Waldrop - Light while there is light : an American history

L IGHT W HILE
T HERE IS L IGHT

An American History

Keith Waldrop

Introduction by Jaimy Gordon

For Elaine

The overtakelessness of those
Who have accomplished death...

E MILY D ICKINSON

Work, for the night is coming....

O LD H YMN

Contents

I always knew I was not going to measure up as a literary giant, so from the start I put my hopes on making myself a name as a literary pygmy, that is, on writing one great but undoubtedly odd, sui generis, irreplaceable, one of a kind, modestly immortal book. The book I had in mind would be a novel along the lines of Richard Hughess A High Wind in Jamaica, or Sybille Bedfords A Legacy, Elizabeth Bowens The Death of the Heart, Walter Abishs How German Is It, Witold Gombrowiczs Ferdydurke, J. R. Ackerleys We Think the World of You, or Harry Mathewss Tlooth. True, each of these novels being by its nature unlike any other, they reveal nothing in common to the aspiring imitator, besides being the one book by their various authors (some prolific, most not) that one really couldnt live without. Oh yes, and I first heard of all of them from Keith Waldrop, the best person I know to talk about books withwhatever it is, hes read it, has an opinion on it, and has it in his library on Elmgrove Avenue in Providence, in the next room, or just upstairs.

Therefore its both fitting and something of an impertinence that Keith Waldrop would end up writing such a novel himself. Beautiful, funny, wise, sad, endearingly economical in size, guaranteed one of a kind in voice and subject matter, inimitable, universally admired by that small percentage of the human race that has read it, Light While There is Light, which first appeared from Sun & Moon in 1993, was an instant eccentric classic. In protest I step out of the line where the would-be writers of one great but peculiar novel are waiting, to write this introduction. I will be brief.

Where was the need? Keith Waldrop is a poet with some fifteen volumes in that other genre to his credit. Both his first, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968), and his latest, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, were nominated for the National Book Award, which he won in 2009. He is the translator of another ten or twelve books, including an important, illuminating prose version of Les Fleurs du mal . As co-editor and publisher, along with his wife Rosmarie Waldrop, of Burning Deck Press since 1961, he has been a major influence on two or three generations of innovative writing in America, and was even knighted by the Republic of France in the year 2000named Chevalier des arts et des lettresfor his contributions. In short, Keith Waldrop is a fully arrived international person of letters, a literary giant, there you have it, and a brilliant visual artist besides. So where was the need to toss off a great small novel like no other?

Light While There is Light, though surely a work of imaginative fiction in design, is a bit shifty about its genre. It calls itself, not a novel, but An American History. A bookish, patient, witty, gently melancholic, ruminative narrator with the same name as the author and a rare gift for anecdote recalls his bizarre but profoundly American and Midwestern family, not from withoutand this is the special art of the bookbut from within, as a member, lifelong, like it or not, willy-nilly.

All my family, and Julian is our type in this, have a streak of the unworldly, the narrator tells us. Long before Keith is born, just after the birth of the oldest of his three half siblings, Motherpossibly in reaction to an offhand remark from that handsome wastrel, her first husbandgets religion and passes it on as a lifelong quest to her young family, which, despite many obstacles, hard travels, and theological and financial gyrations, never entirely loses it again. The books long opening chapter, which takes up almost half the novel, is entitled A Pilgrimage; in due course we realize that Mothers long search, at first with her one marriageable daughter in tow, for a church sufficiently homelike, unworldly, and doctrinally pure, will never end, not even when she comes to rest, in her last days, in a rented garage in Champaign, Illinois.

The terrible truth that haunts the family and the novel is that the world might simply be dull and meaningless:

The history of my mothers religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hells worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.

It takes an eccentric, Waldropian sort of genius to see a weak attachment to the world-as-it-is as the common thread between Mothers wounded and wary fundamentalism, sister Elaines cheerful obedience, brother Charles and brother Julians talent (talent is not quite the word) for flimflam and otherwise illegal solutions to all of lifes problems, and the narrators troubled spirit: I was often afraid in those days, more than a little sometimes: afraid that there was no truth, or that there was one truth, only one, and that I had it. His faith wavers and slowly blinks out, becomes one of the books many shadows of an absence.

Light While There is Light takes its title from the Gospel of John, 12:35-36: Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.

At rhythmic intervalsin this respect as much like music as collagethe novel revisits the theme of the narrators own relations with light, in brief, image-rich variations throughout the text, each floating in its own shining white space. Is this the light of the title? The light of God? Of revealed truth about a God we once thought to grasp with our senses? Maybe it is justlight. The physiological phenomenon of light, its perception and attendant sensations, is a subject of deep interest to Keith Waldrop the poet. Passages about it, images of it, are scattered all over his work. But in Light While There is Light, it is both itselflightand the leitmotif for the origin and end of faith: what precedes it, what survives it.

I remember, for some reason, a film I once saw, in which sequences resembling old, contrasty photographs faded, not into darkness like the usual fade, but into a bright white empty screen, so that the story seemed sketched in elaborate shadows against a field of perpetual lightshining now through the pictures, illuminating them, and now supplanting them, shining on its own.

The odd balance of pleasures in a small, perfect, one-of-a-kind novel can be inventoried better than it can be explained. Some of its delights may sound like suffering when lifted out of the book for closer examination: for example, Light While There is Light is an exemplary Midwestern novel (though a substantial chunk of it unfolds at an unaccredited Bible College in Sharon, South Carolina) in its understanding of space as a baffling, featureless surpluswhat is a pair of towns like Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, doing in the so-called real world at all? And yet, only because Keith once tried, briefly, to go to university there, a good many family members get stuck in the homely sister cities seemingly for lifeeven after the family used car lot is no more (see chapter three, Discerning of Spirits). I hate to accuse the narrator Keith Waldrop of anything as banal as a Midwestern trait, but what else, pray (I still live in the Midwest) is that polite hopelessness in the face of an ever receding normal that one eventually concludes was never there in the first place?