(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)
Jim responds to what he knows must be her deep pain by recounting the story of some of his own scars in some detail. His older son weathered his parents’ divorce in 1962 pretty well, but Jim’s younger son Marshall seems permanently damaged by it. Early problems in school are followed by more severe ones in later life: drug addiction, abrupt personality changes, and finally, a complete breach with his father. Jim writes,
Last fall he phoned me suddenly in a long and terrifying speech barely coherent, full of anger and confusion. Shortly afterward I received a letter from him. He told me that he did not want me as his father. Since that time, I have kept in touch with his mother, and I’m helping financially without his knowledge. Annie has been a great support through it all, but I have mainly clung to my books, my writing. . . . Leslie, I am not telling you all this in despair, and I ask you to forgive me for laying out my worst pain to you. I just wanted somehow to tell you that I understand how you feel about your children.
Telling her his own story is, as he says later, his way of sayinherish and guard the story of his letter, which she realizes was told with grief and love and compassion. She writes, “I believe more than ever that it is in sharing the stories of our grief that we . . . can feel that we are not alone, that we are not the first and the last to confront losses such as these.”
Her belief in the power of stories is rooted both in her vocation and her culture, “The root of each Navajo healing ceremony is a particular story–by now very ancient stories–but the idea is clear: certain stories at certain times have healing property.” Knowing which story to tell when and just how to tell it is an art, one that must be informed by love: “All we can do is to remember and to tell with all our hearts, not hold back, because anything held back or not told cannot continue on with others.” These friends, then, are a source of consolation and strength for each other. As Leslie writes, “Of all the times you might have written to me and this exchange between us have begun, this is the time when I most needed to hear from you. . . . I am just thankful that we are so fortunate to find each other again.”
They also give one another inspiration that nourishes their craft. Jim sends Leslie six new pieces he has written, saying that their friendship provides their inspiration and that their correspondence “is one of the finest things I have ever had anything to do with in my life, and I trust it will continue.” And Leslie reflects on how her feelings for Jim make her “realize” things in language that she would otherwise miss. She says, “With you to write to, I go through the day with a certain attention I might not always have. I look for things you might want to see for yourself, but I can’t seem to get them into a letter.” Even when she does not find the time or calm to write to him, she goes through her days composing letters to him in thought.
Given the nature of their relationship, it is not at all surprising that when Jim Wright learns that he has what is likely to be a terminal illness, Leslie Silko is among the few to whom he discloses the full gravity of the situation. On December 18 he writes that “in determining who to tell, I have considered that I want to share the worst of this news with a very few people whom I admire and value the most, and it is interesting to me that you stand very high in my mind among those.” He says that he would wish to be able always to send her happy news, but that the tragic news belongs to her too. He closes by saying, “Please don’t despair over my troubles. I will find my way through this difficulty somehow, and one of the best things I have is my knowledge that you exist and that you are going on living and working.”
In her letter of January 3, Leslie, in her characteristic way, responds with a story. She recounts the saga of Hugh Crooks, who came to Laguna in his early twenties with what doctors thought was terminal tuberculosis. Years went by, and then he was in a terrible car wreck, sustaining injuries that people thought would be fatal. More time passed, and his heavy drinking brought on what looked like terminal cirrhosis, yet he recovered from that as well as from a gunshot wound (which he sustained while being robbed), pneumonia, and cancer of the gums. At almost 80, Hugh is “known almost solely for the simple fact that he is alive.” She closes by saying:
You are a dear dear friend, Jim. In so many ways it was you who helped me through those difficult times last year. At times like these I often wish I had more to say, but somehow it comes out in a story. I hope all this does not strike you as too strange. I seem not to react like most people do at times like these. I think I sense your calm and your deep faith. I know it has to do with your wonderful writing and, more importantly, with the visions that emerge from it.
This is the last letter from her that Jim is able to read. Leslie, in Manhattan for a speaking engagement, visits Jim in his hospital room on February 6. His cancer of the tongue makes it impossible for him to speak, but he responds to her conversation by writing on a pad. He later reflects on the visit by writing to Anne: “I have the sense of a very fine, great person–a true beautiful artist.” Leslie’s final letter to Jim arrives after his death:
Dear Jim,
I have been trusting another sort of communication between you and me–a sort of message from the heart–sent by thinking of you and feeling great love for you and knowing strongly that you think of me, that you are sending thoughts and feelings to me; and you and I, Jim, we trust in these messages that move between us. I cannot account for this except that perhaps it is a gift of the poetry, or perhaps it should be called “grace”–a special sort of grace. I am never far from you, Jim, and this feeling I have knows that we will never be far from each other, you and I. . . . Knowing and loving someone has no end. . . . It is not easy to avoid confusion. What I wanted to do was stay in New York, move in with Annie, and sit with you and talk with you. But that would have been confusing one present time with another present time. Anyway, I know you understand, Jim, and I know Annie does too. In one present time, you and I can count the times we’ve met and the minutes we’ve actually spent together. . . . There is another present time where you and I have been together for a long long time and here we continue together. In this place, in a sense, there never has been a time when you and I were not together. I cannot explain this. Maybe it is the continuing or on-going of the telling, the telling in poetry and stories. . . . There is no getting around this present time and place even when I feel you and I share this other present time and place. Anyway, I treasure the words you write–your name most of all. But no matter if written words are seldom because we know, Jim, we know.
My love to you always,
Leslie
Leslie’s words to Jim reflect her deep feelings, yet are also set in a general view of reality that she expressed in a letter she wrote to him much earlier. She explains, “Death never ends feelings or relationships at Laguna. If a dear one passes on, the love continues and it continues in both directions.” On another occasion, she writes, “The trouble is I’ve never said good-bye to anyone I love. Where most people learn is with death, but at Laguna the dead are not gone, so no need to say good-bye.”
The ongoing connection on which she depends is not rooted in sentimentality or escapism: there is another present time and place, but there’s no getting around this present time and place. One senses that Jim does share this understanding; Leslie’s existing and living and working maintains his own connection with present time. What these two know is not easily grasped; but they know.
A considerable part of Western popular culture would construe all “friendship” between men and women as either failed or incipient romance. In using The Delicacy and Strength of Lace to sketch a conception of such friendship, I have tried to offer an alternative to this view. But some may think that calling on the correspondence between James Wright and Leslie Silko as an example of friendship between men and women is cheating. A relationship as short as theirs, the skeptic might say, consisting almost totally of letters rather than firsthand contact, is too easily prevented, by circumstances alone, from “taking its natural course.” Thus, Leslie and Jim have no need of insight into the creative tension that supposedly allows women and men who are friends to endorse and contribute to one another’s destinies while not being impelled toward union. Physical distance and shortness of time are what allow their intense feelings to remain friendship, not “balancing” or “standing at a distance.”
This view would, however, ignore the role that references to Jim’s wife, Anne, play in their relationship. Early allusions to her are incidental, impersonal references, reporting the fact that she and Jim have traveled to one or another place together. But as the relationship between Jim and Leslie deepens, this changes. Of the birthday gift of lace that he sends to Leslie, Jim says, “Happy birthday from Annie and me.” As we have seen, Leslie closes the letter in that she has expressed loneliness and a wish to converse directly with Jim with “I miss you–take good care of yourself and Annie.” Such references characterize three of her last five letters. Jim’s planned trip to the Poetry Center in Tucson is to include his and Annie’s staying with Leslie. In the letter in which Jim tells Leslie of his illness he says:
It is a shock, of course, perhaps the most cruel shock that a middle-aged person can face. But I have found that I have a number of considerable powers to help me. I have always been happy with my marriage to Annie, for example, but I suddenly have a deeper and clearer understanding of how very strong this marriage is.
Thus, as the friendship deepens the friends repeatedly invoke Annie, emphasizing to each other the fact that one of them already shares a joint destiny with someone else.
Among the most tender passages of Leslie’s final letter to Jim is that which tells of her struggle not to become “confused.” Annie’s place is by Jim’s side; Leslie’s is not, no matter what her wishes might be in this regard. She cherishes the “grace” of the deep connection Jim and she have forged between them; she also realizes the distance that must be respected in order not to usurp Annie’s place. Fittingly, the last letter written to Leslie comes from both Jim and Annie:
Dear Leslie,
I can’t write much of a message. Please write to me.
Love,
Jim
We loved seeing you last month. James is moving to a fine new hospital on Friday. We miss hearing from you. How is the roadrunner?
Love,
Annie
Annie is confident enough in Jim’s and her shared destiny to bless (and even make public) the remarkable delicacy and strength of the bond between her husband and this other woman. This is a powerful affirmation that Jim and Leslie’s friendship, deep and intense as it was, achieved an equipoise that made it no threat to other commitments that constituted each friend’s destiny. Here is delicacy and strength; depth with the flexibility necessary for fitting into a complex constellation of commitments within which the friendship, while of great worth, does not displace vital and central commitments. The “space” within the destinies of the two friends that makes the friendship viable is created by the vows that define other central commitments. In the case of Jim and Leslie, these are Jim’s marriage vows.
Although the friendship between Silko and Wright has intrinsic value, the relationship has a creative focus beyond itself. Grace is not a phenomenon merely internal to the relationship, but flows outward through the destinies of the friends. For Leslie and Jim, grace flows in the continuing and ongoing of poetry and stories.
Caroline Simon is associate professor of philosophy at Hope College and coeditor of Perspectives. This essay is adapted from her book The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny and Imagination, just published by Eerdmans. To order this book, call 1-800-253-7521.
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 28
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