So it was that C. cared for our children while I took the required courses all in a rush and planned to write my dissertation later, after he’d found a job and we’d all moved away from Madison. Many things had come to be that we’d never imagined at all.

And yet how, on the basis of crossing paths in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni with Diana, did she and I find our way immediately on sitting down together to a discussion of whether or not affairs were possible in marriage? How was the subject broached and by whom? But she had married in her early twenties, as had I, and she told me that she and her friends had endlessly discussed the possibilities just as we did now. She did not give advice, did not say how she herself had addressed these difficulties, but, as I nervously gobbled cucumber sandwiches, led me to understand that she believed people had the right to claim some area of privacy around themselves, some measure of freedom wherein the choices they made need not be revealed to anyone at all. She said that fidelity in marriage was not easily defined, that she thought it a strenuous and lifelong enterprise, but that she considered it dirty-minded—that was the expression she used: it rests in my journal—to make fidelity a matter of whether you slept with someone other than your spouse. She said also that she remembered a time not so very long before the afternoon we were speaking when a group of their friends, married couples of the same age, had been talking about these things, and that it had been the women who seemed most to have regretted the opportunities left unexplored. She was not telling me one thing or another, but she was assuring me of the possibility of choice.

In fact, we returned to this subject over a period of several visits spanning the next two years. We talked, too, about our parents and brothers and sisters, and when I voiced a fear that something I was thinking about writing might prove upsetting to someone in my family, she said she thought it best to assume a generosity of response, that that was best for one’s own sake and for everyone else’s. The subject was quickly dropped, but years later, when we were both writing memoirs, we would return to this subject with greater urgency. She talked, too, about how it was only in her thirties that, like myself, she had come to writing; how, after an extended illness had led her to abandon all hope of a singing career, she had watched Lionel like a hawk to see what his response would be the day she first proposed writing reviews for The Nation. But he had encouraged her work, she said, always. Coming down the hall from the back of the apartment, he would courteously greet us on his way out to teach a class, pausing to arrange with her some small errand, a trip to the post office, or a stop at the butcher’s to pick up the chicken breasts they would have that night for dinner. Did he have enough money with him? “But don’t leave me penniless, Li!”

Diana in 1974 was at work on a review of Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage, and she said that although she admired the devoted friendship between Vita Sackville-West and Nicolson, she thought their freedoms to live as they liked had largely to do with their privileged position in English society. Members of the middle or working class, pursuing a life as sexually adventurous as theirs, would have paid heavily, both socially and economically. She spoke of the arduous labor writing was for her. She had already asked me if I didn’t think Lionel’s style sounded simple. “But you can’t imagine the . . .” she said, pausing. “Pain?” I offered. “The pain,” she repeated, “that went into it.” Perhaps it was on this occasion that I complained about how slowly my dissertation was taking shape, because my difficulty prompted a letter dated February 27, 1975:

“I’ve been thinking of what you told me of your slowness as a writer; as I said, we’re similarly afflicted in this household. I think the important point about which you have to be ruthlessly honest is the matter of progress: do you inch along, do you carry the work forward if only a small amount at a time? There is no other criterion, it seems to me, for distinguishing between a perhaps too great but nonetheless valuable precision of style and the use of meticulousness as an evasion to be thought of as only a problem against which you must mobilize all your energies of self-correction. Once you work out the style for a piece of writing, appropriate to the material and your image of yourself as author, you should, in a morning of work, have a page that’s new—that’s a practical minimum at your age and stage, I think. Thus, if you go back over four or five pages, you should come out with five or six, perhaps not every single day, but most days. Do you manage that? If you do not, then just by force of will you must move on despite this or that lax sentence or this or that insufficient word. Anyway, I’m making this my rule, even at my age and stage, and invite you to join with me.”

“Mobilize all your energies of self-correction.” I knew the ring of a sentence like this one. But I had heard it at school only in admonitory statements in regard to the prescribed duties of young girls, of married women in relation to their husbands and children. To people you could do something for. I had not yet heard diction such as this used in regard to responsibilities toward oneself or one’s chosen work. Nor had anyone ever taken my writing quite so seriously.

Diana would tell me not long before she died that she hadn’t seen my face in years. I was startled because it was easy to forget, watching her move quickly across a room, that she could at last see only the edges of things. But startled, too, because I realized she had not seen my face grow older as I had seen hers, that she perhaps imagined mine to be the one that had hovered beside her own years before while she filled my cup with tea as quickly as I drained it, dropping a lump of sugar into it with silver tongs, tearing open a pink slip of saccharine for herself. Or, I wondered, was it, in any case, continuity that we always see in our friends? Did the new lines in their faces finally make very little difference? What mattered was what I could see before me: the woman who at ninety threw her arm, just as she had always done, across the back of the sofa, who sat at ease with her legs apart or with an ankle resting elegantly on a knee. Here she was, bending to pick up the phone as she had during those years when I eagerly listened to her strategies for making sure of her working time. “Yes, yes. I’d adore a visit. That would be wonderful. Next week and the one following are impossible, but would the week after that suit you? Are you quite sure that would fit your schedule? Be really convenient? Good, and in the meantime I’ll look forward immensely to our visit.”

So that I had wondered if the person on the other end of the line had hung up thinking that it was he or she who had chosen a time one month hence for the visit they had hoped to arrange for the next days.

During the fall of 1975, when Diana and Lionel returned from their summer away, Lionel was not well and went into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for tests. One day in September I was driving Diana up Riverside Drive to visit him when she told me that the day before a shadow had been discovered on his pancreas, a tumor. I thought of the Guermantes receiving Swann’s news that he would soon be dead: “Why, you’ll outlive us all,” the duke cries, and sends up for the red shoes. In the silence that gathered in the closed spaces of the car, I was made aware by the presence at my side that for the moment there was nothing to be said and instead stared mutely through the windshield at the rain-drenched road. Diana went on to say that he had heard the diagnosis and that she’d assumed he’d understood until she heard him later on the phone telling someone that this was all going to delay his teaching for a couple of weeks.

And then she continued that she knew something had been wrong in July when he’d had a series of terrible nightmares. That she blamed herself for thinking so long that the disorder was psychological and had tried to talk him out of his distress. I had still found nothing to say when we pulled up in front of the hospital and she climbed out of the car and disappeared through the revolving doors.

In one of our visits soon after his death two months later, on November 5, she said the genius of marriage was that in a cold world there was one other person for whom you counted first. When night came, you at last went home to each other. You might disagree, endure periods of disharmony, but when one of you was in danger or very unhappy, the other one rallied. “If Lionel were alive, I know we’d fight sometimes, just as when he was alive. It’s not that I think things would be altered to perfection. But he’d be here.” We were sitting in her immaculate little kitchen, eating tunafish sandwiches. For the moment, the formality of the teas had been put aside. “The world may be lamenting the death of the literary critic,” she continued, “but I miss the man bringing home the pork chops.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I had been watching a cockroach make a slow path down the wall next to the table where we sat. Just then he crawled into sight. Diana looked blank for a moment, then threw back her head, helplessly delighted with the absurdity of it all. “What a life!” she hooted, as if all our dilemmas were nothing.

In the years following Lionel’s death, Diana plunged into the editorial work of putting together his uncollected writing, of seeing his collected work brought out in a new edition, and into writing a book of her own. I, having at last finished my dissertation, began teaching full time. Our afternoons together were less frequent. Sometimes C. and I would be invited for dinner or for drinks, as in the days when Lionel was alive, but Diana was afraid of heights and wasn’t eager to come to our fourth-floor apartment. One day she called to say she wanted to make some tapes—informal conversations—in which she talked about her life, and asked if I would be willing to help her do this. We arranged a time, sat in our accustomed places on the sofa, set the tape running, and attempted our usual conversation. But it was all flat and stilted, the rhythms were wrong, and we gave up in defeat.

Then one afternoon in the fall of 1986, when we were again sitting at tea, she told me that her eyesight had in the past few months badly deteriorated. She talked about the ways her life was consequently made more difficult. She needed to bring in more money from her writing now in order to pay the secretary she had recently hired to take dictation. She could no longer see the typewritten page without the aid of a magnifying glass. But her greatest regret, she said, was that she would never again read Proust. I listened amazed. It was ten years since I had completed my dissertation, and over the last months I’d been visited by the thought more and more insistently that it was time to return to Proust. I wanted to read his novel under circumstances that would have nothing to do with a dissertation. I was writing fiction now, and knew I would read À La Recherche differently. What’s more, the disposal of my time was more or less my own. Our youngest daughter was in her first year of college, C. and I ate our dinner late. So it was quickly agreed. Once a week in the afternoon I would read aloud to us À La Recherche du Temps Perdu—in English, of course—an undertaking we could not have predicted would take us six years to complete.

II

Perhaps because Proust’s novel begins with an account of that floating state between dream and waking, it soon occurred to me that reading aloud to someone you love is a little like sitting with them in the dark, talking. The words of the book, the image that passes before your eyes, is the dream from which you slowly awaken to find yourself awash in scattered images from your past, odd bits of ponderings for which there seem no words. But if someone is there beside you, and if there are rings of quiet surrounding anything that is said, then these fragments may find their way into speech. Your thoughts can roam freely, darting backward and forward in time, the way they do when you are alone. You are speaking to the dark. Silences, as under a night sky, open to a place beyond themselves.

The book, with Diana, was our dark place, the fertile ground of memory and confidence. Had it ever happened to either of us, as to the narrator when he first encounters Gilberte at Tansonville, that an exchange of eyes had been enough, that it had seemed as if everything had been accomplished in a gaze? Yes, once to her after her mother’s death on a boat going to Brazil, when she had been traveling with her father. She had been singing one night to an assembled group and a man had come and stood in the door to listen. She would never forget his face. I had passed someone on a street in a village in southern France, in Provence, when I was twenty-six and we had both stared in instant, blinding recognition. And cruelty such as that with which Françoise had tormented the pregnant kitchen maid, the spring of the asparagus? Yes, we had each encountered that in our childhoods, the sudden revelation of gratuitous malice in an adult, and remembered the thrill of fear it produced.

Or, when we reached Swann in Love, Diana confessed she had never been subject to obsessive love, the kind Swann felt for Odette, what she supposed was called romantic love. It was not part of her makeup and she never quite understood what people meant when they talked about it. To be imprisoned in this way! To be sapped of one’s will! It made her think of people she had known in the grip of alcohol, or drugs. But there we differed. Love of this kind was all too familiar to me, and I suddenly understood that our conversations about affairs so many years before must have had a different meaning for each of us not apparent at the time. Yet the period had passed for speaking of these things between us.

There were moments, too, many of them, when we sat in hushed and humbled silence. These occurred early in our reading, but were repeated again and again throughout the years. They were almost always in response to a passage building rhythmically, irresistibly, toward a moment of revelation—as, for example, the famous passage in which the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea is said to evoke a joy in the narrator that stirs him from lethargy to the work of memory, the resurrection of the whole of Combray, “town and gardens alike.” It was then that we were together listening to the voice beneath the voice on the page, the strains of rapture that are the most intimate thing we know about a writer, the secret urgings of spirit. And it was then I remembered the cathedral at Amiens and the soaring sense of expectation roused by my own uncertain pronunciation of the name of the town, Cambrai.

We had begun, rather self-consciously, sitting side by side as usual on the sofa. But before long, as we gradually fell under the spell of words and silence, I found myself in a chair on the other side of the room, facing Diana across a distance. Perhaps we said the light would be better if I sat there, but the light had nothing to do with it. A listener needs room to be alone in the expanding world of the story. And a voice telling a story requires space if it is to assume the anonymity of a voice crying in the wilderness, requires at least the illusion of speaking beyond time and place. It must not be burdened too emphatically with individual history.

And yet, very soon, I found this to be impossible. What could I do when I heard myself reading in the voice my mother had used reading to me as a child, the voice, mimicking her, I had used to read to my own children? I heard the same intonations, the same pauses and emphases, the same strains of irrepressible sadness. Diana’s father had been born in the Warsaw ghetto, my mother’s grandmother had been born in Ireland during the Famine. Yet here was Diana, and here was I, sitting in an apartment on Claremont Avenue, each listening to Proust read in accents that were beyond our choosing, either hers or mine. And perhaps, for that reason, in a voice after all with its own share of anonymity, the voice of ancestors whose sorrows might find their unlikely but entirely fitting expression in the pages of Proust.

III

It was sometime during those early years when we were reading Proust together, Diana and I, that on my way home one winter’s afternoon I paused to watch the setting sun. I often ran the few blocks east to Morningside Drive from sheer exhilaration. But on this December day—turning onto 120th Street from Claremont, looking back toward the Hudson, just beyond the silver tops of the trees in Riverside Park—I stopped, as if recalled to something. The red winter sun was setting, disappearing into the dark Palisades above the icy river. The cold was intense and I continued on my way. But that night I woke from what may have been a dream, or perhaps not a dream at all but a floating reverie.

I seemed to recall, there in the dark, a time when our mother read to us in the late afternoons. It was winter and my brother Charlie and I were sitting on a little sofa, facing a window, one on either side of her. She was reading from a book with a cover the color of dull gold. It was not a book at all, not as I understand books now, though I know it was Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Rather it was a voice, and that voice was hers. She was speaking as if the words were prayers, as if she wanted us to hear in the words something we couldn’t see. Her voice was both tender and sorrowful. She pronounced the words as if she herself had known the sufferings of the lonely and the poor, those chilled to the bone, had heard the voices of the afflicted, the wailing in the night. The sun shot down through the trees. It was melting in the branches, it was falling out of sight. Then she stopped reading and stood up and turned on the light above our heads, a bulb skirted by a glass shade. When she sat down again and continued reading, the bright band of red was gone and there was only a shiny black window, the electric light swimming in it.

I may have drifted back to sleep, may even have slept awhile, dreaming of the red sun setting over the Palisades not far away from Diana’s, of that winter sunset long ago when our mother’s voice had taught us what to listen for. But a little later I woke again, this time to a pounding heart. A nameless anxiety had taken hold, a sense of terrifying urgency. But none of the worries that ordinarily preoccupied me seemed to fit. In this case, I was being recalled to something of a different order. It seemed that from every side I heard a soft hissing, something like the sound of snow driving forward in a storm against a wall or window or tower, blotting out the familiar landmarks and signposts, leaving behind mysterious shapes that rendered the mind blank and stupid. I couldn’t make out a thing.

And then, thinking of nothing at all, I understood: I must change my life. I must change my life. In spite of the many things my life had included, and I didn’t stop to name them, I’d nevertheless missed the most important thing of all: the pearl of great price. There wasn’t a moment to lose. And I faintly discerned, in the reverberating silence that followed, that I would discover what that was only if—as Miss Hughes had instructed us so many years ago—I was able, with all the attention she had insisted on, to listen for the vibrations of what had come before and prepare for those that would follow. But that night and its urgency disappeared like a dream erased and I wouldn’t think of it again for a while.

IV

Diana was eighty-one when we began our readings. The novel was long. She had already told me that when you were as old as she, you did not expect to live for more than a few years. That expectation, she said, both had its reality and did not. And yet, perhaps because we had entered the sphere of timelessness in which the book revolves, perhaps because the words we were reading were proof against the destruction of our present, the fear of time running out did not intrude until the book was closed at the end of each afternoon and returned to its place on the table next to the sofa. We were at first making use of the little Scott-Moncrieff volumes, taken from a shelf in the dining room, that had Lionel’s tracings in them—a pencil line drawn next to selected passages ending in an arrow turned in at the bottom—and when we completed one volume we left it on the table for the next to rest on. After we had changed to the Kilmartin translation, each volume wrapped in silver paper eventually took its place on top of all the others. There was, then, a vivid growing testimony to the accumulation of our afternoons, at times a comfort of sorts, at others a bleak reminder that someday it would all be over—the book, the afternoons, Diana and I sitting together reading with our cups of tea beside us.

But there would be occasions when the minutes passed one by one. The open-air charms of Combray and Balbec behind us, we found ourselves moving laboriously through the corridors of The Guermantes Way. Then, just as reading aloud had earlier been the occasion for a sharing of wonders, the sound of my own voice seemed a hindrance to understanding. I could not let my eye run quickly ahead, as when reading alone, to see what was there and move on. Nor reread a sentence or paragraph meditatively, pausing to reflect, and afterward turn the next pages rapidly. Every word had to be pronounced, each given its due. Sometimes I would turn a page and fall into a stupor, appalled by the prospect of a block of print unbroken by a single paragraph, only to sneak a glance at the pages immediately following and find they were the same. Then the reading seemed a chore. Intent, simply, on looking ahead to locate the end of the sentence so that I wouldn’t heedlessly run up against it, as against a brick wall, I found myself struggling to understand what it was all about and, when Diana interrupted with a comment, was relieved to be able to stop for a rest.

We had made our stolid way through a long account of the afternoon reception given by Madame de Villeparisis and were embarked on a dinner party at the Guermantes when Diana broke in to wonder aloud if they would ever get to the table. And then again when we were told at last they had, because we weren’t given any details besides an unspecified bowl of soup, to conjecture what they were eating.

After we had concocted a meal for them, Diana asked me what I was having for dinner that night, and I asked her the same question. We then talked about soups and how we both liked cold summer soups in particular. I recounted to her my experiment with cucumber soup at Igbobi College, using powdered milk. She in turn told me she sometimes served a cold asparagus soup with sliced cucumber on top that she liked very much, and I described a curried pea soup thickened with half-and-half or yogurt. We wrote down the recipes. Our conversation ran next to summer itself, and when I told her that we had decided to rent a house in the country, we spoke of visitors. We agreed we loved the idea of having people come to stay; it answered to some idea of bounty and life at high tide. “But visitors are the despair of work,” she told me solemnly. “I warn you about this. If you leave your doors wide open, you’ll spend all your time in the kitchen and changing beds. I had to learn this myself during our years in Westport.”

Edith Wharton, in contrast, I reminded Diana, with a house full of guests, had spent her mornings in bed writing, scattering the sheets of paper on the floor where they were later collected by a secretary who typed them up. She had a complete staff to take care of things, no children to tend, could do her work and enjoy her visitors in the afternoon. “But wouldn’t you want to know what they were all doing?” Diana asked. “You’d be in bed, and they’d be downstairs talking to each other, happy without you.”

We pondered this dilemma for a while and then Diana said that one of Edmund Wilson’s wives, so that he might not be disturbed, would bring him his lunch on a tray adorned with a flower stuck in a vase. Lionel had been exactly the opposite. He’d leave the door of his study open so that Jim could run in and out at any time, and he did, to Lionel’s delight; the cats would settle on the keys of his typewriter and he would work around them.

We talked of the Carlyles, of Jane and Thomas, and how she never got to her work at all, ever. Diana said Jane had spent her life protecting him, as he sat writing in Chelsea, from the noise of the renovators who were soundproofing the house, that she had almost pleaded with the roosters not to crow. I asked her if she knew the story of Alfred de Musset and George Sand, how waking early in the morning, he had thought that George Sand, disheveled with sleep, already bent by the fire over her writing desk, had not presented a very attractive image to his eyes.

For a moment there was silence from across the room. Then, in a burst: “Kill ’em all! Shoot ’em dead!”

Another pause: “And what kind of an image, pray, did he present?”

Each of us, separately, was engaged as well in her own struggle with the clock. Diana had already been writing for some time the memoir that became The Beginning of the Journey; and I—after a return to Niger—had begun to write something that, although fiction, was close enough to memoir to provoke some of the same concerns. I’d been visiting a daughter who had herself returned to Niger to work for a couple of years in a place she remembered from childhood. Now Diana and I were both laboring to get our words on paper. And Diana was also struggling with difficulties new to her. It was, she said, not only that words didn’t come to her as quickly as they had when she was younger but that dictating to a secretary was a tricky business. The person receiving the words on the other side of the table—whether through some attitude of sympathy or the lack of it—made a difference in what she was able to express. But even more pressingly, she was fearful that in speaking of Lionel as she had known him, and of their marriage, she would be perceived as irreverent or disloyal. She said that Lionel would have urged her to speak out, that he would have taken courage from her trying to tell the truth. She went on to say that everyone had always tried to make so much of her being married to someone more gifted than herself. “But I absolutely loved it,” she said. “I ate it up.”

I reminded her of what, years before, she had advised in response to my own difficulties—that one must try to assume generosity on the part of one’s readers. I said, too, how disheartening it was to read about a life that was presented as seamless, how one could only find hope, apparently, in the reflection of troubles recognizable as one’s own. I was speaking partly to give myself courage, prey to some of the same fears as she was. I had read many accounts of the connection between mothers and daughters, but almost every one of them had been written by a daughter. I hoped that my own dilemmas and guilts and confusions as well as my joys would be recognized by someone else. When I told Diana I had begun to give one or two people portions to read of my own work in progress, I saw her face change. “If you give your work to someone,” she said, “it’s impossible to control the response.” She warned me that I should be very careful, that response in the wrong place can set you back. I said I had taken this step because working in the dark a long time was so difficult. “Be patient, darling,” she said. “Be strong.”

After we had sat in silence for a moment, I asked, already knowing the answer, if life was any less turbulent when you were older. “It isn’t for me,” she answered. “And I don’t think it will be for you.” Then, as we were standing at the door, I at last in my coat about to leave: “I think we’re only half committed to reading Proust. We have to have our weekly dose of talk.”

We had at last left the Guermantes behind and embarked on The Cities of the Plains, plunging into the story of the narrator’s love for Albertine. His love, like Swann’s, is volatile, painfully attuned to absence, to anguished fears that the lover might be cherishing secret desires for someone else. But the inner world of the lover remains closed. After listening to an analysis of jealousy drawn out over many pages, Diana said how absurd it all was, how by contrast with the simplicities of Combray it was all too much, simply too much.

I remarked that I thought this an element of Proust’s genius; he risked absurdity, took things to the last length. Diana said nothing for a moment. “You’re right,” she said at last. “You’re absolutely right. And that’s my despair. My own writing doesn’t do that.” She had been rereading the memoir that now was almost finished and had decided that it was the public story. “But there’s another story yet to be told. My own. The texture of my days isn’t there.”

She said for example that once when she was a young girl she’d been walking with her father down on 18th Street. A man had approached, asking for money, and her father had reached into his pocket and given him a quarter. As they continued on their way, Diana had looked back over her shoulder and seen the man walk across the street and into a bar. Diana had asked her father, then, what was the point of giving the man a quarter if he were only going to buy a drink with it. “He needs that drink more than I need my quarter,” her father had replied.

“But where do I put that?” Diana said. “I can’t just thrust the story in anywhere, it has to have a place. What does it mean?”

I told her I thought Proust himself must have struggled with all this, that the manuscripts I’d seen in Paris, the week following our meeting in Venice, had revealed his confusion. There had been one bound notebook, I remembered, in which page after page of small legible handwriting, all in sequence, had been struck out with a firm line of black ink drawn diagonally from top to bottom.

All discarded. But also carefully preserved in case he should reconsider or wish to make use of them later, in another context. I told her, too, about the drawings in the margins, the doodlings, the woman in a long dress leaning on a parasol, and the railroad tracks, wide at the bottom, that running up the side of the page had narrowed to infinity.

Before long we’d arrived at that remarkable section in the same volume called “The Intermissions of the Heart.” The narrator is visiting Balbec a second time and, on arriving at the Grand Hotel, is bending down in the quiet of his room to take off his boots when he is overwhelmed by the recollection of his grandmother years before kneeling lovingly, humbly at his feet, assisting him in the same task. At once he is shaken by sobs. He has scarcely missed her; she has been dead a year and this is the first time her lost presence has broken in on him. Adding to his misery is the knowledge that he had inflicted senseless injuries on her, mocking her when she had posed for a photograph that she had secretly intended as a memento for him after her death. His mother’s mourning, so different from his own, is constant, irreversible.

As always when Proust is speaking from the place of wondering discovery, the rhythms of the sentences had changed and Diana and I sat breathlessly as the room filled with the cadences of a nameless grief. At the end of the passage my voice came to a halt.

Neither of us said a word. It was late October and already the luminous fanfare of ginkgo leaves was being swallowed by twilight. I was about to continue reading when Diana broke the silence. She said that beneath the narrator’s comparisons of his own superficial grief for his grandmother with his mother’s consuming sorrow she had heard some fear that he had never loved anyone in his whole life. “And I don’t think I have either,” she said.

For herself, she continued, she thought this incapacity had a kind of Freudian origin; her passionate love for her father had been refused and she had never been able to offer it again. She’d had only a glimpse of this possibility in all her years of analysis, but she thought nonetheless that it was true. Then she went on to say that although she thought she had herself never loved anyone, she’d never known anyone else who had either. Devotion: she’d seen plenty of that, how in the case of a couple she knew one cared for the other who had suffered from a stroke, cutting his meat, helping him up from a chair. But this wasn’t what she meant by love, any more than she meant Swann’s obsessive love for Odette, or the narrator’s for Albertine. No, what she was talking about was the passionate attachment, the fixed attention over time, the blaze that would brook no replacement.

We wondered, then, whether it was this undying love that everyone pined for, feeling in its absence that we alone had remained on the outside looking in, never having experienced what we are pleased to call life, watching others and envying them, imagining everyone else had known something we ourselves had not; whether we were all haunted by the fear that we had never lived, not really, that there was something we had missed, something waiting, even calling to us, that we had looked straight through without ever recognizing.

After sitting in silence some moments, Diana got up to draw the white curtains on the night. The phone rang and, after she’d promised to call back later on and hung up, I resumed reading, pursuing the slow tale of the narrator’s unraveling grief in Balbec. But we hadn’t got very far before we broke off to remember, at a distance of almost twenty years, our meeting in Venice.

“We picked each other up,” she said. “No,” she corrected herself, “you picked me up, there on the steps of the Schiavoni.” We recalled our lunch together, the icy beer and sandwiches, but she didn’t remember that she had talked about staying with her father at the Danieli or that she had invited me to stop at the hotel. When I had seen them at the coffee bar the morning I was leaving Venice, I told her, I had used the fact that I’d stumbled on the Danieli as a pretext to greet her, that Proust, who had stayed at the same hotel with his mother, like his narrator, had been present even then. “If you hadn’t stopped in the coffee bar we’d have never seen each other again. It would have been only another Venetian interlude.”

The air of intimacy was gathering in the room, the air of two people drawing close. I felt myself reeling away in terror, fearful of the presence of love. “I’m not good at expressing gratitude,” she said, “but I can never tell you what these afternoons mean to me, how important a part of my life they have become.”

I told her then that if I lived to be as old as she was now, I knew that these years of our reading together week after week would return to me.

She paused a moment. “Do you mean,” she asked—and here she spoke tentatively, carefully—“do you mean, perhaps, that you might think of me, I don’t know, but perhaps as some kind of a model?”

“I’m sure I will,” I answered, “but no, that wasn’t what I meant. It’s rather that I’ll be warmed by the knowledge that I’ve had this experience, that it will always be mine, however old I become.”

And then I saw in a flash—imagining myself when I was perhaps as old as Diana was now, looking back at the two of us from some faraway point in time sitting here in the twilight with the lamp and book between us—that the life we’d been talking about, the life denied us, was a creature of the air, a fancy, a way of giving a shape, a story, to the lives we’d been given: lives too various, too mysterious, too fluid in complexity and surprise to make sense of. And seeded too with death, with the end of things. In my own, for all time, amid so much else, a boy sat listening one snowy afternoon to a requiem, his head buried in his arms, and a class of children were instructed they must never forget that for someone else’s sorrow they must reserve their deepest bow.

The unlived life was the shadow against which our actual lives trembled and shook, the shadow that revealed the color and shape of what we had. We’d been talking, Diana and I, of our own fear—and the fear of so many others—that we alone were incapable of love, that we alone were excluded from the feast of life. I remembered my own terror when I was still young that books would deprive me of ordinary joys and sorrows, that my incessant reading disguised a fear of striking out. But here I was, so many years later, and it was once again the book Diana and I were reading together that was bringing in the news. Looking back at the two of us from some imagined point in the future, I could see that it was these moments together that had themselves been what my dream had named the pearl of great price, the life we’d actually lived, the pages we’d turned together these many afternoons.

V

There were days when I would arrive and Diana would say she was a little tired, would I mind if she put her head down on the pillow of the sofa while I read. She would tell me that if she fell asleep I was to let her know. She would close her eyes, then, and after some time had gone by without any sound in the room except that of my own voice droning on, when I had just decided she had probably fallen asleep and was asking myself what I should do, suddenly there would be a splash, as with a whale rising from the deep, and she would exclaim that this was a remarkable passage, what he had to say about his mother’s refusal of a kiss and Albertine’s displeasure was absolutely accurate, they both drew from the same source. Or, instead, in a different mode, she might suddenly, vigorously, declare that she didn’t believe a word of it, that here he had taken a wrong turn.

But one afternoon, when she was feeling unwell enough to have remained in bed and I was sitting in a chair in her bedroom, a silence continued longer than I had ever remembered it. I was reading the passage in which the narrator hears Albertine’s window flung open in the middle of the night and, in a fit of anguish, paces up and down in the corridor outside her room, vainly hoping that the sound of his footsteps will attract her attention. I continued to read on, but this time Diana did not stir. Facing me, on the bureau, were photographs of Lionel and Jim. A Blake engraving hung on the wall nearby. Beyond the room stretched the long hallway lined with books and at one end the OED on its stand, which I had often consulted when we weren’t sure of a word. The apartment was moving from light to dark, and when my voice came to a tentative halt I knew I was sitting in the silence that surrounded Diana every night when she turned off the lights.

Perhaps to keep myself from imagining too closely what that silence might hold, I resumed reading, and when Diana stirred at last I was just finishing the volume that concludes with Albertine’s rising early one morning and disappearing from the narrator’s life before he is awake.

But there was another occasion on which Diana, alert in her accustomed place on the sofa, one arm flung across its back, the other at rest on the arm beside her, listened to page after page without speaking. The narrator is describing the astonishing masquerade he walks into at the reception of the Prince de Guermantes, where he has expected to find old friends. The people he has not seen for many years are unrecognizable to him—as, indeed, he finds to his surprise, is he to them. Diana listened in silence to the long descriptions of the horrors wrought on faces by time, of the parade of grotesque figures, the puppets, into which the friends of his youth have been transformed. There came, then, a passage in which an old woman receives the news of the death of a contemporary not with sadness but with the satisfaction of a victor: the other is dead, but she is still alive. She feels she is alive because she has triumphed!

The room had been still for so long that I had wondered if Diana would speak only when the book was closed for the afternoon. But now, into the unbroken quiet, sounded a long, deep “No.”

“No,” Diana repeated after a moment. “That’s not the way it is. I used to imagine the same thing myself when Lionel’s mother would talk about the death of someone belonging to her own generation. I used to think that what she felt was vindication. But I was wrong: it’s not like that at all. Desperation is what you feel. You watch one friend after another removed and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Nothing. You feel absolutely desperate. To imagine you feel triumph is the mistaken idea of a younger person. I remember thinking that myself. Poor Proust didn’t live long enough to know.”

It was winter now and the ginkgo tree appeared nubby at the window, its limbs in the dim afternoon light curving like the neck of a dinosaur, a swan. We sat in silence, I marveling that although I had come across this passage in my earlier readings of Proust, it had never occurred to me to question its authority. And yet this was not the first time, with Diana, that I had hesitated before reading aloud a scene in which an older person figured. It was scarcely that Proust was lacking in imagination; it was rather that he had died in his early fifties. We at last took up the book to hear the aging Odette described as sitting a little out of the way while people, thinking she couldn’t hear a word, loudly tell each other not to bother speaking to her, that she is completely beyond it all, that no one need take the trouble any longer to introduce themselves or inquire after her.

“It’s not the disabilities of age that are so painful,” Diana broke in. “It’s the indignities. One is treated as if one no longer had a wit in one’s head. It’s truly maddening. The fact of age, it seems, disqualifies one for ordinary exchange.”

She sat thoughtfully for a moment, then threw one of the glances across the room that made it so difficult to remember that she was almost blind. “You know the three stages of life, don’t you? I never told you this one? Well, there’s youth, middle age, and finally ‘you’re looking wonderful.’”

I laughed and she continued. “Sometimes I wish someone would tell me I look like an old witch. Then at least I’d know I were still in life.” She paused, considering. “But sometimes, too, people my own age make me want to scream. Someone calls and says they saw something or other in the paper about the past, that they know that’s all we really care about now, the things that happened in our youth. What can this possibly mean? I want to scream. I don’t know why it upsets me so much.”

I told her, then, how my mother, who Diana knew was dying of cancer, went on with the life she had always led, going through the round of her days, inviting people for dinner, working in her garden.

“What an affirmation!” Diana said.

“Of what?” I asked stupidly, wanting her to spell it out.

“Of life!” she said. “Your mother has not given up on life. She is holding to the things that have always been hers, to what she is.”

Then, after another long moment of reflection: “I wonder if it is an act of will that keeps her going, or if it is something innate.”

I didn’t altogether understand the distinction: it seemed that the “something innate” might include an act of will. So, wanting her to elaborate, I asked what she thought it was for herself. Was it will, was it determination, that made the difference in her life?”

“No,” she said. “I never ask myself, when I wake up in the morning, if I’ll have the courage for today. It’s simply my nature to go on as I do, it’s the way that I am.” And then, returning to my mother: “She’s carrying on with her work.” There was another pause, followed a moment later by the words I’d heard her pronounce more than once before: “It’s our work that saves us.”

The end of the book had swung sharply into view. Each week I would tell Diana how many pages we still had to read; we were preparing ourselves for the voice to fall silent that had accompanied us through six years. “I feel as if I’m dropping off a precipice,” Diana said, and then one day in January, when it seemed we might finish that day, I told her we had only seven more pages to read. We at once began and when we had arrived at the last paragraphs I was unsure whether to break in to tell her so or to allow the rhythm of the sentences to carry us like a wave to shore. I could see, but she could not, that we had only two paragraphs remaining and then had arrived at the last sentence of all: “But at least, if strength were granted me for long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the result were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men first and foremost as occupying a place, a very considerable place compared with the restricted one which is allotted to them in space, a place on the contrary immoderately prolonged—for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch epochs that are immensely far apart, separated by the slow accretion of many, many days—in the dimension of Time.”

I had always imagined that when we reached the final word, the room would reverberate, that all our afternoons would, like the novel we had read, immediately assume the irrevocable shape of a completed work. But the silence that followed was open, answerable to the next. Diana looked up expectantly, and in response I told her we had reached the end. We sat there in silence for a few moments, and then began to speak of the abounding wealth of these so many afternoons. How during these years we had been writing our own books and how Proust’s voice had been present throughout it all, seductive, tedious, rapt. We spoke of how that voice finally seemed one’s own lost voice, the voice of one’s deepest self, how the narrator’s memories at last seemed to belong to a life one had known long ago. And I silently remembered the warm autumn afternoons among the chrysanthemums on the steps of the house in Avesnes and how those moments had once seemed to me to belong to some earlier, forgotten life.

“And even so we haven’t been a bit solemn, have we,” Diana said.

When I finally got up to leave, we stood at the door, looking back at the pile of books on the table by the sofa. “Goodbye, dear Proust,” I called out. “Goodbye.”

“We love you, Proust,” she called, and then, turning to me: “How silly we are. But at least it’s just the two of us.”

And yet, if not in the moment, at least in the weeks that followed we found the book had indeed set its seal on the years. We had thought to read next a book that could not possibly invite comparison, that was as far away from À La Recherche du Temps Perdu as we could make it. Half in joking one of us suggested Little Women, a book neither had read since childhood. And yet, after the astringency of Proust, we discovered that Alcott’s book was, as Diana pronounced it, “treacle,” better left to children. We tried one novel and then another, Cather’s A Lost Lady, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, but the long afterglow cast by our hours with Proust left us restless, easily dissatisfied. Was it because we would have thought ourselves disloyal to have fallen so soon into the embrace of another novelist? Or because our imaginations, deeply stained in the colors of Proust, were for the moment impervious? When we happened on Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a book about passionate attachment enduring over time, we were for the first time captivated. But in our new fascination we could not help feeling a stab of regret.

My mother died that fall, and a few weeks later Diana inquired about my father, who, having just turned ninety, was only a few months older than herself. She asked how he was doing, and whether I thought he would remarry.

“I hope not!” I burst out. If pressed, I might have admitted that I thought his age disqualified him, as well as his sixty years of marriage to my mother.

Diana sat looking at me and then quietly told me that she didn’t know if she had ever before been shocked by anything I had said but that this time she was. Why was it so preposterous an idea that my father marry again? Why should he not? I could see that her response was an outright expression of my own more unspoken outrage, and I sat chastened and silent. Whatever my reasons, she went on to say—and I knew she was thinking with some justification that I had no desire to share my father—I must allow him in any way I could to feel comfortable if he should find someone else, or make efforts in that direction. And I must remember that he had only a very few years in which to do so. I could have no idea, she went on, how lonely it was to be by yourself after sharing a life for so long, that he was only beginning to get the taste of it, that it grew more lonely with time. She said that she herself, in the first years after Lionel’s death, had thought remarriage would be an act of disloyalty. “But I have come to feel that I was wrong,” she said. “What I imagined to be disloyalty was in fact fear of life.”

Then, reflecting, she went on to say that in any case our culture looked on older women’s sexual lives very differently from older men’s. She thought that most people regarded sexuality in older women with mixed feelings verging on disgust and that this attitude had something to do with the middle-aged seeing their own mothers in elderly women. The whole business was altogether too complicated. Men, by contrast, however old, were regarded more tolerantly, even approvingly. Abiding sexual energies were seen as reassuring evidence of a firm hold on life.

Was it at this moment we spoke of the reviews that were coming out on Diana’s memoir that had been published some months before? As she had feared, there were indeed those who disapproved of her discussions of her marriage, thought she needn’t have disclosed things Lionel might have preferred left unsaid. “But you know,” she said, “every one of these reviews has been written by a man. Not one woman, in reviewing the book, has taken exception with what I said or has charged me with disloyalty. There’s a story in that.”

Then, as I was getting up to leave: “Too many buttons in life. Too many buttons to button and unbutton.”

We at last happened on R. W. B. Lewis’s The Jameses: A Family Narrative, a book in which we soon realized we might stretch and sprawl. It was both very long and very absorbing and would happily carry us over many months, perhaps even some years. As we turned the pages of the first chapter, however, gripped perhaps by fear of the future, one book after another suddenly occurred to us that we determined to take up when this one was finished. On a small paper, stuck in the last page of the book, I made out the list: a new biography of George Eliot that Diana had heard about, Amy Kelly’s life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth Gaskell’s of Charlotte Brontë. That taken care of, we let ourselves drop carelessly into the spinning world of the James family, of which Henry was our much-acclaimed hero. “Henry to the rescue!” Diana cried when we heard how, soon after their father’s death, he had immediately traveled to Milwaukee to visit his ailing younger brother Wilkie. It had come to light that Wilkie, sorely in need, had been left out of the will altogether, and Henry’s response had been to repair, with patient generosity, the wrongs done to his younger brother, corresponding with each member of the family. And we exclaimed approvingly when, as on many occasions, we were led to believe that he alone had been capable of responding to Alice’s sufferings with imagination as well as concern. Like the kindly Ralph Touchett to Isabel’s, I thought. I had in the intervening years reread The Portrait of a Lady but had not suggested the novel when we were looking for something new. Osmond seemed ever more terrible and Isabel’s deluded, fatal approach to him all but unbearable.

Diana had already told me that at her age, on arriving at the end of a piece of writing, it was difficult to resist the feeling that one’s life’s work was over, that one had completed what one was meant to do. But now, in the years following the publication of the memoir, it seemed that ideas for new work rushed in, writing of a more personal nature than formerly, the brimming life she felt had been left out of the earlier reviews and essays. One day she was telling me about the ways holidays had been celebrated when she was a child, and then how during the summers she had gone away to a camp in the Berkshires. “Perhaps I’ll write about that,” she said. “I haven’t begun to explore my childhood.”

I remarked how extraordinary it was, the surge of material at this moment in her life. “It couldn’t have happened earlier,” she said, “Not when Lionel was alive.” Perhaps she’d been given to polemical writing at an earlier time, she continued, because she hadn’t allowed what was more intuitive, more associative, to emerge for fear of competing with him. That was to have been his sphere. He had wanted to be a novelist; the life of a critic had always seemed to him second best. And until she’d written the memoir, she hadn’t been aware that she might one day want to look back to her childhood. They’d talked about their ambitions as they had about everything else, she said, absolutely everything. She could say whatever she liked to him because he never held anything against her. And he’d always said himself that she was underappreciated, that people didn’t know her worth.

I answered that his crediting this fact must have made a difference.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, musing. “It might have lulled me, made me accept things too easily.”

We had come to a place in our book where, in a discussion of Henry James’s novel The Princess Casamassima, Lewis mentions Lionel’s essay by the same name, its brilliance and insight. “Have you ever read that essay?” Diana broke in.

I told her I had, years before.

“He figured it all out from intuition,” she said, “and only afterward did the research. He’d come home from the library every day and say quietly, triumphantly, I was right, it was that way.” Further down the page Lewis went on to explain that although Trilling had got the autobiographical element right, it was Rosie Muniment and not the Princess, as he had supposed, who was based on Alice.

It was disquieting, after Diana’s eager account of the manner in which the essay had taken shape, to be floating on the air words that seemed to discredit it. But she listened without comment.

Years earlier Diana had once told me that before Lionel died he had destroyed the early manuscripts of his essays, the ones that showed the extent of her editorial assistance. And perhaps it was on this afternoon, perhaps another soon afterward, that she repeated the story. “I think I told you this once before,” she said. I told her I remembered and she went on to say that there may have been reasons for his having destroyed them, that she knew someone had told him that only the latest manuscripts had any value, although she herself couldn’t understand why this should be the case. But then, she continued, he hadn’t destroyed other early manuscripts, ones she’d had no part in. “It’s not a pretty picture,” she said.

We sat thinking about this and then she said, after a long pause, that perhaps she had particularly stringent values, that perhaps she extended her censure too readily, on too many fronts, she didn’t know.

In the spring of 1996, soon after Diana had been diagnosed with cancer, she returned to the question of judgment. It was an afternoon in May and the ginkgo was in full leaf, casting a green light in the room. The day was warm, almost a summer’s day, and we were sipping iced tea. The Jameses lay open in my lap, but we were making slow progress. “I have never been able to get over the idea of wanting people to be perfect,” Diana said. “And where did I get the idea they should be? I suppose, as in everything, from my family. I’m judgmental, I know that, I’ve said hard and harsh things, and this has given me a bad reputation in some quarters.”

She was sitting on the sofa with her arm extended along the back, wearing a dark blue shirtwaist and blue stockings, her face thoughtful. After our time together she had an appointment for a CAT scan.

“Well,” I said at last, “you’re full of responses and feelings in regard to people, that’s true. And you express them strongly. You say what you think and leave it at that. People are sometimes offended or think you’re wrong. But it seems to me that you’re also flexible in your judgments. They seem to be changing all the time.”

“I hope you’ll put that in writing,” she replied.

“I will.”

Then she told the story of how Eudora Welty had long ago forgiven her. When Diana had first begun to write for The Nation in the early 1940s, she had written a review of a collection of Eudora’s stories. “I could have put what I wanted to say differently,” Diana said. “I needn’t have been so harsh. I was just showing off.”

Then one Sunday afternoon, years later, perhaps in the late 1950s, a group of her friends and Lionel’s had planned to take a picnic to Saxon Woods. It was early summer and there was a rainstorm, so they had all decided to stay in the city. They had spent the afternoon in the apartment, where we were sitting now, getting drunk. Every once in a while someone would run out to buy another bottle while the others, in desperation, rummaged through the cupboards, drinking whatever they could get their hands on. At last, when they were all reeling, Diana remembered that she and Lionel had been invited that night by some friends for dinner. But nobody could move. So she had called and explained the situation. The friends said she needn’t worry, Eudora Welty had been with them all afternoon and that they would all come over to Claremont Avenue. Diana had been apprehensive, but when Eudora arrived she had greeted Diana warmly, showing no trace of bitterness. Someone put on a record and they had all leapt from their chairs and begun to dance, Eudora kicking off her shoes. Soon everyone was spinning around the room in tipsy oblivion.

It was on that same afternoon that Diana told me that the strangest thing had happened since she had received her diagnosis. She found that she had been drained of all ambition for herself, she could scarcely remember what it was about. Not the writing itself, but where she would place it, how it would be received. Instead she lay awake at night worrying about her friends’ work, wondering how it would fare. This had become her preoccupation and she couldn’t shake it.

Diana’s “camp story,” as she called it, came out that summer in The New Yorker. With the money it earned, Diana rented a house in Wellfleet for two months rather than the customary one. I called early in July, the first weekend after she had arrived. The car ride up had done something to her back—the car seats were “not designed for human beings”—and as we spoke she was prone. But from where she was lying she could look through a window and see the green leaves of summer stirring in the sun.

Then she told me about her days. From nine-thirty in the morning until one o’clock, she worked with the help of a secretary. Afterward she was free to have lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon and evening with friends who had come to visit. Her ninety-first birthday was only a couple of weeks away and Jim and his wife and the grandchildren she loved would be with her. “I don’t know how people grow old without work,” she said. “And writing is the best work of all. You can set up a schedule that will make it a part of every day. And you can take it with you anywhere.”

She began to speak again about the lightly moving leaves she could make out on the other side of the window, how they kept her company in the room where she was lying. There were spots of sun there, too, she thought. Or she was remembering the trees of her childhood.

“But you sound radiantly happy!” I exclaimed, thinking how dazzling the light had been on the steps of the Schiavoni and how we had moved away into the shade waiting for us beneath an awning.

“If these are the final months of my life,” she answered, “I could not be more so.”

We said goodbye then and only later did I understand it had been for the last time.