Double Vision: A Novel

By George Garrett

A shotgun marriage of fact and fiction by one of the most highly regarded writers and teachers of our time

A writer named George Garrett, suffering from double vision as a result of a neurological disorder, is asked to review a recent, first biography of the late Peter Taylor, a renowned writer who has been his long-time friend and neighbor in Charlottesville. Reflecting on their relationship, Garrett conceives of a character—not unlike himself—a writer in his early 70s, ill and suffering from double vision, named Frank Toomer. He gives Toomer a neighbor, a distinguished short story writer named Aubrey Carver.

As the real George Garrett and Peter Taylor are replaced by two very different and imaginary writers, the story becomes a wise and insightful exploration of American literary life, the art of biography, the comical rivalries among writers and academics, notions of success, and the knotty relationship of art to life, fact to fiction, and life to death. Double Vision is a witty tour de force and an elegy for a gifted generation of writers.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Release date: May 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780817381875

George Garrett

George Garrett is a retired reporter who spent over forty years with CKNW. He also worked for BCTV, now Global TV. He has received the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation and the Radio Television Digital News Association of Canada Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an Honorary Life Member of the RCMP Veterans Association, an Associate Member of the Vancouver Superannuated Police Officers Association, and an Honorary Constable of the New Westminster Police Department. He lives in Surrey, BC.

Book preview

Life

BEGINNING

Life is sad, because it ends sadly, and every story of a life follows its narrative thread to the same unraveling.

—Kelly Cherry, The Hollins Critic

ONE

Begins with the call of a crow, a lone crow. Reedy, repetitive caw. He is out there high and all alone in the budding branches of the sweet gum tree next door. Peter Taylor’s sweet gum tree, close by the toothpick fence marking the line between his place and mine. A handsome old tree. Crow is most likely a handsome fellow, too, a glossy shard of darkness, at this moment far from the fellowship of his black caucus, for some reason or other. He calls out something loud and clear, and by the time that I am standing at the kitchen window to watch him more closely, he is long gone.

Peter Taylor is long gone too.

Death is much on my mind these days.

My friend thinks I am dying. I am not so sure. And, after all, it’s my choice, not his. Before I had the MRI at Martha Jefferson Hospital we were both in this thing together. Roughly the same situation. We had the same symptoms—double vision, drooping eyelids, muscle weakness and fatigue, occasional problems maintaining balance, things like that which, taken together, might point directly to a brain tumor, though statistics, they cheerfully allowed, were against it.

So, with the statistics on our side, we patiently waited, he and I, first for the scheduling of the MRI, then more anxiously for the report based on a reading of the MRI by the radiologist.

Is reading the right word? It’s the one they used.

MRI . . . the only time I had ever seen one was in a Woody Allen movie. I forget which one.* It was a sight gag where you see old Woody, world-class coward and hypochondriac, a perfectly bland and innocent expression on his face, being slid like a pizza into the metal whale mouth oven of the MRI. The theater audience dissolved into tears and gales of laughter, something that doesn’t happen all that often any more.

What they didn’t do anything with in the Woody Allen movie was the noise of the machine. It’s a very noisy experience, a very noisy machine. They give you earplugs and that helps a little. Wonder why they didn’t use the sound in the movie. Maybe it would have distracted from the purity of the sight gag. Maybe it scared Woody.

After the experience we waited—he and I and my wife Susan—in the crummy and depressing little radiology waiting room full of sweat smell and sad humanity, for an hour or so until somebody came along to say that the radiologist was satisfied with the pictures and would read them later at his leisure and convenience.

A fortnight or so later somebody or other called me and said that the MRI was clear and very normal. Which for me meant (a) no brain tumor and (b) having to take a battery of tests to find out what really is wrong with me.

In due time—and in another story, a factually true one—it turns out that I am suffering from something called Myasthenia Gravis, a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease. It’s the same thing that killed Jackie O’s second husband, Aristotle Onassis. Remember that? Remember him? I think it should be named after Onassis. Like Lou Gehrig disease. Not enough dread diseases are named after celebrity patients.

It’s not supposed to kill me too. We’ll see about that, won’t we?

My friend and I shared an anxious fortnight. Which seems fair enough. I do not, however, believe that I will share my MG with him. For a number of reasons. Not least of which is that, though quite serious and sometimes even deadly, MG is also vaguely comic. In a purely literary sense—and that is the only sense we are considering here and now—MG is not as interesting as the fact or the possibility of a brain tumor. As my family doctor told me about my MG: Well, hey, it’s better than a brain tumor.

My first thought, my best idea at this point is to separate myself from my imaginary friend more clearly. Let him be the one with all the symptoms. Let him be the one, all alone like that crow, waiting for an anxious fortnight to hear about the reading of the MRI brain scan. Even though, in fact and in truth, we both shared that bad time with some equality, I here and now elect to leave him alone with it. Let it be his problem and none of my own. Let it be his story. He is a character, not I. The time span of the story, then, is an indeterminate time. Might as well be a year or two or even his whole lifetime, past, present, and (possibly) future.

Let it be, at least superficially, give or take, the here and now of this writing, part of a new year and century, 2001. It is therefore your world, too, reader, as well as mine or his. It’s our time. It’s his particular situation. His problem.

Who is he? you ask. And what is his name?

I hereby christen him as Peter Toomer. Bad pun, bad joke? Not quite. Toomer is one of the family names on my mother’s side. So be it. Here is Peter Toomer, by trade a modestly talented and minimally successful writer. A lesser figure, but a figure no less, one critic named him. Not that I think writers are especially interesting, but for the sake of this story, my plot, not his, it will be more convenient if he is a writer.

I will step away, back into the shadows and out of sight. He is all on his own, waiting to learn whether or not he has a brain tumor.

What did you say was his first name? you ask.

Originally I chose Peter. Partly by accident. A crow called from the sweet gum tree and I found myself thinking of the late Peter Taylor, my good neighbor, whose work I greatly admire. Peter, I am pretty sure you would not approve, at least aesthetically, of this kind of story, the whole thing from guggle to zatch. It’s not the kind of story you would like to end up in. I won’t risk your posthumous disapproval. Next I thought of Fred in honor of my Uncle Fred, one of my mother’s five brothers, a gifted musician, a kind and gentle and good man, and a born loser. But then I thought: Fred has his own honorable story and I have no right to tamper with it. So? Another one-syllable name, then, starting with an F—Frank.

Let’s go with Frank.

Frank Toomer is waiting to hear from the radiologist.

I know exactly how that feels.

While I was waiting for results of the MRI, death was much on my mind. And there were other things as well, a multitude of things I had done that ought not to have been done and things I had left undone that ought to be done. And there is no health in us. Along with the usual fear was the fear that I was here and now and arriving, mostly unprepared, at the raggedy tag end of things. I had enjoyed a full lifetime and had no good excuse but my own foolishness to explain away the fact that I was unready for the one absolute certainty of my life, of our lives.

And then one night, in a dream or on the edge of dreaming, that state of being where it is uncertain whether you are awake or asleep, where all too often in my youth the purely erotic escaped its flimsy cage to dance a show and tell, I found myself alone in a dark place. That is the best that I can describe it—a dark place. Neither clearly exterior nor interior, country nor city, just a place of darkness, though not a fearful place. In fact, the darkness seemed, at least at that time, softly reassuring. I heard nothing, not a sound or a word. And I saw nothing, no object, no other person, shape, or shadow. But nevertheless I felt something very strongly. Vividly I would say, except that I couldn’t see anything in the dark. I felt presences. Presences plural. I felt the presence and nearness of all my dead, close kinfolk and others too, friends and lovers of long ago and mostly lost to memory by now. I felt the wince of shame at having forgotten so many of them so easily and for so long: so many boys and girls from the schoolyards and playing fields of days gone by. They were all there, a multitude, a cloud of presences; and, without saying anything to me or doing anything, they were telling me not to allow myself to be mastered by my fears and trembling, but to know, now and forever after, that I have never been, never will be, all alone. These presences are here and now and always will bear witness to whatever becomes of me, and, at the right time and place, they will welcome me into their company. Meanwhile they watch over me.

Thank you, Jesus.

I eased into a sound sleep. Woke in the morning remembering all this and something more. It came to me that this is my story too, and so I must bring at least some of those presences into it one way or another.

What has happened in this story, mine and his, so far?

A lone crow, a fragment of the night perched up high in a huge old tree, has called out something, a message I cannot decode or translate, and then flown away. Will he return, come home to roost?

One thing, among others to consider, is this: When you have been sick, and I mean really and truly sick (though it need not, perhaps should not be a life-threatening condition), when you have been sick enough for a good while, you tend to dispose of a lot of life’s baggage. You try to travel light. So many quotidian hopes and fears become entirely expendable. And, as the body, already at my age busily, steadily, remorselessly unzipping, unbuttoning, unfastening its wrinkled and disheveled garment of skin and bones and the atrophying muscles from whatever puff of ghostly smoke is at the center of being, this is a good and appropriate feeling. Heavy with your weight of private woe, you are also given a surprising gift. You are lighthearted, and, in the words of Holy Scripture, every bitter thing is sweet.

It’s not a form of wisdom, however, not at all. Wisdom doesn’t matter anymore. Wisdom and folly look like identical twins. It is not regret either. Not precisely. That is, regret, as long as you are living and breathing, is, of course, inevitably present. But regret can always be mitigated and modified, unlike pride, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, and greed, which are with us always, like the poor, undiminished, at least until the end of us if not the end of the world. And where do the seven deadly dwarfs go then? God knows. Free at last! All we know is that we are free of each other. Do they sing and dance around that aforementioned sudden puff of smoke that is all we really are anyway, all that can be left of us? Or do they disappear, a scruffy crew of surly Rumpelstiltskins, shaking their tiny fists in outrage at being so rudely disembodied? Are these spirits, who have been so dangerous and so much trouble for a whole lifetime, now suddenly revealed to be a band, a jolly gang of klutzy clowns, like Fellini’s white clowns?

Do you remember the magnificent conclusion of Fellini’s 8 1/2 where, at the tag end of all that loss and failure, the major and minor characters of the story suddenly arrive clad in dazzling white and form a ring hand in hand around Guido, the director, and he joins them and so on?

No such complete vision for me. The darkness was all around, but close also around me was that sense of presences, a version of Guido’s vision.

What happened to me is that I began to get not well but better. And with that change for the better I located my lost luggage. I found myself reaching out again, grasping for my old life. With cheerful pratfalls, belching and farting as usual, my seven dwarfs happily returned and encamped for the duration. Tenting on the old campground.

Of course, I did not and cannot ever fully revert to the kind of ignorance and innocence I relished when I was still more or less healthy. Even if I may pretend otherwise, I know now that at all times I am only one step, a stumble, a gasp of breath, a missed heartbeat away from where I was and where I will surely be again. One step, one breath, and I am gone forever or, anyway, in Dylan Thomas’s words, for as long as forever is.

So are you.

So are we one and all.

All of the time.

So, at the outset, this story begins with a man of a certain age, in fact, an old man—myself, then, in my early seventies—feeling a little better after an illness that has already wasted and wiped out months of his life. He has experienced a visitation by palpable, invisible presences. He too was reassured. He is disappointed now that better health has brought back with it the old familiar heaviness of heart, the sagging weight of this world, that he had cast aside before, like a traveler leaving his luggage behind at the airport carousel to join all the other lost luggage in many a cluttered warehouse. Who simply walks out into the real world’s noise and sunlight empty-handed and with an undeniable sense of inexplicable