Shaping Loss and Love

At the end of March 1995, I was in Washington DC to attend and participate in the annual CCCC, a conference of writing faculty. On the morning before the conference began in full force, I met Carl Klaus for a late breakfast at one of the restaurants well known among the connected and powerful, a hushed and dark-paneled room with discrete booths and leather, within sight of the neoclassical lines of several government buildings. We were catching up on my career, my upcoming tenure review, his most recent iteration of a seminar in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa's nonfiction MFA program, a program he had created many years before.But pretty quickly he interrupted himself to tell me about a writing project he'd begun. The previous New Year's Eve, he'd been standing at his kitchen window, staring at the wide expanse of his garden beds settled in for winter—the large trees in his backyard, the sweep of the neighboring park—and he had hatched a plan: 500 words a day, every day for a year, about the weather, his garden, everything growing in the large, carefully sculpted plots surrounding his 100-year-old historic home in Iowa City.I was heartened, in a way. Carl had been a monumental influence in my own development as a writer and teacher of nonfiction. He himself was a passionate teacher—“intimidating,” I had been told the first day I set foot in the building seeking to add one of these writing workshops to my schedule. I could see why at the first class, his magnificent eyebrows meeting in the middle as he scowled, his voice gruff, without a smile but with a demand that we all take this workshop as seriously as he did.He had just finished co-directing a three-year NEH institute for directors of writing programs across the country. He was well-connected in the profession and had published or shared in the editing of a number of books on teaching writing, on prose style, and on the literary essay.But he had not himself published any essays or nonfiction. My own career had led me to a faculty position that did not recognize, nor encourage, anything to do with nonfiction, and I had found my way into an administrative position in order to align myself with colleagues who understood the teaching of writing as a discipline. I was stuck in the tension between the writing I wanted to do and the writing I needed to do in order to be granted tenure. So I was heartened, as I say, to see before me an example of a successful scholar and administrator who had wound his way to this particular passion, a reminder that a career, like a life, can have various stages and take new turns. That is, after all, one of the advantages of tenure, and I was encouraged to imagine something similar for myself.As he described what it had been like for the past three months to pursue this disciplined writing, to finish the 500 words each day before sleep, to heed or resist the promptings of Kate, his wife, who would of course appear in the pages at times, he slid a sheaf of papers across the dark table towards me, urging me to read.Even before I picked them up, the air in that dark leather booth felt too close. I am by nature an internal processor, which means I have a very hard time telling you what I think or am feeling in the moment; it means that I need time and some degree of silence, a vigorous walk in the woods or a good bit of staring off into space in order to know even what it is I might put words to. I began to read, acutely aware I'd have to say something when I looked up from the pages.I was familiar with the view outside the kitchen window in that house of Carl's, and also the view from the third-floor attic study, the sweep of lawn up to Kate's flower bed, and the pergola next to the vegetable beds that these pages evoked. But what was threaded through and through each page that purported to be about the weather and gardening was a persistent returning, at each turn, to a contemplation on mortality and loss.I wasn't sure that Carl was aware of this. I wasn't sure it was wise to point it out to him—and I cannot tell you even now if my uncertainty grew because I didn't want to take up that role as reader, or because I wasn't sure it was the sort of feedback he wanted at that point. And I cannot now remember if I accepted the invitation to step into the kind of reader, friend, or editor that he extended to me by pushing those pages into my hands.I have celebrated in turn the publication of each of his books since then. Those first pages of the first three months of that year eventually grew and were then whittled down to produce My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season, and the pages that were shed from that year were subsequently shaped into Weathering Winter: A Gardener's Daybook. When the box of author copies of the second book arrived at his house, Carl and Kate were about to leave on a cross-Canada road trip, in late August, his first autumn that was not taken up with planning to teach. I was at their house, receiving instructions on how to care for the gardens in their absence, and Carl was beginning to produce the pages of Taking Retirement, having just, finally, taken retirement.With the project that yielded those first two books, Carl had taken on a challenge that was twofold. In setting himself the requirement of 500 words a day, he discovered that being able to complete it became a matter of how to live and write at the same time—how to have a life and produce the pages—a discipline that shaped his days in ways he had not anticipated. It was, as well, a formal challenge: he could not, he told me, find any other writer who had created a book in such a way, shaped by that formal discipline and informed by the essayist's mandate to allow readers to follow the writer's mind at work. A daybook. He'd looked at Anne Truitt's 1982 Daybook: A Journal of an Artist, and recognized it as missing the impulse of the essayist. Entries were made daily, but are sometimes brief, observations that are dropped on the page but not often taken up to be examined and probed, to unfold or resonate later.When he finished the year of writing, he told me he could and would not try it again—that its toll on daily life had been too much. But he delayed taking retirement because the challenges and discipline of a daybook had led him to conceive of one last seminar to teach, based on his year-long experience with this form.In each of his books, he has sought a variation of that form and discipline, each appropriate to its occasion or impetus, each bringing with it a kind of habit of mind. In Taking Retirement, he conceives of it this way: I have, in fact, such mixed feelings about giving up the classroom, my office, and the community of my colleagues and students that I thought I'd better start keeping a diary. A diary where I can deal with the bittersweet feelings I'm experiencing even now as I sit up here in the attic writing this piece. A diary that might help me through this suddenly dismaying phase-in-phase-out—and beyond. (4)The entries are daily, but of varying length; the intent is to “help [him] through,” a more self-conscious attention to all the loss, and all the ways that loss pops up unexpectedly.Six years later, in November of 2003, Carl's wife, Kate, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, and Carl took to writing again in order to “get through.” Letters to Kate takes the form of regular (though not daily), brief letters. It's not a chronicle, not a diary, but the letters are shaped by narrative and steeped in an intimacy often heart-rending.After Letters to Kate, Carl's publications turned to projects about the essay and nonfiction writing, books for scholars and teachers. Persona is a short masterpiece on style and voice for writers and represents a distillation of much that anyone who's sat in a classroom with him will recognize and appreciate. Essayists on the Essay, an editing collaboration with the late Ned Stuckey-French, is also a culmination of his decades of teaching and research as one of the preeminent scholars of the essay.The Ninth Decade, Carl Klaus's latest book, is the result of his project to document or keep track of what it is like to live one's ninth decade. This time he calls it a chronicle; it's shaped not by daily entries, but chapters that mark a year or two from the decade. They resonate with reflection from a longer view, as if undergirded with the question—what change has this year wrought?—marking changes in health, stamina, cognitive acuity, goals, and activities in ways that one isn't compelled to do at any earlier decade. He has taken a cue, perhaps, from an article “focused on age-related changes,” which notes “the pivotal nature of octogenarian life”: “Age eighty to eighty-five is a transitional period when major health changes take place. Until age eighty, most people do not have functional impairment or disability, despite the presence of chronic disorders.” (quoted on p. 64)It's ironic that at an earlier age, he took on a compressed, hectic, consuming schedule to write—500 words a day, every day for one year, while teaching and administering full-time—and now, when having the time to bring a decade-long project to completion is less certain, he set out on such an accounting. And yet, perhaps not: he writes about how much less he is able to manage as various health matters take their toll. Perhaps this ninth decade is precisely the point in life when the rest of us need some markers, some references, some guideposts, and as he has said, there are precious few to be found, though so many more of us will be traveling that route. It's when we most need that longer view: And octogenarians themselves have written so little about their eighties—a couple of one-year journals published more than twenty years ago—that the ninth decade, an exceptional period of life, is uncharted territory. (1)Perhaps, too, that's why I found myself perseverating on the book's title. For some reason, I was hung up on the numbers, needing over and over to parse the matter of how we count our age: you are one year old when you begin your second year; it is your ninth decade when you are in your 80s. I kept repeating the title, then trying to figure out my own placemarker in decades. Say it out loud and you realize how few of these decades any of us are granted. The vast majority of us expire before we ever get to ten. A ninth decade is a luxury, and yes, more and more people get at least partway through it, but somehow counting by decades startles me.You see it coming but you can't do much more than live it as you've been living each one before. It's like driving a flat, straight road at sunrise, towards mountains tipped with rosy dawn. You're headed there up into those mountains, but for now you have a long view, expansive sightlines to what's all around and to what's ahead. You can't really see at all what it will look like once you are up on those mountains, nor see what's way up and over them.Carl Klaus's journey into these mountains looks like this: he is repeatedly seeking out research, consulting what others have to say about the landscape ahead, and confronting his own past experiences and foibles, his own habits and inclinations, his own winding ways. Such a book cannot predict or really help out the particulars of anyone else's journey, but it is indeed—as one would expect from an essayist and scholar of the essay like Klaus—a record of one journey, one man's mind at work confronting aging, old age, a new identity, and a new set of challenges. The particulars of my ninth decade won't look like his, but I can learn a bit about how to proceed and what habits to take with me—consulting experts, weighing the advice with my own willingness to take a chance, taking care to bring companions, taking care to prepare for letting go.This is a man who has had a lot to tell us about loss, and about letting go. And this is one of the most remarkable things about The Ninth Decade: from its pages you hear a wisdom tempered by decades of confronting loss. The underlying grief startled me on those pages slid over the mahogany table so many years ago. My Vegetable Love is a love song to the life Klaus created in his 100-year-old home, with Kate, that was a response to the early personal losses he's written about or alluded to in several of his books. The loss of parents, of home, of the security of groundedness. In a garden, a fellow graduate student once observed to me, one can exert control, can visibly create and shape—an apt occupation for a scholar of language and literature. “Don't you find it interesting,” my friend asked, “that so many English professors are gardeners?” My Vegetable Love is threaded through with Klaus's observations about his own attempts to control, shape, plan what comes up, and to adapt to the unforeseen, unpredictable events of time passing.Weathering Winter, which emerged from the same year-long project as My Vegetable Love, bores deeper and more pointedly into loss, throughout the book weaving Klaus's contemplation of weather and garden in and among reflections on the enormous losses facing the Japanese community of Kobe after the January 1995 earthquake. In Taking Retirement, it's a long career Klaus is letting go of. He finds himself clutching and trying to manage his retirement income, believing he can manage it better himself, once he finds the expert advice that makes sense to him. But he struggles also to face the limits of anyone's ability to predict the market, to game the system, to secure some security. So soon afterwards, he's faced with the gut punch of loss again with Kate's sudden death, and again takes up essaying to come to terms with that loss.It should be no surprise that The Ninth Decade is the book in which he most explicitly confronts loss, questioning everything, imagining the losses yet to come. In just a few pages, for example, a visit from an old friend leads him to reconsider how much traveling he can do, and he decides to find different places to vacation that don't require air travel, to “wonder what [he] would do if Jackie [his partner] became disabled,” to conversations about what he and she would do if confronted by a terminal or disabling illness—and more: But I can't help thinking the pleasure of our present lives is predicated on a baseless hope of avoiding some kind of dementia, much as the pleasure of continuing to live in our comfortable homes is predicated on the tenuous hope that we'll never need assisted living.A few days later, I discovered another foolish hope, when I took my twenty-year-old Jeep in for an oil change and check of its rusting underside. I assumed it would survive as long as I'm able to drive. (131–132)On the very next page, he's considering “the oldest and most influential attachments of [his] life,” his house and garden, and the likelihood of having to let go of that as well, feeling “deeply saddened by the end of a sixty-five-year passion for vegetable gardening.” In the next paragraph, he's facing “the death of my friend and former graduate student, Ned.” The wave of successive losses, both present and anticipated, is broken by a buoyant ability to turn to the blessings that can be found, thanks to his essayist's practiced eye and habit of paying attention: I escaped such somber thoughts . . . by retreating indoors, reading and reading, [including] Louise Aronson's Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimaining Life . . . a work that has led me to be even more grateful for the cautious, low-risk care that Jackie and I have received from our internist. (135)In The Ninth Decade, Carl Klaus gives us yet another record of a journey and a life, rich and blessed, unsparing in confronting inevitable losses along the way. His self-questioning doesn't let up, not even as he reaches towards the tenth decade. I for one am enormously grateful for his witness and his vision.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.