Book Review: The Life I Really Lived

Book Review: The Life I Really Lived

Author: Jessamyn West

        

Date: 1979

        

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

        

ISBN: 0-15-151562-X

        

Length: 404 pages

        

Quote: “Why tell the truth now? To...end the belief that I wrote of joy and courage and faith because I had never known anything else.”

        

This is not, of course, the life Jessamyn West really lived. This is a melodramatic novel, written as the memoir of an inspirational novelist, Orpha Chase, who decides in her late seventies to write about what she did before her last, and lasting, marriage.

        

In a sense this novel is a sort of apologium for the kind of novels Jessamyn West chose to write. They weren’t saccharine, exactly; they dealt with war and murder and slavery and betrayal and suicide; but they dealt with those things as good Christian ladies deal with them—clearheadedly, refusing denial or despondency, holding the self at a distance from ugliness. In the 1960s and 1970s any novel that was neither obscene nor depressing was likely to be accused of escapism, of having “refused to confront the reality” of the bad things in the world, or of having been written by someone without life experience. The Life I Really Lived is West’s retort. It's fiction to protect the privacy of West's family and friends.

       

Orpha has chosen to write about joy and faith because she was born poor and brought up tough; because her first husband, a bisexual teacher falsely accused of molesting a girl student, shot the accuser and himself in front of Orpha; because Orpha chose, at first with the help of her first husband’s boyfriend, to adopt the student’s unwanted baby; because her second husband, chosen for the hope of security, stifled her creativity until she chose the disgrace of divorce in the 1920s; because her brother, an ordinary bratty boy, matured into a saintly minister whose reward for his good deeds was to be accused of murder. In addition to the brother and the first two husbands Orpha also finds time to love two other men before finding the right one to marry. She also remarks darkly that her memoir will include incest, though this at least turns out to be in a psychological sense.

        

It takes a while for Orpha to discover the liberating joy of sexual self-control, but in other ways there is a consistent integrity about her—not to mention a gift for pithy phrases that summarize things perfectly. She deserves a happy ending. She will get one, but it won’t be any of the ones she’s led readers to imagine.

        

West was one of the handful of novelists whose fiction-for-adults I’ve consistently liked. A lot of people who felt that way about novels-for-adults felt that way about Jessamyn West, in her day. High school literature books used to include episodes from The Friendly Persuasion or Cress Delahanty alongside the work of Steinbeck or Hemingway. I suspect her sudden disappearance from the canon had more to do with academic identity politics than with any reevaluation of the merit of her work—I’ve never seen such a reevaluation. West, like Pearl S. Buck, Madeleine L’Engle, or even Phyllis McGinley, was the sort of feminist foremother the NOW movement found embarrassingly hard to live up to, and although all of them made solid feminist statements in their writings, none has been much studied in Women’s Literature courses led by NOW feminists.

       

And there is, ahem, that little matter of their being Christian. Despite the adultery and incest in Orpha’s life, The Life I Really Lived is a story about the spiritual life and growth of a serious, even radical Christian. Women don’t adopt the unwanted babies of the people responsible for their adored first husbands’ death unless the women have some kind of radical faith; Orpha’s faith happens to be conservative and Protestant. Orpha’s brother believes that his life, throughout most of the story, is the direct result of a spiritual experience. By the time we learn that Orpha is moving up on age eighty (as was West), we have to consider the possibility that her survival is also intended to be read as the result of her spiritual experience. This is not a book Christian-phobics can appreciate.

        

If you are not Christian-phobic, and if you appreciate the kind of stories smart, tough, goodhearted senior citizens tell, you’ll probably like The Life I Really Lived. A particular treat is the way the novel manages to show us the young Orpha’s passionate sexuality without ever being graphic or tasteless. “Today a woman having bedded with a great general feels free to tell us that in bed the general could not present arms. Women of my generation would have spared the great general the revelation of this failure...I would have, though Jake needs no such protection.”

        

Then there’s the wit that sparkles through a story that’s never actually funny. “Bernard...just stuttered away until what he was after came out. He seemed to like stuttering.” “I was just as ladylike as could be about words myself. I never said belly for stomach...True, there were quite a few words I didn’t know were bad...like pussy.” “He could’ve stirred the soup with his toes without harming the soup.” “Ending my thirties, I thought I had entered age.” One of the qualities for which Jessamyn West used to be known was the high percentage of wise or witty, very quotable, aphorisms in all her work. The Life I Really Lived is rich in them.

        

There are Christians who disapprove of the whole idea of novel writing. They existed even during the mid-twentieth century, although during West’s active years the rest of the reading world tended to view nonfiction as hack work, memoirs as self-indulgence, and only novels or poems as respectable forms of Literary Art. Christians who accept novels as a valid way for writers to say what they think may want to reread Jessamyn West’s books, and demand that the literary community reestablish them in the canon of excellent twentieth-century fiction.