`A Grief Without a Pang'

On page 4, the second page of text, the book lifts out of the merely interesting into some “wider realm”:

“My work attunes me to the versatility of words. I like language that’s allusive but solid enough to allow comic somersaults within its gravity, while meaning radiates from its premises to wider realms.”

These are sentences that enact precisely what they articulate. The book, A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode, ostensibly belongs to a genre I never read -- the contemporary memoir – one I associate with scandal, victimhood and rancid prose. But I remember with pleasure his 1975 novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and the splendid review John Gardner gave it and the remarkably stupid and condescending review it received from Gilbert Sorrentino. Bill Kauffman reviewed A Step from Death two months ago in the Wall Street Journal, and ever since I’ve wanted to read it. Kauffman writes:

“North Dakota's apartness has been a blessing, the author says, in part because it emboldens him to reject consumer- and pop-culture: `I don't need a new car to enhance my identity, and don't have to go shopping to certify I exist, and don't watch with slavish addiction a version of the nightly news, which more and more is a fictional construct.’”

That quote from the book cinched it for me, but it’s also misleading, for A Step from Death is in no sense a tract, and Woiwode recognizes the vulgarity and essential futility of rant. He writes his memoir in the form of a letter to his only son, Joseph, a helicopter pilot serving in Iraq. Like Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, which is framed as an extended letter from a 76-year-old pastor in Iowa to his young son, the book is rooted in history, family, religious faith and the rural Midwest. In 2005, a momentary act of carelessness on his North Dakota farm nearly cost Woiwode his life. As he works to unjam the hay baler behind his tractor, his jacket snags in the mechanism. His account of the two hours he struggled to free himself ranks with the most compelling narratives I’ve read in years -- suspenseful, funny (in the middle of his suffering, he thinks, aptly, of a line from King Lear), humbling and un-heroic. He hobbles away with cuts, bruises and broken ribs.

City dwellers have little sense of the routine dangers faced by farm workers. Woiwode’s ordeal reminds me of an accident the happened near Richmond, Ind., in 1984. I was a newspaper reporter there, and casually friendly with a guy about my age who worked in the backshop and also ran a dairy farm. His wife one day was backing up the family tractor and failed to see their six-year-old son behind the machine. He was killed instantly. Many of us from the newspaper attended the funeral. The casket was open and beside the little boy, whom I had never met in life, was a toy tractor – his favorite toy, I was told. I was three years away from being a father for the first time, but the sight of the toy and the motionless body caused me, and most of the others present, to weep. Woiwode interrupts his description of the accident to write what might stand as his writerly credo:

“I’ve always enjoyed the company of working people, including writers who record the existing world to reshape or better it, rather than those so enmeshed in writing they’re overwhelmed, nearly speechless, at their significance.”

His devotion is always to “the existing world,” to creation and the convolutions of the human heart. Some of the most moving pages I’ve read thus far in A Step from Death concern the late William Maxwell, the novelist who edited Woiwode’s early work at The New Yorker. They shared another bond: Both lost their mothers while they were still boys – a loss always at the heart of Maxwell’s fiction. When they first speak of the unhealed rupture in their lives, Maxwell begins, “To lose a mother at that age --,” and stops. Woiwode writes:

“It’s all he says, and we sit in the resonance you feel in the air after a church bell rings in the steeple next door, and then a tear slides from a corner of his eye – the right the most prone to spill – and although he has said it to me, I know he’s referring to himself, too, and his mother, who died when he was ten, and he doesn’t say a word more. We attend to the resonance like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. He is sixty, resilient, cheerful, the only person I know who can speak with joie de vivre while tears runs, but he’s never been able to accept her death.”

The knowledge of unexpected death, injury and disease hover as a theme throughout the book, especially when the memory of Woiwode’s son, a soldier in a war zone, returns. I started reading A Step from Death in the park near our apartment where I took my younger sons Sunday morning. While they ran around the playground, unmindful of mortal matters, I sat reading at a picnic table. A woman in her mid-thirties and a boy of about 10 walked by me and sat on a nearby bench. The boy held his left hand flat against his throat as though stanching blood. His gait was twisted, his face fixed in a toothy rictus. His body, like my sons’, produces more energy than it consumes but his was turned inward, causing him to writhe and twist even as he sat. He never seemed to hear his mother’s soft voice. She walked him to the women’s restroom and they walked away. When I looked again at my kids tearing about on the playground, I was shamed by my complacency in the face of such good fortune. Early in his recovery, Woiwode remains in pain regardless of how he arranges his body. He sleeps at his desk for an hour at a time, head on his folded arms, amid reproachful piles of manuscript. He can read only when standing up:

“The only book that holds my attention above the pain is Early Visions, the first volume of a biography of Coleridge by Richard Holmes. I like Holmes’s wit and precision of language and his take on the dark side of Coleridge’s opium addiction, which I sympathize with in my daze of hydrocodone-muted pain. It’s no help to rise up and try to pace away the discomfort of sitting, so I read standing up. I move to the second volume, Darker Reflections, and finish the thousand pages of both in a week.”

Holmes’ life of Coleridge is among the supreme literary biographies, and I too, without the prod of pain, read both volumes in a single great swallow. Woiwode is in no sense Coleridgean, but he shares an aptitude for expressing the theme sounded by Coleridge in “Dejection: An Ode”:

“A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear…”

Only in precise, artfully chosen and arranged language.