The Pleasure of Their Company (Review)
The Pleasure of Their Company by Doris Grumbach. Beacon Press. 119 pp.
Reviewed by Colman McCarthy.
In relaxed conversational prose, girded by a tone of unpretentious candor regarding the ideas, events and people central to her values, Doris Grumbach has written still another imaginative and, at times, touching reflection about the larger themes of life: truth, commitment, identity, aging.
With “The Pleasure of Their Company,” Grumbach adds to a list of six earlier works that include “Fifty Days of Solitude,” “Life In A Day,” and “Coming Into the End Zone.” In her novels and memoirs, Grumbach, who taught English for three decades at several liberal arts colleges on the East Coast and who served as The New Republic’s book editor in the 1970s, draws on her experiences as a mother of four daughters, a wife in a marriage of 31 years and, after an amiable divorce, as a partner in a 25-year union with a companion named Sybil. It helps, also, that Grumbach has had a life immersed in literature. As a result, linkages between the ideas of a Proust, or a Dickinson, or an Auden or Sarton, are easily joined to Grumbach’s rich contemplative world. The softness of her writing style, plus the consistent grace of her language, places her in the lofty company of Florida Scott-Maxwell and her classic text on aging, “The Measure of My Days.”
The “company” in the title of this 118-page meditation is the more than 30 family members, neighbors and literary and publishing friends that Grumbach invited to help celebrate her 80th birthday on a July 1998 weekend. They came to her and her partner’s 100-year-old house in Sargentville, Maine, a peninsula village on Penobscot Bay and a few miles from Allen Cove where E.B. White of the New Yorker settled.
Grumbach uses the occasion of her 80th birthday as a canvas on which to paint a forest of stories, recollections and reflections. “The Pleasure of Their Company” is essentially a journal, with entries ranging from the wry and succinct—people who reach 80 are “time challenged” –to the expansive and pensive, as in this observation about the vagaries of the obituary page where the media have the last word: “I have always read the obituaries in the New York Times, both the extended ones under black headlines and the privately placed ones in tiny type. In the harassed days before I reached eighty I found that I read them even more closely. I used to think that I paid attention to them in order to feel superior; after all, one had survived even the featured dead. But yesterday, reading the dread page, I discovered a better reason for turning first to the obituaries every day. I was reading about persons who were notable enough in their lives to merit lengthy considerations at their death but of whom I had never heard.”
One of the many intellectual pleasures provided by Grumbach is found in her ability to meld her inner spiritual life to the outer realities of daily living in Maine. On some early mornings, she reads the Psalms of David to energize her into the day’s obligations. Other times she draws strength from the writings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist priest and writer who died in 1968.
She uses a Merton prayer found in his enduring work, “Thoughts in Solitude,” as a way “to start my hour of meditation. It begins: ‘My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.’ I liked this prayer, I trusted it, because it is full of my own doubts and uncertainty. The force of its negative is better than the bland assurances, the mindless certainties of most prayers. As for Merton, for me the future always seems full of fog and peril, and the promises of resurrection somewhat difficult to accept. Preachers always seem to be so sure of what God wants of us, what His will is, whereas I am uncertain about those matters because I do not know the source of their authority. How do they know, how do I, or Merton, know, what God wants?”
Other God-centered reflections are sprinkled throughout, including this quick one: “An old theological difficulty attempts to collate the existence of God with the presence of evil and suffering the world. St. Teresa of Avila had a witty way of expressing it. She believed deeply in God but reproved Him for His behavior. ‘You have few friends because you treat them so badly.’”
Amid the many pluses in this journal is one minus. Readers are given little information about the birthday celebration itself, except that the dinner menu ran deep with the customary Maine staples of lobster and blueberry pie. Some reporting is needed. Who offered the most eloquent after-dinner toasts? What stories were told by the guests, presumably a literate and voluble crowd. How about a paragraph or two on the latest gossip from the publishing world, guaranteed to be spilled when two or more authors get to gabbing over dinner. And what of Grumbach’s assessment of the weekend?
Perhaps the omission is due to modesty, a reticence to shine a spotlight on herself. Grumbach is other-centered, not self-centered. She writers glowingly of Sybil, who toils at a local bookstore and has been Grumbach’s partner for a quarter-century. It has been “ a union that was once regarded as scandeleux but, in the current climate for such odd couples, seemed to be accepted by most persons…..A genuine lesbian union is, in every sense except the legal, a marriage. For us, the domestic life has been no different from what our former arrangements were, except that perhaps there is more commonality, more equality, fewer unshared tasks. There are the same obligations and responsibilities to each other.”
To her credit, and to the reader’s benefit, Grumbach writes affectionately about her former husband “who has remained a good friend.” He would have been at the birthday party, except his wif was ill and he stayed home to care for her. “He is a man,” Grumbach writes, “who has always felt responsibility for the welfare of others—for his parents, his daughters, for me when we lived together for 31 years. Now he is old, frail, but still a caretaker.”
Another gift from this writer is wit. She recalls the lines from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who at age 94 saw a pretty girl and sighed, “O, to be 80 again.”
Grumbach confesses that she has “always thought of old age as a long defeat, full of unsuccessful skirmishes with the small losses of memory and physical capacity and, finally, a lost battle. It is also replete with ironies that sting when they are humorously expressed. Malcolm Cowley tells of an octogenarian ‘with all his buttons’ who said at a testimonial dinner for his senior partmer: ‘they tell you that you’ll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don’t tell you is that you won’t miss it very much.’ Funny. Terrible.”
In “The Pleasure of Their Company,” readers are in the company of a writer offering the pleasurable delights of an author at the top of her form.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C.