MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR
By Andre Dubus
Knopf, 210 pages, $23
In “Meditations From a Movable Chair,” author Andre Dubus seeks to illuminate the source of the grief that over the years he has perceived to be lurking all around him–from the air above a naval destroyer, hanging like palpable fog after news of a fellow crew member’s suicide, to the dark earth spilling from a trench he once dug in his hometown of Lafayette, La. Throughout this emotionally intense collection of essays, Dubus presents his memories and meditations like panes in a stained glass window held up against the light of his own passion and conviction.
To the empathetic reader, Dubus’ literate ardor is both the strength and weakness of this collection. It is either asking a lot, or nothing at all, of the reader to accept such optimistic assertions as the one posed in the closing paragraph of an essay about the rape of Dubus’ sister: “But one bright day her anger and hatred will burn to white ash, and she will forgive him, the rape will finally end, and the man will truly be gone, to wander in her past.” It is through this fervency, whether sublime or overwrought, that Dubus is able to focus clearly upon the center of many different kinds of suffering. In the occasional moments in which the clang of false notes rise, they are soon absorbed by more harmonious chords: The rather fuzzy, 10-step-program vibe of “Letter to a Writer’s Workshop” soon seems like mere filler when compared to the essays surrounding it, such as the elegy for the leg he lost in a 1986 accident. It is worthwhile to note that the essay “About Kathryn” is the first in the book because its subject, presumably, is at the heart of all these meditations: the soul in turmoil in search of grace.
The book’s title is a bit misleading. Several of the essays do deal with the author’s crippling (he also lost the use of his remaining leg), and allusions to his changed physical life are not infrequent. But the meditations on life and its attendant pain are more diverse than the book’s title might suggest. Put another way, the book gains its meaning through a profusion of particulars. Especially engaging are essays about first jobs, a short story by Hemingway and the depth of its meaning as the author’s life changes, and the sacraments he perceives as being part of daily life.
The first of these, “Digging,” reveals Dubus as he was when he was 16 in Lafayette, coasting through a brutal Southern summer. Content at home with his sisters and mother, he does not want to work, but his father arranges a job for him at a construction site. Because he loves his father, because he is ashamed of his own indolence, Dubus accepts the job wordlessly. The work is impossibly hard for him; at lunch, beneath a tree’s meager shade, he vomits. In this essay Dubus recognizes the importance and inevitability of physical pain and hard work and how, between two shy men, Dubus and his father, it became for them a shared vocabulary of experience in which labor is love and, ultimately, gratitude.
In “A Hemingway Story,” one of the more moving pieces in the book, Dubus examines the role a single work of art–here, Hemingway’s “In Another Country”–can play in an individual’s life. For years, Dubus taught the story in college literature classes, but the meaning eluded him; by turns it seemed to be about death, the futility of cures, pain. Finally, not long after his accident, he volunteered as a tutor for girls in protective custody of the State of Massachusetts. As he read Hemingway with them, Dubus suddenly realized that “In Another Country” was not only about suffering but healing, as well.
The piece in this collection that is perhaps most truly a meditation is called “Sacraments,” an essay that begins with life and ends in death and, Dubus implies, life again. A lifelong Catholic, the author muses about God, perceiving His presence in the chlorophyll green of the leaves outside the window by which he writes, present in the sandwiches he makes for his daughters in the kitchen that is too small for his wheelchair, and present in the crushed ice he feeds his father on his death bed. For Dubus, even in life’s leaving there is the touch of sacrament because it is a form of completion. The world is powerfully tactile, to the point of pain, he seems to suggest, and from this knot of raw nerves comes the power of Andre Dubus’ prose, constantly summoning the spirit of calm, even if only for a moment.
