Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C.
S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin
(review)
Tara Hyland-Russell
Biography, Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2012, pp. 405-407 (Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2012.0019
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v035/35.2.hyland-russell.html
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Jeffrey Berman. Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C. S.
Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin. Boston:
U of Massachusetts P, 2010. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1558498037, $26.95.
Jeffrey Berman furthers his exploration of the relationship between writing
and grief through a detailed reading of the memoirs and fictive writings of
five literary couples. He excavates the spousal loss memoirs of C. S. Lewis,
John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin, reading them
through the lenses of their fiction and their partners’ fiction to illuminate
the intimate relationships each held with their partners and with their beliefs about life and death. Berman reveals that, like Scheherazade, he felt
compelled to write about grief in order to remain alive after the death of his
wife in 2004. Companionship in Grief follows Berman’s Dying to Teach: A
Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning (2007), that charts his personal terrain of
grief, while Death in the Classroom: Writing About Love and Loss (2009) recounts his efforts to bring loss and death into the undergraduate classroom
in an empathic and productive way. Conceding that “most of my experiences
with death have come through literature” (Dying to Teach 3), in Companionship in Grief Berman surveys spousal loss memoirs for what they reveal about
“love, loss, and bereavement” and as guides to lead him—and the reader—
through the uneven terrain of grief and mourning. He asks of the memoirs:
how can they help us cope with our own losses and what role does writing
play in bereavement?
Berryman situates his reading of spousal loss memoirs through the most
frequently recommended grief memoir: C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961).
Revealing his unruly emotions and the religious crisis he faced after Joy Davidman’s death, Lewis’s memoir reminded Berman to “avoid the Victorian
process of mummification,” but to honor the dead by “affirming our companionship in joy with them” (9). The necessity for a dual process of mourning
through remembrance and walking in companionship with grief is affirmed
throughout Berman’s text. Donald Hall’s The Best Day the Worst Day (2005),
a memoir about his life with poet Jane Kenyon, gives Berman his title and
thesis. Taking up Hall’s attitude toward the function of writing in response
to loss, Berman suggests that spousal loss memoirs “offer companionship in
grief” (2), a grief which encompasses the deceased, the survivor, and the reader empathizing with the memoirist’s grief. As he read these memoirs, Berman
found their authors to be “allies, friends, and teachers” (2) pointing the way
toward what thanatologists term anticipatory grief and anticipatory recovery.
John Bayley’s three memoirs about his wife, celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch, whose career was interrupted by Alzheimer’s disease, help him work
through the increasingly difficult task of losing a spouse through progressive
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Biography 35.2 (Spring 2012)
disease. Despite his and Murdoch’s skepticism about autobiographical writing, Bayley’s trilogy of memoirs is humorous and life-affirming. Elegy for Iris
(1999), Iris and her Friends (2000), and Widower’s House (2001) chart his
journey as care-giver, chronicler, and mourner throughout the losses associated with his wife’s increasing dementia and death. Freud’s theory of mourning finds its way into several of Berman’s chapters, first to provide some theoretical grounding for bereavement studies, and then through the memoirists
who consulted Freud’s theory in their attempt to navigate the uncertain terrain of grief. Berman notes Freud’s centrality in early concepts of grief and
mourning but ultimately disagrees with Freud’s stance that mourners need to
shatter their relational bonds with the deceased. A more contemporary view
of grief, based on attachment theory, frames mourning as a relational process
that maintains an emotional or spiritual connection with the dead.
Berman clearly views the memoirs he reads in Companionship in Grief
as practical and emotional guides to maintaining such a relationship: “I can
imagine no better way to maintain our attachment to the dead, our continuing emotional bond, than by writing about them” (7). His prescription for
spousal loss is writing as an act of “reality testing” and a “sacred death ritual.”
Such reality testing is especially needed in the face of sudden loss. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) charts her response to the sudden
death of her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, in the memoir
that is the most “self-blaming” of those Berman surveys. In one of the book’s
few moments of weakness, Berman notes the fragmented nature of Didion’s
memoir but prefers to read it more through the lens of Didion’s previous
psychiatric history than through the frame of trauma. Reading for the differences between Didion’s memoir and her later stage play (2007) of the same
events might have revealed that Didion’s memoir is a candid portrayal of the
debilitating trauma of an unexpected loss, and that its fragmented nature was
a necessary prelude to a more coherent telling of the same events.
Calvin Trillin’s short memoir About Alice (2006), which Berman calls
“less a portrait than a poignant glimpse” (13) of Trillin’s muse and wife, is
offered by way of permission for mourners to be circumspect in their disclosures: the act of writing about grief rather than the exact content, Berman suggests, is key to moving into companionship with grief. Berman cites the work
of James Pennebaker about the positive emotional and physical effects from
writing about emotional experiences, and briefly refers to the “reauthoring”
or “restorying” processes taken from narrative psychology. This is one place in
which Berman’s detailed reading could be augmented with a more thorough
discussion about the processes of therapeutic acts of writing, including Suzette
Henke’s understanding of “scriptotherapy.”
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Berman offers spousal loss memoirs as evidence of the transformational
potential of writing grief. His work will appeal to a wide range of readers in
various relationships to grief: teachers, counselors, scholars, people experiencing grief. The texts Berman surveys offer a broad range of responses to
grief and loss, and a distillation of strategies for those contending with loss.
Among the survival skills Berman gleans from reading spousal loss memoirs
are the humanizing of death, the importance of humor, a willingness to live
fully and deeply, and the willingness to create our own meaning out of life
and death. Berman reminds us that loss is an inevitable part of loving someone, and the more joy there can be between the dead and the living, the
better. Berman offers his fellow memoirists as powerful guides, through their
modeling of the act of writing that takes one beyond grief for a time. Writing
not only “heightens our feeling of self-control” (173) during periods of intense grief, but it helps us achieve clarity and comforts us in the act of coming
to terms with the loss of loved ones. Loss changes us, but Berman finds in the
accounts of others’ losses a source of hope that he too will make it through the
uneven terrain of grief—a possibility he freely offers to his readers through
the memoirs he presents as guides.
Tara Hyland-Russell
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