We have zoomed, emailed and rambled. But the most consistently comforting thing I’ve done during this pandemic year is reading aloud daily with Nancy, my wife and housemate for 61 years.
We began with Michelle Obama’s Becoming, moved on to Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, then to five novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, and most recently, Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
Except for the two Obama memoirs, one or the other of us was familiar with all the books. I did most of the reading aloud, and Nancy sometimes took over when a passage choked me up, which began to happen in Becoming and recurred in other books. To my surprise, I sometimes choked up as soon as I remembered where a moving passage was headed. It set me to thinking about actors who perform in deeply emotional scenes.
On March 8, driving to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway for a joyful encounter with volunteers who seemed truly pleased to be administering COVID-19 vaccinations to vulnerable old folks, we listened to an NPR interview with actor and novelist Ethan Hawke. The interview focused mainly on Hawke’s recent novel, A Bright Ray of Darkness. The book, he said, about “the healing power of performance.” He had my attention with that phrase because I’d been thinking about scenes that didn’t seem especially memorable when I first read them and then moved me deeply when I “performed” them for Nancy and me.
A Bright Ray of Darkness tells the story of William Howard, an actor who comes to New York City to play Hotspur in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. He is drawn to the city and the play partly because it gives him a chance to be with his children from a marriage recently fallen on very hard times. In 2003, Ethan Hawke performed in Henry IV just after his marriage with Uma Thurman ended. Hawke says playing the role of Hotspur in 2003 shaped his fictional account of an actor who learns much about himself from performing in the Shakespeare play. Finding self-knowledge, I’m guessing, is the healing Hawke claims to find in performance.
It’s not quite the same thing, but I’ve been learning about our marriage from scenes so powerful my “performances” became little breakdowns of a sort.
This began with passages in which Michelle Obama acknowledges the price their family sometimes paid for Barack Obama’s meteoric career. Not even close to meteoric, my own career still had its price for my wife and daughters, which probably gave my reading of Michelle Obama’s words a sense of authenticity.
Magical scenes in Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction made her novels addictive for both of us during the pandemic. Characters that teeter on the edge of being disagreeable often reveal themselves to be lovable, reminding me of our struggling, sometimes successful efforts to teach each other how to understand our own families.
There are passages describing great sadness in the life of Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry’s imagined barber, a bachelor, not by choice. He ultimately commits himself to loving a woman he concludes will never return his love. “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness,” he says, “I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”
Speaking his loneliness, I choked up as I read, feeling gratitude for 61 years with Nancy.
People married as long as we have been are likely to have shared deep emotions of many kinds. Trying to understand my powerful feelings when we read together, I conclude the writers’ words sometimes touch off memories of experiences we have seldom been able to put in our own words.
Our reading together sometimes touches off revisions of past events. The Black novelist Ernest Gaines once came to a dinner at our house that included a Black student who had been collecting folklore from her family for a project in a folklore course I taught. She mentioned her project to Gaines, and he asked for an example. She told one of her family’s best stories, leading Gaines to laugh so heartily he rose and, bent over, backed down the hall away from us as though getting away from the story might be the only way he could control his laughter.
In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the novel’s narrator is a very old Black woman in Louisiana who Gaines imagines to have lived through slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow and into the Civil Rights Movement. Hearing her voice as I read, we both realized how much our shared memory of Ernest Gaines was tempered by the laughter we heard so long ago. As I spoke Miss Jane Pittman’s words, we knew her quiet, justified anger must have been alive in the imagination of Gaines, her creator, even on the night he laughed so wonderfully in our house.
If it turns out the comforts of reading aloud to each other in a pandemic are not limited to octogenarians, one explanation might be our increased reliance now on the technologies of the internet. Instead of pretending we’re in a place with people who aren’t really there with us, as we do on Zoom, we find ourselves close to an actual person, sharing the power of a writer’s imagination, which can take us anywhere.
And that imagination leads us into forgotten feelings, hidden thoughts, abandoned memories. More than comforting, these rediscoveries often inspire new conversations.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.