LIGHT WHILE
THERE IS LIGHT
An American History
Keith Waldrop
Introduction by Jaimy Gordon
For Elaine
The overtakelessness of those
Who have accomplished death...
—EMILY DICKINSON
Work, for the night is coming....
—OLD HYMN
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
A Pilgrimage
Tibet
Discerning of Spirits
The Call Asserts Nothing
About the Author
Copyright
Selected Other Works by Keith Waldrop
I always knew I was not going to measure up as a literary giant, so from the start I put my hopes on making myself a name as a literary pygmy, that is, on writing one great but undoubtedly odd, sui generis, irreplaceable, one of a kind, modestly immortal book. The book I had in mind would be a novel along the lines of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, or Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Walter Abish’s How German Is It, Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You, or Harry Mathews’s Tlooth. True, each of these novels being by its nature unlike any other, they reveal nothing in common to the aspiring imitator, besides being the one book by their various authors (some prolific, most not) that one really couldn’t live without. Oh yes, and I first heard of all of them from Keith Waldrop, the best person I know to talk about books with—whatever it is, he’s read it, has an opinion on it, and has it in his library on Elmgrove Avenue in Providence, in the next room, or just upstairs.
Therefore it’s both fitting and something of an impertinence that Keith Waldrop would end up writing such a novel himself. Beautiful, funny, wise, sad, endearingly economical in size, guaranteed one of a kind in voice and subject matter, inimitable, universally admired by that small percentage of the human race that has read it, Light While There is Light, which first appeared from Sun & Moon in 1993, was an instant eccentric classic. In protest I step out of the line where the would-be writers of one great but peculiar novel are waiting, to write this introduction. I will be brief.
Where was the need? Keith Waldrop is a poet with some fifteen volumes in that other genre to his credit. Both his first, A Windmill Near Calvary (1968), and his latest, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, were nominated for the National Book Award, which he won in 2009. He is the translator of another ten or twelve books, including an important, illuminating prose version of Les Fleurs du mal. As co-editor and publisher, along with his wife Rosmarie Waldrop, of Burning Deck Press since 1961, he has been a major influence on two or three generations of innovative writing in America, and was even knighted by the Republic of France in the year 2000—named Chevalier des arts et des lettres—for his contributions. In short, Keith Waldrop is a fully arrived international person of letters, a literary giant, there you have it, and a brilliant visual artist besides. So where was the need to toss off a great small novel like no other?
Light While There is Light, though surely a work of imaginative fiction in design, is a bit shifty about its genre. It calls itself, not a novel, but An American History. A bookish, patient, witty, gently melancholic, ruminative narrator with the same name as the author and a rare gift for anecdote recalls his bizarre but profoundly American and Midwestern family, not from without—and this is the special art of the book—but from within, as a member, lifelong, like it or not, willy-nilly.
“All my family, and Julian is our type in this, have a streak of the unworldly,” the narrator tells us. Long before Keith is born, just after the birth of the oldest of his three half siblings, Mother—possibly in reaction to an offhand remark from that handsome wastrel, her first husband—gets religion and passes it on as a lifelong quest to her young family, which, despite many obstacles, hard travels, and theological and financial gyrations, never entirely loses it again. The book’s long opening chapter, which takes up almost half the novel, is entitled “A Pilgrimage”; in due course we realize that Mother’s long search, at first with her one marriageable daughter in tow, for a church sufficiently homelike, unworldly, and doctrinally pure, will never end, not even when she comes to rest, in her last days, in a rented garage in Champaign, Illinois.
The terrible truth that haunts the family and the novel is that the world might simply be dull and meaningless:
The history of my mother’s religious opinions should be told as the record of a pilgrimage. As I imagine most pilgrimages, it was less the struggle toward a given end than a continual flight from disappointment and unhappiness. Neither the joys of heaven nor hell’s worst prospects provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world.
It takes an eccentric, Waldropian sort of genius to see a weak attachment to the world-as-it-is as the common thread between Mother’s wounded and wary fundamentalism, sister Elaine’s cheerful obedience, brother Charles and brother Julian’s talent (talent is not quite the word) for flimflam and otherwise illegal solutions to all of life’s problems, and the narrator’s troubled spirit: “I was often afraid in those days, more than a little sometimes: afraid that there was no truth, or that there was one truth, only one, and that I had it.” His faith wavers and slowly blinks out, becomes one of the book’s many shadows of an absence.
Light While There is Light takes its title from the Gospel of John, 12:35-36: “Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.”
At rhythmic intervals—in this respect as much like music as collage—the novel revisits the theme of the narrator’s own relations with light, in brief, image-rich variations throughout the text, each floating in its own shining white space. Is this the light of the title? The light of God? Of revealed truth about a God we once thought to grasp with our senses? Maybe it is just—light. The physiological phenomenon of light, its perception and attendant sensations, is a subject of deep interest to Keith Waldrop the poet. Passages about it, images of it, are scattered all over his work. But in Light While There is Light, it is both itself—light—and the leitmotif for the origin and end of faith: what precedes it, what survives it.
I remember, for some reason, a film I once saw, in which sequences resembling old, contrasty photographs faded, not into darkness like the usual fade, but into a bright white empty screen, so that the story seemed sketched in elaborate shadows against a field of perpetual light—shining now through the pictures, illuminating them, and now supplanting them, shining on its own.
The odd balance of pleasures in a small, perfect, one-of-a-kind novel can be inventoried better than it can be explained. Some of its delights may sound like suffering when lifted out of the book for closer examination: for example, Light While There is Light is an