And Also a Vision of Returning
Lynn Freed, an extraordinary novelist, short story writer, essayist, and friend, died in the spring, on the eighth of May, at her home in Sonoma, California. I learned of her death, the cause was lymphoma, when I saw her obituary’s headline in the New York Times, “Lynn Freed, South African Writer With a Wry Style, dies at 79,” and while the fact of her dying took me wholly by surprise, I’d felt its prospect for some months. I’d sensed the weight of that, of course, whenever I thought about her, but I often experienced something lighter as well, a nostalgia rich with memories of being in her company.
For many years, our lives brought us together regularly, but we’d not been in touch for a very long while, until late last winter when she called. I wasn’t home, it was Sue, my wife, who answered. They knew each other fondly. I don’t know, have never asked, how Lynn’s voice sounded initially because I selfishly want to hear her predictable exuberance. “Sue, darling, it’s Lynn Freed.” It’s always how I heard her, a kind of decorous gusto in her greeting, when she welcomed people: into a conversation, into a social gathering, into her home for food and wine and spirited talk. “Darlings, come in!” “Darling! Lovely to see you!”
As one reflexively does, Sue first asked her how she was, to which Lynn answered simply, “Well, I’m dying.” I’ve heard the quiet drama of her response in my mind many times and I recognize it as a version of how she met the world. By this, I don’t mean an absence of feeling, quite the contrary. I’m describing an emotional efficiency, and if that sounds somewhat anomalous—emotion and efficiency linked in a phrase—they were in her case complementary. Joined, they comprised her singular personality. It’s as if she instinctively sensed, could measure, just the amount of delight, or empathy, or concern, whatever emotion fit the moment. She says in an essay collected in her book, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, “Life’s a mess. Fiction is tidy,” and she has her character, a writer named Ruth Frank, say almost exactly the same thing to her young daughter, Hester, in Lynn’s novel, The Bungalow. Explaining why her fictional version of an incident varied from what had actually happened, Ruth explains, “Fiction is orderly; life’s a mess.” I think of the way Lynn navigated life as working to keep the inevitable mess of it as orderly as possible.
After her shocking news, Lynn talked of her daughter, Jessica, who’d come from South Africa to be with her through the last months, however many, however few. She mentioned her dog, whom Jessica would take back with her. She’d gotten the dog after Robert Kerwin, her second husband, died three years before. I remember her telling me years ago, long before they married, that she was forever tempted to get another dog, how much she’d loved the company of the ones she’d had over the years, but she was always stopped by the memory, the image, of a canine face reacting mournfully as she got down a suitcase from a closet shelf, and she traveled ambitiously for much of her life.
In saying good-bye, she spoke of others she’d known who’d recently died or whom she knew were deathly ill and taken together with her own failing, it was, how else to think about it, “the season of death.”
—
Ours was an unlikely bonding on the surface, Lynn's exotic background, growing up in a Jewish family in apartheid South Africa, the youngest of three daughters, their parents both actors, a husband and wife heading a nationally renowned theater troupe; mine, a Midwest farmer's son. About as opposite as two starts in life could be.
I’d taught in the Bennington College MFA program for a year or so before Lynn arrived, and at her first residency we were assigned to teach a fiction workshop together. I see the two of us sitting at opposite ends of a long table with our ten students. We’d met briefly as a group the day before, introducing ourselves and offering bits of personal information; what we’d been reading; what we were working on; what were some books, who were some writers that we loved.
After that first meeting, I’d been chatting with the director of the program, the late, beloved, Liam Rector. He was a wondrously mischievous bear of a man for whom the description “larger than life” might as well have been invented, and he’d asked me, and asked if I’d ask Lynn, if we’d mind letting the students start the discussions, that way guaranteeing their comments would be heard and set the tone. He said he’d gotten some feedback from a couple of them, complaining that Lynn and I had dominated yesterday’s conversation a bit too much. It took me a moment to decide if he was serious. He was, but his expression, as so often, was warmly conspiratorial. When I relayed this to Lynn, she laughed and said it was fine.
I remember nothing about the first student story we discussed. It was thirty years and hundreds of workshop stories ago. What I do recall is that the tone of the opening comments was excruciatingly cautious and that, after a few minutes, Lynn suddenly interrupted the student who was talking and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t stand this.”
I was as taken aback as the students were. But as Lynn spoke into the silence, setting about to make an assessment of the story—pointing to its failures and why that’s what they were, while also generously suggesting ways to bring it closer to what it was trying to say—the thought came that she had led us to a valuable moment.
She’d said, in effect, that her quick trigger had less to do with the story before us than the class’s faint-hearted criticism of it. That she recognized the students’ kind intentions, but kind intentions were impediments here, because attempting to write serious fiction and learning to read it well, knowing what its pleasures were and how to look for them, mattered too much, both the writing and the reading, not to treat each as though you recognized how much the effort mattered.
Also, she was smiling when she said what she’d said. It was a slight smile that wasn’t mocking, wasn’t sneering or scornful, but somehow comradely, inclusive. I’ll take a share of the blame for ignoring what we’d agreed to. And then proceeding with her own critique as an example. Here. Something like this.
Even so, it’s fair to say that not all the students heard Lynn’s impatience in that moment as instructive, and it took another class or two before the discussions found the tone of courteous candor that was new, or at least unfamiliar, to the majority of them. And for the years she taught at Bennington, she was – perhaps another apparent contradiction that she made complementary—a presence of demanding generosity. Many sought her out for this very quality and some, likely many, did not. I think, at base, those who learned the most from her grew comfortable seeing themselves as she saw them; less as students and more as like-minded peers just starting out who knew how much they didn’t know and saw how much she was ready to give them.
The MFA program has a custom of nightly readings by faculty to the gathered population, a hundred, a hundred and twenty students, and it was some years after she’d arrived, maybe five, maybe more, when Lynn asked me to introduce her. I began by looking back at the launching of the program. I recalled its early years and, staying as straight-faced as possible, confessed that over time I’d gained a reputation as a tough marker, a demanding teacher. Not for the faint of heart. In short, a bit of a hard-ass.
“And then,” I said, and a quick pause, “Liam hired Lynn Freed.”
And the room erupted in laughter.
—
All of her fiction and nearly all her essays are set in her native South Africa, a landscape she variously described both in conversation and her work as uniquely abundant, its beauty, its fertility, but also vibrantly immune to the wishes of the merely human beings who occupy it. Whenever her prose turns to her country’s natural world, I hear an admiration for its splendid indifference.
“I walked out onto the verandah to watch the sun rise over the sea,” her protagonist, Ruth Frank, tells us in Lynn’s novel, The Bungalow.
It was pale, diffused by a storm building up on the horizon. . . Waves, coming in fierce and high with a late spring tide, crashed onto the beach over a hundred feet below. The river, too, ran strong for the time of year. . . The beach itself looked as desolate as ever. . . [and] the waves seemed to have tumbled the old breaker of rocks, to have stolen half the beach.
Even so, Lynn lived all her adult life in America, first for graduate school in New York, then to Northern California, San Francisco for some years, and for many more, Sonoma. It was, as I said, a peripatetic existence, marked throughout by regular trips home.
In Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, Lynn wrote, “Obsessions tend to be so familiar and so intimate as to occur not as ideas but as images, as daydreams . . . My own . . . tended toward a dream of leaving home, and also a vision of returning, both somehow cloaked in an aura of magnificence.”
Departure and return, the need to leave in order to come back. Not merely travel for the sake of traveling, but something more strategically vital, a nomadic pendulum. It was a pattern she followed for most of her life. As she writes in “Taming the Gorgon,” from the collected essays, “I had long since achieved a version of the life I had longed for—leaving and returning had become the rhythm and substance of that life.”
And what was true for her was also true for her central characters. The same Ruth Frank who admires the rambunctious South African sunrise, and who explains to her daughter how fiction can tidy up the mess of life’s disorder, says later in The Bungalow, “All my life I’d wanted two things at once, two worlds to move between—with me just arrived, just about to leave, and always with somewhere to come home to.”
Ruth first appears as the retrospective narrator of her childhood in the novel, Home Ground, and when she returns in The Bungalow she’s grown up, a novelist living in New York. Since leaving South Africa a decade before, she’s returned for stays of varying length. Sometimes her reasons have been practical, dutiful, family matters. But more often, she’s simply succumbed to the impractical pull of home, to reclaim for a time her place as both audience and player in the finely honed theatricality of her family.
Conversing at a party with a fellow South African expat who’s also back for a visit, Ruth learns that the man has settled happily in America with his family. In Minneapolis, of all places!, Ruth thinks. And then, “I couldn’t bear even to think of going back again, even as I couldn’t think of staying on . . .”
This is the internal turbulence alive in all her protagonists, and its conflicting extremes share something centrally profound: neither yearning to return nor feeling you must stay offers sufficient reward in life at the moment, a satisfaction with the present, with what’s there to be had. It’s an urgent choreography that extends beyond the call of geographical place, beyond the replenishing rituals of tribe and family, to the emotionally confounding seesaw of physical desire.
—
In the poignant final paragraph of her essay “Embracing the Alien,” Lynn writes of standing with a friend on the verandah of her childhood home, the two of them looking out at the city and the bay and the ocean beyond, and her friend turning to her and asking how she could have possibly left this place. “And then,” she writes, “all at once, . . . I saw my bifurcated life for what it was: a failure of daring. I had not dared to remain.” In “Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home,” she describes “confronting daily” in America “the anomaly of my presence in a country that was both home and could never be home to me. . .”
And so she stayed a passenger on the global shuttle of a “bifurcated life.”
At first glance, given the world she moved about so naturally, this seems maybe the most surprising aspect of her perspective on her life. Surprising in that she never came to feel, at least not strongly enough, that home was not a matter of where, but how, she lived. Home not as a physical place, but as a frame of mind, as the heart’s attitude. Surprising that she didn’t fully feel the luxury of exile that I think most all writers seek, consciously or not.
Maybe this helps explain it: for her, as a writer, exile was consignment, not reward, an inevitable but less than preferable fate. As she writes in “Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, “ . . . being out of the society of home provides the remove at which the writer must live in order to see, in order to write. It is this enigma that informs the writer’s perspective—the restless pursuit of a way back while remaining steadfastly at a distance.”
She rightly saw that for writers it was not a matter of going away in order to come back, but leaving “the society of home,” or discovering you’ve left it, and staying “steadfastly” gone.
In an interview with Sarah Anne Johnson for her book The Very Telling: Conversations with American Writers, Lynn was asked where, for her, home was. “Home,” she answered, “is an idea, and it is past tense.” For me, “home” in everything she wrote is much more an emotion than an idea. Her characters respond not cerebrially but viscerally to their surroundings. It’s their senses that are stirred. It’s their mood that responds and dictates their behavior. And if home as she defined it is comprised of the past and of what’s about to be, then the present, what’s there to be taken, is unarguably absent, never mind being “cloaked in an aura of magnificence.”
—
A book-jacket endorsement of Lynn’s work in general suggests that her colorful family, combined with the alien magnificence of the place where she grew up, together made an ideal world for a writer to have come from. In other words, with such a vast store of such rich material, it’s as if the vivid, animated, uniquely oblique life that fiction aspires to came for Lynn pre-made. It was already fiction and needed only to be recalled.
She writes in her essay “Sex with the Servants,” “I [did not] consider my material exotic. To me, despite the remove of time and distance, the world of which I was writing was so familiar as to be commonplace.” I hazard a guess that what she means is not that she forgot it was exotic, but rather, that she could make full use of such material—could manipulate it freely, without awe, paying it no undue respect. Could treat it, that is, as if it were commonplace, while remaining keenly aware of its exoticism, realizing the power of what she had in hand.
—
She wrote about Home Ground that it was “the story of a girl, who, like me, had grown up in South Africa; whose family, like mine, were Jewish; whose parents were actors, as mine were; and who spent much of her childhood, as I had, dreaming of escape into the ‘real world’.” Early in that novel, Ruth Frank tells us that “My parents were theatre people and to theatre people sounds mattered. Voices, tone, diction, intonation, enunciation, articulation—all were considered more telling by them than handshakes.” And this from the essay “Embracing the Alien:” “. .when you grow up in a family like mine, in which performance, both formal and informal, is prized, you’re never quite offstage.” From “Not Much of a Funeral,” an essay written in the voice of her speaking to her father after his recent death: “Standing dry-eyed at your funeral, and Ma quite mad in the wheelchair beside me—mad or playing mad. . . . none of us knew the difference, not even you—standing there in the heat and damp of summer, with the men chanting in Hebrew . . . I could only think how ordinary it all was—eleven o’clock in the morning, people glancing at their watches.”And from The Balcony: “My mother had always said Jewish funerals were barbaric. But I had never been to any other kind, so I couldn’t imagine how death could be made civilized. . . My mother stood at my side in her navy suit and new felt hat. . . she was dry-eyed. So was I. . . . Men closed the lid and lifted the coffin. We traipsed after them, down from the bleak prominence where we’d stood, to the freshly dug hole. More than a hundred people followed in the terrible heat and took up ranks around us . . .’Quite a turnout,’ she rasped, as the rabbi cleared his throat. ‘On a day like this to boot.’”
These more than close connections (and as examples they’re a tiny fraction of the whole) give evidence of her working aesthetic, of the freedom she felt to help herself to the stuff of where she started. At one point in her interview with Sarah Anne Johnson, she’s asked, given that she and her characters led nearly identical lives, how she kept herself out of the picture. “I don’t,” she replied. “I’m in every picture. But I’m in disguise.” And further in that same conversation, it's Lynn who asks the question: “What’s the difference between an imagined experience and a remembered experience? I don’t know.”
I believe her. Making things up all her writing life from having lived them, how, after a time, could she have kept imagination and memory separate even if she’d tried? Or maybe she didn’t need much (if any) time. Maybe she saw no difference from the start.
When I told a former Bennington colleague that I was writing about Lynn, he said, “Do I remember that one year, at the readings, she actually read from the phonebook? . . . Or was that Liam saying that with her voice, that beautiful accent, he could listen to her read from a phonebook for hours?” Remembered or imagined? Not only was she unable to tell the difference. The power of her projected self sometimes had the same effect on others.
In any event, I see her artful greediness as a facet of technique, as an element of craft that allowed her to create a familial universe of flamboyant temperaments: the mother’s elegant aggressiveness, the father’s suave sense of privilege, the three sisters fighting like cats, a domestic display, to repeat a word, that gives domesticity a kind of foot-lights flair. And it makes me think again of her essay “Embracing the Alien,” where she writes that she saw her restive adult life as a failure of daring.
—
In her essay, “Honorary Son,” Lynn wrote, “Over the years, both on the page and off, I’ve learned the same lesson again and again in many different modes: I am no good out of character.” And at the conclusion of “Embracing the Alien,” she confesses, “If I have learned the language of life in America, if I have made friends here and found in them a generous audience for the performance of my life, then this is what I have become, what I have always been in fact: a performer of myself.”
At first, this sounds like still another contradiction. A performance is a role, however skillfully played. But for Lynn, the world she was born into and from which she learned life’s lessons was one where performance was not disguise. It was instead the way you revealed your most authentic self. Not performing yourself, that was the disguise; that was how you hid behind a façade of not performing who you were. And so, she was a performer of herself, and also for herself, to let her be herself.
This explains so many moments, including her startling intervention in that first class we taught together. “I’m afraid I can’t stand this.” Yes, it was performance, but she was her most genuine, truest self when she was performing.
—
In all the work of hers I know, her remarkable short story “Under the House” presents in six pages the most dynamic depiction of her abiding theme, the insoluble hunger for and rejection of human desire. And it also best depicts the awful animation of South Africa’s apartheid history. All of it narrated from a distance sufficient to live completely on its own, an invention traced to nothing, explicitly owing to nothing, in her life.
It tells, in a third-person voice, of the unnamed early-adolescent daughter of a moneyed white family and a hired worker who comes to the house twice a year to sharpen all the family’s knives, among a smattering of chores. He’s referred to in the story only as “the Sharpener” and we’re told he “may be a Coloured” or he may be “just dark from working in the sun, and from lawnmower grease, and from not washing properly,” no one knows for sure. The girl is described as having a reckless sexual spirit, at the same time naïve and precociously aggressive, which draws her to “wild” men near her school and to doing “rude” things with cousins and friends.
One day the girl, fixed as always on the Sharpener when he comes, responds to his nod and follows him down to a warren of raw-earth rooms beneath the house’s wide veranda: “. . . he tossed his head for her to follow him, and so she did, down into the cool, dim light.” There she allows him to molest her, an invited violation as the story describes her bold participation, at one point even giggling, but that becomes for her in a few frenzied moments “wilder and ruder than anything, anything.” Until the nanny in the house notices her missing and moments later the family’s dogs, who are “crazed by Coloureds, even someone who just seemed Coloured,” come “roaring down into the darkness, making straight for him.” He is saved, badly bloodied, and is locked up for good, the girl’s mother concluding that he’d have been locked up for good for what he did even if he wasn’t Coloured. “And,” quoting the story, “the girl didn’t argue.”
It’s then, mere sentences from the story’s conclusion, that the narrative abruptly makes a stunning leap forward in time, leaving the “past tense,” that precinct, in Lynn’s view, where memory makes the idea of home, to the girl’s life as a grown woman in the present. And in two sentences we get her full emotional biography: “But now, lying in bed with her own man or another, she’s always down there again, under the house, with the Sharpener. Over the years, he has only gotten wilder. ” And there the story ends.
In the country of her fiction, Lynn dared to remain.
Douglas Bauer’s latest novel, The Beckoning World, was chosen a “Must Read” selection by the Massachusetts Library Association, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. He’s the author of three previous novels: Dexterity; The Very Air; and The Book of Famous Iowans, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. He’s also written three works of non-fiction: Prairie City Iowa: Three Seasons at Home; The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft; and What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, awarded the PEN/New England Award in Non-Fiction. He is the editor of the anthologies Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals.
His numerous essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications.
He has won grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and, in both fiction and creative non-fiction, from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He lives in Cambridge, MA.