Lessons from the Deep End
‘Waiting is what ghosts do,’ says Stuart Dybek.
Mavis Gallant’s “When We Were Nearly Young” is a story that has saved my life for many years. It was introduced to me in 2019 by a woman I worked for at the time. I was fretting, worried to death that I would never go to the university because I was just not smart enough. (I had had two F9’s in Maths, GCE et WAEC; I tried GCE again and had D7). My boss recommended the story because she thought it would calm my nerves. She understood. She was nearing or past forty, had applied to MFAs in the US for years but had not gotten into any school. (Meanwhile, the friends she helped with their apps got in.) Year after year, like the narrator in this story, she ‘heard the ritual ‘No’ everywhere.’ (She has been at Cornell now for a couple of years.)
I have probably heard the story read in Antonya Nelson’s voice (on the New Yorker: Fiction podcast) a hundred times or more. The last time was two days ago. This is how it begins: ‘In Madrid, nine years ago, we lived on the thought of money. Our friendships were nourished with talk of money we expected to have, and what we intended to do when it came. There were four of us—two men and two girls. The men, Pablo and Carlos, were cousins. Pilar was a relation of theirs. I was not Spanish and not a relation, and a friend almost by mistake. The thing we had in common was that we were all waiting for money.’
‘Money’ appears three times in that paragraph; the emphasis is telling. That brilliant phrase—to ‘live on the thought of money.’ Like quelling hunger by dreaming of food? Why does Gallant emphasise argent?
Some context. The narrator in this story is an American who travelled to Spain to treat the deficiencies in her character. As she says, ‘My choice in coming here had been deliberate: I had a plan. My own character seemed to me ill-defined; I believed that this was unfortunate and unique. I thought that if I set myself against a background into which I could not possibly merge that some outline would present itself. ’ As Nelson says on the podcast, this ‘character is probably not unlike Mavis Gallant herself.’ In fact, in her preface to her Selected Stories, Gallant described how everyone thought she was crazy when she decided to leave everything behind in America and go off to another country to write. William Maxwell, then-fiction editor at the New Yorker, was the only one who thought this ‘was perfectly natural.’
In the new country, our narrator meets the afore-named Spaniards: Pilar (twenty-two and a widow), Pablo (mid-twenties, like the narrator), and Carlos (the oldest, at twenty-nine). All four characters are worried about growing old, and with nothing to show for done time. For the narrator, being in a country where she knows no-one, no easy help to run to, you can understand how pressing the need for money must have been, especially when all four of them live on the edge of ‘a financial crisis,’ one that they will eventually come to at a similar time.
But money, though central (‘Poverty is not a goad but a paralysis,’ Gallant writes), though it is the thing waited for, is not what this story is about. Gallant’s piece is a study of waiting—‘this blank amiable waiting state that had become the essence of life’—and the numbness that can come with that, the inability to act, the fear that you might be waiting in vain, that the ship is drowned, the chest of precious things gone forever, and all your life now would be merely to look at the horizon, hoping that a dot would emerge, a dot that something would magnify. And yet if a dot emerged it would be nothing but a message-bird, dumb, bringing news it cannot tell.
Lessons from the deep end.
‘Waiting,’ says Stuart Dybek, another master short-story writer, ‘is what ghosts do.’ Only, we are the ghosts. We are all dead until the resurrection; life is essentially a waiting for the resurrection.
Until you find the woman or man who will animate your existence, a part of you is ghost. Until you make a poem, the energy that is passed into the words is non-living. You wait for it to be. Until it be’s it is not. Only God waits for nothing (really? really); only He is living. And only those who are a part of Him, as a leaf long stuck to soap becomes soap, are alive in Him. But even as we are alive in Christ, we are ghosts in time. Faith is the reconciler.
In time, all things are potential. I am potential. You are potential. Even this blank space that I am marking up is. And as things that may or will or may not be, there is an interim where being, or intended being, is not yet manifest. That interim is the hard part. And it is from that hard part, that deep end, that I fish these words.
The year is not at its end yet. Mountains may yet become valleys. The goad may yet give in. Breaches in the dream may be healed. (Has the Sun of Righteousness not risen with healing in His wings?) But standing with my two feet on the rough disgruntled back of the year, I can look back over the past eleven months and say, ‘Ah.’ And, ‘Ẹṣé.’
We are all dead until the resurrection; life is essentially a waiting for the resurrection.
It has been a year of waiting, of waiting like the narrator of “When We Were Nearly Young,” who says, ‘My existence had been poised on waiting, and I had always said I was waiting for something tangible. But they had thought I was waiting in their sense of the word—waiting for summer and then for winter, for Monday and then for Tuesday, waiting, waiting for time to drop into the pool.’ (That other kind of waiting is also pregnant with potential; it is ghosts (in a figure) waiting, not for the resurrection, but for the putting off of mortality—and not to put on immortality. A waiting to decay. Resignation. It is a negative process, but it is a process of actualisation, too. (I would say deactualisation but that would not be right. A man must become, either this or that.))
I have not spent my year waiting negatively. Scripture says we are not like those who beat the air. I have tried to work (though I am a mediocre even at being diligent) and pray (I am a mediocre of the spirit, which would be good if I was not also arrogant: Do I contradict myself?). But even actively waiting can be painful. I asked myself several times this year why I should be investing in literature if it cannot pay. Why learn the Gettysburg Address by heart when your mates are ‘crushing it’ using AI to produce lucrative junk? What is promise if it cannot buy bread?
On Sunday, in the Christian Life service (our Sunday school), Reverend Abraham talked about the resurrection. He brought up Joseph. I had looked at the story of Joseph a while back. Reverend said, ‘Right from when his brothers sold him into slavery, Joseph was a dead man.’ He was dead, as Paul would say, ‘in a figure.’ (Reading Genesis recently, I was amazed at the power that fiction, that constructed lie, even an image—such as a coat dipped in goat’s blood or a man’s garment in the hand of a duplicitous woman—can have.) Jacob mourned his son and thought him dead. To his brothers, he was as good as dead. When they came before him in Egypt, they had come to believe their own ‘fiction’: ‘And they said, Thy servants are twelve brethren, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan; and, behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is not.’ (Genesis 42:13; my emphasis.)
The prison to which he was sent when Potiphar’s wife incriminated him was a figure, too: of Hades. Peter said of Christ that He ‘also went and preached unto the spirits in prison.’ (1 Peter 3:19.) Meaning Christ went to Hades. As a state, metaphorically, Joseph was in the land of the dead.
However, the moment when Pharaoh ‘sent and called Joseph,’ in Genesis 41, a dead man came back to life. The ghost waiting for the resurrection saw it. Dry bones were clothed in flesh; the veil that is process fell off and potential was reconciled to fact. He would wait (for his brothers to come, for his father, too, to join them, for the Salvation of God, which he would not see), but in a sense all his waiting henceforth would be in ‘minor’ keys.
Antonya Nelson says of Gallant’s story, ‘It seems to celebrate the way that a life changes just because it’s time for it to change.’ (My emphasis.)
I like that. I think about that. 🔷
Read “When We Were Nearly Young,” here. Visit the New Yorker: Fiction podcast to hear it read, here.
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