Statement for Josephine Carson Memorial

Jack Foley

          A few birthdays ago, I wrote a song, “You’re No One If You Don’t Know Jo,” which my wife Adelle and I performed. Jo did a Charleston.

          Today I’ll read a few passages from a review I wrote of Jo’s book, Dog Star and Other Stories, published by Santa Barbara Review Publications, and a short poem. You can find the entire review in the archives of “Foley’s Books.” I expect that most of you here know that the word “anthology” is by etymology a “gathering of flowers.”

          Josephine Carson is seventy-nine years old, but you wouldn’t know it from this delightful collection of witty, elegant, meticulously-written stories. Her people suffer but they do it in gorgeous sentences:

Sometimes he sounded like a woman. His mother, maybe.

Now she is in an agony of hope and despair, of frustrated knowing, suddenly half-awake to the idea that the world has ruined her life.

The light sank like a last breath.

Carrie found the rack, the scalding of feet, the severing of tongues and the guillotine impressive; and the large engravings of mutilated bodies spellbinding.

          One character--like many of the central characters here, an older woman--complains that the great novels she loves “all began...with the presumption that people all had access to one another. And it wasn’t true. People don’t have access to others, she thought. She did not.” These stories grant us momentary access to imaginary real characters, but Carson is not so foolish as to believe that she has exhausted the subject: access is always tentative, enigmatic, limited. The same character asks,

And what did she want? Life? In what sense did she lack life, a life? She had to admit that she lacked at least a life worthy of her imagination and energy, or--no, admit it, be cruelly honest as only the lonely can be--she simply lacked a life. The novels she’d been reading had made her crave the world.

          How can life “merely--die out”? Yet it does. “Having” and “losing” a life are two sides of the same coin. The writer inhabits both worlds: like her characters, she is lonely, her attachments fade; yet her writing memorializes her life. In the title story someone describes the Dog Star, Sirius, as having “an unseen companion.” The person who says it is himself an “unseen companion” to the story’s central character, a woman whose still-young husband is in the last stages of death by cancer. (He will soon be an “unseen companion.”) But the phrase has resonances that go beyond the specifics of the story. A writer’s characters are “unseen companions”--interestingly, Saint Paul describes faith as “the evidence of things not seen”--and so are her readers. In the midst of life’s transience and loneliness, the fact of being read is a genuine comfort. “My dear!” says Edith Wharton to the woman who laments the lack of life, “Please control yourself. Why, you’re my ideal reader! Absolutely ideal! We live our whole lives waiting for readers like you!” Carson understands the distances between people and in many ways asserts them: separation (divorce, emotional distance, death) is a primary fact of her world. Nevertheless she finds comfort in the possibility of the genuine interest of those people--readers--whose actual lives remain, like hers, inaccessible. Though friends and lovers may fail her, the interest and, indeed, the “kindnesses” of strangers cut across isolation. Like Scheherazade’s, her storytelling is a way of keeping even death--the greatest of separating forces--momentarily at bay.

          Themes include the need for a savior and his constantly unsatisfactory manifestations (the savior is often a father of some sort, frequently a doctor, but in one instance it is a woman). Loneliness and not being in love are also themes. The possibilities of a powerful imagination are constantly being demonstrated, as is manipulation, getting others to do what you want in the way you want them to do it. The relationship between mothers and children (particularly daughters but also sons) is a constant concern, as is the split between the “urban” and the “natural.” For the most part, Carson’s characters are upper middle class, articulate, educated people: these stories are, in the best sense of the term, New Yorker stories.

The stories...seem to be essentially speech-driven. They are like good talk. Reading them one is reminded a little of those interesting persons who inhabited the Algonquin Club’s Round Table in New York City. When one of Carson’s characters tries to define “her type of friend,” she conjures up a vision of people who are very much like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Wollcott, etc.:

          She began to brood on and try to define for herself her type of friend. The dapper, confident, fun-loving and intelligent man her husband had almost been before dying of acute alcoholism; the chatty and clannish, ingrown women her three sisters (two of whom were now dead and one of whom had Alzheimers) had been. People who have fun and talk a lot together, and who think.

           Many of the primary characters in Dog Star are “older” women--women in their fifties, sixties, or even in their eighties. Yet they are beautiful, attractive, even sexually alluring. Does it require a woman writer to tell us that? The attractiveness of older women is a secret that Hollywood isn’t likely to reveal to its legions of fans. Josephine Carson tells us about it in very convincing, touching, open-hearted ways. And there are other secrets she knows, too. Dog Star is full of them.

Dear friend,
you knew better than anyone
the immense all-leveling nothingness of life
and knew
how sweet that nothing was:
your life
an immensely populated absence
which you lived alone
How many friends you spoke of
What lost times
You were always old
but bright, funny, full of gossip
“That was the underwear everyone wore then”
Dear Jo,
you’re telling stories to the soil
which (darkling darling!) listens
and answers
with rich shoots,
flowers,
and unimaginable anthologies. 

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TWO POEMS BY JOSEPHINE CARSON

Upon Seeing Willa Cather’s Grave
     At Jaffrey Center

It’s worth a visit
but the stone is wordy.
They had to speak
            who buried her
and couldn’t let her name suffice
nor let her bones
            wise enough when living
probe the long passage
back to silence.
The tongue submits in gratitude,
but how could they know?
Willa never would condone
more than the slow effacement
of her name
            upon that stone

Jack Foley