The photograph of Rebecca Solnit’s desk that features in her recent memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and since we began sheltering in place in mid-March, I’ve read just two new books. One was Writers & Lovers by Lily King, which I read in one sitting and promptly forgot so completely that I just spent a good five minutes searching for its title and author using phrases like “new book young woman writer.” Critics liked it — Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post, “it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness”. To which I can only say that perhaps we read different books. Then again, critics as a whole like Sally Rooney’s work, so maybe I’m more outside the mainstream than I thought.
The second was Rebecca Solnit’s recent memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence. In preparation for a potential collaboration, I wrote a more traditional review, reprinted below.
Between the title page and table of contents of Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit’s recent memoir, is a photograph of a desk with scalloped edges and teardrop-shaped drawer pulls. It is a writerly desk, with stacks of books and papers on either side of a keyboard and a swath of translucent linen over the computer monitor. The photograph goes unremarked upon until the third of the book’s eight sections, when Solnit writes, “A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him.”
Her friend survived the attempted murder, and the desk she later gave Solnit became the foundation of her work, both literally and figuratively — it’s at this desk that Solnit wrote the more than twenty books that comprise her career, among them investigations of storytelling, walking, the aftermath of disasters, the history of Yosemite as well as the essays for which she is perhaps most widely known, including 2008’s Men Explain Things to Me, which inspired the now-familiar term “mansplaining”.
Everyday and often violent misogyny is an enduring theme in Solnit’s memoir, which begins in late 1970s San Francisco. Men beat, stalk, sexually harass, demean, and ignore her. Solnit describes these and other horrors in plain language that reflects their mundanity, and often with mordant humor. Though she is a regular at the iconic City Lights (which published her first book) over a period of decades, Lawrence Ferlinghetti never spoke to her, “including under circumstances where speaking to me would be the normal thing to do.” A review of that first book, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, mis-attributes authorship to “poet and critic Bill Berkson, who’d written a very gracious foreword, opening with a quote by Mina Loy: ‘The common tragedy is to suffer without having appeared.’” In high spirits at a birthday party for noted misogynist and alleged murderer William Burroughs, Solnit and her editor are asked to pose for a photo with the guest of honor: “I’ve always described him as looking like a slug between two saltshakers in that moment. It was very satisfying, and then we moved on.”
Even when writing about what is ostensibly a single subject (herself), Solnit moves nimbly between themes and registers in a particular style of essayistic nonfiction of her own devising. The questions and interests that drove her previous books are present here, in obvious and delightfully subtle ways — Solnit wrote her Master’s thesis on the work of Wallace Berman, one of whose collages is on the partially obscured monitor in that opening photograph. Revisiting these through-lines is in keeping with her own description of this memoir as like hopscotch — treading and retreading the same ground, “in a slightly different pursuit each time”.
That ground, however, is much more than the plain facts of her past: Solnit is a keen observer with a restless eye that manages to keep abreast of both the external world and her interior life. Invisibility, for example, is not just a condition some men are determined to inflict upon her — how it permits atrocity is the subject of her second book, Savage Dreams, about the human and environmental impacts of nuclear testing in Nevada as well as the erasure of Native peoples at Yosemite National Park.
This approach produces a rich accretion of events and analysis, though some readers may find her prose overly discursive and occasionally artless — a description of an open book as “two arcs of paper that, seen from the top or bottom… look like the wide V of birds in flight” spurs Solnit to “think about that and then about women who turn into birds” and then to reflect on how rape is at once ubiqitious and invisible in art. Solnit is aware of this possibility but suggests a more generous interpretation: “I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”
Solnit’s becoming is nothing less than a crucible, as she writes in the first chapter: “I was trying not to be the subject of someone else’s poetry and not to get killed.” Her memoir offers a compelling account of making a life that accords with one’s self and one’s values in a world that is often hostile to both.
What I missed in that review — I was already over the word limit — are the moments of grace that occasionally broke through the hostility. Solnit writes early on in her memoir of searching for and finding the apartment that would shelter her while she did the work of becoming.
The place astonished me with its beauty. A corner studio whose main room had a south and an east bay window through which light cascaded. Golden oak floors, high coved ceilings, and white walls with rectangular panels of molding. Glass-paneled doors with crystal doorknobs. A separate kitchen with another east-facing window that would explode with morning light when the sun came up over the big house across the street. It seemed luminous, a little unearthly, a place from a fairy tale, immense and exquisite compared to the spartan single rooms in which I’d mostly lived since I’d left home shortly after I turned seventeen. I floated around in it for a while, then went back downstairs and told the manager I wanted it. He said, kindly, “If you want it you should have it.” …
When he handed me the rental application, my heart fell I told him that I had already been turned down by the slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form… The building manager told me that if I got a respectable older woman to apply, he wouldn’t tell them of the deception. I took up that offer and asked my mother, who had often refused to go out on a limb for me, if she would. This time she did, filling out and submitting the form…
At some point, the property management company found out that the resident was not the signer of the lease and asked the building manager what was going on. He vouched for me as a quiet, responsible tenant and nothing happened, but I still felt precarious.
James V. Young was the building manager’s name. I always called him Mr. Young. Sometime or other he mentioned that I was the first white person to live in the building in seventeen years… I would stay so long that when I left, I left a middle-class white place… where something vital had died.
Solnit writes more about Mr. Young in subsequent chapters, but already we have a sense of what a compassionate person he must be. As Solnit writes,
Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end.
I am trying to notice more pleasurable moments these days, not to keep the bad news at bay but to keep it in balance — the donkeys I help care for seeming pleased to see me when I arrive at their pasture to prepare their breakfast, a letter from a friend who is such a talented writer that he can make me laugh and weep in the space of a few pages, the springiness and slight scratchiness of cool grass under my bare feet and the warmth of sunshine on my skin.
But it’s hard to linger in these moments — it’s hard to sit still without remembering that in the US alone, more than 200,000 people have died because of our government’s failure to respond to COVID-19, without thinking about how we are a country on the brink of fascism, without wondering whether I’ll get to see some of my elderly family members living in other countries before they die, without worrying about what could go wrong next in a year that began with the threat of nuclear war (remember that?) and has since deteriorated spectacularly, without wanting to scream at self-righteous people telling me to VOTE when at best that will throw a few extra sandbags behind failing levees. And without reflecting on just how twisted it is that we are expected by our employers to, in spite of the pandemic and wildfires and isolation and grief, not only remain productive but feel grateful that we have jobs at all. How quickly pleasure slides into rage and fear and frustration.
I don’t have the capacity to handle many more surprises — I suspect this is the reason I’ve been so disinclined to read anything I haven’t read before. I’m reading the way Rebecca Solnit writes, treading and retreading the same ground, “in a slightly different pursuit each time.”
In the letter I just mailed back to my friend the talented writer, I told him that I’m after consolation — comfort and perspective and truth, delivered with a sense of humor. If you’re looking for the same, try Aminatta Forna, Tim Kreider, EB White, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, Oliver Sacks, Anne Lamott.
I hope you and yours are safe and well.
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