FROM NYTIMES
ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS
A Memoir
By Paul Guest
202 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.99
By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA
“Almost I rushed from home to tell you this,” begins “Melancholia,” the opening poem in Paul Guest’s first collection, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World”:
that melancholia, the word, when broken
down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
I’ve been reading the dictionary again.
There are myriad self-deflating ironies spring-loaded into that seemingly innocuous adverb “almost,” given pride of place by the snarled syntax of Guest’s first line. The poet almost rushes, but does not, because he discovers in time his mistake: melancholia means not “black hole” but “black bile,” one of Hippocrates’ four humors. More profoundly, Guest can only ever almost rush, because he has been, since a freak childhood accident, a quadriplegic.
This blunt truth serves as a kind of grounding to most of the poems in “The Resurrection of the Body” and the three remarkable collections that have followed. But Guest is no confessionalist. He comes at his own catastrophe sidelong, alluding to it as another poet might to Stevens or Pound. “O hearts fat with custard, and sweet / forgive that I move at all,” he writes in one poem. Or, elsewhere: “I feel better that none of me / works well at all.” These poems — angry, funny, canny — do not depend for their meaning on the facts of their maker’s biography, but they are enriched by it.
Now, in his memoir, “One More Theory About Happiness,” Guest writes more directly than ever before about his paralysis. After a short prologue, the book begins with a recounting, harrowing in its matter-of-factness, of the accident that has shaped his life. Guest was 12 years old, attending a sixth-grade graduation party at a teacher’s house, when he and another boy set off on a pair of borrowed bicycles. As he lost control of his bike, Guest squeezed the hand brake and discovered it broken:
“I was resigned to the inevitability of crashing, and in those few seconds I had before the bike would be dangerously fast I decided it was better to crash on grass than to land on the asphalt. . . . What I did not know, what I could not see, would be what changed the rest of my life. At the bottom of the slope, a drainage ditch ran beside the road, overgrown with weeds and thick tussocks of grass. I hit the ditch still traveling at speed. I was thrown from the bike, over the handlebars, catapulted, tossed like a human lawn dart into the earth.”
Guest had broken the third and fourth vertebrae of his neck. “There is no real way to describe what this felt like, or did not feel like,” he writes about the first moments after landing on the ground, “the sudden, violent abstraction of the body, the brain left to believe all has vanished in a terrible, surgical instant.” Eventually, Guest is taken from his hometown, Chattanooga, to a center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal injuries. There follow several surgeries and months of physical therapy, which leave Guest with some muscle control over his legs, though not nearly enough to stand or walk. Then he is sent home, to live the rest of his life, which is the real story of this book.
Among that story’s highlights are portraits of the various aides hired to help Guest through his days. Sharon, provided by his school to take his notes in class, appears to be dyslexic, forcing Guest to spell out each of his teachers’ words as she takes dictation. The woman’s replacement quits abruptly after announcing that she has fallen in love with her teenage charge. Most memorable is Tony, a muscular Romanian who takes care of Guest during his years of graduate school, where he lives on his own for the first time. Instead of standing Guest up to transfer him from wheelchair to bed, Tony lifts him “like a professional wrestler,” first calling out, “Are you ready to fly?” and “Come to mama!”
For those familiar with Guest’s poetry, his memoir is most engaging as a coming-of-talent story. “The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind,” he writes, and that charged word “accident” recalls the wry fatalism of his best work. Sitting bored in class, Guest is visited by “the propulsive patterns of a poem.” He finds a typewriter in the school’s library and uses his mouth stick to put down the words that have come to him. “There was no doubt, none, that I had stumbled on to something essential about myself, who I was and who I might become, and all around me the future seemed to crackle like a storm.”
Eventually, Guest describes the writing of “Melancholia,” which he claims as his first mature work. He recounts his false etymological discovery and his initial disappointment at realizing his mistake. But then he saw, he says, how his very error might become the real subject of the poem. “This was different, better, truer than all the poems I’d written before,” Guest explains. “Looking at the screen, rereading the lines, I felt changed.”
This is just how the reader feels upon discovering Guest’s work, which cannot redeem his brokenness or ours, but makes something beautiful of it. And that is enough, almost.
Christopher R. Beha is an editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of “The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else.”
ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS
A Memoir
By Paul Guest
202 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.99
By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA
“Almost I rushed from home to tell you this,” begins “Melancholia,” the opening poem in Paul Guest’s first collection, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World”:
that melancholia, the word, when broken
down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
I’ve been reading the dictionary again.
There are myriad self-deflating ironies spring-loaded into that seemingly innocuous adverb “almost,” given pride of place by the snarled syntax of Guest’s first line. The poet almost rushes, but does not, because he discovers in time his mistake: melancholia means not “black hole” but “black bile,” one of Hippocrates’ four humors. More profoundly, Guest can only ever almost rush, because he has been, since a freak childhood accident, a quadriplegic.
This blunt truth serves as a kind of grounding to most of the poems in “The Resurrection of the Body” and the three remarkable collections that have followed. But Guest is no confessionalist. He comes at his own catastrophe sidelong, alluding to it as another poet might to Stevens or Pound. “O hearts fat with custard, and sweet / forgive that I move at all,” he writes in one poem. Or, elsewhere: “I feel better that none of me / works well at all.” These poems — angry, funny, canny — do not depend for their meaning on the facts of their maker’s biography, but they are enriched by it.
Now, in his memoir, “One More Theory About Happiness,” Guest writes more directly than ever before about his paralysis. After a short prologue, the book begins with a recounting, harrowing in its matter-of-factness, of the accident that has shaped his life. Guest was 12 years old, attending a sixth-grade graduation party at a teacher’s house, when he and another boy set off on a pair of borrowed bicycles. As he lost control of his bike, Guest squeezed the hand brake and discovered it broken:
“I was resigned to the inevitability of crashing, and in those few seconds I had before the bike would be dangerously fast I decided it was better to crash on grass than to land on the asphalt. . . . What I did not know, what I could not see, would be what changed the rest of my life. At the bottom of the slope, a drainage ditch ran beside the road, overgrown with weeds and thick tussocks of grass. I hit the ditch still traveling at speed. I was thrown from the bike, over the handlebars, catapulted, tossed like a human lawn dart into the earth.”
Guest had broken the third and fourth vertebrae of his neck. “There is no real way to describe what this felt like, or did not feel like,” he writes about the first moments after landing on the ground, “the sudden, violent abstraction of the body, the brain left to believe all has vanished in a terrible, surgical instant.” Eventually, Guest is taken from his hometown, Chattanooga, to a center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal injuries. There follow several surgeries and months of physical therapy, which leave Guest with some muscle control over his legs, though not nearly enough to stand or walk. Then he is sent home, to live the rest of his life, which is the real story of this book.
Among that story’s highlights are portraits of the various aides hired to help Guest through his days. Sharon, provided by his school to take his notes in class, appears to be dyslexic, forcing Guest to spell out each of his teachers’ words as she takes dictation. The woman’s replacement quits abruptly after announcing that she has fallen in love with her teenage charge. Most memorable is Tony, a muscular Romanian who takes care of Guest during his years of graduate school, where he lives on his own for the first time. Instead of standing Guest up to transfer him from wheelchair to bed, Tony lifts him “like a professional wrestler,” first calling out, “Are you ready to fly?” and “Come to mama!”
For those familiar with Guest’s poetry, his memoir is most engaging as a coming-of-talent story. “The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind,” he writes, and that charged word “accident” recalls the wry fatalism of his best work. Sitting bored in class, Guest is visited by “the propulsive patterns of a poem.” He finds a typewriter in the school’s library and uses his mouth stick to put down the words that have come to him. “There was no doubt, none, that I had stumbled on to something essential about myself, who I was and who I might become, and all around me the future seemed to crackle like a storm.”
Eventually, Guest describes the writing of “Melancholia,” which he claims as his first mature work. He recounts his false etymological discovery and his initial disappointment at realizing his mistake. But then he saw, he says, how his very error might become the real subject of the poem. “This was different, better, truer than all the poems I’d written before,” Guest explains. “Looking at the screen, rereading the lines, I felt changed.”
This is just how the reader feels upon discovering Guest’s work, which cannot redeem his brokenness or ours, but makes something beautiful of it. And that is enough, almost.
Christopher R. Beha is an editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of “The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else.”
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