Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Pleasure of His Company

2006; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ail.2006.0047

1548-9590

Lois M. Welch,

American Sports and Literature

The Pleasure of His Company Lois M. Welch The smile, the smile. Eighty-five percent of the letters of condolence I received mentioned Jim’s smile as their fondest memory of him. For a foolish moment I considered planning a segment of his memorial service about that smile. That is the Jim I want to remember here: the smiling, generous, surprising Jim. As Jim’s wife, I leave the bronze plaque stuff to others. What I loved about him was the fun. The fun was what made me love him. What I want to try to convey is the quality of the pleasure it was to be with him. He had the broadest and most nuanced emotional range of anyone I have known. His easy responsive laughter. His unflinching look at tragedy. The attentive intimacy of his gaze. His curiosity. His pleasure in the world around him—verbal, sensual, intellectual pleasure. His willingness to do the spontaneous. His potential goofiness. (He insisted, for instance, on a trip through Sun Valley that I take a snapshot of him alongside Hemingway’s grave, lying beside the grave.) He was even a genial drunk. Never malicious, never carping or contemptuous. (Sometimes cranky.) He was more fun to be with than anyone I have known. He liked artichokes the first time I served him one—how could one not love him? This is not to say he was fun all the time; we all lapse into humdrum routines (though I suspect writers thrive on routine). Of course, he had his moods, annoyances, and flaws. Of some people one speaks tolerantly of balance between the good qualities and the bad. In Jim's case, I know of no one who disliked him. Here I want to sketch a few of these delights, since a definitive portrait is impossible in these few pages. [End Page 14] First of all, living with Jim was fun. Living with a writer is a bit like your childhood expectations of a refrigerator come to life. The light really is still on when the door is shut. Something is going on inside the refrigerator, and you will never quite figure out what. (In real life, what goes in comes back out in about the same shape.) Writers tend to obsess; they tend never to stop thinking about their current project, no matter what they are doing. One must accept this. With painters, you can see bit by bit what they are painting; with a writer, it may be a long time before you are shown any pages. Lest romantics get excited, we did not sit by the fire and read to each other of an evening. Jim only showed me what he was working on when he was nearly finished with a draft or when he wanted specific feedback. When I first knew him, he was writing poems, so of course I got to read new poems almost every day for a couple of years. That was an amazing period. I would come home from school, he would show me "Magic Fox" or some such new poem, we would go for a walk, fix dinner. Little did I know we were living the Native American Literary Renaissance. Later, there were long stretches, when he was writing the novels, when the fridge remained closed, as it were. But what surprises when it opened! He acted as though it were perfectly ordinary, and it was—his pleasantly lit study, his typewriter (then his computer), the same baseball cards on the wall then as now. He would hand me some chapters from, say, Fools Crow, and I would read them. I was always surprised, sometimes amazed. Trailing in Jim's wake was fun too. I shall follow Jim's example and not drop names, but what a lot of writers and Native American scholars he got to know, and I beside him. Most of our friends were writers. The literary events and the travel were bonuses. Jim was enormously popular in France, and he loved it: he established close friendships with his editor and translator and others. It helped that I speak French. We never got enough of exploring both Paris and the countryside...