Early this evening, just before running down to Moving Arts for the latest set of readings from my playwriting workshop, I finished Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending. I was deeply struck by the book, which among other things concerns 40 years’ of misunderstandings by our narrator and his immediate circle. Things that happen during school days and immediately afterward are reinterpreted decades later with emotionally devastating results for the protagonist. Much of the book concerns emails back and forth between that protagonist and a former paramour. And tonight, before those readings, I received an email that showed just how deft and resonant the novel is.

The night before, I had gone to a reading by my friend, and also my grad-school professor, David Scott Milton. David’s new novel, Iron City, has just been published by another friend of mine, Christopher Meeks, who is also a former student of David’s.  I took my 9-year-old son Dietrich with me, and bought him a couple of books to keep him occupied and also distracted from what I imagined, judging from David’s previous work, would be a  reading from a novel with lots of sex and violence (an assumption proved right, as the detective in his novel haggles over money with a bar full of prostitutes. Dietrich asked me later what a prostitute is and I told him, “A person who has sex for money,” to which he replied, “Oh, that’s right.” No doubt I had already explained this to him. Or he’d heard it on TV. Or on the playground. Who knows? There’s no sense in saving anything for adulthood any more.) At the reading, I also saw one of my own former grad students. I was surprised to see her, but went up to her and embraced her and said hello. Immediately after the reading I looked for her, but couldn’t find her; evidently she had left right away, and somehow I knew it was because of me. When I got home, I emailed her:

Subject: Nice seeing you tonight.

Nice seeing you tonight, however briefly. I looked for you afterward — wanted to find out what you’ve been up to — but you had left.

And, as I said, tonight, just after finishing the Barnes novel about misunderstandings and misinterpretations, I got this reply:

Hi, Lee,

Thanks for writing this… I felt that you didn’t want to talk to me, and it saddened me.

Always too sensitive… the only good part about that is that I can write.

So she had seen something in me, something in my face, that she read this way. And, to some degree, she was right in seeing what she’d seen, but wrong in the interpretation. Here’s what she had seen cross my face:  Oh no, what’s her name? Yes, I was glad to see her — but I was mentally fishing for her name.  Once I had it, I was even more eager to see her, to prove that of course I remembered her and wanted to speak to her and now had her name, but she had gone. I remember her distinctly, of course, and believe I was her thesis advisor (or was that David?), I remember her plays and many other things, but for a moment I couldn’t remember her first name, and didn’t want to embarrass her or hurt her feelings, and she mistook that for something else, and that misapprehension actually did hurt her feelings.

David is 77. When I was his student, from 1988 to 1990, we would play racquetball; he was a better shot, and had a better serve; the only way I could win was to run him to ground, to wind him, because he was 28 years older than I. Now someone in his 20s could do this to me. After his reading, we talked briefly. I told him that I’d seen X. He said, “I was trying to remember her last name.” I said, “Really? I was trying to remember the first one.”

In Julian Barnes’ book, the protagonist is shaken to discover that not only was he not the person he believed he was early in life, he may not be the person he now believes himself to be. If character is changeable, and if our self-perceptions are wrong, how are we ever to understand each other, if not ourselves?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2011 at 10:43 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.