The Friendship of Books

“Lasting friendship is rare. It requires constant maintenance and is never a passive accomplishment. Not so with books. Despite our neglect and ingratitude, they remain constant, happy whenever we return.”
Patrick Kurp

You form your friendships where you find them. They can be anyone, anywhere, at anytime. There was an era when book collectors and readers had a close relationship with books and its characters. They viewed them as friends, companions, as real as any person and for some that era still lives on.

In Companionable Books, first introduced to me by Patrick Kurp on his blog, Anecdotal Evidence, George Gordon writes, “What most men and women are looking for all their lives is companionship…There is a companionable quality in some books that skips the centuries…”

The neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, in Ian McEwan’s Saturday is as real to me as anyone I will ever hope to meet. I continue to think about his ideas, his medical expertise and his sense of humor. Perowne’s daughter is a poet and he is amused by her tutorials to try to get him up to speed about literature.

In turn, I was entertained by their delightful banter and the ironic exchanges they have about his disinterest in following her lead. And it is clear that Perowne isn’t much of a reader. So even though he is a deeply reflective man, I suppose one should not have been surprised, as I was a first, by the following passage:

Henry read the whole of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, two acknowledged masterpieces. At the cost of slowing his mental processes and many hours of his valuable time, he committed himself to the shifting intricacies of these sophisticated fairy stories. What did he grasp after all? That adultery is understandable but wrong, that nineteenth-century women had a hard time of it, that Moscow and the Russian countryside and provincial France were once just so.

No, Henry is a scientist devoted to his work and the promise he sees in neurophysiology. Still he is restless, at times silently dissatisfied with his life, and yearns for something more. If it is anything, the missing element is music.

There’s nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he’s being denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs. There has to be more to life than merely saving lives.

It’s hard to find a friend quite like Henry Perowne. But he became a close friend during the time I was reading the book. I greatly enjoyed his company and the chance to spend some time with him. And once in a while, I think back on our conversations and return to the ideas we discussed. It seems we had a good deal in common especially our tendency to spend part of each day ruminating about one thing or another and examining the contents of our mind down to the smallest synapse.

That Saturday Feeling

I like going to the cleaners and the coffee shop on Saturday morning.
Condeleezza Rice

When I was younger, I recall a distinctive feeling that used to sweep over me each Saturday. Every now and then it comes to me again. How to describe it?

The week is over, so are classes for a while. The homework can wait. The day is wide open. And it was usually sunny where I grew up. Saturday is different and what is clearly different about it is the prospect of not having anything I must do. It is a free day. That which must be done can be put on hold for a day.

Saturday

Today is Saturday
a day to relax
and lie in the sun
a day to drink lemonade
when all the works done
a day to eat strawberries

Barbara Stahly

And so the Saturday feeling is a blank space, an open range of possibilities and unknowns. It is like being at a traffic circle that takes off in half a dozen different directions. Which one to take? Around and around I go.

In remembering that elusive feeling, I am, of course, also reminded of Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, a novel that engrossed me for days. In Saturday McEwan charts a Saturday in the life of a reflective, London neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne. Henry rises early, glances out the open window of his townhouse and sees a plane off in the distance falling in flames as it approaches Heathrow. The mood is set. It looks like Henry’s Saturday is going to be an ominous one.

And yet I think Perowne also felt that special Saturday feeling as he started to ponder the day ahead and how he might spend it. He didn’t have to rush off to the hospital, worry about his next operation, give a lecture or attend an endless series of meetings. He could do pretty much whatever he wanted—play squash with a good friend, take a drive in his silver Mercedes, plan what to cook for a family gathering that evening, or simply ruminate about his discipline, his family, and the troublesome times in which he lives.

And Henry ruminates a great deal:

For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. …. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this... He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist.

Yes, to a certain extent that is the way I feel on Saturday now—momentarily free of the past, a sense of calm about the day ahead. And when Saturday is over, I am likely to measure myself a little bit by how I chose fill up the space that loomed before me as the day began.

The Power of the Pen

In the early morning light on this island in the tropics, I drink my coffee outside on the lanai, as it is called here. The trade winds had moved on and the canal along the building where I live is calm. Dover Beach drifts into my mind.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Two stanzas later it concludes:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

And then I am reminded of a section in Ian McEwan’s Saturday where Dover Beach came to the rescue, indeed, saved the lives of Henry Perowne and his family. Perowne, a well-established London neurosurgeon, returns home after a harrowing Saturday in 2003 as America is about to launch its second war in Iraq. On the way to his early morning squash match, he is involved in a minor automobile collision with a criminal that Perowne immediately recognizes has an irreversible brain disease.

Later that day, the criminal returns to Perowne’s elegant home to take revenge on him and those who have gathered to welcome the return of his daughter, Daisy. Baxter, the criminal, is holding a knife to Perowne’s wife, Rosalind, and asks Daisy, whom he has told to strip, to read from her newly published book of poems. She is terrified, doesn’t know if she can begin or what to read, and looks to her poet grandfather, Grammaticus, for a hint. He senses her dilemma and tells her to read one that she used to recite for him. Daisy catches the hint at once and begins reciting Dover Beach.

Baxter is transfixed by the beauty of the poem. “You wrote that. You wrote that,” he says in amazement. He asks her to read it again. When she is done reciting, Baxter’s mood changes suddenly. He is thoroughly disarmed, overcome, as McEwan writes, by “a yearning he could barely begin to define.” He removes the knife from Rosalind’s neck, puts it back in his pocket, and tells his sidekick he has changed his mind; the tension is broken, the threat is over, and the eventual overpowering of Baxter can begin.

Here, in the extreme is the power of literature. In fact, it saved the life of Perowne and his family. The experience is not only the stuff of fiction. While not exactly a work of literature, reading from a book called The Purpose-Driven Life played a central role in saving the life of Ashley Smith, who was a year or so ago held hostage for hours in her suburban apartment near Atlanta by Brian Nicholas, on the run after killing two people during his escape from a courthouse trial for an earlier murder.

Smith claims that reading and speaking with Nicholas about the book gave her a chance to simply talk with him and begin the process of gaining his trust so that he would allow her to leave the apartment to see her daughter. Once out of the apartment, she called 911; Nicholas was captured moments later. Who knows what might have happened had she not been able to read sections of the book to Nicholas?

The Car in Literature

I return to the car for an additional comment. While automobiles play such a central role in the life of most individuals, as far as I know, they hardly play any role in contemporary literary fiction. However, there is one notable literary exception, It is in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday. Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon depicted in the novel, keeps a silver Mercedes S 500 parked in a nearby garage. McEwan describes what this car means to Henry who tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms and in so doing makes it clear that there’s nothing about a car that cannot be the stuff of fiction:

“...this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device [automobile] is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first…

Henry lives in a fashionable section of London where three and four story townhouses were built around a central square long before anyone ever heard of an automobile, let alone a garage in which to park it. So Henry must walk to down the way a bit to collect his car parked along with others inside a nearby building

He walks down a faint incline of greasy cobbles to where the owners of houses like his own once kept their horses. Now, those who can afford it cosset their cars here with off-street parking. Attached to his key ring is an infrared button which he presses to raise a clattering steel shutter. It’s revealed in mechanical jerks, the long nose and shining eyes at the stable door, chafing to be free. A silver Mercedes S 500 with cream upholstery— and he’s no longer embarrassed by it. He doesn’t even love it—it’s simply a sensual part of what he regards as his overgenerous share of the world’s goods. If he didn’t own it, he tries to tell himself, someone else would. He hasn’t driven it in a week, but in the gloom of the dry dustless garage the machine breathes an animal warmth of his own…

It’s Theo [Henry’s son] who disapproves most, saying it’s a doctor’s car, as if this were the final word in condemnation. Daisy, [Henry’s daughter] on the other hand, said she thought that Harold Pinter owned something like it, which made it all fine with her. Roslind [Henry’s wife] encouraged him to buy it. She thinks his life is too guiltily austere, and never buying clothes or good wine or a single painting is a touch pretentious. Still living like a postgraduate student. It was time for him to fill out.

Still Henry has mixed feelings about the car. Yes, he doesn’t drive it much. And at one time it embarrassed him to have such a fancy car. But he likes having it, owning it, having it there, much like a piece of jewelry or a Picasso on the wall. Then there are those days, when he takes the car out on the road and his ambivalence about the thing vanishes very quickly:

For months he drove it apologetically, rarely in fourth gear, reluctant to overtake, waving on right-turning traffic, punctilious in permitting cheaper cars their road space. He was cured at last by a fishing trip to north-west Scotland with Jay Strauss [Fellow physician]. Seduced by the open road and Jay’s exultant celebration of “Lutheran genius,” Henry finally accepted himself as the owner, the master, of his vehicle.…He and Jay fished the streams…One wet afternoon, glancing over his shoulder while casting, Henry saw his car…and felt for the first time a gentle, swooning joy of possession. It is, of course possible, permissible, to love an inanimate object. But this moment was the peak of the affair; since then his feelings have settled into mild , occasional pleasure. The car gives him vague satisfaction when he’s driving it; the rest of the time it rarely crosses his mind. As its makers intended and promised, it’s become part of him.”

Yes, I often felt that way about my car too. It became a part of me, an extension, another limb as it were. We were melded together as one. But it had to be that car and no other. Now that I look back upon that feeling, I realize how stupid I was, how much havoc and destruction the automobile has led to. Like Henry, I often felt embarrassed by my driving machine and I hardly drove it at all. I too was “addicted” to the thing, to both having it and using it. I know now that feeling this way is no long possible, that it is, in fact, untenable, that it must abandoned for good. Will a large segment of the population ever come to feel this way? Well, that is the 24 dollar question, isn’t it?

Riffing With Words

In addition, to the empirical temperament of Ian McEwan’s literary works, there is a subtle appreciation of music lurking the background. I am occasionally reminded of a jazz musician riffing when I read some of the long reveries in his novels. He remarks in Zalewski’s New Yorker (February 23, 2009) profile that “…in terms of the pulse of a sentence I care as much as anyone.”

This is clearly illustrated in Saturday when Perowne takes off on one of the many daydreams that McEwan sprinkles throughout the novel. In the unforgettable early morning scene that begins the novel Perowne falls into such a state as he observes his own mood:

“It is not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant…It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialized out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered….Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to be work.”

Zalewski quotes the ending of McEwan’s 1992 novel Black Dogs as further example of his tendency to drift into a meditative trace-like mood which is this case becomes almost poetic:

“She was delivered into herself, she was changed. This, now, here. Surely this was what existence strained to be, and so rarely had the chance: to savor itself fully in the present……the smooth darkening summer air, the scent of thyme crushed underfoot, her hunger, her slaked thirst, the warm stone she could feel through her shirt, the aftertaste of peach, the stickiness on her hand, her tired legs, her sweaty, sunny, dusty fatigue.”

While writers often describe how hard it is to write well, rarely do they speak about how enjoyable it can be. McEwan is an exception. He notes: “One thing that’s missing from the discussion of literature in the academy is the pleasure principle. Not only the pleasure of the reader but also of the writer. Writing is a self-pleasuring act.”

One of the several passages in Saturday where Perowne enters into a recollection of an operation he had earlier performed also illustrates the great pleasure McEwan finds in his “love of sculpting prose:”

"For the past two hours he’s been in a dream of absorption that has dissolved all sense of time, and all awareness of the other parts of his life. Even his awareness of his own existence has vanished. He’s been delivered into a pure present, free of the weight of the past the past or any anxieties about the future. In retrospect, though never at the time, it feels like profound happiness. It’s a little like sex, in that he feels himself in another medium, but it’s less obviously pleasurable, and clearly not sensual. This state of mind brings a contentment he never finds with any passive form of entertainment. Books, cinema, even music can’t bring him to this…This benevolent dissociation seems to require difficulty, prolonged demands on concentration and skills, pressure, problems to be solved, even danger. He feels calm, and spacious, fully qualified to exist. It’s a feeling of clarified emptiness, of deep muted job."

McEwan’s obvious pleasure in riffing with words leads me to wonder if he might secretly wish to be a musician. I do know from Zalewski’s profile that he likes live music and that recently he wrote the libretto for a new opera. And in Saturday while ruminating about his son’s rock musical career, Perowne admits

“There’s nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he’s being denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs. There has to be more to life than merely saving lives.”

It was a treat for me to learn about McEwan’s life, his many friends and many talents. He is one of those authors whose next novel I look forward to reading and will inevitably purchase a copy the moment it becomes available.

An Empirical Temperament

When I read Saturday by Ian McEwan a few years ago, I was not only impressed with the power of the novel, but also by the extent to which McEwan introduced neurophysiological and psychological analysis in his tale. There is this foolish tradition that fiction and science simply don’t mix. To my mind, McEwan’s talent in disabusing the reader of this myth in Saturday and elsewhere is among his greatest strengths.

In the February 23, 2009 issue of The New Yorker Daniel Zalewski has written a wide-ranging, highly informative profile of Ian McEwan. Because I have such great admiration for his literary fiction, I would like to convey some of what I learned about McEwan by discussing Zalewski’s profile during the next day or so.

Zalewski begins by pointing out that: “All novelists are scholars of human behavior but Ian McEwan pursues the matter with more scientific rigor than the job strictly requires.” Elsewhere he notes that McEwan regularly introduces his observations with reference to peer-reviewed studies. Doing this is very unusual but never once in reading Saturday did I feel it intruded on his fictional narrative.

In Saturday as Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, approaches the owner of the car he had just scraped in heavy traffic, he makes a mental note to himself that “…even as he sees, or senses, what’s coming towards him at such speed, there remains a portion of his thoughts a droning, pedestrian diagnostician who notes poor self control, emotional lability, explosive temper, suggestive of reduced levels of GABA among the appropriate binding sites on striatal neurons.”

And a few pages later “Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter?”

According to Zalewski “McEwan’s presiding interest has always been psychology.” In discussing his novel Atonement McEwan “pointed to a study in cognitive psychology suggesting that the best way to deceive someone is to first deceive yourself…(She [referring to Briony Tallis, the precious teenager who makes a false accusation of rape that led to the ruin of two lives] trapped herself, she marched into the labyrinth of her own construction.”

The study McEwan mentioned is one of the most widely cited in experimental social psychology. It laid the foundation for most of the work in cognitive dissonance theory whose central tenant is that holding two inconsistent ideas is a highly discomforting experience that individuals strive to reduce in a variety of non-obvious ways.

Oddly I was actually a subject in that experiment when I was an undergraduate student in psychology and I remember it vividly. After it was over, I was quite agitated for quite some time for the deception I was induced to make as a result of the experimental manipulation.

Zalewski notes that “Like many scientists of his generation, McEwan has shifted his intellectual allegiances. At first, he studied perversity; now he studies normality. His first god was Freud. Now it is Darwin.”

It is also clear McEwan is extremely well informed about current research in neuroscience. In Saturday, he writes about Perowne’s visit with his dementia stricken mother: “The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets.”

And further on in over six densely written pages he describes in exquisite technical detail one of the two surgeries that Perowne performs in the novel: “Perowne asks for the first of the big-self-retraining retractors…Although Rodney leans in with a Dakin’s syringe…Perowne takes a scalpel and makes a small incision in the dura…”

In a word Saturday was, as Zalewski points out “…a direct assault on the modern novel’s skepticism toward science.” No wonder I enjoyed reading it so much as it naturally blended the two cultures that have been so much a part of my life yet, at the same time are widely held to be incompatible with each other.