The Beauty of Metaphor

I recently finished a remarkable book of short stories by Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain, reviewed in the NYT here. I am not easily persuaded by contemporary authors to love them, and can count only on one hand the number whose books I wait for with eagerness, or whose stories will energize me when I see their names in Granta or The New Yorker. I am a hard customer, for sure.

That said, a few weeks back, I was poking around our local bookstore, one of the few that Amazon hasn't killed yet. I read a few pages from The News from Spain and found myself transported. Wickersham's voice spoke to my cynical soul. There were no secret mothers in this book, no adoptees (Colm Toibin, one of my favorite writers, recently pissed me off by extolling family secrets in "The Summer of '38"). Alleluia for Joan.

In particular, I loved her discussion of unruly emotions in the last story of the book. She used the metaphor of servants, doing our bidding, or not doing our bidding, or beating us up. It's admittedly a white, upper middle-class metaphor, and maybe I like it because of my penchant for British history and Henry James. Who knows?

But still...her words are evocative, at least for me.

"it occurs to me to return to the servant metaphor--to invoke again those evil retainers, to add new members to the staff, who were by now holding me captive, doing whatever they wanted. Rage: a stable boy, unwashed, brutal, very strong, barely capable of speech. Shame: the housekeeper, a tight-lipped woman dressed in black with sparse greasy scraped-back hair, who hissed excited filth at me and watched--to guard against impropriety, she said--while the butler stripped me naked and beat me."

And again:

"You meet someone, you fall in love but you are able to keep your feelings mostly hidden; occasionally they cough, or break a dinner plate, or burn down the kitchen (accidentally? On purpose?), but mostly they stay out of sight when other people are around. At night they have run of the house. It's a creepy, even sinister menage. An outsider who happened to glimpse it might be horrified--might as you in a whisper if you needed to be rescued: Wouldn't you like to call in the authorities? But no, you're fine. It's your own lunatic household; you know how everything works. You've all been together for so long that the servants have acquired a battered credibility. They've endeared themselves without ever having become likable. You respect one another's endurance."

Oh, the kitchen burnings I could describe. Lovely, delicious metaphor.

I am having dinner next week with Nearly Perfect Man on Paper and his wife. I know he will appreciate this metaphor, having endured many of more than a few of my servants' roundly recalcitrant outbreaks. I am glad that we're attempting friendship, of the real and not metaphorical kind. Some people do simply understand you; finding them is difficult, keeping them can be hard, as well. But it's worth it, especially if you're an eccentric. I daresay he, being an eccentric math professor juggler, might have discovered that I am not so bad, either; we used to finish one another's sentences in multiple languages. I was joking with him about what it's like teaching math to today's youth, and he said that respect for math is what it's always been, and they'd better keep off his lawn. Sense of humor is intact.

Age has the great effect of sanding off one's sharper bits, as well. We will see.