MEMOIR: ENDA WYLEYreviews A Widow's Story: A MemoirBy Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, 415pp. £25
YOU HAVE BEEN married for 47 years. One February morning your husband is suddenly hospitalised with pneumonia. There are strong hopes for his recovery, but in a few days he dies of a secondary infection, some weeks before his 78th birthday. You make a decision. You will write a book that will track the details of the death and the pain of the ensuing year. It will be a widow’s story.
Not everyone would respond to such a gut-wrenching experience like this, by writing a memoir, but Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 50 novels and of numerous volumes of poetry, short stories and non-fiction, and A Widow's Storyis a driven response to her pain.
Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinkingit chronicles personal grief, but unlike Didion's slim volume Oates's memoir, at more than 400 pages, is an exhaustive and somewhat relentless account of the disorientation and loneliness of widowhood. When at one point she is sent a present of Didion's book she praises it for its "melancholy wisdom". But perhaps she should also have noted the brevity of form that Didion employs to execute her perfectly shaped, heartbreaking tale.
The memoir is at times enlivened by Oates’s sense of humour. She derides fruit baskets sent as sympathy gifts. One of her cats urinates on her husband’s death certificate. But elsewhere she can be cruel in her observations. She dedicates a whole chapter to Jasmine, the talkative, TV-watching nurse, “her voice high-pitched as the cry of a tropical bird”, and cruelly describes her as “a distraction, an irritant”. But when a note left on Oates’s badly parked car outside the hospital reads “LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH” the author is surprisingly philosophical in her response. “So, the widow-to-be, like the widow, is made to realise that her situation, however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn’t give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others, especially strangers who know nothing of her.”
As a portrait of the dynamics of their marriage, the memoir seems rushed, too sketchy. It is amazing, for instance, that her husband, Raymond Smith, an “excellent editor, sharp-eyed and informed”, had not, Oates tells us, “read most of my fiction and in this sense it might be argued that Ray didn’t know me entirely – or even, to a significant degree, partially”.
Theres a striking literariness about the way both inhabit their world, even in the face of serious illness. At his hospital bedside she reads the bound galley of a cultural history of boxing that she is reviewing for the New York Review of Books; encumbered by his nasal inhaler he tries to read a book she has brought him from home; she is preparing her fiction workshop at Princeton University, and she worries about hauling packages of book jackets, page proofs, galleys into the hospital for her husband to work on.
Not easily will Oates let us forget that her husband is an impressive editor, not just of the Ontario Review, the literary journal that he founded with his wife, in 1974, but also of his independent publishing house, Ontario Review Books, established in 1980, which, alongside other publications, has reprinted many of Oates's own books.
She is the “widow of a good man”. Even weakened with pneumonia her husband is still “thinking of . . . the responsibility he bears to the writers whose work he is publishing. He isn’t thinking of anything as petty as himself”. In contrast, by her own admission, she has become “one of those blighted/wounded/ limping/sinister malcontents in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama”, and seems encouraged by her friends to be this way. “Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it,” her friend Gail Godwin writes. While Gloria Vanderbilt encourages, “One breath at a time, Joyce. One breath at a time.”
That Oates embraces her tale of loss and anguish with gusto seems in direct contradiction to her own advice that a widow should be “reticent in grief, mute and stoic”.
We are also rarely allowed to forget that Oates is an eminent author of an enormous oeuvre. The memoir is littered with e-mails to her famous friends and editors – Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, Edmund White, Richard Ford. After an event she organises for the writer George Saunders at Princeton he remarks that literary writers of the 21st century "are artisans who have fashioned elegant friezes on walls, beauty of a kind to be appreciated by a very small percentage of people, and of course by one another".
That slightly self-regarding tone can afflict this memoir, which, for all its acute observations and undoubted courage, might have benefited from more editing.
Enda Wyley is a poet. Her fourth collection, To Wake to This,is published by Dedalus Press
