Jackson’s Dilemma
One of you, dear readers, asked how I decide what to write about. “You’re
all over the damn map,” you said. “Sometimes it’s interesting – like New
Orleans or Helena, MT – but sometimes it’s
just . . . not: Think the middle of a field in the middle of Indiana.”
Reply: It’s not rocket surgery. Since
there’s neither middle nor bottom, I write about what’s at the top of my mind.
The difficulty is not what to write about, it’s how to put my fingers on
the keyboard and move them – right ring, left-middle, left-fore, left-fore, and
so on.
Two days ago – or three, it’s easy to lose track of time – this came from Trudy Monae. Or four?
Dear Ted,
Will you write back and forth with
me sometime about Jackson’s Dilemma? That’s not too much to ask, is it?
I really like the book for all the death and all the bungling in it. There’s a
happy fairy-tale/comedy conclusion, isn’t there? Is it fair to say there’s
redemption, or is that too much? Nur ein Gott kann uns retten. Is that
Karl Barth? What is fair to say is that there are lots of doorbells and doors
and standing just inside or just outside.
Do you remember that tall,
exceedingly narrow Englishman that was at school with us the year we were at
school together – he stayed one more year, I think, and left as I did; in
fact, he came to W&M as I did –
Leslie Becket (with one t)? I went out with him a few times before I met you. And I
went out with him a few times after you and I went kaput. Then, he left W&M,
too. Then, he went just about everywhere, dying in a place that doesn’t exist except in your imagination. I mentioned him a couple of months ago. You do remember?!
We go
for night-time walks from time to time, and he talks about Wittgenstein and
George Eliot, and about Hobbes and Rousseau, and about spiders, what we used to
call granddaddies-long-legs. He talks like Bertrand Russell writes: I can
understand what he’s saying as long as he keeps talking. But then he’ll realize
he’s gone on and on, and he’ll stop and look down at me from his great height
and say, “What?” Meaning “do you have something to interject or add or . . . ,”
and everything he’s said will go right out of my head in that moment when he
pauses to say “What?” And I’ll shake my head, “Nothing.” And we’ll walk on.
Every now and then he’ll ask about you. He’ll say, “I think he liked me,” as if
that were an odd thing. “He was kind to me,” he’ll say. “We should have gotten
to know each other better.” And I’ll tell him you liked him, too, and wished
the same because I imagine that to be true.
I have another friend, Gretchen Monet. We roomed
together my first year at W&M: Monae and Monet. Then, she dropped
out; and she and another girl, Beth Something, who was graduating, put on their
best hippie regalia and left the morning after graduation and began hitchhiking
west. They were lucky, Gretchen says, nothing bad happened. Except in a commune
in Nebraska – could there have been a commune in Nebraska? this was 1977 – Beth
decided she was going to fall in love with this guy Bill, and he was going to
Montana for some reason. But there was this “sweet” gay guy there, and he was
going west. So, she, Gretchen, and this guy, Sam – for Samantha, he said – got going
again. And eventually, they made it to San Francisco. Where he disappeared. He
died of AIDS, she thinks, but she’s not sure; she’s not sure why she thinks
that, but she’s pretty sure she heard it somewhere. Meanwhile, she met a professor
at the University of San Francisco, who was much older and divorced, and that
was a mess. And LSD and other stuff, she waves her hands.
But she had to find a job, and she
ended up working in a head-shop. Then, quite a while later, her dad died, and
she bought the shop. And when she died, of cancer, in her fifties,
she was rich, though she didn’t know it until she found out she had money to
pay all her medical bills and there was still quite a bit in the bank after she’d
arranged her funeral.
Why am I writing this? Because she,
Gretchen, has read all of Iris Murdoch five or six times, and she thinks the
mystical side of Jackson is really interesting and true to life.
She says she has met a lot of people like that, that can fix almost anything
but don’t know where they came from or where they are going, only “somewhere
else” in both cases. I told her that I had not – met lots of people like that;
in fact, I didn’t think I’d ever met anyone like that. And she said, “What
about your friend Ted?” because she knew about you from when we were at W&M
when you and I were still writing, and she also knew you were an Iris Murdoch
fan because I told her when I was reading A Word Child with you.* So,
what do you think? Have you met anyone like that? I told her I bet you hadn’t
because neither of us had ever lived in San Francisco or India; rather we both
went to school in Minnesota. She said, “Ask anyway.” So, I’m asking. Tell me.
And tell me more about the book. I
do like the ending where everybody gets married, even those that don’t.
So? – Trudy
P.S. Gretchen also wants to meet Leslie. She bets he knew someone like that. He
may even know someone like that, like Jackson.
03.30.21
_______________
Graphic: That's J. J. Jackson! of J. J. Jackson
* Starts here.
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