10th
Now it occurs to me that at least some of her resistance to teaching might have had to do with her passion for being a student. She had the habits and the aura of a student all her life. She was also, all but physically, always young. People close to her often compared her to a child (her inability to be alone; her undiminishable capacity for wonder; her strong, hero-worshipping side and her need to idolize those she looked up to; her being without health insurance in her forties, when she got cancer, even though health insurance was easily affordable in those days). David and I joked that she was our enfant terrible. (Once, when she was struggling to finish an essay, angry that we weren’t being supportive enough, she said, ‘If you won’t do it for me, at least you could do it for Western culture.’) My enduring image of her fits exactly that of a student, a fanatical one: staying up all night, surrounded by piles of books and papers, speeding, chain-smoking, reading, taking notes, pounding the typewriter, driven, competitive. She would write that A-plus essay. She would go to the head of the class.
Even her apartment—strictly antibourgeois, unapologetically ungemütlich—evoked student life. Its main feature was the growing number of books, but they were mostly paperbacks, and the shelves were cheap pine board. To go with the lack of furniture, there was a lack of decorative objects, there were no curtains or rugs, and the kitchen had only the basics. About six square feet of kitchen space were taken up by an old freezer that hadn’t worked in years. A pair of pliers sat on top of the TV set—for changing channels since the knob for that purpose had broken off. People visiting for the first time were clearly surprised to find the celebrated middle-aged writer living like a grad student.
(Everything changes. In her mid-fifties she would say: ‘I realized I was working just as hard, if not harder, than everyone I knew, and making less money than any of them.’ And so she transformed that part of her life. But the time I’m talking about was before—before the grand Chelsea penthouse, the enormous library, the rare editions, the art collection, the designer clothes, the country house, the personal assistant, the housekeeper, the personal chef. And one day when I was around the same age she had been when we met, she shook her head at me and said, ‘What are you planning to do, live like a grad student the rest of your life?’)
~Sigrid Nunez [buy]
