Dearest Virginia (Woolf): A Novel-in-Essays

Dear Jack,

I don’t know if you remember me but I was that eighteen-nineteen-twenty-year-old blue-eyed brown-haired (sometimes blonde) shy confused lonely drunk girl just trying to figure out who I was while usually wearing something like my grandfather’s old hunting outfits a thousand fashion miles away from those beautiful blonde-haired blue-eyed ringleted Marilyn Monroe and Jean Harlow types or those beautiful brown-eyed black-haired Mexican girls you liked to flirt with on buses going West (or South or North, whatever). But none of that really matters because honestly I never loved you (like I never loved Hemingway) for your physicality I always loved you for your On the Road and your Dharma Bums and your bottle which I kept close in my back pocket (so to speak) during those eighteen-nineteen-twenty-year-old years and never mind the whoring and the hangovers I enjoyed all that, too. So you might be wondering why I’m writing after such a long time well it just so happens that on a recent visit to Madison, Wisconsin I passed through the old Willy Street neighborhood where I lived for those few years after graduating high school, remember? It all started in that upstairs flat on Jenifer Street where I shaved my head and went from hippie to punk rock pretty much overnight (why-the-fuck-not?) and soon after got my first official on the record boyfriend and moved in with him down the street (where my deeply fossilized self-loathing eventually destroyed the whole thing). Well, being in the old neighborhood got me thinking about your book Satori in Paris and how you traveled to France (Brittany and Paris) in search of your French Lebris de Kérouac family roots (btw I was in Paris a while back and followed your footsteps or cab steps rather to the old church Saint-Louis-en-l’Île on Île Saint-Louis and there I said a prayer for you in front of the statue of St. Genevieve, patron saint of Paris). I’m sharing all of this because it turned out that the visit to my old Willy Street neighborhood was a pilgrimage of sorts and you (as previously stated) were highly influential during those aforementioned years. I didn’t take a cab in Madison though (like you did in Paris) but was driving a borrowed Subaru Forester. I also didn’t do any drinking or whoring (I’m sober now) but I did drive past the old tattoo parlor on Atwood Avenue. Remember that place? Larry’s or Steve’s or something? Where Larry (or Steve) tried to talk my eighteen-year-old self out of getting a tattoo of an Ouroboros and to choose instead something more normal and girly like a rose or a bluebird and how I scoffed at the suggestion but would never have listened anyway because I already fancied myself a hardened badass or something and was 100% convinced that it was never going to be otherwise. Larry (or Steve) turned out to be right (but that’s another story). Anyway, the old tattoo parlor is now an ice cream shop which happened to be shuttered for the season otherwise I would have bought myself a scoop, chocolate probably, minus the slice of apple pie and minus the tattoo. I passed the old art house on Willy Street where I lived for a short time in a flea-infested room with a painted black door and where I had the acute awareness of not having felt clean since moving out of my mother’s place. I passed the old Willy Bear (now an Ethiopian restaurant) where I used to spend hours bellied up to the bar with friends. I couldn’t find the other Willy Street apartment though where I stayed with my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend and my badass black German Shepard puppy with a sometimes floppy ear named Blixa (after Blixa Bargeld the guitarist from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) who ended up almost destroying my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend’s wall-to-wall carpeted bedroom. I turned onto South Brearly Street passing the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center (still there) where we used to pack in on weekends to see punk rock bands and where I hung back still shy even half-drunk and after the Wil-Mar I looked for my best friend at the time’s small apartment building where she had a studio the size of a shoe box and where we shared her bed (with her tortoiseshell cat) and drank beaucoup cases of crap Point beer. I drove around Orton Park still hemmed in by those big beautiful houses and I remembered the (now at a park in Manhattan) Gay Liberation statues (by American artist George Segal) near the Spaight and South Few Street corner across from the one-time home of Spaightwood Galleries. I ended up skipping B.B. Clarke Beach Park where I would sometimes sprawl out near Lake Monona on summer evenings my head spinning from the booze and the heat and as I was driving away I was thinking what a beautiful neighborhood and I’m not the same person I was back then and Madison, Wisconsin is not the same city it was back then and I had an illumination of sorts a kick in the eye you might say a sudden feeling of love and tenderness towards that shy confused lonely drunk girl I once was and also a kind of forgiveness towards Madison, Wisconsin and all of that and well there you have it for what it’s worth something like my very own satori on Willy Street. So in closing Jack, merci mille fois for helping shore me up during those sometimes sweet and difficult aforementioned years.

All the best,
Jody

Originally published on CutBank Online’s Long Way From, Long Time Since on November 7, 2017.

Dear Ernest,

I got to thinking about you while on a recent visit to Aigues-Mortes, a place you loved, and not so far from where I live now with my husband and kids. I suddenly missed you despite that falling out we had those many years ago and was whisked back to the beginning, to the time when I was sixteen, and how I had, in those initial moments upon discovering (via my now ex-stepfather) The Nick Adams Stories, a profound and visceral (bordering on spiritual) experience, most especially with “Indian Camp,” “The Battler,” “The Last Good Country,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and “The End of Something” and though I never loved you for your physicality (like I never loved Henry Miller or James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald for their physicality—except for Zelda maybe—for their physicality), how quickly I clung to those hidden parts of you and to those seen parts, namely the drinking-depression-suicide and how those parts (and those stories) made me feel less strange and alone stumbling through adolescence on my middle-class island in the Midwest.

The darkness felt like a whalebone in me. How even before I met you (already at ten-eleven-twelve-years-old) I would disappear into the woods not far from our apartment complex, running from my father’s depression, suicide threats and soon-to-be drinking and follow the creek down to County Highway M or going in the opposite direction, would end up at the pond where my brother and I used to catch bullheads and sunfish and where I was once swallowed up by quicksand in that marshy place just off the path and, despite the mind-numbing panic, was able to grab hold of a low-lying branch and pull myself out. (You’d have been proud of me, I think.)

Did you know that there’s a street named after you in Aigues-Mortes? From your street (Rue Ernest Hemingway) it’s a short walk to the old town center following the Canal du Rhône à Sète until you reach the Porte de la Gardette and those lovely ramparts with, as you probably remember, their impressive towers and lookouts and views of the salt marshes and the sea in the distance.

I never intended to follow you to the South of France (after following you to Paris). Admittedly, I was a bit of a throwback compared to other kids my age, always dreaming of Paris, of the Lost Generation, and of getting away from that middle-class island in the Midwest. When I finally got to Paris it felt like a homecoming, like the missing piece of the puzzle to my confusing life. I could breathe in Paris and at some point further on in the story, I’d fall in love with my future French husband and after marrying, we’d end up a tiny village near Nîmes (and the Roman amphitheater and the Hôtel Imperator whose bar is now—surprise, surprise—named after you and also, a long way from Oak Park and River Forest High Schools, there’s the Lycée Ernest Hemingway). It was spring when my husband and I arrived in that tiny village near Nîmes and sought shelter against the incessant mistral and made love in secluded olive groves on hikes from above Saint-Bonnet-du-Gard to the Pont du Gard and how I desperately hoped for a baby to replace one of the babies I’d lost somewhere along the way (I don’t know why I’m telling you this except to say that it’s a bittersweet memory for me) and how within months I’d be so homesick that I, bona fide city dweller, would be begging to leave that tiny village near Nîmes and how sometimes you want something so badly (to stay in France, to be French) and when you get the thing you wanted, you realize you maybe didn’t really want it so badly after all.

Do you remember the opening chapter of The Garden of Eden? How Catherine (the wife of your fictional alter ego and main protagonist in The Garden of Eden, David Bourne) bikes north along the Canal du Rhône à Sète from Le Grau-du-Roi to Aigues-Mortes to get a boy haircut at a barbershop there and how we, like Catherine, wanted so badly to be loved for our androgyny and our beautiful minds, but at the same time wished to be noticed for the shape of our lips when pouting, our half-moon manicures, and our flapper dresses by certain men and women because of the distinct need to be special buried deep in our psyches like some archetypal mother-father-God wound.

Remember when I went deer hunting those couple of seasons with my ex-stepfather? The one who introduced me to The Nick Adams Stories? And how, despite my killer temper, I turned out to be a lousy deer hunter like I was lousy at fishing. How I couldn’t stomach baiting the hook, taking the fish off the hook (worse if the fish had swallowed the hook) or cleaning the fish (my brother did all of those things and more for me). Still, I wanted to be tough, tomboy that I was, carrying what I imagined were past life memories as a Native American living off the land. Remember how I spine shot that doe? Remember my horror on seeing her, eyes wild with fear, frothing at the mouth and trying to pull herself up by her front legs? Remember I ran towards her, getting closer and closer until, point blank (her beautiful eyes), I shot her again and fell to my knees and sobbed as I watched the life go out of her and how you called me a coward for crying, the same way your father called you a coward when you were Nick in The Nick Adams Stories.

From Aigues-Mortes, we drove (instead of riding bikes) the ten minutes or so to Le Grau-du-Roi. The Hôtel Grand Pommier, where you (as David Bourne and Catherine) stayed on your honeymoon, is no longer there, and the local church, Saint-Pierre, has been replaced by a more modern-looking one making me think of America and its often dull and anti-Garden of Eden architecture. I had no desire to fish though we saw plenty of fishing boats in the old port which reminded me of how much you loved your 38-foot fishing boat, Pilar, the only woman who never stopped being fun, like Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Marjorie in The End of Something had stopped being fun. The sky that day was a brilliant blue. Do you remember those South of France skies? A blue you would have painted beautifully, I’m sure, had you set down your notebook and pencils and picked up a brush.

You know, at least you were an honest man instead of pretending or actually believing you were, as it’s said in today’s argot, a woke feminist man, who might later let it slip (during a relaxing day at the beach with friends, for example) that he has a fondness for young girls in short skirts and tall leather boots, or French maid uniforms and high (high) heels, followed by, “And so what’s wrong with my private stash of porn? I don’t get it. It’s not hurting anyone.” And how some of us women immediately understand because we once played those games but now we silently surrender another man to the matrix of men (all of us, really) still lurching toward adulthood.

Luckily writers aren’t supposed to be saints, like our parents aren’t supposed to be saints though we still like to try to saint them like I tried to saint my father (the original wounded king) and how I wanted so badly for him to be something more than a broken human and how, after his various crimes and eventual fall from grace, I practically (years later) killed myself trying to save him until I needed to let go (to save myself ) and how he was whipped and battered on the rocks before finally landing in a safe place until his death (from pneumonia, not suicide) and how I finally came to understand that the only person we can save is ourselves and then how, in the forgiving of our wounded kings, we forgive ourselves and our same human brokenness.

At the Plage de l’Espiguette in Le Grau-du-Roi, I imagined Catherine tanning on the sloping dunes as you, David swam in the sea and you, coming up from underwater, seeing Catherine darker and darker against the almost gray sand and how I loved to sunbathe when I was younger, my skin, for a few short months in summer, not my own. And who among us hasn’t dreamt of changing places sometimes, of being the other, of having been another like William Butler Yeats’s I have been many things / A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light / Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill / An old slave grinding at a heavy quern / A king sitting upon a chair of gold like Catherine and David staining their already deeply tanned faces with berry juice trying to pass as Gypsies during the festival of Saint Sarah (patron saint of Romani people and of travelers) in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. How the first time I was in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer wasn’t for the festival but was a sort of a pilgrimage to Saint Sarah in honor one of those children I’d lost along the way (a daughter, I imagined, and not at all the puff of air followed by a certain happiness as you wrote in “Hills Like White Elephants”). I didn’t rub my face with berry juice, but I did light a candle for my daughter in the lower chapel in the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer and afterward, I waded in the sea and imagined Vincent Van Gogh once painting there.

Speaking of our falling out: I realized it was over when I tried but finally couldn’t get through Green Hills of Africa. I was sober then and the problem wasn’t the writing (not at all) but the realization that I didn’t want to go out drinking or big game hunting or to bullfights in Pamplona with you anymore. In recovery circles it’s said that if you hang around a barbershop long enough sooner or later you’re going to end up with a haircut. I was done hanging around in barbershops and needed to walk away to save myself.

Last spring, I thought of you while we vacationed near the Massif de l’Estérel and hiked under those towering eucalyptus trees and had sweeping views of the Mediterranean Sea from up high and later, descending a narrow path through pine trees, we discovered a small, isolated cove, and how I wondered if it might be one of the coves where David, Catherine and Marita (a woman who both David and Catherine fell in love with and had an affair) had swum and sunbathed in The Garden of Eden. We were alone for a long time until a group of German-speaking tourists arrived and then suddenly one of the young men, probably in his late twenties, with dark hair, a wide, handsome face and strong shoulders, stripped down to his suit and dove into the crashing waves with such raw machismo (trying to impress one of the girls) that all I could think of was there you were, that is exactly how you would have cut into the waves trying to impress your fictional wife Catherine and your fictional lover Marita, and afterward, on leaving the sea with your hair smoothed back and wet, you would have kissed Marita’s breasts and drank Tavel from the bottle and ate artichoke hearts dipped in mustard sauce prepared by Madame, the owner of that rose-colored hotel where you were staying in Mandelieu-la-Napoule.

Ketchum, Idaho, is a long way from Le Grau-du-Roi and Aigues-Mortes. What happened, Ernest? Why couldn’t you get this thing? (Don’t ever accuse an alcoholic of being weak.) What happened between the time you were young and beautiful crossing the Mississippi River for the first time or up in Michigan (Lake Walloon) before Italy and the war before Paris and the Left Bank and Hadley (the women who loved the man were mirrors of the man) and Bumpy and the apartment on Notre-Dame-des-Champs above the old sawmill before Key West and the six-toed cats and your father’s suicide before Cuba and Finca Vigia and the shoring of the Pilar before those cold, snowy winters in Ketchum, Idaho, snowy and cold like Austria and The Hotel Taube at Schruns before the alcohol took you before… I have been in that dark place before, face pushed up against the wall, throat so full of fear that breath only comes in short, quick animal panic heaving like a spine-shot doe whose eyes are a thousand times more beautiful than a long-barrel W. & C. Scott & Son shotgun on an early summer morning in a kitchen in Ketchum, Idaho. Ernest, put the gun down. (Put the drink down.) There is another way out. (Follow me.)

A few months ago, at a thrift shop in Aix-en-Provence, I found a 1950 first British edition of Across the River and Into the Trees and something felt oddly serendipitous about buying that book (one I’d never read) in that thrift shop in France and since it had been published when you were still alive, it seemed as if I were holding a very real piece of you in my hands. It’s like, after the death of a loved one, we choose certain of their belongings to remind us, like how I chose my father’s antique Rolleiflex New Standard camera and his clarinet. The dust cover of Across the River and Into the Trees is gently worn around the edges and the yellowed pages carry that faint, sweet smell of old books and used bookstores. I still haven’t read it yet, though once in a while I’ll open to the first page and begin: “They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead,” and it feels like I’m returning to the woods not far from our old apartment complex only this time not running but slowly following the creek and gathering up a few more broken off pieces of myself.

Best always and Godspeed, etc.,
Jody

Originally published in slightly different form on CutBank Online’s Long Way From, Long Time Since on May 9, 2018. Photograph of Ernest Hemingway from the Clarke Historical Library.

Jody Kennedy

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