Goodbye Without Leaving

My new goal in life is to be a character in a Laurie Colwin novel. I'm crazy about her. Have I mentioned that?

Goodbye Without Leaving begins with the epigraph (no idea where this is from, if anywhere),

"Americans leave without saying goodbye,
Refugees say goodbye without leaving."

The novel traces the life of Geraldine, a pilgrim, who prefers to live in the margins. Geraldine drops out of grad school in order to be a backup dancer. She eventually gets married to a pretty normal lawyer and raises a son and works a couple of jobs (one time doing archival research regarding of black music in the U.S. and another time working with a bunch of Jewish people from Europe), all of the time searching for authenticity. Geraldine's best friend, Mary, decides to become enter a Benedictine monastery. Geraldine longs for the structure that Mary has in the Catholic Church and that the Europeans have in Western Civilization (these Europeans, in turn, are fascinated by American industriousness)--she realizes that as an American daughter of assimilated Jewish parents, she sort of has to make it up for herself as she goes along (in this way, backup dancing and raising a child are both profound existential experiences for her that lead her the closest to being that she gets). Her job choices also indicate her attraction to cultures that are unified. I think that T.S. Eliot would be proud of Geraldine: she does the work of acquiring and appropriating tradition, even where the remnants of tradition are few and scattered. She is struggling to be, a struggle made much more difficult by the fact that she lacks a starting place. To go back to the epigraph--she's struggling to be able to say goodbye without leaving (which is only possible when you really belong somewhere).

The novel examines the complicated relationship between parents and children (Geraldine never satisfies her mother's plans):

"And of course, I was to my own mother what Buddy was to Gertje. Gertje, who did calligraphy and watercolors, who had grown up under the old order, did not expect to spawn a millionaire, and my mother in her proper, tailored suits, with her mahogany dining room table, her sense of order and propriety, did not expect to raise a daughter who would someday stand on a stage wearing a dress the size of a camisole, jumping up and down and singing with a bunch of Afro-Americans."

And Colwin mentions one of my favorite political theorists: "I was sort of a blank slate and Leo was a school. I needed the experience of him. He would kiss me and I would turn into Hannah Arendt. I would definitely be a better person for it."

Speaking of Leo, Colwin is complicated when it comes to affairs in her writing. Colwin doesn't hold back in addressing the complications of love, so affairs are not infrequent things. In Goodbye Without Leaving, it seems to be connected to Geraldine's unreserved search for authenticity, a search with which Colwin herself seems to identify. Moral struggle is only secondarily present, if at all. Morality in this novel seems to be primarily existential (which makes the mention of Arendt even more appropriate).

And there is, as always in Colwin, the witty writing:

"If I were the sort of person who fainted, I would have swooned dead away."
...
"'She's going to be a nun,' I said.
'Oh, goodness gracious!' said my mother. 'You girls! What next? Why ever is she doing that?'
'Well, Ma, she is a Catholic, you know.'
'Darling, there are millions of Catholics. That's hardly a sufficient reason. Oh, her poor parents!'"


(picture)