Grief

Am presently reading Grief by Andrew Holleran. The general consensus seems to be that Holleran's first novel, Dancer From the Dance, is his finest, but I found The Beauty of Men, a heartbreaking meditation on loss and loneliness, emotionally profound in a way Dancer, a celebration of youthful passion, etc, could never hope to be. Here's something from Grief, which I'm enjoying very much thus far:

"He was now a sort of homosexual emeritus. Sex had left him in its wake. He was a man who'd been riding the rapids of a river, who finally finds a cove, a still pool, and pauses there to catch his breath--though after a while he realizes it's not just a pause, but rather the place he has ended up, beached in the sunlight, exhausted, no longer able to get in that cold and tumultuous river again."

Three more things which struck me in Holleran's superb novella, both quotations the narrator comes across:

"On a gloomy winter afternoon, a scholar sits in his elegant pavilion as a kneeling servant prepares some warm tea." From the descriptive text next to a Chinese scroll painting in the Freer Gallery

"You should go out every day and enjoy yourself--you are so very young and should be as gay as a lark. Trouble comes soon enough, my dear child, and you must enjoy life, whenever you can." From the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln

"For sorrow, such as ours, there is no balm, the grave and Heaven, with reunion with our loved ones, can alone heal, bleeding, broken hearts." ibid.

I didn't know a thing about the suicide of Marion "Clover" Hooper-Adams, wife of Henry Adams. Now that's an American Gothic. From Grief: "He was forty-seven when his wife killed herself. She had just taken care of her own father till he died. Then she returned to Washington. Everything seemed fine. Then one day while Henry Adams was downstairs reading she went upstairs and swallowed one of the chemicals she used to develop her photographs. She left a note saying that if only she had one good quality, she would have continued living, but she didn't. Of course she had lots of good qualities--she had just nursed her father through his final illness. It was pure depression, pure guilt. Adams was devastated--but his grief took an unusual form. The day after she died, he came downstairs, tore the mourning band off his arm, and forbade anyone to mention his wife's name ever again."

And finally, I read somewhere that Holleran initially had reservations about having his author photo used on the book jacket or in any publicity material because he didn't want some trick or bathhouse encounter to recognize him. I know I've seen a picture of him somewhere but all I can really remember is a very 70s-looking moustache. For some reason though I kind of imagine he looks like the very dashing William Faulkner as captured by Henri Cartier-Bresson in the photo at the top of this post.