796: If I were . . .
At Home with the Glynns, the Preface concludes
If I were still working in the novella form, this short book would have had three parts: “Abed with Twins,” “Driven to Abstraction,” and “In Your Own Words.” For quite a while during the writing of the book, I thought that I would call it War (Life, Love, Dust) and Peas, and at other times I was tempted to call it The Night the Fine Arts Theater Burned, but as I wrote I found that the strongest of all my motives for writing the book was the desire to commemorate two things: the coziness I felt in the company of the Glynns and a discovery I made in Andy Glynn’s studio that—here’s that phrase again—changed my life forever. So I settled on the present title.
Because I keep turning from the straight and narrow to investigate the byways and alleys, my account of my life is unfolding at a slower pace than my life itself. When I first began my personal history, I imagined that at some point I would bring the story of my past up to my life in the present, and a day would come—namely, my sixtieth birthday, as I had it planned—when I wouldn’t be writing reminiscences anymore. My story would have brought Albertine and me to Small’s Hotel, and I would shift to a running account of life there, writing something closer to a journal than a history, an easier task for my later years. I expected that I would stop telling my story, for the most part, and instead tell the stories of people who stayed at Small’s, combined with meditations on the relationship between life in an old hotel and the plumbing in an old hotel. I even thought that I would finally get around to writing that big book about clams, and so on. Now, however, after having put years into the effort, I can see that it isn’t likely to happen that way. I now think that in my doddering years I will still be—in the clam bed of my mind, where my imagination lies with my memory and sires countless offspring—a bumbling youth.
I fear that my rambling makes me a poor guide for you. I seem likely to get you lost along the way, to lead you somewhere from which you’ll never find your way home. I imagine you, as you follow along, looking back over your shoulder, ignoring my patter, wearing a worried look. I don’t blame you. I know that you’re wondering whether the narrative thread I unreel as we ramble along will allow us to find our way back. I sometimes wonder the same thing. The thread seems too thin to hold up for the length of the journey, too hard to spot in the thickets, too difficult to follow along a path that seems to be haphazard, and it’s already snarled and tangled, impossible to unravel. Should we have taken the precaution of dropping bread crumbs behind us as we went along? Probably.
One more thing, in the interest of accuracy. Margot and Martha are not actually twins. They resemble each other so closely that people mistake them for twins, they often pass themselves off as twins, and, early in my reconstruction of my personal history (in “Do Clams Bite?”) I referred to them as twins to avoid seeming to prefer one over the other. Now, after years of writing my life, I’ve fallen into the habit of thinking of them as twins. When they visit, I can hardly tell them apart.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
December 12, 1994
[to be continued]
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