I write and edit for a living. Have for years. Most of it is a combination of flackspeak and journalism, short and sweet, avoiding the hyperbole that my client base always wants. I like to imagine I’m channeling Hemingway as I slash away at bloated copy and reduce an item to its essence. (Think the Associated Press Handbook, not the Chicago Manual of Style.) But I occasionally get to write something I’m proud of, something I’ll return to and read and rearrange and tweak and massage just a little. “No good writing, just good rewriting,” I remind myself. Yep, yep. I can do that.
It’s usually at this point that I’ll pick up and read something that smacks me in the forehead and makes me realize I am a hopelessly illiterate hack who should trash her word processing software before she does any more damage to herself or the English language. Annie Dillard’s little burnished diamond “The Maytrees” is my latest lesson in humility. I have a copy of her much-acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” sitting in one of my to-be-read piles scattered around the house — so many books, so many more distractions — so this was our first encounter.
It’s a small-canvas version of an old story — boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy leaves girl for other girl, with ensuing complications — but the beauty, of course, is in the telling of it. Dillard’s spare style suits the setting, a worn Cape Cod community in the years following WWII, and the simple but deep lives of her characters. For me, the book asks — and answers — a haunting question: Can love really last? The answer is: Yes, it can and does, but sometimes in ways that you might not expect.
Maytree, the husband, mulls his choice of the bohemian Deary over his wife, Lou.
Early with Lou, and then with Deary and again now, he returned to this: Why can love, love apparently absolute, recur? And recur? Why does love feel it is — know for certain it is — eternal and absolute, every time? He opened a notebook and found a passage he had copied from Kafka’s letters to Felice. “I have no crazier and greater wish than that we should be bound together in separably by the wrists.”
…Perhaps everyone gathers or grows an enormous sack of love he hands whole from one beloved to another. In this instance, the beloved is love’s hat rack. Or, second, perhaps love is delusional. The heart never learns and keeps leaping the length of its life… Or, third, perhaps he never really loved Lou, let alone his other girlfriends, and, having learned love by loving, had found in Deary his true mate at last.
All three… apostatized. They apostatized by saying that love between man and women, or anyone and anyone, beyond those eighteen months that science allows for infatuation, was imaginary, or theater, or inertia, or convenience.
Lasting love, Maytree later concludes, “is an act of will. It is a gentleman’s game.” And, much later, at the end, as he watches those he abandoned care for the dying Deary, he wonders at the origins of that loving, selfless care. “Was that tending love genetically or socially determined convention? …That steady wish on which he had acted for years and Lou and Pete had acted on for eight weeks — was love?”
Love is an act of will, I think, and an act of service: We serve those we love, we hold them in our hearts and look to the best for them, always. And, if the fates are kind, they do the same for us. Annie Dillard found a much better way of saying it.