Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is Necessary Sins
This is a strange situation. I read this book in 2009, and judging from the archive of long introspective posts I wrote about the book, it obviously touched me on a very deep level. But I can’t remember one word of the book. I don’t remember reading it, I just flipped through it and remember no passages I read, it’s as though I never read the damn thing. I remember books that I read when I was a teenager better than I remember Necessary Sins. This is not a dis on the book at all. There was a lot going on for me when I read the book. I had been unable to read in the early months of 2009, and had given up on completing several books, because I wasn’t retaining anything, I couldn’t get through anything, and Lynn Darling’s marriage-memoir was the first book I was able to finish, and I think my exhilaration at being able to read was part of my response to it. But that’s not just it. I was clearly inspired by the book to do some pretty deep thinking, about love, about narrative (especially narrative – one of my themes of 2009). I look at the posts I wrote about Necessary Sins and I don’t remember writing them. That’s a hell of a lot of words to not remember writing.
Necessary Sins is Lynn Darling’s memoir of her illicit courtship and eventual marriage. He was a bigwig writer at The Washington Post and I believe she wrote for the Style section. That much I remember. He was married and had a couple of kids. They had an affair. He left his wife for Lynn Darling. The book ends with her husband’s death.
I remember crying AS I read the book.
But more than that, I can’t say. The book made a huge initial impact and nothing is left of that impact except the passionate posts I wrote about it back in 2009.
Very strange.
It’s not at all my type of book, either. I don’t care about your marriage. I don’t care about how you fell in love. The only reason I care about someone else’s marriage is if I am already interested in that person. Joan Didion. Madeleine L’Engle. Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. I care about what you have to say about marriage if I am already a fan of your writing. But I have no idea who Lynn Darling is. The book came highly recommended by the marvelous Jessa Crispin (aka Book Slut), and she has never steered me wrong. I’ve encountered a lot of incredible books by following her lead.
So yes, I read Necessary Sins and it is apparent from my posts about it that I got a lot out of it. I didn’t enjoy it so much as I identified, related, felt named, recognized. I also seemed to have been disturbed by some of it. My thoughts on narrative, and being the one to tell the story, and the competitive subtext I felt in Lynn Darling’s book – made it interesting. (Apparently.) This is not a mushy book. This is kind of a disturbing story. Her grief at the loss of her husband is real, but look at the title of the book. Getting together with her husband was a debacle for her in many ways. She got a reputation. She became “the other woman” in the gossipy world of The Washington Post. She already wasn’t taken seriously (she was a bit of a party girl, a wild child), and her love affair with her eventual husband may have been a “necessary sin” in her eyes – but there were definitely casualties. There’s a heartlessness to the book.
And as someone who spends much of my time writing personal essays, I related to that heartlessness. Yes, everyone has a story to tell, and it’s great to “share”, and blah blah, but underneath all that, often, is a selfish drive to beat everyone else to the punch, to OWN the narrative: This is how it happened.
That tension makes this slim volume rather unbalancing.
At least from what I gather in my responses to it.
But I was baffled looking for an excerpt this morning, because as I flipped through the pages all I could think was, “I don’t remember any of this.”
Pulled out this section of the beginning of their affair. Reading this now, I think, “Well. She certainly can write. I should read this book some day.”
Excerpt from Necessary Sins
Over the next few weeks, in late February and early March, we met for drinks several times. The invitations on both sides were always offhand, spur of the moment, as if the idea had just occurred to whoever was doing the inviting, which in my case was patently untrue.
I loved our conversations, the volley of black-humored observations and literary references. He was cool to look at, to play against. His charm played beneath the surface of his features, appearing in the briefest of smiles before disappearing once more into deeper waters. I was drawn to the banked emotion I sensed but would not see until later.
I liked the way he laughed at me, at my sense of melodrama. He was amused at my neurotic approach to writing, just as I was amazed by the offhand confidence of his. In Vietnam, he would pour himself a drink and write his copy for the day – after the last round of parties in Saigon, after the last round of mortar fire in the field.
His humor was dark, wry, worldly. Again and again, that is the word I come back to – he was intrigued by the world, its degradation and splendor, the opium dens of Laos, the slums of Soweto, the sinuous allure of Venice. He waded into the largeness of life, and that fascinated me. I lived in an interior world of intense, often murky, self-definition. It was only later that I saw the symmetry between us. Our explorations, one convex, the other concave, comprised a whole.
Lee’s impatient disdain for the machinations of the powerful was real, but so was admiration for their antithesis: the everyday courage and kindness of ordinary people. And he found it everywhere: Saigon, New York City, Accra, Benin, Burkina Faso.
He never made a display of his own kindness, and yet the unstinting testimonies poured forth in the condolence letters, from the freelancers whose fledgling careers he nurtured, to the refugees from Pakistan and Saigon for whom he found homes and jobs.
“Ouagadougou revives my contact with the types who give large chunks of their lives to relief work,” he would write in a letter from the Hotel Silmande in 1985. “Many are just doing a job that pays ok but many are quite wonderfully inspired with the desire to help others. I’m not concerned with the managers who stay mostly in Ouaga, I mean the men and women who bring their families to stay 4-5 years or more and work on a single project to aid a village, a school or hospital or whatever. Progress is so painfully slow it is a wonder there isn’t more cynicism. But then managing to ease the lives of even a few or few dozen people on one scale certainly should be more rewarding than, say, writing scrapbooks full of newspaper articles.” He was about to set off on a long trip through dangerous country with a driver he couldn’t understand in a car about which everyone had doubts on a road that turned to glue when it rained. “Should be worth a paragraph or two.”
As the conversations continued, I began to feel an unfamiliar camaraderie with this diffident, mysterious man, as if under all the differences we were somehow kindred. An intimacy developed, and something else besides. I was intensely attracted to him, and I began to see, in the way he let himself look at me, that the attraction was returned.
We didn’t flirt – not in the way I defined it, anyway, hiding behind double entendres and practiced gestures, skipping between provocation and retreat, hoping to be followed but never found. Flirtation was the best of games, and I had always loved to play it with proper men like him, rubbing against their rectitude the way a yearling rubs the downy fuzz from his antlers against the bark of a tree. But this was foreign country to me. I felt no urge to conquer, no combustible alloy of anger and desire, no lie at the heart of it, none of the hollow druglike urgency that desire induced.
Instead we talked, and drank, and drank some more until it grew late and looking deep into each other’s eyes, we called for the check. Back on the street we smiled and said good night and got into separate cabs. What did he want? What did I?
It was not a question I had ever needed to ask myself. Desire in its own right had always been enough. Until then I was entranced by the mere possibility of passion, the way it created its own reality, set in motion by the beauty of a man’s forearm when he rolled up his sleeves or the way he raked his fingers through his hair. For such gestures, Virginia Woolf wrote, one falls in love for a lifetime. Or at least for a night. I loved the way the heart just turned and suddenly there was someone you wanted more than anything – or just as suddenly wanted no longer. I couldn’t understand why anyone ever got married. Passion was perfect because it was unconnected to the real world, because it overwhelmed, at least for the moment, everything you were meant to be or were supposed to do, conferring the exuberant license of a snow day. In some obscure way I knew it was an escape of sorts, a balm for anxiety and a way to delay the future, but that had never seemed like much of a drawback.
Now Lescaze had come along and screwed the whole thing up. I had tried to turn him into a character in my latest fantasy, but he refused to play the part. He didn’t have the kind of vanity that puffs up in the presence of admiration. I had tried to turn myself into a character he would find fascinating, but that hadn’t worked either. He seemed to look right through my attempts with a kind of amused patience, as if waiting for me to simply settle down and be myself. As if he had seen the good in me and was just waiting for me to see it too.
That was the difference between him and all the others, I realized finally. He offered me the chance to connect the dots between my public and private selves, maybe even to find bedrock. And heart in throat, I took it.
