ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.2
11.2
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Patrick Madden
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Dear Brian,
I have been tossing around various titles to help me indicate to readers what is going on here. The one I ultimately went with, “An open letter to my late friend Brian Doyle,” gets us to the fact that you are gone and to the fact that I know that I’m not really writing to you (despite my hope that some part of you still exists), I’m writing to interested readers, many of them essayists themselves, whose knowledge of you I cannot be sure of. Some of them may not have heard of you, though many have likely read your essays or proems or stories or novels, and some probably knew you and miss you as I do. In any case, I’m grateful for the clue provided by the word “open” before “letter,” which allows me to avoid some of the awkward falseness inherent in writing to a mentor who can no longer read my missives as he once did, and I appreciate the efficiency of that adjective “late,” more than, say, “dear, departed” or the stark “dead” or any other way of conveying the fact that you died almost eight years ago. No matter what, all the ways are ready-made, on the shelf waiting to be called into service. Which is a bit disheartening, to think that I write, we write, simply by arranging preexisting materials, some of which are tired and worn from use. Which makes the little things quite exciting, like how you sometimes repurposed adjectives as nouns, as in “I want it so bad I can taste the stony chalky desperate of it,” or another one that I’ve just decided to save for the end of this letter. Or how you suggested a higher awareness of things with “Playfulnessness,” the title of the lecture you gave at an essay conference in your home city of New York. An awareness that the persnickety copyeditors who later published the piece in an esteemed literary journal did not perceive (and thus your title was “corrected” to just “Playfulness,” which misses a whole level, the awareness-of-awareness level). Or how you stacked adjectives (“sweet wild holy brilliant gentle witty delight”) and eschewed traditional punctuation (“we all mother father sister families friends staggered through the days and nights too tired and frightened to do anything but lurch into the next hour”) and ran on and on (examples too numerous to even attempt to quote here, and we don’t really have the space anyway) in an attempt to make an essay like a conversation, even if the conversation is one-sided, with a silent or absent interlocutor, or one of us is a ghost. [You should know that, that paragraph just above?, I’ve just copyedited it, changing my verbs from present tense (“stack,” “eschew,” “run”) to past, and I’m still not sure I did the right thing, and you’re not around to ask.] Or, too, the thing I began with, the itch in my heart that I am here seeking to scratch by way of searching and researching, as I attempt to create another kind of conversation via resurrection. So I will ignore so much of what we’ve shared, and the recurrent ache I feel at your absence, and focus on one tinybig joyous thing I’ve learned from you: to write the word “waaaaaay” with way too many “A”s in it. I’ve just spent a minute trying to search online for specific examples of this spelling in your writing, iteratively knocking off “A”s after each “No results found” for "brian doyle" +waaaaaay until Google got tired of me and, once I’d gotten to “+waaay,” asked Did you mean: "brian doyle" +essay Which it might have gleaned from my habitual (not to say incessant) searches, but, no, Google, there’re hundreds of Brian Doyle essays, and I cannot reread them all right now. Instead, I’ll leave here the strong recommendation that my real audience, those eager essayists, should type those very words into their own search engines and follow the links to your essayistic excursions and insights into the joys and surprises and wonders of the world. Thankfully, Google allows me to look within your books, which brought me to “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” with its three-A-ed “…then there would suddenly be a sharp sentence where the dagger enters your heart and the essay spins on a dime like a skater, and you are plunged into waaay deeper water, you didn’t see it coming at all, and you actually shiver, your whole body shimmers,” And “Joyas Voladoras,” with a five-A-ed way to describe a baby blue whale: “When this creature is born it is twenty feel long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car.” And a eulogy for a friend who, “was waaay deep in the past in his head these last days” And a report on a nature expedition with family where “my kids and I were in a biggest-creature mood, because we had found slugs waaay longer than bananas, and footprints of elk that must have been gobbling steroids.” And there’s even a caption about a University of Portland cyclist (“the refreshingly humble freshman Clara Honsinger, who finished waaay ahead of her closest pursuer”) and a blurb for Patrick Hannon’s book Sacrament (“It’s rare to read vibrant, witty, piercing essays that get waaay under the small boat of religion and deep into the sea of our wild spiritual search”), which could well be said of your own writing, too. There are more, I’m sure (I’ve found some; others will remain hidden from me), but let’s stop here, on the list of “What Matters,” which includes “Fresh bread with waaaaaay too much butter” sandwiched between “The sinuous liquid flow of rivers and minks and cats” and “My children’s hands when they cup my ancient grizzled face” and not far from “The way horses smell in spring” and “Tears of sorrow” and “Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary” and bonus points for “Walrussssses” and so many things we tend to overlook and underconsider, like “The tiny screws that hold spectacles together. Book marginalia done with the lightest possible pencil. People who keep dead languages alive. Wooden rulers. Fresh-mown lawns. First-basemen’s mitts. Dishracks,” and a sharp turn to the categorical paradoxical “all other forms of coupled pain and joy” and a simple, complementary coupling, “Exuberance and ebullience” and so much more, suggesting, as I’m sure you intended, that there is nothing that doesn’t matter, that there are not even discrete, quantifiable “things” we could count or pass judgment on whether they matter or not, and even if we stingily decide they don’t matter to us, we’d have to concede that they matter to someone, or could, or should, like how intentionally misspelling a word by adding some “A”s can hold our throat open a count longer, suggesting emphasis and importance, or exuberance and ebullience, a contagious condition we can catch even long after you’re gone, because you’re not gone; you’re here in your words, your thousands upon thousands of words, including “We hardly ever talk about the ravenous of sentences,” as you once wrote, and you’re probably right, though maybe we can take heart that here in this letter that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about, you and I and these patient curious vibrant holy people reading over our shoulder, these essayists with so many wonderful and painful experiences and so much more life in them, and were I to have your ear once more, I might suggest the seemingly correct but gleefully silly sounding “ravenousness” instead, as a rhyme to your “playfulnessness” with their stuttering endings, like the undying echo of the words “asks” or “ghosts” or “exists,” whispering doubly off into eternity. I love you, my friend. I miss you, Padraig |
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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010) teaches at Brigham Young University. He is coeditor of the journal Fourth Genre and Ohio State University Press's 21st Century Essays series.
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