Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 8

A Little Life — Week 8

This week’s reading included one of the book’s most moving passages in my estimation. Jude, in and out of consciousness in his hospital bed, asks Willem simply to confirm who he is. Willem’s response is beautiful, and heartbreaking:

“You’re Jude St. Francis. You are my oldest, dearest friend. You’re the son of Harold Stein and Julia Altman. You’re the friend of Malcolm Irvine, of Jean-Baptiste Marion, of Richard Goldfarb, of Andy Contractor, of Lucien Voigt, of Citizen van Straaten, of Rhodes Arrowsmith, of Elijah Kozma, of Phaedra de los Santos, of the Henry Youngs.

“You’re a New Yorker. You live in SoHo. You volunteer for an arts organization; you volunteer for a food kitchen.

“You’re a swimmer. You’re a baker. You’re a cook. You’re a reader. You have a beautiful voice, though you never sing anymore. You’re an excellent pianist. You’re an art collector. You write me lovely messages when I’m away. You’re patient. You’re generous. You’re the best listener I know. You’re the smartest person I know, in every way. You’re the bravest person I know, in every way.

“You’re a lawyer. You’re the chair of the litigation department at Rosen Pritchard and Klein. You love your job; you work hard at it.

“You’re a mathematician. You’re a logician. You’ve tried to teach me, again and again.

“You were treated horribly. You came out on the other end. You were always you.” — 607–8

It’s a summation of sorts, and in the light of what follows reads as one all the more. This is the life of Jude St Francis in six paragraphs; it is missing some of the detail of the 600-plus page version, but the beats are all there. And the emphasis is changed: all of the darkness of which we’ve learned is encapsulated, in Willem’s version, within a simple sentence of four words — three fewer than describe Jude’s having overcome it. This victory is the real story of Jude St Francis, who was able to beat seemingly insurmountable odds to find happiness. We see it too in the way Jude has started to conceive of his life:

his life after Brother Luke, his life after Dr. Traylor, his life after the monastery and the motel rooms and the home and the trucks, which was the only part of his life that counted — 641

Of course, it’s not possible to survive such things without having sustained lasting damage, and we continue to see Jude suffering both physically and psychologically. There are his night terrors that play upon the possibility of Harold hurting him, and then the guilt that follows having made — even subconsciously — a comparison between Harold and Dr Traylor:

what does it say about him, about how he thinks and what his fears are, that he should even imagine this about Harold? — 587

And, just as pervasively, there is Jude’s understandable tendency to draw links between his past and his present that only he finds logic in:

If he sacrifices his legs, he will be admitting to Dr. Traylor that he has won — 600

In all though, a good majority of the week’s reading dealt with the latter of ‘The Happy Years’. Yanagihara is very good at the details of these pleasurable times, whether it’s surroundings, foods, or conversations that Willem & Jude are enjoying, the stuff of their daily lives is as well-rendered as it is enviable. The clean, functional expanse of the couple’s multiple homes, the thoughtfulness of their gifts to each other and from friends, the continued depth of pleasure they take in each other’s company. Jude is able to take refuge in all of this:

he needed to surround himself with people, with events, with noise and clamor, with evidence of the life he now inhabited. — 580

Even if, as we are continually reminded, he also struggles to believe that it has happened to, and is happening to, him:

the beauty was so uncomplicated, so undeniable that it seemed at times an illusion. — 593

Following the interruption of all of this by a series of health problems, Yanagihara writes:

Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. — 614

This reminded me of a comment she made in an article I have mentioned previously (‘How I Wrote My Novel’), wherein she states:

“I thought a great deal about that particular brand of male unself-consciousness, which JB and Willem embody but which Jude cannot.”

Willem in particular is an embodiment of this way of being, both in terms of his personality (eg. we continue to see him entirely at ease at potentially-awkward parties) and physicality (eg. the descriptions of his body as he takes on the role of a ballet dancer). We might think of Willem’s comment in their youth:

“I hate to tell you this, Jude, but we have the same body.” He looked at him. “You’re an inch taller, but can I remind you that we can wear each other’s clothes?” — 452

As we are reminded of the continued vigour of one, however, we see the other further reduced — by infection, by dramatic weight-loss, and ultimately by the loss of his lower legs. This kind of reflection is one manner in which Willem & Jude relate to one another within the structure of the novel. Consider also the fear that Jude retains that the relationship is less symbiotic and more parasitic:

He had always thought that Willem was capable of making him better, but over the years he feared: If Willem could make him better, didn’t that also mean that he could make Willem sick? And in the same way, if Willem could make him into someone less difficult to regard, couldn’t he also make Willem into something ugly? — 579

Earlier in the novel we had seen Jude’s absolute mania for independence, the reasons for which lie in his history of having been serially used, controlled, and betrayed. His ability to let some of that go, and to become entwined with Willem to the extent that he does, is a sure sign of his improved emotional stability. That the lowering of these barriers and the building of this trust should then lead to further heartbreak upon the loss of Willem is — quite literally — tragic. Let us look again at an excerpt included above, but this time including the parts I had topped & tailed:

His entire life — his life after Brother Luke, his life after Dr. Traylor, his life after the monastery and the motel rooms and the home and the trucks, which was the only part of his life that counted — had had Willem in it. — 641

Jude’s happiness and his relationship with Willem are the same thing at this point.

He was unable to conceive of life without him, because Willem had so defined what his life was and could be. — 641

For Jude, losing Willem means losing the love of his life, of course, but also losing his best friend. And just as tragically it means losing all that he had come to like and accept about himself.

His coping strategy is partly a descent into oblivion wherever he can conjure it, partly a submerging of his mind into work, and also a cocooning of himself in isolation. If it’s not obvious to Jude it’s at least apparent to us that his misplaced anger toward JB has its root in the same place as JB’s reaching out to him does. ‘“We’re all we have left, Jude,”’ (p.648) JB says, and indeed it is precisely because JB is a living reminder of the loss of Willem & Malcolm that Jude can’t face him.

All of this, Jude thinks of as ‘the scaffolding, rickety and fragile as it is, that he has learned to erect in order to keep moving forward’ (p.635). Much of the behaviour is familiar to us as a reprise of his methods of dealing with his intense psychological pain of old. The manner in which Jude portions out his reminders of Willem (one film a month, one email a week…) is a form of control just like his cutting — as much calculated to reassure him that he retains some control over his life as it is to keep some part of Willem present.

It is a deeply sad place we’re left in. With the pinch of pages in my right hand having grown thin, I am simply hoping that this is not the state in which we are left to remember Jude.

• Not mentioned in the text, but having reached the end of ‘The Happy Years’ and read of Willem’s death, I listened to Chopin’s Nocturne No 20. (The switch from C major last week, to C sharp minor here feels appropriate.)

• Somewhat different, but another song that came to mind was Bloc Party’s ‘Only He Can Heal Me’.

• And a little visual stimulation also: this week I learned of the existence of the Pinterest board Hanya Yanagihara put together as a kind of tonal palate during the writing of the novel.