Saints

Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lemann.  New York Review Books.  199 pp. *****

The Oyster Diaries a novel by Nancy Lemann.  New York Review Books   240 pp. *****

Transcendence for Beginners: Life Writing and Philosophy by Clare Carlisle. New York Review Books.  194 pp.  *****

Lives of the Saints is not a book I would expect to like.  It concerns a group of decadent aristocrats in New Orleans, which is deadly hot and swampy, with overhanging trees and lush vegetation that is stifling just to read about.  These people wear formal dresses and seersucker suits to social occasions and sweat through the heat.  They have little apparent stress in their lives yet suffer constantly from (what they call) nervous breakdowns.  They seem to live on alcohol alone.

This is the kind of novel where a man walks up to a beautifully-dressed woman during a long day’s celebration and says, “Could I get you a drink?”, and instead of saying, “No, I’ve already had fourteen,” she says, “Why yes, I would love one,” as if that were a spectacularly novel idea.  The novel opens with a wedding reception—for a couple that is already on the verge of splitting up, though they were married hours before—and it is the hottest, sweatiest event imaginable, though I’ve lived most of my life in Durham, NC.  New Orleans seems to have another kind of heat altogether.

I thought the day would never end.

Yet in the midst of this world there are saints—at least two; there is even a small child whose name is Saint—and a woman narrator who, though she is living a life much like everyone else’s, working as a clerk in a law firm—is able to perceive them as saints.  That might be even more rare.

We like our saints to be obvious.  Mother Teresa or Bishop Desmond Tutu.  We don’t want them portly and sweaty, smelling of alcohol, chasing after women, smoking cigars, or—in the case of our most unlikely saint—constantly tearing up matchbooks and pieces of paper in a nervous habit that leaves a trail of trash in his wake.  And yet, in the unlikeliest of places, these men have open loving compassionate hearts despite all their flaws, and they inspire love in the woman who observes them.

That would be Louise Brown, our narrator.  She knows the whole social scene, has known it all her life, but has a special thing for Claude Collier, the young handsome man who keeps leaving scraps in his wake.  He is, despite his apparent indolence, a creative person, an inventor; he’s patented a shrimp shelling device that I for one would like to get my hands on.  He lives on family money and the earnings from his inventions, and apparently, though he seems to be staggering around drunk, is in a constant state of creative ferment, envisioning new inventions.  Or maybe he’s waiting for inspiration to strike.  (Or maybe he’s just drunk.}

His father, Saint Louis Collier (there’s a name for you) is one of the finest attorneys in town but hardly seems to practice law.  He is obsessed with classical languages and opera, and loves to do gardening projects; he more or less lives for the weekend when he can indulge in these things and play with his young son Saint, the child of his old—or at least late middle—age.  Saint is especially precious to him because his birth his begetting marked the end of a long uneasy hiatus in his marriage, when his wife was disaffected from him.  We never hear why exactly (though the man is definitely eccentric.  On one occasion he has lit eight cigars at one time, and when Louise asks why, he says, “Because it’s Sunday.  Hmm).

Lemann, to say the least, is a novelist who works by indirection; that first scene lasts forever, and we are way into the novel before we realize what the book is actually about, if we ever do (if it is about anything).  It seems to be just a comic portrait of these eccentric people, but I would like to venture the opinion that it is really about Louise’s love for Claude, who keeps coming back to her and seeming to love her but then disappearing (and often showing interest in other women).  He also hangs around a collection of New Orleans low-lifes, and though that seems to be saintlike behavior on his part, loving all people as children of God, he apparently gets involved in a horse-betting scheme that has gone awry.  By the time we’ve decided that the novel is about Louise’s love for Claude, we’re convinced it can’t have a good end, but the moment when it does end, in the novel’s final scene, in fact its final paragraph, is nevertheless heartbreaking, but also open ended.  This novel that never seemed to be going anywhere doesn’t wind up anywhere either.

Dwight Garner has expressed the opinion that Lives of the Saints is superior to the much more recent The Oyster Diaries, and while that may, strictly speaking, be true, anyone who finishes Lives of the Saints will want to move on to this new book, especially when we hear that Claude Collier returns in it.  The narrator in this novel is named Delery Anhalt, and though she has a different name than Louise, and a different history, all the old obsessions are there.  She has lived in the DC area but returns periodically to New Orleans; she is bookish, witty, and self-deprecating, just like Louise; opera and classical languages are once again central to her story, and most of all, though Delery is married with two children, she seems to be in love with Claude, who shows up midway in the book.

She too is a master of indirect narration; there has been a problem with her marriage though it takes forever for us to nail it down.  Plot details like that aren’t the point in this book or in Lives of the Saints.  The point is to enjoy the ruminations of this offbeat but extremely funny and interesting human being.  She reveals in this novel that Claude was “one of those men” who frequented strip joints and patronized prostitutes, for whatever reason, though all women seem to love him.  He also, when his marriage ends, cares for his disabled child on his own, though his wife has left with the other kids, and instead of this being a burden, it’s a huge blessing.  He’s now grown portly like his father, still sweats buckets, and has all his old bad habits.  He’s also as saintly and love-inspiring as ever.

I think that ultimately, both of these books are about the woman who narrates them, and honestly, I’d read ten books by her (though there is a final section of this book, about an African safari, that feels tacked on and rather stupid; I wish she had cut it).  I enjoy her company, and her mind.  Garner recommends a nonfiction book that I expect to move on to soon—it was commissioned by Vanity Fair but killed because it didn’t adhere to the magazine’s standards.  (I wouldn’t have expected it to.  Had they read the woman’s work?)  Nancy Lemann is a real find.

I seem to be on a New York Review Books kick, but that is strictly coincidental.  I discovered Clare Carlisle’s book in a New Yorker feature called What We’re Reading, not a traditional book review at all, more like the quick takes on Goodreads or Amazon.  But it convinced me to check the book out, and I’m glad I did.  It focuses on a more conventional kind of saint, or religious figure.  But the collection of people Carlisle has come up with is offbeat and fascinating.

She is a philosopher by trade, but her writing life has focused on lives of various people, including Spinoza, George Eliot, and Kierkegaard.  She devotes a substantial section of this book to the very activity of writing lives, which she has given her life to.  And she delivered the chapters of this book as Gifford Lectures, a series of talks at ancient Scottish universities that have inspired a number of distinguished books (the list is astonishing  https://giffordlectures.org/).7y

Carlisle begins with Spinoza, a philosopher whom I read in a survey of philosophy that I did in college, but I have no memory of him.  Her book on Spinoza is called Spinoza’s Religion, and that title seems apt; what he says in his Ethics sounds astonishingly like the teachings of Eastern Religions (though with a different vocabulary): there is only one God, we are a part of that One, everyone and everything is a part of it; when we die we’re still a part of it.  Einstein supposedly said, when asked if he believed in God, “I believe in the God of Spinoza,” and—as Smokey Robinson once said—I second that emotion.  Spinoza’s view not only makes sense; it is one of those teachings that I always believed in some deep part of myself, but had never heard anyone express.  But Spinoza expressed it centuries ago (and Eastern religions centuries before that).

Carlisle has also written a book on the British novelist George Eliot, who got her start translating Spinoza’s Ethics (at which time she was known by her given name, Mary Ann Evans).  She then proceeded to write her mammoth novels—including the book that some people consider the greatest novel of all time, Middlemarch—in which she embodied the ideas of Spinoza.  Eliot expresses the idea that human beings influence each other in diffusive ways; they might not be great leaders or important people, but they still have substantial influence.  Carlisle points out that writing a person’s life can have a similar effect, what details the author chooses, what she chooses to leave out.  In a way, every biographer is creating a different person.

Carlisle also writes about Kierkegaard—a man I’m less familiar with—whose instincts agreed with Spinoza’s view but who was trying to reconcile them with more traditional religious views.  In the course of writing about these people, Carlisle mentions that she has changed her own life in various ways, beginning to meditate and do yoga, and that she met realized people in both of those endeavors.  But the most interesting chapter in the book for me was the one on Ramana Maharshi, the most extreme person in the book.  I’ve read about him before, but never in such a cogent and fascinating chapter.

Maharshi famously had an experience when he was young of an extreme fear of death, after his father died.  We all have that—I certainly have—but he faced it directly, lying on the ground and imagining he was dead.  He could imagine his body being dead but felt there was something within him that would survive.  He went on a pilgrimage to a nearby sacred mountain named Arunachala, and pretty much never left.  His mother pursued him and pleaded with him to come back, but he let her know he couldn’t.  Years later she came to join him there, and he lived with her at the base of the mountain.  When she died, he built a structure in honor of her, then founded an ashram at the base of the mountain, where he lived for the rest of his life.  I don’t know if it is correct to say he practiced meditation or that he was in a state of meditation all the time, but people who visited felt a profound peace in his presence.  Countless people reported that, both Easterners and Westerners.  Carlisle’s own meditation teacher had had an experience with the man, and no less an eminence than Somerset Maugham once visited, and base his novel The Razor’s Edge on that experience.

This whole chapter illustrates what Carlisle had been saying about diffusive influence.  Maharshi had no wish to influence anyone; he was just leading his life as he saw fit, but eventually influenced countless people all over the world, sometimes in mysterious ways.  Carlisle’s meditation teacher, for instance, had had a traumatic experience in World War I and was facing a personal crisis when he had a vision of Maharshi, though he’d never heard of him or seen his picture.  In another context that would sound crazy, but by the time we get to the incident in this book it’s hardly even surprising.  Maugham was a rationalist if there ever was one, and a non-religious person, but even he had a major experience of some kind when he encountered Maharshi, and wrote about it beautifully not only in his famous novel, but in his final piece of writing, an essay called “The Saint.”

I’ve come a long way from stumbling across Lives of the Saints in a review devoted to another book.  Sometimes I wonder at the magical way books seem to fall into my life in exactly the right way.  I see the same thing in Claire Carlisle’s life; one book led to another, and to a life’s work that all somehow goes together (and it’s far from over; she’s still a young woman).  I highly recommend Lives of the Saints, with The Oyster Diaries on the side if you fall in love—as I did—with Lemann’s voice.  But Transcendence for Beginners is the big discovery this time around.  I’ll be exploring more of Carlisle’s books.