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The Pleasure of Their Company
By Doris Grumbach
Beacon Press
160 pp $22

Doris Grumbach has written still another imaginative, candid, and, at times, touching reflection on the larger themes of life: truth, commitment, identity, and aging.

Grumbach achieved fame early on as both an author and a critic. She taught English for three decades at several liberal arts colleges on the East Coast and served as the New Republic's book editor in the 1970s. In this thoughtful, unpretentious memoir, she draws on her experiences as a mother of four daughters, a wife in a marriage of 31 years, and, after an amiable divorce, a partner in a 25-year union with a companion named Sybil. It helps, too, that Grumbach has had a life immersed in literature. As a result, linkages emerge between the ideas of Proust or Dickinson, Auden or Sarton, and Grumbach's rich contemplative world. The softness of her writing style, plus the consistent grace of her language, places her in the lofty company of Florida Scott-Maxwell and her classic text on aging, The Measure of My Days.

The "company" in her most recent title consists of the more than 30 family members, neighbors, and literary and publishing friends whom Grumbach invited to help celebrate her 80th birthday on a July 1998 weekend. They came to her and her partner's 100-year-old house in Sargentville, Maine, a peninsula village on Penobscot Bay, a few miles from the place where E.B. White, of New Yorker fame, used to live.

Grumbach uses the occasion of her 80th birthday as a canvas on which to paint a forest of stories, recollections, and reflections. The Pleasure of Their Company is essentially a journal, with entries ranging from the wry and succinct -- people who reach 80 are "time challenged" -- to the pensive and expansive, as in this observation about the vagaries of the obituary page where the media have the last word: "I have always read the obituaries in the New York Times, both the extended ones under black headlines and the privately placed ones in tiny type. In the harassed days before I reached eighty I found that I read them even more closely. I used to think that I paid attention to them in order to feel superior; after all, one had survived even the featured dead. But yesterday, reading the dreaded page, I discovered a better reason for turning first to the obituaries every day. I was reading about persons who were notable enough in their lives to merit lengthy considerations at their death but of whom I had never heard."

One of the many intellectual pleasures provided by Grumbach is her ability to meld her inner spiritual life with the outer realities of daily living in Maine. On some early mornings, she reads the Psalms of David to energize her to carry out the day's obligations. At other times she draws strength from the writings of Thomas Merton, the Trappist priest and writer who died in 1968.

She uses a Merton prayer found in his enduring work Thoughts in Solitude as a way to start her "hour of meditation. It begins: 'My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.' I liked this prayer, I trusted it, because it is full of my own doubts and uncertainty. The force of its negative is better than the bland assurances, the mindless certainties of most prayers. As for Merton, for me the future always seems full of fog and peril, and the promises of resurrection somewhat difficult to accept. Preachers always seem to be so sure of what God wants of us, what His will is, whereas I am uncertain about those matters because I do not know the source of their authority. How do they know, how do I, or Merton, know, what God wants?"

Other spiritual reflections are sprinkled throughout, including this quick one: "An old theological difficulty attempts to collate the existence of God with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. St. Teresa of Avila had a witty way of expressing it. She believed deeply in God but reproved Him for His behavior: 'You have few friends because you treat them so badly.' "

Amid the many pluses in this journal is one minus. Readers are given little information about the birthday celebration itself, except that the dinner menu ran deep with the customary Maine staples of lobster and blueberry pie. Some reporting is needed. Who offered the most eloquent after-dinner toasts? What stories were told by the guests, presumably a literate and voluble crowd? How about a paragraph or two on the latest gossip from the publishing world, guaranteed to be spilled when two or more authors get to gabbing over dinner? And we would welcome a few words about Grumbach's assessment of the weekend?

Perhaps the omission is due to modesty, a reticence to shine a spotlight on herself. Grumbach is other-centered, not self-centered. She writes glowingly of Sybil, who toils at a local bookstore and has been Grumbach's partner for a quarter-century. It has been "a union that was once regarded as scandaleux but, in the current climate for such odd couples, seemed to be accepted by most persons. ... A genuine lesbian union is, in every sense except the legal, a marriage. For us, the domestic life has been no different from what our former arrangements were, except that perhaps there is more commonality, more equality, fewer unshared tasks. There are the same obligations and responsibilities to each other."

To her credit, and to the reader's benefit, Grumbach writes affectionately about her former husband, "who has remained a good friend." He would have been at the birthday party, except his wife was ill and he stayed home to care for her. "He is a man," Grumbach writes, "who has always felt responsibility for the welfare of others -- for his parents, his daughters, for me when we lived together for 31 years. Now he is old, frail, but still a caretaker."

This writer also passes along the gift of wit. She recalls the line of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes when, at age 94, he saw a pretty girl and sighed, "O, to be 80 again." Grumbach confesses that she has "always thought of old age as a long defeat, full of unsuccessful skirmishes with the small losses of memory and physical capacity and, finally, a lost battle. It is also replete with ironies that sting when they are humorously expressed. Malcolm Cowley tells of an octogenarian 'with all his buttons' who said at a testimonial dinner for his senior partner: 'They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much.'" Funny. Terrible.

With The Pleasure of Their Company, written in relaxed, conversational prose, Grumbach adds to a list of six earlier distinguished works, including Fifty Days of Solitude and Coming Into the End Zone. Reading her latest book, readers are in the pleasurable company of a writer at the top of her form.

-- Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist and book reviewer, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. He is the winner of a 2001 Excellence in Journalism award for an opinion series from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

First published January 22, 2001
Last updated October 27, 2008
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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